He looks tired and his eyes fill with tears. Without saying a word I see inside him and pull out his answer. I recognize the same hunger and courage in his expression, the same glow of tenderness and hope. I feel a tidal rush of emotion and gratitude. A new road is available to us.
I reach for my bag. Vahid places his hand on mine. Then, his back is to me, leaving me to walk forward and wipe the tears falling down my face.
The guard stares at me and I compose myself. I feel the weight of each gesture, the stamp he places in my passport, the tearing of my boarding pass, all dragging me away.
I stop to look behind me one last time for Vahid but he is gone, probably already fighting his way into a shared taxi. Back again to his old ways of traveling. Anonymous and nimble once more without me.
As I move forward, my sadness gives way to something bigger, an urgency and a willingness to open up my life and come to him again. In some small way this rash agreement has given us a kind of power, one we’ve forfeited up until now.
Epilogue
I returned to Iran two more times in the following year. Vahid moved to Tehran where he’d found a job, and we lived there together for short periods in a small apartment.
During that time Ahmadinejad was reelected. Two million people took to the streets. News channels around the world replayed footage of Neda collapsing to the pavement, blood spilling out of her nose and mouth. There were rallies, anti-Western demonstrations. Embassies and foreign companies were shut down.
In between those visits we met everywhere we could. Tbilisi. Yerevan. Twice in Istanbul. Anywhere Vahid’s Iranian passport could take him.
Then, one cloudy Thursday evening, just over a year after we’d first met, I went to Heathrow to pick him up and bring him home.
On the way to the airport I had tried to imagine him leaving Iran: closing the door to the apartment we’d shared together, taking a taxi alone to the airport because no relatives would drive him, and staring out of the airplane window at the hazy, fading skyline of Tehran. I imagined the courage and leap of faith that it had taken for him to come here, to London, to me.
When Vahid broke the news to his parents that he was leaving, his mother had said, “Jennifer’s blade is sharper than ours.”
The everyday certainties of my city are all mysteries to him and I feel a proud, protective joy in watching him discover and decipher them one by one. I catch his musky scent when we sit together in the stoic silence of the British Library. I smile as he laps at salted caramel ice-cream cones and dunks the base into a cup of sweet, black tea. I love that he still shakes my hand when we meet in public, but now accompanies his greeting with a wet kiss on my cheek. On our fingers we wear new, simple silver bands, the result of a quiet ceremony at a register office, held on a Tuesday afternoon.
It’s hard to imagine an Iran where we could walk so freely, go unquestioned, or be permitted a three-dimensional life. Iran, for all its magic, has pushed us into exile. We don’t talk about it but I know we are both nervous, even fearful, about whatever future lies ahead for us. Our relationship has been stitched together out of fragments of devotion, strong will and despair, and made us sometimes restless and brittle. But the arc of our history is a wonder to us; the powerful trajectory that has brought us to this place regularly makes us stop: to smile, to reach across the table to one another and to shake our heads in unison at the journey we have taken so far.
Reading Group Guide
The Temporary Bride
Discussion Questions:
Have you ever had to overcome a cultural disconnect or work to understand an entirely new culture?
How does Iranian culture differ from American culture, especially in regards to courting, marriage, and sexuality?
What role does food play in Jennifer’s life and her relationships with others?
In what ways does The Temporary Bride show the difficulties of intercultural dating?
Vahid says to Jennifer, “I want you to be me my first love.” Do you believe you can choose who you love?
Has Jennifer dispelled any original beliefs you may have held concerning Iranian culture?
What role does Vahid’s innocence play in the power dynamics of his relationship with Jennifer?
How does Jennifer show food to be indicative of a culture?
In what ways were you made aware that you were viewing the Middle East through the eyes of a Westerner?
Aside from food, how does Jennifer embrace Iranian culture?
What do Jennifer and Vahid offer one another that they cannot find in the environments they were raised in?
How does the word “temporary” define Jennifer throughout this book?
What do you think defines our “comfort zone”? What keeps us there? What allows us to break out of it?
Do you think this book could have taken place anywhere else? Are these themes: family, loyalty, courage and obedience universal challenges or are they more prevalent in traditional societies?
What underlies the tension in the relationship between Jennifer and Vahid’s parents as the story unfolds? What aspects of their differences inhibit their ability to communicate with each other? Do you feel more sympathy for either character’s point of view?
How would you describe the tone and style of Jennifer’s account of her childhood in Canada and eventual departure for Europe? Does her emigration reveal similarities between her and her parents? In what ways does their relationship result in Jennifer’s own behavior as an adult, both in choosing to leave Canada and in the pull towards traditional ways of life she feels when she travels?
A Conversation with Jennifer Klinec
1. The Temporary Bride is a memoir of your own very personal experiences. What inspired you to write it in the first place and is there anything you found particularly challenging about writing a memoir that was so personal? What was the hardest part of writing this book?
The journey that takes place in the book—both my own journey to Iran and the emotional journey I embarked on with Vahid—was so complex, challenging and beautiful that even for me, as someone who lived through it, I found it fascinating to very emotional to relive and convey it into words. It felt like a story that wanted out, and one that I hoped would resonate and strike a chord with people, or make them think or feel something new.
I think the part I enjoyed least was when my agent submitted the first few chapters around to editors at the various publishing houses. You subject yourself to a lot of judgment and commentary—much of it pretty superficial—from editors who may or may not want to buy the rights to your book. I remember being shocked by how many editors wanted me to jump on the “Eat Pray Love” train and make myself more fuzzy and likeable.
I think for women in particular, when writing memoir, there is an intense pressure to be likeable. I wanted to show myself and others as they were—as real people with flaws and complexities, people trying to navigate challenging and sometimes deeply uncomfortable situations, being clumsy and vulnerable. So the challenge was to constantly ask myself “how did you really feel?” and to feel brave enough to commit it to paper.
2. Where do you think your fierce sense of adventure and fearlessness comes from? Do you feel there is a specific message about this that you want your readers to grasp?
Ultimately—my childhood and upbringing which I wrote about in the book have made me the person I am. I feel the greatest gift of my life is that from an early age I learned to think for myself, and not to look to others for approval for the things I wanted to do. If you wait for others to give you consent, to tell you they agree with the choices you are making, you risk living a very constrained life.
I think if there is a message, it’s that life is an experiment—the fact we are born in a certain place and surrounded by people who think a certain way shouldn’t constrain us from venturing outside of our comfort zone. It’s a cliché, I know, but our time in this life truly is short, and we owe it to ourselves to live the richest, most fulfilling
lives we can, and to find beauty, love and joy in whatever shape it comes to us. There are no fixed rules on who we should love, or where we can be happy. As you’ll know from reading the book, Vahid and I ended up marrying—and are still married, five years later. I knew it would be difficult and everyone I knew told me our relationship was doomed to fail. But I decided it was worth risking failure—I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking about a man I once loved in Iran and wondering if he was still thinking about me, wondering ‘what if’.
3. You have traveled and tasted a wide range of cuisines with your passion for food. What is it about Iranian cooking that set it apart from other styles and flavors?
Persians use combinations of sweet and sour, fruit and meat that we would never imagine to use in our cooking. Dishes like lamb and wheatberries sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, or chicken stews with quince or dried plums. The flavors are so rich and inventive, and so multidimensional. You can truly taste the fact you are eating food from an ancient empire that once sat at the crossroads of the silk route and the spice route.
The other thing about Persian food is it is very visual—Iranians eat with their eyes. They always finish a dish with a scattering of herbs, a zigzag of kaskh (a kind of sun-dried whey) or some chopped nuts. They like their food to look beautiful when they bring it to the table.
4. What was the most difficult part of adapting to Iranian culture?
None of the obvious things that you might expect were difficult for me—like having to wear a scarf and hijab or the pervasiveness of religion in all aspects of daily life. I think one of the biggest challenges of being a Westerner in Iran is having to overcome the burden of stereotypes that being from a Western culture places on your shoulders. You often find yourself the object of fascination, pity and disdain because for many Iranians who have never left the country, a huge amount of what they have learned about the West is from MTV and programs like ‘Sex in the City’. They assume we place no value on the things they hold dear like family, tradition or relationships and often believe quite wrongly, that we are cheap with our affections and give our intimacy and emotions away too easily and they can feel quite superior about that. It is hard to be on the receiving end of that kind of cultural bias.
5. As a foreigner, what privileges did you find you had in Iran?
People are always shocked when I tell them that Iran is a fantastic country to be a solo female traveler but it’s true. Iranians will both be in awe of your courage and pity you that you have no husband and apparently no friends either. Either way, as a lone female in Iran you get the best of both worlds. You can ride in women-only subway carriages and go to all-female parties where you can toss your coat and headscarf into the pile at the door and let your hair down, but you’ll also be accepted as an honorary man and be permitted to smoke pipes, eat offal and spit bones on to the floor with truck drivers in places that Iranian women wouldn’t dare set foot.
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