Temporary Bride

“Yesterday I had your dream and I dreamt that you were my wife,” Vahid said. “That you loved me the most and we were peaceful together.”

His voice was interrupted by a loud, high-pitched shriek.  "Listen to how romantic they are speaking!" exclaimed a chubby girl with a loud mane of hair who gestured in our direction. Her cheeks were streaked with violent rouge and she had tiny, cheap-looking diamonds glued into her eyelashes. The group of girls on the cobbled riverpath behind her erupted into peals of exaggerated laughter and I felt irritated to see a satisfied grin spread across her plastic, doll-like face.

"What is my business to you? You bullshit girl!" Vahid shouted after her. I had never heard him raise his voice before and was startled by the brusqueness of their exchange, at how quickly his features clouded with defensive anger. I bristled at these raw confrontations that passed between strangers, at how quickly Iranians could turn on each other. 

Away from Yazd, away from the presence of Vahid’s parents, our being together invited suspicion and intrusive questions. “Who is that girl? Is she your guest? What do you know about her past?” In the tea house where we sipped iced milk with rosewater, on the bus as we leaned on the barrier that separated the men from women, I pretended not to notice but I felt it everywhere. People leant in to understand our conversations, prodded with curiosity and nosy whispers, watched closely as we enjoyed our limited freedom. They asked questions for which we had no answers, and we didn’t care to explain ourselves.

I had no idea how long this would last, or really what I was doing. We couldn’t sit next to each other on buses or hold hands in the park but managed tender nights of sex on the cold floor of my room.  We watched and guarded and fed each other, sleeping like lambs on the thin foam mattress, mixing together sharbat, turning heart and liver kebabs, eating sheep teats and tripe snipped into bowls of broth with cinnamon and lemon juice. As he slipped from my room at first light each morning, he turned my shoes around outside the door to ease my first steps into the new day, facing the direction of the warm, Esfahani sun. It was as if from birth he had been groomed to savour the attachment of finding a partner and was willing, somehow, to entrust this devotion upon me; a Western girl who knew little of such things.

Upriver we heard shouts and yelling, followed by the sharp, hissing sounds that we understood too well. Boys driving past on mopeds twirled circles in the air with their fingers in warning and we joined the rush to gather up our things. Men extinguished their qalyuns and cursed as they threw a day’s salary of apple tobacco into the river. Couples separated and rejoined with cousins to form single-gender groups. Sticky plumes of over-styled hair were smoothed into place and shirt sleeves were rolled down past the elbow. A group of men in olive uniforms made their way along the riverbank, clearing the scene of people, of colour, of joy.

We fled the riverbank for a brightly lit street, falling into step with each other, but walking several feet apart.