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.