Mohsen with Umbrella

I’m looking at the reflection of trees in a rock-lined pond, safe in the tea house of my husband’s Jappalachian garden. He’s fixing the homespun hydrology system that brings fresh water into this pool from a nearby creek. For the moment, the surface is still. The moss-colored depths, trees towering down to the bottom, remind me of your eyes.

Somewhere I have a picture of you sitting on the roof of your little house in Kansas. You are holding an umbrella over your head. But it isn’t raining. In fact, the sun is out.

I admit to being intimidated, even frightened, when our first conversation began with you demanding to know in broken English, “Why you do not look at me in the eye?”

Embarrassed, I scanned the mailroom, as if to find the answer in the grid of wooden cubby holes protecting envelopes addressed to the faculty and graduate students of Kansas State University’s math department. I’d only seen you a handful of times, maybe didn’t yet even know your name. I think I’d been told it wasn’t culturally polite for young American women to look directly into the eyes of Middle Eastern men.

“Is it because you tink you are better than me?” Your second question ended in a chuckle. Derisive or sympathetic, I couldn’t tell. But I liked the way you said “tink” for “think.”

“No, of course not!” I disclaimed. Provoked into looking directly at you for the first time, I saw you were about my height, short for a man. Soft curls framed an olive face. Your eyes were mischievous and utterly affectionate. You were teasing me.

“I’m sorry. I’m new here and in a little in over my head,” I stammered. “You’re the first person I’ve met from, from . . .” I trailed off, realizing I had no clue about your country of origin.

“Ear-On,” you said, pronouncing its name for me very precisely, the way it should be said. “I’m from Iran.”

It was the early 1980s and you had come to KSU to study geometry. My eastern Kentucky upbringing hadn’t exposed me to many people from other countries. With the Iran Hostage Crisis still visible in the rearview mirror, Reagan era propaganda portrayed all Iranians as evil and dangerous, and I’d bought into that insidious prejudice without even knowing it.

Manhattan, Kansas, is known to those who love it as “The Little Apple.” I thought of it then, and still think of it today, as a dustbowl. The actual dustbowl was an ecological disaster of the 1930s precipitated by humans plowing up native grasses for agriculture characterized by overgrazing, which combined with severe drought led to “black blizzards” of dust. Living in Manhattan, I nearly died from asthma, brought on by the dry dusty wind carrying pollen that clogged my lungs whenever I stepped outside.

But, like its namesake “The Big Apple,” Manhattan, Kansas, was also a melting pot. Its central location in the Midwest drew scores of international students to KSU’s graduate programs. Along with others from the U.S. and Iran, our circle included friends from Argentina, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, India, China, and Japan. I was reminded of my Southern Baptist bible-school upbringing, during which I learned to sing:

Jesus loves the little children,

All the children of the world

Red and yellow, black and white

They are precious in his sight.

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

In those days, I would stay up late at night making candles. I’d heat wax in metal kitchen pans, adding blocks of dye to make different colors. I poured the dark colors of hot wax—reds, blues, purples—into ice cube trays, and let them set up. Then I’d stack the cubes into empty milk cartons and pour light colors like yellow to create a large candle with chunks of color shining through. Peeling off the milk carton mold to reveal the final product was like Christmas morning.

Right after we met, I wrote in my journal: “Mohsen has come into our lives. Frazzled and cynical, hating math and government, he said to me: ‘Teach me to make condel.’”

You rode your bike back and forth to school from the little house you rented on Ratone Street. We called it “Rat One.” Every night at seven you watched the news—CBS with Dan Rather, NBC with Tom Brokaw, and ABC with Peter Jennings—switching around between them to get all the coverage you could possibly get.

I’d come over in time for the “animal story,” your favorite part during the last five minutes of the nightly news. It might be about a dog that got its family out before fire consumed their house. Or a crow that learned to solve a difficult puzzle. Or pandas pampering a new baby at the San Diego Zoo. Tired from cycling and solving math problems, you’d scrunch around in your overstuffed chair and pretend to want to get up and be a proper host. But I’d help myself to a drink and we’d settle in to watch Marx Brothers movies. We loved that scene in “A Night at the Opera” when Harpo is trying to hide from villains in a theater and ends up toppling one long row of adjoining seats after another, revealing himself to the enemy. Laughing hysterically, I searched in the dark for your beady eyes and saw by the television’s glow that you were crying.

I didn’t understand politics. I didn’t have to. After I went home, you’d tune in to more news on the shortwave radio. Listening to broadcasts from Germany, where you’d had a girlfriend, was the best way to get the big picture, the non-American and non-Iranian perspective.

One day you told me you had married your lesbian friend. You married each other out of mutual necessity—she needed a husband, and you needed a green card.

One night you had a horrible toothache and rode over to my apartment to drink an entire bottle of cough syrup to ease the pain. That night you told me that the cats in Iran are green. I insisted that you meant gray.

MTV had taken the country by storm, and we’d watch it when I’d drive us down to the bar in Aggieville. We’d sing along to “Every Breath You Take” and “Rock the Casbah” riding in my car to the Safeway, your preferred grocery store. “Why do they call it safe vay?” you asked once, knowing I loved the way you said it, replacing the “w” with a “v” sound. “Is this where we are supposed to go if my country starts bombing your country?”

One day when we passed in the hall at the math department, you were agitated, rapidly calling out my name with the stress on the ending, “Fronkey! I have got a spoon too big for my mouth!”

“Mohsey, what are you talking about?”

“I bought a car!”

“Ah, you mean you bit off more than you can chew.”

Later, you told me about the Persian language, how you have adages, idioms, metaphors, and satire just as we do. How Farsi also has homonyms, similar words creating the opportunity for a joke. A cartoon capitalized on the name of a political leader being almost the same as the word for part of the male anatomy.

You always called me out when I told you that you “should” do something. Many of our discussions revolved around the philosophical question of whether one person, or one government, had the right to tell another one what he or she should do.

One time riding in your car, we played a cassette tape of a woman singing plaintively in Persian. She sounded so passionate and earnest. I asked you to translate. “She is saying that she loves him, and she wants the best for him, but he has to go away from her, and she may never see him again. And she is saying a lot of other tings but it’s too complicated to explain.”

The Iran–Contra Affair broke out in ’86, and then you got your degree. You enjoyed the freedom of the US, but you wanted to marry a traditional woman and have a family. Teachers were revered in your country. So you went home.

Being wily, you were able to arrange academic positions and collaborations in geometry research that allowed you to visit America again—twice in the ’90s and once in 2013. Each time we debated about green cats and what those in power should do to ensure world peace. On that last visit, we drove from Kentucky to Kansas in freezing February to see some of our old friends. My mom had died the previous July, and I was still grieving. I wish I could have been more present with you, asked you more questions, learned everything I could about your life in Iran.

Yesterday, my country bombed your country. As I listen to all the United Nations representatives commenting on the situation in Israel and Iran and on the United States’ strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities last night, I know that you are without internet and do not have access to all the information that I have, may not even realize the extent of the current danger. But I know you. I know that you are sensitive, humanitarian, and like me, just want all people to get along. From your son, now living in the U.S., I know that you and your wife are safe, for now, but irreparably afraid and deeply sad.

Once we were strangers. How have we even managed to keep in touch all these years? I have lost track of many people close by in the US. What is the tie that binds us across 7,000 miles? I haven’t seen you for a dozen years. If you are able to travel again, I will meet you—in Italy, Germany, Switzerland or France. I don’t want us to be strangers again.

I found the picture of you sitting on the roof of Rat One. It is a perfectly calm, beautiful day in Kansas, without even the unrelenting wind. Yet the shadow of a big, dark umbrella covers your head. The posture looks like something Harpo Marx would concoct. I hear your voice saying my name, “Fronkey,” and I finally understand this gesture. You have never known safety. Could never leave your house—not in Iran, not in Germany, not in America—without looking over your shoulder, without that feeling that someone could be lurking somewhere to intercept your comings and goings, to rain on your parade.

Back in my little tea house, next to my writing tablet a candle flickers. Homemade waterfall back in action, the stillness of my pond has been replaced by wondrous patterns. The incoming liquid creates unending vibrations, breaking the refracted light into glyphs that, for me, today, resemble Farsi script. I can no longer see the trees reaching down to the bottom of the pond. But I am entranced by the shimmering geometry.