For two weeks, I kept close to the front door or sat outside on the steps, watching for the mailman, trying to intercept him sometimes even before he reached our street. By the end of the second week, I had two letters from American friends who, independent of each other, had sent me copies of my transcript, and I had a telegram from Norman. “You owe me a mitzvah. Come back. I love you.” All along he believed that I had received my transcript weeks earlier.
Soon I had a student visa but no ticket. I was wondering how to contact Norman for the money. I stopped by the office of Iran Air to make reservations, but all tickets were sold out. I walked around the room that day banging on the wall with my fist, needing to feel the physical pain to dull the greater hurt inside.
At noon, my father came back from work and handed me an envelope with a round-trip ticket to New York City and a check. He took his hat off and motioned for me to sit next to him. “If you need to leave so badly, go!” he said. “But promise me—promise me on my life—that you’ll wait a year before you make any decision about getting married. Remember, this is your home. You can always come back.”
Epilogue
SEPTEMBER 2001
Nightmares
I left Iran for the first time on July 4th, 1975, then returned to visit my birthplace for the last time the following summer. Upon my return to the United States in the fall of 1976, I began to suffer from nightmares. I would wake up screaming, soaked in sweat, shivering and shaking uncontrollably. Night after night I dreamt of Iran, of the fate I had escaped.
I was back in Shiraz. The mountains looked taller, closer, looming over me. I couldn’t breathe. I stood in the crossroad in front of my parents’ house and tried to remember which way led back to America. It was a long journey, I knew.
A man with white stubble stood by his little kiosk. He straightened his curled body. Laughing through his yellow teeth, he pointed his trembling finger at me. “Whore, Jewish whore.”
I wanted to ask the jeering old man with yellow teeth if he remembered selling me candy when I was a little girl, when he was not such an old man. I wanted to tell him that I was smacked with a ruler at school because I wrote my homework with the diluted ink he sold me. The letters were faint. I was a cheap Jew, my teacher said. My classmates laughed.
My bare legs were numb. I bent down to massage them, to get the blood flowing, so I could walk, run, escape. My feet were hidden among opium poppies, like those growing in farms beyond our neighborhood. When I was a child, my mother once found me running through the red flowers and wheat stalks in a white dress, laughing, screaming in delight. “Keep away,” she scolded, then warned that the pollen would blind me. Now in my dream, I covered my eyes for protection. When I opened them again, everything was in black and white.
On one of his trips to Iran, my father brought my daughters the costumes of the Ghashghai nomadic tribe outside Shiraz.
The old man was still there. “Hee, hee!” He laughed and coughed with a throat filled with phlegm. What was he pointing at? Then I saw them. Those weren’t flowers on the ground, just red droplets, the only image in color. I headed toward my friend’s house for shelter, wanting to ask if Paree knew where the blood came from, and why it was on my legs and my bare feet.
Her brothers stood on the roof, their zippers open, their penises pointing at me like arrows. “Here! Is this what you are looking for? Here, here.” Their laughter traveled from the rooftop and pierced my eardrums.
I backed up and stood in the middle of the crossroad again. From another corner, I saw Shahnaz and Firoozeh coming toward me, wrapped in black chadors. “My good friends, my good friends,” I cried joyfully as I ran to them, “Save me, save me!” I stretched my arms toward them. “I am lost. Which way are the oceans?”
They spread their arms and their chadors flew in the air like the wings of angels in black. They opened their hands and threw stones at me, which changed into daggers as they hit me in the stomach, slowly disappearing into my flesh. The skin closed over the wounds before I could extract them. “We don’t know you,” they said. “Away, away, filth, filth.”
My stomach filled with hurt. The other neighbors joined them—the boy who hung the red swastika in his room facing our house, the teacher who invited my grandmother and me to hear a mola cursing the Jews in a ceremonial prayer in her house during the month of Moharam, and the young men down the street who leaped from hidden doorways in side streets to stick their fingers in me. From every door, every window, and every storefront, the young and the old emerged. They darted at me with nails that my body absorbed, my stomach now bursting. “That girl kissed a foreigner, impure, impure,” they told one another.
I looked toward the doors of my house to see if I could find a refuge, but my aunts and uncles blocked them, sticks in their hands, my parents’ faces hiding behind them. They took turns shaking their fingers at me. “Shame, shame! You’ve brought us shame.”
Or sometimes I dreamt that I was dressed in a white gown, sitting in a chair in our backyard. Musicians played tonbak and setar over a wooden cover on our key-shaped pond; a belly dancer moved her generous body to the laughter of men drinking aragh. I didn’t understand how the yard had stretched so deep, so wide, tables set up as far as my eyes could see. My sour orange tree was gone, all the trees cut down to make room for the entire mahaleh. I noticed faces that I had never seen before and those I knew, frozen in time—the beggar, the boy with an elongated head, and myself, still a child.
The guests cracked watermelon seeds between their teeth and spit the shells out on the bricked yard and on the flower beds. They saluted each other with their shot glasses, “Besalamti, to your health. May the next happy occasion be yours.”
My aunts surrounded me, sang vasoonak, and threw noghl at me.
I looked at the faces from behind a white veil. This can’t be true. I am not going through this. Wake up, wake up. But it couldn’t be a dream—too real to be a dream. I wailed silent cries. Please no. I don’t want to get married. Who is the groom? I have never seen him before. I am already engaged to someone else.
The guests laughed.
My father was drunk with happiness.
My mother said, I told you that’s the way. I told you there was nothing you could do.
Or sometimes in my dreams I made it back to the States, losing all family and friends, breaking all bridges behind me, only to find out that the man I had made the sacrifices for, my fiancé Norman, did not recognize me. Every time I was pregnant, these dreams intensified. Norman turned his back on me. I pleaded. Where can I go, pregnant and unmarried? They’ll call me a whore.
Every time, he turned his back and walked away with an American woman. I don’t care if you are pregnant. Go back home. I’m not marrying an alien.
My nightmares always seeped into reality for minutes after my eyes were open. Even after I sat up, the horrors still gripped me, and the room, the bed, the man lying next to me looked unfamiliar.
When I finally left Iran in that summer of 1976, I wanted to distance myself from my culture, my society, and even my extended family. Putting continents between us, I vowed never to return, never to miss them, never to think about them, and never to indulge in nostalgia.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution changed all that for me. Now most family members who had never stepped foot out of our southern birthplace of Shiraz, those who never dreamed of leaving, the very ones who laughed and pointed fingers at me as the “odd one” when I decided to leave, have come to the United States. I see them at family gatherings. I hear what they whisper behind me, what they say to my face, and I am even sometimes amused by the irony of my situation.
For me, America had been a naïve utopian dream, and at least for a while a refuge, a deliberate escape from all that was familiar. Many Iranians considered the move a hardship for the sake of a better future for their children, a forced exile into an alien culture, banishment to a country that didn’t feel like home, unlike Iran that had been familiar even if hostile.
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On 9 September 2001 a large number of my aunts, uncles, and cousins attended a cousin’s wedding, just across the river from my Norfolk home, in fact at the same spot where I married my American-born husband, Norman. The bride had been a flower girl at my wedding. Now my three daughters were her bridesmaids. Weddings can be emotional rollercoasters, especially ones with such close ties. My face was wet with tears as my daughters walked toward the khupah.
More than anything else, my children’s lives affirmed how right I had been to leave Iran. Here they had not personally felt hatred against the Jews; here they didn’t know of the fear I had felt, the hostilities I had faced during the Six-Day and the Yom Kippur wars; here they didn’t have to worry about their existence being threatened for being a minority or just for being different. As women, they live in a country and an era that give them liberties and choices that I never knew to yearn for. One by one, my daughters turned around and smiled as they passed by me. I wished my mother could be with me to see how her granddaughters had fulfilled her dreams of escape.
As the bride followed, a big smile visible beneath her veil, I viewed the celebration with a double vision both as an unattached spectator and an emotionally involved participant. I was moved by the smiles, the tears, the laughter, the soothing sound of breaking the glass, the familiar ululation, not just by the Iranians but also my husband who had mastered the art at our own wedding. I juxtaposed the past and the present, evaluated the relationships, and marveled at the effect of time. I was joyous beyond words, but at the same time I experienced many of the tremulous moods that had possessed me during the last summer I had spent in Iran.
I have now been in the United States longer than I lived in Iran. The emotional turmoil, the struggle to leave against the will of what felt like the entire community, has become an almost dreamlike memory. But at times, on occasions like this wedding, these rare instances when family comes together again for celebrations, the haze lifts, the memory bites.
The aunt whose garden wedding had mesmerized me as a child was visiting the United States and attended the wedding with her husband. When my aunt tried to leave Iran about twenty years ago, she was arrested along with her husband and son, and imprisoned for attempting to take her military-age child out of the country. Now she and her husband could visit the rest of the children in America only if they left their youngest son as collateral. She cried every time she looked at me. I wasn’t the only one thinking of how a close-knit family had been torn apart.
Another aunt was there with her husband, children, and grandchildren, wearing a shytel, a wig worn for religious modesty. In Iran she was popular at the weddings because of her loud and clear voice, singing vasoonak, Jewish wedding songs. She knew more songs than anyone I knew. She used to clap as she belted the words out, encouraging the other women’s participation. At this wedding, she first refused to sing vasoonak for the bride because of the restrictions of kol-isha—a woman’s voice should not be heard in gatherings that include men lest it arouse them. I learned about such Eastern-European Jewish customs only after moving to the United States. When the men cleared the area to give her privacy, my aunt stood very close to the bride and whispered the words.
The sound of the flute comes from the gates of Shiraz.
Don’t worry any longer the prince-groom;
It’s your fiancée arriving, shy and demure.
Not understanding a word of the Farsi poem in its Shirazi Jewish rhythm, my independent, hybrid cousin brushed her veil aside and smiled bigger.
Uncle Morad and his wife were at the wedding as well. I looked at them in disbelief, my hands shaking, my heart pumping, my mouth dry. His hair gray, lines around his eyes, he still displayed the same sarcastic smile I remembered from twenty-five years ago.
Through writing my book I’ve learned to confront my past, but this I wasn’t ready for. “Go, talk to him,” an aunt said.
He had been hateful to my sister even in recent years, telling her that he disliked us both.
A cousin chimed in, “We’ll go with you.”
My uncle was talking to a few family members when I approached him. He ignored me. I offered my hand, but he stood there for a few minutes as everyone looked on silently. A man I called dear uncle for most of my Iranian life, who lived with my family until I left Iran, shook my hand like a stranger.
“Mazal tov,” I congratulated him on the wedding of his daughter just a few months earlier, an occasion to which no one in my family was invited. “I won’t recognize my cousins if I ever run into them on the street,” I said.
“Oh, you will,” he answered. “There’s a family resemblance.”
“I don’t think so.”
I saw his wife quickly withdrawing from the circle. I followed her, called her name, shook her hand, and wished her mazal tov too. She pulled her hand away as if she had touched fire. The animosity had reached second and third generations by now, but the touch was strangely calming for me. The demons died. The sediment of the past leisurely settled in time—until the next storm.
Jahangeer was at the wedding with his family, and his daughters bonded with mine as if they had always known each other—as if blood transcended time and distance.
My parents didn’t come. The trip from Israel, across continents and an ocean was hard on old bones, uneasy minds. My father lost just about everything he had worked for all his life, the farm, the house, his status, his dignity, and prestige. In his first years in exile, still hoping to return to Iran, he spoke constantly of his apricot trees—little Persian apricots, the kind that simply melted in the mouth. Now with the apricot orchard gone, along with the poultry farm, the house, and the car, he couldn’t bear to talk about them. He dreaded humiliating himself in front of us. A man crying. But I could always tell when he missed his orchard. He had known every stone that had to be cleared, every piece of dirt dug out of his well to water the land. Thinking of his apricot trees, his wrinkles deepened. He put his balding head between his two hands, hiding tears.
My two brothers and a sister live in the United States, while our youngest sister Niloufar lives in Israel with our parents. At the wedding, we lined up for a picture to commemorate the rare occasion of being together. We have only four of these pictures of the five siblings shoulder to shoulder, hands laced around each other’s waists in the same city, in the same country. My sister Nahid and my brother Farzad speak to Niloufar in Hebrew, but my brother Freydoun and I, who aren’t fluent in the language, prefer English. We never communicate in Farsi.
My sister arrived in Israel for the first time in 1979, when she was four years old. Ayatollah Khomeini was on his way to replace the Shah of Iran, and the country bubbled in the heat of an oncoming Revolution. As anarchy ruled, my family members were virtual prisoners at home, frightened to attend school, to shop for food, to visit friends and family. My father alone ventured outside to buy provisions and to find out the news not broadcast on the radio. The entire Jewish community feared mass attacks by young angry crowds, carrying American weapons of the Shah’s military. Funeral processions of Moslem “martyrs,” those who had died fighting against the Shah’s army, passed by our house daily. When my family heard chants of “Allah-O-Akbar, death to America, down with the Shah,” they trembled. As any procession went through our neighborhood, men banged on the doors with their fists and a few threw rocks at the windows. “Come out dirty Jews. You are next!” they shouted. The revolutionaries attacked the Bahai section of town one week, mowing down residents with machine guns. The killers promised that the Jews would be next.
Not being a citizen yet, I could not obtain American visas for my family. My father found out about two El-Al planes landing in Mehrabad airport in Tehran to help evacuate the Iranian Jews. My four-year-old sister left the country on my mother’s lap, in one of those planes, jammed with frightened and crying Jews. Most of them had never left their cities of birth and had never been on a plane before. They sat in the aisles or two and three to a chair, their luggage a
bandoned on the tarmac to make room for bodies, and in the darkness, the plane took off without the use of the tower, its own lights off.
A few weeks later, when I visited them in Israel, my mother and I took Niloufar to the preschool. Excited to be with other children, she spoke nonstop until she realized that the words she heard in reply didn’t make sense to her. She shrieked and ran back to us. “Don’t leave me!” After learning Hebrew, she refused to speak Farsi even to our parents. She wasn’t Iranian, she told everyone. For many years, as I lived in the States and she in Israel, my sister and I didn’t have a common language. We now communicate in English, a borrowed tongue for both of us.
Relearning it, Niloufar speaks Farsi to our parents with an Israeli accent and Hebrew syntax. The language doesn’t carry the cultural experience for Niloufar as it does for our parents, so they constantly misunderstand each other. Speaking in Farsi, they slide by each other, throwing words at one another like stones. Afterward, emotionally exhausted, with no shared words to convey their love for one another, they heal their wounds with hugs.
Niloufar forgot her Farsi when my father went back to Iran to salvage some of his belongings. His passport was confiscated upon arrival, so he became mamno’ol khorooj, forbidden to leave the country. For four years he tried to reclaim his passport since he didn’t want to leave the country illegally.
For four years, Niloufar didn’t have contact with our father. She lived with Maman, who had slid into a deep depression and was paralyzed with uncertainty, indecision, and fear. After all, she had never before been allowed to make decisions on her own. Living with a silent mother, Niloufar turned to her Israeli friends and their parents for love and support. She adopted their European lifestyle, distancing herself from our mother and refusing to speak Farsi.
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