Song of a Captive Bird

by Jasmin Darznik

  The next day I read over what I’d written. I managed to startle myself with the rough, raw anger of those poems. As a girl I’d hidden my poems under my mattress for fear my mother or—worse—the Colonel might read them and punish me for what I’d written. But I knew my father would never see these poems, and every day it mattered less and less to me what Parviz might think if he read them. So why shouldn’t I just write what I wanted? Why shouldn’t I write about what I really thought and felt?

  When I think back on this period of my life, I remember it as having the intensity of a love affair. The green ink with which I’d written the first poems pleased me so much that I gave up writing in black ink and composed all my poems in green. For the first time, I wasn’t following a model but working directly from my own emotions and sensibilities. Parviz had shown me a different way to write, but now my work was becoming truly my own. There was still a gap between what I wanted to say and how well I managed to put my ideas into words, but slowly the gap began to narrow, if just a little.

  I didn’t intend to share these new poems with anyone, at least not at first. I wrote for myself, and that was enough. More than enough. In those hours, I was happier than I’d ever been, happier than I imagined I could be. I was alone in a room, and one by one the poems were setting me free.

  When I gave Parviz a copy of one of my milder poems, which I’d inscribed with gratitude for his encouragement, he said nothing. I’m not sure that after our marriage he ever read a single thing I wrote.

  Fine, I thought. That’s just as well. My poems really are my own now.

  Back then there was still a strict division between a “poet” and a “poetess.” No matter how skillful her writing, a woman was invariably given the feminine moniker. This, apparently, was where I now belonged, among the so-called aspiring poetesses. But ambition had got hold of me. I squirreled away money from my housekeeping allowance to subscribe to a few prominent publications. Thumbing through these journals, I saw that the addresses of the publishers were printed on the inside flaps. Somehow I thought if I went in person to the office of one of these publications I might fare better than if I sent my poems by mail. It was an idle thought, and one I quickly dismissed. Why would an important literary journal want to publish a sixteen-year-old housewife from Ahwaz?

  I was long accustomed to hearing discouragement from others, but now I was discouraging myself. I hated myself for it. True, I was terrified, and I had no real sense of what I was doing, but when, after many days, I couldn’t come up with a reason that didn’t stem from fear, insecurity, or shame. I finally asked myself why I shouldn’t try for something more.

  * * *

  —

  We’d leave. That was my plan: Parviz and I would leave Ahwaz. I’d find a way out for both of us. I’d think of some way of making money and we’d move to Tehran together and then we’d set up our own house, however modest. I could pursue my poetry and maybe, beyond the reach of his mother, Parviz could return to his own writing, as well. We’d be happy if we moved away—or at least in Tehran we’d have a chance at happiness, a chance we’d never had in Ahwaz.

  Then, one day in the early months of our marriage, life took a turn that made my plans impossible. I set out for the marketplace early in the morning, a green woven basket under my arm. A few doors from the house, I suddenly felt weak and light-headed. I stumbled toward the old stone wall to steady myself, but before I could reach it my knees buckled under me and I fell to the ground. My first thought when I came to was that I must have forgotten to eat, which happened often in those days, but the next morning and the morning after I still felt so queasy that I could barely bring myself to drink a glass of water. At noon I went into town and called on a local nurse for a poultice to help settle my stomach. The nurse, a tiny old woman with gray eyes, tipped my chin up, peered into my eyes, and then, without comment or explanation, pressed her hands against my stomach. I watched her face as she massaged me with determined fingers. “May God grant you a son,” she said at last. I was confused, which she must have noticed, because then she added, “You’ll be a mother soon.”

  11.

  It was autumn, the eerily still kind of autumn day that sometimes precedes the season’s first hailstorm in Ahwaz. My legs and ankles had swollen up terribly in the last weeks of pregnancy, which made walking a torment, but I thought that if I went out for a walk it might hasten the delivery. With a kerchief wrapped tightly about my head and my hands buried in the pockets of my coat, I set out down the road that led to the river, away from town.

  The streets were deserted; it was late in the day and even if anyone was down by the riverbank, I was so distracted I wouldn’t have seen or heard them. I had no idea where I was going, only that I had to keep walking. I walked until exhaustion stole over me, until my sides began to ache, my fingers turned numb, and my cheeks smarted from the cold air. I’d been gone for over an hour when I felt the first contraction, and only then did I finally head back to the house.

  The labor was quick, a blessing for which I knew to be grateful. When the midwife swaddled him in a cotton cloth and handed him to me, I clasped my baby to my chest and breathed in his scent. Kamyar—my Kami. His small face was bright red and he had a shock of black hair. I traced his forehead with my fingers, then kissed his eyelids, his palms, the sweet downturned petal of his lips. Later, when the room was dark and Kami had fallen asleep, the midwife sat with a bowl of ashes between her knees. Working quickly, she rubbed the ashes into my wounds to stanch the bleeding, and when she was done she wrapped my belly tightly in gauze.

  That night Parviz sat in the chair beside Kami’s crib, watching him with quiet joy. I slept deeply, as deeply as if I myself had turned into a child, and together we three made a warm enclosure.

  I woke the next morning to the sound of a cry tearing through the air. I sat up and looked around the room. Parviz was gone and Kami’s crib was empty. My heart lurched. High and distant, the cry grew louder and higher as I listened. My first thought was that Kami was hurt and crying out in pain. I leapt to my feet. The binding around my waist was tight, and I felt light-headed as I made my way down the hall. In the foyer I stopped to catch my breath and listen. The house was quiet, which only made me more frantic, but after a minute I realized the crying was coming from outside.

  When I flung the door open, I saw a crowd had gathered by the house, stretching from our door to the end of the street. Khanoom Shapour was standing near the gate, holding Kami in the crook of one arm. He seemed to be sleeping soundly, but I felt I had to get to him, I had to hold him in my arms. Before I could make my way outside, Parviz appeared and threw his coat around my shoulders. “You can’t go outside,” he told me, pulling me back into the house. “You’re too weak. You need to rest.”

  I pushed my arms through the sleeves of Parviz’s coat and forced my way past him. The temperature had dropped in the night and the ground was pebbled with hail. Fumbling and slipping in my bare feet, I made my way frantically through the courtyard toward the gate.

  “In the name of the All-Mighty, the All-Merciful!” a voice called out.

  Everything stilled. For a moment I stopped and searched the crowd to see who’d spoken. It was a tall, heavyset man. He stood with a lamb at his feet, his large hand clasped over its mouth so that it could make no noise. It was a small creature, months if not weeks old. Its thin, spindly legs were bound together with rope and its ears were rigid with fear, but otherwise it was silent now. With one hand, the man jerked the lamb back by its head, and with the other hand he lifted a knife to the creature’s neck. The lamb twisted under his grip, but then in one swift gesture he plunged the blade into its throat. It made a small soft bleating sound, then its limbs folded and its eyes turned glassy.

  Nausea flooded me, but I managed to push past the crowd and make my way toward Khanoom Shapour. Her eyes narrowed when she saw me approach. I must have been a sight, hobbling barefoot in the street, my hair unkempt and my swollen stomach protruding from
under Parviz’s long winter coat. “Blood brings good luck,” she said as I came near. The words made no sense, but I said nothing, only wrenched Kami out of her grasp and turned back toward the house.

  “May God protect you and your child!” a woman called out, clutching my arm as I tried to pass.

  “May God give you ten more sons!” cried another.

  Crossing the courtyard with Kami clasped to my chest, I let my eyes fall to the slaughtered lamb. Blood had soaked its white coat, making first a bright collar of red around its throat and then pooling on the flagstones. Fixated by the blood as it ran in the street, I slowed my step for a moment but then quickly turned away and willed myself not to see the ground reddening at my feet.

  “But why?” I asked Parviz, who answered me by saying, “It’s a custom, Forugh. They say it brings good luck.”

  Whether from the exhaustion of giving birth or from the spectacle in the streets, I suddenly felt dizzy and couldn’t walk any farther.

  “Careful, Forugh!” Parviz said, taking my arm and guiding me back to the house.

  Within the hour the lamb had been skinned, carved into pieces, seasoned, salted, wrapped between sheets of newspaper, and handed out as alms for the poor. A sacrifice for my child and my husband’s house. There would be a serving for us, too, cooked in a pot of herbed stew for dinner, but I pushed it away and refused to eat even though I knew there would be nothing else.

  * * *

  The year 1953 would later be remembered as the Year of the Coup. The country was divided over the nationalization of oil, a movement spearheaded by Prime Minister Mossadegh and opposed by the shah and his Western supporters. In August, the whole city of Tehran poured onto Avenue Pahlavi. The shah sent his soldiers and police marching through the streets, pounding drums and blasting pistols into the air as they swept across the capital. The king’s supporters brandished gigantic posters of His Majesty. “Down with Mossadegh!” they shouted. Meanwhile, the other contingent distributed hand-printed leaflets denouncing the shah, and they met their opponents’ cries with “Iran’s oil is ours!” and “Down with the monarchy!” Men clambered onto the roofs of cars, and armored tanks barreled down the streets. Lampposts announced the names of those to be hanged there the following day. Children broke loose from their mothers’ hands and were instantly swallowed up by the crowds. Husbands and uncles and cousins disappeared in those days; no one knew, at least not for a while, if they were alive or dead.

  By summer’s end, five thousand people would be dead in the streets or shut away behind prison walls. The CIA’s first successful covert overthrow of a foreign government drew to a close. Iranian oil was again firmly in foreign hands.

  But all this was happening in the capital, far removed from the walled compounds and empty sun-scorched streets of Ahwaz and certainly not in my world. I was eighteen years old, a wife, a mother, and a woman in the grip of fate.

  * * *

  Whatever they said about me later—that I was a bad mother and that I abandoned my child—the truth is that I loved my son. From the moment he was born to the moment he was taken from me, I loved Kami.

  It’s true that at first I didn’t know how to take care of him. I had no experience with babies, so I’d have to teach myself everything about motherhood. Kami’s cries unsettled me. My hands shook when I reached for him, and when I held him I felt as though I might drop him at any moment. Worse, despite many tries, I failed at nursing him. Whenever I put him to my breast, his tiny lips locked into a tight line. He wouldn’t latch on. Within a week of his birth, my breasts were as hard as rocks and hot to the touch. When he finally began to suckle, the pain was excruciating; as soon as he took to my breast, it felt as though my nipples were being pinched with tweezers.

  “You’re not holding him properly again,” Khanoom Shapour told me, snatching Kami out of my arms. “Do it this way!”

  I flinched when she put her hands on me, but after many nights of sleeplessness and exhaustion and Kami’s hungry cries, I was too tired to protest and I let her guide me this way and that. When she set out large plates of chopped chives to increase my milk, I ate them, and when she handed me poultices of cabbage leaves, I pressed them against my breasts to ease my engorgement.

  But no matter what I did, my milk still wouldn’t let down. “The child needs nourishment,” my mother-in-law told Parviz one night. “And it’s obvious she can’t nurse him.”

  The next morning she nudged a bottle of goat’s milk into his lips. The liquid was faintly green and smelled sour.

  “Don’t!” I told her, slapping away the bottle and pulling Kami out of her grip.

  “Would you rather he starves?”

  When she tried to take Kami from me, I yanked him away so hard that his head jerked back. His crying pierced me, but I wouldn’t let him go. I took him to my bedroom, where I pulled my blouse open and guided him to my breast. Again and again I coaxed his lips open with my finger, but they stayed locked shut. Eventually I gave in and allowed him a bottle, but I insisted on being the one to offer it to him. He drank greedily and slept for several hours in a row. Soon his complexion brightened and he grew almost plump.

  “Will you ever leave that child alone?” Khanoom Shapour said. “You’ll ruin him with your fussing and fawning.” She criticized me for holding Kami too much and too often. I was too indulgent with him, she said, which was maybe true. I’d had little tenderness from my mother and knew love only from Sanam. I was determined to be a good mother. I wanted to understand Kami’s every cry and meet it with a kind, calm efficiency.

  In the mornings on the first warm days of the year, I bathed him in the courtyard by the hoz, and in the afternoons I took him into the garden to sit under the persimmon tree. The fruits swung like small glowing lanterns in the breeze, and I sang him whatever snatches of song I knew. “I’m a flower carved in stone. What should I say of my forlorn heart? Without you shining on me like the sun, I’m cold and colorless.” I would set Kami’s bassinet in the shade of the tree and sing him all the songs I remembered from my own childhood, songs from the nights when I couldn’t sleep and my nanny had slept beside me in my bed. I recited every rhyme and riddle I remembered and many more that I invented just for him.

  Agha Shapour had brightened with Kami’s arrival in the house. Whenever he saw me lift the latch off the fence that divided the house and the garden, a smile crinkled up by his eyes. Some days he laid Kami against his knees and rocked him with his old legs, from side to side, and Kami would grow quiet and fall asleep. Kami was growing fast now. Each day brought some change in him, and I didn’t want to miss any of it. Remember this, I thought when I sat in the grass, spreading my skirt in a circle around me, looking up at the sky, and savoring the warmth of the sun on my skin while Kami slept nearby. Remember this, I thought when the fruit trees ripened in the summer and Kami tasted his first fig. Remember this, I thought when I held him to my chest, burying my nose in his soft black curls.

  But Khanoom Shapour was determined to claim my son as her own. She bought him rattles and balls. A stuffed monkey in a red suit with large brown beads for eyes. At the New Year holiday she’d pressed golden coins into his small fists. One day, without telling me, she took him to be circumcised, and when she returned she had tied a tiny blue amulet around his wrist. “To protect him from the evil eye,” she said, knotting it so tightly that it cut into the soft folds of his skin.

  I was furious. “How could you let her do that?” I demanded of Parviz.

  “He had to be circumcised, don’t you know that?”

  “Yes, but why didn’t you tell me beforehand? So that I could have been there to hold him. To comfort him.”

  “I thought it was better this way. I mean, look how you’re acting now….”

  “How do you expect me to act? He’s my son! My son, not hers!”

  I had only one picture of myself with Kami and it was one I would carry always. One day Parviz and I had gone to a photographer’s studio in town. Kami had fussed t
he whole way there, but when we entered the bright room and the photographer took his place behind the tripod, Kami suddenly settled down and we were able to sit for a portrait. What did I see later, when I held the photograph of the three of us in my hands? A young woman with painted lips and unruly curls. The Forugh who existed for the briefest time: a wife, a mother. The pearls that looked too tight about my throat. The lost look in my eyes. And next to me, with a hand placed hesitantly on my arm, a husband in a three-piece suit and bow tie. Despite the eleven years’ difference in our ages, with his smooth brow, shy smile, and jacket that was much too big in the shoulders, Parviz looked younger than me.

  On those spring days, I spent hours away from the house, pushing Kami’s carriage down the mud-packed alleys of Ahwaz. “The cold will be the death of that child!” Khanoom Shapour shouted after me when I left the house, which only further stoked my desire to be outside. One afternoon I tucked him into his stroller and headed for the river. There was the scent of fires burning in the town and smoke snaking into the sky. Usually dozens of people stood begging for alms outside the mosque, but the day was chilly and I saw only one old woman there. She wore a thin shawl pulled around her shoulders and a kerchief knotted tightly under her chin. I dug into my pockets, pressed a few coins into her palm, and continued toward the river.

  I’d left the house without a coat, and Kami was dressed only in pajamas. The wind snapped against my skin and Kami’s cries grew louder and louder, but I didn’t really hear him. At some point I began to run. Soon I was running so fast that my blood beat against my ears and the stroller was jerking and bumping wildly under my hands. I became aware of a voice calling out to me, telling me to slow down, to take care, but I couldn’t stop running. I remember there was a slamming of brakes and the furious screech of wheels, and then I woke as if from a dream and saw that I’d managed to steer Kami’s stroller straight into the throng of cars. Panicked, I looked down into the stroller. Kami’s face and his small hands had reddened from the cold, but he was fast asleep.