STORY

The two friends came home to what had become their home, a rooming-house in Utrecht, Holland, late at night and slept and awoke full of a feeling that something was gone and it was:  They had come home from a trip through Europe and they were now face-to-face with the question of whether it had been the places they'd gone to or if it had been movement itself, and if it had been movement itself, what were they going to do about that?  They knew one thing:  They were great friends, for all that was spoken and unspoken on their trip, for the way they each loved both and wanted to keep learning about both and about who they were in relation to spokenness and unspokenness.

     They were an American and an Iranian, but the Iranian felt more American than he realized in Europe.  They knew that what they appreciated most about the trip was to know and to appreciate themselves passing through life  That was true for the whole thing - the drunken nights and the hitchhiking and girls they'd met and little towns and cities.  The point was to live, and they had forgotten and remembered that, but something had happened to the forgetting and remembering along the way.  It had become part of a conversation, part of an internal conversation first and then part of an external one, and that was when it did not matter where they were.  When they could talk like two men who had already had that conversation with themselves, then they knew that what they were really asking was:  How can I bring the beauty I find where it is easy to find to the places where it is hard to find?  It was a very practical consideration.  The mountains of eastern Slovakia, the train stations of little towns in Hungary, the remembrances of America they felt and shared on the trains, they all had a direct bearing on the rest of their lives, because they were twenty-one years old and to love the world as much as they did then was new and sudden but it was not foreign.

     So they took their time coming back home, not wanting to say that it was nothing and not wanting to say that it was everything either.  It was morning in the city that had become familiar to them, and the American, who had been studying art there, had a Dutch girl who came over in the morning with coffee and bread and chocolate for them.

     "If she slept with someone, she's going to be very nice," the American said before she arrived.

     The Iranian did not know what to think.  He was still thinking of all the places they had gone to.  He was still thinking of America before that and he was still thinking of Iran before that.  I don't think I'm ever going to have a girl except for the very quiet kind, he thought.

     She came and she was very nice and the American made up for it by talking.  The Iranian was stunned.  He did not think they should be talking about it just yet, not on the first day back, and not in a straight chronological order.  It was a cloud, it was a mixture, and it had not even happened in chronological order really.  It had happened in an order that went back to before they had started and would go on to after they had come back.  We saw something of life there, he would say if he were asked to tell it.

     The Dutch girl listened and the American told it and she was giving something as a compensation and he was taking it.  The truth was that it was kind of fun to relive the whole thing, but it was too easy of a fun.  On their trip the Iranian had come to believe in a fun that was the result of hard work, whose ease came from the fact that it was something everyone had inside them and not from anything indulgent.  There was a place where the world rose to meet a man who allowed for hard work, and it did so as a promise, that it would continue to meet him there as long as he did his part in it.  And he was beginning to understand his part in it.  He had to take the best of who he was in motion and put it in his stationary life.

     And being new at it, he did what he thought he should do just then, which was to dream of the girl he would want to come home to after a trip like that.  Tell me about one thing, she would say.  One person or one view out the train window or one town you saw along the way.  But go as deep as you want, and tell me how the sight of the thing goes all the way back to your own life.  Tell me even if it comes out confusing and lost, because inside of that confusion there will be moments of an indisputable love.

     It wasn't the thing itself, because it was sure to be something ordinary, but if he told it well enough, it would go back to things that were ordinary in her life, that deserved the same kind of telling and listening, and then he would have something, because the notion of movement while stationary could go beyond himself.  It did not have to be limited to himself.  He took some solace in that, because he did not want to come home from anything and tell her about it, whether it was a trip through Europe or a walk down the street.  He wanted to use the thing to find out what they both knew.  Unless he could find something new in the telling, there was no point in doing it.  It wasn't fair to those moments to treat them like royalty, like they occupied a place where they didn't have to try any more.  Even at the end of a trip through Europe, they still had to try.  They had not been asking that of him along the way.  They had not been asking him to bask in them, and to go back to some kind of opposite of basking when he got home.

     He didn't know if the American was basking as he told the Dutch girl about it or not, but he knew that he had learned from his friend that it was all right to do that once in a while.  He had learned that with food and drink and even a little with girls, though that was still the hardest one when it came to basking.  But it might mean that it was all right to do that a little even with stories, so he went along as his friend took the girl through the Netherlands, and Germany, and down through Czech and Slovakia, then Hungary and Croatia, and up through Italy and Switzerland.

     Somewhere around France, where the Iranian was lost in the slowness of a river in Strasbourg, and wondering if it was his river, if it was really his river as much as it seemed, which was nearly as much as it was the river of a boy who grew up next to it, only because he could see the boy, the boy was his too, in the least possessive sense of the word, in the least possessive and most generous sense of the word, somewhere in the middle of all that, she turned to him and she seemed to know that his silence was more than silence and she said, "What about you, Kamran?  How was the trip for you?"

     He looked at them and shrugged and smiled and he knew that he was never going to know if the way he felt there was so much to tell and so much that couldn't be told had to do with being Iranian in America or not, but he was Iranian, he thought as he looked at them, and maybe that meant nothing other than not being in his own place made him move slowly like that river in Strasbourg, France, and he decided that if it did, he didn't mind that at all, he loved that slowness, he didn't mind even if it meant a feeling that he was always catching up to Americans, because when he did catch up he always felt glad that he had taken as long as he did.

     "It was everything I've always been trying to say," he said.