Song of a Captive Bird

by Jasmin Darznik

  “The Caspian,” he said, gesturing broadly once he’d parked the car.

  I stepped outside, dazed. He turned to study me and I could see he was clearly pleased with my reaction. The wind picked up, tossing my hair across my face. For a moment I forgot Darius. It was just past four o’clock, and the beach was completely empty. I shaded my eyes to study the view. The sea was vast and blue here, not the tin gray of the gulf. Orange groves rimmed the coast, and in the distance pine trees stretched up to the sky.

  I broke away from him and made off for the sea. The air was moist on my skin, and the steady surge of the waves filled my head. Even from here I could see the shore was dark and wet. I had an urge to feel the water against my bare feet. I slipped off my shoes and then continued down the pebbled shore. When I reached the water’s edge, I glanced back toward him and then watched as he lifted his arm to wave. I waved back. Aware of his gaze now, I turned again toward the waves, lifted my skirt, and stepped into the water.

  The joy of it. Walking into the sea that day gave me a feeling of freedom I loved and had always loved. Suddenly I was a child crouching under a honeysuckle bush in my mother’s garden. A young girl sneaking up to the rooftop to gaze at a sky thick with stars. I could not remember the last time I had felt so carefree and happy. I closed my eyes, inhaled deeply, tasting the salt in the air, and thought, I want to be of the sea.

  * * *

  —

  Leaving the beach, we held hands as we walked to the car. We drove to his villa, in a small village on the beach. Tucked above a citrus orchard and draped in bougainvillea, the villa faced the Caspian. Inside it was large but spare and plain. It would be ours for a week. As soon as we entered, Darius threw open the windows, and a soft, damp breeze, smelling of rain and cypress, filled the room. I stepped toward him and he reached around my waist, found the zipper of my skirt, then undid the buttons of my blouse and slipped it over my head. I had one brief moment of self-consciousness, but then he kissed the hollow of my throat, my neck, the inside of my wrists, and I could think of nothing. In the honeyed evening light, I bent toward him. In that room, I forgot hesitation and doubt. “You’re beautiful,” he murmured, and knelt to kiss my breasts, and the next words were lost against my skin.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, as I took in the shining brass bed, the crisp cotton sheets, and the aroma of Turkish coffee wafting from the kitchen, I understood that this was a very different happiness from any I’d known. We spent hours walking on the shore and along the mountain trails and came back to the villa for dinners of whitefish, fresh greens, walnuts, yogurt, and figs with cream. At night we talked by the fire and drank red wine. We slept late and made love twice a day. It was a true heaven.

  One such afternoon, I learned the meaning of my name.

  “Forugh,” he murmured, his head resting on my navel, his warm stubbled cheek brushing my skin. “Do you know what it means?”

  “My name?” I said, laughing.

  “Yes.”

  “It means light,” I said.

  He raised his head. “No, not light. Or not quite,” he said. “It means luster—the glow that circles light.”

  Those days by the Caspian Sea were the only ones that were ever completely ours. A world separate from everything and everyone else. When I wrote about them afterward, the words carried me back there, back into the thrill and sweetness of a love beginning:

  We found truth in the garden,

  in the shy glance of a nameless flower,

  found eternity in the moment

  when two suns faced each other.

  I’m not talking about

  fearful whispers in the dark.

  I’m talking about daytime

  and open windows and fresh air

  and a stove where useless things

  are left to burn,

  a land fertile with different plantings:

  birth and evolution and pride.

  I’m talking about how our loving hands

  built a bridge forged of scent and breeze

  across the night.

  —from “Conquest of the Garden”

  24.

  “It seems I’m in disgrace,” I told Leila. It was a balmy summer morning on the terrace, and I was sitting on the grass with my legs drawn all the way up, my chin resting on my knees. Only a few weeks had passed since Darius and I returned to Tehran, but already it was clear everyone knew or could guess we were now lovers.

  “Shocking,” she said teasingly. She lowered the record onto the turntable and dropped the needle in the groove. There was a hissing and crackling and then the song started up. Ella Fitzgerald.

  “You’re falling in love with him,” she said after we’d listened for a while.

  “Fallen,” I corrected her. “It’s already done.”

  “I see.” She tweaked the volume down a notch and studied me quietly.

  “You’re not going to warn me off him?” I asked.

  She arched an eyebrow. “Would it work?”

  I shook my head. “No, but I do remember you trying to steer me away from someone before.”

  “Nasser?”

  “Yes.”

  “He wasn’t worthy of you. Not even slightly.”

  “And Darius is?”

  “Possibly,” she said, “but only possibly.”

  “He’s arranging a place for me to live in the city.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking surprised. For a moment she said nothing. “Is that what you want?”

  “Yes.”

  Her face went very still. “If things don’t turn out quite as you want, promise you won’t be too proud to come back, will you? You’ll remember you always have a place here with me?”

  I felt a stab of sadness, and I could only nod and say, “I will, Leila joon. I promise you, I will.”

  * * *

  —

  Love is another country. No, I’d go further than that. The difference between foreign countries is never so great as the difference between being in love and not being in love. Not only does the world around you seem changed when you are in love—bright where it was once dull, lively and varied where it was once routine—but people are different, not least of all you yourself, though the difference might be that you’ve returned to your native self.

  Falling in love with Darius brought forth my old impetuousness but also a warmth and hopefulness I had lost. The wisest thing to do would have been to stay at Leila’s, at least until I had some clear notion of where I stood with Darius. But I didn’t do the wisest thing. In those days, I thought he was my future, that everything was just beginning, and for a while so much was.

  My new home was in a part of Tehran I hardly knew, a bustling district that felt a world away from my childhood home in Amiriyeh. I loved the little grocery at the corner, loved all the cafés, boutiques, and bookshops down the street. The apartment itself had two bedrooms, and one of them I made into my office. Darius had the apartment furnished before I moved in, and what little decoration there was pleased me, with simple, modern lines, the overall impression elegant but not ostentatious. Right away I began to rearrange the furniture and to unpack the few things I’d brought from Leila’s house. She’d given me a carpet, a lovely red kilim. “For good luck in your new house,” she said. There was a terrace with a small garden, and until the weather turned cold, I laid the kilim on the ground outside and worked there. It was the first time in my life I had a home of my own, and I relished the feeling of pulling the door shut behind me and knowing I wouldn’t be disturbed. I was living in Tehran, earning a living, and, for the first time, I was in love.

  Darius wasn’t perfect—far from it. He could be remote and arrogant, but I admired him in spite of those qualities, maybe even because of them. We spent hours talking about poetry and films. These were the kinds of conversations I’d never had with a man. He wanted to know my opinions about everything, and of course he shared all his ideas with me. He talked about his
plans for the studio, all the films he was burning to make. I’d never known anyone so intense—so ambitious and alive.

  What attracted me deeply, perhaps most of all, was his lack of sentimentality, his refusal to be ruled or defined by the past. Darius couldn’t be bothered with tradition, and he had no use for nostalgia or even for remembrance. “We only lose ourselves by looking back,” he said, and he was a man who would never be lost. Everything in his world was deliberate. He was free on the terms he’d decided for his life. What others called “fate” was to him an ancient mindset that stunted people’s thinking and kept the country choked and subservient. He didn’t care for the old Iran, with its notions of a destiny inscribed across one’s forehead, and he laughed at the ignorance in which people chose to live. Iran was surging toward modernity, albeit unevenly, but his countrymen lived as if it were still the fifteenth century. It was unintelligent. Unfathomably so.

  Talking to him, I realized that until now my life had been haphazard, as had my education. All that would change—I was determined it would and so, too, was Darius. He hired a tutor so I could improve my English. He set up accounts for me at the city’s best booksellers. T. S. Eliot’s poems and essays. George Bernard Shaw’s plays. Hemingway’s stories and novels. I bought these books by the armful and began to read my way through them. He liked to hear my reactions to the writers he loved. He’d ask me to read my poems aloud to him, and he was content to just listen, his tall frame spilling from the chair in the corner of the living room, which seemed so small when he occupied it.

  Every time I turned the lock and passed through the front door, I wanted to know he would be waiting for me in that chair, wanted to know he’d pull me into his arms, walk me backward into the bedroom, and stay with me until the next day and all the days after that. But just because I wanted these things didn’t mean I could have them. He’d stay over some nights, but most of the time he drove back up to Darrus before morning, to his house there. I should have let myself understand what I was in for—he was married, after all. If I were honest, I would have to admit I knew exactly what I was getting myself into from the moment our affair began. I just told myself it didn’t matter.

  A Fire was my first film project at Golshiri Studios, and while it didn’t find much of an audience in Iran, it would win an international prize, and that launched my cinematic career. Not long after the trip to Abadan, I started working in the editing department. Until now, money—or a lack of it—had been my torment, but my new salary was three times what I’d been paid as a receptionist. I loved the feeling of freedom a steady salary gave me, but most of all I loved the work. In editing films, I was inventing a visual rhythm and syntax, translating my ideas into a medium that felt fresh but consonant with my writing. I’d come home from the studio late at night and go to bed with my mind still buzzing with ideas. As I advanced at the studio, I joined Darius at gatherings of esteemed intellectuals and their pleasant, lovely wives. Look how well you’re doing, I’d say to myself. I was meant to be in Ahwaz—or else locked up in an asylum—but instead I had found my way to this new life.

  Through Darius, I came to know the painter Sohrab Sepehri, the poet Ahmad Shamlou, the architect Bijan Saffari. Every one of them knew we were lovers, but this was a new era—or an era some Iranians wanted to see as new—and people in our circle pretended not to notice or care we were together. For a time, too long perhaps, I pretended the same.

  Darius had been careful to tell me very little about his wife, but I began to piece together parts of their story. When we met they’d already been married for fifteen years and had two children, a boy and a girl. So far as I knew, he had only one complaint against his wife: boredom. He’d solved that easily enough by building a separate house for himself.

  I called it “the glass house,” on account of all the enormous windows. It was a large modern structure, set on a remote property in Darrus, far from the city and with nothing but trees and mountains all around. The drawing room had lacquered white walls and a polished white parquet floor with fine silk carpets scattered here and there. A painting of bare tree trunks by Sohrab Sepehri hung above the mantel, and the chairs and couches were all covered in buttery white leather. The house had a cool but stately emptiness. The stone tiles were mostly bare of carpets, the walls decorated with a few modernist paintings of exceptional caliber. One had the feeling here of entering a world without women, which it was.

  He made it sound as though she—he only spoke of his wife as “she” or “her”—was content with their separation. That it had been in place long before I came along. That they were married in name only. He told me in such a way that I believed him. Especially in our first few years together, I think the two things really were separate—his marriage and his feelings for me. Maybe he also thought it would hurt me to hear a different version of the story, but he treated the subject as though it had nothing to do with me, and instead of voicing the questions flooding my mind—Do you mean you’re permanently separated? Are you planning to get a divorce?—I held my tongue. I never kissed him, never touched him, never said an intimate thing when there was anyone to glimpse or overhear us, and if my head and heart chafed at the secrecy of our arrangement, I told myself I had to stifle them. We’d struck a bargain of a kind. I had to love him within the limits of his life, or I wouldn’t have a chance to love him at all.

  Photographs of us cropped up in the papers all the time. I could tell it unnerved him. Whenever somebody pointed a camera in our direction, he opened a distance between us, but there was always a look, a gesture, or some slight movement between us of which we were unaware. Later I would look at those photographs, the grainy images blurred and softened by time, and I’d see it—how our bodies were drawn together as if by an invisible thread. One picture showed me with a long-stemmed cigarette holder, sitting on a couch with my feet tucked under me, and him with his head bent toward me, leaning close to listen to something I was saying. Another caught me holding two wheels of film while he pointed his camera up to the sky. His linen trousers were white and slightly creased by the heat, and I was squinting against the sun, following his directions and learning to sharpen my vision beside him.

  That first year we were together, with the first flush of spring, he planted a row of saplings in the terrace outside my apartment, tucked them one by one into the ground, patted the earth above them, and encircled them with smooth stones for safekeeping. See? I thought. Roots. We’re putting down something solid here, something that will last.

  * * *

  “Forugh was a still, feminine pond without waves or movement. Darius Golshiri has now fallen into that pond like a bright stone and replaced the calm and quiescence with vibrant waves.”

  The idea for a party came to Darius on the day one of the big Tehran papers reviewed some of my recent work. This was in 1961. We’d spent a rare night together in Darrus, and I was lingering in bed with a mug of sugared tea when I picked up the newspaper and noticed the review.

  Now, it wasn’t as if I was wholly unprepared for what it said. These latest poems had inspired a round of familiar screeds: “Forugh’s poems showcase a fascination with matters of the body and continue this woman’s campaign to corrupt our nation’s youth….” Usually, reviews of my work were linked directly to some scandal or other in my life, but for the first time a small number of critics voiced praise for the poems, focusing on the writing itself rather than using my poems as an occasion to generate more gossip. “While they are as fully impassioned and embodied as we’ve come to expect from Forugh,” wrote one, “these new poems demonstrate not only a greater range of philosophical and political subject matter but also an ever-stronger technical finesse.”

  I’d also started receiving notes and letters, most of them from young women, telling me how much they admired my writing. “You express what I can’t say, not even to myself,” and “You write with the soul of Hafez, but in a voice that’s completely of our time.” The letters were full of intelligence, c
uriosity, and rage, the very things that had drawn me to poetry in the first place, and it gave me a strange but wonderful feeling of kinship to read these women’s words.

  I smoothed the newspaper over my knees. It was my habit now, as I drank my tea in the mornings, to sit up in bed, flatten the paper across my lap, and read it front to back. This morning, I opened the arts section and saw my name linked to Darius’s. What I read unhinged me: Darius, the author claimed, was writing my poems for me. That, he insisted, was the only thing that accounted for the strength of my latest work.

  “Take a look at this!” I said and handed Darius the newspaper, stabbing the offending article.

  He took one look at the byline and refused to read it. “The man’s a nobody,” he said. “How can you take anything he writes seriously?”

  As usual my stubbornness and rage were no match for his pride. I envied his cool, constant refusal to be even slightly annoyed by the gossip surrounding us. He was not one to read reviews of his own work, and he always seemed oblivious to people’s opinions of his films. On rare occasions he’d dismiss some journalist or another with a cutting remark; more often, he acted as if his critics and enemies just didn’t exist—no, as if they couldn’t exist.

  “I’m throwing you a party,” he said. “And they can all go to hell.”

  * * *

  —

  The dress for the party arrived by courier in a red-ribboned box. Later it would seem impossibly stupid, but for days all I could think about was what I should wear to the party Darius had decided to throw in Darrus. He never made any apologies for his wealth. He dressed impeccably and, while he never said it outright, he expected the same of me. For my birthday he’d given me a necklace of pavé diamonds, and from the moment he fastened the clasp and called me beautiful, I knew how much it pleased him to see me dressed up.