I wanted to escape, to turn on my heel and flee, but already Bertolucci had tucked his arm around mine and was leading me through the crowd.
I felt Darius’s eyes on me as we approached, but I couldn’t trust myself to look at him. I was still trying to catch my bearings when I heard him say, “And this is my wife.”
Wife. Of course she was his wife. What else would he call her? Still, it floored me to hear him say it aloud.
I could tell from how she raked me over, forehead to heels and back again, that she knew exactly who I was. Pretty and petite, she wore a flawless powder-blue suit with white piping and elbow-length sleeves. A gold wedding band flashed on her ring finger. Her eyes lingered briefly on my décolletage before settling back on my face with a pleasant expression.
“It’s wonderful to finally meet you,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand.
All at once, I felt gangly and awkward, and my cheeks began to redden. I’d imagined her as fragile, lusterless—had I really imagined her at all?—but this was a woman in full possession of herself. Certainly more so than I was at that moment. I was so flustered I barely managed to choke out a hello, but when she said, “I’m so looking forward to your film,” it was with a look of complete graciousness that nonetheless managed to convey a note of pure loathing.
And suddenly I understood who I was to Darius—or, rather, who I was not. He and Bertolucci had fallen into conversation, something to do with a mutual acquaintance in Italy, and I fumbled with the clasp of my purse, desperate for a cigarette. I had none. When I looked back up, I saw that Darius’s wife had cocked her head to look at her husband, in a way that signaled both tenderness and respect. There was something else there, an unspoken familiarity, a history translated through their bodies, a something I stood completely outside of. They belonged to each other, and I belonged to no one.
I was grateful when, a few minutes later, the doors to the theater swung open and the lobby lights blinked on and off. Bertolucci, Darius, and his wife began to walk toward the theater, and I mumbled a hurried apology and broke off in the opposite direction.
I was pacing the foyer when Leila found me. I must have looked a mess, because as soon as she saw me she said, “What’s happened?”
“Darius’s wife…” I stammered.
Her eyes widened and she gripped my wrist. “She’s here?”
I nodded.
“What do you want to do, Forugh?”
I flicked my eyes around the room. The foyer was nearly empty, and the film would start any minute. My film would start any minute.
“I want to go inside.”
“Then that’s what you’ll do.”
She slipped a hand into the crook of my elbow, and together we made our way into the auditorium and down the carpeted aisle to the front row. Whispers rippled around us, but my mind was flitting wildly and I was oblivious to the looks and stares. The seats were almost full and we had to stumble over several pairs of legs to reach our seats. I sank into my chair, which seemed very narrow and hard. Darius and his wife were just a few seats away to my left, but I willed myself not to look in their direction.
This was not the entrance I had imagined for myself, not at all. I hated Darius for bringing his wife, for not knowing—or caring—what it would mean for me to have her there. Of course I was bound to meet her eventually, but this night was my debut, not to mention we were in the company of nearly five hundred guests. But maybe that was the point. Maybe he wanted every one of those five hundred guests to see him on the arm of his wife.
“Look up there,” Leila whispered. There was something strange in her voice. An uneasiness. She gestured with her head toward two figures in the gallery. Their faces were in shadow, but I knew them by the glitter of their tiaras, their impeccable posture, the diamonds encircling their long-gloved arms—Empress Farah and the Princess Ashraf, the shah’s twin sister.
“Did you know they were coming?” she asked.
I shook my head. Suddenly she looked grave and her face began to pale.
“What’s wrong?” I leaned closer, taking her hand in mine, hoping to ease her fear.
Before she could answer, the theater darkened, the curtains slid open, and then the opening shot filled the screen. A man ran a ravaged hand along a high stone wall, chanting numbers until they became a kind of song. When he reached the end of the wall, he turned back, performing the ritual again. The sun beat down cruelly, beading his forehead with sweat, but he went on with his chant. I heard the sound of my own voice, weaving scripture and poems in the voice-over, and the first image gave way to other candid shots of people in the colony. The film was like a poem, like a rendering of a dream. Mangled hands without fingers, legs with no feet or toes, faces without eyes or mouths. The bright eyes and unblemished face of a small boy. A woman before a window, brushing the silken black sheet of her hair. A man in prayer, raising two handless arms to God. The hidden things of this world. The beauty that shadows despair.
I knew by the silence all around me that I’d made people see it.
* * *
—
Later, at a reception at the prime minister’s mansion, Darius pulled me into a dark portico.
Whatever upset Leila in the theater had seemed to pass, and after the screening she insisted we go to the reception together. We were standing in the courtyard when her eyes fastened on something over my shoulder. I turned around and saw Darius making his way toward us.
“Can you give us a few minutes?” he said to Leila as he approached.
She looked at me. I swallowed hard, then nodded.
“I’ll be in there,” she said, tossing her head to indicate the house.
As soon as she was gone, he took my hand and led me into the portico.
I yanked my hand back from his grip and folded my arms across my chest. “You could have told me your wife would be here!”
“Would you have shown up if you knew?”
“What do you think?”
“You see! I didn’t want to risk your not coming.”
“Then you shouldn’t have come yourself. Not with her.”
“Everyone expects to see us together at these sorts of formal events. You understand that, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Look, she knows we’re together and she’s made her peace with it, but I can’t—” His voice broke off.
I saw it all then, understood it all: the hesitations, the separations, the silences. He was bound to her. He’d always be bound to her.
“You can’t divorce her.” I heard my voice go hard and bitter. “That’s what you wanted to say?”
“It would devastate her, Forugh. She’s not like you. Respectability is everything to her.”
I wish I could say I made some cutting remark then or that I told him how much he’d hurt me, not only tonight but at the party in Darrus and all the times he’d pretended I was no one to him and there was nothing between us, but all I did was turn away. Darius called out something that sounded like “Please,” but I didn’t turn back or stop. I stumbled toward the house and found a door.
Inside, the salon was overheated and teeming with people. I was used to wealth by now, but I’d never been part of a crowd like this, the men in tuxedos and silk cravats, the ladies with their gowns and heaps of jewels. People drifted past me, a whirl of perfume and cigarette smoke. I had a vague notion Darius was following me, and I quickened my pace. I shouldered my way through the crush of people, stumbling and cursing. “Miss Farrokhzad!” called a voice, but I didn’t turn my head, only walked steadily onward, searching for a glimpse of Leila.
I turned down a long hall and found myself in an even larger salon. Here a waiter approached with champagne, and I plucked two glasses from the tray. Champagne always made me sick and light-headed, but I knocked back the first glass in one long gulp.
“Forugh!” Darius called from somewhere behind me. Before he could stop me, I’d drunk the second glass.
The c
hampagne hit fast and hard. In a minute the room was tilting. Darius grabbed the empty glasses from my hands and muttered something I didn’t catch. From behind my eyes I felt a hammering in my head. The glittering ceiling and mirrored walls splintered the light into thousands of pieces, throwing specks of color against every surface. And then I saw it: the brilliant tiara bobbing between the guests. The princess was coming toward us, parting the crowd as she approached.
On her arm was a tall, silver-haired man in a dark suit with a boutonniere on his lapel. “Eskandar Gerami,” the man said, bowing ceremoniously as he introduced himself as the princess’s adviser. His hooked nose put me in mind of an eagle.
“Your Highness,” said Mr. Gerami, “may I present to you Miss Forugh Farrokhzad, the director of The House Is Black, and its producer, Mr. Darius Golshiri.”
I gazed at the princess. Her hair was blue-black, cut in a straight bob. Her white mink was draped over her evening gown and hung almost to the ground, and her gloved hands were stacked with rings, one of them a turquoise the size of a robin’s egg.
As Darius bowed to kiss her hand, I watched her lower her lusciously fringed lids and smile. Her perfectly painted lips, her mole—which I was fairly certain had been penciled in—the deft flick of eyeliner that accented her slightly wide-set eyes: She had a cold but ravishing beauty.
Uncertain what to do, I extended my hand. The princess’s shake was slight and unconvincing. Her eyes narrowed as she took me in, and she flashed me a strained smile. “I have always had the highest hopes for our country’s women, and it gratifies me to learn of your work with Mr. Golshiri.”
“Thank you,” I said. A little too late I added, “Your Highness.”
“I’m deeply touched by your film,” she said, turning to Darius. “How movingly you’ve shown the plight of these poor people!” As she said this, her eyes teared up a little. Mr. Gerami instantly produced the handkerchief from his breast pocket, and she dabbed the corners of her eyes very gently with it a few times before continuing. “I feel it’s vital that we extend our charitable works to help such unfortunates. You do know, Mr. Golshiri, that it has been my particular calling to provide refuge and comfort to the dispossessed and to bring the issue of human rights to the attention of the king. I wonder, have you heard about my new projects in the south?”
“I have heard something, yes.”
“I’m glad to know it—so very glad. You’ve been quite difficult to reach lately, Mr. Golshiri. I would have so loved to enlist your talents to showcase some of our recent successes. I do hope,” she said in her velvety voice, “that you’ll be more accessible as we continue our work on behalf of the people.”
Far away, across the room, I saw a flash of a raspberry-red dress and a tumble of dark curls. Leila. She saw me, too. Her eyes slid from me to the princess and then back to me. For just a moment she held my gaze, then she disappeared into the crowd.
“Thanks to the princess’s unbounded generosity in advancing civil and human rights,” Mr. Gerami was saying, “and of course to the monarch’s own great vision for our country, the regime has never been more popular than it is now.”
I felt the heat rise to my face. I’d been too full of my own bitterness to notice it earlier, but all at once I understood: it was Rahim whom Leila had been thinking of just before the film started. Her brother’s fate was linked, even if tenuously, to those two figures in the dark. I felt hot and weak-kneed. Maybe it was all that talk of human rights or maybe it was an effect of the champagne, but Rahim’s prostrate, battered body came back to me with amplified clarity.
I cleared my throat. “I wonder, Mr. Gerami, how much of this popularity depends on gratitude and how much depends on fear?”
Darius shot me a sharp look.
“Fear?” said the princess, her penciled brows arching up. Her eyes lingered over me for a long, odd moment, and then she raised her chin and spoke. “It may be that in the past certain parties have offered false counsel or acted improperly on the monarch’s behalf, but the shah himself has only ever been guided by his deep love for the country.”
“As his loyal subject,” Darius said, “Miss Farrokhzad shares the shah’s devotion to Iran, as do I.”
Mr. Gerami looked from Darius to me. “Your work on behalf of these unfortunate souls is admirable, Miss Farrokhzad, but is it possible you’ve spent disproportionate time dwelling on these rather grim stories? Are you aware of His Highness’s campaign against illiteracy, the new legislation supporting women’s rights, his generous land reforms? May I suggest that in the future you focus on the monarchy’s many historic advances? It seems a far greater use of your talents, Miss Farrokhzad.”
“Indeed,” said the princess, and smiled.
“Wise counsel,” Darius said, bowing his head.
* * *
—
“Don’t say anything,” he hissed, his words hot against my ear. “Not a word until we’re in the car.”
“Leila’s waiting for me in there and she—”
“Call her in the morning and tell her we had to talk.”
“But she—”
“I have to speak to you now, Forugh. Alone.”
The moon was set low in a navy sky, bright and swollen as a lantern. From behind the tall stone walls that enclosed the mansion there came the sound of laughter, conversation, and music—the sounds of a reckless, glittering world.
Inside the parked car, Darius turned to me, breathless. “You can’t go around talking like that.” His face tightened, and his grip on my wrist was as firm now as when he’d marched me to the car. “It’s dangerous and you’re being stupid.”
“That’s what you dragged me here to say? You humiliate me by bringing your wife to my premiere, and on top of that you want me to keep quiet? Maybe it doesn’t faze you, but I can’t stand all that smug self-congratulation, all that preening and phoniness. They put up hardly any money for the film, and now that it’s out and there’s talk of foreign prizes, they want you to work for them? Never mind that they call it ‘your’ documentary because they can’t stand the idea that I made it!”
A car flashed past and its headlights swung around, flooding the car with light. For a moment, Darius’s face was caught in the glow and then the darkness slid over his features again.
“Do you honestly think that’s the first time they’ve made me an offer to work for them? That I haven’t spent decades dodging their patronage so that I could build something of my own?”
“But what’s the point if you can’t ever say what you want, what needs to be said?”
His eyes scanned my face. “If we all say what we want, in the way we want, who do you think will be left to make art in this godforsaken country?”
“That’s it, then? We shouldn’t say anything? Not even when—”
I stopped myself.
“When what, Forugh?”
“Do you know what happened to Leila’s brother?”
“Rahim?”
It startled me to hear him say Rahim’s name. Leila’s family had been close to Darius’s, so he must have known Rahim, and likely very well, but we’d never spoken of him. I’d never told Darius—or anyone else—that I’d gone to the safe house and seen Rahim before he disappeared from the country.
I bit my lip and stared ahead. A bird trilled noisily somewhere outside. “Forget it,” I said. The air in the car was humid and heavy. I started to roll down the window, but he reached over and stopped me.
“Tell me what you know about Rahim. Every last thing.”
I took a deep breath. “He was beaten so badly he couldn’t stand, he couldn’t talk.”
“When was this?”
“After the assassination.”
“And you helped him?”
“Yes.”
His silence was sudden. He stared ahead, working out what I’d said. When he was done, he turned back at me. “From now on, figure out a way to put what you want to say in your poems and your films, but don’t go around critici
zing the regime directly. There are some decent people in there”—here he jutted his chin in the direction of the prime minister’s mansion—“but there are also certain people who will peg you as a dissident and then it’s over. Writing poems, making films—it all stops.”
I stared into his face: the tanned skin, the hooded hazel eyes, the hard set of his jaw. For a moment I tried to imagine what I would have made of him if our lives hadn’t become entangled. His massive self-confidence, his fierce independence and pride—part of me was already detaching itself from him, snapping into a different awareness about who he was and what we’d be to each other from now on.
“So that’s your idea of freedom?” I said hotly.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve asked me to say nothing about our relationship, and now you want me to keep quiet about what’s going on all around us. Don’t say this; don’t say that. Is this what freedom is to you?”
He shook his head, as if the question pained him. “It’s my idea of survival,” he said.
I looked at him for the space of a few heartbeats, then I jerked the door open and swung my legs out of the car. This time he didn’t try to stop me.
“I love you, Forugh,” he said just before I slammed the car door shut. “I’m trying to protect you. I’m trying to keep you safe.”
27.
“Have you ever gone swimming in Amir Kabir Lake?”
“No,” I told Leila, cradling the receiver between my ear and shoulder, the cord stretching from the jack in the hallway to the kitchen. “I’ve been out that way a few times, but I’ve never gone all the way down to the lake. Why do you ask?”
“I’m really so sick of Tehran. Aren’t you?”
“Well, sure, but—”
“Listen, I’m staying up in Karaj through the end of May. I have this place up here. An old family house. About an hour from the city at this time of night. Why don’t you come up and join me for a while?”
“I would, but I’m writing,” I told her. This was true and not true. I’d been holed up in the apartment for five days straight, working through a new cycle of poems, but the words weren’t coming. I was working from home, avoiding Darius. He called me once after the premiere, but I’d hung up as soon as I heard his voice. He hadn’t called again after that. I kept trying to put him out of my mind, but it was no use.
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