Zyan Hassan #9184

I met Zyan Hassan at a stoplight on Harding Place.
I didn’t tell anyone this when we started seeing each other.

“Peek Point.”
“Pea pod?”
“Peek Point!”
“Ping pong?”
“Peek Point!”
“…I guess I’ll just recognize it when I see it.”

He was Kurdish. He had a thick accent and had not been in the country for very long. Maybe two years.
His apartment at Peek Point, which I eventually located, smelled thickly of men’s aftershave. You could smell it before you knocked on the door outside on the landing. The permeating smell of this spicy cologne might have been the only thing that continually lingered in his apartment. The place was nearly devoid of furniture. He had a television, and several large woven blankets on which we sat and ate things like cucumber salad and something that looked yellow like eggs but was actually chicken. It was really good.
He explained to me about the different countries that had once been pieces of Kurdistan, and about how traditionally rigid Kurdish values kept one inside a box, maybe, but that the box was safe, happy, and commonly accepted.
I learned to say, “Hi, How are you?” “I’m fine, and how are you?” in Sorani Kurdish.
He continually called me something that meant “beautiful thing of my heart.”
I learned that he’d had a girlfriend who was now married and still called him sometimes begging to run away with him.
He told me my clothes were too tight, and he left me five voicemails one night when I left my phone in the car by accident.
He told me that there was a difference between traditional Kurds and acculturated Kurds. I quickly came to understand that the ones I’d had crushes on in high school were the acculturated kind. He told me they were shameful, insolent, and disrespectful of the religion and the culture from which they came.
One day he made a point to show me a commemorative coin I had never noticed resting on the mantle above his fireplace. It was unusually large. He told me that while he was in Iraq, General Wesley Clark had come to speak to American troops about the war. He handed out some coins, and somehow, the then-presidential hopeful ended up giving a coin to Zyan. He kept going on about how nice General Clark was, what a good man. He held the coin out for me to see grinning, his white teeth and wide eyes a glow with something akin to pride. An Iraqi boy with an American General’s coin.

“Help me with this?”
He sat crouched on the floor of his Peek Point apartment with a thick white form paper in front of him.
“What is it?” I put my bag down next to the door and came to sit beside him.
“It’s a form so that I become a military interpreter.” He held the paper up in the light and squinted at it. “What does this mean?”
He pointed to the words “Social Security Number”, and I knew I would be there a while.
Zyan wanted to go back to Iraq in a safe way. He wanted to stop cleaning office buildings after dark, stop working at his friend’s hamburger joint, stop driving a car that smelled like french fries. He didn’t have much that other people didn’t. He didn’t have education, a degree, any technical training. He didn’t even have an extended family here like most immigrants you see clumped together in certain parts of the city. He did have one thing though; he was tri-lingual. Aside from English and his native language, he spoke Arabic. And in 2005, knowing Arabic could make you a living.

Eventually I viewed his near-fail pass of the ASVAB as a quick out for me. If he went into the military, and back to Iraq, I wouldn’t have to sit there calling him every time I went somewhere. Before long it was clear that I was going to break up with him.
Clear to me, anyway.

“What… why?”
“Because.” I pressed the phone tighter against my ear and cupped my hand around the receiver. “We don’t have the same values. We’re not in the same place in our lives.”
“What is value?”
I sighed, and crossed the kitchen to stare out at my mother’s backyard.
“We’re not in the same place in our lives,” I repeated.
“But, I—I never tell you this, but—I love you.”
A little late for that one!
“Oh… I’m sorry. I have to go.”
I was annoyed by the whole thing. I hate break ups. I always tried to get them over with as quickly as possible and start thinking about what I was going to do the next day, the next hour, the next five minutes. It was much easier to decide to make grilled cheese than to figure out what I could do to make things easier for someone else.
If I always had something to do, I wouldn’t remember what their face looked like, or their voice sounded like, when I told them I’d rather make a sandwich than be with them.

Zyan came back from Iraq a year later. He was thirty pounds lighter, and I thought twice before telling him I was practically engaged to Miguel Morales. Zyan didn’t like the military. His English still wasn’t that great, and he never saw General Wesley Clark. I pictured him crouching in the sand like Geraldo, trying to explain something to US Military personnel. He wanted to date me again. Instead he went back to cleaning offices and working at a gas station.
I sincerely hope he kept his faith. People with principles, even ones that don’t make sense to me, are hard to come by these days. It’s 2009 and I’ve only met a few people since then that have matched the intensity of his beliefs. That’s admirable.

Sometimes, someone will walk by me wearing a certain scent of men’s cologne, and my brain will literally drop everything. Before I know it, I’m back on that landing outside his second floor apartment at Peek Point. Scent really is the strongest link to memory.