by NAM LE
He took her to a seafood bistro near Seven Corners where even the water smelled like mussels. They ordered crabs. Paul rolled up his sleeves and broke open a pincer, his fingers with their perfect square nails glistening in the meat's steam. She found herself transfixed as he slurped the wet flesh. As though to hold up her end of the deal, she tried to eat sexily – imitating the way women on TV pursed their lips, leaving the tip of each morsel visible – but ended up dripping grease down her chin and forearms and onto her blouse. He didn't notice, or seem to. They went on to a small jazz club in an Irvington brownstone that looked, from the outside, like a B&B. The music, breathless and wheezy, mixed with the alcohol, and, when he righted his chair away from her and leaned toward the band, wrists on his knees, his expression almost narcotic in its concentration, she shocked herself by arching over and kissing him on the side of his neck. He turned to her with a look of surprise.
The door of his apartment was cold and hard against her back. She popped up on her toes. His hands were all over her body now. It was dark. He reached under her shirt and pulled it up, over her face. She tilted her head back. The collar caught under her chin. He kissed her through the fabric, roughly, the taste of his mouth salty with the taste of her body. She felt heavy in her legs. The metal of his belt buckle shocking her skin.
"I can't stay," she said.
"I'll stop," he murmured, somewhere around her navel. His fists were tight on her waistband, tugging.
"No." She reached down and outlined his shoulders, tense with exertion. His tendoned neck. "I mean, I've got a brief due tomorrow." For a moment everything was suspended but the words, the image of her keyboard blue-lit by her screensaver. Why had she said that? He continued below in the darkness. Maybe she hadn't said it aloud. She lifted her legs one by one. "Turn around," he ordered.
She turned around. The air was cold against her bare skin but still she felt woozy with warmth. The music from the jazz club banged around in her head. She had never done this. She had never turned around like that. She was a girl who'd always undressed under the covers and now she was naked in the hallway of an unknown apartment with a man she barely knew behind her.
"Wider."
From an adjoining apartment a telephone started ringing. She heard him undo his buckle, unzip. She could feel the heat of him, her body nervous with want. He spat into his hands and slick-ened her. A shudder ran through her, was forced from her mouth as noise.
"Wider."
Someone answered the phone, a muffled, stale inflection in counterpoint to his spongy breathing. His wet hands gripping her hip bones. His fingernails. All of a sudden she needed to see him. She needed to see his face. She twisted around and looked at his face. It was creased in anger – his eyes closed – a snarl on his lips. She bit back a cry. She didn't know him. This man who was fucking her. Then she looked again, closely, and realized the look on his face wasn't anger at all.
He was gone when she awoke. The room grown strange in its size, the white glow through the shutters. Except where her body had lain the bed was cold. Stupid, she thought, Stupid, stupid, stupid. The secretaries would have a field day. Why was she thinking about the secretaries? Stupid! She got up, squinting in the dim burn from the windows. Then she saw them – her clothes – neatly folded in a chair. The bastard. Later, she would tell him it was preposterous to think a woman wouldn't interpret the scene as she had. She dressed quickly, quietly, as though under orders. By the time she'd finished she was so shaken that when, on her way out, she saw him at the kitchen counter, still in his boxers, pen in hand, correcting her brief in the light from an open fridge; when he called her name and she heard how it sounded on his lips, it was unfair-an unconscionable situation- because she'd been rendered wholly susceptible and was no longer in any state to resist.
The air-conditioning unit clicked twice, made a rattling sound, whined off. Sarah tried it again, then gave up. She lay down on the bed. The sheets were cool, the pillowcases so starched they creased like cardboard. The shadows thrown by the tree boughs against her skin looked like the written language here: half-open mouths, fishhooks, sickle blades, pregnant letters with dots in their bellies. An alphabet refracted in water. She closed her eyes. Again, the faint thud of drums. After a while- unable to sleep-she got up and turned the bath spigot, conscious of the waste but past caring, letting the water run as white noise.
THE PHONE RANG. Sarah woke up – how long had she been asleep? – into an awful smell: like fruit gone bad, sink water left too long. She struggled to place herself inside it. No one answered when she picked up the receiver, the only sound a faint hum of song. The sun was high outside. She realized now: the smell had worried her since she'd first arrived in Tehran – suppurating as though from some open wound beneath the city.
Three short knocks at the door. She floundered up.
"It's you!" exclaimed Parvin in a hoarse voice, lunging her arms around Sarah's neck. "You made it!" Sarah held on to her, startled by the force of her own relief. They both pulled back. It was disconcerting to see Parvin's face cropped by the black scarf.
"Oh, Sarah." Parvin, smiling steadfastly, seemed on the verge of saying any number of things, but said nothing.
"What's going on?" asked Sarah. "Why can't I stay with you?"
Parvin glanced behind her. In the hallway was Mahmoud, wearing dark slacks with a white shirt buttoned up to his Adam's apple. He looked fleetingly at Sarah, then shuffled his body completely around.
"He told you that?" Parvin lowered her voice: "It was just a precaution."
"A precaution against what?"
Parvin hesitated. "There have been a few arrests." She sidestepped Sarah into the room. "But they tend to crack down during religious holidays. My God, it stinks in here." She swung around. "No – I'll tell you all about it, but right now" – she waved with both hands – "go get your things. We're late."
Sarah dashed into the bathroom. She would save her questions. In the bathtub, the water was cloudy, tinged with mineral colors. She turned off the faucet and suddenly the sound of the outside world flooded in: drumbeats, unmistakable, in every distance, cymbals, the occasional flare of an amplified voice. She thought she heard children's footsteps.
"Sarah!"
The din on the street was astonishing. Noise collected and chafed, it seemed, in the folds of fabric next to her ears. The sky was white, overcast, and beneath it wind gusted, fitfully, as if trapped. They were going to her parents' house for a meeting, Parvin shouted, but first she wanted Sarah to see this. They turned into a chaotic market: shop after shop spilling wares onto the road – hats, shirts and shoes, electronic gadgets that blared a cacophony of tones and trills as they walked past. Sidewalk barrows were packed with green plums and big yellow limes and red-black mulberries, with dates, raisins, and nuts of every description. The dull sheen of the sunlight heightened and contrasted the rows of colors.
Parvin turned toward her. "I'm so glad you came," she called out.
Sarah grinned. For the first time since landing she felt completely safe. She was still taking note of the new heft of Parvin's body underneath her robe, the untidy fringe of brown hair – her natural color! – underneath the hair-clipped scarf. Even her eyes seemed more naturally brown. She looked like a rougher, truer version of herself.
"Where were you this morning?" Sarah asked.
Parvin held up her hand. They rounded another corner and abruptly the air turned thick with deep-throated cries, the crash of cymbals. A mourning procession. It looked, Sarah was stunned to see, exactly how it looked on newsreels: young men straight-backed behind enormous drums; behind them, moving in block step, men clapping their chests, throwing iron chains over their shoulders like dinner jackets. They were all bearded; all – she thought with reflexive guilt – indistinguishable from one another. Men in loose black robes and green headbands. Men with tunics open to their navels. Men naked above the waist-their backs swollen, flayed, slug-shiny in the light.
Sarah let go of
her breath. This was why she'd come-to see exactly this – the city as it was – the proof of this place unthinkably outside herself.
Now an enormous square canvas floated down the street, hoisted on two poles and luffing like a sail in the wind. It depicted a black-bearded man. His eyes soulful, mascara-dark, watching everything. The street was full of these pictures.
"Imam Hussein!" shouted Parvin. The loudness of her voice almost tipped it into cheeriness.
He was shown in deep green robes and a black turban, and – with his gentle, cowlike eyes – looked bizarrely like an oriental Jesus. What had Parvin said about bin Laden? That it had to have been a mistake: that no one so soft-spoken, with such kind eyes, with that flossy beard, could have been responsible. It was difficult, sometimes, to tell when she was joking.
"Grandson of the Prophet." That was Mahmoud speaking – he'd caught up with them from behind.
But Parvin was already pushing farther into the mayhem. They came across a low gnarl of bodies: a man with white pants lay on the ground bleeding from his scalp, his hands interlocked around his head as though to improvise a basin. People converged, crouched over him, then kept onward. Sarah realized with horror that they were dipping their sleeves into his blood.
"Why are they – "
The drums drowned her out. She rooted herself within the milling mass and said it again, louder: "Why are they doing that?"
It was a street show extravaganza and she was being scripted, deeper and deeper, into panic. A test, she reminded herself. She could write her own part. Both Parvin and Mahmoud were a short distance ahead, on the opposite sidewalk – Parvin beckoning to her. Parvin, who'd assured her a few months ago it was worth coming just to see Ashura. There was a huge black cauldron behind them. A tarpaulin making the sound of surf as it flapped in the wind – something white and woolly weighing down its center. Sarah came closer, then shrank back. The carcass of a headless sheep – blood still dribbling, gel-like, from its stump, darkening its matted collar. On the sidewalk, spectators threw up their hands and wailed.
Parvin shoved a plastic cup into her hands. "Tea," she said loudly.
Sarah twisted back toward the parade.
"He is okay," said Mahmoud. He pointed at his head.
"He's not okay, he's bleeding!"
A troop of women and girls poured down the street, coalescing around the prone figure. They were dressed in full black chadors – covering everything but their shoes and faces – and their faces shone out from within their black hoods like beacons of pale grief.
"You are thinking 'What a barbarism,' " shouted Mahmoud. "You are thinking, 'There is much violence in Islam.' "
Some of the women, Sarah noticed, wore white sneakers. They were keening to music that crackled from a ghetto blaster. White and yellow tulips sprang from their hands.
Mahmoud pointed at his head again, a certain shyness in the gesture. Sarah realized her head scarf had slipped down to her neck. She quickly pulled it up over her hair, turned back to face him.
"I was thinking 'Poor sheep,' 'Poor man.' "
"The man," he replied with a small smile, "he cuts his head to remember the imam's suffering."
"And the sheep?"
From nowhere, a bearded figure in a black gown and white cap brandished a metal rod in front of her face. She cringed, closed her eyes, then felt the spray of water on her cheek.
Both men enjoyed this. "Perfume," explained Mahmoud, "for pilgrims."
Parvin cupped Sarah's elbow in her palm.
The man walked away. There was a metallic tank affixed to his back like a rocket pack. Sarah's face smelled of musk and amber. Dime store deodorant. She made a decision. She swiped the wetness of her cheek onto her fingers and made to flick it at Mahmoud 's face, his smooth-skinned jaw.
"Please," he said, taking a step back.
She flushed. "We're all pilgrims," she said.
* * *
LONG BEFORE SHE'D SET FOOT on its streets, this world had already conspired to throw her off balance. When Parvin first told her she'd founded, with typical slapdash resolve, a weekly call-in radio program agitating for women's rights reform in Iran, Sarah hadn't known what to think. Back then – four years ago – no one did much thinking about Iran. At most, people in her circle were predisposed to a vague solidarity with the country – arising from the sense that any place reprehended by an administration itself so reprehensible couldn't be all that bad.
Parvin had her own ideas. She taught herself how to produce an audio program at a local college; how to stream it online to a company in Holland, which then broadcast it live, via shortwave radio, into Iran. Shortwave – what did that even mean? Her show, Tehran Calling, was live, direct, unrehearsed: its proclaimed mission the complete political, economic and religious liberation of the Iranian woman. Its callers broke the law – risked their lives – every time they called. Sarah indulged her friend's effusions. She'd become used to them. Ever since they'd met in college, Parvin had enthralled herself with one cause or another. What was surprising to Sarah was that Parvin had actually chosen this cause: she'd always been close-lipped – even cagey – about her past in Iran. She'd left as a teenager, Sarah knew that. Her parents had sent her to Europe. Beyond that was a studiedly offhand trail of red herrings: a Swiss boarding school, a German boyfriend, an older divorcé who'd been an offroad racer, a father who'd been a university professor. Sarah could never have predicted that the show would make Parvin a minor celebrity in the Persian reformist movement – let alone that it would pave the way, ultimately, for her re-emigration.
The truth about the show: Sarah had always had trouble taking it seriously. For one, everybody who called in spoke English. Of course it was a show in English, but how could she take seriously the oppression of this far-flung people who were not only English-speaking – but so liberally educated? Who could afford to make these regular international calls? Her misgivings were foolish-she knew that. But on the occasions when Sarah had dropped by the studio, she'd repeatedly heard words like oppression, lectures laced with jargon and political-science abstractions, and it didn't help that Parvin seemed to absorb, expansively, unconsciously, the heavy Persian accent of her callers. To Sarah it seemed that, as the show grew in popularity, it developed more and more a sense of staged parody.
Once, she'd stepped in near the end of a show and heard a thickly accented male voice ask: "What do you look like?"
Parvin had thrown Sarah a look – a look full of slyness, scorn, self-mockery – and instantly it had dawned on Sarah that Parvin had changed, that she'd drawn away, steadily and for some time, from that side of herself. The side that Sarah knew.
"I think you are ugly," the man said. "Your voice is ugly."
The rest of the hour slid into bewildering invective: Parvin was a monarchist, she was un-Islamic, she was funded by the CIA, she was completely ignorant. Not once did she hang up. She let her callers talk. It wasn't until much later that Sarah learned she'd stumbled on the anniversary of the 1999 student uprisings; then, in the small, too-bright studio that evening, Sarah had struggled to puzzle out her own feelings. She'd never seen her friend like that. Where was the headstrong, irreverent Parvin? the hot-tempered disputant? the career radical who nevertheless prided herself on maintaining professional irony at all times? Where was the strength and variousness on which Sarah had always drawn-and often over-relied? She should say something. What should she say? How to navigate that space between sympathy, tact, unconcern?
A sign above the mixing desk read: Please leave the STUDIO IN THE SAME CONDITION.
"The thing is," Parvin anwered her later, during the drive home, "they're right." It was nighttime now; as she talked, cigarette smoke vented from her mouth and shredded out the open crack of her window. "I was born there, but still. You need to be there."
"They shouldn't talk to you like that," said Sarah. She thought of the man's voice – all those voices – faceless and hateful. Those accounts of killings, rapes, finger ampu
tations, related in attitudes that seemed possessive, even petty. If those things were happening, she felt instinctively, they couldn't be happening to those people calling in. Mostly, she realized, what she felt was anger. What she'd meant to say to Parvin was, You shouldn't let them talk to you like that.
"It's their right," said Parvin.
"Doesn't it piss you off, though?"
But her friend was resilient, she was preposterous, amazing. Probably there was something wrong with her. Something missing that, in everyone else, assorted actions by the need to be liked and the anxiety that you weren't.
Set in these habits, they grew apart. By then Sarah had met Paul, and Parvin, to Sarah's mind, had reacted gracelessly. She couldn't concede how frustrating it might be for Sarah – watching Parvin sink into a world so at odds with the Iran everyone now heard about: the place populated overwhelmingly by brand-conscious, recreationally drugged youths; riddled with online networking sites and underground dance parties. If there was indeed a tyrannical regime, it seemed the citizenry had opted out of it. This version of Iran, especially being counter-mainstream, struck Sarah as authentic. Parvin, she felt, was being exploited by a native audience that kept insisting – for whatever reason – on its own victimhood.
For a long time Sarah deferred to Parvin's background, probing her friend only lightly about these discrepancies. Later, in efforts to prove the baselessness of Parvin's concerns – the audacious sham of the regime – Sarah began marshaling facts: that during the embassy takeover, for example, people had been bused in from the provinces and hired to burn American flags and shout anti-American slogans in exchange for free food, that they wouldn't start until the cameras were rolling and, if there weren't any video cameras – if only still photographers were present-they wouldn't even bother shouting but just punch the air in silence. It was a country busy with its own deceptions. It neither wanted nor needed Parvin's help.
