Persian Girls: A Memoir (21 page)

 

 

Now from an even farther distance than that between Ahvaz and Tehran, I was haunted by Pari’s state in life, in the hands of her despotic husband. She had hoped that in Tehran she would find freedom. She had been naive to believe Taheri would let her pursue what she wanted. She had pulled a veil of self-deception over her face in order to bear marrying him.

I had an urgent desire to talk to Pari, hear her voice. I decided to use the public phone in the dorm lobby. It was ten o’clock in the morning in St. James; it would be nine o’clock in the evening in Tehran. The international lines were busy for a long time. When I finally got through, Pari’s phone rang and rang and no one picked up. The same thing happened on the following days. Each time I failed to reach her I was filled with a bottomless sense of foreboding.

I thought about visiting her. I would need a permission letter from Father again to be able to get out of Iran and return to school. What if, for some reason, he decided to keep me there and force me to marry? Besides, I didn’t have the money for travel and I knew he wouldn’t pay for the trip since he had never sent money to my brothers to visit. The unfavorable exchange rate from
tooman
s to dollars made the tickets exorbitantly expensive. Pari couldn’t visit me because Taheri would never allow her to come all the way to America; now that she was married, Iranian law stipulated that he (rather than Father) was the one from whom she needed a permission letter to travel.

I began to dream about Pari. In one dream I was in Maryam’s house. Pari was there, too, and the three of us were sitting in her large living room around a
sofreh,
eating. Mellow green, yellow, and amber lights seeped into the room. Maryam suddenly frowned and said, “That isn’t Pari, she only looks like her. And that isn’t really my courtyard.” I looked at Pari and I could see there were certain obvious differences. And the courtyard was filled with paper flowers, not real ones.

I woke, covered in sweat.

The next night in my dream I was sitting in the hollow trunk of the old plane tree in Maryam’s courtyard. It was a very clear day and everything around me was vividly delineated. Then the air suddenly changed; a hard wind began to blow and it quickly turned into a hurricane. Someone was walking toward me in the darkened air, calling my name, asking for help. I jumped out of the tree and ran toward the figure, whose voice became more desperate. It was a tiny, featureless figure with hands stretched out toward me, trying to move forward but not able to. I realized that the figure was Pari, only smaller and younger. She sank into the ground before I could reach her.

Pari gave birth in the modern and well-equipped Russian Hospital in Tehran. After she came out of anesthesia, she found Taheri sitting on a chair by her bed, looking at her with loving eyes. He kissed her and said, “You gave us a lovely son.” But Pari knew this new behavior would not last; beneath his congenial and adoring manner lurked the desire to control, the dark possessiveness. It would return. A nurse examined Pari’s breasts to see if she had enough milk to breast-feed. She did but it hurt when she fed Bijan, so much that Pari couldn’t help but cry. Pari considered bottle-feeding Bijan, as some modern Tehrani mothers did, but Taheri didn’t like the idea.

After two days in the maternity hospital Taheri took Pari home. His three sisters were waiting for them there. Taheri’s elderly parents visited for a week. Other family members, hordes of them, some of whom Pari hadn’t met before, visited daily. Many of Taheri’s relatives were ultraconservative Muslims who were hoping Taheri would give Bijan a name like Mohammad or Hussein. They insisted that he and Pari, too, start praying daily to set a good example for their child. Taheri prayed while they were there and forced Pari to do the same. Pari pretended. Mohtaram and Father didn’t visit as they were saddled with responsibilities at home. Farzin was having seizures that were hard to control with drugs. She couldn’t speak and threw tantrums in frustration. She couldn’t attend school, and they had hired tutors for her.

T
hat fall, the foreign student adviser called me into her office. “What is your major going to be?” she asked.

“I want to be a writer.”

“You know we don’t have a writing major,” she said, frowning. “Besides, writing isn’t practical. How are you going to support yourself? Are you engaged to a rich man or are your parents willing to support you through the struggle?”

I shook my head.

“Why don’t you major in psychology? It’s a practical field and it is about people, like writing. After you get your degree here, you can apply to graduate schools.”

I liked her suggestions, though I wasn’t sure how I would manage to go to graduate school. I became fascinated by mother-child relationships. I devoured literature about teenage girls, how during teen and preteen years girls often rebel against their mothers, even hate them. They think of their mothers as being too restrictive and are sensitive to the slightest criticism. In turn they are critical of anything their mothers do: their clothing, way of speaking, hairstyle. It reminded me of my attitude toward Mohtaram, with whom I had lived only during those typically rebellious years.

I began studying anything that had to do with mother-child issues, including the rights of a biological parent as opposed to an adoptive parent, and the fierce fights often put up by each. Most of the time a child was given away for adoption by his or her mother because of financial or psychological problems. Mohtaram didn’t have either of those problems.

Once I was watching a TV program in the lounge about a mother who had spent several years trying to regain custody of the child she gave up for adoption. Tears collected in my eyes and streamed down my face. Janis, who lived on my floor, was doing homework on the sofa. She asked, “What’s wrong?”

“My mother has cancer,” I said and got up. I went to my room and cried some more.

 

 

 

 

 

Parviz found me a job for the summer as an assistant to a psychiatrist at the hospital in St. Louis where he did his internship. Parviz himself was leaving St. Louis for another state to do his medical residency. He’d assured Father, “Don’t worry, I’ll still check on Nahid.”

I lived in St. Louis with a roommate, Amy, whom I hardly ever saw. One afternoon, while I was waiting for a bus, a young man came over to me and asked, “Are you a singer?” He was carrying a guitar case.

Perhaps it was the way I was dressed, in a red T-shirt with a picture of a pair of darker red lips on it, a full white linen skirt, and large, dark sunglasses (my attempt to cultivate a style).

“Have you ever been to Leopard’s Jazz Club?”

“No,” I said.

“I thought I saw you there,” he said. “I play the guitar there.” His hair, long and disheveled, hung in curls over his shoulders. He couldn’t have been more different from the clean-cut boys who came to our college to pick up their dates. He said his name was Jack Bruhel. By the time the bus came he had invited me to the jazz club that evening and offered to pick me up at my apartment.

That evening I tried on different outfits, put my hair up in different styles, applied different lipsticks, anxious about my first date in America.

Jack drove me to the club in his silver, somewhat banged-up convertible sports car. He took me to a table and ordered me a beer before joining a group of musicians on the stage.

A young woman came onstage from a back room and stood behind the microphone. The proprietor introduced her as Martha. She was very tall, with wheat-colored hair and large blue eyes. After the applause died down, she began to sing in a soft, melodic voice:

 

 

 

 

 

At intermission Jack came over holding a beer. “What do you think of Martha?” he asked.

“She’s very good.”

“I may as well be honest with you. She and I have been going out—well, on and off. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs. We’re in a down period right now.” He played with his beer bottle, turning it around on the table.

I was confused. Why was he telling me this?

It was after midnight when we started for my apartment in his car. In the living room, Jack kissed me.

“You have such a nice complexion and hair,” he whispered, his lips close to my ear.

In my room, he started to undress me. My heart beat wildly with yearning.

But again, as with Bill, in spite of my desire to open up, I became stiff. “Not tonight,” I mumbled.

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Don’t play games with me.”

“I’m sorry. Another time.”

He squeezed my breast hard with a surge of irritation and got up. He left, slamming the door behind him.

I lay there, hearing all the negative remarks and warnings about sex in Iran, expressed by Maryam and her neighbors as well as the more modern people like my parents and people at school. “Sex is only for procreation,” one of Maryam’s neighbors said to her daughter. “Men are nice to you until they fulfill their lust and then they abandon you,” my high school principal lectured. It was amazing that I had tried to model myself after American women in movies and books but I was crippled by the voices of my own past.
Here I am,
I thought,
in the land of freedom, and yet I am so unfree in my own life.
In spite of my rebelliousness, the deep fear of losing my virginity was still with me. Kissing James that afternoon in Ahvaz, so daring in that repressive town, was still all I was able to allow myself. If I were an American girl, raised in America, would I have given in? Was this what Father meant when he warned me not to become like American girls? I was overwhelmed by confusion about who I was. I wanted to have new experiences, to experiment, but alas, most of the time I felt as if I were in a precarious situation and had to be cautious.

 

 

 

 

 

That summer I received a letter from Maryam. She had married Rahbar and was living with him in Dubai. She didn’t provide a return address. She said they moved frequently because of his job, which took them to different cities in the Middle East. I recalled the glow on her face when she talked about him, and was happy she had him in her life.

B
ack in Tehran, Pari had joined a group of women, arranged by her friend Azar. Pari attended meetings while Behjat, Taheri’s sister, babysat.

In the meetings they talked about how to improve laws for women. Shirin, Azar’s sister, had worked as a secretary in a law office and had studied all the laws relevant to women; she believed they were unfair. There were five women in the group: Pari, Azar Mirshahi, her sister Shirin Tavalodi, Zohreh Nadjoumi, and Latifeh Ahkami. Shirin was married but thinking of getting a divorce. Latifeh, who was unmarried, lived with her mother, who suffered from bouts of depression; she believed that her late husband had poisoned her and that the poison was still in her system. Latifeh thought there was some truth to her mother’s fears; her father had been violent and abusive. Now her mother slept most of the day in a back room in the house. Latifeh herself didn’t see joy in marriage and didn’t see the point of bringing children into a miserable world. Zohreh had been married for a short time, before her husband had left the country without a trace. She lived with her aunt and worked in a travel agency, and knew a lot about world affairs. The group always met in Zohreh’s house because her old aunt kept to herself in a room on the other side of the courtyard.

After discussing various issues, they wound down by reading poetry. If the weather was nice they sat in the courtyard under a clump of trees next to the pool. Some read poems they wrote themselves. Writing poems was something many women did, most of the time with no intention of publishing them. At one meeting, Pari recited one of the poems Farrukhzad wrote before she left her husband:

 

 

In a letter, Pari revealed to me what it was in Taheri’s past that Azar had once hinted at.

“Azar thinks it’s fair that I should tell you what I know about Taheri’s past,” Shirin said to Pari after one of their meetings.

“Please, what is it?” Pari stared at her, waiting breathlessly.

“Did you know he was in jail for a year? Nine, ten years ago.”

“No, I had no idea. For what?”

“He was riding his motor scooter recklessly and he ran over a woman. If he had sought help for the woman immediately she’d have survived. But he sped away from the site, leaving her on the ground bleeding. She went into a coma and died in a week. Taheri was sentenced to ten years in prison. His father bribed people and got him out after a year. My cousin works in the lamp shop on the street where your husband ran over the woman. He also knows the woman’s family intimately. Please, please don’t tell your husband I told you all this.”

Pari thought about what a reckless driver Taheri was, always full of free-floating anger and the conviction that he had the right of way. When he wanted to emphasize a point he clenched his fist so tightly that his knuckles became white and then he would pick up a vase or a plate and throw it against the wall. Leaving the shattered pieces on the floor, he would zoom out of the house. True, he was regretful later for his behavior—he would get on his knees, ask for forgiveness, cry, and declare his love for her. But what good did any of that do? She had come to hate even his presents because they made him feel he had paid penance. After she and Shirin went their separate ways, Pari walked rapidly, propelled by anxiety, disgust, and fear. She almost stumbled into a
joob.