Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

  Two of Pari’s friends, Ziba and Fereshteh, played the male parts—Tom, the restless, poetic brother, and Jim, the gentleman caller. Tom wore a suit and tie, and Jim a suit and bow tie.

  When the play ended, there was long, loud applause. People were saying how good Pari was. I beamed with pride. As Pari had explained to me, they had left out or changed from the original what would look immoral to an Iranian audience. They didn’t show that Laura once had a crush on Jim, that he used to call her “blue roses.” They didn’t show them alone together onstage at any point. They had changed the fact that Jim told Laura directly that he was engaged. Instead the mother drew it out of him.

  I headed backstage immediately after the applause stopped. “Pari, you were so good,” I said, as she changed into her clothes.

  A girl who had worked as an usher came in with a bouquet of flowers and gave it to Pari. “For you,” she said and walked away.

  Pari looked for a card but there wasn’t one.

  As we walked home with Pari holding the bouquet, she said, “It has to be from Majid. Did you notice the man sitting on the side in a plaid maroon and blue shirt?”

  “Yes, he looked very excited watching.”

  “That was Majid. A few days ago, after a rehearsal, he was waiting for me outside, just standing next to his cherry-colored Buick, his arms folded. It was like we had an appointment. The street was empty then and I dared to get into his car. He drove through backstreets and we talked like two people who know each other well. He teaches in a boys’ high school but he’s interested in all sorts of things. He loves movies and plays. He believes women should have equal rights.” Pari paused, then said, “I let him kiss me.”

  My heart was pounding loudly in my chest. Pari had entered a forbidden realm, condemned not just by people in Maryam’s milieu but even by the more modern Iranian society.

  “He’s going to send his mother over to ask for marriage.”

  “But, Pari, do you want to get married?”

  “I know I will have to. It may as well be Majid. Just a few days ago Father said to me I should be seriously thinking of marriage. He said someone appropriate has asked for me, but didn’t say who.”

  The blind flute player who usually sat on the Karoon Bridge was sitting against a wall on the path, singing and playing his flute.

  On that moonlit night in the alley,

  You stole my heart.

  Spring came to town with you holding a bunch of wild violets;

  And when you went back through the

  Doorway there was a smile,

  Alive, on your lips

  And your eyes spoke memories of our love.

  “Why do we have to be content to exchange notes and look at each other from afar?” Pari said, half to me and half to herself.

  At home we used the door that led directly to the second floor and to her room so we wouldn’t have to go through the courtyard or the porch in front of our parents’ bedroom. Pari put the flowers in a vase and the room filled with their scent.

  Nine

  That would look really good on you,” Pari said as we walked on Pahlavi Avenue. She was pointing to a dress in a shop window.

  “I’ll try it on,” I said.

  The dress wasn’t my size and they didn’t have it in other sizes, so we bought another dress, dark pink with white circles on it, and headed home on a quiet path that ran parallel to Pahlavi Avenue.

  As we were passing a field filled with wild sumac and jasmine bushes, a little boy rushed over to us and handed Pari a rose. A small envelope was tied to the stem with a ribbon. The boy walked away quickly and disappeared into another street. The path was empty and quiet and Pari opened the envelope. I watched her read the note. She was so absorbed in it that I lost her for an instant. Then she came back to me, her face radiant. “Here, I’ll let you read it,” she said.

  My dear Pari, I can’t get you out of my thoughts and heart. I know we’re for each other. Your parents have sent my mother back with no promises of any kind. Are you aware of that?

  “Were you?” I asked Pari.

  “No, they never told me about his mother coming over. I was despairing thinking he had changed his mind,” Pari said, suddenly looking perturbed. “I’ll have to talk to them.”

  At home, Pari put the rose in a patch of sunlight on the terrace to dry, so that later she could put it in her bureau among her clothes, as she had done with the flowers in the bouquet.

  “Wear your dress, I want to see it on you again,” she said when we were in her room. “You look grown up. Soon many boys will go after you and you’ll fall in love, too, if you let yourself.”

  We promised each other that we would marry only for love. Arranged marriage was a disaster, we decided. Look at Mohtaram and Father; they were more like father and daughter than husband and wife. Look at all the girls at school, engaged to men they hardly knew and had to share a life with. We didn’t want to be links in that long chain of tradition that went back to our ancestors. Pari and I had to break the pattern.

  “Where did you get those foolish ideas, love, love? American movies!” Father shouted at Pari on the porch.

  “Many families in northern Tehran approve of their daughters going on dates and getting to know a man before marrying him,” Pari retorted.

  “Ahvaz isn’t north Tehran. And nobody in Tehran is so foolish as to leave such decisions to a girl,” Father said.

  “Romance doesn’t fill empty stomachs,” Mohtaram offered. “Why would you marry a teacher who won’t be able to provide well for you and your children?”

  “I want to marry for love,” Pari insisted.

  “Your head is in the clouds! You don’t know what’s good for you,” Father shouted. In a burst of rage he took hold of Pari’s arm and dragged her across the porch, then threw her into her room and slammed the door. He walked away briskly to his office.

  I ran to Pari.

  “I feel this ache in my heart from the way they talk. It hurts when I breathe,” Pari said, her voice shaky. “Mother should be on my side. She should understand her daughters. Instead she always takes Father’s side.”

  “Father knows so much about world history and politics. He speaks French. His office is filled with all those leather-bound books, and those dictionaries. But when it comes to Mother and us, he’s a dictator,” I said.

  I thought of the two framed tapestries that Mohtaram had made and a few days ago hung in the salon, where they entertained guests. They both depicted ponds with ducks floating on them. In the upper right-hand corners were suns. The ponds shimmered in spangled sunlight.

  “Did you see those tapestries Mohtaram made?”

  “That’s where she’s allowed to express herself,” Pari replied.

  “Do you think she ever felt for Father the way you feel about Majid?”

  “How could she? She was just a child when she was forced to marry.” Pari was lost in thought. “But she may have felt that way about another man,” she said after a pause.

  “What?” I gasped. “Who?”

  “I still remember years ago, when Father traveled a lot, there was a handsome man, the owner of a jewelry store on Pahlavi Avenue. Mother kept going to the store all the time. I saw her once when she came out; her face was glowing as if inflamed, the way I feel when I see Majid.”

  After I left Pari’s room, I came across Mohtaram standing in front of the tall mirror next to the gauzy white curtains in her bedroom, studying her appearance. She had her hair in a flattering permanent wave, had red lipstick on. With the wistful, soft expression on her face, she was so different from the woman who was trying to put practical sense into Pari’s head.

  What Pari and I had talked about tantalized me. Unable to sleep that night, I sat in bed and constructed how an affair could have happened between Mohtaram and the jeweler.

  At first, when they passed each other on the streets, she and the man exchanged glances. Then she began to visit his jewelry store on one pretext or another. Fi
nally, he begged her to meet him somewhere. At first she resisted the idea. One day, she went to the balcony and saw him standing in the square, looking up as if hoping she would come out. Mohtaram remained on the balcony, her eyes locked with the man’s, until one of her children started crying and calling her from inside the house.

  Finally, when Father was away on a business trip, she succumbed to temptation and met the man, maybe in a quiet corner of a park. She felt faint with desire just being near him. Maybe she had a moment of panic and began to walk away from him. But he went after her and said, “How can you walk away from me? Don’t you see how I follow you everywhere just to get a glimpse of you, hear your voice?”

  He pointed to a blue wooden chalet. “Will you come there with me? I know the park guard. We can stay there without being interrupted.” The chalet stood in a date palm garden, set off from the rest of the park. Its door was open and they walked in. A rug covered the floor and an earthen jar stood on the mantel, but otherwise it was bare. He latched the door from the inside and took her in his arms. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There is no one around.” Did he make a practice of bringing women there? The question passed through her mind but she was too far gone in her desire to resist him. The palm fronds were whispering in the breeze outside. A patch of sunlight skipped in through the dormer window and danced on the wall before them. She was wearing a blue skirt and sandals and a white blouse with a row of red, yellow, and blue flowers, embroidered by her mother, at the neckline.

  Then he was undressing her and himself. She went along with it, mesmerized. She was shivering—it was exhilarating to be with someone close to her own age. She sensed her own attractiveness as she felt the young man’s touch and heard him whisper, “You’re beautiful.”

  After that, as if pulled by a magnet, she met him again and again, whenever Father was away on business.

  One day she went to the chalet and the man wasn’t there. Later she found him in the store but he avoided looking at her. He no longer stood in the square, staring up at the balcony to get a glimpse of her.

  I wrote it all down and hid the notebook under my mattress so that Father wouldn’t see it, as he frequently dropped into my room to check to see what I was reading and writing.

  The next day I read it to Pari. We almost convinced ourselves that it was true, that it had to be.

  Arguments between Pari and our parents about Majid, who sent his mother over several more times, continued for months.

  “I won’t marry anyone else except him,” Pari said, but Father always said no.

  Pari locked herself in her room for a week. Her skin became sallow and she had nosebleeds. Ali or I brought food to her. I ate my meals with her and tried to comfort her, telling her that maybe it was just as well if she didn’t marry now, but she was disconsolate. She reminded me that our parents were going to force her to marry someone else. At times she was uncommunicative, wanted to sleep or just be alone with her thoughts.

  “What are you doing, what’s this silly strike?” Father would say as he pounded on her door. And Mohtaram told her she was torturing herself for no reason. “There are much better suitors for you.”

  I wondered if Father and Mohtaram were evil. But my grandmother, whom I loved so much, had done the same to her daughters, had forced them to marry men she and my grandfather chose. They themselves were victims of the oppressive system that dictated to people how they should feel and live their lives. This was the time Pari should resist marrying anyone but Majid, break the chain, as we had promised each other.

  Miss Partovi sent a message through me to Pari, telling her she should audition for a part in My Fair Lady, an American musical. Pari’s spirits lifted at once. She took the chance that Father wouldn’t stop her if he found out about her participation in the play, that he’d hope her involvement in something she liked would heal her wound.

  But Father said no. “Father has forbidden me to participate in the play, now that I actually got a part,” Pari cried to me. “He told me he doesn’t want me to stand onstage and represent a woman as an object of a man’s lust.”

  “Pari, that isn’t all there is to My Fair Lady.”

  “I told him the same thing but it fell on deaf ears. He told Miss Jahanbani that he doesn’t want me to be in any more plays and that’s the end of it.”

  To help Pari calm down, we went to see a movie that was showing in the auditorium of the American high school on the other side of the river, in a neighborhood where many Americans lived. Though there were many Americans in Ahvaz, we didn’t have a single American friend. I understood why; all the differences in values kept them apart from Iranians. Most Iranians, even many of the Westernized ones, were still bound, at least partly, to their cultural-religious values and traditions, as the Americans were to their own. Iranians referred to them as “the Americans,” and I assumed the Americans referred to us as “the Iranians.” We were categories to each other.

  The movie, Separate Tables, was in English with Farsi subtitles. On the way out we saw a notice on a bulletin board in the hallway that a studio was looking for people to dub movies from other languages into Farsi. Pari wrote down the information. She said, “I’m going to try for that, hope that Father won’t find out.”

  Pari was accepted by the studio to dub Bitter Rice, an Italian movie, into Farsi. She cut classes several afternoons and went to the studio. For a while, she managed to keep her part-time job a secret.

  “Father isn’t the only one who thinks of actresses as whores,” Pari told me one day. “The people in the studio seem to be of the same opinion. One of them asked me to take my clothes off. I just ran out of there.”

  Ten

  One afternoon, as I was taking a different route home, I noticed a bookstore on a narrow street off Pahlavi Avenue. The street was lined with a few run-down and some closed-down houses and was very quiet. I walked in and looked for books. A few boys were there, but no girls. Among the boys was the one I had seen with the red kerchief. That day he wasn’t wearing it.

  The store wasn’t large but it was brimming with books. On a table I found books by revered Iranian poets, Saadi, Hafiz, and Omar Khayyam. These ancient poets spoke to all strata of the population in Iran; each interpreted the poems in his own way. Hafiz’s poetry was often used to tell fortunes. The person would open the book randomly to a page and whatever was written there was interpreted to mean something about the person’s future.

  On the same table were several books translated into Farsi, among them Pride and Prejudice, The Sun Also Rises, Crime and Punishment. They must have passed censorship, I thought. Operating under the Ministry of Information, the censorship authority controlled the publication of all manuscripts, original or translated. Books that either contained a political message or could be interpreted that way were banned. Sometimes a book passed censorship but, after some new meaning was found in it, was taken off the market and all copies destroyed. SAVAK was always on the lookout for anything even remotely threatening to the regime. Restlessness aroused in people by reading certain books could eventually lead to an uprising, they believed.

  I picked out The Sun Also Rises. When I went to pay, the owner looked at me quizzically, as if wondering what a young girl was doing buying a book by a foreign writer. He was a thin, tall, sensitive-looking young man with grave dark eyes. As I was leaving the store he said, “Come back. I get new books all the time.”

  At home I devoured the book. I began visiting the Tabatabai Bookstore weekly to buy more. The owner, Jalal, told me a little about the translated books he had in stock, which he ordered as soon as they were available. I liked reading those books; they gave me glimpses into other worlds, other lives, as American movies did.

  Once when I came home, I found the door to my room wide open. Father was rummaging through my books. I stood at the door fearfully. Was he going to object to the books I was reading? What if he looked under the mattress and found the story I wrote about Mohtaram and the jeweler? I entered th
e room and just stood there silently.

  “Nahid,” he said in a tense, agitated tone. “Be careful about the books you buy; some of them can get us into trouble. You never know who might be a SAVAK agent. It could be someone disguised as a handyman or an electrician.”

  Then he zoomed out. I breathed with relief. He hadn’t mentioned my story. I shut the door and, just to make sure, looked under the mattress. The notebook was there as I had left it. I picked it up, pulled out the pages containing the story, and tore them into pieces. I put them at the bottom of my schoolbag to discard in the large garbage pail just outside of school.

  One day when I was browsing at Tabatabai Bookstore, Jalal said, “I just got a new book I can show you.” It was as if we had an unspoken connection, trusted each other. There was no one else in the store at the time but he was whispering. His face, his voice were even more grave than usual. He reminded me of characters in Brothers Karamazov.

  “What is it?” I asked, dropping my voice.

  “Les Misérables. It was taken off the market. I managed to get a few copies before they shredded them. I tell you because I know you love books as much as I do and you hate many things about our society as I do.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A man who, out of starvation, steals a loaf of bread and is hounded by the police for the rest of his life. SAVAK thinks the book might mirror some things in our society.”

  “I’d like to read it.”

  Jalal pushed aside a thick curtain in the back of the store, revealing a stairway. He climbed down and returned within minutes holding a book. He handed it to me. It had a plain white jacket on it, revealing no title or name.

  After I bought it he wrapped the book in gift paper and gave it to me. “Be very careful,” he said.