Overhead, the mystery man is moaning his everlasting complaint. “Leila! Leila, you bitch! You evil bitch!”
“Hey!” I call up to him. “Was Leila pretty?”
He stops moaning. He must be thinking. “Yes,” he says, “but she was a whore.”
“Did she have long hair?”
I hear the mystery man drawing a deep breath. “She did, long and black, but she was a bitch.”
“Where did you meet her?” I ask. I have asked him this question before, more than once, sometimes idly, sometimes out of genuine interest, sometimes just to shut him up. He always says, “None of your damned business!”
I wait while he considers his reply. He’s taking his time.
“None of your damned business!” he shouts.
Why do I bother?
“Hey, listen to me,” I call. “Are you really here because of money? Tell me the truth!”
He doesn’t answer me. He begins again to moan the name of the woman he loves and detests, the bitch, the whore, Leila.
Well, say nothing then, I think. Why should I be concerned? But really, I do wish to know more about Leila.
My hand goes to my skull, and my fingers roam through the stubble. I write my name in capitals across my skull, from the top of one ear to the top of the other, and again, and again:
ZARAH
ZARAH
ZARAH
14
MY MOTHER TONGUE is Farsi, the ancient language of Persia and still the official language of Iran. I thank God for that. With a little more bad fortune, I and my countrymen could well have been speaking Arabic, and Farsi might have withered on the vine, as Latin has.
Everyone believes that his or her native tongue is the language spoken by the angels in Heaven. That’s how it should be. But I believe Persian, Farsi, even more than other languages, truly is the first choice of the angels. Of course, my feeling for my native tongue is entwined with my love of my country. Farsi suits Persians. It is an outgrowth of the Persian sensibility. I have already spoken of the Persian character in regard to love and romance, but I haven’t mentioned Farsi’s most adorable feature: it is the language of liars. Not of cold-blooded liars—that’s not what I mean. Not of liars who use language as a pickpocket uses his fingers. No, I mean those who dream, those who tell stories to themselves that they believe because of the beauty of the telling, those who use words to make roses bloom in the desert, where the sun has baked the soil black and red.
Farsi is kind to the impractical, the hopeless, and the helpless, to poets and madmen. It throws out tendrils that curl around whatever they can reach, whatever will support them for the time. It draws its nourishment up through roots that have burrowed deep down for thousands of years, roots that clasp the bones of Darius and his court poets, that curl through the relics of dancing girls who smeared kohl around their eyes and perfumed their hair and made their flesh glisten with scented oils. It is not the language of the downright, of the straight-talking, of the morally fearless. Can you ever get a straight answer from a Persian? No, it’s not possible, because on the way to providing a straight answer, the Persian suddenly becomes aware of a hundred more fascinating routes to the answer, and before he knows it, before she knows it, a simple yes or no has become an adventure that requires a thousand words in the telling.
It was my literature teacher Mrs. Mohammadi who helped me fall in love with Farsi. I hadn’t thought before I came to know her that my native language was anything special. I spoke it, yes; it helped me get from A to B by a very roundabout road, yes. But its beauty was hidden from me. Mrs. Mohammadi had so drenched herself in the language that she had taken on its color and shimmer. “Listen,” she said and began to read one of Sa‘di’s prefaces from the Golestan, or Rose Garden, a famous sequence of poems:
I remember that in my youth I was passing along a street when I beheld a beauty with the radiance of the moon in her face. The season was late summer, when the fierce heat dries up the moisture of the mouth and the scorching wind boils the marrow in the bones. Through the weakness of nature, I was unable to support the power of the day’s sun and was forced to seek shelter in the shade of a wall, hoping with all my heart that some passing stranger with a pitying heart would relieve the cruel thirst I suffered and cool the flames that consumed me with the balm of water. All at once from the shaded portico of a house, I beheld a bright form appear, of such beauty that the grandest eloquence should fail to sing her beauty. She came forth as the dawn that lifts the veil of night, or as the liquor of life rising from the parched earth. She held in her hand a cup of water in which she had mixed sugar and the juice of grapes. The water was perfumed with the scent of rose petals, unless it was only that I received it from her hand and breathed in a moment the aroma of her flesh. In short, I took the cup from her fair hand, and drained its fullness, and received new life. Ah, but the thirst of my heart cannot be slaked with a cup of water, nor if I should drink rivers would it lessen in the least.
In Farsi, the bloom of love’s revelation is more pronounced than in any other language I know—English, Spanish, Arabic. It is almost as if Farsi exists for this purpose, to carry into the reader’s heart once and forever the sensation of cool water touching the parched tongue, of love reaching the fragile roots woven around the heart, and reviving the poetry and tenderness of life.
It was not Mrs. Mohammadi’s intention to politicize the teaching of Persian literature, but it wasn’t possible to illuminate the beauty and subtlety and cheerful laziness of Farsi without being political. Arabic words have bullied their way into our language, and whenever Mrs. Mohammadi came across an Arabic word that had nudged aside a Persian word, she restored the Persian word. That is a political act, a subversive act. But she never sermonized, never put Arabic in the dock. She simply said, “This in place of this better serves the poem.”
Little by little, I began to understand. It is possible to read Sa‘di’s verses and prefaces a thousand times without ever being moved, for literature cannot create the joy that comes when you recognize beauty, it can only exploit what is growing in your heart. A fine teacher like Mrs. Mohammadi can awaken that joy, if it is there to be awakened, and that is what she did for me and for my friends in her class. Once the thrill of the poetry had been kindled, she went on to highlight themes, to help us understand why we were thrilled and what went into being thrilled.
They relate that once, during a hunting expedition, they were preparing for Nushirwan the Just some game, as roasted meat. There was no salt, and they dispatched a slave to the village to fetch some. Nushirwan said to the slave, “See that you pay for what you take, lest it become a custom to take without paying and the village be ruined.” Said the slave, “Oh, Master, what harm will such a small quantity cause?” Nushirwan replied, “The origin of injustice in the world was at first small, and everyone that came added to it, until it reached the magnitude we behold today.”
Whenever possible, Mrs. Mohammadi turned her light on the theme of justice and injustice in Sa‘di and Hafez and Rumi. Once again, she offered no sermons. But she allowed us to see that the greatest things said about justice and injustice in our language stood in strong contrast to the far pettier and coarser things said about justice and injustice and right and wrong by the mullahs, or at least by the mullahs of the regime. An insult to God to wear white socks? An insult to God to speak openly of the love in your heart for another human being, a male human being, a boy? An insult to God to let the light of the sun touch the hair of your head? And justice is being served when the girl who let the sun touch her hair is pushed into a dark cell and beaten? Who could imagine Hafez and Rumi and Sa‘di being moved to write great poetry on the subject of the girl whose hair was exposed to the sun? What would they say? “Oh, dark clouds filled the heavens and a hail of frogs fell to Earth when the young beauty uncovered her hair”?
This is the way great literature is most subversive—by allowing the reader to see what subjects, what experiences, great writing
favors. Once literature has thrilled you deeply, you cannot imagine those who created it rejoicing in injustice, employing their pens to make sonnets that celebrate hypocrisy. Who wrote superb poetry celebrating the triumph of the Third Reich? Who will write superb poetry celebrating the censorship code of my country’s Council of Guardians? It is certainly true that highly accomplished writers are capable of revealing vile prejudices in their work, but great literature, by its nature, does not endorse the degradation of humanity, or even of a race, caste, or class.
Do not reveal to a friend every secret that you possess. How do you know but that at some time in the future he may become your enemy? Nor inflict on your enemy every injury that is in your power, as he may someday become your friend. Tell no one the secret that you want to keep, for no one will be as careful of your secret as yourself.
Mrs. Mohammadi did not tell us her secret, but she let the secret tell itself, of its own free will. When she introduced us to Omar Khayyám, she didn’t attempt to make a hero of him to us, although he was plainly a hero to her. Just the exposure to his thought was enough:
Ah, make the most of what we may yet spend,
Before we too into the dust descend;
Dust into dust, and under dust to lie;
Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and—sans end!
What four lines in all of Persian poetry could more contradict the philosophy of the mullahs? No wonder they hate him! I mean not the exhortation to drown your sorrows in wine but the deeper message, asking us to look at life not as rigorous preparation for a second life, a life after death, but as an end in itself. Or not entirely an end in itself but a period of seeing and breathing and tasting and loving permitted by our senses and limbs and lips, which it would be folly to abjure out of a conviction of a greater delight to follow. Omar Khayyám is no atheist; on the contrary, he simply says that the mind and motives of God cannot be fathomed. We know that we will die, but to die without having lived? Without having rejoiced in the sunlight, the air? Without having loved?
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out the same door in which I went.
With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the harvest that I reaped—
“I came like water, and like wind I go.”
Into this Universe, and Why not knowing,
Nor Whence, like water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as wind along the waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.
What, without asking, hither hurried Whence?
And, without asking, Whither hurried hence!
Oh, many a cup of this forbidden wine
Must drown the memory of that insolence!
The “insolence” of Heaven, the indifference to our curiosity and disdain for our questioning and demands, is a far more profound issue than the insolence of the mullahs toward my natural curiosity and questioning. But lines like these make the reader impatient with powers that ally themselves with Heaven and lay down laws designed in part to thwart intelligent inquiry. The God whom Khayyám satirizes is the Father of All Despots; the mullahs of the Iranian regime were, to me, minor versions of Him. Poetry that is critical of God, His plans, and His very character prepared me, prepares us, to be critical of pettier versions of God.
Almost every quatrain of Omar Khayyám’s subverts the dogma of the mullahs, because his poetry is the work of an inquiring mind. You can’t have an inquiring mind and talk about it publicly in Iran. You can’t have an inquiring mind in two-thirds of the countries of the world. Mrs. Mohammadi’s gift to me and my friends was to show us what our beautiful Farsi had produced when an inquiring mind went to work with it. She didn’t have to make any other point. Her point was made by itself when we left the classroom with our hair (if we were female) carefully concealed.
Oh, friend, come along so that we don’t mourn tomorrow’s sorrow
Oh, friend, come along so that we make the best of our short lives
Tomorrow, when all of us will leave this old temple as dead bees
We won’t be any more or less than thousands of others in hives.
One day when Mrs. Mohammadi was reciting Omar Khayyám’s poetry, I wished time could halt just for a moment. Her voice and the incandescent language of Khayyám had thrust me forward in a thousand-step leap. I wanted time to stop so that I could write something myself, something Khayyám-like, and show it to this beloved woman and win some approval from her. (Yes, I have always and forever sought what I have come to speak of as brownie points.) Not on that day, but on other days, I showed Mrs. Mohammadi whatever I wrote. Sometimes her face bloomed like a flower as she read; sometimes she frowned; sometimes she giggled.
I THINK OF myself as a Persian rather than as an Iranian. This is not hairsplitting. Persia existed before Iran, a name for the country that dates only to 1935, when the Pahlavis chose Iran, meaning “Aryan,” to impress Western powers with Persia’s supposed “white” racial pedigree. To think of myself as Persian allows me to embrace the whole of my country’s history, going back to the flowering of a distinctly Persian sensibility under the early Persian emperors—Achaemenes, Cyrus, and Darius—twenty-five hundred years ago. For the first fifteen hundred years of Persia’s existence, Zoroastrianism was the state religion, and so, by embracing Persia’s past, I also embrace the roots of my religion. This may all sound quasi-mystical or even sentimental, but I do believe that the whole of what it means to be born in Iran can only really be enjoyed when the whole of Persia’s history is in one’s veins. The ancient language of Persia, Farsi, still expresses the Persia of the past as well as the present. Reefs of gold run through the language. I don’t believe that the Arab and Mongol invasions of Persia between 633 and the thirteenth century and the establishment of Islam in my ancient country destroyed the Persian sensibility; no, up until the triumph of fundamentalism in Iran in 1979, the spiritual beauty of Islam coexisted with the beauty that prevailed before the coming of Islam. In schools, Persian history was taught without distortion, unlike in postrevolutionary Iran, where the mullahs seem to hold the pre-Islamic era in contempt. And from what I can tell, relying on what some of my teachers and my father and mother report, the intrusion of Arabic words into Farsi was not nearly so resented in the era of spiritual coexistence.
The child I have in the future, that boy or girl, or those boys and girls (even better!) must speak Farsi. English, yes; French, maybe; Italian, Spanish, perhaps. But Farsi above all. I want to become the Mrs. Mohammadi of my children’s lives. I want my children to read Sa‘di and Hafez and Khayyám and Rumi and, of course, all of those Iranian writers who are alive now. Then I want them to read the Code of the Council of Guardians of the regime. I want them to say to me, “Mom, why has the Council of Guardians squandered such a beautiful language on this nonsense?”
15
“ARE YOU REALLY here for something to do with money?” I ask the madman, directing my voice to the fan grille. We have been chatting in a desultory way for a half hour, and it just seems weird to me that the man in the cell above me is here for theft or embezzlement or passing false checks while I am here for shouting in the street. My mind is an orderly one; I always grow uncomfortable with the ill-sorted, with things out of their proper categories. I know that the prison includes murderers in its population, and I can see how, to the regime, killers and political protesters are all of the same bad breed. But people like the madman who have done something peculiar with checks? No, that I can’t accept. The madman belongs in a different prison, a prison for those who transgressed without raising their voices or their fists.
I repeat my question.
The madman doesn’t answer.
“What’s your name? You can tell me your name, surely.”
Part of my curiosity about the madma
n has to do with trying to glimpse what I myself will become. If you are kept here for a long time, is this what happens to you? You begin to howl day and night and rain abuse down on the heads of your loved ones? In a year or five years, will I be the madwoman in the cell above some newcomer, abusing the guards for the sake of the pitiable intimacy of a beating?
“Sohrab, it’s my name,” says the madman, and I am so shocked at receiving an answer that I ask him to repeat what he has just said.
“Sohrab,” he says quietly. He has done this before, switched from pure craziness to quiet courtesy in the space of a minute. I know that I must take advantage of his sane self before it is lost in shrieking again.
“Sohrab, how long you have been here, Sohrab? How long?”
“I’ve lost count. Maybe seven years, eight, maybe ten. It’s difficult to keep count.”
I mutter my amazement, and Sohrab laughs. It is not his madman laugh. It is the rueful laugh of someone noticing the impact of his experience on another, far more naive person.
My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir Page 11