Persian Girls: A Memoir (25 page)

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Authors: Nahid Rachlin

BOOK: Persian Girls: A Memoir
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Parviz, who had returned from Iran, and his wife, Bahijeh, were passing through Boston and dropped by for a visit. He had met Bahijeh in Ahvaz while visiting our parents from Karaj. His marrying an Iranian girl introduced to him by our parents was a surprising turn, considering how Americanized he had become.
Parviz and Howie began to drink beer in the living room.
“What’s wrong?” I asked Maryam in a whisper, noticing that she looked tense.
She glanced at the men and then back at me. I understood what she meant.
“Sorry, Aunt Maryam,” Parviz said to her, noticing the exchange. “We didn’t mean to be disrespectful.” He and Howie went into another room to finish their beer.
Bahijeh, who had studied abroad and came from a very modern family, seemed uncomfortable with Maryam’s strict adherence to Islamic rules. She went to join the men in the other room.
“It’s a treat to see you after all these years,” Parviz said to Maryam, as he and Bahijeh were leaving.
“It’s wonderful to see you, so grown up and with a wife,” Maryam said.
As soon as Parviz and Bahijeh were out the door, Maryam began to cry. “I’m so sorry, I spoiled things,” she said.
Her soft, gentle face was so sad that I felt tears coming into my own eyes; I was caught in this conflict.
“Don’t worry, Mother, it didn’t matter,” I said. “Parviz had to leave anyway.”
 
 
 
 
“I wish we could live near each other, but it isn’t our destiny,” Maryam said, as we strolled with Leila.
“Do you remember that day when Father came to my school and took me away?” I asked Maryam.
“How can I possibly forget?” she replied. “I had some hint that it might happen; he sent a message to your aunt Roghieh’s husband that he was coming to Tehran around that time. And then Roghieh’s husband sent another message on the day your father took you away from your school. It was as if God had forsaken me.”
“Were you angry at Mohtaram for not sending me back to you?”
“I knew I shouldn’t be,” Maryam said. “She was under your father’s control.”
As we walked, several people gaped at Maryam, who was wearing a long, black chador.
She told me about her life during the years away from Iran, her marriage and divorce. She praised Rahbar eloquently; he was gentle and sensitive. It was clear she’d been in love with him, though she never said so.
“What went wrong?” I asked.
She sighed. “He started to come home with one young boy after another, going into a room and spending the night with them. He always said, ‘He’s my cousin,’ or ‘He’s my nephew.’ Finally I caught on. I told him I wanted a divorce and he knew why. No fights, no confrontations. It was easy enough for me to get a divorce after I let the judge know what was going on.”
I was speechless. “Oh, this is unbelievable,” I finally murmured. “I guess you knew little about him when you married him.”
She nodded. “I’m going back to live in the same rooming house by the shrine of Imam Hussein in Karbala. I feel peace just being near the shrine. And I have good friends among the women living in that area.”
Again I was aware how close Maryam and I were in our emotions and how far apart in our way of life.
“Your mother sent a ring with your grandmother when she brought you to me,” she said after a few moments. “I was supposed to give it to you when you got married but I lost track of it during all those years of moving around. I’ll keep looking.”
“Really? A ring? You never mentioned it.”
“I was waiting for when you got married.”
So Mohtaram had expected me to stay with Maryam until I got married. It was something I’d never considered before.
On her last day Maryam promised to visit again. She and Howie had gotten along well and liked each other, and she was so happy to be with Leila. But it was clear she didn’t feel comfortable in America. There were all her dietary restrictions. She didn’t know a word of English and it would take years for her to become fluent enough to communicate with others. She couldn’t read or watch TV or listen to the radio. There weren’t that many Iranians in the area, no community for Maryam to get involved in. Other Asians—Japanese, Chinese, Indian—had more of a sense of community; their cultures had become more a part of America, with restaurants and ethnic neighborhoods.
As Howie and I were driving home after dropping Maryam at the airport, I already missed her presence in my life. It was an echo of the way it used to be when she left after a visit to Ahvaz.
Thirty
W
hat Maryam had told me about the ring from Mohtaram lingered with me long after she left. I thought of the jeweler Pari had told me about so many years ago.
At first, when they passed each other on the streets, she and the man exchanged glances.
Could it be that the jeweler gave her the ring?
Then another version of that story came to me. In it, there is a child from the romance with the jeweler. And the child is me. Terrified that Father would detect something just looking at me, Mohtaram gives me to her sister. Maybe this was why she’d always been cold to me.
I imagined Mohtaram pushing the infant—me—in a stroller down a long narrow lane with high walls. She hears her name being called from behind. She turns around and sees the man approaching her. He asks her about the baby, tells her he loves her. He is talking in a whisper. He gives her a box containing the ring and quickly turns around and vanishes into an alley. Mohtaram is alone on the lane again with her little baby and the ring, unable to fully understand the meaning of the encounter. Was it a final good-bye or was he inviting her to start a new life with him?
“You always write about the past,” Howie said one evening. “Write something about what goes on around you now.” He was convinced that my preoccupation with my past—with Maryam and Pari—had to do, at least to some extent, with my not being engaged enough in my present life.
It wasn’t just Howie who thought that. “Nahid, you’re so obsessed, I feel bad for you,” my friend Irene told me one day.
“I know you’re right,” I said.
So I started writing a novella about our neighbors in the building, with whom we shared a backyard. But it was flat, dead words on a page, and I abandoned it.
I drifted to Iran again, evoking the scenes and characters that had been part of my past.
 
After many years I went back to Tehran for a visit. I was sitting in Aunt Maryam’s living room (she, not my mother, raised me), and she was drawing vivid pictures of people I had known growing up.
“Do you know Batul has twelve children now? Her youngest son drowned in the pool and the poor girl has been fainting several times a day ever since. Everyone says her child drowned because she didn’t give alms.” Or, “Remember Hassan? The truck he was driving turned over and he died instantly. He was such a mean man, no wonder.”
In her stories she tried to leave nothing to chance. Yet all the elusiveness of my growing up echoed through her words. I thought of the starry nights I had lain beside her on the roof and the morning I had been frightened by my own shadow, the heavy silence of midafternoons when everyone was asleep and the pigeons stood drowsily in their cages, the inexplicable excitement as I lay beside my cousin under a blanket, listening to him talk about the other boys in the neighborhood. The picture of the tenants occupying the rooms around the courtyard came back to me—the woman who hid in our room to escape from her abusive husband; the young girl who mysteriously died in her bed. Then I thought of Sultaneh, a tall, slender woman with thick black hair, braided in several strands. I recalled her soft touch as she handed me things—a dish or a bouquet of flowers. I recalled whispers about her not being married.
“She finally got married to a man of her own choice—a young man working in an office,” Maryam said. “He took all her money away and then he began to take on other wives. But he must have had a spell on her. With all the pain he inflicted on her she pined after him when he just vanished. She searched for him everywhere. She went on trips to where she thought his business might take him. One day she came back and never mentioned his name again. But she was changed. Once she tried to drown herself in a tank of water. Another time she almost jumped from the roof. One night she began to curse and throw her belongings out into the street. They put her in a sanitarium for a while and when she was released she was put in chains. She lives in the basement, tied to a pole. She has a niece who comes in once a day and attends to her.”
That evening I was standing at the edge of the roof, looking down into the courtyard of the adjacent house with its ancient plane trees and gables filled with pigeons when I had a glimpse of Sultaneh. Her hands were tied behind her with a chain, the end of which was held by a young girl I assumed was her niece. She was stooped, like a hunchback, and her chin protruded so far that it almost touched her long nose. The strands of her black hair were now replaced by a mass of unkempt gray, and she carried herself with caution, like one who has received many blows and expects new ones. Only in her dark, pensive eyes could I see her as she had once been but even they seemed puzzled, crazed. I watched the girl tie the chain to a column on the porch and I moved away when Sultaneh began to shriek as if she were being whipped.
I pressed my brain for a lesson that might be learned from Sultaneh’s downfall but I could not honestly accept any of what came to my mind.
 
 
I put this sketch together with two others with similar themes I had written over the years—one about the woman with a blind child, one about reading to Ali. After making some changes, I sent them to a few literary magazines.
My first acceptance came a few weeks later. The old feeling returned in a rush, the one I’d felt years before when the radio station had chosen to air my story.
I received a letter from a Lindengrove girl, Judy Conrad, who had read my story in the magazine. I mentioned the name of the college I went to in the biographical information published with the story.
 
 
I don’t know if you remember me. I used to live two doors down the hall from you. What stopped us from being friends? We were from different religions, countries. But should any of that have mattered? I know now it shouldn’t have. . . . Life has dealt me a few blows. I married as soon as I graduated and that marriage finally has ended, thank God. We were truly incompatible. . . . As you see by the address, I live in Chicago, a big city. I meet people from all over the world here. . . .
 
 
I remembered Judy. She was the girl who had put her hand on her hip and said to me, “Well, in this college we’re all Christians.” Though the letter was apologetic, it brought back the ambivalent feelings that had plagued me over the years in America, being neither here nor there.
Then I met an Iranian woman named Nayereh in the supermarket. After a few minutes of conversation, she invited me to lunch at her house. She was married to an Iranian doctor. Her parents had arranged her marriage to the son of a family friend who had emigrated to America. Her house was large and fancy. The floors were covered with the most expensive silk Persian rugs, and there was marble everywhere. Nayereh wore a large diamond engagement ring and a large sapphire ring on her other hand; sapphire earrings dangled from her ears. She served Persian food,
fesengoon,
chicken and pomegranate sauce and crushed walnuts, saffron rice, and Shirazi chopped salad, which a maid prepared.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking,” she said as we sipped tea, “but isn’t it difficult to live with a man from a different culture and religion?”
“I’m not so much a part of my own culture,” I said.
“But . . . someone who doesn’t speak your language, doesn’t understand where you come from?”
I couldn’t think of a response, and although the conversation drifted to other topics, her pointed question stayed with me. She stirred up the same feelings as the letter from Judy did. I had gone against many Iranian traditions, and was even now an American citizen, but I didn’t feel like an American. I had an accent. I didn’t look American. There was a lot I didn’t understand about the culture. I had finally found freedom in America, but there was a hole inside me, a lack. I didn’t feel either Iranian or American.
I started to devote my free time to writing a novel that captured those feelings. In the novel,
Foreigner,
I tried to channel that state of mind—feeling foreign in both Iran and America, into the female narrator. The protagonist, Feri, is a young Iranian girl who comes to the United States after high school to go to college. She marries an American and stays on. At one point a restlessness for her past begins to set in. After many years she goes to Iran for a visit. At first she feels like a foreigner there but then she gets involved in searching for her mother, whom she had lost as a child. She finds her, then begins to question her happiness in the United States. By the end of the book she is not sure if she wants to go back to America.
I suddenly yearned to go back to Iran and put myself in touch with the sights and sounds and people who were haunting me. I knew part of my obsession with the past had to do with my lack of contact.
But alas, turbulence had erupted in Iran again and was only getting worse. Political parties were formed and outlawed by the Shah in swift succession. The youth movement, consisting mainly of male students, was growing larger by the day. They sent out messages to people in Iran and abroad through newsletters in which they talked about corruption in the royal family, reported on the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners, the suppression of dissent, and heavy censorship of books, radio and TV programs, newspapers, and speech. They displayed graphic photographs of men and women being tortured in Iranian jails. They described the methods of torture—hanging prisoners, male or female, upside down, stuffing urine-soaked cloths into their mouths, making them walk on nails.

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