After Tehran (4 page)

My screams became so urgent I couldn’t catch my breath. I ran to find air.

Faces around me were a blur of colours and lines that blended and moved, but sometimes a face came into focus and all I could absorb from it was a sense of shock and fear. I landed in the front yard, still screaming. I needed someone to help me stop, but everyone was staring at me. I collapsed. A friend of mine who is a medical doctor bent over me. “You’re okay,” she said. “Everything is okay. Look at me and breathe.” I gazed into her familiar brown eyes. I trusted her, had always trusted her. Her husband had been Andre’s colleague in Iran, and she had been our family physician there. I concentrated on her voice.

I can’t remember how I got home, but in the days that followed no one phoned to see how I was doing. No one asked why I had behaved the way I had. I guessed they assumed that I was upset because of my mother’s death. Except, that kind of an outburst wasn’t like me at all. What I had done was not normal in any way.
That
was not grief. Why didn’t people ask me anything? Maybe they were doing the right thing. Maybe I had to continue doing what I had done for all those years and look ahead. I had a job, a family, a life, and I had to attend to them. So I tried to do just that. I kept on serving quarter-chicken dinners at the local Swiss Chalet where I worked, and I smiled at my customers and inquired if they wanted fries or salad with their meal. Then, every weekday after my lunch shift, I picked up my kids from school, went home, did laundry, and made dinner.

*
Chador
is a cloaklike garment worn by some Iranian women in public and is only one way in which a Muslim woman can follow the Islamic dress code known as
hejab
. A chador covers all of a woman’s body so that only her face remains visible.

Ed’s Receipt

I
n the spring of 1994, I began working part-time at a McDonald’s. Even though Andre’s salary wasn’t too bad, we had been unable to save any money. My parents were now living with us and my children were growing up; expenses were on the rise. Michael was five and a half and in kindergarten at the time, and Thomas was a year old. My mother agreed to look after Thomas while I was at work. She was good to my children and gave them the love she had never given me. With my first paycheque—about three hundred dollars—I bought a swing set for the boys. I was so proud of contributing to my family’s finances.

When my parents first arrived in Canada, they were happy to be with us. But they had expected life here to be easier than it was. I simply couldn’t meet their expectations. I was too busy working, and when I
was
home, I spent most of my time with my children. I had vowed to be a good mother, and I tried to accomplish this by being present in my children’s lives. The boys and I went to the park, swimming pool, library, and movies when they were old enough. We biked and took long walks. Eventually, I signed Michael and Thomas up for soccer and piano lessons, and Andre coached their soccer teams. I wanted them to have the opportunities I had never had. Still, I tried not to spoil them. They knew they couldn’t have
everything they wanted. Andre and I worked hard, and we made it clear that we expected them to do the same. As a result, they did well in school.

My parents soon began to feel isolated in Canada. My father coped better with his adopted country than my mother did because he spoke English, but my mother’s English was so limited that she stayed at home most of the time. She quickly became bored. In Iran, she had had friends and relatives to fill her time; in Toronto, she had no one except Alik, my father, Andre and me and our two boys. She couldn’t make new friends because she spoke so little English and our neighbourhood was predominantly “white,” with few Persians other than us. As well, we lived in a small semi-detached house, which didn’t give any of us much privacy from one another. All these problems together with the long, harsh Canadian winters took their toll on my mother. She once told me she felt as if she were in prison. I wanted to say that she had no idea what being in prison was like, but I bit my tongue. Before long, she grew irritable and got upset over little things. I prayed she would come to see that if she and my father had stayed in Tehran, their lives would have been much more difficult. Before Andre and I left Iran, and even when Andre’s work caused us to live away from Tehran, across the country in the city of Zahedan, we’d paid half my parents’ rent because we knew that if we didn’t, they would be unable to live in a good neighbourhood. Prices had soared after the revolution, and middle-class families found it hard to pay their bills. My parents might not have a life of luxury in Canada, but they were safe and relatively comfortable. At least, this was how I saw it. Yet my mother was not happy. We had fight after fight, and after a while, we were barely talking to each other. My parents informed me that if I wanted them to babysit Thomas when I was at work, I had to pay them. I agreed. The situation became increasingly tough to bear, but I kept up hope that their
dissatisfaction would pass. Andre was very patient, but my parents’ behaviour caused him a great deal of stress, too.

In 1997 when I heard that a new Swiss Chalet would soon open close to my house, I applied for a job there and was hired. Every day, I went straight to work after dropping Michael off at school, then picked him up after my shift ended. For the first three years or so, I usually walked to the restaurant, which took me about half an hour; when the weather was good, I rode my bike—I had bought it for five dollars at a garage sale. After arriving at work, I did the morning prep: chopped and diced all the vegetables for the day and made salads and coleslaw before the restaurant opened at 11:00 a.m. At lunchtime on weekdays, I waitressed. I now earned tips, and compared with McDonald’s, I had a better income. I liked my boss and co-workers, and before long, I had regular customers who would tell me about themselves and their families.

My customers often remarked that I had a “cute” accent and would ask me where I was from, and I would encourage them to guess. Most thought I was Italian, or South American, even French. When I said that I was from Iran, they were surprised. Some knew a few things about Iran, and said I must be very happy to be in Canada. I told them I was. Many people, however, did not know much about Iran at all, and believed that it was similar to Afghanistan, when in fact the two countries are very different. Others thought that because I was from the Middle East, I was an Arab. I found this frustrating and explained to them that Arabs and Persians are two distinct peoples.

Historically, Persians are the people of the Great Persian Empire, which became the first superpower of the world about twenty-five hundred years ago. Persia is the land of the great Achaemenid kings (circa 550
BC
to 330
BC
) Cyrus and Dariush; they made Persia the largest empire the world had ever seen. These kings were not mere conquerors; they showed respect and tolerance toward
other cultures. Arabs trace their ancestry to the tribes of Arabia, who were the original inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and the Syrian Desert. Arabs speak Arabic; Persians (Iranians) speak Persian (Farsi).

After two years of working at Swiss Chalet, I seemed to know most of the people in the community. It felt good. My biggest disappointment lay in not being able to return to school. I only had a high-school diploma and wanted to go on to university. However, that was impossible; we couldn’t afford it. I had to think about my children’s futures.

Living in a “normal” town and working a “normal” job almost made me believe that I was a “normal” person. People told me that I was cheerful, friendly, and kind. Why would anyone be any other way living in a country like Canada? No one ever asked me about the details of my life in Iran, and I was relieved that they didn’t. The last thing I wanted was to revisit the past. However, life has its ways of reminding us about what we do not want to remember.

One winter day a few months before my mother’s death, the first customer who came into the restaurant was a man in his late sixties. His grey hair was thinning and he was wearing a navy suit and a white shirt.

“Table for one?” I asked him from behind the hostess stand.

“No, two,” he answered.

People waiting for people—this was usually the case at lunchtime. I always ended up having four or five tables with people waiting for someone to show up. Then everyone would arrive at once, and I’d have to deal with customers who wanted their food served immediately. Canadians, I discovered, were always in a rush.

“Would you like to sit by the window?” I asked the man.

“Sure,” he replied.

I seated him at table five, put the menu in front of him, and walked to the kitchen. It was almost 11:30 a.m. Jimmy, the other
daytime server, had just arrived. He was supposed to be in at 11:00, but he was always late. I didn’t mind. Our lunch rush didn’t start until noon. Although my shift ended at three, Jimmy would let me leave earlier if the restaurant wasn’t busy. We had a give-and-take. We got along. He was in his late twenties, and trying to decide what to do with his life. Most of our servers were students. For them, working at Swiss Chalet was a passing moment. For me, it had become destiny. I wasn’t unhappy about that. I knew my children would have the opportunity to follow their dreams far from wars and revolutions.

Putting on my name tag, I walked back to table five. The man was looking out the window. It had started to snow.

“Something to drink while you’re waiting?” I asked.

“Two waters and two of your specials.”

“Would you like me to place your order right now? The food won’t take more than ten minutes to get here.”

“The sooner the better.”

By the time I delivered the meals, the man’s friend—predictably—still hadn’t arrived.

“Would you like me to take your friend’s food back to the kitchen to keep it warm?” I said.

“No, leave it.”

I put both orders on the table and walked away. A couple of minutes later, as I was seating another table, the man at table five, who was still eating alone, waved me over.

“Yes?” I said, guessing that he probably wanted me to remove his friend’s food.

“Can we have two glasses of your white house wine? And the ketchup bottle is almost empty. My wife likes ketchup. Can you get us another bottle?” he said.

“Sure.”

I poured two glasses of wine at the bar, watching table five. The
man was talking to himself. Something was not right. I delivered the wine.

“Thank you,” he said with his mouth full.

I walked to the hostess stand to greet the elderly couple waiting at the entrance. They were regulars, and I knew that the husband, Mark, had Alzheimer’s disease. Helen, his wife, was small, delicate, and still beautiful, with deep blue eyes and short grey hair. Mark was tall and handsome, with kind brown eyes, his well-made suit always perfectly pressed. I seated the couple at table six and looked at the man at table five. He was still alone.

“Heather, don’t do this,” I heard him say softly, and I knew for sure that his wife would not arrive.

I went to table six to take Mark’s and Helen’s orders.

“We’ll have the quarter-chicken special,” Helen said, “but salad instead of fries. I’ll need extra napkins. Oh—and you remember that Mark likes extra Italian dressing on his salad.”

“Of course,” I said, nodding.

Mark stared vacantly at me.

“How are you today, Mark?” I asked, but he didn’t reply.

The man at table five had finished eating. Both wineglasses stood empty on the table. He waved me over again.

“Yes?”

“We’re done. I guess Heather wasn’t too hungry. She hasn’t been eating much lately. I think she’s on a diet. She doesn’t listen to me when I tell her to eat more. She’s always been stubborn. Today is our fortieth wedding anniversary.”

“Maybe Heather would like to have her food later. I can wrap it to go,” I said. My voice sounded weak and distant to me.

“Thank you, but she doesn’t like the taste of leftover chicken.”

“Can I get you anything else?”

“What’s your name?” He narrowed his eyes, trying to read my name tag.

“Marina.”

“Thank you, Marina. You’ve been very kind.”

My face felt hot.

“Maybe Heather would like a slice of apple pie,” I suggested, uncertain why I was playing along.

“That’s a good idea. I think she would. One slice of apple pie with two forks, please, and two coffees.”

I went to the kitchen. Table six’s meals were ready. I delivered them.

“Who are you?” Mark asked me.

“Mark, this lady is our waitress. We’re here to have lunch. See? Your favourite. Chicken and salad. I’ll cut your chicken for you.”

“This is nice,” he said, and smiled at me. “Are you coming with us?”

I smiled back. “Can I get you anything else?”

“No, thank you,” said Helen.

I took one slice of apple pie and two coffees to table five.

“My name is Ed,” said the man, glancing down.

“Nice to meet you, Ed.”

“You’re probably wondering …”

“I understand.”