Tami is enjoying coffee at Starbucks with her new friends, Eva and Ike. It's a surreal experience for her, because it's such a simple pleasure and yet one she's never experienced before.

This is all I ever wanted in Iran, the freedom to laugh in public. To choose my own friends, no matter if they're men. To sit in the open air at a café and talk without fear of the bassidjis. I would gladly wear that stupid hejab forever if I could just look at men in the eye and make a connection of friendship and share a table at a coffee shop.

  "Earth to Tami," says Eva and snaps her fingers in front of my eyes. "You're a million miles away, and all you've left us is a dopey smile on your face."
  I come back to them. "I was just thinking what a great day it would be in Iran if we were suddenly allowed to go to coffee shops and mix men and women together. To be friends with each other, I mean. I think a whole revolution could be prevented."
  "Really?" says Ike. "You think lives will be lost before coffee shops are integrated?"
"Absolutely." Of this, I am sure.
"But going for coffee. That's such a simple thing," he exclaims.
  I laugh. "But it's not, of course. Men aren't even supposed to look at women. To look at them is considered fornication of the eye."
"Fornication of the eye!" Eva loves it.

She slaps her hand on the table and repeats the phrase. "Fornication of the eye! Ooh, baby, fornicate my eye!"

I am glad she finds it funny. I, however, cannot laugh. I am reminded of sixteen-year-old Atefeh Rajabi of Neka who was very recently found guilty of the similarly absurd crime of "acts incompatible with chastity." Poor Atefeh was hung from a crane and left dangling in public view for forty-five minutes, while the man involved received one hundred lashes and was released. The story making the rounds in Tehran is that she so incensed the judge by pulling off her headscarf and speaking in a sharp tongue that he, personally, slipped the noose around her neck and gave the order for the crane to rise. He, personally, ordered her lifeless body to hang there for forty-five minutes as a message to other girls: This can happen to you.

I fix a smile on my face and stop myself from sharing the story of Atefeh. There is no need to infect my friends with the vision of such atrocities, no need to dampen the pleasure of this afternoon. Yet, what if the world could really see? Would it matter, would it make things different for us, if they saw Atefeh dangling from the crane?

=+=

  Danny looks at each of us in turn. We're German. Czechoslovakian. Iranian. Russian. Polish. Peruvian. And we've all got something we're trying to leave behind. We've all got our sad stories. Nadia is the one Danny wants to hold eye contact with, tries to hold eye contact with, but she won't look at him, so he rests his eyes on me. I am too courteous to look away.
  "I tend to get all worked up when people talk about their rights," he says. "Any kind of rights. Civil rights. Human rights. Women's rights. I don't know, quite honestly, if anybody anywhere has any inherent rights. Says who, you know? Who decides what these rights are? Who bestows them?"
  I am tense all over, especially in my shoulders. This is not the Danny I thought I knew. Just like a man, I think. Just like a white man from America, to so casually toss out the only ounce of belief I've been able to sustain all this time, all these years, the idea that somewhere, somehow, I would get my rights, maybe even take them if the opportunity comes along. But I have them, Danny, I do! I do have rights!
  Again, he plays the same chord, a little faster this time. The tone of his hum has changed, too. It's less mournful, more determined. It fuels my curiosity, makes me willing to hear him out. Where's he going with all this?
  "Talk to me instead about responsibilities," he continues. "And I'm paraphrasing Ghandi here. But I think we're all put on this earth to make it a better place, plain and simple. And I think that everyone - everyone - has a special contribution to make. A God-given potential. And I believe it's a crime against God not to find out where your talents may lie and to develop them. And I think it's a crime against God to hold other people back from contributing in the way He intended, whether it's a husband or a government that's doing the holding back."
  He turns from me to Edgard. "What if you, with your doctor's brain, are the one who's supposed to find a cure for cancer, but instead you're washing dishes in a restaurant?"
  He turns back to me. "What if you are supposed to bring about this oxymoronic notion of peace in the Middle East - what if you're the one who can actually do it -- yet you've received no training in persuasion, in negotiation? Can you really be expected to stand up for the whole world when you've never been allowed to stand up for yourself?"
  I stood up to Eva yesterday, I whimper in my head. Victim, victim, victim. The ugly word victim thuds back at me from the recesses of my brain.
    "I'm going to sing a song for you all in just a minute, and what I want for you to think about while I'm singing it is this: What are you waiting for? I happen to think that if you only have the courage to hope for a better someday, you've barely got any courage at all." Now he stares at Nadia. I want to elbow her, in her unbroken arm, so she sits up and pays attention, because I know what Danny means now, at least in relation to her. "If the best you're willing to do is hope that things will one day be better for your children, forget about you, then you're selling yourself short in the eyes of God. You're ignoring that hint of greatness God put inside of you, and isn't that the saddest thing of all?"
  He strums the chord again, harsher. But briefly, no humming this time. He's got his final point to make, this pony-tailed man who's now got the eyes of a zealot. "I used to wonder, what do they have to lose, these people who hold others back? These husbands, these parents, these governments? And I've come to realize that's the wrong question. The correct question is: How do we help them realize what they have to gain by letting us, encouraging us, insisting to us, that we develop our God-given talents and put them to good use in the world?"
  We Shall Overcome.
  That's the song he sings to us, teaches us, then insists we sing along with him.
  We Shall Overcome, One Day.