The Boat (30 page)

"No one knows who was taken with Reza." He cleared his throat. "I think it was a random arrest. But we must wait. We must go somewhere safe and wait."

"Who were they?"

His face went distant. "Ansar-e Hezbollah they call themselves. Friends of the Party of God."

"Then why did they let us go?" She swallowed; her throat was dry. "What did you say to them?"

He shrugged. She felt it through her arm and chest and legs.

"What did you say?"

He looked up at her with his dark eyes, then bowed his head. "You want to know what I said?" His jaw tensed. "It is not that I am religious or not."

"What?" Now his voice was harsh. "I told them," he said, "I told them I was the son of my father."

His expression glazed over for a moment, then he swung around to face her. "Now tell me the truth. Why did you come here?"

"What do you mean?"

He waited, his eyes coruscating in the candlelight. After a drawn-out silence she looked away.

"To escape," she said. And she laughed.

He laughed too, but bitterly. "Then you are the first American to escape to
Iran
."

"To escape from a man," she said. It surprised her to say it. To hear herself say it. A giddiness overcoming her and with it this urge to tell out her life, those problems so personal she could only tell them to a stranger. She looked at Mahmoud in the green-gold glow. His face drawn into the slightest suggestion of a smirk – as though it had forgotten itself in the middle of self-mockery. He'd invoked his father's name. He'd saved her from those men. He'd left her at odds with herself. There was sadness and then there was this, a field of candles, smoke-flowers in the wind.

"Parvin," he said, "she comes here to find a man." The mock-lines on his face deepening. "She says she wanted to meet me before she marries me."

"Marries you?"

"She will marry me to save me. So I can go to
America
if I want. If I choose."

He wasn't joking. He seemed amused by her silence.

"We are not all birds flying in the same direction. We are young-most of us are young." He rubbed his chin with the heel of his hand.

She forced herself to nod.

"Perhaps I will let myself be saved," he went on. "I, too, am young, and expect much from the world."

"How old are you?"

His pupils were gunmetal black. "I am twenty-three. I know what you think. You look at me and you do not see me as a man. I know."

"You're wrong."

And he was. At every turn he'd misunderstood her mind. She was thinking of Parvin; she was thinking of the man in front of her who was Parvin's betrothed, that it was yet another thing she didn't know about her best friend. She was thinking of Reza and of Zahra Kazemi and the man with fat purple lips. She was thinking of Paul. There was no incongruity at all – or maybe everything was incongruous. Maybe that was the condition of things. She was thinking of their drive here, how everything would seem like the grimy, industrial, urban standard – when suddenly she'd glimpse the yearning tapering of a spire, the delicate axis of an arch, and, for a moment, she'd remember to exist alongside the ghosts of this ancient city.

***

Mahmoud led her through the black streets. Many of the mourning candles now snuffed by the risen wind. Dogs roaming the alleyways. She followed him to a tall apartment building, one side of which had been whitewashed and painted over: a twenty-story portrait of a man with a gray beard and black turban. This one wearing glasses. The background was laid down in green and red, the whole wall unevenly illuminated by spotlights.

It was a different hotel. In a blocked-off alley behind them a group of men laughed raucously. A boy wearing a baseball cap urinated against the wall.

The man at the desk was angular and trim-bearded. He watched them unremittingly, not once looking away.

In the room Mahmoud went over and drew the curtains shut. "We will be safe here for now," he said.

"What will happen to Reza?" she asked again.

"I do not know." He started to say something else, then checked himself. "All we can do now is wait."

Again, her breath started coming short and fast. She gulped down some air. "But you think Parvin's okay?"

He sat beside her on the bed. "I think so," he said. Then in a smooth yet awkward gesture he wrapped his arms around her. She neither resisted nor relented.

For what seemed like hours they stayed in that room. Twice he answered his cell phone but learned nothing new. Sarah kept going to the window, lifting the curtains by their hems, looking out into the blinking night as though the act of looking might make her friend appear. Out there it seemed like any other place but underneath, she knew – she understood now – there was an alien body. A deep and adverse structure.

Seven thousand miles she'd come and she'd failed their friendship in every way. Parvin had confided in her – had made her mind and soul intelligible – and Sarah had pushed her away, pushed her into the teeth of some horrible proof. There was the thirteen-year-old girl, those small dark rooms and small bright rooms, there the woman with a girl's face, the man trussed by his wrists to a ceiling fan. A metal chair with a gas flame beneath it. Her heart smashing inside her ribs. Why had she come here? What had she wanted? She'd wanted purpose, sure, but every part of this turned-around place gave purpose to some action – leave, never leave, come back. She'd wanted to look past herself but now, when she did, she saw nothing at all that was different. She was alone. Parvin was alone.

Mahmoud was standing behind her. Then he was propping her up, sliding her closer to the bed. He laid her on her back and went away, returning with a glass of water.

"It is okay," he said. He handed her some hotel napkins. "Listen to me. She will be safe. Like last time."

"How do you know?"

"Try to rest," he answered.

She pushed herself back on the bed. The naked bulb glaring down from the ceiling. The sound of incessant traffic outside. She stilled herself, succumbed to the noise of her body – its angry clunk and shudder. After a while, Mahmoud leaned over her, looked at her closely before saying, "Wait here."

"Where are you going?" She was revolted, even before she spoke, by the desperation she expected in her voice. She closed her eyes, started shivering. She waited.

Hours passed, or maybe minutes, and he came back in and chain-locked the door behind him. He took off his jacket. Then he laid out on the desk two long pipes, a plastic-wrapped baggie, a candle.

"This will help," he said.

"What is it?" He looked up at her curiously. "It is better than drunk," he said.

She knew, on some level – on the level that experienced this place as a series of unfolding stories-that there was amusement, irony, in this. She was receiving the all-Iranian experience. But two days had shattered that way of being here. What she'd thought about things no longer mattered. She was here, now.

Mahmoud fidgeted with his instruments. He struck a match, lit the candle. The pipe shifted in his mouth as he persuaded the white smoke in and out.

"Here," he said. It smelled like chocolate caramel. She watched his fingers, how he shaped the gummy resin until it was pea-shaped, worked it into the widened hollow at the end of the pipe. "Lie down like this," he said.

"Like this," she repeated.

The pipe's bum end was metal, black with an old burn, and he held it to the candle flame. A tindering sound. "Follow the smoke." She did as he said and followed the smoke.

"Like that," he said. He was serious now, that little secret smile on his face. He didn't know her at all. He was kind. He taught her how to rotate the pipe. He prepared the other pipe. Then he gave it to her and she handed him the first and then, when they were done, they exchanged again, almost formally. His shirt tucked tight into his pants. He caught her eye and they both looked away. Much later, he talked, his words solvent with smoke. She talked too. At one point he stumbled up and turned off the light. At one point the streetlamp stopped working and after that there was only candlelight.

He put his hand between her legs. She saw it happening, the feeling arriving after the thinking about it – it was maybe mildly disagreeable, she decided. The candle flame reflected off his skin so that his cheekbones and forehead became patches of brilliant white, as though the light had burned clear through.

She closed her eyes. The floating night before her.

"How do you feel?"

He sounded far off, acoustic, calling to her as though from the bottom of a well. There was water in her now, light in her body, in her lungs. Words floating up in bubbles of air. She followed the smoke and breath by breath her body gave out its substance. She got up with the slow, easy motions of a swimmer.

She was at the window, looking out. The light-spilled streets like narrow banks, the metal stream rolling ceaselessly between them. Lights from cars, candles, distant streetlamps deranging themselves into an emptiness so bright it evaporated everything. Parvin was out there somewhere. Inside those lights. Parvin, her friend.

Mahmoud called for her from the bed.

You could never know. Streets. Women walking, wind whipping their clothes. Black chadors loose and flaring behind their bodies, shreds of shadow. Wind blowing against their faces, shaking the veils smooth as sheets on clotheslines. Lights. You could never know when the light would take on weight again and crush you. She pushed herself against the glass. She was alone, and there was time yet. From the tops of plane trees, black birds hurled themselves against the sky – thousands of them.

"Sarah!"

Her name carried, still, a remote comfort and she stopped for it.

THE STORM CAME ON QUICKLY. The crosswind surged in, filtering through the apertures in the rotten wood, sounding like a chorus of low moans. The boat began to rock. Hugging a beam at the top of the hatch, Mai looked out and her breath stopped: the boat had heeled so steeply that all she saw was an enormous wall of black-green water bearing down; she shut her eyes, opened them again – now the gunwale had crested the water – the ocean completely vanished-and it was as though they were soaring through the air, the sky around them dark and inky and shifting.

A body collided into hers, slammed her against the side of the hatch door. The boat righted and she slipped again, skidding in jets of water down the companionway. The hatch banged shut. Other bodies – she was on top of them – thighs and ribs and arms and heads-jammed this way and that with each groaning tilt, writhing toward space as though impelling the boat to heave to, back into the wind. The rocking got worse. Light was failing fast now and inside the hold it had become uncannily dim.

Inches away from Mai's face, a cross-legged man tipped forward, coughed once into his hands, then keeled back onto his elbows. His face was expressionless. When the smell arrived she realized he had vomited. In the swaying half dark, people pitched forward and back, one by one, adding to the slosh of salt- water and urine in the bilge. People threw up in plastic bags, which they then passed on, hand to hand, until the parcel reached someone next to a scupper.

"Here."

Mai pinched the bag, tried to squeeze it out through the draining slit, but her fingers lost their hold as the boat bucked. The thin yellow juice sprayed into her lap.

On the steps below her, an infant started crying: short choking bursts.

Instantly she looked for Truong – there he was, knees drawn up to his chin, face as smooth and impassive as that of a ceramic toy soldier. Their eyes met. Nothing she could do. He was wedged between an older couple at the bottom of the steps. Where was Quyen? She shook off the automatic anxiety.

Finally the storm arrived in force. The remaining light drained out of the hold. Wind screamed through the cracks. She felt the panicked limbs, people clawing for direction, sudden slaps of ice-cold water, the banging and shapeless shouts from the deck above. The whole world reeled. Everywhere the stink of vomit. Her stomach forced up, squashed through her throat. So this was what it was like, she thought, the moment before death.

She closed her eyes, swallowed compulsively; tried to close out the crawling blackness, the howl of the wind. She tried to recall her father's stories – storms at sea, waves ten, fifteen meters high! – but they rang shallow against what she'd just seen: those dense roaring slabs of water, sky churning overhead like a puddle being mucked with a stick. She was crammed in by a boatload of human bodies, thinking of her father and becoming overwhelmed, slowly, with loneliness. As much loneliness as fear. Concentrate, she told herself. And she did – forcing herself to concentrate, if not – if she was unable to – on the thought of her family, then on the contact of flesh pressed against her on every side, the human warmth, feeling every square inch of skin against her body and through it the shared consciousness of –
 
what? Death? Fear? Surrender? She stayed in that human cocoon, heaving and rolling, concentrating, until it was over.

***

She opened her eyes. A procession of people stepping over her, measuredly, as though hypnotized, up the companionway and onto the deck. She got up and followed them.