Camelia (7 page)

“Hello.
Salaam
. I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“Yes, you can see that I'm fine. Is there anything else?”

“No. Good-bye.” As I left the office I looked around haughtily at the others, and under my breath so the teachers wouldn't hear, I'd hiss, “Babies! Fraidy cats!”

We led a double life. Our homes were small islands of privacy, hidden from the Omur-e Tarbiyati, the eyes and ears of the new government. The moment you entered, you had to shut the door quickly behind you lest some stranger steal a glance inside. Many luxury items we considered indispensable to our lives were forbidden under the new government. Playing cards. Music cassettes. My father's bottles of vodka. All the forbidden books in our library. The VCR. Ali Agha, who we called “Agha-ye Movie,” would come on his motorbike once a week with his black briefcase locked in his trunk. We had only a few minutes to tell him what we wanted. Kati and I wanted Indian movies while our parents wanted the old Nouruz specials from before the revolution, shows featuring Khanum Hayedeh and Mahasti from a time when they could watch the New Year turn over on TV with delight and excitement instead of fear and apprehension. Ali Agha would take back the movies from the
previous week, set four new movies down on the dining table, close up his briefcase, put the rental fee—one hundred tomans—in his pocket, and go.

On the day Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated, a Hezbollah partisan extended a box of sweets to my father, trumpeting, “Anwar Sadat got what was coming to him.” My father declined, saying, “I am not so thrilled when people are killed that I go around eating sweets.” They brought my father from Shir-e Pak factory to prison for “examination of his beliefs.” He was interrogated, blindfolded, for hours while the guards went through his wallet. As the director of the sales department, he was paid a handsome salary. In compensation for the wound he had inflicted on national revolutionary sentiment, he paid a “voluntary” settlement of six months' salary to the “Imam 100” account for veterans wounded in the war. He had no choice but to work six months without pay, cursing at the ground under his breath.

My father also put himself in danger by visiting the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery. If one of us two—Kati or I—didn't go with him, we'd spend the whole day worrying. One morning I woke early to be sure I didn't miss my chance—I felt it was impossible for me to allow him to leave without me.

“Baba, I'm coming with you.”

My father's voice floated from the kitchen, “No, you sleep. Next time.”

It was twilight, five in the morning on a wintry Friday in 1983. Fridays are the only days in Iran when everything is closed. My father wasn't going to work, and we didn't have school. I threw my nightclothes on the bed. Before my father could finish drinking his unsweetened tea, which he drank every morning, I was standing in front of him, carrying my coat and head scarf, my hands and face unwashed. My father was in a hurry to pick up Afsar Khanum before the traffic started, and we had a long drive ahead of us.
When my mother snapped, “Do I have to do your homework for you?” I didn't answer, and I followed my father to the car with my mother still threatening in a cracked and sleepy voice.

Tehran had been reduced to a pleasant dream in the clarity of the cold winter morning. Only a few cars stopped here and there at traffic lights, and occasionally a haggard street sweeper would push his worn-out old broom across the icy, tarnished pavement. Afsar Khanum's familiar figure, dressed in black with a bag in her hand, waited for us in front of her house. She got in the car and took one look at me napping in the backseat and said, “Feridun, why did you bring this innocent child? My dear Camelia, why aren't you at home resting on a Friday? Would you like to go sleep in our house?” I shook my head no and half-opened my eyes to read the scrawled slogans left over on Afsar Khamun's home from before the revolution. “100%—Bani Sadr,” and further down, “Brother Rajavi.” Rajavi's photo was still everywhere; he was the leader of the Mujahedin-e Khalgh party and had nominated himself for the presidential election. He had been popular at the beginning of the revolution when he led the Mujahedin's movement against the Shah, disseminating Khomeini's message throughout his networks across Iran. Without Rajavi, the revolution would never have succeeded, but just a few months after Khomeini's victory the Mujahedin turned in opposition to the Ayatollahs. The next slogan on the wall was illegible; someone had crossed it out with black spray paint and written beneath it, “It's traitors who run away. Death to the opponents of the
velayat-e faqih
.” Rajavi had fled to Paris. But he led from exile, and his portrait printed on this cement wall was still in good shape.

Afsar Khanum was making a fuss, ceremoniously apologizing to my father for having inconvenienced him at such an early hour on his day off. In reply, my father joked that they could settle his payment later. Little by little we made our way from north Tehran to the outskirts. We drove around Meidan Shahyad (Shah's Remembrance
Square), newly Meidan Azadi (Freedom Square), where travelers from the western terminal stood out in the street. Peykans and Fiat minibuses labeled “Azeri Junction—Meidan Azadi” frantically changed gears to pick them up and scattered lovely plumes of smoke around our car. The further south we traveled, the more the landscape changed. Around Meidan Bahman several hundred construction workers gathered, some sitting on the curbs. A pickup truck waited to carry them off to work, and everyone started trying to pile in, with the boss yelling, “Twenty people. No more than twenty needed.” And he cursed in Turkish, saying anyone else had to walk. Work was so scarce these men lined up on a Friday. We reached Yaftabad and there was more hustle and bustle. People waiting outside a bakery in their pajamas and ragged flip-flops stared into our car as we drove past. Small children with their fingers up their noses played with trash in front of their doorways. The houses were wretched hovels. My father looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, “Take a good look and see how people are living and think about the value of the life you lead.” As my father signaled to turn at the billboard that read, “Way of the Mausoleum. Entrance to Behesht-e Zahra,” I thought about whom we were visiting.

My mother burst into the house in a fit. She tossed her purse in a corner and collapsed on the sofa in the dining room. All afternoon, rather than focus on our homework, Kati and I had been watching anxiously out the window for our mother to return from Afsar Khanum's house.

“It's a good thing I didn't bring you two. It was no place for children. There were men in civilian clothes standing around on the street staring at everyone. They were keeping an eye on who was
coming and going, and watching to make sure there wasn't any noise coming out of the house. The family didn't have permission to have a memorial, and we had to pretend we weren't coming to mourn. Your aunt and I had to go into the bathroom to put on our black clothing. You couldn't even cry, they would have come and taken us away.” She started whimpering, “Oh, poor Afsar!”

Guli, Afsar Khanum's twenty-seven-year-old daughter, had gone to the firing squad four days before. Afsar was the widow of Agha-ye Shahandeh, my grandfather's cousin who we had been shocked to see confessing to spying on television some years before. He was the first member of my family to be executed. Guli had been in the middle of her graduate studies in England but had come back to Iran at the height of the revolution to marry her cousin, only to find her father on the run. The father and daughter arranged to see each other in a restaurant, and revolutionary secret police followed Guli to arrest her father then took them both. Guli was accused of conveying a message from a foreign agent to her father, and she was held in the dreaded Evin Prison for two years. But this fall we heard that she had been transferred to Ghezel Qal'eh Prison, and we all assumed that, sooner or later, she would be released.

That Thursday, my father had taken Afsar Khanum to the prison, as he often did on visiting days. But this time the guards announced, “Today you cannot see her.” She asked them at least to accept the sack of food she had brought, but they handed it back. “Guli isn't here.”

“Why? Where is she?” her mother asked.

“She hadn't been corrected. Hajj Davud moved her to Evin to be corrected!”

Afsar went home dazed with the sack in her hand. The next morning her telephone rang with the news that her daughter was buried in Behesht-e Zahra.

My father gestured to me and said, “You go down there and sit on that bench till we get back.” I waited in the Behesht-e Zahra's Rose Garden of the Martyrs with a bottle of rose water in my hand, wondering whether he would allow me into the forbidden area. A fine, stinging rain was falling. In the distance I watched Afsar Khanum's tiny body clad in black running in the wind, disappearing into the section designated for the executed. They called the grounds where Guli was buried the section of “infidels” or “atheists.” There were neither proper tombstones nor proper names and addresses for the dead, just “six-month-old child” or “five-month-old newborn.” And these small stones had been smashed and scattered about. Even the weeds and shrubs were burned day after day by vengeful hands, lest any blades of green grass appear on the graves of these nameless souls.

The Rose Garden of the Martyrs where I sat was covered in thousands of signs and plaques. “
Shahid qalb-e tarikh ast
” (The martyr is the heart of history). “
Shahidan zende and Allahu Akbar, Be khun ghalatide and Allahu Akbar
” (The martyrs live on—God is Great. They have been rolled in blood—God is Great). A photograph was fastened to each tombstone. “Martyr: Mohammed Ali . . . Soldier martyred for his homeland: Jevad . . . Martyred Pasdar: Mohammed.” All the walkways had benches for the families of the martyrs to rest on. A few mothers and wives had spread prayer rugs over the tombstones and were reading from the Qur'an.

I watched the silhouette of my father as he stood guard on the main road, in case some revolutionary hard-liners appeared to harass his cousin-in-law as she sprinkled white
noql
(thrown to symbolize the deceased was of marriageable age) and wheat around her daughter's resting place, so that birds would gather there.

“Khanum? Khanum? Please, have some hot milk with cocoa.”

A young boy of about seven with a tray in his hand called out to me. Steam rose high from the disposable plastic cups. His mother, a little behind him, held a newborn baby in one arm, and in her other hand she had a thermos from which she was filling some more cups.

“Please take. It's
kheirat
.” The drink was to honor the dead, and I understood that they were relatives of a martyr.

“Thanks.” I took a cup. He probed my face with his eyes.