Chapter 113
When I was six, we moved to Iran. The unknown. Blistering heat. Desert sands. Mystical monuments. Silver, turquoise, golden jewels. Dark eyes, hidden faces. Incense, Sumac.
An interminable plane journey. Short flights take us from London bouncing across Europe, finally landing in Abadan. The plane door opens and I am buffeted back by the dank hands of the night. The air here has a personality, it heaves with the immense subsiding heat of the day and hums with dust of the million motes swept between sand and sky. We are bundled into a waiting car and I fade rapidly in the arms of my parents, the endless black all around us… I surface to a semi-consciousness, feeling the vibrations change beneath me and the sudden movement of a different flavour of air across my lips. My eyes open slightly and I am aware of passing between two tall gates and skirting the edge of a dry fountain, its five-pointed concrete walls only a few inches high. The container is painted blue, but no water graces its face. Only seconds later we creak to a halt. This is our new home.
I blink and curl back deeper into sleep.
I blink and wake.
Everything is strange. The air tastes strange. The background noises are all unfamiliar. I hear a hum, something electric running somewhere? I near the muted voices of a man and woman, but I cannot make out the words. Where is my Mum?
I throw back the sheet and light blanket that covers me and swing my feet to the floor. Glabrous beneath my toes, surprisingly warm, the tiles stretch the length and breadth of the room. They are softly speckled, light blue-grey. A window is shaded with a nondescript covering and I swing it aside to reveal blinding sunlight. Dropping the shade again, I turn and pad softly through this house, conscious of my breath filling my ears. Where is my brother?
The voices become rounder, fuller, and suddenly alive before me, my Mum and Dad are there! I run into their arms as we greet each other and the world drops into a semblance of normality for a moment.
We are in a village of maybe a dozen houses. The perimeter demarked by a 12- feet high chain-link fence. To keep out the jackals… and the nomad tribes. Beyond the fence I see naught but an endless, vast expanse of dirt and sand. There are small undulations and hillocks, the occasional tumbleweed, but other than that, nothing.
Inside the fence, small bungalows are dotted about the carefully concrete- edged road. There is a eucalyptus tree in our back yard and very little in the front. Hedges delineate territory and a great metal tank with spider legs and a ladder rises up from the ground beyond our house. Rose bushes transplanted by previous enthusiasts dot the area before the front door. The heat is intense.
All the families here are ex-pats. Germans, Americans, English. We make friends and enemies. Most of us under the age of 10 get on well. I don’t know what it’s like for the adults. We don’t like Mark Lidyard though. He and his mother, pale, pale- skinned with red hair and an abundance of freckles, so eminently unsuited to this climate. Their strangeness – none of us had seen colouring anything like that before – compounded by an inability to act like the rest of us. Small children in packs, vicious little things… we hide behind the denser bushes along the village road, hands loaded with mud bombs crafted from dirt beneath the nearest stand-pipe. As Mark walked innocently home, he was bombarded by a bunch of shrilly protesting kids, a bunch of hoodlums who scarpered right quick and were thin air before anyone else could catch a breath.
When school came around, we loaded onto a small bus. We sat on skin- scorchingly-hot plastic seats at the back, cradling our cheap carcinogenic plastic bottles of tepid water. My bottle was crimson, a latticed and lumpy imitation of woven reeds. The smell of cheap plastic lives in my nostrils. School was at the Sugar Plantation… somewhere not so far away, across a stretch of barren desert, within the confines of another, much larger, fenced village. I enter into another concrete building, finding my way to a small desk in a room that looks like a classroom. There is a great clock on the
wall before me, but it does not function alone. The teacher uses this to instruct us how to tell the time. She teaches things I already know. I’m bored.
Back home, in the afternoon, we go to the pool. Two minutes to walk down the road from our house to the Club House, where in days to come we will spend much time eating, socializing, playing snooker, admiring Persian jewellery, saying goodbye. Behind the Club House, a sauna and swimming pool. It is 115F outside and some days we are cooler on leaving the sauna than sitting in it.
There is a tame antelope tethered on the sparse grass beyond the pool and we play with her. We run the standpipe at the bottom of the slope beyond the pool and sit in the crater of cool mud we create. It is blissful. Walking back across the tiles by the pool blisters my feet. I’m too hot.
Later, sitting by the pool dangling feet in the sandy murky waters, my Dad draws a smiley face in livid pink lipstick all across my back. He takes a photo. The men from the mill dive into the pool and lark around racing and splashing. They build a human pyramid on the flat surface just before the base of the pool dives sharply into the deep end. I climb the limbs of these men to stand at the top, the fairy at the top of the Christmas tree! I dive into the deep end of the pool to the amusement of all.
Some days the water is so dark with sand that I cannot see my hand if I put it just below the surface. A frog hops in from the side and we watch its progress by tracking the bubbles it leaves bursting through the water’s slick skin.
Some days it is so hot it is impossible to move. We stay inside, flat out on the cool tiles that line our house. We get a cat. My Dad is not an animal lover, but he is fascinated by cats’ ability to land on their feet. The kitten is taken into the master bedroom held upside-down a couple of feet above the bed and dropped. She lands on her feet and looks at him “what’s up with that?” She is called Kitty.
Out back is a vegetable garden of sorts. The black ants are the size of my little finger. I sit in the crook of the eucalyptus tree out back chewing on fat cucumbers straight from the earth. The contrast of heat and the cool soothing flesh of the fruit is incredible. I am a koala.
Some things never change.
With gratitude and love,
Kat Dancer
bodymudra@gmail.com
www.kat-dancer.com
415.525.2630, ph/txt/wtsp
