Next was Tara, a difficult woman. Loads of unresolved anger, very political, the sort of person who thinks that calling my patients “patients” instead of “clients” really “changes the power dynamic.” She said she was a vegetarian, and when I told her I was quite interested in the role of vegetarianism in female depression and anxiety, she went right into a neurotic reaction. Three minutes seemed a frightfully long time.
But then I met Rebecca, an excellent conversationalist who shares my interest in Ralph Ellison, the new Roth, jazz scholarship, and the Fischer-Spassky chess match. Incompatible life plans, alas! Then Eleanor, who was lovely and intelligent and maternal. My concern about her was that after eighty seconds she started talking palmistry and homeopathy. I didn’t react, just focused on listening. I didn’t want to argue and create another separating experience.
Caroline was my next date. She and I had an excellent exchange about mind, body, soul, and self-concept. Her parents sounded fine, father highly anxious and keen to please, mother well medicated now, no more psychotic episodes or bipolar disorder. We even had our first row and came through admirably, listening well and compromising nicely. I may well be sufficiently different from her dad that we could make a go of it. I was impressed enough with her as a person that I truly wished I found her more attractive facially. I’m ambivalent about her; I checked her name, but now find myself 55–44 against another date.
(I wasn’t sure what the remaining one percent was angling for.)
I wanted Jessica, a lively and emotionally adult actress, but sadly I was not wanted in the same way. She wants to be friends, though. She was gracious and prompt in her clarification, and I accepted with pleasure. I enjoyed our three minutes together so much that I was quite sorry to have to move on to Winkie, a rather hysterical girl who said she was looking for her soul mate. Relationships, I offered her, are hard enough without getting into advanced unrealism.
Finally there was Marianne, who needed to slay her father to become a full person—I told her not to feel guilty, just get it done. There’s little more important in life. I take it very seriously and I hope one day she’ll feel empowered to do the same. I had to do it with mum, of course. Painful, but the lesser of two evils. I was very impressed by her self-awareness, humility, reasonableness, and availability. She’s also highly orgasmic, unlike Kirsten, whom I didn’t tick off, even though she was posh, intelligent, and five-foot-eight—with Déjeuner sur l’Herbe tattooed on her lower back! But she didn’t have the warmth I need.
All in all, much better than I expected. I ticked seven of them off. I would have been content to receive three friendship ticks and one romance tick, but with half the results now in, I’ve received three romance ticks already, including one from the überbabe of the evening, Helen the ice-swan sculptress! So I shall have three dates this week:Marianne, 33, for Tuesday supper; Helen, 31, on Wednesday, same time; and Caroline, 41, on Friday afternoon at 3:45. I feel proud to have taken the bull by the horns! I’m reading lots of Thackeray as well as a history of geology. And the cool weather is so lovely; I had all four car windows down today en route to my own therapy. Gerry Mulligan on the stereo, clear as freshly rinsed Baccarat champagne flutes drying in the sun next to a window with spring dawning outside!
Much love to you,
Immie
When I try to describe Imran to other people, they never believe me, but really, I’m not exaggerating. Once I had asked Imran why, precisely, he devoted such attention to his attire. “It’s a narcissistic compensation,” he explained, thoughtfully rubbing his lapel. “I’ve always hoped that if I dress carefully enough, women won’t notice that in reality I’m a dark, hairy, Pakistani weirdo.” The odd thing is that they rarely did notice; I guess that’s what a green corduroy waistcoat will do for a man.
I checked my e-mail one last time before going to bed and was pleased to see that Arsalan had written.
From: Arsalan [email protected]
Date: August 28, 2003 02:20 AM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Once more, thank you
The banquet went well, all thanks to your advice. The fat Arabs ate every last scrap of the lamb and the eggplant. Alas, they did not touch the lentils, but I am certain this has nothing to do with your culinary suggestions. I mean no offense, but I must say this carbohydrate business is absurd. They are fat because they eat so much. One of my colleagues pulled me aside to praise me for the meal and for my “dignity under the circumstances.” So a success, thank you. But I must inquire: Is it normal for a cat to eat so very much? Wollef is beginning to look a bit like a Gulf potentate himself. Though, unlike them, he is very quiet and polite now. He shows a sweet nature now that he is at ease. I begin to see why my mother was so attached to him. I wonder if he would enjoy the remaining lentil pollo? Do you think so? You were extremely kind to help, my gratitude is great, and perhaps tomorrow I will have time to discuss your romantic difficulties. Until then, sleep well, Claire.
And that I did.
• • •
Arsalan wrote to me the next day about Jimmy. His letter was sympathetic. There had been a romance like that in his past too.
. . . I saw her last, the torment of my dreams, several years ago. It was a party in Teheran, and she arrived on the arm of some rotten pimp. I heard her say to all the fawning men what she had said to me so many times before—she was a poetess, she lived for poetry, without poetry for her life would have no meaning. Someone persuaded her to sing—“Sing, Layla, sing a song for our pleasure!” She required little coaxing. It was a song, she told us, that she herself had written. She began singing and did not stop. At last came the crescendo—“My heart! My pain! My heart! My pain!” When she finished, red and breathless from her exertion and entirely too moved by her own display, all the men applauded, much too loudly. “Another one,” cried the pimp. A mean, clever girl standing beside me said, in a low voice but a voice loud enough for me to hear, “No, please. My heart can’t take it anymore.”
The candle flame went out; the wine spilt.
It seemed natural after this exchange of intimacies to begin writing to each other about anything and everything. We began exchanging letters, long ones and short, throughout the day as we worked. We discussed his mother’s cat at great length. With each passing day, he grew more fascinated by Wollef.
. . . I have never had a pet before. You see, Claire, I have never known an animal well; my father was a very traditional man and did not allow us to keep animals in the home. But my mother was so tender hearted, a house of love with no limits. She found poor Wollef in a flowerpot, a damp small creature all alone in the world. She said that he cried for his mother with the very cry of a human baby. When she picked him up and comforted him he began to suckle on her finger, and this so aroused her fierce maternal instincts that she took him into her home and adopted him as her own. She could not help but nurture him; it was her nature, gentle and giving. She said always that Wollef had a complicated soul with many deep emotions, and I see now that she was right. He can smell my mother on the chair that was her favorite. He will sleep on it for hours until he wakes, looks about, and realizes she is not there, upon which his disappointment and grief are clear beyond all dispute. . . .
His letters were for the most part mournful. He too missed his mother. But he appreciated the distraction of our correspondence, or at least he often said he did. Imran later suggested to me that my display of culinary expertise might have persuaded him at some level to view me as a replacement for his mother; this, Imran imagined, may have been why he wrote to me so often. Perhaps. I couldn’t really say. I wrote to him so often because it was a distraction from my work and because I found his letters charming; at least, that’s the way I looked at it at the time.
Over the course of the next few days, I came to understand more about my correspondent’s life. He was a member of Isfahan University’s archaeology faculty, he told me; the fat Saudi donors were funding a dig th
at he was to supervise come wintertime, at Persepolis. And he wrote English well because it was his first language.
. . . I was born in Persia, but my childhood was passed in London, the grey city of exiles, and we also were such exiles. My mother’s uncle, Claire, had been a parliamentarian, loyal to the Shah. But on my father’s side I had a cousin, a misguided young man, a reckless dreamer who joined the MKO, which as you may not know was the People’s Mujahedin, much feared and loathed by the Shah. On one day my young cousin was arrested by SAVAK. He was tortured brutally; I do not even wish even to tell you what they did to him for fear of troubling your sleep. My father’s heart was broken into daggers, and his anger made him incautious. “The Shah is nothing but a sword pulled from a dog’s ass!” he said to his colleague, forgetting for a moment the danger we all knew too well. Forgive me, Claire, for repeating those vulgar words; I mean no disrespect, but this is so you know how little was required to tear our lives apart.
That bald, jealous little imbecile before whom he spoke was a man with no honor, an informant. My father received word one morning from a friend that he was to be arrested that night. With no time to prepare we fled, hiding first in the house of friends and then, with their help in securing documents and a vehicle, escaping the country by motor. I was too young to understand. I was only sixteen months old. My mother carried me in her arms as my father drove from Iran to Turkey, Turkey to Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia to Venice, Venice to Calais, Calais to London. They brought nothing with them. Don’t cry, Maryam, don’t cry, my father said to my mother; Our wind whereby we are moved and our being are of thy gift/our whole existence is from thy bringing into being. But she cried nonetheless, my poor mother, my poor mother who was not made for a life of adventure, my poor mother who would have been content all her days to tend her rose garden in Isfahan. . . .
His family had not been rich. Although he had been a physician in Iran, his father could not practice medicine in England and so took a poorly paid job as a medical transcriber. The elegant Persian with the noble bearing had been demoralized by his loss of professional authority; he had been the last of a long line of distinguished physicians and was accustomed to deference. Arsalan did not say so explicitly, but I surmised from his description that theirs had been an aristocratic family. It had been difficult for them to adapt to life in a small flat in East London amid the bus drivers and the bricklayers. He had never felt at home in England.
. . . School for me there was beatings, fighting. Children hate someone who is different and I was different with my strange skin and my strange family and my home that smelled of spices. I became an inward child, contenting myself with books from my father’s library. My father bought for me one day a book about archaeology. It was called The Treasures of Ancient Mesopotamia. The Lady of Warka was on the cover. Do you know the Lady of Warka, Claire? She is the Sumerian Mona Lisa. I read the book with enchantment, and it was then I began to dream of the life of adventure I would have as an archaeologist! It is silly now and embarrassing to tell you, but as a lonely child I pretended that I had discovered her, this mysterious Lady of Warka; I imagined cradling her in my arms as I rose from the site I had excavated. In my lonely child’s mind I imagined telling the other children in school of my magnificent achievement. What envy and admiration they would feel!
He had met the news cheerfully, he wrote, when the Shah was deposed and his father announced that the family would return to Iran, a place, he imagined, where all the children would look like him. Our birthdays, we discovered, were two days apart, so like me, he was eleven years old when the Revolution came. When I read this, I remembered hearing about the Revolution on television; I remembered the hostage crisis and the yellow ribbons. But of course it had seemed to me then as distant as the moon.
His parents were ecstatic when at last his father came home with their airline tickets to Teheran.
. . . My mother was so unhappy in England. English women with faces like hungry dogs assumed she had no education, was a backward woman, because she covered her head. What they did not know is that even so their English husbands stared and stared at her, calling out to her in the street. She was too beautiful to be given peace. This is why she covered herself—so that “no tainted eye shall gaze upon her face, no glass but that of an unsullied heart.” She was not backward. She was highly educated, a sensitive woman. She knew poetry and music. She spoke French and English and Arabic and the most musical Persian. No one understood this. She was so lonely. She missed the markets and bazaars of her Isfahan, the groves of Seville oranges in blossom, the gardens of perfume and roses and babbling fountains, the sight of old persimmon trees in autumn. England was cold and wet and dark. For ten years, she had been lonely.
And my father—my father, Claire, had the fortune unlike me to be a devout man. Europe to him was a machine without a soul. He could not understand how men in England could wake each morning, day after day after day, to a universe without the mystery and grandeur of Islam. “What do they believe in here?” he asked us at night at the dinner table. “They kick a football about and they go to the pub, then they go to the doctor and complain that it hurts everywhere and nowhere, and they have no idea why.”
I had no memories of Iran. I was too young when we left, but my parents had spoken of it in such a way that I believed it would be a paradise. I remember the dazzling sunlight at the airport, a white, brilliant light such as I had never imagined. But on the night we arrived we stayed in my cousin’s home in Teheran, and I heard “Allaho Akbar” in the streets, and “Death to America!” I did not understand at all. For me America was Starsky and Hutch—brave heroes!—why did people here want them to die? I saw piles of sandbags in the streets, everywhere, and logos sprayed on the walls—a fist, a gun, a star, all in paint red like blood. I saw smoke. It was not how I had imagined it for so long. And soon, Claire, I learned that here too I was an exile. I did not speak Persian like the other children, and I did not understand the strange words that they used. Here, as in England, school was beating, taunting, fights.
Two years after we returned, my brother, who is older than me, was conscripted into the army. During the terrible bloody battle for Susangerd, which is in Khuzestan, he was gassed by the monster Saddam Hussein. He spent more than a year in hospital. Overnight my mother became an old woman. My brother suffered disfigurement in his face, and to this day he labors in his breathing. Most of the schoolboys of my age were sent to the front. I escaped this fate. My father, by then a disillusioned and heartbroken man, paid certain people to keep me out of the war. But these are sad things to talk about, Claire. . . .
Arsalan and I, we discovered, both had memories of celebrating our birthdays in May. But while his parents were fleeing for their lives, mine were pushing my stroller through the leafy suburbs of San Francisco. While teenaged boys in Iran were dying in the trenches I was living with my family in Seattle, where we had recently moved. I was preoccupied with my first love, Jude Kremer, a freshman at the University of Washington four years my senior, who grew huge Cannabis indica plants in a special greenhouse he’d kitted out with halide lights in his basement. While Saddam Hussein bombed Iranian cities and Arsalan’s family lurched from hysteria to despair, Jude and I were stretched out on the lawn chairs on his porch at night, overlooking Lake Washington, smoking a fat one and listening to Grateful Dead bootlegs. We were both dimly aware of the Iran–Iraq War. But it certainly wasn’t weighing heavily on our minds.
Our letters tread delicately around the American invasion of Iraq.
. . . You must understand what we suffered when Saddam Hussein, curse him, rained missiles on Iraq . . . there was such a fear, a panic that never abated. The missiles could land anywhere—on women, on children, on your neighbor’s house—or maybe on yours. The sky would crackle—you could see the missile coming and hear it! But where would it come down? Who would it kill this time, who would be left without a mother or a son? One of my classmates, Claire, a little boy named Hossein with w
hom I played games in the street, was crippled forever—his leg neatly sliced off—and his brother and mother were crushed to death by falling concrete. I remember seeing his house and the broken glass, the cracked walls, the front door blown to the middle of the kitchen—the blood everywhere, barely dry. His father died a madman. To this day, I confess to you, I cannot bear the sound of fireworks.
Saddam Hussein was a demon. To the donkeys and fools who say he had no weapons of mass destruction, I say: Do not say this to my brother’s face! But now the Iraqis too know what it is like to feel the hail of missiles, and has their suffering lessened his?
Your military, Claire, is careless. I do not wish to insult you, but I must say this. They are careless with the present and careless with the past. When the museum in Baghdad was destroyed, I wept. . . .
He wrote of the museum more than once. He was appalled by the American military’s failure to protect the priceless archaeological treasures at the Iraqi National Museum. Of course he was: he was an archaeologist. He took artifacts seriously.
In one letter, he told me of his awe as he stood above the Burnt City at dawn:
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