“Tell him privacy. Tell him we had some, and we’d like it back.”
Maryam spoke slowly, her accent apparent to Darius though he had a few words of the language at best. During a prolonged silence, as she squinted at the truck unsure that anything she had said had gotten across, the men began laughing, a lunatic howl that went on so long Darius began to search the blank sky for a full moon. Gradually the hysterics subsided, one of the men coming to his senses ahead of his companions. When the old man talked to them again the humor was gone from his voice.
“Now what does he want?” Darius asked.
“He says he knows what we’re doing here,” Maryam said, “what we’re really doing.”
The farm truck clattered up to the Paycon, and Darius saw that it was a Ford, at least forty years old, with running boards eaten through with rust and a spare tire in the fender well. The old man at the wheel was wearing a karakul hat and a double-breasted suit with wide stripes that had been in fashion when the truck was new. Beside him were two men, considerably younger, although not so young that they were not showing some gray. The shallow lines in their forehead and cheeks were a blueprint for the old man’s scowl; well before they were forty, Darius thought, they would weather into exact copies of him. One of them addressed Darius in a mixture of Farsi and Arabic that was as good as Maryam’s Azerbaijani.
“There is a Komiteh roadblock on the highway not seventy kilometers ahead. If you would like, my father will be glad to take you around it. It is on the way to where we live.”
“I wouldn’t go anywhere with them,” Maryam whispered to Darius.
“We don’t have a choice,” he said. “Thank the old man, and tell him we’ll be glad to give him some money.”
“… He won’t take anything.” Maryam translated the reply “He says it’s his privilege to help anyone who wants to leave Iran.”
“Ask him if there have been many.”
Maryam spoke haltingly to the old man, who laughed again in his lunatic way.
“Not nearly enough,” his son answered, and lit a cigarette from a wood match.
Under the dust Maryam saw that the truck once had been blue, but was now a colorless amalgam of primer and body putty. The passenger door opened for her. The old man’s sons carried their weight in their hips and thighs, and were broad across the shoulders, a full load by themselves. She looked at Darius, who went back to the Paycon for the knapsack, and then led her around to the rear of the truck. Two dusty dogs lunged at them, spraying hot slobber as they were brought up short at the end of a heavy chain.
“There is no need for you to ride outside,” one of the younger men said. “We will make room.”
He hopped into the back with the dogs, and Maryam slithered onto the seat beside his brother. Darius squeezed in after her as the truck lurched forward on sagging springs. The old man ground through the gears, sending oily fumes inside the cabin, but the truck did not seem to gather speed. Maryam began to cough. With every bump her head grazed the ceiling. A hand brushed her leg, slid deliberately along her thigh, and settled close to her lap. The fingers, which did not stop moving, felt like worms.
The old man started up a rapid patter from which she could extract only an occasional phrase. The son closest to him said in Farsi, “We have a farm not far from Khvoy. We went into Tabriz to have work done on our truck, and to visit friends. We see refugees in this part of the mountains all the time, and help them however we can. We are Iranian Azerbaijanis. One day, if God wills it, we will unite with our brothers in Azerbaijan, and our nation will be restored. In the meantime, this is what we do.”
Maryam nodded at the man, but he had not been speaking to her.
“This road doesn’t bypass any checkpoints,” Darius said to him. “Komiteh checkpoints are positioned on main highways to catch the traffic from feeder roads like this one.”
“You are correct,” the gray-haired man answered curtly. “Still, there is no need to be concerned. The checkpoint is two hours away. When we get there, it should be almost light. We will time our arrival for the moment of morning prayer, and while the guards are otherwise occupied, that is when we will pass through.”
“This is the way you always do it?”
The gray-haired man mumbled a few words to his father, and both men shrugged. “It will be the first time,” he said, “but it is a good idea just the same, don’t you think?”
The truck was moving so slowly that Darius was of the opinion they would make better time on foot. He glanced toward the speedometer, but the dashboard gauges all had been torn out. After an hour they passed a Shahsavan encampment in a pasture backed up against the mountains, several dozen round tents of black goat hair arranged in no particular order, and everywhere the great, bleating flocks the Shahsavans followed to the summer grazing lands in the high valleys.
A washout sent them far into a meadow, which returned to a section of the road that was axle-deep in water. The lane declined as it swung around a shrine with a green tile dome toward a cemetery in which the graves were designated by low lines of mud bricks that did not violate the religious edict that burial markers must not throw a shadow. Then they were on pavement again, and Darius saw the lights of the checkpoint. The old man laughed, and said something to his sons, who also laughed, and Darius began to wonder how great a bounty the government was paying in Azerbaijan for illegal refugees.
Darius counted more than twenty Guardsmen inspecting the traffic in both directions. A bus stopped ahead of them at the barricade, and when the door opened for the Guardsmen a sheep scampered off followed by a boy in baggy trousers. As the truck proceeded toward the adjacent bay, Darius noticed the first streaks of pink in the eastern sky. The Guardsmen spotted them, too, and turned their backs on the highway to kneel in the direction of the rising sun.
The old man did not ease up on the accelerator, but waved to the Guardsman who looked up at him in anger for disturbing his prayer. The truck shuddered as it roared away from the checkpoint, the wheel vibrating in the old man’s hand. He laughed some more, and said something to his son in the middle, who told Darius:
“This is how we will do it all the time from now on.”
Twenty kilometers between exits, at a place that seemed to have been chosen on a whim, the truck turned off into the hills and climbed a stone track to a poplar oasis, a muddy village hard by a stream that nurtured a few slender, silver trees. No one was about, except for a man coming down the main street on the back of a dispirited mule, and on foot alongside him a woman in a vest of red brocade and an ankle-length skirt worn over bright, pajamalike pants. The old man hailed the couple, and the woman gave him a long strip of the dimpled bread called naan sangak. He broke off a piece for himself, then passed the warm loaf to his sons. Darius pulled out several pebbles that had attached to the dough while it was being baked on a bed of stones, and shared what was left with Maryam.
The street branched off into a welter of twisting paths lined with puddled clay structures. An old woman came out of a two-story building, and looked Maryam up and down before saying something that made all the men laugh. When his sons had gone inside with her, their father brought Darius and Maryam to a shanty with a green door that crashed against the frame with every breath of wind.
“Stay here,” he said. “Stay till night.”
The single room behind the green door was black with the smoke from a crumbling fireplace. Disconnected patches of sunlight were projected through gaps in the wattle roof. Maryam lifted a dented teapot to her ear, and then spilled out a liter of rusty water. Ragged quilts of Kurdish design were balled up on the floor near a mound of goat droppings. Darius found matches, and ignited some khar bushes left over from an earlier blaze, and soon sooty flames threw warmth into the area immediately in front of the fireplace.
“What do we do now?” Maryam said.
“We sleep. The Zagros are full of bandits; and the army patrols for illegals along with the Revolutionary Guards. It’s safer traveling after dark. We can start for the border then.”
“How will we get there without a car?”
The door creaked open, and the old woman came in with a tray that she set down on the quilt. There was more of the dimpled bread, glasses of tea, yogurt, and pungent goat cheese, fresh yellow cherries, and red-and-green peaches. The woman stood looking at them for a very long time, and was laughing again as she backed outside. Moments later, she returned with a bottle containing an amber fluid. Darius lifted the cork, and sniffing sweet date wine, smiled at the woman in appreciation.
“How—there aren’t any roads.”
“On foot,” he said. “There’s no other way.”
Through a chink in the clay Maryam looked out at the featureless mountains. Her teeth were chattering, and she stamped her feet on the floor. Darius spread the quilt close to the fireplace, offered her the first taste of the wine.
“You’re not opposed to alcohol?”
She took a long drink, and kept her hand on his wrist when he snatched away the bottle. “I’m freezing,” she announced. “Would you mind very much holding me in your arms?”
She sat between his knees, leaning toward the fire. He rubbed her shoulders, then clasped his hands together in her lap. The shaking of her body reminded him of a bird trying unsuccessfully to achieve flight. When he reached for the wine again, she wrapped his arms tightly around her. “Like this, please,” she said.
He held her near, and her trembling eased. The heat of the blaze was searing his legs, but Maryam edged closer to the fireplace. Calmness came over him as she settled back against his chest. He had been craving sleep—forever, it seemed—and now, scarcely able to keep open his eyes, he fought it. Turning Maryam’s face toward his, he kissed her.
Her body tensed, and she wrenched away. Maryam had lied to him about many things, but never had she pretended to be anything other than what she was, a Bride of Blood, a virgin pure in heart, vigilant against the corruption that was the essence of her female flesh. He gave her a guilty smile. “Temporary insanity,” he said before he kissed her again, and pressed her down on the floor beside the fire.
Her arms came together in a hammerlock around his neck. Straining against him, she tightened the grip. Her sealed lips rubbed against his in a childish way, and then opened, instinct taking over, instinct or passion, but nothing he cared to analyze too deeply now. His hand slipped under the rough cloth of the chador. Her breasts were bathed in sweat that smelled to him like spices. A bird’s heart palpitated beneath her ribs.
She pushed him away. She squirmed out from under him and turned over onto her hands and knees, looked back expectantly and a little afraid, willing to forget they had started, if he would. Here, he thought, was a
real
Iranian woman—intelligent, beautiful, politically aware, utterly compliant, approaching sex as just another suicide mission. The national fantasy—but not his.
“In a few days you’ll be in the West. No sense in picking up bad habits now.”
He put her on her back again, and she held herself stiffly as he tugged at the chador. Underneath she still had on her shroud. He shivered at the sight of it, then tore it from her body and balled it into the fire.
The flames saturated her skin in firelight, making something different of her beauty every second. It was impossible for him to have enough of her. She did not like to be looked at, and fluttered her hands in front of his face. “You’re the first man to see me like this,” she whispered.
He wanted to tell her that she was exquisite. But the superlatives in which his thoughts were arranged sounded like so much hollow flattery. He tasted the spiced moisture between her breasts, lay beside her pretending not to notice as she stole furtive glances at his body.
“You’re going to be angry—”
“You aren’t forcing me to do anything,” she said. “How could I be angry with you? In time I think I may come to love you.”
“Not with me.”
“Who else is there that I’m not already furious at?”
“With yourself,” he said. “For waiting so long.” He smiled to let her know he was joking, and again when she saw that he meant it.
“I’m glad I did. That I waited for you.”
Tears seeped through her lashes when he entered her. Her hand came up sharply against his chest.
“Am I hurting you?”
She wrapped her arms around the broadest part of his back, thrust herself at him so ardently that he was lifted off his knees. A sob answered every movement of his hips. He felt her heart beat inside his chest, an instant of perfection in which he lost himself lost in her.
“So glad,” Maryam said.
She woke him with kisses to ask, “Will people be able to tell that I’m not a virgin?”
“Why would you think they would?”
“I’ll be different—everything about me. People will see it, won’t they?”
“I can’t speak for women,” Darius said. “But, yes, I suppose men can tell—those who pay that kind of attention. Most men.”
She pressed her cheek against his shoulder. Her fingertips drew whorls in the hair on his thigh. “Good.”
The sun roused her as it warmed her body. Not yet awake, she reached out to him; but she was alone on the quilt. She spotted him at the fireplace emptying the heroin into the embers, and would have called out to tell him how pleased she was if she hadn’t seen him return the yellow bags to the knapsack. He washed his hands fastidiously in the rusty water left in the teapot, then lay down again. Her body shrunk away from his, but he pressed himself against her and didn’t notice.
He couldn’t stop staring. Dressed in a red waistcoat over a riotous blouse and brocade vest, a long skirt and felt boots, Maryam might have been a native of the high country, but for the blonde hair hidden under a fringed shawl that was held around her forehead with a satin sash. “How do you like me as an Azerbaijani?”
“I like you any way,” he said. “Where did you get those clothes?”
“The old woman was here while you were sleeping.” A bundle of black cloth dropped onto his chest. “She brought these for you, and more bread and cheese to take on the road.”