Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

  “Maybe you and Mansour could emigrate to America and live there. I’d love for my little girl to get to know you, to be close to you.”

  “I’d love to see dear Leila, too. But there are so many obstacles. In America Mansour could never get the kind of work he has here. Anyway, he loves Iran. But more than anything, Nahid, I can’t bear leaving the country until I know I’ve done everything to get Bijan back. But then if I do get him back it will be only part-time and I have to remain in Iran. No judge would allow me to live out of the country and deprive a boy of his father for long stretches of time. It has been so many years without any results but I keep hoping, hoping. I can’t live without that hope.”

  “Did you think of having another child, with Mansour?”

  “I tried to get pregnant but I couldn’t. Something about the temperature in my womb. But having a child wouldn’t make the loss of Bijan any easier to bear. Mansour, having lost one son, feels the same way, luckily.”

  Pari became lost in her own thoughts for a moment and then said, “It’s amazing that he didn’t show anger at me over not getting pregnant, because he’s traditional in many ways. He really discouraged me from acting, so much so that I stopped auditioning. I just didn’t want the constant arguments. There are many things I want to tell you.” But instead she sank inward again.

  We walked back through Elizabeth Boulevard, one of the in-town natural recreational places with a creek and well-cultivated grounds. In a corner a young man was playing the tar and a crowd had gathered around him. We continued through Mellat Park, which was patterned after an English park. It was filled with tall, old trees, flower beds, and vast lawns. It had a glimmering lake with boats for rent, cascading falls, sport facilities, a zoo. Children were bouncing around, feeding the animals. At that moment, missing Leila, I acutely felt Pari’s yearning for Bijan.

  “Manijeh is in some kind of trouble but no one is telling me about it,” Pari said, as we headed back to the house. “She and I haven’t been in contact, and Mohtaram and Father don’t mention her in front of me. But I know something is wrong. At this point, Nahid, I hold no grudges. Her life has been hard, too, ever since she left home.”

  “Yes, it must be hard for her to deal with problems without Mohtaram’s supervision. Anyway, I’ve been away from her for so long . . .”

  “But I still can’t forgive Mohtaram,” Pari said. “That she didn’t exert herself and come to my side when I first resisted Taheri, and then when I left him and came home.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about Mohtaram. . . . It’s a kind of detachment, more than anything, now that I’m not dependent on her.”

  After we left the park we passed the civil courthouse. “I’ve been there so many times to face the judges,” Pari said off handedly.

  As dusk began to set we took a taxi back to her house. In the courtyard sparrows were swarming around the trees and the sky was streaked with red.

  Thirty-four

  That evening I suggested to Pari that we go and hear Googoosh sing. The room was suddenly flooded with tension. Pari and Mansour exchanged glances across the room, and then fell into silence.

  “You remember what happened last time?” Mansour finally said to Pari. Pari blushed but didn’t say anything.

  “Is there something else we could do instead?” I asked.

  Pari turned to Mansour. “Let’s go hear Googoosh, if we can get tickets at the last minute.” She explained to me, “Last time I felt overwhelmed by her songs, thought I was going to faint, so we left halfway through. It doesn’t mean it will happen this time.”

  The hall was packed with young boys and girls accompanied by their parents. A star from the age of fifteen, Googoosh was an idol to the country’s youth. We found a table in a corner.

  The orchestra began to play, and Googoosh came onstage wearing a striped white-and-red dress with glittery threads woven through it, a low neckline, and shoulder straps. She wore long dangling gold-and-emerald earrings. Her hair was dark blond, cut in a pixie style. After the applause died down, she began to sing, her eyes closed, her voice and her face resonant with emotion.

  I’m that same woman who wanted to become an ocean

  I wanted to become the greatest ocean in the world.

  Oh God, I’m as lifeless as a desert, Desert

  tell the clouds to rain, I want to live again.

  For I am the season of raining leaves

  Deprived of gardens, flowers, and dew drops

  I’m like a tree that is barren and lifeless

  Caught in the tunnels of a hailstorm.

  Don’t tell me I’ve grown up

  Don’t tell me it’s bitter

  Don’t tell me crying no longer suits me

  Just take me in your arms and embrace me

  What I desire is nonstop affection.

  We left before the concert ended; Mansour said he had to get up early for work, but I could tell he was uncomfortable. Tension still lingered between him and Pari. When we returned home, Pari and Mansour disappeared into their bedroom and I joined Howie in the guest room. He was already asleep.

  After hours of tossing and turning, I got out of bed and went to the window. I was startled to see Pari in the courtyard, shivering. For a moment that scene of Manijeh standing on the balcony in the moonlight flashed in my mind. I wanted to tiptoe out and talk to Pari, but just then she got up and went back inside.

  I said nothing about it to her the next day.

  “Nahid, I saw Majid,” Pari told me. “And not just once.” We entered a narrow street shaded by tall sycamore trees tangled at the top.

  “Oh, Pari.”

  “He comes to Tehran frequently, mainly for work. That night when Mansour took me to hear Googoosh sing, Majid was there, too, and I recognized him after so many years. Even stranger was that I immediately knew I was still in love with him. My feelings for him have never left me. It shook me up, being in the same space with Majid and Mansour, and I told Mansour I felt dizzy and that we should leave. As he held my arm and led me out to the car, I felt so dissociated from him, from the touch of his hand. He could sense something else was wrong with me, but I never confessed to it. Majid recognized me, too. Just like those times in Ahvaz, he sent me flowers the next day. A little boy came to my door and gave them to me. There was a note with the bouquet, asking me if I would meet him at an address he gave. I was tempted to go but stopped myself. What would be the point? I’m married and so is he. That evening, having dinner with Mansour, the scent of the flowers I had put on the dining table dragged me down with confusion. It was as if a whirlpool was pulling me into dark waters. And then Majid sent me more flowers and notes. Oh, Nahid, I finally gave in.”

  Near the square was a bazaar, and carts heaped with fruit. We continued to a bakery and sat at a table in a secluded corner and we ordered honey-glazed pastry and tea.

  “At our first meeting, in a studio apartment that belonged to a friend of his, Majid told me he came to Tehran periodically to see publishers, hoping to interest one in several nineteenth-century French poets he had translated into Farsi. Some of their poems dealing with decadence wouldn’t pass censorship but some were delicate, full of interesting imagery. He particularly liked a poem by Mallarmé, about the wandering thoughts of a faun on a drowsy summer afternoon. It reminded him of those days in Ahvaz. We talked about literature, poetry, theater, movies. I was in heaven with him.”

  “Pari, I feel so good that you met him, had that pleasure.”

  “Yes, it was an amazing experience, at first. I realized even more clearly then that what I had with Mansour was what actresses feel toward the actors they kiss in movies—only pretend. We saw each other for a few months, then everything ended.” Pari looked caught in a dream. “Nahid, it’s such a long story. It’s painful to tell it all.”

  “Pari joon, you don’t have to talk about it if it’s so upsetting.”

  But Pari went on. “I was in conflict, both for betraying Mansour and for taking Majid awa
y from his wife for even those few hours. Worse, I hated all the hiding and the lies that went with it. I suggested to Majid that we tell everything to our spouses and face the consequences. He said he needed time to think about it.”

  A group of women and children rushed into the bakery, talking about a movie they had just seen. They sat at tables around us, filling the small bakery with their laughter. As the women talked, the children ran around the tables, playing among themselves.

  Pari and I paid and started walking home on a long, winding street behind the bakery.

  “Once Majid fell asleep while we were in the apartment together,” Pari said. “I noticed a letter on the desk in the corner. It was addressed to his wife at her parents’ home in Tabriz. Majid had told me she was visiting there and he was spending more time in Tehran. He must have taken the letter out of his pocket and absently put it there. The envelope wasn’t sealed. I couldn’t stop myself. I took out the letter. What I read was so upsetting. He told his wife that I was just a passing person in his life and that his love for her was far deeper because she was the mother of their two sons. I wondered if he left that envelope there intentionally. I confronted him. He actually began to cry. He said he loved me and he wrote that to his wife out of guilt because she had found out he was seeing me. Someone told her.”

  “Who do you think told her?” I asked.

  “I’m almost sure Taheri is behind it. He stalks me when he’s in Tehran. He follows me in his red Mercedes.

  “We saw each other only once after that,” Pari said after a long silence. “At our last meeting, Majid told me he had thought a lot about us and realized he could never leave his wife.”

  My mind went back to that Norooz picnic in Ahvaz when Majid gave me a letter for Pari, encouraging her to leave her husband. I reminded Pari of that.

  “He claimed it was because of his children that he didn’t want to break up his marriage. I even detected a touch of criticism in his tone that I left Taheri at the expense of giving up my son. You know, Nahid, what happened with Majid has weakened me. The fact that he was disapproving that I gave up my son brought out all my self-blame, more so than any other person’s criticism. I really thought he would understand what I did. Here I was, face-to-face with a man I had loved so deeply and for so long, who had never left my heart, and he turned out to be not much different from all the others. The bright light of my romantic love for him died. It fell into the dark realm where my hope for being an actress is. All I yearn for now is reuniting with Bijan.”

  It was as if Pari were lost in one of those endless staircases in an Escher drawing that lead nowhere. I could almost hear the bells of pain ringing loudly inside her and yet I didn’t know what words of comfort I could offer. What she told me next hit me like cold, sharp-edged hailstones.

  “Not long after my relationship with Majid ended, Mansour committed me to a mental hospital. It was a terrifying experience. Two orderlies came over, tied me up in a stretcher, and took me to Pahlavi Sanitarium. A doctor came in and gave me an injection to knock me out because I was screaming.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to upset you long-distance. I didn’t tell Father and Mother because of their attitude toward me, always thinking of me as a little insane because I left Taheri. You’re the only one I’m telling about it now. Remember that movie The Snake Pit with Olivia de Havilland?”

  “Yes, very well.”

  “I was so afraid they’d do things like that to me. But my main doctor, a Dutchman, told Mansour there was nothing seriously wrong with me and that I shouldn’t be in a mental hospital. He said he’d often seen temporary breakdowns or depressions in Tehran and that many people recovered at home. If I got overly anxious, I could take a tranquilizer. So after I had been there for a month I was released. I took the tranquilizers on and off. But our relationship has been really strained ever since.” A faint smile appeared on her face as she said, “The irony is that, as much as I feared the hospital, I felt a certain sense of freedom there, too. We said what we wanted. There was one woman my age who always took her clothes off and danced naked. We put on a play in the large reception room, when it was empty at night and no one stopped us. The nurses and orderlies left us alone.”

  My knees felt weak as we strolled, from all that Pari told me. We passed a sprawling building with a high wall around its courtyard. “That’s where Mansour took me,” Pari said.

  “Pahlavi Sanitarium for Women” was written on a tile plaque on the wall next to the compound’s wrought-iron gate. When the gate swung open and a guard let visitors out, I got a glimpse inside the courtyard. Patients wearing drab beige robes were sitting on benches, looking downward or staring into space. Some wandered around aimlessly.

  The sun was beginning to set and the sky was full of streaks of red and purple. A pair of crows sat on a bare tree branch, and the muffled voice of the muezzin from a mosque reached us. We walked home in silence.

  As I tried to sleep that night, my head whirred with Pari’s disappointments and traumas. I was glad she had finally been with Majid, and seen him in the flesh, but now I saw Mansour in a different way. He appeared so kind and attentive to her, and yet he had committed her against her will and with no real cause. As a husband he had the power to commit his wife and no one would question him. I thought of him saying to me, “Your sister is cut off from reality.” Now, after what Pari had revealed, his comment was upsetting.

  In the morning, the roosters crowed from the coop Pari and Mansour kept in the courtyard. I heard Pari talking with Mansour in the dining room. My dark thoughts were blown away. Perhaps it was all exaggerated, I told myself. Her affair with Majid had to end, considering the circumstances. True, Mansour had committed her, but then he took her out when the doctor recommended he do so.

  Howie was still asleep, so I joined Pari and Mansour for breakfast: flat bread and sangag, cooked on hot stones lining an oven, the kind of bread Maryam used to have delivered to our house, along with tea, feta cheese, eggs, honey, and jam. Pari and Mansour seemed like any couple together. I watched them as I ate and wondered if perhaps yesterday had been a dream.

  Our trip was cut short by a sudden upheaval. Khomeini’s son Mustapha, who like his father lived in Iraq, was found dead in his bed in the city of Najaf. Autopsy is against Islamic law and the cause of his death remains a mystery to this day, but many people suspected SAVAK of murdering him. Theological colleges in Qom closed in protest and demonstrations erupted everywhere. These protests were different from the demonstrations that took place in Iran earlier that year. In September there had been peaceful protests, mainly through letter-writing campaigns, by various segments of society, complaining about familiar and seemingly ever-present problems. They wanted improvements in their conditions. They criticized government officials for spending money on the wrong things and for hoarding it within their own circle. They criticized the Shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf, who was extremely close to her brother, for her licentious lifestyle divided between Mecca and Monte Carlo casinos. A group of lawyers had banded together to criticize SAVAK torture and to monitor prison conditions. Dissident academics formed a group called the National Organization of University Teachers, and they joined students in demanding academic freedom.

  All the open criticism seemed to signify that the Shah was giving people the freedom to express their views. But now the protests were loud and angry and sometimes violent, mainly organized by religious groups, with the secular segment joining in.

  As Howie and I were returning to the house after a visit to a museum, we came across a crowd in a square.

  “We have to weed out foreign vices. We have to put an end to nightclubs where foreign women in scanty clothes dance and where liquor flows like water.” A huge crowd, mostly men but some women, too, in chadors, had gathered around the platform. “Yankee go home! English go home,” they shouted.

  Shopkeepers stood in their doorways, watching. The teahouses and rest
aurants had emptied. Coca-Cola and orange-soda bottles set on the outdoor tables in front of restaurants were untouched. Some boys had climbed up the tall cypress trees, looking down at the scene and yelling the same slogans.

  “They steal our oil and give us nothing,” the man on the platform said.

  “Go home, oil eaters!” the people gathered around him shouted.

  “Tehran has become a whore town. Women wander on streets wearing almost nothing.” The voice of the man on the platform overwhelmed all the others. “Western whores calling themselves dancers perform almost naked in nightclubs where alcohol is served freely like water. Many of our people have to crowd into tiny huts or sleep on streets. They have only one set of clothes to wear day in and day out. They’re forced to work as sweepers, garbage collectors, factory workers. And they’re paid a starvation wage and given no benefits, while foreigners are stealing our money and insulting us. Do you know what our exploiters, the Americans and the English, call us? Camel culture. Bedouins.”

  Howie and I managed to find our way out of there and walked speedily toward Pari’s house.

  “This looks really bad,” Howie said on an empty street.

  “It’s scary. Complaints are just piling up,” I said. “Maybe it’s even worse now than when I lived in Ahvaz.”

  On another street we came across a group of men wearing black clothes and holding black banners with slogans written on them in purple letters: “Weed out evil,” “Death to America,” “Death to English.” They shouted, “We have suffered oppression for too long. We must unite, drive out exploiters.”

  “Khanoon, go cover up, please,” a middle-aged bearded man said to me. I was wearing a blouse and skirt.