The second announcement woke her. Sarah turned to the window: nothing -- night -- then, swimming up through the blackness, an image of her face. The cabin lights coming on. She couldn't remember falling asleep. All around her were dark-eyed women dabbing off their makeup, donning head scarves and manteaus in silence, as though beguiled by some lingering residue of Sarah's sleep. Sarah put on her own scarf, felt the knot of cloth against her throat.
The city came up at them like a dream of light. White streams and red, neon lava, flowing side by side along arterial roads; electric dots and clusters of yellow, pink and orange. She thought of Parvin down there, working her way between those points. With a mechanical groan from the undercarriage the wheels opened out. The plane banked, decelerated, then seconds later they were touching down, roaring to a stop in the middle of a vast, enchanted field. Runways glowed blue in the ground mist. Taxiways green. Lights around them blinking and blearing in the jet fuel haze. Sarah checked her watch: 4 a.m. local time.
Inside the airport, Parvin was nowhere to be seen. Sarah hurried through the terminal, pursued, it felt, by photographs lining the walls: faces of men in gray beards, black turbans, their expressions strained between benevolence and censure. Despite the hour, the airport was implausibly, surreally busy. Low-wattage light pressed on her nerves as she walked, coercing her body into its familiar anxiety: rushing to work through underground tunnels, the digital alarm still ringing in her ears, toothpaste still bitter on her tongue -- suspending herself in the slipstream of other bodies. Staving off sleep. She wore a long black overgarment and black cotton scarf. All the women wore long overgarments and head scarves. This shook her a little -- she'd expected more visual disparity. She'd expected to be surprised by it. Around a corner an electronic sign pulsed: IN FUTURE ISLAM WILL DESTROY SATANIC SOVEREIGNTY OF THE WEST. It was too early, and she too tired, to burrow beneath the threat. Keep moving, she told herself.
Large glass windows separated customs from the arrival bay. Retrieving her bags, Sarah noticed a young man watching her through the glass. She stopped, waited for some bodies to interpose, then shuffled out behind them. He was still there. Slight-figured and clean-shaven, nondescriptly dressed. He hadn't taken his eyes off her. A slow warmth rose up from her abdomen. She'd read too many accounts, before coming, about the plainclothes police in this country. She lowered her eyes, withdrawing into her scarf, and then, without warning, he was beside her.
"Sarah," he said.
She froze.
He said, "I am Parvin's friend."
Her posture, she was aware, was one of almost parodic decorum -- a sister of the faith, scrupulously observing the veil -- but there was no part of her spared to find it funny. She'd barely landed. Now she was shocked awake, her mind instantaneously compacted in fear, fixed on the image of a small dark room ... a metal chair in the middle of it.
"Parvin. You know?"
She didn't speak. What if it were a trick? To elicit information? An admission of association?
"Come with me," he said. For the first time his English seemed weighted by a heavier accent.
She looked up but he hadn't moved. He reached into his shirt pocket. "Here," he said, and took a step back.
It was a Polaroid. Parvin, her jaw dangling open in the middle of some mischief, one hand brushing back her purple-streaked hair, the other squeezing Sarah's shoulder. Both their faces upwardly flushed by the candlelit cake before them. Sarah recognized it from her thirtieth birthday. Five years ago. Parvin had taken her to a sushi restaurant near the Chinatown lions and, after the complimentary snapshot, had persuaded the waitstaff to sing "Happy Birthday" in Japanese. They'd filed away, smiling tightly, harassedly. How hopeless that whole occasion had made her feel, Sarah remembered -- turning thirty -- yet even so, looking back now, she was stifled with nostalgia.
"Good," said the young man. He leaned in closer. "Now. Please. Come with me."
His name was Mahmoud and he was a family friend of Parvin's. She shouldn't be afraid. Also, he was the leader of the Party. Parvin worked with him now. Why hadn't she picked Sarah up? She had been busy with last-minute responsibilities. He spoke rapidly, in a tone suggesting he didn't want to explain any more than he already had. He assumed Parvin had told her about the rally in two days' time.
Sarah sat with him in the backseat, wondering what responsibilities could possibly have kept her friend at this hour. It was hard to tell whether dawn had broken. A faint glow massed behind the smog but it could have been the electric ambience of night -- caught and refracted in low-lying haze. In the driver's seat a heavily stubbled youth named Reza steered their car, an ancient Ford, like a bullet into the city.
"You have come at a busy time," said Mahmoud.
"Where are we going?" She wound down her window. A warp of gasoline and exhaust filled the car and she quickly closed it again. Behind the brief scream of wind she thought she'd heard the sound of drums. "Where are we meeting Parvin?"
The two men conferred in Farsi.
"You have come during Ashura," said Mahmoud. "Our holiest week."
She nodded impatiently. Reza glanced up into the rearview mirror.
"Your hotel is near one of the largest processions," Mahmoud went on. "If you would like to see -- if you are not too tired--"
"Hotel? I thought that was just for the visa." Parvin had arranged the letter of invitation from the hotel, had assured her it was just a formality. "I'm staying with Parvin," she said.
The car swerved left. Sarah slid over and smacked into Mahmoud, who flinched, then, as she disengaged herself, smiled stiffly down at his knees. Inexplicably, his reaction riled her. Reza twisted half around from the front seat, made a comment in his skipping Farsi. A short silence ensued, then Mahmoud translated, "He says there are one thousand accidents a day in this city." Reza caught her eye in the rearview mirror and gave her a civic nod. After another silence, Mahmoud said, "We thought it would be better. At the hotel."
"Why?" She frowned, shook her head. "I don't understand."
The lines on his face were so shallow, like lines on tracing paper, and this, with the way his lower lip turned outward, gave him the slightly churlish air of a child. He said, "At least until the rally is over." There was irritation in his voice. "Parvin will explain -- she comes to meet us in the afternoon." Then his face closed off completely to her.
Sarah slumped back in the deep seat. As they drove, the sky around them lightened, lifting the concrete landscape -- block after block of squat, square buildings -- into blue relief. Sarah swallowed repeatedly, trying to clear her throat of its sooty taste. She had no choice -- she'd wait for Parvin. Her body felt suddenly spent beneath her clothes. Her head still fumy from the flight, the sleeping pills she'd taken. And now she'd offended this smooth-cheeked boy -- this reluctant guide of hers -- Mahmoud. She pressed her face against the glass. The city was stilled, caught in the subdued minutes before sunrise. A woman tripped out of a cinder-block doorway, holding her scarf down against the wind. In the distance, the constant shudder of drums. All at once Sarah was overpowered by the strangeness of where she was. Loneliness dropped on her with the speed of a black column.
Three months ago, she'd been a senior associate at Pearson, Peelle and Sloss -- one of the top-tier law firms in Portland. She'd had a private office with a river view, a private understanding with management with regard to her next promotion, a reservoir of professional goodwill accrued, it sometimes seemed, by virtue of having not yet majorly screwed up. She'd paid off half of a two-bedroom apartment in the Pearl District, exercised almost daily to keep her body in good shape. And -- back then -- pathetically, she knew -- she'd had Paul. She would return from her morning exercise to find him still ensnared in their bedsheets, or shaving behind a blade of light from the bathroom, frazzle-haired and stumbly, seeing her and hauling her body -- buzzing and taut and alive -- toward his own. He was the aberration of her life: the relief from her lifelong suspicion that she was, at heart, a hollow person, who clung to hollow things.
She unknotted her head scarf. She'd pleaded jet lag as soon as they arrived at the hotel and Mahmoud, who seemed already uncomfortable accompanying her into the lobby, had quickly taken his leave. Upstairs, someone had forgotten to draw the curtains and the room was blanched with golden light. The eastern windows were level with the top of a large plane tree -- so close Sarah could reach out and touch its leaves. It cast a fretwork of shadows on the floor.
She removed her long black overgarment and threw it on a chair. Her shirt underneath was drenched. She peeled it off, then her jeans, and abruptly caught a glimpse of her reflection in a bathroom mirror: slender and olive-skinned, a body in accidentally matching bra and underwear. A small wad of undeclared U.S. dollars was gauze-covered and bandaged to the back of her knee. She looked mysterious, glowing -- there was a different sun here, somehow; more impersonal. Incandescent. Well, this was what she wanted, wasn't it? She was in the desert now.
They'd met at work. At first Paul had been just another good-looking suit in Banking, three floors up, with good teeth, arms that filled out his sleeves when he leaned, the way men always leaned, double-elbowed, on bar counters. He had the salt-and-pepper hair that, on some men, draws more attention to their youth than their age. He was divorced -- no kids. He was her professional senior. She'd dealt with him on some statutory debt recovery claims. One day, at Friday drinks, he brought up the last file they'd worked. Their client had been demanding payment from a company in Chapter 11 but had been low on the list of creditors. The firm had all but counseled forfeit when Sarah developed a submission for priority and, against all expectations, won a good settlement. It had been a tough case. Paul admired her work and said so. Despite her proficiency, work had for so long devolved into sets of empty, unaltering rituals for Sarah that she was capable of registering his comment only as some kind of code. Already, she found herself deferring to him for meaning.
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 slickened 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 each other. 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, cow-like 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 thrust 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 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, unconsciously, expansively, 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 answered 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 amputations, 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.
But Parvin kept on. Three years in, she downgraded, then quit her job with an events coordinating company to dedicate herself to the show. She hired an assistant -- with what funds, Sarah never learned. Then she asked Sarah to stop coming to the studio altogether. Sarah's presence and comments, she felt, belittled her efforts. Not long after that they stopped speaking.
"It's what she wants," Paul consoled her.
"What?"
"For us to talk about her. While she suffers, nobly."
Sarah shifted under the bedsheets and thought about her friend, bracketed by her headphones in that dark, windowless studio. It depressed her. "You don't know her at all."
"You know what your problem is?" He traced a path of intersecting loops, a figure eight, around her nipples.
"Which one?"
"You take everything so personally." His face sank into thought. "Can't you see? It's her who doesn't know you at all."
But what was it Parvin didn't know? Hadn't she seemed sure of her knowledge when she'd declared, during their last conversation, that Sarah had ransomed herself to Paul? That she'd become blind to the needs of those around her -- that she now lived a useless life? At the time Sarah had considered those words unforgivable. Then she wasn't sure. For as long as she could remember, she had indeed felt that she hadn't lived in the strong, full-bodied current of her own life; that at some point she'd been shunted to one side, trapped in its shallowest eddies. She was capable of velocity but not depth -- there wasn't enough to her. It was Paul, when she met him -- as gradually she got to know him -- who seemed to suggest the possibility of a deeper, truer life. He could anchor her. That was what Parvin could never understand. That it could actually be -- had actually been -- Sarah's choice.
She made the decision to love him and she did. He walked into a room and stood still. His face clouded when he planted himself behind her, bobbed above paper bags as he carried them up the stairs. When he cooked for them, he rolled up his sleeves and tipped and tilted the frying pan in a half-haute style that never failed to delight her. When he made their bed, he made it a point to billow the sheet out over the mattress in a single flourish. She loved the striations of his character -- how, at work, he became serious, taciturn, giving himself over to the duties of the profession in the old sense. They lived together, worked together. Once a year they visited his family home in New Hampshire. It was there, in that large house in that large clearing, that Sarah finally realized how much Paul's character had been governed by his parents' easy formality; there, watching them attend their shared days, that she'd allowed herself to extrapolate -- impossible not to! -- her own future with their son.
Her first visit, she'd endlessly explored the wooded backyard that gave onto a lake the locals insisted on calling a "pond." One hot afternoon she convinced Paul to swim with her to the opposite shore. The water was the one place she felt more comfortable, could lead the way. Unexpectedly -- charmingly -- he was a nervous swimmer, and she set a slow pace. They swam a good mile or so, then pulled themselves onto a boulder. The rock almost too warm. Once the sludge and sand had settled, the water over the edge became so clear that they could see all the way down. Gnats and dragonflies skated the liquid surface. Beneath, shapes of fish trolled the leaf-tramped bed. Sarah ducked her head underwater. When she opened her eyes she caught sight of two brown-spotted trout within arm's length; she tracked their languid movements until suddenly a sleek, almost metallic gleam of black and white crossed her vision; she turned, saw -- bewitchingly -- the beak, the folded, streamlined wings -- it was a loon -- gliding steadily into the cool depths. She spluttered to the surface, mute with excitement, and saw Paul lift his head from the rock and smile at her as if he understood completely, and right then she knew, cross her heart, in all her life, that she'd never been so happy.
Parvin left for Iran. The news, when it came a year ago, seemed abstract and out of place in her life. At last, part of Sarah admitted that she had misjudged her friend, had taken her at far less than her word. But the rest of her -- the part given over to Paul -- took ever more pleasure from him and, in her mind, day by day, proffered it to Parvin as rebuke.
"This morning," said Parvin. They were walking to the car, back along the smoke-drab streets. Mahmoud locked in step behind them. "What can I tell you about this morning?"
On both sides of the road, multi-story walls had been painted over in gaudy murals: Shi'ite saints, mope-faced martyrs in army uniforms, garlanded with flowers and butterflies and rainbows. Publicly-rendered paradises. Beneath one mural a thoroughfare was strung with fairy lights, an Internet café crowded with youths. Walking past, Sarah glimpsed girls in heeled boots, girls with colorful hijabs, sunglasses perched on top of them.
Here she was, she thought -- with Parvin -- in the place itself. She'd bought a ticket -- that was all it took! -- and stunningly, almost unimaginably, she was here.
That morning, Parvin explained, while Mahmoud was picking Sarah up from the airport, Parvin had met with members of a sympathetic group. A drama company from one of the city's smaller universities. It was urgent, they'd said. They needed to speak to someone high up in the Party.
Mahmoud walked behind them, leaving a buffer between his body and theirs.
"I thought the worst, of course. They'd found us out. Or they were gathering all their people to attack us on Thursday." She looked around, askance. "It's happened before."
They passed a jewelry shop glittering gold, silver, crystal. Out front, a group of men were arguing animatedly. They all had the same puffed-up hair, all wore what looked to be hand-me-down suits from the eighties. Across the street, Sarah saw the upper half of men's bodies draped over scooter handlebars, the bottom half of their faces darkened by short beards. Mahmoud caught her eye and held it coolly for a moment.
"What it was," said Parvin, "was they'd put together a play. That was the big secret."
"A play?"
"Oh, Sarah -- you should have seen it." She pinched up the thigh of her robe as she stepped over a reeking culvert. Ruts ran all over the road and sidewalk, trickling waste into the gutters. "One of them had a little sister. Thirteen years old. She wanted to be an actor too." Parvin scaled her voice back. "Last month they arrested her -- for 'acts incompatible with chastity.'"
"What's that mean?"
"Then they held her for two weeks of tests and interrogation." She spun around to face Sarah. "Were you searched? At the airport?"
Sarah shook her head. Parvin nodded, walked on. Unbidden, a particular case from her pre-travel research surfaced in Sarah's mind. Zahra Kazemi, Canadian journalist, detained for taking photos during a protest -- then beaten, with a guard's shoe, into a coma. She remembered the picture she'd seen: a late-middle-aged woman, her baggy chocolate-colored sweater lending her a girl-like air. She remembered the camera hanging from her neck, its black lens a well beneath her own calm, deeply settling face.
"Last week," said Parvin, "she was hanged. This little girl. All this is in the play. It's sentimental, and a bit slapstick, I'll admit, for a tragedy -- but they only had a week to throw it together." A steeliness Sarah had never heard before now reinforced her friend's voice. Parvin flipped her thumb -- a hitchhiker's gesture -- behind her, toward Mahmoud. "But he's not a fan."
"Too much!" said Mahmoud. Sarah turned. His Adam's apple jogged pronouncedly above his collar. "I said it is not a play for Ashura."
"It's the perfect play for Ashura," Parvin spat. "It's a very religious play."
They'd reached the car. Parvin stood by the passenger door and stared directly at Sarah. "Those men," she said, curling her mouth on the word, "those men of God, do you know how they enforce God's law?" She'd brought her voice under control, but tension clenched her shoulders and neck. "They kidnap this girl on an immorality charge. Then they test her -- but find out she's still a virgin."
"Parvin," Mahmoud implored. "Please get in the car."
"So what do they do? They marry her, so they can rape her. They rape her -- so they can kill her -- so she won't go to heaven, where all the virgins go." Her nostrils flared in the middle of her rough, square face. "Men of God," she said.
A block away, drums were beaten as though into the ground, trembling the very concrete. Mahmoud's eyes searched the street. To her surprise, Sarah felt a swell of sympathy for him -- even as she found herself exhilarated by Parvin's rage. No one else she knew, it occurred to her, would ever dare speak so critically of Islam. Parvin got in the car. She looked down at her lap for a long time. Then, in a softer, effortfully lighthearted tone, she said, "And what about Sarah? If she has to wait till after Ashura, she'll miss the play."
"How long are you staying?" demanded Mahmoud. He pinned her with his gaze.
Sarah smiled weakly. "Six days."
The engine clattered to life and they pulled away, the parade diminishing behind them. Mahmoud drove and didn't talk. Parvin was quiet now too. They merged with traffic on a busy one-way street and seemed to drive directly into smog. Sarah looked out, her head as clouded as the air, the thoughts within it churning shallow and fast. It felt inconceivable she'd been here only a few hours. She slackened her attention and almost convinced herself she was home again: slate-gray sky, concrete-walled compounds, poured-cement yards, a roofline rife with billboards and signs. But wherever she looked, just underneath the outside of things, something was always slightly off: ordinary buildings listed toward, or away from, one another -- their lines never quite plumb; straight roads turned into alleys wending into dead ends. And words -- words everywhere -- on trucks, street signs, T-shirts -- seemed like language that had been melted, meandering up and down like quavers and clefs on invisible staves. The car climbed to higher ground. Sarah stuck her whole head out the window, letting the wind crunch her scarf against her ears. On every other corner she thought she heard an English-speaking cadence -- recognized someone from home -- but then the realization set in. Parvin was here. Otherwise she was alone. People looked at her and understood that. She was completely extraneous.
As they repaired to the quieter, more affluent boulevards of northern Tehran, it felt like they were entering a different country. At one point they crested a rise and ahead, through a green canopy, materialized the full spread of the Elburz Mountains, stately and snowcapped, slopes dappled with sun and cloud and shadow. Mahmoud turned up a narrow street. They stopped in front of an old, weatherworn villa, which, Sarah was astonished to learn, belonged to Parvin's family.
What she noticed first, entering the room, were the women seated at the long dining table. They'd shed their robes, four or five of them, and their hair was uncovered. Several men were present, too, standing across the room next to a set of ornate sofas. Mahmoud immediately joined them. Platters of bread, goat cheese, pistachios and yoghurt were laid out on tables.
Conversation paused when Sarah walked in.
"This is Sarah Middleton," announced Parvin, pushing her scarf back onto her neck like a hood. "Who I told you about. My best friend." She repeated the introduction -- more emphatically, it seemed -- in Farsi.
A couple of the women nodded to Sarah. "Come, sit down," said one. She sat by herself at the far end of the dining table.
"Thank you."
The woman poured tea into a glass shaped like an egg timer and handed it to Sarah. She slid a vase of pink-blue gladioli out of the way. "My name is Roya," she said. She was young but there was a subtle dourness about her face that weighed on her features. Her body was stout, small-breasted, and she wore a tight T-shirt with a Chinese character embossed on it. It seemed on her almost a parody of youthful fashion. She said, "So you are the one."
"The one?"
"The one whose heart is broken." She peered into Sarah's face. "You must forgive my English."
Sarah turned sharply to Parvin at the other end of the table. She was absorbed in conversation with the group of women. Sarah turned back. Who was this woman? What did she know? Her comment felt to Sarah almost spiteful. Now Roya leaned in closer.
"I have wine too," she said.
Sarah gave a terse shake of the head.
"It is made by my parents. I know where they keep it upstairs. And their opium, too -- if you prefer."
Mahmoud said something aloud and immediately the men unbunched and came over to the dining table. He was the shortest of them all, Sarah saw, yet they all treated him with noticeable deference. Sarah stood up. She felt like being alone.
"No," Parvin called out from across the table. "Stay. You should stay."
"I will translate for her," said Roya. Parvin smiled at both of them before turning back to her discussion.
Something occurred to Sarah. "You live here?"
Roya lifted her hand to her mouth. "She did not tell you?" She rested her chin in her palms -- an awkwardly coquettish effort to frame her face. "I am her sister."
Sarah sat down and sipped her tea. She felt acutely unsettled. It was in keeping with Parvin to withhold details, but all this? -- this sister from an erstwhile life? This baroque villa? What else hadn't her best friend told her?
"Are your parents here?"
"They are away because of the rally." On seeing Sarah's expression, Roya amended, "I mean, they are in Turkey for vacation. They give us the house for the rally."
The meeting began. Mahmoud spoke first and others -- in particular, Parvin -- interjected. It soon became clear, as Roya confirmed during the course of her choppy, digressive translations, that they were again arguing about the play. Parvin wanted to stage the reenactment -- in the square where the rally would be held -- of the young girl's torture and execution. Mahmoud said it would be too dangerous. The square would be watched by religious militia. Such a reenactment would mock the official passion plays of the Battle of Karbala. Sarah tried to concentrate but she felt, as Roya jawed in her ear, the room, the crowd of strangers, their heated back-and-forth -- everything -- all receding from her as though she were in her mother's house again, watching the plants in front of the living room window curl into chalky remnants of themselves. Parvin was gesticulating. Sarah, watching, now felt a delicate tenderness toward her: she had, at least, acknowledged Sarah's heartbreak -- if only to her sister. She'd said to her sister that Sarah was the one. Had she also told Roya that for the last three months -- since Sarah had quit her job -- she'd crawled back to her mother's house? Eating, not talking, blanking out and coming to with undirected terror? Awakening constantly as if from afternoon naps into darkness? Even now, those months seemed to Sarah a dim fantasy. Those honest, initially unbearable conversations she'd had with Parvin about Paul all seemed suspensions of lived memory. They'd talked like suitors, careful with one another, and in the end, when Parvin had extended the invitation, it hadn't been assurance or exhortation that had convinced Sarah to come to Tehran but the note of vulnerability she'd detected in Parvin's voice when she'd stated, simply, I want you to see what I've been doing.
Someone was saying her name. She blinked, focused on Mahmoud. He said in English, "Sarah, what do you think?"
Everyone watched her silently. She hauled her mind back to its present circumstance: the rally, the play. She sensed Parvin glowering in her direction.
She said, "Well, if it's dangerous--"
Mahmoud's mouth twisted up at one corner.
Parvin broke in, "What does she know? She's only been here half a day."
"And how long have you been here?"
"Mahmoud," said one of the women.
"No," he declared, "was she here in 1999? When we went out on the streets and -- and Hassan and Ramyar and Ava were taken? And she" -- pointing to Parvin -- "was in her radio station in America, telling us to go out on the streets?"
Parvin said, "I didn't have a show in 1999."
"Last June," muttered a young dark-haired woman.
"I'm as politically committed as anyone here."
"She was not here in 1999," said Mahmoud, "and she was not here last June."
Parvin turned directly toward him. "I'm here now," she retorted, but her voice inflected upward, as if unsure whether or not it was asking a question.
"And now, for her, we should defame our religion? When she understands nothing of it?"
"Forgive him," said Roya. She looked sideways at Sarah.
"Why did you come?" a man's voice demanded.
For a moment no one spoke, then Sarah realized, all at once, that he was speaking to her. She broke off a piece of bread and dipped it in yoghurt. It would be folly, she knew, to engage someone in such an aggressive frame of mind.
Parvin turned toward Sarah. Her face had an odd, hollowed-out look to it. She said, "She came to visit me."
Mahmoud held up two fingers in a dogmatic manner, his head and neck gone rigid. He started intoning in Farsi.
"The imam comes to Karbala with fewer than one hundred men," translated Roya, her tone official, impersonal, "to sacrifice himself to the army of Yazid."
Mahmoud floated his gaze over to Sarah.
"He is -- how do you say it? -- beheaded. He dies -- for who? For mothers and for daughters. And now we are to spit at his face?"
Parvin, seething, replied in a low voice, in Farsi.
"He does not die for the little girl," said Roya.
Mahmoud spoke again. Roya said, "This week is to mourn the imam."
She waited for Parvin to finish speaking, then said, "Who will mourn the little girl?"
Then, once Mahmoud had spoken, she lifted her hand and flicked her fingers, unconsciously mimicking him, and said, "One has nothing to do with the other."
Roya led her to an upstairs study that smelled strongly of wood lacquer. The window had wooden shutters and, behind those, thick milk-colored drapes. A small writing desk fronted the view. A single bed against the wall. Roya went in and shuttled the curtains to either side, letting the sunlight strafe in.
"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 asked, "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, strenuously, 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 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 surviving 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.
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-flow 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 high 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, ringtones 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 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 strange 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 at 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. "Ansar-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.
"Perhaps I will let myself be saved," he went on. "I, too, am young, and expect much from the world."
"How old are you?"
His pupils were gunmetal black. "I am twenty-three. I know what you think. You look at me and you do not see me as a man. I know."
"You're wrong."
And he was. At every turn he'd misunderstood her mind. She was thinking of Parvin; she was thinking of the man in front of her who was Parvin's betrothed, that it was yet another thing she didn't know about her best friend. She was thinking of Reza and of Zahra Kazemi and the man with fat purple lips. She was thinking of Paul. There was no incongruity at all -- or maybe everything was incongruous. Maybe that was the condition of things. She was thinking of their drive here, how everything would seem like the grimy, industrial, urban standard -- when suddenly she'd glimpse the yearning tapering of a spire, the delicate axis of an arch, and, for a moment, she'd remember to exist alongside the ghosts of this ancient city.
Mahmoud led her through the black streets. Many of the mourning candles now snuffed by the risen wind. Dogs roaming the alleyways. She followed him to a tall apartment building, one side of which had been whitewashed and painted over: a twenty-story portrait of a man with a gray beard and black turban. This one wearing glasses. The background was laid down in green and red, the whole wall unevenly illuminated by spotlights.
It was a different hotel. In a blocked-off alley behind them a group of men laughed raucously. A boy wearing a baseball cap urinated against the wall.
The man at the desk was angular and trim-bearded. He watched them unremittingly, not once looking away.
In the room Mahmoud went over and drew the curtains shut. "We will be safe here for now," he said.
"What will happen to Reza?" she asked again.
"I do not know." He started to say something else, then checked himself. "All we can do now is wait."
Again, her breath started coming short and fast. She gulped down some air. "But you think Parvin's okay?"
He sat beside her on the bed. "I think so," he said. Then in a smooth yet awkward gesture he wrapped his arms around her. She neither resisted nor relented.
For what seemed like hours they stayed in that room. Twice he answered his cell phone but learned nothing new. Sarah kept going to the window, lifting the curtains by their hems, looking out into the blinking night as though the act of looking might make her friend appear. Out there it seemed like any other place but underneath, she knew -- she understood now -- there was an alien body. A deep and adverse structure.
Seven thousand miles she'd come and she'd failed their friendship in every way. arvin had confided in her -- had made her mind and soul intelligible -- and Sarah had pushed her away, pushed her into the teeth of some horrible proof. There was the 13-year-old girl, those small dark rooms and small bright rooms, there the woman with a girl's face, the man trussed by his wrists to a ceiling fan. A metal chair with a gas flame beneath it. Her heart smashing inside her ribs. Why had she come here? What had she wanted? She'd wanted purpose, sure, but every part of this turned-around place gave purpose to some action -- leave, never leave, come back. She'd wanted to look past herself but now, when she did, she saw nothing at all that was different. She was alone. Parvin was alone.
Mahmoud was standing behind her. Then he was propping her up, sliding her closer to the bed. He laid her on her back and went away, returning with a glass of water.
"It is okay," he said. He handed her some hotel napkins. "Listen to me. She will be safe. Like last time."
"How do you know?"
"Try to rest," he answered.
She pushed herself back on the bed. The naked bulb glaring down from the ceiling. The sound of incessant traffic outside. She stilled herself, succumbed to the noise of her body -- its angry clunk and shudder. After a while, Mahmoud leaned over her, looked at her closely before saying, "Wait here."
"Where are you going?" She was revolted, even before she spoke, by the desperation she expected in her voice. She closed her eyes, started shivering. She waited.
Hours passed, or maybe minutes, and he came back in and chain-locked the door behind him. He took off his jacket. Then he laid out on the desk two long pipes, a plastic-wrapped baggie, a candle.
"This will help," he said.
"What is it?"
He looked up at her curiously. "It is better than drunk," he said.
She knew, on some level -- on the level that experienced this place as a series of unfolding stories -- that there was amusement, irony, in this. She was receiving the all-Iranian experience. But two days had shattered that way of being here. What she'd thought about things no longer mattered. She was here, now.
Mahmoud fidgeted with his instruments. He struck a match, lit the candle. The pipe shifted in his mouth as he persuaded the white smoke in and out.
"Here," he said. It smelled like chocolate caramel. She watched his fingers, how he shaped the gummy resin until it was pea-shaped, worked it into the widened hollow at the end of the pipe. "Lie down like this," he said.
"Like this," she repeated.
The pipe's bum end was metal, black with an old burn, and he held it to the candle flame. A tindering sound. "Follow the smoke."
She did as he said and followed the smoke.
"Like that," he said. He was serious now, that little secret smile on his face. He didn't know her at all. He was kind. He taught her how to rotate the pipe. He prepared the other pipe. Then he gave it to her and she handed him the first and then, when they were done, they exchanged again, almost formally. His shirt tucked tight into his pants. He caught her eye and they both looked away. Much later, he talked, his words solvent with smoke. She talked too. At one point he stumbled up and turned off the light. At one point the streetlamp stopped working and after that there was only candlelight.
He put his hand between her legs. he saw it happening, the feeling arriving after the thinking about it -- it was maybe mildly disagreeable, she decided. The candle flame reflected off his skin so that his cheekbones and forehead became patches of brilliant white, as though the light had burned clear through.
She closed her eyes. The floating night before her.
"How do you feel?"
He sounded far off, acoustic, calling to her as though from the bottom of a well. here was water in her now, light in her body, in her lungs. Words floating up in bubbles of air. She followed the smoke and breath by breath her body gave out its substance. She got up with the slow, easy motions of a swimmer.
She was at the window, looking out. The light-spilled streets like narrow banks, the metal stream rolling ceaselessly between them. Lights from cars, candles, distant streetlamps deranging themselves into an emptiness so bright it evaporated everything. Parvin was out there somewhere. Inside those lights. Parvin, her friend.
Mahmoud called for her from the bed.
You could never know. Streets. Women walking, wind whipping their clothes. Black chadors loose and flaring behind their bodies, shreds of shadow. Wind blowing against their faces, shaking the veils smooth as sheets on clotheslines. Lights. You could never know when the light would take on weight again and crush you. She pushed herself against the glass. She was alone, and there was time yet. From the tops of plane trees, black birds hurled themselves against the sky -- thousands of them.
"Sarah!"
Her name carried, still, a remote comfort and she stopped for it.
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