Wedding Song

by Farideh Goldin

  As the Shah’s government encouraged education abroad, more Jewish men enrolled in the universities in the United States. Rarely did these men marry Americans. Most were shocked at the sexual freedom in the United States. Declaring that “there were no virgins in America,” many returned a year later suffering from culture shock and loneliness, looking for wives to take back. Since time was of the essence for these students, their families made the preliminary arrangements. A few wanted brides as young as possible. Many requested their choices to be limited to those women attending a certain high school. Some preferred women with higher education, particularly students of a humanities major—not medicine or engineering.

  I studied English literature at Pahlavi University in Shiraz, frustrated by living in two different worlds. My American and British teachers spoke of individual freedom and rights, of the power of critical thinking, free expressions of thoughts and exchange of ideas. Yet daily I went back to our half-communal household, to a world of patriarchy. It was one that I understood less every day, a world whose rules were rapidly becoming foreign to me.

  After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Americans often asked me why the Iranian people accepted such a radically different government. I told them that if one person in each family had felt as I did, that would have been enough reason for the older generation to revolt against the government for separating them from their children by offering Western education. If half of Western-educated men and women had felt as I did, that would have been enough for them to reject the West, which alienated them from their culture, weakened their roots, and drastically altered their identity.

  In 1973, I was finishing my sophomore year in the university. At the end of the second semester, as exams approached, I often spent extra time at school to avoid confrontations with my family. The weather turned extremely hot. Lacking deodorants, I went back to the house every day at noon to take a shower before returning to school.

  One day as I gathered my books in a hurry to make the 4:30 bus, my grandmother approached me with an evaluating look. “Good, good. I was going to ask you to take a shower myself. I see you’re dressed nicely,” she said. “Make sure to use the sidewalk on the right side of the street and walk very slowly.”

  I looked at my mother for an explanation. She giggled and looked away. I went to a second-floor window and saw what I suspected. There they were, women of all ages waiting for a one-person show, a drama whose sole actress was me. The watchers had spread a Persian carpet on the sidewalk, set up a few chairs, brought tea and even a waterpipe. I could imagine the conversations:

  “No khanom! You should sit closer,” one probably said.

  “This is a better place for you; after all you are the one to make the decision,” another responded.

  “Come, come sit here. It’s under the shade of the tree. It’s cooler here,” a third woman offered.

  My hair dripped wet. I always allowed it to dry in the hot dry summer air, but now I regretted having washed it, since a woman’s wet long hair was considered seductive. I contemplated grabbing the scissors to chop my hair off. I thought of going downstairs and releasing my anger by hitting my grandmother and my mother hard on their chests, breaking the cultural rules of seniority and respect. In the end, I did neither. I was going to miss the bus, and the exam was more important than my rage. I collected my books, held my head up, smiled, and walked out of the house. I noticed a commotion in the little circle down the street as someone announced my appearance and more women came out of the house. I wondered if the entire extended family had come there to see if I were a suitable bride. I looked back. My father leaned out of the upstairs window, smoking; my mother and grandmother stood at the door watching.

  My grandmother motioned me with the back of her hand: “Go, go. Don’t keep them waiting. It isn’t polite.”

  I wore my comfortable shoes, no high heels for such an occasion. With no one around to beat my back as I held my books tightly to my chest, I slowly crossed the road to the opposite side, took a long breath, and broke into a run. I managed to get on the bus in time, flushed, sweaty, and out of breath. I sat there for a few minutes with my fists clenched in anger. But the episode had been too funny. Soon a small giggle escaped my mouth, which I didn’t try to hide from the rest of the surprised passengers.

  When I returned from school, no one was amused.

  My grandmother fumed. “You embarrassed us. You embarrassed me! How am I going to hold my head up now?”

  My father was disgusted. “A girl doesn’t run like that—after all those years that I taught you to take little steps!”

  “He’s a college-educated man. He just came back from America.” My mother said. “He could take you away.”

  America was more enticing than ever. Maybe if I had been approached differently I would have accepted the offer. Maybe not.

  That summer, I agreed to meet the suitor in person—just to tell him off. He apologized, saying he had no idea of our families’ schemes, but I was too angry to care. More than ever now, I knew that I didn’t belong. I had to find a way out.

  Chapter Six

  MY NEW WORLD

  Leaving Iran

  The struggle to leave Iran was the most difficult endeavor of my life. Six hours short of finishing my bachelor’s degree in English at Pahlavi University, I realized that I would soon run out of excuses to avoid marriage, that my graduation would expedite the transfer of control over my life from my father to a husband, and that I would be trapped forever in the same cycle of life as women before me.

  Also, the political climate changed rapidly. During my last year at Pahlavi University in the fall of 1974, I felt a shifting mood among my Moslem friends. In this American-style university, many women put aside their latest Western clothing, covered their hair, and discarded their French makeup; men grew stubble and exchanged their American jeans for black pants and dress shirts without ties. Adherence to strict Islamic teachings, and, as a consequence, hatred against the Jews and the West, bonded the young and strengthened their resolve against the rule of the Shah. The sword of Islam became the weapon that would eventually destroy the Peacock Throne.

  Whenever I joined a circle of my Moslem friends, the conversations stopped; secrets circulated to which, as a Jew, I suspected I wasn’t privy. One by one, all but two Moslem friends stopped talking to me. Although she was from a religious family, my dear friend Firoozeh still kept a close relationship with me. Her sister studied in a religious school in Ghom, the city that became famous later for being Khomeini’s hometown. Once she told me that her sister awaited a man who would change the country. When I inquired about the man’s identity, she realized she had let slip a piece of information to which I, as a Jew, was not entitled. She didn’t repeat that mistake.

  During the exams, I would meet Firoozeh for tea in the morning before we headed to the library. One day as I said goodbye to her, I casually mentioned, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” A look of surprise crossed her face. She told me she couldn’t and maybe I should study at home too. Her attitude puzzled me, since she knew I lived in a multi-family house, too chaotic to allow me quiet time for studying.

  When I arrived at the library the next day, somber and watchful students stood in small groups around the campus. Few Moslem students occupied the usually packed library, but Firoozeh waited for me by the door. I asked her if she too had noticed the “weirdness” that hung in the air. She didn’t respond; instead she insisted we abandon our regular seats by the windows and choose a space between the stacks. Firoozeh fidgeted, looked around, and couldn’t concentrate on the subject we studied. She was distracting me; and I almost wished she hadn’t come when I heard the loud shouts. Frightened, I jumped, but Firoozeh pulled me under the table as rioters ran through the library, throwing chairs at full-length windows. Large sheets of glass sliced the air. Firoozeh led me outside through a back door, and we talked our way through soldiers who had barricaded the school with drawn guns and bayonets. Through iron fences,
I watched the Shah’s army rip the clothes off women and batter my classmates.

  My architecture professor stood next to me screaming, “Not on their heads, please don’t hit them on the head.”

  At first, my body shook uncontrollably, and then I was listless and cold. While the brutality of the troops appalled me, I found the alternative theocracy more frightening. Logically I knew that my friends deserved a better government, while personally I knew that the shift of powers potentially could destroy Jewish lives. I had to leave as soon as possible.

  Firoozeh found a taxi, pulled me out of the frenzied crowd, and, when we reached the house, told my mother that I was in shock. She even stayed to help me get in bed. Although she couldn’t trust me with a warning about the student riots, Firoozeh endangered her own safety to ensure mine.

  Most of my Jewish friends avoided the public arena to avoid the political unrest and the growing anti-Semitism. Their homes became the only places of refuge as they reevaluated their changing relationship with the world outside. For me, however, life in the house became more unbearable. The hamam had been my only quiet sanctuary in the house. When my grandmother, my parents, my siblings, my aunts and uncles, and my cousins took their afternoon naps on hot summer days, when the heat melted the asphalt on the pavements, I locked myself in the hamam, taking long cold showers. This was my private time of solitude, of reflection and peace. On one of these serene afternoons, Morad pushed the bathroom door open and watched me as I stumbled toward the door to close it. Slippery with lather and with the shampoo stinging my eyes, still I could not help but see his gleeful smile. From then on, the hamam became a place of fear, where I took showers with my underwear on, a chair wedged behind the door. Sometimes I took a bucket with me to the bathroom, which I filled with water to wash the soap off as I stood behind the door guarding it.

  I hated myself. The water lost its magic to soothe me; instead I felt dirtier after each bath. Whenever my uncle smiled at me, looking at me appraisingly, I shuddered, blaming myself. I would learn from my mother that after a fight with my father, Morad had opened the bathroom door on her as well. Revenge, a man’s way. But Morad had miscalculated me. I had learned to keep silent. Fearing another round of arguments, I didn’t share the information with my parents. I withdrew inside my body. Bitter, angry, lost, and abused, I needed to distance myself from everyone I knew.

  My need to depart quickly became urgent. Initiated by the Shah’s sister, a new law included women in the Shah’s White Revolution army. We were candidates to serve as soldiers and teachers in remote villages for two years. My fear was realized later as my classmates were called to duty after graduation. I had only a short window of time to run. To serve the country by force wasn’t exactly my idea of equality. I could vote; I had to vote, but only for one seat assigned to a Jewish congressman who was already preselected by the Shah. Such liberties I could live without. I was twenty-two years old, but because I was a woman, I would never have the right to apply for a passport without the permission of a male guardian.

  Fortunately, in the winter of 1974, my father applied for passports for himself, my mother, my siblings, and me to travel to Israel to visit my mother’s family. The situation became complicated, however, when my grandmother requested to accompany us. My father considered taking one of the cousins to assist with her needs, and then other cousins asked to join as well. Finally, because my father didn’t have the will to hurt any family members by refusing them, we gathered such a large entourage that the journey became impossible.

  When the trip fell through, my mother smiled in resignation, although she had tears in her eyes. She hadn’t seen her family since they had emigrated to Israel seven years earlier, and her father was elderly and fragile. “This is it,” she said. “I’ll never see Agha.” That was the name she called her father.

  She was right. At the time, I was mad at her for not picking up her passport and demanding to go by herself. I wasn’t going to wait as she did for someone else to make decisions for me.

  My passport had collected a year’s dust in an office downtown when I showed up to claim it. I tried to hide my apprehension and guilt for cheating the system and defying my father’s authority. Bored faces looked at me from behind metal desks and piles of yellowed paper. A guard in a khaki uniform looked at me suspiciously, surprised to see a young woman. I recognized an older man, gnawing on a pencil, gave him my sweetest smile, and introduced myself. “Do you remember me?” I asked him. “I was here with my father.”

  He barely let me finish the sentence. “Of course, of course.” He jumped out of his chair, turned to the clerk and asked him to find Miss Farideh’s passport in a filing cabinet. “Don’t you need the others?” he asked.

  “No, my father is sending me to America by myself to visit an uncle.” I satisfied his curiosity, making sure he knew I was being protected by my father here and my uncle in the States. I smiled at him once more, glad no one I knew could see my flirtation. He double-checked my father’s permission. I paid the cost of the orange and blue stamps that he pasted on the back pages, waved at him sweetly, and stepped out, dancing in my head.

  I still had to obtain a visa and there wasn’t an American consul in Shiraz. A close Moslem friend, Shahnaz, knew people in Tehran and tried to find a way for me to skip town for two days without arousing suspicion. My father wouldn’t allow me to sleep away from the house, afraid that I would compromise my reputation. In college, I had slept over at a Jewish friend’s house only when my father was away. Obviously, going to Tehran was impossible.

  Again I was lucky. That week, when I stopped by the Iran-America Society, the principal called me to his office. “Didn’t your uncle want to visit the States? Tell him that if he is still interested the consul will be here next week.”

  I didn’t give Jahangeer the message, but I was waiting for the consul myself hours before the doors opened. He looked twice as big as any Iranian man I knew, spilling out of a student chair in a classroom. I sat in front of him, trying to control my quivering, at the same time fearing that if the flimsy desk chair collapsed under his weight, he would be too angry to grant me a visa. This was it; my entire future was in his hands.

  He looked at me for a long time before addressing me. “Do you speak English?” he asked me in Farsi.

  I nodded. “A little,” I said in English. The blueness of his eyes unnerved me, so I stared at my clasped hands on my lap.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I need a visa,” I said. Was he wondering why a young woman would appear in front of him unescorted?

  “Why?”

  “To visit family and friends, to improve my English.” My face flushed. I was sweaty.

  Minutes later, I walked out with a shiny stamp granting me a visit to the United States to visit family and friends for three months. I had saved my monthly stipend from the government for being in the top one percent of my class. Firoozeh, my close Moslem friend, lent me another 2,000 tomans, all her savings. Since they wouldn’t accept checks, I walked into the office of Iran Air with all the cash in my pocketbook and bought a one-way ticket to New York City. Then I told my father.

  “No!” he said.

  He couldn’t do anything about it, I told him, since he had legally given me permission by applying for a passport. He fumed, screamed, threatened, but there was nothing he could do but to imprison me in the house. He demanded to see the passport and the ticket and went through my clothes and books to find them, but they were in a friend’s locker at school.

  Uncle Jahangeer intervened. “A trip to the States might be a good thing for Farideh. It will raise her status, make her a better candidate for a good marriage,” he said. “Our brother Beejan will watch over her.”

  Having the blessing of at least one member of the family, Baba gave up. “Just a month,” he said.

  “A month,” I lied.

  Before the trip, Baba went through my bag after it was packed and pulled a winter coat and a sweater out. He r
epacked the bag with summer clothes only, folded each item neatly, and grumbled that I didn’t know how to pack. I watched silently, and when he stuffed my panties and bras in the corners I promised myself that was the very last time anyone would have so much control over my life.

  I arrived in New York for the first time on July 4th, 1975. As the plane circled over New York City, I could see pleasure boats on the Hudson River, people water skiing, the sun shining through the Statue of Liberty’s crown. I would never return to Iran, I thought. I was out. I was free. I was scared.

  That year I didn’t go back. Beejan, my uncle who lived in the States, convinced my father to allow me to finish my bachelor of arts degree at Old Dominion University, not too far away from his home. I also met and fell in love with my future husband. Norman’s youngest sister and I had been pen pals for over two years. My sister Nahid had visited the States, hoping that American orthopedists could repair the discrepancy in the length of her right leg. She met my future sister-in-law and asked her to correspond with me so I could improve my English. When in America, I called my pen pal to meet her for the first time. She was away, but her brother was visiting from school. Their mother begged Norman to do a mitzvah, a good deed, and take a poor Iranian girl out for dinner. I was impressed by him because he wouldn’t enter my uncle’s house until he learned to pronounce my name. We became good friends, wrote to each other, and he walked me through my culture shock that first year, at the end of which we considered ourselves engaged to be married.

  When Uncle Beejan called my father for his permission for our engagement, my proud father cried like a child. I was his. My uncle didn’t have the right to decisions concerning me. He begged his brother to send his daughter back, like I was a package given for safe keeping. It was bad enough that he had kept me much longer than anticipated. Beejan was in a terrible bind, because my father had raised and sent him to school at a great sacrifice to himself. He helped me study in the States in order to partially pay his debt to his brother. To keep a balance between his loyalty to my father and fairness to me, he bought me a round-trip ticket and told me that I had no choice but to return to Iran and ask for my father’s blessing; otherwise, he said, he would withdraw his legal support and I would be deported. Meanwhile, my father hoped that if I came back, I could be convinced to stay, to get married to a man of his choice, and to forget about life in America.