by Sam Tranum
He quickly stepped back into the bathroom, his equilibrium rattled. From behind the bathroom’s glass door, he now saw that it was, indeed, a snake – a black snake with white marks around its nape. For a moment, he wondered how the snake had gotten into his studio. Then he realised the window facing his work desk was wide open. The snake must have gotten in through there by perhaps crossing from the overhanging sycamore tree branches to the open window’s metallic frame. He could still hear the young Afghan men working and the pigeons cooing, but they would not be of help.
Eventually, the snake moved, sliding and slithering across the travertine tiles, towards his work desk, under his antique wooden chair, and, finally, onto the small, Kork wool rug underneath which it coiled. It took a long while to do this, and Kaveh Mirzaee patiently watched it as his hair and his skin dried out and the humidity in the studio dissipated and the young Afghans and the pigeons outside carried on as before.
When he felt safe enough, he opened the bathroom’s glass door and hurried across the studio to his bed, where he had laid out his clothes. He got dressed much faster than usual, his eyes never leaving the snake. It seemed content, even peaceful, on that oval rug from Qom, which was patterned with white lotus flowers and green silk highlights. Kaveh Mirzaee put his sandals on – again, much faster than usual – and left his apartment without turning the key in the door. He had no clear plan for how to deal with the snake.
At a corner, on the way to the elevator, he bumped full speed into a woman. She was holding a brown grocery bag against her black manteau. The force of the impact made her drop the bag; spilling out, as if from a magician’s hat, came a cascade of ripe tomatoes, eggplants, onions, potatoes and green herbs, and a huge packet of shredded Mozzarella cheese – menu ingredients, no doubt, for the Eid progressive dinner. The tomatoes, as ruby as Jupiter, radiated out across the floor like billiard balls, and Kaveh Mirzaee, momentarily embarrassed and clumsy, stepped on one and then the next.
‘Madame,’ he cried, ‘I’m so sorry!’ He squashed another tomato under his leather sandals, kicked at an eggplant like he was a marionette out of control, and was nearly undone by the hardness of a potato momentarily under one foot. ‘Madame …’
She adjusted the matching chiffon hijab on her head and then assessed the damage done to her groceries – several of her tomatoes splayed out like starfish on the white linoleum floor, and Kaveh Mirzaee trying his best to get the rest of her groceries back into the bag.
‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the bag from him. ‘You shouldn’t worry …’
He looked at her face then and saw that it was as brown as the seeds of a Persian walnut. Her forehead was round and her lips were full and she carried the scent of oud about her.
‘I will pay for this,’ he said, dropping his gaze onto the wet redness on the floor, while feeling about for his wallet and not finding it.
‘You are a war hero,’ she said. ‘You have already paid.’
He looked up at her, startled.
‘Everybody in the building knows this, Kaveh Mirzaee, even those of us who are merely passing through.’
‘I should pay, nonetheless,’ he said, making his way back to his apartment for his wallet.
At the door, he, however, remembered the snake, momentarily forgotten amongst the red tomatoes and the woman with a brown face the colour of Persian walnut seeds. She is beautiful, Kaveh Mirzaee thought to himself, one hand on the doorknob.
She was watching him.
He stood there and did not open the door.
‘They took away your family and everything that was dear to you in Ābādān. And yet you live, like a true pahlevan,’ she said. ‘The wind is in you, Kaveh Mirzaee – you shouldn’t pay.’
‘Oh … the wind … it must be coming from my window. I left it open.’
‘I am from Lashar,’ she said, ‘and we hear the winds of Lashar just like my ancestors heard the winds of Africa. The wind I hear is inside of you.’
Kaveh Mirzaee looked into her eyes. They were deep in colour like dates from Bam and soft like only dates from Bam are.
‘There is a snake in my apartment,’ he said, when he could find his voice.
‘A snake,’ she said, with a growing smile. ‘What colour is it?’
‘Black … and white.’
‘Open the door and let me see,’ she said.
Kaveh Mirzaee opened the door and pointed to his work desk. The snake was still there, coiled on the oval rug.
She came to the open door and followed his gaze.
‘It is a rat snake,’ she said. ‘You see them in the mountains … sometimes they find their way into people’s houses and gardens. They are not poisonous.’
‘They are not?’
‘No, they aren’t,’ she said, putting down the grocery bag. ‘They are like me – just passing through.’
She walked into his apartment like she was part of it. The snake on the rug did not move, and the hungry pigeons hovering on the windowsill did not flutter away. She knelt on the travertine floor and picked up the snake by its head without any hesitation whatsoever. It coiled around her arm like it was coiling around an old familiar tree branch, and stayed there – peaceful.
‘See,’ she said. ‘It means no harm.’
There was nothing he could say.
She looked around his home and then at the samples of complete work on his desk: an old Sufi mystic, an antique silver teapot, a red lotus flower, the tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab, and a rendering of Vis and Rāmin in their love epic. Then she looked at the piles of camel-bone tiles with nothing on them, a drying palette of mixed water paints, liquid mother-of-pearl glowing in bottle and his array of tiny brushes made from the finest cat hair. She even turned the pages of his sketchbook, given to him by the old Kurdish man in Ramadi.
‘Take something … anything,’ he said to this woman from Lashar.
‘Make me something new, Kaveh Mirzaee, and I will take it,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said. And then he thought, Yes, of course.
She was like a desert wind that had not been barred outside, whose fine sands he would now forever find in the depths of his being. His eyes followed her through the open door. She left with the snake and her grocery bag and headed to the apartment at the end of the hallway.
Kaveh Mirzaee cleaned up the mess of crushed tomatoes with a roll of tissue and then stood at his still wide-open door thinking that he should go buy some bread now that the snake had been taken care of. He picked up his wallet from the night stand and turned the key in the lock. Walking towards the elevator again, he found himself thinking about the possibility of attending the Eid progressive dinner, as the woman from Lashar was going to be there.
10.
In the Heat
Jackie Davis Martin
Her heels were getting crusty from the Athens dust. Walking the steep rubble of the Acropolis, the sun baking the tops of their heads, Charlotte thought about her feet again and reflexively flipped her leg at the knee and looked back: yes, her foot was uglier than it had been when she’d observed it late yesterday, her feet in the air above Neil, who had been grunting over her. He’d hate that what she was thinking of was her feet.
‘A stone?’ he asked. He reached to steady her.
Her skin was bare and hot and wet with sweat. They surveyed the jagged hill they’d traversed, the squares of white below, the hundreds of people like themselves swarming over the hillside. Neil pivoted them to see the Parthenon above.
‘Not that far,’ he said. He shook his shirt tails to let in a little air.
She squinted at the sun gleaming and flashing through the distant pillars and told him how thrilled she was with the sight. She knew he wanted her to be thrilled. And, mostly, she was. But she felt she was losing the capacity to thrill him.
It was not good to feel tested thousands of miles from home.
Three days before – when they first arrived in Athens – they’d been greeted by a tour guide, a lively
woman with thick dark hair and thick round breasts that undulated as she gestured at the front of the bus. When she paused for breath she grasped the seats on either side of her, leaning forward, and invited the entire bus’s inspection of the canyon of her cleavage. Even Charlotte was mesmerised by such a display, and Neil had mentioned it twice already.
She couldn’t compete in any way with the tour guide’s lusty glamour: she, Charlotte, the English teacher, the one who wanted to go to Greece because of Oedipus and The Oresteia.
The guide’s name was Athena – Charlotte laughed when she heard it – and she’d bid farewell to their group to board another bus. Her aura, however, remained. Today, along with spaghetti sandals that invited crusty heels, Charlotte was wearing a strapless stretch jersey so her own bosom was loosened. Her shoulders were becoming burned.
After three years of dating, Neil admitted he had not been faithful. His confession to her of a dalliance had been tearful and dramatic and he’d begged her forgiveness. He said he loved only her, and Charlotte said she forgave him. The scene, occurring just six months ago, had been perhaps too dramatic, alarming her with a fear that she could lose Neil and also causing her to wonder why he was telling her such a thing. And why then. Had it happened before? She couldn’t shake the suspicion that he’d shown a false contrition and would easily stray again.
‘Let’s rest a bit.’ Neil sank onto a rock and nudged her down beside him. ‘You have to do this sort of thing when you’re young,’ he said. They were thirty-seven and forty-three. Young-ish. ‘This heat. How do old people manage? They’d never see the Parthenon.’
Charlotte looked about. ‘Tour buses? But they can’t possibly reach the top.’
‘She was something, wasn’t she?’
Oh how stupid of her to mention tours, how rude of him.
‘Athena,’ he said, as though she’d forgotten.
Charlotte tugged at her stretch top and stood up. ‘Shall we continue?’
Neil reached out both hands, interlocking them the way they did when they took hikes and assisted each other up steep terrains, and she pulled him upright. He pressed against her and smiled. The Parthenon itself was a way to go, the slag hillside pitching relentlessly uphill in the heat as they trudged to Charlotte’s revered destination – ironically, the temple of Athena. There among the ruins shade was scant. Neil was excited at the friezes of the horses and warriors. Charlotte admired the maidens holding up the weight of the porch with their heads.
‘I think they’re not the real ones, though,’ she said.
The descent was easier, but they were weary as they approached something like an ice cream stand.
‘My brains feel fried,’ Charlotte said. ‘And it’s all so foreign. What do you think that sign says?’
‘Nitea,’ Neil read. ‘Maybe an orange drink. Like Fanta? Want one?’
He indicated to the vendor – the only way they communicated with the Greeks – two orange bottles in the cooler. In a tavern last night they’d pointed to a meat dish on another table, unable to discern anything familiar on the menu, and never did recognise it. Lamb? Beef? Goat?
The Plaka was stifling with its cacophonous piped music, jostling of crowds, leathers and incense stalls, and they were eager to return to their hotel room. But later, after showers, after lovemaking and another shower, they went back into the streets. They’d try a new taverna, they decided, strengthened enough by their familiar bodies to explore the foreign once again – and ventured into an alley strung with coloured lights. At the far end of the terrace of wooden tables, a folk band was playing – flutes and dulcimers – and they ordered beer and salads and bread. Charlotte grinned at Neil, swivelling on the bench to applaud the musicians, and, when she turned back, Neil’s arms were extended in welcome to a woman who stood in the abstract circle of his embrace.
‘Honey, it’s Athena! She remembered us from the tour bus. You know – the first day?’ He moved over and patted the space next to him.
What else could she say but, ‘Of course. Join us, please.’ Neil was happily flustered and ordered a round of ouzo. Athena looked freshly laundered in a blouse that resembled the aprons in the Agora, almost transparent. She loved Americans, she said, and was so happy to practice English. Her skin crinkled into smile wrinkles at the corners of her round eyes. Athena was probably her age, Charlotte realised. She sucked in her own stomach and sat higher
‘Maybe Athena could show us around other parts of Athens?’ Neil suggested. He laughed at the coincidence of the names, a stupid and conspicuous observation, Charlotte thought. Show them around? She and Neil and Athena together for a day? She kicked him under the table, but he was watching Athena.
‘We were going to rent a car,’ Neil said, pantomiming a steering wheel, ‘and go to Delphi. Charlotte wants to see the theatre there. We’d pay you of course.’
Athena clasped her hands together and said she loved visiting Delphi. ‘I feel so – what you say – with spirit,’ she said. Her earrings, dangles of silver disks, reflected the tavern lights like little sparklers.
All Charlotte could picture was Neil behind the wheel he had just been faking, Athena gushing from the passenger side, and her crushed into a small back seat. And that was the way it happened.
The next day Athena was at the hotel desk at 6 AM, as Neil instructed, leaving Charlotte only the hours in between to protest.
‘Relax, Char,’ Neil had said, cuddling her in bed. He spoke with the expansiveness and generosity of a man about to date two women. ‘It’ll be fun; it’ll be different. You liked her, too.’
‘I did?’
But Neil had already dozed off and was soon snoring. Charlotte tossed fitfully and at some point poured herself whiskey from the flask Neil travelled with and stared at the moon over the Acropolis. The tiny balcony she stood on seemed symbolic of her life: she was in a place she longed to be, but merely hovering there, angry and helpless. She couldn’t even read the letters of the language. She took another sip and turned to look at Neil, a man she loved, had loved. How could she get him to value her more? The curtains lifted in the filmy night breeze – it was all so romantic! She wanted to punish Neil for his thoughtlessness in inviting another woman – no matter whether she was a tour guide or not – into Athens, her dream destination. She felt like stranding him here. And suppose she did? Just for a little while, just for long enough for him to see that, without her, Charlotte, other women didn’t mean much. She mulled over how she could do this.
Athena had shown up in a yellow sundress, her abundant hair piled on her head. Charlotte, in her T-shirt and shorts, felt relegated to the back seat on the basis of costume alone, the foster child of an exuberant couple. And, of course, Neil offered Athena the front seat – ‘She needs to see where we’re going, and Charlotte doesn’t mind, do you, hon?’
‘How much are you paying her?’ Charlotte had asked at the car rental as Athena sat in the waiting room, her tanned legs crossed, her canvas sandals laced seductively around her ankles. Even her toes gleamed.
‘Why would you concern yourself with that?’ Neil had said. ‘I’ve paid for everything, haven’t I?’
Yes, of course he had. She knew that. Beholden was not a good position to be in. But what was? He’d reached for her in the dawn light and half asleep (finally), she’d succumbed to the familiar lovemaking, wondering only later whether he’d been fantasising about the buxom Athena.
Now, as the car rode precariously along the narrow mountain road so sparse of traffic that goats wandered by, Charlotte hugged her legs in the back seat, studying Neil’s trim hair and Athena’s coiled mane, and, as she took deep breaths of fear, reviewed what she could do. If necessary, if he continued to flirt, she could get the keys and drive back to the hotel. Or maybe just pretend to go on an errand – and what? – and disappear for a while.
Neil was addressing all his comments to Athena, as though they were on a date. ‘Do you have family here?’ ‘What sorts of things do you like to do when you’re not
tour guiding?’ And, the one that made Charlotte laugh aloud, ‘Do you go to Delphi often?’ In all fairness, Athena sat at an angle in her front seat and talked over her shoulder to Charlotte as much as she could. A daughter. Grow plants – in pots. Dance. She’d been to Delphi four times before. It was beautiful. Top of the world. Charlotte, in her pique, fought against asking more, not wanting to give Neil the more rounded picture of this rounded female.
At a roadside stand (one could hardly even call it a cafe), where they stopped for a restroom (peeing in a hole in the ground) and Nescafé and cheese sandwiches at an outdoor table, Athena set them straight about the ‘Nitea’ sign.
‘Pizza,’ she said. ‘Is saying ‘pizza.’ Here is frozen, put in oven, not made.’
Neil was delighted. ‘That’s great! Oh, I see. The “N” is really the “Pi” sign! Charlotte, look. Not an “E” but an “S”, sigma. That’s really funny.’ He grasped Athena’s knee through the sundress and shook it. ‘Do you know what we thought?’
It was the first time he’d said ‘we’. But he seemed to have forgotten who the ‘we’ was supposed to be. His hand lingered. Athena looked at his hand on her leg and then met his eyes. Charlotte felt a rush of anger. That anger – his causing her to consider a dramatic act – carried her through the hike to the top of the mountain. She carefully memorised the road they traversed, where they turned. But it was a monumental thing to do – to drive away!
On the top of Delphi the air and view filled her lungs and her head and, for a time, seemed to dissolve all else. The associations were magical: Parnassus, oracle, Apollo. She could be a believer in gods up here at Delphi. She gazed through the crumbling majestic pillars and altars to vast horizons of forests and mountain crags, to all of Greece, it seemed. Life seemed boundless in its opportunities for a moment, and the altitude dwarfed her petty jealousies. For a grand moment, she inhaled it all – blue sky, ruins – until she spotted Neil and Athena walking leisurely in the other direction, Athena pointing and Neil nodding and reaching around to steady her over uneven terrain. Charlotte started and gasped as she watched them growing smaller and smaller. She might have reached Delphi, but she stood here alone. Here, in the home of the gods, she was just a lowly mortal, a jealous one, one with keys in her pocket.