Everything Is So Political (5 page)

The day's AA meeting long since missed, Gabriel tried to read up on the Louis Riel statue and the Canadian cabinet minister. A second story had appeared, one focusing on the minister's spending habits. After some tedious clicking on links, Gabriel found the article Dorinda had shown him, the one with the photo of the obscured statue.

Pleasure and fear shot from his hands to his crotch.

The trousers crammed into boots. The long coat, the big hands, the rounded shoulders. Bronze.

Gabriel had collided with the story of Louis Riel in the eighth grade, where he'd failed every subject except choir because print deceived him. Sometimes he could decipher words and meaning. More often, the strain of reading sickened him: nausea, headaches, guilt. No one bothered to look for a reason why. Brother Michael Stephens, who seemed to know young Furey best, assured the other teachers the boy was stupid and lazy. For many years, Gabriel believed that himself. The dreary day he heard of Riel, he sneaked back into the classroom well after dismissal. Songbirds fled the cold; gulls cried at the dusk; foghorns throbbed and moaned. The stench of supper, cabbage and ham, infested the place. Brother Michael Stephens was teaching about the settlement of Canada that week. Somewhere between the lesson's harsh sounds of Macdonald, Dennis, Schultz, Dufferin, and Mackenzie shimmered that beautiful French name: Louis Riel. Gabriel looked up from sketching in his scribbler, a habit that often earned him a few cracks of the ruler across his hands. Brother Stephens spoke for several minutes on the seigneurial system before tossing out as a minor footnote that Riel was elected to the Canadian House of Commons, three times, but never took his seat. He did, however, stand a short trial.

—Louis Riel died an insane traitor and blatant warning. His delusions of grandeur – a question, Mr Furey?

—I suppose he did go cracked, up against the Hudson's Bay Company and the whole Canadian government, which was about as steady as bacon grease in a hot pan.

The other boys laughed. Face hot, Gabriel looked back at his tiny sketches. Brother Stephens mostly left him alone these days, but – well, no point drawing too much attention, but fuck him. Gabriel wanted, needed to draw Louis Riel. No one else. Nothing else. So he sneaked back into the classroom to leaf through the little Canadian history book.
L and R, L and R – got ya
. Curly hair, a big moustache, and dark eyes studying something neither Gabriel nor the photographer could see, dark worried eyes…

Gabriel stared at the photo online. Flannel shirts and a pair of rubber moose antlers on the statue's head.
How the hell did anyone know it was a statue of Riel? Someone must have moved that shit and peeked. Thibodeau?

I cannot get involved. Not my place.

He closed Dorinda's laptop. He needed to sculpt something new. Decades of drinking and running, finally getting home, stumbling through the wreckage he'd left behind, some shades of peace and healing:
Leave it alone, leave it be, don't risk it. Stick to drawin and paintin. Safer. Your last sculpture got destroyed, Furey. Maybe you need to learn somethin from that. Clay it was, fuckin clay, and you want to claim bronze – no. More than likely, it's someone else's work. Got to be.

Fog and cloud hid the moon that night. Gabriel tore himself out of another bad dream, one of Brother Michael Stephens giving him fifty dollars the day he left St. Raphael's, except Gabriel needed to perform one last task. Almost laughable, the economics of that one: in real life, he'd paid the Brother long in advance for that fifty dollars. Gabriel didn't try to explain the dream to Dorinda. She didn't ask, just stroked his hair.

Later, he dreamt of Claire.

I'm sorry, Claire. If I'd known it was gonna end like this, I – Jesus, I'd have come back before now.

You got here in time.

Barely.

What matters is, you got here.

A few days later, Gabriel drove Seth home from the hospital. Dorinda had invited Seth over to supper – macaroni and cheese, easy to eat. Seth disliked macaroni and cheese but felt desperate for familiar company after his stay in a four-bed ward. —Not like last time. No private room.

—Yes, well, last time you were face and eyes into the self-harm shit.

—Nearly went there again. Buddy across from me never shut up, and he had visitors from dawn til the arse crack of midnight.

—You're lookin better.

—Got an appointment in a week's time to get the tooth hauled. Might go at it myself yet. Pair of pliers. Manly as hairy-arsed fuck.

Gabriel laughed. He also knew Seth likely would haul the tooth himself.

At the house, Seth busied himself setting the table while Dorinda talked about the Canadian cabinet minister. —The arrogance – the stupidity – he and Chris Jackman would get along well.

Seth laughed. —Jackman's workin in oil now, local consultant for one of the American companies.

Gabriel nearly dropped the tea tin. —
Oil?

—MaxxOil headhunted him, there, after he got fired from TCR.

—He resigned.

Seth shook his head. —They forced him to, guaranteed. Not that you can expect to stay a Deputy Minister of fuckin Culture, now, after breakin someone's sculpture.

Dorinda snorted. —He should have paid that compensation out of his own pocket.

Gabriel almost asked Seth how he knew where to find the placemats and glasses but changed his mind. —You can't fix what's broken like that just by throwin money at it. Nichole was workin at the museum when Jackman wrecked my sculpture. She said he practically ran outta there. Then he got drunk and crashed his truck into a statue of Gaspar Corte-Real.

Seth smirked. —Two in one night?

—It's about as funny as your toothache, Seabright.

Gabriel looked angrily at the teapot; Seth frowned at the napkins.

Dorinda tried to rescue the conversation. —I always loved that statue, how the bronze turned green and black. I love the windrose on the base. But Corte-Real abducted some Aboriginal men. Beothuk, if he landed here. They died slaves. Corte-Real got lost at sea. Jean Thibodeau, the one who discovered the Riel statue at the cottage? He wants the statue moved to Winnipeg, but he's trying to track down the artist first. He's traced the statue to some banked acquisitions warehouse in Ottawa.

Gabriel laughed, weakly. —It's supposed to be on Parliament Hill. Buddy who commissioned it from me wanted all the MPs to have to weave round it to get into the House of Commons.

Dorinda and Seth looked at him. They both squinted. Seth spoke. —
You
did that statue?

—I cast a bronze sculpture called
Louis Riel, MP
. I delivered it, but I never knew what happened to it. Riel's lookin down at his boots. He's almost up to Parliament Hill, but the place is crawlin with police officers, ready to arrest him. Friggin bounties on his head. And he's got to decide where to step.

Dorinda left the room.

Seth sat up straight. —How you gonna prove it's your work?

—Not sure I will.

Seth wanted to throw a glass of water into Gabriel's face, wake him up. —You cast that bronze. That's your fuckin work. At the very least, they need to know your name.

—Why?

—
Why?
Because – Jesus –

—I got no business wadin into it. Not my place to say where that statue goes. It's better off in Winnipeg, with the Métis lookin after it. At least they won't knock it to the floor or stick fuckin antlers on it. They'll treat it with a bit of fuckin respect.

Gabriel's voice broke.

—A bit of fuckin respect!

Seth waited a moment, then spoke quietly. —You want that work treated right? Come forward as the artist and make a Jesus big racket. You as a foreign national, too. Then the Canadian government might, just might, have a harder time hidin it all away and pretendin nothin happened.

Gabriel closed his eyes, blushed. —I need to see the face of it. Make sure it's mine.

Dorinda returned, carefully balancing her unplugged laptop. —Jean Thibodeau's posted some new photos.

The downcast face of Riel, framed in curly hair, moustached, eyes closed, chin never quite how Gabriel wanted it, in a full colour, high res digital image, sharp and clear. Eight feet of bronze – strength, purpose, will, and meaning, everything Gabriel thought he lacked. Eight feet of bronze connecting him to the lessons of Brother Michael Stephens. Eight feet of bronze depicting a man he now felt he'd got no right to depict or claim in any way.
Louis Riel, MP.

How did I get tangled up with you?

—I did it.

Seth whooped. —Where'd you sign it?

—Come on now, Seth. I can hardly write my name. You know that.

Seth looked like he'd just been kicked in the gut.

—I left a fingerprint in the coolin bronze.

Jaw slack a moment first, Dorinda laughed. —Gabriel Furey, his mark?

Gabriel considered how to explain it all to Jean Thibodeau.

Seth clapped his hands and grinned like a youngster expecting a gift. —This is gonna get messy.

Gabriel nodded. —Just a bit. But it's not supposed to be easy.

Above Her Shook the Starry Lights

Sherveen Ashtari

1

They are going to kill me.

My trial lasted three weeks. I was lucky, because some unfortunate souls have to wait for years to hear that same news. I've also read and heard about smoother death sentences, and so to me at least, this speedy decision came as no surprise. This is Iran, after all.

I stood in cuffs as the sentence was read to me and to a roomful of stern policemen, a couple of psychiatrists, a judge, and a court-appointed lawyer who tried his best, upon hearing the verdict, to appear disappointed. He was a good actor, considering how obvious and predictable the sentence was. I mean, I didn't exactly leave much to the imagination when I confessed to everything, refusing any claims of insanity piled on me by sympathetic relatives and compassionate neighbours who jumped to my rescue. Besides, there was an eyewitness. No, I didn't ask for anything in return for my confession, no deals were made to spare my life, no stalling or plea bargains. They had asked me a question and I had simply answered truthfully. I thought to myself: Sheyda, why must everything in life be conditional? Why must there always be a give and take mentality even when it comes to the purest of ideals? Why must truth always be prodded with hesitance and a desire for reciprocation? I was accused of being a liar all my life, and in a way, all I had wanted was to redeem myself. The truth will set you free they say, but believe me, nothing will set you free. I used to be so sure that death would do the trick, but I have had enough time to contemplate it, sitting in a cell and watching women being led to their death. They should look happier I thought, if they really were about to soar freely without the anchor of a body. I had wondered why none of them was smiling. Why some of them had prayed before being cuffed and led out of the cell. What could a murderer possibly pray for? Forgiveness? Forgiveness should only be asked from the murdered, and since the murdered were no longer with us in the realm of the living, the very act of asking for their forgiveness was ludicrous and bizarrely funny.

My lawyer wouldn't look at my face. The knees of my dear psychiatrist, Dr. Fereydoon, betrayed him, and he sat down and only got up a few minutes later when I was escorted out of the courtroom. I saw him when I looked back and gave him a little wave and a satisfied smile.

One thing about hearing your death sentence is that it really puts things into perspective. It's not very much unlike a near death experience, though I've never really had any of those, but I've heard all those clichéd stories of lights and tunnels, and of floating upwards to God's headquarters and looking down at your own discarded body. When I looked down at myself, I saw tears in my eyes, and my cuffed hands clasped as if in prayer. I saw tears that the media and the public that day had probably referred to as either crocodile tears or tears of genuine remorse, and palms that may have been described as invoking and fatalistic. Let me clear the record by saying that my tears were happy tears. My palms were indeed fatalistic. My palms in cuffs, cupping within them the story of my life, were symbolic of the twenty odd years I had been forced to spend as a captive sinner under the sun. I looked at my forehead, radiant despite me not having showered for days, and let me tell you: it was as white as a bleached past. I had purposefully clipped my blonde fringe to the top of my head, so that everyone could see my honesty, everyone. Framed in the black fabric of a scarf, my face was so white it looked almost saintly. I had never looked so peaceful in my life, calm to the ridiculous point of elation, like my mother's face when she died. I searched my back for wings, and there, on the sides of my spine, I caught the glimpse of strong white feathers budding out, slowly, carefully. Afloat in the cold room I looked around at faces, strangers, no one ever knew me. I was an angel, a misunderstood angel. I still am.

Would they bury me with my parents, the Islamic way? Would anyone visit me in the cemetery and sprinkle rosewater on my tombstone? Would they water the weeds or flowers that grew on the carpets of green grass I slept under? Would anyone say a prayer for my lost soul? Would they shed tears for all the unknown injustices of my life?

What was I? Just a face among many, just a name among many! I was one more broken neck. They'll forget about me like they forget about everyone else, including their own deceased families. I'll be lost in the archives of the prison documents; I will be just another headline in a newspaper that is quickly flipped through, a face that is recognized and spat on, “Ah look: the monster who killed her mother.”

Who will be at my funeral? Only those who are glad to be done with a girl like me. No. I only want birds at my funeral. I want them to dump my soulless body in a Tower of Silence to be feasted on by vultures. Just leave me on the peak of a dry and distant mountain, and allow nature to nibble at my toes and ears until there is nothing left. I want to be spread next to red and rotting pockmarked corpses, and let the bald hideous birds lift me up, then drop me, my broken neck dancing on its way down and my eyes, always looking up. I want to be shattered and the very marrow of my bones extracted. I want them to fly freely with me in their bloated bellies, with my dreams sour on their sinewy rasp tongues, and my hair still fresh in their beaks. I want my face burnt in their black angry eyes and my enslaved brown eyes a memory on their faces. And when they squawk, they'll squawk nothing but my mournful name.

2

I was born a captive.

I was born in Tehran, Iran, April 1, 1979. The day the Islamic Republic was proclaimed.

Months before my birth a Shah was being betrayed by his people, portrayed as a traitor on the small screens of the world, delivered with his queen to an exile and a death that transcended the borders of his sorrow and the boundaries of his nightmares. Months before my birth the history of a nation was being dissected and chewed on, like the fleshy parts of a chicken's neck. The carcass of its future thrown out to bearded dogs and crows that cawed from their Holy-Books then hid behind tall pillars and threw the same books away. A helicopter was lifted and Iran went under siege. Months before my birth, elderly women were burying the charred bodies they assumed had once been their kids while asking God Why?
Why
? Young men and women who to escape the outcries of demonstrations had sought refuge in Cinema Rex and watched
The Deers (
Gavaznha). They laughed at the ironies not knowing that they were about to experience them firsthand. Men and women who never lived to realize
The Deers
was a last-minute name change, just like the inscription of their names on Death's unforgiving list was God's final thought before bedtime. Men and women who were to be preyed on and hunted, naivety scarring their faces. Months before my birth, Death was seen in pied clothing on the streets of Iran, calling out the names of children, and playing his magical pipe, luring them away to drown in the river. Pretty girls were putting away their miniskirts and ironing chadors that were as black as their tears. They folded their long cascading hair into old-women plaits. Those were the days of corduroys and Charleston pants, bangles and bell-bottom Jumpsuits, headbands and Macramé belts, Roman sandals, and rainbow shirts and long-haired Europeans holding up the peace-sign as they drove to Kathmandu in green Cortinas and sky-blue Rovers. Those were the days of “Kung-Fu Fighting” and “Greased Lightning” and Abba and the Bee Gees. Those were the days of American neighbours with whom we exchanged pleasantries and food and lives and stories long before we drew our swords and took them hostage, and long before they called us terrorists and threatened to sort us out. Those were the days when women were not stoned for being in love, and men were not hanged for having opinions, and backs were not lashed for being exposed, and hairs were not pulled for being beautiful, and dreams were not nipped for being dreams, and wings were not clipped for wanting to fly. But I was not there to see any of that, I was born after. By the time I had opened my eyes to the darkness of this world, a dynasty had been pulverized. A slate was wiped dirty and a state was robbed clean.

I was born captivated. I heard all those stories from the nostalgic lips of those around me and took them all for bedtime fiction. I churned in my bed, ready to sleep, cuddling with a teddy bear that was as eager to hear Scheherazade's modern religio-political retelling of a past of pretty clothing and funny hairdos, where things came in more shades than black, white, and gray. A Night among many in the history of this country's a Thousand and One. In this new version the vizier's daughter was modestly dressed and pious, and spoke in a low and timid voice, because, well, a woman's voice was a thing of shame. In this version, Scheherazade didn't care much if she lived or died.

“Ours is a land of fiction, of frictions. And no story is too old to be told time and again,” my mother would whisper to me in accidental rhyming. She would pull out of her cupboard some articles of clothing to show me: father's polyester shirt, gold-sprinkled halter tops from the days she went night-clubbing.
Night-clubbing
! I used to close my eyes and try to imagine my saint-like mother in a pink and pleated mini retro dress with platform-soled shoes, chewing the olive of her martini and eyeing the man who would whet her lips that night, and who, months later, would become my father. My mother who, throughout her life, looked and smiled at everything with the indecision of the Mona Lisa; am I happy or am I sad? Is this what a smile should look like? I am the something, the in-between that has yet to be named. Whenever I opened my eyes and glanced at my teddy bear, it too was smiling its threaded Mona Lisa smile, its eyes wide open, truly shocked. My mother was a teddy bear.

“But here are pictures!” My mother and my aunt Bahar would shove photo albums of proof in my face, pointing at their exposed shaved legs or their maxi dresses and their coiled exposed puffy chignons, painted nails peeping from the slits of their sandals.

What they said and what I saw just didn't add up. I'd hold the square pictures in my hand and wonder to myself while looking out of my window: “How did we go from
that
to
this
?”

My mother would tell me, “It actually happened. We actually had that life of
Azadi;
that life of Freedom.”

Azadi. Azadi… That word gave me nightmares. It meant nothing and everything. It was an ideal that couldn't be grasped, like Perfection and God and True Love and Home. It was an ideal that had to be seen, touched, tasted and experienced, it had to be lived through to be proved. It had to be loved through to be true.

“What did it feel like?” I used to ask them.

“It felt… it felt—” they would stammer not knowing what to tell me, language having left them. Only their eyes articulated what their tongues no longer could.

I was born a captive. And now I am not sure anyone is born free.

3

Yeki Bood, Yeki Nabood,

Gheir az Khuda Hichkas Nabood

That's how every night my mother started all her stories, with those two lines that made absolutely no sense but which, despite their logical impossibility sounded musical enough to start me on a night of sweet dreams and restless wondering. An itch would gnaw at the sides of my spine, and by the time the story ended, wings would spring to lift me from the shambles of reality and into a heaven of ideas. And my mother, with a slightly orange face in the shaded light of the lamp, would always tell me: “You don't need wings to fly. All you need is your imagination. All you need is a heart full of love.” I'd stare, smitten, at the oval holes of her nostrils, at the few pinheaded black hairs on her rounded chin, which she sometimes made me tweeze, and I'd wait for her to unlock the door of my cage and release me: her lovesick nightingale.

Dreams were for free, no one could take mine away. During the eight years of a war that orphaned children and widowed mothers, that amputated dark-skinned fathers and beheaded brothers on both sides of a vicious line called border, I ventured out of my nascent cage only when the rest of the world slept, and in the darkness of the night, free from the evils of this life, I fluttered toward the moon, and only in her light did I sleep.

My mother was an English student whose ambition was to become a teacher. She learnt English in school, and then practiced it with an American family that had —before the Revolution— lived three blocks from our house. By the time the Shah was dethroned, our American neighbours were already back in that distant nosy country, mowing their lawns and painting their picket fences. My mother had a thing for her teacher (it runs in the family), a certain Mr. Carl who was, according to my father, a CIA agent. During the Revolution, when the Morality Police raided houses to confiscate anything that they deemed immoral (everything from playing cards to alcohol but also any pictures of scarf-less women), my mother and father dug a huge hole in our garden and buried in it all their books, magazines, and their own un-Islamic pictures. That's how memories and knowledge were preserved in my house. They had to be smothered to stay alive.

When, due to her unplanned pregnancy, my mother had to drop out of university, her only way of fulfilling her dream of teaching was through me: I was her only student. I learnt English very quickly, but it was years later that I perfected my pronunciation of certain words. For a long time Hawaii was Havaii, waitress was vaitress, and knife, I am ashamed to say, was
ke
nife.