A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (39 page)

It takes months for the visa to come through. There are interviews and trips to Rasht, phone calls to the house at inopportune times, and dozens of made-up stories about doctor visits to investigate her condition and shopping trips with Ponneh, who always quickly agrees to corroborate her story before rushing to hang up and most likely forgetting immediately. Ponneh never asks what Saba is doing, and Saba suspects that her involvement with Dr. Zohreh is not only deepening but also becoming much more dangerous. But Saba is far too busy to investigate.

The date of her meeting with Abbas’s brother arrives, and she calls to plead illness. The lawyer becomes angry and threatens to demand that the courts intervene. But her father is friends with a well-respected mullah of his own, and though Saba has always despised him, Mullah Ali delays the proceedings by muddying up the issue, making sure his colleagues in Rasht are too busy to respond, and sweetening their plates with treasures from Agha Hafezi’s pantry. He paints an angelic picture of Saba the widow, who has only ever used the money to advance the cause of Islam.

For weeks at a time, the courts are placated and the case delayed. Soon Saba begins to crave impossible things. Can she take Reza with her? Can they begin a new life in America? Can she convince him to go? On the other hand, Reza wouldn’t be happy in America. He would miss his family and their traditional ways. He would be come a wandering thing, an immigrant, always searching for someone with a familiar scent. She remembers all the Iranian men, welleducated ones, who end up driving taxis in New York or California. Where would someone like Reza end up? In Cheshmeh he could have his own lands. He could be like her father.

During the wait for her visa application to be processed, two of her tickets expire.
When the paperwork is in place, Saba comes to the most difficult part of her campaign, which is getting to an American embassy. There are none in Iran, and she has to find a way to travel to Dubai unnoticed. She has acquired visas to leave Iran and enter Dubai with the help of her father’s friend who owns a factory there, and she has forged travel permissions from Reza, thinking that soon she will tell him. She plans to drive to Tehran from Cheshmeh and from there fly to Dubai, where she will hire a car to take her to the embassy. The entire trip, including her appointment at the embassy, will take two days. For this she begs her father’s help. She is surprised when he agrees to something so risky. If she has to leave, he says, he would rather she had his help. He will hide her absence from the family. He will tell them there is a sick relative in Tehran.
The trip to Dubai proves tiring and dusty, but nothing extraordinary for a wealthy Iranian.
She sits in the lobby of the American embassy, terrified and desperate for some clue as to what the officer will want to hear. She has her story memorized, has practiced it, but there is no way to know the right answers. She has decided to downplay her English, her education, her resources, and to make this seem like a necessary once-in-a-lifetime trip, instead of a luxury. Luxuries lead to whims and expired visas and illegal migrations.
When her name is called, she inches out of her chair. What if she says the wrong thing? How did her mother behave when she was in this situation so many years ago?
“Why do you want to travel to the United States?” asks the officer, a middle-aged woman with a too-short haircut and a slim build.
“To visit relatives and to get treatment for my condition.” She takes out a letter from her doctor, photocopies from books about medical procedures available in Iran and abroad. She shows the officer the name and address of a surgeon in California. The officer gives the papers a cursory glance, studying Saba’s face instead. Saba tries to sound lighthearted, optimistic. “In Iran we have the best doctors, but I feel safer seeking the help of this man. He’s an expert in this. My husband will stay and wait for me.”
“And this must happen now because . . . ?” the officer asks.
“It will allow us to have babies. My husband and I. We’ve been in love since we were seven.” Suddenly she wishes she hadn’t added that last part. It seems sentimental. And it is a lie. Can the officer see through her act? She pulls out her bank statements. “Here is a record of our assets here. And of course my husband will stay.” Why did she repeat that? It sounds suspicious even to her.
In the car to the airport she chastises herself a dozen times. She goes over every word and gesture in the interview, and tries to guess when she will know their decision. Back in Cheshmeh no one asks questions. When she arrives loaded with colorful fabrics, new shoes, and illegal tapes of Iranian dance music, they are all convinced she has been to Tehran. For weeks she waits for word from the embassy. She becomes anxious, begins to chew her nails, develops another nervous tic of always checking the ground behind her.
Another ticket expires. She grows thin with worry.
One more week passes. Then two. And then one day the wait is over. A phone call in the middle of the afternoon and everything is arranged—magic. She can pick up her visa in Dubai, and from there she is free to travel to America—to California, New York, or Massachusetts. An entire continent is open to her now. It seems that her weeks of sleepless research and her strategy of not seeking permanent asylum worked after all.
Saba spends nearly four hours on hold with airlines, trying to change her flight itinerary from one that includes a stopover in Istanbul to one with a stop in Dubai. Despite her three remaining unused tickets, she is forced to purchase a new one, a flight from Tehran to Dubai, from Dubai to Istanbul, connecting with one of her other tickets. When she hangs up the phone, she is dizzy with the reality of it. She is leaving. And now what is left to do? She has an overwhelming sense of being unfinished. Can she take out her money now? Will anyone check? How should she transport it? Should she try to sell her properties again or maybe sign them over to her father? What about Reza?
At the bank she struggles for breath. Is anyone watching? She tells herself to stop being paranoid and drains her accounts, leaving a respectable but modest sum in each so that they don’t close and trigger some sort of alarm to Abbas’s family. She changes her fortune into dollars at a preposterous exchange rate, half of it in a grungy office in a quiet part of Rasht through a black-market dealer whose name she got from her father and who seems to smell urgency. The other half she changes through a contact of the Tehrani’s, who accompanies her to his friend’s office and shakes his head dramatically. “So we’re losing you, Saba Khanom. Who will buy all the videotapes now?” Saba smiles and says goodbye, even promises to tape a few programs for him in America.
Her fortune, the part she manages to liquidate at least, amounts to forty-eight thousand dollars, a small bag of Pahlavi gold coins, and an armful of precious jewelry.
One morning she receives a phone call regarding her exit visa. “I need to tell you, Khanom,” the man mutters, “that your passport is in order. Everything looks good. You only need your permission letter, one specifically for this trip, to show at the airport.”
“I’m sorry?” she says, though she knows. She has avoided this detail until now.
“Your husband,” he says. “He must give permission each time you leave Iran.”
Saba spends the morning considering her options. Should she tell Reza now? Should she forge another letter like the one she used for Dubai? No, she decides. She will find the courage. She will sort out all her paperwork and when he comes home, she will tell him her plans. She will say goodbye, tell her most faithful friend that he has given her some of her best days and convince him to let her go. Maybe he will struggle, but in the end he will understand. He may be oldfashioned, but he has a musical soul, a rebellious heart. He is the one who plays the guitar for her when she dances. He hates
pasdar
s in Jeeps, black chadors, and curtains at the beach, and he loves the Beatles.
She digs through Reza’s drawers, looking for their marriage certificate. As she is closing the top drawer, her gaze falls on an unfamiliar tape. Is it one of hers? She slips it into her Walkman and presses play. Reza’s silky voice wafts from the headset. He laughs boyishly as he tries to figure out how to record. Then he starts to sing. It’s the goodbye song, “Mara Beboos
.
”
Kiss me for the last time.
He strums his
setar
the way he did for her in the shack. Saba turns the plastic cover in her hand. It is dated autumn 1991, a few days before Reza began their romance. When his song is over, Reza speaks through the crackling in the background, pausing between words. “My beautiful friend, I see now that you’ll never marry me, so rather than dying for you, let’s call this goodbye.”

fter dark, when their parents had already gone to bed, Saba and Mahtab sneaked off to swim in the Caspian. They were eleven then and good swimmers, but the sea is much too strong for little girls. At night jinns come to bathe and drag away all life that dares enter the black water. From what I heard, they played for an hour before one of them noticed they had drifted too far. They tried to swim back and made it a long way too. Apparently Mahtab pulled Saba for part of the way and then got tired, so they both started floating on their backs, trying to avoid the waves.
They floated on their backs for two hours. That’s the tragedy of it, because a normal eleven-year-old could never do that in the middle of the night when she’s tired and scared and certain she can’t beat the sea. Any other girl would have given up. But they had each other, and they lasted for two hours against all those water jinns. They told stories and held each other’s hand. They whispered about the trouble they would get into once they were rescued. That is how Saba described it to me. When I imagine that night, I don’t see it as so peaceful. I imagine them struggling for air, kicking the murky water with their tiny feet, trying to breathe while the terns circle overhead. That is the scene that comes to me when I see Saba alone now, poring over her Mahtab writings, grabbing her throat like she’s struggling for air. She doesn’t think I see it, but it’s obvious that she is in the Caspian again. The body remembers much that the mind forgets.

Agha and Khanom Hafezi had been looking for them for some time. They had searched the entire town and had only just begun to consider that their daughters might have gone for a swim. By some coincidence of timing and fate and the tie between mothers and daughters, Bahareh chose that critical final moment, when the girls were just about to lose hope and let the jinns carry them off, to demand a search of the sea.

The local police ignored them at first. They refused to listen to Bahareh because she was a woman in hysterics, letting her headscarf slip, becoming indecent, cursing and insulting them. Then, when they finally answered the pleas of Agha Hafezi, or rather his wallet, they said they had no boat and had to wake a fisherman and take his. The old boatman was quick to the task, but when they were ready to set off, the officers refused to let Bahareh on the boat with the men. Bahareh, now overcome by absolute madness, threw aside her
hijab
and ran into the water. She started to swim fully clothed into the sea, and the men cried sin and indecency. They pulled her out and chastised her before allowing the old fisherman to set off with Agha Hafezi to find the girls.

The girls couldn’t have been asleep for more than a minute or two when the men in the boat spotted them in the water. Saba was still floating on her back when she was plucked out of the water by the callused, briny hands of the town’s fishmonger. Her father spent an hour more diving after his other daughter. At some point the coast guard joined the search. I don’t know if Saba was awake, if she saw her father trying desperately to recover Mahtab during those sixty minutes of panic in the belly of the Caspian. Probably she didn’t, because she used to tell us that Mahtab was with her in the boat, singing songs or some other crazy, impossible thing.

When the search for Mahtab was over, the boat came back to shore and Agha Hafezi never stopped blaming himself.
I wish I had done things differently,
he said, thinking that he might have reached the girls sooner, or he might have stopped them from sneaking away in the first place. But he didn’t have much time for self-pity—because at that moment his wife was being questioned by the police, who already knew that they would need an excuse. Soon people would ask questions. Why didn’t the search for the girls begin sooner? Why the delay? They blamed Bahareh for indecency. And later for bringing harm to her own daughters by impeding a police search.

You’ve heard the saying “His donkey passed over the bridge,” which is to say that when a person is in trouble—his donkey wobbling over a shaky bridge—he behaves one way. But when his troubles are over—his donkey having passed over safely—he is back to acting superior, as if he doesn’t need anyone at all. This is how most people behave. But not Agha Hafezi. After the Caspian day, when all of Cheshmeh came together to nurse his daughter back to health, he opened his doors to us all and never once did he close them again. Some people think he did it only to
maastmali
his secret religion and, yes, there was that reason. I don’t think his soul cries out for the friendship of some old mullah, or that he yearns to spend every night with old women. No . . . but there is more to it than safety. He has a Gilaki heart, a soft heart. I see genuine welcome in his eyes, though he and I have had many reasons to disagree over the years, even after his wife left. No matter what, he didn’t cast me off. He never told me to stop talking or get out of his house.

For the Hafezis that was the beginning of a long hell. A hundred black years rolled into a few days. When they came back from that Caspian trip, everything changed. Saba had a high fever for weeks and was delirious. She stayed in bed most of the time, asking for Mahtab, but we told her that her sister was sick and contagious.

Bahareh, in all her selfishness, had been planning her escape from Iran for months before, but after that trip, she had to be
sneaked
out of the country. Her husband paid every bureaucrat and paper pusher in town to get her unflagged documents, to sneak her away before the investigation into her crimes could continue. It was lucky the police had let her out, put her in the custody of her husband and Mullah Ali. Every day after that, during the time when she should have been tending to Saba, Bahareh was in some embassy or office or giving piles of cash to this document forger or that passport checker. She had planned to go to America with the girls even before all this. I don’t know how her husband could have allowed her to take his daughters away, but the whole family was obsessed with the Western world. Agha Hafezi couldn’t leave his lands and money behind; he would stay, but Bahareh was stubborn about her plans. One day as I was nursing Saba back to health, I heard her screaming at her husband, “I’m leaving this place. How can you expect me to raise Saba here?”