BRUCE CROWN

Bruce Crown is from Toronto. He is an alumnus of the University of Toronto and the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of four novels, available wherever books are sold, and has served as the Editor of the Hart House Review. He splits his time between Copenhagen and Toronto. You can find him on Instagram at @wittyoutlaw

UNSEEN BY US

The regulars at The Noble Poble-Sec, a Catalonia-inspired bistro-bar, are all about ambiance and a desire for flight. I’m the dayman. I’m there every morning when we open for the people who come in for breakfast and brunch and leave before the sun does. During the lonely evenings, most of us, whether kitchen or floor staff, part-owner or delivery person, review in hushed or absent-minded tones what little we know and learn about the regulars or their lives. 

My girlfriend, Dalia, lived on Palmerston Avenue, just off Bathurst. Her place was close enough to the bar that she came in often, and she was always curious about those reoccurring figures and their lives… Well, not really—I loved telling her about them, and she listened with seeming interest. The bald man who came in at 12:05 sharp, just as we opened, and ordered a double Americano and an OJ. The French mother and son who would spend three minutes staring at the menu before settling on the smoked salmon and mackerel salad.

Recently, we’d gotten a new regular. He’d always sit in the back, his freshly groomed beard offset by big, tough hands. I don’t know why I noticed his hands, but I did, and so did Bernardo, our chef. This regular would come in at 12:40, without fail, and order a bottle of Fiuggi sparkling water and a drip coffee. He’d write right-to-left in this beautiful leather-bound notebook. The letters were so strange, like nothing I’d never seen. He’d also send these quiet voice-notes on his phone, as if ashamed, in a language that none of us could recognize.

I’d asked around, wanting to know about his life in his home country. Most people in Toronto are from somewhere else. I wanted to know if he had kids, a wife. The bartender, Martha, heard from a friend that his girlfriend was a Swiss art-history student, that his parents had died, and that he was as poor as a mosque mouse and still had to support his extended family back home.

“But where’s back home?” I asked Martha, and she shrugged.

“Is he handsome?” Martha had asked me. She had the information but hadn’t seen him, because she worked evenings; I’d seen him but didn’t know anything. I knew what handsome was; I watch T.V. and read. “Well, you could say he’s handsome, but I don’t see it.”

Martha’s information seemed to come through gossip. And so, we workers of The Noble Poble created our image of this man: somewhat tall, faded haircut that refreshed every fortnight, clean beard, strong and hairy hands, and a rugged smile, walking in an exotic place where the signs run right-to-left and the words seem to rhyme. Our curiosity remained unsated, however. 

On the afternoon I began questioning him, the low winter sun housed no warmth, and the sky reflected off the Gaudi-esque windows of the bar, a strip of yellow and one of purple shooting across his inverted page. I had told Bernardo and some of the others I was going to talk to him today. He looked up from his book, covering the writing with his hands, and his almond eyes seemed battered and lost. He stared at me when I asked him if he wanted anything else; his order had been the same for the past month or so. Behind me, a few of the other regulars, including the bald man, vied for my attention. Later, on my walk home, I wondered whether he’d seen our faces peering at him from every angle of the bar, trying to fill the canvas of curiosity we wanted painted with the hues of his past and character. 

When I’d queried where he was from, he’d smiled and said, “Vancouver.” He seemed offended when I asked him where he was “really” from. I watched him close his book and say he didn’t want anything else. When he got up to pay, he told me he was Persian—which explained some things, but not all.

Martha had found out that he’d bought a penthouse in Yorkville. Was his Swiss girlfriend paying for it? How could he afford it? we wondered. He didn’t seem like the Yorkville type, either. That day, I noticed his gait. It was slow and sure, as if he always knew where he wanted to go. His face was younger than I’d seen in passing glances as he ordered. He was mid-thirties, max. He was wearing an old Lacoste polo and slim wool dress pants, very brave in this weather. He seemed old-fashioned; his entire demeanour screamed “quiet elegance.” I looked at my own dress pants—part of my uniform. 

He walked tall, as if he lit up the places where he walked. We all took a dislike. “It seems so aggressive!” Bernardo said. 

We’d all been raised on a steady diet of pop-culture references and colourful media reports. We knew a villain when we saw one… Lest we forget the Iranian Hostage Crisis! Yeah, that happened in America, but we’re neighbours! Dalia was a Greek classics student. She called him a barbarian.

“It’s not racist, though,” she said. “Back in ancient times, we used to call the Persians the ‘barbar people’ because Farsi sounded like barbarbarbar to those who didn’t speak the language. It isn’t racist… It’s historical fact.”

Farsi! That’s what it was! Now I knew where he was really from and what he really spoke. The staff and I murmured about his notebook. What was he writing in there? We talked about his girlfriend with fake sympathy and joked that he might try to steal Dalia. We tried incessantly to decode his voice notes — before work, during break, and after our shifts. Every day, though, I smiled when I brought his coffee. I asked whether he liked Toronto, and told him I was a real Torontonian. 

Dalia and I invented stories about his life back home: Sharia law in Tehran, where people are killed for speaking their mind, a penchant to boast and show off—I told these lies to myself until I believed them—this uranium enricher. The drama of his childhood, of his life outside Canada—I knew he wasn’t Canadian! These thoughts became a dense forest of poison ivy and misty, slithering snakes. Who did he think he was, with his beautiful European art-historian girlfriend and his Yorkville penthouse? 

The winter deepened. It was colder out. He now seemed to understand what was expected of him: our conversations were terse, he continued to tip generously and kept to himself. As quickly as he could, he would pack up his stuff and shove his brand-new iPhone into a pocket of those suit pants. 

“Maybe his girlfriend is rich,” Dalia said.

I found him on Instagram, when I was and wasn’t looking for him. He was a painter and exclusive interior designer. One day, I asked him about it, and he invited me to his apartment. I had told him Dalia’s place could use brightening up. Dalia came with me. His penthouse was not decorated according to one school; he’d show different rooms in different décors so his clients could get a feel for his style. Everywhere except his master bedroom. He said his girlfriend didn’t like strangers in there. We didn’t believe him. What was he hiding?

His hair was so well groomed, and his olive complexion was scrupulously cared for. Up close, Dalia had commented on his scent when they said hello to each other. He told us it was Truefitt & Hill 1805 shaving cream and aftershave.

The wall in the main room was bathed in light; the sun was being kind that day, and the subdued cream of the walls complemented absolutely everything: the leather band of his Master & Dynamic headphones, the USB cable of his Samsung charger, and even his Apple TV remote, which in turn complemented a wooden picture frame filled with landscapes and skyscapes of places we didn’t recognize. He moved with such ease as we went from room to room, his explanation of the décors, their inspirations and history, was all so fluid. It seemed rehearsed… too practised. But all the while, the aroma of the apartment and his aftershave played in our nostrils wonderfully.

Dalia hugged and pecked him on the cheeks when we left. He was very reserved then, but we went back a few more times… and again, he never let us into the bedroom. He even came to Dalia’s once after brunch. We liked him just then, in those moments. He was friendly and exceedingly polite. We started exchanging WhatsApp messages and trading Instagram likes. He didn’t know many people in Toronto; he’d moved here to be with Laura, his girlfriend. 

“Probably doesn’t trust her,” Bernardo said.

We didn’t invite him to Dalia’s birthday party or the closed regulars’ event at the bar. New Year’s came and went, and we didn’t invite him to the bar, even though we knew he only had Laura. Winter ended, but our friendship didn’t blossom further with the coming of spring. I watched from behind the bar as he wrote those backwards letters, always with a peculiar look on his face… Anger? Resentment? 

Dalia found his girlfriend’s Instagram and added her. Laura was beautiful, with long, strawberry-amber hair and a soft, wonderful voice. She spoke four languages. What did she see in him that we didn’t? Laura invited us to her own shows and various other theatrical events during the spring. She was well connected, which also explained her boyfriend’s exclusive clientele and absurd rates.

But the goodwill he’d won by proxy was short-lived. Dalia and Laura had been in his penthouse one day before a show—he was away in Vancouver for the weekend—and a package had arrived. Laura had gone down to the concierge to retrieve it, so Dalia had snuck into the master bedroom. The décor in there had matched the main room. On the nightstand were pictures of the happy couple in various Swiss and Italian towns; Dalia mentioned that “He had a peculiar smile on his face.” Then she saw it. Above the bed was a framed verse of the Koran. My God… Had he converted Laura?

Dalia took a picture and texted it to me. I forwarded it to the Noble group. We kept analysing the picture, trying to figure out what the verse said. Soon, a rumour spread that the Persian regular was an extremist who never missed morning or evening prayer; that’s why he’d come in shortly before 1 P.M. every day and leave before sunset. Bernardo heard that he might be abusing Laura. Everyone googled the warning signs of how Muslims convert others; we trained ourselves to watch for the signs and help each other. Martha said she’d seen them eat pork, that he and Laura were, like, wine sommeliers. We didn’t believe it. 

Whenever he came in, he tried to smile, but his demeanour was morose. We stopped talking on WhatsApp, and all of us unfollowed him on Instagram. Bernardo said he might not serve him if he ever ordered food.

One day, he brought one of his friends to brunch. He still didn’t order any food, but his “friend,” a Mediterranean woman who from behind looked like Dalia, ordered an egg and peppers sandwich. Her long, black, wavy hair smelled of peaches and Hermès perfume. No one knew who she was. Was he being unfaithful to Laura? It was difficult to understand them, switching between English and those alien barbarbars. He was suddenly so alive, so relieved, and a few days later asked me where I buy flowers for Dalia. I told him about my preferred florist and wondered whether I could convince Ted, the owner, to tell me where he’d get his flowers delivered.

The mysterious Mediterranean woman had returned with him on a separate occasion, and he’d shown her a portrait he’d drawn of her in his notebook. She was a few years younger than him. They got along very well, better than he and Laura, that’s for sure. She was very feminine. Both women were too good for him, this man who walked upright and with a purpose that didn’t sit well with any of us. 

Usually, he’d pay with his phone, but the following morning, he said he “hadn’t been home and couldn’t charge [his] phone,” so he paid by card. I learned his name was Khashayar. Dalia told me it was really Xerxes, like the king in the film 300. Things began to make sense. I told Dalia to tell Laura about the other woman, but she didn’t. Our thoughts are buried to the depths of our intellects, but I knew what to think. 

On a rainy spring morning, Laura came in with the other woman, and Bernardo refused to let us charge “that poor girl.” I set myself up behind one of the pavilion screens we use to section the place off for special events, and I could hear everything. Laura seemed happy and despondent at the same time. The other woman was talking about “the Persian’s place in Western society,” no doubt a ploy to get Laura to leave him… She was too rich for him to leave her. 

“He said it was his dream to go home. And to take me there someday. I thought this was his home. With me,” Laura said. 

“It is. Sometimes I feel the same way. Our place… is that weird? … our place in a Western metropolis is finnicky, hidden. Sometimes, we are demons. Iraq or Iran; what’s the difference? Maybe that’s how we’re portrayed.” 

“I know. I just wish I could do more. I wanted to ask you… You know the Hafiz in the bedroom?” Laura said.

“Yeah. What about it?”

“What does it mean? I can’t understand it.” 

“It’s about a wild deer that appears to us. It’s a metaphor for something that everyone is searching for and yet remains unseen by us. It’s about friendship and loneliness, about people who don’t understand you, and why you should search for higher ideals.”

“It’s a very difficult language to learn.”

“Italian, German, English, French, but Farsi is giving you trouble?” the other woman laughed. 

Laura sighed. “Colonizers look down on you, and other Persians think you’re not doing enough to liberate the homeland… or something like that, right?”

The other woman smiled. “Don’t think about it.… Who cares about all that? You think of a date, yet?”

“No. We’re both so busy. We haven’t talked about it—”

Then someone dropped something, and I didn’t hear the next part.

“You’re—do you ever get homesick?” 

We then heard he had been in jail for a few nights. It’d all started because someone made a comment to Laura, groped her and called him a sheik or something. He’d clocked the guy. How barbaric, we said. “Why didn’t he call the cops?” Bernardo observed.

I still stalked his Instagram, and he posted something that caught my eye: “We are tasked with liberation of the homeland. But where is this homeland, with a diaspora that grows by the day, is multigenerational, and whose hands will soon be out of reach of the hundred pillars¹. What is Spadina Avenue to Pahlavi² Street?”

No one thought their relationship would survive. He didn’t show up at the bar for weeks. I bumped into him on Spadina one day. The only interaction I had with him was the greeting. 

“Hi, Xerxes,” I said. 

“It’s Khashayar,” he replied. 

I don’t know whether he knew Xerxes and Khashayar were the same.

If it was his dream to go home, why was he still here? I thought about his post. Why are you on Spadina, then, if you’d rather be on… I couldn’t remember the street name.

Bernardo was out of his mind. He decided to show up at an art gallery opening where Laura had been, and he told her that her friend, “the other woman,” had actually been to the bar a few times without her, and that she had attended with Khashayar. “They seemed very cozy,” he’d said. “Be careful,” he’d warned. 

Bernardo said Laura had nearly broken into tears.

That night, I got a call from the night bartender, Theo. Dalia and I were having sex at her place, and as I was staring at her on top of me, her green eyes the foreground to her off-white ceiling, I began comparing her to that “other woman,” and the phone just wouldn’t stop ringing.

Khashayar had shown up behind the bar, waiting for Bernardo. Before the cops got there, they wanted me to run up the block to help Bernardo because, they said, “Xerxes and I were friends.” 

He’d shown up to talk to Bernardo. The cops arrived, guns drawn, sirens blaring through the street like a wailing crescendo. Ready to serve justice, Khashayar turned to them and said Bernardo had accosted and harassed his girlfriend.

But Bernardo was just looking out for the poor girl, I said. “He was warning her.”

Why did he get so angry, staring daggers at me? It was because he was caught, I told myself then.

It took Dalia, Laura, and the other woman to show up and calm things down. I will never forget that red-filled look in his eyes, contrasting with the yellow of the streetlamp above us. His voice was a burning sword. “That woman is my sister, you racist pieces of trash.”

We felt like idiots, but what were we supposed to think? Then Bernardo and I laughed. Us? Racists? How hilarious. We literally didn’t see race! Bernardo was Nicaraguan! Laura seemed to know what to say, whispering in his ear in German, barbars, and that elusive English she spoke with her beautiful European accent. 

I went back to my own place that night, a Dundas West bachelor that was too close to a Jack Astor’s, so it always smelled like fries and deep-fry oil. Before I got home, though, Dalia called me. She was alone, only she knew what happened later that night, and only may choose to believe whether such things are even possible. 

As she’d neared her house, a few minutes from the bar, Dalia had looked back, seeing the red and blue lights of the patrol cars still dimming and running off against the cool spring evening. When she’d turned back towards her place, a deer had been standing in the middle of the road, silhouetted against the antelucan sky. She’d thought she was dreaming. The deer then walked past her in silence, its hooves echoing along the gravel on the silent street.

He didn’t come into the bar after that, not until he and Laura came in for cocktails on a summer night. They seemed happy. Maybe his dream of going home had faded away. All dreams do. Sometimes because they come true, but almost always because they don’t.

We cuddled in corners and talked about them sometimes, discussing what we knew and trying to infer what we didn’t. Dalia never said anything. We were innocent, or pretending to be, just people curious about the exotic and different. But he was wrong; we weren’t racist… were we? Hadn’t we sensed his aggression in the beginning? 

I told Dalia to ask around. We tried messaging him on social media, but he never replied. Why wouldn’t he accept our apologies? We were reaching out. Martha had serendipitously become friends with one of Laura’s friends.

We asked around on Instagram, and facts came pouring in. It was stunning how easy it was to get the information we needed. 

Khashayar had been born in Vancouver, and his parents had passed some years prior. He’d only been back to Tehran once in his life, to help nurse his sick uncle, who had sustained a battle injury in the Iran–Iraq war; he passed away soon after his nephew’s arrival. 

Khashayar travelled around Iran for a few months, then returned home to Vancouver. Laura had met him at an airport in Italy while they were both waiting for their transferring flights. He’d told her he wanted to live near the beach and paint, and she thought his openness was attractive. She’d told him she was studying art history. The rest was history. They’d been happy for a long time. One day, he’d mentioned something off-hand to another Persian, and the conversation had deteriorated into Khashayar ranting about government corruption, about the mullahs’ evil plans to ruin the country and sell it off, piece by piece, to foreign interests. The other person had turned out to be a government contractor who’d then had someone track Khashayar and his sister down. He was ex-communicated. By pure chance, he’d found out that neither he nor his sister, Cassandana, could never return Iran.

One of Laura’s friends had worked in an embassy and had an in with the government. He was the person to go to if you were ever caught with alcohol or in mixed-gender “parties.” You’d pay off this middleman, and he’d ensure your bribe greased enough hands that you’d get off scot-free. Some were executed or lashed for drinking and having extramarital sex, but those with the government, or connected to them, could simply pay to escape any punishment. How American, we thought. The news at the time was breaking with instances of police just to the south of us murdering black, indigenous, and other marginalized individuals. Anyway, this person had told Cassandana that she and Khashayar were on a list and not to return home. Had they not heeded this warning, they would’ve been tortured and killed as soon as they entered Iran. 

I felt homesick and called my brother all the way up in Alliston, Ontario. He was okay. Our mom continued to take her daily walks around our old family farm, strolling up and down the property as if to memorize every glass blade, scent, and tree. She’d taken up sewing, and embroidering forestscapes and deer on curtains and dresses. Most nights, my brother said, the light in her little sewing room would burn well into the night. 

Dalia and I weren’t invited to Laura and Khashayar’s wedding. Laura posted some pictures on Instagram. It was beautiful. They honeymooned in Lake Como and Moorea, Stockholm and Laamu Atoll.

Two years passed before he came into the Noble again. I was still there, now the floor manager. He walked in and sat at his usual seat. Behind him, the sun had just begun to gather her strength, the sky a crystal-clear blue behind tiny houses, one of which was Dalia’s. His belt, a tobacco brown, complemented his shoes and sunglasses. His eyes shone with both love and determination. Why hadn’t I noticed this before? I wanted to tell him I knew Laura had saved his life, that she was the love of his life, and I hankered to apologize. But what would I say? When he ordered his sparkling water, he turned to face me, and his eyes shone. It was as if he recognized me for the first time. For an age, I stood in silence, frozen in my regret and the perpetuation of such ugliness. Like a deer in a forest, I saw myself surging forward through the mist, towards a cliff, and let myself fall towards the sky. 

Dalia carried his story back to my family farm in Alliston, where she sat with my mom and brother at sundown. The creak of the barn and the whisper of the dancing trees told the tale again and again, all except the ending. It wasn’t that his ending wasn’t happy. We just liked to think the tale ended like this: Khashayar returned home, wherever that was, with the love of his life, where he would appear every morning and order a sparkling water and coffee. He painted canvases with the colours of the dawn and wrote his thoughts in Farsi in his elegant little notebook…

Our eyes brightened with each retelling, and our interlocutors would lean forward whenever we approached this new ending. The new waiter who served him understood him as a full human being right away, didn’t second guess or think the worst of him at every turn, and the wild deer he longed for was never too far from his soothing tenor. 

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¹Sad-sūtūn, or the “hundred pillars,” is a reference to Persepolis, the capital of Persia during the Achaemenid empire. The city holds symbolic importance partly due to the fact that its ruins were the best-preserved monuments of ancient Iran. Persepolis continues to be a particular object of reverence.

²Pahlavi Street is a tree-lined street in Tehran. It divides the city into western and eastern parts. It is considered one of Tehran’s main thoroughfares and commercial centres.

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