Persian Girls: A Memoir (33 page)

I walked down tree-lined paths, passing people sitting on blankets spread in the shade of trees. Trays of sweets and fruit wrapped in plastic and tied with black ribbons were set out for the memorials of their loved ones. A beggar in a dusty black chador
,
holding a sleeping child in one arm, the other hand outstretched, approached them one by one.

Finally I came across a row of marble headstones engraved with epitaphs like “Open the gates of heaven,” and, “Your soul is already in heaven.” I noticed two women kneeling by a grave and looking at photographs of a young man that were inside a plastic case fastened to a pole next to the stone.

“You’re in heaven and at peace,” one of the women said. “It’s we mortals who are suffering.”

A bearded cleric in a brown frock coat and a white shirt came over to the women and said, “He served his nation well, produced three sons and one daughter. He loved his country, religion, family.”

I entered a plot of land with no tombstones; this was where people who had been executed by the new regime were buried. The sight of all the dead in this vast cemetery, some killed in the revolution, some by execution, others from usual causes, didn’t make Pari’s death ordinary or easier to bear.

Finally I came to the path where her grave was. The tree that Mansour had had planted shaded the grave. Two doves were engraved on the horizontal stone. Beneath the doves was carved:

 

 

As I put the flowers on the stone, my mind denied that Pari was dead. “This is no place for you,” I told Pari. “Come on out, I’m here to see you.” Though I knew I had spoken the words, I was startled to hear my voice.

A teenage boy appeared and offered to wash the grave. As he performed his task he recited:

 

 

I paid him well; he had asked for so little.

A man wearing a felt hat came over and asked if he could say a prayer for the dead. I nodded. He squatted by the grave and, closing his eyes, recited a
sureh
from the Koran.

As soon as he finished, a bird hopped on the grave and then flew away, going up and up until it was swallowed by the sunny sky. “That was her soul,” the man said matter-of-factly. “If it’s a bird it means she’s in heaven; otherwise a fly would have appeared.”

After the man left, I sank into a state of near-oblivion. Then I noticed a man who looked vaguely familiar staring at me. I was jolted out of my sunken state when I recognized Majid. Yes, Majid, the man who had been in Pari’s heart for so long and then finally devastated her. He hadn’t changed much since that time I met him in the park in Ahvaz, when he gave me a letter for Pari. Only a few strands of gray were strewn through his hair. His wide forehead was a little wrinkled, and his shoulders stooped slightly. He was wearing a casual woolen tweed jacket over jeans, the way American professors dressed.

He, too, recognized me and said, “Oh, Nahid
e aziz,
you’re here.”

“I come to her grave every time I’m in Tehran. I miss her so much. I’m not the same person without her.” Majid’s words brought me back to the present.

“Majid, she was devastated by some of the things you said and did,” I said, and began walking away from him.

“Please, don’t run away from me. I want to talk to you,” he said, putting a bouquet of flowers he was holding on her grave and, in a few moments, catching up with me halfway to the gate. His face was damp with tears, his manner diffident. He was so different from the buoyant, self-confident man I remembered.

I tried to control my anger. I told myself I should talk to him, hear what he had to say.

“I’ll take you to a teahouse where the ‘moral police’ aren’t always on the lookout,” he said.

We walked to his car, an old Chevrolet. As he began to drive through winding, narrow backstreets I tried to assess him from Pari’s point of view. Here was the man who had brought her to such heights and depths.

At the teahouse, Majid led me to a quiet corner in the back. The walls were covered with posters of historical sights, a minaret in Isfahan, a garden in Shiraz. Copper lamps stood in the corners and the obligatory portrait of Khomeini hung on one wall. Two men were playing
kamanche
and
tar.
At other tables sat couples, single men, or groups of men, some smoking water pipes, some sipping tea.

“You were a shy, tense girl,” Majid said. “You’ve turned into a confident young woman. America must have been good for you.”

“When did you last see Pari?” I asked.

“I saw her once recently, at her request. She left a note for me with a friend saying that she wanted to tell me something. But when we met, she was reserved and we never got around to what she wanted to say. I wanted to start our relationship again but she told me bluntly that everything was dead between us. The sparks she had hoped to bring back by seeing me again were dead underneath the ashes. It was a sad meeting.” He was whispering, being cautious the way people were under the Shah’s regime. “It isn’t easy for anyone here, women or men. We all fought for freedom, which got us caught in months and months of destruction, and what did we get for it?”

“There was that letter to your wife . . .” I fell into a strange daydream in which I was Pari, talking to Majid.

“That was very unfortunate. Someone had told Mahnaz, my wife, that I had been seeing Pari. I’m sure it was Pari’s ex-husband. I don’t know what he wanted from Pari; he had taken everything already.”

“Remember that letter you gave to me on that picnic in Ahvaz? You encouraged her to leave her husband then.”

“Yes,” he said. “Why weren’t we allowed to follow our deepest individual desires?”

“But, Majid, you didn’t want to leave your wife,” I said.

“I have children.”

“So Pari was right about your disapproval that she had left her son behind?”

“She read all sorts of things into everything I said. It was for her own sake that I did and said certain things but now I wish I avoided those subjects. More than anything I wish years ago we had been able to go by our own desires. After I lost hope, I gave in to family pressure and married Mahnaz. I’ve been trying to do the best with my marriage.”

“Pari said she wished she could shatter her life and put it back differently.”

“I feel that way myself; it hasn’t been easy for me.”

A few men came in, looking around the room as if surveying the people. The women who had let their scarves or chadors slip to the middle of their heads quickly pulled them forward, and I made sure mine was in place.

“I thought they wouldn’t show up here, but here they are,” Majid whispered. “We’d better go, before they come over and ask how we’re related.”

We left quickly and he drove me to my hotel.

“We both are in mourning for Pari,” he said.

At the entrance to the hotel, Majid said he hoped we could talk more. But we didn’t make any plans to meet again. No words could erase things or make them different, I thought. And he seemed to be feeling the same way.

In the quiet of my room, I thought how both Majid and Mansour had done and said things that they thought were for Pari’s own good.

 

 

 

 

 

One morning I went to Maryam’s neighborhood, which was now closer in atmosphere to the rest of Tehran, which had more mosques everywhere, and all the women covered up. Construction was under way on Khanat Abad; Haj Abbas Alley was blocked off. I asked one of the construction workers when the job was going to be done. He said he wasn’t sure. The residents had been forced to leave and stay away until the
joob
could be restored with good water running in it.

The memory of my last summer with Maryam came to me. Maryam had urged her sisters to take a vacation together. “I need to get away for a while, clear my head,” I heard her say to her sister Khadijeh. The three sisters took us children for a three-week vacation to Farah Zar, a bucolic village two hours by car from Tehran. Khadijeh was a widow by then; Roghieh’s husband was too busy to go with us but approved of his family taking a long-overdue vacation. The sisters hired someone to take us to Farah Zar in a truck. We filled the truck with bundles of clothing, bedding, towels, and cooking utensils. We sat on the canvas covering the cargo area and peeked out at the roads from between the slats. The aunts said prayers to make sure the journey was safe.

When we reached Farah Zar we had lunch at the main square’s garden restaurant, then rented donkeys to carry our belongings. The roads were too narrow for a car or even a horse. In half an hour we reached the flat top of a hill where tents made of mosquito netting were set up for people to rent. Trees, redolent with fruit, covered much of the plateau. A stream wound through it, leading to a blue lake. Sheep and goats grazed in pastures at the bottom of the hill, and beyond the pastures were fields filled with shrubbery and wild yellow, lavender, orange, blue, and red flowers. We began to arrange our belongings in the tents. Aunt Khadijeh had one tent, her three sons shared another. Aunt Roghieh and her four daughters were in one large tent, and Maryam and I shared one. The aunts and my two oldest female cousins started on domestic tasks, while the two older male cousins went back to the square to buy ingredients for meals. The boys returned hours later. They said they had gone to a different vendor for every item: meat from the butcher, fresh herbs from a peasant who grew them in her garden and picked them right then and there, milk from another peasant (we drank it only after boiling it for sterilization), cheese from another.

In the evening my cousins and I walked on narrow paths lit by gas lamps. Numerous stars appeared so low in the sky that it seemed like we could reach and touch them. We walked to the square, which was teeming with people, and bought fresh pecans that the vendors plucked from a bucket of salt water and fresh corn roasted on charcoal and dipped in salt water. We ate them sitting on a bench and watched people go by, making up stories about them.

Zahra, who was my age, and I went off on our own some days, exploring hills, valleys, and orchards. Everything was enveloped in the sweet mystery of the village atmosphere. Through the open barn doors we could see women milking cows. In some shops women sat on the floor and knitted sweaters with colorful woolen yarn sheared from their own sheep and dyed. Behind gauzy curtains covering house windows we watched families carrying on—a man and a woman eating silently, a child climbing onto a stool to try to open a cabinet. On the way back we picked wildflowers.

Life was full of joy then, but looking back on that trip now, it seemed to me that Maryam had been anxious. She whispered to her sisters and stopped talking when I came upon them. On the last night of the vacation I woke to find her tossing and turning in bed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Go back to sleep, dear.”

“Tell me, tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing, it’s just being in a new place. Go back to sleep now. At night everything seems dark.”

A few weeks later, Father came and took me away.

J
ust as I was leaving for the airport, the hotel clerk handed me a manila envelope. He said it had been dropped off for me by a man early in the morning.

I waited until I was in the taxi before opening it. It was filled with letters and photographs. There was also a note from Mansour, saying he thought I would like to have them.

I had no trouble leaving the country. Their main concern seemed to be that
hejab
was properly observed.

On the plane, I examined the contents of the envelope more closely. I found a postcard from Pari, addressed to me, one she for some reason never sent.

 

 

I imagined her writing the postcard in the sanitarium. The Iranian woman next to me stared at me.

I couldn’t bear examining the rest of what was in the envelope just then. I needed to be alone.

While waiting for my next plane in Amsterdam airport, I looked through the envelope again. I was startled to find a letter from Bijan to Pari.