City of Lies (8 page)

Somayeh often consulted
Find a Fatwa
websites to help solve her more personal dilemmas. She had read a lengthy testimony from a doctor on the psychological damage caused by masturbation, not to mention the havoc it wreaked on the nervous system. There was also advice on how to resist the urge: exercising, reading about the prophets, fasting, avoiding anything that would stimulate lustful thoughts, avoiding people who were not religious, attending religious ceremonies, keeping busy and marriage. Beneath the advice were the ubiquitous words:
Allah Knows Best
. Somayeh followed all these instructions.

Someone had posted a question on the Supreme Leader’s website:
I was talking to a woman (I was not related to) on the phone during Ramadan and although I did not masturbate, and even though I did not intentionally phone her for (sexual) pleasure, I felt myself ejaculating. Please tell me if my fasting has been invalidated? If it has been invalidated, should I atone for this?
The worried ejaculator had got a reply:
If you usually speak to a woman on the telephone without getting (sexual) pleasure from the conversation and without ejaculating, (in this case) if you ejaculated without masturbating, your fasting has not been invalidated, and you do not have to atone for this.

Somayeh’s relationship with God was the best relationship of her life. She was not going to jeopardize it by needless masturbating. She felt closer to God than to anybody else. He was her best friend. He was her protector. She had heard that some people were godless; this filled her with pity, as it signalled a lack of self-belief. She could not countenance a more meaningless existence. Somayeh also adored the imams. Her favourite was Imam Mahdi, whom she always referred to as Imam Zaman, the Imam of All Time. Mahdi was still alive, but he was simply lost. God had hidden him. With every molecule in her body she believed he would appear for judgement day, when he would save the world from evil. The Mahdi also happened to answer all her prayers, which was not only fortuitous but yet further proof of his powers.

Doubt and second thoughts had kept Amir-Ali awake much of the night. Maybe he had been wrong about Somayeh. Maybe she was not as pretty as he had remembered.

‘If you decide you don’t want her, start eating cucumbers,’ Zahra offered helpfully, sensing the waning of her son’s enthusiasm, ‘I’ll handle it with Fatemeh and say it was me, that I think she’s too young.’

‘What if they don’t have cucumbers?’

‘For God’s sake everyone has cucumbers! When have you ever been to a house without cucumbers?’ She was right, of course.

Somayeh and Fatemeh were plotting similar tactics. Over the years they had devised an intricate code of signals involving coughs, statements about the weather and eating certain fruit and nuts. For tonight, a bunch of grapes was the sign for love.

Somayeh put on her best outfit: a smart white shirt and elegant tight black trousers that would remain concealed by her chador, and snakeskin
roo-farshee
heels that would be on show. A poster of Imam Ali was tacked above her desk on her bedroom wall. The imam’s dreamy green eyes, lined thick with black kohl, stared into the distance. A green scarf was tied round his head, the sun emanating around him like a halo. Fat droplets of blood dripped sensuously out of a gash on his forehead and trickled down his angular cheekbones towards a handsome square jaw framed by chocolate-brown, wavy hair. Below him, either side of her laptop, were two blue-glass Ikea tea-light holders that she had bought from the Ikea boutique in the uptown Jaam-e Jam shopping centre on Vali Asr. It was Somayeh’s favourite shop, full of chic, rich Tehranis. The tea-light holders had been all she could afford. Stacked on her desk were books including
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
,
Nights of Loneliness
, a Mills-and-Boon-style love story by the prolific romance author Fahimeh Rahimi, and a copy of the Koran.

Somayeh rushed into the kitchen when Amir-Ali and his family arrived. Her first job was to serve the tea. If a girl could serve a tray of tea without spilling a drop then she would make a good bride. Not all families took the custom seriously, but they had fun with the ritual. Mohammad-Reza was making faces at Somayeh as she walked into the living room.

‘You little devil, stop making me laugh, I’ll spill it over you on purpose!’

‘
Bah-bah
, what delicious tea,’ smiled Zahra encouragingly.

Somayeh bent down to serve Amir-Ali and dared to meet his eyes. He was staring right at her as he picked up his glass. Somayeh’s hands began to shake. She retreated back to the kitchen to catch her breath.

Fatemeh passed the fruit bowl round. Zahra’s eyes were glued to the cucumbers. Amir-Ali picked out a peach.

‘Maybe you two should chat things through on your own?’ said Fatemeh, sensing the tension. Zahra agreed.

Somayeh and Amir-Ali sat on the floor in Mohammad-Reza’s bedroom, three feet apart. An appropriate distance. His stare was animalistic. Somayeh cleared her throat.

‘I have some questions for you.’

‘Ask me anything you like, but you’re so beautiful that you can’t expect me to concentrate.’ Somayeh giggled nervously. She had prepared a list of exactly eleven questions and she needed to stay focused. Her future would be determined by his answers. She held her chador close. Whenever she spoke, it slipped.

‘Do you ever get angry?’ A flash of pale hand.

‘Never. My friends say I’m one of the calmest guys they know.’ His friends often berated him for his explosive temper.

‘How will you support us?’

‘I’ve worked hard all my life. As you know, I’m working for
baba
’s company and I hope to take over one day.’ Amir-Ali’s parents regularly complained that he would not know what work was even if it hit him in the face.

‘Do you pray?’ He saw a blaze of white shirt, but could not make out her breasts. Right now he certainly was praying – praying that her breasts were not bee stings. Even plums would do.

‘When I hear the
azan
, call to prayer, it doesn’t matter where I am, I have to pray. It’s like an automatic reaction. Even if I’m reading the newspaper.’ Amir-Ali never read the newspaper. And after years of enforced learning, he still could not remember all the Arabic words to the prayers.

Somayeh smiled. Her arm dropped slightly. A glimpse of her neck – long. A sliver of a collarbone – sharp, disappearing into a soft nape.

‘Will you let me get my university diploma?’

‘With eyes like that, I’d let you get anything you want.’

Somayeh laughed. A perfect laugh. Not too loud, not too forthright. You could tell a lot from a girl’s laugh. Amir-Ali’s mother had warned him of women who laughed too heartily; the voraciousness of a woman’s laugh was in direct proportion to her morals. The louder, the looser.

Somayeh’s questions were businesslike and perfunctory, but her voice was gentle, her eyes sensual. Amir-Ali danced around the probing, tiptoeing across her questions, generously scattering lies and half-truths. Somayeh trod purposefully forward, every word carefully placed. They each analysed the other, interpreting every move and gesture.

For Amir-Ali, it was usually easier to read girls when it came to his own kind. He knew what was expected of them. The rest was working out what was from the heart and what was for show. There was never any guarantee, but experience told him that Somayeh was genuine. He could also tell that she was already wildly in love with him. Tehrani girls usually acted disinterested and that was part of the ploy, but Somayeh’s lack of game-playing showed an innocence and naivety that was beguiling.

Somayeh was too young to have learnt the art of discerning the truth. To her, Amir-Ali was the most charismatic man she had ever met.

After an hour, they returned to a living room that was silent and heavy with expectation. Fatemeh handed the fruit bowl round and watched her daughter like a hawk. Somayeh looked at her mother as she picked out a bunch of grapes and popped one in her mouth. Fatemeh jumped up and whispered to Haj Agha to bring out the
shireeni
sweet pastries, the sign understood by all: a wedding.

The hulking machinery of marriage chugged into motion. At the
bale-boroon
ceremony, when engagements are officially announced, Amir-Ali gave Somayeh six gold bracelets, a colossal bouquet of flowers and a silk chador. The four parents thrashed out a deal for Somayeh’s
mehrieh
, dowry, an Islamic pre-nuptial agreement that ensures the woman will be looked after in the event of a divorce. Somayeh could hear Fatemeh and Haj Agha bartering over her worth.

‘She’s a beautiful, educated girl and Amir-Ali will be getting her in her prime! He’ll have the best years of her life!’

‘I know she’s priceless, Fatemeh
joon
, but we’re not made of money.’

The negotiating was usually the men’s job, but as usual the two sisters had taken over. Zahra soon relented, and the
mehrieh
was set at
192
gold coins, sixteen for each of the twelve Shia imams. It was a low amount for Tehran, but high for the Meydan and in keeping with tradition here, which regarded very high
mehriehs
as vulgar. Unusually for an Iranian mother, Zahra knew her son was getting the better deal. The rest of the terms of the marriage were set: Amir-Ali promised to allow Somayeh to attend university and Zahra and Mohammad would give the couple their old apartment in the Meydan as, given Somayeh’s young age, she should remain close to her family and friends for the first few years of married life.

The two families careered towards the
aroosi
wedding party, with the marriage sucking up mounds of money, food and relatives in its path. In between the gatherings and the blood test (a prerequisite for all Iranians, not just cousins) and the extra cooking and cleaning, Fatemeh remembered her own
aroosi
as a sad, small affair. She had not wanted to marry Haj Agha. She could have resisted, but was afraid of disappointing her parents, who were thrilled at the pairing. He came from a good family of homeowners. It was a different era then: a woman accepted the fate chosen for her by others. She had been relieved when she saw him for the first time. He had been disappointed, and she had seen it in his eyes. He had been pressurized into marrying Fatemeh too, because her father was known to be a respectable man. She had expected little from a marriage, just financial stability and, if she was lucky, companionship. Instead she got a man who rarely acknowledged her. Despite Somayeh’s tender age, Fatemeh consoled herself that at least Somayeh was marrying for love, and that Mullah Ahmad had seen its potential in the verses of the Koran.

Somayeh’s wedding was everything she had dreamt it would be. She wore a strapless white beaded gown under a white hooded cape and she spent nearly a million tomans on a make-up artist who transformed her into one of the
Western-
looking girls in the government poster warnings on bad
hejab
. Once the ceremony was over, the men and women partied separately, each group dancing until the early hours. In her wedding photographs Somayeh looked like an alien: her eyes had been Photoshopped blue, her skin digitally retouched and she had been given a new nose, pinched and thin – the Tehranis’ style of choice. Somayeh was delighted.

Somayeh’s married life began the day after the end of school and a few weeks after the wedding party. Amir-Ali broke his promise almost immediately. He pleaded with Somayeh to abandon her plans for university. In a flush of love Somayeh agreed. She interpreted his wish for her to stay home as passion; that he could not bear to be parted from her and see her life grow in a different direction from his own. Amir-Ali had chosen a traditional wife for good reason. He might as well have married an uptown girl if Somayeh was going to spend the next few years of their married life with her nose in books. Fatemeh and Haj Agha were angry at first, but Somayeh assured them it was her decision. She seemed so happy, the matter quickly passed.

The first year of marriage was exciting. Amir-Ali was tender in bed. She embraced lovemaking, seeing it as a spiritual act and a religious duty to satisfy her man. Only one of her friends had married. Most of the women in her neighbourhood waited until their early twenties, and then would move in with their husbands’ families as they could not afford the extortionate rents. Somayeh did not have to endure her in-laws and the new apartment was big and modern. She had a forty-six-inch television, a breakfast bar and black leather sofas. Her friends were envious of her new-found independence. A few of the girls had started university (mostly because it increased their marriage prospects) and they had been disappointed how little it had changed their lives.

Most days Somayeh would cook Amir-Ali’s evening meal when she woke up and then spend time with her mother and her friends. They would keep up to date with the latest news, which revolved around gossip about relationships and plummeting morals. Dog-Duck had been sacked as headmistress for being a lesbian, Batool Khanoum the divorcee was now servicing virgin boys and Tahereh Azimi was pronounced a real-life whore living and working in a brothel in the centre of town.

Marriage for Amir-Ali was not too different from life with his parents. He had his meals cooked, his clothes cleaned and a spotless house. Although he had the added bonus of regular sex and of being adored.

Then the inevitable happened. Amir-Ali got bored. He took immediate action, spending more time with his friends. They drank
aragh sagee
,
‘dog sweat’ booze, the slang name for home-brewed vodka made of raisins, and
they
smoked
sheesheh
with Reza, who had given up judo and now devoted himself to his pipe full-time. Amir-Ali discovered a new gambling den run by an old gangster near the south end of Vali Asr.

Somayeh had been shocked the first few nights he had turned up late, smelling of alcohol. At first she was too submissive to get angry. She sobbed in the bathroom with the shower on, hoping Amir-Ali would not hear her. The passing of time and the worsening of Amir-Ali’s behaviour emboldened her, but Amir-Ali was impervious to Somayeh’s pleading and crying. The number of his Facebook friends swelled. Girls with tumbling ash-blonde hair and plunging vest tops appeared. He swore on his mother’s life they were friends from his old life. He became secretive, hiding his mobile phone. Somayeh incessantly asked Amir-Ali if there was another woman. He did what he always did when she dared to question him: he shouted at her. Her traditional outlook was suddenly not so appealing. It had lost its romance. Now she was just a pain.