Camelia (8 page)

“Is your father a martyr, too?”

“Huh?” I suddenly understood what he was asking. I was sitting facing the shrine of a martyr. I shook my head.

As we drove away, Afsar Khanum was in her own world, hunched over and crumpled up in the front seat. I gave her the cup of milk. It was still warm.

“Drink it, it's good for you.” She took a small aspirator out of her purse and sprayed it into her mouth. I knew she had asthma.

We came to the gates leading out of the cemetery. In the large fountain, the spouting water had been colored red to represent the blood of the martyrs. Behesht-e Zahra was gradually coming to life. Cars filled with mourners and covered with wreaths of roses were driving in as we left.

On the way back my father drove much faster than he usually did. He turned on the radio to relieve the grieving, heartbroken atmosphere and asked Afsar Khanum to join our family for lunch. But she politely declined. “I have troubled you enough. It's Friday. You have things to do. I'll be very grateful if you would just drive me home.” My father pulled up in front of the picture of Bani Sadr. To me, the former president's most distinctive feature was his glasses, which looked like the bottoms of little tea glasses. Afsar Khanum walked off with her slight limp.

Two years later, she, too, passed away. My mother said she suffocated in her sleep, but perhaps it would be better to say she died
of grief. My sister, Kati, tells me that when she visits Behesht-e Zahra to pray, she asks her husband to watch out for her as she darts into the section of the “wrongly killed,” as people call the section of the “infidels” now that the government has admitted, in some cases, to mistaken executions. She scatters rose petals in memory of Guli, her father and her mother, and all the others.

As the war continued, we heard the sirens and air-strike warnings so often that we became indifferent. The radio would announce a state of danger, and I would stay right where I was, sitting at the dining room table, doing my homework. When the windows rattled, I would step out into the courtyard and try to guess how close the explosion was by surveying the volume of smoke and in which direction it was blowing. But early one morning, I was woken by shots fired right past our house. My mother, overcome with excitement, exclaimed, “They're the Shah's supporters! It's a coup d'état! I told you that a reliable source indicated that, by the end of the month, they would . . .” Kati cut my mother off.

“Shhh! Shhh! Be quiet. Let's hear what they're saying over the loudspeaker.”

Someone on the street with a megaphone announced, “Respected neighbors, kindly remain in your houses until further notice. A group of troublemakers is operating in your neighborhood, and our brothers in the armed forces are working hard to flush them out of their nest. You are in no danger.” The Mujahedin-e Khalgh had turned against the government and were engaging in street warfare, bombings, and assassinations. The renegade
mujahedin
hid in residential neighborhoods in
timi
houses. We could hear machine guns and the
megaphones asking the
munafiqin
to surrender. “The whole area is surrounded by our brothers in the army. Place your weapons outside on the ground and give yourselves up.”

We went to the window and saw that all of our neighbors were at their windows watching, just like us. I waved at my Zoroastrian friends Nasim and Bahareh who lived across the street. Would the discovery of the
timi
house mean that we wouldn't have classes that afternoon? Our crowded schools now operated in two shifts. One week we'd go in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Every week we'd have new additions to our already-full class of nearly forty students, most of us sitting three to a bench. They'd be warscarred girls from Ahvaz, Abadan, Khorramshahr, or elsewhere in the south. Our director would stand at the blackboard and present an olive-skinned girl with black eyes and dark eyebrows, looking from head to toe like a product of southern Iran. We all put on false smiles, but the girls sitting two to a bench would shoot daggers from their eyes, knowing they'd have to share their places with this new student, not knowing whether she'd be lazy or smart, or whether she'd have bad breath.

Since I was scheduled for the afternoon shift, I was happy when the sound of the clash intensified, as being forbidden to leave the house would mean there was no hurry for me to do my schoolwork. But it wasn't noon yet when the bearded man with the megaphone in his hand returned and pronounced, “Dear sisters and brothers, we are very grateful for your patience and cooperation. The area has been cleared of dangerous elements, and you are free to come out of your homes.
Allahu Akbar! Khomeini rahbar!
(God is great! Khomeini is the guide!) Death to the opponents of the
velayat-e faqih
!” We hurried down from the fourth floor, dying with curiosity. A neighbor who saw the whole thing was narrating the siege with great flair and bombast for an audience that had arrived on the scene before us. She described how the young men and women had
been brought out of their hiding places in the house blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs.

My own Uncle Ali had been accused of turning against the revolution and had disappeared. On June 28, 1981, his young wife, Iran-Dokht, called my father in tears. “For God's sake, come,” she cried. “They've taken Ali . . .” He'd served in the Revolutionary Guard for less than two years when he was dismissed from the outfit. He told us that the conduct of the new government was incompatible with the Islam portrayed in their propaganda and that he was unable to serve in the ranks of thieves and liars. After that, Uncle Ali stayed home, absorbed by his wife and newborn baby. But that morning we'd heard on national radio that the office of the Islamic Republican Party had been bombed by
munafiqin
, and a group of government officials had been martyred. Had my uncle taken part in the bombing? I wondered.

My parents must have wondered the same thing. The Pasdaran searched my
mader-jan
's house and my uncle's house and we expected them to show up at ours next. My father took my hand, and we stole out with the bag of cartridges Ali had given him in the early days of the revolution. We walked to a public phone booth at the end of the street, stuffed in the bag, and ran off. We took stock of whatever else we had in the house that was forbidden—bottles of liquor, playing cards, my mother's beloved issues of
Paris Match
with their pictures of the Shah and Farah, banned books, and finally my father's pistol. Late that night we took everything to the parking lot, and my mother buried it under old newspapers in an empty oil drum.

Every day my mother sat in fear by the radio, holding her breath as the announcer read the names of those executed. Each time she waited . . . but, no, they hadn't said his name. She could breathe again. My father worked all his connections, but the officials said they had never heard of Ali. My mother threw a chador over her
head and went from standing at the gate of one prison to standing at the gate of another, my baby brother in her arms. She pleaded and got useless answers. After seven months we finally found him. He was in Evin and had been arrested for insulting the values of the clergy. On the morning of the bombing, Ali had been in line at the bakery, and a friend had asked him, “Did you hear that today they planted a bomb in the office of the Republican Party?” My uncle, who had nothing to do with the renegade mujahedin, was in good spirits at being newly released from the guard. He answered, “Tell it to my son's balls!” He hadn't yet made it to my grandmother's house with the warm bread when the Pasdaran stopped him. My grandmother spent that whole day sitting out on the balcony waiting for him.

My mother had refused to speak to her brother since an incident in the early days of the revolution. As a zealous Revolutionary Guard, Uncle Ali had been charged with watching the houses of high-profile fugitives on Khiaban-e Sarlashgar Zahedi, a street parallel to my
mader-jan
's in Jamaran. This was while relatives on my father's side, like Guli's father, were fleeing house to house. One night we stopped to visit Ali on the way to my grandmother's, and after passing through the security checkpoint, we came to a brown house with a graded roof. Someone called for my uncle, and he appeared at the entrance in the darkness in his special green uniform. He came right over and lifted me up in a single motion. The fingers of my kind uncle were adorned with gaudy carnelian rings. From his arms, I could see the house in disarray, trampled under the boots of my uncle and his friends. A rag doll lay ripped in half, dragged outside the front door, and peering in, I could see a wooden crib in a child's wrecked bedroom. I remembered how we used to take walks
in the park with his girlfriends. Was it my same beloved uncle who had laid waste to the home of these children? My mother was upset and couldn't bear to see any more. I heard her say some nasty, indecent things to him under her breath. We turned the car around and sped down the hill, my mother crying in disbelief. The man whose house we had seen—Khusraudad—was pictured among the victims of the firing squad in the next day's newspaper.

Though my mother wouldn't speak to my uncle, we continued to visit Jamaran as always. In the summer of 1980, Khomeini, in observance of the birth of Mohammed, held a public meeting with the people. A screaming throng was advancing past my grandmother's house, where we'd gathered to celebrate the holiday. The women had tied their chadors at the waist to have their hands free in the crush of the crowd, and some of them were crying and beating their breasts. Everyone was supposed to gather in the
husseinya
, and Khomeini would speak from his terrace. But the adoring first had to line up, pushing and shoving, so the Pasdaran could issue them entry passes to see the Imam.

I was once blessed by Khomeini when my uncle Ali stole me from Mader-jan's home. My mother was away—perhaps to visit another relative in Jamaran. My uncle asked Mader-jan for a veil to put over my head and told me we were going to buy candy at the Mohsen Agha grocery store. I knew where he was really taking me, but I pretended that I was fooled, knowing how angry my mother would be when she found out. Uncle Ali ignored Mader-jan's warnings. With lots of “
Salaam aleikum Baradar
,” we passed the gates into the Imam's courtyard. At my uncle's request, the Imam himself appeared in the courtyard and put his hand on my head and prayed.

Back at Mader-jan's house, my mother crouched on the terrace like a wounded tiger. As soon as we appeared, she tore into my uncle. Kati had been out with my mother, and in private she later told me she wished she could have met Khomeini, too. My mother
cursed wildly at anyone and everyone around her that day, twisting my ears in a firm grasp, and promising that if I said a word to my father, he'd have our scalps—and we'd never be able to come back to Jamaran to visit Mader-jan again.

Since Khomeini had moved to Jamaran, the village had become “Khomeini's house.” All day on the celebration of the birth of Mohammed, what my mother called “the idle masses” had been knocking on our door to use the bathroom, to take a drink of water, or to change their babies' diaper. It was impossible to refuse them. The strong smell of human waste rose from the far corner of the yard, where people lined up for the toilet. My uncle was in the Imam's special guard and brought by a stack of passes to Khomeini's rally. My mother shrugged her shoulders. She didn't need the passes. As people left our courtyard, they turned to her and said, “Hajj Khanum, how fortunate you are to be close to Agha-ye Khomeini. May you be rewarded by the Imam-e Zaman.”

The neighboring garden had been taken over by revolutionary forces as a base for the units guarding Khomeini. These provincial soldiers with their green hats would sit up on the roof behind antiaircraft guns. But aside from keeping an eye on the skies and the Imam, they found something else to occupy their time, namely, peeping at my grandmother's house. Through the thick of the leaves of the walnut tree that stretched up toward the heavens, you'd see the face of a soldier hoping to catch a woman changing her clothes or something similarly exciting. But sadly, the house had only two old women living in it, my grandmother and her friend Nargess Khanum. And these were not the sort of women to venture out without a prayer chador. And if my mother ever glimpsed a shape turned toward the courtyard, she'd cry out, “Motherless bastards! Was the point of your revolution that you could come stand on the roof and look at women's bodies? Rotten pieces of shit!” Then they'd slip away like phantoms, scared off
by her insults. But an hour later there'd be another shadowy figure on the roof. . . .