Floating in the Hail

By Nima Khoramak, Zahra Hajian, Parnian Sharifi and 2 more

I burned everything. Maybe everything was burnt before I was born.
Doesn't make much of a difference now I suppose. This is it.
Even if were to get out out of here some way, there would be nothing left.
This pen is all I have now.

Here, in this rain, I'll end it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: Jan 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9783347547872

Book preview

Emma

Chapter one

1.

It's going to rain today. Maybe it's a sign. It rained for mom too. Every time it rains the world is saying goodbye to someone. I need to get the pen. This is it. Now or never.

I don't remember much about home. All I remember from home and mom, everything I can actually recall, is from the day she died. Everything before that is a blur, a bunch of misty, shifting images, mostly of mom, walking, cooking, singing, even talking to me, but I can't remember any words; they're from before my brain started recording voices, something like those old silent movies. The beginning of my real memories is the day I lost her.

It was still dark when dad woke me up. Get up Emma, we're going to your aunt's, you get to spend the whole day with Anna! he said, doing his best not to look scared, trying to smile, but I knew something was wrong. Dad dressed me quickly and carried me in his arms the whole way, walking as fast as he could without running while I kept looking over his shoulder at our house and its walls that were made of stones getting away from me. He put me down on the sidewalk in front of their house and rang the doorbell. After all these years I can still recall the smell of wet earth from last night's rain and see dad, just as if I saw him an hour ago. With his shabby hair and unshaven face, he kissed me and it tickled so I pushed him back and made a noise that put a half-smile on his face. Wait right here, ok? Your cousin will be down in a minute. I have to catch the bus and go see mommy. Tonight, I'll come to pick you up and tomorrow maybe we'll visit her together. Be nice to Anna alright? I nodded, looking into his worried, tired eyes. He kissed me again, this time on the forehead, and ran away. I sat down on the wet ground and followed him with my eyes until I couldn’t see him anymore, then looked up and saw that the moon was still in the sky. It was left all alone and now the sun was coming to burn everything and he was scared. I hugged my knees, leaned on the wall, and started crying. For the moon in the sky, for me on the sidewalk.

I couldn't have been there more than five minutes but it felt like I was sitting on that wet concrete crying for hours before she opened the door. I must have really liked her because my tears stopped as soon as I saw her. Anna, tall with jet black hair, just like mom, looked like an angel standing at the door. She ran and hugged me and carried me inside, laughing and talking to me. Aunt Lisa had stayed the night at the hospital with mom, leaving her alone. A few years later dad told me she wasn't older than thirteen or fourteen, practically another child, but to me, she seemed like a grown-up. She made scrambled eggs for breakfast and when I wouldn't eat, tickled me and made so many silly faces that my sides hurt from laughing and I finally ate. A moment of bliss. Then she gave me a pen and a white sheet of paper she had torn from her notebook and told me to draw something nice for mom and give it to her tomorrow at the hospital while she went to clean up in the kitchen. I decided to draw the moon for her, happy in the night sky with all his star friends. I was really trying my best and I was very frustrated that I had to use just one color. How was I supposed to draw the stars and the moon with just blue? But before I had a chance to ask for more colors, the phone rang, an old, ugly loud telephone with one of those ringing sounds that you don't hear, but feel them drilling in your brain. RING RING, RING RING. Anna came out of the kitchen, smiling and half running to shut the noise of that yeller of doom, and picked it up. Immediately her smile faded away and she turned away from me, speaking as quietly as she could so I couldn't hear. But she didn't need to; my heart was pounding so hard I couldn't have heard anything she said even if she shouted. I shut my eyes and kept on drawing as fast as I could without opening them. I saw the sun coming into the night, burning everything. The moon tried to hide all the stars behind him but the sun was getting closer and I knew they were all going to burn. My whole body was shaking and my arm was moving frantically, trying to put everything I was seeing on the sheet. I kept at it until Anna grabbed my arm and shook me till I opened my eyes. Dad was coming to take me to the hospital, she told me from behind a wet face that didn’t belong to an angel anymore. Mom wanted to see me. She wrapped her arms around me and pulled the paper from under my hands. I couldn’t give it to mom. It wasn’t a drawing, just a torn-up piece of paper, all blue with ink and wet with tears.

Outside, it was raining. Dad came running and I jumped into his arms. I pressed my face to his. He was crying and the tears were falling from the sky.

Mom was dead before we got there.

2.

Where is she? I ask when I see her empty bed. They will be taking us to work in the garden today. I'm not going to get another chance. She has it. she told me she'd be here. She is always here. She got in a fight with the crazy bitch from the kitchen. Had her jaw broke, so … infirmary, I guess. Maybe they’ll give her some of the good stuff.

We buried mom a few days later. She had been hit by a bus a month before and apparently, it was a miracle she held out for that long. Everybody came for the burial, all her relatives from around the town, people that we hadn't seen for years and would continue to avoid us forever if it wasn't expected of them to show up for her burial. It was a sunny and windy day and I remember looking around and seeing a lot of old, wrinkled men and women with moles and hooked noses, all in black, standing straight and looking ahead, trying their hardest to keep as still as possible as the sun hit them in the eyes and the wind messed up their hair. I could feel their eyes on me, on dad. I wished they would go away. They were all my mother's relatives, the whole lot of them current or former army members or government workers who never liked dad and looked at him as if he was her murderer. Dad didn't have any family left; they had all died before he met mom. He had been a simple, lonely school teacher with no money or anything in his name except for a small house he had inherited. Now he was standing over her grave, holding a five-year-old's hand, feeling the weight of that barely breathing terracotta army's gaze on him. Thankfully they weren’t the type for chit-chat and offering condolences and so pretty soon everyone had left except for aunt Lisa, my mother's sister, and Anna. She was her only family member that didn't hate dad. She stood next to him and grabbed his arm while Anna came and sat next to me by the grave where I was following some ants by my finger. I'm not sure I knew what exactly death was, but I knew mom was under that mound of dirt and couldn't come back up, even if almost all her bones hadn't been broken. I looked up at the sun. Maybe it could use its rays and burn the dirt away. We have nothing left here. Not anymore Dad said, his hollow voice coming from somewhere outside his body, not his own. We're still here. I can help you take care of her. Aunt Lisa said and glanced at me. We've got nothing left. I sold the house to pay for the surgeries. There is no future here for either of us. Only memories. Bad ones. Dad didn’t look at me. The sun wasn’t going to help so I looked down again. The ants were moving crusts from some half-eaten cookie, all the way over mom to a small hole on her left, between her and a grave with a stone. All the graves I saw had stones. Maybe she could still get out from under dirt, but if they put a stone on her… you'll both be alone wherever you go. You’ll be a single father in a foreign country with no one to help you. To care for you. Or her. What if you don't find a job? And if you do, who's going to be taking care of Emma, somewhere she can't even speak the language? She said in a quiet voice. They both were speaking in hushed voices now, trying to hide their words from me, or maybe from mom. I've already found a job in Germany. I wanted to talk to Mary about it, convince her to go. That was before… his voice faded into nothing. Mary. When they put a stone on her, that's what they'd put on it. Are you sure it's the right time for a decision like this? and with your…condition She almost didn't say the last word. Who's going to take care of you? And if God forbid… at least here you have us! They both fell silent for a while. Someone was now crying over a stone a couple of rows away from us. Was her mom in the ground too? That's the other reason. We have to go before it gets worse. It's free over there and I don't have a penny left. Anna gave me a sandwich. I pulled small bits from it and put them around the hole so the ants didn't have to walk over mom. Would she get hungry down there? I asked the ants to give her some.

3.

Infirmary… They won't let me in there. I get back and sit on my bed again and look outside. Most of what I have been doing these past couple of months in this place has been reminiscing about the past, trying to make some sense of my life; how I became this person, how I got here. Some memories are more vivid than the rest and keep repeating in my mind; like the memory of the campus or the day we moved into our own apartment, the one where I spent all my childhood, and dad spent his last breaths. It wasn't so different from this place.

About six months after mom died, we moved to Berlin, where one of dad's former classmates had gotten him a job as a teacher in some third-rate university where they gave us a room in the campus until dad could find us a place of our own. The few months we stayed there passed very quickly: dad going to work, coming back with lunch, running back to work for hours, then coming to our room to prepare dinner, working on his papers, and spending whatever time he had left sitting me down to teach me German before passing out from exhaustion. And I, well, I spent those months mostly staying in our room shying away, crying, afraid of everyone and everything. I didn't know anybody, there were no children around and no one talked to me; not that I would understand them if they did. I would stand at the window, holding my baby, that's what I used to call my doll, and watch those pretty, tall, blond students walk in and out of buildings or sit on the grass facing our room, always carrying books or pads. Sometimes they were in groups, laughing at something, and sometimes they would walk in pairs, holding hands, occasionally even stopping for a kiss. Once when the sun was going down and the campus was almost empty, I saw a couple walk hand in hand till they stood right under my window. They stared at each other for a while, and then the boy wrapped his arms around her and kissed her and the girl's long golden hair unraveled in waves, glowing under the sun. She was beautiful. She looked like my baby: long blond hair and blue eyes. I remember I tried to draw her right after they left. I didn't know why. everyone was blond, outside, on the TV, they all looked like dolls! We had a picture of mom in the room, with short black hair and eyes. I looked like her. Only my hair was long.

Dad took me outside a few times to see our new country. We walked in the busy streets with all those cars moving so fast and making so much noise. Everything was so loud and the people were always in a hurry and when they talked, they sounded so harsh! Even the cartoons on the TV sounded angry! It was as if everybody was fighting all the time. I preferred to look at them through my window. When I told dad, he laughed and came back the next day bringing some CDs. They were full of songs. They were German too but they didn’t sound angry. They were beautiful. After that, I would play them all day and when I looked at the pretty girls outside, I imagined them speaking in songs.

It took me months to finally learn the language. But even then, no matter how much dad insisted, I wouldn't go outside to talk to people. It was safe in the room and I had no idea how to talk to strangers or even what to tell them. Anyhow, I sounded funny when I spoke German to dad and I didn't want them to laugh at me. I’d rather watch.

4.

No no no no no… I need that pen… what if they change the guards… or if it doesn't rain in a month or a year or… no. I can’t wait. It has to be now. I must find a way in.

It was early summer when we finally got our own apartment, a small dingy one on the third floor of some ancient building that was supposedly built when that part of Berlin was still a part of East Germany. I was finally able to speak some German and could understand most of what people said on TV. We packed everything we had, got in a cab, and left campus forever. I sat the whole way in the backseat with the side of my head against the car window looking outside, the cold of the glass against my forehead. Berlin was beautiful! We went through wide streets with trees on either side and I saw beautiful palaces and skyscrapers, children playing in huge parks, and people in pretty dresses walking along a river with clear water that shined under the sun. But the closer we got to our new home, the streets got narrower and busier, the buildings older and less colorful, and the people looked less happy, more serious. It's only temporary, dad said as we were standing on the sidewalk, looking at that grey chunk of cement that was to be our home, holding all our belongings in our hands: two suitcases in dad's hands and a pink panther backpack on my shoulders, and of course my baby in my arms. We were still staring at that eyesore when an old man in a grey suit, almost the same color as the building, shouldered through us, muttering something in German that sounded harsher than anything I'd heard before and entered the building, punishing the floor with his cane hatefully with every step. He was so tall and big that to me he seemed like a giant! Dad tried to say hello but he kept on walking and muttering. That's our neighbor then. I'm sure he's very busy. We should introduce ourselves later. Come on, let's go inside.

The stairway was narrow though wide enough for two people to walk side by side, but the old man was standing right in the middle so no one could go past him, or so we thought at first; because we soon saw he wasn't standing, but climbing one step at a time, one step per hour. We stood one step behind his wide shoulders, climbing and stopping when he did. I was getting tired and looked up at dad, and he made a face at me that meant I should be patient: his eyes got twice as big, his eyebrows went so far up they went on his scalp, and bit his lower lip with his teeth. He made that face so often that I think half the time he didn't even mean it, it was just something he did. Finally, after a couple more minutes or so, I got frustrated, pulled my hand free of dad's, slipped past the giant, and sat down on the top stair looking down at him, my right hand supporting my bored chin. He groaned something under his breath and avoided my eyes. I kept looking at that grey giant, leaning on a faded brown cane, struggling to move. He had thick white hair, carefully combed to one side, and was very cleanly shaved. He kept his eyes down and away from me for as long as he could, but when he finally reached me, he stopped and looked down right at me. He had blue eyes too, like the girls at the university, but his were different; they were bored and attentive at the same time. He didn't say anything, didn't even groan; just kept me locked under his eyes as if remembering something he had seen before. Dad used the opportunity; moving clumsily pressed against the wall and apologizing at the same time, he managed to get past him. Then picked me up with one arm, and ran up to the third floor.

Dad put the suitcases down to find a rusty iron key in his pockets and turned it in the lock, but the door wouldn't open. He turned the key again, pushed, then turned it the other way and pushed again, but it wouldn't budge. I stood on the stairs and watched him battle with that door for so long he was all red and sweaty. All the while with every thump that echoed through the building, the old man was getting closer, punishing another step as he climbed. You have to push it, The old man said, very cool and calm, towering over dad. I'm trying! Dad shouted, then started coughing. I'm sorry sir, I didn't mean to yell at you, Dad said, when he stopped coughing, to the old man, who had stopped right there, looking at him. Move aside, he stepped past dad, gave me his cane, and put his shoulder against the door. With one easy push, the door fell wide open. He took the cane back from me and restarted his slow ascent up the stairs. Thank you, sir. dad said, looking a little embarrassed. So, he's our upstairs neighbor. Come on Emma, let's have a look at our new castle!

The first thing we saw in our apartment was, well, dust. It had been vacant for God knew how long and everything was covered with a thick layer of dust. Dad put our things by the door and walked five steps across the living room, the whole length of it, and opened the windows. When he turned around and faced me, I saw a smile appear on his face and thought for a moment he was going to say something when a sneaky wind that had been waiting for its moment rushed inside and raised all the dust. For a few seconds, our new home was a desert hit by a sandstorm. I was blinded; only my ears worked and I heard the most terrifying sound that I had ever heard. I thought it was a monster, a desert monster brought here from the Sahara hundreds of years ago, sleeping for all this time only to be woken by us. what else could make that sound? But as the dust settled, it was just dad, kneeling, his hands on the floor, trembling and gasping for air. I was scared, of him, for him, and wanted to run away; but then he slowly raised his head and looked at me and I saw in his eyes, teary with pain, that he was scared too; I didn’t want to run away anymore. I wanted to protect him. I held his head in my arms and pressed it to my chest as tight as I could till he found his breath again. That was the first time that I saw dad having one of his coughing fits.

When he got a little better, I went into the kitchen and after searching all the cabinets my hand could reach, found an old stained glass and brought him some water. He was already regaining his color. This dust… it took my breath away for a second. I’m fine now. He paused for a moment to stare at the floor. Then, as if finding in between the ceramic tiles something he had lost, looked up, smiled, and said: if we are going to live here, we need to really clean this place up, don’t we? I mean not that we’re going to be here for long but in the meantime might as well make it nice, no? The way mom would have liked. He got up and took out mom’s picture from our suitcase and put it on the kitchen counter. The only decoration our new home needed.

After doing some cleaning with whatever we could find in the apartment, we went outside to get some sandwiches and have a look at our new neighborhood. From now on our home is here Emma. These people are our new countrymen. You’re going to go to school very soon so you have to learn their language much better, and more important than that you need to fit in and find friends. It’s very important to fit in. They need to see you as one of their own. Otherwise, it can get difficult. I was watching some kids, blond, bright, happy, playing in a small park on the other side of the street. They were running, laughing, throwing, and catching balls. Two were sitting on swings while their mothers