by Nayeri, Dina
Ponneh’s chest rises and falls in such deep, fitful arcs that surely her footage is ruined.
“Don’t worry, friends.” A scratchy voice behind them reassures. “They won’t do it.” An old woman leans on her metal cane. She speaks with certainty.
Ponneh turns, hungry for a different story. “Excuse me?” she says.
“They won’t kill her,” says the old woman. “They’ll teach her a lesson she’ll never forget and then we’ll all go home.”
Ponneh swallows and wipes the corners of her mouth with two fingers, nails bitten to the quick. “Do you think so?” she says. She tries to link her arm through Saba’s, then gives up, hampered by the layers between them. “Did you hear that?” she whispers to Saba.
The old lady continues. “I saw the exact same thing happen outside Tehran. They read her crimes. They ask her if she’s sorry. And then, you see the mullah standing over there. . . . He will step forward and say that Allah grants her another chance.”
Though Saba knows the impossibility of this, though she knows how much it costs to bring a crane to this remote village, and how widely the news of this event has spread, and how much the mullah standing by the crane scratching his dirty beard must thirst for some righteous purpose, she allows the old woman’s comment to give her hope. Ponneh too must know all the concrete facts that make this hope foolish. Though she doesn’t read newspapers as Saba does, she has spent enough time with Dr. Zohreh to know. But Saba doesn’t want to think about facts or probabilities now. This whispered possibility sprouts in her heart and grows in seconds, taking over her body so that her sole intention and belief is that today she will photograph nothing more than a public humiliation. She ignores the duty in the mullah’s eye, the high calling—this girl is one of the beautiful things of this world, like the Warhols and Picassos and Riveras shut up in a dark place somewhere, like Ponneh’s red high heels, or a schoolgirl with pink fingernails, or a song called “Fast Car.” She draws the world’s eyes to herself.
The mullah steps onto the platform and nods as the female officer puts a black hood over the girl’s head. “It’s a game,” Saba whispers. Ponneh repeats it. “It’s a game. Farnaz jan, it’s just a game.” The mullah lowers the noose around Farnaz’s neck himself, making sure it is fastened tightly to the hook on the crane. With a wave of his hand, he silences the crowd and reads her crimes from a gray sheet. “. . . actions not in keeping with a chaste life and the laws of Islam, acting against national security, enmity against God, membership in a drug-smuggling organization . . .”
The crowd murmurs. Dozens of shrouded heads and bearded faces look up. Farnaz shivers, sucking the hood in and out of her mouth with each terrified breath.
“She did all that?” another onlooker asks the old woman. Saba strains to hear, every cell in her body screaming to run away or at least step back from the crowd. She can sense Reza listening too, and Ponneh has gone unnaturally still, her body stiffening like a corpse.
The old woman shrugs. “They say they found the drugs in her house. But if you ask me, she angered the wrong man.” She points to the front, toward a bearded man with fiery eyes who watches with anticipation like a creditor watching the confiscation of his collateral. “She was supposed to go to the mullah’s son, but she refused. I think she was friendly with the wrong type. Activists and Baha’is.”
Ponneh bows her head and sucks the tears from her lips. She covers her face with her sleeve and leans on Saba, who can see what her friend is thinking now. It’s my fault.
“It’s all pretend,” Saba says. She hears Ponneh’s breath, shallow and strained, her camera hand shaking under her clothes. The mullah climbs into the crane operator’s seat. He holds on to his white turban as he is helped up by the driver.
“What is he doing?” Ponneh asks, turning to the old woman again.
“He wants to do it himself,” she says.
“But it’s fake,” Saba reminds her.
The woman seems bored. “He wants to be high up like Allah when he showers his mercy on her.”
The slight sarcasm in the woman’s voice calms Saba a little. Ponneh is shaking harder now, and then Saba hears a thud. Ponneh has dropped the camera. The old woman squints and points to the hem of Ponneh’s chador just as Reza comes bounding toward them. “Excuse me, Khanom,” he says to the old woman, “I thought I had lost my sisters.” He leans down with the casual air of fetching a ball, picks up the camera, and wedges himself between Saba and Ponneh.
“Are you okay?” he whispers to Ponneh. “Let’s go. This will be very bad.”
Ponneh seems unable to take her eyes off the crane. How can a person not look at such a time? How can she not gawk, stifling each blink until her eyes water? She stares straight ahead, maybe thinking that the strength of her gaze is the only thing keeping the mullah from pulling the lever. Saba stands on her tiptoes and scans the crowd behind her for pasdars, her video camera still fixed on the crane and the girl. Then she hears Ponneh gasp and it is done. The crane hoists the girl into the air mercifully quickly, with one hard motion, not slowly lifting and suffocating, the arc of death revealed by a flutter of small kicks, as in most crane hangings. The mullah places the control stick back into the driver’s hand. Farnaz’s body swings in the air, her neck unnaturally extended, her head bent to the right in a distorted, cartoonish sort of supplication, her sneakered feet twisted around each other in a childish demonstration of her fright.
For an instant the crowd is hushed and there is no thought of modesty or caution. Women cry openly. A man takes his wife’s hand. A young girl’s chador slips back, and curly chestnut strands sweep her face as she watches death for the first time. Saba struggles to find breath. Did these onlookers hope for a pardon as she did? Did they come here thinking Farnaz would be spared? Some of them must have known, and yet they are all overcome with shock. Maybe some of them do hate her, or they expected the many scars in their hearts to protect them. Or maybe they came to show her she was loved. Reza reaches over and takes Ponneh’s hand. Does he know? Has Ponneh told him, perhaps in a moment of teasing, about how she practices for the day they’re married? He takes Saba’s hand too and they stand in that silent half second, watching, unmoved by the danger to themselves. For the second time, Saba marvels with her friends at this cruel new Iran and takes an unseemly comfort in their threesome, a warming of her heart at the moment of deepest sorrow. This time they are just spectators, everything smells like death and gasoline, and there isn’t a broken high heel to blame.
Though she wants to look away, Saba can’t stop staring. She follows the easy swing of Farnaz’s sneakers; the girlish pink stripe on the side of each shoe sends a wave of nausea through her body. Then she is transfixed by the broken neck, Farnaz’s pretty throat tied off with rope. She takes a gulp of air and remembers what it felt like to almost drown, to swallow mouthfuls of water, to be desperate for breath. Mahtab was there, having the same water forced into her small body, unable to move or fight the sea the same way Farnaz can’t fight the rope or the crane. She imagines Mahtab hanging in the sky—a flash before she is swallowed into the abyss. Now she sees her mother in Evin, marching in a doomed line, helpless in prison clothes, with her head down and hands tied, one of throngs executed en masse. Saba has seen the photos, the grisly lines of hanging bodies. Is her mother among them? No, she assures herself. The Evin rumor was wrong. I saw Maman get on a plane with Mahtab. The back of Saba’s tongue swells and she reaches for her throat, moved by the urge to scratch. She swallows hard and looks at Farnaz’s frail body again. The image of her sister giving up, dropping to the bottom, forces itself in and is just as quickly replaced by the fisherman’s callused hands pulling the two of them out. They are together again, letting go, then alternately disappearing into the black chasm below and being pulled into a boat.
Mahtab was there. She sang songs all the way back to shore. Where is she now?
I should leave this place soon, Saba thinks. Or maybe one day it will kill me too.
“No,” Ponneh whispers. “No, no. It’s supposed to be fake.” Tears stream down her blotched, cracked cheeks, forming rivulets that foretell the coming end of Ponneh’s beauty. She jerks away from Reza. She takes the camera from him and begins to snap photos, oblivious, her bare arms jutting out of her robes. Before Saba can react, Reza has pulled Ponneh away, taking the camera from her and motioning for Saba to follow. Across the square, Dr. Zohreh is heading toward her car. Probably she has come to do the same thing: to bear witness and document. As Reza tries to navigate through the crowds, Ponneh convulses. Big racking sobs seize her body and cause her to shudder and collapse into feverish, almost deranged spasms.
“Stop it,” he whispers through clenched teeth. “Ponneh, stop it right now.”
When they reach the cars, Saba notices that her face too is damp. But Ponneh has known about this event, suffered over it for months, without telling anyone. Despite her own scars, Saba knows she can never understand Ponneh’s pain. She fixes her chador and helps Reza put their friend in her car.
Dr. Zohreh reaches the parking area. “Is she okay?”
Reza nods. “We’re going home.” He looks to Saba, who introduces them.
When Ponneh sees Dr. Zohreh, she starts to scramble out of Saba’s car. “Dr. Zohreh,” she says, her voice gravelly. “I’m going with you. We can print the pictures today.”
“What?” demands Reza, but Ponneh ignores him.
“Of course.” Dr. Zohreh glances around. “If you want—”
“No need to trouble the doctor,” says Reza, “Saba will drive you and I’ll follow.”
“No!” Ponneh is becoming very loud now, and Saba eyes a pasdar watching them from across the street. She nudges Reza. Ponneh continues her rant. “It’s my fault!” She takes a shallow breath. “She refused that man because she loved me. You know what’s worse?” She swallows hard. “I’m not . . . I mean . . . I did love her, but I’m not—”
“Yes, I know.” Dr. Zohreh lifts Ponneh’s face and whispers, “Farnaz wouldn’t want you to feel guilty.”
Ponneh laughs bitterly. “You know what Khanom Basir used to say? Only die for someone who at least has a fever for you. Someone should’ve told Farnaz that.”
“What a thing,” Reza whispers, “my poor girl.” The words land hard on Saba’s chest.
“No, no, Ponneh jan,” Dr. Zohreh says. She strokes Ponneh’s hair over her scarf. “You are wrong. She didn’t die for you. Farnaz wanted to live her own way. She died for that. It was her calling and that is a very good reason to die.”
A good reason to die. What a stupid thing to say, Saba thinks. How can Dr. Zohreh expect Ponneh not to feel guilty? Doesn’t she realize that Ponneh’s guilt isn’t for anything she has done, but only for being alive? Saba has no clear memories of struggling to get out of the sea with Mahtab. She doesn’t quite recall letting go of her hand. What she remembers most is Mahtab in the fisherman’s boat. But sometimes in her nightmares, she watches her sister disappear and is consumed by the guilt of not letting herself drop into the depths beside her, of failing to leave the world the way she entered it, with Mahtab, and opening a chasm between them that all the teaspoons in Iran couldn’t fill.
The pasdar is walking toward them. Ponneh is half inside the car, her feet scraping the gravel outside. Dr. Zohreh lifts Ponneh’s legs into the car. Reza’s eyes are already fixed on the approaching pasdar and he takes a step away from the women.
“Salam alaikum,” the pasdar greets Reza. “Who are these women to you?”
Reza doesn’t stoop as he used to in front of pasdars. He does nothing to hide his height. In fact, Saba thinks she sees him pull back his shoulders.
“I saw they needed help,” he says. “They’re my neighbors. I’m parked just there.”
“Papers,” the pasdar barks at Dr. Zohreh.
Dr. Zohreh reaches into her purse for her identification. Saba prays the officer doesn’t look into the cars, that he doesn’t see the cameras. Dr. Zohreh shows her papers with perfect calm. “I’m a doctor,” she says. “These girls are my patients.”
The pasdar bends and glances in the backseat at Ponneh. Saba holds her breath, willing him not to spot the cameras. “I saw this girl in the square. . . . Why the hysterics?” He waits for an answer, but Ponneh just glares at him with red eyes and swollen cheeks. No matter how much she tries, it’s hard to be threatening with a runny nose and bewildered eyes that have just witnessed death. He mutters, “We shouldn’t allow women and children to these things. It’s undignified.” Then he straightens, and Saba thinks he will ask to look inside the car. But the officer nods and turns back toward the square. He says to Reza as he walks away, “Go to your own car. This isn’t your business.”
Without another word, they each fumble for keys and drift away. The gloom of dusk settles all around as Saba follows Dr. Zohreh’s orange Jian and Reza’s green Paykan north toward Cheshmeh.
Ponneh lies in the back of Saba’s car and they ride silently for a while. Saba counts the passing seconds, willing her friend to come back to life. They drive out of the village, past the sloping dirt roads leading to the highway. As they pull onto the main road, flanked by the familiar rocky embankments that signal the way home, Saba struggles for something to say. She thinks of how small Farnaz looked, hanging in the air with her feet crossed one over the other like a lost child in a too-big chair, and she knows that Ponneh is thinking of her too. That Farnaz will haunt her for a long time.
The forest appears on the horizon. Ponneh is slumped, her body crumpled in a corner of the wide backseat, her eyes so bloodshot that the whites are gone. Saba glances from the road once or twice, reaches back and gropes for Ponneh’s hand. Then she turns and blurts out, “Ponneh jan, I can’t stand you thinking this is your fault.” She thinks of a day when she too was in such a state. What did Saba need to hear then? Maybe Ponneh should open her eyes to how uncontrollable things are in this new world; that Farnaz’s fate wasn’t about one or two afternoons of experimentation, but about an unmarried girl who wanted to outwit her captors. “If this is your fault,” she says, “then what happened to me has to be my fault too . . . and I don’t believe that. It’s tempting, but no . . .” Ponneh sits up. “It’s about Abbas.” Saba’s hands move on their own down the wheel. The sun’s rays jut past the felt visor and warm her skin. “I used to think it was my fault,” she says, “because I should’ve annulled the marriage and let them disinherit me.”
“What are you talking about?” Ponneh asks.
Saba exhales.. “He never slept with me. He’s completely impotent.”
Ponneh is wide-eyed. “That’s good,” she ventures. “Right?”
Saba laughs a little. She rubs her neck and tries to push the heavy feeling out with her fingers. “Maybe,” she says. “Except he hired these women to attack me.” She waits for her meaning to become clear. “You know . . . because of his reputation. Two dehatis . . . maybe Basiji, I’m not sure. He let them into our house and paid them to hurt me.”
Ponneh’s face grows more ashen. “Oh God, Saba,” she whispers.
“I’m okay now,” says Saba, deciding that there is no need to tell her about the bleeding. “But see what I mean? Is that my fault?”
“Of course not,” says Ponneh. “But it’s different.”
“It’s not different,” she says to Ponneh. “None of us can prevent these things. This garbage happens all the time, and you and I can’t change any of it. We can’t even see it coming! Blaming yourself is crazy. You have to take care of yourself, Ponneh jan.”
Ponneh leans in, her head between the two seats. “I hope you told your father,” she says. “Those women should be in jail.” Saba shakes her head. She doesn’t want to reveal her hopes for the money or a future abroad—when will it be time? She has such an urge to run. “You haven’t told him?” She grabs the headrest, her voice shrill. “You’re going to let Abbas get away with it? Haven’t you learned anything from Dr. Zohreh? You have to say something. It’s not only about you. What if they do it again?”
The orange Jian disappears behind a mountainous curve ahead. The air is stifling and Saba rolls down the window. The smells and sounds of the road pour into the car. She turns and gives Ponneh a pleading look. “Just don’t tell anyone, okay? Things are different for converted Christians. Baba and I can’t have a legal battle with a devout Muslim. If they start digging around . . . Look, Ponneh jan, I’ve already waited so long . . .” Her face grows hot. “You can’t tell Reza. Promise?”