Sex & The Islamic City: part 3

It’s been a week since I parted from my lover. He is back in the little border town in Iran where he works and I am back in the thick of things in Tehran. I am staying with family, a typical Iranian set up that means I share a three-bedroom flat with a gaggle of aunts, two teenage cousins and my ailing 90-year old grandmother in a flat dripping with sadness. He is back in his own house which has been issued with his job, although two months ago they asked him to vacate it – as a single man it is a terrible waste to give him a whole house. Iran is the only country I know where one’s marital status is the business of one’s boss. They ask him: ‘well, when are you going to get married then? It’s not natural for a man to be alone at your age.’

He is 35 and he has been in his job for nearly four years. Since they asked him to leave his house he has done nothing and no one has said anything. He is hoping it has been forgotten; such is the way with Iranian bureaucracy. He explains to me: ‘Supposing someone one day remembers the order, there will be another lot in charge and it will all be meaningless. Or you never know. I may have taken a wife by then…’

Every once in a while the topic of his single status arises at work, and with the survival instinct of a man dodging sniper bullets, he responds in jokes and promises that satisfy them for a while. He uses a similar tactic with his family, for whom my lover’s failure to submit to marriage is a topic of daily interest, even though the status is unchanging from year to year. Sitting around the lunch table with his whole family while he is still at work, I attempt to put on a convincing show of interest in his marital status too. I have learnt to adopt a manner of teasing spliced with sincere curiosity: ‘No but really, why does he not get married?’ I say, knitting my brows.

What I really want to answer, to shout out loud from every flat rooftop in their small town is: ‘Because if he had a wife, he would not be available for me when I visit. Even though it’s only once a year at most and we only see each other for a week in that time, it is so precious that it is worth adjusting the rest of his life for.’

In truth, although this is how I feel and how I wish it to be, I don’t know if this is how it actually is. We have never discussed the wider implications of our relationship, and we have certainly never talked about the future. Our eight-year affair has only just become a physical relationship. Although we first said the words ‘I love you’ years ago, we used a form in Farsi that is indistinct, a word for love that you can use for your friend, for your mother, for your favourite food. Like so many things in Iran, we keep the tenor of our feelings for each other vague. In a country where the difference between what is lawful and what actually happens is so vast, where everything is possible as long as you keep it hidden, where openness is seen as simplicity bordering on foolishness, it is better to keep things vague.

My lover, like most other Iranians here, is expert at being non-committal. Life under an authoritarian regime means keeping your options open; when nothing is in your control, then you learnt to duck and dive so that at least when things change – as they are apt to do suddenly and randomly – you don’t get caught in a corner. You never ever commit, not to a thought, an ideology, or even a lunch date. And so it strikes me that this could be the real reason my lover isn’t married, he is too expert at the duck and dive, and perhaps his ability to turn that into a game to be enjoyed has destroyed in him the need for security. Perhaps in learning to live with something approaching ease under an authoritarian regime, he has become too enamoured of uncertainty.

In a few weeks there is a public holiday, which I am hoping he will be able to come and spend with me. In the way I last did when I was 17 and living with my parents in London, I have ferreted around for a place where we can be alone, knowing there was no way we would have any space to ourselves in the Sad Flat. And I have scored a wonderful apartment in the north of Tehran with a wide balcony opening onto the mountains, a place full of light and breezes perched above the pollution of town where we can be just us for four whole days. If he manages to take the time off (of course it is uncertain because his boss won’t commit and, to my lover’s questions, only replies ‘inshallah’ – if God wills), then he has to lie to his family who will be expecting him to be home in that time. I too will have to lie to my aunts, and these lies are not something we relish. He, used to these obstacles to pleasure, can live with the lies. I, who have not lied to my family since those breathless first love days at 17, find my heart rebelling at having to deceive people I care about in order to do something I consider perfectly acceptable. I tell him what I think.

Me: ‘Look, for goodness sake, why don’t you just tell your parents you are coming to see me because you love me and we want to have sex?’

Him: ‘Well, in that case, English, why don’t I just forget the first bit and say I am coming cos we want to have sex?’

His meaning is, ‘since I am going to give both my parents heart attacks if I tell them the truth, why don’t I make sure I finish them off by making it as shocking as possible?’ And I know he means this because the idea of telling the truth, in this world of dissembling and opacity that is the Islamic Republic of Iran, is the most preposterous suggestion of all.