I want to get a haircut and maybe some other things and I want to go alone on my bicycle.
I’m feeling very determined as I pedal across the city with its narrow swarming streets. It’s a long way to the barbershop and my journey requires many stops and starts, but at last I’ve dismounted and I’m passing through its modest little door, pitted and marred by the centuries, a passageway through which so many of our illustrious ancestors preceded me. Its ancient bell jingles merrily as I pull the latch, but the clearance is so low—this barbershop dates from an era when our people’s stature was much smaller—I have to stoop to get through the opening, and I find myself entering together with a very old man who at the last second has stepped in front of me, and I’m leaning over his back and unintentionally mimicking his bowed posture and outthrust stringy neck.
Inside, there are a number of people already sitting in chairs waiting for the barber to arrive. There’s only one empty chair available and so I hesitate, and it’s only when the very old man sits down that I realize he’s actually somewhat younger than I am.
Now I’m standing before him, listening to him explain what it’s like to get a haircut here. The barber will not accept all of us, he’s telling me though I have the sense he’s really speaking to everybody in the room. And he does not take his customers in the order of arrival. The old man spreads his bony fingers across his knees as he explains things. It’s only when the barber is ready that he will summon you.
I haven’t yet looked at the barber chair with any particular interest, but now I notice how it takes up most of the room, leaving only a small area along the wall for the customers to wait. The chair, besides being very large—one needs to mount several polished steps in order to sit down in it—is upholstered in dark brown leather that bears the sheen of the thousands who’ve leaned their backs against it. It’s an elaborate expensive-looking apparatus certainly, a genuine artifact, with pedals and levers and gauges and, except for the shiny leather, made entirely of silver. Protruding upwards from the top corners of the chairback are two articulating arms that end in silver wedges shaped like the hoofs of horses, with rounded pads instead of horseshoes. These must be for massaging the neck and shoulders of the customer.
The old man continues to talk at great length, speaking of how the current barber, who inherited his post from the long line of tonsorialists who kept this little shop before him, spent most of his adulthood in barber study, attending all nine of the royal barber colleges with their combined seventy-two levels of certification. And then he recites from memory a long list of royal personages, celebrities, politicians, and actors whose hair the barber has cut during his time. He explains how, in cases where a customer’s comportment reaches the near perfection the barber seeks, he will honor certain among them with an eyebrow snip, a mustache trim or, using his prized razor, an heirloom handed down from the days of Occam that only one in a thousand ever glimpses, shave their chin, their cheek, or even the back of their neck.
Only a few of the customers appear to be listening to the old man. Several are sound asleep, and as I scan their faces, I notice there’s an entire extended family present—a father with his long shaggy beard that reaches the floor, his wife, his elderly parents and two small children, a boy and a girl. And I also realize that several of the customers look familiar. One, even though he’s a grown man close to my own age, resembles a school friend from my childhood, a boy I was jealous of for owning his own pedometer which he used to measure the distance to and from school and was forever explaining to the rest of us the precise differences in various possible routes through the village, and there’s another customer who looks very much like a man who was once my supervisor in a small advertising company, an entirely unreasonable person who made me work during Feast Day even though he was aware that it was only at that time that my wife’s parents made their once-a-year visit from the home country.
The old man is talking and talking and I realize my legs are becoming increasingly tired, and now I’m having a fantasy of simply sitting down on his lap which, it occurs to me, would offer the dual advantage of providing rest for my weary legs and muffling his tiresome prattle. The thought makes me chuckle and the old man stops speaking and looks up at me.
You like your hair rounded on the sides, he says.
I don’t like it that way at all, I respond thoughtlessly, I like it even. What makes you think I want it rounded on the sides?
Because I know your type.
Now it’s clear he knows that I’m a foreigner and I decide to leave. I glance around the room one last time before I make a show of checking my watch. Then I sigh ostentatiously and turn towards the door.
Don’t go! The old man calls out as I’m walking away. You’ll miss the barber!
I don’t answer him. I nearly answer him but I don’t. I know very well how he will respond to anything I say, and only by keeping mum might it be possible to stop him. If I were to make the slightest excuse, if I were to say, I’ll be late for my appointment, for example, he’ll immediately raise the familiar shout, using that most-famous colloquialism of our province, the one that in our native language carries the meaning: Imposter! And then the sleepy patrons will bestir themselves—how quickly suspicion arises in the human heart!—and the dormant idea that there is a trespasser amongst us will once again be resurrected.
Though I’ve lived in this country for my entire life and I speak its language without any discernible accent, I will always be a foreigner, and if I don’t withdraw from the barbershop in time, if I should have the bad luck to be chosen, then god only knows what penalty I’ll have to pay.
The etiquette is exact. The rules of participation, precise. The barber will pause six times and there are six words that one is expected to sing out each time he does so. It’s preordained that anyone not versed in these customs will fail.
Even though all my life I’ve recited the six words every night before I close my eyes, my self-consciousness in uttering them will betray me. The barber will immediately sense that I’m someone who can never understand the significance or beauty of his haircut, and no matter how thoroughly I praise his artfulness, I’m bound to be discovered.
And what stupid impulse made me stop here? When I left my home I only meant to ride through the city and possibly browse among the stalls of the street vendors. I was looking forward to crossing our most famous and monumental bridge, so wide that it supports its own warren of streets and buildings. To traverse the grand bridge after so many years, to breathe its storied air, hear our citizen’s mingled voices and maybe catch a glimpse of the peacock dancers in their varicolored smocks, should have been more than enough for me. As long as I’m on my bike nobody suspects me. What made me take such a risk?
With surprising speed and dexterity the old man has rushed up behind me and, exactly at the moment when I’m passing through the door with its hollow clang, I feel him bend his body over the top of me as we stretch out our scrawny necks in unison and duck beneath the door frame.
It feels inevitable somehow, to be pedaling like this through the bustling streets, transfixed by the many curiosities I’m passing, buoyed by the energy of the teaming life that surrounds me, but now with the added burden of an old man draped across my back who never stops spouting his endless commentary directly in my ear.
I love the voiceover. Your narration adds another dimension to the story.
Bicycling, with an old man draped across my back who never stops spouting endless commentary directly in my ear. This better not find its way into one of my nightmares. "Get off my back Dad! When did you ever give me good advice?"