Sex and the Islamic City: part 10

There are many differences between East and West that have become clichés over time. I used to think that the fabled Eastern fatalism was almost as much of a myth as Western ‘can do’ but after three months in Iran, I am not so sure.

My lover and I are separated as much, I am beginning to think, by culture as by the vast distance and soaring mountains that stand between my life in Tehran and his in the border town in the west of Iran where he works. The Islamic regime’s Sharia (Islamic) law makes our relationship illegal, worthy of flogging and possibly jail, while the culture refuses to accept that we should want to love each other outside of the bonds of marriage. Our different upbringing – his in the lap of his huge family in their ancient homeland of Kurdistan, mine torn away from my people and instead entrusted to the care of Christian evangelists in drizzly Sussex – means that the one thing we cannot talk to each other about is the future. Since meeting my lover eight years ago while we were both staying with mutual family in Tehran, he in town for one year of his National Service and me in town for a three-week visit to my roots, I have been constantly amazed by our ability to talk about everything. To cut across differences in language, culture and upbringing to find in each other a twin heart and matched brain.

Our courtship took place slowly and, though I knew immediately that we had a special attraction, I never thought there was the possibility of any actual romance between us. In reality we had first met as small children. About a year before we left Iran, my family had spent a week in Kurdistan for a wedding, and we had hooked up with his family to hire a bus to take the legion of our combined numbers sightseeing, a gaggle of joking adults and tumbling children. History hasn’t recorded what my lover and I said to each other then, but if future relations are anything to go by, I may have stroked his head while he regarded me with serious brown eyes before breaking into a wide smile.

Despite the lack of memory of our first meeting, our subsequent meetings as adults are burnt into our brains. Talking now about the last eight years, we discover that we both remember every touch and glance that passed between us. Somehow these glances turned into fluttering touches and somehow that all culminated in a conversation that took place over the phone after my last trip. We were finally left in no doubt as to our feelings for each other and, while at first I found it extraordinary to be discussing with the man of whom I had resigned all hope of a physical relationship, the fact that yes, I wanted to sleep with him, I soon was revelling in the fact that we really could talk about anything.

But now, our physical relationship consummated, and the conflagration of desire so uncontrollable in us both, we suddenly stumble at what should be the simplest conversation. ‘What now?’ I want to say, ‘How can we arrange our lives to be together?’ But he, presuming that I will one day soon return to London, occasionally refers to the future only in terms of my visits. ‘Listen my love,’ he says, ‘When we next see each other is up to you, how quickly you can come back.’

‘Come back for what?’ I say nastily, hurt he isn’t asking me to stay. ‘Come back so I can be in Tehran and you can be there and we can not see each other?’

He sighs but says nothing. In reality I know he admires my independence and respects my dedication to my career too much to contemplate asking me to stay. ‘Imagine you living in my town English,’ he said once, ‘you would be like a prisoner here.’

But since falling so hard for him I have started to wonder about the meaning of freedom and I have found myself contemplating the possibility of life as a provincial Iranian wife. Though I have no great desire for marriage, even I realise that this is the only way we can be together, either in his country which won’t allow us any other form of open contact, or in mine where he would not be granted leave to stay any other way. But marriage is a scary word in any language so instead I turn my agile Western mind to solving the immediate problem of our current separation. My lover’s Eastern heart may be adept at surrendering to the frustrations and limitations of his life (‘But this is the way it is English,’ he says repeatedly, ‘we have to accept our situation. I mind as much as you do, but what can we do?’), but I cannot. I am a problem-solver of the type so beloved of US corporate management gurus. And so before long, I come up with a plan, one that will withstand the scrutiny of both our families, particularly my suspicious aunts, and have me on a bus to Kurdistan within days with everyone’s blessing.

I tell him my idea. For a moment he is silent and I hold my breath: ‘OK, now you are going to tell me all the ways in which my perfect plan is, in fact, impossible.’

Him: ‘Actually English, it is a perfect plan. Well done,’ I can hear he is impressed, ‘you are smarter than me.’

Me: ‘Clearly. Now, how long shall I stay?’

Him: ‘Love of my life, my beautiful flower, why don’t you stay for ever?’

Me: ‘Do you know, I think I will.’

And for that moment, as we smiled down the phone at each other, thrilling at our imminent meeting and feeling triumphant at outwitting the conventions of the Islamic Republic, in that one moment, we said all we needed to about the future.

Sex and the Islamic City: part 9

I have now been apart from my lover for three weeks and I am losing my mind a little. I know this because a note of desperation is creeping into our conversations and I am finding the phone calls, even when they go on for two hours and climax in a, er, climax, to be increasingly unsatisfying. On Thursdays and Fridays when he is back with his parents and cannot talk to me, I find the days almost unbearably hard to get through. I am fighting myself to control my need of him and, on the occasions when we talk, the fact that he cannot give me an answer as to when we will meet again grates on my nerves. I don’t say anything though, because I know that it is not in his hands, he cannot get time off work and he lives too far away to come to Tehran for the day and a half that constitutes his weekend.

But it is not in my nature to be so accepting and there is a small part of me, growing ever bigger, that wants to scream that there must be something he can do, that he can’t just be helpless in the face of all the forces that keep us apart. And because this is how my mind is set, it is becoming harder not to feel somehow rejected by his inability to change the world we are living in so that we can be together.

One morning he rings me. It is unexpected, usually he never rings while he is at work. ‘I sneaked out for ten minutes to talk to you,’ he says, ‘I am missing you so badly English, I was desperate to hear your voice.’ I ask him whether he knows yet if he can get time off work to come and see me, and he says it is unlikely. ‘Well,’ I declare dramatically, ‘If you can’t come and see me then I will come to you!’

‘I know you will,’ he says quietly. And as soon as he says that I also realise that, yes, of course I will. It’s just that I hadn’t known myself until he said so, and I am surprised that he knows me so well. Then I remember my gentle friend who has spent eight years getting on a bus for twelve hours at a time just to come and sit next to me for three days. My sweet friend with his soft Kurdish accent who has spent years patiently helping me find the right words, listening hard to what I am trying to say in my broken Farsi, and understanding me anyway when I fail. My lovely friend who has always been the one to ring me in London when I have gone AWOL for months and kind of forgotten him, the one who sends the email saying I miss you, I am waiting for you. The one who has sat and patiently waited for me to return as promised months turned into years without ever complaining or holding me to account. So I remember all this and I feel moved by our little story… until my tender thoughts are interrupted by him saying: ‘You know of course that you can’t come?’

I say nothing but my silence speaks volumes. ‘Please my love,’ he pleads, ‘You know I wish it of God to see you again, but think about it. For you to get up and come here, be on a bus overnight for twelve hours, to lie to everyone about where you are going. Do you think it’s wise?’

Me: ‘Well, I can see it’s risky and I don’t like that I have to lie but what’s the difference with you lying about coming to see me?’

Him: ‘Darling of my heart, if something happens to me on my way to Tehran, it’s not particularly suspicious that I am coming there, I have many friends there. But if you lie and say you are going, I don’t know, to the country to your friends, then you get on a bus to here, several hundred kilometres in the wrong direction, and something happens, what then? Who else could you have been going to see?’

I ponder his point. It is a good one.

Him: ‘My love, my life, don’t let’s risk everything, what we have had, what we can have in the future. If, may God not will it, something was to happen to you on the way – and you know the mountain roads are dangerous and you are a woman alone – and everyone was to find out about us…’ He doesn’t finish because it is beyond both our imaginations, the horror and shame of being discovered in our affair by our families.

I agree with him. I hate to admit it but as usual my lover has pointed out difficulties beyond the reach of a mind used to moving freely in the world and being autonomous. I hang up, feeling hopeless and deeply rebellious at the same time. My 17-year-old self would have thought nothing of getting on that bus, but 15 years later, I have seen more of life and am becoming cautious. I don’t wish to be the cause of the disgrace of my family, the skeleton forever threatening to fall out of the closet of both our tribes, souring a family relationship that has been sweet for generations and which, like a web, spreads out to include some of the people I most respect and care about in Iran. Unlike my 17-year-old self, I now accept that, for all my individualism, I do not operate in a vacuum, I come from a context that has meaning in this country, the country where I am from and where, after all, I am living right now.

In Iran you have a wealth of contexts. Not only are you Iranian, but you have an ethnicity within that – my lover is Kurdish, my friend M is Turkish – that often comes with its own language and culture and, like a Russian doll, sits within your overall Iranianess. Depending on the rootedness of your family, you will also have a place, the place where you are born is forever the part of the country you are associated with, ‘you are a child of Wherever’ we say. And then of course there is your family, the most important definition of all. Your family, and how it has conducted itself in the past, can make or break your life, especially as a woman. The behaviour of every member of that unit has a bearing on the whole, both for good and bad, and when it comes to marriage, you cease to be an individual.

Marriage is the joining of two families and many love matches have been frustrated by the existence of a drug addict brother or the known existence of a past lover or fiancé. A good marriage for her child is still the goal of every mother in Iran. While things are changing, and the soaring divorce rate and rising age for marriage – young men take much longer to set themselves up in a decent life, with jobs being so hard to find, and young women usually want their men to be able to support them royally even if they themselves work – have made palatable many things that were in the past unacceptable, Iran is still far away from being a country where I can openly have a relationship with my lover, where our affair won’t cause heartache and distress to our families and won’t in the future affect my lover’s chances of finding a decent wife and saddle me with a ‘reputation’.

Of course, since I am an outsider my cautiousness is for my lover, but in fact, I am still Iranian enough for this form of social control to affect me. And though I know Iran will surely change and the bonds will surely loosen, I know this won’t happen quickly enough for my lover and I to be open about our love affair.