Chapter 13

Soon after Reza proposed, we began to prepare for a small, casual wedding. He introduced me to his four sisters and mother. His mother was living with his youngest sister, who hadn’t married. They were very different from Reza. All his sisters, except for the youngest, married right after high school to men who were shopkeepers, similar to his father, who had been a blacksmith. Reza went beyond all his family members in education.

His mother, sisters, and their husbands adhered to the daily rituals of Islam, as Grandmother had. Reza was agnostic, more like Baba, Mum, Tala, and me. Still, he was close to his family, as I had been to my grandmother and was to my uncle, in spite of the differences between us.

We found an apartment, bigger than the ones we each were living in. I stopped going to the language school as the tuition kept going higher, and by then I was fluent in Spanish and English.

Tala offered me her wedding dress, but I thought it was too fancy, considering we were going to have a small reception in one of Reza’s sisters’ houses. Instead, I settled for one Uncle Ahmad’s coworker’s wife made for me, putting sequins from Uncle’s own shop at its neckline.

We would have the wedding in Soheila’s house so that we could have the guests sit in the courtyard. We went to the Grand Bazaar to look for wedding bands. Daylight came in through the small round skylights. Shoppers, porters, errand boys, brokers, and beggars roamed through the bazaar’s lanes and went in and out of shops carrying jewelry, clothes, handbags, kitchen appliances, and produce. Donkeys heavily laden with merchandise made their way laboriously through the lanes. The air was filled with sounds of hammering of metal, the swish of shoemakers’ tools, jingling of donkey bells. We found a ring with a woven design for me and a plain one for him.

The day before the wedding, we rented chairs and a large table and arranged them around the pool. We hung strings of colored bulbs on tree branches and added flowers to the beds and bought additional goldfish for the pool.

For the first part of the wedding, in the afternoon, we spread the termeh that Grandmother had used for Tala’s wedding and arranged the symbolic objects on it, something Reza’s family liked to do. The mullah who married Tala came to do the same for Reza and me. He asked Uncle and Hassan, Reza’s sister Soheila’s husband, if they approved of the wedding, and then asked Reza and me the usual questions.

After the mullah left, Reza’s family members and friends, thirty of them altogether, came for the reception. Neither Anton nor Tala came, canceling just before the first part of the wedding. She called and said, “Anton says he has to work in Natanz for two weeks and he doesn’t want to go without me this time. He said he absolutely had to leave today. It was an emergency situation. Not that I know what that would be. Forgive me . . .”

“But it’s my wedding; you’re my sister. Everyone expects you to be here.”

“I’m sorry, but you know how Anton is.”

Tala lowered her voice to a near whisper as she said, “Roya, this week, locked up with him in Natanz, I finally will try to get pregnant . . . you’re getting married, and you can try too. We’ll have babies close in age.” Before I could respond, she had to get off the phone. I was stirred up by her request, and liked the idea—if we could control getting pregnant as we wished.

The guests were arriving, and my mind drifted to the party. The single men and women didn’t mingle directly in respect for the more conservative guests, including Reza’s mother and his sisters. But, as at Tala’s wedding, the single men, Abbas and Hooshang, Reza’s friends, eyed the single women—Afsaneh and another girl, Nooshin, friends from my language school. We had no musicians, in fear of the Basij. Hooshang began to play his violin very softly so that it would be hard to hear from the street. You do not know who you are until you find the person you love, he sang in a quiet tone.

The lights from the lanterns and the round, full moon were reflected on the pool, creating different shapes and images.

At the end of the evening, after all the guests left, Reza and I went to our apartment. We undressed and lay in bed, making love with abandon. Reza, not afraid of me getting pregnant and in fact having expressed a desire to have children, didn’t wear protection, and neither did I, thinking of what Tala suggested.

The following day we went to a little bucolic village that was less expensive than some other resorts. We stayed for three nights in a hotel perched on a hill covered by bright wildflowers. Our room overlooked a stream with crystal-clear water flowing in it. In the morning, roosters crowed, and the scent of bread baking filled the air. We ate breakfast on the veranda and had bread, jam, and sarshir, all made by the family who owned the hotel, and a platter of fruit from their garden.

After breakfast, we explored the village, walking through winding, shady garden lanes with a fragrant breeze blowing.

The air was clean and cool, a contrast to the polluted air in Tehran. Reza told me about an article he was going to write. I told him about a vignette I wrote based on the amazing coincidence that brought us together after years of not having seen each other.

“My grandmother used to call it fate. I think of it as coincidence,” I said.

He looked at me in an utterly interested way that made me feel everything I said was important and said, “Yes, coincidence.”

We came to a path along the river. We used the flow of the water as our guide. In a secluded area, protected by the high walls of a valley, we climbed down and swam naked in the river.

At night, we ate in one of the village restaurants where the food was prepared with local ingredients and served on plates made by the local artisans. After we left the restaurant, we strolled for a while on streets lit by lanterns hanging from tree branches and by the stars, which were very bright in the clear air.

When we returned to Tehran, we completed our honeymoon by celebrating at the Mar Mare restaurant in Shemiran. The owner had, at one time, introduced Iranian cuisine to Americans and other foreign tourists. It was inside of an eighteenth-century building overlooking a large courtyard filled with ancient trees and an abundance of flowers. The sitting area of the restaurant consisted of booths covered with green velvet cushions. The brick walls were decorated with Persian miniatures and framed calligraphic lines of poems by ancient poets, Saadi, Hafez, and Khayyam. Candles in brass holders were set on tables or hung on walls. The candlelight and the poems, mainly with themes celebrating love, which passed the censors because they were written centuries ago, created a romantic atmosphere.

Finally, in our apartment, we got undressed and went to bed. As we made love, I said to myself, maybe this is the night I will get pregnant, and so will Tala, in another city.

When Tala and Anton returned to Tehran, they invited me and Reza out to dinner at the Russian Club’s restaurant, which was separated from the larger part by a colorful curtain. The atmosphere was lush, with a chandelier, vivid blue drops hanging from it, bright maroon chairs, and bouquets of flowers on each table. The people at the other tables seemed to be a mixture of Iranians and Russians. Anton ordered food that was enough for at least ten people—a variety of dumplings, beet soup, fish, and beef. He mainly engaged Reza in conversation, while Tala and I were quiet most of the time, listening to them talking and studying their reactions to what each said to the other. They talked about their work, Reza only mentioning his teaching and of course nothing about his newspaper. Anton only said he worked for the petrochemical company with branches in Tehran, Natanz, and Moscow.

Tala and I were on edge, eager for our husbands to get along. Both of them looked somewhat tense and defensive. As soon as we were finished with dessert—blini and porridge, along with fragrant tea—Anton asked for the check, paid, and we left. He drove us to our apartment. With him behind the wheel, Tala sitting next to him, and Reza and me in the back seat, we were all quiet.

In our apartment, Reza said, “I think Anton is involved in some illegal things. How do you think they manage to live like that?”

“You may be right.”

I thought Reza’s own involvement with the newspaper, writing under a pseudonym, was considered illegal by the government. But of course, it was of a different nature altogether, with humanitarian intention.

“You didn’t tell Tala about my writing . . .”

“I did, but made her promise not to tell Anton.”

“You shouldn’t have told her.”

“She confides in me about Anton. She doesn’t trust that he’s telling her everything about his work.”

The subject was dropped. It was obvious Reza and Anton didn’t have much in common.

The following afternoon, Tala called. “I’m sorry nothing developed between our husbands,” she said. “They are so different.”

I agreed with her, but before I could respond, she had to get off the phone as she heard Anton’s car in the driveway. Reflecting on what we had said about how different Anton and Reza were, I realized they were similar in one essential way—they both were keeping a part of their work and activities hidden. Perhaps Reza’s work was more honorable, but still, he had to hide and lie about so much that engaged him. It seemed Tala and I couldn’t take steps too far from each other, as when we were children. Still, the other differences between our husbands pulled us apart in many ways.

We became close again when we both became pregnant within days of each other, miraculously, as she had wished and so had I.