Home Is a Stranger

by Parnaz Foroutan

  I watched him, at first, from a distance. Then, as though animated by something beyond myself, I jumped across the rooftops that separated us, walked up to him, and placed the three pomegranates at his feet. “The blessings of the arid earth,” I said. “Some angels gave these to me.”

  Then, he spoke.

  At one point, I knew all the ten members of our party sat there, listening. Night fell. A near full moon. A galaxy appeared overhead. “A time is coming,” he said, and I saw fire, destruction, wasted earth, blood. “A time is coming,” he said, and I saw chaos, suffering, children drowning in open seas, the hunger, and the thirst. “A nightmare awaits us, and we sit here on its eve, before the world begins the worship of fire.” Then he looked at the sky above us, as though addressing it, and said, “But even between the tiger and the gazelle, there is Love.”

  I saw a tiger, like a flame, moving with stealth amidst the tall, golden grass of a savannah. He watched, enamored, the gazelle he hunted. The tiger thought of nothing but her grace. It heard nothing but the sound of her footfalls in the tall grass. The very air was the scent of her body. Then, the brilliant flash of her fear. And the chase. The struggle. The savage teeth against the taut skin, the torn flesh, the hot flow of blood, the intimacy of breath.

  “Within this violence,” the man said, “there is a hidden Love.”

  Someone made a fire. Beside its heat, we ate. When the desert became too cold to bear, the sage invited us into his room behind a tattered curtain that served as the fourth wall. A worn wool kilim on the stone floor, pillows, books, a blackened kettle. He made tea and offered us wisdom and cookies from a tin.

  “It is not a time for drunkenness,” he told us when someone pulled out a bottle of wine. “You must have your wits about you, for the illusions will be many. You will need a strong body and a strong mind to weather the storms.” And then, at one point in the middle of those dialogues, he turned to me and, for the first time that evening, addressed me directly. “I am someone for you,” he said. “Someone you seek through me. Tonight, you will make a gesture that will let me know who I am meant to be.”

  After the nearly full moon rose, the laughter of jackals echoed through the mountains. The moon gave way to the dark, impenetrable hours of the early morning, but the fire blazed with a gentle warmth, a gentle light. In those hours dedicated to sleep and dream, in lucid wakefulness, I leaned over to that stranger and I placed my hand on his shirt, my palm over his heart, then I looked him in the eyes. He let out a gasp, as though I had struck him, or as though he had just been witness to something awesome. He closed his eyes, nodded, sat still, and when he opened his eyes and looked back at me . . . an inexplicable familiarity. A remembering. He smiled. And I placed my head against his chest and wept. A fantastic light shone all around him, and he laughed.

  I asked him, through my tears, “What am I going to do now?”

  And he said, “You are going to live your life.”

  I can’t explain. I don’t know how. Madness, maybe. Later I would read the DSM, I’d read liturgies, study books on consciousness and on quantum theory, I’d talk to psychoanalysts, scientists, listen to lectures about hallucinations of the mind and reality, talk to the clergy of this and that religion. Years after, I would try to understand, to explain. But in the light of that dawn, he sat there before me. Forty-six, alive and in good health, though a bit thin. He was a man now, who lived in the mountains of a lost desert, at a temple with tremendous bronze doors, within which grew a miraculous tree and burned a miraculous fire and dripped from the walls the tears of an ancient princess. He sat before me, in the light of day, and I remembered him. Remembered the cadence of his speech. Remembered the glasses he pulled from his shirt pocket. Remembered the way he skinned an apple with a knife in one long, curling peel when I used to sit as a child and listen to his stories.

  “How do I live my life, now that you are gone?” I asked him.

  “With joy,” he said, and laughed a laughter I remembered from before I even had memory. “A joy that comes from within you, from deep within you like a gushing spring.”

  He gave me a slice of the apple, and another, and another. He took the seeds from me and placed them in his shirt pocket, beside his heart.

  “I’ve felt that joy,” I told him. “Sometimes, it devastates me and all I can do is cry. Sometimes, it makes me want to dance, even in the streets.”

  “Then dance in the streets,” he said.

  “People will call me a fool.”

  “There are many ways of dancing,” he said. “Remember the Charlie Chaplin movies?”

  And I remembered sitting beside him on the couch as a child, my head in the crook of his arm, laughing with him at those silent black-and-white movies. “That was a dance, too,” he said. “The art he created, it was a way of dancing, no?”

  We walked up and down the stairs. We came to the temple doors. A crowd of pilgrims and Scandinavian tourists sat waiting, watching the old keeper impatiently. When the old keeper saw the two of us approach, he hurried past those people and, without a word, opened the bronze temple doors to let us in, then closed the doors, just as quickly, behind us as the crowd rose in protest, demanding to know why he let us in, and not them, even though they had been waiting all morning. We walked around and around the altar, talking. We danced, in conversation, so that we became nothing more than ideas, and past that, to something like light. Between us, a galaxy appeared. The sun climbed to its zenith. We opened the temple door to leave and the group of pilgrims and blond tourists sat resigned to waiting outside in the blinding light, beneath the shade of the trees. Amir sat among them, waiting for me.

  “Is this paradise, then?” I asked the old keeper of the flame. He looked at me with his bygone eyes, and I saw the answer in them, before he turned to close the temple doors. I faced the pilgrims and the blond tourists, men and women with cameras around their necks and backpacks upon their backs, and questions in their eyes and sorrows in their hearts and I asked them, “Is it paradise you have all come seeking?”

  The Scandinavian tourists looked at me uncertainly, but a group of pilgrims immediately surrounded me, asking, “What did you see within the temple, miss? What vision did you have? Did you hear a voice? What message do you bring?”

  “That even a blighted desert can grow trees,” I said.

  He and I . . . that man . . . the Stranger, the thief, the sage . . . the one who allowed himself to become empty so that I could fill him with the spirit of the man I had been seeking and seeking . . . he and I . . . my father and I . . . we walked down those too few stairs carved out of the mountain, walked down the rocky footpath, walked until I saw the white tour bus waiting.

  “I don’t want to leave here,” I said to him. “I want to stay with you.”

  “You must leave,” he said. “There is a world waiting.”

  “And how do I face it, without you?”

  “Look for me. You will find me.” He reached into his pocket and took out the tiny, black apple seeds. He placed them in my hand. “Throw these in the dust,” he said. “And from them springs a gallery of trees. There are so many paradises on this earth, waiting for you to see.”

  He walked me to the bus. He held my hand to help me in while Amir took my backpack.

  “Allow that joy to rise within you,” the man said. “Let it flow from you like a perpetual spring.”

  When the bus door closed, he raised his hand in farewell. My friends looked back at me . . . and they understood. Don’t ask me how. Sometimes, it was like that, in that beautiful, tired, broken country of Iran. Sometimes, beyond all the chaos and the suffering, there was an element of the sublime so clear, it appeared before you as real as a mountain temple in a lost and endless desert.

  WHILE OUR WHITE tour bus drove us through the desert back to the city and Amir read out loud from a little guidebook about a hotel named Malek-o Tojjar in Yazd’s bazaar, I sat beside the window, watching the stretch of bleache
d landscape. My heart pounded in protest, the rhythm uncertain. I felt as though I couldn’t inhale enough air, my thoughts hazy, my head swimming. “That hotel has been in business for over 250 years,” Amir noted. “Longer than the United States has been in business.”

  Amir had sat waiting outside the bronze temple doors with the visiting pilgrims when I stepped out and the crowd surrounded me, asking what vision I had seen. It was then that he decided he needed to follow me more closely. And so when our party decided to split up and explore the city during the wait for our train, he offered to walk with me. Since I was having difficulty grounding myself, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to let him carry my backpack and accompany me through the winding labyrinths of the bazaar.

  The vendors in that bazaar, they all sang. They sang about their blackberries. They sang about the freshness of their poultry. They sang about the sale on tomatoes. They sang about hot chai. T-shirts, jeans, pots, radios, eggs. They sang about the variety of their melons. And amidst all this, there happened to be songbirds, too, hanging in little cages by the storefronts. Above all the human voices, I could hear the clear notes of the birds singing. I closed my eyes, leaned back against a wall, and listened to all of it, the haggling, the merchants, the birds, the scales, the coins, the people coming and going. There were the smells, too, of overripe cantaloupe, of ground cinnamon, the wafting smoke of wild rue seeds. And the dizzying sights. Whole skinned side of cow or an entire goat hanging from hooks, eyes bugged out and entrails dangling and delighted flies. The gleam of light in the gold merchants’ windows. Entire stores dedicated to spools of thread. The bazaar offered commerce in its purest form. People smiled at one another. Sometimes, they yelled at one another. They bargained, they talked politics, they gossiped, they argued. They were rude, gracious, kind. They praised the cut of meat. They boasted about the quality of their cotton. Something was alive in that place, full of life, there, something that didn’t exist in the strip malls or supermarkets back in LA. There was a humanness to the exchange of cash for commodity. An intimacy between buyer and the seller.

  On that afternoon’s stroll through Yazd’s bazaar, Amir and I came to a store that sold rock sugar. The window displayed what looked like giant, translucent gold gemstones. The confectioner stood by the door and looked at me like the grandfather I never had. He smiled in the warm glow of the light and invited me in to sample his sugar. Inside, he brought me a glass of tea, then chipped a piece of rock sugar with a small hammer and dropped it in my cup.

  “Listen closely for the crackle,” he said. “But do not stir. It is important to know the bitterness, first, in order to better understand the sweetness that follows.”

  I sipped my bitter tea. He asked me where I was from. “America,” I responded.

  “Is your family safe there?” he asked.

  “My mother is frightened,” I answered. “People are getting envelopes in the mail with anthrax. My uncles have put American flags on the windows of their cars, to indicate their loyalty, but people still yell and spit at them at stoplights, in the streets.”

  “It is a terrible, terrible tragedy. And now, America has decided to blame the Afghans. The Afghans! And soon, George W. Bush will begin the bombings,” he said. His eyes teared, and he looked away. “How do you heal wrongdoing by doing wrong?” He shook his head. “We watched,” he said. “We watched it, here in the market, those people falling from the towers in New York. Human life has no value for men in power, Taliban or American,” he said. “They only think about money and mask their greed with righteous ideologies.”

  He stood up and filled a white box with rock sugar, then tied it with red string. “Take this to your mother as a gift from me,” he said. “Tell her there is an old man in Yazd who believes that the bitterness will end, someday.” By the time he handed me the box and bid me farewell, we already loved each other, that old man and I.

  Amir and I walked down a particularly dark, long passageway that came to an end at a set of large wooden doors. Above the doorway, a sign read “Malek-o Tojjar Hotel. 250 years old.” Amir pushed the doors and they opened to an expansive courtyard beneath the starry night sky. The two-story hotel was built around that open courtyard. In the middle was a long and shallow rectangular pool that reflected the night sky. The rooms above the courtyard had intricate latticed wooden shutters open to the night, and men and women sat on the balconies, drinking tea, smoking hookahs, talking in whispers. In a pavilion at the far end of the courtyard, beneath a canopy of jasmine, a group of men were gathered, sitting at tables, drinking tea. They, too, were talking, though passionately and out loud, in heated debate. There were no women there, it was clear that the pavilion and the dialogue beneath it was for men only.

  I walked up closer to where I could unobtrusively listen to what they were saying. A young man spoke. “This is not a problem that can be resolved by war,” he said. A chorus of voices agreed. “How do you heal atrocity by committing more atrocities, haji?” A louder agreement followed.

  “No,” a deep voice interrupted the crowd. He sat at another table, across from the young man’s. He was older, tall, and heavyset. Judging by the size of the gold ring on his finger and the tailoring of his suit, it was clear that he was wealthy, this haji, who either owned a profitable business in the bazaar or was the very owner of the hotel itself. “No,” the old haji said again, this time pounding the table with his fist for emphasis. “We cannot show weakness. If America decides to attack Iran as well, then we must fight to defend our nation.”

  “They will annihilate us,” the young man said.

  “Perhaps, but we will die with our dignity and our honor.”

  “Haji, what is dignity and honor to the dead?”

  “It is everything.” He had a look of impenetrable anger in his eyes. I watched the haji and the crowd of men awaiting the young man’s response. Then, I noticed a small boy, a child, standing among the men, looking from one man to another. That little boy stood there, listening, learning, trying to piece together explanations of the world from what he heard these men say. He saw me, and I smiled at him. Here he was, so innocent. And what was he learning? Who would he hear? Which message?

  “Haji?” I said, from the edge of that crowd. The men already knew of my presence. They pretended not to notice me out of respect, to protect my anonymity, but they knew I had been standing there for some time, they knew that I had been listening. But nobody was expecting that I would speak. And I had the rules down by rote now. A woman should not be heard in public, not even the sound of her shoes. But didn’t this moment, the moral magnitude of it, require that I speak? The men all turned to look at me. Amir looked ready to faint. I felt my heart in my mouth, and thought, Well, if my heart is in my mouth, then it’s through my heart that I should speak. “Haji,” I asked, “To what end? Where would your war lead us?”

  He studied me for a moment, then asked, “Where are you from, young lady?”

  “I am Iranian . . . but I grew up in America,” I said. “So what does that make me, father? Your daughter or your enemy?”

  That question was followed by a period of shocked silence. Not only because I dared to speak, but that I challenged a man older than me and placed him in a position that granted him one of two options, to either be hospitable and negate his own point, or to be rude to a guest, a young woman, publicly. The haji glared at me. Then, all at once, the other men started to speak before he had a chance to answer. A few men surrounded him and talked to him. A crowd of men surrounded me and apologized for the haji’s opinions. Someone brought out another tray of tea and quickly passed it among the guests. The haji sipped his tea and looked at me while nodding his head in response to something someone said to him.

  I reached into my backpack and pulled out the box of rock sugar. I opened it, walked over to him, and held out the box. “A bit of sweetness, to end the bitter,” I said. And something in his gaze softened. Everyone watched, breaths shallow, waiting. Then, the haji reached
over, took a piece, and dropped it in his tea.

  It was time to catch our train. We bid everyone farewell, I bowed my head goodbye to the haji, who returned my gesture with a bow of his. On the way to the train, we passed through the produce section of the bazaar. I remembered the watermelon I had bought at the onset of this journey and thought it wise to buy more, so I purchased two. Then, we reluctantly boarded that Tehran-bound train out of Yazd, the fortnight before the commencement of a war that promised justice through the spilled blood of the enemy.

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG with me. I think it may have been the full moon. Big and full and red, just shamelessly hanging in the black sky, ominous over that bleak desert as our train clackity clacked beneath it. I had never seen a moon like that. Red. Blood red. Like a pomegranate. It hung there, ironic and menacing. I walked past the open train compartment doors and asked the weary passengers if they had seen the moon that night. I felt a sort of existential recklessness. My heart wouldn’t stop racing, perhaps because of the combination of heat exhaustion and fatigue from staying up the night before, but I could feel it pounding in my chest. I ambled through the halls of that train like a drunkard, peeking my head into compartments full of strangers, and asking, “Have you reckoned the moon tonight?”

  Some passengers looked out of their windows and responded with awe. Some looked at me with awe, for behaving in a way a young woman on board a train in the Islamic Republic of Iran ought not to behave. Some passengers responded with verses of poetry learned by rote. Others, with biting sarcasm. But we all knew. All of us on board that train. We all knew that the war was about to begin. And nobody wanted that war. We had seen the Afghan refugees, broken, walking over the mountains into the cities of Iran to find work, to find safety from the slaughter of the Taliban. And there it hung in the black of night, that blood red omen of a moon. And somewhere, quite near, the American planes approaching and soon, very soon, the forecast of fire, raining from the skies.