Cities of Refuge Read Online Free PDF Page A

the fold. On into the west-end residential streets, still cool, with the light now tall on red- and burnt-yellow-brick houses, open doors, small pissing dogs, shoulder bags hitched up, wet-haired workers leaving their houses, patting their pockets, pointing remotes at car locks, tossing blind waves behind them, the morning emerging in each yard, until finally she arrived at her three-storey building, to begin the end of her day.
    In the hallway she passed fumigation notices that conjured images of men in masks with metal wands in private spaces, uncovering all variety of secretings and abandonments, onward to her numbered door. She went in to find a handwritten message on the entryway stand: “gone out – Sadaf.” On the small desk Sadaf’s laptop sat open, not yet dormant, with text on the screen, the blinking cursor stopped mid-sentence. She read the half-composed story and felt the little tremor in her core at the descriptions of events in the infamous prison in Tehran. The story was a version of Sadaf’s own, altered to give to another refugee claimant in her world of local Iranians. A good story, without the fatal inconsistencies of the original. The other claimant had her own history to tell, but wanted a better one.
    The screen went dark.
    She stepped into the kitchen and stopped. There was something wrong she couldn’t place. She saw the phone reflected enormously in the toaster. Empty dish rack. Artwork fridge magnets, Kahlo, Mondrian. The tray of sunflower seeds on the counter. Someone, Sadaf, had run a finger through, dividing them into continents.
    From her bag she took a two-week-old edition of the
Asr-e Azadegan
, what she understood to be a liberal Iranian newspaper, flipped it open, and tried to penetrate a page featuring a photo of someone she guessed was a government official and lines of lettering like slow handstrokes on tickertape. She put it down next to the phone, and there, out of place, was an onyx chess piece, a knight that she’d found on the lawn of the hospital at the time of her mother’s first surgery. It belonged on the teak side table. Sadaf must have picked it up and held it absently, while moving to the kitchen. Kim looked at the piece closely. Had she ever really seen it before? The horse’s bevelled neck, serrations along the mane.
    She sat on the stool. Then she looked up and saw it.
    An empty slot in the knife block. It was absent her one good long knife.
    And the text had been fresh on the screen.
    She stilled herself.
    “Sadaf. It’s me.”
    She started down the hallway and she knew now there was someone there. She stopped in the bedroom doorway and said again, “Sadaf, it’s just me, Kim.” She listened for movement, restrained breathing, and heard only her own. In the mirror mounted on the slightly ajar closet door was her believing face. Either there was someone there behind the cold mirror or there was no one.
    Kim pictured her kneeling in the closet, the knife raised and ready. The image was movie-born, exotic, to be dismissed.
    But there’d been kneeling and knives in the prison account, not to be dismissed.
    Kim stepped forward and opened the door, and this was her closet in her place in her city and so there was nothing until, on delay, a sudden chill and weakness mixed with disappointment in herself. She went back to the kitchen and sat on a stool and wondered at her imaginings.
    The referral from GROUND warned that Sadaf might be paranoid. She was convinced that the men who’d come to her apartment the week before weren’t removals guys from Immigration but assassins from her government. She’d been out, up in the north of the city, in so-called Tehranto, selling spices in a strip mall, and came home to a neighbour’s description of the men, and was now more or less on the run. And it was apparently true that the assassins existed, or had existed over the past decades in Western countries, killing dissidents. It just hadn’t happened in Canada yet, as far