The Heart's Desire

by Nahid Rachlin

  She was finally falling asleep when she heard Karim undressing in the dark, then going over to Darius to check on him. In a moment he came to bed and lay next to her. She put her arm around his waist. He turned over and kissed her neck, cheek, lips. He caressed her thighs, breasts. The physical passion was still so alive between them in spite of everything …

  He stopped suddenly, perhaps thinking of Darius in the room.

  “Good night,” he said and turned away.

  In the morning, after breakfast, Karim suggested that the three of them go out and do some exploring. As she put on the chador, Jennifer recalled a conversation she had had with Nancy.

  “Are you going to wear the chador in Iran?” Nancy had asked.

  “I like the idea of trying it, to see how it feels.”

  “But the principle of it, to be forced,” Nancy had said.

  It was one thing to imagine wearing it and another to do it day after day, Jennifer thought.

  “Why do you have to wear that on your head all the time?” Darius asked her, full of questions.

  “It’s the law here,” Karim answered for her.

  “Daddy, why don’t we cover ourselves up?”

  “I’ll explain it to you some other time,” Karim said, smiling.

  As they were leaving the house, Jennifer was aware of surprised glances from everyone in the family, as if something strange were happening, as if they were being left out.

  They walked down the alley to Jamali Avenue and waited for a taxi. Taxis were very cheap in Iran, no more than the bus fare in Ohio, a real asset, Jennifer thought, considering how hard it was to figure out the complicated bus routes. Several taxis went by without responding to Karim’s raised hand. The heat was intense and it was dusty from lack of rain. Rain was so scarce in the summer that windshield wipers were removed from cars. The trees lining the streets were withered, and the Alburz Mountains in the distance had a brown, arid look. But traffic went by at its usual hectic pace, cars, mainly Iranian-made Paykans, pickup trucks, buses, motorscooters, motorcycles, bicycles, all competing to get ahead, even through red lights. The air was filled with their noise and fumes from their exhaust pipes and the dust rising from the unpaved parts of the ground. Amid the heavy traffic a man was riding a donkey. A group of men in threadbare gray clothes, clearly out of work, were standing next to a row of carpet shops as if hoping for something to come their way. Not far from the shops stood a hospital for disabled veterans, it seemed, judging by the number of men on crutches walking around in its garden. With all that went the jumbled shouts of peddlers, vendors, who displayed their merchandise on cloths they had spread on the sidewalk or on carts. “Only ten toomans for a skewer.” “Fresh pecans, a bag for only five toomans” “The best icecream sandwich, come closer and see for yourself.” “The best leather in the city …”

  “Let’s go to the Islamic Museum first,” Karim said. “It’s not far. We went there last time we were here—it was called Shahi Museum then.”

  She remembered it well. There had been an excited energy between Karim and her then. They had gazed at each miniature painting, some with dragons in the clouds or faces in rocks and he had told her what he knew about each piece. She had gotten ideas for her work from the exhibition. One pattern she had drawn for Design Loft, the company she worked for in Columbus, was inspired by one of the paintings, a motif of white cumulus clouds against a blue background. Another one that the director had liked was also inspired by a painting there—blue birds sitting among pink roses and pale green branches.

  Finally a taxi stopped and they got in. It moved very slowly, the traffic was so heavy. When they reached the museum, there was a note on the door, “Closed For Repairs.”

  “So this is out for today,” Karim said.

  “We could go to the Carpet Museum.”

  “I don’t want to have to wait for a taxi again.” He thought for a moment. “There’s a little shrine, not far from Teheran we could go to by train. The station is only a few blocks away.”

  A demonstration was going on as they headed toward the station. Knots of people were standing in doorways and on sidewalks or were leaning out of windows and balconies and watching. Karim picked Darius up in his arms and they tried to find their way through the crowd. The air was throbbing with the hum of people repeating over and over, “Down with America …” “Down with the Great Satan, the Mercenary America!”

  “What are they saying, Mommy?” Darius asked.

  “America and Iran are mad at each other.”

  “I don’t want them to be mad,” he said.

  “We don’t either, honey,” Karim said. “But sometimes these things can’t be helped.”

  The train to Shah Abdul Azim was old and bumpy. Darius laid his head on Jennifer’s arm and looked out quietly. In about an hour the train came to a stop. They got out and went through a small bazaar. Karim bought a clay donkey and a pin wheel for Darius. They came out of the bazaar and started to walk through several interlocking courtyards. In one, a man was cutting inscriptions on gravestones, in another, families were sitting in the shade of ancient, dusty sycamore and cypress trees, picnicking. Mullahs in long khaki-colored robes walked by. Old men sat against the walls, one in the hollow of a tree, staring into space. Pigeons fluttered on the ornate parapets on rooftops. An old man, thin and gnarled, holding a parrot on his index finger, came up and stood against a tree and people began to collect around him. The parrot said over and over, “Hello, how are you on this fine day?”

  Finally they reached the shrine. Through the entrance door Jennifer could see the room inside, a dazzling sight, with the walls covered by hundreds of tiny mirrors, rimmed with gold, masses of silver inlaid between them. People were leaning against the walls and kissing the silver.

  They checked their shoes and started to go in. She became aware of the guard’s scrutinizing gaze on her.

  He asked Karim, “Is she a Moslem?”

  It must be my blue eyes and maybe the way I hold the chador, Jennifer thought. He knows I’m foreign.

  “Yes,” Karim said.

  “Is she your wife?”

  Karim nodded.

  “Do you have proof?”

  “Not with me, why would I?”

  “We need proof,” the man said, turning away and attending to someone else.

  “I’m sorry,” Karim said to her as they turned around to leave. “But it won’t do us any good to argue with him. Why don’t we have some lunch and then just go home. We can come back here another day and bring proof.”

  They started walking back to the bazaar. Jennifer was aware of the chador weighing heavily on her head.

  Chapter 3

  After eating in a hot little chelo kebab restaurant, they caught the next train back to Teheran.

  When they got home no one was in the courtyard. Darius wandered to his grandmother’s room and Jennifer and Karim went into theirs. He pulled the shade over the window and latched the door from the inside, then they both undressed and got into bed. They began to kiss and caress with urgency—with awareness, on his part too, she knew, that their time alone together in the room was brief. They skipped the preliminaries. His lips on hers only for a moment, he was already hard, moving inside her. They were pushing for the peak quickly. Karim breathed heavily and pulled out of her.

  Then they lay there, holding each other. Karim seemed pensive.

  “Remember you used to say it doesn’t matter where we are as long as we’re together?” he said. “You didn’t know, and I didn’t either, what would happen.”

  There was something ambiguous about his tone. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You know how hard it is for me there now, and it’s no easier for you here.” He took a strand of her hair and pushed it behind her ear. He embraced her tightly, but the dark shadow was there between them.

  “We’re sleeping on the bed you slept on as an adolescent. Doesn’t that feel good?”

  He was quiet.

  �
��What is it?” she asked.

  “I just regret that my mother wasn’t with us at the crucial times of my life—at our wedding, at Darius’s birth.”

  “I know, but we came here right after the wedding and when Darius was born there was the war, she couldn’t get out.”

  “It isn’t just that,” Karim said. “My family has been immersed in so much tragedy. Poor Jamshid losing his job, his home.”

  “But at least the war is over now, and as your mother keeps saying, thank God we’re all healthy.” She paused. “Honestly, Karim, would you like to live here now?”

  “It’s a complicated question.”

  “We could at some point, maybe when your sabbatical comes up in four years. I could try to arrange with the company to do some of my work here. I could take some courses in Persian art too, I’d love that.”

  “Four years, it’s so long,” he said sounding more resigned than argumentative.

  “Karim, Karim …” Jamshid was calling.

  Karim jumped out of the bed and began to put on his clothes quickly.

  Jennifer was aware of a keen loneliness as Karim almost ran out of the room to respond to his uncle. She thought again of how close she had been once to this man from so far away and with him now in the room of his childhood she felt they were each being pulled in opposite directions.

  But then, she thought, her loneliness had begun months before this trip, back when Karim had begun to act strangely. He sought out anything Iranian, a mosque, newspapers printed in Farsi, occasional radio programs in Farsi. He looked for other Iranians. At first he had become friends mainly with two Iranian men who also were married to American women. The six of them got together as couples. The new friendships were interesting in some ways. She loved the Persian food that the other two Iranian men cooked—lamb marinated in yogurt, rice in a mound on a platter with saffron coloring the top layer. Karim had started to do some Persian cooking too when they had invited those couples over to their house. She liked hearing about the experiences the men had had growing up in Iran and then as foreign students in America. But there was always a strain. The two wives, both younger than she, were even more bewildered than she was by their husbands’ sudden obsessive preoccupation with Iran. “There was a time when no one even knew or cared where Iran was,” one of them said.

  Gradually, as the relationship among the men grew more intense, the women were excluded. Other Iranian men, some unmarried, joined the group. Karim began to put himself at their service almost as if he had pledged a fraternity. Whenever they called, he dashed out no matter what time it was or what else he had planned to do. He and the rest of them had started growing beards at the same time. They went to Columbus together to eat in an Iranian restaurant and then to a mosque where someone was giving a talk about Iran. Sometimes they went on hikes together. They sat up late into the night and read to each other from Iranian books and newspapers. On the anniversary of a martyr’s death, they had a lamb slaughtered and gave the meat to Meals on Wheels.

  His friends’ needs had begun to come before hers and sometimes even Darius’s. Just this past year Karim had missed Darius’s birthday party to be with one of them. “He needs me to stay with him, he’s very upset, his cousin died from wounds he got in the war.” It was reasonable, if it had not been a part of a pattern. And it was unprecedented for him to miss Darius’s birthday. Their son’s birth had been a great event in their lives, particularly because for a long time she had had trouble conceiving.

  Darius had been withdrawn at the party despite all the children; the bright decorations, streamers, and balloons Jennifer had hung on the walls; and the games she had arranged for them to play. He moved, touched things distractedly, asked elliptical questions. Nancy, who had come over to help, had said to Jennifer, “You know, he’s upset because his father isn’t here …”

  At last even the web of Iranian friends around Karim could not seem to mitigate his feelings of dislocation. Sometimes she woke in the middle of the night and found him sitting in the living room watching television or reading.

  The first few times she had gotten up to go to him. “Karim, you couldn’t sleep? What’s wrong?”

  “You know … it must be the darkness, it makes everything seem even worse than it is.”

  “But what’s upsetting you?”

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  “Please tell me,” she asked, her stomach churning with a sense of foreboding.

  “I just feel lonely.”

  “What about Darius and me?” she asked.

  “When I’m home, with you and Darius, I’m all right, but it’s like being on an island …”

  As time went by, that look of, “You don’t understand,” appeared more frequently on his face.

  When he first came to the United States, he had gone to college in San Diego, then to Ohio State to study urban planning. He had tried to know the American culture as fully as he could. When they had just met he had told her he didn’t approve of other Iranians who isolated themselves. More than once he had said, “I came here to get educated and then return home and put it into practice, but now I can’t give up what I have here.” He had made what seemed to be irrevocable choices. He had married her, an American woman, took on a full-time job at an American university, became an American citizen.

  Karim’s voice in the courtyard saying something in an agitated way to his uncle shook her out of her thoughts.

  Then Karim dashed into the room. “A letter from Ed Clancy” he said. “They’ve hired someone else in my field.” He handed an envelope to her. “Read it.”

  She threw on a robe, took the letter out of the envelope and began to read it, filled with a sense of foreboding.

  Dear Karim,

  I thought you’d like to know that we have hired Jim Bower as an assistant professor to work with us, starting this fall. As you recall he was among the three we invited to apply to the department. He took his time and we had almost given him up but then he called last week and accepted the position.

  She looked up at him. What was wrong? “It sounds like it’s something you knew about.”

  “Did you read the whole letter?”

  She read on.

  To get him to come—I hope you don’t mind this—we promised he could teach your seminar on urban infrastructure. We put your name down for the Intro course instead.Between you and me your trip to Iran has put the department in an awkward position.I’m concerned that you may not be able to come back on time, considering the instability and unpredictability in the Gulf.

  Regards, Ed Blood drained from her face. The letter sounded cold, impersonal, Ed didn’t even bother asking how they were. Now that she thought about it, the few times she had seen Ed recently at departmental affairs he had been reserved, and once—very upsetting to Karim—he had invited several people from the department to dinner and had not included Karim and her. Still, she thought Karim overreacted to everything, took every gesture and word from Ed as an insult. “Ed is probably just looking after his own interests,” she said. “Nothing directly against you, I’m sure.”

  “Oh, no? It’s my course they’ve given to Bower without even consulting me. And you know something, this was mailed two weeks ago, before we had even left for Iran. He clearly didn’t want to talk about it with me in person.”

  “It’s only just one course.” She tried to calm him. “I know it’s more Ed’s attitude….”

  But he grabbed the letter from her hand, and crumpled it up. “You don’t understand …” Now he said what his eyes had already expressed.

  He threw the letter on the floor and left the room. She sat on the bed, faint with despair.

  Finally she decided to call Nancy. Don, Nancy’s husband, who taught in the physics department, knew Ed and other members of Karim’s department. Maybe she could get an objective reaction from them.

  Anyway she had been longing to talk to Nancy, she hoped she could get through—the telephone lines in Iran were almost always out
of order because of unrepaired war damage. Nancy was taking care of their mail and watering their plants while they were away. She worked in Columbus too, as an editor for a nature magazine. Her son Josh was Darius’s age, and they often got together with the children. Nancy usually came to their house, in a secluded neighborhood tucked away behind the university. On nice days Josh and Darius would go across the street and play in the field or watch the freight train, hooting and whistling by, on the tracks on the other side. On stormy days they might stay indoors and have coffee and hot chocolate, listening to the rain drum on the roof. On weekends one of the women would call the other, “Why don’t you come over for dinner? I’ll make something easy,” or, “I invited the Porters over for brunch on Sunday, would you come too?” Don and Karim enjoyed debating various issues, discussing their work. Sometimes they stayed up late into the night talking. But then, when Karim started to spend more and more time with other Iranians, he saw less and less of Don.

  Next to her address book, Jennifer found a sheet of paper on which Darius had drawn a picture with crayons. It was of a two-story house, shingled, set on a tree-filled street, their house in Athens, Ohio. She had been repainting Darius’s room before they left. He had wanted his room yellow, like Josh’s room.