Also by Deborah ELLIS
Parvana
Parvana’s Journey
Parvana’s Promise
Shauzia
Looking for X
A Company of Fools
The Heaven Shop
Diego, run!
Diego’s Pride
Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli children speak out
Children of War
Off to War
No Safe Place
The Best Day of My Life
First published in Australia in 2015
Copyright © Deborah Ellis, 2014, originally publishing by Pajama Press, Toronto, Canada
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 9 781 76011 197 7
eISBN 9 78 1 74343 976 0
Cover and text design: Sandra Nobes
Cover photo: Shutterstock
Typeset by Tou-Can Design
TO THOSE WHO have loved and have perished for it, and to those who love still, dancing and rejoicing in the face of oppression.
I’M THE KEEPER of my secrets, aware of my time.
HAFEZ
THIS NOVEL IS based on a true story.
CONTENTS
PART ONE
ONE 1988
TWO
THREE
FOUR
PART TWO
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
AUTHOR'S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART ONE
ONE
1988
DEMON HUNTERS OF THE DESERT
Ancient demons roam an ancient land.
They dwell in the valleys and lurk in the mountains. They hide among the grains of sand and sleep beside the scorpions.
They watch the humans go on about their insignificant business – shopping in the markets, heeding the call to prayer, taking care of their children. The humans are busy. The demons go unnoticed.
The demons play their games and inflict their pain – a train crash here, a sick child there – and the humans blame themselves, their own failings, beating their chests and decrying their weaknesses before God.
The demons just laugh.
And thus the eons pass.
Until one of the humans finally wakes up, opens her eyes, and decides to fight back.
‘YOU’RE WRITING ABOUT demons.’
Principal Kobra’s voice was hard and humorless.
Farrin lifted her eyes from her open notebook on the principal’s desk and looked into the woman’s face. She tried to figure out how much trouble she was in.
‘She was supposed to be doing chemistry.’ This came from the third person in the office. Pargol, the class monitor, was one of the most powerful students in the school. She was also the biggest rat.
‘My assignment was completed,’ Farrin said. ‘I wrote this after my work was done.’
‘So you know all there is to know about chemistry, then,’ Principal Kobra said. ‘How lucky we are to have such a brilliant student at our school. What is the chemical formula for carbon tetrachloride?’
Farrin knew the answer and fired it back, only to have another question thrown at her, then another and another. When she finally stumbled, Pargol answered in her place. Farrin wanted to slap the smirk right off the monitor’s face.
‘Stop slouching!’
The order took Farrin by surprise. She didn’t respond right away.
‘Stand up straight!’
Farrin was already standing as straight as she thought any human could, but she lifted her head and shifted her body slightly to make it look like she was obeying. Now, instead of looking at the face of the principal, she was staring straight into the eyes of Ayatollah Khomeini. A large portrait of the Iranian leader hung on the wall over the principal’s desk, just as it hung in every room in the school.
The principal was just getting warmed up.
‘Do you think we fought for the revolution and kicked the Shah out of power just so you could stand there and slouch?’
‘No, Principal Kobra.’
‘So many Iranians died in the bombing last night, and so many more will likely die tonight, and you stand there and slouch. It’s obscene.’
‘I’m sorry, Principal Kobra.’
‘Perhaps you think you know more than your teacher,’ the principal said. ‘Your chemistry teacher has a Master of Science degree, but you know better. Perhaps you think you know better than your class monitor. Pargol comes from a family that has given three sons to the war with Iraq. She is the highest achieving student in your year, while you lag behind in fifteenth position, but you know better.’
There was a rumor around school that in her free time, just for fun, Principal Kobra was an interrogator at Evin Prison.
‘No, Principal Kobra.’
Principal Kobra picked up Farrin’s notebook and held it in her hand.
‘You are writing about demons,’ she said again. ‘Demons in the desert.’ She flipped through the pages of the notebook, stopping here and there to read a phrase or examine a drawing. Farrin held her breath – there were sketches of the principal in that notebook.
‘Are these demons supposed to be in Iran?’
‘Yes, Principal Kobra.’
‘You want to be careful not to perpetuate a stereotype,’ the principal said. ‘Iran is only thirty percent desert. It is also mountains and marshes and lakes and fertile regions and cities.’
‘Yes, Principal Kobra. I mean to put all those into the story,’ Farrin said. ‘The inspiration was the shahnameh, where the hero battles dragons.’
That was a lie, of course. Farrin’s inspiration for the story was a grainy VHS recording of an old American television show, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, brought in secret to Farrin’s house by the Briefcase Man. But she wasn’t about to say that!
‘You aspire to be another Ferdowsi?’ asked the principal, speaking with reverence the name of one of Iran’s ancient storytellers. ‘An admirable goal.’
‘Thank you, Principal Kobra.’ Farrin glanced over at Pargol, who was looking slightly disturbed by this unexpected bit of praise.
‘Who do the demons represent?’
In an instant, Farrin saw the smirk return to Pargol’s face and realized she’d been asked a question she had no idea how to answer. Which meant it was a dangerous question. In Iran, it was important to always be prepared with answers. It was best if the answers w
ere true. At the very least, the answers had to be believable and on the right side of politics.
Who were the demons? In Farrin’s mind, they were just demons – standard, run-of-the-mill creatures of the underworld and the afterlife, djinn and ghouls, shape-shifters and blood-sucking foot-lickers. She was writing the story because she saw an episode of The Night Stalker that had a Middle Eastern demon in it, and the show had gotten it all wrong. But that answer would not do.
‘Who do they represent?’ Farrin repeated the question to give herself time to think.
‘That’s not a difficult question,’ the principal said, ‘for a smart girl like you. You are fifteen, not five. Surely you don’t believe that fairies and pixies really exist. I know you’ve studied allegory in your literature classes. So I’ll ask you again and I want an answer straight away or I’ll have to start wondering if you are hiding something. Who do the demons represent?’
Farrin’s parents were always warning her to keep her mouth shut and her activities beyond question. ‘They’re watching us,’ her mother said. ‘We’re trying to put the Shah back in power. Nothing is more important than that. So behave yourself. All it takes is one mistake.’
She had a sudden flash of brilliance. She actually grinned as she said, ‘The demons represent the antirevolutionary forces, Principal Kobra!’
Principal Kobra stood up and came around her desk to stand a few short feet in front of Farrin.
‘Apologize to your class monitor for forcing her to report you.’
Farrin turned to Pargol and said in a voice that sounded as sincere as she could manage, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘And?’ the principal asked.
‘And … thank you for helping me become a better student.’ Farrin knew what was expected. She’d deal later with that rat of a monitor.
‘I suppose you want this back,’ the principal said, holding up the notebook. ‘Do I need to remind you that this is a school for gifted girls? You have been invited into it, and you can also be invited out. Writing stories about demons during class time is an insult to your chemistry teacher. If you don’t want to pay attention to your studies, we can find someone else to sit at your desk.’
Principal Kobra held the notebook out to Farrin but kept a firm grip on it.
‘You are a smart girl, Farrin,’ the principal added in a quiet voice. ‘You are strong willed and you are smart. These are good qualities. These are qualities all Iranian women should have. These are qualities that give you confidence. Just be careful you don’t end up with too much confidence.’
She released her hand from Farrin’s notebook and nodded her dismissal.
Farrin retreated as fast as her legs would take her. She wasn’t worried about maintaining any shreds of dignity. All she wanted was to escape.
TWO
FARRIN PLOTTED HER revenge all the way to the cloakroom.
She was so tired of that sneak monitor sticking her nose into everybody’s business. School would be fine without Pargol and her spies. Farrin could parrot back the right answers in her revolution classes. Most of her teachers were enthusiastic about their subjects and really cared that their students learned. And even though Farrin had no friends at the school, she had to admit that most of the students were all right, despite what her mother said about them belonging to the wrong social class. She might even enjoy herself if she were able to have one or two friends there.
‘If you want friends, I will find you friends,’ was one of her mother’s standard phrases. ‘We can’t allow you to become involved with some low-class rabble. When I was a girl, that school was really a special place – ’
And Mom would be off on one of her good-old-days tirades. She had attended Farrin’s school back when it was a place where moneyed families sent their daughters to be ‘finished’ rather than educated. After the revolution, it was turned into a school for intelligent girls from all over Tehran. Admission was by test score only, and tuition was free. Girls from all sorts of families attended now.
‘It’s not the same,’ Farrin’s mother would whine. She refused to go to prize-giving ceremonies, even when her daughter received a prize. ‘There’s no value in distinguishing yourself among a pack of dirt-dwellers,’ was another of her mother’s sayings. ‘Do your work to avoid trouble, but there is nothing to be gained by flaunting it and drawing attention to yourself. There’s too much at stake.’
It was like a crazy balancing act. Farrin had to do her work well enough to avoid getting kicked out – since whatever other school she’d have to go to would be worse – but she could never become engaged enough to attract notice. As a result, she was often sent home with could-do-betters on her report card.
Farrin didn’t care about that. Her whole life was about living with lies.
She was five when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by what her mother called the dirt-dwelling rabble. Everything changed. Women had to cover their heads – not one single strand of hair could show or the Revolutionary Guards would harass them, right on the street. There were women in the Guards whose job it was to drive around the city and look for women who were not dressed according to the new rules.
‘There’s a career for you,’ her mother would sneer whenever they’d been stopped and yelled at for a clothing violation. ‘All the things that need fixing in this country and they worry about hair.’ Her mother would mutter almost under her breath. On the streets the spies could be anywhere, just as it was at Farrin’s school. Farrin grew up wearing two faces – one face she wore when she was out in the world and another face she wore when she was in private.
The story she was writing in her notebook was an attempt to escape all that. It had nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with the Shah, nothing to do with the revolution, nothing to do with religion. Just an exciting story about a girl battling demons and winning.
Farrin stomped through the halls, past the giant revolutionary slogans on the walls, barely noticing the white-chadored younger girls scurrying to get out of her way. She clutched her notebook so tightly that the wire coils were imprinted on the palm of her hand.
The story might have been really good, good enough to be made into a book. And maybe the book would have been so good and so popular that it would have been made into a TV show, a TV show that might have been shown around the world, and then everyone would know that Iran had strong, clever, creative girls … and maybe she’d have been invited to make other TV shows in England or even in America.
Now it was all ruined. All because of that horrible Pargol.
Pargol would have to pay.
Farrin turned into the cloakroom. Rows of black chadors hung from pegs.
The school uniform was a black tunic with a gray headscarf for the older girls and a white scarf for the juniors. Most of the girls wore long, dark gray manteaus outside. The ones from the most conservative families, which included all the monitors, wore voluminous black chadors over their school clothes.
Farrin wore the manteau. Her mother considered the chador a symbol of the revolution, and therefore something that was against the Shah.
Farrin plopped down on the bench beneath her peg. Each student had a peg on the wall, a spot on a bench, and a crate underneath for things like outdoor shoes and sports equipment. Farrin threw her notebook to the floor by her crate.
All that work! All those dreams! She felt silly now, like some little kid who still believed in fairy tales.
She stared at her notebook; it had landed in a pod of dust. The girls in charge of cleaning the cloakroom that week hadn’t done their job very well. There was rubbish all around.
Rubbish, Farrin thought. That’s all my demon story is.
Her eyes landed on a nib of white chalk, lying in the gray dust like a tiny mushroom in the forest. It was an unusual bit of rubbish. The teachers jealously guarded school supplies, since there were never enough of them to go around. A piece of chalk, adrift and ownerless, was unheard of.
Farrin looked around. All the oth
er students were at one of the mandatory after-school enrichment activities. She was alone in the cloakroom. In a flash, she bent down and picked up the chalk. The black chadors looked an awful lot like chalkboards.
Trembling all over – since what she was doing was definitely breaking the rules – Farrin found Pargol’s chador, spread it out so that she had a flat surface to work on, and made her first chalk mark. The white chalk stood out starkly against the black cloth.
Then she hesitated. What to write? She didn’t want Pargol to get arrested, just yelled at by woman from the Revolutionary Guard.
Her imagination failed her. Worried that someone would come into the cloakroom and catch her, she quickly drew a large white circle, put two dots inside it for eyes, and added a big, grinning semicircle for a mouth. Then she pocketed the chalk and sat back down by her own peg. She opened up her crate just as a flood of chattering juniors opened the cloakroom door and streamed inside.
Farrin leaned against the wall. The younger girls always looked so happy, so unconcerned. Did they have any worries? Had she been like that when she was younger? Were any of them covering up their parents’ secrets, like she was? She admired their easy way with each other – the chatting, the joking, the giggling, the jostling. They were like mice.
No burdens, Farrin thought. They can’t possibly be carrying any burdens.
The door opened again for more juniors. Through the cacophony of conversation, Farrin heard a different sound. It was a sound she had never heard before at that school, and it was so unexpected that for a moment she had trouble identifying it.
But then she knew.
It was music.
Music itself was not against the law in Iran. Songs about the revolution were encouraged. But any other music had not been allowed officially as far back as Farrin could remember.
The sound disappeared with the closing of the door then could be heard again as a few juniors grabbed their backpacks and left the cloakroom to start their journeys home. Straining to hear, Farrin grew frustrated.
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