Moon at Nine

by Deborah Ellis

  ‘Ada says you did, and I’ll believe her long before I believe you.’

  ‘That says a lot,’ said Farrin.

  ‘Yes, it does. Why were you late? Look at me when I’m talking to you.’

  Farrin lifted her head and looked at her mother. ‘I was at the construction site with Dad. I wanted to learn more about the business.’

  ‘What for? You’ll never work in it. I want you downstairs. Some of the ladies would like to hear you play.’

  ‘I’m busy,’ Farrin said. ‘I’m doing homework.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  Her mother made a move toward the notebook. Farrin held it to her chest.

  ‘I thought so,’ her mother said. ‘Wasting time again. Downstairs, please. And try to put a smile on your face. It is a party.’

  ‘I think it is shameful to have a party when so many died in the bombing last night and even more will die tonight,’ Farrin said. ‘It’s like “The Masque of the Red Death” at your parties – everybody drinking and having fun and thinking they can just lock Death out of the castle, but Death comes in anyway.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Farrin, must you be so dramatic about everything? So much has been taken from us. What is the point of living anymore if we can’t have a little bit of fun now and then?’

  ‘I don’t think your parties are fun,’ Farrin said. ‘I think they are obscene when so many Iranians are suffering. I’m not coming down. Your ladies can meet the end of the world without my piano playing.’

  Her mother gave one of her exaggerated sighs, even though they had had no effect on Farrin for some time. ‘After all we’ve given her, you’d think a daughter would be grateful and try to please her mother by simply playing a happy little tune for some sad, frightened neighbors. But I understand. You exist at a much deeper level than all of us. You feel the pain of the universe, and I respect you for that.’

  In one smooth, decisive move, her mother crossed the room and swept up Farrin’s food tray.

  ‘You can feel the pain of others much more clearly if your stomach is not filled with decadent delicacies,’ her mother said before she left, slamming the door behind her.

  Farrin threw her notebook at the door. Her mother was probably out of earshot already, not that it would have made any difference. The whole family slammed and threw things. It was like the background music for their daily lives.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll get Ahmad to drive me to a grocery shop and I’ll stock up on packaged food,’ Farrin said aloud. ‘Or, even better, I’ll steal it from the pantry. And while I’m at it, I’ll load up the car for Ahmad and his little band of Afghan workers.’

  Farrin’s anger took the edge off her appetite for a few hours. She watched a few more episodes of The Night Stalker, wrote a bit on her demon story, and even did a splash of homework. As time passed, more people arrived and the party noises got louder.

  Finally she was so hungry that she decided to chance it. She counted on her mother being too involved with her friends to even remember that she had a daughter.

  She opened the door a crack. No one was in the hallway. Down the stairs, back through the formal sitting room and into the kitchen. The kitchen staff was washing dishes. Unlike Ada, these young women had no long history with her mother’s family. Farrin doubted her mother even knew their names. Farrin did, though.

  ‘Any food left, Zahra?’ she asked one of the women.

  ‘I’ll make you up a plate,’ Zahra said.

  ‘Don’t be dainty,’ Farrin said. ‘Just dump the food on. I’m in a race against my mother. The first one to get back to my bedroom wins.’

  Zahra took a tray and started heaping on the bread, roasted chicken, feta cheese, and fruit. Farrin was just reaching into a bakery box for a couple of pieces of baklava when she felt a claw on her shoulder.

  ‘Feeling the suffering of the Iranian people?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Oh, here is your lovely daughter!’ One of her mother’s friends stepped into the kitchen. ‘Farrin, your mother has been bragging about your piano playing. You will honor us with a small piece of music, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course she will,’ her mother answered for her. ‘She loves to play the piano for our guests.’

  With her mother’s fingers like talons in her neck, Farrin headed for the inner room.

  The first thing that greeted her when she opened the door was a large picture of the Shah of Iran. A cloud of cigarette smoke wafted around it, giving it a mysterious, mystic appearance. The next thing Farrin saw was the bar, a cabinet that held the family’s liquor supply. The cabinet, which was usually locked, was now open, its contents littering tabletops all around the room. Rock and roll was coming from the stereo, and her parents’ friends were dancing.

  ‘Let’s get this over with,’ Farrin said under her breath.

  Her mother turned the stereo off and clinked a fork against her wine glass.

  ‘Let me have your attention, please,’ her mother said. ‘I would like to introduce you to – well, you all know her already, so it is not an introduction, but I would like you to hear my daughter Farrin play the piano. Farrin, clear off that piano bench and sit down. And smile, for crying out loud!’

  The bench had been a repository for empty glasses and full ashtrays. Farrin resisted the urge to sweep it all to the floor with her forearm. Instead, she carefully placed the detritus on the floor by the piano legs and sat down.

  ‘Now I know she looks like a bit of a monkey, with that dark skin of hers,’ her mother said. ‘That’s what I get for marrying into a family of desert-dwellers. But look beyond that ugliness, if you can, and just listen. All right, Farrin, don’t just sit there. Start playing. And play well. Don’t make me a liar in front of my friends.’

  Farrin looked to her father to see if he might say something in her defense, but he was too busy pouring himself another drink. He rarely stood up to her mother, anyway.

  She wondered what to play.

  For a moment, she considered playing something childish, and doing it badly, so that her mother would be humiliated. But then she thought about what the party was all about, and ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ the Edgar Allen Poe story about people trying to keep the plague out of their party. And her fingers started to move across the keyboard.

  The party stopped. There was no fidgeting, no clinking of glasses – all drinking and smoking ceased. I’ll show them, Farrin thought at first as she pounded the keys defiantly, but soon she was drawn into the emotion of the music.

  The words of Principal Kobra, the ones she had so cynically parroted back to her mother in order to appear morally superior, became words that had depth and meaning. People died last night. And more would die tonight as well, unless Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah, and all their combined forces decided they were done fighting and were ready to go home and be still.

  The bombs falling, the young boys rushing into the battlefield, the widows crying, the homes being smashed, the long, sad marches to the graveyards – all these things found their way into Farrin’s playing. And the atmosphere of forced gaiety that had ruled the party and the lives of the adults fell away as the sorrow of the war entered the room.

  The song came to an end. The ghosts of the notes still hovered over the piano, holding the peace over the gathering.

  Farrin’s mother shattered the silence.

  She bent down low to talk right in Farrin’s ear. ‘This is supposed to be a party,’ she snarled. ‘Are you so obtuse that you can’t understand – ?’

  Saddam’s bombs were louder than her mother’s snarl.

  The air-raid sirens started going off after the first bomb exploded. The explosion was close enough to the house to knock some of the whiskey glasses off the tables, but not close enough to shatter the windows.

  ‘Everyone – into the storeroom!’

  Farrin’s father shepherded the group, using his arms to direct everyone into the small room at the very center of the house. Built with a reinforced ceilin
g and lined with shelves, it acted as their bomb shelter.

  The electricity went out. The house was so dark that people tripped over chairs and each other as they groped their way to the storeroom. Farrin was swept along in a clutch of people. She couldn’t tell who they were.

  Saddam and his army were in fine form that night, with plane after plane dropping bomb after bomb. Farrin counted four explosions before she got to the storeroom, where her father had at last discovered a flashlight with working batteries.

  Farrin perched on a large plastic bin filled with bags of powdered milk. Someone lit a cigarette, immediately setting off a chain of others lighting up. Soon the little room was more smoke than air. Farrin coughed, but no one seemed to care.

  ‘Put your cigarettes out, please,’ her father said. Farrin silently thanked him.

  ‘How are we supposed to get through this without cigarettes?’ That came from her mother. ‘Someone open the door a crack – that will bring in some fresh air. I don’t suppose anyone thought to bring the Bordeaux.’

  Farrin hated her mother in that moment, then in the next, she wondered if her mother had the right attitude. What else were they supposed to do during a bombing? Cry? Pray? Sit and shake with fear? She had done all of those things before, but the bombs fell anyway. Maybe it was best to act as if everything were normal.

  The bombing went on for a long time. Farrin’s father and mother found their way to her in the dark and sat with their arms around her, as if simple bone and sinew could protect her from the military might of an army eager to destroy.

  As the night went on the pretense of normality fell away. The house shook, and screams from the outside world seeped into the storeroom.

  ‘Maybe we really will die tonight,’ someone said.

  ‘Are you all right, Farrin?’ her father whispered to her.

  Farrin didn’t answer. What was there to say? She just wanted the bombing to end. She wanted to be back in her bedroom watching The Night Stalker and grouching about her mother.

  She closed her eyes against the darkness and tried to think of something – anything – that would take her head out of this tiny storeroom filled with drunk, smoking grown-ups and into a place where she had a life and a future. She tried to conjure up her demon story, and the prospects for fame and fortune as the story would be made into a big Hollywood movie.

  None of that worked.

  The thing that worked was something that she had not expected. She could not begin to explain it.

  What brought her calm and a feeling of hope was a vision that rose from somewhere deep in her chest.

  The vision was Sadira’s face.

  PART TWO

  FIVE

  FARRIN PLAYED IT cool.

  She saw Sadira at the flag raising in the school yard the next morning, but pretended as if she didn’t. She kept looking over toward the other end of the line where Sadira stood, just in case … she didn’t know what. In case Sadira disappeared? In case Sadira needed help remembering the words to the national anthem?

  Stop staring, she told herself. But she couldn’t make herself stop.

  ‘Farrin, you had better come to the front,’ Pargol said. It was Pargol’s turn to lead the school in morning exercises, and of course she saw Farrin not paying attention.

  Sheepishly, Farrin tried to muster an expression of defiance but could only manage to look at the ground, at the sky, at the other students – anywhere but in Sadira’s direction. What if Sadira was laughing at her? Even worse, what if Sadira had forgotten who she was?

  Farrin was forced to stand right beside Pargol while Pargol gave the usual ‘Let’s Work Hard For the Revolution and For Ayatollah Khomeini’ speech that started every day. Pargol was particularly verbose when it came to revolutionary lingo. The thicker it was, the more she thought it made her look tough. Farrin thought it just made Pargol more boring.

  ‘Where does she think it’s going to get her?’ Farrin whispered as Pargol droned on and on about fighting the Imperialists and the Iraqis. ‘She’ll never get to run Iran. At best, she’ll get to marry someone who runs Iran.’

  Farrin started to imagine Pargol as an older woman, still looking fierce and cross, standing behind a leader of Iran. The poor man would try to give a speech to the nation on television, and Pargol would poke him in the neck, correcting his grammar and telling him to sit up straight.

  The image gave Farrin the giggles, and she had to make a big show of coughing to cover it up. As she raised her hand to her mouth, her eyes went to Sadira. Her face was sparkling with the same mischievous energy that Farrin felt.

  She remembers me, Farrin thought.

  The blood rushed up from her toes to the top of her head and did a wild dervish dance in the middle of her chest.

  Finally, Pargol wound down. After her came Rabia, the school’s Head Girl. Farrin paid attention to Rabia. This tall, calm girl held power by being smart and kind, and by setting the sort of example all the girls wanted to follow. Pargol held power simply because she was mean and not afraid to make others afraid.

  Rabia briefly made an announcement about the mother-daughter tea coming up and asked for more volunteers to serve tea and clean up. Farrin knew her mother would not be going, so she saw no need to volunteer.

  Principal Kobra stepped up to the flag post. She sent Pargol, Farrin, and Rabia back into line.

  ‘This is the saddest duty I have to perform as your principal,’ she said. ‘I regret to inform you that another one of our students, Zohrey Bakshir, was lost in the bombing last night. She was in the junior school, in the second class. She was doing very well in arithmetic and loved to draw flowers. We will now have a moment of silence to think about her life and her family.’

  The school community went quiet.

  Beyond the walls that surrounded the school yard, Farrin could hear the traffic of Tehran. She could hear peddlars and taxis and stray dogs barking. She heard a baby crying and a mother telling her small child to get up out of the dirt, she just washed those clothes! Outside the walls, life went on as normal. Inside the walls, the girls were mute.

  This was not the first moment of silence at the school. It was not the second; it was not even the third. Farrin did not want to do the count.

  There had also been moments of silence for family members – for Pargol’s brothers and other girls’ fathers, or uncles, or brothers.

  Farrin though it was a wonder that there were any Iranians left at all.

  Then one of the students behind her let out a loud belch. It was an accident, of course, but it was a good excuse to laugh. Farrin held it together, but around her she could hear some of the younger ones stifle giggles.

  The assembly was brought to a close.

  The day was, as usual, full of study and work. Farrin was in line for lunch when Sadira picked up a tray and stood in line beside her.

  ‘Private joke?’ Sadira asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This morning. During Pargol’s speech. You were trying not to laugh. Was it a private joke or do you feel like sharing it?’

  Farrin placed a plate of chickpea stew with rice on her tray and moved down the line toward the glasses of juice. ‘I was imaging Pargol married to a prime minister,’ she said. ‘He’d be giving a speech and she’d push him out of the way and correct everything he said.’

  ‘If any woman can be the leader of Iran, it will be Pargol, or someone with her temperament.’

  ‘It sounds like you like her.’

  ‘I don’t have to like her to admire her,’ Sadira said, which Farrin had to admit was true. ‘Pargol is fearless. And she’s bossy. She could make men listen to her. She could run the country one day. Iran has a history of powerful women.’

  ‘Pargol might end up running the country, but only because she’ll have killed off all her enemies,’ Farrin said.

  Sadira just laughed at that.

  Farrin stood with her tray and surveyed the dining hall for a place to sit.

  ‘Are
you looking for your friends?’ Sadira asked. ‘Do you usually eat with them?’

  ‘I don’t really have friends,’ Farrin said, then wished she could snatch back such a bold admission.

  But Sadira admires boldness, she thought. So she added, ‘My mother doesn’t like me to have a lot of friends. She thinks – well, she wants the family protected.’

  ‘Is your mother here today?’ Sadira asked.

  Farrin grinned. Her mother certainly was not there.

  She spied an empty table. ‘How about over there by the window?’

  They sat and ate lunch and watched the junior girls play in the school yard. Farrin knew the other students were looking at them. In all her time at that school, Farrin had never eaten lunch with anyone, except when there were no empty tables to sit at. And that wasn’t really like eating with someone. It was more like a gang of cats tolerating a stray eating nearby, just for a little while.

  At first, Farrin felt self-conscious. How should she hold her fork? Was there a bit of carrot stuck in her teeth? Could she drink her juice without spilling it all over herself and looking like a great big fool in front of her new friend? But then they started talking and Farrin forgot all about herself. She watched Sadira eat and laugh, and she wished the lunch hour would go on forever.

  ‘Are those little girls crying?’ Sadira asked, spotting a few of the juniors huddled together by the slide.

  ‘Probably,’ said Farrin. ‘They’re from Zohrey’s class – you know, the girl who died.’

  ‘Let’s see if we can help.’

  They carried their trays to the kitchen then went outside. For the rest of the lunch hour, Sadira talked with the juniors, hugged them, and comforted them. The juniors took to Sadira right away, but they eyed Farrin with suspicion. Clearly, they had heard that no one liked her. But by the time the bell signaled the end of lunch, they were including Farrin in their talk. She was even allowed to fix one of the girl’s braids that had come loose.

  ‘I’m glad we did that,’ Farrin said. ‘By making them feel better, it feels as if we’ve won our own little battle against Saddam Hussein.’