The Temporary Bride

by Jennifer Klinec

  In a strange way Ali and I are almost alike. He sets up his round wooden chopping board at an angle to the two plastic colanders he uses repeatedly, one designated for the pot, the other full of peelings and scraps. I can see by how he moves that he is used to being alone in a kitchen. His entrances and exits force me to duck out of his path and when he reaches for utensils he frequently knocks me in the face. While he works his sharp elbows extend out from his sides, allowing little room for me to stand beside him. I understand that I am in second place, limited to the territory of a small section of free counterspace at the opposite end of the kitchen.

  But Ali can be warm, even charming. He comes to be proud, and to like the taste, of our food, carrying it on a tray with great ceremony, in amber bowls and earthenware plates. We eat our meals in the same shady alcove each day, watched by a squadron of cats. He enjoys that I have an appetite, sometimes laughs with his mouth full as between us we eat portions for four, even six. He teaches me to tap the long slender bones with my spoon, to release the jelly-like marrow trapped inside. We smear it across torn pieces of flatbread or eat it with last mouthfuls of rice.

  It is at Azadeh’s urging that I try to extend my visa. She offers me extended use of my room at no charge, insisting I stay on as a guest. From now on I am to use the key she hands me on a ribbon in place of ringing the bell when I come and go. But in all honesty I tend to go out rarely, preferring the sanctuary her home gives me and the pattern that now consumes my days. The mornings see me with Ali, chopping and grinding, busy in the haze of oil that rises in the kitchen. Afternoons, by unspoken agreement, I go to her.

  Sometimes we sit for hours on the roof sipping fresh lime sodas, clad in only our T-shirts, our hair flapping in the sun. We download flamenco music and jazz over her high-speed Internet and light candles when the sky darkens, wrapping ourselves in wool blankets and dipping our toes into the fountain that runs the length of her courtyard. If Ali finds it all extravagant or improper, he gives little away. Or perhaps he has grown used to Azadeh and the way she conducts herself with the guests she singles out. Besides, he is outnumbered; we are two against one, which I suspect is part of the reason she wants to keep me on.

  When Azadeh looks at me she doesn’t see someone with a determined agenda or a sightseeing checklist, someone with a clear allocation of time. What she sees instead is a companion, someone equally uncompelled, with the same sense of ease and freedom to fill her day.

  She gives me an address and a man to ask for—a government channel who owes her a favor. At the mention of her name she believes he’ll stamp a new exit date in my passport, allowing me to stay beyond the original date I’d planned.

  Street names in Iran follow a pattern. They commemorate milestone dates from the Islamic revolution or celebrate valiant themes of war. Every city has a street named for freedom, another for martyrdom; the largest and most important square is given over to Imam Khomeini. Occasionally streets retain the names of writers and poets, the wide, tree-lined thoroughfares named after Hafez or Sa’adi.

  Vali Asr is the name of the street where the Police Office for Foreign Aliens is located, named after the prophet of time. It is here in this gray four-story building that foreigners’ visas are agreed or extended, where permits are granted or deportation orders signed.

  The security officer at the entrance barks at me to fix my scarf before entering. My mobile phone is taken away and locked in a drawer. Inside there are at least four separate lines of people waiting at counters manned by officials in uniforms, not unlike old-fashioned tellers at a bank.

  Though Azadeh made no mention of money, I’ve come prepared. I’m aware of the covert power it has. Even in the taxi here my driver had refused to pass me the change for my twenty-thousand-tooman banknote until he first had my cash firmly in his hand. By his clamped fist you would have thought he was holding back a day’s salary or at least the equivalent money for a packet of cigarettes. But it meant that attention was paid to the passing back and forth of money: a lesson in what was okay and what was not.

  There is little natural light in the room except what creeps in through the yellowed, dusty blinds. The room is warm and humid with the bodies of so many people. The amount of documentation they carry—from a photo card to entire folders of sheafs of paper—indicates there is a vague logic to who is standing in which line, a suggestion of some kind of order and purpose. I join the smallest queue, hoping for a quick turnaround; the man behind the counter seems flustered but efficient.

  Nearly everyone here is Afghani. I recognize their accents. Their dialect, Dari, is formal and centuries old. Their Persian is that of ancient literary texts, a language once spoken in royal courts. They speak with the open, rounded vowels Iranians have long abandoned. Their vocabulary and syntax are complex and rich. None of the laziness of the standard Tehrani dialect has crept into their speech. They would never imagine saying Iroon instead of Iran as Iranians do, or referring to its capital as Tehroon or saying e instead of ast.

  In spite of their elegant patter, or perhaps because of it, the officials here delight in bewildering the Afghanis with long, complicated words. They pass them documents full of Arabic terminology more suited to legal contracts than for instructing them on applying for the coveted residence permits they seek. Although the government has instigated a language-preservation program called Farsiro pas bedarim where Arab words are singled out and replaced with Persian, it doesn’t seem to be widely practiced here.

  The Afghanis accept their documents in a distracted state. The men do all the talking while their wives appear to be speechless. Gradually, one by one, they shuffle away, under a shadow of confusion and defeat.

  When I reach the front of the line the official looks startled to see me but his expression quickly changes to a distant one of boredom. Behind him are shelves and cabinets piled with paperwork and manila folders, cabinets that have to be prized open by the staff in order to be rifled through. On wheels and at a strange angle is an unplugged, glass-fronted refrigerator, the kind used in fast-food places to display meat for the grill. But inside there are no chicken wings or skewers of minced lamb, no pieces of liver threaded between chunks of raw onion. I want to make a joke about it, if there is perhaps some bureaucratic reason for its presence. Maybe it is an inventive place to file papers or a mechanism to transfer files from one place to another. But I know any attempt at humor would probably just agitate him, so I look down at my hands instead.

  “What do you want?” he says, addressing me in the informal. His voice is unmistakably gruff and his insult plain. I remember Vahid once telling me that some Iranians strive to treat foreigners with added indifference, to make a show of being blasé and unimpressed.

  As a result, I feel my Persian begin to slip. Any hope of clear, perfect sentences fades away. I mangle my tenses and forget the word for extension, saying something like “visa prolongment” instead.

  It doesn’t matter, he doesn’t keep me for long. A photocopied form in English is pushed toward me through the little grate at the bottom of the teller window. He shrugs when I repeat the name Azadeh has told me. Already he is looking over my shoulder at the growing line of people behind me and points me to another window, number nine, instead.

  The woman at number nine looks harassed, as if any request will cause difficulties. She squints at my form as though an extension is both unique and unlikely. She asks for my passport and shoves the form inside. Pointing to the row of seats, none of which is empty, she tells me to sit down and wait. She doesn’t smile and I don’t expect her to.

  Beneath a square clock on the wall a line of us are standing. Some have taken to sitting on the floor. Jackets are rolled into cushions. A bag of dry bread scraps is passed around. I stand watching the spot where my passport has been placed. I can barely make it out at the bottom of a stack of folders and forms stapled together. For the next hour it ascends only slightly toward the top.

  In between there is the slow, confused passage
of people: from the back to the front of one line and again to the back of another, new line. Sometimes people are sent scurrying away to search for a pen, to secure a hasty signature or to complete another form. More than once there is fierce yelling and shoving when they return and try to reclaim their place. In one case a couple with a young daughter challenge another man who tries to step in front of them, insisting that he’d been waiting there first. Few intervene to break up the resulting shouting match, which goes on for several minutes until they are all removed by Security and escorted outside.

  The staff has begun to rotate. Working shifts end and new ones begin. The security guard who’d taken my phone and complained about my scarf earlier is gone. A younger, clean-shaven man takes his place. One by one the women employees close down their wickets, lowering metal shutters and going off to a small room to pray. The queues begin to dissolve into huddles, the huddles into a kind of human forest. I have to edge my way along the walls to see any movement or guess when they might call for me.

  A woman sifts through the pile of folders under which my application is buried. Every hour or so she plucks a handful of files from the top and carries them away. Eventually my passport is moved into another metal basket. Then finally it is placed on a man’s large wooden desk. He gives it a cursory glance and then scans the room for me, his eyes briefly meeting mine. Minutes later I am summoned back to window nine to collect it and the whole ordeal is over. Fifteen more days—a lifetime in Iranian visa terms.

  Later that evening, Azadeh insists we celebrate. She brings out two glasses, a bucket of ice. She is studying the new stamp in my passport, which takes up an entire page. I tell her the man whose name she’d given me had been nowhere to be found. Rather than being alarmed or confused, she absorbs the information casually, as if she’d expected nothing less. She tilts the passport to make out the signature of today’s official. “Mr. Hemmatipour,” she reads aloud.

  Chapter Ten

  He doesn’t know it, but Ali’s acceptance makes it somehow easier, makes me feel less cut off than I have been. I still picture Vahid standing alone in the middle of the street where I left him, watching as my bus pulled away. I imagine him sleeping alone on the floor with his mother and father in the next room, unable to say anything, with them knowing nothing at all. By now I will have become just a memory for his parents, their lives having returned to normal, three plates put on the cloth at mealtimes instead of four.

  Before coming to Esfahan I had tried to drain the life of these thoughts. In Shiraz where the bus had deposited me for the next stage of my journey, I’d aimed to find a fresh routine and move on. I’d bought myself a new coat in a style I’d noticed was fashionable, a thin crêpe-like material that hugged my waist and flared out like a dress. I went for walks to the poet Hafez’s tomb each evening, where his poems were read aloud in thick, masculine voices that poured out of speakers hanging from trees. I sat on benches in gardens that smelled overwhelmingly of orange blossom and ate cups of tart lemon sorbet with noodles that crackled between my teeth.

  Every day Vahid wrote to me. Brief e-mails, sometimes two or three in one day. In between short sentences of concern for my well-being and expressions of tenderness, he put the craving for foods in my mouth. He urged me to wait in the long lines outside the Mahdi ice-cream parlor, to eat their chewy ice cream made with orchid root and mastic that can stretch for several feet without breaking. He described the torshi shops in Bistodoh Bahman Square where vegetables, roots, even young pinecones are pickled, swimming in buckets of caraway seeds and vinegar. I bought cauliflower, caper shoots and tiny turnips scooped into clear plastic bags and topped up with a ladleful of sour brine. He made it so that when I ate I heard his voice in my head, missing his presence from every meal. I felt him beside me adding lemon juice or salt, tapping sugar or crushing sour sumac between his fingers.

  Though I knew I wouldn’t see him again, I took actions to make myself more pleasing. I bought a pumice stone to rub against my dry cracked heels, a balm to protect my lips from the sun. One afternoon, on a whim, I removed all my body hair in the shower, shaving while clumps of hair dropped to the floor. I stood afterward in front of the mirror, examining myself, expecting to feel pleased, but instead I felt lonely and stranded, having prepared for an intimacy that would never take place.

  It was strange to be on my own again. I was unused to the men in Shiraz who hissed and called out. It felt impossible to walk any distance without attracting their stares or the honking of cars or being followed in the street. One evening I counted thirty blocks while a white car drove slowly alongside me, pulling over and blaring its horn every few paces. I did my best to ignore it all, always staring straight ahead, flushed and irritated but unwilling to give in and shout back. My resolve finally broke one afternoon when two teenagers pursued me down a narrow alley, whispering obscenities and spitting sunflower shells at my feet. I prepared to make a loud scene if they tried to touch me, but there was no one around. As they closed in I reached for my camera and began taking their photographs, an act that finally sent them running away.

  The sound of Vahid’s voice was a comfort to me. I grew to look forward to his phone calls every evening in my hotel room. His impatience and hurried questions no longer felt brusque. Instead I enjoyed his high-energy demands for information. He wanted to know everything I’d seen and where I’d eaten. He laughed and sounded proud that I did all these things alone. In the background I heard his parents calling out greetings; sometimes his father also came to the phone. He told me they missed me, that I should come back, his words faint through the crackling of the line.

  His phone calls came around nine each night without fail, until one evening they abruptly stopped. I had waited over an hour, telling myself I wasn’t really waiting, and reminded myself it made sense for things to taper off. I had just started to fall asleep when I was startled by a loud banging on the door to my room. I threw on my scarf and opened it to see two men shuffling nervously on the carpet, looking embarrassed, holding armloads of screwdrivers and tape. They told me someone had been trying to call me all evening and had demanded they come up to check the wiring. They got down on their knees, turning screws and twisting cables, but not without first wedging the door open with a chair. Five minutes after they left, the phone rang and it was Vahid. “How are you?” he chimed, his usual greeting instead of hello.

  I knew he had annoyed the hotel staff by berating them. Probably he’d raised enough suspicion that my name had been logged. But it had been a long time since anyone had shown such persistence in getting through to me. I was touched by the extent of the measures he took.

  In spite of this, even as we spoke I could feel myself changing, already getting back to a more rational place. I’d quietly begun in turn to scold and forgive myself for what had taken place in Yazd. For acting on feelings where there had been no one to witness or judge how I behaved.

  But on that evening he opened a new chapter. He offered to come to me, to meet in Esfahan. “I don’t want to impose on you,” he said and I heard myself urging him, telling him, “No, please come, just come.” With just a few sentences he’d thrown away all my misgivings and this questionable thing had returned to life. And instead of closing the door on what I had considered unthinkable, I was asking how soon he could be with me again.

  After we hung up, I tried to imagine the restrictions we’d be under, all the things we wouldn’t be able to openly do. It became clear a line would be drawn between what we had been together in Yazd and what we might become in the days ahead. On one side was the sheltered existence we’d enjoyed in his parents’ home, clandestine but with safe places to flourish and hide. Now we’d be without shelter, exposed, forced out into the open, subjected to new attention and scrutiny, but without the security of any real foundation between us.

  We choose Imam Square as our meeting place, a vast meidan the size of fifteen American football fields. We are due to meet somewhere near the fountains in the center
, opposite the breathtaking tiled heights of the Shah mosque. I pass through the stone pillars of the western entry gate, slipping into the open-air corridors that shield me from the sun. The long curved archways of honey-colored stone resonate with the rattling of idling taxis and the giggles of schoolchildren. As I walk I hear the heavy footsteps of the turbaned mullahs Iranians call “cabbageheads.” Their surly bodyguards force a path through by shoving people roughly to one side. Young men hopeful of an emigration romance watch out for German tourists, waiting to tell them they have beautiful eyes.

  I’ve already dreamed this moment in my head. I know how I want it to be. I hope he’ll notice my new coat, how its color makes my eyes seem more green. At the edge of my scarf I’ve fastened my hair with a clip to the side to show off the streaks of blonde that have emerged from afternoons in Azadeh’s courtyard, exposing my head and arms to the late afternoon sun.

  It isn’t lost on me, all the effort I am making, to go and meet a boy in a square on this clear blue morning. I feel a flutter in my stomach at the prospect, a nervousness that makes me light-headed. If I had anyone to tell, they might laugh at me, willfully succumbing to courtship, here in this most hopeless of places.

  I know Vahid’s family have consented for him to follow me here only because it could never have occurred to them. When his father had loaned him fifty dollars and his mother had tucked a lunch of lavosh, cucumber, mint and cheese, into his travel bag, they were thinking of him as my host and protector. They had enjoyed the sweet, temporary nest I had made for myself in their suburban Yazdi home and smiled at my quirky Western socialization, seeing me as bold and animated where their daughter and nieces were reserved and shy, but they had never imagined the unthinkable.

  For a traditional Yazdi family, a relationship was a mathematical formula: the correct variables of age, beauty, morality and finances were entered and the output was a successful, peaceful marriage. It couldn’t be, therefore, that their Iranian son could feel desire for someone six years his senior, someone who didn’t come to him pure and untouched. I was an amusing visitor from another world and soon enough I should return to it, fading quietly into an anecdote brought up over tea or a postcard taped onto the fridge; a photograph kept in a shoebox. There was nothing in their minds to worry about, for Vahid could never love such a girl as me.