Release came in small doses – in the shadows of the Harunieh mosque, in the twist of a passageway near my guesthouse, in those fleeting, fragmented moments of privacy. Listening always for footsteps or the sounds of voices, we’d grab for each other – my lips to his cheek, his hands around my waist; the hungry closing in on the spaces between us. It was a slow, nagging Iranian torment but the anticipation made my skin prickle. We lived for hours, sometimes half a day on the taste of just one kiss or half a dozen brushes of warm fingertips.
Now, as we sat by the riverbanks, Vahid peeled an orange and passed its half to me, reaching for me to spit the pits into his cupped palm. In the growing darkness I could clearly make out his face, the determined, almost stubborn line of his eyebrows and accumulation of stubble on his cheeks despite shaving with a pocket razor just that morning.
“Yesterday, Jenny I had your dream.”
I smiled and relaxed a little when I heard him speak this way. Little by little my ears had grown attuned to it, this curious Persian grammar of ownership. ‘Ferdosi Street? Its traffic is terrible!” taxi drivers exclaimed in between long drags on pungent cigarettes. ‘Tehran? Its people are rude and its city is so dirty!’ disapproving mothers told their children who long for the excitement of Iran’s capital. “Let’s keep the rest for our tomorrow,” Vahid would insist, wiping crumbs from his face and handing me the wrapped remains of a fig and honey cake we’d bought from an Armenian bakery in Jolfa.
The hot sun dipped low in the sky and streams of Esfahanis had begun their evening promenades along the pathways planted dense with shrubbery. The thick foliage and recessed stone benches made the river area a popular gathering place. Students came to play chess or read from French novels, printed from the internet and bound together with twine. Young couples came to nestle and kiss each other in shadowy corners. Seed sellers came to dispense toasted chickpeas and melon seeds into twisted newspaper cones at the heightened price of 5000 Rials.
