Yasmeen Read online

  CAROLYN MARIE SOUAID

  Yasmeen Haddad

         Loves

  Joanasi Maqaittik

  A NOVEL

  Baraka Books

  Montréal

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  © Carolyn Marie Souaid

  ISBN 978-1-77186-124-3 pbk; 978-1-77186-125-0 epub; 978-1-77186-126-7 pdf; 978-1-77186-127-4 mobi/pocket

  Cover photo by Pierre Dunnigan

  Book Design and Cover by Folio infographie

  Editing by Elise Moser and Robin Philpot

  Proofreading by Brownwyn Averett

  Author photo by Joel Silverstein

  Legal Deposit, 4th quarter 2017

  Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

  Library and Archives Canada

  Published by Baraka Books of Montreal

  6977, rue Lacroix

  Montréal, Québec H4E 2V4

  Telephone: 514 808-8504

  [email protected]

  www.barakabooks.com

  Trade Distribution & Returns

  Canada and the United States

  Independent Publishers Group

  1-800-888-4741 (IPG1);

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  We acknowledge the support from the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC) and the Government of Quebec tax credit for book publishing administered by SODEC.

  TABLE DES MATIÈRES

  RAIN ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  SNOW NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SQUALL SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  THAW TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  In loving memory of

  Doreen Shaker Cheeseman

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  YASMEEN MOVES THROUGH THE CITY TRYING TO FORGET. The sidewalk is wet and slick, window displays of skeletons and zombies with eyes spun back in their sockets—a veritable Festival of the Dead—calling to her. The Halloween moon is conspicuously absent. She crosses a dark intersection bordering on a derelict park she normally avoids. Except for a crepe-thin layer of snow on everything, the grass is brown and worn and the trees are bare. At one time, before the pigeons and the homeless moved in, it was a sanctuary of mown grass and manicured hedges, a landmark named for its centrepiece bronze of a famous explorer, John Cabot, scanning the horizon with a map in one hand and the other shading his eyes.

  As though answering a dare, Yasmeen saunters toward the park. She notices some motion at the base of the statue, a shabby man looking small and unstately before the monument’s grandeur. Something in his appearance makes him vaguely familiar, his lopsided Montreal Canadiens tuque, his unsteadiness, the brown paper bag in his lap.

  “Qanuippiit?” she calls out. A sharp wind blows the hair backwards off her face as she approaches him.

  The surprise in his face leaps out at her, the fact she can speak his language. She feels the burn of his eyes as he drinks out of the brown bag, sizing her up. She is wrong; she’s never seen this man before.

  “Where did you learn to speak Inuktitut?”

  “I was up north for a while.”

  He takes another slug and looks down at the space beside him. He glances in her general direction, then down again at the same space. She hesitates but can’t find a reason not to join him. The marble steps are cold.

  They sit together in silence, observing the ebb and flow of the city. Once upon a time, she would have stoked the conversation. She would have asked what community he was from, why he was here, when he was returning to the North, she would have bombarded him with an earful of questions. She would have hardly waited for his answer before moving on to the next. She doesn’t do that anymore, she’s learned to let things happen in their own time.

  “You look like a smart girl,” he finally says. He horks up a mouthful of mucus and spits it across the darkness. “Maybe a teacher.”

  She nods, impressed by his guess.

  “Lots of girls go up north to be a teacher. And to be in love with an Inuk.” He smiles. “I had a Qallunaaq teacher once. She was smart, she left before she found a man.” He drinks a little more, sniggers and passes her his bottle.

  Yasmeen shakes her head no.

  They return to their comfortable silence. The snow picks up, needles them with icy pellets. He pulls the hat down over his ears. A fat, wet flake falls onto her lashes and melts down her cheeks. She sits there quietly. The fact that she can go on this way, indefinitely, with a thousand things to say and no real urge to say them, amazes her. And doesn’t.

  After a while he stands and stretches, wobbly on his feet. He scratches his head and furrows his brow, trying very hard to remember something. He looks wistfully into the distance. “Tell me everything you know about winter,” he says.

  RAIN

  ONE

  “Are you insane?” barked Yasmeen’s mother. Samiyah Haddad had tried everything to convince her daughter that setting off for the middle of nowhere was a bad idea. But time was running out. “It’ll be like living in an icebox, and the polar bears will get you if you don’t starve to death first.” It wasn’t a battle, it was a war, and things were slipping out of her control. “I can’t win for losing,” she harrumphed. “Whatever happened to law school?”

  Yasmeen rolled her eyes. “That was your idea.”

  Samiyah was hunched over a frying pan, mangling the vegetables with her testy stirring. “For heaven’s sake,” she groaned, blasting the fan, waving away the billowing steam. She pursed her lips over a wooden spoon, slurping to taste. “Needs something.” She tossed Yasmeen the last yellow onion from the net, the papery shells flying everywhere, and handed her a paring knife.

  Yasmeen sliced through the deep layers. Her eyes filled with the sharp sting.

  Samiyah pointed. “Get another from the fridge, cold ones are easier to work with.” She sighed and shifted her weight to the other foot. Her eyes narrowed. “They don’t cause you tears and heartache like your children do.” All week she’d complained of insomnia, up at four every morning, pacing the kitchen with a cup of hot milk. At breakfast she mentioned how she was having a rough time sleeping, maybe her diverticulitis was acting up again.

  “What’s a year, anyway?” Yasmeen shouted over the roaring fan. “In the scheme of things.” She rolled a newspaper and fanned the steam out the window.

  Years ago, her best friend Morgan coached her on how to deal with parental disapproval, how to downplay certain things or say whatever her mother wanted to hear and then just turn around and do as she pleased. Over time she’d gotten good at it, the little white lies, the staying out later and later. She learned how to keep her “real” life separate and hidden from the family. She got so good that even Morgan, with all her one-night stands and crazy shenanigans, was impressed. Then Yasmeen’s father died and Samiyah went berserk
with her parenting, as though if she didn’t, her kids would turn out all wrong and then the world would judge her as a terrible mother. She uttered her dire warnings, wagging an index finger. Good men didn’t marry girls who slept around. It was all about honour. Who would marry her if she had a soiled reputation?

  Exasperated, Yasmeen began looking for opportunities to cut loose without causing her mother to have a conniption—a job overseas, something lucrative and respectable. But she knew that one way or the other, her mother would read it as a betrayal. As though Yasmeen were somehow turning her back on family. Family was sacred to her mother, untouchable. It was everything. The outside world came second. You didn’t break with family. You didn’t tarnish the family name. You kept family skeletons in the closet where they belonged. You took the good with the bad. You stood by one another, the way her mother had stood by her father, even when things were at their worst. To cap it all off you put a smile on for the world, especially if you were a woman.

  But it was a different world now. Her parents’ immigrant past was just that. It was past. Yasmeen knew if she didn’t take off while she had the chance, her mother would slowly work on her until her dreams evaporated altogether. And then heaven help her. How would she break free? Yasmeen’s greatest fear was falling into lockstep with the rest of the world, people living lives of bored indifference, sleepwalking through decades until they woke up unable to remember where all the time had gone. If she wanted a real life she had to ditch the safety net, her suburb of clean sidewalks and immaculate lawns and Sunday suppers with appropriate suitors; she had to go away, far away, further even than the flickering beacon across the river, city of nine-to-fivers and trendy dance clubs. She had to pick up and leave and not look back.

  “It’s only a year.”

  “I was already married at your age.”

  Yasmeen cringed. “Sometimes you have to take a less direct route.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means what it means, I guess.”

  Samiyah dropped the pyramid of onions into the oil, stirring quickly as it sizzled in the pan, dense steam rising again. It was typical of how she behaved when things weren’t going her way, a brusqueness colouring her actions. She laid it on thick—haughty disappointment, showy displays of disapproval. Samiyah had a highly developed technique for insinuating guilt, sharp talons in her silences, clenched jaw, narrowed eyes glinting with disdain.

  She pushed past Yasmeen to get a bell pepper from the fridge. “Tell me, what sane person leaves a city with all its comforts and opportunities to go all the way up to … where the hell is this place again? The jobs here aren’t good enough?”

  “I’m only twenty-three.”

  “You keep reminding me.”

  Yasmeen wiped her hands on the back of her jeans and switched off the deafening fan. She took an awkward step toward her mother, lowering her voice an octave. “Look, I don’t want to get tied down so soon. I’m still young.”

  “What are you trying to imply? That my life was a waste?”

  It was her typical reaction, Samiyah twisting everything to sound like Yasmeen was trying to punish her. Or ridicule her. But it wasn’t so. No way was she trying to do that, bring up the past, all the stuff with her father. Her mother was the one causing all the fuss. Yasmeen just wanted her life to be her life. She wanted freedom, plain and simple. She tried to remember the clever, snappy things Morgan told her to say to get her mother off her back. The guilt truck stops here. Terminus. Everyone off!

  Yasmeen had no intention of going through life dragging her ethnicity behind like an old steamer trunk. She wasn’t about to become a clone of her mother, a controlled woman afraid of her own shadow. She refused to have her comings and goings scrutinized under the microscope, she wouldn’t be probed and interrogated and she certainly didn’t want to feel like a criminal for having emotions and feelings.

  But that was the rub. For all her big talk, Yasmeen wasn’t so great at voicing opposition. Especially when it involved her mother. It had taken a while, but she developed a strategy, and with that, a thicker skin. The couple of times she had tried it, just blurting out what was on her mind while she imagined, that very instant, someone appearing in the headlights of an oncoming car, it worked. Something about following an action through to the end, to impact, to the knuckle-white screams and the smash of metal and glass, gave her courage. Just say the words, she thought to herself. Say them straight out.

  “I’m not ready for a husband and children.”

  After it flew out of her mouth, Yasmeen couldn’t be sure if she’d actually said it or only thought she had. Or if, instead, she’d given in to emotion and had a hissy fit, stamping her feet and shouting I’m never getting married, so just forget it. Dad would have been on my side. The whole tirade without an ounce of sugar coating.

  A nimbus of smoke hung over them. Samiyah yanked a bulb from a plait of garlic and loosened a handful of cloves. She worked in silence, shucking their skins, while Yasmeen dawdled at the sink, scrubbing the onion smell from her hands. She felt a smidgen of guilt but mainly she felt a lightness of being. She snapped off a sheet of paper towel, drying each finger slowly and deliberately as her mother’s mallet pounded the chopping board repeatedly, again and again, until the last of the garlic was smashed.

  Yasmeen peeked at her watch. There were still friends to see, last-minute items to pick up at the drugstore, vitamins, razor blades, foot scrub, birth control pills. “Well, I’m off,” she said.

  Her mother spun around, thin-lipped. “And to boot, you spend your last night at home gallivanting around town …”

  “Mum. For cripes’ sake.”

  •

  Everyone at the party was operating on adrenalin and nerves. Including Yasmeen. For months their assigned villages had been coloured pushpins on a giant wall map of Northern Quebec, an area bordered by Hudson Bay to the west and Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay to the north. An area the size of Venezuela, all of it covered in permafrost.

  Yasmeen had always dreamt of travelling to exotic places. When she was a child her father bought her a box of glow-in-the-dark stars. He stuck them on her bedroom ceiling so that at night when he tucked her in they could look up at them and pretend they were camping out under the twinkling sky. He told her his own bedtime stories about the astronauts preparing to land on the moon and the great explorers who had sailed centuries ago, looking for the New World, gold and silk and the Northwest Passage. He promised that if she went to school and put her mind to it she could become anything she wanted to be, somebody important, even an astronaut. Shoot for the moon, he told her. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?

  It got her thinking about life outside their peaceful suburb. Summer afternoons she dragged Morgan out with her, five kilometres to the highway that bordered the St. Lawrence River that the natives of Hochelaga canoed and Jacques Cartier explored. The two of them barely twelve, the light catching in the spokes of their CCM bicycles. Breaking their parents’ rules just to get a look at the pigeon-grey skyline of Montreal. Standing in the scruffy weeds, socks down around their ankles, they poked their noses through the chain-link fence and invented juicy stories about living in a place where you wore high heels and a purse over your shoulder and were constantly on the go. Back then, she never dreamed she’d want anything more. It didn’t occur to her that the exciting city wouldn’t satisfy her, that one day she’d get on a plane to fly almost fifteen hundred kilometres north, to the Arctic.

  The farewell party was happening at Sayard’s place, an airy, high-ceilinged walk-up in a part of Little Italy where rents were dirt cheap, a typical student apartment sparsely furnished with odds and ends from yard sales and thrift shops. A B-52s song was drifting from the stereo and people were laughing and swigging beer as though it were any normal night. Sayard floated around the room, popping into and out of conversations as she
cleared away the leftovers.

  Leaning against the wall Yasmeen observed their merriment, eager for the night to be over. She could have easily left town a week ago. She would have been happy. A week ago everything was ready, her bags packed, the flight booked and confirmed, all the loose ends—medical appointments and banking—tied up.

  Sayard rattled toward her with an armful of dirty dishes, her honey-brown hair tossing from side to side. “Help me with this, wouldya?” She gestured for Yasmeen to relieve her of some of the pile and they entered the kitchen sideways through a swinging door, heaping everything in the sink. Sayard heaved a sigh of relief. “Thought I’d drop the whole shitload,” she said. They both laughed nervously.

  Yasmeen popped the cap off another beer. “You psyched?”

  “Haven’t even packed yet.”

  “Seriously? I think I was ready when I was six,” said Yasmeen. She tore a strip of pita and wiped the bottom of the hummus bowl with it.

  “Nervous?”

  “Me? Are you kidding?” Yasmeen laughed, stuffing the bread into her mouth. “My mother’s being pissy about my leaving, though.”

  “Mothers, meh.”

  “She just doesn’t get it.”

  Sayard pulled a platter of fruit and cheese from the fridge. “What do you want her to get? She’s from another generation.”

  “I want her to get that it’s not only about the job. It’s about everything.” She watched Sayard snip the grapes into smaller clusters and arrange them attractively around the dish.

  They heard a champagne cork bounce off the living room ceiling and hit the wall.

  “Time to celebrate,” said Sayard, hurrying.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Yasmeen carried the platter out while Sayard ferried the cocktail napkins and a tower of plastic wine glasses. By the time they got there, Finn was already walking around with the chilled green bottle and a dishtowel draped over his arm, saying “Chin-chin, sustenance for rickety plane rides.” Finn was the jokester of their gang, a lanky Nordic guy, not her type physically but whose black humour she couldn’t get enough of.