by Rolf Potts
Chet squinted into the wind and rain. He resembled a wet cat; his rain-drenched hair clumped into random hunks. But most of all it was his long, matted eyelashes, blinking away the water streaming into his partly closed eyes, that made me thankful not to be Captain. Instead, I was safe and relatively dry beneath the spray hood.
Though rousted from sleep minutes ago, Chet stood at the wheel without complaint. It was as if he’d been waiting for this opportunity to prove himself. Chet Against the Squall. There was an assuredness about him that spoke to his years of ocean racing. Here was the sailor who, when Royal Yachtmaster test officials turned off the GPS-enabled, electronic charts in the middle of the night, was able to find his location and pass his exam using only a depth sounder and paper charts to feel his way over the bottom.
I relaxed back into my corner of the cockpit, even as a coiled sense of unease pressed against my chest. Despite my best efforts, I’d woken him too late, though he didn’t seem upset.
“Nice and wet,” Cyrille said, spitting saltwater out of his mouth. Standing half out of the main hatch, he had caught the full brunt of a wave. The hollow clinking of winches would have amplified through the hull. That and Stops’s catapulting motion must have woken him.
Cyrille stepped into the cockpit wearing what he’d been sleeping in: swim trunks and nothing else. “You should really have a tether,” Chet said. I’d made that mistake before, coming on deck in weather without the tedious safety gear—life jacket, tether, foul-weather pants and jacket—that the conditions required. I was glad it wasn’t me this time.
Cyrille opened his mouth as if to say something, but just nodded his chin into his chest and went below. I knew that feeling; it was hard to be told what to do first thing in the morning when you just wanted to see what the commotion that woke you looked like, and harder still that Chet was always right.
A few minutes later Cyrille reemerged in full regalia. He sat in the small, dry-ish space beneath the spray hood opposite me and flashed a good-humored smile, wrinkling the corners of his eyes—the only hint of age. Cyrille seemed to greet each day with ease. He’d shrugged off the recession that had reclaimed his house. And then slipped out of half-ownership in a restaurant to be an extra hand on a racing yacht. That was two boats and six months ago. Though he was from Brittany, France’s sailing capital, he hadn’t sailed there and was learning as he went. I never caught him looking back, not once. How was that possible? I wished I could live as effortlessly.
The wind fell away and the sky opened, releasing large drops that relinquished themselves to gravity. The rain clattered against the silver surface of the ocean, hollowing out 10 million tiny craters. Waves sloshed against Stops’s hull with idle energy left over from the wind. “This is like sailing in England,” Chet said in mock complaint. “You don’t need to go to the South Pacific, it’s rainy, dark, cloudy. Jesus, it’s like the English Channel. Right?” He was playing around; he knew that of the three of us, only he had sailed there. He continued, “Look at this thing. Is it getting bigger, or . . .” Waggling his head, he said in a ludicrous falsetto, “We’re gonna die.”
If Chet was joking around, maybe he really wasn’t angry? We shortened sail in time. The boat was intact. No one was hurt. Then why was I queasy with the thought of what could have happened? Instead of feeling elation for having survived the squall, fear hollowed out a hole behind my solar plexus. I’d made the cut, but barely. Maybe all those other captains who’d dismissed me had been right.
It didn’t occur to me that I’d used my knowledge and skill to make a call that was well-timed enough, considering my exhaustion, my newness to South Pacific weather patterns, the vagaries of the ocean.
From far above, the sun murmured through clouds, raising the ceiling and brightening our morning. Then the rain subsided and the world expanded all the way to the horizon. There, like a forgotten promise, the hazy shadow of our destination floated between sea and sky. “Nuku Hiva,” I pointed straight ahead excitedly. This time there was no question; I identified our barely discernable island with certainty.
“You haven’t seen it yet?” Chet said, that same surety slapping a grin across his face. Apparently, while looking forward steering the boat, he had seen the island ages ago. For him, Nuku Hiva had always been there, poised near the ninth parallel for 3 million years. With my attention directed back towards the squall behind us, the island had snuck up on me.
The sea has amnesia. An hour after the sky had opened up, the trade winds returned and the waves relaxed back into a manageable size. Our bodies and the boat were dry. The only reminders of the squall were a gray ceiling of clouds and a cool, misty morning veiling Nuku Hiva.
Nuku Hiva’s mass and density solidified as we approached. A dark mist on the horizon grew into the sleeping body of a blue-gray whale lumbering on the sea. I had been expecting the startling mountains that Tania Aebi, the first American woman to sail around the world, described in her 1989 book, Maiden Voyage. To me, however, Nuku Hiva at a distance was flat as a tabletop, the island’s gently sloping volcanic rock slouching into the sea.
As we got closer, the island multiplied into a quintuplet of headlands separated by deep bays. One of those headlands marked the entrance to Taiohae (pronounced Tie-ee-oh-hay) Bay, where we would finally anchor.
With Chet at the wheel, I tried to make sense of our satellite position on the digital chart below deck in relation to the actual rock, dirt, and leaves off our starboard side. I was anxious to be the one to find our headland. I wanted to prove—to him and to myself—that I could do something right.
Eventually, Chet lost patience and gave Cyrille the helm. I was crestfallen. After consulting the chartplotter, Chet turned us in the direction he thought Taiohae Bay. Sure enough, the trail on the plotter corresponded exactly with our new heading. We were now aiming for our destination.
Large ocean waves couldn’t penetrate the deep bay. The incessant motion that had rattled my body for more than three weeks began to ease. Standing in the cockpit became easy. I could walk around deck without holding a handrail. It was like breathing deeply when I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath.
“Wanna take the helm?” Chet asked me.
“Really?” I didn’t move, unable to believe that Chet wanted me to steer us into our first South Pacific port, the port that marked the end of our long and successful journey, a port that neither of us had ever seen before.
“It’s an easy entrance,” he said. Chet knew the island was steep-to, sloping downward toward the seafloor 13,000 feet below.
“There aren’t any reefs or rocks to worry about?”
“You’ll be fine.” Chet’s eyes were kind, vacant, expectant. He really did want to give me this honor. Besides, he needed to consult the sailing guide to decide where we’d drop anchor.
In one synchronized movement, Chet stepped away from the wheel and I slid in. I assumed the captain’s stance, back tall, legs wide, hands firm. Though the ocean had emptied me of more energy than I thought I had, my senses sparked to alertness as my hands grasped the wheel. At the helm, my fears receded. I was driving and being driven, captain and passenger.
My hands hold the memory of every boat I have ever steered, though none are held so tightly as the first. From my father’s lap, I clasped the knobby handles of the ship’s wheel on my family’s boat. The open wood grain, weathered in the sun, was smooth and rough in my small hands. I was always oversteering, turning the wheel too far and worrying us off course, then over correcting in the opposite direction. My father told me again and again to look straight ahead, to keep the mast in line with our destination. The fifty-foot sailboat swaggered back and forth as I found and lost and found our heading.
The morning we sailed into Taiohae Bay, I navigated a straight course. Cyrille prepped the anchor, and Chet surveyed the bay for a good place to drop the hook. In a few hours, I would walk the crescent footpath around the bay, waves smashing against the beach, then draining back through larg
e, smooth stones in a silvery clatter reminiscent of rain.
Glenda Reed is a writer, artist and adventurer. Her writing has received funding from the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund among others. She was awarded a fellowship to the Loft Literary Center’s 2-15-2016 Mentor Series. Reed is also a winner of The Moth StorySlam, and is currently working on a memoir about hitchhiking around the world on sailboats. This story was originally published in the Winter 2016 issue of Creative Nonfiction.
MARIO KAISER
Love and Lies in Iran
Most people dream of spending their honeymoon on exotic beaches. The author and his American bride opted for a road trip through the land of the ayatollahs.
We raced through the darkness and didn’t see it coming. Mehdi sat erect behind the wheel, honking slower cars out of his way. But one car stayed in its lane; it challenged his hierarchy. Mehdi honked, flashed, tailgated, and when the other car slowly made way, he barreled into the opening. Then something crashed, glass shattered, and the other car’s side-view mirror went flying through the air, leaving a trail of silvery dust glittering in its wake.
Mehdi laughed and kept going.
We sat in silence, and it unsettled Mehdi that my wife, Gypsy, and I weren’t laughing. He kept looking at us, anxious, it seemed, for approval, some kind of validation. And then, suddenly, a car appeared next to us, honking, flashing, pushing us to the edge of the road. Mehdi looked for a way out, braking, accelerating, swerving, but the other car followed us like a shadow. He struggled for a while, then gave up and slowed down. The other car cut him off, forcing us to stop.
It was after midnight and we were cornered on a dark road somewhere in Iran. This is where our honeymoon ended and the epilogue began. Without turning around, I whispered to Gypsy not to move or say a word. Then I pushed the bag with the money deeper into the legroom, until it was no longer visible.
The other car’s doors opened and two women got out. The woman on the passenger side screamed into her phone and started walking in circles, glowering at us in the glare of our car’s headlights. The woman on the driver’s side went to the trunk of her car, opened it and leaned in. She was heavyset and wore her headscarf in a rigid style, showing no hair. Mehdi jumped out of the car and raised his arms in disbelief. The woman pulled a baseball bat out of the trunk, straightened herself and slowly walked toward him.
I knew that a honeymoon in Iran with an American bride would not be without complications, and that my being a German journalist wouldn’t help. When two governments are as mistrustful of each other as those of the U.S. and Iran, their citizens are made to feel the suspicion whenever they enter the other country. The fact that we were living in Berlin might have made us look a little less suspicious, but I was prepared. In my pocket, I carried a piece of paper with the phone number of the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which, in the absence of a U.S. Embassy, takes care of Americans and their consular needs. Missing from my emergency plan was the wrath of the Iranian women.
We had been sitting in this car like exhibition pieces in a museum of the Iranian Revolution—in the front, Mehdi and I, two bearded men in the back, Gypsy, a veiled woman. And suddenly the dominant male figure around which everything seemed to revolve in this country was gone. The man who minutes ago had his hands on the wheel was now standing in the street beseeching a woman who wanted to crack his skull.
When Gypsy and I made plans for our honeymoon, we weren’t dreaming of lagoons and lonely beaches. We weren’t drawn to riding elephants in India, or flying in a propeller plane across the Okavango Delta. We wanted to penetrate a hermetic country and find beauty behind its forbidding façade. We liked the idea of lovers subverting a state ruled by imperious men, and quickly fell for Iran.
The first conflict of our honeymoon erupted even before we departed, in the women’s section of a department store in Berlin. We argued about a pair of shoes. To me, they looked like the shoes of a splay-footed ballerina—black and shiny, with ribbons glued to the tips. Their brand name was “Yessica,” and I didn’t like them. They made my wife appear small. I called them “mullah shoes.” Gypsy bought them for seven euros.
We were standing in the middle of Berlin’s hip Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, and I felt as though the power of the Iranian mullahs extended all the way to the German capital. They had reprogrammed my wife.
I didn’t know this side of Gypsy, this kind of submissiveness. She was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in the Bronx, and she has the fearlessness of the underprivileged and Simone de Beauvoir’s lust for arguing. She is also the daughter of a woman who used to carry a ladies’ revolver in her purse, and who once shot into the ceiling of a bar where she had tracked down her husband, a woman sitting on his lap. And now Gypsy bought a pair of ugly shoes to please the mullahs, letting them decide when she was a woman and when a subject. I didn’t understand. “You lack pragmatic intelligence,” Gypsy said.
We knew that the dress code of the Islamic Republic of Iran was also enforced in Frankfurt, from the moment passengers entered an Iran Air plane. At the gate, we didn’t notice it. We sat among Iranian women who only stood out because they were dressed more elegantly than the German women around them. But at some point they began to change. As boarding time approached, they slipped into overcoats and covered their hair with headscarves. They slowly disappeared.
A few Iranian women remained uncovered. They showed their hair, their necks, the shape of their bodies, and they weren’t wearing mullah shoes. They walked around in high heels and didn’t mind being followed by the looks of others. They seemed determined to hold on to their freedom for as long as they could.
Gypsy didn’t dare to do that. She knew that, as an American, she would be watched with particular scrutiny, and she worried about offending anyone. She covered her head with a black scarf and pushed it back to reveal some hair, just as she had seen it in pictures of street life in Tehran. She knew the Iranian dress code in detail—she had been studying it for weeks. Sometimes during her dress rehearsals, she would stand in front of me, covered in a headscarf and an overcoat, and ask if I was still attracted to her. I didn’t care for the coat, but I became enchanted by the way the scarf framed her face, the mystery it bestowed on her.
Gypsy knew that liberal Iranian women are smarter at interpreting the dress code than the mullahs are at writing it. She admired their mastery at stretching the rules, how they played with the fact that the boundaries of the permissible are fluid on a woman’s body. But she also knew that plainclothes officers walk the streets, harshly enforcing the dress code. In their canon, women are only allowed to show their face and hands; their feet, if they dare to wear open shoes, have to be covered by opaque stockings.
We entered the plane, and my Dominican wife, who was raised in America, lived in Germany and bears the name of a vagabond, obeyed the Iranian dress code by covering herself in an overcoat sewed by Chinese hands and a scarf bought from a Kashmiri in India.
Gypsy understood the uncovered Iranian women and their longing for freedom, but the German women irritated her. She looked around the plane and none of them was wearing a headscarf. She found it disrespectful. The men on Iran’s Guardian Council would have liked Gypsy, how she stood there in her headscarf, her opaque stockings and her mullah shoes, seething at the women of the West.
I kept quiet. In a strange way, I was indebted to Ayatollah Khomeini and the revolution he instigated. My life would have been different without him, shallower. I never would have met the first love of my life. He pushed her toward me, and if he were still alive, I would have to kiss his hand for it.
Her name was Mandana—the Everlasting. Her parents took her and fled to Germany after Khomeini seized power. We went to high school together, and she enraptured me in a hotel room in Warsaw. I was eighteen and knew nothing; she was nineteen and knew more. Our love lasted six years. I could have liberated her father from the brothers who kept calling from Iran, claiming they had f
ound the perfect husband for his daughter. But I kept her waiting, and she left for Jerusalem with the one who promised to make her wait no more.
Observing Mandana’s father, I studied the inner conflicts of an Iranian man. He used to work as a bartender, and had married Mandana’s mother even though she was a divorced woman from the West. He loved his black Jaguar and a good whiskey. He worked tirelessly to give his beloved four daughters the best education possible. And he lied for me when he told his brothers that Mandana was already engaged.
His name was Faramarz, and he could be as tender as his name suggested: the one who forgives his enemies. He seemed like a prototype of the modern Iranian man, but his modernity had its limits. He wasn’t supposed to know that Mandana took the pill. He wasn’t supposed to know that she was lying in my bed when she purported to be staying at a girlfriend’s place. He wasn’t supposed to know any of the secret deals his wife struck with his daughters.
He knew it. He knew everything. But he had to pretend he knew nothing. At the time, I thought he was living in a lie. Years later, I understood that the lie was his armor in defending us against the liars, the cover behind which he gave us freedom. I never thanked him for it, and it haunted me.
Gypsy knew this part of my past. She understood that Mandana had played a crucial role in shaping me into the man she took as her husband, and she was grateful for it. She knew that it was Mandana who had kept my life from falling apart when I despaired over my parents’ separation, and that it was Mandana who had pushed me to mend my relationship with my mother. This journey was a passage into our future that acknowledged the past.
We landed in Tehran and entered a quiet country. Freedom of speech was quietly suppressed. Dissidents were quietly arrested. A nuclear program was quietly developed. We detested the regime, but we believed in the beauty of the country. We believed that the Iranian people were different from the men who pretended to represent them.