Wedding Song

by Farideh Goldin

  When I woke up, I took the keys to my father’s car without his permission. He would have insisted that people gossiped about young women driving by themselves. I didn’t want to be jammed in the back of a taxi with three men who weren’t afraid to touch. I didn’t want to walk down side streets where men cornered women and groped them. In the short time I had been home, I learned quickly that our sleepy city had become increasingly more hostile.

  On a busy street, I passed a car that slowed down to let a passenger out. Minutes later, I felt a strong jolt; the same beige Peykan had hit me. I got out and appraised the damage. Other drivers honked, stuck their heads out the car windows and cursed us for causing a traffic jam. Feeling self-conscious and unsure of the next step when the driver didn’t come to me, I walked to him, a man in his sixties with stubble and a fatherly demeanor. “Why did you hit me?” I asked amazed.

  “You passed me,” he said accusingly. In the back of his small car with tinted glass, four women sat wrapped in black chadors, two with children sitting on their laps. Although I was in the first generation of Iranian women to be given the right to drive, I had thought it an accepted fact. Now, standing in front of this gentle-looking man, I realized that from his perspective I had demeaned him. By daring to pass him, I had eroded his sense of manhood, embarrassing him in front of his women. This was definitely a changing Iran, going back in time. I returned to the car and drove away, wondering whether there was such a thing as car insurance in Iran and mulling over what I was going to tell my father about denting his beautiful mung bean–colored Rambler.

  When I reached my friend Shahnaz’s house, she was smoking a cigarette, listening to the Beatles, and cursing the Shah for forcing her to serve in the army. She was on leave from the military for one day, staying with her parents who lived closer to the base. Being a newlywed, she much preferred spending time with her husband who worked at Bandar-Abbas on the Persian Gulf—a much greater distance to travel, especially for an unescorted woman. She argued with her superior officer nonstop, she told me, wishing to be dismissed for insubordination. Shahnaz pressed the butt of her cigarette in the ashtray as if trying to suffocate something more than an inanimate object. “This whole idea of serving in the army is such nonsense. Let her highness, Princess Ashraf,” Shahnaz rolled her eyes, “wear army boots instead of her Italian-made shoes. Let her jog around the army compound since she was behind this great idea for Iranian women. The officers are all lechers. They want us to jump up and down to watch our quivering breasts.” She threw her blond curls over her shoulders, and her blue eyes filled with tears as she lit another Winston.

  Shahnaz was my contradictory friend. She wore mini-skirts, didn’t shy away from good wine or aged scotch, and danced in the discothèques until early morning hours; yet she was a devout Moslem. She frequently visited Shah-Cheragh, a religious site in Shiraz, to pray and pay alms, yet her European looks aroused suspicion. When she drank from a waterspout the previous year, an angry mob at the shrine gathered around her, shaking their fists and calling her an infidel, who had defiled water that was used for ablution. She was saved when a family friend spotted her and vouched for her devotion to Islam. Once, Shahnaz made a pilgrimage to the holy city of Ghom and waited in her uncle’s car as he ran into a shop to pick up merchandise. In the half an hour he was gone, molas in their black caftans, white turbans, and long beards knocked at the car window, “Sigheh meeshee?”—asking if she was available for a sigheh, a temporary marriage that could last from an hour to a hundred years. Shahnaz laughed as she told me the story, and only at the end did she admit that she had chewed all her nails as she awaited her uncle. Like most of my Moslem friends, Shahnaz and her family venerated Islam even though they made fun of its peculiarities and lived in a very Western style. Shahnaz’s father served his guests aged whiskey but washed his mouth with soap to cleanse it from the forbidden drink before praying. Once a year he crawled on his knees to a shrine and gave a portion of his salary to the religious leader of a maktab, a religious school, in a show of atonement for straying from Islamic teachings.

  Shahnaz’s family had always treated me with respect and kindness, and on this day, when I was so distraught from the match-making pressures, both Shahnaz and her mother were surprised that my family’s opposition to a man I had chosen was his nationality and not his religion. Three years later, with the arrival of Khomeini in 1979, most Iranian Jews including my family would disperse around the world, but during that long summer, the emphasis was on keeping the family together, close by, and segregated from the larger world around us. I told Shahnaz that even if I had chosen a man from Tehran, the distance would have been unacceptable to the family. Most importantly, had I even chosen someone my own age, anyone not selected by the family, I would have faced severe opposition, for the process was as important as the choice. No woman in the family had ever decided on her own husband. Why should I differ? The women of the family especially questioned my judgment. My progressive Moslem friend, who didn’t know of the oppression we had felt as Jews for generations, struggled to understand my family’s need to see me bend to the rituals and customs that had embittered their own lives.

  Shahnaz was leaving the following day for the boot camp and then to her husband’s house for a long weekend. She told me either to hurry home or to go the long way since the movie theater by her house would let out soon. I decided not to take my father’s large car through the tiny side streets, thinking that I could beat the crowd. I was beside the movie theater when the doors opened a few minutes earlier than I had expected, and a large crowd of young men poured out. I reached over and locked the doors quickly and tried to keep calm as I inched my way toward the nearby main street.

  A young man with stubble jumped in front of the car. “Put it in second gear,” he screamed. This was a customary way to make fun of women driving, insinuating that women didn’t know how to drive, hoping that the driver would panic and the car would stall, embarrassing her and proving their point. Another man knocked at my window with his hand on his crotch, “No, put it in first gear.” The crowd laughed hysterically, surrounding the car and banging on it.

  I was strangely stoical. Looking indifferently at their faces for a few minutes, I put the car in first gear and pressed the gas pedal. The men in front of me banged harder on the windows, now cursing and calling me a whore. I accelerated a bit more. The men jumped aside, still pounding on the car, telling me where they were going to put their penises. I calmly made a left turn, grazing a few others, truly not caring, a smile on my face, enjoying the havoc. My revenge. I stopped the car across the street, suddenly aware of the meanness that had penetrated me like a virus. I was becoming them. By breathing the hatred hanging in the air, by sharing the uneasiness surrounding me at the house and on the streets, I was being transformed into a person I didn’t know and now didn’t like. What if I had seriously hurt one of them? What if I had to face the courts? I shivered. I had to leave Iran soon in order to save myself.

  I heard screams and laughter again. Looking back at the theater, I saw an American teenager running away from the men, her pink underwear peeking through her short skirt once in a while, her blond hair blowing behind her. She stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled for a pick-up truck. When it stopped she jumped over and sat on its flat back, sticking her thumb up to her pursuers in the Iranian middle-finger gesture. The truck driver stuck his head out of the car, waving a colorful kerchief, ululating, “Kiliiliii,” as if he were taking home a bride.

  A middle-aged man with stubble ran after the truck, screaming, “The lessons of the West, behold the imported abomination defiling our land.”

  “Western filth,” another man yelled. “Look at the sample of ruinous America!”

  I shook in fear.

  The Last Days

  My flight left without me. The employees of Iran Air were happy to have the extra seat, since there was a large waiting list for flights to New York City, but they wouldn’t give me even a partial r
efund. A few weeks through August, schools in the States had already started. I hadn’t signed up for classes. I wasn’t admitted through the doors of the newly opened consulate in Shiraz. Although I had taught summer school, I barely had enough money to get on a bus to Tehran, never mind a plane ticket for overseas.

  With a strange sense of resignation and emptiness, I lost the desire to talk, to read, or to visit friends. My Jewish friend Fereshteh kept an eye on me and dragged me out of the house to visit some of her American friends. She was the only person who could bring a smile to my face with her funny stories. She told me how her white-haired father showed up in his pajamas at a party at the Organization for Jewish Students, a block away from their home, and insisted that dancing was immoral and everyone should go home. Fereshteh and her sister were mortified as friends watched their father grabbing the women’s arms to take them home, his hair uncombed, looking as if he had just left the bed. I wondered why she could laugh at the humiliation and not act bitter. Maybe what I lacked was a sense of humor.

  My father arranged for the entire extended family to have an all-day picnic in a garden, hoping that an outing would improve my mood. My male cousins set up a net and played volleyball with gusto. Other men wearing pajama bottoms and dress shirts and ties sat on a Persian carpet under the trees to play backgammon and poker. Morad slapped the ground with his aces and laughed; Jahangeer screamed “double sixes” as he rolled his dice on the backgammon table; two other uncles brought over trays of kabob, cilantro, and radishes on a bed of flat bread. Smelling the food, the players stopped their games, wrapped the meat and the herbs in a piece of flat bread, chewed them greedily, and washed them down with vodka, “besalamati, besalamati, to your health.”

  Women skewered the meat. Bent over makeshift grills, they frantically fanned the ambers and turned the kabobs. They washed and arranged the vegetables—sweaty, covered with ashes. I sat alone and watched the scene as if it wasn’t my life. No one asked me to help. Instead, they pushed food on me. I chewed for a long time before spitting it out. Something was blocking my throat; the food wouldn’t go down. Jahangeer offered me a drink. “See how much fun this is? You wouldn’t get this kind of closeness among Americans.”

  I nodded.

  My father put a plate of food in front of me and offered me a beer. I took a sip and picked at the bread drenched in the juices of the kabob, my mind too exhausted to come up with a solution for my life. I had contacted the Israeli consulate in Tehran, asking if they could arrange for my aliyah, but I hadn’t heard from them. The prospect of staying in Iran now certain, I had applied and been accepted to the graduate school at the Pahlavi University in order to avoid being recruited to the army. I saw Morad smiling at me as he wrapped himself another sandwich and my stomach turned. I wondered if Tehran University would give me a scholarship so I wouldn’t have to live with the family in Shiraz. I was nauseous. I hadn’t heard from Norman and assumed that, tired of the complications, he had let go of me.

  Morad’s wife sat next to me on the carpet and stared at me for a few minutes, “So, what’s all this stuff about America? There is less shadee on your face now than before you left. America obviously didn’t bring you any happiness, so why are you making everyone miserable because you want to go back?” I couldn’t find the words to respond. Thinking that I was rudely ignoring her, she picked up her plate of kabob and stomped away toward the other women.

  An aunt brought me a drink and told me that I needed to let go of my stubbornness. “It doesn’t befit a woman’s dignity,” she said. I opened my mouth to tell her how she contributed to my disobedience, to tell her that her words years earlier to my father, that books would ruin my character, took away my only refuge and made the house a more confining prison. I wanted to ask her if she knew how I felt the day I woke up to the smoke coming from the kitchen, my books on fire. My eyes teared, a lump blocked my throat, and I didn’t reply. I heard her tell the others that I was too disrespectful to give an answer.

  I lost my voice, my language. Sounds wouldn’t leave my mouth. Sometimes I forced the words out, but I found the language to be unfamiliar, not communicating my ideas. Or, worst yet, sometimes I didn’t understand my own words as I said them.

  That night I lay on a platform bed in the yard next to my sisters, brothers, and mother, feeling their rhythmic breathing, feeling the cool desert air, feeling as if I were in the womb of the night. In America, I had forgotten that the skies over Shiraz could be so deeply black, that there were so many stars, so close, so clear, and so breathtakingly beautiful. I outlined the constellations, trying to remember their names, sleep eluding me as I watched a point of light moving in the yard. My father had started smoking again since I had come back. He was now pacing the yard in the darkness. Every time he neared our section, I could hear his soft sobs. Again I thought of myself as cruel and decided I should stay and make the best of it. Maybe all the complications were simply an omen.

  Before I could share my decision with him at the breakfast table the following morning, Baba told me, chewing his mustache, that if I insisted on leaving, he would hire the men from the synagogue to read Tehilim at our house and he would personally sit shiva for me. He would also forbid my sisters and brothers to contact me. Then he put on his hat and left the house.

  That was it. I was leaving.

  I asked Khanom-bozorg for money, grabbed all the tomans I had earned from teaching, and took a taxi downtown. On the way, as we passed the familiar sites, part of me wanted to stop by the ghetto to take another look at the house I grew up in. I longed to go to the bazaar once more, where I first visited clinging to my grandmother’s chador; a place I later explored with my good friend Shahnaz—bargaining for a sheep-skin coat, eating smothered eggplant and sour yogurt in a converted caravansary, and smoking a waterpipe.

  At the post office, scribers sat on low stools on the sidewalk by the long wall and wrote letters for kneeling old women wrapped in chadors. Most of them cried as they dictated their words for a loved one, a soldier-son maybe, a husband working in a faraway village, a daughter taken away by her husband to another town. I waited in a long line to send a telegram to Old Dominion University, asking them to send me my transcript. I had been unwise to wear jeans, a blue tie-dyed shirt, and platform shoes, or maybe I just looked different, fairer than most Iranians, too free in my movements, not avoiding eye-contact. I was creating a commotion and finally the clerk behind the desk motioned for me to leave the line and approach him. “What can I do for you?” he asked in English.

  Surprised, I spoke to him in Farsi and gave him a piece of paper with the information. He looked disappointed not to practice his English and tried to convince me for my own good, “since you’re like my sister,” to cut the return address and save money. I told him that it was imperative to keep the address and asked him for the price. I was shocked at the expense of sending a few lines and tried to cut words so I would have enough money for the cab ride back. I could walk, but the thought of making my way back through jam-packed religious neighborhoods and busy shopping areas wasn’t pleasant.

  The clerk looked at me with curiosity and said, “No worry!” in English. “I fix it.”

  I paid him and thanked him before leaving. His eyes were still on me when I turned around by the exit doors. Later I would learn that he had cut off the return address.

  I waited by the side of the road for a taxi, trying to dodge donkeys with loads of watermelons and kamikaze moped drivers. Not mid-day yet, the temperature had risen rapidly. My sweaty shirt stuck to my back, and I felt light headed and thirsty. The cabs passed me by quickly, not stopping. I wouldn’t get into a few that were already filled with men.

  A man dressed in a suit and a tie and carrying a briefcase approached me. I inched away from him, not making eye-contact. “I mean no harm,” he said in English. “You don’t belong here,” he added. “Let me help you, please. Where are you going?” he asked.

  “The medical school,” I told him in English,
not trusting him with my address.

  He motioned for a taxi with an empty front seat, opened the door for me, and in Farsi gave the driver the address and a stern talk about not putting anyone else next to me and waved.

  “Thank you!” I said to him in English, not wanting to ruin his image of me.

  I changed my mind about going back to the house and told the taxi driver to drop me off at my uncle’s office. Jahangeer was about to go home and invited me to lunch. I happily accepted. On the way, sobbing uncontrollably, I asked him please to help me get out.

  “This is so hard for me, you know. I’ll be disrespectful to your father by doing it.”

  “Please! You’ve been like my older brother. Please help me. I need a sponsor to get a visa.”

  “Okay,” he said finally. “As long as it’s between the two of us.” Jahangeer was leaving town that week for a long vacation and I feared that my transcript would arrive when he was gone. He gave me a check for a large sum and told me to deposit it in my account if my transcript arrived to prove to the consul that I could support myself independently in the United States. I would have to transfer the money back to his account if I left before he had returned from his trip.