Persian Girls: A Memoir (10 page)

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Authors: Nahid Rachlin

BOOK: Persian Girls: A Memoir
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He pointed to a blue wooden chalet. “Will you come there with me? I know the park guard. We can stay there without being interrupted.” The chalet stood in a date palm garden, set off from the rest of the park. Its door was open and they walked in. A rug covered the floor and an earthen jar stood on the mantel, but otherwise it was bare. He latched the door from the inside and took her in his arms. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There is no one around.” Did he make a practice of bringing women there? The question passed through her mind but she was too far gone in her desire to resist him. The palm fronds were whispering in the breeze outside. A patch of sunlight skipped in through the dormer window and danced on the wall before them. She was wearing a blue skirt and sandals and a white blouse with a row of red, yellow, and blue flowers, embroidered by her mother, at the neckline.
Then he was undressing her and himself. She went along with it, mesmerized. She was shivering—it was exhilarating to be with someone close to her own age. She sensed her own attractiveness as she felt the young man’s touch and heard him whisper, “You’re beautiful.”
After that, as if pulled by a magnet, she met him again and again, whenever Father was away on business.
One day she went to the chalet and the man wasn’t there. Later she found him in the store but he avoided looking at her. He no longer stood in the square, staring up at the balcony to get a glimpse of her.
I wrote it all down and hid the notebook under my mattress so that Father wouldn’t see it, as he frequently dropped into my room to check to see what I was reading and writing.
The next day I read it to Pari. We almost convinced ourselves that it was true, that it had to be.
Arguments between Pari and our parents about Majid, who sent his mother over several more times, continued for months.
“I won’t marry anyone else except him,” Pari said, but Father always said no.
Pari locked herself in her room for a week. Her skin became sallow and she had nosebleeds. Ali or I brought food to her. I ate my meals with her and tried to comfort her, telling her that maybe it was just as well if she didn’t marry now, but she was disconsolate. She reminded me that our parents were going to force her to marry someone else. At times she was uncommunicative, wanted to sleep or just be alone with her thoughts.
“What are you doing, what’s this silly strike?” Father would say as he pounded on her door. And Mohtaram told her she was torturing herself for no reason. “There are much better suitors for you.”
I wondered if Father and Mohtaram were evil. But my grandmother, whom I loved so much, had done the same to her daughters, had forced them to marry men she and my grandfather chose. They themselves were victims of the oppressive system that dictated to people how they should feel and live their lives. This was the time Pari should resist marrying anyone but Majid, break the chain, as we had promised each other.
Miss Partovi sent a message through me to Pari, telling her she should audition for a part in
My Fair Lady,
an American musical. Pari’s spirits lifted at once. She took the chance that Father wouldn’t stop her if he found out about her participation in the play, that he’d hope her involvement in something she liked would heal her wound.
But Father said no. “Father has forbidden me to participate in the play, now that I actually got a part,” Pari cried to me. “He told me he doesn’t want me to stand onstage and represent a woman as an object of a man’s lust.”
“Pari, that isn’t all there is to
My Fair Lady
.”
“I told him the same thing but it fell on deaf ears. He told Miss Jahanbani that he doesn’t want me to be in any more plays and that’s the end of it.”
To help Pari calm down, we went to see a movie that was showing in the auditorium of the American high school on the other side of the river, in a neighborhood where many Americans lived. Though there were many Americans in Ahvaz, we didn’t have a single American friend. I understood why; all the differences in values kept them apart from Iranians. Most Iranians, even many of the Westernized ones, were still bound, at least partly, to their cultural-religious values and traditions, as the Americans were to their own. Iranians referred to them as “the Americans,” and I assumed the Americans referred to us as “the Iranians.” We were categories to each other.
The movie,
Separate Tables,
was in English with Farsi subtitles. On the way out we saw a notice on a bulletin board in the hallway that a studio was looking for people to dub movies from other languages into Farsi. Pari wrote down the information. She said, “I’m going to try for that, hope that Father won’t find out.”
Pari was accepted by the studio to dub
Bitter Rice,
an Italian movie, into Farsi. She cut classes several afternoons and went to the studio. For a while, she managed to keep her part-time job a secret.
“Father isn’t the only one who thinks of actresses as whores,” Pari told me one day. “The people in the studio seem to be of the same opinion. One of them asked me to take my clothes off. I just ran out of there.”
Ten
One afternoon, as I was taking a different route home, I noticed a bookstore on a narrow street off Pahlavi Avenue. The street was lined with a few run-down and some closed-down houses and was very quiet. I walked in and looked for books. A few boys were there, but no girls. Among the boys was the one I had seen with the red kerchief. That day he wasn’t wearing it.
The store wasn’t large but it was brimming with books. On a table I found books by revered Iranian poets, Saadi, Hafiz, and Omar Khayyam. These ancient poets spoke to all strata of the population in Iran; each interpreted the poems in his own way. Hafiz’s poetry was often used to tell fortunes. The person would open the book randomly to a page and whatever was written there was interpreted to mean something about the person’s future.
On the same table were several books translated into Farsi, among them
Pride and Prejudice, The Sun Also Rises, Crime and Punishment.
They must have passed censorship, I thought. Operating under the Ministry of Information, the censorship authority controlled the publication of all manuscripts, original or translated. Books that either contained a political message or could be interpreted that way were banned. Sometimes a book passed censorship but, after some new meaning was found in it, was taken off the market and all copies destroyed. SAVAK was always on the lookout for anything even remotely threatening to the regime. Restlessness aroused in people by reading certain books could eventually lead to an uprising, they believed.
I picked out
The Sun Also Rises.
When I went to pay, the owner looked at me quizzically, as if wondering what a young girl was doing buying a book by a foreign writer. He was a thin, tall, sensitive-looking young man with grave dark eyes. As I was leaving the store he said, “Come back. I get new books all the time.”
At home I devoured the book. I began visiting the Tabatabai Bookstore weekly to buy more. The owner, Jalal, told me a little about the translated books he had in stock, which he ordered as soon as they were available. I liked reading those books; they gave me glimpses into other worlds, other lives, as American movies did.
Once when I came home, I found the door to my room wide open. Father was rummaging through my books. I stood at the door fearfully. Was he going to object to the books I was reading? What if he looked under the mattress and found the story I wrote about Mohtaram and the jeweler? I entered the room and just stood there silently.
“Nahid,” he said in a tense, agitated tone. “Be careful about the books you buy; some of them can get us into trouble. You never know who might be a SAVAK agent. It could be someone disguised as a handyman or an electrician.”
Then he zoomed out. I breathed with relief. He hadn’t mentioned my story. I shut the door and, just to make sure, looked under the mattress. The notebook was there as I had left it. I picked it up, pulled out the pages containing the story, and tore them into pieces. I put them at the bottom of my schoolbag to discard in the large garbage pail just outside of school.
 
 
 
 
One day when I was browsing at Tabatabai Bookstore, Jalal said, “I just got a new book I can show you.” It was as if we had an unspoken connection, trusted each other. There was no one else in the store at the time but he was whispering. His face, his voice were even more grave than usual. He reminded me of characters in
Brothers Karamazov.
“What is it?” I asked, dropping my voice.
“
Les Misérables.
It was taken off the market. I managed to get a few copies before they shredded them. I tell you because I know you love books as much as I do and you hate many things about our society as I do.”
“What’s it about?”
“A man who, out of starvation, steals a loaf of bread and is hounded by the police for the rest of his life. SAVAK thinks the book might mirror some things in our society.”
“I’d like to read it.”
Jalal pushed aside a thick curtain in the back of the store, revealing a stairway. He climbed down and returned within minutes holding a book. He handed it to me. It had a plain white jacket on it, revealing no title or name.
After I bought it he wrapped the book in gift paper and gave it to me. “Be very careful,” he said.
I put it in my schoolbag and headed home. His remark, “Be very careful,” rang in my ears, and I was tempted to turn around and say the same thing to him. Terrifying images of Jalal getting arrested, his shop being shut down, his being thrown in jail for years or even executed came before my eyes. According to rumors people were punished that way for just that “crime” he was committing. How strange that in our culture books were considered dangerous, that the written word was given so much power, that a person was thought of as a criminal for owning or reading certain books. I had actually taken a few steps back to the store, I realized. I stopped myself. He was older than me, had owned the store for three years, he once told me. He was cautious enough to have gotten away with selling such books. He knew instinctively whom to trust.
I stayed in my room with the door shut and immediately started reading the book like a child starved for food.
I wrote a story based on the plight of the woman who had been tempted to abandon her blind child, the story Maryam and Hamideh had spoken of that day in Tehran.
 
When Shamsi and her two small children moved into some rooms in our house, they looked very poor and pathetic. My mother took pity on them and reduced the rent. Wherever Shamsi went her children followed. One of her daughters, Monir, the smaller of the two, was blind in one eye and the other eye could see only vague shadows of things. No one knew how Shamsi suddenly began to acquire new possessions. She got new clothes for herself and the children. She bought copper pots and pans, which she shined every day. And a faint smile lingered on her face. Then Monir disappeared. No one saw her in the mornings or at any other time and the smile on Shamsi’s face also disappeared. One day she confessed everything. There was a man who was interested in marrying her but he would not put up with a blind child. So she had taken Monir to the desert at the edge of Tehran and left her there. Then Shamsi had run away and gotten into a jeep full of soldiers. The soldiers had teased and flirted with her but she covered her face under her chador, unable to cry or smile. I picture Monir standing in the vast desert, listening to the vanishing echoes of her mother’s footsteps. Then waiting desperately for her to appear again until other frightening images and echoes swept over her consciousness. . . .
 
 
I showed the story to Pari, as I did all the stories I wrote. As important as it was for me to write, it was equally important to hear her reassuring, encouraging voice. After Pari told me she liked the story, I handed it in as my composition assignment at school.
“What do you think?” Mrs. Soleimani asked the class after I’d read it aloud.
“It’s too sad,” one of the girls said.
“It doesn’t sound real,” another girl said.
“But it
is
realistic; it captures the desperation of women all around us,” Mrs. Soleimani said. She was married with a son, thus having fulfilled conventional expectations, and in addition she had managed to have a career. She encouraged us to strive for more than just marriage and children.
At her comment the class fell into silence.
“If you had a choice, would you have been born a man or a woman?” Mrs. Soleimani asked.
I raised my hand.
“Yes, Nahid?”
“I would still want to have been born a girl, but I want to go to America and live there.” The idea of going to America had been in my fantasies ever since my brothers left.
A few others in the class of twenty raised their hands. One said she would want to be born a girl because she could become pregnant, something a man couldn’t do. Another said she didn’t understand boys, so she wanted to be a girl. Yet another said she thought life was harder for men because they had to be the breadwinners and be strong. Only one said she would want to be a boy so she could become a good soccer player like her brother and do other things her brother was allowed to do, like stay out late at night and take trips with his friends without parental supervision.
“Most of you are fourteen years old,” Mrs. Soleimani said. “Some of you have been promised to men who are much older and know a lot more about life than you do and will no doubt be able to dominate you. You must fight being in that situation.”
Some of the girls looked at her with awe for saying such things. Others seemed vaguely disapproving, as if she were attacking them rather than giving them guidance. But of course she was absolutely right, I thought. It was the way Pari and I felt, too, that we had to fight against that situation.

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