The Heart's Desire

by Nahid Rachlin

  But of course there were great differences between them too. Aziz’s big house was minimally furnished, although the heirloom rugs, the decoration around the fireplace, and the columns reminded her that it had once been different. The rooms now had only a few essentials—a rug, a bed, shelves built into the wall and hidden behind curtains to function as bureaus. Only Zohreh’s and Azar’s shared room had some special, personal decorations—a shortwave radio on which they somehow got American music, a phonograph, some records, and Zohreh’s books. On the wall over Zohreh’s bed were photographs of American actresses—Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Meryl Streep, and many others—that she must have cut from magazines, old ones, because in new publications they did not allow such pictures, or if they did, the women’s faces were blotted out by dark ink, something Jennifer found terrifying to look at. Over Azar’s bed was a poster of a popular Iranian singer.

  Jennifer’s mother’s house was the opposite of Aziz’s in that it was cluttered with years of shopping, full of things she had bought, whether she needed them or not, at flea markets, garage sales, at the auctions she went to sometimes on Saturday nights. Flowery plates, an antique commode, all sorts of colored glasses. Every room had more furniture than it needed. Windowsills were covered by decorative glass items that glinted in the sun. The kitchen shelves were full to the brim with dishes and glasses, including her mother’s set of chartreuse glass dishes (called Vaseline glass), mugs, goblets, salt and pepper shakers, candleholders, plates, and bowls.

  She thought that all in all her mother would enjoy Aziz—oddly, in spite of her rigidities, she’d always had an openness, even more, a yearning to learn about other worlds. When Jennifer was a child her mother had given her a collection of foreign dolls for her birthday—one Romanian, one Swedish, one Indian. Her mother liked the idea that an Indian family was running the supermarket nearby, that a Hungarian woman had opened up a restaurant. “Foreigners bring color,” she said. She had said something about Karim that had affected Jennifer deeply, “He has the kindest, warmest eyes of anyone I know.” (Her father’s reaction to Karim was ambiguous, harder to read—he often made remarks that revealed his ignorance of a larger world.)

  Darius came out of the room and joined them. “How do you feel?” his grandmother asked.

  Darius just rubbed his eyes.

  “I have something for you,” Aziz said. She went into her room and came back holding a box. She gave it to Darius.

  Darius opened it. Inside lay a gold pendant with the word, “Allah,” engraved on it.

  Looking deep into Darius’s eyes, Aziz said, “Let the spirit of God enter you while you’re a child. God is always watching you, what you do now on this earth. Your actions on this earth will determine whether you will go to heaven or hell.”

  Darius nodded, awe-struck, it seemed, though he could not have understood every word.

  Yesterday Jennifer had seen him kneeling with his grandmother with mohrs set on prayer rugs spread before them, Aziz saying the prayers aloud and Darius repeating after her, as they bowed down, putting their foreheads on the mohrs for a moment, and then rising.

  I hope she’s not going to try to make me pray, Jennifer thought uneasily. She remembered her battles with her own mother about religion—her refusal to go to church, when she was an adolescent, had been a source of tension between them. Aziz had already said to her, “Hundreds of men were martyred for a holy cause. If I could put some religious feelings into you while you’re in my house .. .” Aziz had given her two chadors, a black one for outside and a white one with floral designs to wear around the house in the presence of male guests. Otherwise a scarf, a roopush (a raincoat-like garment), and dark stockings would have been sufficient as far as the law was concerned.

  Aziz took the pendant from Darius’s hand and put it around his neck. “Now God will be with you all the time.”

  Her religion seemed to guide her every action. “It’s up to God, if I live for another day.” “If God wills it.” She used these phrases very frequently.

  She had been trying to get Karim to pray. Karim had done so once in a while, clearly just to please her. Not that everyone in the household prayed. As far as Jennifer could see only Aziz and Monir did and Monir clearly to accommodate Aziz.

  On their first visit religion had not been much of an issue, maybe because she and Karim were here only for two weeks. At that time, the main thing that had concerned Aziz was whether they had a Moslem wedding ceremony, and Karim had reassured her in this.

  “Mommy, I want to go to heaven,” Darius said to Jennifer suddenly in English. ‘Til have lots of candies and cakes to eat there and toys to play with. There’s only fire in hell.”

  Jennifer smiled but did not bother translating what he said for Aziz. It would only encourage her.

  “These are the most comfortable shoes I’ve ever had,” Aziz said to her, pointing to the clumpy black shoes made of soft leather she had taken off and put next to the rug. Jennifer had bought them, at Aziz’s own request, along with other presents. Aziz had described what she wanted in such detail that Jennifer had spotted them right away in the window of a Florsheim shoe store in a Columbus mall. “I’m an old woman, my legs ache all the time.”

  It always startled Jennifer that Aziz referred to herself as old. She was fifty-seven, only a year older than her own mother, who never saw herself that way.

  Sinking into a melancholy mood, Aziz added, “Karim used to tell me he would come home after he finished his education. This is only the second time he’s been back.”

  Jennifer could feel the weight of the blame. “We’ll be coming back more often now that it’s become easier. And of course we’d be happy if you came to America.”

  “If I come to America, where will America go?”

  Jennifer could understand how Aziz felt. She remembered meeting an Iranian woman Aziz’s age with the same strong adherence to Islam who lived with her son in Columbus. The woman had been sitting cross-legged in a corner in her son’s house during a party and complaining to whomever was willing to listen, “Why doesn’t my son take me back home, what’s here for me?” Tears had fallen from her eyes. Her son had told Jennifer that the old woman insisted on washing her own clothes by hand and hanging them to dry out in the sun so that they wouldn’t be washed with his non-Moslem wife’s clothes in the washing machine. She asked him to read the ingredients on every food package to make sure no pork or pork fat was used in it because it was against Moslem dietary laws. He had to have meat or poultry slaughtered in the correct Moslem way for her. He had to buy a pitcher for her to use in the bathroom instead of toilet paper.

  Monir took out a white pill from a jar next to the samovar and swallowed it with a few gulps of her tea. “Take one,” she said to Aziz. “It soothes the nerves.” She took several kinds of pills every day—multivitamins, iron, and calcium. This one seemed to be a tranquilizer. She offered them freely to whoever was willing to take them.

  Aziz took the pill, with her tea also. “I was lonely before you came to live with me,” she said to Monir. “Now you’re all here and Karim is back too. What will I do if you go away again? Do you know what it was like for me without you? Day after day alone in this house, sometimes with only the birds and the fish, and the alley cat to keep me company.”

  There was a knock on the outside door, then the sound of footsteps approaching. A young man, holding a large bouquet of flowers, came into the courtyard.

  “Oh, Hossein, how nice of you to come,” Aziz said. “Sit down, have some tea.” The samovar was still hissing.

  “Please don’t go to any trouble. I have only a few moments. I have to be back at my shop but I wanted to visit for a little while.”

  “It’s no trouble, sit down.”

  He gave the bouquet to Aziz and she walked away with it.

  She came back momentarily with a vase holding the flowers and put it in the middle of the cloth, then she poured tea for the visitor.

  He put several pie
ces of rock sugar in his tea, practically filling up half of the glass, and kept stirring it, then he drank it in a few gulps as if his body were deprived of sweetness. His hands, fat and dimpled, gave the same impression of gentleness as his round face did. “Your tea is always excellent, a beautiful amber color, and just the right fragrance.” Turning to Jennifer he said, “Welcome. I hope you don’t find our country too difficult right now. I’ve been meaning to come over ever since I heard you and Karim were visiting. I was sorry I didn’t come to the airport to meet you.”

  “Thank you, you’re very kind,” Jennifer said, cheered up by the young man’s gay spirits.

  “How long are you staying?” he asked.

  “Two months altogether.”

  “You’ve come a long way, why go back so soon?”

  “Darius has school and Karim and I have our work.”

  “There’s always work to do, it will get done eventually.”

  While he was talking to Jennifer, his eyes often returned to Zohreh.

  When he finished his tea, he got up. “I’d better go.”

  “Won’t you stay for lunch?” Aziz asked.

  “I’ll come back again for a longer visit.” He said goodbye, his eyes lingering on Zohreh. Zohreh’s face became intense with emotion. He glanced at Aziz and Monir, who were engaged in a conversation and then reached over and surreptitiously squeezed Zohreh’s arm. She did not respond to his touch, Jennifer noticed.

  He started for the door, swaying as he walked. His manner was a combination of gentleness and masculinity.

  As soon as he was out of the door Aziz said, “He’s a second cousin, related to us by marriage. He’s such a nice young man, he’d make a fine husband for Zohreh.”

  “Please,” Zohreh said, blushing. She and her sister got up and went back into their room.

  “My daughters are very particular,” Monir said to Jennifer, a furrow of sadness appearing between her eyebrows. “They had so many suitors when we had our own home.” As if Jennifer could not judge for herself, Monir explained, “Azar is prettier in the conventional sense. She’s always had a perfect complexion and her curls are natural. Zohreh has more magnetism.”

  “They both are attractive, accomplished young women,” Jennifer said.

  There was another knock on the door and other visitors began to stream in.

  Chapter 6

  Karim and Jamshid took turns driving the old Mercedes, one luxury Jamshid had kept from his employed days. They went more slowly when they reached the towns along the Caspian Sea. Miles of rice fields stretched between the towns. A few times Karim had asked Jamshid to stop so that he could take photographs—of a mosque with blue minarets, a steep stairway leading down to a spring, the steps crowded with people carrying jugs to fill with water, a field being irrigated by horse-drawn equipment, an intricate maze of alleys.

  Jamshid began to smoke a cigarette, taking long drags and inhaling deeply. Then, abruptly, he put out the cigarette. “It’s suicidal for me to be smoking, with my bad heart.”

  “You never said anything to me about a bad heart.”

  “It isn’t that serious, it’s just that my doctor told me to be careful.”

  “Jamshid, this should be the last cigarette you smoke.”

  “I know. I’ll quit as soon as I start working; that’s my latest resolution.”

  They passed through an ancient village full of historical sights—a karvansary, a castle. They made their way through an alley so narrow that the walls seemed to be closing in above them, forming a tunnel.

  Jamshid patted his arm. “You’re preoccupied, is it still that letter?”

  “So many problems are waiting for me.”

  “You do have alternatives, you know.”

  They had reached Naushahr. The town was surrounded on three sides by jagged mountains, on the fourth by the sea. Its streets were lined with immense fir trees. Elegant, whitewashed villas stood side by side with burnt-out buildings, destroyed by bombs and not rebuilt yet. There was more war damage visible here than in Teheran. They passed a dilapidated house, where a family, a woman and a man and two children, were sleeping all together under a huge beige army blanket in one of the rooms. The children kept twisting around as if in pain. Outside the house stood a glass case displaying an enlarged photograph of a young man. Underneath it was written, “Martyr Farhang Naghdi, Died in the Holy War.” He had a handsome, innocent face, large, dark eyes, high forehead, full lips and a thin mustache. Guilt gripped Karim’s heart. How devastating it must have been to be bombed, to lose your children and others close to you. In a park in the middle of town, rows of men were sitting on benches, most of them with crutches at their sides. War veterans, no doubt. He had read that there was a high concentration of them in these seaside towns, where they now tried to make a living by fishing.

  “A lot of these veterans are addicted,” Jamshid said. “They steal caviar from the state packaging plant here and exchange it for drugs. They also get vodka from the Russian sailors that way.” He parked his car in front of the Arise Construction Company and they got out. The street was crowded with people coming in and out of offices and shops, vendors displaying crafts out in the open—handmade pottery and jewelry, wooden boxes. Men dealing in the black market lurked in doorways, exchanging foreign money or selling rare items. Everything, even liquor and American videos, seemed to be available in the huge black market.

  Karim followed his uncle into the building and they looked for the office where the interview was to be held, then he waited in the reception room while his uncle went in. On the sofa across from him several other people were waiting. One of them, a middle-aged woman, was poring over some documents.

  Before long Jamshid returned with another man whom he introduced to Karim as “Khosro Ghotbi.”

  Karim got up and they shook hands.

  “I’d like to talk to you in my office for a few moments, if I could,” Khosro said.

  Khosro sat behind his desk and Karim sat across from him. The room was pleasant, with pale blue walls and oak furniture.

  “Your uncle was telling me about you. With your education in urban planning you would be very valuable here in Iran. Would you consider working for us, at one of our branches, here or in Teheran? So many of our educated people have left the country just when they’re needed the most.” He had an easy, self-confident manner.

  “Thank you but I really can’t take a job here. I’ll be returning to the United States at the end of the summer.”

  “We have several projects going already, restoring mosques and historical sites that were damaged by bombs, planning parks,” Khosro persisted. “We’ll provide you and your family with subsidized housing, and give you a Paykan car. The starting salary is competitive.”

  “It’s tempting but really not possible for me.”

  “The position is available immediately this fall,” Khosro went on. “All you need to do is to provide me with your vita.”

  The two of them talked for a while. Khosro himself had been educated in England. “You know, my life has more meaning here. I had a good life there, but I knew I’d never be really and truly an Englishman. I’m an Iranian. And I’m more needed here than anywhere else.”

  Karim smiled and got up, feeling his heartbeat accelerate. This man would hire him right then and there.

  Khosro saw him to the door and they shook hands again.

  Jamshid was pacing around the waiting room. He stopped as soon as he saw Karim. “Don’t dismiss the idea,” he said to him.

  “What happened with your own interview?” Karim asked.

  “It’s promising. Frankly, he was more interested in you than in me. Do you want to spend the night in Naushahr?”

  “We may as well, it’s getting late.”

  “I know of a good hotel. I stayed there once.”

  They got into the car and drove along the green, thickly wooded coast to the hotel.

  The hotel was small but clean and inviting, faced with stucco
and brick, surrounded by fruit trees and flowering shrubs. Jamshid asked the clerk for a room with two beds.

  “We have one available on the second floor.”

  Karim followed his uncle up the stairs. In the corridor a maid was folding sheets and putting them in a closet. The doors were all painted bright yellow. Their room overlooked the sea and was colorfully furnished with a purple, blue, and yellow kilim on the floor and yellow bedspreads. Karim looked out of the window at children playing on the beach; one threw a ball and ran after it while others were holding strings of kites that fluttered high in the sky. “I should call Jennifer, I want to know how Darius is doing,” he said to Jamshid who was washing up in the bathroom. He went to the phone and asked the operator to dial Aziz’s number. After a few rings someone picked up.

  “Hello.” It was Jennifer herself.

  “Jennifer … we’re in Naushahr.”

  Silence, filled with tension, followed.

  “Jamshid just had the interview. How’s Darius, can I talk to him?”

  “He went to bed.”

  She sounded remote. “He doesn’t have temperature or diarrhea, does he?” he asked.

  “No, he’s just tired all the time.”

  “Well, if he doesn’t have…”

  Suddenly the phone seemed to have gone dead. He couldrft hear anything. “Hello, hello, hello,” he said, then hung up. At least he had managed to say the essential things, he thought. He sat there holding his head in his hands.

  “Are you all right?” Jamshid asked.

  “I couldn’t really talk to her. The line went dead.”

  Chapter 7

  Before they entered the hotel restaurant, the clerk approached Karim and his uncle and said, “If you need anything let me know” He added in a near whisper, “Everything is available at reasonable prices. You could have a sigheh for one night, two nights, whatever you like. An aghound is on the premises to perform the ceremony.”