作品选读（二）

Foreigner

(Chapter 1)

By Nahid Rachlin

As I boarded the plane at Logan Airport in Boston I paused on the top step and waved to Tony. He waved back. I pulled the window curtain beside me and closed my eyes, seeing Tony’s face falling away, bitten by light....

In the Teheran airport I was groggy and disoriented. I found my valise and set it on a table, where two customs officers searched it. Behind a large window people waited. The women, mostly hidden under dark chadors , formed a single fluid shape. I kept looking towards the window trying to spot my father, stepmother, or stepbrother, but I did not see any of them. Perhaps they were there and we could not immediately recognize each other. It had been fourteen years since I had seen them.

A young man sat on a bench beside the table, his task there not clear. He wore his shirt open and I could see bristles of dark hair on his chest. He was making shadow pictures on the floor—a rabbit, a bird—and then dissolving the shapes between his feet. Energy emanated from his hands, a crude, confused energy. Suddenly he looked at me, staring into my eyes. I turned away.

I entered the waiting room and looked around. Most people had left. There was still no one for me. What could possibly have happened? Normally someone would be there—a definite effort would be made. I fought to shake off my groggy state.

A row of phones stood in the corner next to a handicraft shop. I tried to call my father. There were no phone books and the information line rang busy, on and on.

I went outside and approached a collection of taxis. The drivers stood around, talking. “Can I take one of these?” I asked.

The men turned to me but no one spoke.

“I need a taxi,” I said.

“Where do you want to go?” one of the men asked. He was old with stooped shoulders and a thin, unfriendly face. I gave him my father’s address.

“That’s all the way on the other side of the city.” He did not move from his spot.

“Please ... I have to get there somehow.”

The driver looked at the other men as if this were a group project.

“Take her,” one of them said. “I would take her myself but I have to get home.” He smiled at me.

“All right, get in,” the older man said, pointing to a taxi.

In the taxi, he turned off the meter almost immediately. “You have to pay me 100 tomans for this.”

“That much?”

“It would cost you more if I left the meter on.”

There was no point arguing with him. I sat stiffly and looked out. We seemed to be floating in the sallow light cast by the street lamps. Thin old sycamores lined the sidewalks. Water flowed in the gutters. The smoky mountains surrounding the city, now barely visible, were like a dark ring. The streets were more crowded and there were many more tall western buildings than I had remembered. Cars sped by, bouncing over holes, passing each other recklessly, honking. My taxi driver also drove badly and I had visions of an accident, of being maimed.

We passed through quieter, older sections. The driver slowed down on a narrow street with a mosque at its center, then stopped in front of a large, squalid house. This was the street I had lived on for so many years; here I had played hide-and-seek in alleys and hallways. I had a fleeting sensation that I had never left this street, that my other life with Tony had never existed.

I paid the driver, picked up my valise, and got out. On the cracked blue tile above the door, “Akbar Mehri,” my father’s name, was written.

I banged the iron knocker several times and waited. In the light of the street lamps I could see a beggar with his jaw twisted sitting against the wall of the mosque. Even though it was rather late, a hum of prayers, like a moan, rose from the mosque. A Moslem priest came out, looked past the beggar and spat on the ground. The doors of the house across the street were open. I had played with two little girls, sisters, who lived there. 1 could almost hear their voices, laughter. The April air was mild and velvety against my skin but I shivered at the proximity to my childhood.

A pebble suddenly hit me on the back. I turned but could not see anyone. A moment later another pebble hit my leg and another behind my knee. More hit the ground. I turned again and saw a small boy running and hiding in the arched hallway of a house nearby.

I knocked again.

There was a thud from the inside, shuffling, and then soft footsteps. The door opened and a man—my father—stood before me. His cheeks were hollower than I had recalled, the circles under his eyes deeper, and his hair more evenly gray. We stared at each other.

“It’s you!” He was grimacing, as though in pain.

“Didn’t you get my telegram?”

He nodded. “We waited for you for two hours this morning in the airport. What happened to you?”

I was not sure if he was angry or in a daze. “You must have gotten the time mixed up. I meant nine in the evening .”

My father stretched his hands forward, about to embrace me but, as though struck by a shyness, he let them drop at his sides. “Come in now.”

I followed him inside. I too was in the grip of shyness, or something like it.

“I thought you’d never come back,” he said.

“I know, I know.”

“You aren’t even happy to see me.”

“That’s not true. I’m just...”

“You’re shocked. Of course you are.”

He went towards the rooms, arranged in a semicircle, on the other side of the courtyard. A veranda with columns extended along several of the rooms. Crocuses, unpruned rosebushes, and pomegranate trees filled the flower beds. A round pool of water stood between the flower beds. The place seemed cramped, untended. But still it was the same house. Roses would He went towards the rooms, arranged in a semicircle, on the other side of the courtyard. A veranda with columns extended along several of the rooms. Crocuses, unpruned rosebushes, and pomegranate trees filled the flower beds. A round pool of water stood between the flower beds. The place seemed cramped, untended. But still it was the same house. Roses would blossom, sparrows would chirp at the edge of the pool. At dawn and dusk the voice of the muezzin would mix with the noise of people coming from and going to the nearby bazaars.

We went up the steps onto the veranda and my father opened the door to one of the rooms. He stepped inside and turned on the light. I paused for a moment, afraid to cross the threshold. I could smell it: must, jasmin, rosewater, garlic, vinegar, recalling my childhood. Shut doors with confused noises behind them, slippery footsteps, black, golden-eyed cats staring from every corner, indolent afternoons when people reclined on mattresses, forbidden subjects occasionally reaching me—talk about a heavy flow of menstrual blood, sex inflicted by force, the last dark words of a woman on her death bed.

My father disappeared into another room. I heard voices whispering and then someone said loudly, “She’s here?” Footsteps approached. In the semidarkness of a doorway at the far end of the room two faces appeared and then another face, like three moons, staring at me.

“Feri, what happened?” a woman’s voice asked, and a figure stepped forward. I recognized my stepmother, Ziba. She wore a long, plain cotton nightgown.

“The time got mixed up, I guess.” My voice sounded feeble and hesitant.

A man laughed and walked into the light too. It was my stepbrother, Darius. He grinned at me, a smile disconnected from his eyes.

“Let’s go to the kitchen,” my father said. “So that Feri can eat something.”

They went back through the same doorway and I followed them. We walked through the dim, intersecting rooms in tandem. In one room all the walls were covered with black cloth, and a throne, also covered with a black cloth, was set in a corner—for monthly prayers when neighborhood women would come in and a Moslem priest was invited to give sermons. The women would wail and beat their chests in these sessions as the priest talked about man’s guilt or the sacrifices the leaders of Islam had made. They would cry as if at their own irrevocable guilt and sorrow.

We were together in the kitchen. Darius, Ziba, my father—they seemed at once familiar and remote like figures in dreams.

Ziba, her eyes still shrewd and slipping frequently into disapproval, lips thin and prim, hair frizzy from a permanent, breasts flat under the loose, white robe. A woman in her late forties but looking older, with deep frown lines on her forehead and creases all over her face as if a layer of anxiety had imprinted itself on her. Darius, wearing his stained work clothes— his dark, persistent gaze, protruding forehead, heavy sensual lips. The last I had heard, he worked as a garage mechanic instead of in my father’s fabric shop in Sabzi Bazaar as they had once both hoped. And my father, crouching on a chair, eyes almost hidden under his thick eyebrows as if he were trying to avoid confrontation with me.

“I’d have had something better for you to eat if I knew you’d be here tonight,” Ziba said, mixing with a spoon the leftover abgoosht she was warming on the stove.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m not hungry.” Although I had eaten little on the plane I had no appetite.

“She isn’t a stranger,” Darius said.

But I was a stranger, with people I had not seen for so long and hardly knew any more. I looked around the imitation modern kitchen—redone since I had left—with plastic chairs made to look like wood, a brown formica table, a flimsy gas stove and, instead of the wooden icebox, an old refrigerator with its enamel chipped. The gold-colored curtains were soiled with spots of grease.

“What did you do that for, not come back for so long?” my father said, his eyes still cast downward.

“I was busy, time went by—it didn’t seem like so long.” I couldn’t seem to find the words. “And my work—it’s hard to get away from it.” I was a biologist, a researcher in a consulting firm near Boston. Although I worked hard, building a career, my refusal to return for visits, in spite of my father’s pressure, had taken an effort on my part. I had tried to forget my past. But gradually, after years, that had no longer been possible. Little by little I had been filled with a sense of futility and restlessness. Vague dissatisfactions with work, with Tony, with people I knew had set on me.

“You’re back now,” my father said, as though trying to avoid unpleasantness.

“It seems she never left,” Darius said, punching me gently on my side.

“But you look different,” my father said. “You look Western.”

My hair was short, just to the nape of my neck in a blunt cut. I had plucked my eyebrows so that they were almost straight, making my eyes seem larger than they were and my face more angular. I wore a silk blouse, a scooped-neck sweater, and slacks.

“You don’t expect me not to have changed,” I said.

“She’s just as thin as she used to be,” Ziba said, putting a bowl of abgoosht and a slab of gravel-baked bread before me.

I began to eat reluctantly.

“She was thin as a child,” my father said. “Thin as a reed.”

“We’ll have to feed her well,” Darius said.

“Why didn’t you bring your husband with you?” my father asked.

“He had work to do.”

“He teaches college, right?”

I nodded. Tony taught urban planning at a university in Cambridge.

“A college professor,” Darius said with a touch of mockery. “Do you have any pictures of him? You never sent one us.”

My father had objected so strongly to the news that I wanted to marry Tony—an American—that I had kept most of the business to myself. zy7Ge+sCbEahpYEe6CeX7Ltb9+nev5vNwDhK/yfGxSPoTpBMRqdeKA1RLW7Mlm5r