Roya followed Claire down a corridor and into a large hall furnished with a long table and plastic folding chairs arranged on either side. But no one sat at the table playing bingo or gossiping.
Claire pointed to the far end of the room. “He’s been waiting for you.”
By the window sat a man in a wheelchair next to an empty plastic chair. His back was to them; Roya couldn’t see his face. Claire started to approach him, but then she stopped. She cocked her head and took in Roya from head to toe as if measuring her potential for safety, for harm, for drama. Claire fidgeted with her necklace. “Is there anything I can get you? Water? Tea? Coffee?”
“Oh, I’m fine, thank you for asking.”
“Are you sure?”
“You are kind to ask. But no.”
Now it was Claire’s turn to linger. By God, no one wanted to leave Roya alone with this . . . resident. For crying out loud. As if she, a small woman in her seventies, held any kind of power over him or anyone else anymore. As if she, Roya Archer, could torch the place down with her presence, create a blast just by being there.
“I am good,” she said. She’d learned to say that from Americans: I’m good, I’m fine, it’s all okay, okey-dokey. Easy-peasy Americanisms. She knew how to do it. Her heart pounded, but she looked steadily at Claire.
Claire lowered her head and finally turned and walked out. The click-click of her heels as she left the room matched Roya’s extra-loud heartbeat.
She could still follow Claire and leave this smelly place, catch up to Walter before he finished his lunch, go home, climb into bed, and pretend never to have made this strange miscalculation. It wasn’t too late. She imagined Walter hunched over his ginger beer and lobster roll alone at that deli—poor thing. But no. She’d come here to finally find out.
One foot in front of the other, that was how you did it. She forced herself toward the wheelchair by the window. Her heels didn’t click; she had on her trusty gray thick-soled shoes. Walter had insisted that she wear snow boots, but she had refused. She was willing to accept a lot of things, but seeing her old lover for the first time in sixty years while wearing fat Eskimo boots was one of the few things she could not accept.
The man was oblivious to her presence, as if she didn’t exist.
“I’ve been waiting,” a voice suddenly said in Farsi, and Roya’s body buzzed. That voice had both energized and comforted her when they were inseparable.
It was 1953. It was summer. She was seventeen. New England melted away, and the cold outside and the false heat inside evaporated, and Roya’s legs were tanned and toned, and they were standing, she and he, by the barricades, leaning onto the splintered wood, screaming at the top of their lungs. The crowd billowed, the sun burned her scalp, two long braids ended at her breasts, her Peter Pan collar was soaked in sweat. All around them, people pumped their fists and cried as one. Anticipation, the knowing of something new and better about to arrive, the certainty that she would be his in a free, democratic Iran—it was all theirs. They had owned a future and a fate, engaged in a country on the verge of a bold beginning. She had loved him with the force of a blast. It had been impossible to imagine a future in which she didn’t hear his voice every day.
On the linoleum, Roya saw her feet, suddenly unrecognizable to her—in gray little-old-lady shoes with thick soles and tiny bows on top.
The man wheeled his chair around and his face broke into a smile. He looked tired; his lips were dry and deep lines scored his forehead. But his eyes were joyful and filled with hope.
“I’ve been waiting,” he repeated.
Was it possible to slip so easily back? His voice was the same. It was him, all of it, the eyes, the voice, her Bahman.
But then she remembered why she had come. “I see.” Her voice came out much stronger than she’d expected. “But all I’ve wanted to ask you is why on earth didn’t you wait last time?”
She sank into the chair next to him, as tired as she’d ever been in all her years on earth. She was seventy-seven and exhausted. But as she remembered that cruel, disillusioning summer from which she’d never fully recovered, she felt as if she were still seventeen.
Chapter Two
1953
* * *
The Boy Who Would Change the World
“I would like it,” Baba said at breakfast, as they ate fresh naan with feta cheese and homemade sour cherry jam, “for you girls to be the next Madame Curies of this world. I would like that. Or even writers”—he smiled at Roya—“like that American woman: Helen? Keller?”
“I’m not deaf, Baba,” Roya said.
“She’s not blind, Baba,” Zari said.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Maman motioned for both her daughters to eat faster.
“You have to be deaf and blind to be Helen Keller.” Zari beamed, proud of her knowledge of American heroines.
“And mute. Don’t forget mute,” Roya mumbled.
“I didn’t mean that part.” Baba put down his tea glass. “I meant the genius part. I meant the writing eleven books part. That’s the part I meant!”
Fate had given Maman and Baba only two children, and girls at that. Baba was remarkably, exceptionally enlightened for his time: he wanted his girls to be educated and to succeed. Education was his religion and democracy his dream.
As high school students, Roya and Zari were on track to get the best education a girl could get in 1953 Iran. The country was rapidly changing, opening up. They had a democratically elected prime minister: Mohammad Mossadegh. They also had a king, the Shah, who continued the advocacy for the rights of women that his father, Reza Shah, had begun. “The Shah’s certainly a servant to the damn British when it comes to giving away our oil!” Baba always said. “But yes, he did help with women. I’ll give you that.”
Scorn and judgment from more traditional family members accompanied Baba and Maman’s enlightened views. How could they, aunts in the kitchen whisper-shouted at Maman, allow their teenage girls to walk everywhere without chaperones? Maman became expert at laughing it off. She had dropped the hijab as soon as Reza Shah enforced a no-veil policy for women back in the 1930s. She welcomed reforms for the emancipation of women even as her more religious relatives cringed at farangi foreign-embracing ways.
Maman and Baba sent their two daughters to the best girls’ high school in Tehran. Every morning, as Maman brewed the tea, Roya and Zari got ready for the day. Roya simply washed her face and braided her thick dark hair into two long plaits, but Zari dabbed a little color on her lips and proudly puffed into place the waves she created by pinning sections of her hair with newspaper scraps every night.
As her younger sister preened and primped, Roya looked at her own reflection in the mirror. Over the last year, Roya had changed a lot. Her face had lost some of its baby fat and her cheekbones were more prominent. Her skin, which had sometimes broken out with pimples, had cleared up. Her long black hair was naturally wavy, and she could have let it cascade over her shoulders as Zari so often recommended. But Roya still braided her hair. It kept her feeling more like herself, especially since the rest of her had changed so much physcially. She was still petite, but much more curvy and big-breasted—or, as Zari said, developed—these days.