I waved with a vague gesture that could indicate he was at the fire with the rest of the crew or on the next continent.
“Food is scarce here?” I asked before they could press me for more details.
“Yes,” the younger woman said, her eyes on the ground. “And water.”
“They drove us away from the village,” the mother explained, “and told us to stay here, in these tents. The foreigners are gone now, but our men still go out every day to the wells. They work fourteen hours at the fire, and they come back at night half crazy from heat and exhaustion.”
“Since the fire started,” the young woman said, “the babies are always coughing, and the older people are weak and sickly.”
“Twelve of our goats have died already. The only ones left have gone mean and wild.”
I took a gulp of tea and set down the cup.
“Mina!” the older woman called. Almost at once a small girl scampered into the tent. Her arms were thin as twigs, but she was dressed as a miniature version of the women, with a crimson veil, and her large brown eyes were rimmed with kohl. “Show the lady what you found yesterday!”
The child’s eyes went wide at the sight of me in my pants and with my camera around my neck. I could tell she was unused to strangers, but she did as her mother told her. When we ducked out of the tent, she walked ahead of me, looking over her shoulder from time to time to make sure I was still following behind. We walked away from the encampment, and after some minutes we came to a clearing shaded by a very large palm tree. The trunk was gray and desiccated, its bark prized open and its fruits shriveled and blackened by the heat. The child squatted down and pointed her finger at something barely visible in the sand. I bent down and looked closer.
A bird—it was a bird. The wings were spread open, and it lay with its beak pointed up at the sky like a tiny arrow. I touched it with one finger. The bones were frail and brittle and its feathers were pressed into the earth, stuck in oil and silt. It looked as if it had been trying to fly when it died. I felt my eyes begin to smart. When I looked up, the girl pointed to another figure and then another. There were at least a hundred dead birds embedded in the ground.
Back in the tent, I pulled the lens cap off my camera and flipped the shutter open. At first the women raised their hands to cover their faces or drew the edges of their veils to hide themselves, but eventually their shyness and vigilance eased and then fell away. I found the young woman with the heart-shaped face and the bottle-cap necklace sitting by herself at the edge of the encampment. The sun was on her face and her whole throat seemed to glow with it. I raised my camera to my eye. The light was pure and plentiful. I could feel the woman waiting for me on the other side of the lens, and then I focused the camera and clicked the shutter.
* * *
—
That night, as I stood in the dark inner courtyard pinning up my just-scrubbed bed linens, I heard heavy boots against the tiles. I turned around to find Golshiri watching me.
“How was it at the camps?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he really wanted to know or if he was just making conversation.
“Sad,” I replied. “But beautiful, too. The women are doing their best to care for their elderly and their children, but so many people are getting sick. Everything’s getting sick here. I took some photographs—”
“They let you photograph them?” he interrupted, surprised.
He came closer, so close that I could feel the warmth radiating off him, could detect the sweat from his own day in the fields. I tucked the pins in my pocket and stepped back from the clothesline. “Not at first. We couldn’t make much sense of one another in the beginning. They think it’s strange, a woman coming from Tehran to ask them questions. It didn’t help that I don’t understand their dialect very well, but eventually some of them began telling me about the fire.”
“What did they say about it?”
“They say it’s made the children sick, that they can’t stop coughing. The old people, too. No one tells them what’s going on, but the women say the air’s been poisoned by the fumes.”
“They’re right. But you know that.”
“I don’t think they understand why we’re here, what we’re trying to do by making a movie about the fire.”
“You explained it to them?”
“As well as I understand it myself,” I said. “It doesn’t seem enough to help them, somehow. Making a film.”
“It’s a record. A testimony.”
For a moment we were silent, then I asked, “What happened out at the wells today?”
“The workers poured cement in the sand. The desert out there’s covered in cement. They’ve rigged up the oil pipes so that they reach all the way to the Karun River. Tomorrow they’ll start blasting the fire with water. Kinley thinks he’s got it figured out this time.”
“Does he?”
“We’ll see.”
I pressed my lips together. “I think I could convince them to be filmed—the women, I mean.”
“For the documentary?”
“The fire displaced them. No, it’s totally disrupted their lives. It seems to me that’s part of what’s happening here, too.”
His eyes narrowed—my only encouragement. He was calculating, thinking through what I’d said. “See if you can take more photographs,” he said finally. “If you think you can convince them to be in the film, I’ll go out there and take a look around myself.” He cleared his throat and continued. “You’d need to come along.” He turned to me. “Would you want to?”
Was he really asking for me to collaborate with him on the documentary? I bit back a smile. “Of course,” I said quickly, my heart hammering against my chest.
23.
In the end, it was a bomb that put out the fire. It was dropped from a helicopter and straight into the flames. The winds were ferocious above the fire, and for nearly an hour the helicopter struggled to right itself. It circled the sky and then returned, only to bob and buck against the wind, but finally it steadied long enough to finish the task. When the bomb fell into the fire, the earth trembled with the force of an earthquake and then everything went very still. I was in the encampment that day. The children were accustomed to smoke and fire, but the force of the explosion terrified them and they began to cry. Cries rose up to God, turning into frantic prayers and then more silence. A second blast exploded the stillness, and when I looked out to the horizon, the sky was a riot of flames and black smoke.
The next day, in place of fire, gases shot from the earth. The air was rank with the stench of burning oil and smoldering steel. The sky went from black to gray and then white. This went on for three days, and when it stopped, Myron Kinley left Iran. I was free now to walk out by the wells, to pick my way through the rubble alongside the other members of the film crew. I took photographs as workers hauled charred ladders, pumps, and hoses onto trucks and then dumped them into the gulf, where the refuse from the fire was turned into another of the sea’s secrets.
Other than Kinley and his crew, there hadn’t been a foreigner in Abadan for weeks, but now they were returning. The streets filled with the noise of their cars and the cafés filled with their voices. Soon the workers and their families would return to the Paper City and to their work at the wells. The fire had burned for ninety-one days, and now it was gone.
* * *
—
We stayed in Abadan for another week after the bomb fell. During the daytime, while Golshiri and the other men were out shooting footage by the oil wells, I walked around Abadan, alone. I set out at dawn, in the coolest part of the day, stopping to photograph the tall grasses that had somehow survived the fire and the deep heat of summer. For all the calculated, manicured order of the colony, the wells themselves were ugly, but I saw now what drew Golshiri to this part of the country. The bare earth, the rough silence of the men, the violence of the fire, which was matched only by its indifference to the world around it. In Abadan, the bleakness of the landscape threw beaut
y into high relief, but you only saw it if you knew how to look carefully.
The days seemed to slide by swiftly now. The women in the encampment never complained about my presence. They were used to me, regaling me with stories about the times before the wells, when they lived as nomads and their lives were set to the rhythm of the seasons. After the fire they were busier than ever. They’d have to move everything back to the Paper City, which was hard work in the blazing heat.
For days I was still forbidden to go near the fire, which made me furious, but I realized none of the men could have experienced what I did: the encampment, how the women made a life even there, the moments of laughter, how they sometimes spoke in songs. Their resourcefulness moved me deeply. I also felt a delicious anonymity at the camps. No one knew anything about me here. I was a stranger from the capital; that was all. In Tehran I’d become a spectacle, but all that felt very far away now. It wasn’t my poems that marked me, or the fact that I’d been divorced or even that I was on my own. In Abadan I was different, but no one particularly cared.
A woman could see herself better where she wasn’t known, I decided.
A vague plan began taking shape in my mind. Until now poems had been the medium through which I communicated ideas and feelings. With my camera, my work was still to observe and record, but writing poems depended on solitude, while this work was taking me outside myself. There was something so appealing about this. Coming to Abadan had not only given me a feeling for my own possibilities but also launched me into the world and initiated me into a community. I didn’t think, yet, that I could make films by myself—that was past imagining—but I wanted to learn all I could.
I could watch Golshiri work for hours, and I think that’s how it really started between us, with admiration. So far as I could see, there was no fear in him, none. He did everything with a cool authority, including teaching me how to work. I learned everything from him: How to scout a location, how to angle a camera, and how to operate it. How to look into the viewfinder, select a target, and press down the lever. His own assuredness gave me confidence, and soon I realized I could capture an experience or a place with pictures as well as with words.
* * *
—
In the evenings we sat in the courtyard, swatting at mosquitoes and smoking cigarettes. He’d talk about his life and I would quietly listen. I learned he came from a wealthy family in Shiraz, the city of poets in the south. The Golshiri men were learned aristocrats who spent their days in leisurely contemplation, but it was his mother, a woman unable to write even her name, who’d most shaped his education. One day she took Golshiri’s hand and headed for the closest school. She was determined to become literate—so determined that when her husband objected by saying her plans would compromise her maternal responsibilities, she’d simply taken her son along with her. He was four years old.
He’d taught himself English by sitting in his father’s house in Shiraz, listening to BBC Radio and American Forces Network broadcasts, a fat dictionary on his lap. “What use is that?” his father and grandfather demanded to know. America was yengeh donya, the tail end of the world. He’d been taught to think of Persian poetry as the world’s highest artistic achievement, though mild concessions were made for certain works of French and English literature. The Iranian upper class was still looking to Europe for its models, but he set his sights on a newer New World.
At thirteen he discovered American literature, Hemingway in particular. He couldn’t believe a story could be told with so little ornament or that he should find in these American novels and stories a spirit so like his own. Eventually he began to translate these books into Persian, but what came out didn’t seem like Persian at all; now spare and sharp, his mother tongue had been made over by English, just as he himself was being remade from a knobby-kneed boy into a man in the mold of his heroes. That’s when he took up writing short stories.
Why, I asked, didn’t he keep writing fiction? “It was useless,” he said after a pause. He frowned as he said this, and his voice took on a hard edge. In a country still riddled by illiteracy, he explained, what he was doing was basically meaningless to most people. No, he wouldn’t be a writer. He never gave up his love of books, but he trained himself to see the world through images and sounds, adapting the features of the novels and stories he admired into cinematic techniques. By temperament he’d always been independent, and from what he told me I guessed he was unencumbered by the necessity of making money from his films. As a director he could work alone for long stretches of time, which suited him, and he was free to pursue a project for as long or as little as he liked.
Golshiri saw the whole history of the country in the Abadan fire, but something more essential drew him here and to this work. Making a movie called for control. For mastery. It had to do with the way a film enveloped the viewer. As we worked together, it occurred to me what he did with such assurance and effortlessness was capture the whole world. To direct a film was to say “Look, this is how I see the world,” and then to say “See it as I do.”
* * *
—
Golshiri—Darius, as I came to know him—used to say we’d always loved each other, even before we met. He’d recite Rumi’s couplet, the one about lovers not suddenly meeting but being in each other all along. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “I’ve always been waiting for you.” But he had his story, and I have mine.
In my version, our love story began the night I crossed the garden in Abadan. I remember the lush heat as I made my way to the carriage house, the square of light in the darkness that told me he was still awake. He was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms and his collar loose, a glass of whiskey in one hand and a book in the other. When he looked up and saw me standing in the doorway, his face softened with recognition, then pleasure.
I sat down in the chair opposite his and folded my legs under me. My dress, a simple shift, skimmed the tops of my knees and revealed skin tanned from days in the sun. My hair, shiny, black, and bobbed, was tucked untidily behind my ears.
We looked at each other for a long time. The gleam of his hazel eyes, the glow of his skin. His presence. His intensity. It was hard to think what to say.
A strand fell over my eyes, and he pulled his chair closer, reached over and pushed the strand away. Our knees were almost touching. “You—” he said, his hand lingering near my face.
“Yes?” I said lightly.
“You’re brave. You don’t fear the things other women fear.”
“Maybe not, but it hasn’t earned me much praise in the past.”
We both fell silent for a moment, watching each other.
“But your past doesn’t matter to me,” he said, lifting his glass. It was beaded with moisture, the whiskey burnished gold by the lamplight.
“Excuse me?”
“Everything that happened to you. Your marriage, your divorce—you don’t need to feel ashamed for anything in your past.”
“Well, I don’t feel ashamed about any of that. I never have.”
At this I caught a slight register of surprise. We were quiet again, studying each other.
“You’re married,” I blurted out. If I expected an explanation, he didn’t give me one.
“Yes,” he said. There was nothing in his tone that invited a response, so for the moment I left it at that.
I looked away. When I looked back I saw that his gaze had fallen to the rope of pearls knotted between my breasts. His chair scraped against the tiled floor and his body slid toward me. I watched as he touched the pearls around my neck and then traced his fingers along my collarbone. It was the moment between not having something and having something, the moment between desire and deed, and then he took a last draft of whiskey and set down his glass.
My whole being is a dark chant
singing you into the dawn
of eternal growth and bloom.
In this chant I conjure you with a sigh,
I graft you to the trees, to the water, to the fire.
—from “Reborn”
* * *
—
All at once: That’s how I first saw the Caspian Sea. Later, I’d travel the road to Chalous many times, but never without remembering my first view of it, on the day Darius took me there. It would seem impossible that it could have risen before me suddenly, so long is the approach to the beach in that place, but the first time I traveled to the Caspian it felt as if we shot through a forest of pines and straight toward an endless line of blue.
I thought he’d forgotten, or didn’t choose to remember, what had happened between us. The kiss, the urgent fumbling, the sound of voices in the courtyard, and how we’d sprung apart just before his brother knocked at the door. But then there was this: a suggestion, almost casual, to drive north together and spend a week by the sea before going back to Tehran. The others would go directly to the city, he said, but he would hire a car and drive us to Ramsar.
Now the backseat was piled high with cameras, tripods, and canisters of film. He’d handed me a map when we set out from Abadan. A line had been traced to mark the route north. It bypassed Tehran and ran past the jagged lines of the Alborz Mountains, where pale yellow gave way to bright green, then looped round and round so many times that it made me dizzy just to follow the route with my eyes. From Chalous we would continue north until we reached the Caspian.
All along the way, turquoise domes beckoned in the sun, their stones a blue so pure it encapsulated the earth’s longing for the sky. We approached the coast in the late afternoon. Though I was tired from the long drive, the magnificence of the countryside rejuvenated me, and I craned my neck out the window. The road opened onto endless green fields, mountains shrouded in mist, vast dense woods, rolling green hills, and, finally, the sea.
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