“Paul,” she says, turning to him.
“Listen,” Paul says, “she’s not carrying any dope, there’s no sense...”
“Shut up,” the man says. “Inside,” he says to Lissie.
“I’m an American citizen,” she says, immediately thinking she has said exactly the wrong thing. The man’s eyebrows arch. A smile crosses his face.
“Ah,” he says, “American citizen.”
“Yes,” she says. She is trembling now. She wishes she could stop trembling.
“Does America not have customs?”
“What?”
“La douane,” Jean-François says.
“What?” Lissie says.
“Do they not search?” the man asks.
“You... you already looked through my bag.”
“Inside,” he says.
“What for?”
“A more complete search. Inside.”
“No,” she says.
A more complete search means a body search. She’ll be damned if she’ll allow this officious little bastard to probe her cavities with his germy little fingers.
The unlikeliest hero steps forward. Fat little Jean-François Bertaut, his peaked woolen cap covering his bald head, his shaggy mustache bristling, his jacket open over his sweatered potbelly, says calmly and with only the faintest trace of a French accent, “I will be her witness.”
“What?” the officer says.
“À Teheran, je vais raconter aux officiers tout ce que est passé ici.”
“I do not speak French,” the officer says.
“I will say all what I see and hear. To les officiers in Teheran.” The officer turns away from him. “Inside,” he says to Lissie.
“Pas sans moi,” Jean-François says, moving into his path. “I will stay with the young girl.”
The officer hesitates. Hands on his hips, he stares at Jean-François, their eyes locked in silent combat. Lissie, terrified now, watches them. Is the officer wondering how the officials in Teheran will react to his demand for a body search when nothing in her bag seems to warrant one? Who are these officials in Teheran, anyway? Does Jean-François even know if there is anyone in that city to whom he can report unseemly conduct at the border? He has traveled this road many times before, so maybe he knows what he’s talking about. But what if he doesn’t? The officer keeps staring at him. Paul, standing by, says nothing. She will remember later that he did nothing, said nothing.
“Alors,” Jean-François says, “allons,” and takes Lissie’s arm, and jerks her toward the cab of the truck.
“The search will be made,” the officer says, and then to Jean-François, almost under his breath, “You may attend.”
She cannot at first comprehend how a body search in the presence of a courageous little Frenchman will differ in any way from one conducted in private. Reluctantly, she follows them both into the hut. Jean-François insists that the second officer go outside. His superior says something in Persian, and the man goes out to stand by the fender of the truck. He is lighting a cigarette when the senior officer closes the door.
The search, much to her surprise, is circumspect in every way. She realizes, as the officer delicately, gingerly, and cautiously pats her clothing and then looks through the shoes he has asked her to remove, that he is going through the search now only as a matter of face-saving routine. Whatever he had earlier planned or expected has been headed off by Jean-François’s intervention and his threats of reporting the entire incident to some nameless officials in the capital. The search takes no longer than three minutes. She remembers having looked up at the clock on the wall when she sat down to take off her loafers; she looks up at it again when the officer says, “That is all, you may go.” He turns to Jean-François then, and — with the faintest trace of a smile on his mouth — says, “Do you see, then, there was nothing to fear.”
Jean-François returns the smile. “Merci, mon capitain,” he says, “vous êtes très gentil.”
“I am not a captain,” the man replies, suddenly understanding French, and then abruptly turns away to light a cigarette. Dragging on it, he pulls open the door and calls something in Persian to his colleague. The other man immediately raises the striped border. They are both still standing outside the hut as Jean-François eases the big truck away from the border station. The senior officer has his hands on his hips, the cigarette dangling from his mouth. It is a quarter past five, and the sky in the east is already becoming light.
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.