The air is colder than you’d think it’d be. The legs of my long pants flap in the fierce wind. The red spines of the mountains stick up just above the high-rise apartment buildings. A car rattles by, its doors holding on for dear life to its rusted-over hinges. The windows roll down as it whips by, and I make eye contact with a small boy, his hair already askew, and a woman whose red hair is barely shoved under her pink scarf.
“FUCK YOU!” she screams at me. Her child echoes her sentiment with a puppy-like howl. The car whips down the two-lane highway, driving on the lane line at a speed that looks to kill. The thin branches of the trees bend and shake in surprised symphony. I look at my mother, who stands farther down the sidewalk with her hand over her mouth.
“What the hell was that?”
This is, whether I like it or not, Iran. The days are long and hot, the nights freezing cold. The stars are barely visible above the smog and light pollution of the city. The government— despotic and hanging on by a thread after two people’s revolutions enacted in the last decade. Iran: 88 million people on the verge of something, even if they’re not sure what. Dancing, drinking, singing, are prohibited for 88 million people who tremble with revolutionary energy, even though they are afraid of the certain death that comes with it. The economy is in ruins, twenty percent of the youngest generation is unemployed; nobody knows where the future is. Whether it is hiding behind the staggering mosques or the Israeli missiles. Iran: toppling politely over the edge of disaster.
Every inch of Isfahan’s central square is crammed with someone selling something. Handcrafted silverware, rich calligraphy on brush carrying cases, miniatures painted with squirrel-hair brushes, handwoven portrait rugs of 30 feet or more. Gold, copper, silver, and all the fake metals and jewels you could imagine. Fruit, spices, and ancient mosques all crammed around a square that was once the capital of the Persian Empire. This is the world of Aladdin that you thought didn’t exist, the city of Scherezade and her thousand and one nights. Next to the fountain stand two men in all black with an unmarked van behind them. The morality police are tasked with maintaining the purity of the Iranian populace. In other words, they’re hunting for the next woman without a hijab to pass by to make their victim. My Iran; deeply beautiful and terribly frightening.
My fingers are pressed up to the glass of yet another brightly lit display case that seems to glow under the cheap LED’s. I ask the salesman to pull out the copper carrying cases of walnut eye powder that stand in neat military lines. He brings them out for my examination, then rests his hand on his chin.
“Are you tourists?”
His eyes light up when we say we live in America; I turn the cases over in my hands while my parents speak to him. I’m tired. It’s hot, and the sweat of my back sticks to my striped shirt. They go through all the motions of an Iranian conversation—overfamiliarity, a blessing, and then a discussion of personal history.
“Do you work for your father?” My dad asks.
“Yes,” he replies, and I now realize that the man is actually quite young, probably closer to my age than I realized. “I was going to university, but then I got put in jail by the morality police. They held me for a couple months, I still have the scars where they beat me over my tattoos. They beat you terribly. I didn’t go back after that”
His hands brush lightly over his ribs, and he exhales shakily. My mother looks like a deer caught in the headlights. I pretend to look at the bracelet. We apologize, curse the government, and pay for our goods. The standard Iranian conversation, then. Another night.
Love—its meaning— is found in Iran for me. Its rhythms and embraces. Its support and most of all, its recognition. Of your face in other faces. Of your life in others. The gathering, no matter what gathering it is, lasts until late. Hands, callused, slender, with acrylics, with rings, pass the food on. Tear into bread and meat, shape kabob and stir soup. I stay up until late, I stay with them, drunk on many things including a little bit of illegal liquor that my uncle made in his backyard. I fall asleep in the guest bedroom of my grandmother’s house, in her pajamas, with my grandfather’s picture on the wall, watching over me. Safe from everything. Safe from the men with the unmarked vans, safe from the politicians, safe from the frantic scrabbling of life.
My sister shakes me awake, and while my eyes are adjusting to the sunlight, she says Israel just killed Ismail Haniyeh. We don’t know if we can go home, she says. They might bomb. I want to go to sleep–I want so badly to go back to sleep.
The attendant holds my chin while the surgeon runs a needle through the place where my wisdom teeth used to be. “The receptionists are lazy,” he says to the attendant, “I asked for her x-rays twenty minutes ago and they never gave them to me.” The attendant shakes her head, false eyelashes hitting her cheek as she blinks. “They’re on their phones all day, don’t they know this is a job?” The doctor grunts in agreement. He squints down at me, tilting his head. “Your nose is too Iranian,” he says to me, and pulls another stitch closed. “Come back next year and we’ll fix it for you.” I try not to laugh, but I choke a little.
Iran is one of the countries with the highest rates of plastic surgeries in the world. To be Iranian, to look Iranian, we have been told, is a horrible thing. My distant cousin is considering surgery to make her eyes permanently blue, even though there is a high risk of permanent blindness. I wonder if she’ll go to the dentist for that.
There is someone outside of the shop, speaking to my sister. I glance through the window, though nobody else seems concerned. He is old, his hands folded behind his back. White hair. I am unable to keep myself from going outside, just in case. He is lecturing her, as old men often do. “Biden is an idiot and Trump is a maniac. You have to throw a revolution there, so we can throw one here. So we can be free.” She nods along, hijab slipping off her head.
In the garden, a trickle of water runs through the gutter. The plastic chairs creak as people shift their weights. Cats run zipper-quick over the cobblestones and into the dark shelter of the fruit trees. The crushed petals of carefully watered flowers lay ghostly and downtrodden under dress shoes. My cousin, removed to some degree through the ancient and tangled family tree, is asking what I want to do with my life. I give the diplomatic and naive reply of “help people.” He laughs.
“Mashallah, kid. Studying in the US to help who? That’s like stabbing someone and then giving them a band-aid.”
The mountains tower over the landing strip of the airport. The men in black wait by the door to Arrivals, their gazes squeezing the windpipes of everyone who walks by. They stop my father, grab our passports and tell him to follow them into a room. This is Iran, like it or not. Here we are, tightrope walkers. Spinning tops.