Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

  As Howie and I were driving home after dropping Maryam at the airport, I already missed her presence in my life. It was an echo of the way it used to be when she left after a visit to Ahvaz.

  Thirty

  What Maryam had told me about the ring from Mohtaram lingered with me long after she left. I thought of the jeweler Pari had told me about so many years ago.

  At first, when they passed each other on the streets, she and the man exchanged glances.

  Could it be that the jeweler gave her the ring?

  Then another version of that story came to me. In it, there is a child from the romance with the jeweler. And the child is me. Terrified that Father would detect something just looking at me, Mohtaram gives me to her sister. Maybe this was why she’d always been cold to me.

  I imagined Mohtaram pushing the infant—me—in a stroller down a long narrow lane with high walls. She hears her name being called from behind. She turns around and sees the man approaching her. He asks her about the baby, tells her he loves her. He is talking in a whisper. He gives her a box containing the ring and quickly turns around and vanishes into an alley. Mohtaram is alone on the lane again with her little baby and the ring, unable to fully understand the meaning of the encounter. Was it a final good-bye or was he inviting her to start a new life with him?

  “You always write about the past,” Howie said one evening. “Write something about what goes on around you now.” He was convinced that my preoccupation with my past—with Maryam and Pari—had to do, at least to some extent, with my not being engaged enough in my present life.

  It wasn’t just Howie who thought that. “Nahid, you’re so obsessed, I feel bad for you,” my friend Irene told me one day.

  “I know you’re right,” I said.

  So I started writing a novella about our neighbors in the building, with whom we shared a backyard. But it was flat, dead words on a page, and I abandoned it.

  I drifted to Iran again, evoking the scenes and characters that had been part of my past.

  After many years I went back to Tehran for a visit. I was sitting in Aunt Maryam’s living room (she, not my mother, raised me), and she was drawing vivid pictures of people I had known growing up.

  “Do you know Batul has twelve children now? Her youngest son drowned in the pool and the poor girl has been fainting several times a day ever since. Everyone says her child drowned because she didn’t give alms.” Or, “Remember Hassan? The truck he was driving turned over and he died instantly. He was such a mean man, no wonder.”

  In her stories she tried to leave nothing to chance. Yet all the elusiveness of my growing up echoed through her words. I thought of the starry nights I had lain beside her on the roof and the morning I had been frightened by my own shadow, the heavy silence of midafternoons when everyone was asleep and the pigeons stood drowsily in their cages, the inexplicable excitement as I lay beside my cousin under a blanket, listening to him talk about the other boys in the neighborhood. The picture of the tenants occupying the rooms around the courtyard came back to me—the woman who hid in our room to escape from her abusive husband; the young girl who mysteriously died in her bed. Then I thought of Sultaneh, a tall, slender woman with thick black hair, braided in several strands. I recalled her soft touch as she handed me things—a dish or a bouquet of flowers. I recalled whispers about her not being married.

  “She finally got married to a man of her own choice—a young man working in an office,” Maryam said. “He took all her money away and then he began to take on other wives. But he must have had a spell on her. With all the pain he inflicted on her she pined after him when he just vanished. She searched for him everywhere. She went on trips to where she thought his business might take him. One day she came back and never mentioned his name again. But she was changed. Once she tried to drown herself in a tank of water. Another time she almost jumped from the roof. One night she began to curse and throw her belongings out into the street. They put her in a sanitarium for a while and when she was released she was put in chains. She lives in the basement, tied to a pole. She has a niece who comes in once a day and attends to her.”

  That evening I was standing at the edge of the roof, looking down into the courtyard of the adjacent house with its ancient plane trees and gables filled with pigeons when I had a glimpse of Sultaneh. Her hands were tied behind her with a chain, the end of which was held by a young girl I assumed was her niece. She was stooped, like a hunchback, and her chin protruded so far that it almost touched her long nose. The strands of her black hair were now replaced by a mass of unkempt gray, and she carried herself with caution, like one who has received many blows and expects new ones. Only in her dark, pensive eyes could I see her as she had once been but even they seemed puzzled, crazed. I watched the girl tie the chain to a column on the porch and I moved away when Sultaneh began to shriek as if she were being whipped.

  I pressed my brain for a lesson that might be learned from Sultaneh’s downfall but I could not honestly accept any of what came to my mind.

  I put this sketch together with two others with similar themes I had written over the years—one about the woman with a blind child, one about reading to Ali. After making some changes, I sent them to a few literary magazines.

  My first acceptance came a few weeks later. The old feeling returned in a rush, the one I’d felt years before when the radio station had chosen to air my story.

  I received a letter from a Lindengrove girl, Judy Conrad, who had read my story in the magazine. I mentioned the name of the college I went to in the biographical information published with the story.

  I don’t know if you remember me. I used to live two doors down the hall from you. What stopped us from being friends? We were from different religions, countries. But should any of that have mattered? I know now it shouldn’t have. . . . Life has dealt me a few blows. I married as soon as I graduated and that marriage finally has ended, thank God. We were truly incompatible. . . . As you see by the address, I live in Chicago, a big city. I meet people from all over the world here. . . .

  I remembered Judy. She was the girl who had put her hand on her hip and said to me, “Well, in this college we’re all Christians.” Though the letter was apologetic, it brought back the ambivalent feelings that had plagued me over the years in America, being neither here nor there.

  Then I met an Iranian woman named Nayereh in the supermarket. After a few minutes of conversation, she invited me to lunch at her house. She was married to an Iranian doctor. Her parents had arranged her marriage to the son of a family friend who had emigrated to America. Her house was large and fancy. The floors were covered with the most expensive silk Persian rugs, and there was marble everywhere. Nayereh wore a large diamond engagement ring and a large sapphire ring on her other hand; sapphire earrings dangled from her ears. She served Persian food, fesengoon, chicken and pomegranate sauce and crushed walnuts, saffron rice, and Shirazi chopped salad, which a maid prepared.

  “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” she said as we sipped tea, “but isn’t it difficult to live with a man from a different culture and religion?”

  “I’m not so much a part of my own culture,” I said.

  “But . . . someone who doesn’t speak your language, doesn’t understand where you come from?”

  I couldn’t think of a response, and although the conversation drifted to other topics, her pointed question stayed with me. She stirred up the same feelings as the letter from Judy did. I had gone against many Iranian traditions, and was even now an American citizen, but I didn’t feel like an American. I had an accent. I didn’t look American. There was a lot I didn’t understand about the culture. I had finally found freedom in America, but there was a hole inside me, a lack. I didn’t feel either Iranian or American.

  I started to devote my free time to writing a novel that captured those feelings. In the novel, Foreigner, I tried to channel that state of mind—feeling foreign in both Iran and America, into the female narrator. The prot
agonist, Feri, is a young Iranian girl who comes to the United States after high school to go to college. She marries an American and stays on. At one point a restlessness for her past begins to set in. After many years she goes to Iran for a visit. At first she feels like a foreigner there but then she gets involved in searching for her mother, whom she had lost as a child. She finds her, then begins to question her happiness in the United States. By the end of the book she is not sure if she wants to go back to America.

  I suddenly yearned to go back to Iran and put myself in touch with the sights and sounds and people who were haunting me. I knew part of my obsession with the past had to do with my lack of contact.

  But alas, turbulence had erupted in Iran again and was only getting worse. Political parties were formed and outlawed by the Shah in swift succession. The youth movement, consisting mainly of male students, was growing larger by the day. They sent out messages to people in Iran and abroad through newsletters in which they talked about corruption in the royal family, reported on the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners, the suppression of dissent, and heavy censorship of books, radio and TV programs, newspapers, and speech. They displayed graphic photographs of men and women being tortured in Iranian jails. They described the methods of torture—hanging prisoners, male or female, upside down, stuffing urine-soaked cloths into their mouths, making them walk on nails.

  They dared to shout, “SAVAK must be defeated,” and they held demonstrations daily, not only in Iran but in America, too—in front of the Iranian Embassy, the UN, and on university campuses, accusing America of betraying Iran’s trust and blaming America for manipulating the political system.

  Once, passing through Harvard Square, I came across a group of demonstrators shouting that they wanted human rights, equality, and democracy. A young man was holding a pile of newsletters and handing them out to passersby. I took one and read as I walked on. The article reported arbitrary arrests, torture, and summary executions in Iran.

  Since it was impossible to identify all the Iranians abroad who were actively opposed to the Shah’s rule, any young Iranian who went back to Iran was taken into a room upon landing at the airport and questioned for hours. Many of them were detained, their passports confiscated. They were thrown in jail and some were executed.

  One day I was reading a newsletter a young Iranian man had handed to me in Harvard Square. I looked at the photographs of two people who had been executed. My stomach dropped. One was the nephew of Ezat Sadaat, the sweet, gentle woman who used to rent rooms from Maryam when I was a child. A few weeks later I read in a similar newsletter that my beloved composition teacher, Mrs. Soleimani, had been killed by a truck while driving to visit her mother. The article maintained that witnesses had seen the truck driver turn aggressively into Mrs. Soleimani’s car, driving it off the road. The article concluded that the driver had to be a SAVAK member. I recalled her sensitive face, her sympathetic voice talking to us in class, encouraging us young girls to develop our minds.

  Thirty-one

  In 1977 Foreigner was accepted by Norton. Simultaneously, the story I had written years ago about Ardavani’s visit was published in Redbook.

  Pari wrote from Tehran.

  I’m ecstatic for you. A dream come true. I can still see the two of us in my room and you reading one of your stories to me and me acting out the parts.

  As for me, I’m not thinking of acting that much right now. I’m struggling to gain custody of Bijan and that absorbs almost all of my attention. So far Taheri has managed to prevent Bijan from seeing me. Complaints to the authorities haven’t gotten anywhere yet. The 1967 Family Protection Law that the Shah introduced to improve women’s rights isn’t enforced. . . . I wake in the middle of the night calling Bijan, Bijan. It wakes up Mansour, then he becomes sorrowful about losing his own son. . . . Sometimes I feel I’m always running after unattainable dreams—to be an actress, to share a life with . . . Yes, Majid is still with me . . . to have my son with me . . . It’s like I’m losing my sense of self inside a body I don’t recognize. I wish we could talk like the old days, sit together by a pool. . . .

  That year, the Shah released 357 political prisoners. He promised that Iranians could come and go without questioning as long as they had valid passports and visas. This new approach was the result of international pressure. Amnesty International had reported that SAVAK’s history of torture in jail was “beyond belief.” President Jimmy Carter told the Shah that if he didn’t improve his human rights record, U.S. aid to Iran, including military assistance, would be terminated. Carter had begun to believe that Iranian anger at America was due to the brutality of SAVAK, which had been created and supported by America. Indeed, anger at America was fierce and escalating by the day. An opposition group had bombed several international offices in Iran, including the Association of Iran-U.S. Relations, the U.S. Information Office, and the offices of Pepsi-Cola, American Airlines, and Shell. Several American employees were killed by those bombs.

  Still, I thought it might be a good time to go to Iran for a visit. Perhaps now the risks weren’t as serious as they were before. Iranians were going back and forth. But then the news of Foreigner not passing censorship in Iran gave me second thoughts about visiting.

  Several months before Foreigner was to be published in America, I received a call from a young Iranian man who had read excerpts of the novel in Redbook. He wanted to translate the book into Farsi. I agreed, enlivened by the possibility that Pari might be able to read my novel.

  One Iranian publisher was interested. The censorship authorities sent the translator a list of words and sentences to be deleted: words such as “red,” which symbolized Communism, and “black night” and “high walls,” symbolizing repression and prison respectively. I reluctantly made the changes.

  A few weeks later, however, I learned that the censors had forbidden the book’s publication. Though by the end of Foreigner the protagonist is won over by her own culture, the censors considered the tone of the book “uncomplimentary to Iran.” It depicted a hotel bed with a bug on it, they said, and a dirty street. Such details might indicate that the Shah’s attempts at beautification had failed.

  My mind went to Ardavani, the writer whose visit to our house in Ahvaz I had woven into a story. Father had said he stayed on safe ground. I wondered what had happened to him, if he kept publishing or if even his mild books had gotten him into trouble at some point.

  I thought of another, older writer, Sadegh Hedayat, I used to read in Ahvaz. He wrote interesting, surrealistic novels and short stories, some allegorical. His books were forbidden at some point because they realistically captured the suffocating atmosphere and the desperation of many of the citizens; I could find them only at Tabatabai Bookstore.

  One of his stories, about a stray dog, outraged the regime because they interpreted it as expressing the brutality of SAVAK.

  . . . Now his whole life had narrowed to the permanent quest for food, which he got by rummaging fearfully in garbage piles, and to being beaten throughout the day. Howls and whimpering had become his sole means of expression. . . . Once upon a time he had been brave, fearless, clean and full of life, but now he had become a yellow timid scapegoat. . . . He had become a bag of nerves: if he heard a voice, or something near him moved, he would nearly jump out of his skin and shiver. . . . Something in him had died, had burnt out. . . . Suddenly he went numb, remembering when he was a tiny thing sucking that warm invigorating liquid from his mother’s breasts while his mother licked him clean with her strong tongue. . . .

  I was in a cavernous, cement room with a lamp hanging from the ceiling bathing the space in eerie yellow light. I was standing in the middle of the room and a fire was streaming in through a window. A man who sounded like Howie but whom I couldn’t see said, “Jump out the window in the back!” I ran toward the window, but it kept receding . . .

  I woke with a start, my heart pounding. Howie put his arms around me, trying to calm me. “You’r
e having a nightmare,” he said.

  PART THREE

  Land of Jewels

  Thirty-two

  Twelve years after I left Iran, my father sent me his first letter. The mere sight of it in the mailbox shook me. He hadn’t communicated with me since that strange and contradictory good-bye in Ahvaz.

  Nahid, I’m getting on in age and I’m able to find forgiveness in my heart for my headstrong daughter. It’s about time for you to come home and bring your husband and your child for a visit. It’s a good time as the Shah is giving guarantee of safe return to Iranians abroad.

  I stood there, sunk in a pool of emotions. So Father had been angry at me all this time. And now he wasn’t. I hadn’t thought about him for a long time, and now I was suddenly forced into it.

  Perhaps the risks of going to Iran weren’t as serious and I had fallen victim to my own fears. Iranians were going back and forth now and only a small number got into serious trouble. I called the Iranian Consulate in New York, where we were living now, and an official confirmed that the Shah was indeed guaranteeing safe return to Iranians abroad. He said, judging by the description I gave him, my novel wouldn’t get me into trouble, even though it had been censored. What about the fact that I had become an American citizen? Though America accepted dual citizenship, Iran didn’t. He said that the rule wasn’t enforced, and many Iranians who went back and forth had dual citizenship. He informed me that I needed a permission letter from my husband to enter and leave Iran, unless my husband was accompanying me. He added ruefully, “Needing a permission letter for a woman to travel is certainly an outdated law; parliament argued against it, but it’s still in place.” My husband thought it would be healthy for me to connect with my family, since he saw his own regularly now.