Sex and the Islamic City: part 4

My lover and I have taken to talking in bed. Since I live in Iran in the Sad Flat with a hundred relatives and share a room with one of my aunts, I go to bed earlier than everyone else (luckily they stay up preternaturally late) and dive under the covers with my mobile phone. Luckily for me mobiles are plentiful enough that even I have managed to get one for the duration of my visit, and again luckily for me, the reception under the covers is quite good, unlike in the rest of Tehran. If I didn’t have the mobile, our conversations would have to be limited to times I could call him from a phone box or the rare nights when my aunts all go out. Since he is a family friend, and since it has already been noted – and brought to my attention – that his visits to see me in Tehran over the last few years are regarded as somewhat inappropriate, there is no way I could speak to him from the landline every night, nor could he ring me openly.

Iranian families being what they are, should he call on the landline, I would only get handed the phone once he had made the ritualistic round of enquiries after everyone’s health and even then, someone could easily hang up the phone before it got to me, and of course I could never openly protest, nor could he ever openly ask to speak to me. And if we did manage to speak, our conversation would have to be light and appropriate: I would have to restrict myself to asking after the health of every member of his family, telling him what I have done only in terms of how much fun it was and how much he was missed, and this sort of ritualistic communication has never been satisfying to us.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, though, we can speak almost as often as we like. I say almost because after all I live with family, and even under the covers, I am aware that they are aware that I am on the phone to someone. Every minute that I am not in the communal spaces of the flat, my absence is quietly noted. While he is in his own house in the border town where he works during the week, my lover is free to speak as he will and he enjoys being deliberately salacious knowing I have to be conservative in my response. Come the weekends (here that means a half day on Thursday and all of Friday off), he goes back to his family home where the concept of private space is so alien that he doesn’t even have a room. His family’s living quarters are arranged around a huge sitting/dining room with open plan kitchen, opening to a long balcony at the end, with the four bedrooms opening off this main room. On the nights he is home, my lover sleeps here, making up a bed on the floor. His parents, sister and brother occupy three of the bedrooms and all doors remain open so every excursion to the bathroom or into the kitchen for water is likely to awaken his parents who are the lightest of sleepers.

For the few weeks I was recently the guest of his family, I preferred to sleep outside on the balcony, to enjoy the fresh mountain air of the balmy summer nights. I would wake every morning at 5 with the bright sunlight and sneak quietly into the sitting room to find him waiting for me. I would walk the length of the room to the door leading to the bathroom, checking to see if his parents were asleep, all the time followed by his questioning eyes. And then, pretending I was on my way back from the bathroom, I would stop by his bedding, stoop down and give him a lightening quick kiss on the lips, before retiring back out onto the balcony to sleep a few more hours. His little brother decided to join me there after a couple of nights, adding another obstacle to the already dangerous course I negotiated every morning.

We couldn’t take too many chances. I love his family and would have been mortified at the disrespect to them my actions would imply had we been caught, and he seemed to possess a sixth sense about people’s movements and the possibilities of being seen in ways I would never have considered. For example, sitting in his sister’s room side by side by the computer, as we often did, I would begin to run my foot up and down his leg, safe in the knowledge that the desk obscured our legs from the rest of the house. He, however, knew that the mirror that was behind us on his sister’s dressing table would probably, at some angle, reflect what we were doing and beam it into the sitting room, and would therefore stop me. Something I would never have thought of.

On my last morning in their house, I woke up to have breakfast with him at 6 as he prepared to leave for work, before the rest of the house was awake. We snuck into a corner of the kitchen where I was sure there was no way anyone who suddenly appeared could see us, but before taking me in his arms, he walked out to the sitting room from where the tiles of the wall opposite us were visible, to check how much they reflected. They were glazed black tiles and indeed were busy reflecting our liaison to the exact spot where his parents would emerge from their bedroom. We found another spot for a quick embrace, but neither of us was relaxed by now and I was too amazed by his foresight to concentrate.

It was our last morning and we knew we would not get another chance to be alone all day, that later in the full glare of the family we would have to part with a handshake and would have to contain our sadness. So we found our corner and we kissed and hugged each other tight, attempting to put into those short, wordless actions all that was meaningful between us.

Here in the Islamic Republic of Iran, in this culture that is fed by feeling, run by a regime that has ritualised religious fervour and passion to fever pitch, I have had to learn to quell floods of desire with mere drops of satisfaction and to find my love answered with the subtlest of glances. And I have learnt to have it be enough, the vastness of our love expressed in a quick kiss, a longing look, a whisper under the covers – in the absence of freedom, I have finally had to learn to be content with my lot.