The Temporary Bride

  For a moment I think maybe I’ve lost him, that he’ll begin to turn away from me. I feel like crying out of exhaustion and despair, the solid ground we’d just begun to walk on beginning to shift away.

  “Maybe the world isn’t ready for us,” I tell him.

  “But maybe it doesn’t need to be this way,” he says. “I still want to come everywhere with you and stay at your side. I will stick to you until it is time for you to leave.”

  No two people look more sad or more shy. I reach over and touch his cheek. We are in the middle of the pavement, with people and cars rushing past. “I love you,” I tell him. He smiles and gives a little nod. A tear rolls down his face. I slip on the ring that I carry in my pocket. Already one of the diamonds has come loose, threatening to detach and come away.

  A car pulls up alongside us, honking its horn. A young man lowers his window and leans out. “Do you need a lift into town?” he asks. “Let me take you. I’m going that way.” Out of politeness Vahid climbs into the front beside him and I sit on my own in the back. The man smiles at me in the rearview mirror, then turns and begins speaking to Vahid.

  “I was in the butcher’s,” he says. “I saw you both with that clergyman. Everyone knows him in our neighborhood. We have a name for him: ‘Haji Poolaki.’ All he cares about is money. He is famous for demanding bribes. We see some couples paying up to eight hundred dollars, and even then he tries to make them pay more.”

  He tells us it’s good we didn’t pay him, that one day such men will disappear from Iran forever. We offer him some money for the ride before stepping out of the car, but he won’t hear of it and smiles while shaking his head. Once more Vahid is patted on the shoulder like a younger brother. “Good luck,” he tells us and drives away.

  It is nearly three in the afternoon when we find ourselves wandering the streets again. We are both quiet but vigilant, looking around, as if some sign of what to do might show itself. We pass car repair shops where orange sparks fly onto the pavement. Metal pieces are sawed and banged together so loudly that we move away and plug up our ears. I’m accustomed to following Vahid, to his leading the way with some destination in mind, but for the first time it feels as if there is nowhere for us to go. As we walk we are both silent and angry, stubbornly having set our minds on something that hasn’t worked out. We’d been swept along on our thrilling act of rebellion and have landed flat on our faces, unfulfilled.

  We avoid talking about how we will manage tonight. Or tomorrow. About what to do with the bus tickets to Kashan in my hand. We’d made the reservation together just this morning to stay with a family there. The name of their house, Noghli—the sugared almonds Iranians throw at weddings—had seemed perfect. They were a close proximity to the rose fields where damask petals are harvested. It had seemed the ideal place for us to begin.

  My stomach is growling. We haven’t eaten since breakfast. The day has been too urgent to think about food. But as we pass a stall with a few wooden stools on the pavement, we stop and decide to buy something to eat. I’m disappointed to learn it sells only puddings, something I have no appetite for. But as I lean over to see the simmering pots of creamed rice and thickened milk, I succumb to my hunger and point to a pot of bubbling fereni. It is a mixture of milk, cardamom and rosewater thickened with rice starch, something Vahid’s mother had taught me to make. It had been the first cooked food Vahid and his sister had consumed as babies. She’d prepared it almost daily when they were children. I remember her eyes filling with tears as she whisked it with her fork, mimicking how they’d opened their infant mouths for the incoming spoon. I’d stepped forward to take her place at the stove as she wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

  We drop onto the stools, exhausted. We eat ravenously, barely stopping to look up. Quickly we reach the bottoms of our plastic cups and Vahid rises to buy each of us a second. The afternoon sun cuts down with a fierce, radiating heat. The trees overhead provide little shade. A row of “fashen” shops are reopening for after-lunch business, and mannequins are being carried horizontally and propped up in the street. Muscle shirts with lopsized logos for the men. Pink trench coats and rousaris for the girls. A loud mix of trash disco and bandari goatskin drums blares from the speakers inside. It is getting close to the end of the school day. A few moms and children are trickling in among the older men who drop their cigarette butts on the pavement.

  “Salut!” An eager voice booms out. I squint to see a man waving at me from across the way. He is dressed in the same long robes as the mullah who’d shunned us earlier, but he must be twenty years younger at least. His face is chubby and round.

  Gingerly he moves through the crowd. He lacks the arrogance of the other religious men I’ve seen. In spite of the heavy clothes he is wearing, his step is lively and upright. He reminds me of a student on his way to a lecture.

  “Vous parlez français?” he asks, grinning down at me. When I nod, he drops his leather satchel at his feet, taking Vahid’s vacant seat next to me.

  He speaks to me in an overly intimate manner. Patting my arm. Staring into my eyes as he speaks. Did I know Paris? Wasn’t it the most beautiful city in the world? Had I stood in front of Notre Dame at sunset and seen the way the light reflects off those thousands of pieces of colored glass?

  It’s been years since I’ve set foot on the continent, since I’d first admired the places he describes. I feel a hint of annoyance at being reminded of them now, bits of information and detail having nothing to do with here. They come from a world I’ve temporarily but fully abandoned. And now they seem intended to pull me away.

  I suspect this is his usual way—that, in spite of his obvious choice of career, he would be no different if he were a barber or one of the merchants in the bazaar. Passersby glance over at us. But he takes no notice or perhaps he doesn’t care.

  I am not really surprised by how he is acting. A lot of people I’ve met while abroad behave this way. There is a quantity of European imagery—cathedrals, canals, quaint villages with wooden houses and red geraniums blooming from every window box—that travelers tend to cling to, recalling them with tremendous nostalgia.

  As superficial as his interest is in me, I nod and shake my head in turn at his questions. In any case he doesn’t seem concerned with what I think. He inhales sharply, pressing fingers and thumb together, rolling his eyes skywards in a dreamy way.

  A tingling begins in my stomach and spreads through my body. I search the crowd for Vahid’s face. He is just heading back to me, his hands full with the sticky-sweet cups he is carrying. When he sees us he stops in his tracks. The young mullah is still grinning lazily, swooning like a teenage girl. I need no instructions. I know what to do. Quietly, carefully, I lean toward him.

  “You want to get married!” he exclaims. “But why? To whom?”

  Vahid steps forward, extending his hand with a greeting of “God be with you” and a knowing smile breaks on the young mullah’s face.

  “Aha!” he exclaims. “I understand. It is a terrible state to find yourself in. I remember when I was studying in Paris it affected me too. For months I was surrounded by beautiful European girls, my body burned with sexual desire that I needed to satisfy.”

  I listen, stunned, my eyes moving from him to Vahid. I realize by Vahid’s blank face he hasn’t understood a thing. I tilt my head to the side quickly and smile at him. Cautiously, he pulls up a third stool.

  “Would you help us?” I ask the mullah, still speaking in French. “We need some help to keep ourselves protected.” Swallowing hard, I explain we’ve had a lot of problems with the police in Yazd, that we would like to do things right “by God.”

  “Of course!” He smiles again, looking delighted. He reaches for his satchel but Vahid is ready, passing across his notebook and pen.

  “How long would you like to be married for?” the mullah asks. “You said you are leaving in one more week?”

  I turn to Vahid, speaking to him in English, before turning back to the mullah to relay
his answers in French. Somehow it suits me to be sitting between them, translating, on one side his eager smile and on the other Vahid’s bewildered expression.

  “Four years,” I reply, giving Vahid’s answer.

  The mullah looks at me as if we’ve lost our minds. “Go for one year, it is enough,” he says. “After that you can just do another one.”

  I don’t want to threaten our fragile footing, so I agree to the terms. “Now how much will he pay you?” he asks, his pen flying across the page.

  I look at Vahid. “Well, it really isn’t about money. He doesn’t need to give me anything.”

  “Bah. You must ask for at least one thousand dollars,” he insists.

  “D’accord,” I agree, nodding. I can see Vahid squirming with curiosity, biting his lip.

  He turns to Vahid and offers the pen, showing him where he should place his signature, next to the space that awaits mine. Below, the mullah has written his name and the address of the madresseh, the theological college, where he is studying Islam, then his phone number. If anyone should question the authenticity of our situation, we must tell them to contact him directly, he says.

  While Vahid is signing a crowd has formed. Large numbers of passersby have stopped in the street. Several more are gaping at us from their cars. I try to seem nonchalant, to keep the relief and excitement from flushing my cheeks. People appear desperate to peer over the mullah’s shoulder to find out what is going on. I look away, fighting to keep the blush down.

  Suddenly it is over, the document is carefully folded and tucked away, the whole ceremony ending as abruptly as it began. The mullah stoops to gather his belongings, waving eagerly as he turns to go. “Bonnes relations sexuelles,” he wishes us, his robes flapping as he walks away. In his wake, he leaves us, suddenly, a family, the plastic cups still in our laps. Beside me sits my new husband. Beside him, his new, temporary, bride.

  Kashan is the first place where we’ll truly know no one. No aunts or uncles. No cousins’ floors for Vahid to sleep on. When he spoke to his mother, he told her he’d be staying in a cheap dormitory for traveling students, a lie she willingly accepts without question. I’m amazed she suspects her son of nothing, believing that he will return to his parents more or less the same as when he’d left. It gives me a strange momentary surge of power, to be tearing apart their dormant, decades-old arrangement.

  We nearly don’t make it. To catch the bus we have to run across a pedestrian bridge and down another flight of stairs. I was worried Vahid would knock someone over with his red tent, which threatens at one point to fall off his shoulder and tumble away. Waving fiercely and out of breath, we arrive to find the bus engine is already rumbling.

  Quickly, we push our bags into the hold and the driver slams it shut with a bang. He motions for us to get on and drops his cigarette, crushing it under his shoe.

  We climb onto the bus and it is full this time, unlike the nearly empty bus I’d taken from Yazd. There is a mix of elderly people and students. Some of them are already dozing off with their heads pressed against the windows, while others are lost in a world of earphones and video games.

  We find two empty seats next to each other and collapse, relieved and still out of breath. Drawing our knees up into the small space is the very opposite of confinement; for once a wide-open world of possibility seems to be spread out ahead of us. Though we haven’t explicitly called this a honeymoon, we feel the same change of status, the same sense of stepping out as a single, joined-up force.

  We hold our tickets for the driver to inspect, and he makes several trips up and down the aisles. I can see by his hesitation he plans to separate us, and is looking for how to rearrange things. He believes he is protecting my reputation, by insisting Vahid move to a seat at the back. Normally Vahid would move automatically, without question, migrating toward the back of the bus. But the existence of a piece of paper has made us bold, more confident, so Vahid remains at my side, defending his place. The driver paces the length of the aisle and Vahid reaches for his backpack, preparing to leave.

  The driver returns, pausing, studying us for a moment. Perhaps he can already detect something familiar, something close. He mutters something to Vahid and gestures, informing him he can stay where he is.

  The sun is setting, the sky a deep pink. The two-hour journey will pass largely in the dark. The bus pulling away feels like an achievement in itself, after such a difficult day. Vahid leans across and I hear him singing, something he usually does only at night, when we are alone.

  His singing fills me with the same combination of belonging and detachment it’s always provoked, the same nostalgia whose origin I can’t trace. The things that defined my life in London take on a quality here that makes them seem brittle. As if, were I never to go back to them, there would be no imprint or trace that I was there at all.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Vahid is teaching me to talk dirty. He urges me to be aggressive, even to shout. My polite inquiries, he insists, must now be spoken in the command form, a tense I’ve never had cause to use.

  When I try to respond, he glares at me, scribbling notes with a notebook and pen. He waves me away dismissively, tutting and lifting his nose in the air.

  I scarcely recognize him when he acts like this, speaking sternly and raising his voice. No matter what I say, he is cold and unsympathetic, voicing angry, confused and never-ending sentences full of cryptic, literary words.

  For hours he tests and provokes me in Persian. He measures my persistence, my vocabulary to demand and insult. I subject myself to his constant rejection and apathy, searching my brain for the words to fight back.

  “Chera! Nonsense!” I protest when he declares there is nothing he can do for me. “I know you can, you are just being lazy,” I retort. I would normally never dream of addressing anyone in this manner, but in Iran I am learning it is often the way.

  The reason for this is a consequence of failure. An attempted second visa extension in Rasht. We’d been told it was the easiest place in the country, a guaranteed certainty, a matter of ten dollars and an hour’s time. The official there was a retired naval officer who cherished the opportunity to help the rare foreigner who washed up on his doorstep. We sat for eight hours squashed in the back of a taxi to get there, on roads that clung perilously as they curved around the edges of mountains. Twice I’d had to ask the driver to stop so I could climb out and be sick at the side of the road.

  I couldn’t explain where it had all gone wrong. It had started on a perfectly pleasant note. The man, Mr. Ehmadi, had smiled when we’d first arrived, ushering us into his office. The plush leather chairs seemed to exhale as we sat on them, our knees brushing against a polished rosewood coffee table. The walls were covered in maps and posters of the surrounding region—endless rolling green hills and tea plantations. This is where Iranians come to craving humidity and rain, an area they simply called shomal, meaning “north.”

  When I mentioned the possibility of an extension he waved his hand broadly. He picked up my passport and asked whether I’d like an extra month, or even six. It was no problem, he said, either way, there was nothing to worry about, it could all be done. Then he moved toward a kettle and a set of porcelain cups, and said we’d proceed on that matter in just a moment. First, he insisted, I must taste the tea from the new season, grown in the hills just beyond Rasht.

  But in the end, neither of these things happened. Instead he stopped suddenly, his hand in mid-air. He set down his kettle without filling it and turned his attention to Vahid, his manner stiffening as if he had remembered something unpleasant. In his first, formal recognition of Vahid, he seemed to be already condemning him. “How do you know this woman?” he demanded, a cold scrutiny entering his voice.

  I interjected with talk of an itinerary, a pretend reason for needing a few more weeks. I mentioned the Caspian Sea and the names of villages I’d read about in the Alamut valley, with traditional houses made of stone, capped with straw-thatched roofs.
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  It felt pathetic trying to deceive him. But in any case he had little interest in what I had to say. His eyes were focused on Vahid, studying him, judging him, weighing up an outcome in his mind.

  At first Vahid pretended to be my translator, a casual companion, concerned with helping and acting on my behalf. What more could he say? That I was his girlfriend? His wife? Such a possibility was so remote, it was impossible to express.

  They began speaking so quickly that I couldn’t follow. Vahid looked calm, if somewhat overwhelmed. But their voices were soft and measured, so I was sure there was nothing to fear.

  Then Mr. Ehmadi said something remarkable. “Do you want to marry an Iranian?” He turned, addressing me. I looked at Vahid and back at him. I presumed I’d missed something in their exchange, that somehow Vahid had let our intimacy slip. “Which Iranian do you want to marry?” he said to me without waiting for an answer. I felt heat rising to my cheeks. And then stupidly, out of confusion, thinking it was what I should do, I gestured at Vahid.

  “We can do nothing for you here,” he said flatly, passing me back my passport, his “It’s no problem” disappearing like smoke in the air. “You’ll need to go back to the people who gave you your first extension. I cannot help you here. I’m sorry.”

  The prospect of revisiting the place I went to before is daunting. And now there is no question that I must go alone. I dread the idea of staring again into the glum faces of the officials in Esfahan and pleading for two more weeks. It is no longer just a matter of asking and waiting, nor simply filling in another form. With two stamps already in my passport, a request for a third is certain to arouse suspicion, which is why I must now learn to stand my ground.