ARYA by Dina Nayeri

At night he haunts the attic apartment we share. I try not to observe him, creaking the ancient wooden planks on cut and calloused feet, casting tired shadows everywhere as he watches the sensible Dutch lights smear the canal below. He likes the bicycles suspended over the bridge, their noses just touching the water, because there’s no practical way to get them back. Like the toxic brew of items Amsterdamers lose daily to the thick black of the canals (flower pots and old dinnerware and gifts from cheating lovers tossed from windows), they’re part of the city’s landscape now, and untouchable. I whisper for him to come back to bed. He pretends he doesn’t hear and takes a wet towel to the beams above the window instead. He makes tea. He makes cherry sharbat. He makes a vodka tonic. In the morning, three glasses will be lined up by height beside the sink, still full. The waste irritates me.

He can’t sleep with others at home, not even me. He once explained that he requires a locked door between him and all the world. Still, he puts on his pajamas at precisely eleven o’clock; then at seven a.m. he changes into jeans and a fading but meticulously ironed shirt he brought from his village. It has checkers like a lumberjack’s. He pretends to have breakfast with me, asks about my book. When I’m gone, settled with my laptop in my usual spot at Koffiehuis on Prinsengracht, he will turn the lock. He will clutch the leathery stress ball he’s fashioned out of some mattress filling and an old pomegranate skin long sucked dry, stuffed, and jaggedly stitched with thick string, a bloody-looking remnant he keeps from his prison days that frightens me. Only then will he surrender to exhaustion and fall asleep, not in bed, but on the couch facing the door. When he moved in, the only change he made was to turn the couch and I didn’t argue.

The first time I found him in this position I lingered confused, keys still in the door, and for the three seconds it took him to jump up, hands shaking for the pomegranate, and take two hungry breaths, I saw real fear, bewilderment in his sleeping expression. I thought, I never want to see that again, my Arya like a hunted thing. But I see it once a day now, always when I walk in. I have lived too easy a life.

He accuses me of vasvas because I sift through a plunder of mustard packets, keeping track of how many we use. I accuse him of vasvas because he checks his pockets, the ground around his feet, and every place he sits for things he might have left behind. He wears and washes and wears cheap shirts he brought from his village until they’re dust. Which of us has vasvas? It might be the only thing we have in common.

In Iran, we are unequal. He carries this with him, his gratefulness and what he mistakes for respect, and he force-feeds it to me. I combat this by showing him too much affection, and so we spend our days bowing to each other, like a certain kind of water bird. Tonight we eat leftover raisin rice with a bottle of red wine and we go to bed early. He doesn’t sleep. He will wait for me to fall asleep, then he will get up, do sit-ups, fix a doorknob, switch the television to mute, scrub things, mend things, read things, open and close things. He will smoke some hash. Once I found him on the floor, passed out from too much, and I slapped him again and again. Wake up. Wake up, Arya joon, I begged. Don’t sleep now . . . any other time. But I couldn’t bring him back for three hours.

Sometimes I sleep with my arms and legs intertwined with his. He doesn’t mind. If I were to kiss him too much, or reach into his pajamas and try to wake him the way I might do with other men, he would take my hand and kiss it. Then he would pull me closer and make a very convincing show of being asleep. He won’t turn his back to me though, because you don’t turn your back to people who want something from you. This is another thing two years as a political prisoner has taught him. I try anyway. At night my ambitious side takes over. I stand in my underwear in the bathroom, scrutinizing myself – I remember Maman joking about Persian men and how they’ve been spoiled by self-loathing, perfectionist women who tweeze every hair and paint every surface. I clutch a silver pillbox in my fist. I moisturize my body from head to toe, thinking, this is a good way to make myself un-prisonlike – though maybe I’m simplifying the situation.

I crawl into bed beside Arya, tangle my arms and legs with his like always. He murmurs things, that I’m beautiful, that I’m soft. He’s very good with the words. I run my finger along the half circle of hipbone jutting up out of his pajamas. He smiles at me, his eyes still closed. I kiss the scruffy patch of black hairs below his chin, inhale the spice and musk of his skin – a scent that contrary to our every truth reminds me of sex and physical safety – now mixed with a faint odor of paint. He pulls me to him and holds me too tight, my head pressed against him, his thumb stroking my temple in a father-daughter way. I grow bolder, I move my finger down the line of hair on his stomach, shift my weight above him. Three, two, one, I wait for it, and sure enough he grabs my wrist.

“Four more months,” he says. He argues that after that long, he can be sure that no diseases lie dormant in his blood, waiting to infect me.

“I have condoms,” I mutter. And this too has been said before.

He looks at my other hand, reaches over and pries open my fist. He stares hard at the pillbox, at me. We both know where it came from, but I’m not ashamed. The bone in his jaw moves up and down like a gear. This is Arya angry, just a single bone, a single movement. I don’t look away. “Just let me finish the tests,” he says, to punish me. That’s the end of it. But not the end, because no matter how much I press and writhe beside him, no matter what I wear or how I talk, I can see that he isn’t fighting any kind of urge. I could accept this, if he too were suffering. But his body agrees with the decision. Why?

“Do you want to hear a Farsi song?” he asks. He knows I savor it, that Arya and I have Farsi, a glorious bond, when Lucas and I only had English, a universal nothing.

I turn on my pillow and whisper bitterly into the fabric, “Maybe by the time they finish the tests you’ll have your residency.” Immediately I regret this. I hear his breath quicken beside me. He doesn’t respond, only climbs out of bed and goes to the kitchen, where for the next hour he clanks and rearranges our pots and dishes in protest, the closest thing he has in his gentle arsenal to a fuck you. He is a village boy, and he knows his place. When I was a girl in Tehran and we visited the farms in the north, I would play with the dehati boys and would revel in their deference, their worshipful awe of me. I would play the princess. Now I wish he would just come in here and tell me to fuck off.

I reach into an old bottle of antibiotics and pull out a joint. I light it in bed, thinking, Who cares if it fouls the linens? Tomorrow Ingrid, our young Brazilian housecleaner, will come to tidy up the apartment. Every week Arya objects to this intrusion, so I make sure we’re out. “I don’t understand about Ingrid,” he says. “You refuse to throw away spoiled milk. You eat apple cores. And you spend sixty euro a week on a maid?” “Yes,” I say, but I don’t tell him more. It’s impossible to explain to someone with Arya’s background the difference between actual waste and an expensive but worthwhile something. I have no problem paying for a massage or a leather jacket. But if I pay for an apple, I will eat it all. No part of it will be lost, because I am not just some rich girl who wastes things. I will eat the spoiled apple, because I’m not spoiled, and because I didn’t earn this apple and have no right to decide. This is not strange.

Another thing I don’t say is that Ingrid works for my ex-husband Lucas and sometimes she tells me things. Maybe she tells Lucas things too. Arya doesn’t know this, but sometimes I pour a mixture of water and karne milk – a disgusting buttermilk-style Dutch drink – just a tablespoon here and there, onto the sheets before Ingrid arrives, then I cover the smell with weed so Ingrid thinks we’ve spent the entire night smoking and making love. It’s a stupid thing. Karne milk doesn’t really look like . . . that. The thought makes me blush. Is it possible to be embarrassed in front of yourself?

I take three hits. It doesn’t kill the guilt, only makes my hands shake. I fling off the comforter, mumbling to myself like an old woman, as I wrap myself in a bathrobe and head to the living room. Damn you, Arya, I think, again sticking him with the responsibility for my decisions, I left a good man for you. I hurt my friend. And now I’m speaking in this fucked-up secret code of fake fluids through his goddamn maid.

Arya sits by the round window, on the little ledge above the radiator. He doesn’t ignore me. Instead, he turns formal, “I feel that what you said was very . . . very unjust.”

“I’m sorry,” I offer. His phone rings. He glances at the number and takes the call, jumping up from the ledge and moving to the farthest corner of the apartment as if pushed there by some repellent charge between us. He whispers. Oh God, I think, he’s getting involved in all that Green Movement business again. Why can’t he wait to get his residency, at least? Why does he have to risk everything? But I don’t scold him. Arya is fragile. Arya is my responsibility, and I really am sorry. He’s been through hell. He can handle it however he wants without any presumptions from a pampered girl like me.

When he’s finished with his call, he returns to the ledge and takes my hand. “I know I’m not a good husband,” he says. “I’ll do better.”

“I don’t need you to do better.” I sit beside him. He tells me he’s going for a job. This alarms me – we’re still sorting through his residency and visa. But he says it’s only a cash job, painting a house. “But why?” I ask. “We don’t need money.” A part of me rejoices at this. Now is his chance to ask about my – our – resources, to put his hands in my business and share it with me. Please, Arya joon, just get involved.

But he looks at me with hurt eyes and he whispers, “Yes. That I know.”

“I love you,” I say, my voice childish. I found early on that he relates to children in ways that impress even his grandmother. A person like Arya might have gone through all his life without meeting an adult who needs him. Maybe he doesn’t believe it possible.

It works. He pulls me to him, wraps his arms around me. “Tell me about the manuscript,” he says, “how it’s coming along, the search for the sour tea.” Arya has these surges of optimism that make me love him. When things feel bad, he suddenly perks up, as if someone turned a gear inside and gave him a momentary jumpstart.

I shrug. I don’t like talking about my book, but I do because it interests him. I tell it to him again like a soothing poem: There is a tea leaf in Iran that grows with the lemon flavor already inside. It tastes like a bit of magic or a lie, like the rice they say has the taste of smoke growing in each grain. I’m trying to discover something of this leaf’s history. “I’m calling a bookseller in Rasht tomorrow.”

He considers this and there is joy in his expression, as if he’s thinking of home, forgetting who I am and that I took him away from there. “Which one? Ardeshir? Ghafari? No. Ardibil Ketab, right?”

“Ardibil,” I lie. I have no idea which one.

“Aaahh,” he breathes, a sound of pure pleasure. “I know the owner. He is someone who’d want to help a beautiful foreign scholar.” He plays with my hand, the smile fastened to his face. But now I’m distracted by what he’s said. He adds, “I’ll go to the library and get more books for you.” He does this practically every day, fetches my books, buys me more pens and notebooks to record my futile thoughts. I can easily do all this on my own, but I bury my head in his chest and thank him too much. He tosses the pomegranate up like a tennis ball, even lets me catch it and hold it for a moment.

“Okay.” I decide to keep back most of what I want to say, even my Green Movement suspicions, for now. But there is something else I can’t resist, so I add, “But I’m not foreign.”

He laughs, as if I’ve insulted myself. He says, “The next time it’s sunny, would you like to bike to Weesp? Maybe have a picnic?”

“That sounds really nice,” I fling empty husks of excitement at him.

“Beautiful,” he says, “beautiful, beautiful.” He hums this word with a genuinely happy look, as if he has done his job as my husband. What I want to tell him though, is that marriage isn’t a job. And it isn’t a kindness, not something to be grateful for. It’s the marrow in the bones life dishes up for you, something to be handled with brazen fingers, sucked dry, hungrily and with entitlement.

* * *

The last time I traveled to Iran, I kissed Lucas and promised to come back. I met an old woman in a teashop, and even then my intentions didn’t change. But when her grandson was released from Evin and he arrived at his family’s low-roofed village house, full to bursting with eager relatives in skullcaps and colorful skirts waiting to welcome him home, I saw him try to pick up a child. His withered arms trembled with her weight as nervous guests watched, but he kept lifting her up, up, slowly but with such hope, as if this would bring back his old strength. Sad, emaciated skin and bone, but so full of conviction – the one thing I had always hungered for. I told his grandmother, whose cold henna fingers were clutching mine as she mumbled prayers for him, “I’m getting a divorce.” Why did I say that? She nodded and said, “These things happen.”

Now, if you asked an Iranian village mother what is happening here, she would say I’m getting just what I deserve. So I call my own mother in New York.

“Maman, can I come visit you?” I lean against a bridge railing beside my bike.

I can hear her waking up on the other end. She yawns, her voice grainy and drawn as she strains to make sense of what I’ve said, “Why, baby joon? Are you sick? Did something happen with Arya and Lucas?”

She always includes Lucas in her questions, because she wants him back. She despises Arya, his Irani-bazi and his risky political posing, his home-wrecking ways. Once, in a drunken moment, on a Thanksgiving trip back to New York, she said, “How can a man manipulate a girl into leaving her precious life from inside a fucking box?” She spat it out with such rage. She never curses.

“Nothing,” I say, “the usual stuff.” When I thought our love was too epic for me alone, I told her about Arya’s ways – this is the part I regret most. Now she’s involved.

“Shameful,” she gasps into the receiver. “Does he still carry that disgusting fruit skin? It’s crazy, Azizam. It looks like a severed head all stitched up with string like that.”

“Never mind,” I say, my voice cold. The rule is: you don’t blame Arya. The end.

“Maybe he has disease,” she says. “Or maybe he prefers men. Do you consider that?” She suggests this as if it’s a clever new possibility, as if she’s just discovered it.

“You sound uneducated,” I snap. “He was in Evin, for god’s sake. You sound like them.” This is the worst insult. She is silent, waiting for me to apologize, which I won’t.

“Then why you call?” she snaps. Her English slips when she’s mad. “Just for more Evin complaining? Always this prison talk . . . why you call me with this?”

“Because I’m an idiot.” I hang up, furious at myself on my husband’s behalf.

Two minutes later my phone rings just as I’ve finished ordering a broodje – a two-euro monstrosity of a sandwich with which I often punish myself when I feel I’ve been reckless with Maman and Lucas’s money. Neither of them ever considered stopping the deposits. Maman calls my life a phase: the dark of my daughter’s youth or playing house with Evin boy. I eat broodjes and picture the tortures Arya has suffered. The deep cuts on his feet, back and chest, the burns, forced awake every half hour for a week, the rapes. Always, after a few bites, the broodje tastes okay, a blessing, an entire lunch for just two euros – money that I have spent in a good, responsible way.

I pick up the phone, hoping for Arya, a one-ring reminder that he loves me today. But it’s Maman. “I’m sorry,” she says grudgingly. “Don’t ruin my day.”

“I’m sorry too,” I say and wait. After a short silence, I offer her a morsel. “There’s something he wants, and he can’t get it out. He won’t tell me and he doesn’t get that I want to give it to him . . . maybe he wants to be an activist again.”

“Or maybe,” she says, annoyed, “he doesn’t want you giving him more things.”

* * *

Today Arya and I have been married for two months. We celebrate by cooking lamb with pumpkin from his grandmother’s handwritten three-ring cookbook, one of just a few sentimental possessions he asked his family to mail to Amsterdam from Tehran. I have many glossy Persian cookbooks on my bookshelf in both French and English, which I find easier to read, but we never use those. The photos are all wrong. In one of them there is a whole chicken, bones and all, inside the walnut fesenjoon sauce, as if a chicken would hold up to three hours of slow stewing.

Our cooking is like music, each practiced in our part, never clashing. The crunch of his knife as he scalps the pumpkin and the chop-chop-sniffle of onions on my cutting board. Wet scrapes as he slides in elbow deep to remove the slimy seeds. He smiles when I sprinkle the turmeric, teasing him with one too many shakes of the jar.

In Evin Prison his food was bland. Mostly bread, tea, bread again. If I can get him to love spices again, maybe other memories and instincts and necessary habits will follow that one to a welcome grave. In my last marriage, the one I abandoned to be with Arya, we made love twice a day . . . or maybe not always love, but it was ever probable and reassuring. Lucas was my first real relationship. I’m not sure why I chose him. He is a towering half-Dutch lawyer who highlights his already blonde hair, uses a cheese grater to age his jeans, and carries three passports, scanning airport customs lines for the shortest ones. I have a strange affection for him, a sharp ache for having left him alone.

But Arya is never to be blamed. He has been inside the worst Iranian prison. He has written hungry letters from behind high walls; the soles of his feet have been lashed and cut with razors and his once flawless back burned with cigarettes. He has laughed aloud in protest with new friends he would never meet but for that walled-in yard they shared. He has been brutalized in the night and told by the guards that he preferred men because of it – a thing that could be a death sentence on its own.

I collect the bits of leftover lamb fat in a plastic bag. Maybe I’ll use it for soup. But halfway through the ritual of packing each piece tightly together, pressing them into a satisfying ball of flesh with my fingers, Arya gently takes the bundle from me, tosses it in the trash. “It’s okay, Azizam.” He doesn’t chastise me. “Did you talk to the bookseller about the sour tea?” he asks. “The Ardibil man?”

What I tell people is that I am writing a book about tea farming in the north of Iran and in China and India. What I don’t say is that it is a stupid obsession. I like the peaceful smell of tea, the look of it, the steam rising off a tulip cup. It won’t earn me money or fame. But once in the middle of my third useless, stressful graduate degree, I went to the north of Iran and drank tea on a farm and I was happy there. I met Arya’s grandmother on a colorful blanket outside a teashop. She smoked her water pipe, gave me jagged rock candy made entirely of crystalized sugar, touched my face, and told me about her grandson in prison. She cried because she had no resources to help him. I had resources. I drove her to visit him, this man I had never seen, and I waited outside Evin because I was a non-relative. I stood in my black chador with hundreds of mothers and sisters and wives in billowing black, a frightening, throbbing, writhing mass of female anger and desperation. What else could I do, the unhappy Western woman that I was, with my patchy Farsi, my French citizenship, my degree from New York? I was grasping for my roots and I had time to waste. Time is a thing I’ve never had trouble wasting, unlike ketchup packets and chicken skins and old underwear and the last morsel in a can of tuna. Time is the rock candy of the undeservedly rich – always more of it waits staling in a pantry or a dish or in someone’s pockets. So I could afford to devote myself to a man whose confused, photo-faded face I decided to love. And now I can afford to wrap myself inside a book that will sell to no one. So I will. Arya is helping me.

“No one will talk to me,” I say, “They hear my name and think it’s a political book . . .” I catch myself. “Sorry.”

“No,” he says to the cutting board, his expression revealing nothing. “I’m honored you took my name . . . honored.” He gets formal when he’s hurt, and redundant. How can someone so easily bruised be a political prisoner? I ask myself this a hundred times a day.

He starts to say something else, prepares several times, his lips cradling the words as they would a bitter morsel, like the first time he tasted Dutch bitterballen covered in hot mustard. He has been doing this for days. There’s something he wants.

What? What do you want, Arya? Ask me. I’m your wife. But he swallows it.

When he has finished cubing the pumpkin flesh, we gather the pieces in our fists and rinse them, both our hands under the faucet so that the water runs in rivulets over my fingers onto his. Inside the stream I rub the edge of my pinky against his, because I love him. He removes a seed from my thumb then kisses my cheek, because he admires me.

Did I save him, as they say I did? He was already out of prison by the time we met, though he was forbidden to leave the country. And what did I do? Throw Lucas’s money at the problem. Hire the smugglers and the forgers and whomever else his friends told me to pay because Arya couldn’t. It was because of me that he had a spot in the cargo hold of a truck, a bed-mat in all the friendly village huts between Tehran and Istanbul, where I met him after a comfortable flight with pillows and vanilla cookies, where for the first time I held his hand and touched his face. Once – only once – in Istanbul he spoke to me about all that had happened in Evin, what he had done to get there, and it seemed so brave. He had hung a banner, a sort of newsletter, with the regime’s atrocities, Ahmadinejad’s foolish words, his lies, secondhand evidence of the stolen election, on the wall outside his grandmother’s favorite teashop. Every day a different set of things. He showed me his pomegranate skin and said, “In Evin, I had no friends. When they lashed me or dragged me to the small room . . . they called me a coward because I made too much noise. Then, I met this man from Isfahan, Iraj, and we talked a little about food and poems. He gave me this. He said to bite down on it or grip it hard, and never ever make another sound again.” Arya called it an oath between brothers. I imagined him pouring all his hurt and fear, every single scream, into that ball; hoping the guards would tire of the game; thinking that one day when he’s far away from those walls, and there is no more poison left to expel, he might toss it away like a sneeze rag.

His words were like a hit of opium, like every droning setar song I had heard as a lonely child when Maman would say, in her clumsy way that seemed always a bit misinformed, “See? This is where you come from. This is why you’re a little darker, a little prettier, sweeter (banamak, she would say, better salted) than the girls at school.” I wanted Arya more than my old, easy life. I thought: when I marry him, somehow these purposeful ways, this Iran-grown strength will seep into my body through his skin.

Not yet though, because I’m failing to bring him back to life.

During the two hours it takes for the dish to stew, we walk by the Prinsengracht, he on the canal-side holding my arm, as if a wind might pick me up and deposit me right into the water. We carry the odor of meat and onions on our bodies. Lucas would have made me shower before going out. But Arya smells my cumin-steamed neck hungrily, makes a joke about eating me up. I know that this is a purely gastronomic impulse.

He kneads the desiccated pomegranate as we walk. He does it softly, no urgency in his fingers, and I know he isn’t thinking of Evin or home. We stop for espressos and I pay. I slip seven extra packets of sweetener and some brown sugar into my purse.

I pay for everything. I haven’t told him the smallest detail about my money, where it comes from, where it is all kept, and in what quantities. I have been waiting for him to ask me. Is he not curious? Does he find it ugly? Disgraceful? What I crave is for him to reach in with both hands and disrupt things, rummage around all the parts of my life, alter them to suit himself. There’s so much that I took for granted last time, the certainties of marriage, that no longer seem so inevitable.

I play a mind game: He doesn’t ask about the money because he wants me for the visa. Or: He doesn’t ask about the money because he is ashamed that I have it. Or: He doesn’t ask because he plans to leave me. Actually, I believe he wants to be honorable, his notions of masculinity warped now, like a sheet of plastic melted and dried again.

In the café, we read – I a book on the tea farms, he poems from a magazine called In Verse. From across the wooden table, he sends me a text, grins when I look up. Hi, the message says. I text back. Teenage games, so we can pretend. I think we’re withering.

In poorer parts of Iran where he has lived, lovers call each other and hang up after one ring, only to say they are thinking of each other without incurring charges. Though we share a mobile plan, each time his name appears on my phone something moves in my gut. Arya Gharibyan, his name is fraught. I know not to pick up, because he has told me, in his quiet way, what one ring means. He never says a thing twice, especially his wants – in prison that would triple the price of things. Still, I know to wait for a second ring before answering. I’m stunted in a phase that should be long gone, the heady first days. Today he loves me. Tomorrow he might not. The effect of text messages and loving gestures and cappuccinos shared by a canal wear off quicker now and I need more and more, always hungry but also always functional, like the village women, opium addicts who cook feasts for forty yet can’t go ten minutes without a hit behind the dirty pots.

“Arya joon,” I ask, “was there something you wanted to ask me before?”

He shakes his head, still reading. “I don’t remember.” He lies badly.

Sometimes I want to slap him. Right now, as I finish my espresso, I want to slap him. But before I can overanalyze, he rolls up his magazine and says, “Ta hala ja oftadeh.” It should have fallen into place by now. He means the stew.

* * *

I hang onto Arya’s waist as he pedals my bike back home after one of his painting jobs. He uses the warning bell too often, when he is still far away from pedestrians. I rest my arm against his stomach, a whisper of heat reaching my skin through his thin shirt. By the time we arrive at our apartment, all energy is drained from me, as if I have fueled his efforts through that faint connection between our bodies. He hops off by the door and starts toward his own bike, flipping to the right key in his meager chain.

“Do you mind if we save the Weesp ride for another day?” I ask. “I’m tired.”

He stares at me, keys dangling sadly from two fingers. After a pause, he says, as if to punish me, “I found the bag. In the closet behind your suitcase.”

I sense panic rising like an air bubble in my chest. Did he touch the bag or dig around in my things? If he accidentally lost or threw anything away, I’ll have to count again. 343 distinct items. A perfect symmetry. Their estimated value is around a thousand euro, a bundle I plan to cash in when it reaches two thousand – my small contribution, an earned crumb. Since I met Arya, or rather, since I said goodbye to Lucas at the Iran Air desk of Schiphol Airport, I’ve been saving things (hotel shampoos, Japanese candies), then making things (rice paper cards, dried pumpkin seeds, things I think people will buy), then taking things (silver napkin rings from parties, a cheese board from Lucas’s mother). My collection has no significance or meaning, except to me, and that is a comfort. The bag also holds my engagement ring from Lucas, a diamond and sapphire clasping each other like lovers from different worlds. I haven’t included it in my estimate.

“What does it matter?” I say. “Those are my private things.”

He sighs. Doesn’t argue, though I wait hopefully.

“Tomorrow,” I say, “I’ll see if I can get a table in the Albert Cuyp market.”

He reddens, his jaw clenching. He doesn’t want to ask about the money, but he has to now, doesn’t he? Because what if our money comes, not from my family, but from shameful things like street market vending? What if I have a secret life of small disgraces that make him less of a man? Once at a party, he caught my eye and looked away, his eyes full of kindness and grief, when I slipped a cheap pepper spoon into my pocket. Now because of that bag of hodge-podge, he will ask about our finances, and we’ll sit together and sort through it like husband and wife. It will be a beautiful evening over cups of hot tea, and afterwards, when we’ve balanced our budgets and thought of ways to pay back Maman and Lucas over many years, we will make love on the couch and fall asleep there. This is my thinking, not just today.

He doesn’t argue about the bike trip. “If you don’t want to go, we won’t go,” he says, though I can see he too had looked forward to the ride. I wait, hoping he’ll say, No, we’re going because that is what I need. But he doesn’t. Arya has no needs. He only wants to pay me back, a thank you for having him, maybe an apology. He has debts to pay and it wears on me to be the one owed.

“I’m thankful for all your efforts,” he begins – always the dehat formality in moments that scream for something else. Maybe I should just fling it at him, the truth about what he is doing to me. That I feel like expired medicine, like the year-old birth control pills in my drawer, or the antibiotics bottle that now holds my weed. He adds, inching toward me, “We can move. If you want.” He tries to hold me.

I push him away. “Why would I want to move?” I want to slap him again. Here is what I want: I wish he would just fall asleep first for once. If Arya ever fell asleep in my presence, what I would do first is look at his feet. I’d stare at the knife marks, every slice of the interrogator’s razor, without touching. I would memorize them, his unique footprint. And if one day there was a nuclear war and everyone was burned and disfigured, their families scattered across the world, I would walk from city to city, asking men of a certain height to show me the bottom of their feet, and this is how I would find him. It would become my life’s work, and worthwhile.

* * *

In the morning I find that he’s made me breakfast – a waste of three eggs since most mornings my appetite takes hours to awaken. I let them cool while we pretend to read. Then I get up to clean and, unable to scrape the plate into the garbage, eat the cold, waxy eggs over the sink with my fingers. It feels like a violation, being force-fed when I’m not hungry. I despise him for it. Angry tears mix with the eggs creating a gummy paste in my morning-dry mouth. But I dispose of the mush fast, joylessly, and Arya doesn’t stop me, or even look over.

* * *

“Please don’t bring that,” I beg Arya. We have been invited to a cocktail party – expat writers and Dutch artists, a few bankers and lawyers too. Usually we would refuse an invitation from the couple hosting, Jorgen and Elissa Visser, because they are in Lucas’s circle. But they’re in mine too, so why shouldn’t we go? It would be a waste of good friends that I’ve earned. Arya has put on a shirt from his village. He is holding the pomegranate as if it’s a part of his hand; all night I’ll have to watch it and wonder what his fingers are whispering to it, this grisly receptacle of things I’m not allowed to hear.

“Let’s not argue,” he says. He tries to kiss me, but I pull away. He massages the ball, a little more feverishly as he puts on his jacket. We ride our bikes to the party and I listen to music, trying not to think of which of us is right. Probably my request is insensitive. As we lock up our bikes, I ask him what he wants for his birthday. He shrugs. I can’t stop thinking that Arya does want something. He keeps starting and stopping, unable to say it, and I’ve been consumed by finding out his secret.

Upstairs, Jorgen comes over to welcome me. The Vissers live in one of those tottering canal houses from the eighteenth century, the party meandering from the narrow, sparsely furnished first floor, to the second floor with its utilitarian couches and frugal rugs, to the third where both toilets, a bedroom, and a larger dining space are inconveniently located atop a staircase so narrow that any new furniture has to be air-dropped in through the windows. Most guests gravitate to the rooftop balcony by the time they’re handed their first drink, and we’re standing just inside the sliding doors.

I wear a modest, almost matronly white shirt over gray slacks. I don’t want to be a spectacle so soon after everything. When Arya is giving our jackets to our host, thanking him too much already, making sure to remove his relic from the pocket (Jorgen eyes it with fascination), I scan the room for Lucas. It isn’t that I miss him, but I want to know things. And I’ve been lucky to retain a realistic hope of friendship. He’s sensible, not at all prone to fiery rages or jealousy. Our divorce was full of sane, almost too rational contentions, talks of tradition and roots and the native language of unborn children.

Arya brings me a mojito, his favorite western drink because of the crushed mint.

My gaze hops from one useless knick-knack to another, and I feel a tingle of embarrassment. Is it possible to be ashamed in front of yourself? Arya and I discussed this once, and he said that, yes, absolutely, that is the truest way of it.

He brings me a plate of carrots and ginger cookies. I wish he would stop serving me things. Once we went to a Dutch restaurant and ate carrot ginger soup, and so Arya, the savviest man I know by every measure, believes these things go together. His sweet lapses overwhelm me and I kiss the side of his mouth, the warm space where his lips come together and a blotch of dark skin, like a stain or spilled paint, colors the edge of his mouth. He looks around, smiles but pulls away. I stare at the plate of sad Dutch snacks and want to go home. I wonder how much this party cost. I calculate it item by item while Arya greets the only other Persian guest.

The snacks are all very cheap, but they have overbought, probably thinking that the way to fight this stereotype in front of their foreign friends is to buy more of the same shit, instead of something nicer. There’s a story Arya and I often tell about Dutch hospitality: how they host a dinner for six and make exactly six potatoes. Maybe Jorgen and Elissa have heard it too. I open my napkin and fold it around a stack of ginger cookies. I wrap each corner of the napkin down, a perfect bundle. I put it in the pocket of my slacks, a glimmer of satisfaction running through my body. Tomorrow, at Koffiehuis, I will eat this with my cappuccinos, and that will save me from needing lunch. I will have saved eight euros. In fact, if I bring a small snack to the café every day, I can save forty euros a week. This is substantial and my contribution.

I look for Arya, afraid of another disappointed glance, the kind he gives me when I take things, but he’s nowhere to be found. I wander toward a cluster of women with whom I used to have coffee and lunches. They embrace me warmly, ask about my work. I ask about their sun holidays to Costa Brava and Provence and Marrakesh.

Lucas comes to talk to me. “Your boy’s outside . . . on the phone.”

“Oh, sorry,” I say. Why did I say that? He’s the one who has been rude. He still calls Arya your boy, as if I’m having an affair. He doesn’t believe that I never slept with Arya in Iran, doesn’t know that I haven’t still. “You look well rested.”

He laughs at my tedious compliment, scratches his messy blonde head. He doesn’t look thirty-two, or anywhere near it. When he’s sixty, he’ll probably marry a twenty-five-year-old and move to Naples. “Ingrid says you’re reading a lot of out-of-date magazines and smoking too much weed, and that you developed this bizarre habit of drinking karne milk in bed. I thought you hated that stuff.”

I will myself not to flush. Arya was right; you can be ashamed in front of yourself. It’s the only true way. Then I think: Lovely. Just lovely. All that fucking work . . .

An urgent need to retaliate comes on and I mutter, “She says you gave her your old workout clothes.” He nods and I add, “What would a single twenty-five year-old woman want with your old gym shorts?”

“Oh.” He looks hurt. “Do you think I insulted her?”

“No, no.” I give him a dismissive wave. He likes big Persian hand gestures. He once told me they’re comforting. “She gave them to someone, and called you generous.”

I notice him looking at me strangely when I say entitled words like generous. It’s the look people give me when I name the places I’ve gone to school, the street in New York where my mother has a home, the good things I haven’t earned. Why would Lucas do this to me, the one thing he knows I despise? I want to fight the urge in him, to cleanse myself. “What if you hired me instead?” I say.

He sips his juice; Lucas doesn’t drink at parties. “Instead of what?”

“Instead of Ingrid,” I say, a flush creeping up my shoulder blades like warm fingers. “I’d be very good at it,” I pause and luxuriate in saying the word, “housekeeping. Plus Ingrid obviously tells people your secrets.”

He turns beet red, his mouth tightens as around a tart fruit, and I take great pleasure in having said just the right thing. This is a good idea. This is what I need. This will sever me from the useless degrees, the wasteful rock candy life, the aimless neverending time, and make me similar to Arya in all the most fundamental ways. It will close the chasm between us and allow him to understand me, to embrace and trust me as if I were one of his own. Then I think of other distorted parts of my world that I want to set right, “so I can earn the money you keep depositing in my account.”

His jaw is so taut I wait for it to snap, sending his teeth one-by-one across the room, angry little bullets that lodge in people’s store-bought apple tartlets. I wish Arya were here. It makes me nervous that he isn’t. “Don’t be crazy,” Lucas blurts. “I have to go.” And he does, barely stopping for the aerodynamic umbrella he carries even on sunny days.

Half an hour later, I have spoken to everyone I care to speak to, in turns exhilarated by my talk with Lucas and annoyed at Arya for being gone. I look out the window but there are trees obstructing the view. My former friends ask about him, about our life, and I give short answers, wishing I could reach over and take Arya’s hand so they would see. Then I think that this is just the sort of display I hate, like the cookbook authors who put a whole chicken, an impossible thing, in the photo of the walnut stew.

I sprint down the perilous narrow stairs easily, as only a true Amsterdammer can.

Outside, I find him sitting at the edge of the canal, his phone to his ear, his head leaning against a pole. “Agha jan, trust me,” he says in sumptuous, almost elegant Farsi, a testament to an education he has given to himself. “It isn’t dangerous, nothing to do with the Movement.” He sounds upset, flustered, and there’s some kind of desperation in his voice. Is he dipping his fingers in the shit-pot of Iranian politics again?

Then I spot that damn ball in his hand, his thumb stroking it lovingly and there is a heat in my chest. All I wanted was one night of pretending.

I storm to my bike, unlock it, and without checking to see if he’s watching, I pedal past him toward home. I feel him behind me all the way to the Jordaan. In a city full of bicyclists, Arya’s presence is unique, his careful weave, his overuse of the bell. Once when we were high, he said, “What if the bike bells mean something else we don’t know about? Like maybe it means they want a kiss.” Boos bedeh, boos bedeh, he sang, kiss me, kiss me. I wait for him to ring the bell again, like a plea. The street is almost empty, and my heart softens.

But at home, his sad face reignites my anger. I leaf through my repertoire of dramatic gestures – packing a bag, locking myself in the bathroom, breaking something. In the end, I’m too tired. “You didn’t even try,” I say. “You sat outside the whole time. How can you do that to me?”

He looks confused. “You were with your friends,” he says, his tone accusing, as if to suggest that he hasn’t been with his friends for years and years – and that much is true.

I take a deep breath and drop onto our tiny generic couch. “I just wish you would have been there. Just you. Not the horrible dehati shirt. Not that awful stitched up pomegranate. Why do you have to cover yourself with the story every single minute? Don’t you get sick of it?” Maman’s words present themselves, like a poison apple, and before I can stop myself, I’ve blurted them. “Don’t you get tired of being Evin boy?”

His eyes go cold. I can see that he’s about to get formal again, to close the door and hide behind dehati manners. “I’m very sorry, madam,” he says. I perk up because the way he says madam isn’t polite at all. It’s dripping with irony. For once Arya isn’t bowing to me. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” he says. “Though offering to scrub your ex-husband’s toilet isn’t much more honorable for a wife, is it?”

I’m about to spit back venom, incensed as I am about Lucas betraying my confidence, about the two of them talking about me by the canal as I waited, worried, upstairs. But joy, and relief overtakes me. This is the first time Arya has ever yelled at me, the first time he has been mad, really mad – not grateful or indebted or deferential.

“Fuck you,” I say, and storm to the bedroom, a little satisfied, and fall into bed. I hear the door slam, and it’s the sweetest sound. I fall asleep considering this strange sensation. I am quenched. Why? Do I want my husband to suffer? How can that be any kind of yearning, at least for a person who claims to be good? I remember all the things I’ve longed for, the hunger. Once as a teenager I gave up ice cream for a year, to please my tennis instructor. The instant the decision was made, it was all I thought about. And then six months later, on a sticky hot road trip with my best friend, I gave in to a drive-through milk shake. I was on a stretch of empty highway when I brought that straw to my lips, and suddenly I found I couldn’t drive. I had no choice but to pull over. It was an animal need, like blood lust or a first-ever orgasm. I pulled the car onto the shoulder and with my friend watching aghast, sucked every drop from that cup with such voracious greed that it was over in thirty seconds. It was a spectacle. I think that might have been when I first understood about waste. Wasted drops of ice cream, wasted years, wasted oaths and unnecessary thirst. Fuck that, I said as I drained the cup, tossed its ruin out the window, then doubled-back and bought another.

In the middle of the night, I hear fumbling. I wander to the living room. He’s digging around in the suitcase closet. “What are you doing?” I ask, panicked, because he’s unzipping my bag. “No, stop that.” I grab it from him and clutch it to my chest.

He releases the bag easily, looks at me with pity and regret. “Azizam, I wouldn’t take anything from you.” His anger is gone. I wait, the bag tight and warm against my chest, watching him study me. He smiles a little. “I know it feels good to have something that’s all yours, junk that has no value to anyone else. It’s safe from the jealous eye.”

I drop the open bag to the floor and rub my face with both palms, wait for him to say more. His words are like that first drop of the milkshake, and now I want him to talk and talk and talk. “I’m sorry I left you alone,” he says. “I was calling a farmer in Rasht, trying to find out things about the sour tea. I imagined it as this big, happy surprise, and I’d be a hero . . . it was very stupid. I wanted to pay you back.”

I want to thank him, to say that it’s the loveliest gesture, a beautiful thing for him to have done, but I hold it in. “I don’t want payback,” I mumble. I wipe my nose on my sleeve, not caring if he finds me unsexy or even disgusting. “I want . . .” how do I say this? “I want all this generosity to stop. We’re married, for god’s sake!”

“Okay . . . you asked me before what I want,” he says. My chest tightens. No, I think. No, don’t ask me to throw away my collection. I need it. I’ve given up so many things for you. Maybe he notices my worry, because he says quickly, “It’s the wedding ring.” I open my mouth, then close it and wait. “You keep it still. I wish you wouldn’t.”

“It’s worth money,” I say, sounding stupid even to myself. “I was going to sell it.”

He snorts, seeming almost aggressive, a shocking thing for me after everything. “I don’t want another man’s money,” he says. “I’m sorry I haven’t done enough . . . but . . . never mind.” He starts to pull himself to his feet, and I can see that he’s giving up.

I kneel down and peer inside the bag, all my pilfered soaps and stolen letter openers and amateurish handicrafts. Suddenly it seems ugly, like a bag of chicken skins. I am repulsed by it, push it away and stare at our pumpkin-hued walls.

“Okay,” I say. Now I have an idea, a longing that grows in urgency because I know I can fulfill it. After all the months of blindly bowing to each other, one of us can finally give the other something he actually wants. I whisper, as if suggesting the most mischievous thing, “Let’s throw it all into the canal.”

He stares blankly at me for two seconds before he leans over, grabs me by both hands and pulls me up, “Let’s go,” he says, his voice eager, like a scheming child.

* * *

We sift through the hoard object by object because it is important to have an order to it. The least valuable, least guilty items first – the shampoos, the sewing kits. They float at the top and drift under docked boats. Then the things I’ve made, the patchworks and the stale pastry samples. They glide to the edge of a bridge and linger there, as one would at the corner of a mouth. By the time we reach the expensive things, it seems easy, inevitable. It has to be done, or we’ll be stuck in limbo, in that horrible state of incompletion we both know well, because this is something we have in common – vasvas, they call it in the village.

But it’s not only the compulsion; I feel the urge to do this with the same intensity as that first ice cream on the roadside, a real and true longing. I want badly to throw this shit away. Not to hoard, or to waste, or to be consumed by what I consume. To help Arya heal and tuck away my own needs for a while. But every item is more difficult than the last, and when he isn’t looking, I pocket the silver pillbox. I will throw it away later.

When the bag is empty I hold the ring out to him. “You do it,” I say. He rubs his chin and I realize he doesn’t want me to just give him the ring. Before he can answer, I pull my hand away and toss the ring far into the canal. It makes a wide arc and lands halfway across, where it disappears in the black ripples shadowed in moonlight.

Arya laughs loud, a delighted almost-cackle, like he’s seen the very best thing. He breathes deep on his hands, then kisses my cheek, kisses my lips, and it almost seems as if he doesn’t want to stop. I lean my head against his chest. Something shifts. He is tensing, then relaxing again. I look up at his face, and it’s a little ashen. I’m about to ask what’s wrong when I see that he’s holding the pomegranate, tossing it up and down, its stem plucked out like a missing nose. He waits a moment, staring at the gruesome fruit skin with its surgical stitching. “I don’t know why the guards let me keep it. They only checked it every now and then. This ugly thing made my last few months a good five . . . maybe ten percent better . . . Yes, ten percent. It did at least that much.”

I’ve never heard Arya so bitter, and that too is a poison released. I want to say something meaningful – about wants or needs, about how alike we are, two neurotic Iranians though we’ve lived so differently, how the worst parts of us will now melt together in a toxic canal, welded into a single wretched thing and how intimate it can seem. I want to tell him that there are many things that are his to keep, more valuable things than his prison toy. But in the next instant he has pitched the pomegranate into the water. It makes a plop, a splash, and sinks down to the bottom, joining the lost bikes and flowerpots and the old books, Amsterdam stockpiles secretly or drunkenly, vengefully or accidentally chucked into the canal. The beloved junk people throw out windows or from passing bikes and can never get back again – relics now, part of the

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Dina Nayeri’s work has appeared in The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Glamour. Riverhead Books will publish her first novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, in winter 2013.