Dead Batteries
By Mateo Jarrin Cuvi
Your Parents always praised your intelligence and diligence. During boisterous family gatherings, your Mother proudly told the relatives about how you would return from Cyprus to stake your claim on the household. One day, she repeated ad nauseam, you would deplane at Benazir Bhutto International Airport in a three-piece suit with a European degree in hotel management and infinite work experience at luxury spas and resorts. Your future would be bright as a highly-qualified assistant manager at a Marriott or Best Western or Crown Plaza, and your Father would receive dozens of marriage offers from other fathers desperate to marry off their daughters to such an illustrious catch. The salary would be high and the dowry plentiful, and your Parents would be delighted with your prospects.
They called you once a week on Sundays. The phone lines were usually jam-packed, but they tried until they reached you. Anxious to hear about your week, they always called too early and the Lady Gaga ringtone broke through your slumbering sleep. Over the crackling sound of distance, your Mother asked about your classes while your Father wanted to discuss work at the restaurant and the latest impasse with India. Before hanging up, your Mother told you she missed you and beseeched you to be brave and eat properly. Your Father said he prayed for you each day and that your efforts would pay off in the end. When you finally hung up, you always felt guilty you had not yet informed them that you worked in construction, laying bricks, mixing cement and painting walls the color of graying clouds or sandy beaches or boiled shrimp. Still, you did take slight comfort in the Greek you had learned from your sun-scorched, dust-covered colleagues.
Your class attendance was impeccable your first six months in Nicosia. You did not want to dishonor your family’s name by receiving lousy grades. There was no job to occupy you, so you woke up early and rode your hand-me-down bicycle to the college, a massive box of a building with faulty elevators, crammed classrooms, and cigarette butts collecting next to half-open windows. You paid attention to your instructors, respected your classmates’ opinions, and submitted your assignments on time. Not once did you need a witty excuse involving one of the many feral cats that haunted your neighborhood to explain your homework’s delay. After class you walked in and out of restaurants, cafes, bars, hotels, spas, beauty salons and gift shops, hopeful for work that would provide you with the management know-how needed to join a large multinational in Pakistan. Managers turned you down because you lacked a proper work permit or you were not European enough or you did not look like a less pretty version of Daniela Pestova or Petra Nemcova with their breasts like the rolling hills of Margalla and their eyes three shades lighter than the green of your nation’s flag.
After six futile months, your friend Amir told you to join him in the construction sector. “There is plenty of work under the brutal sun for men like you,” he would say. “The pay and hours are decent. I can talk to my mastros if you want. He’s always looking for additional bodies.”
Your money was running low and you were embarrassed to ask your hardworking Parents for additional funding. It was not easy, though. Every time you walked past the Western Union branch near your apartment — its yellow-and-black sign perched above like a beehive next to the inviting lights of the cabarets — you would consider dialing your home phone number and begging Mother and Father to wire ten thousand Pakistani rupees to keep you alive for a few weeks. You would then close your eyes, and that initial temptation to call your Parents and abuse their faith in you gave way to other temptations. You imagined walking down that dodgy staircase through a curtain of crimson beads and watching the naked bodies of the dancers slithering onstage or rubbing up against a crotch, their full reddish hair swirling like cotton candy being spun on Ledra Street. One of them hands you a tumbler with a few fingers of a strong liquor in it. You sink into a plush black sofa and take a long sip; she unzips you. And each time this happened, you forgot about your Parents and your hardships, and you rushed up the stairs into your apartment and locked yourself in the bathroom before your raging guilt consumed you.
So you accepted Amir’s proposition and joined the dozens of Pakistanis who plied their trade in construction. Your first few weeks at the job were tiresome, but you had no school to worry about during the summer. Sleepy-eyed, you rolled out of bed as the morning sun slipped past the horizon’s grip and crept through your bedroom’s blinds. You rode your bicycle forty-five minutes to the outskirts of the city, helmet-less and carelessly slaloming your way through traffic. At eight o’clock, you were expected to throw on a jumpsuit and do as you were told by a burly contractor with a mullet, who was assigned to you by Management. Lug around sacks of cement or sand or lime. Carry buckets loaded with paint the color of rainbows. Lay bricks at noon when the sun beats down on the capital and you can hear your brown skin crackle. You realized that fetching coffee, olive savories and cigarettes for Management was the closest you would ever be to the services industry. Often, when you refused to do any of the above, your contractor would crack down on your insubordination and remind you that many other boys would kill for your paycheck. Sometimes, when he woke up on the wrong side of the bed, he would call you and your people terrible names.
Come fall, when you informed your boss that you had class on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, he grunted, took off his glasses and stared you down. The forbidden smell of chunks of fatty pork grilling nearby distracted him for a few seconds. You thought he would respect your desire to receive an education and gain work experience. Instead, while wiping the sweat off of his eyebrow with a stained handkerchief, he gave you an ultimatum.
“Son, I need you five days a week from eight to five. You work these hours or focus on your studies. Part-time is bad business,” he barked out. “Remember, I can very easily find someone to replace you. Cut the nonsense and go fetch us some kebab.”
You saved your job and stopped going to class like many of your classmates. Manual labor exhausted you, so the last thing on your mind after a hard day’s work was to open your textbooks. Before construction, you would spend hours with an English-Urdu dictionary by your side, learning new words, their correct usage and pronunciation. You knew the difference between “sole” and “soul,” “hence” and “hens,” “mere” and “mire.” Your English had been improving, but that ended the more you practiced and perfected the Cypriot colloquialisms gathered onsite. Your grades dropped from the mid-nineties to the failing forties, but your professors could care less about such a precipitous fall. They were in it for the money, and so were you, it seemed. Survival and occulting your truth from Mother and Father were all that mattered. Dishonoring them was not an option, even if it meant dishonoring yourself.
You met Dina — a sweet Mongolian girl with a speckled face, round and white like a full moon — and you kept company after sunset. Her English was rudimentary but sufficient to communicate how much she liked you. You were horny and she was smitten, and the first time you ever had sex — on your bedroom floor, clumsy and desperate — was also the first time since you started your construction career that you felt good about where your life was headed. Maybe it was the newness of it all that jolted you alive, or just having found a kindred immigrant soul to share your sheets with. Dina shared her life with you, showing you pictures of her younger sister (“…she like horses, bicycle, dolls and color red…very intelligent girl…”) and dead parents (“…they die in car crash, I was twelve, I miss them…”) and the aunt that raised her (“…difficult woman, strict…but she love us, cook very good, I cook for you one day…”). You told her about Pakistan and Islam and Mother and Father and you asked her question (“…I work at betting shop…”) upon question (“…God I believe…”) upon question (“…Yes, lonely…”) until you felt you liked her well enough to confidently voice the word love.
On Fridays, around seven p.m., you would block the bathtub’s drain with a brick you stole from work and let scarce warm water run unencumbered for a few minutes. Sitting on the tub’s edge, you would get lost observing the spurting soap bubbles and she would walk in, her naked thin body like a ghostly apparition, waking you up from your stupor. You would wrap your arms around her thighs and rest your head on her firm abdomen, her hairy pubis close enough to tickle your chin, her oniony scent vivid enough to arouse you. But each time she would undress you and lead you into the water and observe you with those morose obsidian eyes as she rinsed your hair and gently scrubbed your fatigued body with a pitiful lathered sponge. You would lose your erection and cry on her shoulder as you did with Mother when you were a small boy. Exhaustion — from the work week, from school, from that burning solitude — consumed you both. No words were spoken, no love was made; the world, tragic as it was, was understood.
Not long after you met Dina, you learned ways of circumventing an actual education and relied on ethically dubious strategies to ace your classes. Instead of studying the night before an exam, you would spend an hour or two producing cheat sheets dabbed on both sides with microscopic handwriting or entering and saving password-protected information into your mobile phone or unevenly writing down answers on your inner forearm or thigh or the palm of your hand. You would fight your classmates an hour before the exam for prime (cheating) real estate — desks at the back or leaning against a wall or window or ensconced in a corner or bunkered behind an exaggeratedly fat and tall Chinese student or scribbled the night before with the subject’s pertinent definitions. As soon as the professor handed you the short stack of stapled papers, you would read the questions and attempt to answer a few without any assistance. But what little motivation you had to rack your brain had departed with your virginity. You unfolded the piece of paper stuffed in your pocket, or punched your phone’s keys in search of knowledge, or cautiously rolled up your sleeves to make sure you did not smudge it all. Once satisfied with your skills in transcription, you would turn in your exam and rush back to Management’s wrath or Dina’s tender arms.
Albeit, many times your efforts were for naught. You would wake up the day of the exam and absentmindedly jump into the shower only to realize you were screwed once you opened your eyes after shampooing and spotted dark ink being ominously swallowed by the drain. Other times, you would oversleep or pedal away from work thirty minutes too late; by the time you walked into the classroom, the better positioned desks were taken by even those students who did not have it in them to bamboozle their way through a paper. Or you would forget to charge your phone and be interrupted mid-exam by that annoying chime that announced to the world that your battery was running low and that soon it would perish, even if you had not had a chance to look up the meanings of “business cycle” or “capitalism.” So you would daydream of sitting next to a large, dirt-specked window. You peer down into the chaotic street and Dina is standing there holding human-sized white placards containing the answers to the exam’s questions in a bulky bold typeset. She flips from one sign to the next each time you bob your head. Question one, question two, question three and four and five, until you reach question fifteen and write down a brilliant exposé on something related to fiscal policy, thanks to your girlfriend’s patience and connivance. She drops the last slab of cardboard and reveals herself to you in all of her splendorous nakedness, giggling and glowing like a gullible woman being entertained by circus performers. She yells out your name and hops down the street waving her arms in the air and swerves past the stopped cars at the traffic light, and the male motorists gawk at her pasty skin and small buttocks, and the light turns green and she is still galloping along like a Kenyan long-distance runner when a tempestuous taxi driver tramples her with his Mercedes. You wake up startled by Dina’s sudden death and resign yourself to a zero.
It is the Sunday of your final weekend in Cyprus. Monday morning you will board an eastbound flight that will take you away forever. After so many zeroes, unexcused absences and probationary periods, the matchbox college informed you that immigration had revoked your student visa and that you had been politely asked to leave the country. When you first landed, you never figured deportation would be in your cards. Now you have opted to depart with your head held high and several handfuls of hundred Euro bills as your life savings, instead of ending up as just another hopeless foreigner who has made the island his illegitimate home.
Mother and Father will not understand your actions. She will sob and smack your firm chest with her closed fists. He will admonish you for bringing disrespect to the family and then not talk to you for a month. But you will explain to them that you have not returned empty-handed. You learned Greek, a classic and noble language, and your English is somewhat improved. You have seen Europe and its beauty and you gained some insight into its culture. You have work experience in construction and can now lend a valuable hand to your Uncle in Lahore until you figure things out. You will also feel like telling them that you are no longer a virgin and that you have experienced love, but they will certainly be bothered by Dina — despite her loveliness and motherly care — not being a handpicked Muslim girl from a good family.
And you will miss Dina. From the couch, you study her standing in front of your stove in a curry-stained apron that overwhelms her slight curves, vigorously stirring a Mongolian chicken and vegetable stir-fry with a wooden spoon. She lifts her right foot — the pink rubber sandal lies flat on the kitchen tiles like a beached catamaran — and rubs her left calf with her toes and the arch of the foot. Dina hums a tune by a Greek artist she has grown to enjoy and sways her head from side to side, her long, silky hair fluttering and tangling itself with the clasp of the necklace you bought her on her birthday. You make your way into the kitchen and you overlook her cooking and you kiss her on the cheek, and she gives you a saddened smile and tells you that she loves you, and you tell her over and over again that you will come live with her in Ulaanbaatar and get lost together in the Gobi Desert, and she places the wooden spoon on the counter and turns off the burner and leads you by the hand, maybe for one last time, into the bedroom, where everything is forgotten. Mother and Father have not called you since you broke the news of your impending arrival but, as Dina unbuckles your belt and spreads her thin lips against your unshaven neck, you turn off your phone anyway.
