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.