Without the Window, It's Not Worthwhile
Without the window it’s not worthwhile. To think of the
exorbitant rates of plane tickets, how soon the journey is over, clearly the
most valuable item up for grabs is the view. Consequently, it is entirely
unsatisfactory to slum it in the aisle or worse, squashed between unwelcome
strangers in the middle seat, especially when the price is the same. Those
other seats are simply a rip off for people who know no better, who cannot have
enjoyed a window seat previously. Without a window seat it’s not worth flying.
It’s perfectly reasonable not to board the plane.
These are not my words. While I tend to prefer the window I
would not refuse to fly; nor would I expend so many words explaining my
preference. For Iqbal, silence was a negative waiting to be filled. His tips
and stories came like a flash flood, bowled you over with barely time to
recover before the next flood began.
Farsi is a language of exquisite beauty. It’s the language
of great literature, of poets like Hafez and Saadi and simply to hear the
language spoken is like a melody from heaven. The phrases used even for
everyday speech are poetic and enlightening. Of course Iqbal couldn’t
appreciate the entirety of it, but from his Urdu he could glean enough. He was
Pakistani and it was a dreadful loss for my Australian friend Lachlan and me to
be in Iran
surrounded by the sweetest language unable to comprehend a single word.
Farsi is beautiful. I would say we might have told Iqbal we
had Farsi lessons and were more than beginners, but it’s not easy to spit into
a raging torrent. And yet, Iqbal was very likeable.
We were on the same flight from Bandar Abbas to Chah Bahar
in eastern Iran , in Iran ’s
Baluchestan. Flights were very cheap in Iran with one way fares as low as
ten dollars due to the appalling, for the Iranians, exchange rate. I don’t
think we met on the plane, as Iqbal found the window seat in front of mine –
but as we needed transport from the airport into Chah Bahar town, we shared a
taxi.
It’s unacceptable to use somebody else’s bathroom. If one
needs to use the bathroom they should certainly do it before leaving home,
before arriving at another person’s home as a valued guest. Children should be
instructed same. There is nothing worse than visiting another man’s bathroom –
it will leave the host wondering if it was them you came to see or if you only
came to use the plumbing.
No comment from me.
Chah Bahar has its Baluchi ways that were significantly
different to most of Iran .
Baluchis were mostly Sunni and their clothes harked more to the subcontinent
than to the country’s west. The only difficulty, common to all port cities in Iran , hotels
for foreigners were expensive. As Iqbal really was a nice guy, the three of us
agreed to share a room, with two single beds and a mat on the floor for me, in
between.
It was in that small period between the turning off the
light and the sleep arriving, with the very last of the day’s chat winding
down, when I heard one of the strangest sentences ever. We were finally asking
Iqbal why he was in Iran .
Through the darkness I heard him say, “I lost my jeans. I’ve come to find
them.”
Politeness says a small reply is in order, something along
the lines of “oh, that’s nice” or “I hope you find them.” I don’t recall if I
managed to squeeze something out, but I was entirely grateful for the darkness
– nobody could see me biting hard on my lip to prevent laughter from bursting
out. It was helpful that I couldn’t see Lachlan ’s
face at that stage, because I knew he would be having great difficulty holding
his own laughter back. But the silence – it was no longer a negative waiting to
be filled – it was substantial, unbearably heavy and with the force of a category
five cyclone. That silence couldn’t be resisted.
I heard the first busts from Lachlan ’s
closed mouth – and then we roared laughing, both of us – unseemly, rude and for
several minutes, unstoppable. Iqbal didn’t understand what was humorous.
There were some obvious questions – why would a man lose a pair
of jeans in a neighbouring country – had he been there before or were they
somehow smuggled over the border? How regularly is it that people travel abroad
in search of missing trousers?
When the laughter eased and we sought explanation it became
apparent we’d misunderstood. It wasn’t his jeans he’d lost but his jinns. He’d
sent them to Iran
and they’d not returned. Of course, the concept of losing one’s jinns also
raises some obvious questions – but it was better not to ask. It was time to
sleep.
We took the plane on to Zahedan, the capital of Iran ’s Sistan and Baluchestan province and not
very far from the border with Afghanistan .
Iqbal was with us – he was going the same way – and he was still a rather good
and likeable guy. So we stayed at the same hotel.
If you ever happen to get shot in the leg, it’s certainly no
excuse for interrupting a dinner party. Particularly if it’s a family birthday
party and others are in high spirits in the hope of an entertaining night over
a meal, then it’s better not to mention the shooting. As for the blood that’s
dripping on the floor under the table, a fistful of napkins can help, and if
it’s done discretely nobody need know. Then, once the meal is completed, it
will possible to drive the wife and children home before quietly continuing on
to check into a hospital.
It was the first moments in Zahedan that I started to
consider that Iqbal might indeed have some kind of superpower. Lachlan and I had gone to buy water and I was discussing
Iqbal’s flourishing communicativeness. I said, “He can talk on any topic. He
could talk for an hour about his socks!” Socks was random; yet minutes later,
back at the hotel when we went to find Iqbal to go sightseeing, he was just
putting on his socks.
The best socks are made with thicker wool by Afghans. You
can buy them at the Afghan market and other socks simply won’t compete – Afghan
socks are warmer and more comfortable and never get holes in them because they
are hand knitted. Once you’ve worn Afghan socks you’ll never wear others. If
it’s not Afghan the socks aren’t worth buying.
Zahedan is picturesque with its backdrop of jet black hills.
We took to the city’s photogenic suburbs with their mud brick houses. It was
inevitable that in the mix of buildings we’d end up standing on somebody’s
roof. What was unexpected was that the householder came rushing out and asked
us not to stand there because it might collapse. Instead, he invited us to come
in for tea.
We chatted with the Zahedani and he was rather impressed by
our Farsi. For some reason, maybe his accent, we could understand him well
while Iqbal struggled. “These two have come from the other side of the world,”
said the Zahedani, “and their Farsi is good, but you come from a neighbouring
country and you can’t understand.”
Yet he really was nice guy, Iqbal. So what did it matter if
he’d lost his jinns? It could happen to anybody.
The story of apparel cannot be told by jeans and socks alone... There'd need to be...
Saying Goodbye
At 2 pm I glanced down the hall to the room they call the new big,
in which I taught the teenagers of an evening. The language centre in Donetsk , eastern Ukraine
Thinking of my camera, two blocks away at home, I slipped into hat
and coat. All eyes were upon me as I exited the cloak room. I wasn’t supposed
to know about the party. “I’ll be back for my lesson at 6 pm,” I said casually.
Mouths dropped – I would miss my party – Marina
But it was Lena who donated her weekend to my first days in Donetsk
I remember Lena at the airport – she
had a 1960s hairdo and behind-the-iron-curtain clothes – feminine, becoming and
quite different to western styles. I remember as we’d driven past the White
House, the seat of city government, how Peter the driver said, “That’s where
the thieves live.”
At lunch on the following afternoon, in a café by the Karlmeus,
when I asked what Lena’s ex-husband did, she replied, embarrassed, in her
suave, winter-coat-thick accent, “We don’t ask what people do in Ukraine.” It
was my first lesson. “There are many Ukrainians,” she said, “who have money but
are technically unemployed.”
She’s a mother of two but can never remember their ages. She started
to explain how it was, life in and after the Soviet Union .
“People should only create and not destroy,” she said, “This is our history.”
She was worried about her children’s futures in an uncertain, capitalist Ukraine
Lena was most insistent I phoned Australia
One day she came to work in a cardigan that fashionably featured a
single button, where there might normally be two or three. I pulled her aside
and said, straight-faced, “Don’t worry. I know teachers’ salaries aren’t much.
I will ask the other teachers to donate a few kopeks and we’ll buy you a couple
of extra buttons.” She was outraged! I was laughing.
She coined my nickname: the difficult Australian. When we returned
from summer holidays Lena said to Marina Marina
Yet sometimes we’d sneak away to eat flatbread-rolled kebab-like
zapykankas in the park or deluxe hot dogs, Donetsk-style. Such hours were
precious.
Classes would end late evening but if I found energy it was a
simple matter to phone Svetlana. “Shall I stop by?” I’d ask. “Sure,” she said,
most often, “and why not bring a bottle of red?” We used to talk into the wee
hours, and dance and sing. It’s a good thing Ukrainian neighbours don’t bother
about noise.
Svetlana explained how living in Ukraine Ukraine
Once I was buying a bottle of wine at a kiosk by the marshrutka taxi stand, and the woman
behind the counter asked in Russian, “Sweet or dry?” I asked for dry and the
woman looked me up and down before saying, “Is it for a girl?” On the way to
Svetlana’s there was only one response: “Da”.
“You’ll need a nice bottle then,” she said, before scouring her selection to
find the best. She checked the chocolate situation too.
On the weekends Svetlana and I would sometimes find a café to
watch the afternoon pass, by tradition first meeting at our regular place:
beside the left shoe of the Lenin statue in Lenin Square.
When it comes to Val – well, her kitchen is where I learnt much of
what I came to know about Ukraine
It was through her I picked up additional classes with the
three-year-old Senya. His mother wanted him to be bilingual. His classes were not
stressful or rigid. The instruction was, “just play in English.” And we did.
Senya was obsessed with Spiderman.
At the end he had tears in his eyes. “When are you leaving?” he
asked. “After eight days,” I said, accurately.
“No,” he replied firmly, “After three days!” He had the concept of
bargaining but lost the concept of numbers at crucial moments. He hoped to lengthen
my stay.
I mention Senya because he discovered a new term I came to
embrace. From confusing English pronouns with his country, he once told Val he
lived in “Mykraine.” And that’s the thing of it – it became Mykraine.
The language connected: they enjoyed when I invented words, in the
way that happens in any living language, what you can’t get in books. There was
the Soviet washing machine I had, plastic, semi-manual, the size of a
television set. You had to load the water by bucket before plugging it in. Lena chuckled when I called it the “electric bucket.” And
in the park after rain, when I pointed to a small flow into a drain and called
it a waterfall, and was rebuked because it wasn’t a waterfall, well, the
English teachers took amusement when I said it was at least “waterfallish.”
With grammar: they knew the rules and I knew the answers. Team
work: they could explain the former, which native speakers are not taught; while
I helped apply the rules correctly.
The decoration and food in the new big: I’m not sure I wanted it.
It represented such an enormous loss, about to come. On the other hand, as an
Australian had once described my moving there as “throwing myself into a
transcontinental abyss”, well it hadn’t been at all bad. Surely I could do it again?
I’d been dreading that there might be cake restrictions, as there were
on Teacher’s Day when each teacher had a single slice ration. I remembered
those cucumber and parsley sandwiches with the bread cut so thinly they must’ve
split grains of wheat in the process. The institute liked to save. But these
things did not recur.
Instead
both Lena and Marina gave speeches so full of
praise I was convinced they were talking about somebody else; and Marina
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This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Saying Goodbye
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