Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

—

In the twenty years that passed between my first visit to Professor Pine and my second, from 1967 to 1987, I remained in the same city. I graduated from Massey and then from LeBoldus High and then from the University of Saskatchewan, with a degree in biology. As an adult, I worked as a soil consultant, traveling around the province to small satellite towns in a flatbed truck that I could sleep in, if necessary, on warm nights.

Bouts of the depression did return, but they never overwhelmed me. Perhaps my life was not the most rigorous testing ground for Professor Pine’s technique, because my life was relatively free of tragedy. Most of my depression erupted out of nowhere. I’d be in the fields in the midst of a bright day, and a dreariness would mysteriously descend. I’d sink into it for a few minutes, but the lift would always come. I would take a step up, or two or three, and recognize how good life in fact was. From above, my job appeared to me excellent and strange. There I was, under a blazing sun, kneeling in a yellow expanse, weighing samples of earth. And later, with instruments as tiny and beautiful as jewelry, testing the dirt for traces of nitrogen and phosphorus, the gleam of potash.

—

One night, in the middle of the year 1985, I made the mistake of describing this technique to my fiancé, Rezvan Balescu, the Romanian liar. We had known each other for only two months at this point, but we were already engaged. We were standing on a small balcony outside our apartment. He was smoking, wearing pajamas under a down-filled jacket, and he was in the midst of one of his tirades on North America, which he loved and hated. “This place is so strange to me, so childish. You have so many problems that are not real, and you are so careful and serious about them. People discuss their feelings as if they were great works of art or literature that need to be analyzed and examined and passed on and on. In my country people love or they hate. They know that a human being is mysterious, and they live with that. The problems they have are real problems. If you do not eat, that’s a problem. If you have no leg, that’s a problem. If you are unhappy, that is not a problem to talk about.”

“I think it is,” I said.

“Exactly. That is because you are an American. For you, big things are small, and small things are big.” Rezvan was always making these large declarations about North Americans in a loud voice from our balcony.

“I bet you one million in money,” Rezvan said as he blew out smoke, “that the number of hours Americans spend per week in these — what do you call them? — therapy offices is exactly the same number of hours Romanians spend in line for bread. And for what? Nothing. To make their problems bigger. They talk about them all day so at night they are even bigger.”

“I don’t agree. The reason why people talk about their problems is to get over them, get rid of them. I went to a therapist once and he was very helpful.”

“You?” He lifted an eyebrow, took a drag.

“Yes, when I was eleven.”

“Eleven? What could be the problem at eleven?”

“I was just sad. My parents were getting divorced, and I guess I could tell that my dad was about to leave.”

“But isn’t that the correct emotion — sadness — when a father leaves? Can a therapist do anything to bring your father home?”

“No, but he gave me a way to deal with it.”

“And what is that way? I would like to know.”

“Well, just a way to separate from the situation.”

“How do you separate from your own life?”

“Well, you rise above it. You gain some objectivity and perspective.”

“But is this proper? If you have a real problem, should you rise above it? When a father leaves a child, the child feels sad. This seems right to me. This rising above, that is the problem. In fact, that is the problem of America. I cannot tell my family back home that if they are hungry or cold, they should just rise above it. I cannot say, ‘Don’t worry, go to the movies, go shop, here is ten dollars in money, go buy some candy. Rise above your situation.’ ”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean you literally rise above it. Your mind hovers over your body, and you understand the situation from a higher perspective.” I knew that if he pushed me far enough, this would end up sounding insane.

“So this is what your man, your eleven-year-old therapist, teaches you: to separate your mind from your body, to become unhinged. This does not teach you to solve the problem; this teaches you to be a crazy person.”

But already I was drifting up until I was watching us from the level of the roof. There she is, I thought, Margit Bergen, twenty-nine years old, in love with Rezvan of Romania, a defector who escaped political hardship to arrive in a refugee camp in Austria and a year later in Regina, Saskatchewan, where he now stands on a balcony in the moonlight, hassling her about America, as if she contained all of it inside her.

—

I had met Rezvan in my father’s lab at the university. Rezvan was a geologist, like my father. Technically, for grant reasons, he was a graduate student, but my father considered him a peer, because Rezvan had already worked for years as a geologist for the Romanian government.

Originally he had been a supporter of Ceauşescu. In fact, his father, Andrei, had been a friend of Ceauşescu’s right up until the time Andrei died, in 1985. Rezvan, by his own account, stood by his father’s deathbed as he died and held his father’s hand, but both father and son refused to speak, because Rezvan had by then ceased to be loyal to Ceauşescu.

In the two years that Rezvan and I lived together, I would often rise from sleep to find him hunched over his desk, the arm of his lamp reaching over him. He wrote long letters into the night, some in English and some in Romanian. The English ones, he said, were to various government officials, asking for help in getting his family over to Canada. The ones in Romanian were to his family, an assortment of aunts and uncles and cousins. He wrote quickly, as in a fever, and if I crept up on him and touched his back, he would jump and turn over his letters immediately before looking up at me in astonishment. At the time, I thought this was simply an old habit of fear, left over from living for so long in a police state.

Sometimes he said he could not forgive his country for keeping his family captive. He told what he called jokes — dark, labyrinthine stories that always ended with some cartoonish, undignified death for Ceauşescu: his head in a toilet, his body flattened by a steamroller. Other times he spoke about his country with such longing — the wet mist of Transylvania, the dark tunnels beneath the streets of his town, the bookstores lined with propaganda that opened into small, dusty rooms in back filled with real books.

In this same way Rezvan loved and hated America. He would rant about it from the balcony, but then we would return to our bed and sit side by side, our backs to the wall, and watch the local and then the national news, where almost every night somebody would criticize the prime minister, Brian Mulroney. Rezvan could never get over this: men appearing on television to insult their leader night after night and never getting pulled off the air. Sometimes we would turn to the news from the United States, which we received through a cable channel from Detroit. This was a real treat for Rezvan during the period of Reagan-bashing. “I love that man,” he said to me one night.

“Reagan? You don’t like Reagan.”

“I know, but look at him now.” They were showing a clip of Reagan waving. His face did look kind. His eyes were veering off, looking skyward. He looked like somebody’s benevolent, faintly crazy grandfather.