Home Is a Stranger

by Parnaz Foroutan

  “I have to go soon,” I said.

  “Don’t go.”

  “I have to.”

  “Then come back again.”

  “I can’t.”

  “To marry me?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t.”

  To read love into this story would be an error. This is not a love story. Love is another beast altogether. This story is about longing, about desire, about forbiddance, and how forbiddance, in and of itself, beckons its own transgression with a powerful draw. And once I had scaled the wall and stood in that forbidden place, I knew, with certainty and without explanation, that it wasn’t a place for me. The perimeter, too small. The sky above, endless. Unenclosed. And to accept those walls, to ignore the great expanse of experience beyond them . . . I couldn’t. Even if it meant denying that golden man and the fantasy of being a fisherman’s wife and cooking stews on the hearth of a small picturesque stone hut with a thatched roof and primitive furniture and a tin can full of wildflowers on a wooden table with a hand-stitched linen tablecloth, the truth of the matter was, to accept this story, I would have to forgo all other potential narratives that I sensed life held for me.

  A half hour left before the cab arrived. The noon azaan echoed from the minarets of the mosque. The song carried out to sea. On shore, a host of witnesses waited for our return. All we had left were these brief moments. And in them a regret, that growing distance, the heaviness of goodbye. We spent that last half hour stretching time so that, forever, in both our minds, we sit in an embrace in a little red boat in the middle of a blue sea with no future and no past.

  He held my hand as I stepped out of his boat for the last time. A group of men stood by the market. Village men. They saw me take hold of his hand, saw that my shoulder grazed his chest when I lost my footing, saw that he placed an arm around my waist to steady me. I walked ahead of him, to the waiting cab, where he opened the car door. I got in, quietly. He shut the door without a word. As the cab drove slowly down the gravel road away from the sea, I looked out of the rear window and saw him standing there, hands in his pockets. He raised one in goodbye. I rolled down the window and leaned out fully, my hair blowing wildly from beneath my veil.

  He watched after me until the taxi turned the bend. Then, he must have turned to face the group of men who stood witness to this ending.

  WHEN I RETURNED to Tehran from the Caspian Sea, Ramin the photographer invited me over to his apartment. “You said you make good Mexican food,” he said. “We can search for the ingredients at a bazaar near my place and cook them in my kitchen.”

  Lavash for tortillas, kidney beans for pinto, enough cumin to mask the difference, we made our way through the bazaar talking and I, careful of laughter, selected ripe tomatoes, chili peppers, yellow onions. In his apartment, the walls were lined with shelves, the shelves full of books, the floor full of books, the coffee table stacked with books, the couch worn. He put on a Leonard Cohen record and the smooth bass of Cohen’s voice filled the home. I admonished him for the black thing he called a pot as we washed and chopped the produce. He told me about his father, who was ill for some time then died, leaving him all alone. He showed me framed photographs of his relatives.

  Ramin the photographer came from a long line of intellectuals who were either dead, exiled, or forced to escape the country. The only relatives he had in Tehran were his distant cousins and an elderly uncle, near blind. He told me about his formidable lineage as he selected a pipe from a collection on his desk, opened the pouch of tobacco he carried in his breast pocket, and filled the bowl. In the quiet street outside, a peddler passed, singing about the coal he sold. And the sunlight filtered into that room, and a breeze came in through the open window and that peddler’s song carried in, too, and the smoke of Ramin’s pipe rose into the air, swirled in the eddies of the wind, and I stood barefoot on a tattered rug, and the scent of chili and cumin and onion filled the room, while Cohen swooned, You live your life as if it’s real, and I allowed myself to slip right into that masterpiece, the perfection of that afternoon, when I was beautiful and the world was beautiful and life stretched herself wide and inviting before me.

  “Do you want to hear a story?” I asked Ramin.

  He looked at me through the smoke of his pipe, in the haze of the sunlight. “A story?”

  “About a girl and her golden fisherman.”

  “Sure.”

  So I told Ramin the photographer the story, that once upon a time from a land far away, a girl returned home, and she came to a shore and found a red boat, and a fisherman who shone gold, and that fisherman took her into the middle of the blue sea, and saw her naked wrist and then touched her soul. I told him how she witnessed divinity in the desire of his eyes. I told him of her return to that seashore. I told Ramin the photographer about the waterspout, the arch of the foot, the trickle of water, the glimpse of the calves, the whispered conversation. I told him how the next morning she stepped into the golden fisherman’s boat and, in the middle of the sea, swam with him, and the moment he asked her to be his wife. And then, I told Ramin the photographer how the golden fisherman kissed that girl, and how he tasted in her mouth. And later, how he had stood at the edge of his boat, then jumped into the sea, surfaced, then swallowed her and the whole world, too, and how, after, she felt the loss of something. A fading in the sunlight.

  Ramin listened with rapt attention. When I finished the story, he looked at me for a while, in silence, then asked, “And this happened in Feraydoon Kenar?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the fisherman’s name? His real name?”

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t know. Perhaps he told me. Certainly, he must have told me, but he was the golden fisherman. That was his name. What other name did he need?”

  Ramin looked at me for a while longer, without speaking. He had finished his pipe. The beans simmered on the stove in the kitchen, the street outside silent as the neighborhood rested in the hours of the afternoon. The dust motes hung suspended in the rays of sunlight that came into the room and spilled across my bare legs on the couch. Ramin put his pipe on the coffee table, stood up and said, “I’ll be right back.” Then he went into his bedroom.

  I thought about my golden fisherman. About how I couldn’t remember his name. Maybe I hadn’t acknowledged the golden fisherman’s humanity? Maybe I had ascribed him the role of object so that, like the American tourist that I was, I could have the experience, as though experience, too, was like the tchotchke you bought from a local artisan in an open-air market. Maybe. But my intentions were honest, weren’t they? I felt, and he felt, too, an unbearable gulf, a question, a void, a something that needed to be filled by knowledge. Our hands, our lips, our bodies answered. The answer now existed. Surely, we could have spent a lifetime building on that answer. But I couldn’t really marry a fisherman. And he must have known, too, known that to marry me, to spend a lifetime answering that question would not have worked.

  Just then, Ramin the photographer came back into the living room. He was wearing a white poet’s shirt, unbuttoned, and nothing else.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Isn’t this what you want?”

  He walked over to the couch. I leaned back into the cushions, hoped for the cushions to hide me, far away from him, from his nakedness, from the look in his eyes.

  “What do I want?” I asked.

  “This,” and he leaned down toward me, his hands on either side of me on the cushions.

  “From you? We’re friends!”

  “But you told me that story . . .”

  “I told you a story!”

  “You are in my home, cooking for me . . .” He stood back up, naked, his arms open, in question, in accusation.

  “We’re friends!” I cried.

  He turned, angry, retreated to the bed
room, returned clothed fully in a pair of jeans, his shirt buttoned. “You are in my home,” he said. “Alone.” He sat on the couch beside me, his shaking hand reached for the pipe, then filled it with tobacco again. “You told me that story. What do you think I would think?”

  “That I’m in your home, telling you a story!”

  “I’m sorry. I misunderstood.”

  “I didn’t even know . . .”

  He looked at me, incredulous. Inhaled smoke. Looked away from me. “The way you dance,” he said. “You know I watch you. The way you talk, like you’re open . . . you know, free . . . about these things. And all the times I’ve come to your uncle’s home to take you out. And, now, you’re here, alone, in my home, with your bare legs in that dress, telling me stories about what you did with a fisherman? What did you think I would think?”

  I didn’t answer. He kept his eyes away from me.

  “I think the beans are ready,” I said, finally. “But I have to go. Now. Could you get me a cab?”

  When the cab honked in the street outside a few minutes later, he held open the door to his home. “It’s best if you leave alone,” he told me. “I don’t want my neighbors to see us together and think things.”

  That night at a party at Sarab’s house, I performed my poetry while the boys improvised on their instruments. I knew that Ramin the photographer was there, somewhere, watching. We had greeted one another earlier like nothing had happened. He had his camera that night, and he was taking pictures. Some girl in a short skirt, with short hair and red lips, seemed to have his attention, at least the focus of his lens, anyway. The whole of the night, he did not address me.

  A famous painter was there, a middle-aged woman who was well known and sold her work in galleries throughout Europe. After our performance, she called me over, in the dark of that home. She sat, regal on the couch, smoking a cigarette. “Sit with me,” she said. I had been told of who she was, and those who told me spoke with reverence. She studied me for a while in the dim light.

  “I watched you dancing earlier,” she told me. “You have a beautiful body.” She took a drag on her cigarette, blew out the smoke, leaned in closer. “You move like poetry. And are you a poet?”

  “I would like to be.”

  She placed her hand on my thigh and said, “You cannot choose to be a poet. You are either born one or you are not.”

  Hours after midnight on our drive home, Pouya and I decided to stop for juice from one of the stands that was open all night on the main avenue. There weren’t many people on the street in the early hours of that morning. Just the street sweepers in their ill-fitting, government-issued, orange jumpsuits holding their wooden brooms. They stood, an army of those haggard men, beneath the strung lightbulbs up and down the street, in the flurry of sycamore leaves, and they swept and they swept and they swept.

  In front of the juice stand, in the light of its neon sign, stood three foreigners and a couple Iranian men, all in finely tailored suits, heavy watches on their wrists, holding their cups of juice, rocking on their heels, talking with voices booming. They laughed with the air of assured men. Powerful men. Men who made secret and lucrative deals. The foreigners spoke German. The Iranian men responded in German. They must have had ties to the government. Everyone who had money in Iran, who made lucrative deals, had ties to the government. Behind the men, at a distance, there stood an old man. A street sweeper in his loose, orange jumpsuit. He leaned on his broom, barely standing.

  I walked past the businessmen, aware that they were watching me. Smelling me. I felt their attention, felt it in my body. An animal alertness, a strange surge of adrenaline. A girl, dressed so oddly, at this hour, alone on the street. I walked up to the old street sweeper and said, “Father, it is so late, what are you doing on the street, working at this hour?”

  “Fire,” he mumbled, without seeing me. “Fire fell from the skies. Burned up the village. And they died, one by one. They died.” He was one of the refugees from Afghanistan, I could tell from his accent.

  “Who? Who died, father?” He stopped and he looked at me, trying to focus on my face. He had been crying. That old man, on the street, in the middle of a cold, almost autumn night. He held his broom, barely able to stand, and he had been crying.

  “Who died?” I asked again.

  “My children,” he said. “My children died. Before the spring.”

  And something in me broke. Like shattered glass, like fragmented concrete, and I felt a crushing weight, a crumbling of my soul, a thunderous fall, the shower of dust and debris, and rock and silt. Behind me, I could hear the businessmen talking, laughing, assured, powerful. Watching me. Assuming. Surely. Assuming that since it was night, and I stood alone, dressed so oddly in such bold colors, with the scent of sweat on my body, that surely I was the sort of girl who visited young men alone in their apartments, stood bare-legged on tattered rugs in the light of the afternoon, and told stories about nameless fishermen and desire. So I turned, and I walked up to those businessmen, with the strut they expected of me, and stood real close to the tallest German among them, the one who thrust his chest out more than the others, the one who had the hungriest eyes, and I looked at him and asked, “Do you have money?”

  And they laughed, those men, laughed the laugh of men who assume the world to be lucrative, to bend and give to their needs. And the German replied, “How much do you need?”

  And I leaned into him and said, “Show me your generosity.”

  And the men looked at one another, like wolves, maybe, signaling something unspoken amongst themselves, and the German smiled and reached into his pocket, took out a fold of bills and made a show to count out several, before he handed it to me. “Is that enough for you to show me your generosity?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I said. I smiled, licked my lips, like a wolf, maybe. Then I turned and walked away, to where the old man stood sweeping, and I took his arm and placed the money in his hand, closed his fingers around the bills and said, “Go home, father, go get some rest.”

  I could feel the men watching me. I had breached our contract. The German men looked angry, but the glares of the Iranian men were burning. I had humiliated them, certainly, before their guests. I, an Iranian girl, should have known my part on that night, alone, in the street. I walked past them, without a word, to where Pouya waited for me in the car. We drove home. To sleep.

  IN THE LATE afternoon of a September day, I lay in my bed naked, damp with sweat, the sheets crumpled around me as I watched the curtains dance, impregnated by the breeze. The scent of the city had changed. It carried a smokiness to it now, and the musk of fallen leaves. The afternoons were still hot, but the evenings held the chill of the impending autumn. Blackbirds called to one another from the roof of the mosque outside my window.

  Then, a stillness, and in that moment of their silence, the phone rang.

  Behrooz called my name from the living room. “It’s your mother,” he said.

  I put on a T-shirt, pulled on my jeans. I walked out of my room and Behrooz held out the phone to me without looking at me. He was searching for the remote control to the TV with an urgency, a panic I had never seen in him.

  “Mom?”

  “Are you watching the TV?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “We are being attacked.”

  “What?”

  “Turn on the TV. New York is under attack.”

  “What?”

  Behrooz turned on the TV. On the rooftops of apartment buildings all across Tehran were hidden satellites. Inside homes all across the city, the people were secretly watching television channels outlawed by the Islamic regime. And we watched, too. We watched, stunned, among the millions of others who watched, stunned. There stood the Twin Towers, one already crumbling down to dust. We watched in silence at what looked like blackbirds at first, falling from the buildings.

  “Those are people,” my mother wept into the phone. “Those are people. J
umping.”

  THE CITY WAS congested with traffic, the street below our apartment flooded by the devout pouring out of the mosque. Festival lights strung from telephone poles shone brightly to mark the birthday of another imam. A strange, frenzied dread, an awful uncertainty, hung heavy in the air. The smog, the heavy exhaust of the cars, the heat, the scents of the city, human sweat, fermenting fruit, fallen leaves, smoke, the sudden shock of the perfume of tuberose the street children sold at traffic stops, the horns, the screeches, the cacophony of human voices, the lights, everything felt like an assault. I waited for a late taxi with Sarab, Shervin, Amir, Sanam, and Pouya. We were leaving Tehran for the city of Yazd. The rest of our party was to meet us down at the train station.

  Amir had planned this trip. A group of ten of us would go to the city of Yazd by train, then hire a car to drive us through the empty surrounding desert in search of an ancient Zoroastrian temple named Chak Chak. Our arrival at that temple would fall on the night of the Autumn Equinox, when the Zoroastrians celebrated the harvest and a deity named Mehr, who originally represented the covenant of friendship and purification by fire but, over time, would come to be known as the king of warfare.

  More than a week had passed since the fall of the Twin Towers in New York City. America had already named her enemies, Iran among them, and scheduled a preemptive strike on Afghanistan. The night before our trip, we watched the president of the United States on television. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he had said.

  Amir suggested that we visit the ancient Zoroastrian fire temple, lost in a desert, on the night consecrated by the deity of the covenant of friendship, who then became the deity of warfare, to wait out this turn history was about to take.

  “There is no way we’ll make that train,” Amir said.

  “We are already on that train,” I said. “We have arrived at the temple, we have lived our whole lives, grown old, and rotted in our graves. We are bones. We are the dust of the universe, waiting to be conceived.”