“Since when does it matter what I think?”
“You still don’t trust me.”
“I trusted you to lie to Ashfar and Bijan,” he said, “and wasn’t disappointed.”
She was in the shower a long time, and came out wearing one of the clean chadors and with a towel wrapped like a sayyid’s turban around her wet hair. The hot water was used up when it was his turn in the tub. Sitting on the bottom, he played the cold against his bruised muscles.
There was no shaving cream in the medicine chest. He toweled the mirror and stared at himself in the steamy fog. His ordeal showed in hollow cheeks, and residual swelling around the eyes. His beard had come in full and thick. With short hair and his collar open he might have been any loyal, tired son of the Revolution. In Mehta’s best suit he looked ten years older.
Maryam had taken up residence in the kitchen. The oven and two burners were lighted, and he stood close and enjoyed the heat against his damp skin.
“I found some canned salmon in the pantry,” she said. “It’s almost ready.”
She brought him fried fish and rice, and tea, and though the salmon was burned on the edges and cold inside he couldn’t get enough of it. Maryam watched him eat before she served herself. She sat beside him taking slow, thoughtful bites, and when he finished before she hardly had started she filled his plate again.
“I was sixteen the year I made up my mind to martyr myself in the cause of the Shi’ites,” she said abruptly. “A boy I thought I was in love with had left me for my best girlfriend, and I was going to have revenge on both of them by dying for Iran.”
Darius put down his fork with a piece of salmon still on it.
“Eat,” she said. “Learning to cook was my singular accomplishment as a soldier for Islam. At least have the fruits of my training.” She tasted what was on her plate, but had no appetite. “I ran away to Teheran again, and Sheik Salehi arranged for me to be sent to ‘The Institute’ at Manzarieh for religious indoctrination. There I was taught how to hide explosives under my chador, to make myself human shrapnel. That was the extent of my instruction as a guerrilla.”
“You?” Darius said. “Your vanity would allow you to die like that?”
“Don’t laugh. It was what I wanted. I still hated my friend and the boy, and now I hated myself for having come to that miserable place. When we were asked who wanted to go to Lebanon to fight, I was the first to give her name.” Maryam looked at her plate again, and made a meal of a forkful. “Manzarieh had been a country club compared to the camp of the Sayyidah Zaynab Brigade. ‘Search for the Jew behind every depravity’ was the watchword of the mullahs there. The girls all were zealots. Many were terribly ugly and had known rejection their whole life. Like me, they would take out their unhappiness on an unsuspecting world.”
“But first upon themselves,” he said. “It’s the psychology of the camps.”
“Where were you when I needed someone to tell me why I was the most miserable person on earth?”
“You saw action against the Israelis and their Christian allies?” he asked.
“Our days were spent in prayer, and in waiting. I was bored every minute until I met Leila. She also had come to Lebanon for the wrong reason, and saw no way out but the martyr’s end we were promised. To ease her loneliness she had stolen some of the hashish that was used to give courage to the girls who were about to blow themselves up. To ease mine she taught me to smoke it. Things were not so dismal anymore. There was hope for us yet, if we could stay high all the time or get away.”
Maryam reached under the table and brought up two bottles of Russian vodka of a fine label that Darius had never seen in the evidence room.
“Where did you find Stolichnaya?”
“There’s an unopened case under the sink. I’d trade it all for two grams of hashish.”
She filled his tea glass with the vodka, but took none for herself. “In the spring of this year, three girls were requested for a special mission. I had learned never to volunteer for anything unless I wanted to make good my martyrdom. Leila advised me to put my name forward as it would mean a break from our tedious existence. The other girl chosen was Sousan Hovanian, who was new to the camp and to us.
“We were returned to Iran and flown to Mashad. Revolutionary Guards drove us by night to the Afghanistan border at Jannatabad, and gave us over to a party of Islamic resistance fighters who had come to Mashad for medical treatment. We traveled with them by horse caravan over the Zulfikar Pass. The best thing I can say about the men is that they were too weak to bother us. The mountain valleys all are cultivated in opium poppies, and I began to understand what we were needed for … began to think I did.” Maryam paused, and did not resume again.
“Yes, go on.”
“I’m sorry I started. What difference does any of this make? We owe it to ourselves to forget the things that motivated us when we were in service to Iran, that seemed so important we would give up our lives for them.”
“And if we could,” Darius said, “what cause would take their place in your heart?”
“Myself,” she said without hesitation. “All that concerns me now are my plans for the future—assuming I have a future.”
“Someone has to remember those things.”
“Why? To remember how we were duped, and used as if we were less than human?”
“Yes,” Darius answered. “That’s why.”
Maryam sighed. Then she said, “The wounded fighters were bringing antihelicopter missiles into Afghanistan. On our best day in the mountains the horses made fewer than fifteen kilometers. We established contact with the main body of guerrillas at their base overlooking the highway to Herat, and were greeted with news that our camp in Lebanon had been overrun by the Israelis. We cried all night. But these were tears of joy. Without discussion we decided to return to our homes, and put out of our minds that we had ever been Brides of Blood. I was in favor of throwing the parcel the Afghanis gave us into the first lake we came to. Leila said no, that if we were picked up by the Revolutionary Guards, we would need what was inside to bargain for our lives.”
Maryam sniffed the vodka bottle. “How can you drink this vile stuff?” she asked.
“We divided the plastic bags of heroin among us and taped them to our bodies as we had learned to hide explosives. Leila left for Iran in the morning, and Sousan the day after that. We were to meet one week later at the Rudaki Hall opera house. A blizzard closed the Zulfikar Pass for four days, and I lost three days more en route to Teheran. You can’t imagine my relief when I found Sousan waiting for me, and she brought me to Saltanatabad Avenue.”
“The apartment was hers?”
“Hers and Leila’s,” Maryam said. “They had sold one bag of heroin to a drug dealer from south Teheran, and were negotiating to get rid of the lot. The money that was left over from household expenses went for the first nice clothes they’d had in years. They didn’t understand why I wanted no part of the deal. After talking about it long enough, neither did I. What could be more fitting, they argued, than for the people who supported the camps to be polluted by drugs, while we came away with something to show for our wasted lives?”
“Where was your part of the heroin?” Darius asked. “You weren’t still carrying it taped to your body?”
“Mehrabad Airport. In a locker. So, you see, I don’t lie so much as you think. The dealer was a hopeless addict who called himself Najafi. The big money he promised was always coming the next day. In time I came to feel the apartment was my home. I brought back my share of the drugs, and put it in the freezer with all the rest. While we waited to become rich, Leila began acting strangely, sleeping until noon, not eating or keeping herself clean. Najafi had taught her to smoke heroin, and it was all she cared about. Sousan and I were worried the Pasdars would pick her up on the street, so Sousan moved to Najafi’s to keep a close eye on her. Next time I looked in the freezer, it was empty. I had no money, nowhere to go. I didn’t even know where to reach the other girls. Then Leila came home with her insides torn up. It wasn’t the Pasdars who had found her, but your friends from SAVAK.”
“You’ve seen what good friends of mine they are.”
“Leila said they would do the same to me if we didn’t turn over the heroin. She became hysterical when I told her I didn’t have it. Sousan had fallen in love with Najafi, and taken it all.”
“And the mycotoxins?”
“The first I heard about them was from Rahgozar. He had been chasing after them for months. He was several days behind when he lost track of them near the Zulfikar Pass, and by the time he caught up to me in Teheran they were gone again.”
“What did he want with them?” Darius asked. “The Russians didn’t need them, since they were the first to synthesize yellow rain.”
“He told me the Red Army had brought stocks of yellow rain into Afghanistan, but lost them when a cargo plane was shot down by the Islamic guerrillas. They weren’t missed till the Soviets got into bed with the West, and began retrieving their chemical weapons all over the world.”
“Where did you tell him they were?”
Maryam didn’t try to hide her exasperation, but looked at Darius as though he were impossibly thick. “You know I don’t know.”
“He accepted that?”
“He was like you. He thought if he never let me out of his sight, eventually he’d have them. Them and me.”
“You went along with him?”
“I’d seen what had happened to Leila. Better to let him drive me crazy asking the same question over and over than try convincing Baraheni of anything. Rahgozar was a good man, who had the best interests of two countries at heart. Whenever I think about what happened to him, I want to cry.”
Reaching for the bottle again he brushed her arm, and she smiled and covered his hand in hers, a gesture that left him unmoved. In her aversion to him he’d been cast as another nuisance she was willing to put up with in order to preserve her life. He leaned across the table and kissed her.
She didn’t pull away, didn’t encourage him either. The sensation was like ice against his mouth—a thin layer capping a dormant hot spring. A thin fantasy, as well. He laughed out loud, and when Maryam asked, “What’s funny?” he shook his head and drank more, then cupped her chin in his palm and kissed her again, watching the top of her breasts inside Mrs. Mehta’s frumpy chemise.
He carried the bottle into the living room, and nestled against bolster pillows covered in red damask. Maryam came in after him, and though he concentrated on the vodka soon he had her in his arms. His hand on her breast made her heart accelerate. But she remained unresponsive when he kissed her, and he wrote off her reaction as one of alarm. On the chance that he was wrong, because he wanted to be, he nudged her onto her back. Her arm came up and stiffened against his chest.
“You heard just a small part of my story,” she said. “I was a Bride of Blood in more than name only.”
“I heard enough.”
“No—there were rules for everything. If you broke even one of them, it might mean your life. For the girls of the Sayyidah Zaynab Brigade there was one rule that couldn’t be bent, although our instructors challenged us to do so every day.”
“Oh … ?” he said, knowing what she would tell him, already looking for his glass.
“We had to remain virgins, pure in heart and in body.”
“You weren’t so malleable that you agreed to everything they demanded of you?
“I thought I was being loyal.”
“Loyal to who? Of what use could the Party of God make of your virginity?”
“Those are the same arguments our instructors raised,” she said, “after class was over.”
She remained quiet for so long that he felt obligated to change the subject. “It’s getting late …”
“Loyal to myself,” she said then.
Women worldlier than she had given him the same rationale. From childhood, every Iranian girl had it impressed upon her that her virginity was her most precious possession. Even in cosmopolitan Teheran a young woman who was sexually experienced would have a difficult time finding a good husband. Any man who would marry a nonvirgin was deemed to be more seriously flawed than the girl he desired.
“You’re falling asleep,” he heard her say.
“You’ve hypnotized me.”
He reached for her again, but embraced air as she slipped through his arms. The bottle that he snatched as a consolation prize was empty. She was scolding him, telling him he drank too much and that he needed rest if he was to regain his strength. In all her clothes, like a girl from the provinces, she wallowed in the pillows making a place to sleep for one. Darius tucked the empty under his arm and stumbled into the bedroom.
The single mattress was narrow and rutted; Mehta must have had his share of nights like this. The sheets felt gritty, and hadn’t been changed since the body was taken away. He had no qualms about sleeping in his dead friend’s bed. Perhaps Mehta’s ghost would come down from Zoroastrian heaven where seven archangels dwelled with Ahura Mazda, and he would have companionship till morning when he would feel well enough to pursue Maryam again. Whole new areas of investigation were opening up to him now that he was no longer a detective.
He hung Mehta’s suit behind the door and slipped between the sandy sheets. His eyes already were shut. The kiss that he felt on his forehead must have been a product of his imagination, for he was out by then, sleeping the deep, dreamless sleep of the dead.
Her throat was on fire. She tore open the windows and sucked cool air into her lungs, held it until she could swallow without pain. She crawled back into her nest to wait for her body to wake up, but still felt sluggish forty-five minutes later when she went into the bedroom. Darius had kicked off the covers and lay with his weight supported by both shoulders and one hip, a contortionist’s trick that must have provided some relief for his wounded back. Breathing through his mouth, he made strangling sounds that she didn’t like to hear. She opened the bedroom windows all the way. The breeze rustled the sheets, but Darius didn’t stir. She tossed the covers over his twisted body, and walked out.
A hot morning shower was mad luxury after the weeks in Evin. She cooked some eggs and put up water for tea, and after she had eaten she made a second breakfast for Darius. His body had rearranged itself into a more intricate knot. When she raised the shades to allow the sunlight to spread over his face, she noticed an oozing rash under his beard. The light moving into his eyes didn’t budge him. It was unsettling for her to see someone sleep so soundly, and she pushed at his ribs until his body rocked on one hip. “Come on,” she said, “it’s time you were up.”