by NAM LE
As she dressed, the sound of amplified stereo static, followed by a haunting ululation, piped through the street bullhorns. The call to prayer. She went to the wood-shuttered window, looked out through the web of large leaves. The sound touched a deep chord within her. For the first time, she strove to imagine the cleanness of belief that could pull all those foreheads to stone, unwaveringly, five times a day. What was the lie? That you could change your life? She looked out, watching the unknown city roll out before the new sun, its dazzling labyrinth of streets and walls, its villas and bazaars, the evil vizier cast down for good into the valley and the smog burned off to unveil magnificent Damavand – vast and near, seamed with snow and meltwater. It was a two-minute peace – she knew that – but she allowed it.
"I know, it still gets me too."
Sarah turned around and saw Parvin in the doorway. She wore, uncharacteristically, a long, fluid, green dress, and her mouth was pressed tight.
Sarah started to speak but Parvin held up her hand. She sat down on Sarah's bed. The call to prayer continued, the man's voice so elongated, so reedy, it sounded like an instrument.
"There's a word in Farsi," Parvin said, "Khafeghan. It means a feeling where you can't breathe. A kind of claustrophobia." Parvin lifted her face and stared straight ahead. "You hear it used a lot over here."
Sarah tried to repeat the word. "I think I understand," she added.
Parvin shifted on the mattress to face Sarah. "Listen," she said, "this is my work. This is what I do now." She made an effort to smile, and then she did. "It's enough that you're here."
"I can't believe it. That I'm here. You're here."
Parvin thought for a moment, then said, "I won't lie to you. Mahmoud thinks you shouldn't come tomorrow."
"What do you think?"
"There's something else," said Parvin. "One of our members isn't answering his cell phone." She jutted out her jaw, then closed her mouth again. "It's probably nothing, but you never know."
Sarah looked at Parvin, newly surprised by the green dress – gladdened, somehow, by how obliviously she wore it. A vestige of peace abided in Sarah. She wanted to share it with her friend but before she could figure out what to say, Parvin had already stood up and left the room.
***
ALL DAY THE PARTY CONVENED DOWNSTAIRS. Sarah was glad to keep to herself, perusing books in the study – mainly German books on art and architecture. She found the satellite television and sated herself on current events, most of which seemed irrelevant and repetitive. She watched clouds move across the mountains. Jet-lagged, she fell asleep.
Late in the afternoon Roya barged into her room. Sarah barely recognized her at first, fully arrayed, as she was, in robe and head scarf.
"Parvin is gone," she said. She looked at the cell phone in her hand. "Reza says she is going to the square."
"Is she okay?"
Roya shrugged, her expression indistinct. "He says she is meeting with the drama group. He went with her to help."
"Wait," said Sarah. "Where are you going?"
"I am going out." She puckered her lips, shot Sarah an astute look. "I think Mahmoud is driving to the square."
It was almost dark when they left. The motorway was clogged – cars like theirs – wide and metal and box-nosed. They turned down a one-way street straited on both sides by canals. Buses belched out charry exhaust. Sarah looked and spotted men with kerchiefs over their faces, women with rearranged scarves. A city of bandits. Suddenly a bus – going the wrong way – roared straight at them. She gasped, closed her eyes, then realized they were okay. The contra-fiow lane, said Mahmoud, muttering his reassurances.
Neither of them wanted to talk about Parvin. They talked instead about the program for the rally. Sarah asked him about his father. He hesitated, then told her his father was a high-ranking cleric, one rank below ayatollah – here you decided for yourself when you were ayatollah – but his, Mahmoud 's, own religion was more complex. He was born after the revolution. What did that mean? It meant he was supposed to feel a certain way.
He and his father no longer talked.
"I forgot you were a lawyer," he said wryly.
The Party stood for civil rights. That was all. It was not anti-Islam. Nor was it anti-America. After 9/11 they'd come out with the other thousands and did she know what they said? They said, Death to terrorism! They said, Death to bin Laden! They said, America, condolences, condolences.
Abruptly he turned to her. "Was Parvin like this when you knew her?"
"Like what?"
"Like she cares for nothing. For no one."
"What are you talking about?"
They rumbled across a low bridge. The water below soupy and junk-filled.
"She's trying to help," said Sarah. Without fully understanding why, she felt – in that moment – that before Mahmoud she would defend Parvin to the very end. She owed her that much.
"And you?"
She laughed uncertainly. "Don't ask me about politics," she said. "I'm just here for her. Moral support."
"Moral support," he repeated.
They parked the car and started walking. A drizzle came down and made the concrete dark around them. At last they reached the edge of a large square. It shone with the changing light of a thousand candles. In the radiance Sarah could see that stalls had been set up in parallel rows and a stage erected at the far end. There was movement on the stage. Two large portraits of the black-bearded martyr bannered down on either side. Above the ground glow, trees had been hung with green lamps. According to Mahmoud, all the candles were to light the imam's passage after his death.
"Is this where ..."
"Yes," he said. He pointed at the distant stage, then opened his hand and made a motion like a windshield wiper. "Tomorrow – there will be hundreds here."
"Where's Parvin?" He frowned slightly. "Her phone is not on."
They wandered into the gridded space. It was crammed with people, mostly youth. Gas lanterns and feeble fluorescent tubes. In the half dark, fewer people stopped to notice her. The air smelled strongly of burning meat. Mahmoud behind her, she passed a cluster of stalls selling chains set in wooden handles. Then juice vendors and smoking grills. Her mouth watered; she stopped to buy kebabs and immediately a quick-witted boy accosted them, hawking popsicles. His eyes became large, almost insectoid, when he saw her face.
"I'm sorry," she murmured.
There was a stirring at the far end of the square. The sound of firecrackers and the sputtered brightening of smoke. They couldn't see anything through the crowd.
Mahmoud accepted a kebab from her but didn't eat it. They left the congested market stalls and walked into the green halo of a multi-lanterned tree. "You come to Iran – during Ashura – and do not want to talk politics?" He spoke loudly, over the square's hubbub, and his tone seemed to have risen in pitch. "Who comes to Iran if not for politics?"
She looked at him and realized he was joking. It accorded, she felt, with her beginning ease in this place, her sense of being slowly let in. She recalled what Roya had said about him being a hero. As though he'd read her mind, he turned away.
In front of them was the large stage. Actors mimed a battle scene with much shouting and clashing of wooden swords against shields. They were roundly ignored by the square's swarming youth. Parvin was nowhere in sight. Sarah sat with Mahmoud on a bench near the stage. On an opposite bench, a white-bearded old man bared his stained teeth at them. He was something sucked out from a dream. The tree behind him had flowers in it, a carpet of candles all around its trunk. As the night passed, people came and knelt and added candles in religious observance – shapes of women more fabric than human-form; men same-faced, retreating into their beard-shadows. Who were they? What were they to her? The more she looked, the less she saw of this city.
Mahmoud flung out his right arm. "You see them?" he asked. "Look."
They gathered, where he pointed, in fluid, makeshift groups. Teenagers, by the looks. Most of the girls wore h
igh heels and flared jeans or calf-length capris. Their faces glossy and made-up. Their scarves not black but bright and diaphanous, pushed far back to expose their hair, and instead of the long, loose overgarment they wore figure-hugging trench coats that barely reached their knees. Even through her outward alertness Sarah felt self-conscious. She remembered the pilot's announcement on the plane, remembered feeling, curiously, the act of covering up as though she were stripping naked. But this. How could anyone arrest anyone at all when all this was in plain sight, was plainly permissible?
"They are not here for Ashura," spat Mahmoud. "They are here for Valentine's Day." Many of the girls in lazy possession of bouquets and teddy bears. Couples holding hands.
"You know what they call this? 'The Hussein Party.' " He didn't look at her. In the candlelight, his features seemed statuesque. He hadn't touched his kebab. She caught a sudden whiff of spice on the wind.
Firecrackers went off again, closer this time. She shifted in her seat. There ran a new restlessness through the youth. Cell phones, dozens of them, ring tones random as wind chimes.
They came from the southern edge of the park. Four cars – old sheet-metal heaps that could have been salvaged from American junkyards, one with a broken, million-glinting windshield – pulled up bumper to bumper and they spilled out, men with various beards, holding clubs and chains and walkie-talkies.
"It's them," hissed Mahmoud. He yanked her back down onto the bench. "They will see you."
One man swung a baton through the crowd of youth as though cutting through brush with a machete. They skittered apart. A girl screamed. Several of the men stood behind the others and spoke out through cupped hands, clearly and ecstatically. One came toward them. He paused in front of the stage and took in the show.
"Your scarf."
She pulled her scarf tight over her head, tucking in every strand of hair, leaving the front hanging, cowl-like, over her face.
More cries sounded out from the maze of stalls. The rows between them clearing fast. The men fanned deeper.
"You must stop looking at them," said Mahmoud. He moved closer to her on the bench. They were a couple now, close enough to be conventionally transgressive – but not too close. An older couple in this park of kids, with nothing to fear from these men.
Her breath caught when she saw a group of them dragging three shapes back to their cars. Then she saw. She actually felt her heart stop. The darkly stubbled face – it was Reza, seemingly unconscious. The other two were young men she didn't recognize. A strange girl stood rooted at the edge of the square and lifted her hands to either side of her nose and mouth.
"Stop looking," Mahmoud murmured. She let her face drop, inhaled sharply. Now the men were banging their clubs against steel poles. She felt each impact in the seat of her stomach. Warmth emanated from Mahmoud 's body. The ground was wet, busy with candlelight, green shadows. The old man opposite started talking, roaring with laughter. Another man's voice joined in.
Mahmoud leaned in closer. "You are an American citizen," he said. "You will be safe."
"Did you see Parvin?"
"Listen to me," he whispered into her ear. "Listen to me. When Parvin first came back, she was taken."
Sarah's stomach, already riled, turned hot and sick.
"But she did not want to tell you. But she was safe. I tell you this because."
A man stopped in front of them. Bits of gravel and broken glass stuck to the rim of his soles: cheap, synthetic-leather shoes. You couldn't beat anyone with those shoes. The wooden club hanging beside them.
"Salam."
"Salam," Mahmoud said. Sarah kept her head bowed, the hard burl of cloth digging into her throat. The men conversed for some time. He sounded normal, in good cheer, this man with his wooden club. He told a joke and found it worth repeating again and again. Mahmoud laughed behind his words with terrible sunken sobs. Then the man fell silent – a short lull – and when he spoke again his tone had changed. He was speaking to her.
Mahmoud said something in Farsi. The strange man reacted animatedly, quarreling now with the exaggerated intonation she'd come to expect, through TV, from Middle Eastern men – that windy, slightly petulant swing of voice. Mahmoud turned and murmured to her, but in Farsi. Those words – their lilting, curious energy – she was sure they held the key to her life. If she could just understand those words. The man reached down, elbowing Mahmoud aside, and lifted her chin.
Breath rushed into her windpipe; she started to cough, then stopped herself.
The man considered her. There was a dangerous looseness through his face – his wide-spaced eyes, his purple lips swelling out through his beard. She felt irrationally as though she already knew him, had encountered him already in some similar situation. Mahmoud so young, fresh-faced, next to him. The man said something to her. She was aware of his companions prowling the square behind him as he prodded the club into the damp ground, leaving a mesh of curved dents. She forced herself to smile-the effort tearing up her eyes – then she drooped her head again. The lamb kebab lurching up from her gut. She had to not vomit.
What choice did she have? She stood up. The man shouted aloud. Three other men rushed over, one snaking a steel-link chain behind him, another's trousers sodden at the ankles. The smell of gasoline strong off them.
Her heart pounded her skull. "I am an American citizen," she said. Her voice came out squeezed, for some reason English-accented.
They all fell silent. Then the first man laughed, a harsh, high-pitched sound. Mahmoud got to his feet, started talking, his speech gaining momentum. He took out his wallet and showed it to the man. Sarah kept her gaze trained on the ground. All four men started laughing, then at one point the man with the chain threw a question to Mahmoud. He replied. Behind them the clatter and thrum of car engines, distant human cries from the street. The square itself gone quiet. Finally the first man tossed back Mahmoud's wallet and lifted up his club with a twirl, like a baseball player loosening his wrist, and tapped it against the sole of one shoe, then the other, and when his second shoe met the ground he'd already swiveled and walked away. The others followed him.
Sarah waited, blood surging in her ears. Not daring to look up. Finally, she did. The square was empty. The cars were gone. They were safe.
She turned to Mahmoud. "What did you say to them?"
His face was tight, sickly-looking.
"What did you say?"
"You saw who they took?"
She nodded.
"They said they took them as American sympathizers."
"But not me."
"Not you." He chuckled dryly. "I told them you were nothing. You are a foolish tourist I guide around our city."
She shuddered her head. She felt dizzy in the green-glowing landscape. Flags snapping in the wind.
"Who were they? What will happen to Reza?"
"I said I wanted to show you this beautiful square and it is too bad, with all these infidel youth."
She clutched his arm. "Where's Parvin?" she asked. She felt a desperate compulsion to keep asking.
Mahmoud chuckled again, an abrasive sound like he was hawking up phlegm. "You are an American woman. He was jealous of me, for being with you." They both sat down. She realized she was shaking, was chill with sweat. He took out his cell phone and dialed a number. She watched the fingers of his free hand as they twitched beside his legs, as though in some meaningful order, as though warming up some invisible instrument. He tried another number. Another. Finally he got through. His voice swerved to a different pitch and pace. She waited – all that time, waiting – time driven into the act of waiting for him while he talked. He hung up.
"Her phone is still off. No one has seen her."
She collapsed her face into her hands with a moan.
"No one knows who was taken with Reza." He cleared his throat. "I think it was a random arrest. But we must wait. We must go somewhere safe and wait."
"Who were they?"
His face went distant. "Ans
ar-e Hezbollah they call themselves. Friends of the Party of God."
"Then why did they let us go?" She swallowed; her throat was dry. "What did you say to them?"
He shrugged. She felt it through her arm and chest and legs.
"What did you say?"
He looked up at her with his dark eyes, then bowed his head. "You want to know what I said?" His jaw tensed. "It is not that I am religious or not."
"What?" Now his voice was harsh. "I told them," he said, "I told them I was the son of my father."
His expression glazed over for a moment, then he swung around to face her. "Now tell me the truth. Why did you come here?"
"What do you mean?"
He waited, his eyes coruscating in the candlelight. After a drawn-out silence she looked away.
"To escape," she said. And she laughed.
He laughed too, but bitterly. "Then you are the first American to escape to Iran."
"To escape from a man," she said. It surprised her to say it. To hear herself say it. A giddiness overcoming her and with it this urge to tell out her life, those problems so personal she could only tell them to a stranger. She looked at Mahmoud in the green-gold glow. His face drawn into the slightest suggestion of a smirk – as though it had forgotten itself in the middle of self-mockery. He'd invoked his father's name. He'd saved her from those men. He'd left her at odds with herself. There was sadness and then there was this, a field of candles, smoke-flowers in the wind.
"Parvin," he said, "she comes here to find a man." The mock-lines on his face deepening. "She says she wanted to meet me before she marries me."
"Marries you?"
"She will marry me to save me. So I can go to America if I want. If I choose."
He wasn't joking. He seemed amused by her silence.
"We are not all birds flying in the same direction. We are young-most of us are young." He rubbed his chin with the heel of his hand.
She forced herself to nod.
