by Ava Homa
Children were initiated into an Iranian double life starting as young as kindergarten, when teachers and government agents began questioning students about possible non-Islamic activities that may happen at home. Chia nodded.
“Let’s water the trees so they give us cherries again,” I offered.
His chubby legs, arms, and cheeks jiggled as he ran to fetch me the water hose. I corroborated what everyone else used to say: “You are bitable.”
He frowned. “Biting’s bad.”
I grabbed the hose and started telling Chia the movie I was directing in my head. “Once upon a time, there was a king who said to his son, ‘You should go and kill your sister. She is a bad girl.’”
Chia tilted his head and frowned. “She’s a bad girl?”
“She wasn’t, but the vizier wanted to cut her head off.”
“Why?”
“Maybe he had Alzheimer’s.”
His hazel eyes darkened in puzzlement. “What’s Alzheimer’s?”
“Like Grandma. Now she doesn’t even like you.”
I was too lazy to recite all the details of the story, and I didn’t want the girl in my version of this tale to endure so many tests before she could prove her innocence, but I still wanted her to meet the prince.
“So the daughter told her father . . .” I let go of the hose and held onto the trunk of the only cherry tree that the water had not yet reached, turning in slow circles around it. “She told her Baba, ‘I will let you kill me, but you should listen to me first.’ When she spoke before the court, she showed them all what a hypocrite the vizier was. So her brave words defeated the evil man, her father loved her, and a prince who was present as a reporter fell in love with her courage.”
I stopped circling the tree and laughed at the thought of a prince as a journalist and at Chia’s confused expression. I ran around the yard, and he chased after me. We laughed.
“Don’t soak the trees.” Baba’s hoarse voice announced his presence before he appeared in the yard, carrying a light jacket over his arm.
Chia explained, “We’re watering the trees to make the cherries grow.”
Baba turned off the tap. “Chawshin gian, you’re drowning the trees with the water and me with the utility bill.”
I wanted to reply, “At least we didn’t forget about them,” but my nerve failed me. I was nothing like the girls in my stories.
“Leila, watch your brother, and stay in the yard.” Baba shut the gate behind him. Chia pouted and looked to me to gauge my reaction.
I didn’t speak, didn’t cry, didn’t sulk. I jumped on my bicycle. Shrieking like a banshee, I pedaled around the water faucet in the middle of the tiled backyard hundreds of times. Chia cycled after me.
Once I was sure Baba was far enough away, I told Chia about my plans to earn enough money to buy a camera. He could be my model when I became an award-winning photographer, if he helped me. We fetched the bowl of soaked apricots from the kitchen along with an assortment of chipped and cracked mugs, neatly arranged them on top of two boxes, and waited in front of our door for passersby.
Chia, with his big bright eyes and his little speech impediment, turned out to be incredible for business. He boldly accosted people, saying, “Only three tomans for a bowl of malisaw.” Unable to resist him, our customers patted him on the head and dropped their coins into my bag.
Even with Chia’s salesmanship, our location was quiet, and business was slow. The town center was full of peddlers, shoeshine boys, young and old men spreading blankets in crowded streets and selling clothing, accessories, fruit, and cigarettes openly—and playing cards, alcohol, and pop song audiocassettes secretly—but the side streets were mostly quiet.
A mother of three who purchased some malisaw and tipped us too advised that we walk down the street to the mosque that was fronted by rosebushes and stocky mulberry trees. We collected our things and headed down the block, leaving the door unlocked behind us.
As we walked, we passed a group of women sitting on the front steps of a rather big house. They were laughing as they cleaned a large bin of parsley, dill, and some other herbs, bantering and gossiping. Some reclined in the shade; others allowed the mellow sun of early fall on their backs. I tried to picture Mama as a member of their group, but couldn’t.
We set up shop across from the mosque, and I admired its architecture: the magnificent blue dome, splendid minaret, brick walls, and stained glass windows. The men in folk dress who were leaving the mosque after their evening prayer purchased our product and told Chia just how cute he was. I washed the mugs after each use at the fountain in the mosque’s courtyard. The mosque was a man’s world, and it was my first time stepping inside one. The high-ceilinged interior was covered with rows and rows of spotless, beautiful rugs, mostly burgundy. A niche inside indicated the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, before which dozens of men prostrated in humility. Books were arranged neatly on shelves, and there was a box for donations, which I believed had lost its daily share to Chia’s magnetism. By the time we had only six apricots left in our big bowl, the change in my pocket was weighing me down.
“Why does the sky turn so red and beautiful at sunset?” Chia asked as we walked home.
“Hmmm . . . I think the sky blushes when the sun kisses her good night.”
Chia tossed his head back and showed the little space between his two front bottom teeth.
“Catch me if you can. You are the police, and I am a thief,” I said, and ran back toward home.
The out-of-breath policeman whose face was covered in beads of sweat came close to arresting me, but I was an uncatchable criminal.
At home I found some old sour yogurt in the fridge and mixed it with sugar. We ate it with bread to stop our tummies from nagging as we counted our money, coins rolling off the table like marbles. I did the math. If we set aside a portion of our profit to invest in more apricots, and if we were as lucky every day as we’d been today, it would take five years to earn enough money to buy a camera. That felt like an eternity.
“We should work harder.” I decided, and we headed back outside to sell the remaining apricots. But the bright vibrant alleyway of the daytime had become a dark tunnel. There was not a customer to be found. Chia and I sank down in silent defeat against the gate, feeling too tired to talk or move. My head rested on his, eyes closed. We must have drifted off to sleep, because we awoke to Mama’s furious face, silhouetted by the light of the moon high in the sky.
Mama was hysterical. “Out this time of night again? Are you out of your minds? Where’s your useless father? What are these bowls and mugs about? Where did you get apricots from? Oh, God, oh God, oh God!” I sprang up at her shouts. Beads of sweat dripped down her brow. Before I could answer, she swatted me on my bottom.
She went inside, leaving the door open for us to follow. I didn’t know how to get out of trouble, and took a deep, ragged breath before entering the house. I rubbed my behind absently; her smack hadn’t hurt, not really, but I was worried it was merely a taste of what was to come. Mama had gone straight into the shower. Chia pretended to play quietly with his toy bear, then leaned his forehead near the coal heater when he heard the squeak of the shower tap.
“You have some explaining to do, miss!” Mama was wrapped in a robe, her hair spreading a wide, wet stain over her shoulders, and she sank onto the divan and massaged her swollen legs that always hurt. Chia crawled onto her lap. “Chawkal gian.” She kissed his red cheeks. “You have a fever again.”
“He’s faking it,” I declared. “He had his head near the heater to—”
“And you only know how to make a mess for me?” She winced as her eyes traced the trail of yogurt along the kitchen floor. “What kind of daughter are you?”
“He doesn’t have a fever.”
She touched Chia’s forehead again. “Tell me what crazy thing have you been up to?” She sighed.
How could I explain to Mama? She’d never understand my desire for a camera; she’d just call me self
ish, tell me there were so many other things we needed.
But before I could answer, the phone rang. She snatched it from the receiver immediately and spoke in a soft voice so unlike her usual tone.
“Just go to bed.” She then unplugged the brown rotary phone, clutched it to her bosom, and rushed to her room, shutting the door behind her.
CHAPTER THREE
Chin in hand, I admired the first snow of the year covering the city of Mariwan like a bridal veil, wondering if one could marry herself. I drew a wedding without a groom, a gown made from flowers of all shapes and colors. But I only had a black pen.
“Daydreaming again, for God’s sake?” Mama startled me. “We should leave in five minutes.”
I had my coverall on. “My school headscarf has vanished.”
“Belsima.” Stalving. Chia lumbered to the kitchen, rubbing an eye. Now in grade one, he could pronounce his r’s, but he also knew how cute everyone found his little speech impediment. His mismatched socks under the open door of the fridge were brightened by the pale winter light.
“Mama! Stalving!” Chia called out on his way to her room.
“Be grateful to God, Chia,” she said. “Many people don’t have roofs over their heads or heaters in the winter. And no more trouble at school, eh? I have enough on my plate. My mother no longer even recognizes me.”
Yesterday Chia had made a scene at school when he stood up for his classmate who had been beaten by the teacher for not being able to speak Persian.
“I only asked a question. What’s the point of school if our teachers won’t answer our questions?” Chia rubbed his eyes again with the back of his hand and turned to me. He’d asked why students couldn’t read and write in their mother language. “What’s wrong with learning Kurdish?” The standard response—“One country, one language”—hadn’t satisfied him and only led to more questions.
I’d faced this same horror when I began school, and now it was Chia’s turn, the inheritance of all the students of Kurdistan and other non-Persian regions in Iran: Beginning in grade one, we were forced to learn to read and write in a new language entirely different from the one we’d grown up speaking, and when we struggled, it was literally beaten into us. Overnight, we were robbed of our language, our heritage. Little by little, we began to understand that our mother tongue wasn’t the language of power and prosperity. At a young age, our alienation from Kurdish history and literature—from our roots, identity, and inevitably our parents—began, escalating with each year that passed.
“Ready yet?” Mama called out to me, a hand on her hip. She was dressed in an elegant velvet overcoat, a simple design that gracefully showed off her curves. She must have picked it up from Tanakora, the reeking bazaar where secondhand Western clothes were sold for cheap. My mother was indeed beautiful.
Chia turned to me now. “Leila? No bleakfast?”
“You’re not so adorable anymore. Speak properly.”
I had spent the previous evening arranging my hair into an elaborate braid, tied with a spotted, forest-green ribbon, and hated that I had to cover it.
Baba and his radio came downstairs. His eyes were puffy and tired. “—and four Kurdish villages were demolished by Iran as the government continues to level five more,” the radio announced.
“Alan, your children want breakfast,” said Mama. “Leila, hurry up.”
I frantically searched for my headscarf, worried that we’d miss the infrequent bus downtown. Our neighborhood had a boys’ elementary school for Chia, but the girl’s school was nearly a two-hour commute away. Chia finally presented the headscarf, all wrinkled. “Did you hide this under your pillow again, meshkaka, you little mouse?”
“Don’t go to school if you hate it!” he said.
“Listen, Chia.” He probably couldn’t understand how a girl had to be either pretty or brainy in this world. “The only way I can buy a camera is to get a job, and to do that I need to earn a degree. You should stop hiding my school stuff, and I’ll show you my new drawing after I color it at school today, okay?”
Mama and I took the faded blue bus to the city where my school and her counseling office were located. I wondered what advice she would give someone who had a family like ours. I stared toward the front of the bus where the men sat; women were not allowed up front. Sitting by the window in the last row, I looked at the weather-beaten houses, the flats stacked on top of each other without much structure, so different from the stunning architecture of the historic houses I’d seen uptown.
During the long rides, Mama would talk to any woman who sat beside her. It always started with a discussion of how expensive everything was getting, and by the end of the first hour, the woman knew the ins and outs of Mama’s life, such as how our landlord lived too far away and was too busy to hound us for the months-delayed rent.
“I’m married to a man who has a doctorate but can’t earn a dime and has a separate bedroom, claiming he does not want another child. God’s rage will break his back one day,” she told a woman sitting next to her today.
Although Mama didn’t say that Baba couldn’t get a job because he had been a political prisoner, everyone could guess why someone so highly educated was unemployed.
“I am the one who has to feed four mouths, and I cannot work and do all the housework too,” she said. By now the bus was so crowded that nobody on it could move, and private conversations were impossible.
I continued to gaze out the window. Most cars already had snow chains on their tires. On several corners, venders sold hot beets. Each time a seller removed the lid of the dome in the middle of his cart to pour out the beets and their wine-red liquid, steam rose and danced in the cold air. My mouth watered.
“Isn’t that your daughter?” asked the woman in a folk dress who had been eagerly listening to my mother’s endless tirade.
I faced the scrutinizing eyes of the matron. She had a whiskered mole on her upper lip. “If I find crayons at school to color my drawing, it would be the prettiest gown,” I blurted out, hoping my talent for drawing would soften her glare.
“Your daughter is big enough to give you a hand. My granddaughter is younger than she is and does all the cooking and cleaning. They’ll do everything for their husbands later. Why not for their poor mothers?” She shrugged, and Mama nodded in firm agreement.
After I got off the bus, I sprinted the whole way to school, splashing through the slush puddles, ignoring my wet socks. In the privacy of a bathroom stall, I bit into the stale piece of bread I had hoarded. The walls of the stall were covered with graffitied curses at Khomeini, Khalkhali, and Rafsanjani, calling them murderers and bloodsuckers. The janitor must have given up painting over them. Recognizing Shiler’s neat handwriting in the upper corner, I added some profanities of my own, wishing the men would be lashed, tortured, and executed again and again in hell because death was too good for them. Then I noticed an amateur drawing of a worm, or perhaps an arrow, and turned it into a beautiful butterfly, white with black dots.
The school bell rang, and I rushed to join all the girls who stood in queues in the courtyard, respectfully listening as one of the older students recited the Qur’an verses that vowed friends of God never experienced sorrow or fear. Shiler stood behind me in line. Her mother was the only one I knew who often looked happy despite her hard life, or at least peaceful.
Neither Shiler nor I wore gloves, and as the principal lectured us on ethics, we rubbed our hands together, blew on them, and tucked them under our armpits. Shiler wore a loose, short headscarf that would certainly get her in trouble again. “I drew penises in all the bathroom stalls,” she whispered and chortled.
I giggled and blushed, realizing just then that what I had seen was neither a worm nor an arrow. I hoped nobody would know it was me who had given the penis wings. Shiler’s neck was turning red in the cold, so I reached to tighten her headscarf.
She pulled away. “No. If I wear hijab fully, they’ll think I believe in it.”
“Aren’t
you worried that Mrs. Givi will punish you?” The parwareshi teacher didn’t actually teach any classes; she was an official agent of the government whose job was to browbeat girls into submission and report on teachers and students who didn’t comply with religious and political rules. In fact, the only thing that all of the Kurdish regions had in abundance was intelligence agencies; about six of them were active in our small border town, which neighbored Iraqi Kurdistan, alone. There were innumerable spies around town, from cab drivers to peddlers. Even families whose own members had been executed or rendered disabled by torture sometimes turned in other families for cash.
At only twelve years old, the rebellious Shiler was one of Givi’s most frequent targets.
“Fuck her!” Shiler said, shocking me with her profanity. “She doesn’t scare me and my mother.” My friend struck a defiant pose, but the usual audacious glint didn’t quite reach her eyes today.
“Plus she has such stinky breath,” I whispered to Shiler to prove my solidarity. I secretly believed that the teacher had exchanged her heart for a sewer system in return for the power to intimidate.
Shiler covered her face with her shawl and chuckled, then clutched her belly and winced.
“Are you okay? Did you eat breakfast?” I regretted not sharing my bread.
She swatted away my concern. “I’m fine.”
We followed the Persian national anthem with chants of “Death to America, death to Israel.” It was the only time we girls were allowed, even encouraged, to be heard. Shiler and I shouted with all our strength as a way to fight the cold and to participate in an unofficial contest to see who had the loudest voice. It was also our shared act of defiance that, instead of saying the slogans, we simply yelled out gibberish, enjoying the sensation of screaming with mouths wide open and cackling about our secret insubordination.
Afterward, we marched in neat rows to the classroom. “I’d show you my new drawing, but I have to find crayons first.”
“I love it already.” Shiler sat in the back with the other tall girls, where it was easier to giggle and whisper.