When we reached the hostel, I told Reza I would bring Ali down. He sat on a sofa in the foyer. As the lift doors closed, Reza watched me with an expression of smug satisfaction. In our room, Fariba was on her own with Ali. She said Mansoor had gone for a walk in the city. I explained to Fariba what had happened, then took Ali downstairs to his father. I returned to my room with the excuse that I had things to do. In truth, I couldn’t stand to be with Reza and I wanted Fariba’s advice about what to do next. Fariba and I talked for few minutes until . . . I froze.
‘Ali. I left Ali with him downstairs!’
In a frenzy I grabbed my bag, gave Fariba some cash to pay for the room and left, leaving my poor sister behind. What if Reza had taken Ali?
When the lift doors opened it was like God had given me the world. Reza was still there, with Ali still on his knee. I breathed again.
Reza stood up with Ali in his arms. ‘I go,’ he said.
‘Where will you go?’ I stammered. ‘Where will you take Ali?’
‘I take Ali,’ was all he said.
In my stupor I said nothing. Ali started to cry in Reza’s arms, and cried louder when Reza tapped the side of his head and told him to shut up. Reza then walked out; again I followed.
The distance from the hotel to the railway station was about one kilometre, right through the heart of the city. There were many people going about their business, moving in and out of the many shops along the route. Reza strode along quickly while I dragged along behind, my eyes clouded with tears. He did not wait for me; I kept up only because he had to stop at the occasional red light. All the way Ali was looking back at me, reaching out an open little hand and crying. If people were staring I didn’t notice. The world had stopped spinning but for the three of us wending our way along the footpath.
No word was spoken on the long train journey back to Kananook or for the rest of the day.
That night, Reza emptied himself into me. I submitted in silence as usual, feeling nothing but humiliation. I was left feeling disgusted with him, with myself, with everything.
The next day I discovered that, while we’d been away, Reza had destroyed most of my documents: photos from before we left Iran, our marriage certificate, my résumé, my qualifications and references from previous employers. It would take me years to replace everything, though luckily I was able to obtain copies of my work-related documents from one of the companies I had sent them to with a job application. After that I left copies with Fariba for safekeeping. My passport, thankfully, remained intact but Reza had also disposed of most of my clothes, shoes and some other personal belongings.
That afternoon, Fariba returned from the YWCA. She told me that Mansoor had returned to his apartment and his job, and that she had been back to her college. By chance she had met up with Christine, Mansoor’s former girlfriend, who had offered that Fariba stay with her for a while. Fariba had accepted. Staying with us now was going to be too uncomfortable. She took her few belongings and left, leaving Reza, myself and Ali living alone together for the first time in over a year. From this point on, Reza started sleeping in our spare bedroom where there was less chance of his being disturbed in the mornings; Ali and I slept in the main bedroom. After a short time Fariba would move in with Mansoor, sleeping in his bedroom while he slept in the lounge. She would stay with Mansoor for the next year before starting a nursing degree in the regional city of Warrnambool in 1986.
Apart from the change in sleeping arrangements, I was now left with my old self in my old situation, the ‘new’ Sohila having been nothing but a fleeting fantasy. I gave up any hope of escape. We soon returned to our old routine with my work at the Wool Corporation continuing to provide respite from my husband and torturous separation from Ali. However that separation was now even worse than before because with Fariba having moved out I had to rely entirely on Reza to look after our son.
If Ali woke in the morning before I left, he would cry, asking me not to leave; if Reza woke he would hit me. If Ali was still asleep when I left, I would worry about him waking alone, whether he would eat the breakfast I had laid out for him and what he would do to entertain himself until his father emerged, hopefully by midday. By now Ali was old enough to understand he shouldn’t wake his father so I worried about whether he would wake Reza if something happened and he needed to. Most days I cried for the two-hour journey to work, and when I got there the first thing I did was call home. The sound of Ali’s voice was such a comfort. He is okay! I would ask if he had eaten and he would ask if I had read the story book he had chosen for me for my train ride. If he told me he was not feeling well, I would be half dead and completely unable to concentrate for the rest of the day. I often rang again during the morning, two or three times if I could, but if the ringing phone disturbed Reza he would complain, and possibly hit me, when I got home. If Reza was disturbed by Ali making noise, he would complain about that too. He would tell me I should not leave until Ali woke up so I could give the boy his breakfast. But this was impossible if I wanted to keep my job. As it was there were some days when the anxiety built up in me so much that I had no choice but to call in sick.
February 8, 1985
Today is Friday and I am happy that tomorrow and after tomorrow I am with Ali. My feeling is like someone who has been broken into pieces.
I have been beaten, yes, beaten. By whom? My husband. I have been feeling so much pain. My heart is broken. I am humiliated physically and mentally. I just want to forget by writing. . . .
My state of pride and perfection and patience and tolerance is broken.
I don’t know if I will ever be repaired.
I have forgotten happiness. It doesn’t have any meaning. My hope and support is God. The rest . . . leave it!
A week or so after we returned from Canberra, I rose earlier than normal one morning to try to clean the house. As I hurriedly washed dishes, Reza shouted from the bedroom, ‘Why do you make so much noise, you bitch? Don’t you see that I am asleep?’
I ignored him and continued to wash up.
‘Fucking well shut up!’ Reza yelled.
I knew that if I said anything it would escalate into a full-blown fight which would upset Ali and prevent me from going to work, so still I did not respond. Reza came out of his room, stormed over and slapped me on the side of the head.
‘I have to finish these dishes and go to work,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘You have to wake up and look after Ali.’
This set him on a frenzy of swearing. ‘The more I give you, the more you demand, you bitch. You have fallen from the elephant’s trunk.’ [An Iranian expression meaning ‘You have become a snob’] ‘Nobody wanted you – you would have been a spinster. Thank God I came and got you.’
Still I remained silent. Every word from his mouth was a dagger to my heart, soul and pride.
Once again I cried all the way to work. What kind of a life is this? Why is this man like this? Why is he so selfish? He has no idea that all day I have to work in front of the computer, concentrating, drawing flowcharts, solving problems. And then I come home and without one minute’s rest I start doing housework and cooking and all this is for him too. As well as the money. Feelings are completely foreign to him, he has feelings only for himself. Where is the path to escape? I wish I had never said yes. Damn me 100 times!
Where was the escape path indeed? There was none – not as long as I believed that to leave Reza would be to lose Ali.
My ‘death in life’, as I saw it, continued.
Around this time Reza’s temper became ever more tightly wound, and beatings more regular. Reza would slap me if I made any noise and hit me if I answered back.
On more than one occasion he almost strangled me.
The Kananook unit had a small backyard, so Reza started doing his 15-minute exercise regime outside. Not long after we moved in he hung an iron bar with ropes over a thick bough of the single tree in the yard. He now added chin-ups to his arm-pumping exercise. He always wore a white single
t and blue tracksuit pants while doing his workout, with a small yellow towel draped around his neck. As the small kitchen looked straight onto the garden, I would often see him doing this as I washed up.
One day he came inside, closed the screen door behind him that led straight into the kitchen, walked across the room and stopped in the doorway of the living room. He turned and, leaning on the door frame, said, ‘Apologise.’
I had no idea what I was supposed to apologise for, so I said so.
‘Well, I want you to apologise.’
I ignored him and turned back to the sink.
I heard him approach me from behind, then saw his yellow towel drop over my face and felt it tighten around my neck. I froze. He pulled it just tight enough to cause me fear without blocking my breathing.
‘See how easily I could suffocate you,’ he whispered.
He would repeat this ‘joke’ – as he saw it – at least three times. Sometimes he added, ‘You want to make a murderer out of me?’
Around this time I really did start to wonder whether Reza was going mad. He became increasingly erratic and had strange, warped illusions of grandiosity and having ‘special powers’. ‘No other man on Earth could bear to live like me,’ he would say. ‘Most men go crazy if they don’t have a job or money or a car. Only I have the special power to resist these things.’
So his laziness was, in his eyes, one ‘special power’.
‘I am the greatest man on Earth,’ he would tell me. ‘I have special powers. I have no job, no money, a kid and a wife. I have no place, no car. I can’t even go from Kananook to Frankston because I have no money. Yet I am still on my feet.’
He also loved to tease me. He knew I loved the outdoors – fresh air, flowers and trees. (He even brought me red roses from time to time.) And he knew I liked it when he was out of the house. Sometimes he would open the front or back door and, while standing behind the security screen, take several deep breaths. Then he would smile and say, ‘That is enough fresh air for today’ and close the door again. He (and I) would then stay closed up inside for the rest of the day with all his ordering around, machismo, bad language and smoking. He liked to remind me that the only reason I could go to work was because he stayed home. Once he even woke at six in the morning, said he had found a job and left. I had no choice but to take Ali with me to work. Fortunately I had heard of a child care centre about ten minutes up Sydney Road from my office. They were very helpful and took Ali in for the day without prior notice. But he cried and cried; when they called me mid-morning I was too anxious to leave him there, so collected him and we went home. By the time I got back Reza was there too. There was no job; I suspect he returned home not long after Ali and I had left.
And then there was the ongoing gambling, which now took on a new tone. As long as I had been working at CAS and then the Wool Corporation, we had had more income than when I had been unemployed, but our rent also went up as it was no longer subsidised. We weren’t a lot better off, but we could afford to have the telephone on, and with that came phone betting.
‘72964.’
‘1234.’
This became a ceaseless refrain from the living room couch as Reza dialled the phone betting number and provided his account number and password.
‘72964.’
‘1234.’
Thirty years later I can still recall those numbers as clearly as I remember the mesh of angst that tightened around my heart every time I heard them. Whereas before his gambling was obvious but invisible – and at least required him to leave the house – it was now happening right in front of me. The frustration was endless, but saying anything about it meant risking either being hit or, on a good day, being told that he was ‘trying to make a living to pay the rent’.
April 19, 1985
. . . It seems that this man, even though he ‘believes in God’, he tolerates no view other than his own.
I feel like a heavy mountain. I am very sad. I keep to myself at work. Why am I so sad? I am lonely. What is my destiny?
I protest, I protest, I protest!
When will a new beginning come for me?
He is telling me to stay at home – that God will provide. But I have had this experience staying at home with Reza. Him sitting and gambling.
~
In April I learnt that I was pregnant again. Again this was not something I had planned for, but neither had I avoided it. Having had Ali, I now knew how much love there was to find in a child. Besides, I also felt that it was unfair for Ali to only spend time with adults at home. On the other hand new worries now surfaced for me. For a start, how would I work and care for two young children?
I have few memories of this pregnancy. The rest of that year is a colourless blur of train travel and work, arguments and ongoing abuse. If Reza was not on the sofa he was on the toilet, where he spent more and more time as he struggled with haemorrhoids. Conversation between us was reduced to virtually nothing – just the necessities. Respite came on Sundays when Ali and I went over to Frankston to see Mansoor and Fariba; Mansoor would cook roast lamb. These afternoons were brief bursts of sunlight in our otherwise overcast lives. Ali loved to see his uncle and aunt, and his bubbly three-year-old personality brought much joy to them as well.
September 16, 1985
I am at Australian Wool Corporation. It is cold and cloudy outside.
In the morning I left the house crying because Ali didn’t want me to come to work. He said, ‘Don’t go, Mum’. Reza was, as usual, asleep.
Reza told me to give Ali his breakfast then go to work. I would love to do this, and give him his lunch and dinner as well, but how can I?
I cried the whole trip on the train. My heart was in pain. Why is this man so irresponsible and so lazy? I am sure Ali sits alone in front of the TV many days until 10 or 11 in the morning, without having any food.
I don’t know what to do. If I don’t give him breakfast who will? But if I do I will be late for work.
~
As my pregnancy progressed I became more and more tired. Nevertheless, with the baby due in early January, I remained at work and intended to do so until as late as possible. Early one morning late in December, I was walking past our local milk bar on the way to the train, bent slightly forward with the weight and bulk of my bulging stomach. The store owner’s adult son, who knew me as a regular customer, was out the front.
‘Missus,’ he said to me, ‘how long are you going to work? Your baby must be about to come out. You need rest.’
I thanked him for his kindness but assured him that I had no choice but to keep working. He then asked me what my husband did.
‘He does nothing,’ I said with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘He sleeps on the couch all day.’
I thought about this conversation as I travelled into work. The young man was probably right – I should have been resting. But to my mind I gained more rest by going to work. At least there I could sit. I could do my work without being insulted or hit or having to listen to endless swearing.
That evening, as I sat at the kitchen table, I told Reza about the conversation I had had that morning. He stayed cool until, without thinking, I shared my comment about him doing nothing and just sleeping. His face darkened. He stood up and, pacing the kitchen, started swearing and insulting me and my mother and father. In some ways this was completely predictable so I said nothing and just waited for him to calm down. But he didn’t. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain at the base of my neck as he slapped me from behind. I fell to the floor from my chair, and remained still for some minutes. Inch by inch, I got back to my feet, holding my aching back as I did so. Shaking violently out of both shock and anger, I picked up the vase of flowers from the table, opened the back door and threw the lot into the garden.
‘Why did you throw away the flowers?’ Reza shouted.
‘I don’t want you to buy me flowers for 70 black years,’ I said, using a Persian expression that meant that I didn’t want to put up with this hardship fo
rever. ‘For 70 years, I don’t want flowers, I don’t want swearing and I don’t want beating.’
Reza laughed, a scoffing laugh. ‘What? Did I beat you?’
‘No,’ I said, looking him in the eye. ‘You were massaging me.’
‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘That’s how it is. Of course I was massaging you. If I wanted to hit you, you wouldn’t have one healthy bone in your body.’
The next morning our dining room was a mess of broken and torn chairs. Reza had taken a knife to the red-and-grey cushions of the metal-framed chairs I had bought on hire purchase at Myer not one month previously. Some of the legs were bent too. He had also slashed at the refrigerator we were renting.
‘Don’t upset me,’ he said when I discovered the chaos. ‘Next time I will do it to you.’
~
Towards the end of 1985, as I entered my final trimester, there was an added complication to our lives when Reza ‘invented’ a product that he called the ‘Exerciser’. A predecessor to today’s stress balls, this was essentially a cylinder of plasticine that could be squeezed repeatedly in the palm of the hand. Reza believed this product could be used to improve grip strength. Where the idea came from I don’t know, though it could have been from the play dough Ali had as a toy. The uncharacteristic inspiration came to him as he sat in front of the television flexing his hands, and for him it was the perfect exercise: one that could be done while doing nothing else. He also believed that by using his ‘Exerciser’, smokers would be able to reduce their urge to smoke by directing their concentration elsewhere. He was convinced that he could establish a business around this product and that it would make him a millionaire very quickly.
To get his business going, Reza needed two things: money and letters. Money was initially taken from what little we had left over from my salary and, later, our unemployment benefit after I stopped working with my second child. Over the next two years we would sink nearly $20,000 into this idea. The letters were to prospective co-investors, manufacturers and distributors. An advertisement for investors was also placed in the local newspaper. As Reza could neither write English nor use a typewriter, the task of letter writing became mine. It was something I was expected to do late at night, after all the other household jobs were done.
Scattered Pearls Page 17