by Deno Trakas
“Really? I didn’t think that kind of thing happened in Iran.”
“Oh yes, no like America maybe, but the young people they love in every country. But now, with mullahs and Khomeini, I no know. Maybe everything change.”
“But do girls have sex before marriage?”
“Yes, some time. The father and mother say bad, Koran say bad, but some time the young people they want for to go to Garden of God.” She looked up at me, and I couldn’t help but interpret her smile to mean that she would like to go to the Garden of God with me. I’d been aware of her body next to mine under the blanket, of course, our shoulders rubbing, our thighs slightly overlapping as we sat cross-legged, but now the contact was hot. I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her to me. She yielded, leaned into me, let me kiss her on the lips for the first time—she tasted like hot chocolate—but then she pulled back.
“Jay, I sorry, I am afraid.”
“It’s okay,” I managed to say.
“I sorry.” She got up, put our mugs on the table, turned off the TV, and came back to me, kneeled in front of me.
“I want for to be free, I want for to be modern like American girl—my roommate, Nadia, she is like American girl—but I am afraid for sex, the body part and the heart part.”
“I am too. Most people are.”
“Yes? I am, how you say, I no talk about it.”
“Embarrassed, you’re embarrassed. Me too. Sex is private, and hard to talk about.”
“Yes? For you?”
“Yes, for me too, but with you I feel like I can talk about anything.”
She hesitated but continued. “Okay, I tell you. I want for to kiss you, but I want for to go slow.”
“Okay, sounds good.”
She scooted forward on her knees, put her hands on my thighs, leaned in, and kissed me on the lips again . . . slow, exploratory, and although I was almost certainly more experienced, I felt as if she were teaching me how to do it.
She pulled back, looked down, took one of my hands in both of hers and pressed it to her breast, then leaned in and kissed me again, and as I felt her body, I felt my body flood with chemicals or magic or whatever it was that drove human beings to mate. I would’ve thought that lines of poems would pop into my head, but no, this moment was all about the senses. I tasted her lips and tongue, I smelled compatibility in her skin, I heard and felt her accelerated breathing match mine, and my body wanted more, wanted all of her, but my head clicked in to remind me to let her dictate the pace, and she was stopping, breathing, pulling her lips away slowly, one inch, two, three . . . and we both opened our eyes, and her face came into focus, her eyes steady in the physical moment, looking at me almost without expression as we pulled apart and our breathing slowed in the aftermath of our first sexual encounter. Then she twisted around, sat in my lap with her back to my chest, and wrapped my arms around her.
We wiggled a bit to get comfortable, but then we sat silently for a while with our own thoughts and unsettled emotions.
I spoke mine: “Don’t leave.”
She looked at me over her shoulder, and I noticed that the kiss had wiped off her lipstick. “I must to leave.”
“Why?”
She turned so she could look at me more easily. “My mother sick. Also, for Sadegh is better.”
Not thinking clearly, I said, “Doesn’t your family want you to stay here where it’s safe?” As soon as I said it I remembered the attack—she wasn’t safe here either.
She understood and said, “I no can be happy here when trouble there.”
I nodded—what could I say to that? I wanted to say, Then let’s make the most of the time we have left, but I didn’t, I just held her and kissed her hair.
I began to feel sleepy and glanced at my watch—after 11:00—then asked if I could turn on the late news. She got up, did it herself, and crawled back into my lap. There was Ham Jordan, an old friend of mine, standing behind Jimmy Carter at the White House, and I bragged that I had worked with both of them briefly while I was at the University of Georgia and Carter was running for governor. A few minutes later, there was Sadegh—she pointed at him with pride—announcing that international observers would see the hostages “in the very near future.” How strange, these connections.
I took her home. She hugged me hard, kissed me quickly on the lips, and went inside.
The next day I bought her a red rose, took her to another movie, using the last of my last ESL check, but my American courtship made no headway, and at her door, when I asked her again to stay, she smiled but shook her head and didn’t invite me in.
On her last night, after supper she asked if we could walk down to Five Points. She went to the bathroom and came out wearing a long black cloth that covered her from head to foot, leaving only her face and hands exposed. She must have had it stuffed in her purse. She saw my surprise and said, “I want one time to wear chador in America.”
“Sure, it’s just, I’ve never seen you wear it before. But it’s nice, exotic. Will you be warm enough?”
“Yes.”
“Do you wear your regular clothes underneath, or what?”
She looked down, her eyes all I could see. “Usually the clothes, but now no.”
“No?”
Still looking down, coquettish whether she was trying to be or not, she shook her head. I didn’t ask why, I just took her hand, heated by the thought of Azi’s semi-naked body floating beside me, and as we walked the body pressed against my side as close as a layer of cotton.
Five Points was not very busy on this mild Wednesday night in mid-December. The few people on the sidewalks stared at us. In the Middle East, women wore chador so that men would not be tempted by the flesh, but tonight Azi was not only calling attention to herself, she was driving me crazy with temptation. Distracted by her body, and melancholy because this was our last night together, I didn’t have much to say, and she was unusually quiet too. We just walked, me and my shadow.
I brought us to a stop in front of a bookstore where James Dickey’s book, God’s Images, was displayed for Christmas. In the window’s reflection, with the moon rising over our shoulders, our eyes met, steady, and as naturally as the moon pulls on the sea, we turned to each other and kissed. A good kiss, not as good as the first, but long, deep—she tasted like a spice I couldn’t name.
After a quick, single-minded walk back to my place, I unlocked the door and opened it for her. She glided straight to the bedroom without turning on any lights, I followed, she stood beside the bed, turned her back to me, slowly pulled the chador off her head and shoulders, it slid to the floor, and there, cast into silhouette by moonlight coming in through the window, was the back side of the body I’d been imagining, unbelievably real. She got into the bed, under the sheets, and turned to face me. I resisted the urge to jump on top of her and devour her, tried to be cool instead, sat on the side of the bed and took off my clothes. When I rolled over to her, she clung to me. This close, I could see her eyes and part of her face—her expression was . . . determined. I said, “Are you sure?” She nodded. I couldn’t see her body as I wanted to, but I could feel it everywhere, and we took our time, kissing and touching and undulating, action and reaction, the physics of love, which came to her naturally, even though it was probably her first time, even though it hurt her.
She lay beside me, asleep, her head nestled against my hip as I sat up in bed looking at her, at the stripe of moonlight that had moved across her body for the last hour, as if the moon, like a slow Xerox, were trying to copy her for me.
To relieve the stiffness in my hip I slid down beside her, pushing off the sheet. Before pulling it back up, I touched her again, memorized her with my fingers from this new angle: her neck, shoulder, the dark-side moon of her breast. Even in the darkness her skin seemed to glow. I wanted to give her something, everything, to show how much she meant to me and to remind her in Iran that I was here, thinking of her, waiting. My most valuable possessions, the Toyota and bike, could h
ardly be stuffed into a suitcase, but she liked my black USC sweatshirt—I’d give her that—and my copy of The Poetry of Robert Frost. Inadequate symbols.
She awoke a little after eight with a flutter of her eyes. I watched. She didn’t seem confused about where she was or whom she was with or what she had done. Instead she seemed drowsy, relaxed, and pleased. I pulled her into my arms and kissed her forehead, said, “The Garden of God. I like it. It has beautiful flowers. Thank you for taking me there.”
She looked up at me. “You take me too.”
“Thank you for saying that.”
“Thank you for saying that,” she repeated with her own emphasis, and laughed.
“I’m not trying to be funny. I’m serious. You can’t leave today.”
“Insha’ Allah.”
“What does that mean?”
“Is Arabic, mean ‘will of God.’ I no want to leave, you know this.”
“I’m glad you don’t want to, but that doesn’t help. What will I do without you?”
“You find another.”
I almost said the cliché, “There is no other,” but it was simplistic and inadequate. My earth had settled a lot since the quake of my father’s death, but this was another huge loss, like a crack opening under me, and I felt wobbly with the knowledge that after today I’d never see Azi again. I tried one last time. “Please stay. I know your family is important, but . . . isn’t this important?”
She shook her head slowly, seemed to make a decision and said, “My father have sigheh, that is, um, short marriage. He marry other woman for some time, a day, a week, a month, and he give to woman money, and to baby if baby.”
“You mean he’s divorcing your mother?”
“No.”
“You mean he’s married to two women for a while?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t the mullahs and ayatollahs condemn that sort of thing?”
“No, mullahs have sigheh too.”
One of the stranger ironies of a strange land. “Can’t your mother get a divorce?”
“Maybe, but difficult for woman. In court in Iran, word of woman is half word of man. You understand?”
“And you want to go back there?”
She didn’t answer at first, but then said, “My father also pay for the school, but no pay now, and money is . . . . But mother need for me, no just for money.”
So it wasn’t political after all, but personal: man, wife, adultery, money. I thought of my own mother and her difficulties after my father died. “Do you think you’ll ever come back? If things settle down?”
“Hell if I know,” she said, repeating a phrase I used often, catching the inflection perfectly. She smiled. “I want for to come back, when everything in Iran better, but . . .”
I translated “but” to mean “no.” “Are you sure you have to leave?”
“Yes.”
“What was that phrase, the will of God?”
“Insha’ Allah.”
“Insha’ Allah,” I said. I liked the way it sounded, its soft vowels, but its meaning was hard and grim.
Azi pressed her body against mine, kissed me on the cheek, then turned over, reached to the floor, and picked up the chador. She sat with her back to me and wrapped herself, became Iranian. Then she half turned and looked at me, sad and sympathetic but ready to move on. She put a hand on my arm and said, “Rumi say Hold pain, it take you to God. In Iran I do this.”
“You mean you did in the past or you will in the future?”
“In past and in future.”
“Does it work?”
She hesitated, squinted like someone who wants to lie but has to tell the truth, and said, “No.”
CHAPTER 3
Azi and the hostage crisis became my obsession. Every night at 11:30 I turned on Ted Koppel’s new show on ABC, “The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage,” which kept count, Day 1, Day 2, Day 22, Day 32. . . . I watched the other news shows too and read all the stories I could find. Clearly, the hostage crisis was being prolonged by the power struggle between the student militants and the weak interim government, with both sides looking to the brooding Ayatollah for approval. Azi’s cousin, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, was mentioned and appeared on TV often. He spoke English well—he’d gone to school in the U.S. and Canada—and seemed more worldly and reasonable than any of the other Iranian officials, also stubborn and combative, also charming. When a reporter asked him if he was a radical, he smiled and said, “No, I’m a nice guy.” Although he was an unwavering supporter of the Ayatollah and staunch enemy of the Shah, he also wanted to end the crisis. When he came on TV, I felt hopeful and said out loud, Come on, Sadegh, send ‘em home. I put these thoughts and many others in my first letter to Azi, then closed with the last stanza of one of my favorite poems, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” written in the nineteenth century but as relevant as ever:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
As soon as I sent the letter, I began anticipating her reply, knowing that it might take weeks or . . . . I called the post office and asked if U.S. mail was still being delivered to Iran—I was assured that it was, although the U.S. Postal Service couldn’t say what went on in the mail rooms of the Ayatollah. Then I used all my Christmas present money to buy Azi some earrings, wrote another note, and sent them off. Then I called Mom to tell her that I couldn’t join them at my sister Barbara’s house on Christmas day, said I was broke, said I had work to do, said I didn’t want to be around my conservative brother-in-law, all true but still selfish and inadequate. The unspoken truth was that I was a mess over Azi. I dreamed about her: sometimes pleasantly we were together and laughing, sometimes painfully she was hidden or walking away or in danger. All day her absence ached in my muscles and bones. Joni Mitchell, Billy Joel, and Earth, Wind and Fire sang about her. Edith Wharton and e. e. cummings wrote about her. I’d always kept my crushes and loves private, rarely bragged or whined to my friends, except Richard, and never shared them with my family, and I didn’t want to start now, and I didn’t want to sit around and pretend to be in a festive mood either.
At winter solstice, the new season meandered in mild, the temperature rising into the sixties. A college campus, even one as city-bound as USC, is spacious and tranquil when all the students are gone, and for about five minutes I enjoyed having the lawns and lounges and library mostly to myself. Of course there were others around—maintenance men cleaning dorms and raking the last of the oak leaves on the horseshoe, assistant professors dashing off articles in the competition for tenure, and a few other grad students, working on dissertations or studying for the comprehensive exams in February—but I didn’t want to hang out with them any more than I wanted to hang out with my family. I wanted to steep in loss, the formal feeling as Emily Dickinson called it, zero at the bone. If I had been slightly more compulsive, I would’ve counted the days of Azi’s absence just as Ted Koppel counted the days of the hostage crisis. Instead, I read The American Adam for comps, a John le Carre novel for pleasure. And I walked a lot. Sometimes I wrote haiku about absence in my head. Sometimes I remembered them and sent them to her:
Crows crack spines of pines,
flimsy firs flinch with finches—
weight of your absence.
Everyone else was in a happy, holiday mood, buying presents and decorating their houses for guests, but for the first time in my life I spent Christmas day alone.
I drifted around my empty apartment all morning, turning the TV on and off, wrote Azi another letter, read a little, and treated myself to a double cheeseburger and fries i
n a plastic orange booth at Hardees, the only restaurant open. That was ridiculous, me and a wino with his shirttail sticking out of his open fly, an Indian or Pakistani couple eating without speaking, two rowdy teenage boys pulling up in a new truck with a red bow tied around it. I went home and took a nap. When I woke, I turned on the TV to check for developments in Iran—the White House Christmas tree was not lit, a symbol of the hostages’ loss of freedom, but there was no good news from Tehran. I lay on the couch and tried to read, couldn’t, and stared at nothing for hours. Finally I roused myself, ate chips and drank a few beers, and opened my only present, a gray wool sweater from Aunt Jane that was too big, or I was too small. My other presents, I knew, were waiting for me in Atlanta, but my sister would mail them. I thought my family would call to wish me a Merry Christmas—maybe they had while I was out—but I waited, gave up, tried to read again but couldn’t, and went to bed early, aching for Azi. I awoke around 5:00 A.M., dreaming of my father mowing the lawn barefoot, and lay awake with guilt whirring in my head.
When morning finally arrived, I still felt shitty, but I was determined not to wallow in self-pity any more. I thought of people I might visit: if only Richard were home, but he was visiting relatives with his wife and daughter until after New Year’s. I took another long walk and found myself on the edge of the Shandon neighborhood near Azi’s former apartment—on a whim I stopped to see if her roommate Nadia might be in. She was, and she welcomed me—“Mr. Nickel!”—like her dearest friend.
“Call me Jay,” I said.
Showing me in, she clicked off the TV, sat me down, then disappeared into the kitchen. Everything in the room was the same as before—Azi’s absence had left no obvious scar. From the kitchen Nadia called out, “I am so happy to have visit. I am so lonely since Azi is leaving. Usually I am going home for holiday, I live in Kuwait City, but my father and mother are in Japan for the business, so I stay. Why you not at home, Jay? Where is home?”
“Spartanburg, 90 miles north of here, but no one’s there. My mother went to my sister’s house in Atlanta, and I didn’t want to go because, well, for several reasons.”
