Persian Girls: A Memoir Read online

  Oh, beautiful woman,

  Your pure soul will be carried to heaven by two angels

  Oh, the example of purity, you’ll be soon in heaven

  where a garlanded seat under cool shady trees is awaiting you.

  I paid him well; he had asked for so little.

  A man wearing a felt hat came over and asked if he could say a prayer for the dead. I nodded. He squatted by the grave and, closing his eyes, recited a sureh from the Koran.

  As soon as he finished, a bird hopped on the grave and then flew away, going up and up until it was swallowed by the sunny sky. “That was her soul,” the man said matter-of-factly. “If it’s a bird it means she’s in heaven; otherwise a fly would have appeared.”

  After the man left, I sank into a state of near-oblivion. Then I noticed a man who looked vaguely familiar staring at me. I was jolted out of my sunken state when I recognized Majid. Yes, Majid, the man who had been in Pari’s heart for so long and then finally devastated her. He hadn’t changed much since that time I met him in the park in Ahvaz, when he gave me a letter for Pari. Only a few strands of gray were strewn through his hair. His wide forehead was a little wrinkled, and his shoulders stooped slightly. He was wearing a casual woolen tweed jacket over jeans, the way American professors dressed.

  He, too, recognized me and said, “Oh, Nahid e aziz, you’re here.”

  You know, Nahid, what happened with Majid has weakened me.

  “I come to her grave every time I’m in Tehran. I miss her so much. I’m not the same person without her.” Majid’s words brought me back to the present.

  “Majid, she was devastated by some of the things you said and did,” I said, and began walking away from him.

  “Please, don’t run away from me. I want to talk to you,” he said, putting a bouquet of flowers he was holding on her grave and, in a few moments, catching up with me halfway to the gate. His face was damp with tears, his manner diffident. He was so different from the buoyant, self-confident man I remembered.

  I tried to control my anger. I told myself I should talk to him, hear what he had to say.

  “I’ll take you to a teahouse where the ‘moral police’ aren’t always on the lookout,” he said.

  We walked to his car, an old Chevrolet. As he began to drive through winding, narrow backstreets I tried to assess him from Pari’s point of view. Here was the man who had brought her to such heights and depths.

  At the teahouse, Majid led me to a quiet corner in the back. The walls were covered with posters of historical sights, a minaret in Isfahan, a garden in Shiraz. Copper lamps stood in the corners and the obligatory portrait of Khomeini hung on one wall. Two men were playing kamanche and tar. At other tables sat couples, single men, or groups of men, some smoking water pipes, some sipping tea.

  “You were a shy, tense girl,” Majid said. “You’ve turned into a confident young woman. America must have been good for you.”

  “When did you last see Pari?” I asked.

  “I saw her once recently, at her request. She left a note for me with a friend saying that she wanted to tell me something. But when we met, she was reserved and we never got around to what she wanted to say. I wanted to start our relationship again but she told me bluntly that everything was dead between us. The sparks she had hoped to bring back by seeing me again were dead underneath the ashes. It was a sad meeting.” He was whispering, being cautious the way people were under the Shah’s regime. “It isn’t easy for anyone here, women or men. We all fought for freedom, which got us caught in months and months of destruction, and what did we get for it?”

  “There was that letter to your wife . . .” I fell into a strange daydream in which I was Pari, talking to Majid.

  “That was very unfortunate. Someone had told Mahnaz, my wife, that I had been seeing Pari. I’m sure it was Pari’s ex-husband. I don’t know what he wanted from Pari; he had taken everything already.”

  “Remember that letter you gave to me on that picnic in Ahvaz? You encouraged her to leave her husband then.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Why weren’t we allowed to follow our deepest individual desires?”

  “But, Majid, you didn’t want to leave your wife,” I said.

  “I have children.”

  “So Pari was right about your disapproval that she had left her son behind?”

  “She read all sorts of things into everything I said. It was for her own sake that I did and said certain things but now I wish I avoided those subjects. More than anything I wish years ago we had been able to go by our own desires. After I lost hope, I gave in to family pressure and married Mahnaz. I’ve been trying to do the best with my marriage.”

  “Pari said she wished she could shatter her life and put it back differently.”

  “I feel that way myself; it hasn’t been easy for me.”

  A few men came in, looking around the room as if surveying the people. The women who had let their scarves or chadors slip to the middle of their heads quickly pulled them forward, and I made sure mine was in place.

  “I thought they wouldn’t show up here, but here they are,” Majid whispered. “We’d better go, before they come over and ask how we’re related.”

  We left quickly and he drove me to my hotel.

  “We both are in mourning for Pari,” he said.

  At the entrance to the hotel, Majid said he hoped we could talk more. But we didn’t make any plans to meet again. No words could erase things or make them different, I thought. And he seemed to be feeling the same way.

  In the quiet of my room, I thought how both Majid and Mansour had done and said things that they thought were for Pari’s own good.

  One morning I went to Maryam’s neighborhood, which was now closer in atmosphere to the rest of Tehran, which had more mosques everywhere, and all the women covered up. Construction was under way on Khanat Abad; Haj Abbas Alley was blocked off. I asked one of the construction workers when the job was going to be done. He said he wasn’t sure. The residents had been forced to leave and stay away until the joob could be restored with good water running in it.

  The memory of my last summer with Maryam came to me. Maryam had urged her sisters to take a vacation together. “I need to get away for a while, clear my head,” I heard her say to her sister Khadijeh. The three sisters took us children for a three-week vacation to Farah Zar, a bucolic village two hours by car from Tehran. Khadijeh was a widow by then; Roghieh’s husband was too busy to go with us but approved of his family taking a long-overdue vacation. The sisters hired someone to take us to Farah Zar in a truck. We filled the truck with bundles of clothing, bedding, towels, and cooking utensils. We sat on the canvas covering the cargo area and peeked out at the roads from between the slats. The aunts said prayers to make sure the journey was safe.

  When we reached Farah Zar we had lunch at the main square’s garden restaurant, then rented donkeys to carry our belongings. The roads were too narrow for a car or even a horse. In half an hour we reached the flat top of a hill where tents made of mosquito netting were set up for people to rent. Trees, redolent with fruit, covered much of the plateau. A stream wound through it, leading to a blue lake. Sheep and goats grazed in pastures at the bottom of the hill, and beyond the pastures were fields filled with shrubbery and wild yellow, lavender, orange, blue, and red flowers. We began to arrange our belongings in the tents. Aunt Khadijeh had one tent, her three sons shared another. Aunt Roghieh and her four daughters were in one large tent, and Maryam and I shared one. The aunts and my two oldest female cousins started on domestic tasks, while the two older male cousins went back to the square to buy ingredients for meals. The boys returned hours later. They said they had gone to a different vendor for every item: meat from the butcher, fresh herbs from a peasant who grew them in her garden and picked them right then and there, milk from another peasant (we drank it only after boiling it for sterilization), cheese from another.

  In the evening my cousins and I walked on narrow paths lit by ga
s lamps. Numerous stars appeared so low in the sky that it seemed like we could reach and touch them. We walked to the square, which was teeming with people, and bought fresh pecans that the vendors plucked from a bucket of salt water and fresh corn roasted on charcoal and dipped in salt water. We ate them sitting on a bench and watched people go by, making up stories about them.

  Zahra, who was my age, and I went off on our own some days, exploring hills, valleys, and orchards. Everything was enveloped in the sweet mystery of the village atmosphere. Through the open barn doors we could see women milking cows. In some shops women sat on the floor and knitted sweaters with colorful woolen yarn sheared from their own sheep and dyed. Behind gauzy curtains covering house windows we watched families carrying on—a man and a woman eating silently, a child climbing onto a stool to try to open a cabinet. On the way back we picked wildflowers.

  Life was full of joy then, but looking back on that trip now, it seemed to me that Maryam had been anxious. She whispered to her sisters and stopped talking when I came upon them. On the last night of the vacation I woke to find her tossing and turning in bed.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Go back to sleep, dear.”

  “Tell me, tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Nothing, it’s just being in a new place. Go back to sleep now. At night everything seems dark.”

  A few weeks later, Father came and took me away.

  Forty

  Just as I was leaving for the airport, the hotel clerk handed me a manila envelope. He said it had been dropped off for me by a man early in the morning.

  I waited until I was in the taxi before opening it. It was filled with letters and photographs. There was also a note from Mansour, saying he thought I would like to have them.

  I had no trouble leaving the country. Their main concern seemed to be that hejab was properly observed.

  On the plane, I examined the contents of the envelope more closely. I found a postcard from Pari, addressed to me, one she for some reason never sent.

  Dear Nahid, I hope all is well with you. . . . I may be going home soon. . . . A few days ago one of the nurses here took me out to lunch at Hotel Sahra. . . . It was a good day. . . .

  I imagined her writing the postcard in the sanitarium. The Iranian woman next to me stared at me.

  I couldn’t bear examining the rest of what was in the envelope just then. I needed to be alone.

  While waiting for my next plane in Amsterdam airport, I looked through the envelope again. I was startled to find a letter from Bijan to Pari.

  Mother, I’ve been searching for you for a long time now. I’m hoping this letter will reach you. Many others I sent to you were returned. I may not have had the right address. . . . I want to see you at the first opportunity I have. It has been years since I saw you last but your expressions, your voice, everything about you are still with me. Mother, I never wanted to be separated from you, even when I was rude to you when you came to my school to see me. That was all due to my father’s order and my own sadness that you left me. Now I understand perfectly that you had good reasons to leave. I’m glad that you managed to escape the confinement of the life my father imposed on you.

  I know deep in my heart that I will be able to unite with you. Then I will never let anyone separate us. No one can stop me again from being your son. I have no recent photographs of you but a long time ago I stole one of us together from my father. You’re holding me on your lap and looking lovingly at my face. Your lips are shaped as if you’re talking to me, telling me stories. Your eyes, large and soft, your melodious voice, come to me from years ago. I can smell the scents of the cream and shampoo you used. Here in this faraway boarding school in Essex, where I have been for two years, I still feel your presence with me. My father sent me here hoping that I would pull myself together. I had dropped out of school and spent my time in a wayward way, took drugs. When I came here I had a hard time too and was about to be expelled when my father begged the school staff to give me another chance. I have finally pulled myself together. But I will never feel at ease with myself until I unite with you.

  I’m not a child anymore but my need of you is that of a child. My father never managed to destroy my love for you. It only went on growing, blossoming inside me. In the dawn of my life you were everything to me. Then there came the eclipse. But you are in my fantasies and dreams. In the last dream I had of you I was a child and you were holding my hand, taking me somewhere. We were walking inside a long, narrow tunnel which was brightly lit anyway. When I woke I was hopeful. I’m enclosing the most recent photograph of myself.

  Your loving son, Bijan

  I looked for the photograph but instead found a note from Mansour. It said, “This came too late, after the accident.”

  I put the letter back in the envelope and pulled out a photograph of Pari. On the back she had written, “To my dear sister Nahid.”

  She was dressed in black and she had a melancholy, depressed expression on her face.

  I pulled out a letter from Pari. It was only one line.

  Nahid . . . I must talk to you . . . about pain . . . about misery. . . .

  Back in New York I tried to push away my dark thoughts and feelings by immersing myself in the more stable, pleasurable aspects of my life—tending to my growing daughter’s needs, teaching, going to movies and plays and concerts with my husband, and attempting to write. But the loss of Pari and not knowing what really happened remained like a dark hole in my existence.

  I wanted to track down Bijan, to talk to him, invite him for a visit, or go and see him in England. I wrote Mansour at his office to find out if he had an address for Bijan. He wrote back that he hadn’t been able to find the envelope that Bijan’s letter came in and he apologized for not being more careful with it. He said he had been distraught going through Pari’s belongings. He added that he had saved what was left of her clothes and jewelry and would give them to me the next time I was in Iran.

  I tried to find Bijan through his boarding school in Essex but the principal told me he was no longer there and they had no forwarding address for him. I asked about his father’s address and was told they had been instructed to keep that information confidential.

  Years went by and the war between Iran and Iraq continued to rage and even escalate. The front lines shifted back and forth across Ahvaz and Abadan, and I knew our house must have been demolished. My mind kept going to Manijeh now. Had she and Javad left Abadan before the war started? The conversation I had about her with Pari in Tehran kept going through my mind. Pari had told me Manijeh was in some kind of trouble.

  I began to write a novel about her called Married to a Stranger. I changed her name to Minou.

  . . . Minou was going to be married the following day. Sparks of excitement leaped out of her as she thought of that. How could it be that she would be married to him, living with him forever, day after day, when he had been unattainable, no more than a fantasy, a short while ago. Her future had been amorphous, a stretch of undefined days. In a matter of weeks everything had changed.

  In the fictional account Minou’s husband has an affair with a woman she suspects he is in love with. One day she catches them in bed together and leaves him. She goes to America to pursue her education.

  Married to a Stranger was published in 1983. My happiness was diminished by the fact that Pari wasn’t there to share the news with.

  The war, which lasted for eight years, was one of the bloodiest of the twentieth century. It was a devastating human tragedy. More than a million people on each side were killed, and millions more were wounded and made refugees. Both the secular Saddam Hussein and the theocrat Khomeini ruthlessly sacrificed their people, while America, along with other Western nations, provided weapons to both sides (for the sake of oil and military advantage in the Gulf). Iraq had more sophisticated weapons; to compensate, Iran sent boys as young as fifteen, unarmed, to fight on the front lines. Iraq bombed major Iranian citie
s, demolishing houses and buildings. Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons maimed hundreds of Iranians. There were food and medicine shortages. The government ordered rationing. There were not enough hospital beds because of the number of wounded and dying soldiers. There were blackouts everywhere.

  Finally in August 1988 Iran and Iraq reached a cease-fire. After intense negotiations between the secretary-general and two foreign ministers, both countries accepted a UN resolution.

  I decided to travel to Iran once again, this time to see Maryam, who had returned there. Despite all the political twists and turns, it was still relatively easy for an Iranian with dual citizenship to travel back and forth without trouble.

  The plane was filled with Iranians returning home with hopes of uniting with or searching for their loved ones or finding jobs in reconstruction and rebuilding projects in the war-damaged areas. Some were going to their demolished homes in the hope of salvaging valuable family mementos in the rubble—jewelry, a box filled with old belongings.

  From the window of the taxi taking me to Maryam’s house, I could see the war damage. Shattered windows and partially wrecked buildings were everywhere. Some houses had black flags hanging above the front doors to designate that a member of the family had been killed in the war. In various spots soldiers sat on benches, crutches by their sides.

  As I approached Khanat Abad, sweepers were cleaning the streets. It was a cool December morning and the beet seller was setting up his stall. Shopkeepers were washing the ground in front of their stores.

  Maryam was squatting by the door to her house, wrapped in a chador, waiting for me, as she had when my grandmother brought me to her as an infant. She got up and we embraced tightly and kissed. Several years had passed since she visited Cambridge. Being back in that alley of my childhood, in Maryam’s arms and enveloped in her scent of rose water, I felt as if no time had gone by since we had lived there together.