The German doctor who sat beside him on the plane mistook him for Canadian and Marty let him. In Tehran, his luggage came quickly. Passing through immigrations and customs, changing money, all of it easy, a breeze. Crowds waited to greet the passengers, there to greet everyone but him, but outside the terminal as he began to reassemble his bike, people gathered round to watch. Put the pedals back on. Reinflate the tires. Men nodding their heads and smiling, taxi drivers coming over for a look, women who’d gone out the women’s exit rejoining their men, then hanging back just a little as they watched him, cautious in a public place. And he was cautious too, don’t stare at them, he warned himself, the way their head coverings draped so gracefully to reveal high pure foreheads, a soft lock of hair, the cowls somehow setting off the women’s eyes so that they glowed, remarkably big and deep. And don’t look at the men in green.
“Hello, my friend, hello,” male voices coming from all directions in a strange mix of hearty and tentative, not one thing, not the other, while the men in green uniforms kept their distance but kept watching. The men who circled round him, close, wore polyester pants in blue and brown and tan. He smelled his own sweat and the men’s cologne and the oil as he checked the bicycle chains.
“English?”
“Yes,” he said because English is what he spoke.
“The English,” said a bearded man. “Always interfering.”
A man crouched beside him. “My brother, she live London. And you?”
Another man crouched next to him. “My cousin—Los Angeles. Tehrangeles.”
So he might as well tell the truth. “I live north of LA.”
“Maybe you know him?” The man blushed, his olive skin ripening like a plum.
Hugs, backslaps, even men kissing him on both cheeks. Welcome welcome welcome. So much for the Great Satan.
He hoisted his pack onto his back, fastened the sleeping bag to the bike. He pedaled off into the smog and car exhaust to the sounds of honking, not in warning but in farewell. If he thought the cards stuck in the spokes would click to let drivers know of his presence, he was wrong. Even he couldn’t hear their sound as he biked along, drivers and passengers waving and the enemies of his country cheering and applauding as off he went on his quest.
He followed a motorbike as it threaded between cars. Some he could not identify at all. Others, obsolete model Chevies and Fords, he recognized from old TV shows on cable. Through the smog and the dust, there was the smell of something roasting, burning, the appetizing smell of something charred but filled as he was with inspiration, he had no need of food. There were construction cranes and yellow wedges dividing the road. Drab faceless buildings but faces everywhere on billboards. Everything oversized: bearded turbaned men loomed huge, coming at him in fragments, then a giant toothbrush. The Ayatollah Khomeini, dead now, his stern face. As Marty passed, the Ayatollah winked.
Impossible.
It was too much. There was too much to see until he felt as though his eyes could no longer see anything.
Where did I get the idea I could do this? Why headscarves? People here should wear gas masks. If he’d left the bike in its box, he could have taken a cab to the outskirts of the city. Not now. Was that a mountain in the distance, through the haze? He wished he were back in Frankfurt, eating dinner with his aunt, someone who didn’t see his enthusiasm as pathology. He had such nostalgia now for Frankfurt: only a couple of days ago his journey was still thrillingly before him. Stranded on the sidewalk by a traffic circle he drank from his water bottle. “English? English?” he asked.
“Where do you want to go?” asked a woman, black garment, high forehead, big gray eyes. Her little girl held by the hand, already in headscarf, just like in America, he thought, dressed to push her into womanhood too fast.
“Out of the city, please. The highway south.”
He was surrounded again. Pedestrians gestured, men rolled their hands like exaggerated courtiers in comedies, a woman offered him pistachios, a woman offered tea—in this heat, hot tea!—and the men were waving down panel trucks and pickups. There was shouting and honking every time someone pulled over and traffic stopped.
The first, the truck bed full with flats of—he couldn’t believe it—bottles of Coca-Cola, and no room for him.
The second, hauling trash. Relieved it wasn’t going his way.
A white van stopped. No no no said his new friends.
And so on till Yes yes, come come welcome, he hoisted his bike into the back where two little boys rode along with a stack of tires chained together, a pile of newspapers tied with twine, a broken swivel chair, a tool box, a box spring and a rolled-up rug. One boy whispered to two sparrows in the birdcage he held on his lap though he glanced shyly up at Marty once or twice. The other never lifted his face from his Game Boy. They headed into the pink haze where a yellow glow at the horizon marked the setting sun.