Read by Sophie Morris-Sheppard.
I.
The first impression was unforgettable. Unforgettable, how his turquoise eyes melted in hers before he even knew her name. Unforgettable his height, the softness of his hands, the radiance of his amber skin. Until that moment, Anna had regarded love at first sight as a cheap trick from romance novels she scorned. After seeing him, the cliché commanded her faith. His physical beauty – and beauty was the word because Persian did not distinguish between a man's beauty and a woman's – wasn't the kind she associated with the men she'd known. She was electrified by his breath drifting over her shoulders. These thoughts sifted through her mind before they'd exchanged more than a few syllables. They sat together on the bus, headed to a book-fair outside Damascus, near the airport, conversing in an Anglo-Persian no-one could have deciphered except themselves. Perhaps certain emotions could only fully be realized in this pidgin tongue?
If you would like to read the rest of this story, please check out Lovers' Lies, the Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other sexy and lovable stories from the League archives, appears.
Her emotions drove her body; she could as little direct its movements as she could guide the morning tide. She waited for his call. It came when she was fuming over the failures of her correspondents back home. No-one had written, though she'd been in Damascus for a week. No-one had asked whether she'd arrived safely. Then came the call she'd been waiting for for two days.
“I just wanting to see how you are,” he said softly in an accent-free English that must have been rehearsed many times prior to calling. The pronunciation was perfect, unlike the grammar. His lapses, however, charmed her in ways she couldn't explain. The stranger his speech, the stronger her attraction. She suppressed the urge to correct him, replying in an equally broken tone she knew he'd understand, “I missing you so much.”
They spent nights together in the coffee-shops of downtown Damascus, smoking the nargile and sharing fresh strawberry drinks (she loved how he pronounced the rich sherbety concoction, freeze, felicitously conjoining the Arabic for strawberry with the English verb), walking its lonely, ancient streets crowned by rows of grapevines. Only rarely would they converse in his native tongue, the language spoken by Cyrus the Great of Persia. She imagined he was waiting until he knew her better before deciding to speak with her entirely in Persian.
The first time he slept with her, he prefaced it with his mother's advice:
“My mother told me when I touch a woman I must be soft and gentle with her. I must clean her body before I make love to her. Would you like to go swimming?”
Anna was perplexed by his question. It was cold outside and they were already undressed. “Swimming?” she repeated.
“Dush, dush,” he whispered, pressing forward in hope that she'd understand what he couldn't translate. She understood. He picked her up and carried her to the shower, where he cleansed her entire body, head to foot, with the same single-minded devotion a mother brings to bathing her child. Only she couldn't tell who was the mother, and who the child.
Every night, he repeated the phrases that gave him control over her, that made her feel like she was falling in love, although, like most clichés, she didn't know what that meant: delam tang shodeh (my heart has constricted from missing you), dustet daram (I love you), fikr mikonam dobareh-yi to (I am thinking about you). And then the names, the many names by which they called each other, as numerous and various as the names for God: arus-i man (my bride), hasti-yi-man (my being), zindegi-yi-man (my life), bahr-i man (my sea), keshvar-i man (my country), dokhtar-i-man (my girlfriend).
Language became its own force of attraction, supplanting everything else. They played wordgames, he asking her how much she missed him, her seeking ever more innovative phrasings: chun rige biaban (like the sands in the sea), chun qatrehyi bahr (like the water in a sea). When she played the game well, when she became for an instant more versatile in his native tongue even than he, he'd wrap his palm around her fists and say, to mu’jize hasti (you are a miracle). Then they'd talk about angels and stars and the celestial things people don't discuss when they are speaking in the language of home; things she'd never shared with anyone who could not share the mystery of a foreign tongue.
When they spoke in Persian, the shame disappeared. She remembered learning in school that sharm, despite its obvious morphological link to the English shame, had no true equivalent in any language; that the Persian social conscience was at once thicker and more oppressive than any other tongue. But she could not taste it with Mehdi (his name meant saviour). With Mehdi, for once, she could be herself fully by becoming another. She told him stories about the past she was too scared to share even with her parents or friends. She invented a Persian identity to free her from an American one. He understood her even when her Persian pronunciation ranked below his English. She understood – indeed, preferred – the broken English he'd scraped together from Shakespeare, Stephen King, and Beatles songs.
What their tongues lacked when they were apart made them complete when they were together. Whenever they travelled together outside Damascus, the answer to the inevitable questions about their origins would elicit curious, bewildered smiles.
“I am from Iran,” he would answer in flawless Arabic. It sounded native to her ear, and always deepened her admiration for him. “My friend is from America. Two enemies, now friends,” he would add, anticipating the driver’s reaction.
“You should set up a travel agency together,” one taxi driver said good-humouredly.
“You can teach something to the United Nations,” said another.
“Maybe you can show your presidents how to rule the world,” said a third.
II.
A few months passed before she began to see the matter differently. He was a con-artist, a master at making language serve his own private representations. Although she realized his linguistic brilliance early on and was impressed by his ability to change between different idioms like different clothes, the connection between this talent and his deceptions dawned on her gradually. He did not deliberately deceive. Language was for him a tool that allowed him to be anything he wanted, without regard for truth. It overcame the oppressive world of factuality, it was a place where his imagination was king, like the Persian poets they studied together.
She only realized his deceptions were a problem when she saw how systematically he deceived himself. The evening they first met, when the world receded as they crafted a new pidgin from their native speech, he'd told her he'd soon be going to the University of Chicago to become an Assistant Professor of Persian Literature. She was slightly skeptical – how could he have possibly have landed a job like that in faraway Damascus, with substandard English to boot? – but the details hadn't concerned her then. Who was she to second-guess the achievements, at least the potential achievements, of the man who'd captured her fancy and taught her to dream of the stars?
But the self-deception gradually became absurd. Months into their language games, Mehdi told her the assistant professor job was really an email from a senior professor at Chicago proposing to take him on as a research assistant (the professor had since ceased responding to Mehdi’s queries). And she saw how this was part of a long pattern of misrepresentations, of exaggerating his status, of overstating his brilliance, of groundlessly prognosticating futures no-one could control – all enabled by his miraculous capacity to speak in tongues. Who was he trying to fool, and, more importantly, why?
She was amazed his imagination could drive his tongue to such extremes when it received so little nourishment from the world of facts. Bragging she understood. Lying in self-defence, or even for reward, made (limited) sense. What she didn't understand was the uncontrolled lying about himself, from his future prospects to his grades; his siblings’ names to his place of birth. Once, they were in an elevator when the operator opened a conversation with Mehdi in Arabic. The operator was so impressed with his interlocutor he told him he should write a novel. Mehdi responded, no, I will write about novels. I am a critic, not a novelist. Anna thought Mehdi would make a much better novelist than he realized, given his felicity for ignoring facts.
Mehdi’s fantasies extended to their future together as well. They were already speaking of marriage two weeks into their acquaintance, and of children by the third. None of the conversations threatened to add up to anything. It was as though he dreamed for the pleasure of dreaming, without regard for the consequences. His love of language was a self-sustaining passion, and that was the basis for her love too. Whether any of his fantasies would ever be mattered less than the pleasure he took in uttering them in different tongues. Jawhar-i man (my gem), he said. Falak-i man (my sky), she replied. That was why she'd got into this business in the first place, because she believed, like the poets of Persia, the well-chosen words could bring about a new order in the world.
They spent their nights poring over dictionaries, inventing new phrases no-one had ever heard. “I am the night that shines in the black hole of your stomach,” he said proudly, with complete disregard for the proper order of speech. “Man in chashmeh-yi hastam, ke to mikhondi pish az khubidi (I am the eye you read before going to sleep),” she replied, with an equal disregard for logic, meaning and sense. On their last night together, he shared with her Sohrab Sepehri’s visions of water and rain, after which she read a vision recorded by Sylvia Plath. She paused a long time over the lines:
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident
To set the sight on fire
In my eye, not seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.
because she wanted, desperately, for him to understand. After months of speaking his tongue, she wanted him to speak in hers, to find a way for them to exist between the world of the imagination and the reality in which they were forced to live. And she wanted him to understand Plath’s point about miracles: they don’t happen when you want them to, and cannot be conjured through speech. Language doesn't yield to the worlds we wish to inhabit. We don’t make something true just by saying it. If he couldn't learn this basic lesson, she thought to herself, they had no future together, no matter how much she loved his felicitous tongue.
It was the night before her departure. She wanted to tell him that having a miraculous ability to speak in tongues doesn't give the right to fabricate your way through life. She wanted him to understand what she needed from him, so that maybe someday they could build a life together. Above all, she wanted him to know that fluency in many languages doesn't bestow the right to lie, especially not to your friends.
He nodded the nod that signifies understanding. He caressed her hands, whispering bahr-i man, akhtar-i man (my sea, my star). She didn't believe he'd understood “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”. Plath’s lines sounded beautiful, he said finally, but he didn’t quite grasp their meaning. Was a rook a fish or a dog?
--
Speaking in Tongues by Rebecca Gould was read by Sophie Morris-Sheppard at the Liars’ League East & West event on Tuesday August 9th, 2011 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London.
Rebecca Gould's fiction, essays, poetry, and translations have appeared in Guernica, The Gettysburg Review, Literary Imagination, Asiatic, and Open Democracy. Her work is forthcoming in Wasafiri and Redactions. She currently teaches at the University of Iowa.
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