Thirty Shadow Birds, page 2
This is more confusing, she thinks.
“A little boy, very quiet … very introverted….”
Yalda finds her words surprisingly familiar.
“For me, he was a little boy, you know….”
Yalda nods, as if the woman is talking to her. When the interviewer asks, “How much responsibility do you believe a mother has for…” she turns off the radio and looks out the window at the sombre façade of the Hare Krishna Temple in order to push the interview out of her head for the rest of her trip.
It isn’t long before she arrives and all but jumps out of the car, eager to put the drive behind her. When she walks past St. Basil’s Church, she pauses for a moment, as if she’s forgotten something. She reminds herself that she had heard the signal of the remote control indicating she’d locked the car doors. She gazes at her favourite church in the city, with its brick façade and aquamarine roof, which always makes her think of those lovely bricks and tiles of her lost past. This time, for no reason, it reminds her of the woman on the radio, a mother like her, a woman far away from her, but not a stranger anymore.
“Pardon, Madame. This is not a good time,” Yalda whispers in embarrassment, and rushes towards the clinic.
While checking in, Yalda glances at the clock. She’s on time; she can relax. She looks around. The waiting room is very small and includes a partitioned office for the secretary, with several rooms around it. It’s not only the old building and furniture, but also the lack of any kind of harmony that announces how modest the office’s budget is. Oddly, this is another reason to feel comfortable. She’d be skeptical in a luxurious doctor’s office, assuming that it was the patients who were paying for it. She’s against private health care, but she’s not sure whether she would remain a supporter of the public health system if she had more money. Yet, as a born admirer of beauty, she hungers to find harmony in any space, and so its absence here is mildly disquieting.
Taking a seat, she ponders the health system’s flaws. It’s taken about six months for her to find a family physician after moving to her new condo. She’s been picky about choosing a doctor, she has to admit. The reason for this is that she believes there should be trust from the first visit. A female colleague eventually recommended this clinic, telling Yalda that the clinic had been a pioneer in women’s healthcare.
A baby’s cry, coming out of the half-open door of the corner room next to the entrance, pierces her ears. She wishes there was a mute button—she has to concentrate. While the baby gasps for breath in between screams, she can hear the soft anxious voice of a young mother plying the nurse with questions. She feels some sympathy for the mother. She hardly remembers Nader ever screaming even though he was more or less always sick before he started school—not a boisterous baby at all. He was quite calm in the doctor’s office, to the point that once she suspected the nurse had not really given him a vaccine shot. When the mother comes out of the room, the baby still screaming, Yalda wonders if, in twenty years, she will be able to admit how annoying her baby was.
The doctor is a young pregnant blonde in a denim trapeze dress that is a bit tight for her at the top. She looks like a peasant woman with her red cheeks, cheerful face, and stout torso. While Yalda tells about her back pain, the doctor’s smile crinkles the skin around her eyes. She doesn’t look so young as to be having her first baby. When the doctor advises her to change her lifestyle, Yalda is annoyed. It’s all about “how” not “why,” she thinks. The doctor moves her chair a bit to use the small desk in the corner to write a prescription. Yalda looks at the doctor’s belly to gauge how many months pregnant she is.
“I can take care of you only for a few months. Is that okay with you?” the doctor asks, without taking her eyes from the prescription.
“Well, you’ll have a replacement. Won’t you?”
The doctor nods. “I’ll be on leave for six months,” she says.
“Is it your first time? Your first baby?”
The doctor takes her eyes off the paper. “Oh, no, he’s going to be my fourth,” she says smiling.
Yalda wonders whether or not she should show her astonishment. The doctor makes it easy for her by turning her eyes back to the paper.
“How brave you are!” Yalda says, and her mind goes back to the Montréal mom she’d heard interviewed on the radio.
4.
THE OCTOBER DAY IS GREY AND UNINSPIRING, and Yalda decides not to hang around downtown. She looks at her watch to see how many hours she has before she has to go to the college. To kill time, she opens the door of Timothy’s coffee shop at the corner of Bay and Charles. It is quiet as usual, and thankfully her favourite spot is free. A bit depressing, but good for daydreaming, she thinks as she orders her coffee. Sitting on the club chair, she imagines it in a more modern style with a different pattern and colour. She curses this habit of picturing furniture looking different, once so pleasant and now so troublesome. She turns her head towards the window to watch passersby, her gaze blank.
Yalda remembers her last night’s dream, realizing that it was not exotic, uncommon, or even remarkable; it was just tasty enough to be chewed over. It was not a genuine dream by any means, only a reproduction of something that had happened in waking life two years ago. When was it? The first semester of Nader’s freshman year, she recalls. Both of them were excited, but in different ways. They were also both pretending that nothing had changed. But after a long period of single-parenting an aloof, indifferent teen, she noticed her son expressing a mild interest in his chosen field: philosophy. Not to make waves, Yalda gave up grumbling over his choice. She’d learned over the years that Nader would go deaf if there was a hint of advice in her words, let alone a lecture.
Then, out of the blue, a small miraculous thing happened on a Friday evening. Right after coming home, Nader proposed going to the beach on Saturday afternoon, no matter what the weather was like. So they went to Guildwood, down the bluffs, to watch the fall sunset over the lake. Each of them sitting on a rock, Nader read aloud some lines from Plato with obvious fascination, and she listened to his voice with satisfaction. Then there was silence again. With all her body and soul, she channelled the feeling of the sunset ahead of her; she sensed the generous vastness of the earth; and she sipped the mild sweetness of simple happiness.
AND IT WAS NOT A DREAM.
Gradually, the silent sea swallowed not only the sun, but the sky itself.
5.
NO, SHE DIDN’T SEE IT. NOT IN THE MORNING when she got out of the car, and not a while ago when she got back into it. It’s only now, a second after turning onto Bay and passing the parking lot, that Yalda sees the dark grey steel and glass presentation gallery, signalling that one more condo tower will soon pop out of the earth. It’s not surprising that she doesn’t recall any news about it; her serving of daily media has been reduced to nil. She can’t help but notice the hard humps on the city skyline, reminding her of a Stegosaurus under the burden of its bony plates. That a tower or two will make St. Basil’s look dull is something that she cannot do anything about, and so she is sad that they will dwarf her beloved aquamarine tower.
Before turning onto Yonge, she reaches her hand into the small plastic bag of fruit she usually carries on her teaching days. She likes to eat an apple or peach or nectarine while driving on Yonge to her evening class. It gives her some energy before the class and makes the long trip seem shorter. It’s more than that, though. Munching on the fruit as she drives toward Yonge and Lawrence always enhances her pleasure as she sneaks glances at the store windows on both sides of the street. Sometimes she is tempted to take the Don Valley Parkway, not because she prefers a fast trip, but simply because the road runs through a green valley. However, the busy freeway often doesn’t allow her to enjoy the scenery. Not to mention that slender Yonge Street, with its multitude of boutiques, appeals to her European sensibilities.
At the red light on Davisville, Yalda, an apple core between her teeth, enjoys the amusing variation of faces and figures, shapes, and colours passing at the pedestrian crossing. In the middle of the human wave moving in front of her eyes, she detects something familiar—an elephantine head on top of a mouse-like body, with panda eyes and jet-black hair, gelled upright like a hoopoe’s crest.
“Dr. Ahmaqi!” Yalda says under her breath, and the apple core falls to the floor.
She bends to grab the core and, straightening her back, bangs her temple on the edge of the sun visor.
“Okay! I got punished by the invisible hand of heaven,” she mumbles. She remembers that the man’s name is Dr. Ahmadi, which means “admirable”; not Ahmaqi, which means “idiot.”
“He’s a genius; he’s not stupid,” she says, this time aloud, resentful.
From the first moment of her first visit with him, Yalda felt an urge to call him Ahmaqi instead of Ahmadi. Was this an overt bias, the wisdom of first impressions, or just for the pun? Clearly, she never called him by that name outright, even when they quarrelled. On the morning of her fourth day at work, when she was sent to the freezer to get something, she repeated that name four times under her breath, shivering and wiping tears off her frozen cheeks. On the afternoon of the fourth day, she learned that Mrs. Ahmadi, his wife, had fired her—the first job Yalda had found after four months of hunting for work. Yalda was glad she hadn’t missed the opportunity to take revenge on Mrs. Ahmadi’s husband earlier that day by calling him by the name that suited him most.
Somebody behind her honks his horn. She looks into the rear-view mirror, steps on the gas, and waves an apology. She allows herself to think about the man who rose above the human current for a minute and then disappeared, like scum on running water. But scum, like scars, never go away. One of her college students, an architect back home and a kitchen helper in Toronto, said this to her once. As the student described her humiliating working conditions, she tried to hide her scarred hands under her armpits; the pain was obvious in her broken voice.
Yalda looks at her own hands resting on the steering wheel. No scars; no traces. Not on the skin; not on the surface. Down there, beneath the skin, maybe in the folds and grooves of her brain’s grey matter, she hides all the scars, all the scum.
It was not Dr. Ahmadi’s disproportionate body or the oddity of his facial features that gave Yalda a bad impression of him. It was his attitude. It swelled like a balloon in the course of the four days she worked for the Ahmadis in their bakery/café franchise, and eventually burst when, after one final insult about her many “failures,” her anger and humiliation reached a boiling point, and she broke down in tears.
Missing a yellow light, Yalda slams on the brakes to stop at the red. Another failure, she thinks.
The last straw was when he had pointed out her inability to toast a bagel for a condescending customer. “No wonder Ahmadi deserves to be called Ahmaqi,” she chides aloud as she recalls the incident.
She tries to forget the way he looked at her, not only during that thorny discussion, but also when he spied on her to make sure she was doing her job.
Yalda notices a fluffy chocolate-coloured puppy looking at her through the window of a flashy car. A smile comes to her lips, but quickly vanishes when the dog begins to bark aggressively. Her mind goes back to the man who could be demoted from “admirable” to “idiot” just by a simple change of “d” to “q.”
Dr. Ahmadi, who used to be a university professor in Iran, was unhappy with his wife’s decision to hire her because he considered Yalda overqualified. When Mrs. Ahmadi introduced her, and mentioned Yalda had been an architect, a smug grin appeared on his face. From day one, he looked down on her. He wanted it to be clear that she was no more than a “help unwanted” newcomer with no “Can Exp”: not quick enough to comprehend the customers’ mumbled orders; not savvy enough to know how to make and serve breakfast, salad, soup, and sandwiches; not smart enough to interact with customers.
“Go to hell, Dr. Ahmaqi. You made me lose my confidence,” Yalda mutters. Yet she has to admit that this is not the root of her anger.
The light turns green. It’s time, perhaps, Yalda thinks, to look beneath the surface. What vexed her was that he was right. Despite what she claimed, she had zero talent as a waitress. More than that, she was reluctant to cater to stomachs, either hers or those of others—the only exception was her Little Bird’s stomach.
Other girls, and even the chef, that bulky Slav with sweat flowing off his red chubby face, knew that Mrs. Ahmadi was the real boss, and they always called her Madame. In reply to the nonstop orders of her husband, though, they would say, “Yes, boss! No, boss! Okay, boss!” The Ethiopian girl, who was supposed to train Yalda, used to whisper, “He’s a bossy boss,” and they would both titter.
Yalda recalls that she had been taken aback when Mrs. Ahmadi had first introduced her to her husband. She had referred to him as her “full partner,” rather than her “better half,” and considering the tacky, dollar store tie that dangled around his neck, Yalda couldn’t blame her. She had been unable to hide her surprise and Mrs. Ahmadi had noticed. After the meeting, which was an informal interview, she had shrugged to shake the guilt from her shoulders, reminding herself that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
They were an unusual pair. Mrs. Ahmadi was tall, slim, stylish, with honey brown eyes, delicate hands, and well-manicured nails. Yalda had been inclined to imagine that business people were snooty or boring, but Mrs. Ahmadi seemed nice. Yalda wondered how she kept her hands so beautiful. During their interview, Mrs. Ahmadi had been doubtful about hiring Yalda; she had been concerned that the position did not suit her. But Yalda had been tenacious. A mutual friend, who’d also been an architect back home and had rented a room in her house to Yalda, had told them about each other. Yalda explained that as a newcomer, a single mom, and a woman without any support or savings, she needed the job to survive. She implored them to kindly ignore her background as an architect. It had been four months since she and Nader had landed in Toronto, and, despite all her efforts, she hadn’t succeeded in finding a job. Mrs. Ahmadi wondered if she’d tried French tutoring. Yalda told her it had been her first idea, but that the school, claiming a false bankruptcy, wouldn’t pay her in full. Noticing the sympathy in Mrs. Ahmadi’s eyes, Yalda smiled and told her she hadn’t expected Canada to roll out a red carpet for her when she decided to emigrate. The vertical frown line between Mrs. Ahmadi’s eyebrows got darker and the fine wrinkles around the corner of her mouth deepened.
“Besides, our mutual friend does not work as an architect after all this time, and neither do you,” Yalda let slip, later regretting her words.
“Not a convincing comparison, you know,” Mrs. Ahmadi replied with a vague smile and hesitant tone. “Our friend preferred to make money as a realtor. And me, well, you may know that I married a wealthy man, a university professor, oddly enough, who also happened to own restaurants and discos. But then….”
Mrs. Ahmadi’s story reminded Yalda of All The Shah’s Men, a book she’d recently read. People just like the Ahmadis lose their king, and all their puffy daydreams go with him, she thinks. Pretending to listen, Yalda could imagine Mrs. Ahmadi’s story. Yes, you left all your belongings and fled abroad in the hope of returning soon. Alas!
When Mrs. Ahmadi’s narrative reached a certain point, Yalda began to listen.
“…I didn’t want to raise my twins in Texas, you know. We moved to Canada for them. My husband couldn’t get an academic position in the United States or in Canada, even with a Ph.D. from Britain. Obviously, I couldn’t work as an architect as a graduate of the University of Tehran with little work experience. We decided to start up a small business. And you know, the fast-food business is a safe business.”
Yalda was not brave enough to reveal her work experience in a chelow-kabab restaurant in Saint-Étienne to a prospective boss who was also a fellow countrywoman, so she just insisted that she would not mind a menial job.
“It’s not that easy to be a simple labourer, you know,” Mrs. Ahmadi insisted.
“I’ll do my best to learn how to do the job. As a single mom, I am familiar with making sandwiches,” Yalda said with a grin.
“I’m concerned about whether others will accept you.” Mrs. Ahmadi put her cards on the table. “Nevertheless, you can try it for a few days and we’ll see if it works for you and for us.”
As it turned out, it didn’t. When she handed the bagel and cream cheese to her first customer—a white-faced, blue-eyed guy in a well-tailored suit—she noticed a frown between his eyebrows. He didn’t say anything, though. During the break, her Ethiopian colleague mentioned that the gentleman—she didn’t call all male customers gentlemen—didn’t like his bagel to be too crunchy. The customer hadn’t told her about his preference. She resisted the urge to defend herself; instead, she swallowed what felt like too much saliva in her mouth.
Later, she got another sign. The boss, not the real boss but the bossy boss, wanted to see her on her lunch break. When she went to his office, she was prepared to accept the blame and apologize. But not only did he lecture her about customer service, he also yelled at and threatened her. He definitely crossed the line.
Recalling the meeting, Yalda questions whether the volume of his voice was high enough to be called yelling. His tone had been accusatory, decisive, and harsh. Most likely, it was his look that had been so offensive to her. While listening to him, she had felt all the pressure and stress of the four-day learning process. She had had to learn so much in so little time: the names of different breads, pastries, cheeses, drinks, soups, salads, sauces, etc., the types of sandwiches, the ways of wrapping, the sorts of smiles she could practise on customers, and on and on. The worst was the moment just before a customer ordered—what if she couldn’t understand what they meant? For three nights, she’d suffered from the same nightmare: one by one the customers came to her, stood in front of her, fixed their eyes on her, opened their mouths, and showed her all their speech organs—teeth, tongue, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum, uvula, and glottis—without uttering a word, or even producing a sound. Dr. Ahmadi’s head floated above them. A hoopoe’s fan-like crest, sitting on top of his head like a crown, opened and closed nonstop while his mouth spewed out words, sounds, and saliva.
