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  IS A

  STRANGER

  Amberjack Publishing

  An imprint of Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  Copyright © 2020 by Parnaz Foroutan

  Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This memoir is a work of creative nonfiction. It is nonfiction in that this is a recounting of the author’s memories, and creative in that the author has expanded on her memory to build a richer narrative. The events contained herein are accurate to the best of the author’s memory. Names and minor details that do not impact the story have been changed as necessary to protect those involved.

  Interior image reproduced with permission.

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  Book design by Aubrey Khan, Neuwirth & Associates

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Is available from the Library of Congress

  ISBN 978-1-948705-60-8

  eBook ISBN 978-1-948705-61-5

  To the friend G.d sent me,

  in the darkest and loneliest hour of my need

  A thousand years ago in Nishapur, a poet drew a map for the journey of the soul. A seeker, he wrote, travels through seven valleys. In the first valley, he comes to a place of questions, of uncertainties. In the second valley, he finds himself in the bewilderment of love. In the third, he comes to understand that he does not understand anything. In the fourth, he abandons his attachments to the world. In the fifth, he sees that all things are connected by love, and beyond all things, the Beloved. In the sixth valley, the wayfarer loses himself to wonder, to awe, and in this state, he enters the final valley, where he becomes timeless, placeless, annihilated.

  Dear Father,

  I am sitting at my writing desk, looking out the window at my garden in the morning light. There had been a drought for years. Then, this year, a fire burned through our town. Burned the ancient oaks, burned homes, charred the mountains black. It was followed by a deluge of rain, which was followed by a deluge of wildflowers and, now, a thousand butterflies in their migration pass by my window, all flying in the same direction, tumbling on the breeze.

  You died on a morning like this, the first of May, twenty-two years ago. I was just a girl then. I could still feel you in the sunlight on my skin. I believed that if I listened closely enough, I could hear you laughing. I knew you had become the migration of butterflies, the seed, the blossom, the wilting, the mountain, the wind, the stone, the sea. I knew with certainty. So I threw myself into the world, searching for you in cities, in forests, on mountains, in music, through strangers.

  I am no longer that girl, Father. I’ve lost her, you see? I awoke one morning and knew that she was gone. And she took with her all her certainties.

  In the last year of your life, you lost the ability to speak. I spend my days searching for words. Outside my window, the migration of a thousand butterflies and foolishly, desperately, I write Hills. Wildflowers. Breeze.

  Dear Father,

  You died on a morning much like this. I awoke that day, and the beauty of the world devastated me. Now, I write so that I can hold it, for a moment, on this page, before it is all taken from me.

  HOME

  IS A

  STRANGER

  The girls in our boat undressed and jumped into the sea. And I stood there, in my red bikini, considering death. In my dreams, death was always a tremendous amount of water, a flood, a tidal wave, a rushing torrent. In that weathered boat, while the rest of the party swam and squealed and ducked and dove beneath the surface, I kept looking at that bottomless expanse of it all until I heard the fisherman say, “Go ahead. Jump.”

  His job was not to talk to me, but to scan the horizon for patrol boats and, if he saw one, to give a sharp whistle to call us back into our respective boats. The boys would climb into theirs, and we girls would scramble into ours, to pull our hijabs over our wet bodies and veil our dripping hair and sit in pious contemplation of the blue and the horizon.

  He sat there, leaning back, cigarette in hand, watching me.

  “I’m not a good swimmer,” I said.

  “I am,” the fisherman said. “Stay close to the boat. I’ll keep an eye on you.”

  So I jumped.

  I was suspended in the silent blue of it. There loomed the threat of being discovered by the police. But beneath the water, nobody could see me. I surfaced, gasped, looked at the boat, which seemed a little farther than I had expected. Then I went under, again. Eyes open. I turned and turned, weightless. It felt exhilarating to be in the waters of the Caspian with the bottom so deep, in Iran, with home so far away. I felt so brave, so alive. I surfaced again. I turned to find the boats and saw that everyone was scrambling in. Someone was calling my name above the deafening lull of the water. My cousin Javid waved at me frantically.

  I swam over as fast as I could, the waves working against me. My arms felt leaden. I dragged myself through that water, terrified, frantic. Back in Los Angeles, I had heard about the dark prison cells, the beatings, the disappearances. I spent months worrying about these stories before I had made my decision to return to Iran. And was this moment it, my fate? I finally reached the boat and clutched the side and heaved myself up. The other girls were almost dressed, pulling their pants with panic over their wet legs, buttoning their manteaus with trembling fingers over their nearly bare breasts, tucking their dripping hair beneath knotted headscarves. I struggled clumsily with my jeans, shaking violently with fear. I was the only one still undressed. Then, the fisherman in our boat said, “It’s okay. Don’t be so afraid, it is just some local fishermen. They are not the police.”

  He waved at the distant boat. The men in it waved back. It was a false alarm, I thought, trying to steady myself, I don’t need to be covered in hijab. It is not the police. I gave up trying to cover my wet body with my unwilling clothes, threw my jeans onto the bench and drew a deep breath as the boat came nearer.

  Relieved that it wasn’t the police and looking in the direction of that oncoming boat, I didn’t see that behind me the other girls sat dressed in full hijab. The fishermen we had hired to take us out in their boats had just seen us in our bikinis, so I didn’t register that before these other local fishermen, who were not paid to look away, we must be fully clothed. Maybe because of the sun, or the exhilaration of having been in the bottomless sea, or the close encounter with absolute terror, I forgot the codes of conduct in Iran, forgot that this wasn’t Malibu or Venice, and the closer that boat came, the more distracted I was by this unforeseen situation to notice the bulging vein in Ali’s neck, or the shock of the girls, or my male cousins’ horror at my indiscretion. I stood there, hands shading my eyes from the sun, waiting to see what these strangers wanted, in the middle of the sea.

  Javid said, from the other boat, in English, “Cover yourself up.”

  I didn’t understand that he meant fully, in Islamic hijab. So I took my saffron silk headscarf and wrapped it about my torso, Tahitian style, the way I might have back home on the beaches of Southern California. I watched, mesmerized, the two older men who now stood in their boats before us, their faces wrinkled by the sun, their kind, curious, furtive eyes. They had thick mustaches, calloused hands. They wore knitted sweaters, wool caps on their heads, faded black pants, rubber boots with a tangled net at their feet. They turned off their motor and the three boats bobbed si
lently in the water. Then the older fishermen coughed, cleared their throats, and greeted the fishermen we had hired, barely glancing in the direction of the girls’ boat where I stood. They turned to the boys’ boat and asked if we wanted to buy their catch. They pointed to two large fish, gasping on the floor of their boat.

  I was enraptured. It was such a magnificent exchange, so unexpected a meeting. Fishermen, in the middle of the sea, selling their catch. How could I have remembered what I was or was not wearing when I was no longer even cognizant of myself, lost to the newness of the experience? I had slipped beyond the veil, so to speak, of temporal reality. I thought to myself, we, these older fishermen and I, are entities beyond the masks of our respective identities. We are the attraction of foreign, strange unknowns drawn together to learn, to understand, to make meaning. However, what my cousins wanted to do was to end this transaction of meaning making as quickly as possible, so the younger one, Pouya, asked the fishermen how much for the fish and that’s when I saw it. The third fish. Tiny. Long. Strange, like a small dinosaur. I had never seen anything like it.

  “That one?” I said, addressing one of the older fishermen.

  He leaned over and picked it up and said, “A hatchling sturgeon. Too small to eat.”

  It was an ancient thing. Smooth ridges down its back like a mountain range. “I’d like to buy that one,” I said.

  “For what?” the older fisherman asked. “It is useless.”

  “Please. I will pay for it. If you don’t need it, I want to return it to the sea.”

  Maybe it was the strangeness of the creature. Or its grotesque beauty. Or the fact that it was to be wasted, this living thing, caught accidentally and left to die in the bottom of a boat. I wanted to return it to the water, where it would swim off to grow into the behemoth that it was destined to become. “It is near dead,” Javid said from the boys’ boat, perhaps through clenched teeth. The moment froze like that. The girls in their full hijab aghast. The boys angry. The hired fishermen waiting, the hatchling sturgeon gasping. I stood in my red bikini immodestly covered by a breeze-blown silk scarf, in the middle of the Caspian Sea, unable to think beyond the moment before me. The kind, older fishermen. This unexpected occurrence in an unlikely location. The urgency of the dying fish.

  “You can have it,” the older fisherman said to me. He held it out to me, with his eyes cast down.

  “Don’t take it,” Ali said in English, perhaps through clenched teeth.

  We were all Ali’s guests, staying at his seashore villa. He was my cousin Pouya’s closest friend and had invited us as an excuse to get to know me better, before a formal pursuit. The moment froze, again. I didn’t know what the trespass was, but I started to understand that I had done something terribly offensive, though against whom, I didn’t know. Was it that I had encroached upon the natural hospitality of these people and placed this poor village fisherman in the uncomfortable position of offering me a free fish?

  “Don’t take it,” Ali said, again in English.

  The older fisherman held the fish out to me, glancing over at me, to see if I intended to take it from his hand. I looked at the fish he held. It was marvelous. Blue, silver, green, its strange pointed face, its smallness in relation to the potential of what it was meant to become. Then, the fisherman in our boat, the one who told me to jump, who had promised to keep his eyes on me, said, quietly, “Go on.” I looked up at him, standing there, looking intently at me, still smoking his cigarette. He nodded. “Go ahead,” he said. “You’re right. It belongs back in the sea.”

  So I took the fish, carefully, from the weathered hands of the old man holding it out to me. I held it for a moment, then I bent over the ledge of that red boat and gently set the fish in the sea. We all watched it in silence, expectantly. And it just floated there. Then, as if awakening, it jumped clear into the air, a flash of silver, a piece of lightning, before it fell back into the water and swam at the surface for a fraction of a second, the sun glistening on it, green, purple, blue, before it disappeared.

  After the fish incident, we returned to Ali’s villa. On the walk back, Javid explained to me, patiently, my error in not realizing that the unpaid older fishermen should not have seen me half nude. Javid believed that the mistake was innocent enough on my behalf, and the incident seemed to have passed without consequence. Ali, however, wasn’t as forgiving. The locals knew him. He had a reputation to protect, and my behavior threatened his honor within that small community. I should have known better, as an Iranian girl, to be more protective of my modesty. “You are too unladylike,” he said. I found myself apologizing, trying to defend myself, to prove to him my innocence, but he shook his head and walked away from me.

  That afternoon, we grilled the fish we had bought, listened to music, and danced, while Ali ignored me. Then, one of the other girls invited on that trip, Naghmeh, pulled me aside and said, “Let’s take a shower together.” Both of us were covered in sand and salt and tired from the outing. Naghmeh. Blond-haired, petite and large-hipped, with the devil in her eyes. She used to date Ali. She and I walked to the large room that served as a hammam. Beautiful hand-painted tiles on the walls and floors, and a copper showerhead in the center of the room, with nothing to enclose it. We undressed and washed our bodies. We were young and supple and beautiful in the steam and the fading light of that late afternoon. We talked and laughed, and she told me stories about Ali, who kept knocking on the hammam door asking what I was up to now, locked up in the shower with Naghmeh. Then, Naghmeh brought up the fisherman we had hired.

  “Wasn’t he beautiful?” she asked me.

  She was right. He was beautiful. Long and lean and toned. Gold skinned. High cheekbones, eyes gold in the light. Sensuous mouth. Beautiful. “Imagine his bed,” she said. “Sheets that smell like saltwater . . .”

  “With grains of sand in it . . .”

  “A collection of seashells on his windowsill . . .”

  “A mosquito net hanging over the bed . . .”

  “The taste of his skin . . .”

  “His mouth . . .”

  “The strength of his arms . . .”

  “Would he play an instrument?”

  “Guitar?”

  “Flute?”

  “Daf. But only when he is angry.”

  “On moonlit nights, he’d take you fishing.”

  “Teach you how to throw the net.”

  “And wait . . .”

  This went on, this dangerous unfolding narrative we made of him. We named him the golden fisherman, and soon it was night and we kept weaving him from this thread of fantasy and desire until well past midnight. Tangled in our own story, we finally fell asleep.

  I AWOKE THE next morning to find Javid about to leave the house. He and Ahmad, the fisherman hired to ferry the boys, had arranged the day before to meet so that Ahmad could take Javid to the fish markets, to the dark back of a store where a man sold black market sturgeon caviar in tins.

  “Do you want to come with me?” Javid asked.

  Hungry for adventure and story, I threw on my headscarf and pulled on my sneakers and ran out to the gravel road that ended in sand, where Ahmad was supposed to meet us. Ahmad was to lead us to the fish market, through its winding passageways, past merchants singing about their bream, their whitefish and kutum, past the plastic bins full of ice and fish, with their futile gills, the shock of their eyes, the mouths that opened and closed in agony. The grounds of that fish market would have been strewn with slippery silver scales, entrails, scattered rainbows, and I imagined having to step with haste, with cautious feet past all those bins, the fish in them flopping, dying as we followed Ahmad quickly, covertly, to a nondescript store, to the dark back, where a man waited with tins of sturgeon caviar. I walked with Javid down the gravel road toward the sea to find Ahmad, but I would never participate in that black-market exchange, because just as we reached the sand, a mule came trotting along the beach.

  I remember little ab
out the rider sitting on top, bouncing, but I do remember that mule clearly. A thick, red kilim on its back, with yellow and green tassels hanging from the decorative thing on its head, and blue turquoise stones and bells, just jingling and jangling as it trotted along the water. It stopped before us and the man on the mule said, “Ahmad is coming soon.”

  That mule was lovely. Big, intelligent eyes and decked out splendidly, like a little parade. It tossed its head and whinnied. This is not a thing of Los Angeles, I thought, looking into his eyes. Never would a mule arrive, decorated with so much love, to deliver a message. Then, the man muttered something close to the mule’s ear, which twitched in response, before the two turned to ride away.

  “Wait,” I called out to the man, not ready for him to leave yet. He stopped. Not knowing what else to say, I asked, “Do you hire out your mule?”

  Javid and the man stared at me.

  “I’ve never ridden on a mule before,” I said. “In fact, I can’t ever remember even seeing a mule. I just thought it might be interesting, to experience, the coast . . . in such a traditional way.” The man looked at Javid, because Javid, as a man, was my assumed custodian. It didn’t matter if Javid was my brother or cousin or husband or even friend. He was a man and, as a young woman, I was his charge. By token of his gender, the man expected permission from Javid before even addressing me. Even though I had initiated the exchange, even though I intended to pay for the service.

  After a moment’s pause, Javid turned to the man and said, “She is from America.” The man nodded, as though in understanding. Then, Javid turned to me and said, “Fine. I’ll walk back and get the car. It is getting too late to walk to the fish market, anyway. I’ll drive over with Ahmad. You ride the mule, then go directly back to Ali’s.” Money exchanged hands, and I found myself sitting on top of that mule, like a village bride. The man pulled the mule by a rope and I rode on top, imagining a procession of dafs and women ululating, though no sign of a groom. We turned to ride back and that’s when I saw the fisherman, the golden one, walking toward us, dazzling in the morning light.