The Temporary Bride

by Jennifer Klinec

  I see him through the crowds before he sees me. He is sitting on a stone bench, his chin tilted downward. His brown eyes look tired and his clothes are wrinkled from the six-hour bus journey from Yazd. Lying at his feet is a worn army duffel bag and the canvas circle of a folded Iranian tent. He’d said he had an uncle in Esfahan, but he has come prepared to sleep in a nearby park among the travelers you see without money for a hotel, families who barbecue chickens and boil kettles on open gas flames. A sense of responsibility for him flares up in me. We are in this new city: together, alone.

  “Hi, Jenny,” he says, looking in the opposite direction when I sit down beside him. “Are you fine?”

  He runs his fingers quickly along my hand to let me know that he is happy to see me. It has been six days since we’d last seen each other. We blush and exchange shy glances, gently pressing our ankles together. Vahid is more nervous than I have ever seen him. His face is even sterner than usual, his mouth pulled into a tight line. He tells me he has tried to dress like a baazgashteh, an Iranian emigrant coming back as a tourist. He wears a golf shirt two sizes too large, printed with a consulting firm’s logo, a gift his uncle had brought him from America. A National Geographic tote bag hangs from his shoulder, a Nike windbreaker is looped around his waist. He asks for my guidebook so he can carry it openly, the front cover facing outward at all times. He hopes by looking as if he too is a foreigner in this country, maybe we’ll be left alone.

  As we start walking it startles me to realize how out of place he is here. I feel a stab of guilt for encouraging him to come find me again, for tampering with his innocent and planned-out life. In Yazd he’d always seemed agile and in control, switching smoothly between the local dialect he used with bazaaris and taxi drivers, and an educated Tehrani accent. He’d been fully at ease, wandering freely, knowing every crooked lane. Now he must constantly ask for directions, pausing every second or third street. He speaks loudly, unconvincingly, to me in English, a ruse to make it seem to outsiders that we have come here together from the same part of the world.

  I take him back to my guest house and introduce him as my cousin. I tuck his tent under my bed and bring him soap and a towel to wash his face. I am clueless how such a thing can be managed, ashamed at how Vahid will be scrutinized by Azadeh. When she arrives I can tell she has no time for him, that he is what she would call “traditional” in a dismissive, derisory way. His formal courtesies and gestures she returns with minimal interest. I can see by her face she pities me for being saddled with such a relative for a companion, that it is only for me she tolerates his presence, allowing him to linger on the veranda outside my room.

  I make up a tray for Vahid of the leftovers I’d cooked with Ali and we eat lunch together. We don’t kiss or touch each other, but quietly dip our spoons into the same bowl and tear pieces of bread. It is enough to sit beside him, to share a meal.

  Esfahan should be a romantic place to meet again, a city of pleasure gardens, wooden palaces painted with peacocks and nightingales, and a river criss-crossed with softly lit bridges. But in Iran, in this new city, we are growing accustomed to behaving like strangers.

  Chapter Eleven

  It is our fifth resting place in less than an hour—the riverbanks of the Zayand e Rood. A few moments to linger among the dense plantings of shemshod and mulberry, then it will be time for us to move again. We sit facing the river and I count the width of five handspans between us, the distance we aim for each time we stop. I pull my scarf forward to hide the blonde streaks of my hair and avoid using my hands—the giveaway of a European background—when I speak, which I do while looking out at the horizon or down at my feet. We direct the things we tell each other to my black, pointed ballerina flats or the shoelaces of his brown loafers, matching them as best as we can with uninterested expressions. I don’t imagine we are fooling anyone.

  The river is dry, drier than it has been in a generation, reduced to an undulating plain of mud. Stray dogs chase each other where the water should be as high as our waists and birds peck for worms in the few puddles that remain. The Si o Seh bridge would normally see its reflection shimmering in a broad expanse of water, but now it looks like a great wall dividing some disputed land in two. The figures visible on its thirty-three arches could easily pass for border guards, instead of the families who are weaving in and out to cross from one riverbank to the other.

  In the handful of days we have spent in Esfahan in each other’s company, we’ve come to prefer the evenings over the daytimes, which to us seem harsh. When the sun is high we find ourselves most pressed upon to explain something to someone, obliged to give some account of ourselves. The sunsets mark the turning point where things become simpler, where we can at last feel marginally more free. In the growing darkness I can make out the determined line of Vahid’s eyebrows and the stubborn accumulation of stubble on his cheeks despite shaving with a pocket razor only this morning.

  “Let’s keep the rest for our tomorrow,” Vahid says, and I smile and relax slightly to hear him speak this way.

  He wipes crumbs from his face, handing me the sticky remains of a fig and honey cake we’d bought from an Armenian bakery in Jolfa. Little by little my ears have grown attuned to it, this curious Persian grammar of ownership. “Ferdosi Street? Its traffic is terrible!” taxi drivers exclaim in between long drags on pungent cigarettes. “Tehran? Its people are rude and its city is so dirty!” disapproving mothers tell their children who long for the excitement of the capital.

  He uses the same syntax to talk about this city and its river, its nocturnal rhythms of which we are now a part. He uses it when he refers to its people, the Esfahani, with whom we mingle. They gravitate to the same places, purchase the same snack of toasted chickpeas and melon seeds in twisted newspaper cones, pay the same heightened price of five thousand rials. They come out each evening as we do, to claim a piece of the riverside for themselves.

  The long cobbled riverbanks are ideal for drawing the attention of admirers. Legions of unmarried girls patrol up and down from one side to the other, giggling and burying their heavily made-up faces in their sleeves. Young couples nestle in shadowy corners and hold hands. Students come to play chess or read French novels, printed from the Internet and bound with twine. On the grassy embankments behind us a group of women in chadors lie on scraps of carpet, shoeless but in black-stockinged feet. They watch us disapprovingly, grumbling a sour-faced commentary while fumbling with the yards of black cloth they lower and raise across their mouths.

  We know we don’t have very long to stay here, in one place. We’re already dreading the arrival of the village boys with patched-up shirts and scraggly, attempted beards who make up the lower ranks of the religious police. Nightly they scour the riverbanks for signs of illicit behavior, jostling for bribes to avoid a trip to the police station. The only way to have any privacy or to elude the threat of arrest is through a routine of constant movement: coffee shops, small shaded parks and quiet teahouses. Each day becomes a circuit of stolen moments, whispered conversations and hands snaked together.

  Sometimes we are lucky and can manage an hour. The man who runs the halim shop lets us monopolize a table at the back for as long as we like, eating his thick, turmeric-stained purees from a flat, Styrofoam tray. At the beyrooni shop we were less fortunate; its owner regarded me suspiciously over his scorched iron cooking drum and told Vahid he didn’t want any trouble. Thrusting warm, oily packets of sheep’s stomach fried with cinnamon and almonds into our hands, he shooed us away, forcing us to eat from our laps, perched on the steps of some ruined, forgotten building. Luckily for us in Esfahan there are many such places. We spread out newspapers and eat our meals in the candle-like glow of Vahid’s Nokia. If we keep perfectly still the elderly men and women with diminishing eyesight who live in the quarters we frequent can be reliably counted on to pass us by.

  The worst are the good-byes each night, the fact we must spend it separately, sleeping apart. I fetch an overnight bag from
his belongings kept under my bed—a clean T-shirt, a toothbrush, barbari spread with honey from Ali’s kitchen—and we meet in the side alley outside Azadeh’s heavy wooden doors. We kiss and say goodnight for what seems like hours before he begins the two-hour journey from shared taxi to shared taxi to reach his uncle’s apartment on the outskirts of the city. I know his uncle’s home is little more than a hotel to him, that they’ll think nothing of him coming and going, of offering him a place on their floor. But each morning I feel guilty to see him looking tired and haggard from the distances he travels to and away from me.

  Fearing for his safety, I dissuade him when he wants to erect his tent in the alleyway behind, wanting to be nearby when I wake up, to avoid wasting time. Already there is the sense of days running out, the knowledge that in two weeks this will end. Without saying it to one another, we know the nighttimes are preparing us for how things will be. It makes me remember something he’d written to me in an e-mail, after I’d left him the first time in Yazd. “I am spending beautiful times alone by myself, with my memories.” I realize I have begun to love him, that in our strange way I belong to him and he to me.

  I’m startled at the appetite he now has for sex, asking for it openly, making demands. “I need to be romantic now,” he says, his eyes full of longing. We fumble and grasp at each other like teenagers. My hands turn his hair into an unruly mess. Though there is a sense of desperation to how we are with each other, something of the formal ceremony remains. He asks first for permission, his initial approach still innocent. He is careful, always watchful for a cut-off, in case I grow uncomfortable or get spooked. But I never say no or “Not here.” In alleyways, next to rusting bicycles, under archways more fit for feral cats and nesting pigeons, I oblige him, denying him nothing, holding little back.

  Sometimes in our anxiousness, on evenings when there are too many people walking past, too many hurried, clumsy separations and smoothing of hair and clothes, we resort to sheltering in the peace of Azadeh’s hallway, pressing up against the wall amid some coats. Once I’d been mortified to hear the approach of Ali’s footsteps, feeling shame at what he’d think if he found us there. To our relief he turned away at the last second and we listened to the creak of his door, the eventual turning off of the lights in the corridor. Vahid spent that night in my bedroom, on the mattress on the stone floor.

  Away from Yazd, away from the presence of Vahid’s parents, our being together invites suspicion and intrusive questions. People interrogate him as if he were their son or a family member, and I feel my face flush hot when I see them gesturing at me. “Who is that girl? Is she your guest? What do you know about her past?” ask the swells of people who crush up against the table next to us and look at me like a piece in a museum. The fascinated attention I’d first enjoyed now seems like a big misunderstanding. I feel stupid and foolish for mistaking admiration for what it really is: a kind of morbid distaste. In the teahouse where we sip iced milk with rosewater; on the bus as we lean on the barrier that separates the men from women. People close in to understand our conversations, prod with curiosity and nosy whispers, observe as we enjoy our limited freedom. I pretend not to notice but I feel it everywhere.

  They ask questions for which we have no answers, and we don’t care to explain ourselves. For there is no term for what we are to one another. We can’t sit together on buses or hold hands in the park. But we watch over and guard and feed each other, a kind of makeshift family, caught up in long and endless restraint. We manage tender nights of sex on the cold floor of my room, sleeping like lambs on the thin foam mattress, sharing sips from the plastic bottle of yogurt and mint we leave to ferment and grow fizzy during the course of the day. We turn heart and liver kebabs over tiny barbecues, eating sheep tripe snipped into bowls of broth with cinnamon and lemon juice. As he slips from my room at first light in the morning, he turns my shoes around outside the door to ease my first steps into the new day, facing the direction of the warm, Esfahani sun. It is as if from birth he has been groomed to savor the attachment of finding a partner and wants, somehow, to bestow this devotion on me.

  “Yesterday I had your dream,” he says to me now as we sit together by the river and I hear girls laughing, the Iranian girls he should prefer to me. It is their fourth or fifth circuit of strolling up and down the riverbanks, their faces long and bored, their greasy eye shadow beginning to smear.

  “Listen how romantic they are speaking,” one of them says, observing us, causing Vahid’s face to turn red and angry.

  “What business is it of yours?” he shouts, yelling out an expletive that translates as “you bullshit girl.” I begin to understand how quickly Iranians turn on each other without warning, even strangers insulting each other freely in the streets.

  “Yesterday I had your dream and I dreamed that you were my wife,” Vahid says, turning to me. “That you loved me the most and we were peaceful together.”

  He is interrupted by shouts that come from upriver, followed by the sharp, hissing sounds we understand too well. Boys driving past on mopeds twirl circles in the air with their fingers in warning and we join the rush to gather up our things. Men extinguish their qalyuns and curse as they throw a day’s salary of apple tobacco into the river. Couples separate and join up with cousins to form single-gender groups. Sticky plumes of overstyled hair are smoothed into place and shirtsleeves are rolled down past the elbow. A group of men in olive uniforms make their way along the riverbank, clearing the scene of people, of color, of joy. We flee to a brightly lit street, falling into step, but walking several feet apart.

  “I have an idea that could make everything okay for us,” he says when we come to a stop, finding ourselves again in the square where we’d first agreed to meet.

  I listen to him, see his eyes flash when he becomes serious, the stern, solid expression that even now has the power to intimidate and hold me at a distance. He begins to describe something I’d read about somewhere, a strange Islamic custom that would cast a hush over everything. We’d just need to obtain a simple piece of paper to be given instant standing and credibility, he explains, to be able to pass freely through the streets. I agree instantly, without hesitation, torn between amusement and intoxication at the suggestion. For in spite of our caring for one another, it is in something of an abstract, almost mythical way, the way girls fall for glamorous men the same age as their fathers or boys worship popular girls who are unobtainable. We still remain something of a joke, lacking any substance, when the marriages around us are designed and built to last a lifetime.

  But this magical piece of paper would allow me to spend time fully, openly, with him, sleeping in the same hotel rooms, sharing the same benches, without fear. It would let me dissolve freely into our disobedience, trying out a life together without limitations. I imagine myself deferring to him on some of my opinions, pushing him playfully, resembling one of the braver couples I’d seen, holding hands in public, even placing my head on his shoulder. It would give us a taste of being something normal before all this comes crumbling down. For even though he says, “You have to come back to me,” even though he pushes for an arrangement of not days or weeks but four years, I do not believe that, once I have left, we will ever meet again. It is easier just to love him now and do as I’m told. But like being temporarily sick with a fever or a daily craving for the same food, all of this must be fully explored and exhausted until it can be finally abandoned, before I step on a plane where there are no more headscarves, no more fear, no containment nor regret.

  “You have to come back to me,” he says again and when I tell him I will, I feel my voice thicken, maybe out of sadness, even shame. There are no easy terms on which to consider this, but I fear he is too good and intact for me. I feel it when he asks a passing couple to take our photograph and he leans proudly toward me, not quite putting his arm around me but making it clear we are something to one another. I blush with embarrassment, folding my hands awkwardly across my waist, reluctant to peer up into
their skeptical faces for the judgment I know is waiting there.

  He twists a piece of tin around my finger to measure it, insisting on going to the bazaar alone. I know it is partly out of superstition that he doesn’t want me to accompany him, and partly to avoid the questions starting up all over again. He returns, having spent the last of his money, holding a simple silver ring shaped like a V. It has a tiny row of diamonds, which I know must be plastic, but I like the way it feels when I try it on, new and foreign on my hand. I twist it, lining up the stones to the front, enjoying the simple symbolism it represents before tucking it away to keep in my pocket. For as much as it is serious, it also means almost nothing, just a ritual we are being forced into, the only thing that makes sense in a place where there is no other way forward.

  As Vahid and I walk down the darkened alley where we usually say our long goodnights, I have questions, perhaps, but I don’t feel frightened. We finalize the plans that we’ve made for tomorrow (“Bring your passport, a photograph, the ring that I bought you”) and squeeze hands tightly before parting.

  To anyone watching, we could be tour guide and tourist, fixing an itinerary to the Chehel Sotoon palace or a day trip to see the damask rose fields near Ramsar. The only clue of intimacy lies in our willingness to linger, the excessive eye contact, the quick, uneasy kiss goodnight. If all goes well, if we find the right people, this night might be the last that we’ll be forced to spend separately.