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  The man with the mule greeted him and they started to talk, so I assumed my paid ride had come to an end. I dismounted the mule, patted his head, and turned to walk back to Ali’s villa, when I heard the golden fisherman ask, “Do you want a ride in my boat?”

  I stopped. A second’s hesitation. Then I looked at him and said, “No, thank you.”

  I turned back to walk immediately, as my cousin had instructed, to Ali’s home, even though Javid and I were born only six months apart, back when Tehran still had discos and our dads wore bellbottoms and our moms wore miniskirts and we watched Bruce Lee movies together on Friday afternoons while sipping Coca Cola from glass bottles, while students met secretly and talked about freedom and democracy, while students disappeared and mothers wept and searched for their sons and daughters, waited outside prisons, wrote letters, prayed and prayed, before enough was enough and the students took to the streets and the Shah fled and the void he left behind a blackness filled, and the war began and the air raid sirens woke us from sleep and sent us running to dark basements, and murals of martyrs covered the walls of buildings left standing, while the rest were rubbled heaps of brick and mortar, steel and bone. My family escaped, and Javid’s family stayed behind, so when Javid had said to go straight back after the mule ride, and the golden fisherman asked, “Do you want to ride in my boat?” I turned and said, “No, thank you,” then started walking home, as my cousin had instructed me. I stopped there for a moment, looking down the road that led back to Ali’s house, with him, the golden fisherman, behind me, and behind him the beautiful blue beckoning of death, and I thought to myself, but how long do we live, really?

  I turned around again. I looked at the golden fisherman, magnificently real in the morning light. And while he kept talking to the guy with the mule, he looked back at me, too. So I marched up to him and asked, “How much? For the boat ride?” Just to set things straight. Just to make it clear that I was hiring him, to take me out in his boat, so that I could contemplate the sea and the horizon. That the day before, when I stood on the ledge of his boat, trembling, and he had said, go ahead, jump, meant nothing. That when he was the only one to see my anguish about the hatchling sturgeon and my uncertainty, it meant nothing. He had a boat. It was for hire. I was a tourist. I had American dollars. And nothing else existed between the transaction of all those concretes. No thread of desire, no story of longing.

  The two men said goodbye, and the mule rode off with the jingle and the jangle. I stood there. And the golden fisherman stood before me. His little red boat with the word Morvarid painted in white on one side and Pearl on the other was just a way off, beached in the sand. He started walking toward his boat and I followed, thinking danger, trespass, police, customs, sharia, laws, beating, disappearance, drowning, all to the pounding rhythm of my heart. According to sharia law, an unmarried girl could not be alone with an unmarried man, unless he was mahram, her father, her brother, perhaps an uncle. Any rumor of anything to do with moral misconduct could lead a young woman to find herself in the hands of the law, at the mercy of an Islamic court that could sentence anything from whippings to death by stoning.

  But I was twenty-four, on the green, lush, humid shores of the Caspian, and the boat was red, and the sea seemed endless, and the man before me, who happened to be a fisherman, a vocation so full of allusions, radiated with some burning light, and all of this was a transgression forbidden to me. I was trapped in an old, old story. And that story wasn’t just about physical attraction, it was about a compulsion to step closer to what is forbidden, to look and touch and taste, to come to know, beyond the fear of what is not known. It wasn’t crude or carnal longing that drew me to the golden fisherman, it was the possibility of something perfect in its manifestation to occur between him and I, an understanding that would come to shift and change us both. So for the sake of platonic inquiry, I stepped in his boat, and I sat down, and tightened my headscarf, and looked off at the sea with the air of some foreign tourist hiring some local fisherman to take me out in his hired boat to the middle of the waters where I could meditate on whatever people meditated on when they return to the land of their birth, before the bombs and the Sisters and Brothers of Islam sent them running. He pushed the boat into the water. He started the motor. I was getting farther and farther from the shore. I could feel him behind me. Then, over the loud machinery of that boat, I heard him ask, “Do you want to drive my boat?”

  Me? Drive a little red boat into the face of the exhilarating unknown?

  I turned to look at him and nodded. He stopped the boat and I got up. He moved over on the bench, and I sat down where he had sat. We waited like that, for moment, in silence, until he nodded his head toward a lever and he said, “Just turn that. The more you turn, the faster it goes.” I turned it a little, and we putt-putted forward. I turned a little more, and we hit those waves with the boat jumping a little each time. He put his hand next to mine on the lever, an inch of space between our hands, and that empty space between his skin and mine burned with atomic energy. He held the lever and said, “Turn it this way to go right, and this way to go left. It will be a smoother ride.”

  Then he looked down at my hand. And I looked down, too, and saw that, brazenly, the sleeve of my manteau revealed my naked wrist. Smooth, delicate, white. He looked up at me, and I looked into his eyes and I saw the generations of men and women, lineages of lovers, the flame of all those who coupled to create him. Tall, beautiful, skin turned gold by the summer sun, and eyes gold, too, shining with light. I looked at him, and the boundaries between us dissolved. Or expanded. Because through his eyes I understood something of the infinite. Something of what that desire is that brims over from the confines of our bodies.

  In that timeless place, he reached out across the great aching chasm of separation, and he traced his finger along the revealed skin of my wrist. A touch. Barely.

  Perhaps in fear of what he had done, or what he might do next, he removed his hand quickly and looked away. And I revved up that motor and took those waves head-on. No rights or lefts to smooth out the ride, just a rage to hit each wave, so that we flew for a moment, airborne, before the boat crashed back down and may have splintered into pieces. Then I turned back toward the shore, with the boat tilting to its side, and drove that thing into the sand, stumbled out, wet from the spray, panting, unaware of all the eyes that had seen. I walked, without looking back, past the women in their dark chadors sitting on picnic blankets, past the men standing with arms crossed, smoking cigarettes, past children building castles in the sand, to the road that led to Ali’s villa. I opened the door to find them all sitting at the table, spreading caviar on pieces of toast. Javid turned and asked, “How was the mule ride?”

  Naghmeh looked at me and knew. She knew, from the bewildered look in my eyes, that something wonderful had just happened. That, somehow, it involved the story we had spent an afternoon and a night creating. He wasn’t just some hired fisherman anymore, just as the sea wasn’t just the sea anymore, and the ride on that tasseled mule and where it led me was too marvelous to reduce to a simple response of, “The mule ride was lovely. What a pleasant way to explore the shore.” But I did say those words, and Javid nodded, and Ali looked up from his toast, upset that I had hired a mule without his permission. Ali had invited me to his villa to see if I was worth pursuing, and the incident with the local fishermen, the red bikini, and that hatchling sturgeon had left a bitterness in his mouth, because he sat now, visibly irritated that I had left his home without him, gone into public, and either unwittingly or intentionally undermined his masculinity once more, in this small fishing village on the coast of the Caspian where he reigned king.

  Naghmeh, with the devil in her eyes, asked Ali, “Will we go swimming again today?”

  Ali looked between the two of us, searching for clues masked by our words, by our tone, by the glances between us, to discover if we intended to mock him, before he said, “You girls will go swimming after we eat. Javid, P
ouya, and I will be waterskiing.”

  After breakfast, we returned to the beach where the boys climbed into their hired boat and the girls into ours. The two boats set off in opposite directions, this time Ahmad towing Ali on water skis. When our boat was far enough from the shore to be seen, the golden fisherman shut off his engine and anchored. The boys’ boat zoomed in our radius, with Pouya in tow now. I was first among the girls to undress. I felt his eyes on me. My cheeks burned hot, my body on fire. I stepped on the ledge of his boat and jumped. Because the desire to quench that burning, the intensity of it, was greater than the fear of death. I swam in the sea, waited for the other girls to jump, and when they were all swimming, I swam back to his boat unnoticed, pulled myself up and flopped in, all wet, like a clumsy fish, and he sat there, looking at me with my limbs askew, in the bottom of his boat, trying to gather myself with some semblance of grace. He took a slow drag on his cigarette, blew out the smoke, and asked, “You’re not afraid anymore?”

  “No.”

  “Are you Ali’s girl?”

  “No. No, I’m not.”

  “You are not from here.”

  “No.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  “You were born there?”

  “I moved there when I was a child.”

  “Why have you come back?”

  “I lost my father a few years ago. I wanted to find something of him, here. You?”

  “I have always been here, like my father and his father.”

  “You are a fisherman?”

  “Like my father and his father,” he said, then looked off at the endless expanse of the water. “This is my sea.”

  “Do you like being a fisherman?”

  “It’s hard in the winter,” he said, looking at me. “The summers are easy, though. I rent out my boat to take you city kids out to swim. But the winters . . .” He held out his hands. Strong. Calloused. Beautiful. I wanted to reach out, to touch them, to feel the power of their grip. I didn’t. Ali was swimming, and he noticed me.

  “Come back in,” he yelled from the water.

  “I’m tired.”

  “Then let’s leave.”

  “Go back in,” the fisherman said quietly. “I want to watch you.”

  I threw myself into that water with the passion of a suicide. I swam shamelessly. To the brink of exhaustion, of nearly drowning. Until it was time to return to the seashore, to walk away from him. I spent that afternoon and evening whispering with Naghmeh. Ali had taken to ignoring me completely and turned his attentions to Bita, another one of the girls in our party. We spent the night with music and dance.

  When I was a child, one of my favorite stories about Iran was the one my father told about his own childhood, when he fetched the bread, baked fresh each morning. He’d walk to the neighborhood bakery, buy that bread piping hot, wrapped in paper, and bring it back to his family before breakfast. So when I awoke on our last morning by the seashore, I decided to buy the bread for our breakfast from the local bakery.

  “I’m going to buy bread,” I told Ali, asleep on the couch.

  He hoisted himself onto his elbow. “No. You are not,” he said. “Don’t you dare leave.” Then he flopped back down to sleep.

  I shut the door softly behind me, took a deep breath of that heavy, humid morning air, and set off to find the local bakery. I walked along a road encroached by a green and lush forest, beside a marsh teeming with lotus and egrets, turtles, kingfishers and frogs. The sun was just coming up and a blanket of heavy mist lifted from the trees. I walked with a bounce to my step, until along came a young man on a bicycle. He rode past me, very slowly. I knew that I needed to keep my eyes down, unless I intended to be inviting, but being alone on an empty road early in the morning seemed invitation enough, so he started circling me. He rode around and around me as I walked forward, his circles getting tighter, until, choked by the threat of his proximity, I stopped. He stopped, too, right in front of me. There wasn’t a single living soul on that road, save him and me. My heart was beating so hard, my head was spinning. I looked directly at him and I asked, “Where is the bakery?”

  Something shifted. Maybe the clarity of my intentions occurred to him, the simple, banal, human act of buying bread. He looked at me, puzzled, then softened and started to give me detailed directions to the closest bakery. “Take the main road,” he told me. “You’ll be safer.”

  When I found the bakery, a simple box of a building with a large window and a glowing tandoor inside tended by three or four sweating men, it wasn’t open yet. I walked around the corner to sit and wait, and there before me, sitting in a field of green, tall grass, were more than fifty local women in floral print chadors, chatting and laughing, and dispersed among them chickens and geese pecking the earth and clucking.

  Those women were so lovely, with their rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes, the vitality of their being. I wanted badly to be taken into their fold, to learn who they were and what they thought and how they lived each day. I walked to where they all sat on their haunches, talking, and I said, greeting all of them at once, “Good morning.”

  Everything stopped. Dead quiet. The women, young and old, all looked at me in silence. A second passed, two, eternity. Then, they all looked away and continued talking.

  I stood there, embarrassed. Hurt. Was it my clothes, my accent, the way I stood? Surely they could tell I wasn’t from their village, which made me another tourist from the city, but did they know that it wasn’t even one of their cities, but a foreign city altogether? Did they see this lack of belonging in me? I wanted so badly to belong. I wanted so badly to sit among them. Wasn’t that longing itself a passport in? I felt like I was on the playgrounds of my childhood, again, in the suburban neighborhood school of Los Angeles. Nobody wanted to sit beside me or talk to me. I was a foreigner. A stranger. Gharib. I didn’t have the words to say, “Please, allow me to join you, I have something to give.” Instead, I thought, I’ll just buy my bread and leave.

  So I walked back around to the window, stood where I imagined the line would begin, ready to wait for the baker to open for business. After ten minutes, a beefy man with a red face opened the window and, suddenly, from around the building, the women rushed to that window. They shoved and pushed me violently as they lined up in front of me, until I found myself standing at the very end of that line, flustered. I straightened my headscarf, which someone had pulled undone, and brushed off my manteau, and told myself, No matter, I’m in no hurry. But then a strange thing happened. The baker ignored the first woman standing at his window. Instead, he came out of the door, walked past all the women to the back of the line where I stood, and asked, “How many sheets of bread would you like, Miss?”

  I looked at him, and he looked back kindly. Then, I looked at the women who had pushed me to the end of the line, and they did not look back kindly, so I said, quietly, “Five sheets, please.” The baker walked past all the women, back into the bakery, took five sheets of fresh, hot sangak, dusted them off, wrapped them in paper, walked out past the now glaring women, and handed them to me.

  “Thank you,” I said. “How much?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “That’s kind of you, but I can pay, please. How much?”

  “Don’t worry about it. You should leave now, though.”

  “But I have money, I’m not poor or something.”

  He looked at the women waiting in line. Then, he came in real close to me and whispered, very seriously, “Morvarid.”

  That word. Painted in white. On the side of that red boat.

  “Go now,” he said. “Leave quickly. Across the street there is a taxi waiting for you.”

  I took my bread and walked briskly to the other side of the street. The driver was already holding the door open. I got in, and he shut it and drove me back to Ali’s without even asking me where I was headed.

  We ate that bread. I di
dn’t tell anyone about the incident with the village women and the baker. We packed our bags. I needed to see the golden fisherman again. The story between the two of us couldn’t end like this, with a village scandal, uncertainties, unsaid goodbyes. I suggested one more boat ride before the long drive back to Tehran, and everyone agreed that it seemed like a fine way to end the trip, so we headed to the shore, all of us, to find the fishermen.

  He was there, waiting. Ahmad, too. We piled wordlessly into our respective boats. Somehow the air seemed thicker. Everything had a heavier gravity about it, the way the atmosphere feels before a storm. Naghmeh sat at the front of the boat and I sat in the middle, keeping my eyes on the horizon, not daring to look at him. After we rode for a while, with the spray in our faces, in silence, I finally turned around and met his eyes. Then, he did a peculiar thing. He turned that boat in a complete, graceful circle.

  The other girls squealed with delight. He stopped the boat and instructed the girls to stand up and move to sit on one side of the boat. When I got up to join them, he said, “No, you sit where you are.” Then, he started the boat’s engine and turned it in a full circle again, but this time, my side lifted up into the air, so that I was looking down on the girls, who were nearly touching the water with their backs. He looked at me, lifted up like that, with the sky above reeling and the cool water beneath and that little red boat just turning and turning in the waves. Then, he sped that boat straight out to sea, and the girls screamed with the exhilaration of the speed and the spray, and I sat quietly, watching him, and he looked back quietly, and he slowed the boat down and turned it again, and my body rose once more with my side of the boat, clear out of the water.

  If existence is reduced to just our bodies, then sex is merely a penetration of flesh. But the intercourse between two people is more than just this merging. It begins well before that. Before touch. It begins as a thought. A ripple of air. The slight change in temperature, the minute trace of scent. The pull of some magnetic force. All that defies the illusion of separation. The idea that I began here, and he began there, and we were both confined to the lonely prisons of our bodies. Desire allowed us this escape, we began to touch before there was any contact between our skin. And in that boat, I felt him kiss me, the sea spray an extension of his wanting mouth, and I felt him hold me, the waves an extension of his body, but he never touched me with his hands, save that singular trespass of an inquisitive finger against the white beckoning of my naked wrist.