The Cypress Tree

by Kamin Mohammadi

  Standing alone in the middle of this circle formed by all my housemates, I stared, my hand covering my open mouth, slowly turning around to take in the fact that everyone from the house was there and that they really were singing Happy Birthday to me. When they finished, they cheered and clapped and I blinked back tears and, for the first time since leaving Iran, I smiled unreservedly.

  After choking in the smog of fear, confusion and mortification that had polluted my life for the last year and three months, I suddenly felt able to breathe. Here, at last, was kindness.

  That was the moment when I drew a veil over the past and, like a refugee stumbling gratefully over a longed-for border, I set my face towards this new world, determined to fashion myself perfectly to it. From then on I stopped speaking Farsi and refused to speak to my relations when they rang us. I rejected everything about my country and remade myself as an English girl.

  17

  War is Coming

  Fatemeh Bibi had known the war would come, this she always told me every time I went back. She told me years later that although her sons and daughters listened feverishly to short-wave radios, tuned into the television, scoured the papers to try to fathom what was happening, she just felt it inside her. It was hard to know what was really going on, they complained, this new regime had taken over the media with extreme proficiency – this was the media age after all – and they were good at slogans, at propaganda, at feverish revolutionary pronouncements dripping in populist rejoinders and socialism wrapped up in a Shia Islamic package. It was therefore nearly impossible to decipher what might actually be happening through this spin, even for those in Iran who had always been good at decoding propaganda of some form or other to get at least a gist of the truth.

  But it mattered not what the news said or failed to say, Fatameh Bibi could feel it was coming. She told me that sometimes, at the fish market by the lazy waters of the Shatt, she stood out among the scribes who had their carbon papers and typewriters and plain paper set out neatly on their tables, ready to help those illiterates who needed letters written – despite the shah’s reforms, and his father’s, most people in Iran still could not read or write. She gazed out over the river, beyond the boats docked and those sailing gently by, some with the triangular sail of the dhow, others powered by engines spewing diesel fumes, spluttering like smokers at the end of their lives, and her eye raked the other shore. Iraq. There it was, looking so much the same, innocuous, the shore covered by lofty date palms, fecund and sun-drenched just like Khuzestan. Her mother was buried there, as Abbas had promised.

  She would look around at the ethnic Arabs who were part of Iran but preserved their tribes, their sheikhs, their own dress and customs – and called Khuzestan Arabestan. She, and other Fars people like her, had dwelt happily with the Iranian Arabs for years and while it was true they didn’t mix, there hadn’t been any trouble. Would these people, these women with their tattooed faces and black, sleeved chadors, the men in their abayas and headdresses, would they, as it was rumoured, turn against their Farsi neighbours and join the Iraqis to fight? Maman-joon had heard the rumours and she wondered if they were really sending out signals in the night to their Iraqi brethren on the other side of the river, letting them know when would be a good moment to attack?

  ‘Naneh,’ she would say, pointing a crooked finger. ‘Remember I have never liked war, I was born into one and and I have lived through enough.’ She didn’t think she could face another war. ‘You know,’ she would usually break off, ‘that just before the war was when I got my first great-grandchild!’

  Parivash’s eldest son, Alireza, Maman-joon’s first grandchild, had recently been married to Shahnaz, a modest young girl that Parivash and Jahanzadeh had picked for their eldest son, small and round-faced with a pretty smile, and around the end of the summer of 1980, she was delivered of a baby girl. Shahnaz was pious and she called her daughter Maryam, and Maryam, born on the eve of the war with Iraq and one year after the revolution, always had a special bond with Maman-joon.

  * * *

  While I was busy trying to severe the ties that bound me to my homeland, Iraqi forces were preparing to invade my country. In escalating skirmishes that started the devastation of Khuzestan, Iraq disputed the border between the two countries – set at a certain water level in the Shatt al-Arab – and the ancient enmity between Arab and Iranian was reignited. Fuelled by a historic disagreement over land, old racial resentment that stretched back to the Arab invasion of Iran in the seventh century and fanned by Western powers who did not want to see a revolutionary Iran spread its Shiite zeal across the Middle East, soon modern armies with modern methods of mass slaughter were rolled in to solve a historic problem that had been made worse by modern nationhood and the map-drawing skills of the superpowers.

  On 22 September 1980, four days after my new friends had sprung on me my birthday surprise, Iraqi forces invaded Iran. One month later the Iraqi army reached Abadan, the place of my birth, the town where my parents fell in love and were married, the Paris of Iran with its oil refinery and Fargilisi patois, where my grandfather had created himself and built a house in which he had waited eagerly for Fatemeh Bibi to return after her trips away, the town that transformed my father into a New Iranian and where my aunts and uncles had wooed and been wooed, had fallen in love and strolled by the river – Abadan was besieged by a hostile army.

  In Abadan my family had laughed and danced and fought, had celebrated and mourned and wept and made love. Abadan, where my grandfather Abbas was buried and my aunts, uncles, sister and I were born, its children made up of its dust and its humidity, of its flowing river and towering palms. Our Abadan where my father was trained and where he, in a moment quite beyond design, collided with history and found his vocation for life. From Abbas’ opium deals to Bagher’s oil deals, from the marriage of Fatemeh Bibi to the unknown Abbas to the union of my parents after a year long love story, Abadan had been part of us and we had been part of it now for more than sixty years, the dust and the blood mixed together to shape us into a family.

  On 24 October, Khorramshahr – then Iran’s largest port – also fell to the Iraqis. My great-grandparents’ first home in Khuzestan was in Khorramshahr and it was still home to many of their descendents, including my precious Khaleh Mina on whose roof I had spent so many blissful summer nights. Our little corner of the world, the place from which our roots sprung, was now occupied by Iraqi forces and, for the next eight years, would be the scene of carnage so savage that Khorramshahr became known as khunistan, the land of blood. During the two-year Iraqi foray into Khuzestan, 1.5 million people were made refugees in their own country. Among them were my family.

  On that first trip back to Iran, my lasting impression was of how much the war with Iraq had affected both sides of my family. It had already been over for eight years by then but I could still feel its presence everywhere. Everyone I spoke to mentioned it in conversation – there was no getting away from it.

  In Tehran Pars, Mehry’s younger brother, the jovial Behrooz, who had grown round as a laughing buddha, slapped his prodigious belly and said, ‘We all got fat in the war. They closed the mountains, you know, we couldn’t walk there any more.’

  When the fighting reached the cities and Tehran was suffering daily bombings, all the trekking paths through the mountains had been closed. My family found their movements restricted not only by the new laws of the regime, which made going out a ‘war of nerves’ according to my cousins, they were enclosed also by the curfews and restriction that ‘the war of the cities’ brought.

  In Shiraz, Maman-joon and Khaleh Mina told me the story of how they left Khuzestan. It was early in October and the Iraqis had still not reached Abadan but they were on their way. The inhabitants of Abadan were leaving in droves, pouring out of the city like a plague of locusts, commandeering any transport available. Petrol was in short supply and the few planes still flying were so overbooked that even Yassaman with her job at IranAir could not get tickets
for her family.

  Fatemeh Bibi had grown obstinate into the bargain. She had maintained there was nowhere for them to go. Her mind had roamed over the children she had living in Abadan, Khorramshahr, Ahvaz, and her brothers’ children too, all with their own families, their numbers legion, too many to count and certainly too many to move. It was impossible to contemplate and though they all begged her to pack up her house and prepare to leave, Fatemeh Bibi went about her daily routine as best she could and refused to budge.

  ‘Naneh, this is my home,’ she was just that morning telling Mina who had rung her to reiterate the request. ‘Naneh, where will we go? No, I am staying put, ghorbonet beram. Anyway, the Iraqis probably won’t make it this far, look how fiercely our boys are fighting them. And then we will have got up and left for what? Just so people can come and steal our things? No.’

  But Mina had a bad feeling that day. Something in her was worried, her belly was pickling and, despite her own fear of the Iraqis and the dangerous road to Abadan, she got into the sand-coloured Paykan that had replaced her Beetle a few years before, and drove from Khorramshahr to her mother’s house in Abadan.

  She found Fatemeh Bibi shuffling round the courtyard. The weather was just becoming clement, it was the time of year that they would start to think about moving their mattresses indoors to sleep. ‘Maman!’ she demanded shrilly, ‘Alo! Maman what are you doing? The whole world is running for their lives and you are here, ghorbonetam, pickling fruit, engar na-engar as if nothing is happening. Bejomb, move!’

  As they stood and argued in the courtyard – Fatemeh Bibi and Mina always bickered, it was their favourite method of communication – the sound of planes flying overhead buzzed closer. And closer. Before either woman had worked out whether they were the Iraqi planes or the Iranian ones they usually heard, or had time to feel the fear that had haunted them for the last few weeks since Iraq had crossed the border, an almighty bang pierced the air and they were both thrown to the ground, the sound of windows shattering all they heard as they landed, winded, on the courtyard floor. An age seemed to pass in which they both struggled for breath. Then, a high-pitched scream, the sound of sirens and everywhere around them crashed waves of wailing. A bomb! A bomb in Abadan itself! And not just a bomb but one that had clearly hit nearby.

  Mina, as consciousness dawned on her, looked over to Fatemeh Bibi from whom, she realised, the scream was coming. She picked herself up and ran to her mother. ‘Maman! Maman-jan, khak bar saram, are you hurt?’

  Fatemeh Bibi lay on the ground, screaming and muttering, ‘Her step was unlucky then and it is unlucky now.’ Mina’s presence obviously reminded her of the terrible world war and how it had arrived so soon after the birth of her daughter. But Mina was pulling her up, examining her, clutching her to her breast, crying and wailing too, from relief that her mother seemed to be all right and also from the immense fear that now engulfed her. She chivvied Fatemeh Bibi through the house and into her car. Everywhere was strewn with broken glass from the windows that had blown in. Fatemeh Bibi said nothing as Mina drove them away, careering through the devastation all around them, and spirited her away to her house in Khorramshahr and to safety.

  There the two women clung to each other, only letting go to take sips of the hot, sweet tea Busheiry had made them. When they revived a little, Mina grabbed the phone and started to call all her siblings, to check that they were OK and to reassure them that their mother was unhurt. ‘Do you need anything from the house, Maman-jan?’ Mina asked her, the receiver cradled against her ear. ‘Mostafa is going to go to your house and bring your things.’

  ‘My photos,’ cried Fatemeh Bibi. It was all she could say so Mina instructed her younger brother to grab some of their mother’s clothes, find her handbag and her identity papers and bring them over. ‘And Mossy-joon, bring her photo albums will you – she keeps crying for them. May your hands be blessed.’

  Mostafa arrived a few hours later with a bag in which were thrown whatever of his mother’s possessions he could grab and under his arm were the stack of her photo albums, her most precious belongings apart from the gold that she wore in her ears and around her wrists.

  In the next few days, the women wandered about Mina’s spotless house in a daze. Fatemeh Bibi, never given to much reflection, had recovered from the shock, but Mina had instead slumped into a trance. She wandered dazed, uninterested in even getting dressed in the mornings. The shock of war had terrorised her and she had become a shadow of herself. For one more week she wandered lost in herself until one day Yassaman rushed in.

  ‘Mina, bejomb, move! Seini has found a bus – a bus, I tell you! – and he has managed to fill it with petrol. I don’t know how but …’ Yassaman paused, a smile crinkling her face. ‘Be khoda, Mina, I don’t know how that man does it, he is so amazing … Anyway,’ shaking herself out of her reverie of love for her fiancé, she went on, ‘Mina, bejomb. He is on his way now and there is no time to lose. They say the Iraqis are only a few days away, our boys can’t hold them off that much longer. Come on! Get Clark Gable. Get packing. Just bring essentials, we will be able to come back for our things later, inshallah! They are picking us up in half an hour.’

  Mina couldn’t care but Busheiry, who was home from work that day worrying about his wife and his ameh Fatemeh Bibi, threw a few things in a bag for them knowing there would not be much room for luggage. When the bus arrived, Yassaman made Mina put a coat on over her dressing gown and, still wearing her slippers, she was guided her into the truck by the handsome Seini.

  The bus was already filled with the wives and children of my various uncles, not to mention Fatemeh Bibi’s nieces and their children, and the noise of the kids revived Mina as soon as she got on the bus. They drove to Ahvaz, pausing long enough to pick up Shirin and little Cyrus, and Seini drove and drove, heading north to another part of Khuzestan not yet threatened by the Iraqis, to the house of a distant relation.

  They stayed in that house for a few days while their men came and joined them when they could. All of my uncles worked for the Company and it was so important that the oil industry should continue running and producing the oil that was going to finance this war that they were forbidden from leaving their posts. The best they could do was reassure their wives and confused children. Those days and night were terrifying, but as always when the clan was together, the children played and the women cackled, despite their circumstances, unable to stop themselves from telling stories and teasing each other. Slowly people started to make arrangements. Fatemeh Bibi’s nieces went to Tehran to join their husbands’ families and the day Abadan was besieged by Saddam’s army, Seini reappeared again with the same bus and they started the long drive east across the great desert to Shiraz, where Parivash had begged them to come to her for shelter.

  The next day Khorramshahr fell to the Iraqis. Mina was never to live in her spick and span house again.

  The first real act of God’s government (as it called itself) when it had settled down in 1980 was to repeal the Family Protection Law of 1975, taking away the rights that women had won. The legal marriage age for women plummeted to nine and soon high-ranking women were banned from continuing in office. With the country in chaos, the administration in tatters, towns and cities being run by tightly localised networks of armed vigilantes killing who they pleased and taking whatever house and lands they fancied from their rightful owners, God’s government had decided that the most urgent matter it had to deal with was the rights of women in the divorce courts and the legal age of marriage for girls. The issue of Islamic hejab was discussed, but as yet the women of Iran were not ready to capitulate.

  The war proved very useful for the new Islamic regime. As nationalistic as Iranians are, such a bald-faced incursion into their territory could not be countenanced and everyone united under the government to fight the Iraqis. What Khomeini had not been able to achieve in the early days of his rule – such as the enforced veiling of Iran’s gutsy women – was now ushered in among a raft of m
easures that tightened the Islamists’ grip on the nation. Opponents were wiped out and any protest or dissent was labelled a threat to national security, an act of treachery against the nation, and ruthlessly repressed. The jails were groaning with political prisoners once more and the executioners were kept busy dispatching yet more souls to that other world.

  For the first two years of the war, the regime also sent its troops into Kurdistan to quell the rebels that had taken over many of the major towns, bombing first Sanandaj then Saqqez and anywhere else that had been taken by the peshmergas intent on establishing an autonomous state. Ten thousand Kurds were killed by firing squad alone, the executioners hardly having time to break for lunch or tea, the only respites from the gunshots coming at the times for prayer. Morality police roamed the streets of Iran checking on the appropriate dress for women and among their ranks were many black-chadored women, so keen to keep their ‘sisters’ in check that they were even said to hide razor blades in the sponges they used to wipe made-up faces clean.

  In Tehran Pars my amoo’s house was filled with our extended family from Kurdistan, fleeing the fighting in their homeland and flocking to safety like a flight of exotic birds, decked out in their long colourful robes. Mehry, who had protested so vehemently against the veiling, covered her head with a scrap of the flimsiest fabric in order to be allowed to enter work. In those early days, she later told me, she and her female colleagues would leave their scarves unknotted, shaking their hair free as soon as they entered the building, the fragments of fabric dancing to the ground in a pile of chiffon and cotton as they stepped lightly away.