Back on shore, Javid, particular about the cleanliness of his car, was directed by Ahmad to a waterspout behind the small general market where we could rinse the sand from our feet. I trudged behind him, dejected. And lo and behold, there stood the golden fisherman, leaning against the wall, cigarette in hand, exhaling smoke, dreamy-eyed. He turned and saw me standing behind Javid. But he couldn’t let on his emotions, because even though the police weren’t there, or the angry village women, the hulking body of Javid was. And Javid was my guardian, and I was a single girl, and he was a fisherman.
The existing taboos in Iran are culturally specific, but there are some universal ones, too. And one of these universal taboos is that a woman from a certain socioeconomic class cannot give herself to a man beneath her class. I learned this from the Afghan refugees who were all over Tehran that summer. All young men fleeing the Taliban, leaving in droves, by foot, running across the mountains, across the borders, many of whom found themselves in Tehran, where work was plentiful. And what beautiful young men they were. I’m not sure what elegant sequence of genomes came together, what history of rape and war and conquest led to this, but these boys were blond and tan-skinned, tall and light eyed, with cheekbones to die for. I’d see them walking in the streets and, as a young woman of a certain class, was not allowed to notice their beauty. But holy mess if I could keep my eyes off them. I asked the few girlfriends I had if they noticed this mass of Dolce and Gabbana models walking around, or was I hallucinating, and the girls denied that they noticed, and if they had, they denied that there was even a modicum of desirability in these men. Another note on taboo, it is hard to transcend. It pushes things deep into the unconscious mind, forces us to hide parts of ourselves, to mask the truths of our wanting for fear of repercussions. For aeons, men have etched these rules into stone tablets, exiled and maimed trespassers, killed the ones who dared. Naturally, it was a safer bet to deny any desire that lay beyond these sanctioned borders. So, the Afghan refugees were off-limits, and my fisherman, too. And the golden fisherman knew this, knew that he was a fisherman and that I was an educated young woman from a respectable family of the hardworking middle class, and woe be the day we tipped this fine balance. So he greeted Javid and nodded a nonchalant greeting in my direction, then joined Javid at the spout while my cousin rinsed his sandy feet.
Two months had passed between our first meeting and this moment. Two months of poetry written about that moment of grace between us, that ineffable and divine longing. In the span of that time, he had become a metaphor, but now, suddenly, he stood before me in flesh and form. And I stood frozen to the spot. I couldn’t find the tongue to address him. I couldn’t bring myself to look into his eyes. Javid rinsed his feet and the golden fisherman sat down on a log near the waterspout, looking out to sea, his back to Javid, while the two chatted. Javid sat down beside him, meticulously dusted off his toes, then rose, bade him farewell, and started for the car when he remembered me.
“Could you rinse your feet before you get in my car?” he asked.
Javid left me standing there alone beside the waterspout. I didn’t have much to work with, but I did have a keen aptitude for seduction and an uncanny resourcefulness. At my disposal, one waterspout, two sandy feet with red-painted toenails, and a little less than ten minutes. If the female form is veiled, hidden for fear that every aspect of it gleams with temptation inspired by the devil, imagine, then, the power of red-painted toenails, the delicate arch of the foot, the ankle. There he sat, his beautiful straight back, the taut muscles beneath his shirt, the fine, sinewy neck, the soft golden down of his skin, those hairs raised by my proximity, standing erect to feel the minute shift of air currents caused by the motion of my body in the approximation of his. Only these small hairs attested to his awareness of my presence, giving away our secret. The rest of him sat motionless, feigning disinterest, his back turned to where I stood beside the waterspout, but at a slight angle, so that he could still watch me from the corner of his eyes.
I walked to the waterspout. I lifted the hem of my skirt slightly, then extended my foot. I turned the water on, a gentle trickle, which hit the top of my foot and ran in small rivulets down to the spaces between my toes, leaving the skin washed of its sand a stark contrast to the dust of the rest. I turned my foot, pointed my toes to extenuate the arch, then lifted the hem of my skirt just a bit higher, above my ankle bone, and turned the water to a steadier, harder stream. The cold jet of it hit my skin with more force, sending droplets of water dazzling into the sunlight. I lifted my skirt higher still, to my shin, just below the naked curve of my calf.
Here, both his attention and mine were so acutely focused on this singular visceral experience, the washing of my feet, that we lost that distinction between our separate bodies. Through that transcendent annihilation of self for want of the other, he became me, felt the possession of my foot, and I became him, felt his wanting, and that foot became an extension of this shared body. I slowed the water back to a trickle. I shut it off. I rested my foot on the spout and dried my toes slowly with the hem of my skirt.
One foot down, one foot to go.
We had only this left, the duration of time it would take for me to wash my other foot, before an indeterminable distance separated us again. He spoke, quietly, his back to me. He brought his cigarette to his mouth to hide the motion of his lips, and he said, “Come back tomorrow. Without your cousin.”
“How?” I asked.
The rest of the whole wide world saw only a young woman washing her feet at a waterspout. The rest of the whole wide world saw a young man near that spout, smoking a cigarette, his back turned, looking out to sea. The world saw these two strangers, disconnected from each other, engaged in their own experiences, just passing. The world did not see the magical stardust of the universe that burned between them.
“Hire a cab,” he said. “Come early in the morning, when the beach is still empty.”
I washed my other foot. Slowly.
“I’m afraid,” I said.
Javid honked the horn. Intrusive, the sound blasted the delicate intimacy, the gentle exchange of whispers between us. Whispers are a form of touch, too. When touch is forbidden, the distance between two bodies unreachable, a whisper feels like the caress of fingertips down the soft skin of the neck.
I dried my foot.
He stood up, took a step farther away from me and threw the spent cigarette butt into the sand. “Will you come?” he asked, without turning to look at me. Javid honked again.
“Yes,” I said.
I walked to the car. I didn’t look back. I don’t know where he went after that. Javid drove us back to the gated community, but I wanted nothing to do with the crowd at that party. I told Javid to go inside without me, that I intended to go for a walk, alone.
I left the gated community and walked along the two-lane highway that stretched lazily between those slow, sundrenched, humid villages. I walked past a lagoon with egrets and turtles, past rice paddies full of women in colorful scarves tending to the crop, until I reached a field of tall grass turning blond in the sun. I walked into that open field until I came to a wall. An enclosure, the perimeter small enough that I walked around the whole thing within a minute. Four walls, and no roof. In the middle of a field. A garden? The wall was short enough for me to climb. I hoisted myself up and sat on top, my heart racing, wondering what in this field of tall, rolling grass needed to be walled in. In that small enclosed space there was more tall grass and, in its midst, a single old gnarled fruit tree. Nothing more. No muted, ravenous beast. No bones. No fantastic flowers or gurgling fountains or piles of gold. Just a single old tree.
For some reason, perhaps the fact that it was enclosed, I felt an urgency to trespass. Why, in all this open space, wall in something so insignificant? Would the ground of that enclosed space give way beneath my feet? Did a nest of snakes, entire generations born there, inbred, evolved separate of the snakes in the vicinity, wait hidden in that
grass? I didn’t stop to figure out the meaning of this seemingly forgotten garden in the middle of an empty field. Something about it felt forbidden, and that forbiddance, in and of itself, beckoned its own transgression with a powerful draw. I jumped down into that walled space.
The earth did give, a bit, beneath me. The world sounded with the buzz, the hum, the chatter, the singing of ten thousand living things. I walked to the tree with slow, hesitant steps. I don’t know how much time passed as I stood there, but somewhere in that indeterminable period, I understood that this wasn’t a place for me. I walked across the garden to the wall opposite of the first one I scaled, climbed up and jumped back into the open field. Above me, an unchanged, unseeing blue sky.
We spent the afternoon by the beach. There was barbeque and beer and volleyball. By evening, I was so on edge, that everything surrounding me felt like an intrusion, an obstacle between me and my golden fisherman. I retired to a quiet room, shunned the society of my friends, to wait out the night. I sat there alone and listened to the conversations that carried above the music. That’s when I noticed a certain change in the pitch of the female voices when they addressed the guys at the party. An octave higher. Almost childlike. Even their laughter indicated the presence of an eligible man, modified to appease, to attract, to assure him of his power, his desirability. In the bazaar, a woman was not allowed to laugh out loud. In public, she was not to be heard, but even here, among friends, how free was she to express herself?
Just then, as I recalled that moment when Ramin the photographer placed his entire hand over my mouth to silence me, a few girls walked into the room and asked why I wasn’t joining the festivities. And so I launched into a speech about the liberation of our sisters from the systematic dehumanization enacted upon us by the patriarchy. It was a talk of the inspirational variety, complete with fist pounding the air, voice amplified by truth, a golden light shining upon me as I pontificated on our enslavement as women. Soon, the girls all sat around me in that room while the boys waited pensively in the living room, wondering what sort of secret female rite drew all the girls away from the party.
“Why change your voices?” I demanded. “Why soften it each time you speak to a man? Why swallow your dissensions to your fathers, your brothers, your boyfriends?” The girls murmured their approval. We sat in that room, our oppressors separated from us by a wall. “The time is nigh,” I proclaimed. “We cannot allow them to imprison us with their expectations, their laws, their rules. We cannot, for fear of our reputations, be kept calm and quiet and still!” Louder approval. I stood amongst those girls, my eyes gazing at the future that waited past our struggle, where we’d freely dance naked in some forest, with spears in our hands and garlands of daisies in our hair. “Let us strip ourselves of the yoke they have put upon us! Let us renounce the sanctity of the hymen! Let them know that we will no longer be beholden to this piece of skin!”
And that’s when I lost them.
Just like that. The rapture ended, the band stopped the march, the golden light flickered off, and they looked at me in shocked, dead silence. “Are you saying that virginity is not important?” a girl named Farah asked, eyes welling with tears.
“No! No, it is not important. We are more than this! I am more than this! My worth is not tied to what happens or does not happen between my legs!”
I might as well have turned into a giant lizard in that moment, the way they looked at me. Farah actually broke into tears. Real, flowing tears. She ran out of that room to the boys sitting in the other room, sobbing, heaving, pleading for them to give her protection from my heresy. She had had her eye on Javid for months now, and this was a magnificent political move on her behalf, a strategy that immediately secured her place as a marriage-worthy chaste girl, attacked for her righteousness by the corrupting propaganda of the slut from Los Angeles. Javid actually came into the room, now empty of all my constituents, who abandoned the cause and returned to party with the boys, and he gave me some kind cousinly advice about being more discreet with my “ideas.” Then he returned to the party, too.
Hurt that I had been forsaken, that the revolution had been aborted before it even had a chance to breathe, I turned my thoughts to the following morning. What was I to wear? Bikini beneath the burqa? No one wears a burqa in Iran, but I couldn’t resist the alliteration, purple prose writer that I am. No. No bikini. A bikini would mean that I would swim with him. No swimming with him. A dress, instead. A blue silk dress with little white flowers. I’d remove the manteau once we reached the open sea and stand before his male gaze, coyly innocent in a blue silk dress.
I awoke the next morning and explained to Javid my intentions to hire a boat and told him I’d return that afternoon. I called a cab. We drove past the sleepy lagoons and the pastoral scene of women bent over rice paddies, then turned onto the gravel road and stopped before the sand. I paid the cab driver and told him to return at half past the noon azaan, and to wait for me, should I be late, that I’d pay him for his time. The cab driver bid me farewell and drove away.
What in G.d’s good name was I doing there, on that empty beach, secretly meeting a fisherman in the Islamic Republic of Iran?
But that thought never crossed my mind. In that moment, in the actual moment, I believed fully in the magic of things. In destiny. In the power of a good narrative lived. I ignored danger, I refused to write fear into my story. Only desire. Only forbiddance, which heightened that desire. The golden fisherman was a creation of mine. I, myself, was a creation of mine. The very beach, the seagulls, everything, parts of a story I intended.
He stood by the water, dazzling in the sunlight. When he pushed the boat into the sea, I climbed in and sat at the front, looking out to the horizon. We did not speak a word to each other. He sat behind me. I felt him watching my back. The wind caught in the silk headscarf I wore, then blew my hair wild as we escaped from that shore. When we were far enough not to be seen, he shut off the motor.
Silence.
Save the birds. And the deafening lull of that tremendous body of water, beneath which an entire universe glimmered in secret darkness. The boat rocked in the gentle waves. I finally turned to look at him, knowing that to look at him might obliterate me and him and law and time and all else I knew. He sat there, in the soft morning light, watching me.
“Swim with me,” he said, finally.
“I can’t. I didn’t wear a bathing suit.”
“No matter,” he said. He stood up, then stripped off his white T-shirt. What can I say? Really, we don’t pay enough homage to the male physique. He might have been some fashion model, standing in that red boat with all that blue surrounding him. Some beautiful young man in the glossy pages of a magazine, with his sinewy golden arms and his lean body and the taut of his belly, the build of a man who labors with his body. He stood there and had I an easel and some oil paints, I’d have painted a portrait of his utterly devastating perfection.
“Swim with me,” he said, again.
“I can’t. I decided I wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be right. Anyway, all I have on is a dress. It’s best I don’t.”
“Swim in your dress.”
How could I tell him I wore that dress as a way of placing a hard and fast rule for myself? I had decided not to swim with him, to just sit in the boat and look pretty. To be in the middle of the sea alone with him was overwhelming enough. Too much unknown. To sit in the midst of that existential immensity usurped all the courage I had, but to swim in it with this man? The touch of that water and his hands just might lead to the spontaneous dissipation of my whole body. No. Cannot. Will not.
Okay, fine.
I unbuttoned my manteau, slipped it off and stood there, bared shoulders, bared arms, the wind blowing the silk of my dress against my body. I looked him straight in the eyes, then turned and dove into the water. And he dove in right after me. It occurred to me, under that water, that we had just crossed some threshold. Our act, if witnessed, would certainly bring up
on us the vengeance of any Islamic judge. But here, in the blind sea, beneath a blind sky, all of that could be ignored, momentarily forgotten, and we could now give ourselves, with complete abandon, to our desire. Beneath the surface, we sought each other’s hands. Just that. The hands, seeking one another. I tired and swam to hold onto the side of the boat. He followed me, put his hands on either side of mine.
“Tired?” he whispered into my ear.
I nodded yes.
“Let’s get into the boat and rest.”
I lay on a bench beneath the warm sun, the wet silk of my dress pasted against my skin. He opened a couple cans of soda and offered me one. “You will return to Los Angeles,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And I’ll stay here. Forever.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“You will forget me,” he said.
“I won’t. I can’t.”
“Stay with me, then,” he said.
“How?”
“Marry me. Live here with me. As my wife.”
He moved closer to me, knelt beside the bench where I lay. He touched me. His lips found mine. We kissed, deeply. After, he pulled away from me, threw his head back, and let out a deep moan. He stood up, walked to the front of the boat. Looked out to sea. I watched him, and he stood somewhere outside of time. He stands there still, eternal, and from that place, perhaps, he looks back at me. Then, he turned and dove into the water.
He stayed beneath the surface for a long while. I watched for him, anxiously. When he shot out of that water, he took in a breath that swallowed the whole world. With that breath, he swallowed me, too. I entered him and felt the pleasure of his lungs filling with air. I felt the pleasure of his body. The strength of it. Its virility. I felt him as though I were that man, in that body, in that water, satiated by a woman, calmed by the sea. And I felt something else, too. Something in his gaze. The dazzle of that immense mystery between us had dimmed a bit. A distance appeared, instead. A particular loneliness. Just then, the azaan arose from the speakers of the mosques, the prayer that signaled noon. My cab would arrive in half an hour.
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