I learn he likes to change into “house clothes” as soon as he is settled for the evening, putting on a pair of loose cotton trousers that could pass for pajamas. By now I know from the tags when he turns them inside out he wears a size thirty-two medium; from the identity cards that spill from the pockets that at nineteen he had a mustache.
I discover that he wore glasses until he had laser eye surgery, just before his father pushed him to join the army. The labels in his clothes are from Iran or Turkey, in an old-fashioned font, bought ready-made from shops in Yazd. He doesn’t share the Iranian obsession with designers and brands, the fake logos blaring Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana. I learn that his cousin once went to a party, leaving him at home for refusing to wear such things, a story he tells me one night when we lie in bed, my head resting on his shoulder.
He is superstitious about his health in ways that seem silly, reminding me of my grandmother’s old-fashioned beliefs. I laugh sometimes at the expert-sounding tones in his voice, when he counsels or advises me about this or that. If I get a headache he blames it on too much sun. If I have the sniffles it is because we walked facing the wind. He refuses to go out in the mornings with damp hair, believing wet hair is “like a poison,” and insists on blow-drying his hair thoroughly, as well as aiming the hot air for several minutes at each foot in turn. He finds it faintly repulsive when I stir honey into the yogurt we bring home from the market in plastic bags, sometimes adding mulberries from a tree I find in the road. He believes salty and sweet is a guarantee for a stomachache, that certain foods were never meant to be combined.
He is willing to make an exception for the way I bake, something he tells me one lazy afternoon. We are side by side on a long wooden bench in the courtyard, sharing a bag of sour green plums sprinkled with salt. “Let me tell you when I first made something of you,” he whispers, leaning forward so that his breath rustles my hair. “You were in our kitchen. It must have been your second or third day. And you made that chocolate cake.”
The cake had been my attempt to impress his family. I’d wanted to make something fancy and European. Vahid had been sent to the shops to buy dark chocolate and butter while I’d searched through drawers for something I could use for a whisk. I remember how his parents had reacted, shocked that a cake could require salt and six beaten eggs. That was the first time Vahid had ventured into the kitchen since I’d arrived; normally he avoided it except to wash a plate or grab an orange. He’d stood watching over me, even passing me milk and a spoon. At one point he was so close I could have easily touched him. But my mind was not on such things at that time.
His parents had been aghast at the light, fluffy sponge that had risen, threatening to spill out of the tin. When I served it they ate nothing more than a small, polite mouthful, largely pushing it around on their plates. The next day his mother took to it with a pair of metal spoons, rolling it into dense balls and pressing them into a plate of cheap, puffed-sugar sprinkles. This she passed around and served with tea, pleased to have resurrected my folly.
“Your combination of salt and sugar was new for me,” Vahid remembers. “You brought something different into our house. I don’t know why but I became greedy for your taste. I wanted to hide the cake from everyone else, to eat it all myself and not share it with anyone. It was special, as if baked just for me.”
I feel a surge of warmth listening to him. How he’d come to know me through eating a few simple slices of cake. He’d eaten what no one else had an appetite for, the pinch of salt I considered crucial that had perplexed them at best.
We are the only guests at the house in Kashan, which suits me perfectly. The family are what in Iran would be called “intellectuals.” The husband, a lawyer, voraciously reads the newspapers in the evenings. His wife studies calligraphy and takes karate lessons. A comfortable ten-year age gap lies between them, a pattern I begin to see is normal between spouses here. I suspect their courtship was at least partly founded in romance rather than the meddling of families, a fact which puts me immediately at ease. They don’t ask us a thing about our status, or for the document we have. In fact they couldn’t care less about our marriage; they don’t ask a thing. I’m awash with gratitude for their indifference, for the fact they appear to take us seriously, though the paper we fought so hard for remains untouched in my bag, which disappoints me a little.
They are warm and welcoming but keep their distance. I suspect they sense our hunger to be alone together, to cram an entire lifetime into just a few days. We join them for meals but we don’t linger. We seek their advice about which traditional houses and gardens to visit, which distileries of rosewater and marigold have begun harvesting this spring. They give us the name of a driver we call to arrange a trip into the mountains, to see waterfalls and acres of bergamot trees.
Their home, at least four hundred years old, is decorated with rustic style and taste. Its walls are curved and imperfect, its rooms filled with wooden carvings and round silver trays. Their five-year-old daughter leaps between the clay jugs and glazed pots planted with ferns that crowd the courtyard, and tosses scraps of bread to three goldfish circling the square pond in its center.
In the corner of the garden a clay oven has been recently cast, a deep pit stacked with cherry and olive wood waiting to be set alight. They intend to roast chickens and bake bread in it, they tell us, for the groups they occasionally host from the embassies in Tehran. One of their mothers who also lives with them does most of the cooking, preparing the kind of food that cannot be had easily in restaurants or from stalls in the street. Most foreigners must make do with kebabs, or the strange pizzas twisted into cones and covered with ketchup and mayonnaise, intended primarily for feeding working men and teenagers.
So every few days our routine is broken by a carload of Europeans: the Dutch ambassador’s wife or a French trade delegation. The women toss their scarves aside with relief as they enter, admiring the lanterns lit around the courtyard. We are invited to join them, to sit among them on the floor, sharing a vast tablecloth loaded with plates and bowls. We eat hollowed-out quince stuffed with ground lamb and almonds, and hunks of meat with chickpeas and dried limes baked in the oven overnight in stone pots. Vahid, not used to being a paying guest, behaves like a host, showing everyone how to pour the broth into bowls like soup, and mash the meat and chickpeas into a paste. He passes the meat to the foreigners and fills himself instead with the boiled turnips with cinnamon they barely touch.
The whole time I am aware of him, knowing it is his first time mixing with so many outsiders. They talk about places—Bologna, Antwerp, Lyon—he knows only from maps, but has never visited. For once the tables are turned and he is in the minority, not me. Their gaze on us is warm, curious, accepting, lingering only slightly on the ring on my finger but too polite to ask for details. It makes me realize how much I’ve changed, always preparing to be on the defensive, to having to explain things away.
On the nights when it is just the six of us we eat more simply: a stew with tiny meatballs flavored with tomato and saffron, roasted aubergines mashed with garlic and turmeric, served with soured cream, that we eat with our hands. The mother makes a special tea from dried quince cores that she urges me to drink. Apparently it is supposed to help me conceive children.
Of course they don’t suspect we are using condoms. That we need to be kept separate still. Everything that to them must seem obvious we have ignored or put aside. It makes it easier as I prepare to leave him. Such thinking would only make it worse. I don’t know how to describe the feelings I have already, going through the motions of marriage with Vahid in a stranger’s house, except that I do so with love. With every new habit I learn or discover it becomes more real, and the more real, the more impossible to imagine that it wasn’t always this way.
The room where we sleep is small and plain, not much wider than a meter across. Two cot-like beds are pushed against opposite walls with a narrow length of carpet lying between them. At first we tried to sleep on the
floor together, with our bodies half beneath the beds, but I felt pent up and claustrophobic with my head under wood. Instead we spend half the night in separate beds and half together in two-hour intervals. I fall asleep to the sound of Vahid in the bed across from mine, only to wake to find him crushed up beside me, his arms clasped tightly across my shoulders. Normally such a position would make me kick and go crazy but I’ve come to like the protective nature of the way he holds me, the sense of solidity it brings.
A little mirror hangs just inside the doorway to our room, a last chance for a quick inspection before stepping outside—to check that a scarf is in a good position, that one’s clothes are free of dust and lint. I pause often there and examine myself, looking at my face so that later I’ll be able to recall exactly how happy I look.
The days that follow are serene, without confrontation. Seldom, if ever, do we rub up against question or challenge. Like the smoking esfand seeds that are whirled around our heads in a glowing tin pan to keep away the “evil eye” while we sip tea in the bazaar, the paper we hold, though it is never asked for, never demanded, seems to have surrounded us with a protective balm.
When we climb onto buses and Vahid counts his coins to purchase our tickets, people think nothing of tearing two loose from their strips and handing them to us. If my eyes linger for a moment on the bread or pastries women are carrying, they insist on passing a generous piece to me to taste. When couples stop us in the street and implore Vahid to make a stern face at their child, a traditional remedy to scare them into behaving for fear of a reprimand from a stranger, he kisses their children’s hands, prompting their parents to smile wearily at me, at his kindness in being unable to bring himself to frighten their offspring with even a mock scorn.
We still wake early to go out for soup—a breakfast that has come to mean something more than just food. The cavernous tabaakhi have sustained us throughout our courtship, the soup cooks turning a blind eye when we push two chairs into a corner to eat together undisturbed. It is as much from loyalty as hunger that we now seek them out, reaching gratefully, sentimentally, for their plastic seats.
In Kashan the name of the soup changes; the broth is cloudier, swimming with intestines, tripe and the milk teats of sheep. I learn to identify my favorite parts by color, pointing to the pink spongy membranes that float at the top. With tongs they are lifted from the pot and snipped with a pair of scissors, falling like ribbons into my bowl. Sometimes a sheep’s foot, added for gelatine and flavor, is fished out and set on a plate as a gift, which Vahid shreds into our bowls with his fingers. With our soup we eat bread from the sangak bakery, which we purchase beforehand, the only point in the day when we are obliged to separate. Vahid stands among the men on the right while I join the women huddled on the left. Orders for stacks of seven or eight sangak are called out, folded notes are held in one hand and cotton cloths in another. The wet dough is pulled from buckets or deep steel reservoirs and flattened into ovals, poked with fingers to make small holes. With a flat shovel a man in rubber boots hurls them one by one onto a mountain of pebbles, heated underneath by a roaring gas flame. When each is puffed and crisp it is pulled from the oven and tossed onto a wire-mesh table. In spite of the straight lines I am used to in London, the quiet, firm order to distinguish who is first and who last, there is no confusion here about whose turn it is to grab the next pile of oval loaves, studded with tiny stones.
Vahid carries our rounds of bread over to a row of sharp nails along the wall, impaling them to cool. When they are cool enough to touch, we gingerly pull the hot stones from the dough, letting them drop onto the marble floor. The pebbles are raked up and hurled back into the mouth of the oven, safe from the waiting crowds of black rubber-soled shoes. Vahid folds our bread in half and carries it pressed against his jacket, tearing off the crunchy ends and passing them to me.
We visit the villages where sharbat and golob are produced, where rose petals, herbs and plants are boiled up and distiled. We have developed a taste for them, the plastic bottles that are sold in shops everywhere in Kashan—essences of coriander, mint, wild lilac, chestnut blossom. We get through several every day, diluting them with water, adding a spoonful of sugar, sipping them from ceramic mugs. We see the ancient kettles that are set overnight on fires, connected via clear pipes to copper urns. The urns are stood upright in tiny canals dug to channel fresh water from the river to help the vapor condensate and cool. The kettles are opened to show us the mixture inside: halves of oranges, bergamot, a pulp of wildflowers and bark that will eventually be fed to goats. When the urns are uncorked we are urged to lean forward and inhale the scent of the water captured inside, its surface shimmering with droplets of oil.
After our weeks spent in cities, the villages feel friendlier, more welcoming. People come out of their homes but not to question or judge. Gone are the made-up faces, the hairstyles thick with gel, to be replaced with simpler clothes and plainer shoes. The harsh staring and calling out has softened into a gentler concern. It allows us to become tranquil as well, making our way more slowly along the crisscrossing paths.
Vahid asks others to take our pictures as if we are on our honeymoon, posing against views of mountains, next to monuments, standing side by side in front of waterfalls. Reviewing some of the photos, I see my hand often clasped around the ring on my finger, twisting it back into place, a gesture that in the course of a few days has already become second nature to me.
One afternoon Vahid took a picture of me without my knowing. I’d been leaning against a brick wall, absorbing the sun’s warmth and lost in my own world. Two elderly village women had come out and stood next to me, holding their outer cloaks in gathers around their waists. When Vahid showed me the photo it looked like an organized portrait, the three of us standing side by side. Our eyes were closed and our chins tilted upward, our elbows jutting out at the same angle. I’d felt inexplicably touched by the details he had captured, the light brown mud on our shoes, the long metal house keys dangling from the women’s hands, the quantities of hoses and metal scoops scattered on the pavement. It is one of the few photographs he took of me in Iran in which I look as if I belong, not at all out of place, despite the fact I tower over the other two women by at least a foot.
Only once in all our time in Kashan do I feel us returning to the spotlight we’d been so eager to shun. Vahid is eager to visit a converted hammam he’d read about in my guidebook, a spot that is now fashionable for smoking pipes. When we enter through the arch the setting is magnificent. The marble stairwells lead up to unknown passages. The ceiling is a cluster of caps like overturned teacups, thousands of multicolored glass panels of light. In London such a place would be a museum. But here, where such buildings are in abundance, it has been permitted to decline into a spartan, dimly lit smoking den. Somber stringed instruments play off a mobile phone hooked up to speakers. Small groups of people huddle in a warren of dark and neglected niches.
We slip off our shoes and step up onto an elevated stone slab beneath a soaring gold and emerald dome. At least forty carpets for sitting on are strewn across the floor. I am barefoot, which I know must be indecent, but in this place it doesn’t seem to matter. We choose a spot between two pillars, facing each other. There are scarlet pillows to place behind our backs. I spot two other couples through the dingy lighting, partly hidden by the palms in heavy pots on the floor. They are tucked away in the darkest corners, barely speaking, their voices drowned out by the tinkling fountain in the center. One girl is wearing a chador at least two sizes too large, the other a black coat and scarf. The boys with them look incongruously stylish with long sideburns and leather jackets, the pockets of their jeans bulging with wallets and packets of cigarettes.
Tea arrives without our asking and Vahid orders a pipe with apple and rose tobacco for us to share. We take turns puffing and blowing smoke, tapping each other on the hand to signal when we are ready to pass the mouthpiece across. I like the serenity that has come lately to Vahid, the settled w
ay he appears in my company. When I glance around me, there is a calm about us, compared with the other couples here.
It is clear there is a plan to it, these girls who blush coyly and sulk, and their male counterparts who act stubborn and deprived. A ritual of tugging back and forth. A pressure to give in and deny. A line has been drawn, dictated by the girls, who are forever pushed to go further than they are used to. I wonder how Vahid feels at being spared this experience, at skipping over this chapter of his life. I try to imagine him sitting opposite one of these girls, telling them things they pretend are shocking, watching them clasp hands over their giggling mouths. But I cannot imagine him behaving in such a way.
Sometimes I feel them glance over at us, as if hungry for us to notice their flirting. But Vahid seems to find them tiresome and for the most part looks away. He leans back against the pillar, slipping salam biscuits into his mouth, looking pleasantly removed from it all. I know at least half of my appeal must be because I am not from here, because I have allowed Vahid to sidestep the formalities he would otherwise be expected to follow.
I gaze at Vahid and wonder how it can be. Our relationship feels so powerful and sharp. He has readily opened up his life to me, taking pride in sharing with me the things he loves. Our attachment feels bone-deep, irrational, addictive, recalling the kinds of friendships I imagine one has in youth. He took on the mantle of the childhood friend I’d never had, the adult equivalent of the friend who might have woken me on summer holidays by banging on my bedroom window to coax me outside or scratched our names with a twig in the dust.
Many hours he has listened to me as I talked, staring at me or stroking my hair. He is hungry to fill in the most complete picture of every story I tell him. He wants to learn every last detail, asking—when did that happen? Who was that person? His eyes flash with anger and he inhales sharply when I tell him about some difficulty or sadness. He smiles and shakes his head when I describe achievements or triumphs. The pride on his face is fierce and genuine, as if my accomplishments are as much his as my own.
The Temporary Bride Page 18