After Tehran by Marina Nemat

air.
    “Where’s Toronto?” I asked Alik.
    “Toronto!” Michael exclaimed, pointing at horses in a farmer’s field.
    “My house is in the suburbs,” Alik said, as if this explained everything. We had suburbs in Tehran, but we had almost no open spaces between them. What I now saw were farmland and wilderness.
    The car moved along the highway, and after a few minutes, a town with rows of almost identical brick houses came into view. They all had front yards that, unlike the ones in Tehran, were not fenced in behind tall walls. Flower beds overflowed with reds, oranges, and pinks. We had arrived. I was worried but hopeful. How could I not find my way to a good life in a land of so many intense colours? As we walked into Alik’s house, I felt like an astronaut on her first Martian expedition.
    I had expected Alik and his wife to ask me about Evin, but they didn’t. The silence I had faced in Iran, the one I had helped sustain after my release from prison, had stretched all the way across the ocean. I could almost see it now. It looked like a giant poisonousjellyfish that had swallowed the world. I did not want pity, but I needed acknowledgment—not only of my own experience, but also of all I had witnessed. My cellmates and I had suffered, and deep in my heart, I was desperate to know that our suffering had not been meaningless.
    The day after we arrived, Andre began looking for a job and Michael and I set out to explore our new country. The first time I took Michael to a park in Canada, it was drizzling, but we went anyway.
    Before coming to Canada, we had spent ten months in Hungary. In Budapest, people sometimes called me “Gypsy” and swore at me on the bus or at the park. I didn’t take it personally. I had nothing against Roma people, but I was not a Gypsy. I had dark eyes and long dark hair, and I guessed that Hungarians had never seen an Iranian, so I couldn’t blame them for their ignorance. After all, they had lived in a closed society for many years (we arrived there in 1990 shortly after the fall of Communism). I hoped that things were different in Canada and that I wouldn’t be judged because of the colour of my hair or skin.
    I put Michael in a swing and pushed him as hard as I could, and he laughed in delight, crying, “Higher! Higher!” No one else was at the park, but after a few minutes, a man with a girl about Michael’s age joined us. I decided the man was the girl’s grandfather. Michael got off the swing and went to the slide, and the man put the little girl in a swing. I watched them. The man smiled at me. I smiled an uncertain smile in return. He wore black casual pants and a beige jacket. Unlike me, he seemed very much at ease. He and the child blended with Planet Canada, not at all aware of its strangeness. Their every step told me that they knew what they were doing, when my every move was full of doubt and insecurity. I wondered how many times they had already come to this park. They had probably both been born in this country. This place belonged to them, andthe truth was that I was an outsider—but at least I was sure that Michael would soon feel as though he had always lived here.
    The rain had become heavier. The sky was an impatient shade of grey, the colour of a storm.
    “Do you need a ride?” the man asked me.
    I shook my head no and mumbled, “Thank you.”
    “Cookies! I want cookies!” Michael now cried. He had had his very first chocolate-chip cookie two days earlier, and we had no more left. I knew there was a convenience store around the corner, but I had not bought anything in Canada yet, since we were still staying at Alik’s house.
    “Cookies! Please, please!” Michael begged, and I scooped him up in my arms and ran toward the store as the rain drew puddles on the sidewalk. “‘Rain, rain, go away, come again another day!’” I sang. I was teaching Michael to speak English, and he loved nursery rhymes.
    They had so many different kinds of cookies at the