I spent a whole day in uptown boutiques with carpeted floors and mirrored walls, boutiques where beautifully turned-out shopgirls praised my narrow waist and slender legs, bent down with tape measures and pins, and laid all their prettiest and finest garments at my feet. The dress I finally settled on was truly exquisite: raw black silk with a fitted bodice and flared skirt. Refined but alluring. Perfect.
I tipped the courier and carried the box to the bedroom. Bags and boxes lay splayed open on the floor. The bed was scattered with other purchases from my shopping spree: seamed stockings, two-inch satin heels, a cashmere wrap. I loosened the red ribbon from the box, pulled off the lid, and then stripped down to my slip. I bathed and made up my face before the mirror. Cat eyes and crimson lips. The flash of diamonds at my throat set off my eyes. I flipped off the bathroom lights and crossed into the bedroom. The silk gleamed and rippled as I lifted the dress from the folds of faintly perfumed tissue paper. I shimmied it down my waist, zippered up the back, and straightened the skirt. The lining was silk and cold against my skin. It was only when I turned to look at myself in the mirror that I realized I was holding my breath.
* * *
—
“You’re magnificent,” Darius whispered when I arrived in Darrus later that night. He placed his hand at the small of my back as I walked through the door, and for a few moments we lingered in the foyer. He was dressed in navy trousers and matching sports jacket with a wide lapel, and his white shirt was opened at the neck. He’d started wearing his hair longer and he looked very tanned, as if he’d just come back from several weeks at the seaside. He leaned forward so that I thought he might kiss me, but then there was the sound of footsteps approaching and he quickly stepped back and drew away his hand.
The glass house glowed with the light of hundreds of candles. Determined that this night would rival the best parties in Tehran, Darius had ordered crates of English whiskey and French champagne and pounds of the choicest, costliest Iranian caviar. Gardenias and roses perfumed the air. A four-piece band, on tour from America and summoned here with an enormous fee, was playing Latin jazz in the great room.
Talk quieted as I entered the party, only to resume at a higher pitch. I didn’t know many people in attendance, but nearly everyone knew my face well enough to whisper and nod in my direction. I caught fragments of conversation—comments about the currency rates, an article someone had published in one of the undergound communist papers, a new art-house cinema, some scandal at court. It had become fashionable for men and women to mix at social events, but even in this smart set there were limits, and many old ideas survived. Looking out at the guests, I saw that the women fell into the usual groups: wives and girlfriends. When the wives took my hands in theirs and congratulated me on my latest publication, it seemed to me it was really their own graciousness and generosity that stirred them.
I was more comfortable talking with the girlfriends. Most of them didn’t seem to know who I was, which made it easier somehow, but I knew from experience I’d likely never see them again. That, I knew, was the strange, sad economy of love in our milieu. But where, exactly, did I belong?
If only Leila were here, I thought miserably. She had canceled at the last minute—the second time she’d canceled plans in the last few weeks. “I don’t feel up to it,” she’d said. “I’m so sorry, Forugh, but I just can’t come.”
I drifted away, down a corridor and past a pair of tall doors into the library. Here a stack of my books stood mostly untouched on a side table. Darius had said the party would be a celebration of my latest poems, but it was the scandal that captured people’s attention, the fact that I was Darius’s mistress, and they’d come just to see us together. They didn’t care about my writing—not really, and maybe not at all.
Darius must have anticipated all this, because he didn’t stay at my side or hold my hand that night. Which was fine—no, it was even understandable. But I didn’t expect that he’d greet me and then disappear. Within an hour my head was swimming with wine and jazz, I’d reached a state of bored restlessness, and I couldn’t find Darius anywhere. Where is he? I wondered.
On the dance floor, someone elbowed me in the back and I lurched forward. The band was playing Tito Puente, the tune bright and loose and very loud. I couldn’t see much other than a mass of bodies and a cloud of smoke hovering in the air. I threaded my way across the room, ducking between dancing couples, and at last found him chatting among a group of men. I lifted my hand in a small wave, but when I caught his eye he only nodded very slightly and then carried on with his conversation.
I had no expectations of him, but his dismissal gnawed at me, and I felt myself tense. Briefly, I thought of marching over to him, but instead I shouldered my way through the room and stepped out onto the veranda.
Outside, the cool air cleared my head. My feet were hurting from the new satin heels, and I slipped them off, careful not to snag my stockings on the flagstones.
“This whole country’s diseased,” I heard someone say.
I followed the voice to where a group of about a dozen people had gathered. Seated on a large wrought-iron chair in the garden, Bijan Bazargan, the intellectual-of-the-moment, was holding court before a circle of acolytes.
I eased myself down on a nearby bench.
“Diseased,” he repeated. He was a portly man, with a heavy beard. “We watch American soap operas, wear blue jeans, drink Coca-Cola, and call ourselves open-minded. But that’s not open-mindedness. As Al-e-Ahmad teaches us, it’s a disease we’ve contracted over decades of imperialism, and it’s called Westoxification.”
Westoxification. I had heard the phrase before. The new rallying cry among Tehran’s intellectuals, it stood for everything wrong about modernization and consumerism, about an Iran that saw its way forward by angling toward the West. The cure, presumably, was a return to tradition.
“And nowhere is this pathetic aping of foreign manners and gross consumerism so rampant as among today’s Iranian women.”
I’d been listening absentmindedly to Bazargan’s lecture, but this last part caught my attention.
“How do you mean?” I called out as I stood up.
It took a moment for him to place me, but once he did, he smiled with what seemed like delight. “Forugh Farrokhzad, the poetess!” he said, gesturing broadly in my direction. “I’d think of all the women at this party, you’d understand my meaning best.” He turned to his audience, which I now noticed was made up entirely of men. “These days, young Iranian women seem to think that just by styling their hair differently and wearing short skirts, they’re suddenly free. In fact, these women have only prostituted themselves to foreigners and imperialists.”
He meant it as provocation and I took it as that. “I wonder, Mr. Bazargan, if you’d rather have us women shrouded and sequestered in our homes?”
“Whatever their shortcomings, the ways of the past were at least our own. Our customs are our identity, Miss Farrokhzad, and by giving them up we’ve lost sight of who we are.”
“What do you mean, ‘our own’? It doesn’t seem to me that women have had much freedom in choosing the traditions that govern their lives.”
He smiled and shook his head. “Your trouble, Miss Farrokhzad, is that you imagine all women share your discontent. This is, of course, a typical mistake among our country’s new would-be feminists. Tell me, what can you possibly understand of the lives of most Iranian women?”
I nearly managed to bite my tongue, but now he’d goaded me and I couldn’t back down. “Maybe very little, but I do know that it wouldn’t cost you much to return to the past, whereas, like any other woman in this country, it would cost me a great deal.”
He rose from his chair and stepped closer to me then—close enough that I could smell the sour odor of alcohol streaming from his breath.
“Madam,” he said loudly, “how can you stand in this fancy house with this fancy garden, in your fancy dress, and with the rank of…what? A mistress? A half wife
? How can a woman like you lecture us about the value of custom and tradition?”
The next thing happened quickly.
It was his hot, sweaty fingers I’d always remember. The way he gripped my shoulder with one hand and reached back and fumbled with the other one against my neck and the collar of my dress until I heard something tear.
The label—he’d ripped it clear off, and he was now holding it up for everyone to see.
“Without her fancy label,” he announced, “the notorious poetess is just another simple, modest Iranian woman!”
It took me a moment to realize it, but when he tore the label, my dress split open at the back. I scrambled to yank the zipper up, but it had ripped and wouldn’t budge. People now went quiet and looked away. I felt a hand pull me back, but I surged forward, grabbing for the label, which Bijan Bazargan was still brandishing in the air. “You idiot!” I screamed. “You jackass!” He laughed and lifted the piece of cloth higher, waving it over my head in some imitation of a folk dance.
Still shouting, I let myself be led off the veranda by Darius. He covered me in his sport coat, took me into another room, and spoke to me in a cool and reasonable tone. But everything he said—that Bazargan was obviously drunk, that he was famous for his outrageous gestures, that he’d left and I should return to the party now—only infuriated me further. I needed air, water, something. I needed to get out.
I grabbed my purse and made for the door before Darius could see the swell of my tears. His jacket was far too big for me, but I clasped it tight at the throat as I brushed past the knots of whispering women. The pebbled drive was silver in the moonlight, and it was only when my feet hit the ground that I realized I wasn’t wearing any shoes. I’d left them on the veranda. For a moment I considered going back for them, but then I decided against it. I winced and picked my way down the path toward my car, and I was already halfway down the driveway when I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Darius waving and shouting something I couldn’t hear.
It was past midnight, and the road from Darrus was deserted and dark. Tears stung my eyes, blurring my sight. I cranked down the window and let the night in. I had broken out in a sweat without realizing it and the cool air against my skin made me feel clammy, but as I drove toward Tehran, too fast and too recklessly, the tight, cramped feeling in my chest gradually eased.
Then, just outside the city, I turned onto Avenue Pahlavi and hit a wall of light. I braked hard, swerving to the side of the road and sending my purse flying from the front seat to the floor. I blinked, blinked again, then flipped off the headlights and rolled down my window. Lifting my hand to shield my eyes from the glare, I craned my head outside to see what was going on.
An army tank was blocking the road. A figure cut through the brightness and moved toward my car. I glanced in the rearview mirror. Smeared lipstick and raccoon eyes. I was wiping my face with the back of my hand when the soldier beamed his flashlight into the car, ran it from my face to the men’s sport coat I was wearing.
I cut the engine and dropped my hands to my lap.
“Where are you headed?” he asked, not unkindly.
“Home,” I said, and gave my address. From a distance, I heard the long whine of a siren. “What’s happening in the city?”
He looked out toward the city and then back at me. “There’s been an assassination,” he said. “We’re under martial law.”
25.
What had happened was this: On his way to parliament earlier that day, a high-ranking government minister was ambushed in an alleyway. A pistol was shot once and then again. The first bullet pierced the minister’s forehead, the second his heart.
It was a communist plot. A British plot. An American plot. An Islamist plot. Every conceivable and halfway-conceivable scenario was advanced, which left most everyone sure of nothing—nothing apart from their own helplessness and the certainty that worse was coming. And worse did come. Another night of riots, this time close to the British Embassy, followed by several days of sirens, raids, searches, and arrests. The sidewalks were vacant, haunted only by police and soldiers patrolling the streets.
The situation, while unnerving, provided the solitude I needed. For the first time, I wanted to be away from Darius. With Tehran under martial law, no one could travel in or out of the city, and the phone lines had been cut off, so I had no word from him, which suited me just fine.
I was lucky I’d gotten to Tehran when I did; an hour later the whole city was sealed off. With checkpoints at nearly every intersection, it had taken me more than an hour to make it back home. As soon as I walked through the door, I shrugged off Darius’s jacket, slipped out of my dress, and unpinned my hair. I was exhausted but strangely calm. In the frantic haste of getting ready for the party, I’d left the house a total mess. Now I went from room to room, picking up stray clothes, tidying the tables, clearing the sink. By the time I was finished, both Darius’s jacket and my once-perfect, now-ruined dress lay in a crumpled heap at the bottom of a dustbin, but I could still taste the humiliation every time I thought about the party and what had happened that night. Whatever his feelings, Darius was too ashamed, or too frightened, to defend me, much less acknowledge our relationship. Everything between us now seemed based on a massive lie—a lie I’d told myself. Even after all that had happened with Nasser, I’d let myself be misled. I’d let myself be fooled into thinking our relationship was more than it was. I hated Bijan Bazargan and I hated Darius, but even more I hated myself.
I spent the next few days pacing the house with the wireless radio turned on. Leila, I thought at every mention of a Tudeh conspiracy. She must be frantic for her brother’s safety. Again and again I picked up the phone to dial her number, only to find the line dead. I felt a stirring of unease that grew stronger by the hour. Then, on the third night, my phone rang near midnight, shrill and electrifying. I flipped on the light and reached for the receiver.
“Leila?”
But it was Darius. “Are you all right?” he asked as soon as I picked up.
I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes. “I’m fine.”
“Why’d you run off like that?”
I took a deep, steadying breath. “You know why.”
“Because of Bazargan? I told you, he’s a show-off. You can’t let him get to you.”
“It’s not only him. It’s everyone. Everywhere I go. Do you know that behind our backs people call me your—”
“My what?”
“Whore.” The word sounded terrible. I hadn’t said it before and had not known I would until now. I raked my hand through my hair and stared up at the ceiling. “People read the newspapers and see pictures of me and say, ‘Oh, she’s not actually talented, she’s just managed to attach herself to someone who can do things for her. She gets all her ideas from him. I hear she doesn’t even write her own poems.’ ”
“Come on, Forugh. Does it really matter to you what people say?”
“I don’t want it to matter. I’ve really tried not to care, but I can’t help it. People would never talk about you the way they do about me, and they would never dare suggest I influence your films, much less make them for you.”
“The real issue,” he said, his voice softening, “is that no one has a right to any part of our relationship. What we have belongs only to us.”
“But I don’t like this feeling of secrecy. I don’t like to pretend. I had to do that for so long, before.”
“It’s not an ideal arrangement—not at all—but that’s the fault of this small-minded country and all these idiots around us. There’s nothing either of us can do to change their way of thinking.”
“No, I suppose not.” I paused for a moment and rubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand. All at once I felt a piercing loneliness, and despite myself I asked, “When do you think you can come down here?”
He coughed and cleared his throat. “You know they’re not letting anyone in or out of the city right now.”
“But you’ll come as soon a
s you can?”
“I’ll try, Forugh. I’ve got to sort out a few things. Just wait for me, okay? You can do that for a little while, can’t you?”
When I didn’t answer, he sighed into the phone and said, “Please wait.”
Please wait. I screwed my eyes shut. A sense of rage welled up inside me, and I felt myself begin to sweat, hot with frustration. “But haven’t I already been waiting? Haven’t I been waiting all this time?”
* * *
It was clear from my first glance at Leila—sitting in her unmade bed, still in her nightgown at two o’clock in the afternoon—that something was very wrong. The shades were drawn, and I blinked hard as I walked toward her in the airless room. “Forugh,” she said, much too quietly, and I knew at once that she was not at all her bright, unflappable self but rather a hazy approximation, all slender wrists and frantic eyes and unkempt hair.
With Tehran under martial law, almost another week had passed before I could get up to her house. That morning the government had declared the assassination a communist plot. “Members of the Tudeh Party are traitors,” an official announced over the radio, “enemies of both king and country, and they will be rooted out one by one until we are rid of their pestilence.”
I settled on the edge of the bed and put a hand on her shoulder. Her bones felt thin under her cotton tunic. “Have you heard from Rahim?” I asked.
She lifted her eyes. “Nothing.”
“Is there any chance he might be angry with you?”
Her eyes snapped to attention. “Why would you think that?”
“Well, do you remember that day when I saw the two of you? A few years ago? It seemed like you were arguing. Were you?”
I could see her hedging, weighing what she shouldn’t tell me against the urgency of my questions and her own need to unburden herself. “I’d gotten him a passport under an assumed name. And cash. I wanted him to leave the country, at least for a while.”
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