The Heart's Desire

by Nahid Rachlin

  She felt a pressure in her chest. She had to suppress a desire to cry.

  Chapter 16

  While waiting for the passport office to open, Jennifer took Darius’s and her own laundry into the courtyard to wash—the G.E. washing machine in the basement was broken, Aziz had told her, and parts were not available in Teheran. She put the clothes in a pan, added soap and water to it, and washed them by hand using a wash board. She hung them on a rope tied to two trees. She had found that she actually liked drying the clothes in the sun—they looked and smelled so good dried that way.

  Darius was playing quietly in his grandmother’s room, so she left without him. She found the same woman sitting at the Exit Visa desk and gave her the letter.

  “Please wait,” the woman said after reading it and wandered away to another room.

  She came back and said, “Mr. Mobarek will see you now.” She pointed the way.

  Jennifer knocked at the door, and. after what seemed like a long time a man said, “Come in.”

  Inside she waited in the middle of the room, while the man behind the desk stared down at some papers. Finally he looked up and said, “Sit down.” She sat across from him. His beady black eyes focused on her now, as he turned his diamond and sapphire rings around and around his fingers. The fragrance from the mint tea in a glass on his desk did not mask the cloying sweet smell of a cologne he was wearing. Two framed embroideries of the word “Allah” in large black letters on a green background hung on one wall. With the shutters pulled over the window and a lamp burning on the desk it looked like night in the room.

  “What are you doing in Iran to begin with?” he asked.

  “Visiting my husband’s family.”

  “Do you have any documents with you to prove your marriage?”

  From her purse she took out her marriage certificate, the one given to her by the Moslem priest, and handed it to him, thinking how lucky it was it had occurred to her to bring it to Iran.

  The man looked at the document while he took sips of his tea. He left the room suddenly, and returned handing her the passports. “Are there exit visas on them?” she asked, confused.

  He merely smiled at her in a strange, crooked way she could not understand the meaning of.

  She opened the passports and looked. “No Exit Is Allowed,” the phrase Zohreh had used, glared in her mind’s eye nightmarishly before she actually saw that permission to leave had been stamped on both of them. Then she looked again to make sure.

  When she got home Monir was sitting in the courtyard, ironing one of Jamshid’s shirts on a flat board she had put on the rug in front of her. The electricity must have gone off because she was heating the iron on a coal stove. A spark came out of the stove and then faded. More clothes lay in a heap on the rug. For an instant Jennifer was hopeful that perhaps Karim and his uncle had returned. She asked, “Are the men back?”

  Monir shook her head.

  “What’s taking them so long, I wonder.”

  Monir was her usual noncommittal self. She just asked, “Do you want me to iron some of your clothes hanging on the line, they should be dry by now.”

  “Thanks, you’re very kind but I’ll do them later myself. Is Darius still in his grandmother’s room?”

  “Aziz took him to Qom.”

  She stared at Monir. “Qom? That’s two hours away.”

  “She wanted to take him to the shrine and pray for his recovery.”

  “She took my sick child away without my permission. When did she say they’ll be back?”

  “Qom has a very special religious school for children. She thought it would be good for him to attend it for a couple of weeks.”

  “A couple of weeks! I can’t believe it. He’s sick. Why didn’t she ask me?” For an instant it was as if the whole world had faded away, its edges dissolving, she felt so unsteady and lost.

  “Don’t worry about it, Darius was happy to go.”

  “How can you say that? But you’d take her part, you and Aziz are such good friends. I’m just an outsider.”

  “She’s being kind to us, putting us up all these months and she’s the oldest member of the family. In Iran we respect old people.”

  “Yes, of course, but that doesn’t give her the right to take my child away. I have to go there at once and get him. Where are they staying?” She was breathing with difficulty.

  “With her cousin, Batul khanoom”

  “I’ll take the bus there right now.”

  “No buses at this hour. There are a few early in the morning, then one at noon, and one at three thirty.” “Are you sure there isn’t one later than that?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Do you know anyone who’d drive me there? Of course I’ll pay him.”

  For the first time Monir looked impatient. “How am I going to find someone?” “I could take a taxi…”

  “Taxis won’t go that far unless you’ve arranged it in advance. Anyway it wouldn’t be safe for you to be alone in a taxi for such a long distance, particularly with your blue eyes. You don’t need to go there today!”

  Jennifer could not stop a sick, sinking feeling. Everything was sliding out of her control. Now Aziz’s behavior yesterday took on a new meaning: The resolute way she went about her tasks, avoiding conversation or eye contact with anyone, the way she was mumbling about the medical profession being backward. In her outrage Jennifer could not summon up tolerance for Aziz—she was a self-absorbed, selfish woman. What she had done amounted to kidnapping. “I can’t take this, nothing makes sense,” she said. “I’ve really had it. First Karim goes away and stays away as long as he likes, and now Aziz has taken Darius to another town without saying a word to me about it.”

  “Please don’t worry,” Monir said. “Come and sit down here, I’ll get you something to drink.”

  Jennifer ignored that. Entering her empty room, she was hit by a great loneliness. Darius’s grown-up-looking imitation leather slippers that Aziz had bought for him were flung on the floor, one by the bathroom door and one upside down by the bed, his toys were strewn on the floor and his bed was unmade. She could no longer stop herself, she began to sob. She went into the bathroom, shut the door, and kept crying. She said to herself inwardly, stop being frantic, he can’t be that sick or else he would have a higher temperature, wouldn’t be able to get out of bed at all, it’s bound to pass, but she couldn’t push away the weight pressing on her chest.

  After she calmed down a little she looked in the medicine cabinet to make sure Aziz had taken the penicillin with her. She didn’t find the jar there, so she went to Aziz’s room to check there. The air had a lingering scent of the rose water Aziz spread on her chadors and dresses before she went out. She looked on the shelves and then the mantle but she could not find the medication. She noticed that Aziz, as if propelled by a new energy, had put on the mantle the framed portrait of the prophet Mohammed as a young man with a halo around his head that she had seen before in the basement and next to it a photograph of Darius as a toddler they had once sent to her.

  At least Aziz seemed to have taken the penicillin. She kept trying to think of a way to get to Qom that day but then she realized Monir was right, she had no choice but to wait until morning.

  Chapter 17

  I have nothing against medication and doctors, they are created for humans by God, but these penicillin pills are making him worse, Aziz thought, throwing the jar into the river. The river was almost down to a trickle. Some women were washing clothes and rugs in it and then spreading them out on the rocks. Aziz loved the river, the hills around Qom, the startling greenness of the orchards against all the aridness.

  Then, holding Darius’s hand, she went toward the shrine. Nothing helps as much as prayer, she thought. It was prayer that saved Karim when he was a child from dying in a typhoid epidemic that killed hundreds of children. She could almost see herself as a young woman, holding Karim by the hand just as she did Darius now, coming to Qom to pray for his recovery. Under the
chador, she remembered clearly as if it were yesterday, she was wearing her blue satin dress and a blue ribbon on her hair. She was pretty, she knew, everyone said so. They said she was the pretty sister, Khadijeh was the vivacious one. Youth passes so quickly. She could never forget the closeness, all the sharing and confiding she had done with her sister and brother when they were children. Not that they were not close now, but being older, having lived through so many different concerns and experiences, made the closeness bittersweet. They had been lucky in many ways, though. They all married well and had wonderful children, though she had wished for more. Karim seemed to have the same fate now, for he and Jennifer appeared to be unable to have more children.

  What does Jennifer know about the healing power of prayer? She isn’t a bad person and she is so pretty, like a china doll, but she’s inscrutable in some ways. She will never blend in with us, she keeps herself separate, independent, from us. How do she and Karim fit together, two such different people, or has Karim become like her in ways I cannot see? If only she would live on in Iran instead of taking my son and grandson away from me again, I would lavish her with so much love that she would change to our ways. She is more simple and naive in certain ways than many Iranian wives can be.

  The shrine stood among several religious colleges and institutes. They entered its building through the gateway and then went into the huge first courtyard, facing the enormous gold dome and minarets and arches above the shrine. The intricate patterns made by pieces of mirrors cut to fit the honeycomb surface inside the three arches was such an amazing sight. Its splendor never diminished in her eyes, no matter how many times she came there.

  Families with children were sitting in the courtyard, picnicking, finches hopping around tree branches above them. She and Jamshid and Khadijeh were taken to this shrine frequently by their mother. Their mother and father were buried in Qom in a graveyard not far from here. She would go and pay a visit in a day or two after Darius was well, show him the graves of his great-grandparents. He was so curious about everything, and so smart. He was already learning Farsi and prayers so quickly.

  They went up onto the porch and she bought candles from an old man with a full white beard. Then she checked Darius’s and her own shoes with another man who stood inside a cubicle. She paused to kiss the door of the shrine and asked Darius to do the same. Darius said, “I don’t want to.” They went through the anteroom, then to the main room where the tomb stood. She lit candles among the others already burning in the small chamber on the side of the sarcophagus. Many pilgrims were standing around the tomb, pleading, praying. Some of them threw coins on the tomb through the silver grating surrounding it. Scents of sandalwood rose from the coffin inside. The words of prayers and of Koran suras echoed all around, penetrating her so deeply that soon it was as if they were coming from inside her. Bowing toward the sarcophagus she whispered, “I have tried to be good, I have prayed every day, given alms to the poor. I beg you, the Merciful, to make my only grandson healthy, immune to diseases. I have been teaching him to pray, please guide my only grandson to the right path, and to health.” As she stood there with Darius, her arms around him, praying with her eyes closed, everything began to glow brightly, penetrating her shut eyelids. Then she thought she heard a voice, serene and holy, coming from the sarcophagus and spreading through her, “Your wish has been answered.” For an instant she felt such a unity with the saint that she would not mind her life ending at that moment, then she came to herself and she thought of Darius and her responsibility toward him.

  She was filled with happiness, hope, as she walked back with Darius, into the anteroom, and then went into a smaller room that was for women only. Darius was just young enough to be allowed in the all-woman room. She sat down on the rug to rest her aching knees and let Darius stretch out beside her. She covered him except for his face with a part of her chador.

  Other women were sitting there also, alone or together, talking. A woman came in and began to pass around food—dolmas, dried fruit. “I’m here to beg Saint Fatemeh to give my daughter a baby. She’s been trying for years, with no success.”

  I should bring food here too, Aziz thought. I’ll come back for that on another day. Conversation buzzed around her. “I think my husband has another wife,” one young woman was saying. Another one said, “Let him, he’ll bother you less.” Two other women were talking about a relative who had cancer.

  Another woman came by passing glasses of tea and rock sugar around. Aziz took a glass for herself and one for Darius, who was waking up, and rock sugars, too, for both. She put the hard pieces of sugar in the glasses and stirred them until they dissolved. She urged Darius to drink some. “It’s good for you.” Darius took a few sips and then pushed away the glass.

  She drank her own tea quickly, thinking they should get going. This was a good time to find Batul khanoom home.

  Outside she said to Darius, “I want you to start the maktab tomorrow. You’ll learn a lot that’s good for you, my dear child, that will lead you to heaven.”

  “Can I swim in heaven? And eat ice cream all I want?”

  “Of course. Anything you ask for, and in the most beautiful of places.” She marveled once again at how well Darius had understood her and how well he had answered.

  She stopped at the grocery store and bought quince jam, yogurt, and bread for Batul khanoom and dried apricots, peaches, and cherries for Darius. “Already you’re feeling better, aren’t you?” she said to him.

  He just pouted his lips.

  Chapter 18

  Jennifer had a hard time sleeping when she went to bed. She stared at the faint patterns of light from the lanterns in the courtyard skipping around in the room. When she finally fell asleep she kept waking up from disturbing dreams. In one, she and Darius were standing by a pool in their bathing suits. Darius jumped in first, then he called in a high, tinny voice, “Mommy, Mommy, come in.” As Jennifer was about to go in, the air became hazy and then pitch-dark. The pool receded into darkness.

  In another one, she was in a dark alley and she could hear Darius calling in a clear, glass-sharp voice. “Take me with you.”

  “Where are you?” she asked, starting to run. “Mommy.”

  Then she saw Darius standing in a doorway, naked, his stomach bloated, his eyes bright and blinking like a kewpie doll. She got out of bed at dawn and quickly packed an overnight bag for Qom, in case she couldn’t return that day. She could hear footsteps in the courtyard, the clatter of dishes. No matter how early she woke others were already up before her, to do their prayers or set up the samovar.

  “Don’t you want any breakfast?” Monir asked her as she entered the courtyard.

  “I’ll get something at the station. Aziz’s cousin’s address is twenty-two Dadghar Street?” she asked to make sure she recalled correctly the address Monir had given her last night.

  Monir nodded. “Easy to remember, just ask anyone, they’ll tell you where the street is. But be careful, Qom is a very conservative town. Do you know what the saying is about it, they export religion and import the dead.”

  Jennifer tried to smile.

  Monir elaborated, “Almost all mullahs are graduates of Qom’s theological schools. And people like to bury their dead there, so that their graves are near the shrine of Fatemeh.”

  Before going to the bus station Jennifer stopped on Yusef Abad Avenue and went into the foreign currency exchange shop. She was running out of toomans. Luckily it was already open at that early hour. She gave the man in charge two one-hundred-dollar bills and received a huge stack of toomans in exchange.

  The station was very crowded but several buses were going to Qom and she had no trouble buying a ticket. Then she bought tea, cheese, and bread at a stall and ate them quickly. Her bus started boarding. As she was getting on she saw “Death to America” written in large black letters on the side of the bus. The slogan, though pervasive, always made her uneasy. And now she was feeling more vulnerable than usual, maybe because of Mo
nir’s warning.

  The bus was filled to capacity. Some of the passengers were forced to put their luggage next to them on the floor. Children sat on their mothers’ laps. The driver took his seat and said, “In the name of God.” Several passengers repeated, “In the name of God.” The woman sitting next to her was reading a newspaper. Jennifer glanced at the headlines and main stories, “Ayatollah Bagi’s message: Once again I remind everyone of the festering, cancerous American tumor growing in Islamic countries. It is our duty as Moslems to eradicate the tumor by spreading the revolution….” “Yesterday tens of thousands of people demonstrated in front of the former Nest of Spies, the American Embassy …” She turned to the window.

  Except for patches of wild flowers in bright red, purple, and yellow appearing now and then, the landscape was arid along the roads they traveled. The shadows on the ground were dark and wide. They passed a lake. The driver said, “That’s the salt lake the shah’s secret police threw people into. They were thrown in alive with their hands tied up.” A hum of horror rose from the passengers.

  As they approached Qom a glittering golden dome became visible between two minarets.

  The driver brought the bus to a halt on a narrow dirt road next to a food stall and a gas station. “Last stop,” he said, “We’re in the holy city of Qom.”

  There was a wild rush among the passengers to get off. Some of them went to the stall to buy food, others took their children to the public bathroom behind the station.