Persian Gulf to the border city of Astara, in the north near the Russian border.
The treacherous, very often impassable mountain passes of Kotal-e Mullah Felfely, Kotal-e Malu, and Kotal-e Peerezan, between the port cities and the city of Shiraz, had become the graveyard of many of those ill-fated drivers. Most of those poor drivers didn't even know how to shift the gears on those big trucks let alone negotiate the sharp turns of the narrow road through the rugged and unforgiving boulders in the high altitude. No driver’s license was required. Any able-bodied man was hired, and after a day’s training they were sent to the port cities to pick up a loaded truck with weapons and ammunition and drive it north to the Iran-Russian border. Because of the existing black market for American dollars (in which drivers were paid) the pay was considered exorbitant by any standard, but due to the job’s tremendous risk, it was truly a driver’s ghaymat-e khoon, the price of his blood.
Gholam never sent her any money and that was painful for Esmat, nor did he ever send her a short letter of a few warm words and that embarrassed and hurt her deeply. He never returned and that was humiliating for Esmat, especially when her neighbors stared at her and she would read sarcasm and taunting in their eyes. And now and then, the neighbors’ jeering or mocking remarks about the whereabouts of Gholam brought her sleepless nights.
And so it happened that in the early spring of 1945, she consciously assumed Gholam dead after not hearing from him for two long and lonely years. An old hideous-looking, evil-eyed gypsy woman read her palm a few years later. She told her that the man she was waiting for had a chubby black-skinned lover in the remote southern port of Bandar-e Langeh in the Persian Gulf. Esmat disregarded it, called all her fortune-telling “bullshit” and found more comfort in considering him dead than alive. “If my man isn’t next to me in bed every night, if his skin isn’t rubbing against mine, honey, I don’t give a shit if he’s dead or alive. If not aziz-e man [my darling], he’d be better dead than alive,” she would often reason, whispering to herself, in her lonely hours, more to ease the pain of missing him than the belief in such an ice-cold truth.
With no source of income and no special skill to support herself and her child, she began to work as a maid or as a cook for upper middle class and rich families. But, besides having no grace and never at ease, she had a serious and irresolvable problem, almost an incurable disease that made it difficult for her to hang onto that sort of job for any length of time. That was, in addition to being naturally big, with huge muscles and bones, covered with the enormous amount of glut of fat she carried around she had an uncontrollable urge to eat anything that she could get her hands on. In addition to that incurable shortcoming, she was also extremely and unbearably sloppy. Not being able to hang onto any job, there were many nights when she and her deprived child laid their heads down on their pillows with empty growling stomachs. But those nights didn’t last long once Ali-Akbar entered her life, first as a lover, then as a faithful husband and a generous provider.
Ali-Akbar was a remarkably strong young man, who could lift the front of a car or could bring down a brick wall with one tackle – after pouring down a few shots of aragh, of course. In that remarkably powerful body, one could hardly find even one single mean bone. He had a soft spot in his heart for plump women with light skin soft and watermelon-sized breasts, thick thighs, and enormous round buttocks. He compensated for his lack of good looks and charm with the goodness of his heart and his ceaseless passion for sex.
Always smiling, he was mild-mannered, well liked by everyone, even though he always dressed in shabby clothes that never indicated success. He put up with Esmat's flares of temper. He loved her huge body and treated her tenderly. It was as if he could see some precious gem buried deep beneath all that flab, a piece of jewelry no one else could see.
Being younger than her and tremendously strong, he could stand the violent jerking and clenching of her body when she became sexually excited, working herself toward a climax. He would crawl between her thighs, missionary style, whenever the opportunity presented itself, which was way above the average. Afterward, to heighten his sexual ecstasy, he would beg Esmat to tighten her tree-trunk thighs and legs around his body and squeeze as hard as she could. “The best damn way to get rid of the pain in my bones,” he would philosophically articulate with a deep sigh of relief, followed by thunderous laughter.
With the experience of a few men under her belt, Esmat had known how to hook this one, reel him in slowly, land him in her bed, and possess him for good. She had gone to buy a sausage sandwich in a shop that also served aragh and beer in the neighborhood. She noticed that she was the target of an intense stare from a young man, who was trying to undress and devour her with his look. She had responded to his lustful stare with a smile and soon accepted his invitation for a walk, which gave her an opportunity to gather detailed information about him. At first, she pursued him persistently like a shadow. She then lured him to bed, giving him generously as much sweetness as she could muster from her plump sensuous body, until he could no longer live a night without lying next to her. When she thought he was hooked, she pulled back, staying out of his sight for a while. He came running to her like a saturated-with-hormones teenage boy who couldn’t stay away from his first love, begging, as if he had gone utterly mad.
Determined not to lose this lover under any circumstances, she planned everything thoughtfully and nothing was left to chance or luck.
She sent Faty to stay with one of her neighbors for the night. Having the room all to herself, she used her imagination and creativeness to the fullest, arranged an outlandish romantic feast for him that she had never done for anybody before. She spread a sofreh, a rectangular white clean tablecloth, on the floor, placed two candles in the brass candlesticks that she borrowed from her neighbor, two red roses in a tall glass, and a steaming browned roasted chicken on a large plate in the middle. For drink, she chilled two bottles of bootlegged, hundred proof aragh sagy, cheap vodka, extracted from raisins, a sort of aragh that no one except underprivileged men could stand because of its sharp taste. To ease the taste of the aragh in his mouth, or as a chaser, she provided a bowl of cool yogurt mixed with chopped cucumber and mint.
Ali-Akbar gently knocked on Esmat’s door around eight o’clock that night and waited anxiously. When he heard the soft sexy voice of Esmat, saying, “It’s open. Come on in, aziz,” he most probably thought a nightingale in the Garden of Eden was speaking to him. He found Esmat sitting near a sofreh like a pinup girl on calendars – a sofreh decorated with colorful food and drink that was exclusively set for a special visitor. He took off his jacket and placed a passionate kiss on her lips. As he tried to explore her body with his hand, she gently refused his advance and forced him to sit next to her.
Wearing pink see-through chiffon, Ail-Akbar’s favorite color, revealing as much of her soft white skin as she could, she hand-fed him piece after piece of tender-cooked chicken, and acted with naz and kereshmeh, coquettishness and flirtatiousness, and as hard-to-get as she knew how. She then handed him shot after shot of ice-cold aragh sagy to wash his food down, and spoonfuls of yogurt and chopped cucumber to erase the bitter aftertaste of the aragh sagy.
When his stomach was full up to his throat with roasted chicken and his veins were overflowing with aragh sagy, she rose and began to perform an extraordinary dance, stripping down to the little pieces of underwear she had on. She gracefully took a few small steps and twisted her waist lustfully with all the eshveh, teasing, she could muster. The collective movements of her legs, arms, hands, chest, shoulders, head, and even the subtle motions of her fingers, were beckoning, performed to disarm and attract Ali-Akbar.
Loaded with lust that was brewing in him fermented by watching every sensuous move of that great plump goddess of beauty, he was about to lose his mind. The last piece of fabric on Esmat’s voluptuous body was a cherry-red thin string panty. She peeled that tiny piece of garment off in slow motion and rotated it in the air around her finger. The dim candles’ light illuminated a black beauty mark the size of a quarter between her naval and pubic hair. Besieged Ali-Akbar couldn’t take it any longer. He stood up, swaying and shaking, ripped off his clothes
