Camelia (2 page)

Weeks before, a crowd of yelling students had flooded into the courtyard of my school, Ghafari, their faces almost laughably angry. Before the main entrance, a pretty young official with black hair stood guard. Her face was smothered in makeup, and she was wearing a button-down shirt and pants, a rifle slung across her back. I was in kindergarten, and my sister, Katayun, who was in third grade, marched around the courtyard with a group mimicking the older students. I tried to join in as best I could with this game, but an invisible hand—belonging to my sister—immediately took hold of me. She led me out of the ruckus to the wall at the edge of the courtyard. She was watching to make sure that I didn't get crushed. I kept trying, and the last time my sister drew me to the side, she put a cluster of pea pods in my hand and said, “Don't move. Stay here in this spot. Eat your peas until Maman comes to get us.”

I couldn't play the older children's game, but Kati sure was having fun. Every time the angry students rotated past the front of the main building, the older boys would lift chairs dragged from the classrooms above their heads and brandish them at the principal's office, chanting, “
Baroye hefz-e shishe, Madresseh bayad ta'til sh-e
”
(For the sake of the windowpanes, the school must be closed). In the midst of all the protesters my sister waved at me and twirled her body in delight.

The principal of our school was a serious, fashionably dressed woman with long hair wrapped around her head like a hat and fancy necklaces draped around her neck. That day, she and the other teachers stayed timidly inside, glancing anxiously down at the revolt. Even Vice Principal Habashi's wooden meter stick, which she used to punish unruly boys at the front of the classroom every morning, was incapable of inspiring fear. The windows of the building shattered one by one, and there was nothing for the school authorities to do but close the schools and join the strike. That winter day was our last day of school in 1979.

The Shah's administration was faced with a mounting threat as the strikes swept across the country. Banks closed, the Abadan oil refinery went on strike, the electrical plants went on strike, and from time to time our homes were plunged into darkness. The government declared martial law and a nine o'clock curfew. But in the nighttime stillness people went up onto their roofs to cry out, “
Allahu Akbar
.” Within minutes the few voices scattered here and there would grow to a chorus of hundreds.

Most days, we stayed home and watched TV and listened to the radio while my mother went back and forth to Mino Khanum's house to exchange the latest news. Mino Khanum's husband would go out to the demonstrations to gather firsthand information. But my father had warned us not to leave the house even to play because civilians were often randomly killed, caught in the cross fire of armed confrontations. We heard that police had opened fire at a large demonstration at Meidan Zhale, killing hundreds. Every morning we saw new slogans on the walls of our street, hastily scrawled in bright colors. “Hail Khomeini! They have struck down the martyrs. Death to the traitor Shah!” At first Kati and I would
clean as much as we could reach off our walls, but eventually we had to content ourselves with making sure to remove the most dangerous of the slogans: “SAVAKi.”

It was rumored that my father was an employee of the Shah's secret intelligence service. In those days, you'd hear terrifying stories about the crimes of the SAVAK and how they killed and tortured those opposed to the Shah's regime. We were not revolutionaries, and we did not participate in the demonstrations. And my father's cousins, tall men with shiny navy blue uniforms and dazzling shoulder decorations, would be seen going to and from our house. This was enough evidence to label us monarchists, SAVAKi, and
taghuti
. A few months earlier, in November, when the people first started taking to the streets, the Shah had appeared on television saying that he had gotten the message. To a certain extent, censorship of the press had been lifted, and in a show of combating corruption, he'd arrested and imprisoned about a 120 leading state officials, among them the head of the SAVAK, General Ne'matollah Nasiri, and Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hovida. But the people responded to these token gestures by repeating Khomeini's words: “The Shah must go.” The people saw the SAVAKis as bloodthirsty traitors who deserved to be put to death.

But who could say this about my father? How could our neighbors hate us so much? During our summer holiday in England, we had spent a few weeks in the coastal city of Brighton with the Vaqadi family from next door. They drove a green Zhian and spoke Persian with a Kermanshahi accent. Kati and I used to go roller-skating with their young sons, Nima and Mani. But now they had joined the Islamic Revolution and were spending their days at the local mosque. Agha-ye Vaqadi was a poet with fine features, a bald head, and thick glasses—and of course a
tudeh-i
, a communist, as my mother would say. The
tudeh-i
were very active in the first months of the revolution, before Ayatollah Khomeini outlawed
their activities, arrested their leaders, and executed large numbers of their members.

Nima and Mani had little glasses just like their father's and had become stars at their mosque. Mosques all over the country had become centers of resistance, the place to design placards and print propaganda, to plan demonstrations and disseminate Khomeini's communiqués. Passing by our house, Nima and Mani would stick their heads into our courtyard and cry out, “
Mardum chara neshastid? Nakone ke Shah parest id!
” (People, why do you just sit there? God forbid you're supporters of the Shah!) My mother would put on a scowl and shout back, “Dirt on the head of you
tudeh-i
! You've gobbled up all the country's money and gone mad! It would be nice if your father could come up with some better poetry!” My mother knew that just like the students in London, Agha-ye Vaqadi had studied abroad with the support of the Shah.

The worse things grew around the country, the bolder Nima and Mani got. They had made a banner almost ten feet long with a picture of Khomeini on it to carry at demonstrations. At night they would hang it on the terrace of their house in full view of our courtyard. In retaliation, my mother would fasten pictures of the Shah and his queen, Farah, to helium balloons to show off our loyalty. My sister and I would stand out on the terrace, each with a balloon in hand, making faces at one another. Before my father came home and caught the two of us with those balloons, we'd let them go. I really thought that they'd float all the way up to the moon to convey our greetings to the Shah and the Queen.

My mother was madly in love with the Shah, and she was just as crazy about Reza, his oldest son. She carried around in her purse a picture that she had ripped out of a children's magazine of Reza
sitting on a playing field in a soccer uniform. When the Queen gave birth to Reza, my mother, who was eight at the time, asked my grandmother if she could go to the hospital with a bouquet of flowers to congratulate Farah in person. She left the flowers with the guards at the door, singing the lullaby she had learned in school: “I'm a beautiful virgin, my name is Farah Diba, the third wife of the Shah . . . I will bear a crown prince, and I am going to call him Reza . . . La, la, la, my dear Reza, la, la, la, my dear Reza.” I don't know whether this little bouquet ever got to the Queen, but for my mother the important thing was that Reza had come into the world and the royal line would survive.

My mother was one of many women of her generation who had been able to escape the traditional constraints of her birthplace thanks to the Shah's support for women's rights. She was independent and was, I believe, one of the first women in Jamaran who refused to wear the veil. My grandfather had died in an avalanche, and my grandmother—whom I called Mader-jan—was a widow. She was peaceful and kind, and she afforded her daughter every kind of freedom. But the other women in her family beat my mother severely in the streets, hoping to persuade her to put on the veil. She withstood all that pressure and attained a certain distinction for never wearing the
hejab
. New doors opened before her. She met my father at the progressive social club Kakh-e Javanan, and they grew to be friends before they married in 1969. This was in contrast to the customs of the day, where suitors would normally just show up, and families would be obliged to submit their daughters for marriage.

My mother's devoted love for the Shah was rooted in her childhood. Time and time again we'd heard her tell the same story of meeting him as a young girl in her hometown: “Jamaran was a village surrounded by wheat fields. Its roads were so quiet that if a car sometimes broke the silence, it was usually the Shah traveling between the palace in Sa'adabad and the palace in Saheb Gharaneyeh. Wherever
I was, when I heard the sound of the Shah's motorcade far off in the distance, I would run so fast that my heart would almost burst out of my chest. I ran to where the desert began just so I could wave at him from the roadside, and the Shah would always wave back. One day, as I was coming home from school, I saw him driving alone with his queen. Suddenly taking leave of my senses, I ran in front of his car in a frenzy. It screeched to a halt, and he got out.

“I was afraid, but the Shah spoke kindly, running his hand across the top of my head, ‘My dear girl, this time nothing happened, but you must never again run out in front of a car like that.'”

Then she'd stop, let out a sigh, and shake her head sadly. If my father happened to be passing within earshot, he'd pick up where she left off. “And then the Shah said he'd take a shit for you and tomorrow you should send him a plate so he can fill it up!” My father didn't care for the mullahs or the Shah, but he preferred the Shah's government to the mullahs. Naturally, Kati and I took our cues from our mother, and we didn't understand the riots and slogans. Why would people want the Shah to leave? My mother would say, “It comes from having everything they need or even too much of it.” But it was we who lived content in the capital and had everything: water, electricity, telephones, modern streets, and highways. My father had a high-paying job that allowed us to spend all of our summer vacations in Europe. We rode around in a nice car and ate expensive food and bought our clothes in London from Harrods where my mother once tipped the salesclerk fifty pounds. We spent every summer in London and sometimes my mother would take me along on a winter trip just to shop at the Christmas sales. The price of oil had soared to the highest point in history, and the Iranians we knew were better and better off every day.

What did we know about the neighborhoods called Halabiyabad in south Tehran, where people lived in houses made of tin gas-cans? Or about the villages without drinking water? Many towns had neither
electricity, nor proper roads, nor schools, nor hospitals, nor did they meet even the most basic standards of hygiene. The people were fed up with the excesses and wastefulness of the Shah and his family. How many people had been forced to spend years being beaten and tortured in prison as political detainees? We didn't know, and we didn't want to know.

On one of those illusory days when it seemed that the chaos had quieted under the control of Doctor Shahpur Bakhtiar, Kati and I went with our mother to visit our grandmother in Jamaran. On our way back we stopped at Mumtaz, the fabric store. My mother was looking for some fabric to make a winter coat. Of course it had to be in black, because she was still mourning the death of my grandfather. Mumtaz had the best quality fabric. I remember how my mother would always look for crepe chiffon there and my aunt Turan, for silk.

The shopkeeper was busy unrolling the fabrics one by one across his counter when suddenly the earth trembled, and we heard a frightful noise. The Shahanshahi Guard was processing with pomp and circumstance along the main avenue from Sa'adabad Palace toward Meidan Tajrish. Soldiers were riding atop the tanks, covered in iron and armed to the teeth. My mother was drowning in patriotic joy. Then the sound of gunfire tore through the air. A revolutionary group had ambushed the parade, and the guard was returning their fire. The customers retreated to the back of the store in a huddle with a few disoriented people tumbling in from the street. I hid in my mother's arms, and we waited out the firestorm. When we finally emerged, someone told us that a man had been killed. Another man took a bunch of carnations from the vendor across the street and started placing the flowers on the pools of blood. People were chanting “Death to the Shah” and “Martyrs
have been struck down.” From then on, my mother decided we would stay at home and follow the revolution on the TV screen.