Home Is a Stranger

by Parnaz Foroutan

  It was like that. Everything around us a shadow, a charade. The only thing that existed, that Existed, was whatever strange attraction pulled Reza and me, finally, to the center of that dancing crowd, to the apex of that gyrating storm, where he and I finally stood, facing one another. I stopped dancing, and he circled me once, twice, our eyes locked, the two of us hidden amidst the arms and legs and undulating torsos. We stood in the silent center of the tempest of all those other bodies, then Reza said to me, “Abji, you have such eyes.”

  And I, already in love with everything, decided that he was the One. The summation of all of Iran, in the tangible form of a single young man. And a good-looking one, too. Long, thick brown hair he wore tied back in a ponytail. Full beard. Chiseled face. Deep eyes. Hands that looked like they could fell a tree, and hack it and saw it and hew it into a home. He stood before me, the paradigm of Iranian masculinity. Proud. Stoic. Loyal. Good. Honorable. Kind. Capable. In strict control of his emotions, which ran deep, but were concealed and tempered. And since Reza was already devoted, give or take, to his childhood sweetheart, and since he was one of Pouya’s closest and oldest friends, having trekked with them since his early adolescence, as well as a sort of adopted son to my Uncle Behrooz, this One was unattainable. Off-limits. Which made him even more desirable. He was the Iran I could never have, the Iran that would never have me.

  There’d been only one other boy who affected me like this, a boy I had known since grade school. I knew Kevin was the One when he let me run my toes through the stubble of his hair in the back of Mrs. Harm’s second grade classroom. I was seven years old and didn’t speak but two words of English, dark-haired, dark-eyed, lost in a sea of blond-haired, blued-eyed school kids. Kevin was green-eyed, which shone gold in the sun. Gold skinned. And his hair, an auburn gold. I took off my shoe, removed my sock, and he let me feel the contours of his head with my foot. Right there, between reading groups being called up to the rug, I knew that Kevin was the One.

  Kevin was the all-American boy. Played baseball. His dad was a policeman, his mom a homemaker. He knew, from grade school on, that he wanted to be a fireman. “Why a fireman?” I’d ask him later. “You could be anything. Be a senator. Run for president.” A fireman. Because he wanted to save people. And take care of his family. Kevin was popular. Everyone admired him. But he was kind, too. Dignified. He kept from the cruelties. He spoke with whomever he pleased, even danced with whomever he pleased at the school dances. Like me. I remember the first time he asked me to dance. It was on the sixth-grade outdoor education trip to Cottontail Ranch, the big dance on the last night, and his favorite song came on. He came up to where I stood, somewhere on the periphery of the dance floor, presumably in the shadows, and asked if I wanted to dance. I cried on his shoulder. I think I may have wiped my nose on his shirt. Inadvertently. But once you’ve put your toes in someone’s hair, all else is permissible.

  That same year, Kevin asked me out. At the behest of the popular girls. The Kristies giggled and told him to ask me to go steady. It was the moment I had been waiting for since second grade. I beamed yes. And then I saw, in his eyes, a genuine remorse. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he meant it. The Kristies loved it. They roared with laughter. They spoke of it for weeks. They got Ryan to do it next, but this time I was on to them. I wasn’t among the girls you’d ask to go steady.

  Years later, I got another chance with Kevin at our high school graduation dance. The theme that night was Las Vegas. There were roulette tables, blackjack, even little slot machines. But the dance floor stood empty all night until the song from Pulp Fiction came on, where Uma Thurman dances with John Travolta, and I decided the hell with all of them. I stepped out of the periphery, out of the shadows, walked out onto the dance floor, right beneath that glittering disco ball, and I danced. The next song, too. And the song after that. By my lonesome, with the rest of them in the peripheries, in the shadows, until someone tapped my shoulder and I turned and there stood Kevin. Tall, proud shoulders, the expanse of his chest just at eye level, blue jeans, white T-shirt, and a cowboy hat on his head. And he asked me to dance. I looked up into his eyes and said, “I’d give anything for you, anything in the world.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I like you, and you’re real attractive, but you and I, we’re just not meant for each other.”

  The America I could never have, the America that would never have me.

  And here I was again, on another dance floor, now locked in Reza’s gaze, and he said to me, “Abji, you have such eyes.” An echo of Kevin’s sentence, We’re just not meant for each other, summarized by a single word, abji. Sister. I like you, don’t get me wrong, you have such eyes, but we’re just not meant for each other.

  There is, of course, no fruit more desirable than the one forbidden. The one out of reach. The unattainable. And it wasn’t even mere curiosity that compelled me to want to reach out, to touch, to step closer. It was an urgency to know, to define not just the unknowns of the other, but also the unknowns within myself. But a wall stood between us, between me and Reza. He confessed attraction, then dutifully left me in the middle of that dancing crowd to attend to the broken heart of his childhood sweetheart. I watched him leave. Some other man asked me to dance. And another after that. And the whole time, the whole long night of that party, there was no else in that room save Reza and me.

  By dawn, most of the guests had left. Only a few of us remained. Someone filled a water pipe and heated up the coals. Someone brought out some pillows and threw them on the floor. Someone opened a bottle of red wine. Sarab strummed his guitar, and we sang softly. Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Metallica’s “The Unforgiven.” Radiohead’s “Creep.”

  Then Pouya and I went to the rooftop of the apartment building to watch the sun rise and the light shift across the landscape. The minarets broadcasted the morning azaan. The song of that prayer echoed across the city. A tint of pink edged the dark sky above the mountains. Below the apartment, in the still shadows, there stood a single man on the edge of a vast, empty field. He had his hands in his pockets. He was waiting. Pacing. The morning azaan continued, and in the silent rooms of homes, people slept, or they prayed. The sky turned gold and orange at the base of a deep blue.

  That’s when Pouya and I saw her. A woman on the far edge of the field, in the shadow of the mountains, running. She wore a black chador that filled with the wind and blew away from her hair and body as she clutched it with her hands and ran toward the waiting man. The man had his back turned. He did not see her running across that vast field. Then, he gave up. And he started to walk away. She did not call after him, but kept running, faster. And somehow, through some unforeseen connection, some invisible force, he stopped, then turned, and saw her.

  He ran to her, and on the edge of that field, the two of them met and embraced. Pouya and I stood watching from the rooftop, in awe, the sole witnesses to this meeting. They embraced for a moment. Then, they kissed. Finally, she pulled away from him, still holding his hands. She stepped back, then turned and ran in the direction from which she came. He watched her leave until she was a distant speck in that endless field. Then he turned and walked down the empty street.

  THERE WAS RAMIN, too. Ramin the photographer. He had a mess of thick, black curls and wore Lennon eyeglasses. He was an intellectual. He smoked pipes. He quoted Nietzsche. He was tall and lanky, wore wool cardigans and loafers, slouched when he walked, which gave him an air of aloofness, a young man lost in deep thought. Ramin didn’t play music, but he was there most afternoons when the boys and I jammed at Sarab’s house. He smoked his pipe, he listened. He watched. When we stopped, he’d delve into some nonchalant existentialism.

  One day, Ramin called me at Behrooz’s home and asked if I wanted to go to the main bazaar in Tehran. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?” A lot of guys called me to ask me out or to invite me to parties. Amir called, too, every few days, just to chat, to see where I was going, who I was seeing, what I had b
een up to. So when Ramin the photographer called, I thought nothing of it.

  “Try to dress normal,” he said. “Some parts of downtown are gritty, and it’s better not to draw too much attention. I’ll be there in an hour.”

  By then, I had merged Bohemian chic with Islamic hijab seamlessly. Long thrift-store skirts in floral patterns, and in place of the mandatory manteau, I bought fantastically embroidered silk shifts and kaftans handmade by the nomadic tribes, bold colors in a montage of fabrics in dizzying patterns. I wasn’t much of a trendsetter on the Tehran scene, but among the girls, who in those days preferred sleeker cuts, clean tailored looks with heels and full makeup, I did manage to stand out. So for the occasion of exploring the gritty parts of downtown Tehran with Ramin the photographer, I pulled on my blue jeans, buttoned up my simple tan linen manteau and covered my hair with the old saffron silk headscarf.

  When Ramin showed up at the door, he greeted my uncle and gave him a detailed account of where he wanted to take me and when we’d return. Behrooz told us to have fun. I assumed Ramin was just assuring my uncle of my safety on this sightseeing expedition. While a handful of boys sought my attention in Tehran, Ramin the photographer was just my friend. He certainly hadn’t made any overtures of romantic inclinations, not in any fashion I was familiar with, and for all I knew, he was just another one of the boys at Sarab’s. Like I was. One of the boys.

  To fit in with the artists and musicians in Sarab’s home, to be at ease, or rather, to put them at ease, I donned what was considered in that culture as a more masculine identity. Boisterous. Unapologetic. Sexually explicit. I smoked, I argued, I sat and moved at ease with my body. I hid whatever might have been deemed feminine by their standards. It felt like a constant arm-wrestling match. I had to out-boy them. I had to make them blush. And I liked the role. It was liberating. Not just in Tehran, where being female imprisoned you to a set of brutal laws and rigid gender expectations. It was liberating, period. I liked being boyish. I liked sitting in a crowd of young men and not being identified as a sexual object. It was clear that I was female, but my mannerisms didn’t match their assumptions of female decorum, so I was a strange, androgynous creature. And that position granted me a liberty I did not take for granted. None of those boys ever came onto me. Even in the streets, where the men were notorious for grabbing and pinching women in passing, I was left alone. I intentionally walked like a man, boots pounding the pavement with strong strides and direct, unflinching eye contact. No one ever touched me. And so when one of my boys, Ramin the photographer, called to invite me to explore the main bazaar, I never assumed that he was asking me on a date. I thought it would be an afternoon of just two buddies, hanging out.

  And it was. We hailed a taxi, then ended up downtown. We talked about capitalism through the passageways of the main bazaar. We discussed postcolonial theory in Arab Alley until Ramin noticed a group of shady men eyeing us, grabbed my elbow, and hurried his pace, not interrupting his own soliloquy on the debilitating role of American imperialism in the economic progress of third world nations. We talked in hushed voices about the failure of the 1979 Revolution in an old coffee shop that used to house the communists, the artists, and the general dissidents during the reign of the Shah. We stood in front of the central mosque debating the role of religion in the enslavement of the proletariat.

  He took me to the Imam Zadeh, the burial site of one of the descendants of the prophet Muhammed, where we finally stopped talking and arguing because we were separated into two lines, one for men and one for women. I entered a room to find a shrine beneath the tepid glow of halogen lights, where a crowd of women sat praying and weeping, pleading for miracles. Afterward, Ramin invited me to a famous Turkish coffee shop, where the proprietor was renowned for his ability to read your future in the grounds left behind in the cup, but he only did so for select patrons whom he trusted, because the Islamic theocracy had outlawed the reading of coffee grounds.

  Ramin begged the man to ignore the censorship that silenced his art of ground reading, to trust us as we were his comrades in struggle, to please read our future in the bottom of our cups, until the man finally acquiesced. It was a wonderful and exhausting afternoon. And the only intimate moment between us was when Ramin and I were walking past the spice vendors and Ramin said something that made me stop and laugh out loud. He turned in a panic and placed his entire hand over my mouth to silence me. “You can’t do that!” he whispered, close to my face, his hand still over my mouth. He let go of me, looked around us quickly, then turned and walked, motioning for me to follow.

  “Do what?” I asked, hurrying along.

  “Laugh. Out loud. In public.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you know? It is against the law. A woman should not be heard in public. Not even the sound of her shoes. Didn’t you see all those people staring at you?”

  I didn’t. I hadn’t noticed anybody staring at me. Why should I have? I was only laughing. Engaged in a dialogue. Not cognizant of my gender, and the rules ascribed to that. I paid heed to all the other rules in public now. Cover your body, cover your hair. No red bikini in front of strangers, no swimming in the open, blue seas. No display of desire. No walking unchaperoned by a male kin, alone in the brilliant light of morning. Or at dusk. Certainly never at night. No shaking the hands of the merchant who sold you soap at a bargain price. No sockless ankles. No sitting beside epileptic coal sellers on the street. No riding bicycles, no public singing. Or dancing. But laughter?

  This was fodder for intellectual debate, so I started in on Ramin, on the nonsense of a woman not being allowed to laugh out loud and not only his own complacency, but his active participation in its enforcement, but Ramin was clearly nervous, insisting that we were in danger, and that particular discourse would have to wait.

  BY THE END of that August in 2001, Tehran was my scene. I spent the mornings do-gooding for the downtrodden, the afternoons jamming with my boys, the evenings dancing at secret parties or strolling through art galleries or smoking hookah at local chai khanehs with a group of friends. Just when the city became too much, Uncle Behrooz would organize a trekking trip, and we’d pack our gear and set out into Iran’s wilderness, climbing mountains by day, singing beside campfires beneath the star-littered skies at night.

  In between, whenever inspiration struck, I sat down and wrote poetry. The days were hot, languid, hazy, and complete. I felt a wholeness I had never felt before. I was beautiful, desirable, talented. I was compassionate. I was interesting. The world, my oyster, and I, its pearl. Everything was as it should be. America would wait for me and Justin had become a distant memory. The prognosis of a defective heart was forgotten, and my father’s death a reminder to indulge in life, a license to be.

  On the last Thursday of that August in 2001, after a particularly hot week, Pouya, Javid, and I received an invitation to a weekend fete at a seaside condo in a gated community near Feraydoon Kenar, the tiny village beside the Caspian where a certain golden fisherman lived.

  On the long drive to the seashore, I mentioned to Javid that since we were so close to Feraydoon Kenar, I wanted to visit that quaint fishing village again, just to hire out a boat and sit in the middle of the sea. Neither he nor Pouya knew anything about the golden fisherman, so Javid agreed to drive me over the following morning. By the time we arrived at the gated community, it was already dark and we walked in through the door dancing, and danced well into the early hours of the morning, but the whole of that night all I could think about was my close proximity to him, the golden fisherman, and his red boat and his blue sea.

  Bright and early the next day, Javid drove us along that stretch of flat highway between the two seaside villages, less than ten kilometers, until we reached the gravel road that ended in the sand. He parked near the small general market on the beach, and I jumped out of the car to scan the shoreline.

  No golden fisherman in sight.

  Just Ahmad, mending a net. Javid greeted Ahmad war
mly, the two of them buddies now. Javid told Ahmad I needed to sit in the middle of the sea. Ahmad put away the net, pushed his boat into the water while Javid removed his shoes and waded into the waves.

  I suppose I assumed the golden fisherman a permanent feature of that seashore, like the market and the birds and the sea itself. The idea that he might not be there never even crossed my mind. Javid waited in the boat for me, and since I couldn’t argue why this fisherman was not the right fisherman for the job, I took off my shoes and reluctantly boarded Ahmad’s boat. Ahmad started the motor.

  In the middle of the sea, we sat for a spell in silence, bobbing in the waves. After what Javid felt was a sufficient amount of time for musing, he asked if I was ready to leave. And I, glum beneath the morning sun, said, “Yeah. I’m done. Let’s go.”