Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

The seemingly endless, intermittent diatribe Paul delivers all the way to Teheran, some eight hundred kilometers and a bit more than ten hours from the border, is wasted on Lissie; she keeps thinking that he did nothing to stop what was about to happen to her. Aside from his early, feeble attempt to dissuade the officer, abruptly aborted when the man ordered him to shut up, he stood by helplessly while all those veiled threats fluttered ominously on the still predawn air, a Persian song-and-dance designed to frighten her into submission. And then what? Disrobe for them? Had they really expected her to suffer the indignity of an internal examination she might have denied even to a female customs official?

Rape had been in the air last night, she is certain of that, as chilling as the cold wind that blew in over the mountains to the north. A cozy hut-enclosed rape, to be sure, complete with radioed musical accompaniment — finger cymbals tinkling perhaps, tambourines jingling, the rhythmic strumming of a sitar, the lyric frenzy of a flute — but rape nonetheless. The fifty-dollar rape. Two gorillas with their olive-green trousers and undershorts down around their ankles, Lissie spread and struggling, Islamically invaded while outside Paul Michael Gillis shufflingly kicked shit and mumbled something about how long it was taking them to get to India.

She can understand (oh, sure, she can) how frightened he must have been by the officer’s inspection of his spanking-clean, brand-new passport. He is, after all, a draft dodger; he could not have called any further attention to himself once he was in the clear, even if it meant throwing Lissie to the wolves instead. But, Jesus Christ, couldn’t he have made at least a show of support, puffed out his manly chest, said, “Now see here, my good fellow,” clenched his fists, maybe even — if worse had come to worst — thrown both those little bastards over his shoulder in a sudden judo move?

No, not Paul. Stood by. Watched. Said nothing after he’d been told to shut up. True, those words had snapped on the dank morning air like the crack of a whip, sending a flutter of new fear through Lissie, causing her mouth to go suddenly dry. But she had been the one expecting imminent violation; she’d had every right to be frightened by that threatening little bastard with his snotty little fingers, plump fat sausages like the ones she’d seen hanging from trees in the Turkish countryside, the thought of those fingers touching her, poking at her, probing her — Jesus!

And now it is Paul who, in retrospect, is highly insulted. She pays scant attention to the Iranian landscape unfolding beyond the dust-streaked window on her right; she wants only to get through this fucking country as quickly as possible, hitch another ride the minute Jean-François drops them off in Teheran, get out of here, cross the border into Afghanistan and then Pakistan, keep on going till they reach a civilized place like India, where the people speak English they learned at Cambridge or Oxford. She pays even less attention to Paul’s rambling tirade, enormously pissed off by his behavior at the frontier and determined to make him pay for it somehow, if only by denying him the conjugal rights he has already accepted as his proper masculine due. Her mind wanders as he rides his high horse to the limits of his righteous anger.

He is using the border incident as a means of clarifying for Jean-François the indignities young people everywhere are forced to suffer at the hands of ignorant, uncaring adults who consider today’s youth a menace to the smug, self-satisfied, fat existences they enjoy at the expense of the poor, downtrodden masses who bear the brunt of taxation without true representation. On and on, he goes. The jails are full of blacks, Puerto Ricans, and draft dodgers, he says, all of them hippies in their own right, all of them fighting in their own way for a dignity denied them by the fucking Establishment, all of them chasing the fake American promise of freedom and equality for all regardless of race, creed, color, sex—

She doubts that Jean-François understands a fifth of what Paul is saying. As he keeps up his rambling monologue, she remembers the scorn with which the boy in the Princeton sweatshirt denounced America on that Cape Cod beach last year; remembers Judd at Woodstock, and the way he called grownups “the enemy”; remembers the atrocity stories the two Carnegie Tech dropouts told in San Francisco, and Barbara Duggan’s later speculation about the envy young people aroused by their mere existence. Half-listening to Paul, she wonders for the first time in months whether young people are as full of shit as adults are.

August 10, 1970

Dear Mom and Dad,

We arrived here in Teheran yesterday afternoon about three, and we’ll be leaving here in just a little while, as soon as we’ve had some breakfast. I thought I’d write this and mail it before we start off again. We had a terrible experience at the border coming in, and when we start hitching again today we don’t plan to stop till we reach Delhi.

It’s not as noisy here as it was in Istanbul, but the city seems more confusing somehow, I don’t know why, with all these automobiles and taxi cabs (they’re orange here, not yellow like New York or black like London) and buses they must have bought in London, actually, because they’re the same red double-decker ones I saw when I was there, and squares and streets all intersecting and crazy. It all looks very modern here, and not at all Asian, which is surprising after what you see on the road. I mean, that’s where the real Asia is, not in cities like Teheran with its big apartment houses and office buildings and movie theaters and fancy shops and supermarkets and signs like on Broadway and music blaring out of speakers everywhere, you’d think you were in an American city, not New York or San Francisco, but someplace like, I don’t know, some shitty little city someplace in America.

The only thing that seems remotely Asian about this place is these drains they have running in the gutters that the citizens use for washing food in, or throwing garbage in, or peeing in, or spitting in, and then they wash their hands and faces in this mucky water, can you believe it? Well, maybe that isn’t Asian, but it’s certainly filthy, and it sums up the way I feel about Iran in general, I guess. Here in Teheran, the Shah’s done a lot of modernization, but most of the cities and towns we passed on the way here looked uniformly drab and dull — gray will do it every time, Mom, and gray seems to be the favorite color for the buildings here. The favorite food is (surprise!) lamb. Also rice. And cheese. And this flat bread they bake in charcoal pits.

The men are all wearing white shirts and baggy black pants, with here and there one or two who are dressed like sheiks, with the turbans and robes, you know, but for the most part the clothing, in the cities anyway, is westernized. Except for the women. A lot of them are still wearing the chador, which is this long piece of cloth, usually black but sometimes brightly colored, that they wrap around their body and drape across the shoulders and over the head. It used to be against the law here to run around without a veil over your face, but the Shah changed all that. Paul says the Shah’s government is as corrupt as our own back home. Paul’s beard looks marvelous now, and by the time we get to Delhi I’m sure he’ll be mistaken for a guru or something. No address yet, because we’re still on the move. But I’ll keep in touch. Please know that I love you and respect you both very much.

All my love,

P.S. Ooodles and ooodles of kisses to both of you.