“We should go sometime. Get all dressed up. It’ll be fun. But first we should start putting aside money,” she says teasingly, giving him a wide smile.

  He laughs, throwing his head slightly back and narrowing his eyes. He has a deep-throated laugh.

  In his eyes, I am safe, she thinks. I have always been safe, here, so far away from the havoc.

  She leans an elbow on the table, cradling her chin in her cupped hand. “I make you laugh.”

  “Yes, you do. You always make me laugh.”

  “Do you like how I make you laugh?”

  He inclines his body forward. His knee underneath the table bumps into hers. “I do, very much.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do I make you laugh?”

  He watches her. “Because it’s easy to laugh when I’m around you.”

  She studies his face, thinking that it’s true. When he is around her, his tight jaw seems to loosen up, his eyes brighten, and his laughter grows louder. He seems almost too eager to relax, to smile, watching her with an expectant gaze, as if waiting for her to say or do something to make him laugh, to make him forget, to make him feel new. He takes comfort in her, she knows. Breathing in her intactness, reveling in her quiet so as to forget his own anguish, his dither, the horror that still cleaves to his skin, the horror of the violence he has seen committed against ordinary people on the street, his days in solitary confinement, his horror of death that he faced alone, in prison, not knowing what would become of him. She has seen his eyes glisten many times with joy, with relief almost, at the sight of her, as if her very being, with her dainty Italian clothes that he never forgets to compliment, her confident manners, her smile, is proof that it’s possible to reconstruct something beautiful out of devastated debris. And there it was again, just a few minutes ago, when she mentioned going to the opera. The glistening relief, the urge to believe that yes, life can be easy. It can be about deciding to go to the opera or not, about putting money aside; it can be fun, without dread, without horror, without always fighting, resisting, struggling, without always having to test the limits of one’s bravery, of one’s cowardice. Life can simply be about a spring afternoon, drinking a beer at a café, overhearing a soprano rehearsing for a concert.

  I have become his protector, she thinks, his amulet. And she feels like she has grown strong, indefatigable arms that can pull him away from the undertow tugging at him and lead him through that inescapable world of moving on, of starting over. He can pour all his grief into her and walk away a free man.

  “And that’s good?” she asks.

  He touches her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “Of course it is. It’s very good.”

  From a church nearby, the echo of tolling bells swoops down on the square. The sound of children’s laughter fills the air. A woman passes by, pushing a stroller. There is a hysterical flapping of wings and screeches as several pigeons fight to get the bigger share of a handful of seeds that an elderly man has sprinkled on the ground.

  Reza looks at Neda with his dark eyes. He smiles, though there is something sullen hovering over his eyelids; he resembles a man wishing to liberate himself of a weight and stand tall. By now she has grown used to these abrupt attacks of gloominess when he looks as if he’s drowning in a lagoon she can’t see, to which she has no access. It is a lagoon of memories, of friends he has left behind, promises he has not kept, struggles that, at a certain point, he no longer pursued. Of these he rarely speaks to Neda, as though he doesn’t wish to sully her with such compunctions that, in his mind, belong to another land, another time. Only when he’s drunk does he cry, and then she knows. She is familiar with those tears. She has seen her father shed the same tears when alcohol loosens something inside him and he can’t stop.

  “In the beginning, when the protests started, there was a lot of enthusiasm,” Reza says, picking up his story again. Neda sees that his thoughts never waver. That as much as he is here with her in this beautiful quiet square, he is also there, in that other world of bullets and batons. “We didn’t know if we were going to topple the regime or not. In a way, it wasn’t about that. It was bigger than that. We wanted the whole world to know that we were there and we were awake and we were not afraid. We wanted to show everyone that our generation had grown up, that we had a voice and we wanted to and could make decisions.” He pauses, interlaces his fingers. His voice pulsates with fervor. “The most beautiful were the silent protests. It wasn’t something planned in advance. It just happened. That’s how much harmony there was among us.”

  Neda remembers watching the images of a vast sea of people walking silently down a wide bridge. So silent that, for an instant, she thought she could hear the sound of their heartbeats. There were women in scarves, men with green bandannas around their foreheads, young and old, passing in front of the awe-stricken eye of the camera. A long green flag floated on top, held up by the crowd. After a few moments, a thunderclap erupted as the demonstrators broke their silence by simultaneously clapping their hands. There was laughter as strangers united through its heart-lifting burst. Quickly, the clapping gained momentum, spurting out of the screen and into the room where Neda watched, like raindrops battering the roof.

  “It was in one of those videos of the silent protests that I saw my cousins Sara and Omid among the protesters. Did I tell you? Well, they’re actually my cousin’s cousins,” she says, beaming. “It’s a moment I’ll never forget. First I saw Sara. She was flashing a victory sign, laughing, looking triumphantly around her. It was almost as if all those men and women were there to accompany her. Then she turned around and called somebody. A few moments later, I saw her brother, Omid, catching up with her, grabbing her hand, and together they just strode out of the camera’s vision. I couldn’t believe it. I had to watch the video many times to believe it was really the two of them.”

  Reza smiles, leaning back in his chair, with a satisfied expression.

  “They told me there were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets that day alone,” Neda says, clasping her hands. “They couldn’t believe it themselves; the sheer numbers shocked them.”

  “The regime was shocked too,” Reza says. He draws his shoulders in, clenching his jaw, as he speaks. “It was like they suddenly realized that we, our generation, had not come out as they wished us to, that all their brainwashing hadn’t worked. But that’s when the crackdowns started. And it wasn’t just about scaring us away and back to our homes. The forces were out there to kill us, to kill thousands, if not millions.” Reza pauses. The muscles of his face are taut with emotion. He seems bewildered, in shock. His dark eyes widen as if in reawakening terror. Neda feels the goose bumps on her skin, all the way to the roots of her hair. “There were gunshots everywhere, yelps of terror, burning cars and black smoke rising to the sky, bloody faces and bodies. It was not a game. They were ready to kill as many protesters as possible without the blink of an eye. At the time not one of us imagined the regime capable of such brutality. Such violence, such a cold-blooded will to kill. Not even in our worst nightmares.”

  Reza falls silent. Neda stares at him without being able to speak. She remembers watching the videos. The scenes of the government forces’ violence and the protesters’ defiance imbued her with a strange, overwhelming energy. She remembers wanting to pick up a metal bat and break all the windows, to run until she collapsed, to set fire to everything around her, to jump down a cliff. And yet now, as she listens to Reza, watches the bafflement, the shock, in his face, something inside her stomach churns. She feels a shiver of rage, of repulsion, hearing him so astonished, boggled, as if any of what happened was not just as it always was. What was the difference other than now the killing had been transferred to the streets; that it was now bolder, in the open, the blood glittering under broad daylight and not behind prison walls, en masse, in the middle of the night? Or was it always in the daytime, the sun catching the blindfolded prisoners full in the face?

  No, she had not been shocked. They have already killed thousands, Reza, she would like to shout. Your worst nightmares came true twenty-three years ago.

  The waiter clearing away the empty beer glasses interrupts the conversation. “Altre due?” he asks, addressing her.

  Neda and Reza look at each other, leaning back in their chairs.

  “Sì, grazie,” Neda says to the waiter.

  After that, they sit silently, looking around, as if they both need a moment to deal with their emotions, to bring them under control by taking refuge in the life that is unfolding around them, in the square that has slowly filled with blue twilight, in the dawdling shadows that spread over the light green shutters of the conservatory. They watch as the café gets crowded. Groups of friends gather around tables. Couples seek to catch the other’s voice over the din of glasses clinking, ice being hammered into splinters, the crushing noise of the martini shaker. On the opposite side, a man and woman stand in front of a perfumery, admiring the elegant bottles on display. In the middle of the square, a group of teenagers loll about on the steps of the bronze statue of La Marmora, one of the generals of Italy’s War of Independence, inclining a bit forward on his horse.

  The relaxed beauty of the place fills Neda with restlessness and wonder. What are we doing here, in this city, in this country? Just as a few moments ago, the setting seemed like the perfect surrounding for their intimate talk, making it easier for the words to flow out; now, suddenly, the simmering, bubbling life around them feels alien, unrelated to them, blurring out just as it gains life, as if it’s a dream. For a moment, she is unable to tell which feels more unreal: the impervious hum around them or the conversation with Reza. It is as though, in a matter of moments, she has been launched from one world to another. From the weight of the past and present in a place where a blood-soaked dagger is twisting deep inside the heart of the country to a world where a girl on a bicycle pedals through the square, her pink-and-yellow scarf fluttering behind her in the wind. It feels as if Neda is two bodies in one. One that writhes and wriggles, one that lies still. Each world makes the other seem impossible, far, another reality.

  From a table behind them, she can hear bits and pieces of a conversation about a cat that escaped the house after a visit to the veterinarian. The owner of the cat speaks in a plaintive voice. She is afraid the cat will never come back. It has lost its trust in her, she says, and now associates her not with food and shelter but with the traumatizing experience at the veterinarian. The conversation breaks off when a cell phone rings.

  Neda’s gaze turns to Reza, whose large body is slouching into the chair as though an unseen force is pushing him down. He looks strangely childlike, docile. Neda feels an urge to hold him in her arms. Who do they have but each other? She stretches out a hand and smoothes the few graying hairs on his temples. He takes her hand and holds it cupped between both of his.

  “What tiny hands you have.” He examines them almost perplexedly. “I could put them in my pocket and carry them around with me and no one would notice.”

  His eyes glimmer softly into hers. Neda smiles, liking the feeling of being wrapped protectively between his hands, so much larger than hers. His fingers are long and slender, the skin slightly rough, warm. She curls her fingers inside his cupped palms, pushes them open, and curls them again, playfully. She feels an urgent impulse to tell him more of what she experienced during those post-election days, sitting behind her computer, watching it all unfold. It all feels so recent, she thinks, even though it’s been over two years. She feels a shiver of envy at the thought of him having been there, having partaken of that moment when history turned. He ran through those streets, threw stones, shouted slogans, was arrested, released, and arrested again until his last escape. He risked his life. How can she compete with that? How can she tell any story, speak of any memory, larger than that? For him, it was all immediate, intimate; he smelled the bullet smoke, the tear gas, and the blood that steeped the streets. He did what her parents had done thirty years earlier. He is a constant reminder of her parents, of how her parents would have been if she’d been able to see them. But in her memories, her parents are much older. That was how Neda pictured all political activists and refugees before meeting Reza, with the same shape, the same composed, mature middle-aged faces as her parents when she was a bit older, and they were with her, and she could remember them. Not during the time when they were not there and she slept with her grandmother, who enclosed her in her arms, her breath hot on her face, nearly suffocating her. That image of her parents she had never really considered, and it was not until she met Reza that it occurred to Neda that her parents too were once young, as young as Reza, when they were arrested. This simple discovery, in all its apparent banality, had shocked her: imagining her parents scurrying through those hostile streets, throwing anti-regime leaflets into people’s houses, having underground meetings, just like Reza, their young eager faces suffused with a single-minded fervid light, their every movement dedicated to that ideal which made everything else so insignificant. It almost took her breath away to think that her mother had been even younger than Neda when she gave birth, locked up behind brick walls. Then she remembered how Azar referred to some of her cellmates as very young. Too young, she would say, to suffer for their half-baked political ideals. Her mother would speak of how those prisoners always wore black and gray clothes and sat in rows along the low walls and pretended to be strong. But when she wore her white shirt with its yellow and pink flowers, they couldn’t hide their joy. They forgot about their pretense of strength, as if remembering that they didn’t belong to those barren walls and worn-out carpet, that the prison was not theirs, that something had gone terribly wrong. Those confessions of her mother had at the time filled Neda with consternation, not so much for Azar but for those other “very young” prisoners. But now, as she looks at Reza, she sees that her own mother was one of those young prisoners, only she never mentioned it, never revealed it.

  Soon the waiter appears with two perspiring glasses of beer, thick foam bobbing on top. They unravel their hands to let him set the glasses on the table and tug the receipt under the black plastic ashtray. For a moment, they look at the glasses, then at each other, pale smiles rippling on their faces as they clink their glasses and take a sip.

  “It’s good beer,” Reza says.

  “It is.”

  Reza hunches slightly forward, examines the plate of cheese, which they’ve barely touched. “So what can you tell me about the cheese?”

  Neda too leans forward, pressing her chest against her clasped hands on the edge of the table, looking down at the plate. “Well, let me see,” she says, disentangling one of her hands to point at the cheeses one by one. “We’ve got parmigiano, raschera, fontina.”

  Reza laughs amused. “How do you recognize them? When I’m at the supermarket and want to buy cheese, I just pick up something at random and can never remember its name.”

  “It was like that for me too in the beginning. Then I learned little by little.”

  Reza tears a piece of bread in half, places the cheese on top of it, and hands it to her. Just like her mother did a few years ago, making tiny sandwiches for Neda while asking how her painting courses were proceeding. Azar, who Neda knew wanted her daughter back in Iran and yet never allowed herself to say so.

  Neda spoke to Reza only once of her mother and the story of her birth. They had arrived home after a night out. Dawn was yet to break over the hills of Turin. They were standing on the balcony where they had a better view of the pinnacle of La Mole Antonelliana tickling the sparse white clouds and the dashes of crimson and gold in the treetops that sealed off the street.

  “I am a happy man.” Reza enfolded her in his arms, his mouth near her ear.

  She rolled around in the tightness of his arms. She smiled but was already selecting the right words for her story. He held his face so close to hers, as though he wanted to breathe out of her mouth. She wondered if he could feel the pounding of her heart, so wild she thought it might implode.

  She then told him, first in a trailing voice that slowly began to gain strength as she undid the knots one by one. Reza listened to her. There was a weak, pained smile on his lips throughout, as if it had been etched into his face. She felt unease exuding from him as he listened with the obscure expression of a man who didn’t know how to deal with an emotion. His face, aglow with the gentle light of the rising sun, looked fluid, unpredictable.

  He never interrupted while she spoke, never asked a question or made a comment. Later, when she was done, he wrapped his arms around her again and held her tightly and made love to her quietly. It was their most silent lovemaking, as if the sky had landed on them.

  After that, Reza never spoke of it again.

  “There’s something that I’ve never told you.” His voice cuts through the flow of Neda’s thoughts.

  Neda lifts her gaze, somewhat startled, like she’s been brusquely awakened from a dream. “What is it?”

  From the buildings that drip of darkness diluted with lamplight comes the secret calling of birds, perhaps warning of intuited threats, perhaps bidding each other good night. You are going to tell me a story, she thinks. Another story. But I am tired of stories. When will they ever end?

  “My father was a member of the Revolutionary Guards,” he says. “In fact, one of its founders.”

  Neda looks at him, a shiver running up her spine as if she’s caught a chill. It seems to her that his voice dips a little, like he’s uncertain of what he’s saying or wishes no one other than Neda to hear him.

  “But he’s no longer one of them. He left as soon as he realized they no longer stood by their principles.”

  Neda nods and continues staring at him, unable even to open her mouth. She is too shocked to think straight, to truly digest what he has just told her. Although in the beginning, his eyes wavered from hers, he seems to have regained his composure. He looks straight in her eyes while he speaks, like he means to show her he has nothing to hide, that he has a clear conscience.

 

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