Accompanied by her well-dressed mother, Fariba arrived late on the first day of school, wearing a beautifully tailored uniform. The fabric was a rich gray color, I noticed with jealousy, made of soft wool. I wished I could touch it. My own new cotton uniform felt dull and scratchy. I felt that there was a wall between us that was too high for me to leap over and meet her. Our Moslem teacher, Mrs. Khatami, jumped from her seat to greet them: “Salam, hello, Mrs. Doctor, welcome.”
So her father was a doctor. Money and education wiped out some of the Jewish dirt, I thought—first lesson of the day. She made another girl move so Fariba could have an aisle seat, which her mother said she preferred.
During the first break, Mrs. Khatami introduced her to a few choice students, including an American girl. Mary’s hair was yellow, a hair color that I had never seen and thought ugly. Her eyelashes were light, almost white, not giving much protection to the glassy, light-blue eyes. Her skin was the palest I had ever seen, other than the albino boy in the mahaleh. My grandmother would have said that she was “without salt, bland.” I thought, “just washed out.” And she spoke Farsi with a funny accent, displeasing to my ears.
She was popular, nevertheless. Mary and Fariba shooed away girls who were mesmerized by the unusual look of the farangee among our naturally tan skin and dark hair. I didn’t try to approach them.
That day, my mother took time off from the busy kitchen to collect me. I was disappointed. I had hoped to see my father. Maman’s hands looked rougher than usual, her dress thinner and cheaper. The vacant look in her eyes was the same. Fariba’s older sisters picked her up with hugs and kisses, I noticed. They brought her an English language practice book. I heard them whispering that they were going to teach her the language. I felt a pang of jealousy. I wanted to learn English too.
Our teacher told us to bring three notebooks and two pencils to school the day after. “Don’t come to school without them,” she warned.
I felt as if she was only looking at me.
“You’ll be punished, I promise.” She shook her index finger at us.
Punishment, I had learned already, meant standing in the corner of the class on one foot, the way Eshrat was reprimanded that day. I told my mother on the way home that I needed to stop by a kiosk and buy the school supplies.
She was rushing to prepare dinner. “Wait till your father gets home,” she said. I nagged my mother about the matter all afternoon.
When he came home, Baba gave me money to buy naan for dinner before a fast starting at sundown. “What about the supplies?” I asked.
“Get out of here and buy the bread,” he commanded, “before it gets late.”
I went to my mother again and asked if I could use the money to buy supplies.
She shrugged.
I went to Meena’s house and asked her to accompany me to the kiosk a few blocks away and bought half of what Mrs. Khatami had requested, saving the rest of the money for bread. On the way to the bakery, we ran into my father and uncle Morad, wearing pajama bottoms, V-neck undershirts, and plastic flip-flops. How could they embarrass me like that, showing up in their lounging clothes?
“Where’s the bread?” my father asked.
I showed them the notebooks proudly. Morad hit me on the head with the palm of his hand, screaming about how irresponsible and self-absorbed I was as Meena and the people on the busy street watched. I took the supplies back and asked for my money as my father watched from a distance. The owner deducted cash as penalty for the return. This time, my father himself, pajamas and all, rushed to the bakery to purchase the naan.
My teacher was not upset to find that I didn’t have notebooks or pencils. She had expected it; that was the reason they didn’t want kids like me at their school. As the seating was rearranged once more for Fariba and Mary to keep each other company on the same bench, the teacher moved me to the back of the class to sit with a trouble-making girl from the poor Moslem side of the city. “You’re a nice quiet girl. Have a good influence on her,” she demanded. “If Eshrat makes trouble, you’ll be punished as well.”
My parents reminded me years later how I went home everyday crying and not wanting to go back to school. Eshrat tortured me all year, pinched me whenever she thought I was taking too much room, stole my sponge cake, and hit my hand when I was writing and ruined my handwriting. I was afraid to complain. Although a verag at home, I was timid and quiet at school, fearful to voice my discomfort. My parents didn’t try to find the reasons for my uneasiness. Once more, I learned not to count on them for protection.
“You used to be a good student,” my teacher admonished me one day, “look at you now. You’ve become just like Eshrat and I was counting on you to change her!”
The second Jewish girl in my class, Golee, was a short, chubby girl with light, curly hair. Her father was also a physician. One day, as we lined up with our folding cups for milk, courtesy of the United States government, she started bragging about how her father loved her and always wanted to be the one to put her to bed. He caressed her back, and, every night before he left, he put his hand in her panties, massaged her private parts, and licked his fingers before leaving. She was surprised to find out that none of our fathers did that. Her story circulated around the school during recess and made her our pastime activity. We laughed and made her cry. She refused to go back into the classroom.
The principal called her older sister and demanded that Golee stop telling wild stories that corrupted the other girls, or else she would be expelled.
Golee’s sister came to a group of us screaming from the top of her lungs: “You cruel, hateful, nasty kids. My sister would never say such lies. You’ve made up the story! You’re evil.”
I joined the others to answer her accusations with my nervous laughter. For the rest of the time I was at Mehr-ayeen, Golee never spoke to anyone her age, and walked around the yard alone at recess. Her only companion was her sister. I always wondered if she told her parents about the incident or if she too had learned to keep quiet.
I transferred to a new school the following year after we moved out of the mahaleh. My father rented the upstairs of our new house to an American family to make ends meet. My uncle’s family, my grandmother, my unmarried aunt and uncle, and my family lived downstairs, occupying as much space as the two foreigners, a husband and wife, did on the second floor. I saw Mary visiting our neighbors one day as I sat on our outside steps. I said “Salam,” timidly.
“Boro gom sho,” she said with her American accent. She told me to get lost, assuming that I was pestering her like many Iranian kids who often followed the Americans on the streets, sometimes harassing them. She had never noticed me in her first-grade class.
Fariba and I never made friends. I didn’t try and neither did she. She was of a different breed. She came from an educated family who traveled abroad often and had a nice home in an exclusive part of town. She probably was told to keep clear of those who came from the ghetto. She and I crossed paths in high school and again in college, where I struggled with English, which she spoke beautifully. She also knew French from her many trips to Europe. I was still puzzled. How did a Jewish family become so wealthy and cultured? How was she ever going to find a Jewish husband from her social class? I heard that she married a Tehrani man after immigrating to Los Angeles.
As for Golee, we saw each other often at the synagogue and later in college. She always avoided me, never making eye contact.
Leaving the Mahaleh
Midway through my first year at Mehr-ayeen, my father learned about a piece of land for sale in a faraway neighborhood. A well-known man, the owner had minor financial problems and needed to sell the land quietly, preferably to a man of little influence, who would not be among his circle of friends. My father and uncle Morad shared a small shop, making jewelry. The land was an impossible dream, but one they could not relinquish. They mortgaged the house and the shop. They borrowed money from the bank, family, and friends. The land was theirs. Building a mode
rn home on a corner lot in one of the most progressive neighborhoods became their daily joy and pride.
By the time I was ready to register for the second grade, the house was half finished. The masons sat on the street chiseling stones all day for the outer facade of the house. The construction of a metal roof kept the main welding shop in Shiraz busy for months. No more clay roofs for us. No more leaks. No more patching and thatching. But, in the excitement, no one thought of slanting the roof to make the rain and snow run off easier. We still had to hire workers to shovel the snow off the flat roof every winter. Also, no one envisioned the heat absorbed by the metal roof during the hot summer months when the temperatures rose to dangerous degrees.
A market place in the mahaleh. Picture courtesy of Dr. Laurence D. Loeb.
My father, however, foresaw the school problem for me and found one closer to the new house, hoping that we would move in the fall, before school started. That was not to happen. I had to commute to the distant neighborhood every day, and the hour-long walk made it impossible for my mother or father to accompany me both ways. My father walked me to school in the morning. He asked Mehdi, an apprentice at the shop, to pick me up at twelve o’clock.
I didn’t mind going home with Mehdi. He invented funny riddles to make me laugh. He brought dried peaches for me, knowing that I was often starved on the long walk, and made a little game for eating the peaches.
There was a lazy boy who sat under a peach tree every day, he told me. Instead of climbing the tree, he laid underneath and screamed: “Hooloo beoft to galoo, Peach, fall in my mouth.”
One of the many alleyways in the mahaleh. Picture courtesy of Dr. Laurence D. Loeb.
“Did it work?” I wanted to know.
“Close your eyes and open your mouth,” he said. “Yell ‘hooloo beoft to galoo.’”
When I did as he said, he put a small piece of the dried fruit in my mouth. It was delicious, but it was always too little.
“More please,” I begged, closing my eyes and yelling the rhyme.
“Okay, but you have to give me a hug and a kiss first.”
In the space of the five months he took me home, I gave away lots of tight hugs and kisses for the taste of the dried peaches. Although I found the entire thing a nuisance, I never thought much of it.
Once a man saw us in an embrace in the quiet alleyway leading away from the school. “Who are you, little girl?” he asked.
Mehdi said, “Don’t tell him. He is a stranger, a Moslem.”
But I was in a good mood, giggling and chewing the fruit. I told him my name, and when he said he wanted to buy some jewelry from my father, I gave him the directions also.
My father asked me that night if Mehdi had been bothering me.
I said “No.”
Was I sure, he asked me.
Terrified, I denied any problems. Mehdi had made me swear I would deny the Moslem man’s accusation or else I would get in big trouble. Baba picked me up from school from then on. About a week later, I came home to find him holding his head in his hands, looking exhausted. I felt as if I had been a deceitful daughter, a liar. So, I told him the truth.
“Okay, forget it,” he told me. He then walked away absentmindedly, leaving me confused and disappointed.
Later that day, I learned that Mehdi had slipped while moving heavy containers of acid to wash the floor. The acid drenched his clothes, burning much of his body. The other workers rushed him to the hospital, but by the time they managed to secure a taxi and drive through the crowded streets filled with cars, bicycles, mules, and people, he was too far gone.
I felt guilt-ridden. Had I told my father the truth earlier, maybe he would have been fired and not died such a horrible death. Maybe if I hadn’t told the stranger the truth, Mehdi would not have died. For some strange reason, I carried the burden of his horrible end as if I had committed an unforgivable sin.
He visited me in my nightmares, skinless, dripping with acid and blood, offering a dried peach in his deformed hand: “Open your mouth. Close your eyes: Hooloo beoft to galoo.”
1. Quoted also in Laurence Loeb’s Outcast.
Chapter Four
A PLACE FOR ME
Our New Home
The day finally came. We were moving out of the mahaleh to our new house—only thirty minutes from the Shah’s residence in Shiraz, five minutes to the medical school. We were moving to an all-Moslem neighborhood.
There was total chaos in the morning as I prepared to leave for school. I would have preferred to stay at home, to be a part of the hubbub and fun of the move.
No! No one needed a child around. Not even if I could help with my little sister. No one was going to pick me up from school that day either. Could I find my way home?
Of course I could; I was a big girl; and the school was only a fifteen-minute walk to our new address. I was giddy with excitement. We were finally “moving to the street,” a term used to describe those who left the ghetto.
After school, I joined the students lining up to march to various neighborhoods. I jogged gently in place, shifted my weight from foot to foot; the waiting was unbearable.
The teacher in charge of organizing the groups counted the students until she reached me, calling me by my last name as it was the custom, “Calm down! What are you doing here? Where is your father?”
I convinced her that we had truly moved—and yes, I knew how to get to the house after the line crossed the main street.
I was hungry and couldn’t wait to have my first lunch in the new house. Uncle Morad was leaning against the door frame as I approached and was surprised to see me there. I was lucky, he told me, that he had stopped by to wait for someone from the city to connect the water and the electricity; otherwise, I would have come to a locked house. He had to go back and help with the move; he smirked and told me that since I was there—such a big girl and all—I would be in charge of the utilities connection.
I watched him as he walked away rapidly in long strides, and the smaller he became, the larger the house loomed over me. Our new house was a duplex, separated by frosted, sculpted glass doors that led to a winding staircase. I ran around the large rooms, enjoying the feel of the open spaces. I jumped up and down with no one to tell me to stop, screamed and enjoyed the echo of my voice bouncing off the bare walls. When I ran out of games to play, my stomach reminded me that it was past lunch time and there wasn’t even a drop of water in the shiny clean pipes. Lunch was the biggest meal of the day, and the sofreh was usually spread on the carpet by the time I got home from school. But in the new house, the pantry was completely empty, shining brightly from its new coat of white paint.
The man from the water department finally came, and, although he told me it was okay to stay, I waited outside as he connected the water inside the house. But no one from the electrical company showed up that day, and, as the sun languidly dipped behind the buildings, imaginary demons hovered around me. Spooky, dark thoughts occupied my mind: What if the family decided not to move; what if they had forgotten me?
I heard the distant voice of the muezzin chanting the prayers at dusk. I went outside and sat on the front steps, but kept the door slightly ajar, ready to retreat and lock it if a stranger approached me. The light bulbs on the wooden beams lining the street came to life with a yellowish glow. I was afraid of the unfamiliar street, yet more fearful of the dark, empty house. Panic found its way into my stomach and bounced. I wrapped my hands around myself, my head on my knees, and played with my braid the way I used to rub my grandmother’s before I went to sleep.
I sat there for maybe an hour before the neighborhood kids discovered me. First, there was a young girl with short, straight hair, from the house around the corner. She stood afar for a few minutes until she was joined by another one with curly hair and a darker complexion, then another, and another. When a large group had gathered, they finally walked over, examining me, eyeing me with curiosity.
Was I really Jewish? one asked.
How
did they know that, I wondered, and did I match the description their parents taught them, the specifications they had learned about the Jews? They circled me with wondering eyes. Their suspicion of the Jews wasn’t surprising to me, because the first day at my new school, I had caused a near riot as I had tried to drink from the water spouts in the yard. A few girls had knocked me over the head, protesting that they used the water to make themselves taher, to clean before saying their prayers. If I made the waterspouts najes, they wouldn’t have clean water to purify themselves. Other girls had joined the group, deciding if they should designate one spout for the Jews. Yet others thought the entire thing nonsense. I stood there paralyzed until an administrator broke up the group. She told us that it was unsanitary for anyone to put her mouth to the spout. “Make sure you drink out of your hand,” she added, and then walked away, not quite satisfying those who believed that my touch alone defiled the water source.
Now that I was meeting Moslem girls from my new neighborhood, I wasn’t quite sure if I should be happy or afraid.
Did we use the blood of Moslem kids for our Passover crackers, one wanted to know.
I shook my head, not knowing from where the outrageous idea had sprung.
A debate broke out between the ones who were certain that I was lying and were cautioning against getting too close to me, and those who didn’t think a child could be that harmful, especially when they outnumbered me. We finally spoke about other matters. Which school was I attending? Where were my parents? How many people in the household? They too had more than their immediate family living with them, although the size of my family sounded a bit unusual to them. To take care of one’s grandparents at home was customary—but aunts and uncles living in the same house?
We talked a bit longer from a distance. I assumed that they worried that my touch would defile them. I was afraid to ask for a piece of bread or a glass of tea. What if the food wasn’t kosher? What if they poisoned it to kill me? Would they allow me to touch their utensils anyway? They surely feared that I would make them najes.
Wedding Song Page 14