In the one-handed photographs he takes of us standing together, his free hand is always on my shoulder or placed at the back of my neck; sometimes his fingers are clasped gently around my wrist. Always some part of him is attached to my body, seeking contact. The possessive nature of his gestures feels like the purest intimacy.
In relationships I’m used to some barrier or some part being kept off-limits or guarded, but with him I can detect no resistance at all. There are none of the stories men tell women during the first weeks in bed of their past exploits, no quirks or kinky tastes of previous lovers to endure. He has no details for me to confront, no girlfriend to compare me to. With Vahid everything is different. For him there is only me.
Through the pipe smoke there is something perfectly ancient about him, the graceful way he sits, his elbow resting on a scarlet pillow on the ground. It is in these moments I love him most. I feel sorry for the other couples here—for though I know this tug-of-war is probably exciting, it is also sad to be forced into something that must eventually grow tiresome, impossible. Compared with them, with their games and pulling back and forth, I have something direct and real.
The girl in the chador I’d first noticed when we came in repeatedly adjusts and readjusts her cloak, opening her arms wide to spread it out like a cape. She is creating a shield to hide behind, leaning forward each time to be kissed. Moments later another couple disappear into the dark corridor that leads to the toilets. “Watch,” Vahid says, grinning, “the owner will have to go after them.” Shortly afterward they re-emerge, flushed and readjusting their clothes, the proprietor marching them out ahead of him.
He orders them to leave and regards us, sighing loudly, then brings us another pot of tea. “Come back any time,” he says, paying us a compliment on our good behavior. “I am tired of these kids.”
I look across at Vahid, who seems proud, as if perfectly used to being married, responsible, belonging to someone. Once again I’m amazed that he has chosen me, given me a ring, turned away from the pursuit of girls, the rejection, the thrill. It reminds me of those moments when we first knew and disliked each other, when his behavior had puzzled me and I’d struggled to understand him.
When we leave Kashan I pack our joint possessions in my bag and Vahid assembles a dinner for us to eat on the train.
As I fold up his spare shirt and tuck his wooden comb in among my belongings, I gaze at the ring on my finger. Two more of the diamonds have come loose; soon nearly five of them will have detached and been lost. I have come to know it is a symbol of how everything is fragile—the way some fall freely off, while others cling stubbornly, remaining in place.
We arrive at the station and take our seats in the waiting room, holding tickets purchased from a travel agency the day before. Vahid had confidently spelled out our names, given an assured nod to confirm our intention to sit together. No longer strangers, we get on the train and prepare for the seven-hour overnight journey that will arrive in Yazd at three o’clock in the morning.
His parents had been insistent, calling twice daily, urging us to come back as soon as possible. Occasionally Vahid has passed the phone to me so I could hear their voices, but mostly I relied on him to pass on their wishes. The decision is made without a word. I know he needs me to go there with him. As much as I want to carry on alone with him, I agree to spend my final days with his parents in their home.
Vahid looks happy, even brazen, but I am in a constant state of agitation, not at all sure what to expect. Could I be part of a family without knowing it? Welcomed and accepted, even loved? During the trip I feel reduced to a teenager, hoping for their approval, the agony and anticipation swiping years of stability and confidence to the ground.
The train passes through green, gently sloping countryside, giving way to the mountains of the desert as night falls. Apart from the occasional flickering of lights to indicate a village or town in the distance, we travel in darkness, switching on overhead reading lights to see.
When we pull into the station I get a sense of feverish panic. I want to tell Vahid all the things I’ve not yet had a chance to say. But there is no time and instantly our four weeks together seem like nothing: a meager history that could easily be dismantled and put away. Vahid is too eager to see the great strain on my face. I check and recheck myself in the window while Vahid gathers our belongings and guides me to step off the train.
As a daughter, I know how a parent looks at a child who has passed through a milestone or transformation. I’ve seen the realization that creeps over their features. I know how these looks are often wet and emotional, how lips can quiver and throats swell. The knowledge is both sweet and painful, like the force of a tide, bringing a child closer before pulling him sharply away. I’ve learned to recognize it in my own parents on occasions that defined my childhood: when I first walked alone down our kilometer of driveway, clutching my kindergarten lunch box, or ran the fastest hundred meters in my class at school.
Vahid’s father is waiting for us on the platform, wearing a raincoat. On his face there is no trace or acknowledgment of anything momentous. He looks shorter than I remember. He has one hand at his mouth to smother a cough, or maybe a yawn. He searches the crowd for us and Vahid raises his arm to get his attention. When he sees us he walks toward us slowly, his spine rigid. His expression is so aloof and remote that for a second I think about staying on the train. I hang back, feeling a little frightened, now that this moment has arrived.
I stand apart from Vahid on the platform and everything feels like it takes a step backward. He shakes hands with his father, and I can see him stiffen, his father’s arm draped heavily across his back. They become so busily engaged in conversation that I let them go on ahead of me. It feels pointless to walk at their side. I follow behind Vahid, proceeding as if we are strangers. Already he seems many miles away.
Chapter Fifteen
Vahid’s mother hugs and kisses him as if he’s been gone for months. Then, remembering me standing in the doorway, she steps past him to embrace me. My wedding ring still occupies its place on my left hand; Vahid had insisted I shouldn’t remove it.
I recognize at once the familiar scent of their home, the sweet, inky smell of their living room carpet. The foaming lemon soap his mother fills the sink with to wipe the stove. The light is on in the kitchen. The large red pot with one misshapen handle rests overturned in the rack over the sink to dry. The measuring jug for rice is rinsed and hung on a nail, ready for tomorrow.
I get the distinct impression they have accepted what has happened since the last time I saw them. That they understand and have ceded a place in their lives for me. Perhaps Vahid has taken them aside or spoken to them before our arrival or perhaps they sense for themselves something has changed.
Unlike before, I find myself treated with a lack of formality, a clear distinction I am no longer fragile or brittle in their world. Things have become casual. The atmosphere easier. The house is allowed to grow messy and dishes to stay piled in the sink. Tea is no longer arranged on a tray. The single bed in Vahid’s sister’s room is made up for me, and for the first time I sleep with the absence of company, completely alone.
Normally Vahid’s mother would check in on me, be curious to see what I am up to, follow me into the bathroom with a fresh cake of soap. Once, while I am setting out my clothes on the edge of the bed, I catch her staring at me, taking me in. But instead of approaching me as I’ve come to expect, she retreats, the beaded curtain that separates the bedrooms from the rest of the apartment swinging behind her.
Vahid makes little attempt to hide our closeness. He calls out to me from the shower, to bring him the bottle of shampoo we’d been sharing in Kashan. He spreads blankets on the floor and sprawls out beside me to watch films. I feel embarrassed by him here, squirming when he reaches to kiss my hand when his mother’s back is turned. But his parents look unconcerned by his behavior, and for the most part leave us alone.
Vahid’s mother seems quiet, even
tired. I sense a growing frustration. When I pour her tea I feel I am not the right person to do it. When we enter the kitchen together to prepare meals, things are quick and perfunctory. Mint is no longer warmed in butter for soup. The final flourish of toasted walnuts and chopped dill is omitted from omelets. I long for some kind of increased connection, but this too proves impossible. I feel disoriented, even rejected. As if she doesn’t want to waste words or prolong our interaction beyond what is necessary.
She too seems at a loss for what to make of me now. One evening she is opening his baby album for me, placing it in my lap and smiling. Inundating me with details, taking me close, pulling me into her world. Then abandoning me. Her moods swing. One moment she is light and calm, the next without humor, dark and pitiless. Sometimes a single act causes her to tilt.
There is a humiliating episode where she goes through all my laundry. I walk into the kitchen to see my dirty underwear scattered across the kitchen floor. She calls Vahid in and asks him to explain to me that she cannot put these items in her washing machine. As I crouch down, I hear her whisper something about it being improper, some medieval notions about my becoming pregnant. I catch a flicker of disgust on her face as I gather my underwear and take it away.
Each time she enters a room I am reminded I do not belong here. I feel overwhelmed by her presence and desperate for air. Anywhere else, I could go out, clear my head. But I am trapped. Dusty roads of apartment buildings stretch out in every direction. There is no place to go.
The third night I enter my bedroom after brushing my teeth to find Vahid curled up on the floor next to my bed. I know such a thing would be shocking to his parents and nudge him hard with my foot, urging him to wake up, but he murmurs and pretends to be asleep. I get into bed, nervous this will be taking things too far. I hold my breath when I hear his father walk past and brace myself for a reaction, lying still and partially closing my eyes. Through the darkness I see his silhouette linger in the doorway. He pauses, then I hear the creak of the door close and his footsteps move away.
The next morning there is no mention of it and each night Vahid continues to roll out his quilt on the floor next to my bed. If ever there has been a clear signal of what was going on between us, this must be it. But Vahid’s parents give nothing away. How can they be so capable of burying their heads in the sand? I wonder. Or is it that they still view it as some bizarre extension of hospitality, his sleeping in my room beside me? A big brotherly gesture, protecting me, the vulnerable foreigner, even now?
I continue to seek out his mother. I try to fall back into what I hope is my normal place. In the kitchen I am often beside her, grinding walnuts and measuring rice, acting again like the daughter I want to become. One afternoon I accompany her on a trip to a cemetery, to lay plastic flowers on the black granite markers of relatives. She clings to my arm for support as her face clouds over and I feel a pleasant sense of being rooted and weighed down. We seem to have achieved an understanding, her affection for me solid and firm.
That afternoon Vahid watches me closely. I understand what it means for him to observe this bond between me and his mother, the peace of mind he craves. Probably it gives him the confidence to do what he does next. He couldn’t have imagined the result.
We leave the cemetery to climb into the car. Vahid sits behind the steering wheel. He turns on the ignition and fiddles with the air-conditioning vents, aiming them at where I sit beside his mother in the back.
“I am going to ask my mom if she can imagine you being my wife one day,” he says. He is speaking in English, knowing his mother won’t understand.
We smile at each other, hopeful of her approval, and I encourage him with a slight nod. I try to stare out of the car window, pretending I am not aware of what he has planned. Black-clad women clasp the hands of children, making their way through the rows of headstones. Bundles of red and white carnations tumble across the ground in the wind. It makes me feel agitated, wanting the moment to be over with.
He turns around to face his mother and poses his question to her. She shows no reaction and picks at something imaginary in the air. There is such a prolonged silence that I wonder if she’s heard him and I watch Vahid’s face crumple with frustration. “Mama,” he repeats loudly, staring at her.
Then her answer comes, unmistakably firm. It is just a single word: “Nah.”
I don’t know exactly at what point I start crying as opposed to being on the verge of crying. Weakly, I sink into the upholstery. When we arrive home I collapse in a stunned heap in the courtyard.
The feeling I have isn’t of being treated maliciously, or even of being consciously excluded. It is the fact that I am so inconsequential, so clearly beyond the threshold of possibility in their minds. If I have unbalanced things with their plans for Vahid it is only temporary. If I have caused disruption it will all calm down once I am gone. Such is the confidence his parents have in my unsuitability I am not worth considering beyond that.
Affection and sex are out of the question. Or they are sad, desperate acts that feel obscene. Once, we are on the floor of his sister’s bedroom after his parents go to sleep, our hands clamped over each other’s mouths to muffle the sound. Another we climb into the back of his parents’ parked car in the dark basement garage. As we sit in the car afterward, my underwear around my ankles and the windows fogged up, the wrapper from the condom still in Vahid’s hands, I bury my head in my hands and start to cry.
When they are through with me it seems as if I have never really believed this thing with Vahid would succeed. But in my heart I had kept making myself believe, and even now it is hard not to believe a little. But we will never be any kind of family, and his parents and I will never be close again. From that point things only get worse. I have the clear impression everyone is waiting, fixedly, for me to move on.
Vahid looks as if he’s been punched in the stomach. He becomes restless and keeps demanding we go out in the car. “I don’t know what do to,” he says to himself as we hurtle down the highway through the desert at night. In any other situation I’d have been happy beside him, nestled against him as he drives, but on these evenings we feel like refugees.
I glance over at him. But the man who has fought and rallied with such conviction to be at my side has changed into someone lost and defeated. His shoulders are slumped and his face is tense. He has returned to how he looked during the days when I first got to know him, when I found him so bristly and unwelcoming toward me.
Only now do I understand the gravity of what he is up against in trying to go against his parents, how their ideas are shut firmly to anything new. It is heartbreaking that, after a lifetime of living together, they seem to know nothing about what he wants. He isn’t inclined toward the heavily made-up cousins with penciled-in eyebrows whose photographs they have been collecting and placing in front of him for years.
One evening Vahid is so distraught that he pulls the car over and insists we switch places. Behind the wheel I feel instantly more happy and at ease, in control of something for the first time in weeks. Even Vahid seems to relax as we fly along the road as it curves through the mountains, enjoying the sense of open land and sky ahead. We drive in silence and he strokes my hair, kissing me on the cheek as we pass fields dotted with sheep. There is a temporary feeling once again of being free, just the two of us, away from everything that has unhinged us over the past few days.
Vahid instructs me to pull off at an exit and I turn onto a graveled area of parked cars. Beyond I see a wide, grassy area lit up with fluorescent lights and a large circular fountain. Despite the late hour the park is full of large groups and families, sprawled out on blankets, eating oranges or sunflower seeds spilled out on glass dishes. We walk over to a gentle slope, settling ourselves on two towels Vahid brings from the car. By nature I return to my Yazd mode of behaving, ensuring we sit at least a meter apart.
But Vahid has again used bad judgment. It was the wrong decision to bring us here. We are the only couple
present among several hundred families, an anomaly among gatherings between twelve and twenty strong. There are glances of suspicion, even hostility. A punishing tension hangs thick in the air. The explicit message is that we are unwelcome.
In just minutes the police appear. Vahid is again pulled aside and confronted. I listen as they berate him with accusations. “We had three phone calls from people—asking us to come. This is a place for families. There are children present. You should know better than to be here with a girl alone, especially a foreigner. Where are your parents anyway?”
Once more Vahid empties his pockets of army paperwork and laminated ID cards. Once again he is reduced to a small rubble of dates for the officers to rake through. The same disproportionate response—sitting on a grassy hill earns us a visit from not one but three police officers. The eating has stopped and chins gesture in our direction. My limbs begin to shake. I am tired of feeling singled out and humiliated. It aggravates the growing sense of failure I have, to be always on the wrong side of rules that must not be broken and expectations that must be met.
During our time in Kashan I had occasionally allowed myself to imagine we might one day travel together. I wanted him to see my favorite cities and discover new places. I pictured us cycling along canals, buying falafel and carrot juice from the Turkish market in Berlin, or plucking bitter oranges from trees and eating chestnuts from street carts in Jerez. I thought the jumbled, mishmash culture of European cities would suit him, make it easier for him to get used to life outside of Iran. Later when he’d adjusted we’d go further and further, riding dilapidated ferries to islands in Asia, hitching lifts to near-empty beaches in Brazil. I didn’t even know whether he knew how to swim.
The Temporary Bride Page 19