by Parisa Reza
In early Shahrivar 1320, at the foot of Gholhak’s hill, where a few large jujube trees have grown up around a stream, four school friends are playing: Bahram, Ali-Agha, Siavosh, and Ghassem. They are all up in a jujube tree picking the fruit that they call “Chinese dates.”
“I have the most!”
“No, I do! Look at them!”
“Whoever jumps out of the tree without dropping his dates is the winner!”
“I don’t care about winning, I don’t want to break a leg.”
There on that tree, which is said to come from paradise and whose leaves are said to be a talisman against witchcraft, they should be safe from harm: The distant sound of other children laughing mingles with their own laughter, and the wind sifts playfully through the branches. They are happy. But there is suddenly a resounding explosion. They have never heard anything so loud. Panic-stricken, they obey their survival instinct: They jump from the tree and melt away. Except for Ali-Agha, who stays and picks up the dates his friends have left behind. Siavosh vanishes; Bahram and Ghassem run along the dry riverbed. They spot a bomber plane that has just dropped a bomb on the arms factory to the east of Gholhak.
They will never know whether it is a Russian plane or an English one, but it wheels around overhead, and Bahram and Ghassem think it is chasing them, that they are its next target. Bahram is now famous for his gift as a runner, but he slows regularly so as not to abandon his friend. He finds it impossible to go at the same speed as other people, so he constantly gets ahead and has to stop and wait for his friends. The two breathless boys take refuge under Gholhak’s bridge. They watch the plane, peeping their shaven heads out and then hiding again, until it disappears on the horizon.
This marks the beginning of the black nights and chaotic days of the Allied offensive in Iran. In the Amir household on the evening after the bombing of Gholhak’s factory, Talla fills a large pail of water and the three of them sit around it. The radio has told them: If a bomb is dropped they are to pour water over themselves. All their neighbors have done it too: All of Gholhak is sitting around buckets of water that evening.
Whole families of Tehranis arrive, talking of war, the Russians, the English, the bombing. Sardar, who left Ghamsar to get away from curses, starts to think that wherever you go the sky is the same color, and he who has the biggest roof has to sweep the most snow. In Ghamsar the invaders were bandits, in Tehran they are Farangi troops. But the people here seem to have no urge to flee into the mountain, they just say it will pass, that in Iran wars come to an end and invaders go back home, or become so Iranian themselves that they can no longer be distinguished from anyone else. As the saying goes: That, too, will pass. So Sardar eventually learns not to worry. He gets himself organized, keeps himself busy, and thinks about protecting his animals and hiding his provisions.
Four days after leaving for war, Mohsen comes home: He has deserted like everyone else, even the officers vanished. That same day the Iranian government calls for a truce to negotiate their surrender. Nine infantry divisions along with the Iranian air force and navy have been annihilated in under a week. The oil fields and the trans-Iranian railway line have fallen into Allied hands. Iran has been defeated and ends up declaring war on Germany.
On Shahrivar 25 the radio announces that Reza Shah is abdicating in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who swears his oath on the Koran to the National Assembly and becomes Iran’s new sovereign at the age of twenty-two.
The next day Iran is invaded jointly by the English and the Russians, and Reza Shah goes into exile with his entire family. They travel through Iran from north to south on the same road Talla and Sardar took but in the opposite direction. When they reach Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf they board an English ship bound for Mauritius. Reza Shah is never to return from exile, and dies in Johannesburg at the end of the war.
Iran is occupied but a spirit of freedom breathes through it on the wind. The new king distances himself from his father’s policies, condemning his despotic behavior. He returns assets seized from the Uluma, frees political prisoners, promises to bring an end to mixed schools and to set up a department of theology at Tehran University. People flock back to Iran: the exiled, disgraced former friends or ministers of Reza Shah’s, all those who escaped execution and who were forced or chose to move abroad or to Iran’s far-flung provinces. Tribes dig up their buried weapons; their deposed leaders return from banishment and resume their titles—abolished ten years earlier by Reza Shah—as khan or sheik of their land. Mullahs reemerge from the libraries of their religious clubs, go back to their mosques, and start preaching again. Old politicians make a dignified return to the political scene, and young intellectuals eagerly publish books, newspapers, and manifestoes. Iran’s thirteenth National Assembly comes together under foreign occupation. From now on the Assembly will appoint the prime minister, whose cabinet constantly falls and reinvents itself depending on the Shah’s moods and his alliances with his deputies, the British, the Americans, and the Soviets.
The people of Iran have thrown off all the constraints imposed by Reza Shah, and many women now appear in public again in their chadors, while others choose to stop wearing the veil.
Talla, who has not worn one for years, follows her neighbors and friends in readopting the chador. She wears it out of propriety, without conviction, one with a pattern on a white background, the sort women used to wear only indoors. She ties it at her waist to free up her hands, and her hair can be seen sneaking out under the veil, her braids hang over her breasts and she makes no attempt to hide them. Never again will she wear a black chador or a roubandeh.
The new school year began a few days after the occupying soldiers arrived in Gholhak. When the headmaster stood before his war-befuddled pupils that morning at Djam School, he began his brief speech with the already famous words of Mohamma Ali Foroughi, the new prime minister, words he had spoken when his cabinet gave him a vote of confidence at the National Assembly: “They come and they shall go, for their own ends, and they have nothing against us.”
Then the headmaster went on: “You should have no fear in your hearts, because Iran has been occupied by far more terrifying invaders than these, but life moves on and Iran still stands. You should be proud, my dear children, proud of your country. Don’t go looking for fights, feel no hatred, this is not our war. Don’t fret, they will leave. They’re only here to pass through, and pass through they will, as all the others have . . . ”
It was early in the fall and still hot enough for Bahram to be sleeping on the roof. With the curfews, the nights were even darker and the stars so low that you could sometimes see a whole veil of them shifting across the sky. On nights like these they said the imams traveled on the stars to attend receptions among them.
Up on the roof Bahram had no thoughts of war. He gazed at the sky and wondered how he could draw it. Whenever he had a pen in his hand he would draw, landscapes on pieces of paper, and fake tattoos on his arms, like those he noticed on the louts at the hammam. He drew with his left hand, his eyes unblinking. He lay on his back, stroking the gray and white kitten who slept with him, and who woke him at dawn by pawing playfully at his face. Despite her wariness of cats, Talla had given in to her son’s pleading and the two of them were already inseparable, day and night. From where he lay he could hear people talking about the Germans, as people did all over town. And he wondered why the Germans had suddenly become the bad guys. He remembered the German women beside the pool with their white skin and golden hair. He thought of them as if the very thought were forbidden. A thought already forbidden because of the women’s nakedness, but even more so now that the Germans were banished. So he thought it even more quietly, but he thought it all the same.
The Soviet soldiers who moved into Gholhak were Turks and Kazakhstanis. Wherever they were from, though, they would always be known as “the Russians.” Even though they now called themselves “Soviets,” there was stil
l no mistaking them. The people here had known them too long to be fooled.
The Russian soldiers were hungry; they were given only black bread to eat. On the very day they arrived one of them stole food from a grocer and went into hiding. His troop set about searching for him and this added to the upheaval of having them in Gholhak. They were thirsty, too, and tramped through the streets pestering the inhabitants for water. Talla passed some over the wall to them. No one opened their doors; people had livestock and did not want this to be known. The Russians and English must not know anyone had livestock at home or they might come and take animals for slaughter; their soldiers were hungry.
Sometimes the soldiers also argued with the locals, who, once over their fear of foreigners, took no pity on these malnourished wretches. Of course religion encouraged everyone to help a neighbor in need, but no one even knew whether these were Muslims or infidels. Worse still, some said the Russians had lost their religion altogether, they had abandoned God, and God would abandon them. Talla could not really distinguish between Muslims and infidels, or between the pure and the impure. In a peasant woman’s life, there was already enough to do, so none would choose to add restrictive obligations. Talla had her own ways, like reciting a verse from the Koran three times and blowing on an impure thing to make it pure. She believed in these measures with all her might.
As soon as they arrived, the Russians installed a telegraph line. The wires ran past Bahram’s house and went all the way to the Soviet embassy. For Bahram and his friends this was like a new toy: They stole the wooden posts that held up the wires and threw them into abandoned wells, leaving the wires to trail on the ground and cutting off the communication. The Russians were quick to repair the damage, and the children sniggered. Before long, guards were put on duty to protect the line. The children befriended the guards, who quickly grew bored of standing by telegraph posts. They played together with slingshots, and Bahram brought them water or milk and occasionally even a cup of tea. Then the Allies withdrew from the Tehran region, and the Russian soldiers left Gholhak. Bahram pilfered some bread and cheese from Talla and gave these provisions to a very young soldier called Omar who had become his friend. It was meant for the journey but Omar ate it all on the spot for fear of being robbed along the way. Bahram went back home and brought him a bowl of dried fruit to put in his pockets, and he gave him a piece of paper with his name written on it so Omar could write him letters and send him news. Then, copying Talla’s routine, Bahram recited a surah from the Koran and blew on the soldier to protect him from evil. Omar did not understand what his friend expected of him and all he saw in the Persian writing on that piece of paper was a souvenir drawing.
Bahram would see blond women again, in a film this time. They were the same, exactly the same, but American. So were German women not the only ones with blond hair? Bahram had believed for a while that the Allies did not like the Germans because their women were debauched, and too beautiful. That couldn’t have been it, though . . .
But the first time Bahram went to a movie screening there were no blond women in the film. In their barracks the Russian soldiers had set up a mobile projector and a white curtain on which they showed anti-Nazi propaganda films. During the projection one of the Russians gave a commentary in Turkish, and someone did his best to translate. No one was interested in the subject; they were all fascinated by the machine.
Talla attended that first screening. Talla and movies! Movies would never wonder what a woman like Talla might understand of them, but Talla would do a lot of thinking about movies. How could human beings possibly walk on a curtain? And now there were others coming up behind them, and vehicles too, where on earth had they come from when the only thing behind the curtain was its lining? And why didn’t it all overflow, why didn’t the marching soldiers fall on the floor in front of the curtain? And all these things seemed to exist in a real world, trees, buildings, the ground, the sky, all of it! Even war. And it was all nothing. Nothing that matched Talla’s understanding of a real world. It was enough to drive her crazy!
Who could explain the movies to Talla? No one. And Talla never did understand what movies were, nor television when it arrived. Although television, which came to Iran in the late 1950s, seemed more plausible to her, because of the set itself, which could house this miniature population. This was a perfectly acceptable hypothesis for someone who had believed all her life in enchanted creatures of every shape and size. She spoke to the characters on the screen, saying hello and wishing them goodnight. Now elderly and believing she was being watched, she made sure the room was tidy and she was sitting nicely before turning on the set. Sometimes the people on the screen irritated her and she threw insults at them, but the rest of the time she was very friendly.
It was when he was nine that Bahram had an opportunity to go to a real movie theater. Mohsen, his friend Ali-Agha’s older brother, took them to Tehran’s Lalehzar Street, which Naser al-Din Shah had had built like the Champs Elysées after a trip to Paris: a street full of theaters and cinemas where black-and-white movies from the Western world were screened with Persian subtitles—detective movies, action movies, love stories, and westerns. Which is why, with apologies to Naser al-Din Shah, some called it Texas Street!
It was Mohsen’s first time, too, and he made a mistake, taking them to a theater where no one asked to see their tickets. Slightly surprised, they thought they had had a good deal, and sat themselves down. Other people came and sat down, the room filled up, and then a man came and made a speech: They realized the room had been booked by a private school. Children dressed as angels and demons came on stage and put on what the three boys thought was a very strange show. They headed back to Gholhak confused and disappointed but on their way home, Bahram remembered something that had happened that morning. Just before he set off to the movies he had seen a hen that had been missing for over a month coming up from the bottom of the yard. Behind her was a chick, then another, then a third; in all nine chicks appeared out of nowhere. Bahram had squealed so loudly that Talla was startled. At the sight of these abundant gifts from God, she smothered her son with kisses and gave him an extra coin to buy some candy. Now Bahram cursed the hen, which, by arriving with such pomp, had monopolized all of the day’s good luck so there was nothing but bad luck left for the hours to come.
They soon went back to Lalehzar Street. This time they bought three tickets and went into a proper movie theater with a royal box, which stayed empty that day. They watched a gangster film and Bahram sat openmouthed through the whole screening. Men in suits and hats with revolvers in their pockets strolled about with beautiful blond women; they killed other men who stepped out of fabulous cars, with other blond women in clinging, full-length dresses, women who wore dazzling jewels and dead foxes around their necks. Back at home, Bahram and Ali-Agha started playing gangsters; they roamed Gholhak’s vacant lots pretending to sneer at revolvers, step out of cars, escort beautiful women . . .
That film fueled their games for several years, until they were about fifteen and old enough to go back to the movies on their own. Movies soon became their passion, as it was for all the capital’s inhabitants, and the city’s movie theaters were always full.
Talla, the mistrustful peasant woman who had not known any sort of refinement, still never neglected Norouz, the Zoroastrian New Year and one of its major feast days. It fell on the spring equinox, in the first month of the zodiacal calendar.
In preparation for the coming year, the last few weeks of winter were spent in spring cleaning. Talla completely emptied out both rooms in her house, the one on the ground floor and the one above it. She thoroughly washed everything that could be washed: curtains, bedcovers, carpets, etc. She cleaned the rooms from top to bottom and then put everything back where it belonged. In other homes this process was an opportunity to throw out anything that was in the way or of no use. But Talla never threw anything away, not even scraps of wood or bits of string found in th
e street. The more she hoarded around her, the more reassuring she found it. When she ran out of room, she consented to move things to the shed Sardar had built in the yard so that he did not have live alongside the bricks and metal rods Talla picked up in the street.
When the house was clean and tidy, she tackled the henhouse and the stable, and finished with the yard and its pond.
After this, because tradition required every family to wear new clothes for the changing of the year, they would go together to choose them. There was no debate about Bahram’s outfit; they went to the tailor and ordered a suit just the right size, or perhaps a little bigger so he could wear it all year, and they had a couple of white shirts made for him. The tailor also sold underwear and socks. Then they went to the cobbler and bought a pair of thick leather slip-on shoes. Talla had a neighbor make her a long dress and a pair of leggings in cheap fabric. Sardar never bought himself an entirely new outfit. He might replace some pants, a shirt, very occasionally a jacket. Some years he would make do with a new pair of socks. Sardar did not go to Bahram’s tailor, but to the old sewing man who could not make fashionable suits and supplied him with pants held at the waist with string. Farangi pants were not for him. But for Bahram, yes. His son was an extension of him, his continuity; himself but better, his reflection in the modern world. So then, let Bahram wear smart clothes, let him go to school, to the movies . . .
On New Year’s Day they put on their new clothes and sat in their family room at a table covered with a cloth on which Talla had prepared Haft Sin. This comprised seven elements all of which had names beginning with S, and symbolized wishes for the year to come: Sabzeh, grains of wheat, for rebirth; Samanu, wheat dough, for abundance; Senjed, dried jujube fruit, for love; Sib, apples, for beauty and good health; Sonbol, hyacinth flowers, for the onset of spring; Serkeh, vinegar, for age and patience; and a few Sekkeh, coins, for prosperity. Other things Talla had put on the table were a mirror, the one from her wedding day; a bowl containing an orange, which, in ancient times, apparently represented the earth hovering in space; a vial of rosewater from her village; and lastly the Koran. In those days she did not include goldfish or colored eggs.