Persian Girls: A Memoir (34 page)

 

 

I looked for the photograph but instead found a note from Mansour. It said, “This came too late, after the accident.”

I put the letter back in the envelope and pulled out a photograph of Pari. On the back she had written, “To my dear sister Nahid.”

She was dressed in black and she had a melancholy, depressed expression on her face.

I pulled out a letter from Pari. It was only one line.

Back in New York I tried to push away my dark thoughts and feelings by immersing myself in the more stable, pleasurable aspects of my life—tending to my growing daughter’s needs, teaching, going to movies and plays and concerts with my husband, and attempting to write. But the loss of Pari and not knowing what really happened remained like a dark hole in my existence.

I wanted to track down Bijan, to talk to him, invite him for a visit, or go and see him in England. I wrote Mansour at his office to find out if he had an address for Bijan. He wrote back that he hadn’t been able to find the envelope that Bijan’s letter came in and he apologized for not being more careful with it. He said he had been distraught going through Pari’s belongings. He added that he had saved what was left of her clothes and jewelry and would give them to me the next time I was in Iran.

I tried to find Bijan through his boarding school in Essex but the principal told me he was no longer there and they had no forwarding address for him. I asked about his father’s address and was told they had been instructed to keep that information confidential.

 

 

 

 

 

Years went by and the war between Iran and Iraq continued to rage and even escalate. The front lines shifted back and forth across Ahvaz and Abadan, and I knew our house must have been demolished. My mind kept going to Manijeh now. Had she and Javad left Abadan before the war started? The conversation I had about her with Pari in Tehran kept going through my mind. Pari had told me Manijeh was in some kind of trouble.

I began to write a novel about her called
Married to a Stranger.
I changed her name to Minou.

 

 

In the fictional account Minou’s husband has an affair with a woman she suspects he is in love with. One day she catches them in bed together and leaves him. She goes to America to pursue her education.

Married to a Stranger
was published in 1983. My happiness was diminished by the fact that Pari wasn’t there to share the news with.

 

 

 

 

 

The war, which lasted for eight years, was one of the bloodiest of the twentieth century. It was a devastating human tragedy. More than a million people on each side were killed, and millions more were wounded and made refugees. Both the secular Saddam Hussein and the theocrat Khomeini ruthlessly sacrificed their people, while America, along with other Western nations, provided weapons to both sides (for the sake of oil and military advantage in the Gulf). Iraq had more sophisticated weapons; to compensate, Iran sent boys as young as fifteen, unarmed, to fight on the front lines. Iraq bombed major Iranian cities, demolishing houses and buildings. Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons maimed hundreds of Iranians. There were food and medicine shortages. The government ordered rationing. There were not enough hospital beds because of the number of wounded and dying soldiers. There were blackouts everywhere.

Finally in August 1988 Iran and Iraq reached a cease-fire. After intense negotiations between the secretary-general and two foreign ministers, both countries accepted a UN resolution.

I decided to travel to Iran once again, this time to see Maryam, who had returned there. Despite all the political twists and turns, it was still relatively easy for an Iranian with dual citizenship to travel back and forth without trouble.

The plane was filled with Iranians returning home with hopes of uniting with or searching for their loved ones or finding jobs in reconstruction and rebuilding projects in the war-damaged areas. Some were going to their demolished homes in the hope of salvaging valuable family mementos in the rubble—jewelry, a box filled with old belongings.

From the window of the taxi taking me to Maryam’s house, I could see the war damage. Shattered windows and partially wrecked buildings were everywhere. Some houses had black flags hanging above the front doors to designate that a member of the family had been killed in the war. In various spots soldiers sat on benches, crutches by their sides.

As I approached Khanat Abad, sweepers were cleaning the streets. It was a cool December morning and the beet seller was setting up his stall. Shopkeepers were washing the ground in front of their stores.

Maryam was squatting by the door to her house, wrapped in a chador
,
waiting for me, as she had when my grandmother brought me to her as an infant. She got up and we embraced tightly and kissed. Several years had passed since she visited Cambridge. Being back in that alley of my childhood, in Maryam’s arms and enveloped in her scent of rose water, I felt as if no time had gone by since we had lived there together.

As we passed through the courtyard, I recalled how flowers were in bloom in every season. Now snapdragons crawled up a wall. The plum and cherry trees were still standing in their spots. The latticed window to the basement, the stained-glass panes, were intact. In the living room a samovar was giving out sparks. The comforting daily ritual of Maryam having tea with other women while my cousins and I played nearby came back to me. A tin can, perhaps the one I used to water the plants in the courtyard, stood next to the samovar. Perhaps it had been there all these years.

Maryam served tea and pastries and fruit and we talked. Mohtaram was in Ahvaz, which was one of the first cities to be reconstructed after the war ended because of the oil fields. She was there to see what could be rescued from our bombed-out house and to sell some properties she owned in the area. Manijeh’s husband had died under mysterious circumstances, and she had married again and had two children, but Maryam didn’t know where they lived. My other aunts and cousins had left for mountainous villages and hadn’t returned to Tehran yet.

Maryam’s life wasn’t that different under the new regime, she told me, since her neighborhood had remained unchanged and because no bombs had been dropped on it. She had the same pattern of daily interaction with women, some from the neighborhood, and her new tenants. A young couple lived in the rooms that Ezat Sadaat had occupied. The husband had fought in the war, was wounded several times, and was finally sent home. He was a nice man, and assisted Maryam whenever she needed help with repairs and such things. Her other tenant was a widow who lived by herself. Maryam told me that Hamideh had died years ago, and Ezat Sadaat died of “shock and grief” when her nephew was executed during the Shah’s regime.

It was easy enough, I thought, to attribute many things to “shock and grief,” considering all the blows that had been dealt to people.

“How could that happen, she just fell down the stairs?” Maryam asked, confounded by Pari’s accident. “She was a wonderful girl, and her fate was so terrible.”

After a while I got up and walked from room to room. In my old room stood the crib that Maryam had kept in the basement after I outgrew it. It had a lace canopy and thick, protective cushions of a pale green silky material with a leafy pattern. A large rag doll, wearing a full-skirted blue satin dress and a blue ribbon in her hair, lay on one side. It was my doll from childhood. I held it in my arms and rocked it as I used to.

 

 

 

 

 

I woke every day to sparkling sunshine pouring into the room, to the sights of the trees and bushes in the courtyard, the murmur of Maryam saying her prayers, and felt utterly serene, as if I had no concerns in the world and was living moment by moment.

My serenity was shattered when I visited Pari’s friends and her absence was all too real. They were preoccupied with their own problems and losses but Pari’s name came up, followed by sighs and silences.

I couldn’t find the hairdresser I had met on my previous visit. The house where she had her salon was now a religious school for children. I had hoped her cousin who knew Taheri could find out Bijan’s whereabouts for me.

I wanted to see Mansour, partly to find out if he knew where Bijan was. But Zohreh told me Mansour had married and left Tehran, transferred by the company he worked for, but she didn’t know where.

When I visited Pari’s grave, I hoped that miraculously Majid might be there again but alas there was no such luck. I felt a loss, as if it were Pari who wanted to see him again one more time, give him another chance.

One morning I went to an office to leave my passport for “inspection.” It would be returned to me at the airport when I was leaving Iran. This rule applied to all Iranians coming and going, part of the security during the Shah’s time and continuing now.

It was siesta time when I returned to Maryam’s house. In the alley I could smell saffron, turmeric, and dried lemon. A woman wrapped in a chador came out of a house in the middle of the alley and walked in my direction. She was deep in thought, seeming oblivious of her surroundings. When she saw me, she stopped suddenly.

“Oh, Nahid, I’m Batul. I knew you were visiting. My mother heard the news from Maryam.” she said. “I was planning to come and see you.”

Batul, my friend who had been with me in the school courtyard when Father came and took me away.

“It’s amazing you recognized me,” I said excitedly as we embraced and kissed.

“There are traces of the child Nahid in you.”

“I see some of the child Batul in you, too.” Her face was still round, her features soft, but now there was a touch of anguish in her expression and manner, as I saw on the faces of many people in Iran.

“We’ve had so many dark years, but thank God finally things are getting better. It must be hard for you to live so far away from home. I’d miss my family, this neighborhood, so much. Home is home, even with all its problems.”

T
he next day I went to my old elementary school. I found it on the narrow, cobblestoned street lined with yellow-brick houses that looked new. The school was tucked between the stationery store that had always been there and a candy store. I stood in front of the school and stared into the courtyard. The large wooden door with bas-relief designs at the top was wide open. I could see students wandering around wearing head scarves and dark gray
rupush
es.

The day Father came and took me away rushed back to me all at once. I had been particularly happy that year, partly because I loved my teacher, Miss Modaresi. She was young, with long, lustrous brown hair and large dark brown eyes. Dimples appeared on her cheeks when she smiled. She read a poem or a few pages of a story to us every day. The themes were often nostalgic for what had been left behind or lost. Part of a poem floated forward from the recesses of my mind:

A bell rang, interrupting the images of those long-ago days and brought me back to the present. The students rushed into classrooms, and then I could hear voices reciting lines from a text:

 

A gray-haired man came out of the school and started pruning the dried branches from trees on either side of the door. I told him I used to go to school there many years ago.

“You must miss home. Nothing is like home,” he said.

How much happier I would be if it were possible to mesh my present life with the one from those faraway days, I thought. I wouldn’t feel so fractured inside, so full of longing, envious of everyone who has easy access to their homes and loved ones. This was the price I was paying for the independence I had fought so fiercely for.

When I returned, Maryam gave me a bundle of letters she had saved, some were from me when I lived in Ahvaz, a few were from Mohtaram. As she prayed I read the letters.

A letter I wrote to her from Ahvaz said:

 

Another was from Mohtaram to Maryam:

 

When Maryam paused between her prayers I asked her about the ring.

“Look behind the curtain in that room,” she said, pointing. “I found it there a few days ago and meant to take it out for you.”

I sensed reluctance in her, as if there was something hidden in that ring. She resumed praying and I went into the room. A curtain covered the alcove where Maryam used to keep bedding, pillows, sheets, and quilts. The curtain was dark blue with yellow daisies on it, probably fabric left over from a dress. I pulled the curtain aside. There was no bedding there now, just random items—a brass candlestick, a prayer rug, a rosary, a box. I opened the box, but it was filled with odds and ends, a tortoiseshell comb, several golden bobby pins, like the ones my grandmother wore, a yellow silk handkerchief. As I put the box back, my hand touched something. It was a blue velvet cloth tied at the top with a thin white ribbon. I untied the ribbon and found inside a gold cardboard box with a floral design on it. Inside the box was a gold ring with a cluster of tiny diamonds.