The Heart's Desire

by Nahid Rachlin

  “You can always make a marriage work,” Britta said.

  Just then a man entered the room. “Oh, here’s my father,” the girl said, looking almost frightened.

  “Please sit down for a while, if you don’t mind an all-woman get-together,” Britta said to him.

  “I’ll sit for a few moments” He stared at his daughter possessively. The girl introduced Jennifer to her father.

  “Did Maryam tell you she was the first in her whole high school class last year?” he said to Jennifer. He had a nervous, overbearing manner, thinning dark hair, and a brush-shaped mustache. In contrast to his daughter, he was short and overweight. He went on, “I’m an artist … pottery … ceramics. My daughter is the brainy one.”

  Everyone was beginning to leave, whether because this man had descended on them or because they had to go, Jennifer could not decide. She got up too, in a dark mood, and went into the courtyard to get Darius. Darius was sitting by himself in a corner, not mingling with the other children.

  Britta accompanied them to the outside door. “My husband and I are going away for a month to Europe for vacation but then Pll come over and see you.”

  “Yes,” Jennifer said, more curtly than she intended.

  Outside, she held Darius’s hand, and they walked part of the way. The heat was not as oppressive as usual, with a breeze coming off the mountains and blowing away the stagnant air.

  The day was long, endless. She asked Aziz if she could make an American meal for supper.

  “You don’t know how to use our unfamiliar kitchen,” Aziz said.

  “If you’d just show me how to use the stove.”

  Aziz did not resist this time. Jennifer thought she would make fried chicken, green peas and pearl onions, and mashed potatoes. She made a list of the ingredients and asked Aziz if they had any of them.

  “I have everything,” Aziz said.

  The kitchen, a few steps down below the courtyard, was like a little cave, with jagged stone walls and low stone ceiling. Pots and pans were piled up on the floor. An old-fashioned, stumpy refrigerator and an old stove stood in one corner. Aziz showed her where everything was and how the stove worked.

  Then Aziz actually seemed happy about Jennifer’s offer and in fact she tried to make it into a real event. She took down the fancy china and silverware she kept on a top shelf in the kitchen and set them on the cloth.

  The food tasted Iranian to Jennifer because of the spices she had to use in the breading, though to everyone else it was exotic.

  Monir’s attention was on her daughters as they ate. “Azar, you’re getting a bit too thin,” she said. “Zohreh, wipe that brooding look off your face,” a remark that made Zohreh flinch.

  After they finished eating, Aziz served fruit for dessert. Darius looked tired and cranky.

  “My dear child, I promise to get you well,” Aziz said to him in Farsi.

  He was beginning to understand a lot already, with his grandmother tutoring him every day. At least that was something, Jennifer thought.

  Zohreh and Azar went inside and in a moment the sound of American music was heard coming from their shortwave radio.

  “What do they like about that music?” Aziz asked no one in particular. Then she got up and took Darius into her own room.

  Jennifer told Monir about the young girl and her father she had met at Britta’s house. Trying to see where Monir, who seemed to use her affability like a wall with her, really thought of such issues she said, “It’s so hard here for women, particularly young girls.”

  “It’s hard in some ways but easier in others. We’re more protected than American women. We don’t have to be out there making a living, dealing with job stress. I’m happy to raise my two daughters and, when we have a home again, to make it comfortable, beautiful,” Monir said.

  “Work can be exciting, fulfilling.”

  “My dear khanoom, we’re from a different civilization, we go by different rules.”

  Jennifer wondered about Monir’s relationship with Jamshid. She never stood up to him, though she was clearly intelligent and well-informed. She could talk about movies, plays, and novels, by both Iranian writers and foreign ones she had read in translation. Jennifer had a hard time believing that Monir was not oppressed by Jamshid, who was so demanding of her. His tea had to be just the right color or he would ask Monir to adjust it. He would not eat the stew if it was a touch overspiced. He liked his eggs, two of them, fried and turned over lightly so that the yolk was still runny but the white crisp at the edge—if they did not come out just right, he would ask Monir to make him new ones. He tended to be impatient, “What’s taking her so long,” he said, if Monir stayed a little longer than he expected in the kitchen before bringing out the food.

  “How did you and Jamshid meet?” Jennifer asked.

  “In Abadan. His mother is the one who spotted me on the riverbank, where my friends and I had gone after school, and her eyes kept following me. Finally she came up and asked for my address.” A wistful expression came to her face.

  “I guess you fell in love with each other afterward, once you got married.”

  “He’s a good husband, a good provider,” Monir said. “Love is an illness.”

  Jennifer was startled by that remark, then she thought, in a way it was accurate enough, it could take you over completely, blind you.

  Monir got up and went inside. The alley cat wandered into the courtyard and sat by the pool. The fish began to dart around rapidly in the water. Jennifer thought of a vacation she and Karim had taken by a lake in Canada after they got married. They went fishing early in the afternoons and in the evenings Karim scaled the fish they had caught and broiled them on a charcoal grill. At night they slept in a tent they set up. One night as they lay there, kept awake by rain drumming against the tent, Karim said, “Nothing matters as long as we have each other.”

  They were so certain then that they could overcome any problems the future might bring.…

  Chapter 12

  “Aunt Jennifer,” she heard Zohreh’s voice from behind the door and asked her to come in.

  “Do you want to take Darius to a playground?” Zohreh asked, coming in. “There’s one in Shemiran, it’s a long way to go, but it’s a good one, it has all sorts of equipment.”

  She was not sure if it was a good idea for Darius to exert himself. He was getting worse. In fact he had a temperature of 100.5°F when she took it this morning. Nothing to be really alarmed about, it could be due to the heat, but still she could not stop worrying. She had asked Aziz and Monir if they knew a good pediatrician. “No,” they both said. But then Monir had gotten a name for her from a friend. “Apparently he’s American educated and very popular,” Monir said. Jennifer had gone out to the post office to call, since their phone was out of order, and the receptionist squeezed Darius in for the following day.

  Getting Darius out would do him good, she decided. The three of them soon arrived at the playground, which was inside a small park and well-equipped, as Zohreh had said. The park itself, carefully tended, was full of flowers. She encouraged Darius to join the other children in the playground. All the little girls were wearing roopushes and kerchiefs, giving them little more freedom of movement than if they were wearing chadors. The boys stood in clusters, separate from the girls, maybe instinctively or maybe because their mothers forced them. Darius, after standing alone for a while, joined the other boys in the sandbox.

  Jennifer, curious about Hossein, the friendly young man who had come over to the house twice, asked Zohreh about him. “I guess you and Azar will both get married soon.”

  Zohreh did not answer immediately. Then she said, “There was someone Azar liked—he worked at the oil refinery in Abadan. But then we had to get out. Azar has no idea where he went, but I think he’ll track her down.”

  “What about you? I liked that young man who came over.”

  “I don’t want to be forced into marrying someone,” Zohreh said.

  Jennifer,
fascinated by the idea of the arranged marriage, asked, “Aren’t most marriages happy here, at least no less so than in the United States, where people choose their own partners?” In Iran parents not only selected someone for their children but supervised all the details to the end. The groom’s mother would stand outside of the door of the room where the bride and groom withdrew after their wedding, and looked in to see if the bride behaved properly—she was not supposed to give in immediately to the groom’s sexual demands, she should appear to be a virgin …

  “Well, there’s someone else I like,” Zohreh said. She took out something from her pocketbook and held it in front of Jennifer. “The boy I like gave me this.” It was a necklace, tiny hearts on a thin chain. “I can’t wear it; I can’t tell anyone about him and me. My father would kill me.”

  “Who’s the boy, how did you meet?” Jennifer asked, surprised at Zohreh’s secret life.

  “I met him sitting on a park bench! He was with a group of other boys. He broke away from them and came and sat next to me. He studied in America, he’s brilliant.” She elaborated that he had a degree in communications and had been going to graduate school when he had a mental breakdown and was forced to come back home. The psychiatrist in Iran told him that his problem was due to his guilt that boys his age were fighting in the war and he wasn’t. But ironically they didn’t let him in the army because of his condition. “I like him because he understands my dreams of getting an education, being independent.” Then all of a sudden she asked, “Are you a feminist?”

  “I never did anything active, but I’d say so,” Jennifer said. “Are you?”

  “I believe in equality between men and women but we’re so far from it here.”

  Darius came over and said, “Mommy, I’m hot.”

  They left the park and headed to the intersection to get a taxi. On the way they stopped at a stall and bought orange juice that the seller squeezed in front of them.

  No taxis were stopping, so they went to the bus stop. Many people were waiting there already, some of them complaining about the heat. Jennifer was still thinking about the conversation she had had with Zohreh, when she became aware of a sudden hush. Then she saw what it was—a gray Paykan parked in front of them and three pasdars, all women, jumped out. They went directly toward a young girl, about Zohreh’s age, standing in line with the others. Two of them held her arms and the other one pushed back her scarf and began to cut off patches of her hair with scissors.

  “Oh, no, please stop,” the girl began to scream. “Stop, stop.”

  All this happened so quickly that for a moment no one moved or said anything. Jennifer was frozen with shock. Both Zohreh and Darius were hanging on tight to her arms.

  “Next time you’ll be arrested,” one of the pasdars said.

  “What’s the problem, she’s wearing a scarf, isn’t she?” one of the woman said to the pasdars.

  “That’s the way to wear it?” one of the pasdars said.

  Then just as swiftly as they had come, without uttering another word of explanation, the pasdars got back into their car and drove away.

  Darius was crying. “Look what happened,” he said, pointing to the patches of dark hair on the ground.

  Jennifer picked him up and held him in her arms, a difficult task with the chador.

  The young girl whose hair was cut off was crying hysterically and the older woman who had spoken to the pasdars, was trying to comfort her. “The savages. Why did they do this to you? But don’t worry, your hair will grow again.”

  The girl continued crying. “My hair, look what they did to it. Pm going to die, I want to die.” She moved her body to and fro. She took a few steps as if about to run but then she stopped.

  The older woman began to pick up the hair from the ground and put it in a handkerchief. “Here, keep this. Maybe you could make a wig out of it.”

  Several other women were looking sadly at the girl. “Just be careful next time,” one of them said. “They’re always looking for excuses to bother people.”

  “Mommy, why did they cut her hair?” Darius asked through sobs.

  “They’re poor, angry,” Zohreh answered for her. She had gone dead white. “They’re paid to do this.”

  The bus finally came and people rushed to get in. Darius leaned his head on Jennifer’s arm, crying softly.

  Chapter 13

  At home, Monir, Azar, and Aziz were having their endless cups of tea, letting another day dwindle away.

  “Well, well, back finally,” Monir said.

  “We were getting worried,” Aziz said.

  Darius went over to Aziz and sat on her lap, his face wet with tears. He clung to his grandmother and began to cry again. “What’s wrong, my dear, what happened to you?” Aziz picked up some candies she had put in a bowl next to the bowl of rock sugar and gave them to him. “Here, this will make you feel better.”

  “Poor child was traumatized,” Jennifer said. Now, at a distance, she could see the faces of the pasdars as if she were looking at a Polaroid photograph that was becoming clearer by the moment—they were full of humorless, cruel self-righteousness. “Some pasdars jumped out of a car and cut off a young girl’s hair only because a bit of it was showing through her scarf.”

  “Like wild animals,” Zohreh said, still looking distraught.

  “No one bothers anyone if they’re covered,” Aziz said.

  “In other countries people do as they please”

  “Where did you get that idea?” Aziz said, indignantly.

  Again Jennifer was aware of the weight of blame but to avoid an argument, she went inside. Zohreh followed her.

  “We may go back home earlier than we’d planned,” Jennifer said to her. “Depends on what the doctor says about Darius tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Aunt Jennifer, I wish you wouldn’t. I like having you here so much. It isn’t because of what happened today, is it?”

  “I’m worried about Darius,” Jennifer said, taking Zohreh’s hand and squeezing it affectionately. Zohreh reminded her of herself as a teenager, full of rebellion and questions about the prescribed roles and attitudes she saw around her. “I should at least get our exit visas, so we can leave quickly if it comes to that.”

  “Sometimes they stamp ‘No Exit Is Allowed’ on your passport,” Zohreh said. “Then you have no way of leaving, you’ll get stuck in bureaucratic red tape for weeks and months.”

  “But on what grounds?”

  “It’s all arbitrary.”

  Zohreh was called by her mother and left but her words lingered in Jennifer’s mind. “No Exit Is Allowed.” It sounded like a nightmare.

  At three o’clock, when the offices opened after a long midday siesta, Jennifer started to go to the passport office to at least find out what was involved. What she had told Zohreh about going back home earlier was growing more serious in her mind. Depending on what the doctor would say and on Darius’s condition, she might really just leave. Karim, if he wished, could stay on until the time they had planned to leave. He had his own passport. Anyway, it was upsetting that he had left her and Darius here; he seemed to be taking his time with Jamshid. When things had been good between her and Karim, he had a hard time being apart from her even for a night; he liked to talk about everything with her daily. They called each other from work at least once a day and when working at home they took frequent breaks to compare notes, to discuss Darius. They usually reached an agreement on different issues, one of them giving in a little to the other, enough to satisfy both …

  In the courtyard, Darius was sleeping on the rug with his grandmother’s chador spread over him. Motionless, his hair matted down, he looked more like a bundle than a child sleeping.

  “Going out again?” Aziz mumbled.

  “I’m not a prisoner.” Jennifer could not hold back her irritation.

  “You do what you please and still…”

  “You don’t seem to mind your son always being out.”

  “He’s a man.”

>   “Just because he’s a man he can do what he wants?” she said and rushed out.

  The streets near the passport office were wide, tree-lined. She passed the mansion which had once belonged to the shah—it seemed to have been made into a religious school of some kind, there was a picture of a tulip on it, symbol of martyrdom. Slogans were painted on the walls: “Those who spread corruption on earth will be punished.” “Think about God.” “Iraq: puppet of the Great Satan, the Mercenary America.” “Are we going to be trampled by boots of Americans because we have no dollars?” “America is run by mentally ill, perverted rulers, butchers, lechers.”

  She drew back in shock as she noticed an American flag painted in front of the entranceway for people to trample on.

  The passport office was in a modern building. She rang the bell and she was buzzed in. Tables each with a sign above it were set in the lobby. She spotted the Exit Visa table and went over to it but no one was there to help her; the two chairs behind it were empty. She sat on the sofa along with other men and women waiting. Posters of mosques were hung on the walls. A potted rose tree stood in a corner. She could hear voices from inside of rooms.

  “Excuse me, are you American?”

  Jennifer turned to the woman sitting next to her, noticing that she looked American too. “Yes, from Ohio.”

  The woman’s face brightened. “I’m from California. Are you having complications with your passport?”

  “I need exit visas.”

  “Things can take months, if not years here.” “Years! Do you live here permanently?” “Yes and no, not by choice.”

  Jennifer hoped for an explanation but the woman’s expression was suddenly opaque. “I’d rather not go into it.”

  The door of one of the rooms opened, a man put his head out and called in English, “Pamela Adabi.” The woman jumped up and started for the door. She paused half-way and said to Jennifer, “Good luck.”

  There was an impatient shuffle among the people waiting.

  She herself could not sit still and kept shifting in her place. Maybe it was Darius’s illness, or having spoken to the American woman, or the anxiety of complications in getting visas, but she suddenly was acutely homesick, missed her own family, even though she had never been all that close to them, except a little to her mother. Her brother had been the one who had stayed close to home. He had married a local girl, they had three children, and lived in a house in Margaretville. In other ways, too, Jim had duplicated their parents’ lives—his wife was the one with the more formal education, she had a teaching certificate and taught in the high school, the same way their mother had been a nurse while their father had not gone beyond high school.