The Other Americans(14)

This is it, I remember thinking. This is the end of the regime. How could it survive when it was killing its own children in broad daylight? But just as the thought crystallized in my mind, one of the policemen spotted me on the roof, raised his gun, and aimed. Even from a height of four floors, I could see the black barrel pointed at me. I sank to my knees, realizing only by its sibilant sound that the bullet had missed me. With my back against the wall, I waited for the thump of police boots on the stairway. All afternoon I waited. Even as night fell, I waited. I could still hear the sirens of police cars. Tires screeching. Glass breaking. People screaming. The wind in the palm trees.

Dawn brought with it a strange silence. I went down the stairway, walked across the empty lobby, down the street with its smashed storefronts, past the bloodied corpse that still lay under the flickering neon sign, and went home, where I found Maryam beside herself with worry. All night she had stayed up listening, too, hoping to hear footsteps, yet fearing they were the wrong ones. She hadn’t known if I was alive or dead and she’d been too afraid to go to the police. If I’d been arrested, asking the police about me would do no good; they would not acknowledge it. And if I hadn’t been, asking them about me might be used as evidence that I’d taken part in the protest. “I wasn’t arrested,” I said, taking her hand, trying my best to comfort her. “I’m fine.”

But when I told her about the policeman who’d pointed a gun at me, she panicked.

“Are you sure you weren’t followed?” Her gaze shifted to the door.

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so.”

Still, our fear didn’t dissipate, and by the afternoon we heard from Brahim’s sister that he had been arrested. No one knew where he was being held. Others in our circle of graduate students had also been swept up. It was a matter of time before they would be forced to give up the names of supposed accomplices. Maryam’s relief that I had been spared the same fate turned into a vow: she would never go through this ordeal again. Her older brother lived in Culver City and had once offered to sponsor us for visas to the United States.

She said she wanted to leave.

We landed at Los Angeles International a few months later, only to find the Golden State in the middle of a recession. After she’d dropped out of college, my wife had worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office in Casablanca, but here in California no one was hiring, especially not a new immigrant with a shaky grasp of English pronunciation. And I was a graduate student in philosophy; all I knew was how to pontificate about Sartre or Lévinas. But I came from a long line of bakers—my father and grandfather ran neighborhood ovens all their lives—and when I heard from Maryam’s brother about a donut shop in the Mojave that was up for sale, I said we should try to buy it.

“You?” Maryam asked. She couldn’t believe that the graduate student who spoke so fervently about the plight of workers laboring under the boot of capitalists suddenly wanted to start a business. I told her we had nothing to lose but the futon we’d been sleeping on since we landed. Besides, I pointed out, I wasn’t the one who’d been desperate to move here. We had to do something.

Before leaving Casablanca, we had sold my car, her jewelry, and all our belongings, but that only added up to a few thousand dollars, so we borrowed the rest from her brother and sank everything into the shop, which we renamed Aladdin Donuts. I repainted the walls, fixed rickety chairs, and replaced the light fixtures. The menu above the counter listed some items I wasn’t sure I could reproduce: apple fritters, cinnamon rolls, bear claws. I tore it down and decided to sell only donuts and coffee. Donuts were not that different from our sfenj, and I experimented with the dough until it became as soft as the one I had grown up with.

For the first year, Maryam and I slept with Salma between us on an air mattress we laid out in the utility room. I baked and worked the cash register, and Maryam cleaned and handled the bookkeeping. Every penny that did not go toward bills or supplies went to pay her brother back for the money we had borrowed. On Fridays, we went to senior centers, police stations, local schools, construction sites, bringing samples in pink boxes that bore the logo of our shop. People who tasted my special honey glaze raved about it to their friends. Word began to spread. The shop turned a profit. We were able to move into a proper apartment and, three years later, into a house. Nora was born. Maryam quit the shop to take care of the girls. That was how we came to this country.





Efraín




Marisela was waiting up for me, with the newspaper spread out on the kitchen table. I thought it was La Prensa, which she buys from Kasa Market sometimes, but when I sat down across from her with my plate and soda, I saw that it was the Hi-Desert Star. I kept my eyes on my food. I just wanted to enjoy my torta de carnitas. I deserved that, at least, after the rough day I’d had. Enrique and I got lost for an hour in Landers, trying to find the duplex we were supposed to clean, and when we finally got there, the lady of the house was mad at us and followed us from room to room while we shampooed the carpets, making us go over the same dirty spots, even though the stains were old and wouldn’t come out. Then she tried to use a coupon to pay, and Enrique had to tell her three times that those coupons were for Rob’s Carpet Cleaning and we worked for Ron’s Steam Cleaning and Upholstery. The delay pushed all our other appointments back and in the evening when we returned the van, Ron called us careless and stupid and lazy. All I wanted now was some peace.