The Heart's Desire

by Nahid Rachlin

She put down the drawing, sat on a chair next to the phone, and gave the number to the operator.

  “I’ll be happy to try for you, but it’s nearly impossible to get through,” the operator said. There was a pause as she made the connection, followed by a recorded message, “Calls are temporarily limited due to equipment problems. Please place your call again.”

  “Damn!” Jennifer slammed down the heavy, black phone.

  Chapter 4

  Karim accompanied his uncle to a job interview and then they went to a cafe to unwind before going home. But even in the presence of his uncle, sitting in this pleasant outdoor cafe set on a platform over a stream, with the sound of the water gurgling underneath them, he could not shake off the feeling Ed’s letter had evoked.

  “They’re mediocre and smug,” he said. “All the showing off about work and research, fights over secretaries’ time, over space, all the politicking …”

  “Do you think …” Jamshid paused to light a cigarette. He started again, “Would you want to look into a job here in Iran? So many qualified people have fled the country. And, believe it or not, an American degree is still what they trust the most here.”

  “It would be very hard for Jennifer here,” Karim said. “And Darius too…. He’s just a child though, he’d adjust.”

  “You stayed in the United States for years, you could ask her to stay here for a while.”

  Karim felt a sudden tension, talking about Jennifer to his uncle. He just said, “The truth is there’s nothing there for me to go back to .” Ed’s behavior was only touching other, deeper wounds, Karim thought, drifting away into himself How dislocated he had begun to feel in his own house, neighborhood. Dislocated, unwelcome, misunderstood, the target of all sorts of prejudices and hostilities. “Go Home! Go Home!” was written on walls. Once they had driven to the Park Bench, a restaurant they went to often. He got to the door of the restaurant first and could see written on a sheet of paper in large letters, ‘Iranians Are Not Welcome.’ He had flushed, turned around quickly and told Jennifer, “Let’s go somewhere else.” He remembered his most powerful emotion then had been more shame than anger. She had said, “No, we should protest, we should go in and eat there, they can’t keep us out.” “I don’t want to,” he had insisted. The whole evening had turned unpleasant, and he remembered how humiliated he had felt.

  He discovered that feeling was common among all Iranians—many of the students and even older Iranians in town tried to hide where they came from. Once at the public library he asked the young man checking books if he was Iranian—because of his accent and a certain look about him. The boy blushed and after a moment of hesitation he stammered, “Yes, are you?” then quickly he turned away from Karim.

  He had not even told Jennifer, and now could not bring himself to tell his uncle, about what happened to him on a late afternoon driving home on a quiet road through the woods outside of Athens. He had become aware of a car following him. The car swerved in front of his car and he had had to stop. He could see there were three men in it, gruff, angry looking men. The driver was holding a knife, waving it at him. Then the driver got out and came over to him, pointing the knife at his face. Karim remembered saying, “You have the wrong person, I don’t know who you are.” The man brought the knife closer: “But we know who you are.” Luckily, a police car approached and his assailant must have seen it too, for he lowered the knife at once, got back into his car, and sped away.

  Not long after that, he read something terrifying in the Athens newspaper: “Parviz Abadani, a fourteen-year-old Iranian boy, was beaten by his classmates and left in the empty lot behind Taft High School in Columbus. He was found by a man passing by, who had heard his moans. He was taken to the hospital and is in critical condition …” Karim had been so obsessed by the incident that he had gone to the empty lot and had stared for a long time at the ground, morbidly looking for signs of the attack. He had even tried to track down the boy’s family but with no success.

  It was as if a heavy weight had descended on him, pulling him down. He was startled sometimes when he saw his own reflection in a mirror. He had the tired, weary aura of someone who had been through an ordeal. His eyes had lost their luster. He looked ten years older than his age of thirty-six.

  It’s really incredible how vulnerable a human being can be, he thought. You are dealt enough blows and your sense of who you are, where you belong, crumbles.

  “I started to detest the value system in America, the greed, the constant pressure and speed,” Jamshid was saying. “People would pass by a dying man to make sure they would make it on time to their jobs.” A dark cloud spread over his face. He pressed his cigarette into the wet saucer. “I shouldn’t be smoking so much.”

  “You must quit altogether.” Karim thought of his father who had died of an embolism in his brain, perhaps caused by smoking heavily. He had died suddenly, sitting at his desk at City Hall, where he was the chief clerk. Other employees had found him with his head resting on the desk. A flower, pinned that morning to the lapel of his jacket, lay next to his foot on the floor. After his father’s death Jamshid had become a substitute father for him, giving him guidance and support.

  “I quit, but then I started again, with all my ordeals …”

  Karim was keenly aware of a frailty in his uncle, concealed so much of the time by his outgoing manner. It was an echo of the frailty he had seen this morning in Aziz’s wrinkled face while she sat with him reminiscing. She had put her hand on his arm and kept it there, heavily, as if she needed to hang on to him with all the strength she had. “Remember, you used to say, ‘Don’t let me sleep later than five o’clock, I want to get up and do my schoolwork.’ You wanted to be the best in your class and you were, always. Once you had fallen off your bicycle and a policeman brought you home. I was so frightened to see a policeman that I didn’t notice your knees bleeding. Remember …”

  He was surprised to find that she had kept in a box in the closet many of his belongings, records, books, notebooks, and letters he had written to her over the years. She had even saved a few of his kites. One was in the shape of a butterfly, yellow in color with stripes of black, another was the shape of a lantern and had a bright orange glow. The kites reminded him of the hours in early evening when he had stood on the roof flying them. He and other boys, with their kites, would call to each other, swing one kite against another as if in challenge. He had read some of his old letters. In nearly all the early ones he had expressed an almost missionary desire to return home and put his education to use there.

  The waiter came over. “Do you want anything else?”

  Jamshid looked at Karim. Karim shook his head. “I guess we should go back.” Jamshid insisted on paying the bill, saying, “We’re imposing on your mother. She wouldn’t even let us pay her any rent.” Anyway, Karim knew, it went against Jamshid’s pride to let his nephew, younger than himself, pay.

  The houses along the streets were in different styles—modern, old, poor, rich—and haphazardly set, some on elevated foundations. He looked into some of the rooms. A jade vase glowing in the afternoon sunlight, a photograph on a mantle, a pot of flowers on the windowsill. He tried to imagine living in one of those houses with Jennifer and Darius. It would be such a different life from Ohio.

  It was amazing how alive the streets were in spite of the war damage, the weak economy—voices of shoppers, people going in and out of restaurants and houses, cars honking their horns, policemen blowing whistles, guiding traffic.

  They passed a pottery shop. An old man with a long, white beard and a withered face was sitting just inside the door. He seemed ancient, wise. It made Karim feel good to just look at that face. On the unpaved ground, not far from the pottery store, he spotted a blue tile partially covered with dirt. He picked it up and rubbed it with his hand. Fine particles of dust clung to his fingers. Then he put the tile in his pocket as if it were a talisman. At the beginning of the alley in which his mother’s house stood, they stopped at the
bakery to buy bread to take home.

  “Three loaves,” Karim told the man, who was baking bread on hot stones in an open oven.

  “It will be only a moment,” the man said, his dark, thin face red from the reflection of the fire as he slid thin slabs of dough from his wooden platen into the oven. At the end of his working day, Karim imagined, he would add up his receipts on an abacus with amber beads, put out the oven, and then go through the dark curtain in the back of the store, into his house where his wife and children awaited him.

  In a few moments the man took out the baked loaves of bread with his platen and slid them onto the marble counter. Then with his fingers he removed the few pieces of gravel still stuck to them, folded the breads, and gave them to Karim. “God is still providing us with good flour. We should thank him for that.”

  In the alley several children were chasing each other, running and laughing, two others were throwing a ball back and forth in the air and catching it. Late afternoon sunlight cast a pink glow on everything. An image of his mother from long ago came to him. She was squatting by the door of the house, her chador tightly wrapped around her face, and staring down the street, waiting for his return.

  “It took you all this time for one interview?” Jennifer, sitting with the other women in the courtyard, asked Karim as he and Jamshid came in.

  “We had tea afterward,” Karim said. Aware of an edge in Jennifer’s voice he added quickly, “I’m sorry.”

  “Darius was very restless, I put him down in bed to get some rest,” Jennifer said. “I’m worried about him.”

  “He’s away from what he’s used to.” He handed the bread to his mother. “But he’ll adjust, I’m sure.”

  “He’s such a good boy, but of course traveling is hard on a child,” Aziz said, putting the loaves in a basket under the tree and covering them with a thick piece of cloth.

  Karim took off his jacket and hung it on a branch of the tree.

  “No specific jobs yet,” Jamshid said to Monir and their daughters. “But there are promises.”

  Karim noticed that Jennifer was avoiding conversation or eye contact with Jamshid. She had never liked him. When Jamshid had come to visit them in Ohio, she had told Karim, “I just can’t take too much of him. You’re different from him, cut from a different cloth, otherwise I couldn’t live with you!” In some ways he couldn’t blame her—Jamshid only addressed him when talking, and he always expected her to have food prepared for them. Still he wished she would be a little more tolerant, considering that he had to put up with boring, and sometimes infuriating, evenings at her parents’ house. Once, when the Americans were still captive in Iran, her cousin, forgetting he was from Iran, had said, “We should round up all the Iranians in this country and put them in camps like we did with the Japanese.”

  He thought how once he had believed that love could conquer any obstacles. In those early days, when drunk with love for Jennifer, he would have laughed if anyone asked him, “Do the differences in your backgrounds ever create problems?” Anyway, falling in love was not a deliberate act. That was why it was called, “falling!” He could remember the precise moment he had fallen in love with Jennifer. It was as if he had no choice in the matter, as if he had been struck. He was looking at a photograph she had given him of herself when she was twelve years old. In the picture her hair was in pigtails and she was sitting on a swing holding onto the ropes. Something about the expression on her face, the color of her eyes, would not let go of him.

  Before they began to live together he would call her sometimes just to hear her, the way she said hello in a quiet way, and how her voice gathered excitement as she said, “Karim, it’s you.” If she had a record on the phonograph, or was cooking something on the stove that she was afraid might burn, she would say, “Wait one minute.” She would go away for a moment and come back and they would begin a long, leisurely conversation. Did she talk like that to other men? A sickening jealousy would come over him. It became an urgency to get to know her better, spend more time with her, have her in his bed every night if he could. She needed him too and no matter how often he wanted her, she responded. There was something so satisfying, no, magical, about that intense interlocking of their needs for each other. The air between them was always charged by a passionate energy. A mere glance at her creamy soft neck, her sparkling blond hair flowing over her shoulders as she stood by the bed in her nightgown instantly aroused a sexual response in him. When they moved in together he loved lying in bed and watching her get dressed. She would sing to herself as she combed her hair in front of the bureau mirror and put on her makeup. He would get up and put his arms around her and then slowly, sometimes to her playful protests, remove the clothes she had just put on, and take her back into bed again, not letting her go for a long time.

  Karim paused in his reverie, interrupted by Darius, who had come out of his room, and was standing by the door in his pajamas.

  “Oh, there you are, come over here, give your Daddy a kiss.”

  He climbed onto his lap. “Daddy, where did you go?” “Looking for work for my uncle.” He drew Darius close to him and hugged him.

  “When are we going home? I want to play with Josh.” “Soon.”

  “You always say soon.”

  Karim laughed. How delightful Darius was with his tiny little defiances.

  “He’s a perfect combination of you and Jennifer,” Monir said. “The curly blond hair hers, the brown eyes yours, the nose also yours.”

  “I have only one grandchild,” Aziz said, picking up Darius from Karim’s lap and putting him on her own. “Beautiful boy,” she cooed, pushing her fingers through his hair. “Here, this is for you,” She took out a red lollipop in the shape of a rooster from a large pocket in the front of her dress and put it in Darius’s hand.

  “Please, it isn’t good for him to eat sweets,” Jennifer protested.

  Aziz stared at her with puzzled eyes.

  Darius had begun to lick the lollipop. “I like this, Mom,” he said.

  It is going to be a losing battle, Karim thought. And no real harm will be done if he eats a few lollipops. A vendor shouted on the street, “We have live chicken for sale at low prices,” and another cried, “We carry the best fruit and vegetables, we have eggs, the size you’ve never seen before.”

  Karim got up and went out to buy eggs. He remembered his father used to take out cash, which he always had loose in his pants’ pockets, and give it to him. “Buy a dozen eggs,” he used to say, or, “Get a tray of strawberries.” The house then was filled with exquisite old rugs and furniture, chandeliers, china. His mother used to dress in pretty clothes and wear her hair long, almost to her waist. There were always people staying there—aunts, cousins, nieces, friends. In the month of Ramazan he would wake in the middle of the night to the voices of adults in the courtyard, talking and eating, breaking their day-long fasts. When he went out to join them, everyone would focus on him. “What a nice boy,” “He is going to be more handsome even than his father.” “He’s so smart.”

  After her husband’s death Aziz had changed almost irrevocably. She had begun to wear dark clothes, moved around slowly as if under a burden. She had developed sorrowful habits—the way she lowered her eyes and sighed. Habits that lingered over the years were now heightened by her recent tragedies.

  He bought eggs from the old peddler.

  “May God multiply your money by a hundred,” the man said.

  Karim came back inside and gave the eggs to his mother and she put them in the basket with the bread.

  A muezzin’s voice suddenly filled the air. “Allaho Akbar…”

  Chapter 5

  Jennifer waved to Karim as he left the room to join his uncle, who was waiting for him outside. The night before, he had told her that Jamshid had set up an interview in Naushahr, a town by the Caspian Sea, and suggested they all drive there. “You and Darius will get a chance to see the area. The seaside towns are very different from Teheran. For one thing they�
��re lush and humid and the houses and buildings are painted in pastel colors,” he had said. But she didn’t think it was a good idea for Darius to be cooped up in the car. She told Karim he should go with his uncle and she’d stay home with Darius. Karim said he’d be back in a day or two.

  She went into the courtyard and sat with the rest of the women, thinking painfully about the shadow spreading wider between her and Karim.

  “Have more tea,” Aziz said. The samovar, lit for breakfast, was still hissing. She began to pour tea into glasses from the kettle and to add water from the samovar.

  Jennifer took one, so did Monir and the girls. Zohreh drank hers while she read a novel, her attention riveted. Jennifer had noticed in Zohreh’s room a bookcase full of books, many of them translations of American and European classics, but some by Iranian writers too, with whom Jennifer was actually familiar. One she knew was in exile in France after having been in jail a few times both under the shah and then under the new regime; another, a woman writer, had also been in jail under the new regime and was now hiding somewhere. Zohreh had told her she bought her books from a store that sold controversial titles under the counter. What amazed Jennifer was not so much the suffering and sadness expressed in those books, but that they had to be snuffed out. It made her anxious for Zohreh, who was so drawn to these voices, and whose own voice, whose own feelings of being oppressed, seemed to unite with theirs.

  Azar was doing patchwork, sewing pieces of different fabrics together—a flying yellow bird next to a silk green leaf, a purple flower next to a red one. Azar had told her that she cut them out from clothes Aziz had saved from her youth and had given to her. It was a revelation to Jennifer that Aziz had once worn such colorful clothes. She wondered what she had been like then, when she was a young woman.

  She had often wished her own mother and Aziz could meet. She saw certain similarities in the two women—they were both rigidly honest, both were religious, though they believed in different religions. They had devoted themselves to domesticity, though her mother had been a nurse once and had quit after she and her brother were born. Neither her mother or Aziz was a “modern” woman.