The night after our meeting in the park, Amir’s father had turned purple, gasped for breath, fell to the floor clutching his chest in pain. Amir’s mother called me on the phone the next day, weeping, and begged me to leave Iran and return to America. His sister called, too, crying that I was tearing apart her family. But it took two weeks before Amir, himself, called me. “They want to report you to Intelligence. They want to accuse you of trying to convert me to Judaism,” he said. “That’s a death sentence. For you. But don’t worry, I have stopped eating. Soon, they will listen to me.”
Behrooz and his wife had left Tehran for Paris to see a renowned neurologist in hope of finding an answer. Javid and Pouya were never home. I sat alone in that apartment, in Tehran. Strange men started coming to the door in the afternoons and evenings. They rang from downstairs to ask if I had called for a cab, if I had ordered an electrician, if so-and-so lived at that address. Amir wouldn’t call for days and days, then he’d call, whispering into the phone, “I am making progress with them, please be patient a bit longer.”
Sarab invited me to stay in a cottage by the Caspian Sea with his band. Amir decided it was the perfect opportunity to come see me. He lied to his parents about where he was going, then drove in the dead of night. I waited in the attic bedroom of that cottage, in the dim light of a single light bulb that hung over a wrought iron bed, beside a window that looked out to the dark sea. I heard him arrive, greet the boys, walk up the narrow, winding stairs. I did not turn to look at him when he walked into that room and fell to his knees before me, weeping.
I opened my eyes the next day to find Amir already awake. Outside, the sea beckoned and, somewhere, in all that expanse, there might have been a red boat. The sunlight flooded through the attic window in a stream of gold. Dust motes danced in it. He was handsome in that morning light, his dark hair mussed, his lean body outlined beneath the white sheet. I turned away from him.
“You are so beautiful,” he said.
“Let’s go.”
“Let’s never go back.”
I didn’t say goodbye to the boys. I threw my backpack in the backseat of Amir’s car, sat in the passenger side, rolled down the window, and waited while he said goodbye to Sarab, Shervin, and the rest. They spoke and looked in my direction with worry, but I looked away. Amir drove us out of the seaside town. “Let’s go somewhere, together. Another city. Shiraz, maybe. Or Isfahan,” he said.
“What will you say to your parents?”
“That I needed to take a long drive and be alone, to think things through.”
“Take me back to Tehran.”
“Give me time, please,” he said. “I will persuade them.” The road narrowed, the curves sharpening so that we couldn’t see what was coming until the car turned the bend. We sat in silence for much of the drive.
Then I heard the men’s voices. Someone shouted a phrase, and a chorus of men chanted the refrain back. The sound of heavy boots on asphalt. A pounding. I leaned my head out of the window to see and when we turned the bend, we found ourselves suddenly driving amidst hundreds of young soldiers who were jogging up that mountainous road, rifles on their shoulders, beneath the blazing sun.
Amir had to slow the car to a crawl, then to a near stop. We were in a sea of men in green, dust-covered fatigues. I did not readjust my headscarf to hide my hair. I did not sit back in my seat and roll up my window. I looked at them. And in the crowd of all those boys, one young soldier stopped jogging and looked right back at me. The sunlight shone on him, alone, like a spotlight, like some holy illumination cast by heaven, and I knew, among all those soldiers, this one. And he, too, recognized something in me.
Perhaps it is the evolution of genome recognition, that what I needed, that one young soldier had, and what he needed, I had, so that we could create the optimal offspring. Perhaps chance. Perhaps the right timing in both of our circadian rhythms. Or an alignment of stars, the phase of the moon, the currents of the nearby sea. Perhaps, within me, an aching emptiness, and within him the need to expel some hidden longing. Perhaps the illusion of familiarity. Or a molecular truth too invisible to comprehend. Or a truth just beyond molecules and comprehension.
He was tall with a face etched in stone. Eyes alive, clear. Face glistening with sweat. Full lips parted with heavy breath. Golden. He looked at me with brutal, open desire. And I looked back and felt a brutal and forgotten longing. All those men, marching, singing, tired, sweating, black boots, shaved heads. I leaned out of my window among them and wanted to reach my hand in his direction. I wanted to touch his shoulder, his arm, the sweat-drenched uniform that stretched tight across his chest. A voice in my head warned this will only lead to more pain. And something in me screamed back, he is burning with life and I, too, I, too, am still burning.
Amir glanced in my direction. I could feel his eyes on me. I unbuckled my seat belt, got to my knees, and leaned my entire upper body out of that window as Amir drove slowly through the crowd of those men. I stared at that soldier, unashamed. And he stared back, unashamed. And the distance between that soldier and me was less than the distance that had been between my body and Amir’s the night before in that attic bedroom, even though Amir’s hand touched the raised black scar beneath my breast, even though his promises had fallen on the nape of my neck. In the infinitesimal moment as the car inched through the crowd of men, a thousand nights passed between that soldier and me.
The car finally turned the next bend, and the road before us stretched empty. All that remained was the sound of their boots, the chorus of their voices growing fainter. Amir cleared his throat and said something about me sitting back down. I leaned farther out of my window and looked down into the chasm that yawned past the precipice of that narrow mountainous road. Amir said something more, but I could not hear him for the wind. I inhaled deeply, and in that breath, the whole of the world filled me.
Dear Behrooz,
I am flying over New Orleans on my way to the East Coast for a reading. Below this airplane is a city flooded with music, with sorrow and joy and suffering and all that makes humanity so beautiful. And somewhere above this city, beyond this airplane, in the thin atmosphere, you exist. An infinite, or finite, number of particles mixed with ice and pollen and the dispersed atoms of dragonflies.
Dear Behrooz,
Earth has been lonely without you. The stars dim. The city lights dwindling. And the mountains . . . I drove up to the top of one and looked across to the others that sat, infinitely patient, watching the oceans come and go, dressed in tall redwood trees, draping mist about their shoulders, and I looked to their crowns and thought, how impossible to walk down this mountain and up another through the tangle of trees, in the direction of ocean, to climb the steep side and reach the summit. How impossible. And the mountains responded with silence.
And then I remembered what you taught me, that it begins with a step and is followed by another and the summit is no glory of its own, but that it is all glory, each step past the fear of cold death, and every little lichen clinging to a rock, each salamander hidden beneath a rotting log.
Listen, I began writing this note to tell you what I just learned from a tangerine. It is winter now and almost two decades have passed from when I walked behind you, up those paths to the summits of all that glory. Autumns have come and gone, come and gone. It is the season of tangerine. I peeled one just now. I brought it close to my face and I pulled off its skin, which slid off easily. The droplets, as tiny as dust, burst between its skin and flesh so that its perfume filled the whole cabin and I had to close my eyes at that point, so that I wouldn’t see the other passengers and feel ashamed for taking such pleasure in public. I inhaled and held the soft, supple globe of that fruit, and it gave itself to me, a perfect sliver of itself, and I knew, before placing it in my mouth, I knew its feeble pretense, the coy tautness of its skin before those hundred little globules would give between my teeth.
I had a dream a few weeks back that I sat inside
a tomb, and there was a small piece of cake before me, and I took a forkful of it and ate and I knew there must be pleasure, but I couldn’t taste anything. So I took another bite, searching, knowing there must be texture and taste to crumb and cream. But I felt nothing. Because the mind alone cannot taste. Because the body, Behrooz, the body knows texture and tastes. The body is born to feel the world, to know it through the tongue, the fingers, the nose, eyes, ears, the fine hairs on the surface of the skin. And what then, without a body? What becomes of the tangerine? What becomes of the world and all its beauty? When you are particles smaller than pollen, frailer than ice, high above this filthy, beautiful Earth, when you dissipate into heaven, formless, what becomes of all that longing?
Now there is nothing below this plane but the black waters of the Gulf of Mexico. No lights. No cities. No mountains.
Just dark waters and whatever glitters beneath their secret folds.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM INDEBTED to Leigh Feldman, whose faith in my work has pulled me through some dark, dark hours. To Cassandra Farrin and Dayna Anderson, for their courage. To Cherrita Lee, for picking up the pieces. To my cousins and their families. To my late uncle Behrooz and his wife, for taking me in and showing me the world. To the friends I mention in this book, and to the others I cannot, but who have stayed in my heart, still, and inspire me, always. To my mother, to my husband, to my family. To my daughters, who are my everything. And to the beautiful people of Iran, who welcomed this stranger and helped her find home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PARNAZ FOROUTAN is the author of The Girl from the Garden (Ecco 2015). She currently lives in a suburb of Los Angeles.
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