At some point, when the speculations had been exhausted on both sides, when our patience for arguments had ran out, they looked at the sidewalk in front of the house and thought it unusually wide—a perfect spot for hopscotch. The first girl, Zari, ran home and returned with a piece of charcoal. The second girl, Paree, found the perfect stone. We played game after game, laughing and screaming, fighting over nothing but the scores, and the fairness of the judgment: What if someone’s foot had brushed the line? Or if the stone was still inside the square when it touched the line?
By the time the two trucks overloaded with carpets, pots and pans, bedding, and tired faces showed up in front of the house, there were two separate games going on with half the neighborhood children clapping and encouraging the kids hopping on one foot, hitting the stone from one square to another.
My family, horrified to see so many Moslem kids in front of the house, shooed them away. Dismayed at the drawings on the new sidewalk, Morad sent me to find a rag and wipe them out. “The last time! The very last time I’m going to see you bring all those Moslem kids to our home; they will become brazen and learn our comings and goings and rob us clean,” he spewed the words at me.
My hunger came back. I was starved now that the fun was gone and the regular life of discipline and chastisement had restarted.
My sleeping baby sister in her arms, my mother giggled in her usual style of exonerating herself from responsibilities of adulthood. She used the plural “we” instead of the singular “I” to communicate a participatory neglect. “We kept asking what had happened to Farideh-oo,” adding the usual Shirazi accent of “oo” at the end of my name to ensure my third person position, as if I were not in the room.
No, there was no food in the house; they ate before leaving; they didn’t know where anything was. Who told me to come here instead of going home anyway? They had been so busy—such a horrible, taxing day!
I didn’t ask why no one had been waiting at the school to take me home, if I were supposed to go to the old house. They had forgotten about me. It was as simple as that, and no one was willing to take the blame. So in the end, I was at fault; I had worried them; I wasn’t at the house to help at least with the baby. How dare I ask for food when they were so busy moving the furniture with no light to guide them through the house? Someone asked, “Do you ever pay attention?” Another voice chimed in from within the darkness that I must have been too busy making trouble with the neighborhood kids to notice the man from the electrical company. Now someone had to scramble for candles. “When are you going to grow up?” yet another relative grumbled from behind the shadows the candles had etched on the walls of our new house.
I didn’t dare ask why Morad hadn’t mentioned me. I went through the packages as they were being unloaded and found a small snack bundle in the corner of the room that my grandmother had put aside for herself. I tore through it, greedily eating the leftover bread and cheese from the cloth wrapping as I sat on the bare floor in the dark, wishing for a hot cup of tea.
I was the only Jewish student at my new school until many years later when my sister Nahid was old enough to enroll, and the only Jewish child in our neighborhood until my friend Mahvash and her family moved to a nearby street. I had no choice but to make Moslem friends, well aware of the restrictions from both my family and theirs.
Baba, so suspicious of everyone outside the immediate family, couldn’t understand my need for friendship. He himself had been scolded by the members of the Jewish community after his father’s death whenever he had “selfishly” made plans with a friend for a picnic, or if he had strolled down the street with one. Was that a time he could afford rafigh-bazi? The Persian word has no synonym in English. It means the game of having friends, as if they were an addiction like gambling or smoking hashish. In return, my father tried his best to educate me in the lessons he had been taught himself, the codes of community life that he had been subjected to and had come to believe.
The more Baba watched me, the more secretive I became. Once my father observed me happily walking home with a few neighborhood girls, hopping at times, laughing at their jokes. He was incensed.
I defended myself: “It’s not that I wanted to make friends with these girls, but they were going my way …”
“Then, just mind your own business and walk on the opposite side of the street. I don’t want my daughter to run like a farmer’s girl after the chickens. Lower your head and walk modestly. No hopping, no laughing like a fallen girl.”
I told my friends that I had to separate myself from them on the street leading to our house, knowing that my father stood watch from the second-floor window, smoking a cigarette.
Baba’s mistrust of the Moslems had a valid foundation. Not only had he witnessed the raid against the mahaleh as a child, but he had also seen his father beaten bloody as they walked home from the synagogue one Shabbat morning. The ghetto alleyways being muddy, they had decided to walk on the street although it was forbidden for Jews to be outside the ghetto on rainy days. My grandfather, the chief rabbi of the community, respected not just by Jews but by many Moslems as well, looked pathetic and humiliated—his caftan torn, his kippa a toy for the thugs, his long white beard smeared with blood and mud. My father had been too young and too frightened to protect him against strong and angry young men.
Baba had seen unprovoked violence against the Jews, who were hated for being meek and poor, yet despised when wealthy and strong. The week we moved into the new house, our neighbor’s son raised a bright red, glass swastika in his bedroom facing our house. We couldn’t escape its colossal presence: at night, it shone under a display lamp, and during the day, it glittered in the sunlight—sickeningly beautiful.
My friend’s grandfather routinely dumped their garbage by our sidewalk, and one summer night, as we slept in our backyard, someone set fire to our pine trees. We could hear steps receding and loud cackles of laughter, and my father was convinced that Zari’s brothers were behind the destruction.
I had my own experiences as well. The hajee, a title the grandfatherlylooking grocer had taken after pilgrimage to Mecca, rubbed his hands, sticky from handling dates, on mine as he passed a bag of lentils, making me feel queasy. I was disgusted at myself for being lazy and not walking the extra twenty minutes to another shop. But then, a Jewish merchant had also tried to put his hands under my skirt when I was looking at socks in his shop. I didn’t tell my parents of either incident. I knew that the basic nature of people was the same beneath the divisive layers of religious beliefs. Baba himself had told me that whereas close family members left him and his young siblings to starve after his father’s death, a Moslem man trusted him with his gold when he was a young, inexperienced jeweler, and saved the family from hunger.
I didn’t find it possible to build a cage around myself. Instead, I found it ironic that my father, who struggled and sacrificed so much to get us out of the ghetto, was obviously missing the security of its tall walls and insulated community, where all faces were familiar, where he didn’t have to keep on a mask of politeness, humility, and even servitude at all times to present the neighbors with the opposite of what he thought they expected of a Jew.
In our new neighborhood, my mother and grandmother stayed home to cook, clean, and receive visitors, mostly family and old neighbors from the ghetto who were curious about the house. Their outside interactions were limited to the area shopkeepers. Maman came back complaining every day. The man at the fruit stand didn’t allow her to select her own because his customers wouldn’t buy najes food if her Jewishness rubbed off on the fruit; he put overripe peaches and rotten apples in my mother’s basket. The baker gave her leftover naan that no one else would take, and since everyone in the neighborhood had maids who stood in the long line for bread three times a day, the humiliation was heightened for her. She was lower than the Moslems’ servants in stature.
My experience differed from the rest of the family, since I had a balance in my relationship with the Mo
slems. Abuses did happen, but so did friendship, love, and kindness. Members of Paree’s family were devoted Moslems. Unlike our chaotic house, hers was always clean and orderly. Persian carpets covered the entire large common room; a brass samovar with a pot of tea placed on top stood at the furthest corner of the room from the door. Over the mantle, the usual portraits of the Prophet Mohammed and Imam Ali hung above the family pictures. Koranic verses embossed in silver and framed in Shiraz khatam hung on the wall asking for Allah’s protection. Paree’s father bowed to me and never looked at my face, protective of my modesty. Her mother wrapped herself in a chador even at home, never saying anything but kind words, asking about my family’s health, praying for good grades for me, offering a glass of sour cherry sharbat, chai, and sugar lumps with rice cookies.
One day I visited Paree, knocked at the door, and impatiently waited for her to open before someone from our household could see me visiting.
“Shhh!” Paree asked for my silence as she moved aside to let me in. Her mother was in the middle of her noon prayers. We took our shoes off and tip-toed quietly to the corner, sat cross-legged, and waited for her mother to finish. She had a large white kerchief wrapped around her head and fastened under her chin with a safety pin. It covered her shoulders and most of her back. Bare-footed on top of a prayer-rug, she was now bending, now kneeling and putting her forehead on the prayer stone at the head of the carpet. She looked serene, content, at peace, the opposite of my mother, who was filled with repressed anger, hatred, unhappiness, and feelings of abandonment bubbling like molten lava inside her.
I wanted Paree’s mother to be mine.
My Space
I had imagined us having such freedom in the new house, without the eyes of the community scrutinizing our every move. I had envisioned open spaces for me and my family in a big house. Today I can say that I never lived in a place more confining.
When the house was under construction, I went with Baba often to check on its progress. Fascinated, I watched the Moslem workers from nearby villages who had moved to the site, working, sleeping, and eating around the foundation of our house. They sat on the ground chiseling stones all day with long nails and hammers; fine stone dust covered their beards and eyelashes and gathered in clumps around their mouths, where they had coughed it out.
A bare-footed bricklayer hauled buckets of mortar up on a pulley; yet another man, with his legs hanging on either side of the wall, rested the bucket next to himself, scooped and slammed the mortar on the wall with a spatula, at which point the man at the bottom threw him a brick. He grabbed and set it tightly on the mortar. They were quick, efficient, and precise, building a wall around my house to give us our own private space, to free us from the claustrophobic ghetto.
As the house came together, I was ecstatic about my room on the right side of the foyer, about which I bragged nonstop to my unbelieving classmates. One day, his pencil mustache twitching, Uncle Morad smirked and pointed it out to me on the blueprint, “That’s your room. How do you like it?” I looked at him, then at my silent father, and again at the small space on the paper, and jumped up and down in delight.
Finally, Uncle Jahangeer heard Morad building up my expectations and told him to stop teasing me. My room was the only toilet downstairs. Morad was right, however, to tell me that the bathroom was mine, since I had the responsibility of scrubbing it every Friday until I left Iran in my senior year of college.
None of us were destined to have a room of our own. The dining room with no windows was Uncle Morad’s, soon to be married and his wife added to the crowded house. A small room was my family’s. My parents slept on the platform bed, my sister and I and soon two brothers slept on mats strewn on the floor. A large room connected with a smaller one accommodated my grandmother and her two youngest children, Uncle Jahangeer and Aunt Fereshteh—my uncle slept in the back room, the two women in the front room that doubled as the living quarters and dining area.
Years later, we accepted the modern idea of using the large foyer as a common room, conquering our distaste of being so close to a lavatory, but my grandmother cringed whenever someone used the toilet as we lounged in the hallway. She believed a toilet belonged in the backyard, far away from where we ate and slept.
Shortly after we settled in the house, the realtor found an elderly American couple to rent the second floor and help pull us out of the huge debt that my father and uncle had accumulated. The separate quarters with their beautiful curved staircase, large glass windows, living and dining rooms that stretched the entire length of the house, terrazzo floors, gold-embossed handmade plaster moldings, and wooden and glass built-in china cabinet seemed to have been designed from the beginning with the idea of someone else living in it. My father had also had a toilet-e farangee, a Europeanstyle toilet, built to replace the hole in the floor. There was already a bathtub installed in the bathroom with a hand-held shower that didn’t cease to amaze us. I used to walk around the tub and touch it, enjoying the feeling of being so close to such unbelievable, exotic luxury. Unlike the mudcovered, charcoal-burning stoves in the gloomy kitchen downstairs, there was a gas stove upstairs, and a window opened conveniently into the dining room to pass the food. Our American neighbors brought a dishwasher, a washing machine, and a dryer along with their truck and large boxes of canned and packaged food from the States. They also had enough communication gadgets to fill an entire room. They ran a large antenna from the attic to the roof and spent much of their time at night listening to the ham radio, whose muffled beeping traveled through the walls and could be heard on rare occasions, when the house was not noisy and chaotic.
We didn’t have a telephone until I was a college freshman. Uncle Beejan, who was doing a medical residency in the United States, periodically sent us tapes in additions to the letters that were always read and reread, kissed, and stored neatly high on a mantle out of respect. Since we didn’t have a tape recorder either, the farangees lent us one. They excitedly let us use their machine and listened with us. We briefed them on the messages my uncle so painstakingly addressed to every single person in the house, including the children; therefore, it was fortunate that when he decided to speak to his sister, Aunt Fereshteh, in English our tenants were attending a dinner party. “Are the Americans spies?” my uncle asked.
Spies or not, they exposed us to a taste of American life. We never used their names to talk about them; we rather called them Aamrikaioo, the Americans. The tall man, whose robust figure dwarfed the shorter Iranian men, lined up Baba, Morad, Jahangeer, and even some of the neighbors around the large traffic circle in front of the house and taught them the basics of baseball. They stood there with their large leather gloves, learning to throw and catch balls. Self-conscious, Baba chewed his mustache. The neighborhood kids stood around with their mouths wide open, ready to run after each stray ball; the women giggled and pointed to anyone who missed.
When our American neighbors sprinkled salt on the sweet watermelon, we made faces: “Yach, yach!” They boiled their corn instead of roasting it: “Ooo! How nasty!” we all agreed. They pulled some of the flowers out of our flower beds and planted tomatoes that grew large and fleshy, which they reaped when still green. They wouldn’t listen to us that they would taste better ripening on the vine; instead, they lined them up on their window sill. My grandmother thought that maybe those strange farangees ate them green.
To our dismay, they bathed every day, wasting our precious resources. Yet most of us avoided their touch. They didn’t wash their bottoms in the bathroom as Iranians did; instead, they wiped themselves. How disgusting! Americans held their dogs, the most defiled animal in an Islamic country, and even kissed them. They smelled funny. As Jews, we felt hurt whenever Moslems considered us najes, impure to touch because of our religion. Nevertheless, it was easy even for me to go along with the societal beliefs and to think of Americans as najes and cringe if touched by them.
Every Wednesday, our entire family visited my grandmother in the courtyard. I
f the weather was mild, they sat in a circle on a Persian carpet on the bricked-backyard. I played hide and seek with my sister and ten cousins. We chased each other with a water hose, threw shoes at each other, which had to be hunted later from underneath the bushes, from the tops of trees, and from inside the neighborhood yards. The women took turns smoking a waterpipe and cracking watermelon seeds. On these occasions, the Americans stood on the balcony watching us and laughing. They showed us their generosity by throwing candies or boxes of animal crackers down like the king and the queen of the Mardi Gras from a float, watching us scramble, push, and shove like animals for a piece of America.
Out of Place
I don’t remember much about my sister’s birth. When I was four, I once saw my mother folded over the flower beds in the morning, vomiting mushed bread and cheese that smelled like rotten pickled apples. I ran to my grandmother and screamed, “Maman is dying!”
She laughed.
Then, my sister Nahid was born, but I couldn’t play with her as I had hoped. She was back in the hospital with a severe infection shortly after her birth; and I was jealous because Maman spent her time with the newborn. I don’t know who took care of me then—probably my grandmother. I don’t know if I cried, if it mattered to me that at a time when I rarely saw my father, who worked into the late hours of night, my mother was not around either. Early in the morning, Maman left for the hospital on her daily visits to Nahid. Upon returning, she cried softly as she cooked, and she wouldn’t eat her lunch because a big lump was always blocking her throat. Unaware of the seriousness of my sister’s illness, I kept away from my grieving mother as if she were a stranger, afraid to enter her morbid sphere.
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