“What about your wife?” I asked when he finished speaking. “And your children? Will you leave them here or bring them abroad, too?”
“I don’t know, Forugh. We can work that out. There’s time for all that. The important thing is for us to leave. Forget about everything else.”
I turned my face to the window. Forget about everything else. How would we ever do that?
My thoughts spun away from him, but when he laid a palm on my shoulder I turned and looked at him. “You need to think about this calmly,” he was telling me now. “Rationally. If you wait much longer, we won’t be able to get out. You do realize what the stakes are, don’t you, Forugh?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”
29.
Will I ever comb my hair with the wind again?
Will I ever plant pansies in the garden again,
set geraniums in the sky outside the window again?
Will I ever dance on wine glasses again?
Will I ever wait expectantly for the doorbell to ring again?
I said to Mother, It’s all over.
I said, Things always happen
before you expect them to;
we have to send word to the obituary pages now.
—from “Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season”
I didn’t leave Iran.
The years passed. My love for Darius never flagged, yet our patterns never changed—what he wanted, what I wanted. We were together and then apart more times than I could count. Again and again I went from his glass house back to my apartment, from the depths of intimacy to complete solitude. When people called me his mistress—or worse—I forced myself not to care, but each time I saw him with his wife, I had the stifling feeling of living behind locked doors and shuttered windows. I developed an instinct for navigating the labyrinth of streets and alleys of Tehran, for making my way alone. I traveled abroad, too, I saw other countries and discovered different customs. Invariably, I grew restless and uneasy. Invariably, I returned to Darius and to Iran. More and more I was a woman on her own, at home in my work—my poems, my films—but never truly settled in the world.
Then one day in February 1967 I went to visit my mother in Amiriyeh.
* * *
—
“They say there’ll be snow tonight,” she told me as I rose to leave. It had been a lovely visit, and I was reluctant to go. “Why don’t you stay the night and leave in the morning? I can fix up a room for you and we’ll have dinner together.”
I glanced out the window. It was a little after three o’clock in the afternoon, and the sky was low and dark with clouds. I took my mother’s hand and squeezed it. “I can’t, maman,” I told her. I had a dozen wheels of film stacked in the back seat of one of the studio’s jeeps, ready to be delivered to Darrus. “They’re expecting me and I’m already running late.”
She gazed at me uncertainly and the wrinkles deepened around her eyes. “But the roads will be bad…”
Age had threaded her hair with white and softened her features. She still lived in the old house in Amiriyeh, but she was alone now that Sanam had returned to her village in the south. The rooms around us lay still and lifeless, empty now of the seven children she’d raised, the husband she’d married, the servant who had become her closest friend.
I never saw the Colonel after he came to retrieve me from prison. I wrote him a letter once, thanking him for what he’d done to secure my release. In that letter I also asked that he try to understand me. “Will you ever see me not just as your daughter but as a human being?” I wrote. I could never have spoken the words to him. It was impossible. Even writing them to him took every bit of courage I had. But it was useless. He didn’t answer the letter and I never wrote him another one.
I did see my mother, though. I stayed with her for several weeks after I was freed from prison. It was July, then August, and I remember how she would sit by my bed at night, her hands folded in her lap, and in the morning she would still be there. She was frightened for me, yes, but there was something else. It was the first time we had been alone together for any length of time, and those days changed something between us. “Forgive me,” she said one night. We were sitting across from each other at the dinner table when she suddenly laid down her spoon and fixed me with a look so pained and pleading that I had to drop my eyes. I knew then that she understood what it had cost me to oppose my father all those years ago. Stuck in my resentment, I had interpreted her silence as cruelty. I thought she could never understand me, but even as I raged to be understood, I didn’t know anything about her, nothing of consequence anyway. I was determined to change that.
“I’ll be fine,” I told her now, pulling myself out of her embrace. We’d reached the door and I was tightening my scarf around my neck.
But her eyes were troubled. “Why are you rushing? Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Of course. It’s only that I need to get back to the studio before they close up.”
“So stubborn,” she said, and smiled.
“I’ll come again next week. I promise.” I took her hand and squeezed it.
“Yes. Yes, come next week. But come earlier so that we’ll have more time together.”
I ducked down and kissed her on the cheek.
“Goodbye, my daughter!” she called out when I reached my car, her voice echoing in the empty alleyway.
I looked up, smiled, and raised my hand in a wave.
* * *
—
Maneuvering my way through the late-afternoon traffic, I headed north on Avenue Pahlavi, past the rows of new gleaming high-rise apartments and overpriced boutiques that had sprung up in midtown. The city was closing up, readying itself for the snow. Metal shutters were drawn over the storefronts, blinds lowered. Everywhere people were rushing away. There was something strange about it. An excitement mingled with dread.
The city had changed beyond recognition. Wrecking balls and bulldozers had leveled the old buildings to rubble. The dust of construction hung permanently over the streets. Gated mansions reached up to the northern foothills, while slums fanned out from the city’s southern limits.
I feared an age that had lost its heart, and I was terrified at the thought of so many crippled hands. Our traditions were our pacifiers, and we sang ourselves to sleep with the lullaby of a once-great civilization and culture. Ours was the land of poetry, flowers, and nightingales—and poets searching for rhymes in history’s junkyards. The lottery was our faith and greed our fortune. Our intellectuals were sniffing cocaine and delivering lectures in the back rooms of dark cafés. We bought plastic roses and decorated our lawns and courtyards with plaster swans. We saw the future in neon lights. We had pizza shops, supermarkets, and bowling alleys. We had traffic jams, skyscrapers, and air thick with noise and pollution. We had illiterate villagers who came to the capital with scraps of paper in their hands, begging for someone to show them the way to this medical clinic or that government office. The streets of Tehran were full of Mustangs and Chevys bought at three times the price they sold for back in America, and still our oil wasn’t our own. Still our country wasn’t our own.
I’d said too much already, but I couldn’t stop, not even when I began to suspect I was being watched. The letter I wrote after I left prison ran in the editorial pages of several prominent foreign newspapers—Le Figaro, The New York Times, The Guardian. The byline read “Anonymous,” and for a time I was free to watch as my letter lit a fire under the regime. To the shah, who had promised the country two centuries’ worth of progress in a decade, that letter wasn’t just an embarrassment but a scandal, and it provoked a stark denial by the country’s ambassador to America. Much, in particular, was made of the charges of police brutality at Tehran University. “These students,” the ambassador asserted, “have incited aggression, and they must be brought to justice.”
But by then the letter had circulated broadly and other people, mostly students and others living in exile, had
come forth about the lack of civil liberties, the plight of political prisoners, the prevalence of surveillance and torture. If the allegations were believed or even half believed, it would compromise foreign relations and imperil international trade. A flurry of press releases and speeches followed, all eloquently asserting the regime’s commitment to democracy and human rights. Then came the news that the three students had been granted a stay of execution and that their sentences had been reduced to life in prison.
When I read that news one morning in the paper, I sat very still, tasting something bitter at the back of my throat. THE KING’S MERCIFUL PARDON, ran the headline, accompanied by an especially flattering portrait of the shah. I’d wanted something else for those young men, for myself, for all of us: freedom. I knew now we wouldn’t have it. I knew that by writing the letter I’d consigned those men to fates equal to, if not worse than, the swift executions that had been planned for them, and I knew, with complete certainty, that they would live and I would die.
* * *
—
The beech trees on the road from Tehran to Darrus were stark black against the slate-gray sky, their thin branches bending with the wind. The village was a sparse collection of dwellings, unspooling north toward the mountains. Just past a small roadside teahouse, I stopped at an intersection, looking left then right. I’d turned the heat all the way up but I was still cold, shivering. I rubbed my hands against my thighs to warm them. Winter always settled over this city so suddenly, and I was dressed in a skirt, with thin stockings, as if for a different season.
I heard the school bus before I saw it. Just as the signal turned green and I pulled into the intersection, the wheels screamed against the asphalt. Then, with a jolt, I connected the sound to a streak of color at the edge of my field of vision. I veered to the side of the road, missing the bus by a few feet before it rattled, then hissed, to a stop. Wheels of film flew to the floor. For a moment there was silence and stillness. My heart was beating hard. I was about to get out of the car and check if anyone had been hurt, but then the bus roared to a start. Their faces were silhouetted, but as the bus passed I saw that the children inside were peering down at me through the window, and all at once I felt a terrible sadness slice through me.
Kami, I thought. I closed my eyes against the memory, but it was useless, and I let my forehead drop against the steering wheel.
One day I’d gone to his school in Ahwaz. I covered my hair with a scarf in the hope that Khanoom Shapour wouldn’t recognize me before I could even get to him. I stood by the gates to his school, working out what I should do when I saw him. So much time had passed. Year after year Parviz and his family refused to let me see him. Now a decade had passed. Would he even recognize me?
A bell sounded loudly and dozens of boys spilled into the courtyard. The children wore identical uniforms and carried the same brown leather satchels. I scanned every face, but I couldn’t find my son. My heart was beating crazily. And then he appeared. Kami. He was a grown boy now. His torso and legs had lengthened and his black curls had been clipped off, but I knew it was him. My son.
“Kami!” I called out, pulling off my scarf so he could see me better. He must have known who I was. He must have felt it. I was suddenly sure of it. His face shot up in my direction and I stepped toward him, but already Khanoom Shapour was at his side. By then I was inside the courtyard, just a few feet from my son. I could almost reach out to him. But before I could come any nearer, Khanoom Shapour edged herself in front of Kami. “The bad woman’s come to take you,” she said, her eyes never leaving my face.
I held my head high and stepped toward them, but I stopped when I saw the fear in my son’s eyes. All at once I knew what she had told him was something she had been telling him for years. That I was a dishonorable woman. That I was a bad mother. That I’d abandoned him. What else had Parviz let her tell him? What other lies had she told?
I let my mother-in-law move my son away then. She looked warily over her shoulder, and I thought Kami might turn to look at me, too, but he didn’t. When he and Khanoom Shapour reached the end of the street, they turned left and disappeared. A sudden exhaustion stole over every muscle and bone in my body. I moved to the nearest wall and slouched against it, the stones cool and rough against my back. I’d been holding my scarf in my hand, but sometime in the last moments it had fallen to the ground. I didn’t move to pick it up. The sound of children’s voices floated from the courtyard. Laughter, high-pitched screams, the sporadic sounds of traffic. A bus clattered past and a woman walked by, leading a sulky little girl by the elbow. I was gazing at the back of the girl’s blue-and-white checkered dress when I was struck by a horrible understanding. Kami wasn’t my son. Not anymore. I could wait all my life and he’d never be my son again. The sadness I felt in that moment was stronger than any feeling I’d ever know. It was the deepest loss of my life, and it would stay with me until the end.
* * *
It happened a few miles outside Tehran, in the still-wild foothills outside the capital where concrete highways and high-rises gave way to gardens, orchards, and fields. I was so close to Darrus, practically there. A mile outside the village I stopped at a traffic light. The fog was thick, rising from the side of the road and obscuring my view. I had driven this way hundreds of times, but today it seemed as if I were heading into a strange and unmarked land. There were no shops, no people. A desolation I had never noticed before.
I glanced in the rearview mirror and watched as a car rolled up behind me. It was a black Ford sedan. It drew closer and closer, foot by foot, until it was so close I could make out the outline of the driver through the glass. His features were obscured by a hat, but for just a moment he lifted his chin and I could see his face. He saw me watching him and I caught what looked to me like a smile.
It was, I think, that smile that deranged me. Suddenly I felt sure I recognized the man. But from where?
The light was still red, but I peeled out of the intersection, my heart thudding against my chest, my palms slick with sweat. The car skidded and swerved, the tires whining against the dark road. A few seconds later, I glanced into the rearview mirror. The hood of the Ford was inches from my car, so close that I couldn’t tell the screech of its wheels from mine. Coming onto a curve, I slammed my shoe down on the gas pedal and strangled a gasp in my chest. A concrete wall rose up before me, and it was then that I felt death had come for me here, on this road less than a mile from Darius’s glass house. The thought hardened into knowing, and I gripped the wheel firmly with both hands. The seconds seemed to slow to minutes, and outside the landscape blurred, went white, and disappeared.
The jeep was upside down, its wheels to the sky, when Darius appeared. Someone recognized my car and ran all the way to find him and bring him here. The impact with the concrete barrier had flung me through the windshield. I landed in an embankment, my head colliding with the asphalt. My brain was drowning in blood, but my heart was still beating. I was alive.
Darius crouched beside me, screaming—“Forugh! Forugh!” I could hear him so clearly, and I tried to answer him but I couldn’t. I felt my eyelids flutter, and when I opened my eyes again it was as if I were observing him for the first time, that very first time I met him at Leila’s party, when he caught me looking at him and held my gaze. There was so much I wanted to tell him, so much I wanted to say, but there wasn’t much time left, and even if there had been time, that somehow didn’t matter anymore. My silence was part of the story. It belonged to it, was indistinguishable from it now.
He carried me to his car, cradling my head in the crook of his arm. It was night now and the road was dark. He never stopped talking to me as he sped back toward the city, not for a minute, and he was still talking to me when he carried me through a vast gleaming lobby and into the thin blue light of the hospital. My eyes closed. When they opened again, hours later it seemed, there was brightness and many strange voices. We can’t help her, they said, one after another, the nurses, surgeons, spec
ialists. She’s too far gone, practically dead, there’s no point in operating.
I don’t know how long he held me. I don’t know how long I lay there until all the others left and it was just the two of us in the room. We can’t help her, they said, but what he heard then and would always hear was We won’t help her.
He died with Forugh, people said afterward, and he never contradicted them. Not once. Not ever.
I see him there, in that last room where we were together, his hand clasped over mine and his face wet with tears. “I’m sorry,” he says over and over. “I’m so sorry.” He holds me as if it’s the only place in the world he’s ever wanted to be or belong. Sometimes he tells me we’re on the beach by the Caspian, in Ramsar. It’s the first day I see the sea, and he’s watching me walk toward the waves with my shoes in my hands and I’m taking too long, the tide’s coming in, but he lets me go because it’s my moment and he wants me to savor it. Sometimes he tells me a story about a house tucked in a deep-green wood many thousands of miles away. It’s our house, the house where we’ll live together, and he says we’ll go there tomorrow—no, we’re already there, safe and free. Sometimes he whispers a poem, the most perfect love poem in the world, but the words slip loose from their meanings, fluttering in the air and tumbling down and down until silence closes over me and I am gone.
EPILOGUE
Maybe truth lay in those two young hands,
those two young hands
buried beneath a never-ending snow.
And next year, when spring
mates with the sky beyond the window
and green shoots of light burst from her body,
the branches will blossom, dear friend.
Song of a Captive Bird Page 31