ROYA SHAMS

TEHRAN, AUGUST 1987

That rest of her visit during our husbands’ camping trip, Leila was an eager horse charging out ahead of me, dragging me through the grass. I was trying desperately to hang on to the reins. The second day, there was a moment when we were walking through the bazaar. It was unseasonably cold; Leila wore a heavy coat and a long scarf. All along Bazaar-e Tajrish corridor, the street webbed off into side paths and alleyways, many with vendors selling cut flowers, kabobs, powdery cookies, perfumes, beads, carpets, underwear. Men called out to each other unintelligibly. An old woman tasted soup from a great cast-iron pot. Beside her, a younger woman—clearly her daughter—sold steamed sweet beets and fava beans to passersby.

As we walked between people, Leila suddenly pulled me into a bare alley that bent into another alley. The path was thin, dirty, ending in brick apartments and garbage cans. Above us, clothes drying on balconies. A blue-gray sky. Without any explanation, Leila got on her knees and bent her ear down to the asphalt.

“You can hear it!” she said, smiling up at me, ear still pressed against the earth. “The angels playing their drums deep down in the earth!”

I had no idea what she was talking about and looked around nervously.

“Roya jaan, you can hear them too! You know very well that the earth is filled with angels and djinn partying like teenagers, spinning around like waterwheels. Come listen.”

People walking through the alley that turned into ours passed by, ignoring us. At least I hoped they were ignoring us. Hesitantly I got on my knees and put my ear to the ground, near Leila’s. The path was cold. A thin ribbon of sky loomed over our heads like a chaperone.

“I don’t hear anything,” I said. I don’t know what I’d expected but I was disappointed. The earth sounded like nothing, like earth. I felt a little embarrassed, like I wasn’t in on the joke.

“You have to listen, really listen. Not like with all this bleating,” she said, gesturing back toward the bazaar, “but to the sounds beneath the sounds beneath the sounds. You know what I mean?”

I didn’t. Her ear was still pressed against the asphalt and she began tapping out a rhythm with her hand, pum PO-POP pum, pum POP-POP pum.

“Under the soil, under all of us and all our dead ancient skeletons with arrowheads broken off in their ribs,” Leila said, “the angels are drumming!” She kept tapping her hand. “For us, I imagine.”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Are you making fun of me?” I asked, pulling my head off the ground.

Leila sat up too, scooted closer to me, still on her knees. She grabbed the middle finger of my right hand and, shutting her left eye, held my finger gently but firmly on top of her closed eyelid.

“Do you feel this?” she said, moving her open eye up, down, up, down. Beneath the eyelid beneath my finger, her other eye was matching the movements of its sibling. “You feel how even the closed eye is still searching for your face?”

I nodded. Her hand tapped, pum PO-POP pum, pum POP-POP pum.

“That,” Leila said, “is how I have been searching for you.”

And then she leaned forward and kissed me. Right there in the alley path off the bazaar. It wasn’t an insubstantial kiss. It wasn’t familial. It was on the lips, my eyes still open and all surprise. I must have looked like a fish. And though I should have been afraid of being seen, of bystanders peeking in off the main bazaar strip, I held it, Leila’s kiss, and I kissed her back. Her hand was on my cheek then. My finger had moved itself from her eyelid to her earlobe.

The kiss lasted three seconds, maybe four, but it set everything else in motion. My life was a painting I’d been staring at upside-down up until that moment, that moment when Leila wandered in and flipped it right-side up for me. Just like that. Everything clicked into place, the picture came into clarity. Even Leila, in all her poise, looked surprised and, after those few infinite seconds, pulled away.

“I’m sorry,” she said, studying my face.

“No—” I said, pausing. My ears were ringing, I could feel the blood rushing through my skull.

“No?” she said, blinking once, then twice, waiting for me to respond.

“No, don’t be sorry,” I said. “The eye, the angel’s drums.” I paused. “I think I understand.”

She smiled. A few curls peeked out from under her headscarf. We were on our knees in the alley staring at each other like children. Like chickens. I felt dizzy again from aliveness. Flush with baffle and excitement, like the first person to taste snow. And then, natural as air, we stood up and walked back into the bazaar, where men were arguing about nonsense, where women swept dirt from dirt.

After that first kiss, I wouldn’t have questioned anything. Possibility, freedom. If a great winged angel had come up from the earth and burst apart, I would have gathered its feathers.