by Nayeri, Dina
“Fine,” says Ponneh. “But I think it’s wrong.” Saba is glad to see the fire back in Ponneh’s voice. “You should go right up to them and slap them across the face.”
“Next time I see them,” Saba mutters, and they drive silently through the trees.
That night, when Abbas knocks, she ignores him. She listens to “Fast Car” and decides she is finished here. Would it be so hard to try to leave? She falls asleep with images of suspended pink-striped sneakers and red high heels swimming through the foggy places that separate her from her dream universe. And she thanks God that he plucked Mahtab out of Cheshmeh just as the world was about to crumble down.
Soghra and Kobra
(Khanom Basir)
A year before the revolution, when the children were eight years old, Soghra and Kobra captured their attention for a full three months. It was all any of them talked about. Soghra and Kobra were sisters who lived in the next town—distant cousins of Ponneh’s, who told everyone about Soghra’s marriage plans. Soghra was twelve, but her parents were desperate people, stricken with poverty and old-world thinking. They said that she had already “become a woman” and so she was ready to marry. Shameful! They married her off to a man whose sister had come to a local hammam to examine Soghra’s body, as was customary in my parents’ time. And what was so fascinating about her marriage? What made the girls follow her in the streets and tell stories of her to their eager friends? Well, the man Soghra was engaged to marry was forty years old.
“Are you sure he’s forty? Maybe he’s fifty!” one of them said as they spied on the man’s shop in the marketplace.
“It doesn’t matter if he’s forty or fifty,” Mahtab announced. She was always sure of everything that she said. “Because you stop counting at thirty when you’re officially old.”
“It does matter, stupid,” Saba said, “because fifty means he’ll die ten years sooner.” They had this same ridiculous conversation half a dozen times.
After her marriage, we adults watched Soghra for signs of what the man might have done to her. The girls could sense it too. “What do they do?” I heard Saba asking, and Ponneh said she had some idea. Apparently she and Reza whispered about it sometimes. Mahtab asked them a hundred dirty, dirty questions before I lost patience and separated them. Usually we laughed at the children’s curious talk, but on that day, because of poor Soghra, my ladle hit the bottom of the pot, and I ran out of good humor.
The next time the children saw Soghra, they went on and on about how she didn’t look different at all. I tried not to laugh at their shock. She didn’t walk funny as Reza had said she would, and her face hadn’t sprouted moles. Her feet hadn’t swollen, and she didn’t grow giant breasts. And—here’s the part that’s my fault—she didn’t have blood coming out of her nose. Fine, so I had told them that married women get a lot of nosebleeds, and that is why a sheet is needed to catch the bride’s first nosebleed on the wedding night. What do you want, that I tell them the truth at eight years old?
I did notice two small changes in the bride. As she paraded around the Cheshmeh food market, pulled from place to place by her thick-mustached husband, twelve-year-old Soghra seemed taller and damn disappointed with her fate. But then again, I could be mistaken. Maybe it was just the high heels her husband forced her to wear because he had always wanted a sophisticated wife (and these were, after all, prerevolution days). And maybe it wasn’t sadness clouding her eyes, but all that blue eye shadow.
“It’s a shame. A real shame,” Agha Hafezi said when he was sipping tea with his wife and me and Khanom Omidi. “How can the law allow the rape of a child?”
I reminded him that in Iran rape is a very specific thing. Too specific.
But why dwell on sad things? Here is the reason I tell this story. Afterward, when the children were sitting in a circle with their feet touching, Saba said the strangest thing for a girl so young. She said that it was good for Soghra to have her own house to govern and no sister to share it with. A logical choice, she called it, since Kobra was such boring company. I wonder if she would still say that to Soghra if she ran into her today. Even though I can’t imagine what goes on inside Saba’s marriage, sometimes I see that same sad, haunted look, all covered in eye shadow, in the faraway gaze of poor Saba Hafezi.
Chapter Thirteen
SUMMER 1991
People say that twins feel the force of each other’s movements from afar. Saba has read magazine stories about a miraculous few who have felt change overcome their twin while completely unaware that the other exists. In the frightening first days after witnessing death again, Saba tries to feel the forces in Mahtab’s world. She gives herself up to dark thoughts of her sister sinking into the water, of a pasdar gripping her with his knife, forcing her to admit truths that she still doesn’t know. When the images threaten to undo her, she fights them off by recalling better ones, Mahtab singing in the boat back to shore and holding her mother’s hand in the airport. Yes, there is a good chance.
On quiet mornings she imagines her sister, her TV-quality life, and talks to her like one of her American friends would do. What do I do now? she asks Mahtab the day after Farnaz’s hanging. Mahtab’s voice swirls in her head, repeating the same command again and again: Get out! Get out! Get out! That night she begins to entertain an enticing possibility. What if she ran away to America now? She could try for a visa, forge Abbas’s signature, tell them she’s leaving behind a husband to make it easier. But the fear of pasdars and border controls holds her here like it does so many others. One day soon—before she turns twenty-two, or twenty-four, or thirty at most—Abbas will be gone. When that day comes, what will keep her in Cheshmeh? If she is patient, she will be an independent widow in New York or California. Maybe she will go to journalism school. She did, after all, save herself for an American university. She digs up old travel guidebooks collected by her mother before the revolution, and even finds piles of papers from visa offices, passport agencies, and airlines—a treasure of information that her mother amassed just in case. There is comfort in knowing that this desire to run is inherited, a piece of her mother that can never be taken from her. One day soon her feet will loosen their hold on this sodden Gilaki soil and she will go.
Lately Khanom Omidi has developed a strange affection for The Karate Kid. She stumbled upon it when visiting Saba, who was reviewing her latest purchases from the Tehrani in her childhood bedroom. Khanom Omidi doesn’t understand the dialogue, but manages to follow along from one sparring match or training montage to the next, stopping the tape to ask questions or offer opinions. “That Johnny folani is no good. He is wicked already at such a young age, and I think his snake-worshipping dojo has jinns.”
Saba’s favorite summer movie is Dead Poets Society. On a night when Abbas has gone to bed early and she is alone with Khanom Omidi, she lets the old woman prepare a pipe to soothe her nerves. They talk about love and death and Farnaz, watch the movie together, and sip tea. This season Mahtab will begin her fourth year at Harvard. She will have made friends with prep-school boys like the ones on screen. Look at them in their crested jackets and elegant ties, so confident, so poised. Entirely different from Iranian men shouting in their pasdar uniforms, or sitting in corners of the house in morose opium trances, or dancing like fools at illegal parties. Once at a late-night party without the mullahs or cousin Kasem, Saba saw Reza and his brother get up and dance with the full force of their hips and arms, hands twisting this way and that. That’s the difference between men from here and there, she thought. Other than the occasional tuxedoed waltz, American movie men don’t dance. Iranian men dance to impress. Maybe Western manners have eradicated their natural wildness. Iranians have pasdars for that.
Halfway through the movie, the pipe begins to lull her to sleep. She drifts off on Khanom Omidi’s lap, thoughts of her sister and dancing melding together in her memory.
Mahtab used to dance. As
a child, she loved flailing raucously, being the sudden center of an attention vacuum. This is the one Persian thing she will likely retain. After all the hours spent twirling in pairs in dresses and tuxedos, Mahtab will crave center stage. In her stupor, Saba can see it, a scene good enough for a movie. Mahtab will cast aside her escort, and suddenly, out of nowhere, there will be setar music and Iranian lyrics. Maybe the “Sultan of Hearts” will play right in the middle of Harvard Square. A miracle!
One heart tells me to go, to go.
Another tells me to stay, to stay.
Except Mahtab has no such qualms about staying or going. She is already in the place she wants to be. She will dance alone in her elegant dress and no one will dare enter her spotlight. The beauty of being Mahtab is that you need no partner at all.
Come, Khanom Omidi, come and listen to a story about my sister. This year has been a dark, endless one for me, and I want to glimpse into her world tonight. This one is about the defeat of another Immigrant Worry: importance—the one that my mother fretted over for as long as I knew her, even though she was no exile. My cousins in America are afflicted by something similar—nightmares of second-class invisibility, mediocrity, and anonymous death. Legacy-losing, taxi-driving, dry-cleaning worries. All those engineers and doctors cleaning floors and selling cigarettes in corner shops. Mahtab too loses sleep over it, because she knows that she has been lucky, that she owes something monumental to the world. She wants to do good things. But this too will pass, in 22.5 minutes. She will cast it off as she always has. This is the story of how Mahtab stops worrying about living an important enough life.
In the summer before her final year, Mahtab finds a full-time job: a position as a junior reporter for The New York Times that she will begin this June and continue after graduation. She will work for khanom reporter Judith Miller, checking her facts and correcting her frequent spelling mistakes. She will ride in a big white news van and go hunting for stories and quotes. She will become an official storyteller—only she isn’t allowed to lie, not even backhandedly by choosing which details to tell. You see, these Americans have figured out our true-bending tricks. And that destroys all the fun. Lucky for us we have Iranian journalists who understand how to weave a good tale.
“Ai, Saba! Enough with the double-talk. Stop complaining and tell the story.”
Fine. In the days before she leaves for her summer in New York, Mahtab carries a dull but constant ache for Cameron, whom she runs into often at the student gymnasium. She struggles daily with the decision to use or abandon his credit card. She changes her mind each time she runs into him or his waifish lover on campus. You see, realizing you are a secondary character in someone else’s movie, it hurts to the bone. Sometimes Cameron looks sad to see her. Sometimes he tries to say hello. Neither of them ever brings up the card and it becomes an awkward, unmentionable topic between them—the fact that she is linked to his family like some bizarre estranged relative. On angry days, Mahtab tries to torture him from afar. She carries a bag with bundles of towels hanging out, all white except for the thin layer of blue-and-violet-checkered silk peeking out from among the thick cotton. The scarf is faded, that guilty piece of silk she wore to the Aryanpurs’ now relegated to wiping Mahtab’s sweat. She makes sure it is in plain sight in order to make a statement of her power: I am above it, and above you.
“Hah! It’s just what Khanom Basir tries to say with her fancy old scarf.”
One day Cameron tries to say hello in the exercise room, and she finds herself unable to form words. She only walks past, rubbing her neck with the blue cloth.
He shouts after her, “Wiping your sweat with an Hermès scarf, Khanom Shahzadeh?”
She turns. “Don’t talk Farsi to me,” she snaps, because the language of her family and of their romance is sacred to her. “You’re no longer my friend.” I have wanted to say those words to Abbas so many times. He and I used to be friends in our own way. Each time he tries to talk to me now, I want to say: You are no longer my friend. But I do not have Mahtab’s courage or her options. She can take his money and be free, as long as she keeps his secret, whereas I must keep the secret and continue to be imprisoned with him.
But Mahtab is kind, and as soon as the words are out, she regrets them, because what if she’s hurt him? She searches his face. Is he unhappy too? She wishes she could reach inside him and wipe away this new, unfamiliar Cameron who pretends he can never love her. She wishes the old Cameron would come back.
How strange, she thinks, that he should have such a fear, such an intense feeling of dread surrounding his secret. Is it really so dangerous for him in Iran? Could he really be hanged? Mahtab can’t fathom such things. For a future journalist, her mind is too pure, her eyes too unsullied. Is it really so important for Cameron to go back and try for change? How can anyone feel so strongly about an intangible thing? Just a blurry shadow of a concept that may never become truth. She envies him for having such a passion. She listens to the hum of the exercise equipment all around, feeling like the only dysfunctional cog in the engine of some great, success-powered machine. Cameron is making his way onward. He wants to go without her, to become one of the powerful men who rule us all, a changer of fates, and she is only falling further and further behind.
She decides that the only way to overcome Cameron’s hold on her is to become bigger, better, more successful than he is. This was, after all, her mother’s greatest teaching: You must live an important life. Tomorrow she will move to the big city to start her internship at The New York Times and take her place in the white news van. She will make the men and women in business suits—those crows in a line—marvel at her talent.
In New York she lives a movie life. She attends dances like the one in Dead Poets Society, where couples spin in circles over wooden floors. She plays golf in green shorts. She hides a tape recorder in the pocket of these shorts so that she can catch dirty businessmen admitting to things they should not have done.
“So, Agha Businessman,” she will croon, “tell me what you did then.” She will bat her Middle Eastern eyelashes and the fool will fall to his knees and admit to this embezzlement or that filthy-bazi and she will print it all on the front page of The New York Times under the byline “Mahtab Hafezi, Harvard Class of 1992.”
“Are American businessmen really so stupid, Saba jan?”
Hush now, Khanom Omidi! I’m telling a story here. Stories are full of these wonderful alignings of coincidences that lead to smart men confessing their every sin. They are full of quick victories. Do you remember the part in Karate Kid where Daniel kicks horrible Johnny folani in the face, even though his leg is broken? When I watch that scene, I imagine Farnaz at her hanging, looking into the crowd like she has a plan, kicking the mullah in the face with her girlish sneakers and saving herself from the crane to a wave of hurrahs from an audience of onlookers who suddenly worship her.
Mahtab’s life is filled with such unlikely triumphs.
She rises quickly in the ranks of the interns. She becomes a newspaper star.
She lives in a small apartment in New York that she shares with another girl. Each night when she turns her key, drops her pretty purse of real leather onto her couch, and plops down in front of the television, she knows that today she has done something important. Still, she wants more. This summer she must do something monumental, change the world like Cameron plans to do, and have her voice heard across oceans.
A few weeks later she exposes a series of sophisticated crimes in the government, some of them leading to people so high up that even I must refrain from mentioning them here. Please don’t ask for details. I only know that they are big, big news. And with each accomplishment, Mahtab comes closer to finding her true self, her natural self.
One night, as she sits on her couch in her miniskirt, with the windows wide open and her music blaring, drinking a beer openly so the neighbors can see, the answer arrives
among a pile of junk mail and bills. It is a tattered envelope from Iran, covered with a hundred stamps and postmarks, smelling of rice and addressed in a careful hand—a nervous one that hasn’t finished school, reads no English, and seems to have traced the address over a printed copy. It is from a Miss Ponneh Alborz, Cheshmeh, Iran.
Is it true? Her childhood friend Ponneh has written to her? What tales can this long-lost friend have to tell? Will her letter be full of stories about Reza and his crazy mother, about her sister’s health? What a lucky thing to have a letter from Cheshmeh.
She rips open the top of the crinkled white envelope and lets the contents spill out.
Suddenly all joy is gone as her table is flooded with photos, letters, a videotape, and some audio recordings. The photos are gruesome. They show a beautiful girl dragged from a van, then hanged by the neck from a crane. It is difficult even to touch the photo paper. A scrawled note reads: “My friend Farnaz: framed for activism and for preferring women.”
Ah, but Khanom Omidi, do not despair. For Mahtab these pictures are an opportunity. She is savvy enough to know exactly what to do with them. Because, after all, our girl works at The New York Times now. She is our bare-legged champion, and she is armed with a videotape that I shot with my own hand.
She spends the next week watching the video, rewinding and watching it again. It is impossible not to lean closer to the television, to try to peer into the face of the beautiful Farnaz and touch her cheek before it is hooded. Did such a thing really take place? I ask myself that sometimes in the middle of the night when I view that grainy film to torture myself into feeling alive. Despite the shaking hand, the static, and the black chador covering the lens every few seconds, the image is undeniable. It happened. I was there.