The Darling of Kandahar Read online

  I contribute to the rent because, unlike my mother, I both work and study. Does she think this is a good idea? Not really, but, wise as she has become, she does not try to make me change my mind. Her philosophy of life is that people should do one thing at a time: first study, then work. She would like me to become a remarkable person, or at least persevere in something; this is the dream of any immigrant mother. My mother should not judge other people too severely, though, or she might herself be judged.

  It may be that I exaggerate. I think my mother accepts me as I am, with the choices I have made, just as I accept her. I study with pleasure, but as no pleasure lasts forever, I often have to take a break. My mother no longer lectures me, as in the past, telling me what to eat, how to manage my money, what to wear, all of which she then said all over again. The times I come home or go out are not under discussion any more. But don’t worry. There’s really no need to. I’m not at all excessive.

  When I come home, the first thing I do is smoke a cigarette with my mother. Yes, she is a smoker, and I learned this from her. Everyone else condemns her, except for me; even Pierre, who is a smoker, too. My mother eventually convinced me to make a few good choices in my life, so why should she be judged only on this? I started off stealing cigarettes from her packet, and when she found out she was very sad, but she didn’t dare punish me. How could she forbid me a sin that she herself practiced so assiduously?

  My mother cannot give up cigarettes. Smoking is part of her loneliness, her art, her soul. Cigarettes are the good part of her life, the Aladdin’s lamp, her flying carpet, the sacred smoke from Pythia’s temple. Everything makes sense in my mother’s routine when, after an hour, she vanishes behind her thick menthol cloud. Without it, a terrible loneliness defeats her, and she does not want that. Fragrant candles burn day and night in our apartment, as in a cathedral, to get rid of the smell of cigarettes.

  If there were something else to reproach my mother for, it would be that Radou still visits her when Pierre is away. He is a Romanian painter, and it is no secret to anyone, except for Pierre, that my mother was the model for all of his nudes. She is quite chubby now, but charming, with her small shoulders and tiny ankles. She disguises her belly under a knitted shawl and her neck under heavy jewelry. Her head is often wrapped in a scarf. During the Radou years, she was skinny.

  She has a painting in her bedroom of a naked woman riding an eagle, but back to front, which is to say that the woman’s head faces the animal’s tail. The only clothing the figure is wearing is a red hat sewn with pearls. She looks straight at the spectator, her right hand on her belly. Her breasts are perfectly round, like two apples that just happen to be attached to her chest. Her face is unrecognizable.

  But how could you be jealous of Radou, who is now so old? Deep wrinkles crisscross his cheeks and forehead, and his thinning hair has almost turned white. One of our few visitors spoke about his passion for gambling and of his recent desire to end his days in France. This made my mother miserable. She never speaks to me about Radou, and his rare visits make her even more silent.

  Another person who used to visit is a woman writer who got upset after the opening of one of my mother’s shows. I remember this because I was at home when my mother explained over the phone why she did not go to the event. She said she had eaten something that had gone off and had a huge cold sore on her bottom lip. This was not true, and the woman at the end of the phone knew this.

  The day of the opening, my mother stared out the window for a long time, wrapped in her plush red dressing gown, sipping her coffee, and pulling on her cigarette. It was a wretched, rainy day. How could she leave her cozy nest to face the cloudy sky and the empty streets? My mother no longer did things she didn’t want to do. She did not have to. If that writer were really her friend, she would have known not to expect my mother to go out on a day like that.

  Instead of wisely accepting this excuse, the writer chose not to call us anymore. My mother did not seem to suffer as a result. The void around her did not bother her. This is a disease that still affects her, and there’s a name for it: agoraphobia.

  Why am I going on about my mother?

  Because it seems to me I myself am showing more and more noticeable symptoms of agoraphobia. The fact that I never call my friends is taken badly. Some of my friends believe that this is a way of making myself more interesting or more desirable, which is not the case. My physical appearance encourages this interpretation, and there are people who think me proud, which is not something I have ever had reason to feel guilty about.

  If I had to talk about myself, I would admit that I have innocent pleasures and curiosities. I like to watch people’s mouths after they have eaten a piece of cake, for example. They keep on salivating, and the words they utter look like crumbs stuck between their teeth and on their gums.

  I also have to admit that my credit cards are maxed out. This bad behavior does not come from any complex or rebellion against my mother. She always tells me to pay my debts on time.

  I am beautiful, which gives me a certain freedom. I don’t have to make much effort to please people, because I know they like me anyway. I have big breasts and wide hips, which happens to be the title of a Chinese novel. Don’t forget, I’m studying literature, so it’s easy for me to come out with literary references.

  The story I’m going to tell showed me I am even more beautiful than I thought. The events that have changed my life took place in the summer, which is the season when girls can take advantage of their appealing nature. In Quebec, people say that young women do not marry in winter, and it’s easy to understand why.

  I love the company of my friends. I like spending time in cafés, but not in bars; I’ve enough of bars, having worked in one. In summer, I like swimming and sleeping in the park under the shade of a tree. I like shopping for small things, like everybody else. I like listening to gossip about my friends. I eat chocolate, I drink coffee, and I like red wine. It isn’t trendy to do drugs, and I don’t. I am neither solemn nor gloomy nor excessively pessimistic. I don’t like double-talk, symbols, or parables: that’s my mother’s domain, and I take after my father, too.

  You wouldn’t be wrong if you called me ordinary. As ordinary as anybody on this earth who lives and dies for unknown reasons. There is no merit in being born in such and such a place, nor of dying in the most unexpected country, and so our mistakes should not be judged too severely, should they? When you have no merit, you’re not guilty, either. It was Yannis who thought that.

  Why do my classmates hate me? Because they have trouble getting me to join them. Once I get home, it’s impossible to get me to go out again. Just like my mother, I excuse myself with the most ridiculous inventions, anything to be left alone. As soon as I put on my dressing gown and my polar-bear slippers and sit down on the couch next to my mother, nothing can get me to get dressed again. After having walked on windy streets in autumn, snowy streets in winter, boiling streets in summer, no one can persuade me to head outside and take the métro again.

  Some people get angry for no good reason. The routine that makes me happy might well drive another person crazy or make them suicidal. All I need is a good shower after a day of work. My mother often pushes me to accept invitations, and the only argument she can come up with is, What are you going to do when you grow older? I suspect she just wants the flat to herself. But every time I refuse to go to a party, my mother feels secure. She looks the way she looks when she’s lost something and is not sad about it. When the phone rings, she doesn’t even bother turning down the volume on the TV. She knows I won’t be long.

  Talking about clothing, mine reveals my unsophisticated nature. I dress simply, winter and summer. I have long hair but I don’t fix it in complicated styles. I usually wear it down or in a ponytail. To get an idea of what I usually wear, just take a look at the picture in the second issue of Maclear’s magazine. I’m wearing a pair of j
eans and a black T-shirt that shows my breasts, but decently. You can make out my nipples. My classmates tell me I am very sexy, but that was just a casual outfit for a summer day.

  What they do not know is that in this picture my breasts look like those in Radou’s painting: two round apples just about to fall. That image is of my mother at her most glorious. My own life, too, has changed since the day that photographer from Maclear’s asked me to pose for the cover.

  In Quebec, summer is the short hunting season when men search desperately for somebody to spend the winter with. Women are a kind of provision that allows men to survive this horrible season. This may seem funny, but spending the cold season alone can be fatal in certain places. A good woman is someone who’s good to winter with.

  I can’t resist telling you about a scene from the TV series Pure laine, in which an African man has married a Quebec woman. In one episode, the school principal gets into an argument with an immigrant teacher, telling him he does not understand anything about their tragedies. Do you know what it means to wait a whole winter to get a wife? she shouts. No, he doesn’t know, because he’s from Rwanda. A comedy, as you can see.

  The story really begins at lunchtime on that summer day when I was on campus with two of my friends. A young man came up to our group, said hello, looked at each of us in turn, and then asked me if I would be willing to pose for the front cover of a national magazine for an issue ranking universities. I laughed and accepted without hesitation.

  The young man told me to follow him to an alley where another man was waiting for us, holding a plastic Le Château bag. When he saw us, he took an academic gown and a mortarboard out of the bag. They figured out where I should stand, facing the sun, wearing that stupid outfit. The photographer tried more than dozen shots before declaring he was satisfied. It didn’t take long. After ten minutes, they helped me take off the gown and even helped tidy my hair, which had got messy because of the mortarboard. I still wonder about the briefness of things that can later on rouse huge emotions, when they do not destroy you. Ten minutes is long enough to kill a person. The two men thanked me warmly and then left, telling me to look out for the next issue of Maclear’s.

  When I returned to my friends, they asked me how much I was paid. I let an Ah! of surprise escape, because it had not occurred to me to ask for money. You see how much I am like my mother? Making money has never been a priority for us. Did I already have a feeling that this would be something that really mattered to me?

  As for my childhood, I have to say this was a calm, even boring, period of my life. Except for my parents’ divorce – which didn’t come as a shock to anyone – nothing particularly sad or dramatic happened. I loved my father, because he was nice to me, stern with my mother, but fair to both of us. I had no problem with his authority, because I never disagreed with my elders – parents, teachers, or bosses. In all my life, I never once shouted at my parents. I obeyed them as I thought their requests perfectly matched my needs, and they had my complete agreement.

  The lack of conflict between us made my father’s departure bearable. Except for the fact that he wasn’t living with us anymore, our personal relationship continued as before. I found my mother’s presence and my father’s money reassuring. In Quebec, many children expect no more than that.

  My father never asked me to spend weekends or summer holidays with his new family. He probably knew that meeting her father’s new wife is no fun for a girl. There were no regrets on either side. My mother lived alone for a few years, and if she had any boyfriends, she saw them at their place.

  I always went to private schools, which was my father’s decision. My mother was convinced that a child who really wants to learn does so even in the worst possible school, but my father only trusted polite surroundings. What drove my mother crazy were the fees charged for this. It wasn’t a matter of money, because she is not a stingy woman, but a matter of principle. What she could not understand was why they should pay for the same services that children got for free in public schools. My father replied that this was the point, they were not the same services at all, as the teachers were more involved and the students better educated in the private schools.

  “How is this discrimination possible?” my mother wondered.

  “And what happens when the children finish public school? Are their chances of entering good universities the same?”

  “Certainly not. This is why Irina has to go to private school.”

  “Is this fair?”

  “What is fair is what is good for Irina. If the other parents decide differently, that’s their own business.”

  My mother considered refusing to put me into private school as a form of protest.

  “You have no right to protest,” said my father angrily. “We have to accept what we find in this place. We don’t have time to waste disobeying or hanging around waiting for changes. Otherwise, we’re all going to suffer.”

  My father won the battle, as he was the one paying my tuition fees, as well as a nice amount to support my student mother. He thought that having a parent who was still going to school was a good example to follow, and that it was stimulating for me to live in such an atmosphere. When people are so wise, distance is bearable.

  I never lived in luxury, though I never felt poor either, or humiliated because we didn’t own a home or a car. My mother didn’t drive. And when I grew up she spent one whole afternoon explaining to me why renting an apartment was much more advantageous than owning a house.

  “In Canada, a house is never a big investment, mostly because houses are built of perishable materials like wood and paperboard. After 25 years, by the time you finish paying your mortgage – which is the initial sum borrowed from the bank multiplied by three because of the interest – your house isn’t worth much, because it’s already considered old. Besides, quite apart from the mortgage, a house is a bottomless pit. Who could possibly keep track of all the monthly expenses with the garden, the grass, flowers in the spring, irrigation in the summer, snow clearing in the winter, a tent for the car, heating, renovations? With a house, there’s always something to repair or replace – the roof, the pavement, the taps, the windows, the floor, the carpet, whatever.”

  You understand why I do not want a house of my own. In our small family we despise people living on the outskirts, those green suburbs with tiny yards and a wooden patio where the neighbours stare at you in the swimming pool. The biggest problem with these houses is that they remove you from downtown, the kingdom of theatres, art galleries, libraries. A house in the suburbs means a life of slavery.

  Like my mother, I also think that what matters is a diploma you can easily carry with you. That’s freedom, as simple as that.

  I went to Villa Maria, a convent that had become a Catholic school for girls. Girls from other religious groups did not have to attend the Catholic mass, just a few mandatory catechism classes. This was fine by me. I am an Orthodox Christian on my mother’s side; my father and his family are atheists.

  My mother had me baptized without telling my father. One Sunday morning, while I still was in diapers, my mother – accompanied by her parents – went to an Orthodox church where the priest submerged me three times in a basin full of mild water perfumed with basil leaves. Afterwards, they came back to our house for a small celebration.

  My grandmother gave me a precious gift that day, a tiny cross carved out of holy wood. For the longest time, she used to insist the piece came from the cross Christ was crucified on. My mother had great difficulty convincing her that such a cross would have to have been as big as a mountain to satisfy 2000 years of Christian fervour. Afterwards, my grandmother maintained only that the wood came from Jerusalem, and that was how the cross had come to be blessed. Somewhere in the garden of Gethsemane, while waiting for his torturers, Jesus had surely touched one of those trees.

  My father was told about my relig
ion not long before he and my mother divorced, but by then it meant nothing to him. It was too late to worry about such minor things, as their quarrel went much further back. It wasn’t such a big deal for my mother, either, by that time. She had never been a practicing Christian and, although she never admitted it, she was even more of an atheist than my father.

  I think that being born into the Orthodox Church makes you neither too devout nor really an atheist. For my grandparents, religion was more a way of life and a bunch of superstitions. Their faith took a very tolerant form and was therefore quite acceptable. At school, I kept my religion, knowing it meant nothing as it played no role in my life. At Christmas time and Easter, my mother and I went to the Romanian church, more to get some fresh air than out of conviction.

  Besides, going to church was the only way my mother kept in touch with her community. She was glad that she no longer had friends and that she didn’t have to greet old acquaintances or report on her status as an eternal, jobless student. Members of her community had a good reputation with the immigration service due to the speed with which they found jobs, bought houses and went on vacations to Cuba. My mother’s former fellow citizens became good Canadian citizens practically from one day to the next. They spent a great deal and got heavily into debt with their big houses and their two cars. Their philosophy of life was: “In Canada we will have everything we could not afford in our own country.”

  Which is why my mother appreciated not having to talk to anyone about her life. She looked like nobody except herself. She was so modest in her black coat, her knotted multi-coloured scarf, and her wool mittens. After more than 15 years, my mother belonged nowhere.