Читать книгу Bibi's Rainbow: Hilarious Ordeals of Assimilation - Majid Amini - Страница 5

It’s happening again. As if suffering from an acute case of apnea Mike’s breathing is momentarily suspended. Seconds later, awful noises reverberate from his throat in his desperate attempt to inhale and exhale. It’s as if a golf-size object has somehow wedged itself in his airway and is surely going to suffocate him. His respiration accelerates, a tremor extends to his extremities, and before too long, his pajamas-covered body twists and turns violently, palpitating, he goes into a seizure. It is only when a horrifying scream violently jerks his body, followed by several epileptic-like jolts that he awakens. Released from the claws of his nightmare, drenched in cold sweat, he sits up in an utter state of fright and confusion, shuffling through the scenes of the nightmare in his mind, trying to make some sense of it all.

Scared stiff, Mike cannot even blink. Like a person trying to come out of a hypnotic state of mind, he appears as if trying to find his world, the time and the place, whether what just went through his mind was real or just a series of nightmares. It takes a moment or two for him to find his bearings and realize that he is safe and sound in the security of his home in Santa Monica and that most of his loved ones are with him under the same roof. But for a moment or two, he wonders, what if all his nightmares come true? After all, since migrating to the United States, where he has anxiously and wholeheartedly subscribed to the distinctive feature of his adopted country’s culture that equates happiness to consumption and a life style of uncertainty and constant change, things haven’t gone as smoothly as he had expected. Still, there is no escaping the reality of his current personal life in America, in a place that promised him order, stability and tranquility, but is delivering nothing but series of unmanageable chaos. He wonders whether or not all the dreadful events in his nightmares, including his adulterous relationship with Parisa, are forming some sort of message rooted in the bottom layer of his subconscious that is trying to tell him something; something sometimes wonderfully delicious but often painfully appalling. If yes, then his case is a validation of Freud’s hypothesis on dreams that he vaguely remembers reading somewhere. Could they all be figments of his imagination? Are all these images stark reality that they rush forth, often overwhelm him with brutal directness, or they are only just nightmares that should be forgotten? If they are merely nightmares, then why are they always the same? Can it be that he is subconsciously cloaking himself in the memories of his past life, a past that is seriously demanding to become his present and even his future?

His wife, as usual, is hopelessly sedated well to the realm of deafness by a combination of a powerful anti-depressant drug and a tranquilizer, washed down with several big shots of hundred-proof vodka earlier that night to fight her past ghosts that have gifted her seemingly an incurable chronic depression. With her eyes closed her mouth half-opened, and moonlight powders all over her face, pale, she seems has expired hours ago. The screams that end his terrifying nightmares seldom wake her.

A feeling of emptiness comes over him when he realizes there is not much of a gulf between his nightmares and the troubles he is facing in his real life in America. Although the dilemmas he is encountering during his waking hours are totally different in nature, and presumably not life threatening, the intensity of their pain is almost the same. In short, nothing has gone according to his vision and expectation since he set foot on the shore of this country, where millions of other immigrants seem to have found the fabled “streets paved with gold,” enabling them to have it all and consume it all. His journey has forced him to tread a narrow path between two very disparate cultures: one as ancient as history itself, Persian, and the other, as outrageously adolescent as a teenager, American, a country that seems the longer he lives in it the more doubtful he becomes to ever consider it his own.

He seriously thinks and candidly admits to himself that he is not made of the sort of material to be the patriarch of his four-generation family, no matter how much he pretends to behave like one. That is when his thoughts swing to Bibi, their old maid who, for no apparent reason suddenly decided to return to Iran over five years ago. Not hearing a word from her since she left, it has become apparent to everyone that she has no intention whatsoever to ever return to his clan in America. He also remembers how unexpectedly, a few years before, following Noshin’s breakdown, old Bibi―in an unannounced but deliberate move―seized the helm of his family’s stranded ship in a turbulent sea of the American society from him and suddenly became the matriarch of his clan.

The collection of silvery moonbeams coming through their large bedroom window penetrates the shear white curtain casting a soft glow. He lies down again and rolls to his side and peeks at the digital clock on the radio. He is not surprised to see that it is only half past three in the morning. He feels a little better knowing he has two and half more hours to sleep before the radio alarm comes on with soft Hawaiian beach music that always takes him back to the good old days on the shores of the Caspian Sea. He sits on the bed again, and drinks from the full glass of water on his nightstand before wiping the sweat from his face and neck with a corner of the bed sheet. Even though he knows he should get up and use the bathroom to ease the discomfort his bladder is giving him (almost every night at the same time, because of his enlarged prostate), he remains in bed. But soon, realizing that the pressure on his bladder won’t allow him to fall back asleep, he reluctantly shambles to the bathroom, comes back and lies on his back.

A predawn breeze that carries the coolness of the Santa Monica beach drafts in through the large opened window of the bedroom. The shadow of the curtain against the moonlight performs a mysterious dance on the opposite wall of the bedroom. It attracts his attention briefly. Aside from the periodic singing of a sleepless nightingale in the neighbor, the house is immersed in the inherent tranquility of the approaching predawn hours. He turns and sees his wife soundly asleep on her side, partially covered with the light blue bed sheet. Even going on fifty-six, her uncovered shapely legs and thighs up to the crotch of her panties, firmed round breasts shining under the moonlight, present an unforgettable sight that resonates to the core of his troubled soul. Strangely, he finds her as natural and attractive as in those early years of their marriage, when they would routinely drive through the majestic mountains into the lush and sparkling valleys under an enormous blue sky to the seclusion of their luxurious villa on the shore of the Caspian Sea. Now, the once vividly images of those long-ago days are threatened by the vastly different circumstances of his life in his newly adopted country. As time passes by, these innocent images are bit-by-bit beginning to fade away, even as he consciously tries to keep them genuinely fresh and alive by seating them in the front row of the enormous chamber of his memory.

It was on the same shore that they first met under the most extraordinary of circumstances, to say the least. The memories of that hot summer night return to him as he gazes at her soft skin glowing in the moonlight. He wonders why only the moonlight on the other side of the earth is the same as here, while everything else is so horribly different.

The memory of their first meeting is one of those fragments he cherishes amidst the crowded bazaar of his convoluted mind. It belongs to when they were married less than a month, and insanely in love. They were still on their sweet honeymoon―a short period momentarily separated from the real world and all its troubles and obstacles, which he wished would never end. That particular night now appears to have happened a thousand nights ago. He thinks how wonderful and sexy she looks now, almost as seductive as she looked many years ago, even better, for she was young, slender and inexperienced, but now she is full, and invitingly beautiful. Gazing at her several decades later, over twelve thousand miles from that place, Mike remembers how he woke her up with his feather-like soft kisses that night. Ironically, it appears as if it were only last night that the soothing sound of her cat-like purring intensified his lovemaking ecstasy. Would she make the same sound now if I woke her up, he wonders. Better yet, would she allow me to touch her the way I did many years ago? Thoughts and questions continue to streak through his mind like falling stars, as he goes on wondering. He doesn’t remember the last time they made love. Has it been a decade? He asks himself. No, more than a decade. It was about five years after we moved to California, he muses. What was the real cause of her nervous breakdown? Was it because when the Shah of Iran died her hope of ever going home was buried with him in Egypt? Oh, all my life with her, I could read her thoughts loud and clear without her uttering a word. But what has happened to her? Why can’t I tell what’s going on in her troubled mind; she has become an enigma―an attractive enigma, a beauty, yet a forbidden fruit that I’m no longer allowed to touch or possess. Even if she wasn’t sick, and willing to love me the way she did in those days, this goddamn prostate of mine has made me impotent. Nothing is more tragic for a man whose mind is still as intensely full of passion and desire for intimacy with a woman as when he was a young man, but whose body is unable to deliver; miserably fails him. “Didn’t Ernest Hemingway blow his brain out with a shotgun because of the same reason?” he asks himself.

Here in America, the greatest country on earth ever, where nothing bears even the slightest resemblance to the country of his birth, Iran, he is almost certain that even a thousand years of living in America would never endow him with memories worthy of remembrance. Those wonderful yesteryears are gone, or are mostly mere smudges of vanishing color in the dark recesses of his mind. Realistically, despite his efforts to preserve them, he knows they will never really be alive for him again. But now, almost a lifetime later, with four grown children, two boys and two girls and four grandchildren; with his seventy-six-year-old father, Ferdous Yazdy, and Noshin’s mother, Naghmeh Rushanzadeh, seventy-and-change, he is always drowning in a sea of endless social, economic, cultural, psychological and even moral dilemmas that have engulfed his family. It breaks his heart when he looks at his poor disabled wife who has been hopelessly depressed since she suffered a nervous breakdown apparently during an unwanted pregnancy of their last child, a daughter, almost seventeen years ago. He wonders how a sudden social upheaval, Iran’s 1979 revolution, with which he had no involvement at all, has forced him to chase something that he often doubts is even conceivably achievable―the salvation of his family, prosperity, and their happiness in America.

He has come to realize, as unbelievable as it might be, that he was sort of victim of his own success, which was tied to the fatal failure of the last regime, and directly connected to the so-called triumph of the CIA’s covert operation that reinstalled the Shah to his throne in 1953. Since his escape from Iran, in his lonely hours, when he can no longer fool himself, he confesses that by ignoring his conscience in the past to acquire a good life, it is he alone who is responsible for his current precarious position. He is up to his neck in a cesspool of his own making, yet struggling to function as an abundant source of crazy glue, utilizing every fiber of his being, physically and mentally, in an effort to keep his dysfunctional family together in a fast-changing society no matter what crisis is thrown at them.

He concentrates hard to paste together and give real life to fragmented pieces of his memories centered in their villa; the one Noshin’s father gave them as a wedding gift, on the south shore of the Caspian Sea. Whenever he willfully visits them, they perform their magical therapeutic effect on him; from the harsh and cold realities of his present life, they momentarily take him back in time when things were pleasurable. He remembers that their villa was confiscated by the regime shortly after the revolution and for some strange reason it reminds him that he hasn’t had any vacation in the past twenty years that would even remotely measure up to those he used to enjoy in Iran.

Because of always volunteering to work, even on Sundays, in place of his coworkers at The Home Depot in Chatsworth, California, his workweek is often seven days. As the only steady breadwinner in his household, Mike’s family’s financial obligations force him to put in as many extra hours as possible to make ends meet. Oblivious to this fact, his fellow workers consider him a kind, considerate, selfless and generous person, yet a stranger. With a keen sense of preserving and protecting his family’s well being while maintaining their Persian identities and not compromising an iota of their cultural heritage, Mike is determined to play the role of head of his family of fourteen, to have them all safe and sound under one (large, expensive) roof. He is nearly killing himself. With their heads barely above the troubled waters, he has committed himself to this proposition called “family” as if it is the holiest cause he could ever choose.

Mike lies on his back hoping to go back to asleep, but his past comes at him with a vengeance―a past that he doesn’t have to excavate too deeply to find crevices and shelves filled and stacked with joy, regret and sorrow. A past that is populated with characters, some of them were angels then, but now, they all mysteriously appear to him as wandering demons.

Lately, he has often become concerned and even sometimes frightened that the frequent visits of his past’s uninvited ghosts are obscuring his vision for attaining a peaceful life in his adopted country. He feels that only by abandoning his complicated past will it be possible to fulfill his present dreams. Now that Bibi is gone, as head of a family that is becoming more dysfunctional with the passing of every day, and as old as he is, he knows that assimilating into the American way of life will be a bigger challenge than he has thought. This realization is reinforced even more when he sees that all the bridges behind him, those he could have possibly crossed to ultimately return home, have all collapsed. With disturbing events taking place in his homeland, remaining in his new home is mandatory. He has been telling himself repeatedly that he can’t have it both ways: to live here, sort of temporarily, but keep an eye over his shoulder to see when it would be possible to return home. It would be like living in limbo. So, he has made a decision to be more accepting of the American way of life, its customs and traditions and more importantly, to adopt the American character. But he knows that the sooner he can discard the excessive baggage of his past, the less painful it will be to adopt the new ways of life in America. He also knows wishing is different than doing it.

In his quiet hours, when the fast pace of life in America deigns to offer him a minute or two of spare time, allowing him to put his life in perspective, he sees himself as an outsider who, no matter how much he struggles, still finds himself on the margins of this society.

No matter how hard Mike struggles to fall asleep, to save himself from any further unpleasant thoughts, he cannot succeed.