Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

  As we passed through the courtyard, I recalled how flowers were in bloom in every season. Now snapdragons crawled up a wall. The plum and cherry trees were still standing in their spots. The latticed window to the basement, the stained-glass panes, were intact. In the living room a samovar was giving out sparks. The comforting daily ritual of Maryam having tea with other women while my cousins and I played nearby came back to me. A tin can, perhaps the one I used to water the plants in the courtyard, stood next to the samovar. Perhaps it had been there all these years.

  Maryam served tea and pastries and fruit and we talked. Mohtaram was in Ahvaz, which was one of the first cities to be reconstructed after the war ended because of the oil fields. She was there to see what could be rescued from our bombed-out house and to sell some properties she owned in the area. Manijeh’s husband had died under mysterious circumstances, and she had married again and had two children, but Maryam didn’t know where they lived. My other aunts and cousins had left for mountainous villages and hadn’t returned to Tehran yet.

  Maryam’s life wasn’t that different under the new regime, she told me, since her neighborhood had remained unchanged and because no bombs had been dropped on it. She had the same pattern of daily interaction with women, some from the neighborhood, and her new tenants. A young couple lived in the rooms that Ezat Sadaat had occupied. The husband had fought in the war, was wounded several times, and was finally sent home. He was a nice man, and assisted Maryam whenever she needed help with repairs and such things. Her other tenant was a widow who lived by herself. Maryam told me that Hamideh had died years ago, and Ezat Sadaat died of “shock and grief” when her nephew was executed during the Shah’s regime.

  It was easy enough, I thought, to attribute many things to “shock and grief,” considering all the blows that had been dealt to people.

  “How could that happen, she just fell down the stairs?” Maryam asked, confounded by Pari’s accident. “She was a wonderful girl, and her fate was so terrible.”

  After a while I got up and walked from room to room. In my old room stood the crib that Maryam had kept in the basement after I outgrew it. It had a lace canopy and thick, protective cushions of a pale green silky material with a leafy pattern. A large rag doll, wearing a full-skirted blue satin dress and a blue ribbon in her hair, lay on one side. It was my doll from childhood. I held it in my arms and rocked it as I used to.

  I woke every day to sparkling sunshine pouring into the room, to the sights of the trees and bushes in the courtyard, the murmur of Maryam saying her prayers, and felt utterly serene, as if I had no concerns in the world and was living moment by moment.

  My serenity was shattered when I visited Pari’s friends and her absence was all too real. They were preoccupied with their own problems and losses but Pari’s name came up, followed by sighs and silences.

  I couldn’t find the hairdresser I had met on my previous visit. The house where she had her salon was now a religious school for children. I had hoped her cousin who knew Taheri could find out Bijan’s whereabouts for me.

  I wanted to see Mansour, partly to find out if he knew where Bijan was. But Zohreh told me Mansour had married and left Tehran, transferred by the company he worked for, but she didn’t know where.

  When I visited Pari’s grave, I hoped that miraculously Majid might be there again but alas there was no such luck. I felt a loss, as if it were Pari who wanted to see him again one more time, give him another chance.

  One morning I went to an office to leave my passport for “inspection.” It would be returned to me at the airport when I was leaving Iran. This rule applied to all Iranians coming and going, part of the security during the Shah’s time and continuing now.

  It was siesta time when I returned to Maryam’s house. In the alley I could smell saffron, turmeric, and dried lemon. A woman wrapped in a chador came out of a house in the middle of the alley and walked in my direction. She was deep in thought, seeming oblivious of her surroundings. When she saw me, she stopped suddenly.

  “Oh, Nahid, I’m Batul. I knew you were visiting. My mother heard the news from Maryam.” she said. “I was planning to come and see you.”

  Batul, my friend who had been with me in the school courtyard when Father came and took me away.

  “It’s amazing you recognized me,” I said excitedly as we embraced and kissed.

  “There are traces of the child Nahid in you.”

  “I see some of the child Batul in you, too.” Her face was still round, her features soft, but now there was a touch of anguish in her expression and manner, as I saw on the faces of many people in Iran.

  “We’ve had so many dark years, but thank God finally things are getting better. It must be hard for you to live so far away from home. I’d miss my family, this neighborhood, so much. Home is home, even with all its problems.”

  Forty-one

  The next day I went to my old elementary school. I found it on the narrow, cobblestoned street lined with yellow-brick houses that looked new. The school was tucked between the stationery store that had always been there and a candy store. I stood in front of the school and stared into the courtyard. The large wooden door with bas-relief designs at the top was wide open. I could see students wandering around wearing head scarves and dark gray rupushes.

  The day Father came and took me away rushed back to me all at once. I had been particularly happy that year, partly because I loved my teacher, Miss Modaresi. She was young, with long, lustrous brown hair and large dark brown eyes. Dimples appeared on her cheeks when she smiled. She read a poem or a few pages of a story to us every day. The themes were often nostalgic for what had been left behind or lost. Part of a poem floated forward from the recesses of my mind:

  . . . a half-forgotten house, full of sunshine one moment and shadowy the next . . .

  A bell rang, interrupting the images of those long-ago days and brought me back to the present. The students rushed into classrooms, and then I could hear voices reciting lines from a text:

  Roses come out every spring, nightingales begin to sing.

  A gray-haired man came out of the school and started pruning the dried branches from trees on either side of the door. I told him I used to go to school there many years ago.

  “You must miss home. Nothing is like home,” he said.

  How much happier I would be if it were possible to mesh my present life with the one from those faraway days, I thought. I wouldn’t feel so fractured inside, so full of longing, envious of everyone who has easy access to their homes and loved ones. This was the price I was paying for the independence I had fought so fiercely for.

  When I returned, Maryam gave me a bundle of letters she had saved, some were from me when I lived in Ahvaz, a few were from Mohtaram. As she prayed I read the letters.

  A letter I wrote to her from Ahvaz said:

  I miss home. I don’t want to be here. Every day when I come back from school I expect to find you in the house. I’m waiting for you.

  Another was from Mohtaram to Maryam:

  I’m happy to give you one of my children. I know how sad you are that you don’t have any of your own. I’m sending the ring along. . . . You know, my dear sister, that you should give it to her when she gets married.

  When Maryam paused between her prayers I asked her about the ring.

  “Look behind the curtain in that room,” she said, pointing. “I found it there a few days ago and meant to take it out for you.”

  I sensed reluctance in her, as if there was something hidden in that ring. She resumed praying and I went into the room. A curtain covered the alcove where Maryam used to keep bedding, pillows, sheets, and quilts. The curtain was dark blue with yellow daisies on it, probably fabric left over from a dress. I pulled the curtain aside. There was no bedding there now, just random items—a brass candlestick, a prayer rug, a rosary, a box. I opened the box, but it was filled with odds and ends, a tortoiseshell comb, several golden bobby pins, like the ones my grandmother wo
re, a yellow silk handkerchief. As I put the box back, my hand touched something. It was a blue velvet cloth tied at the top with a thin white ribbon. I untied the ribbon and found inside a gold cardboard box with a floral design on it. Inside the box was a gold ring with a cluster of tiny diamonds.

  I put it on next to my wedding ring. It fit perfectly. When Maryam finished praying I showed her the ring on my finger.

  I thought of the stories I had woven around Mohtaram having an affair with a jeweler.

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

  Could it be true? It was such a taboo subject that I could never discuss it with Maryam or Mohtaram.

  “I’m happy you have it now,” Maryam said, but there was a touch of sorrow in her face. “I imagined you would live near me when you got married.” Then she repeated what she had said when she visited me in Cambridge, “But it wasn’t our destiny.”

  Epilogue

  I began visiting Maryam regularly after that. When Khomeini died in 1989, things were not as strict as during his reign. Iran-America relationships have never been mended. President Bush, in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, named Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, an “axis of evil.” Now in 2006, there are huge tensions over nuclear weapons being made in Iran under the latest president there.

  I know firsthand, though, that Iran’s government hasn’t gone from good to evil, but rather from bad to perhaps worse. Under the Shah’s rule people didn’t have most of their rights. I experienced firsthand my sister Pari automatically losing custody of her son when she left her abusive husband. During Mohammad Khatami’s two terms as president (1997-2005), Iran went through a period of relative reform. Part of that was due to Khatami making the Internet accessible to a large number of Iranians. Women frequenting the hundreds of Internet cafés in large cities in Iran to go to chat rooms or look at blogs in Farsi and other languages have become aware of different ways of life. There are more women than men in universities now, and many girls hold jobs.

  But then, rules in Iran are in constant flux and I have to assess the political climate every time I visit. At times I have had to hide my American passport in the lining of my clothes or I have left it with the American consulate in Istanbul; at other times I have been able to show it with no trouble. Sometimes I needed a letter of permission from my husband to go to Iran; at other times I didn’t.

  Typical of the meandering and unpredictable life my family and I have led, on one visit I found Maryam and Mohtaram living together. Maryam had rented out her house and moved in with Mohtaram and Farzin, who was divorced. They lived in an apartment on the top floor of a three-story building that Mohtaram purchased in Tehran. It was interesting how the apartment accommodated their individual needs, combining modern and old elements. It had a modern kitchen and bathroom but was set in a courtyard with high walls in the traditional Muslim fashion. From its balcony the turquoise dome of a mosque was visible. It was furnished with sofas, tables, chairs, and also thickly woven rugs on the floor and cushions to lean against. The building was on a quiet, tree-lined street but was within a few blocks of the bustling Vali Asr Avenue with shops carrying both traditional and modern merchandise. Maryam liked to spend time on the balcony facing the courtyard. “Sunlight soothes my aching knees,” she told me.

  I could see that Mohtaram and Maryam were closer to each other than to any of us children. In some ways we had let them down. I lived far away from Maryam, shattering her hopes that I would one day share my daily life with her. The idea of destiny became abstract to her at times when she was faced with reality. My brothers had no intention of returning home. Manijeh’s blaming Mohtaram for her unhappiness in her first marriage, though in the form of a very mild protest, had hurt Mohtaram enough for her to comment on it. Farzaneh, married with two daughters, lived far away, out of the country. Farzin was “in her own world.” And Pari, of course, was no longer alive.

  “Pari, my dear firstborn daughter, was the focus of all my attention until Manijeh was born,” Mohtaram told me. “Manijeh was weak and needed attention. I neglected Pari too much.” She began to cry with fresh grief. “My wonderful Pari, I wasn’t there for you when you needed me.” Her grief and regret were deep and real.

  Maryam even slept close to her sister, on a mattress in the ell of Mohtaram’s bedroom. Mohtaram had adopted some of Maryam’s values and now she prayed. This wasn’t due to pressure from the regime—there was no way that the new ideology could be enforced in the privacy of homes. It was because Mohtaram wanted to be close to her sister.

  The last time I visited, Mohtaram and Maryam both needed care. Maryam’s arthritis had become more severe and she could walk only with the help of a cane. Mohtaram also could barely walk, although it was not clear what the underlying problem was—the doctors said it could be due to partial paralysis from a minor stroke.

  Surprisingly Manijeh had moved into the second floor of Mohtaram’s building. She was divorced from her second husband, and both her children were in America, living with their father’s relatives. Manijeh devoted herself to taking care of Mohtaram, Farzin, and Maryam. She made sure that everything was running smoothly for all of them. She supervised their daily tasks and solved problems as they came up. She found a family, Nasrin and her husband and two children, to do the cooking, shopping, and cleaning, and to take care of the flower beds and the pool in the courtyard. In exchange, they lived rent free in the first-floor apartment and were paid a small salary. Our old servant, Ali, had moved out of our family’s house years ago and now worked in an orchard belonging to his wife’s family.

  On Nasrin’s day off, Manijeh did the shopping and cooking and helped my mother, aunt, and sister to take showers. She went out and returned with bags full of fresh produce, meat, bread, and pastries. She was happy to be of help to them. Of course, not everything about a person is in the open and explainable. Still, I had not expected Manijeh to be capable of so much tenderness and self-sacrifice.

  Images from the past of Mohtaram’s love for Manijeh kept coming to me: Mohtaram putting her arm around Manijeh and saying, “Isn’t she an angel?” Mohtaram putting a flower in Manijeh’s hair and saying, “She’s like a flower herself.” It is poetic justice, in some small way, that Manijeh is now Mohtaram’s caretaker.

  Once I had a chance to be alone with Manijeh. It was a pleasantly cool and sunny afternoon and I was sitting on the balcony.

  I felt the old tightening in my chest as Manijeh came out and sat on a chair there, too. We had barely interacted during the visit.

  “So much time has passed, so much has happened since those days at home,” she said.

  “Yes, it seems so far away and yet so near. I think of those days all the time.”

  “I wish I had behaved differently when you came home. I was so insecure and jealous. I haven’t forgiven myself for accusing you of being the cause of Javad breaking our engagement,” she said.

  I was startled and shook my head vaguely.

  “The truth is he was in love with another woman,” Manijeh went on. “There’s so much more to what happened.” Her face, which had retained its beauty, became tinged with bitterness, making her look older for a moment. She sank into herself.

  “I didn’t see Pari for years,” she said after she came out of herself. “I wish we had been able to reach out to each other.”

  “I wish she was here with us now.”

  “Yes, it’s hard to believe what happened, how it happened. When she and I were both home at the same time, I could tell she was deeply unhappy. She used strong words. Once, after an argument with Father, before storming out of the room, she said, ‘I’d rather jump off a bridge than stay with Taheri.’ Another time she said, ‘I wish I were dead.’ But then at other times she seemed happy enough. She was excited about some projects she had taken on at the high school. And she kept up her hope that she would gain at least part-time custody of Bijan, which of course never happened. I
n a way we both lived in dreamworlds for a while, she hoping she would have her son back, that she could pursue acting. And me thinking I would win my husband’s heart from that other woman.”

  The mountains had turned into a gray-blue curtain. Over the courtyard wall I could see streetlamps going on and children who had been playing on the sidewalks leaving to go home. Men rode by on bicycles, carrying loaves of bread, bags of pastry, and fruit.

  “Time to get dinner ready,” Manijeh said.

  We got up and went inside. I was struck again by how the passage of time and all the new experiences had obliterated certain feelings and even perceptions. Those feelings we used to express by shouting, “I hate you,” had simply melted away. We were now middle-aged women. We had lived with losses, traumas that, though of different natures, were so great in magnitude that they canceled out the long-ago grievances.

  It makes me happy when I think of Maryam and Mohtaram being so close to each other at this stage of their lives. Although I still view Maryam as my mother and it is her I address as “Mother,” I have come to completely forgive Mohtaram and love her. I am grateful to her for being accommodating to Maryam. I am also more aware than ever of how difficult her life was—married at the age of nine to a grown man, starting at the age of fourteen to give birth to ten children and then losing so many of them. I imagine her and Father together in bed on their wedding night, he experienced with women, and she completely innocent, no breasts, no pubic hair. A child next to a grown man. I love Manijeh now, too, for devoting herself selflessly to Mohtaram, and Maryam and Farzin benefiting from it, too.