The lane appears as though lined by caves. Dark green awnings, grimy at the edges, flap lazily over a row of mechanics shops. Each one seems to belch black dust and exhaust. Piles of cast off car parts litter their perimeters, an advancing front of material encroaching on the thoroughfare, occasionally beaten back by a pulverizing truck wheel, or an irritated rickshaw driver. I search the shops, trying to discern the most successful one. As I stand at the end of the lane, beneath a maze of tattered power lines, slumping my shoulders so as not to draw attention to myself, a shiny black late-model Mercedes pull into one of the shops—luxury swallowed into darkness. Almost immediately, the car pulls out and drives back the way it came. Perhaps the car whisked the shop’s owner in to collect the day’s profits, perhaps the car came to demand tribute in return for protection from the underworld kings, perhaps the men in the backseat simply wanted repairs. Regardless, I find the Mercedes auspicious.
Before I can hesitate, I walk across the street into the same shop, finding two men sitting atop broken engine blocks sipping tea out of chipped cups. Oblivious to me—a man without a car—they sit in silence.
“Salaam aleikum,” I say gingerly, so as not to startle them. They look up, but do not respond. “I wondered if you need a mechanic. I see you work on high-end cars and I have a lot of experience with modern engines.”
They look up at me suspiciously, skeptically, I assume because of my clean hands, the absence of grease on my clothes or body. The younger of the two says flatly, “You have to talk to the boss man. He owns this place, he just left.”
“When will he be back?”
The man shrugs his shoulders.
“Tomorrow?”
“Maybe.”
“All right, I’ll come back tomorrow.”
Before returning to the hotel where I have spent the last few days, I step into an internet shop. I direct the mouse—soiled, likely from the hands of an endless string of frustrated men searching for porn sites—to guide me to mechanics’ blogs and technical sites about late-model Mercedes. My mind seizes on the engineering drawings, delights in the outlines of the precise fittings, the indications of the electrical flows. Ever since I peered over my father’s shoulder at the technical specifications he held for one of our irrigation pumps, I have been unable to resist diagrams. I craved the ideal worlds they seemed to describe, the linear assemblies, the rational joining of form and function. These black and white, two-dimensional images hinted at orderly manufacturing plants, organized systems that seemed a world away from our farms—jumbles of humans and tools, animals and plants.
The internet offers mechanics’ discussions seeking help to solve their problems with Mercedes. What causes the high-pitched hum when the engine is idling? How to reconnect the electrical system that powers the dashboard display? Troubleshooting. In Dubai, I often answered middle of the night calls from anxious engineers whose tools were stuck, or lost in the well. I could usually pinpoint the error, even over the phone. I had poured over the manuals for each tool, read the diagrams and descriptions a soon as they appeared from regional headquarters in three ring binders, before my colleagues could mar the white pages with their spilt tea and dirty hands.
Soon, I understand how Mercedes electrical systems frequently cause glitches, how to hear whether the problem is in the cylinders or the timing belt, when it is easier to order a replacement part, or fine tune a fix on the spot.
I pay for my internet time, surprised to realize three hours have passed. Not once did I think of Kathryn or the boys, or my mother, or the sound of Ali’s voice telling me he would wait another day. I feel a smooth lightness in my thinking. I can contemplate a purpose, an objective beyond my own survival.
My cheap new CD player whirs to life and the headphones bring sound to my ears, muting the noise of the teashop. The first few notes, delicately plucked from the rubab transmit a haunting melody, a rhythm infused with nostalgia, with longing. I close my eyes, blocking out the people around me, their movements, the dull tans and grays of their clothes. This music, Persian-tinted, conjures colors in my mind’s eye; the emerald stone set in the player’s gold ring, the delicate orange of a plate of apricots, bright red pomegranates set against a dusty landscape. I listen. The tabla joins the rubab and they seem to walk together, the rhythm sometimes rushed, sometimes tedious, but always companionable. I am transported, momentarily transformed. The waiter brings my tea and biscuits. I consume them in the tea shop, but I enjoy them in the company of the rubab player, believing we could be friends, stoking the little flame of a relationship with this music. The player spins the CD to the end of the last track and then comes to a stop with a little sigh, as if even the plastic shares my disappointment.
I remove the headphones, allowing the chatter of the shop to reach me again. I look up in time to see the opening banner of My Brother parade across the television screen. I order another cup of tea, a flutter of pleasure rippling through my caffeinated heartbeat. I shift to a more comfortable position in my chair, incrementally accepting the habits of my new life. My life with Kathryn and the boys shifts an equal increment toward the realm of memory and myth.
I return to the mechanics shop the next morning.
“You stupid sister fucker,” the older man shouts, “I told you to hold the wrench still. A donkey has more sense. I should kick your fucking ass back to that stinking brothel your mother came from, I don’t care if you are the boss man’s son.”
I hear the sound of flesh hitting flesh. I don’t know which of them has launched the blow. But the impact achieves a silence, one breath, and then another. “Now hold the wrench still,” the older man says in an even tone. And metal clangs against metal.
I step into the darkness of the shop. “Salaam aleikum,” I call out to announce myself. The two men look up, their hands still in the bowels of the car engine. I step over to look at their work.
“Aleikum es salaam,” they mumble and return to their efforts. They are trying to reach the steering column from the top of the engine, reaching past a maze of parts in the process.
“You’ll have an easier time of it if you raise the car and reach from the bottom,” I offer.
They look at me with disdain, but I can see the older man hesitates to apply any pressure to his tool. “You worked on Mercedes before?” he asks me gruffly.
“A lot,” I lie. “From below, you can easily recalibrate the direction of the steering column if it’s pulling.” I glance at the tires, “If you’ve already determined that the car isn’t pulling to one side because the wheels aren’t aligned.”
The younger man suddenly looks up at the older man. “We didn’t check the wheel alignment.”
“Bain chod!” the older man spits out at the younger one, “I told you to do that first!” Deliberately, he pulls his hands out of the engine and wipes them on a filthy rag. “What’s your name?”
“Ismail Khan,” I reach out my clean hand to shake his dirty hand. He hesitates, my gesture too formal, a touch too Western perhaps. “And your name?” I ask to bridge the physical distance.
“Azim.” He offers no family name. “Get the blocks out,” he tells the younger man. “He is Zakir,” he says pointing.
I help Zakir get the blocks in place. Azim puts the car in neutral and we push it up the little ramps to the blocks. Azim lays on his back on a wheeled platform and slides under the car. He lets out an expression of satisfaction and then barks out orders for tools. Zakir scurries to hand Azim each one in order. In a few minutes Azim reappears, a grin on his face, dominant over Zakir, even in this subservient position.
“The boss man will be back this afternoon to drop off another car. He’ll be pleased when he checks on this one.”
“How many cars does he have?”
“Maybe a dozen, he keeps buying, sometimes he sells. Whenever he feels like one brings him bad luck, or if someone gets shot in the back seat, he changes it.”
Zakir flashes a nervous look at Azim, startled at the older man’s revelation.
I don’t respond. What is it to me who the boss man is? Who am I to judge, to jump to conclusions about what happens in the backs of his cars?
With a groan, Azim lifts himself to standing. “Do you know why the engines sometimes sing in idle?”
I pause for a moment, wondering if perhaps he is hinting at some kind of car metaphysics. Then he makes a high-pitched humming noise. I smile. “Of course,” I tell him, “of course I know what makes that sound.”
With my first earnings from the shop carefully folded into the pocket of my kurta, I step again into the music store. I scan the shelves for Hamyouk Hussain, half expecting he will appear and greet me with a familiar smile. I choose a disc which seems to be his first, so I can hear his early memories, understand the progression of his expression. I will allow myself this small pleasure, I rationalize, promising to save the rest of the salary for my future house in Morocco. I shudder at the years I would have to work at this rate to save enough to reunite with my wife and children in Morocco. But life changes, I remind myself. I will not always be a personal mechanic for a rich man of dubious reputation.