I kept my head down. I couldn’t breathe. The scent of him. I wanted it to stop. The threat of him. His words. The shame he wanted me to feel. The smallness. Everything in me fought against him, but the battle was waged silently. If I wanted to walk out of this office, unharmed, I had to swallow my anger, my indignation. I had to choke back my words. I had to allow this humiliation into me, just deep enough for him to feel appeased. He sat, now, at the edge of his desk, right in front of me, looking down on my bowed head. The walls felt as though they were closing in. If I looked up, I’d see him. The portrait. The leer of the eyes.
“Do you understand that what we do is for your own good, young lady?”
I nodded. And that nod, the simple gesture of it, felt like blasphemy, a betrayal of myself. In fear of his power and his reach, I had handed him my dignity. Without a fight. But where would that fight have led me? I had heard the horror stories of what they did to young women. The assaults, the beatings, the imprisonment. I closed my eyes. To shut out that room, I tried to return to that backyard in Encino, the cool grass, the orange sunset. He sat there reading the minutiae of my gestures, watching closely, smelling the gentle break of my will, the softening of my hold. I could feel his pleasure. He chuckled.
“I can see that you feel remorse, that it was an error born of your ignorance. I will allow you to leave, this time,” he said, satiated.
I stood up.
He leaned in toward me, close enough that the heat of his breath fell on the skin of my face and said, “But if you ever end up in my office again, I will not be so lenient with you.”
Outside, Pouya and Ali waited for me. When I stepped into the sunlight, they ran up to me with concern. “What happened?” they asked. I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to speak. I held the bitterness in my mouth. My body didn’t feel like my own.
“Let’s go play tennis. You’ll feel better after,” Ali said.
I didn’t play with them, that afternoon. I sat beneath the shade of a tree and watched them play instead. The ease with which they moved. Their laughter. The freedom of their voices. They were boys, and while the laws restricted their freedoms, too, the whole machinery of the state seemed to be designed to break the spirit of women. The women needed to be controlled. And Ali knew this when he told me to put on his socks. Knew that they wanted to see his power, his domination. My weakness. My subservience.
I took my notebook out of my satchel and opened it under the shade of that tree. I sharpened the edge of my words, fashioned the tilt, and wrote the voice of that naked girl, the one I had hidden from the gaze of the police chief. She stood before the gates of his paradise, a garland of daisies in her hair, and let out a howl of rage that rattled those bars and shook their chains.
A WEEK AFTER my arrival, I met Sarab. He was sitting on the ledge of the flat rooftop of a house built of burnt red earth in a desert of the same red earth that stretched endless, at the moment when the sun was already sinking, so everything was cast in the ember glow of dusk, and on the edge above the distant mountains, a swath of blue and the faint glow of stars already in the sky.
The house was built by a famous artist whose daughter, Sanam, was courting Pouya with the intensity of a tiger. The first time I met Sanam, she walked into Behrooz’s apartment wearing a blue headscarf. Sky blue. Color was a thing that stuck out in the streets of Tehran, among all that gray and black and dust and soot. Color was like one of those rogue flowers that managed to grow in the crack of the sidewalk, improbable, a defiant will to be beautiful, despite the ugliness of the concrete. And there was Sanam, just walking in off the street into our apartment, her sky blue headscarf covering the locks of her chestnut hair, strands of it in her face.
“Where did you get that color?” I asked her, since most of the scarves sold in the markets were muted tones, tans, browns, black.
“I saw it hanging in the bazaar on my way here,” she said. “Blowing in the wind.”
I imagined Sanam standing there, looking at that silk scarf billowing out like a piece of the sky tied around the hook from the bazaar seller’s awning. I imagined her pointing to it, digging into the pocket of her jeans for the money, smoothing the crumpled bills out for the man, then brazenly taking off her own brown scarf, right there in the middle of the marketplace, with her hair revealed for the brief moment before she covered it again with her new scarf. I fell in love with her right then, with the color she brought in.
When we arrived at the house Sanam’s father had built in the desert, Pouya turned to me and said, “There are two people here you should meet. One’s a musician and the other guy is a photographer.” We found Sanam poolside and followed her up a narrow, open staircase to the rooftop where Sarab sat on the very ledge, beside Shervin and Ramin, the three of them smoking, waiting for the first stars to appear.
Ramin the photographer and Shervin walked over to greet us, but Sarab stood in the peripheries. Then, slowly, he worked his way over and stood behind his two friends. Between Sarab and I there was already a violent magnetism, the kind of energy that exists between two dying stars. I didn’t look at him, but I could feel him studying me. Finally, he entered our circle. A face full of angles. A thin, hard body. Sarab seemed always in motion, even when standing still. I caught his eyes. A dangerous depth in them.
“This is the musician I wanted you to meet,” Pouya said.
“What do you play?” I asked.
“Guitar,” Sarab said, hands deep in his pockets, toeing a nonexistent pebble with the tip of his Converse.
“I write and perform poetry,” I said.
“You should perform one for us,” Ramin the photographer said.
I wasn’t shy about the performance of my poems. Back in Los Angeles, and then in San Francisco and Berkeley, I used to go to poetry readings and slams in coffee shops and theaters. I never talked about my father, his illness and death, or my relationship with Justin, or much of anything else with anybody, but on stage, in front of an audience of strangers, I would let go a whole flood of words. It felt cathartic. I decided to read my most recent poem for them, the one dedicated to that police chief. Without much preamble, I took my notebook from my satchel and read with all of the rage I had felt in that cloistered office, beneath the gaze of that man.
I finished the poem with the assertion that the gate to Paradise lay between my thighs, closed my book, and waited. The air had turned to the delicate, glasslike coolness that follows dry, inescapable heat. It was dark now. Maybe there was a moon, I can’t remember. But if there was, let’s say it was a yellow crescent.
Sarab said, “If you ever want to jam, call me.”
Sarab lived in an apartment in the Gheytarieh district, coincidently the same neighborhood I had lived in as a child, before my family fled to America. I used to play on that very street, and even though I grew up in the quiet, sprawling isolation of the LA suburbs, Sarab’s street, crowded with apartment buildings, held the ghosts of my childhood. When I finally reached his apartment and pushed the buzzer of the intercom for the first time, I felt like I had arrived.
I walked up three flights of stairs. The door to that home was already ajar. I took off my shoes, stepped in onto the cool tiled floors and aged rugs, closed the door and removed my hijab. A soft light filtered through reed blinds. On the floor were deep cushions. A large porcelain bowl rested by the wall, glazed a cobalt blue and chipped, filled with water and a handful of goldfish. There were books everywhere. Musical instruments, too. Each object in that small home looked as though it was placed with intention. Nothing was complacent. Sarab’s mother, Raya, greeted me. She was thin, petite, spry. Her hair shaved to a stubble, then dyed silver. Raya was a staunch feminist and a single mother. She wrote articles and translated academic texts to make ends meet. She was fiercely critical. No nonsense. Easy to dance. Kids would come from all over the city to share their work with her. She took me under her wing immediately, and welcomed me into her home. “The boys are in Sarab’s room,�
� she told me.
When I walked into the room, Sarab, Shervin, and a handful of young musicians I didn’t know were smoking and improvising. I didn’t introduce myself to them or wait for an invitation. I sat down in their circle, the only girl among them, opened my notebook, and started to read. We played for a long while. Then, we cracked open a watermelon, put on an album, and let the afternoon sit with us. We roamed through ideas together. Laughed. Argued. Then played music, again.
The streets of Tehran were a fantastic stage for humanity, full of irony and tragedy, the comic and the absurd. And Sarab’s home soon became my refuge. There, I could take the onslaught of experience and howl it out through poetry. Or dissect it, lay it bare, and make sense of it, then piece it back together. That home was a hallowed place, a thoughtful pause in all the madness, the sorrow, the raging summer heat that ravaged the city outside. It was where we gathered to create, and to be.
One afternoon, on my way to Sarab’s house, I took a detour through the covered passageways of Bazaar Tajrish. I walked beneath a large dome in the middle of the bazaar. There was no one there, save a single figure. At first sight, he appeared as a crumpled mass of fabric someone had forgotten on the pavement. But then the jolt of electricity charged through his thin body, his bald head hitting the pavement with force, over and over, his back arching, his legs, his arms, flailing. He was the only motion in that marketplace. Everyone else had already scurried away, or stood still, in the shadows, watching.
When I realized what was happening, I ran to him, fell to my knees and held his head in my arms. I screamed for help until he fell still. Then, from somewhere in the shadows, from one of the storefronts, a man’s voice said, “Don’t concern yourself too much, Miss. He is probably putting on a show so people will take pity and throw him some pocket change.”
I looked at his soot-covered face, eyes shut, bearded jaw clenched, foam and blood on his mouth. He was one of those men who sold coal from a sack he carried on his back from morning to night. He wore a shirt that may have been white once, and a suit that was black once, and perhaps fit him when he had more flesh on his bones. When the tremors started again, I panicked and cried louder for help.
Two young men stepped out of the shadows. They helped me pull him to the side and leaned him against a wall. After the gallant young men exited, the shadows in doorways, corners, windows dispersed. The bustling crowd resumed. Now, masses of people came and went, pinched fruit and held out lengths of silk fabric. Against a gray wall, on pavement littered with trash, the man, perhaps in his fifties, but so emaciated it was hard to tell, sat. His body shook from time to time. When he finally seemed to come back from that place of death, I asked, “Can I get you something?”
From around the corner, an old woman, an opium addict who sold miniature Korans, stepped into the light. She said, “Hot tea. He needs hot tea with plenty of sugar. Follow me, I’ll take you to where you can buy it.”
I hurried after the old woman, since both age and addiction didn’t seem to have much effect on her ability to maneuver with speed through the crowds and down the passageways.
“You shouldn’t sit beside him.” She came to a stop. “Buy his tea, and a cup for me, the guide.”
“Why shouldn’t I sit beside him?” I asked.
“Because then everyone will think you are of ill repute. Buy him some bananas, too. And he could probably use a Koran, for protection.” She reached into a pocket somewhere beneath the fabric of her chador and held out a selection of miniature Korans in the palm of her hand.
“Don’t let the old hag pull one over on you,” the banana dealer said. “She smokes that money. Been here for years, now, and I’ve never seen her eat a bite of food.”
I bought two Korans and handed one to the banana dealer. We finally came back to the epileptic coal seller, who sat and watched the passing crowd. I handed him the cup of tea, and the old woman disappeared, like smoke.
As it had become customary with me whenever I met someone in dire need in those streets and felt overwhelmed by the guilt of my own privilege, I took all the money I carried and put it in a small pile of crumpled bills and coins beside the bananas. I looked around. A faceless stream of people passed by. I thought for a moment about what the old woman had said, then sat down beside that man anyway. I remembered the miniature Koran and gave it to him, too. The coal seller looked at me, in my saffron headscarf and blue jeans. Then, he took a sip of the tea, closed his eyes, and rested his head back on the wall. With his eyes closed, he recited a passage from the Koran about how, even when we think there are no witnesses, even in total darkness, Allah watches our doings and takes them into account.
I told him about America, about my father, about his death and the day I opened my eyes, and saw the beauty. He told me how he was once a proud man, a veteran of the army, and how, in his youth, he knew how to detonate a bomb that could bring down a whole building in seconds. I asked him why in the world would he want to do such a thing. He paused and thought for a minute, then shrugged his shoulders and said, “It was what we were told to do.”
We sat for a while longer, in silence. Then he turned to me and said, “It isn’t safe for you to sit here like this, with me. People will think badly of you.” He rose slowly to his feet, put the crumpled bills and coins in his back pocket, put the miniature Koran in his breast pocket, held the bananas in his hand and the sack of coal in the other, and walked away, into the bustle of the gray crowd.
Later, at Sarab’s apartment, I told Raya what had happened, how no one stepped forward to help. “They’ve witnessed that sort of tragedy daily, for years and years,” she said. “You are only audience to it. You can leave at will. You can afford to watch his suffering. You have the luxury to feel pity. The rest of us, we need to keep going.”
UNCLE BEHROOZ DECIDED it was finally time to leave the heat and the congestion of the city and go into the wilderness, trekking. Since this would be my first trek with them, he wanted to see how fit I was with a trial journey, a single day’s walk and camp overnight in a valley he knew right outside of Tehran.
The morning of our trip, before the bus arrived, I waited outside of Behrooz’s apartment with my hair done up in a bunch of little braids and my Das Meindl boots laced up. I had bought those boots in Canada on my first trip out of the United States on my own. The sales guy in Vancouver told me about the boots’ three-hundred-year history, showed me pictures of archaeologists in the field wearing them, and said they could carry me to first base camp on Mount Everest without trouble. I imagined myself standing beside my handsome sherpa, my cheeks red from the cold, the flap of the tent behind us slapping in the wind and the sun setting in the distance. For the sake of keeping all future possibilities open, I shelled out the four hundred bucks to pay for the boots, which I wore on several trips throughout the Pacific Northwest, and now I intended to tread the soil of Iran with them, too. I stood beside my backpack, meticulously packed with not a sock more than what I’d need, ready to meet any challenge.
All the members of our party arrived, save for Amir, Pouya’s friend from the university where they had both studied architecture. I didn’t know, when Amir’s cab finally arrived, that he would come to play such a prominent role in my undoing. But throughout my days in Iran, Amir was always in the background, on trekking trips, at parties, informal gatherings. He was among a handful of boys vying for my attention. And he always followed me, silently, constantly, like a shadow. That morning, he put his pack on the ground and paid the cab driver. Then he turned, looked at me, ran a hand through his black hair, and smiled a dazzling smile.
When we arrived at the foothills of the Alborz mountains, Behrooz paid the driver and told him to return to pick us up the following afternoon. I stood beside my uncle and looked at that mountain with apprehension. After a few moments of silence, he said to me, “You look at the peak, once, just to tell yourself it’s there. Then you start walking, slow and steady. And you love each step. You love the
flowers you see, the rocks. You love your body, and the way it hurts and how it achieves, and before you know it, you will arrive.”
Then, he started walking up the trail.
“Follow me,” he said. “Match my pace and my breathing.”
I walked behind him. Behind the tall, strong, reassuring bulk of him. I walked slow and steady, and breathed slow and steady. Every now and then, he’d reach his hand back without looking and give me a date, or a handful of walnuts. Often, he sang. The rest of the kids walked and chatted, but I followed Behrooz diligently. Until we reached the summit and there, beneath the open skies, Behrooz turned to me and said, “You have the spirit of a mountaineer.”
I stood there on that mountain, the whole of it covered in wildflowers, and felt so powerful. I was tired, my feet hurt, my back ached, and nobody but me knew about my heart condition, the prognosis of the defect, but I had scaled that peak, nonetheless. I felt invincible. Then, our party descended into the green lap of a valley.
After that first night of camping, of singing and dancing beside a roaring fire, Ali there, and Sanam, a handful of other kids, and Amir, watching me silently, I awoke in my tent to the sound of bells and baaing. I stepped out, groggy eyed, to find myself in a sea of goats, and amongst those goats, the cowboys of Iran. Mustached Reza, a proud shepherd with the big, white mustache he was known for, stood beside his seven sons, surrounded by their tremendous herd of goats. He was greeting my uncle. Behrooz and Mustached Reza were old friends, and Mustached Reza told his sons to milk some of the goats for his honored guests.
The goats lined up for those shepherd sons like orderly schoolgirls, and one by one, with uncanny speed, the sons pulled on their udders and the milk hit the tin pail with a force that zinged and steamed. Every so often, some excited goat dropped a few pellets into the bucket, too. Seemed that shepherds had a five-second rule, with one hand still milking, the sons scooped out the feces with the other. Those muscled, rosy-cheeked shepherd boys took that fresh, steaming milk in the metal pail and heated some over an open fire, then mixed in crystalized Nescafé coffee and served it to us in tin cups, in the middle of a valley in the lap of the Alborz mountain range, with the grass covered in dew and the mist just rising.
Home Is a Stranger Page 7