"What is that?"
Kurosh takes my hand, pulls me up, and we walk toward the light. With quick movements, a man standing next to a water pipe twirls a chain like a lasso with a metal net at the end of it. Burning wood coals stoked by the whirling begin to glow. After that they are laid on the tobacco on top of the pipe. Then someone offers us a drag, and I take the long qalian hose. They make room for us on the carpets, and we get a glass of tea. Unfortunately I immediately become the center of the conversation and consider the version to tell to these friendly people. In moments like these, Kurosh can either be my husband, business partner, travel guide or married relative. Either way, we have no other choice but to constantly offer some story, but we still have not been able to agree on a final version. The true one we can tell, at best, to well-meaning foreigners. Once again, it is past midnight, when I get back to my hotel, and the man at reception seems to think it normal to ask me why I am coming in so late. Used to white lies by now, I tell of an English tour group staying at the Abbasi Hotel that invited me to dinner.
"Did you dance?" After a moment's silence, we both have to laugh out loud at the macabre joke.
I still feel Kurosh's hand, its tight grip and the hard nails that dug his longing into my skin. His eyes spoke of the desperation of one who desires but can do nothing besides redirect his swelled up feelings through the tips of his fingers and into my hand. The bedside table lamp throws a weak light on the place where he touched

light on the place where he touched me, so tender and rough, on parting a few minutes before. It shows four little red divots, and little imagination is needed to conjure up the vision of his hairy fingers, looking so exceptionally smooth and fine, on my hand's marked palm. I feel them, warm and full of faith. They feel their way up to my elbow and slowly stroke back down, basking in the warm, smooth skin. A look from me causes him to touch my cheek with these beautiful hands as he raises one of his sickle-shaped eyebrows. I turn out the light and listen to the echo of his voice. His rolling "r" when he says my name, and the emphasized "i" at the end make me chuckle. I remember how he tries for the hundredth time to remember the English word "cage". He has so often said that his lovely city is nothing more than a golden ... "what's that word again?"
Will I ever be able to give him a good-night kiss? Sometime between being awake and dreaming I hear a many-voiced giggle, and for a moment I think my ears are playing tricks on me and replaying the sounds of the night. But the nocturnal expression of joy grows louder, becoming ultimately an unbridled, contagious, loud laugh. In the stillness of the sleeping city it pierces shrilly from across the street through my window. That's where supposedly one of the best restaurants in the city is. A secret tip, someone told me. The laughing people seem to be having the best of times, and I could swear that they were intoxicated. Unfortunately I only understand a few words and do not know what is so funny and what keeps