ROYA SHAMS

TEHRAN, AUGUST 1987

Leila was so good at wearing sunglasses. I found myself watching them, watching her more than I was actually listening to her. It is ridiculous to say that she was beautiful. A horse is beautiful, a mountain or an ocean is beautiful. Leila, in those sunglasses, was something else. Something beyond language. I get frustrated this way so often. A photograph can say “This is what it was.” Language can only say “This is what it was like.”

Chattering away in that cab—about astrology, British punk music, jungle cats, Greek gods—this is what she was like: a pinwheel of stars. Lightning under a fingernail. I was watching her, nodding, watching, watching, starting to feel light-headed. Her black slacks hugged her powerful thighs. She was talking fast, fizzing like cold soda. She’d taken her scarf off, revealing her short curls, and as I watched her I noticed the taxi driver kept sneaking glances in his rearview mirror, only ever at her. I watched him watch her, occasionally swerving a little because he couldn’t take his eyes off his mirror.

“Careful!” Leila shouted to him.

“Are you someone famous?” he asked at last in a thick Bandari accent.

“Do you think I’d tell you if I was?” she asked, putting her scarf back on, laughing at me. She pulled out her cigarettes, unfiltered, lit one, puffing it once, and handed it to me. Then she lit one for herself.

“Roll down your windows please,” the cab driver said, scowling, still staring up into his mirror.

We did, and Leila smoked her cigarette with relish. I took polite pulls of mine, staring out the window as the city flitted past in flashes of light and sound. Beat-up Paykans and Saipa sedans growled along like old farm equipment. Women in khimars and hijabs hurried home along the sidewalks while young men with tight bright T-shirts tucked into their jeans stood in packs smoking and laughing. All around us, handsome new parks and plazas effervesced in the night. Many of these fresh constructions, I knew, were converted cemeteries full of the regime’s executed political prisoners. Paving over those unmarked mass graves with turf, with water features, to show the world how happy and pristine Tehran had become. Clean. I’d heard this whispered: If you were taken prisoner, they would ask you, “When you were growing up, did your father pray, fast, and read the Holy Quran?” You were supposed to answer no, though most reflexively said yes. “No” meant your delinquency was not your fault. If you said yes, you’d be tortured or hanged.

Suddenly, out of nothing, Leila turned and asked me, “Who has seen you cry naked? Not your parents when you were little, but as an adult. When was the last time someone saw you cry naked?”

I glanced up at the driver, who was furiously concentrating all his energy into pretending he wasn’t listening. Even in the dark, I could see his temple throb.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I cry all the time,” she continued, as if I wasn’t even there. “I hate it. It embarrasses me. I am not fragile, but sometimes my body just cries and I can’t help it. It’s a betrayal. Like someone tickling you, you laugh even when you don’t want to, even when it hurts. That’s how I cry.”

I nodded.

“I do know that feeling.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I went on. “Last week I was at our neighbor Nafiz’s house, watching her daughter while Nafiz hung clothes outside. Her daughter is this brand-new thing, barely even a human, and as I held her of course she started crying. And there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t put her down anywhere, all the couches were covered with clothes, the table covered with dishes. That was what got me. There was nowhere to set this angry crying beast howling in my face. And so I just started crying too. I couldn’t get her to stop, and then I couldn’t stop myself. Nafiz came in to these two hideous beasts just gasping, huffing. She took her daughter and within a minute the baby stopped crying. Nafiz must have thought I was insane. It was just…there was nowhere to put her. That’s what it was. No place to set her down.”

I looked up—I hadn’t meant to tell that whole story, hadn’t meant to advance in intimacy so immediately. I half expected Leila to retreat, for her eyes to get big as if to say whoa, that’s too much. But what she did was laugh—

“Yeah, that sounds about right. That’s my point exactly. Anyone can see you cry. We all act like it’s this big deal, but it happens all the time. We’re just these idiot animals about it. But to be with someone while they cry naked? That’s real intimacy. All the dogshit stripped away. That’s the top of the mountain.”

She exhaled smoke while she said this and I still didn’t really understand what she was talking about, and so we were quiet for a while, that charged sort of quiet that feels like sand being poured all around you, up to your throat. The driver wove through Tehran traffic like the old man he was, cursing under his breath at boys showing off and honking their horns, shaking his head when they’d roll down their windows to curse.

Finally the taxi pulled up to a campground parking lot by the lake for picnicking families. An old, well-used space. The lake had been manmade, but not recently, not one of the regime’s fresh cover-up affairs. Leila handed the driver a wad of toman for the fare and I said, “Leila, let me help with that,” but she just rolled her eyes and slipped out of the cab.

“Follow me,” she said, pulling her headscarf back off and lighting another cigarette, flame flickering in her sunglass lenses. She held the pack toward me but I shook my head. That she was walking around—at night!—with her hair free was terrifying to me, so terrifying I didn’t even want to mention it, afraid it would invite someone else to notice as well. With her curls, her white workshirt and black slacks and sunglasses, she looked more than a little like Bob Dylan. We walked the pedestrian footpath around the water, worn to hard dirt. Leila paced manfully, puffed up. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. To our right was the lake, a giant brown thing filled with fat carp and slimy mud. On the left was a wall all along the path, three meters high, decorative round gray bricks laid over each other with little protruding lips.

It was dark and getting darker, and cold, and as we passed people walking in the dim light Leila would dip her head and say “salaam” in a gravelly man’s voice, and the men passing by would salaam right back without missing a beat, as if greeting any other man. Leila would look back at me with a big smile, her short curls free in the air. What began in me as fear was being eclipsed by utter fascination. Her energy was infectious, a child’s glee at discovering the hole in a fence big enough to sneak through.

After twenty, twenty-five minutes of walking and playing Leila’s game—one man even responded “Good night, brother”—Leila stopped and leaned against the wall.

“This is my favorite spot on the whole lake,” she said.

I looked around. It was pretty enough for a manufactured thing. Fish would occasionally break the water to catch mosquitoes, rippling the light that shone against the surface. But the spot we were at looked the same as anywhere else we had been—water, path, brick wall.

“Why?” I asked.

“You have to get a better look to really appreciate it,” Leila responded. “Here, help me climb up.” She gestured toward the wall, taller than her by more than a meter. I looked around, saw nobody coming, looked back at Leila.

“Shouldn’t we, maybe, start heading back?” I said. I didn’t even want to, necessarily, but wanted someone to have said it, in case. In case what? That haunting question, now in my head: Did your father pray, fast, and read the Holy Quran…

“Oh come on now,” Leila said. “You won’t believe the view.”

I sighed performatively, then stepped toward the wall and helped boost her up, catching a glimpse of her still-firm stomach as she climbed the brick ledges. At the top she stood facing away from the lake, then turned back to me, crouching to reach a hand down. It was hard to get foothold on the lips of the bricks, harder than Leila had made it look. My breasts ached when I reached up, abruptly reminding me of what was growing inside me, and how until that moment I hadn’t thought of it all evening. With a little more clumsy struggling—and more pain than I let on—I was able to climb high enough for Leila to pull me upwards the rest of the way.

At the top, breathing heavy, I stared. In the sparse grove of trees on the other side of the fence were three massive giraffes, real live giraffes, close enough to us that we could have whispered to them. I nearly fell off the wall.

“Shhhhhh,” Leila said, seeing my face.

“How?!” I stammered.

“It’s the backside of the zoo, Roya jaan,” she said. “This is the fence. Just watch.”

Two giraffes were chewing lazily. Totally uninterested in us. The largest of the three was on the ground sleeping with its giant neck looped around to its backside. It looked like a colossal purse. Each giraffe had the long eyelashes of horses, and those same sad eyes, like they knew they weren’t made for this world. Or worse, like they knew they were.

“How did you discover this?” I whispered to Leila, sitting down with my back to the lake, kicking my feet out to hang into the giraffes’ enclosure. Leila shrugged mysteriously, smiling at my side. We sat there in silence for five minutes, ten, watching the giraffes do basically nothing, just stand there and chew sadly, I never thought about how sad something could look chewing.

Suddenly, a bright light on our backs. We turned and looked down. It was some sort of park security guard shining his flashlight on us.

“What are you two doing?” he shouted. His face looked like crumpled paper. Leila shouted down in her deep pretend man’s voice:

“We’re just sitting, baba! Leave us alone!”

“Come down from there, you two! The park is closing. You shouldn’t be up there!” I could see the sweat forming on his forehead. He could probably see the sweat on mine.

“Baba, I am a soldier!” Leila shouted. “I am just here with my girl! Don’t you love your soldiers?”

I stared at Leila. I couldn’t believe what was happening. If the security guard realized who he was speaking to, that she was a young woman with no scarf trespassing out at night, pretending to be a man…It’s unthinkable. What he might have done.

“Get! Down! Right! Now!” he said, furious.

“Why don’t you climb up and make me, baba!” Leila snapped, laughing. All the dread in my body hardened into a stone organ in my gut.

The old guard scowled hard at Leila, then at me. For fifteen seconds, maybe a minute he stayed there staring at me, as if the sheer force of his contempt would topple the wall itself.

“Leila,” I finally managed to whisper without moving my lips. The moon was bright in the sky now, nearly full. It felt like it was pulling all my blood to the surface of my skin, like it wanted to rip my eyes and ears out through my face.

Then, with a snarl, the guard said, “If you’re still here when I come back, I’m calling the police.”

Leila gave him a sarcastic double thumbs-up as he scuttled off, cursing under his breath. We turned around. The giraffes were unmoved.

“What are you doing?” I hissed in a mix of terror and awe.

“I want to sit with our friends for another couple minutes,” she said, pointing to the giraffes. “And with you.” Saying that, she scooted closer to me and rested her head on my shoulder. I was too flustered, too suddenly dizzy to say anything back, so I just let her head rest there. The giraffe that had been lying there still was, lazily blinking his eyes open and closed. Its great neck curled like some alien punctuation.