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he question with Amir winds up being practical and pure: Where can we go to be alone? When I took the job at the ABC School and moved out of my teachers’ flat, owned by the city, I became a vagabond without a place to call her own, moving between Natsume-san’s house and Sara’s borrowed extra room. Amir’s place, where he lives, is too crowded with his housemates from Iran. I cannot bring him to Natsume-san’s house. We go to Sara’s sometime but we agree it doesn’t quite feel right. And so we find ourselves sneaking all over town instead, going to parks, to temples, to friends’ apartments when those friends are out of town, all of this to touch each other in every conceivable illicit place, on grassy patches, on castle grounds and underneath the bright red of these cities’ Shinto shrines, near the altars of the Buddhist temples, in parks and on park benches, touching so much and so often that finally all that touch, it wears us out, it begins to wear thin and all we want, all we crave, we admit one night, is the comfort of sharing a private bed. And so, one night I usher Amir back into the apartment that used to be mine, the one that we used to cook in and bathe in, the one where, a few months ago when we hardly knew each other, he sat me on a chair one night, arranging to cut my hair, leaning in close, all concentration, and I remember he smelled like soap. The apartment, I know, will remain vacant for a few months until a new American teacher is scheduled to move in. No electricity but the place still has its cache of supplies—running water; futons in the closet; kerosene in the kerosene heater; the heater still sitting there right on the floor. And so, we slip into this place during the thick folds of night, quietly removing our shoes in the genkan, hoping the neighbors won’t T ................................................................................ 78 hear us gliding across tatami mats in our stocking feet, shadows now to each other, ghostly sights. Amir lights the kerosene heater. I slide open the closet door and pull the futons down quietly. We arrange ourselves and bedding on the floor and fall asleep, too tired to touch. Slip out before dawn. Return again and again. One night we consider cooking dinner on top of that kerosene heater in the room that no longer belongs to me but we think better of it. Instead Amir ducks out to a nearby 7-Eleven and returns with two microwave-heated bentō boxes of chicken balls and rice. We eat that night by the light of our kerosene moon, whispering for fear the neighbors will hear us — who knows what will happen then — and in my memory the meal is the most delicious of any I’ve ever had. This is the night that, after dinner, Amir tells me fragments of his Iranian past, how he fought in the Army, how this isn’t something he likes to think about anymore, unless someone asks. It is late now. The glow from the kerosene heater has turned the room into a candlelit church and Amir whispers, Are you sleepy yet? No, I whisper. I’m wide awake. How strange it is, I think, to lie near someone so gentle, knowing he has killed men in a war somewhere. And how lucky we are to have met on neutral turf, a place far away from both of our homes, miles away from competing political ideologies that might, at another time and in another place, make it impossible for us to be together like this. I’m trying to take care, to cherish what goes on between us but never confuse it for something it is not. Amir, I know, does the same. Like is once a week, he tells me just before we both fall asleep, the talk having turned from war to the nature of love. Love every day. ...
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