The Walking by Laleh Khadivi

Author:Laleh Khadivi
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-01-16T23:00:00+00:00

What They Do

At first they cannot work. In the early days and first weeks all they can do is keep their heads above the surface of this new reality of Los Angeles. Once they take the first easy breath, eat the thick meal that reminds them of home, find their minds bored, the men slap palms to thighbones and announce.

We must work.

We have not come all this way to sit in the sun.

And like that the men and women of the migration determine to belong and a job will help make it so.

The ones who did it all—carpentry, construction, tailors, cabdrivers, repairmen—before, do it all here. When they show their faces at the jobs that require no faces, the bosses and supervisors take one look at their rocky knuckles and thick wrists, the brawn of their forearms or the skill in their fingers, and nod. They may ask a few questions, wonder if it is a Mexican, an Egyptian, a Pakistani or a Greek that stands before them, but they don’t ask. When they cannot decide, the foremen look back at the worn fingertips and diligent eyes and nod yes, and just like that the ones who did it all before do it all here, and the machinery of the city takes them in.

The ones who did something in the bazaar, whose little shops traded wholesale in antiques, jewels, spices, rugs or brass, arrive in Los Angeles, Glendale, or Santa Monica to open the very same stores they had closed just last month, last year, in Tehran, Shiraz and Tabriz. In the corner of these new old shops a samovar is always hot, and the voice of a woman dying for love floats out of an old cassette player that never turns off. The rug and spice stores smell so much like home that customers stand around for hours and forget what they had come for in the first place. They trade in whatever they can get—appliances, furniture, kitchenware, fabric—and turn no customer away, glad as they are, these ageless, placeless merchants, to wake up in the morning and have a trade to make.

For those who did one thing, they come to find that here they can do little or, at first, nothing at all. They had given years of study and thought to the structures of bridges, the formation of law, the mechanics of the heart’s valves, and yet here their steady knowledge is not enough. Of those who did one thing, many come to Los Angeles only to realize they must learn to do it all. They take positions behind trucks, in grocery stores, at dry cleaners and gas pumps and say nothing about their fine and useless skills, so great their shame and eventual defeat. One man, an engineer from Mashhad, worked at a mechanic shop on Wilshire for six months and complained to his wife that of all the annoyances in his new life, the engine grease that stayed underneath his fingernails was the most insulting.

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