Persian Girls: A Memoir (6 page)

Maryam looked startled and suddenly collected her chador and put it on. Father was walking over to us. At his approach I could see Maryam’s face darken.

“Welcome,” he said to Maryam. “This is your home.”

Maryam kept her eyes down and said nothing and he walked away without any conversation exchanged between them.

Ali called Mohtaram into the kitchen. As soon as she left, I looked at Maryam and said, “Take me back with you.”

“That’s why I’m here, I want to take you back,” she said. “My house is empty without you.”

Maryam stayed for three more days. Every time I came home from school the first thing I asked her was if I was going back with her. On her last day she said, “Mohtaram asked your father, and I begged him myself, but he said no. Pack everything, let’s leave while no one is home.”

I put a few of my belongings in my schoolbag and we headed outside. As soon as we entered the courtyard, the outside door opened and Father came in from the street. He greeted Maryam and, seeing the small suitcase in her hand, said, “I’ll take you to the station.”

Maryam froze and didn’t say a word. I was silent, too. I could feel a dark current locking me to her, as if we were caught in the same nightmare.

“You aren’t taking her back with you,” Father said firmly.

“She’s my child, how can you take her from me?” Maryam finally said in her shy, diffident voice.

“If you love her you should know it’s better for her here. She needs a father to look after her.”

Mohtaram walked into the courtyard. Maryam again begged her sister to let me go back. But this time Mohtaram said nothing.

“Stay here with me,” I said to Maryam.

Maryam looked at her sister. Mohtaram offered no encouragement, perhaps afraid of other scenes between Maryam and Father. She looked shaky and upset.

“Come with me,” Father said to Maryam. “The car is outside, the chauffeur will drive us to the station.”

“I’ll go to see you off,” I said to Maryam, still hoping that at the last minute Father would change his mind and let me go with her.

“You stay right here,” he said to me and turned to Maryam. “Let’s go, Maryam
khanoon.
”

She kissed me. Her face was wet with tears. I began to cry, too. Father was unmoved.

As soon as they left I ran upstairs to the balcony that wrapped around the second floor, and watched the steel blue limousine zigzag through the traffic and disappear.

Later that afternoon Father came to my room and, taking my hand, brought me to Mohtaram. She and Ali were on the porch, crushing a block of ice to supplement what the refrigerator made.

“Say ‘I love you, Mother,’ ” Father said.

I said nothing.

“Go ahead,” Father said, the muscles of his face tightening and his voice rising above the sound of the ice chips being put into a pail by Ali, while Mohtaram stood and stared into space.

“I want to go back to my own mother,” I said.

“This is your home,” he said. “Say ‘I love you’ to your mother and everything will be fine.” He grabbed my arm. “Go on, say it.”

I pulled away and ran to my room.

“She’s here to stay,” I heard Father say to Mohtaram.

“We can’t let Maryam suffer like that.”

“You can ask her to come and stay with us for a while.”

“She won’t feel comfortable here.”

Several months later Maryam visited again, this time with my grandmother. Aziz was sitting alone on the porch and running between her fingers her rosary with its ninety-nine amber beads and yellow tassel, and repeating, “Allah, Allah.” She looked so different from the year before, when she had visited Maryam and me in Tehran. It was as if she had suddenly aged—her hair was almost totally gray and there were deep wrinkles on her face. She got up and we embraced tightly.

“Maryam is in your room, go see her,” she said as we pulled apart.

I found Maryam sitting on a mattress in the corner of my room, staring into space. Her hair was uncombed and disheveled. She got up and grasped me in her arms, holding me very tight. As I sat with her I could feel that dark current again.

“Can you take me to the river and drown me?”

I was overwhelmed by sadness and a sense of helplessness. “Please don’t talk like that, please, please,” I begged, holding her hand in mine.

“I caught Maryam sitting at the edge of the cistern,” Aziz told me later. “She was staring into it. I had to remind her that it’s a sin to kill yourself. I wanted to take her to the hospital but she begged me not to. A doctor came and gave her injections and she felt a little better but then she got worse. The doctor gave her pills, too, but she won’t take them.” Aziz said she put ground herbs in Maryam’s food, pinned turquoise clay beads to her dress, and burnt
esphand
in the room, but nothing was working.

This time it was Aziz who pleaded with Father to let me go back with them and live with Maryam again, be her child, but Father adamantly refused.

“You’re like my own mother,” he told Aziz. “You bring light to our household. You and your dear daughter Maryam should consider this your home and stay as long as you like. But you can’t take my daughter far away again.”

It was clear that I was there to stay. And hope slowly drained away.

 

 

 

 

 

Every time I thought of the home I had lost, my chest filled with a heaviness, a pressure. I would cough until I turned red and tears pooled in my eyes. It happened at all times of the day and night.

Finally Father took me to a doctor, a taciturn middle-aged man with an authoritative voice. The doctor asked me a few questions and examined my ears and throat.

“Nothing is wrong with her,” he told my father after the exam. “It’s all nerves.”

“You heard the doctor,” Father said when we were outside. “Your cough doesn’t have a real basis. If you try to relax and view your mother as a mother you’ll be fine.” He took me to a café close to the doctor’s office and ordered
falute,
ice cream mixed with strips of fruit, for both of us. “You could fill the hole Mina has left in your mother’s and my heart, if you only try,” he said.

I recalled Maryam and her sisters talking in sorrowful tones about the lovely, curly-haired baby Mohtaram had brought with her on one visit. Mina had contracted malaria, become feverish, her skin had turned yellow, and then she died. I felt a renewed sadness at the thought of her death. But I soon became aware of a weight on my heart—Father was giving me what seemed to be the impossible responsibility of filling the hole Mina had left in their lives, especially in Mohtaram’s life. Mohtaram had lost a daughter and perhaps because of that Maryam lost a daughter. It was almost worse than if I had died. Maryam and I were so close but now I would grow up here in Ahvaz in my parents’ house, far from her. Would we forget each other? Father had also said to me on that first day when he walked me to school that I was nine years old and needed supervision. Perhaps I hadn’t been told the whole truth. There were things no one was telling me.

“The doctor said it’s all nerves,” Father explained to Mohtaram at home.

“I thought so,” Mohtaram said distractedly.

In the coming months I was in and out of the doctor’s office. There were germs in Ahvaz I wasn’t immune to. An eye infection caused swelling in my lids; I had an ear infection and I couldn’t hear well for a while; a large boil appeared on my back and a fever accompanied it. Mohtaram always asked Father to take me to these appointments.

Father also tried to get me to eat more. “You’re starving yourself,” he said, as he kept adding food to my plate. I had lost weight rapidly since coming to Ahvaz, too sad and anxious to have much of an appetite and, anyway, missing Maryam’s cooking. Mohtaram supervised Ali making the meals—usually whitefish, smoked or fresh,
khoresh
served with dill and lima beans, rice, some of the same dishes Maryam made. But they didn’t taste as good to me. What Maryam and Hamideh and Ezat Sadaat prepared was much more flavorful because they knew how to use just the right mixture of spices.

My father was attentive, but I couldn’t warm up to him. He had too much power over me. He had single-handedly changed the course of my life. He was stern, and along with his attention to me came bursts of anger and criticism that I didn’t do anything right.

One day I was sitting in my room when Father came in unexpectedly. He took my hand, brought me over to Mohtaram, who was on the porch, alone, reading a fashion magazine. Although it was in Farsi, it contained the latest fashions in Europe and America.

“Tell her, ‘I love you, Mother,’ ” Father said, trying again.

I distracted myself with the sounds coming from outside—traffic going by, mixed with voices of vendors hawking their merchandise in the square.

Mohtaram looked up from the magazine and stared at me.

I pulled my hand out of Father’s. As I turned to leave he slapped me across the face. “Stubborn child,” he said.

I ran back to my room and shut the door. I wanted to shout, “I hate you,” but my throat was clogged. Later I looked at myself in the small, rectangular mirror on the wall. His handprint was still on my face.

 

 

 

 

 

My new home was chaotic, filled with a clashing and confusing mixture of traditional Iranian/Muslim customs and values, and Western ones. None of us prayed, followed the
hejab,
or fasted. But my parents believed boys and girls shouldn’t mingle with the opposite sex until they were married by the religious law, that marriages should be arranged by parents, that unmarried girls shouldn’t draw boys’ attention to themselves by wearing makeup or suggestive bright-colored clothes, that education was for sons. Daughters should marry as soon as a suitable man came along. Tension from unexpressed desire permeated the house—desire of any kind—for more clothes, a different type of clothing, to say certain things, to be with a particular person.

The mixture of values at home mirrored the ones among the people of Ahvaz. Ahvaz’s population, consisting of a few thousand Americans and English, about seventy thousand Iranians, and a few hundred Arabs, mainly immigrants from Iraq, was an amalgam of the modern and the old-fashioned. There was a great deal of antagonism in the city among people with opposing views. There were the conservative Iranians and the half-Westernized ones, like my parents. Then there were the Americans and English employed by the oil companies, not to mention the Arab immigrants who were Sunnis (in the midst of Shiite Iranians). They mingled uncomfortably. As people lined up in front of the cinema that showed American movies, a mosque across the street broadcast a sermon warning people against worldly pleasures such as seeing movies. Romance was forbidden and yet romantic songs were always blaring out of radios.

The Shah himself, caught between America’s pressure and the mullahs opposed to his Westernization, allowed certain things but not others. His alliance with the United States was rooted in what happened in 1953. At that time Prime Minister Mossadegh was distressed over how much profit the British, who controlled Iran’s oil industry, were making. He tried to initiate certain reforms. The British resisted. Unable to resolve the issue single-handedly, Britain turned to the United States to settle it. It seemed to the CIA that Mossadegh was a Communist and would move Iran into the Soviet sphere at a time of high Cold War fears. An internal struggle between the Shah and the prime minister followed, culminating in the Shah fleeing Iran. With the help of the CIA, the Shah was restored to his throne and the prime minister was arrested (Operation Ajax). The Shah then reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to “restore the flow of Iranian oil to world markets in substantial quantities.” But now instead of the British it was the United States who had most of the control over the oil industry, because of the bigger part it had played in helping the Shah back to his throne. America even helped form SAVAK, the Shah’s powerful secret police.

To remind people of the Shah’s power, his portraits and statues were ever-present in all public areas, schools, parks, squares, and offices. Artisans were encouraged to weave his portrait into small rugs and tapestries; his face was of course on coins and
tooman
bills.

Tehran had a similar mixture of people and values, but it was a much larger city and the tension hadn’t been as apparent to me.

W
eeks went by and I didn’t get any letters from Maryam, even though I wrote to her weekly, sometimes daily. The only news I had about her was through bits and pieces I heard exchanged between Mohtaram and Father. Maryam’s depression wove like a dark thread through their conversation.

I was lying on my bed crying when Pari knocked on the door and came in.

“Come with me, I want to show you my room,” she said, putting her arm around me. I dried my eyes and followed her. Her room was between mine and Manijeh’s, along a row that included our brothers’ and parents’ bedrooms.