The Heart's Desire

by Nahid Rachlin

  PRAISE FOR NAHID RACHLIN

  About The Heart’s Desire:

  Nahid Rachlin has written an intimate family study that is, simultaneously, an exploration of cultures, nations, worlds. Her willingness to be vulnerable to such powerful feeling, and her ability to pass it along to us, make The Heart’s Desire a profoundly moving experience.

  —Frederick Busch

  A perceptive account, in polished prose, not only of cultural difference but of conditions in a society still disturbingly alien —and hostile to our own.

  —Kirkus Reviews

  About Foreigner:

  “… a rare intimate look at Iranians who are poorer and less educated… I have read this book four times by now, and each time I have discovered new layers in it.”

  —Anne Tyler, New York Times Book Review

  About Married to a Stranger:

  “Miss Rachlin shows us not only the tranquil inner courtyards with sweets and gossip exchanged by the fishpond, the flower bedecked bridal chamber, but also the political, social and religious factions contending for primacy in the streets outside.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  About Veils:

  “… The commonalities of life, wherever it’s lived, shine through in these tales of family friendship, love, and war … They are stories of strength and endurance that continually remind us how fragile our outer shells can be, how deeply love can be felt, and how strong the influence of home is, wherever home may be.”

  —500 Great Books by Women, A Reader’s Guide (Penguin Books)

  The Heart’s Desire

  a novel

  Nahid Rachlin

  © 1995 by Nahid Rachlin

  All Rights Reserved

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design by Rex Ray

  Book design by Nancy J. Peters

  Typesetting by Harvest Graphics

  Photo of Nahid Rachlin © Johannes Kroemer

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rachlin, Nahid.

  The heart’s desire / Nahid Rachlin.

   p. cm.

  ISBN 0-87286-304-2 (hard). — ISBN 0-87286-305-0 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

   PS3568.A244H43 1995

   813'.54 —dc20

  95-31002

  CIP

  City Lights Books are available to bookstores through our primary distributor: Subterranean Company, P.O. Box 160, 265 S. 5th St., Monroe, OR 97456. 503-847-5274. Toll-free orders 800-274-7826. FAX 503-847-6018. Our books are also available through library jobbers and regional distributors. For personal orders and catalogs, please write to City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.

  CITY LIGHTS BOOKS are edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters and published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.

  For my sisters

  Pari, Manijeh, Feri, ZiZi

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire

  To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

  Would not we shatter it to bits—and then

  Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

  Omar Khayyám

  Chapter 1

  Where am I? Jennifer sat up abruptly, naked, in the blue, mosaic-covered bathtub. Oh, I must have dozed off. I’m in my mother-in-law’s house in Teheran. She had an unsettling feeling of being exposed. It was like the recurring nightmare she used to have as a girl, in which she would find herself in a classroom or on the street without her blouse on. She got out of the tub quickly and began to dry herself and dress.

  Then she went into the bedroom and checked on her six-year-old son, Darius. It worried her that he was sleeping so long. Then she thought, he’s probably still worn out from days of traveling. They’d gone from Athens, Ohio, to the Columbus airport, from there to JFK, then to Istanbul, where they had finally boarded Iran Air for Teheran. Then there was the long wait on the customs line in Mehrabad Airport, where all the suitcases had been virtually dumped out on the ground to be searched.

  Through the tiny window she could see the sycamore trees lining the alley, scrawny, shriveled up, and the water in the joob, down to a narrow flow. It was unusually hot even for June. She thought of how magical Karim’s homeland had been on their first visit twelve years ago, not long after they were married. Teheran had been exciting to explore, a huge and hectic city with ancient bazaars that sold jewelry, carpets, ceramics, as well as modern shops carrying the latest European fashions, a city where mosques and shrines stood next to nightclubs, traditional houses side by side with high-rises, where women walked on the streets in chadors or in bold miniskirts and low-cut blouses. The mosques, shrines, and steep stone stairways leading to underground wells had layers of history beneath them.

  This ancient house itself, full of hallways and rooms, had fascinated her then. Several of the rooms had fireplaces decorated with stone friezes of fruit, flowers, animals, and cherubs with round, smiling faces, painted pink and blue and yellow. Many of the windows glowed with amber and red stained-glass panels. One of the rugs on the living room floor looked like a forest with pale green leaves scattered on it, another looked like a map of a city.

  But now, in 1989, everything in Iran was touched by the tragedy of a prolonged eight-year war between Iran and its neighbor Iraq, which had ended only months ago. Though the fighting had gone on mainly around the western border, bombs had left their marks everywhere—you couldn’t miss the charred window frames and boarded-up doors, the families camping in quiet back streets, soldiers passing by on crutches. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians, many of them mere teenage boys, only seven or eight years older than Darius, had been killed and wounded in the war. Black flags hanging on almost every door designated that someone in the household had been martyred. On the main square was a fountain with dark red water surging up from it. She had gasped when Karim told her it was meant to be a reminder of the blood shed. Even street names had been changed to point to the war: Martyrdom Street, Army Avenue, War Alley.

  There were other changes too. Before the war, Iran had been through a revolution. After the shah left and Kohmeini came to power, there had been a severing of diplomatic relations with many countries, including the United States. Conditions for women had become more restrictive. They had to cover up thoroughly in the presence of men other than close relatives; many were expelled from their jobs. As a part of the effort to get rid of “vices,” no American or European movies were allowed to be shown in cinemas, the nightclubs had been shut down, and Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants no longer existed. Not that she had come all the way to Iran to find American fast food—it was more that the climate was now inhospitable to her as an American, and worse, an American woman.

  Her friends, when she had told them she was planning a two-month trip to Iran, had cautioned her against going—it could be
dangerous for an American woman. When she had called the State Department to ask about the visa situation the woman answering the phone had said, “We have no embassy there, you’re taking a risk to go.” Indeed the process of getting in and out of Iran did involve a certain amount of risk. To travel to Iran she and Darius, though they were born in America, had to obtain Iranian passports through the Algerian Embassy in Washington, which represented Iranian interests in the United States. Then they had to stop off in Istanbul and hide their American passports in a bank safe; otherwise, if the passports were found on them in Iran, they would be confiscated. On the way back they would have to pick up their American passports again in Turkey.

  But these were minor difficulties compared to the problem of Karim.

  Ever since the trouble began between the two countries, a surge of hostility had risen in America toward Iranians. First it had been a blow to Karim when Iranian students were deported from the United States. For weeks, months, he could not stop talking about the unfairness of it, though he had no students from Iran himself. Then when Iran took the Americans as hostages, Iranians were caricatured, ridiculed in the press. A number of brutal incidents were reported in the local Athens paper. Even long after the hostages were released, prejudice against Iranians still lingered.

  At first it seemed that these events had no effect on the bond between her and Karim, but as time passed she began to feel an invisible barrier growing between them. He often seemed lost, and alone. Lonely with her. She sometimes saw in his eyes a hint of accusation, “You don’t understand.” He acted, she felt, as if having been born in America gave her an advantage over him. She remembered a certain look he’d had one day, and that image of him often came into her mind; he was standing by the living room window, staring into the backyard of their house in Athens. “I’m never going to be happy here again,” he had muttered. “Karim, don’t say things like that,” she had replied. He turned around and looked at her in a startled way as if unaware that he was speaking aloud.

  She was hoping that this trip to Iran, a stay with his family, would provide a congenial atmosphere for him, would give him a new perspective. In fact it would be beneficial for all of them to spend some time in Iran. Darius would see where his father came from, get to know his grandmother. She and Karim would be in a new environment, away from all the tension and conflicts forced on them. It would be good for Karim, who was a professor of urban planning at Ohio University, and looked forward to being in Iranian cities again. And she could get ideas and inspiration from Persian art for her work as a graphic designer. When the cease-fire between Iran and Iraq went into effect, she was the one who suggested that they take the trip, and of course Karim himself had been waiting for the first opportunity.

  A muezzin’s voice calling people to prayers suddenly flowed out from a mosque.“Allaho Akbar …” Then she heard Karim’s voice above that, “Jennifer, dinner will get cold.”

  She checked on Darius again and decided to let him sleep. She went to the courtyard, where the others—Karim; his mother, Aziz; Aziz’s brother, Jamshid; Jamshid’s wife, Monir; and their two teenage daughters, Zohreh and Azar—were sitting cross-legged on a rug under a tree. Food was arranged on a cloth spread between them. Jamshid, Karim had told her, had lost his engineering job in the oil refinery in Abadan because of the war and he was trying to relocate his family in Teheran. It’s odd that Karim did not mention that all these relatives would be staying here. Did he know? So much went unsaid between them these days.

  She sat cross-legged on the rug with the others and they began to eat—chicken kebab, spiced with turmeric and lemon, saffron rice, a stew, salad with lemon and herb dressing, doogh.

  “Darius has been sleeping for hours,” Aziz said, touching Karim’s arm, her eyes intense, a little anxious.

  In a loosely cut brown dress, her gray hair pulled back in a tight knot, wearing a simple gold ring with a carnelian stone, she projected plainness, austerity, Jennifer thought. Slightly arthritic, she wore thick black stockings in spite of the heat. She had not looked so severe on their first visit. Perhaps it was the strain of the war, her brother losing his job, the tragedies all around her. “Maybe I should wake him up?” she asked.

  “Let him sleep, no harm,” Karim said.

  Suddenly the lights went out.

  “Oh, no, I can’t stand it any more! No electricity in a country rich with oil!” Zohreh, the older of the two sisters, said, looking at Jennifer with a smile as if to apologize.

  Jennifer smiled back. She liked Zohreh, feeling a stronger connection with her already, in the few days they had been there, than with anyone else in Karim’s family. She was a lively and curious young girl, and asked Jennifer many questions about America. She marveled at how well Jennifer spoke Farsi, which Jennifer was proud to have mastered over the years of her marriage.

  “What do you expect? America caused this war, kept it going, and who knows what they’ll do next…” Jamshid said. Then his voice got lost in Zohreh’s and Azar’s cheering cries as the lights came back on. In a moment he went on, “They should try to solve their own problems first before interfering with others. With all their wealth they haven’t gotten rid of their social problems, loneliness, crime, poverty.”

  A wave of pain, mixed with shame, went through Jennifer. Of course there was reason for Iranians’ anger and mistrust of America, she thought. America did exploit Iran as much as possible for its oil, then provided Iraq with arms to defeat the new government. At the same time, though, she resented Jamshid’s attitude. It was as if he were attacking her personally.

  “But the freedom they have there,” Zohreh began.

  “I don’t want to give you a sociology lesson, but that’s an illusion,” her father interrupted with chagrin. “You ought to find a book called The Lonely Crowd, it will explain everything to you.” He put down his fork and stood up. Leaning against a tree, he took out a cigarette from a silver case and lit it with a silver lighter.

  Both the case and the lighter were from Tiffany’s, Jennifer noticed. He was also wearing the Phi Beta Kappa key that he must have kept from his student days in Texas. He hasn’t changed much, she thought, he’s still vain and arrogant, particularly when talking to a woman—as hard to take as when he had visited them years ago in Ohio.She was not sure how she was going to live in close proximity with him in this house for two whole months.

  Aziz and Monir began to clear the dishes, and Zohreh and Azar joined them. Jennifer did not offer to help this time—every time she had offered, Aziz had said, “Please sit down, you’re a guest!” Jennifer could not quite understand Aziz’s reactions and thoughts, was not sure if Aziz was being hospitable or if she did not trust her competence in domestic matters. After Aziz and Monir and her daughters had taken all the dishes into the kitchen, they came out with platters of fruit and nuts and arranged them on the cloth.

  “I wish there was something to do at night,” Zohreh said, again glancing at Jennifer, as if she were saying it for her benefit. Then she got up and went to her room, so did her sister. In a moment the sound from a radio drifted into the courtyard. A woman was singing, “Truth is like a flowing river, elusive, hard to hold.”

  Chapter 2

  Jennifer lay awake in bed while Karim sat in the courtyard talking to his uncle, hanging on his words, laughing at his jokes. It was hard to fall asleep with all the sounds that carried over from the courtyard and other bedrooms—Zohreh and Azar shared one room, Jamshid and Monir another, and Aziz had one to herself. The heat was not helping. The ceiling fan had stopped turning because the electricity had gone off again and, with only one window, there was no ventilation. But mainly what kept her up was her own churning thoughts. Was the trip going to resolve anything? As Karim became enveloped in the circle of his family, he grew only more distant from her. And she was worried about Darius—he just wasn’t himself. He was listless, homesick. Though he was picking up the language a little, building on the bit of knowledge of it he had already, h
e still could not understand most of what went on around him. There were no children his own age he could play with. He had been asking constantly, “Mommy, when are we going home?”

  Her watch read 1:00 A.M., Iran time, seven and a half hours later than in Ohio. Their best friends, Nancy and Don, would be eating dinner. It was only five days ago that they had driven them to the airport, but it seemed much longer somehow. Darius missed their son, Josh, with whom he played almost every day.

  She remembered admiring the watch, an oval-shaped Concord with golden hands and a tiny sapphire on the stem, in the window of a jewelry store in Columbus. Just when she had forgotten about it Karim had brought it home to her. It was his first birthday present to her, twelve years ago. It had been so good between them then. Being with him in the seclusion of a room, hearing him speak Farsi, his melodic language (the alphabet, the musical sounding words, were like symbols in a dream), or looking at his face, outlined by the mass of his dark hair, his eyes beaming with warmth, used to make her feel an intense, inexplicable happiness. It was as if he connected with something in a deep recess of her unconscious. Growing up in Margaretville, a small, farming town in upstate New York, she had envisioned traveling one day to countries where the way of life was different from her own. When she was a teenager, on days off from school she would go with her father to Kingston, where he was an electrician, and spend the day reading in the library—novels with foreign settings were her favorites. She thought of that dreamy moment of meeting Karim. It was in the cafeteria of Ohio State University in Columbus, where they were both students. He had picked up the fork she had dropped and replaced it with another one for her; then he had stared into her eyes. “Your eyes are an incredible color” he had said, so naturally that it had not sounded like a line. They had started going out and never stopped. He was always so intense and involved with whatever issue they talked about. They had two weddings. First they were married by a justice of the peace with only two of their friends present as witnesses. But a few months later, when they were planning their trip to Iran, they had been married by an aghound—a Moslem wedding certificate was required for her to go to Iran as Karim’s wife. She had stood next to Karim, her arms clasped in his, while the aghound said some words in Arabic and they repeated them. Then the aghound had given her the name Zahra. For her the sheer exoticness of the event had filled the air with a delicate sensuality. She felt perversely liberated. “Call me Zahra tonight,” she would say playfully to Karim sometimes and tried to imagine how a true Moslem wife would behave. More passionate, more passive? She had asked Karim, “How does a Moslem wife act, tell me.” He said, laughing, “How do I know, I’ve never been married to one. You’re the first!”