1995 to 2005, Atlanta, Georgia

By Wilda Hughes

In 1999, E. called and we met at a coffee shop in Gwinnett County, Georgia. When I asked him where he was from, he said “Iran.” I paused before responding. Of course. Suddenly his face looked Iranian. His beautiful amber eyes were now superimposed on an East-West, male-female conflict that threw him in my mind’s eye to impossible reaches of a neverland where I had warned other women not to go.

His nose had a classic bony ridge. Did he see me pause? “I wondered where you were from.”

He smiled. “I should have let you guess.”

The features of his face clicked into the new cognitive map, while memories surfaced of the Muslim call to prayer playing over loudspeakers on a Mideast compound in Saudi Arabia, where I lived in the 1980s.

Saudi Arabia’s history differs markedly from Iran’s; however, despite their historical and religious differences, both countries are currently fixed to the yoke of religious fundamentalism - and, in their most virulent forms, the triumvirate religions of Allah, God, and Yahweh frown on free women.

Though I had met E. two years previously at a Jiddhu Krishnamurti dialog in Atlanta, this was our first date. He was an older but charismatic man with gray, balding hair, olive skin, and lips that sometimes approached purple. I had taken him for South American, or Greek.

I sipped my mocha and found it quite bitter. I added sugar to it, but I couldn’t get it right. In a little while, I told him that I had lived in Saudi Arabia, and it was his turn to pause. I don’t know what went through his mind. At first I thought that he paused because he knew he was talking to a woman who knew a little of the culture from which he had grown. I knew the score. But now I think that any one or ten of a number of images may have flitted through his mind. What were we doing in Saudi Arabia, anyway?

I’ll tell you. My ex-husband was training the Saudis on how to maintain the fighter jets our defense contractors sold to them, the same fighter jets that shot down a couple of Iranian jets when we were “in-country.” Of course, Iran was our enemy, too. We all thought it was because of the Iran hostage crisis, but they had been our enemy since our CIA and British Intelligence overthrew the government of Iran’s most beloved secular leader — and perhaps their best chance for democracy—on behalf of British Petroleum in 1953.

After the coup, the Shah’s soldiers swept the country killing or imprisoning Mossadegh supporters, and Iranian boys dreamt of one day being the people’s savior, the one who would depose the corrupt Shah. They told each other folk tales about it. “Once upon a time, there was an evil Shah.” Consequently, that coup paved the way for the rise in fundamentalist power there, the taking of American hostages, and a violent crackdown in Iran of their left-leaning intellectuals — and their women.

As I took another sip of mocha, my friend might have been thinking about our part in helping to arm the fundamentalist Saudis. Maybe not. I haven’t asked him, but I do have one clear memory of my Saudi days.

I was in a Bible study on a compound in Saudi Arabia, and as we bowed our heads in prayer on a dusty, peaceful day in 1983, I could hear our fighter jets overhead and felt the cognitive clash of love and violence. Amen, brother. Would I take those two years back if I could? We finally had money. I got to travel. They were some of the happiest days of my life. I would miss them….

“I don’t know,” is what I thought as I looked at this man. “I shouldn’t date him,” was another thought.

Five years have passed and he’s still thoughtful, a friend. We enjoy quiet conversation, special moments that slice through the layers of our conditioned responses built on ancient human schisms and reactive tribalism. He likes to ask, “Why must human beings carry images about each other?”

I sort of trust him, but I’m inherently paranoid in general and with men in particular. However, he makes me wiser, and I feel that I’ve grown up a little bit in his presence.

We both know that ignorance is killing our mutual countries. Several years ago, we watched a news report of some U.S. misdeed; in frustration I said, “I’m tired of being the bad guy.” He smiled, “I’m from Iran,” and I laughed. He held up his drink, said “Salud,” and in resignation, we toasted the collective conscience of our countries’ crooked paths. Like he says, “What can you do?”

This past summer I lay in the warmth of his arms and remembered how I feared angry Middle Easterners as a teenager. Later, as a young mother, I watched my new baby boy asleep under a light, pastel blanket, fearing that I would not be able to protect him from this tragic world and its wars. I had read the Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, while shadows of plotting Middle Easterners with black ski masks loomed in my mind. And who could forget the massacre in Munich in 1972?

In the early 1980s I watched my 3-year-old son, squatting next to Saudi kids in the Abha and Jeddah airports halfway around the world, prattling in English while they chattered in Arabic. At 4, my son saw me bow my head in prayer and said that I wasn’t praying right. He knelt on the floor and bowed his head to the ground, and said, “That’s how you pray.”

This past summer I ran my hands over E.’s soft skin, and he held me tighter. I kissed his shoulder, and he touched my hair. He and I are both divorced — our respective spouses left us years before we met. We are both apostates, but we have sat in meditative silence and felt the sacred presence. Not Christian. Not Muslim. Not American. Not Iranian. Not this. Not that. But something.

We have other things in common, too. One night, in words softly spoken, he told me how his favorite brother died in an accident. We drifted into poignant silence in the dark room, quiet together as we remembered our mutual losses and inconsolable grief — because I also lost my dear brother in an accident.

But culture always returns … our conditioned past. In Saudi Arabia I did not like the severity of the men and the contempt they had for women. I couldn’t go anywhere outside the compound unless I was accompanied by my husband or a group of people. When I got back to the States, I warned women never to date or marry a Middle Easterner.

Now, in my mind’s eye, I see my friend leaning forward in earnest conversation over his polished dining room table. He cooks for me, marinating salmon in Italian dressing and baking it over a bed of rice with roasted tomatoes and eggplant on top. He cuts cilantro into cucumber salad and we break flat bread and eat.

We like each other, but other than brief moments of romance and oxtocin, we don’t love. I always sober hurriedly to the realities of non-acceptance and the self-fulfilling certainty of division. I don’t know if he’s moved emotionally at all. His answering silence tells me that he is not, though there’s a sweet light in his eyes at times and a soft caress.

Today my young son is a man, and he’s a National Guardsman in Iraq. Fear sown in me 25 years ago has reached maturity. His platoon is bombed almost daily, and if I think too hard on it, I feel sick. Relief comes in the form of an email or phone call telling me that someone has heard from him. And I exult when he discovers another cache of bombs that can no longer hurt him. Consequently, I am immobilized by cognitive dissonance.

I have broken off the relationship with E. for a couple months while I reflect in solitude, and in my lonely vigil I wonder … is this hell? I can’t talk to E. about it. I can’t talk to my son about it either, and I can’t help but wonder: If we made room for love, what horrors then…?

Wilda Hughes is a writer living in Atlanta, Georgia; her new novel, The Redeemers, can be found at www.sheshere.net.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 | Email This Post

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