Dreaming in English (34 page)

This world, it’s too cruel.

“And
you
—” Mr. Hernandez looks sternly at Ike. “If you go to court, you might not get off so easy.”

“How is this getting off easy? ” Ike’s trying very hard not to shout. “How is
losing my wife
getting off easy?”

“You could be sent to prison.”

I gasp.

“Bullshit,” Ike says.

“Being a participant in a fraudulent marriage is a felony offense.”

“Falling in love?” Ike says. “That’s a crime?”

“Ike.” I reach to take his hand, but he pulls it close to himself. His eyes are the same color as my perfume bottle of sand, a splintered-glass shade of blue.

“Ike didn’t do anything wrong,” I say. “Please, you can’t send him to jail!”

“I’m not sending him to jail,” Mr. Hernandez says. “But he was an accessory to what the evidence suggests is a fraudulent marriage, entered into for the purpose of gaining U.S. residency. It doesn’t often happen that the U.S. citizen is jailed, but if you get a judge who’s having a particularly bad day, it certainly could. So I advise you to think long and hard about what you’ll do next.”

But there’s no need—no need to think long or hard. I know already we can’t go to court—Ike can’t put his future at risk.

So that’s it. Stunned, I sit there a moment longer.

That’s really it.
America doesn’t want me. As much as I love America, America does not love me back.

GO AS FAR AS YOU CAN SEE, AND WHEN YOU GET THERE, YOU’LL SEE FARTHER

MAMAN JOON, TEHRAN

H
e comes to me, my husband.

He comes to me with quite a story.

Maryam is pregnant, he says, just weeks away from giving birth.

Hamid! This is wonderful news. Oh, this is lovely.

She has been hospitalized, he tells me, and holds up his hands to halt the traffic of my panic. She’s fine; it’s only that the baby is impatient—she is ready to come screeching into the world, a new American citizen, to be born in the land of the free.

My husband loves this phrase,
the land of the free.

When he tells me this, I’m in my mother’s cane-backed chair near the window, warming myself by the stale sun of the late afternoon. I’ve been looking out upon the courtyard, at the stone fountain that hasn’t worked in forever, and at my geraniums in their flower boxes, which thrive no matter how neglectful I’ve been. He has pulled a chair over from the dining room and set it close enough so that our knees touch. He looks young today. Not so old. He looks like a man in his mid-fifties, which, in fact, he is.

This is wonderful, Hamid. So wonderful for Maryam.

How he came to know this before me, I won’t ask. In a marriage, in a life, some questions are best left unspoken.

It’s great for us, too, he says. We’re to be grandparents, Azar! Grandparents at last!

The untainted joy in his eyes makes him seem a stranger. We’ll be grandparents from afar. We’ll call from across the ocean. This is not what my husband wants; I know this. And so what is the reason for such purity in his joy?

I have more news, he says. In his hand is a thick brown envelope, which he holds out to me. I have more very good news.

My heart quickens. Is it Tami? This is a big day for her; she has her immigration interview today. Do you have good news about Tami Joon?

He shakes his head, none yet. The good news is about us, he says. For a change, I have good news about us. Open it. See what’s inside.

My heart falters, skips a beat. There’s a gap between what I want and what can be, and the gap has been there for so long I hardly notice it anymore, except in moments like these—moments that provoke hope against all better reason.

Tell me, Hamid. My eyes hurt today. They hurt too much to read.

A veil of disappointment descends over his eyes. Could you please for once just do as I wish?

Then bring me my glasses, I say. (Let nothing ever be easy.)

He rises to retrieve them, starts away but then turns back. They’re our visas, he says. They’re airplane tickets with our names on them. Inside that envelope is our way out. For once, we finally have good news for ourselves.

What’s this? I say, my mind a fog. I’ve heard him; I just don’t understand. Every year for very many years, we traveled to the embassy in Turkey and applied for visas to America. Every year for very many years, we were always turned down, with no reason given. We never told our children we made this annual journey, for it was best, we always thought, that we suffer in silence when we received the inevitable rejection. In recent years, we stopped going. It seemed there was no point. Yet a few months ago, Hamid wanted for us to try again. Poor Hamid, burdened with hope. I said no, Hamid. Our life is here. This is not a life, he said.

Maryam is pregnant, he says again. And you’re depressed, and I love you, but I can’t go on this way. I’m going to America, he says. We got our visas, and I’m going to be with our daughters, and I’d like very much for you to come with me.

Meaning, he will go without me if he must.

What does a wife say to something like this?

While mine was not, his visa was once approved—once and only once. He could have left long ago, but he stayed.

He stayed.

He stayed for me.

And now you should go for him.
This is whispered to me; I’m not sure if the voice is mine or perhaps my mother’s, but in either case, it’s a forgotten voice, and yet familiar all the same.

He could have left long ago.

Maryam didn’t want to tell you about the baby because she worried you’d bring bad luck, he says now. I know this, of course. It’s why I didn’t ask.

She thinks I’m cursed, I say.

But you’re not, Azar Joon.

Hamid takes the envelope back from me and sits back down. He looks older again, resigned. He thinks he knows what I’ll say. I’d like to surprise him, to see for a second time today pure joy in his warm caramel eyes. I reach for his hand, and absently, he strokes the back of my palm. He’s been doing this since ours were teenage hands. His still look young. They’re still strong, still capable. Mine are old-lady hands now, too much bone and not enough flesh, and yet he caresses them as he always has. It’s perhaps the one thing about us that hasn’t changed.

Will you help me? I ask. If I decide to do this, can I count on your help, Hamid? I’m afraid of everything now.

His throat thickens; he cannot speak. He nods, my kindred spirit, my kind heart. Yes, he will help me. Thank God for this, because I’ve been paralyzed for so long. Anchored to my sorrow like a sunken ship.

For so long I’ve felt like nothing, Hamid. I don’t know what I’m good for anymore.

He looks at me, and I wonder what he sees. The poets would have embraced me once, but I’m not pretty anymore. My eyes used to dance, but now they’re only half alive. And my soul—well, it’s been nearly three decades since I sent it away, a green balloon on a lonely, icy-skied day. A balloon untethered rises; it does not return; it cannot be captured. It is carried away by God’s wind and eventually dies its own death, on its own terms. In this way, it remains forever free. Lying on a cement prison floor, knowing what they’d do to me, I kissed my soul good-bye. I let myself go. What they did in Evin Prison, they didn’t do to me, but to the shackled, blindfolded body of a soulless stranger. It was no one I knew.

My daughter in America is reading
The Great Gatsby
, struggling with that common question: Was Gatsby, who was in love with not a woman but a memory, great like the title of the story suggests? Who cares if he was great, I have wanted to say to her. He was American—always dreaming, always reaching, always believing the best is yet to be. That’s what Americans do. That’s what makes them great.

When I left America, I brought back with me a book called
Atlas Shrugged
. So very different from
Gatsby
! I thought it was brilliant, once upon a time; I was so easy to persuade back then, so easy to be convinced. When someone tells you through their actions, through their laws, that you are worthless, that you have no value, that you have nothing unique to contribute to the world, it’s tempting to say,
That is fine
. If you feel that way, I will stop trying. I will not vote in your facade of a democracy. I will produce nothing for you. I will not, by any degree of participation, give the impression that I support what you are doing to my country. And while it’s unfortunate that you don’t value the beauty that is me, that is fine, because I no longer wish to give it to you, anyway. I will refuse to contribute. Refuse to create. Refuse to dream. All I will do is shrug—at you and at your hypocrisy.

But when we think this way, who, in the end, is harmed the most?

You are. I am.

Stalled, the whole world is.

There’s this baby, now, on the other side of the world. Not content to remain tucked away in my daughter’s womb—not even born yet!—she fights for her independence. Already, I like this baby. I’m sure she could teach me a thing or two. But the question remains: What am I good for anymore? What could I teach her?

You have arms, don’t you, Hamid says. Your arms can hold a baby—that’s something.

I smile. That is something.

You have a voice, don’t you?

Of that, I’m not so sure. It was smothered long ago.

You do, he insists. And I know that baby would love to hear you sing. You can comfort this baby when she’s in need of comfort. As you used to comfort our daughters.

My vision blurs from tears. This is good; I haven’t cried in many years. I sang lullabies to my daughters, and I’d like to sing to this new baby, too. I’d like to smell her baby smell and for her little fingers to vise-grip mine. I’d like her to fade to sleep with her heavy-lidded eyes locked onto my gaze. I’d like to see her toothless smile, to hear her gurgling laugh. I’d like her to adore me. I’d like to cheer her on as she wails unabashedly, demanding that her needs and wants be taken seriously. Very much, I’d like to be part of her life.

I still remember all the old lullabies, Hamid.

I know you do, he says. I know you still remember.

In his eyes, I see his love for me rekindled. I have given him a glimpse of the woman I used to be.

I take the envelope from him. My eyes are not so tired anymore. I take from it the visas, the tickets. My name is on the visa. It’s really there.
It’s really there.

For so long now, America has been a meteor to me, a bright star that shoots to a place I could not follow. It has been Gatsby’s green light.

But suddenly, finally—it’s within my reach.

I
think sometimes of all the people in this polluted city. If you took away the sputtering traffic, the relentless car horns, the obscuring veils, the heavy curtains, the high walls—if you took them all away, what would you see?

You’d see everything. Peace. Desperation. Love being born. Loneliness slowly killing. You’d see music. Dancing. Laughter, pain, drugs, despair, secrets being kept and revealed. In the streets, we’re all alike, all the same. That’s the plan, anyway. But there are poets in the bedrooms, artists in the kitchens, lovers in the living rooms. In one of the apartments, there is a woman of fifty-five years, who yesterday would have told you she was inescapably dying in her cool, dark bedroom, dying from the inside out.

Her mother died in a cool, dark bedroom, too. From tumors, the doctor would have said. Much of her family would have said she died a good death, at peace. But her daughter knows better. I, her daughter, know better.

When I was in prison, this was my greatest regret, that I’d caused my mother such grief. Grief is a cancer; it can kill just as surely. I came to know my mother very well while I was at Evin, my mind’s eye remembering back to every mundane conversation, every ordinary dinner, every shared task of every day, of every year. Every memory strung together, seeing her, at last, as only one mother can see another.
Who will mother the mothers?
I wondered. Who
can
, except for the daughters?

And there I was, being of no use to anyone.

There may be relief, but there is no glory in death, and my mother did not die well. She died bitter. Disappointed. The world was worse when she left than when she entered it. The revolution that was supposed to be so glorious was music turned down, it was eyes to the ground, it was joy suppressed. The government became the
zanjeer zani
, the whips against our backs. My mother’s country had tortured her daughter. It had sent its young men to a worthless war. It had sacrificed one nephew to battle; another had lost both legs.
They’re not martyrs
, she’d say, refusing to accept the religiously convenient terms.
They’re just dead boys.

After being released from prison, like a porcelain doll I smiled unflinchingly through all the wasted words, through all the pointless questions:
What happened? How did we not see this coming? Where is the justice? What can be done?
I myself had only one question. Only to my mother could I ask,
Who will suppress the sadists?