by Azar Nafisi
My mother, who seldom warmed up to anyone in my father’s family, now suddenly was all commiseration. I remember her bringing her Turkish coffee upstairs on a tray—four cups, for Said, Fariba, Bijan, and me. They humored her, and after drinking their coffee turned their cups over so she could tell their fortunes. “There will be a long travel to a distant land,” Mother began. “Look, come closer, come. Don’t be afraid, I’m like your mother. You see, at the top of the rim, these lines? You see this figure? A camel. You will be traveling,” she said again. “Ah, your future is bright! Look at this side of the cup, it is clear. Only anxiety on this side, but the other side, nothing. Your cup is stuck to the plate,” she told Fariba. “This means either wealth or love. I have a feeling, in your case, it is love.” They both laughed a little uneasily, and Fariba nervously extended her hand and picked a tiny cookie off the plate.
That was the last night we spent with them. The next morning, at the top of our winding staircase, we all shook hands, despite the ban on touching a person of the opposite sex, even a cousin. We shook hands formally and awkwardly. Then they walked down the steps, and I stood up there watching them appear and disappear at each bend, until I heard the front door slam and they emerged, like two orphaned children in a terrible fairy tale, walking very close to one another, almost touching, he with his ivory shirt, she with her multicolored scarf. We never saw them again.
“Objects have tears in them,” Virgil’s Aeneas said. I wrote this down, just as I impulsively write down certain words and phrases that won’t let go. I have in front of me a birth certificate, a dirty brownish color, with a photograph staring out at me. There, with her dark scarf (no smile) is Fariba. The first name and the last name on the certificate, though, do not belong to her: she was in fact Fariba Morovat, married to Said Nafisi, but here she is called Fereshteh Bagheri, married to Abdolah Saidipur. It is a fake birth certificate. Date of birth: 1956, date of marriage: 1975, date of death: blank. How did I end up with this birth certificate? I can no longer remember. I found it when I was going through piles of diaries and notes I had brought with me from Tehran. What tears are hidden in its pages?
The birth certificate.
For almost two years their parents would come to Tehran from Es-fahan every month and make their way to Evin Prison in order to inquire about Said and Fariba. Had they escaped the country, they would have let their families know, so their parents had no reason to doubt what the officials implied: that they had been arrested. I remember these visits. The parents usually stayed in a small hotel. At the appointed time, they would take a taxi to the dreaded prison. There they waited for long hours to be told that there was no new information about their children. As long as there was no information, there was also hope. But if they were alive, why did they not call home? Those were anxious days. The confrontations had spilled over to the streets. The Mohajedeen had been banned, people were daily arrested and killed. Many, some among my own family and friends, had been killed or had escaped the country.
After eighteen months they were told that their children had been spotted by the revolutionary guards in the early fall of 1982. They were killed in a street confrontation with the Islamic militia. Fariba’s mother refused to believe this. They are safe and sound, she kept repeating, but don’t want to cause us trouble because the phones are tapped.
Mourning those killed by the regime was officially banned, but the family in Esfahan held a private ceremony for Said and Fariba. Two of my uncles and a cousin refused to offer their condolences—one uncle called to congratulate Said’s parents on their son’s death. “They deserved to die as infidels, and now that they have been justly punished, maybe they will be forgiven in the afterlife and be saved from hell,” he said. Later, when Uncle Abu Torab, famous for his prodigious memory, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, one of his granddaughters would say that he decided to forget after Said and Fariba’s deaths. He kept his faith in God at the cost of relinquishing his memory.
LESS THAN TWO YEARS AFTER storming the prisons, my cousin Majid was also on the run. His sister Noushin and their spouses, Hussein and Ezatt, had been arrested. Hussein was executed. Noushin’s execution was delayed because she was pregnant. I remember the day they brought Cheshmeh, Noushin’s infant daughter, to my brother’s house. My uncle and aunt had come to Tehran to pick her up, a silent one-year-old. Her mother, a painter, had put small painted pebbles in her pockets. Several years later, Noushin was given amnesty and freed. She told us that when she was called in that morning, she didn’t know whether she was to be freed or executed.
Ezatt, Majid’s wife, was executed. She was only twenty-four. Majid writes of wandering around the city after her arrest, the same city that he and his comrades had felt they had conquered. Now his wife was in the prison Majid and Ezatt had triumphantly occupied back in February 1979. After her execution she was buried in a special cemetery assigned to political prisoners and minorities, called the cemetery of the infidels, where bodies were thrown into unmarked graves. Majid visited the spot with her father, who told him that he had his own way of marking her grave: it is eight paces from the gate and sixteen paces toward the wall. She was executed and buried collectively with two women and fifty men. For a while I kept a copy of her will in the drawer in my desk and from time to time I’d take it out and read it. Then I lost it and found it in Majid’s manuscript. She wrote:
NAME: Ezatt Tabiian
FATHER’S NAME: Saied Javad
BIRTH CERTIFICATE NUMBER: 31171
Hi,
Life is beautiful and desirable. Like others, I loved life too. However, there comes a time when one must say good-bye to life. For me that moment has arrived and I welcome it. I have no specific bequest; I want only to say that life’s beauties are never forgettable. Those who are alive should try to get the most out of their lives.
My dear father and mother, hi,
During my life you suffered a lot to raise me. Until the last moment I will not forget my father’s calloused hands and my mother’s work-worn face. I know that you did your best for me. Nevertheless, there comes a time of separation. This is inevitable. I love you with my whole existence, and I kiss you from a place from which I cannot see you. My warm regards to my sisters and brothers. Kiss them for me. I love them. In my absence do not suffer for me and do not be hard on yourselves. Try to carry on your lives with the usual love and tenderness. Give my regards to all who ask for me.
My dear husband, hi,
I had a short life and we had an even shorter life together. I wish I could have lived longer with you. But it is no longer possible. I shake your hand with a salute to all whom I have loved, love, and shall love.
Goodbye,
January 7, 1982
Ezatt Tabiian.
Writing about those years I am reminded of my father, who used to read passages from the Shahnameh about the conquest of the Persian Empire by the Arab army in the seventh century. The warrior Rostam, son of Hormozd, gives a poignant speech, predicting the results of that war, known as the battle of Qadesiya. Who says our present is not already written by our past? Father would ask. He had underlined some passages, I don’t remember them all. These are the ones I do remember:
But when the pulpit’s equal to the throne
And Abu Bakr’s and Omar’s names are known,
Our long travails will be as naught, and all
The glory we have known will fade and fall….
Men will be mutual thieves and have no shame. Curses and blessings will be thought the same.
What’s hidden will be worse than what is known, And stony-hearted kings will seize the throne….
No pleasures, no musicians, none of these: But there’ll be lies, and traps, and treacheries. Sour milk will be our food, coarse cloth our dress, And greed for money will breed bitterness
Between generations: men will cheat
Each other while they calmly counterfeit
Religious faith. The winter and the spring
; Will pass mankind unmarked, no one will bring
The wine to celebrate such moments then;
Instead they’ll spill the blood of fellow men….
Majid went into hiding and later fled the country. He ended up in L.A., where his older brother Hamid lived. He had not written poetry since the early seventies, when he went into politics, but he started to write again three days after Ezatt’s death, when he went with friends to the Alborz Mountains to pay homage to her. In the evening he was sitting by his brother Mehdi, tears streaming down his face, and he started to write nine poems for her. “I wanted to avenge your death,” he writes, “I wanted to have you close to me. You spoke to me through the Muses. I turned back and told Mehdi, Now I understand why early men drew those buffalos on the Altamira caves.”
CHAPTER 27
father’s departure
IN THE SUMMER OF 1982 my father left my mother, this time for good. She had lost Saifi, she had lost her uncle and her mother, but she never thought she would lose my father. I remember the day I walked in on them in the kitchen. She was dressed in an old pink dressing gown and he was holding a knife to his throat, threatening to kill himself. Later she would use this against him, as further evidence of his lunacy, his lack of control. She could not see how she led him, as well as my brother and me—otherwise reasonably sane individuals—toward the edge of desperation. I don’t remember what they were arguing about. It really did not matter. They both turned to me as witness to what each was doing to the other. “This,” he said, “is the last time I will suffer such indignity.” “Indignity!” she shouted. “A man your age, acting like this, threatening me with a knife.” “Not you,” he said, exasperated, “not you. Myself.”
After numerous fights he had managed to set up a separate bedroom for himself (the final humiliation, my mother would claim) because, he reasoned, he could not sleep at night and he ended up disturbing her, as she was a light sleeper. Every night, after Mother went to bed, Father would talk on the phone for long stretches with Ziba Khanoom. Later Mother would criticize his childish behavior. “Acting like a teenager,” she would say, “falling in and out of love. He has no shame, at his age, a seventy-year-old man.” He wasn’t seventy, he was sixty-two, but that’s how it was with her—facts were malleable inconveniences. And yet she was right, he did act like a teenager, and so did she. Aborted relationships seem to keep us in a state of perpetual immaturity; to grow up we need in one way or another to pass on to the next stage. My mother had remained frozen in time after Saifi’s death, and my father never quite let go of the dream of his youth. So he acted like a twenty-something-year-old man, about to marry the girl of his dreams, and she acted like a young jilted bride.
The next day my father left. He had threatened to leave before, and had even gone a few times, but he never stayed away for more than two or three months. Several times they had agreed to a divorce, but she always reneged and he always returned. She had come to count on this, because the truth was that she never intended a permanent separation. Almost a decade and a half had passed since the day he had written in his diary about his fear of going to his grave without experiencing a true and loving relationship. For her these fights seemed like necessary rituals; for him they were fatal. Like so many husbands and wives, she took him too much for granted.
Why did he leave her at that particular moment? Would he have left had there been no revolution? In his diaries he says that every time he wanted to leave, some consideration prevented him: first, the children were too young. Then, when he was a successful public figure on the rise, it didn’t seem right to leave the woman who had shared the hard times with him; when he was in jail there was no time to divorce; later it seemed ungrateful to leave someone who had suffered through his jail time with him. Before the revolution, divorcing my mother would have meant alienating the social group they both belonged to. For a different kind of man this would not have mattered, but my father cared. He was trapped by his own image of himself as a good man. And what good man would leave his wife? It took the Islamic Revolution, the crumbling of the old social order, to facilitate a decision that he had been unable to carry out a decade and a half before.
He had been planning for this for a while. Soon after Bijan and I returned from America, Father sold the house and built a three-story building with three separate apartments, one each for my brother, my mother, and me. His attitude was: for years I have taken care of her, now it’s your turn. My brother never moved into his apartment. He and Shahran rented an apartment while they lived in Tehran and then they left for England in 1986. I accepted my task without questioning. I didn’t have the heart to say no to Father despite the fact that Bijan was opposed to our living in such close proximity to my mother. He felt that more distance would not prevent us from taking care of her. But there we were, and the apartments were built so that each had access to the other. The kitchen and hall opened into an internal staircase. There would be endless quarrels if I locked these doors, which meant that my mother had access to our apartment at all times, even when we were not there.
For three decades I had empathized with my father, hoping that one day he would lead a happy life with someone who appreciated him. I had not thought of my mother, of what would happen to her. And now that he was gone I felt for her in a way I never had before. Always when I was angry at her and derided her for ruining our lives, some fair observer, Bijan or Shahran, would understandably say, “Things are not exactly how you see them.” “Your father is charming,” Bijan would say, “and fed up, but he also charms his way into justifying his bad behavior.”
Shahran, who had become my third eye, saw a side of Mother I had seldom paid attention to. “You don’t appreciate your mother’s honesty,” she would tell me. “She has been either neglected or lied to by everyone close to her. It started in her father’s house, but the tragedy is that even Saifi, the faultless first husband, lied to her when he concealed his illness. I love your dad, I’d rather spend time with him than with your mom, but my heart goes out to your mom.”
Suddenly Mother seemed genuinely alone. The revolution had taken away her peer support group, her freedoms as a woman, and now, without her husband, who for decades had acted by his account as father, steward, accountant, and friend, she had no one to fend for her. Her husband could leave her to start a new life with a far younger woman, but for her there was no such option. She had no way of fulfilling her longings and dreams. “I should have been a man,” she’d said for decades. “I always wanted to continue my education, to go to medical school.” My father speculated often that had he encouraged her to find a job, she might have been far happier. Her time as a member of Parliament had been temporary; its end left her more embittered. She had been left alone with her pride and her anger and her sense of solitary injustice. Did we ever defend her? Did we ever empathize with her?
For a while after Father left, Mother, ignorant of the truth, would confide her grievances to Ziba Khanoom. She cursed my father in front of her, telling Ziba Khanoom that she was sure the whore Shahin had returned to his life. But it wasn’t long before she discovered the truth. Ziba divorced her husband and stopped visiting Mother. Later, Mother blamed us for hiding the truth from her, and we guiltily denied knowing anything about the affair.
When Father left, a great silence seemed to fall over us, like the silence after a major explosion. All around our apartment house there were new craters of silence that gradually gave way to my own muted questions. I started to ask myself some of my mother’s questions. What if she were a man? What if she had continued her education? What if she had never married? What if she had not given up dancing?
IN 1982 MOHAMMAD and Shahran’s daughter, Sanam, was born, two months early. The doctors were not sure the baby would survive, and when I was first told the news I didn’t want to go to the hospital, as if not going there would somehow prevent any harm from coming to her. When I finally arrived the first person I saw was my brother. He escorted me to the roo
m where his daughter was kept under a respirator. He said, “Our brave little baby, she has been hanging on. She seems very determined.” That is how she came to the world, determined and with a haste that would stay with her. She was a miniature baby who broke my heart every time I looked at her, I loved her so much. She and I grew very close. When she was barely two, we walked hand in hand up and down the long winding hall, past her parents’ bedroom, the library, her grandmother’s room, toward her room at the very end of the hall, and I would tell her stories to which she listened attentively, bending her head, eyes focused on the ground, firmly holding onto my hand. When we went into Shahran’s room in the hospital my parents were there along with her mother, who was fussing over her. My parents made us very aware of their feelings toward each other. Every once in a while Mother would throw my father angry glances which he tried to ignore by looking elsewhere. “There we go again,” I thought, “their hidden agenda taking over every event.”
Father with Sanam and baby Negar.
Two years later, in January 1984, our daughter, Negar, was born. “Her eyes are open!” was the last thing I heard my doctor say before I passed out. She was held by the scruff of the neck like a kitten, wide-eyed and alert, an image I took with me before losing consciousness. The night before I went to the hospital, my father called. Mother was in our apartment and she picked up the phone. “You bastard …” she shouted, and I knew it must be my father. “It’s for you, Madam,” she said, her tone changing. She held out the receiver at arm’s length like a dirty dishrag. “I have no right to call my own daughter,” Father said. His tone was bitter, resigned. We didn’t speak much. It was impossible to do so with Mother going on about his sins and my ingratitude.