The Decameron Project

by The New York Times

  I’m just surprised. I didn’t think you would come, I said. But I came, you said. You pressed up against me so that we rattled the coat-closet door. You slid your fingers down my chest and whispered, I’ll be waiting for you when you get home. I love you.

  I said, I love you, too, Ashley.

  I couldn’t concentrate at the hospital, but everyone considered my confusion a result of the overwhelming responsibility and complexity of the times. The attending, with his curly brown hair and its white wisps falling down over his glasses, put a palm on my shoulder and in a quiet moment said, This is not forever. This, too, shall pass. He said, Where there are humans, there is hope. I wanted to believe him, but I was distracted by my thoughts of you.

  I came home to you sitting in the darkness on the edge of the bed staring out the open window. I need to shower, I said. You said nothing. When I emerged, towel around my waist, water streaked down the hard-to-reach regions of my spine, you asked, Can you hear them shouting? I pulled you up from the bed and kissed you. I swept my hands up your long white legs, skin so pale as to show the blue veins branched like lightning beneath. I shivered—from excitement, from disgust? I lifted your tank top to reveal the dimple in your navel, to reveal your bra’s red imprints just beneath your breasts and the freckles around your nipples. You kicked your panties toward the wastebasket and pulled me to you. And now, I breathe rhythmically and you breathe in spurts until you tell me, Stop. You say, Stop.

  Why, I ask you, why?

  Silence from you, from you no noise, and I think, Because now there is something hard between us. And now that we lie like this—facing each other, you aware of my excitement, me aware of my excitement, you unwilling to make love, me unwilling to resist the urge—both staring into the darkness while the world burns, I think forget love, forget passion, forget sexual reconciliation and all the intimate things. I think, then, As you wish, let us sleep.

  Toby, answer me truthfully, you say. Toby, do you ever think of marrying me? And then you whisper, Am I only white to you?

  You always ask questions like this because you think the answers are simple, that I can first say yes and then say no, that I will learn to let love conquer the thousand-year hate and other hard things between us.

  Once, you could go to jail and I could go to jail for what we are doing now. Once, they would have strung me from a tree, slit my scrotum, and let gravity unravel my testicles.

  But that is all past—I think. In the future, it will all be different—I think.

  his is nothing,” Kamran said on the night before Paris was to retreat indoors.

  Sheila looked up from their walking forms. “I refuse to show papers to police.” Glancing at Nushin, she whispered, “They’re always young… just boys with guns they can hardly lift.”

  History, Kamran reminded them, had trained them for lockdowns and famines and power-drunk police. Pandemic or not, they were still on sabbatical. They’d enjoy their new city, minus a few restaurant meals. They’d revive the window geraniums, air out the landlord’s musty linens. “And look at that sky, like a ripe grapefruit. Nothing can ruin a sky like that.”

  “What’s next… dress codes? Mullahs? Woman-check?” Sheila muttered, remembering bygone humiliations as she wrote false birthdays and dropped a digit from their door number.

  “Daddy,” Nushin said, freshly vigilant at four. “If we don’t go out, we’ll get peeled!”

  The daily death tolls reminded Kamran and Sheila of wartime Tehran, in the ’80s, when they were barely out of childhood, pockets still sticky from tamarind, though they made a somber show of checking the BBC each night for casualty numbers, like adults. The Islamic Republic news lied so consistently that Kamran and Sheila no longer blamed or counted on it. They simply waited for their fathers to tune the radio to the BBC, and struggled not to glance sidelong at each other.

  Privately, each suspected the coronavirus numbers too, indulging in brief spells of imagination for which they blamed the revolution and a childhood at war. Kamran joked that modern Iranians were lucky, because once again, they had fake death tolls to keep them happy. And yet, each night they dutifully reminded each other that the BBC knows.

  They made fun of friends panicking over pasta and bread. “Amateurs,” Kamran said. “Rationing would give them a collective aneurysm.” Once, at the start of the war, Kamran remembered, his father went out for milk and came home with three flyswatters, a can of mosquito spray, a shovel, and fishhooks. The shop owner was bundling.

  “I miss those days,” Sheila sighed, then caught herself. “I mean, not…”

  “Me, too,” Kamran said. Then he paused. “There’s a finished basement,” he said, “and a cellar.” He smiled, bawdy and insinuating, a Kamran from another life. The suggestion drummed at her heart, quickening everything.

  For days, they stumbled into warrens of memory as they postured better responses for Nushin. They built blanket forts, clapped for tired workers, shed tears for their ravaged country. It tore at Sheila to imagine those sinister fanged globules skewering her mother’s cells. Stuck in a Tehran apartment, dependent on neighbors, this might be the way she’d lose her maman.

  They browsed the shelves for distraction. The apartment creaked under a mountain of worn but respectable books in Polish and French, Miłosz’s and Szymborska’s poems, Bruno Schulz, Simone Weil, a surprising assortment on military strategy, Chinese medicine, and the history of maps. They squandered the hours, succumbing to the truth that, after years of academic frenzy in New York, they had wanted this. The new tension troubled and thrilled them, as it did decades ago. They carried it with them, fragile and alive like a caught fish, through the day’s newfound tediums.

  One morning Sheila was running her fingers across a shiny black picture book, trying to read the gold looping letters above a fairy-tale scene, when the egg timer rang. Taking it for a volume of children’s stories, she carried it to the table. Nushin was well into Chapter 1 when Kamran wandered in. “So, she’s too young for Mulan, but ancient French porn is OK?”

  Sheila grabbed the book from her daughter. The Five Senses of Eros. Below the title, a girl with a Snow White face and whimsical curls lay on the grass, petticoats pulled back as she was meticulously tended with an ornate feather by some kind of jaunty Pan creature. Sheila stared, flushed, egg yolk oozing onto her hand, for a long time.

  “Does the princess have a tummy ache?” Nushin said, craning for a better view.

  Kamran turned to the inside cover. “Nineteen eighty-eight. The French were publishing this while mullahs were telling us it’s halal to fall on top of your aunt during an earthquake.” After the revolution, clerics appeared on television to offer practical applications of Islam. It was weirdly (almost lovingly) thorough. Stepping into a squat toilet, they advised, go left foot first so, in case of a heart attack, you won’t fall into the hole. “We barely knew our own equipment, remember?”

  In the afternoon, they stumbled into each other in the hallway. Still embarrassed, Sheila looked away, but he pulled her close, his warm cheek against hers. “You haven’t been outside in ten days,” he whispered into her hair. “You’ll get peeled.” She hardly registered this forgotten intimacy when they were flogged by a furious, “No!” Nushin stood huffing and glaring in the bathroom doorway, underpants around her ankles, clutching her skirt.

  “You can’t kiss her!” she said, lips trembling, tears welling. “She’s not the princess.” Her small chest heaved, as if in shock. Twice she whispered, “Say sorry to me.”

  Thinking of her budding dignity, Sheila rushed to pull up her daughter’s pants. “Less than two weeks indoors,” she whispered, “and we’ve permanently fucked with her sexual wiring.”

  “Our parents fucked with ours,” Kamran said as he picked up their daughter.

  Had Nushin ever seen them in love? Sheila was too ashamed to ask. They had toiled side by side for years, each with careers, postdocs, friends. After marriage, then after Nushin, sex fell away so quietly. With
out oppressors or a tangible struggle, it lost its revolutionary heat.

  That night, after Nushin was tucked in bed, Kamran turned to Sheila and said, “Want to tell stories from last time?” And she said, “I think my stories are wrong for now.” All day she had craved to sit alone for a while and think about being 15 in a bomb shelter.

  Instead Kamran recalled the day, at 13, they went walking in the streets of Tehran. A teenage pasdar berated them for an hour before Kamran convinced him they were cousins. They walked home near tears, unable to comfort each other, Kamran a few steps ahead as Sheila fumed about the upturned world, her mandatory hijab, the mere boy chastising her as if he were her father. Then they stood in the lobby, staring at their scuffed shoes, until bomb sirens blared and neighbors streamed to the basement, lifting them in a tide of parents, honorary aunts and uncles, and a lame grandmother grasping her chador as she was carried down in her son’s arms.

  Sheila breathed out. “Then we found the cellar.” And, with it, kinship over their faulty responses, the body’s terrible choice to succumb to shelter, to come alive in times of death and mourning. He kissed her palms. “Stay in. Tomorrow I’ll buy you vitamin D.”

  * * *

  “Do you remember how the old women furnished the bomb shelters?” she asked, imagining the basement under her feet—did French cellars smell like sugar and fire-warmed earth, like the ones back home, or were they full of cobwebs and caked boot prints? “Do you remember the stairs?” A jar of torshi on every step. Fat and thin canning jars, with fabric tops screwed under lids, lined up like Arab princes awaiting their turn.

  “I miss the grandmas. Heaven forbid, in the middle of a war, we run out of pickle.”

  “I’m going to grow out my eyebrows during lockdown,” Sheila said.

  “You have beautiful eyebrows,” Kamran said. He held her cheeks in his palms and ran his thumbs over them, as if he were applying sunscreen.

  “Remember how I had to take it off three hairs at a time to fool Baba?” Nice girls didn’t remove a single hair from their bodies until their wedding. So, Sheila had conspired with her mother to hide her thinning eyebrows from the building’s many vigilant fathers and brothers. If a huge black swath disappears from your head, even the dumbest man knows. But if the hairs fall out one by one, we can say anything we want. We’ll start a rumor: Poor girl has a hypothyroid.

  Oh, Maman, please hold out… believe the numbers… stay inside.

  “The last time, after the cellar,” Sheila said, “my parents screamed at me for three hours.”

  “Mine kept fretting I’d be sent to war,” Kamran said.

  How had they lost track of each other for so long? “Life without war,” Kamran said.

  “That’s awful,” she said. “That’s not us.”

  “I think maybe it is. We’re hardwired for disaster.”

  Their two buildings were connected by an enormous basement shelter, two sets of stairs joining down in a damp cavern. Circling the room, bicycles were wedged among a dozen fridges and freezers, all stocked with cooked meals and ingredients. Shelves sagged under cans, rice, flour, sugar. Huge pots of torshi with family labels were crammed atop each fridge.

  At the start of the war, the grandmothers hauled down chairs, pillows, bright floor cloths, soft quilts, and fuzzy blankets. They brought samovars, plates, cups, outfitting the shelter for meals or tea, backgammon or a smoke, so that every siren could be the start of an occasion. Among the residents lived five teenagers, including Sheila and Kamran, the two youngest and most studious, and therefore the least watched. During that first red siren, as the families fretted over pipes and samovars, arranging pillows and opining on space heaters, the two found a tunnel leading to a small cellar. Inside its rocky walls were shelves of cheeses and dry goods, packets of chopped herbs, a door that closed and enough space for two twiggy fugitives.

  After that, every red siren brought them back to the cellar, in snatches of time between their fathers’ rounds of chess, their grandmothers’ bawdy jokes, and a thousand cups of chai.

  “Do you remember the thing that saved us?” Kamran asked.

  “Philadelphia.” American cream cheese was rare. Even with ration coupons, people were always fighting over it, running to black markets for it. Most evenings, brave parents questing for the special cheese returned with heads hung and a packet of Laughing Cow, or worse, ordinary Iranian feta. When Kamran and Sheila heard the clip-clopping of mothers’ heels, they hardly had time to throw Sheila’s dress back on, tucking her bra (a self-delusional thing made entirely of cotton, no cups or wire) in Kamran’s pocket. They smoothed their hair and stood far apart, but they’d still be caught together, alone in the room. They needed to offer themselves in a crime, a bad one, though not as bad as the one they’d committed. So, Kamran grabbed a packet of precious Philadelphia from a neighbor’s shelf, tore past cardboard and foil and bit into a block of smooth milky white, and tossed it to Sheila. “God, this is good,” she muttered, just as the mothers walked in and started screaming about stolen cheese.

  “These children! Ei vai! They’re animals,” the mothers said.

  All evening there were apologies. The owners of the cheese were gracious. Please. They’re just children. Kamran’s father offered thrice the value in coupons and cash, and they shared out the uneaten portion on crackers. Wild children. No one thought what else they might be doing there, and so they did it again and again, until they were 14, then 15, and Sheila’s black eyebrows thinned and her lips filled out, Kamran’s legs grew long and the mothers began envying such a son. In those years, no one told them about sex. The media tried to turn the boys’ urges toward war, and to snuff out the girls’ under cloth. But the young smuggled magazines, photos, an education, and cellars and larders and butteries across the city rustled and clanged with the efforts of self-taught teenagers.

  Every time the siren screamed a red alert, and the din of families darting to basements filled the streets, Sheila and Kamran ran into the cellar together. Every time the alert was downgraded by a shade or two, when the neighbors sighed in relief, they pounded their pillows, beseeching that bastard Saddam to have a heart and threaten a missile just one more time. They waited for that red alert until fear and desire merged into a single strange and unthinkable brew, until bras became wiry and no longer fit into pockets, and stolen cheese became stolen cigarettes, then a taste of Grandma’s moonshine or opium tea, then stopped working as an excuse, because the pair were too beautiful and cunning, and they looked at each other as if their young teeth, still milky and serrated like a bread knife, might soon sink into a leg of lamb.

  * * *

  In late April, Kamran found his old Kiarostami DVDs, and they watched Taste of Cherry. He asked why she hated remembering, even though she, too, was obviously traveling back there.

  So, she told him. That her mother had checked every hair on Sheila’s body for months. That she regretted conspiring together. That her parents dragged her to a specialist to sew her back up, relenting only after the specialist advised them to wait until just before marriage, to avoid having to do it twice. “It was a humiliating year. Then we left for university.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He held her fingers. “It wasn’t fair. All their shit rolled onto you.”

  In the morning Kamran took Nushin for groceries. “I’m touching zero surfaces, Daddy.”

  Sheila listened to the BBC. French borders had closed. This was home for now. Lockdowns across Europe would last through April, even May. They’d watch many more grapefruit sunsets from their pretty windows, no tape obstructing their view. Soon spring leaves would appear on the trees beyond the glass. But Sheila wouldn’t go outside again, not for a long time. Not while French pasdars, boys still, roamed with guns, barking for papers.

  She sat on the carpet for a long time, thinking of the grandmothers who made parties out of missile strikes, altering the children’s memories. Maybe they meant to prepare them for hardship and war, to mangle their instincts an
d fuse every sensation with its opposite. Her girlish eyebrows were growing back. She craved the taste of cherry, songs from childhood, a hearty meal stolen from the chaos. Sheila pulled herself off the floor and opened the closet where she had stuffed the landlord’s musty blankets. Their stench, the indignities of another era, tainted the air. She texted Kamran, took a stack of pillows, half a bottle of red, crackers, and a book, and ran to the basement to wait out the daylight.

  ou seem lost, Miss. Are you looking for the American consulate station? I could tell, you see, by your hat and backpack and the documents you hold tight to your chest. It’s true that petty theft can be a risk in Casablanca, but I assure you the airport is a secure building. No one will take your papers away. Sit, sit. At a distance, of course, we both know the rules. Make yourself comfortable. It will be a few hours before the consular officers arrive, and, even then, it will take them a while to set up their table and start clearing passengers for departure.

  How long have I been waiting? A long time, I’m sorry to say. These repatriation flights are for citizens only and—if space allows—residents. But apparently space has not allowed, at least not for the last two weeks. Every time I’ve put in a request, I’ve gotten the same answer: “Sorry, Ms. Bensaïd, the flight is full.” I thought of trying the airport in Tangier, but train service is closed, and in any case there are probably more people waiting there than here. The consular officers keep telling me I should be patient, I will have better luck next time.

  The thing is, it was luck that brought me here in March. Ordinarily, I visit my family in the summer, when I am off from teaching, but early this year my brother announced that he was getting married. His fourth time, can you imagine? He scheduled the ceremony smack dab in the middle of my spring break, just to counter what he knew would be my immediate objection. Even so, I told him I couldn’t attend because I had plans to go to Texas with my bird-watching group. But he’s always had a knack for making me feel guilty. He brought up how thrilled our mother would be to see me, how she’s getting on in years, how I should take every chance I get to spend some time with her. I couldn’t say no to that.