The Boat

by NAM LE

  "There is a bath," she said. For a moment Sarah was confused. Then Roya opened a semi-concealed, recessed door and showed Sarah into a bathroom as large as its adjoining room. The toilet, Sarah noticed, was Persian-style – a porcelain-lined hole with a hose adjacent. Through the walls Sarah heard the distinct sound of a BBC broadcast.

  "You have satellite?" she asked.

  Roya smiled at her almost maternally. Then she crossed her arms over the Chinese character on her chest and rocked back on her heels. Her face became pinched and brisk.

  "Parvin says you come for the rally."

  "Yes," Sarah said carefully.

  She emitted a dry chuckle. "Parvin is excited about these things. Very easily. Always. Like the play."

  The scene downstairs came back to mind. "Does that happen a lot?" Sarah asked. "Parvin and Mahmoud, I mean."

  "Yes," said Roya, then, "No, not like that."

  An impulse stirred within Sarah. "What do you think about the play?" When Roya didn't reply, she quickly pressed on: "You must be very happy to have Parvin back."

  But Roya was thinking about something else. Finally she said, "Mahmoud does not talk about it." She stood, arms crossed, absolutely still. "In 1999 his brother was shot. In the square where the rally will be."

  Sarah exhaled.

  "And then his father, who is an important cleric here – how do you say it? – denied him. As his son. In the mosque."

  At that, Roya pushed past Sarah back into the study, then hesitated by the desk. Her stance was guarded now, as though waiting to be dismissed. "Parvin likes it in America, yes?" She pronounced it Amrika. Without waiting for an answer, she said, "Parvin wanted to go, always, as a child." She leaned forward. Sarah realized she was being confidential. "I could have gone too, you know."

  Late afternoon light streaked in, contoured Roya's face in sharp, ambiguous planes. All at once Sarah comprehended the woman in front of her. She was the one who'd stayed behind. She'd stayed, toiling the same unspoken trench of sacrifice so that her sister could escape.

  "The play," said Roya, "it seems like punishment." She lingered on the word. "But who is it punishing?"

  "Is it too late?" asked Sarah. "For you to leave?"

  Roya stared at her for a moment, then her face dissolved into a slippery mess that had a smile in it. "I think about it," she said. "But why would I leave now?" She giggled into her fingers. "This is the most exciting time. If I leave now, what if I miss something?"

  * * *

  WHEN PARVIN WAS FOURTEEN, her family had long been marked as subversives by the revolutionary committees. Although they were religious-and had originally supported the revolution-her parents had been forced into hiding and her two older brothers into the front lines of the war.

  Sarah started. She hadn't known about any brothers.

  This was the war, Parvin went on, where thousands of boys cleared minefields by walking over them, clutching plastic keys to heaven. Where soldiers died in Iraqi chemical attacks because the beards they had grown to demonstrate their faith made it impossible for them to achieve proper seals with their gas masks. Parvin fell silent. She made no more mention of her brothers.

  They were sitting in one of the villa's upstairs studies. Outside the window a busted streetlamp flashed, at long intervals, on and off. Sarah only noticed when the brightness was doused – the world steeped a grade darker.

  Meanwhile, said Parvin, they were bombarded in Tehran not only by missiles but by announcements, victory marches, all extolling the glories of martyrdom. This was 1988. One day, a bomb razed their neighbors' apartment building. Her best friend lived there, and her cousins' family. She rushed over but already – even before the ambulances arrived – the wreckage had been blocked off by basiji in their red headbands. They barked out propaganda from their motorbikes. Parvin ran forward but was immediately knocked to the ground. Her ears were still ringing from the explosion. No one moved to help as one bike after another skidded inches from her head, spraying dirt and dust into her face. No crying! they shouted. Death to Saddam! they shouted. Death to America! It was in that moment, Parvin said, that she'd known she would have to get out of the country. The decision tormented her – her parents had already made it clear they could never leave their homeland. Her own loyalty, however, was used up. Or maybe it was greater than theirs. She didn't care where she went – to America, if those devils reviled it so much. All she knew was that she couldn't allow this place any further claim over her.

  By the time Parvin finished her account, night had fallen and the broken streetlamp lit their room in long, freakish strobes. The wind had picked up and the dark world outside now seemed suggestive of peril: window boards banging against frames, cans scraping themselves jerkily, as though injured, across the roads. Looking up, it was unnerving to Sarah how fast the clouds seemed to move across the nimbus of the moon.

  Parvin murmured, "I'm sorry about what happened at the meeting."

  Sarah shook it off. She glared at Parvin. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I didn't want to be defined by it. The exotic friend with the traumatic past." Parvin switched on a lamp. "You know how it is. Especially now."

  "But your brothers."

  Parvin averted her gaze.

  "Your sister. I'm your friend. You could've told me."

  A strange, abstracted pity sought its level within Sarah. For years she'd yearned to hear this story-this missing piece of Parvin's past – but now that she had, she felt no closer to her. She was confused. Hadn't she come here, in part, to make sense of Parvin's choices? And didn't this – the deaths of her brothers – now offer up that final sense?

  "My sister?" Parvin looked blank, then started bemusedly to smile: "Roya? She's not-she was married to my elder brother." She broke off. "I've never really known her."

  Outside, the wind squalled harder, skimming water up from unseen surfaces and spraying it through the shutters. Parvin got up and closed the window. Sarah saw her face, as she did so, setting inwardly.

  Parvin turned around. "They all talk about needing to be here," she said. "But I was here."

  In a way, Sarah envied them their pasts – Parvin, Roya – joined even by atrocity and privation, a shared past of such moment that they'd been forced, in separate ways, to flee from it. Mahmoud, who could reach meaningfully back to mythic battles. What did Sarah have? A childhood dim and distant, a thing half chewed and incomplete as though first used up by someone else. Memories of her parents, their rubbed-out faces. Only Paul remained – his vividness constant, hurtful, taunting. He walked into a room and stood still. Her past had never offered her any real excuses.

  "Anyway," said Parvin, "they're all hypocrites. They'd all get out if they had the guts."

  Sarah hesitated. She thought of what Roya had said earlier. "Things are really that bad?"

  "They've lost their nerve, is what it is. I'm so sick and tired of all this consultation. All this uprising by committee. All we do is hedge and prevaricate. The other side doesn't prevaricate. Ask that thirteen-year-old girl if they prevaricate."

  She was speaking now as though to an interviewer – as though into a microphone or megaphone. Pacing the small study in consternation. Her two brothers, Sarah reminded herself, had vaporized on the western fields – but already that seemed too easy an explanation. She wanted a deeper sense. Parvin had left here young – returned of age, zealous and single-minded. All those prodigal years in Portland – the biggest part of her life- what had they meant to her? Had they been anything more than personal wilderness? And what, then, of Sarah?

  "Look at what they do," Parvin said. "And we let them get away with it. We bend over backward – just to not offend their religious sensitivities. And the women" – she splayed open her fist in disgust – "all talking about equal rights, equal legal status, under sharia law. Under an Islamic state. All bullshit."

  An image of Mahmoud came into Sarah's head: his two fingers pointing up vatically, like a mock gun, while he preached. She a
sked, "Do they know? The drama group?"

  "Know what?"

  "That you're not putting on their play."

  Parvin considered her curiously. "If they want to put it on, who's going to stop them?" A gust of wind leaned against the house, creaking the walls in their joints. Parvin dipped her chin, then vigorously shook her head as though to cut short Sarah's protests. "So maybe they won't do it on the stage. Or as part of the official program."

  "I just don't understand," Sarah burst out, "what it's meant to do."

  Parvin stared at Sarah. Her mind shifting through its reactions.

  Sarah said, "If the play's only going to antagonize people, religious people – "

  "Remember the parade today?"

  "During their most important religious holiday – "

  "All those religious people, mourning together, right? Devout." Parvin squared round to face her. "Except – when you're in it, you realize it's more than that. I'll tell you what it is. It's sexual. That's how these things work here. All day, every day – it's don't do this, don't do that. Then – in God's name – step into one of these things and cop a feel." She strained, strenously, intricately, for the words. "It's all a con," she said. "Step in – then step out and tighten your veils."

  Sarah had been holding her breath. Now, as she let it out, she . sensed that a mood in her head had cooled and hardened. "You know," she said, "what you're doing. All this. It doesn't mean anything to me." Her own calmness surprised her.

  Parvin stopped, turned away from her. "Listen," she said. She took hold of her voice. "It's a shock at first, I know. But you'll see. Thursday – "

  "I want to understand," Sarah continued, "I do. That's why I came here. But it doesn't make sense to me, not emotionally, not even in an intellectual way."

  Parvin stood still for a while, then went over to the window and looked out. Wind, on the other side of the glass, absorbed the light, released it. From somewhere in the house rose the scent of burnt tea. Sarah waited, feeling the grief of a bygone situation, the deep-seated loneliness, well up into her like a drug. She'd made her choices years ago. They both had. How could they think to undo them now?

  "Is this about Paul?" said Parvin.

  Sarah didn't say anything.

  Parvin thought for a moment, then said, "We can talk about it. Let's talk about it."

  "Why does it have to be about Paul?"

  Parvin's face contracted. "Isn't it?"

  But there it was, in her voice – the habitual undertone, the unsaid charge that had tolled out between them ever since Parvin started the radio program. That Sarah's relationship with Paul wasn't worth talking about. That it had always been a luxury, ill-used and underappreciated, which Sarah had somehow snatched from the finite resources of other women – these women – and then squandered.

  "Don't worry," Sarah said. "I won't make you talk about him."

  It started raining. Standing at the window, her back to the room, Parvin said, "You must be tired. Roya prepared the guest room for you." She stayed standing there. Then she added, "I always thought Paul was fine. It was you who made things unbearable for yourself."

  "I'm sorry," said Sarah, "that my problems – " she broke off, her throat constricting – "that they were never as impressive as yours."

  "God," said Parvin, a sneer in her voice, "you haven't changed at all." She started walking. At the door she spun around. "You know," she said, "this isn't all just make-believe for me." Her voice was unnaturally flat. "I just opened myself to you."

  Sarah looked at her wretchedly, with the full force of accusation. "I know."

  Parvin left. Sarah stayed and listened to the rain. She felt crushed, completely enervated. No matter where she turned- everything she touched, she ruined. Moments later-though it seemed too early to sleep-she crept out and closed the door behind her, cautiously, as though leaving a hospital ward. She went to find her bed.

  ***

  ROYA WAS WRONG: it wasn't Paul who had broken her heart. Her heart had come already impaired. From the beginning she'd led a life of what seemed to be self-maintenance. She'd calibrated herself to be above average in all the average ways: running down the hours, the feasible commitments, the ready consolations of work and sleep. She'd built her life, elegantly, around convention – conventional aspiration, conventional success – and was continually astounded that no one saw through the artifice – no one recognized Sarah Middleton as all falsework and nothing within. Only Parvin had sensed this, she felt, and back in college had accepted Sarah into her friendship with as few questions as she wanted asked of her. It wasn't that they weren't intimate, or equal – more that Sarah, by nature, found it easiest to fall in with her, and had always been grateful for it.

  Of course, Paul complicated everything. Parvin could never understand that for Sarah, being with him was, in a slanted way, like watching TV – one of the few things capable of dragging her, temporarily, to a deeper plane of living. He took her conventionality and gave it depth, luster, definition. How had that happened? Even now, her memories of him dulled everything else. Their last morning: the broad-branched maples catching and holding the last of the dew, running it down their boughs and bodies in streaming rills. How, underneath the canopy, the air was cold, below the frost point, and the cordgrass as she waded through it crackled and chinked like Christmas paper.

  They broke up where, for Sarah, they'd truly begun. On their last trip to New Hampshire, in that held-breath space in a rare argument where they could be absolutely honest with each other, she'd asked – in a low voice as though to forestall any interest in his answer – whether he wanted to leave her.

  He'd paused. Mulling it over, as if it were a trick question.

  "Please tell me," she said. "You have to tell me. Do you?"

  He said, "No." But his face had caved into a deep frown.

  The next morning, ankle-deep in the wet grass, she'd thought over their life back in Portland – their shared apartment, their shared work – how it had seemed so tenable for so long. Years of her life. She turned to look at the blank-faced house and imagined him inside, asleep, buffered by his safe, solid childhood, his imperturbable parents – their mess of shared assumptions – and it occurred to her that maybe she had in fact simulated their entire relationship. Maybe she'd lived it on both sides. What did she really know about him?-about how he felt about her? The front door of the house opened and he came out swathed in one of his family bathrobes.

  "Sarah?"

  He crossed the back lawn in his slippers.

  "It's freezing out here," he said. "Come on."

  She watched him approach. The grass washed into a bright green that was full of light, that had yellow in it. Behind him, black clouds sprouting on the horizon, flying fast and low toward them, shaving the tops of trees. He stopped at the edge of the lawn. Then she saw it in his face. With a visceral hitch that was at least part relief, she thought of all the things that would happen now – the crushing logistics of moving out, parceling out property, navigating a shared workplace – all the wearying, recursive conversations she would be fated to have.

  Paul took his bathrobe off and wrapped it around her. Underneath, he wore boxers and a T-shirt, and the sight of it tore her apart.

  ***

  What had been real and what not? What must she hold onto, what release? Sarah sat on her bed, staring out into the dimly glowing night. Low gray boxlike buildings stretched away into brown slums and behind those, Mahmoud had told her, was the salt desert. Dasht-e Kavir. From out that expanse came music all night, parched, tattered – drums, always, but also fragments of a man's voice in harrowed mourning. Once Sarah heard the theme from Titanic.

  In the beginning it had been terrifying. Her working life she'd spent assigning tasks to units of time; how, then, could she spend all her time not thinking about him? She quit her job, moved into her mother's house. She'd saved enough that money was never an issue. It had been far easier than she'd expected to leave work – but surviv
ing a vacant day seemed impossible. She couldn't cast her life so far. It was a matter of hours – minutes, really, and through those minutes it had been Parvin who had talked her on, coaxed her to apprehensible distances. They'd pored over her pain together – Sarah, all the while, shirking the suspicion that her friend was now only ever present for her pain. What had been real? When had Sarah truly been happy? Here – now – in this dark villa – her life again revealed its fiber to her. Work: an overcast spread of clocked-in hours. Paul: streaks, dyed strands of memory, unraveling at every touch. To think about it now, the closest she'd ever come to real happiness had been by herself: swimming at the local indoor pool before work. She'd always liked the silence of new morning, the crisp smell of chlorine, the high stained windows that, during summer, filtered the light through like bottled honey. Sometimes, when she was first to arrive, the rectangle of unbroken water shone with the hardness and sheen of copper. She liked the companionship she shared with the other swimmers – all serious swimmers at that hour – the feeling of being alone, unrequired to commit any of the compromises required of human interaction, and yet a part of them; her mere presence the stamp of her belonging. Here she belonged. She liked standing on the blocks, goose-pimpled, second-guessing, and then the irretractable dive into cold water – the sheer switch of it against her skin – she was wet now, cold, her hair wet, and there was nothing to do but to swim herself warm. Lap after lap she would swim: pure sound and feeling; matching the rhythm of her strokes to the pace of her breathing, the ribbed circuit of air through her body. Conditioning herself into a kind of peace. Then, afterward – home.

  ***

  SARAH WOKE FIRST THE NEXT MORNING. She ran the bath, turned the bathroom light on, then off again. The water reflecting the bone-dull sky. She slipped out of her underwear and into the cold water.

  Beneath her, the house roused slowly into sound. She lay in the tub, studying the high, molded ceilings, taking in the scents of lacquer and rosewater. She'd made it through the night. Was Parvin awake? Sarah felt toward her now a mild, civilized remorse-as if all her antipathy had exhausted itself the previous night.