Song of a Captive Bird

by Jasmin Darznik

  When I found my sister, I grabbed her by the arm and we danced together, first the fox-trot, then the rumba, then the waltz, taking turns leading and following and stepping on each other’s toes until we doubled over in laughter.

  “You’ve got an admirer,” Puran said, and gave my hand a quick squeeze.

  I looked to where she was nodding. Parviz was standing at the far end of the garden by himself. When he caught my eye, I lifted my hand just a little and he looked away quickly. His sheepishness annoyed me, but at least he’d had the courage to follow me outside to the garden.

  “Let’s see if I do,” I told Puran.

  “Forugh! You can’t—”

  Before she could say any more, I was already making my way to him.

  “Why don’t you dance?” I asked him, planting my hands on my hips. “Aren’t you enjoying yourself?”

  He seemed surprised I’d spoken to him so boldly. “Well enough,” he said after a moment, “I guess.”

  A silence fell, and as usual I could think of nothing but to fill it with words. “Do you like Dostoevsky?” I said, blurting out the first thing that came to my mind. I’d imagined this moment many times in the last weeks, but I’d spoken fewer than a dozen words, and already I could feel my cheeks reddening.

  “Dostoevsky?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Sure, I like Dostoevsky. The Russians are masters of the form. I like poetry a lot more than novels, though.”

  “Do you read Hafez?” I asked.

  “Of course; Hafez is—”

  I cut him off. “I adore Hafez! I know lots and lots of his poems by heart!”

  “By heart?” His shyness had eased and his voice now was light and teasing. “Hafez is wonderful, I agree. Just about the only one of the old guard worth reading anymore.”

  I must have look baffled, because the next thing he said was, “Haven’t you read any Sher-e No, New Poetry? Nima, Shamlou?”

  “Of course I have!” I answered quickly. It was an outright lie, and one he most certainly would have caught me in if my mother hadn’t called my sister and me back to the parlor just then. “I’ve got to go!” I said, and didn’t wait for him to answer.

  In the stairwell, I fell in with Puran and some of the other girls. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw that Parviz was directly behind me, just a few feet back, and I could feel his gaze on me as I climbed the steps. I was relieved to have escaped without revealing the full breadth of my ignorance, but this thought was followed by the certainty that if I didn’t make my intention clear now, I might not have another opportunity.

  On the landing, I looked back over my shoulder again. “Write to me,” I mouthed, and before he could question me further about New Poetry, or anything else, I bounded up the stairs and out of sight.

  * * *

  —

  “Write to me,” I had told Parviz, knowing full well it was an unreasonable proposition and one I might well regret. True, he’d visited our house in Amiriyeh before, but that was a long time ago. Even if he managed to find out my address without arousing suspicion, his letters would be intercepted before they ever reached me, and then there’d be no more letters. And meeting him someplace would be impossible. Since leaving school, I’d barely left the house except in my mother’s company.

  But we soon worked out a system. It started like this: Parviz cornered my little brother, Fereydoun, in the alley and bribed him into slipping me a letter. “I’ll wait for you in the alleyway at four o’clock next Friday,” it read. “Come meet me if you can.”

  Though he hadn’t signed it, the note had nothing of the hesitation he’d shown when I’d served him tea that night at my cousin’s house. Over the next days, I read his note again and again, as if it were a riddle and by studying it carefully I might somehow figure out how to solve it. How could I get away from the house long enough to meet him?

  There was, I finally realized, a way, but it would only work with Puran’s help. “We’ll wait until the siesta, when they’re all asleep,” I explained. “You’ll stand on the rooftop, and if you see anyone coming or hear noises from the house, toss a pebble down into the alley and I’ll run back right away.”

  “I can’t, Forugh! I just can’t!”

  I clasped her hands in mine. “Just once, Puran, I promise. Only this one time!”

  I pestered her until at last she agreed to my plan. The following Friday, when everyone else went down to the basement for an afternoon nap, I slipped out into the alleyway behind the house, and Puran stood guard on the rooftop with a handful of pebbles.

  Parviz was waiting at the corner of the street, holding a single pale-pink rose. “How’d you manage to get away?” he asked as I approached.

  I cocked my head up toward the rooftop. “My sister’s keeping watch.”

  He glanced up to the roof, then back at me. “You’re sure she won’t tell?”

  “Of course not!”

  This seemed to satisfy him. After another quick glance to the rooftop, he held out the rose and I took it. From a few houses down the alley there came the sound of a radio. It was Delkash, my favorite singer. Her voice, rich and pining, drifted from the window and filled the alleyway with an old Persian folk song.

  Parviz reached into his breast pocket and drew out another gift, a bar of American chocolate—Hershey’s—and also a small envelope.

  I grinned.

  He looked around nervously, then stepped toward me and brushed my cheek with a quick kiss. Without another word, he passed an envelope into my hands and turned from the alley.

  I tucked the envelope into my shirt, under my chemise, and hurried back to the house. When I reached the attic, I sat cross-legged on the floor and pulled the envelope from my shirt. It’d gone soft with heat. I slit the envelope open with my forefinger and pulled out two sheets of cream-colored stationery. The first was a letter—a tender, innocent letter filled with compliments and longings: how pretty I looked the day we’d met on a hiking trail in Darband, how often he’d thought of me since then, how much he wished we could meet alone someplace.

  I folded the letter, tucked it carefully back into my shirt, and began to read the second piece of paper. Here Parviz had copied out what looked to be verses of a poem. It was strange, though, like nothing I’d ever read. At first glance, it didn’t resemble a poem at all. The lines were oddly broken, the phrasing was as simple as speech, and it had no rhyme and no meter. For all that, I could not help but read it again. After studying the poem, I pored over Parviz’s letter a second, third, and fourth time, and then I tucked the two sheets of paper back into their envelope and hid it under my mattress.

  That night, I went to sleep humming a tune by Delkash. For many years afterward, I only had to hear her voice and I’d at once be enfolded in memories of the alleyway, of those days when my body was opening in innocent amazement and I had no other name for longing but love.

  * * *

  At about this time, my brothers had begun leaving Iran for Europe to continue their studies and earn professional degrees. My sister and I had both attended high school but only up to the ninth grade. There was no expectation that we would look for work. Actually, it would have shamed our family if we’d considered one of the few professions then opening to women: teacher, nurse, or secretary. “Only destitute women work outside the house,” our mother told us darkly—the widowed, the ugly, and, although she did not say it, presumably also those depraved souls who practiced a profession so sinful its name could not be spoken aloud.

  All this left me with little to do. For a time, I enrolled in an arts course at a technical school. Just as he’d done when I was a small child, my father’s manservant walked me to class each day and waited by the gates of the school until class let out. The instructor, Monsieur Jamshid, had studied in France for a year, an accomplishment about which he reminded us regularly, some days hourly. “Bonjour, mesdemoiselles,” he drawled through a thick Persian accent, peppering his sentences with French words and
phrases. The other students—all girls—came to class dressed in two-piece skirt suits and kitten heels, and they were incapable of laying down a single stroke of paint without first securing Monsieur Jamshid’s approval.

  I kept to myself. I dressed in trousers belted with a scarf, my hair piled into a messy knot at the top of my head. With painting, as with poetry, I routinely lost all sense of time. I spent hours priming my canvases and mixing my paints. I worked with no aim or ambition but to please myself. I covered my canvases in great messy whorls of blue and red, painting until my arms ached and grew heavy. Within a week, my smock was coated with a thick layer of paint splatters. I adopted only the methods that interested me; the rest I felt free to ignore. When Monsieur Jamshid insisted I shade a line here, add a figure there, I folded my arms over my chest and refused. “Incoherent and undisciplined,” he sniffed, summoning the other students to delineate the flaws in my work. One day, I plucked my painting from the easel, tucked it under my arm, and marched out of the studio. I never returned.

  I squirreled away whatever money I came by to buy my own books, classical Persian poetry mostly, but also the nineteenth-century European novels my brothers and their schoolmates were reading. Puran loved to read, as well, and for a while we’d pool our allowances to buy books to share. This worked out all right until she got tired of me always choosing the books and insisting on reading every new acquisition first. Left to my own devices, I could only afford poorly translated second- and third-hand editions, which I bribed Fereydoun into fetching for me from the bookseller near his school. Their pages were discolored and brittle to the touch; their spines were creased and split. I read chaotically, in great headlong rushes. One night, I picked up a battered copy of Crime and Punishment and cracked open the cover. Within the space of thirty-six hours, I’d turned the last page and begun to read it a second time through.

  My other passion was the cinema. Once a month or so, Puran and I trekked uptown to the movie theater on the Avenue of the Tulip Fields, with Fereydoun for a chaperone. At the concession stand outside the theater, we each bought a cup of sour-cherry juice and a cone of hot cashews. We sat in front, in the very center of the row, with our treats balanced on our laps. The films were American, mostly Westerns and musicals. They were dubbed, and clumsily at that, but it didn’t bother us. In the cool darkness of the movie theater, Puran and I sank into our seats with grins and long sighs. We studied the actresses’ clothes, their makeup, their gestures, and their voices. When we were children, America had been yengeh donya, the tail end of the world, so far and foreign we couldn’t imagine it at all, but now America was Hollywood and the beautiful starlets we discovered inside the movie theater on the Avenue of the Tulip Fields.

  I watched them, wanting what they had—their beauty, charm, and confidence, and also the places these things took them.

  Back at home, I continued to study myself in my mother’s mirror. I told myself that someday soon—very soon even—I’d sculpt my brows into a high, thin arch. I would perfect Ava Gardner’s beguiling smile and Vivien Leigh’s cool, confident stare. I’d go wherever it suited me and I’d write whatever I pleased. I admit my plan for accomplishing all this was hardly original, but within that bounded world my methods were entirely my own. I’d choose my own husband, and this way I’d finally escape the Colonel’s house.

  5.

  “We’re having guests this afternoon,” my mother announced one morning at breakfast. Then, more pointedly, she turned to Puran and me and added, “You’ll serve the tea.”

  Tea. To understand the dangerousness of my flirtation with Parviz and the punishments that followed, you need to know that in those days a girl’s destiny wasn’t settled through whispers and furtive gestures but over her mother’s teatime pleasantries.

  From the moment Sanam hustled into the kitchen in the early morning and lit the coals under the brazier, there wasn’t a minute when a pot of tea wasn’t steeping on top of the samovar. In our house in Amiriyeh, everyone—our father the Colonel, the servants, Sanam, and, most especially, my mother and her guests—drank tea all day. They drank tea to steel themselves for the new day, to air out grievances, to celebrate the slightest good luck, and to relax just before sleep. But no pot of tea would ever be prepared and served with greater ceremony than the ones intended for the grandmothers, mothers, aunts, cousins, and sisters of our prospective suitors.

  “Three pinches!” Sanam said, waving three ringed fingers in the air. “No more, no less.” She took her place before the samovar and we stood on either side of her. “Watch carefully,” she continued, reaching for the iron canister filled with tea leaves. She dropped three pinches’ worth into a little ceramic teapot, then tipped in a few cardamom pods and a single drop of rose essence. She filled water to the top of the pot, shut the lid, and then set it atop the samovar to steep for an interval of precisely ten minutes—any longer, she warned us, and the tea would turn bitter and we’d have to begin all over again.

  “Now,” she said, narrowing her eyes and pointing to the cabinet, “the cups.” We pulled out the little gold-rimmed cut-crystal ones—Mother’s best. We held the cups up to the light, one after another, wiped away the smudges and streaks with rags, and then arranged them in neat rows on a silver tray.

  For days we practiced over and over, making it a game to please Sanam and outdo each other, until one day we were at last entrusted to prepare and serve our first afternoon tea.

  * * *

  —

  All morning my mother scolded me, telling me to keep quiet, warning me not to make trouble. No sooner did the knocker hit the door to our house and the visitors repair to the mehmoon khooneh than she ducked into the kitchen and called out, “Forugh! Puran! Bring the tea!” Her eyes swept through the kitchen and then fixed on us: one quick, smiling glance at my sister and then a longer, vexed look at me.

  “All-merciful God! Couldn’t you bother to make yourself presentable, Forugh?” she said. “Go put on your good dress, and braid your hair neatly!”

  I flicked my eyes up. “But there’s no time. The tea will be ruined….”

  Of course, there was nothing she could say to that; a poorly prepared tea would completely spoil the visit. She threw her hands in the air. “Well, at least comb your hair!” she said, and hurried back to her guests. “And be quick!”

  Puran and I took turns filling the cups. We poured an inch of the steeped tea into each one, followed by two inches of boiling water from the samovar. The tea turned from a deep brown to a warm amber. When we finished filling all the cups, Sanam threw us an approving glance and waved us out of the kitchen.

  Now came the trickiest part: serving the tea to the guests. We each carried a silver tray down the corridor, pausing on the threshold to the guest parlor to scan the room for the eldest of the women. We lowered our eyes as we approached, then knelt slightly toward them with the tray so they could inspect the tea. We knew if we had steeped it properly and served it without spilling a drop, they’d smile; if we failed, they’d purse their lips and perhaps even refuse to take a cup.

  That first time, Puran and I both managed to prepare a perfect tea. When we’d served all the guests according to age, we took our seats at the far end of the parlor. “Sit quietly,” our mother had warned. “No laughing, no chattering.”

  I felt the weight of the women’s eyes shift between my sister and me. Puran had a moon-shaped face, lovely arched brows, and very fair skin. Her silky brown hair was pulled back with two flowered barrettes, and her dress was simple but neat. Her cups of tea were invariably perfect, her deportment and manners impeccable.

  “What a charming girl,” the women purred as they took their cups from Puran’s tray.

  “It’s your eyes that see her as lovely,” my mother demurred.

  “Not at all, khanoom. She’s truly as lovely as can be!”

  I didn’t elicit any compliments. I might have envied my sister the attention, except I didn’t wish to be praised. Not at all. That day I
appeared in the mehmoon khooneh with my skirt wrinkled and my hair unkempt. Between chatting with her guests, my mother shot me sharp looks from across the room. The kinder of the women smiled at me as though I were feebleminded; the others lifted their eyebrows and clucked their tongues. I ignored them. When I smiled or laughed, I didn’t hide my mouth behind my hands as a good daughter should. I swung my legs under the chair, ribbed my sister to make her laugh, and sighed loudly and pulled faces when she refused. And, in time, I prepared so many ruinously bitter and disastrously watery concoctions that I was finally relieved altogether of my duty of attending the afternoon tea.

  * * *

  The trouble started with a poem.

  In these final months in the Colonel’s house, I wrote scores of poems, though I did so in secret and destroyed most everything I wrote. This was because the Colonel’s encouragement of my writing, however muted, didn’t survive the poem I wrote soon after meeting Parviz in the alleyway. “My beloved came to me in an ecstasy of devotion,” it began. “I spurned the false piety of my fear.” The poem went on in this vein for several more verses. I’d written others much like it before, love poems in the style of Hafez, but there was, perhaps, something different in my recitation of this particular poem, some tenor of feeling that suggested I’d gained a new intimacy with the subject of love.

  In any case, this time when I finished reciting my poem, the Colonel didn’t nod his head. Instead, he got to his feet, crossed the room, and stopped just short of me.