We used the advance I had received for my novel to pay for it. IVF proved lengthy, meticulous, frustrating, and ultimately unsuccessful. After months of sitting in waiting rooms reading magazines like Good Housekeeping and Reader’s Digest, after endless paper gowns and cold, sterile exam rooms lit by fluorescent lights, the repeated humiliation of discussing every detail of our sex life with a total stranger, the injections and probes and specimen collections, we went back to Dr. Rosen and his trains.
He sat across from us, tapped his desk with his fingers, and used the word “adoption” for the first time. Soraya cried all the way home.
Soraya broke the news to her parents the weekend after our last visit with Dr. Rosen. We were sitting on picnic chairs in the Taheris’ backyard, grilling trout and sipping yogurt dogh. It was an early evening in March 1991. Khala Jamila had watered the roses and her new honeysuckles, and their fragrance mixed with the smell of cooking fish. Twice already, she had reached across her chair to caress Soraya’s hair and say, “God knows best, bachem. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”
Soraya kept looking down at her hands. She was tired, I knew, tired of it all. “The doctor said we could adopt,” she murmured.
General Taheri’s head snapped up at this. He closed the barbecue lid. “He did?”
“He said it was an option,” Soraya said.
We’d talked at home about adoption. Soraya was ambivalent at best. “I know it’s silly and maybe vain,” she said to me on the way to her parents’ house, “but I can’t help it. I’ve always dreamed that I’d hold it in my arms and know my blood had fed it for nine months, that I’d look in its eyes one day and be startled to see you or me, that the baby would grow up and have your smile or mine. Without that... Is that wrong?”
“No,” I had said.
“Am I being selfish?”
“No, Soraya.”
“Because if you really want to do it...”