Scent of Butterflies (15 page)

The
mullah
studies me with narrowed eyes, then draws a pear tart toward himself and digs his fork into the crust.

I lean forward and scuff the back of his hand with my fingernails, settle back with a sweet smile and enjoy his puzzled expression. I am disappointed at the speed with which he seems to shed his confidence and composure, shed the arrogance he carries with undeserved pride. I want him to attempt to stop this charade. I want him to be a worthy adversary, show more backbone, be more like his Imam and leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, who succeeded in exiling Mohammed Reza Shah, the king of kings, from the country he ruled for thirty-eight years.

In 1979, on a cold, dreary January day twenty years ago, I watched on the television screen the once omnipotent Shah, with a fur-clad Empress Farah, shiver on the tarmac as they bade a tearful good-bye to the once invincible Royal Guards. The Shah carried a small box filled with Persian soil in his pocket. But he took with him much more. He took our peace of mind.

A mere fifteen days after the Shah and his Empress left, Ayatollah Khomeini's plane landed at Tehran's Mehrabad Airport. Although I despised Khomeini for upturning our lives and destroying our country, I admired him for his dogged perseverance, for his meticulous planning and endless patience that had eventually culminated in his triumph. That day, back on Iranian soil to address a nation of worshippers, he had at last managed to bring revenge on the Shah, whose secret police had presumably murdered Khomeini's son, Mustapha, who was found dead in bed.

This
mullah
sitting opposite me, who left his religious garb upstairs in his posh suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, is made of weaker cloth.

He squares his shoulders and attempts to compose himself after my inexplicable dessert orgy. “Let us go up before daybreak.”

I want to dig my heel into his polished alligator loafer and scream that the day has already broken and that I am mortified at the prospect of spending the night with him, to tell him I've never been alone in a hotel room or any other room with a stranger and that my husband is the only man I've ever made love to, but that I will still join him in his hotel room because I am being guided by inexplicable forces that are beyond my control. He is only a conduit, I console myself, here to propel me closer to my goal. I am the one who solicited his company to hurt Aziz. That is what matters and nothing else.

Mullah
Mirharouni glances at the check, slides his hand into his coat pocket and retrieves his wallet, pulls out a thick wad of cash and counts out hundred dollar bills.

I hold his hand back. I do not want to be indebted to him. Before he has a chance to make sense of the prospect of a woman not only paying for her meal, but his as well, I leave a couple of hundred-dollar bills on the table and rise.

The lady behind the registration desk glances at us from under lashless eyelids that she swiftly averts as we turn toward the elevator.

I refuse the arm he offers to lead me into his suite, all silk and damask and velvet and smelling of the demanding bodies that had previously occupied the king-size bed. I turn to him and stroke his sleeve with a soft touch. “Are you married?”

“Yes,” he replies without hesitation. Lies are unnecessary, as is foreplay, for the unspoken deal the two of us have struck. Tonight he is here with me, and in a few weeks he will return to his home and his wife. And after a quick angry fuck of revenge, where will I find myself but back to my solitude? Back to my Amorphophallus titanum, my misshapen phallic plant, my Corpse Plant with its decomposing rat stink. Back to my bordello of colorful butterflies.

“Tell me,
Agha
Mirharouni, have you ever loved two women at one time?”

“Of course,
azizam
, of course I have.” The answer comes too fast, too certain, too easily. Like an electrical switch. On! Off! Now this one, next another. “What about your wife?”

“This has nothing to do with her. Allah blessed men with sophisticated…how shall I say…complex neurological wiring. We can compartmentalize our emotions so they won't bleed into our private life.”

To my horror, I watch my fist spring forward and crash against his chest.

His arm circles my waist. “You're nervous,
azizam
. It's normal. Come, I'll calm you down. Give me a moment.”

He shuts his eyes, and without letting go of my hand, his lips begin to move. Distinguishing a few Arabic words, I cringe at the realization that he is in the process of reciting the prayer that would make me his
sigheh
, his concubine, his temporary wife,
halal
, permissible to him according to Islamic law.

He draws me close, his sonorous voice transporting me to that other place inside of me, into my head and heart, and soon enough Aziz is observing
Mullah
Mirharouni slide his hand down my vertebrae, crawl lower, brush against my buttocks, climb back up and slip my shirt off, his stare creeping around my shoulders and breasts to naked curves at the mercy of his licking eyes that linger between my thighs.

My husband's face flames and his lovely eyes rage as the
mullah
coaxes me toward the bed, unfolds the corner of the puffed-up goose quilt, pats the yielding mattress, and gives my back an encouraging tap.

—
Jounam
, you've the sexiest back in all of Tehran—

I slip under the sheets. Pull the covers up to my chin. The king-size bed is far too small to hold all three of us.

—
Jounam
, keep away from other men. They'll break your lovely heart—

The
mullah
's fingers crawl on my stomach, slide up my waist, and squeeze my breast. His lips circle my nipple, kiss one, then the other, graze my earlobe, blow into my ear. His breath scorches my temple, my cheek, comes too close to my mouth. My muscles tense; my nipples stiffen in protest. My hands spring up to shield my mouth. Not my mouth. Not this. Anywhere but my mouth. Not a kiss.

Our kisses, Aziz and mine, are our cherished intimate language.

—
Jounam
, give me your tongue—

I pull the sheets high up over my breasts to cover my nakedness from the
mullah
's vengeful eyes.

I first saw similar cauldrons of vengeance on the television screen when I was seventeen years old.

It was 1979.

A stiff, stern seventy-eight-year-old Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini descended the stairs of a chartered Air France plane, knelt down, and kissed Iranian soil. His vengeful stare pierced through the jubilant crowd gathered in the airport to welcome him. After fifteen years of exile, first in Iraq, then Neauple-le-Chateau in the suburbs of Paris, his eminence arrived to the overwhelming chant of: “
Agha
amad!
Our Sir is Here!”

“
Vaveilla!
” Mamabozorg had cried, in the ancient wail of mourning women. “He is back to take revenge on us all. Revenge!”

“It's the end of us Jews!” Baba declared as he paced the room with cane and gloves in hand, as if ready to leave at the next sign of trouble. “We've lost the Shah, our only ally in the Muslim world.”

Baba had tears in his eyes as he vowed not to abandon everything to our cook, driver, and guard, naming just a few, who were waiting for us to flee, as many of our friends had, in order to confiscate our house, furniture, carpets, antiques, and cars, and then inform the authorities, whoever they might be at the time, of our vast real estate holdings and demand, in exchange for their loyalty, a portion of that fortune, too. The prospect of living among Muslim fundamentalists without the backing and support of the Shah sent a collective shudder through our core.

That day, in my parents' home, crowded by antiques and art, the grounds adorned with ancient plane, mulberry, and walnut trees, Baba and Madar, Mamabozorg Emerald and Butterfly, who had joined us to find answers to her own future, pondered the possibility of the CIA arranging the royal couple's return. This had happened in 1953 when the Shah and his second wife, Soraya, had fled Iran after a coup Dr. Mossadegh, prime minister of the time, had initiated. It could happen again,
Insha'Allah
. The Pahlavi dynasty is not dead.

“Such an uprising was inevitable.” Baba said, “First, the Shah turned into a cotton-brained megalomaniac, forgetting he was America's puppet, after all. Second, he ignored the importance of religion to his people and of oil to the world. Once he did that, his fate was sealed.”

“Oil?” Butterfly asked in a reverential tone, as if afraid to agitate the sacred aura my father wore like a crown.

Baba brought fingers of both hands together like a prayer dome. “Black gold! A blessing and a curse.” In 1971 the Shah had raised the price of oil, stoking the first embers of the revolution. By 1973 he had quadrupled the price. By 1977 Iran was acquiring weapons as if preparing for World War III. Baba slapped his thigh with his gloves.

“Someone should have told him: ‘My man, America depends on oil. You depend on America. Don't forget that the CIA reinstated you, or you would have rotted somewhere in exile. So don't play political roulette with America. Don't yank at the lion's tail.' By the end, when the Shah was lonely and friendless, the lion turned around and chopped off his head.”

I tried to imagine the Shah's royal skull being crushed between the jaws of a vicious lion with AMERICA tattooed on its forehead. It was difficult to envision America as my father's ferocious, Shah-eating lion, or as Khomeini's “Great Satan.” I had attended the Community School, a private American school in Tehran. My American friends did not resemble ruthless lions. If anything, the Ayatollah Khomeini, on the television screen that day, was the one who resembled a furious lion being escorted across the tarmac.

What I did not know then was that before I'd have the chance to digest the whirlwind events of the next few months, the “disinherited”—one of the exaggerated titles granted the poor or the working classes—would turn against the
taghouti
, or supposed royalist elite, storm their vacant mansions, settle in, and distribute their wealth as they saw fit.

I did not know that before long we would watch in disbelief as strangers settled in the house of our neighbors, who had fled the country in fear of being imprisoned for the sin of having the deposed Shah's photographs in their family album.

And that we would end up being one of a handful of wealthy families, part of a small Jewish community, to remain behind after tens of thousands fled. We managed to go unnoticed only because we did not own large factories or have business or political involvements with Israel. Nor did we have any dealings with the royal family or the SAVAK, the Shah's dreaded secret police.

We made sure to donate part of our wealth to the recent Islamic regime. We banned alcoholic drinks from our home, burned photographs that were reminders of the Pahlavi era, and dressed first in the
chador
and later in kerchiefs, opaque stockings, and the
manteau
. Baba believed these were necessary adjustments, a temporary and passive fight against either subjugation or inevitable exile.

We would not abandon our country and home. We would remain and pretend that nothing much had changed so as to protect what belonged to us in the first place. The newly established authorities had confiscated our freedom; we would not allow them total victory by handing over our wealth, too.

I did not know then that Butterfly would succeed one day where a revolution and the cunning Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini had failed. I did not know that she would thrust me from family and home into exile to a country that might not want me.

That day, we watched Khomeini on our television screen as he was being ushered up to a podium to deliver his speech.

“We became
gharbzadeh
!” Mamabozorg coughed up “Westernized” as if it were a chicken bone stuck in her throat. “We're neither here nor there. Westerners invade us as if we're Bedouins with a camel culture. And now this! Will this
mullah
drag us back to the Middle Ages? Will he bring back the barbaric ritual of whipping with chains and maiming themselves during religious mourning? God bless his soul, Reza Shah must be rolling over in his grave. If his son had his father's grit, he'd have stayed put and protected his country.”

Baba curled his handlebar mustache, tossed one long leg over the other. “The Shah had to go. People didn't want him.” He gestured toward me and Butterfly. “You're surprised, of course, having lived a sheltered life. The poor resent us. Call us the One Thousand Families. You haven't been exposed to the poverty and restlessness brewing just a few kilometers south of us. The
mullahs
…”

Mamabozorg cried out in disgust, “If Reza Shah was our ruler, he would have flushed each and every
mullah
down the toilet, where they belong.”

“Reza Shah! He was a worse dictator than his son,” Baba replied. “Do not forget, Madar, that he would have handed Iran to the Nazis if he remained in power. The Nazis were practically at our border. God only knows how many Germans were living in Tehran during World War II. The truth is, if you'd scratched Reza Shah's skin, you'd have found a Nazi underneath.”

Mamabozorg lifted herself up from her stool, tossed her shawl on the carpet, and trampled it with her orthopedic boots. She could not bear the disillusionment of more than four decades of cherished memories. She had developed her own conclusions regarding the politics of Iran. Many were accurate, some tainted by her obsession with the late Reza Shah. And she never forgave the British who had, during World War II, forced him into exile in Johannesburg, where he died. Having achieved their objective, the allies facilitated the way for Reza Shah's inexperienced son, Mohammad Reza, to occupy the Pahlavi throne.

I lifted her shawl and coaxed her back to her stool. “You should have converted to Islam and married the Shah, Mamabozorg. He really liked you. Then I'd have been a princess.”

She coiled a strand of my hair around her finger and gave it a hard tug. “It's the way of life, I suppose, for young fish to dare to peck at their elders.” She rubbed the beads of her necklace, raising the scent of sun-drenched fruit, powdered cinnamon, and ancient longing. “Genuine amber, Soraya, his gift to me.”

“
Agha
amad! Agha amad!
” Khomeini's intense speech, the first of many to follow on Persian soil, whipped the crowd in Mehrabad Airport into a frenzy. “Our Sir is here! Our Sir is here!”

“What now?” Mamabozorg wailed. “Will this bearded Seyyed force us to hide ourselves behind
chadors
? Make temporary marriages legal again?”

I was still young and innocent at the time and wrongly believed that the source of Khomeini's rage was political. I had assumed that he would rest once he achieved his nationalistic and religious ideals. Although I was aware that the Shah had arrested Khomeini's son, and that Khomeini blamed the Shah for his son's mysterious death in Najaf, I didn't know how long pain could brew and simmer and survive in lethal and deceiving stages.

I had not yet been cheated of my lover and friend and had not yet experienced the madness that endures like smoldering embers until the source is, at the very least, humbled.

***

Mullah
Mirharouni, with or without his religious attire, at home in Iran or in a hotel room in America, could never boast of Ayatollah Khomeini's attributes—endurance, cunning, and the never-dying ambition to retaliate.

His breath is hot and demanding on my breasts, this
mullah
, who must have deceived a harem of temporary wives, this
mullah
who helped give birth to a generation that knows nothing but repression.

I, too, am a product of this revolution and have been deeply affected by it in many ways. The fear-ridden atmosphere of the first years is fresh in my memory. We tucked our makeup bags, miniskirts, and fur coats in moth-filled closets and in their place donned the
chador
. The Shah's portraits came down and Khomeini's went up. The Shah's statues were toppled in squares, and in their place a heap of rubble remained, on which appeared cranes with dangling, lifeless bodies to sow fear in the heart of an already traumatized nation.

Arms from the Shah's arsenal passed into the hands of riffraff militia, and we locked ourselves in our estates for fear of a stray bullet finding its way into our confused brains. I woke each morning to news of more senseless executions, more internal struggles for power among different religious factions.

And then, as if we Iranians had not caused enough damage and suffering to ourselves, we plunged into the horror of eight years of war with Iraq. We, who could not bear to be called Arabs because we considered ourselves cultured Aryans; we, who blamed the Arabs for conquering the high Persian culture and displacing the religion of Zoroaster, locked ourselves into war with Arabs. Thousands of our children marched defenselessly across minefields and into the heart of the enemy with the promise that the small plastic key around their neck would open the doors to heaven. The end of the war left us scarred. A nation of martyrs. And we have no one to blame but the likes of
Mullah
Mirharouni, who is sniffing his way between my legs.

My mouth puckers with disgust at the sight of the man who represents everything I despise. I grab him by the hair and push him away with one leg as if he were a wayward dog. Disentangling myself from the surrounding mess, I slip out of bed and step back into my clothing.