If you live long enough in a foreign land, you become like a lone molecule absorbed and assimilated into the host, your DNA retrofitted and reprogrammed for its new circumstances. I’ve been here awhile, just trying to survive and get ahead, and so it never really occurred to me that I’m not the same girl who first stepped off the plane and onto this soil. While I still don’t feel that these are “my people”, I somehow felt even more out of place last year when I went back home to visit my family.
So perhaps I’m something in between – neither here nor there, though with each passing day more here than there.
I mention all this because he is a new arrival, and he reeks of the strong cultural aroma of our shared homeland. He is completely adrift and awkward in this milieu. In a way it’s endearing but it also reminds me of how alienated I felt at first. It makes me feel embarrassed at how I must have come across in those days.
In him I realize how our culture of origin is an inversion of this host culture. Where the locals are loud and bellicose, he is quiet and painfully modest. Where the locals keep each other at arm’s length, he is face-to-face. It can be quite off-putting, even for someone like me who knows where it’s coming from.
Like all of us, he is here to start a new life. Unlike me, however, he came here to escape the recent persecution in our homeland, where the government had accused him of treason. (Where we come from, being a peaceful dissident is equated with insurrection.) He was certainly a dissident – when I look into his eyes, however, I feel a chill, and it makes me wonder how peaceful he’s ever been.
Luckily, my uncle is a close friend of his family, and through some connections was able to get him safely out of our homeland and into this country. Of course, he is here without papers of any kind, and so he has no choice but to work for my uncle at his restaurant, and for now he is staying at my apartment until my roommate comes back from her holiday down south.
He tells me that his plans are to make some money at the restaurant and then move on to a country that, unlike this one, has no extradition treaties with our homeland.
Unless business picks up soon, he may be stuck here for a long time.
Uncle has him working in the kitchen, first because of the language barrier, which would prevent him from being a successful waiter, and second because there is a back door to an alleyway right off the kitchen. The thinking is that should some immigration officials show up to check for valid passports and work visas, he can just slip out the back door and go for a long walk.
The signal for him to exit is the music suddenly shutting off. We have speakers in the dining lounge and one in the kitchen. There is music from our homeland constantly playing at a low volume. That way, when it turns off, it is less noticeable in the lounge than the kitchen. Also, the back door to outside is always propped open during dining hours to allow for better air flow, as well as quiet departures.
Despite the above preparations, Uncle still pays money to some men in exchange for protection from the immigration authorities. We all know this is a scam – what Uncle is really paying for is protection from the men themselves. Business lately has been slowing down, however, and the men are always increasing the amount they claim Uncle owes them.
It has been a full week now that he has been working at the restaurant, and he gets along very well with the others, as he has a very magnetic personality and knows how to tell a good story. In particular, they like hearing about his escape from our homeland, and the arduous journey across the ocean while hidden in a steel cargo container. They all look up to him because they know he’s tough, and that he has yet to develop our immigrant sense of servility.
Speaking of which, he got into an argument with Uncle earlier today. He doesn’t like seeing Uncle bowing down to this neighborhood’s thugs, and can’t understand why he lets them extort money from him so easily. It offends him that we would flee one kind of oppression in our homeland, only to embrace a different kind over here.
The truth is more complicated than that, of course, but nevertheless I find myself drawn to his idealism, wishing that same fire was burning in my belly as well. This makes me want him as a lover, even though he gave Uncle his word he would not be intimate with me.
He is pacing angrily in my living room. “Is this why I risked my life?” he shouts in our language. “At least back home we were bullied by our own race.”
“It’s different here,” I say, letting my fears speak for me. “We have to be very careful.”
He throws his hands up in disgust and goes to the window, gazing out at the evening traffic. “There’s only so long I can stand around and watch this happen. I’ll take things into my own hands if I have to.”
I touch his arm and tell him to stop talking like that, and that he could get seriously hurt, or even killed.
“Well, then I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”
I wish those words were my own, but I have too much fear in my heart. I’m afraid for him but I crave this reminder of our people’s spirit – prior to living here, that is.
I rest my forehead against his shoulder as my eyes fill up with tears. He turns around, taking my hands in his.
“Hey,” he says softly. I look at him and find his eyes searching mine. “Everything is going to be okay.” He takes me into his arms and I begin sobbing, realizing how displaced I feel despite my best efforts to fit in.
Or perhaps because of them.
I look down at him in the ambient moonlight streaming in through the curtains as I straddle him, running nails down his chest and over the rope-like muscles of his abdomen. This is happening so fast. He looks up at me with what seems to be confused ecstasy, and perhaps more than a little guilt over breaking his promise to Uncle.
As for me, I want to conceive a baby with him so that a few cells of his defiance may cling to my uterine wall and grow inside me.
He has been asleep for hours, completely at home and free from contradiction wherever he happens to be. As for me, I am neither here nor there, not knowing if his sense of connection with me has been deepened, or if our intimacy will just dissolve into the blur of women I imagine him to have conquered.
Perhaps I feel insecure because he was able to fall asleep so quickly and contentedly, as if it were no big deal. I am unable to sleep, feeling like I have just invested an enormous amount of emotional currency in another human being, making myself open and vulnerable on so many levels. And here he is in a deep, blissful sleep, as if our lovemaking was akin to a quick round of masturbation – all the pleasure, none of the complication.
Perhaps I think too much. Maybe I need to simply be present. Just like him. Maybe that is why I’m still awake and unable to turn my brain off. I am envious of his ability to live in the moment, like a true animal, without apologies or explanations.
All of this is swimming in my head as the overcast sky becomes lighter. I hear the usual truck pull up in front of the corner store across the street to drop off some bundles of the morning paper. I turn over on my side and make an earnest attempt at relaxing and getting some sleep.
It is a week later and nobody has seen him for days. Apparently he had a major blow-out with Uncle, who threatened to fire him if he didn’t mind his own business and forget about the local thugs. There was much said in their argument, but I know a lot of it is being kept from me. All I can ascertain is that there must have been some hurtful words in both directions.
I wish he would at least call me to let me know he is safe. I worry that he may not make it out there on his own. Although this adopted home has been good to us, there are some elements of the host culture who simply do not like our people.
It is somewhere in the wee hours when I hear a weak knock at the door. I put on my housecoat, go to the door and look through the peephole. It’s him, from what I can see of the right shoulder, neck and ear.
I open the door and barely stifle a scream when I see him propping himself up in the doorway. He has been beaten and battered almost beyond recognition. His face is heavily bruised, his lips and nose are swollen, and his eyes are purple and puckered. He says my name with a sickening wheeze and a gurgle from somewhere in his throat.
I let him in and close the door. He takes a few steps and collapses into a heap on the floor. I ask him what happened, but he doesn’t hear me at first. He eventually gathers himself and says with much labored effort that he went to see those men himself, to intimidate them into leaving us all alone. “They don’t intimidate easily,” he says, trying to bring some levity (of all things) to this moment. As he speaks I see that all of his teeth are now gone.
I tell him I want to take him to a hospital. He grips my arm with all of the strength he can muster. “If you take me to the hospital, they’ll send me back to our country. Than can’t happen. Under any circumstances.”
“But I can’t let you die!”
“I’m as good as dead if they send me back home.”
He falls into a deep coughing fit, and with a heaving of his stomach, some blood gushes out of his mouth. He looks up at me.
“Tell your uncle I tried,” he says weakly, as I practically watch the life draining out of him. “Tell him I did the best I could to make things right.”
He writhes in pain, so I take him into my arms, holding him as the moment passes, hearing and feeling the broken staccato rhythm of his breathing. I don’t know what else to do but hold him as I hear the familiar sound of the truck across the street, and the thud of entire bundles of worldly wisdom hitting the ground.