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  English translation copyright © 2009 by Syracuse University Press

  Syracuse, NY 13244-5160

  First English language paperback edition 2019

  19 20 21 22 23 24 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Authorized translation of My Bird (Parandehye man), by Fariba Vafi, from the Persian language edition, copyright © 2002 by Nashr-e-Markaz Publishing Company, Tehran, Iran. Permission is gratefully acknowledged.

  ∞The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit www.SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu.

  ISBN: 978-0-8156-0795-3 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-0-8156-0944-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-0-8156-5141-3 (e-book)

  Library of Congress has catologed the hardcover as follows:

  Vafi, Fariba.

  [Parandah-’i man. English]

  My bird / Fariba Vafi ; translated from the Persian by Mahnaz Kousha and Nasrin Jewell ; with an afterword by Farzaneh Milani. — 1st English language ed. p. cm. — (Middle East literature in translation)

  ISBN 978-0-8156-0944-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

  I. Kousha, Mahnaz. II. Jewell, Nasrin. III. Title.

  PK6561.V25P3713 2009

  891’.5534—dc22 2009029587

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Contents

  My Bird

  Afterword

  FARZANEH MILANI

  1

  This is Communist China. I have never visited China, but I think it must be like our neighborhood. No, in reality our neighborhood is like China: full of people.

  They say you can’t see any animals in the streets of China. Anywhere you look, you see only people. That’s why our neighborhood is a little different from China because we have a stray cat that sits on the ledge of the balcony, and I think the third-floor neighbor keeps parrots. We also have a bird store down the street.

  When we first moved to this house, I was determined to love it. Had I not made this decision, I would have never experienced this feeling. It was very noisy. The first day, to get us familiar with the neighborhood, Mr. Hashemi whipped his fourteen-year-old daughter. Curses in mixed languages poured out of his mouth like the pebbles in our backyard.

  Maman says our neighborhood is like an attic: “You can find anything there!” She is right. Our street is full of riches, several bakeries and numerous grocery stores. So many that at first I was wondering which one to shop at, so as not to insult the others. There are many fruit and vegetable markets, enough for everybody!

  But the sidewalks seriously dampen my love. They are so narrow and cramped that two people can’t walk side by side. You either have to walk ahead or behind. If you look down, you see spots. The pavement is full of spots, water spots, spit, oil, or crushed vegetables that are good for psychology students who like to read people’s minds.

  Look around and you think it’s impossible to be proud of this scene, even with patience and understanding. Smoky rooftops and laundry that seems to be hung unwashed, tall and short buildings, very close to each other. Each alley has a number of unfinished buildings, and you can see beams, bags of cement, wheelbarrows, and trucks carrying dirt.

  The old homes are being taken down everywhere and new buildings are going up. The rose and jasmine bushes in the old demolished homes are so dusty that they wouldn’t even inspire poets. Here and there, new homes appear a little further back than the old ones, with small balconies and latticed iron doors. The neighborhood has become like a gigolo who wears sunglasses and slicks his hair back, but his shoes are always old and torn.

  The first week I discovered the park down the street, a park with more people than trees. The elders of the neighborhood sit on the benches, lined up, as if they are handpicked for public display, and placed in a show window with no glass.

  When we go to the park, a triangular space at the corner of the street, the kids run to the swings and the slides at the end of the park. The park looks like hell because it is so dusty and crowded.

  Amir and I walk around and predict each other’s future. I always choose the best-looking old man. I don’t want to pick an old, bald, ugly man and say this is your future. My old man is not so bent over that he can’t see the treetops. Although his shoulders are frail, you can see sparkles of affection and curiosity through his thick glasses. But Amir picks a woman that looks like a crumpled old envelope and says, “That’s you in twenty years.”

  When we get to the main street, the first one after our alley, I think it’s more like India; a land saturated with aromas that fill the space between people. The aromas change with each breath. The smells get mixed, and my nose loses its ability to differentiate them for a few seconds. Passing the dairy store, I call out to Shahin. At the same time, I realize that my nostrils are throbbing from the overload. At that moment, distinguishing between the smell of boiled milk and cooked tripe becomes as important as the difference between a common stomachache and an ulcer.

  This place, whether India or China, is full of people, most of them children. There are so many kids! Amir says there are more drug addicts than kids. A little after lunch, the alley becomes crowded. Even the parking lot becomes jam-packed, the staircases too. On a notice on the staircase, the tenants are asked not to send the kids out into the alley during the afternoon nap hours.

  The building supervisor says, “Every month we post a new announcement, which is immediately torn off.”

  He laughs. He, himself, has three kids.

  2

  Our house is fifty square meters. It’s the same size as a flower garden in an average house in the northern part of the city. That’s why Amir says, “Don’t keep saying, ‘My house, my house.’”

  This is the ninth house we have moved into, and we have a feeling that we never had in any of our previous homes. Amir is ashamed of feeling this way, let alone talking about it.

  But I want to talk about our house because we are not the tenants of any landlords. Landlords are not evil, but they can possess your soul just the same!

  Now we are free to move our furniture around without being afraid of banging the walls. The kids are free to talk out loud, play, scream, and even run. I can quit the poor person’s habit of constantly hushing the kids.

  I feel a sense of freedom and talk about it, but Amir does not allow such an important word to be used for such a petty, ordinary feeling. Freedom has significance on a global level, and in a historical context, but in a shabby, fifty-square-meter house in a crowded neighborhood, in a third world country . . .
oh my! How can I be so dumb?

  As long as Amir is at home, I am not allowed to be ignorant, so I wait for him to leave.

  The backyard is full of the smell of fenugreek. The upstairs neighbor has a grinder for chopping greens, and he chops kilos and kilos of them. It took several weeks to get used to this aroma. The curtains got used to it before I did; instead of cloth, they smell like fenugreek.

  I sit on the kitchen chair and look at the backyard that is never quiet and is always full of smells, sounds, and mosquitoes. The walls are cement, with three identical windows above the glass kitchen door. Too bad the sky is so far away. The back of your neck gets wrinkled if you try to see a little bit of the sky. We have done many things to make the backyard look pretty. I have installed a small aluminum awning and mounted a fluorescent light above the glass door. I have put a few flower pots here and there, and the kids have hung many odds and ends on the walls.

  I have to get up and turn the lights on. Light is distributed unevenly in this house. It is already night in the kitchen. But it is afternoon in the living room and daytime in the bedroom. I call Shadi and Shahin. Where did they disappear to? After the first few weeks of being beaten up and feeling like outsiders, now they can’t stay inside. With them gone, it feels like all the sounds are gone. It is rare to have no sound in the house at this time of the afternoon. This kind of solitude is not what I long for every day. This is more like having nobody! As if they have all gone and left me behind.

  I cross my legs and stare at the cement wall of the backyard. I can’t stop thinking about the continuation of the wall, and the windows that only give off food aromas. What is the use of looking at the wall for so long? It is better to turn my chair. Sometimes even moving the chair a little bit makes you feel better.

  At this moment, I hear a sound. The difference between this house and the previous ones is that the walls don’t transfer cold or dampness. They transmit sound. None of the walls are real. They are only a layer of plaster, storing sounds from other lives only to release it at the right moment. Here you don’t need to put your ear to the wall. Even from far away you can hear sounds, low and soft.

  But this sound is not like any other sound from this life. It comes from another world, from that distant portion of the sky. It is like a heartbeat. It is not a tape recording. It is a live sound like a tambour. Someone is playing a tambour. This building and a tambour! The sound is getting stronger, louder than all the other sounds.

  I grow fast, like an embryo that takes shape in a movie being fast forwarded. I grow and I am pulled away from the chair. The backyard has come to life. The walls have moved back. The sound of the tambour comes from the fourth-floor window. Moving my hands, I flounce and twirl, looking at the window that now looks different from all the others.

  I close my eyes and listen to my own heartbeat. When I open my eyes, I see Shadi and Shahin standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring at me with their mouths hanging open.

  3

  Amir says, “I am selling the house.”

  I don’t like surprise announcements. I always need to be prepared. I can’t do anything unexpectedly.

  That is why I am always a little behind. I am late for weddings and funeral ceremonies. Maman says, “What is the use of henna after the wedding is over?” Amir says, “The person who ignores the warning signs has to digest everything all at once.” Now I have indigestion. I didn’t expect Amir’s announcement.

  This is the first time he has talked about selling the house since we moved here. Selling means leaving, but we just bought this house—it hasn’t even been a year!

  Everybody is in the parking lot. To help us get acquainted, the man who is going to be the building manager asks us to say if we are owners or renters. When it is my turn, I say, “Owner.” And I am surprised how sweet it tastes. I go upstairs and relish the taste like a piece of chocolate that fills your mouth with a burst of caramel. Owner! Oh Lord! I am an owner. An owner!

  This word has made me feel important. I am not miserable any more. I am not without a home any longer. These walls are ours. The staircase is ours too. This bathroom and the shower are ours. The magic of this one word stays with me for quite a long time. I can’t believe one word could do this to a person. I never knew ownership could be so exhilarating.

  “Do you hear what I am saying? I am going to sell the house. I need the money. The real estate agent will come to see the house some day soon.”

  One of the benefits of getting older is that I don’t get thrown into a frenzy right away. I take a few seconds and choose from possible responses. There is no need to get up and scream. I can protect the house while seated.

  “You will not sell the house.”

  I like the sound of my voice. It is neither shaky nor worried. It is confident.

  4

  I go. He goes. We go. “To go” is the only verb that Amir is constantly conjugating.

  Damn this luck! We have not quite had a taste of staying in one place, and he is thinking about going again.

  Shahla says, “Amir’s elephant is dreaming of India again.”

  I say, “His is not an elephant. It is a rhinoceros. The rhinoceros always goes alone. I wish I also had an elephant that was dreaming of India or some place closer.”

  Amir is moving toward the future. He loves the future. He dislikes the past. Especially a girlish past that does not include climbing the walls, riding a bicycle, or neighborhood kids playing soccer, a past full of whispers, gossip, and women’s games, a past that ends in dark basements and closets. Amir is not willing to take even one step back with me.

  I don’t like the past either. It is sad because the past likes me! Sometimes it climbs up on my back like a monster, with no intention of ever climbing down. I thought that after marrying Amir I could knock the monster down. I wished getting rid of it were as easy as losing my virginity.

  One night, one of those nights that fantasy overpowers reality and sincerity rules, I told Amir about the creature hanging onto my back. I felt like a hunchback that wanted to reveal the secret of her hump. Amir interrupted my ramblings. Have I loved anybody before him? He got his answer and lay down like a happy man. But I was not finished yet. I was still talking when, half asleep, he covered my mouth with his hand.

  “It is not important who the others were, and what they did. Only you are important, and from now on you are mine.”

  His gesture was charming, but behind his loving tone there was a hint of boredom. I realized that he would not go anywhere with me. I was shocked; loneliness and dismay filled the space between Amir and me like a second wife. Many days had to pass for us in order to leave each other alone and to conjugate the verb “to go” separately for ourselves.

  5

  “The man was stabbing himself when we arrived. By the time people stopped him, he had disfigured himself.” Hosseini and I arrived before any others. They were taking his wife away in an ambulance and saying,

  “She is finished.” Amir has brought news again. Father also would always come home with his hands full, with an armful of fruit. Every afternoon, we kids would wait by the door and run to him as soon as we saw him, to take the bags of fruit from him.

  Maman says, “With all his faults, your father had one good habit; he never came home empty-handed.” Amir does not come home empty-handed either; he brings a bag full of news, events, and stories. Through all these years, he has learned which story to tell first and which one last. He has learned to tell the story halfway and make me beg for the rest. He knows which one to tell in detail and which one to pass over quickly. He knows that I am a good consumer for all the stuff he has in his bag. Emptying it out has its own ritual. The water should be hot, the tea freshly brewed, and a plate ready full of pistachios and mixed nuts, which are not good for my skin but work well for warming him up to tell stories.

  Amir says, “Shahrzad has had a sex change and is a man now.”

  Then Amir pretends he is Shahrzad. I could probably be Shahr
iar, but before I can put on his crown, Cradle Robber’s voice echoes in the building. “Cradle Robber” is what Mrs. Hashemi calls the woman from the first floor. “Her husband is about ten years younger!”

  Her baby is apparently in the business of buying and selling cars and is away from home three days a week. Then he shows up driving a high-end car. He parks in front of the door and you hear him yelling as soon as he gets in.

  I look through the peephole. This gives me the joy of watching others without being seen. The neighbor across the hall does not have a peephole. That’s why her door is often slightly open.

  Mr. Hashemi is standing on the stairs, and by the way he shakes his head, you’d think he was the most peace-loving person on earth.

  Judging by the noise, we can tell that he is pounding on the door with the palm of his hand. He screams, “I swear to the prophet and to the elders that I did not take it.”

  Before all the people in the building figure out what it was that he did not take, you hear Ida yelling.

  The kids are asleep. I sit by Amir. His tea is getting cold, and he is not eating nuts anymore.

  “I don’t know what happened to Hosseini. All of a sudden he had to go home and told me to make up an excuse when the boss asked about his whereabouts.”

  He gets quiet.

  “Shall I warm up your tea?”

  He says, “Why did he go?”

  I shake him gently, “Never mind. Tell me something good, something about love.”

  “Where is love? It’s all dirty stuff. When our Canadian visas are approved, we will get rid of all this.”

  6

  Amir is in love with Canada. Everybody knows about his passion. Anybody who hears something new about life in Canada passes the news on to him. Sometimes he talks about Canada, as if he has lived there for years. He sighs and says, “I’ll go to Canada and be rid of this place.”

  When he hits a dead end, he says, “Canada is totally free from bad luck and problems.”