BODY Chapter 4.0

how we love.

When god brushes out her long, black & thick hair.

What can we do but watch? It suspends us in mid air, love,

Waiting for what has no conclusion, no finish.

Nothing that can be called the last dish, love,

Of this banquet, delivered at extravagant cost

To only the hungriest, the loneliest, the lost, love,

Who hold their breath at the sight of her.

And we cannot relax, but worrying this ear, love,

With a piercing finger & then a cry of pain,

until our eyes are burning and full of rain, love.

                                                NS

Noor walked quickly along side Maryam trying to get her to move fast without telling her to do it. But Maryam was not interested in hurrying. The South Park neighborhood was a longish walk away. They would get to work soon enough. The bosses were pretty wimpish about disciplining them. Maryam wanted to use the walk to catch up. They could have taken a bus the half dozen blocks, but when it was a nice June morning, Maryam loved the luxury of walking.  Maryam also became the articulate voice of every little thing, the Real Housewives or the trouble in Syria but more often the Real Housewives. Noor became her audience.  Maryam’s voice and conversation was as soothing and tepid as warm water.

The scar on her left cheek from eye corner to mouth corner was more of Noor than the rest of her physical person in total, although of course no one ever looked directly at it. It was like something obscene. It drew a kind of lascivious attention—almost sexual in its anxious breathless looks— but it was clearly taboo to examine it scrupulously and or even to inadvertently find yourself focusing on it. To look probingly was against some unexpressed secret community principles, but not at all because it was repulsive. In fact, the scar like a beauty mark almost gave to her already conventionally pretty face a kind of striking beauty, an arresting uniqueness.

Noor couldn’t be reached by phone. She was generally not easy to connect with. Maryam did not even know where she lived. She did not have her phone number. Noor was a very private person in that way. But they had become friends. They worked in the same neighborhood. It was a sorority of annoyance with work and a klatch of the similarity of their private ambitions. They shared some words and music. They could hold each other's hands without asking.

People were forbidden to look because the taboo is ironclad; it is sacred. Her scar was always seen, never missed, but only in the periphery, in side glances or in nonchalant skimming of her face, like an insouciant sea bird an inch above the water, the eye never landed upon the scar, never touched it. The eye never gazed upon it directly, never beheld it with a jaw-dropping gasp, never finger-pointing, no eager unalloyed curiosity. It was not permitted to be so gauche as to call attention to something that must be overlooked if you were to be kind gentle discrete humane thoughtful sincere … full of grace hallowed be thy name.

All intrusiveness was punished with the crucial exception of children, who had not formed the proper inhibitions against cruelty and truthfulness. Children would often point, especially little girls, and sheepishly ask their mothers about what they had seen. Why does that girl have that thing on her face? And the mother would then teach the essential lesson of restraint, good manners, appropriate behavior. Never look at things like that and don’t speak about them, not out loud. It is okay to be curious just never cruel. Maybe you will be someday disfigured like that. How would you feel if someone said something like that to you?

The Wife and Husband waited for Noor to walk into the ancient formerly crumbling and now soaring, oval neighborhood of South Park. The whole neighborhood staked a claim upon style and demonstrated the gradual re-territorialization of what was until recently a lost world. Their lives and their being there was signal evidence of the restoration of the SOMA, the South of Market.

The scar was a new thing for Noor who had lived a different life before the coming of the scar. Her life she knew was divided into before and after in a conspicuous way. She was, before, the quiet one, the pretty one, the good one. Now the scar seemed to make a new person of her; after she was the  noisy, wounded, deserving of some punishment from somewhere who knows where, and who can argue that she is not worthy of such treatment. It might be so. It might be that she called this injury upon herself by some kind of excess of energy or some sin. She had recently been showing more energy.

The Husband and Wife couldn’t leave before Noor arrived or at least they thought they shouldn’t. Mother must be chaperoned. The keys must be passed. The instructions must be given. The Wife was getting antsy. The Husband was mindlessly swinging an invisible golf club.

The scar poisoned her life in Quebec; it disrupted her place in her family too. Before the scar she was pure and innocent; after the scar she was spoiled and suspect. She left Quebec, she said to herself, to protect her family, but it was a mutual decision. They did not resist her choice to go. And they had made no real effort to stay in touch. Even though she told them that it was not advisable, she had expected, and perhaps hoped, that they would defy her advice and try to remain in contact with her somehow, but not so. She was content. She needed to find a new space of safety. In Quebec, her presence was a danger to her family. That was true. But more than that she needed to find a new reality, a new life without them and without the baggage of the old life. It was sad but true. They were completely helpless against the challenges of life. If she were there with them, it would only make it worse. They were confused and distracted by other concerns, not ready to redirect their lives for the needs of a grown daughter with no prospects.

The Wife and Husband exchanged fact-free information about Noor while they waited: I think Noor is happy here. Husband said. --But she finds this all a little beneath her. Wife said. --She’s traumatized, what do you think? Husband said. --Did you find out about the scar? Wife asked. --It was something she got from the Taliban, I bet. Husband responded. --She doesn’t talk much. Wife said. --Maybe her English is bad. Husband said. --Her friend, that girl Maryam, said she is involved in some kind of political thing. Wife said. --… a war refugee? Husband asked.  --Maybe she is illegal. Wife said. --I think she’s illegal. Husband said.

In Vancouver Noor was very happy. It was ideal to be in the west of Canada. There were easy connections to be made, she had documents, and she could work at her true employment, as a teacher. She had earned her certificate to teach école primaire. It was easy enough to use her certificate in British Columbia, even if the system was different from Quebec. She found a francophone school in Coquitlam, just east of Vancouver. The town was almost unique as a French speaking community in Western Canada. No surprise that she was hunted down there in less than a year. It was too obvious that she would go there. Hiding the needle in a stack of needles. She had to leave in a hurry to go south across the border, finally ending up in San Francisco, a city large enough to get lost in, she thought. But she had no papers in the US.

Ideally, she wanted to find work as a French teacher. The French school in the Haight was impossible, because it was run by the French Consulate, much too risky, she reasoned. She had a slight hope of teaching at a French-immersion preschool just the other side of Golden Gate Park, not a long walk really. Actually perfect. But the  softspoken lady who ran the school was unable to overcome her near panic. An illegal alien?  She couldn’t imagine it. If Noor had no papers, she could not work there. So it became obvious that only working off the books would happen. 

She met Maryam by accident at an Afghan restaurant and, after she whispered a few words of Pashto, like a secret password—shibboleths?--they became friends. But Maryam made a face when Noor  would begin to speak Pashto. Noor’s French was not possible with Maryam. A mixture of silence, inane giggling, and English was the most strategic way to hide in plain sight. They both ended up working as maids in the South Park neighborhood, that peculiar oval of old houses now extravagantly refurbished. Probably posh, Maryam had said. Everything is expensive in San Francisco Noor thought. She did not think this block was anything special.

Noor was now as imperceptible as her scar, and as undetectable, the unwelcome but unassailable guest. She was spotless. Her cheap labor had made her irrevocable, a perfect tool, which fit the hand like skin. And she asked almost nothing. Therefore she got almost nothing, except she felt secluded in this work, inside this polished family home. Seclusion was not incarceration yet. In this work, with these people, in this place, she was not asked to provide any voice or ear, only hand and surprisingly heart. It was an affect job. She sold emotions more than something that resembled classic work. She used tools like an attitude of respectful awe, polite supplication, much silence and warm regard for the beloved mother to whom she showed such caring.  The product of her labor was comfort, the perception of caring, almost like what produces a warm lap. Noor was working in the new economy of feelings, where the surplus value was in a heart full to overflowing. It was the only factory left for her. It was not such a distance from teaching, which also had been transformed in this economy of caring so that it took some portion from your soul as much as from your body. 

She was willing to give this for her security and support in this place where she was so dizzingly high in the air and standing on almost no scaffolding. Noor could not judge the boss harshly. The Wife wanted to be her accomplice, to be Noor’s underground railway into some kind of Promised Land that in the Wife’s mind resembled lace curtains ballooning in a breeze leaking the saturated light of a late summer afternoon.

When Noor opened the small iron gate in front of the house, the Wife said, with a lilting passive-aggressiveness : “You’re 5 minutes late!” Noor waved to Maryam as the Wife speaking non-stop ushered her through the front door. At the same time Noor was taking her long cloth coat off to reveal a teal uniform with a starched white collar and cuffs. As she entered, the Husband made an evasive flourish like a bullfighter arching his back to avoid the bull. The Husband then looked at her giving himself a spontaneous air. But, to Noor, he had always shown premeditation in everything, even if he clothed it in a carefully crafted pretended ease of aspect, a sprezzatura Castiglione called it. He swallowed his coffee self-consciously and put it on the marble counter with a clink. He glanced back at Noor once more as he left with his Wife who was steadily delivering instructions the whole time. Noor nodded at her obediently. Mercifully, Noor did not see the Husband’s last snatching at the hem of her dress.