Persian Girls: A Memoir (18 page)

“Rahbar would take me to Dubai,” Maryam said, softening. “He works for a caviar export company and has been transferred there. He wants to have a wife to take along.”

“I’d be so happy for you to get married,” Mohtaram said.

“Honestly, my life is more peaceful without a man.”

But Maryam’s face was glowing, and I could sense a stirring in her heart for this man.

“I’m so glad you’re going to university. I never had that chance,” Maryam told me when we were alone. “I know you’re a good student, always were. I remember the day you came home with a crown on your head.” After a pause she added, “But I hope you’ll return. When you have your own home and are independent we’ll be able to see a lot of each other.”

I nodded and said nothing. I was thinking that I would never come back to Iran if I could help it. Then I felt sad as that would separate me further from Maryam.

At the end of the visit Aziz embraced me tightly and said, “You’re going so far away, God be with you.”

Maryam and I cried as we kissed, knowing this was good-bye for a long time to come.

Pari managed to come home to say good-bye to me.

Perhaps she didn’t want to complain too much, so as not to ruin this happy occasion for me. It was as if she had finally resigned herself to Taheri.

“I’ve struck a bargain with Taheri,” she said. “I promised I won’t resist getting pregnant and he promised to let me take courses in theater and cinema at the School of Dramatic Arts and be in their productions. Their plays and movies have only a certain kind of audience who wouldn’t overlap with the people Taheri knows.”

As for Majid, Pari said she had heard from a friend that he moved out of Ahvaz. That was all she knew. She still thought about him, but she was trying to stop.

“Nahid,” Pari said softly. “Remember how Taheri threatened suicide if I didn’t marry him? Sometimes he turns that around. Once he told me if I leave him, I’d be in serious trouble.”

“Pari . . .”

“It’s all a bluff, as his threatening suicide was,” she said, reverting to a more cheerful tone. “I’ve made some friends at the school. That helps a lot.”

We parted in the same tearful way as I had with Maryam. In spite of Pari’s more optimistic manner and tone, I couldn’t help feeling upset for her. I was getting out and she was still in her prison.

I never said good-bye to Manijeh. When she visited she stayed close to Mohtaram as usual, never interacting with me directly. More often, Mohtaram went and visited her at her new home. But now that I was leaving, our mutual hostility was like a crevasse I wished I could somehow bridge.

 

 

 

 

 

A few days before I was to leave, Father sent me to his friend Mr. Boroojerdi, a pharmacist who also exchanged currency. He was going to give me the best rates from
tooman
s to dollars. Father was giving me some money to take along; after I arrived, he would send me pocket money through Parviz, who was going to meet me at the St. Louis airport.

On the way to Mr. Boroojerdi’s office I came across another demonstration. Hundreds of men and, to my surprise, some women, too, were shouting, “You can’t silence us forever.” “Open the jail doors and free our sisters and brothers.” They looked angry, determined.

When I arrived at the pharmacy Mr. Boroojerdi pulled two chairs together and we sat across from each other.

“I’m very glad that your father is sending you to university,” he said. He was about Father’s age, had a pile of gray hair and an erect posture. His manner, in contrast to Father’s, was mild and congenial. “My own daughter studied in London for a few years. Then she returned, wanted to be with us. But this is a terrible place for an ambitious and outspoken girl.”

The demonstrators passed the pharmacy, their voices drowning out ours. “The American Shah is hoarding the oil money.” “Americans, the oil eaters, must leave,” they shouted daringly.

“Americans have been exploiting us and giving the Shah too much power, but still America has a lot to offer a young girl like you,” Mr. Boroojerdi said.

“It’s been my dream to go there.”

As I packed on my last day, rapid, tropical rain poured down. I placed the clothes I liked well enough and the photographs I had collected of family and friends in a large navy vinyl suitcase. For the first time in years I felt lighthearted. A tightly sealed door had started to open and I was finally walking out.

Before I left for the airport, Father came into my room and said, “It’s good for you to go to university.” Then, as if his kind remark had to be followed with a harsh one, he said, “Go, go, you’ve been causing so much worry, trouble.” His face looked haggard and his usually erect shoulders were stooping.

His cold words hit me like pieces of hail. I leaned my head against the wall so that he wouldn’t see my tears.

“I can’t take you to the airport, I have work I must do,” he said. Then I heard his footsteps receding.

Mohtaram started shouting from the other room, “Go pick up Farzin, she’s crying so. I’m exhausted.” I picked up Farzin and, leaning her on my shoulder, rocked her until she calmed down.

I didn’t hear Mohtaram coming in. She startled me with an avalanche of words.

“Each time I became pregnant your father and I searched for names, fantasized about the baby. Would it be a boy or a girl? What would it look like? I prepared a room, set up the crib. Then labor, giving birth, nursing, watching the baby grow. Each child was so different from the others, unique. Life was snuffed out of three of them. Hoveida with his light curly hair, Asghar with slanted eyes like an Oriental, Mina with dimples in her cheeks.”

As she talked the row of thin gold bracelets she always wore jingled on her wrist. “One day Mina became yellow, her face, arms, and legs stick thin. She knew she was going to die. She said, ‘Mother, I’m going to go to another world.’ ”

“You gave me away.” The words just flew out of me.

In the deep silence that followed I could hear Farzin gurgling, the echo of the music from a movie at the Sahara Cinema.

“My dear sister craved a child. And she felt she wasn’t a woman unless she had one. Her husband was so old, maybe it was his fault. But everyone blames the woman when she doesn’t get pregnant. . . . How quickly children grow. You look away for a moment and look back and they’ve grown.” Then, for the first time in the years that I had lived there, she pulled me to her. Holding me tightly, Mohtaram kissed me.

When we pulled apart, I looked at her face. I had a feeling I was seeing only fluctuating reflections of her—who she was, what her true feelings were. I wanted to ask her questions but I was so full of contradictory emotions that I couldn’t talk. I left the room. In a few moments I saw her leave the house, taking Farzin and Farzaneh with her.

In my room I pulled out a photograph of Mohtaram and me that I had packed. I stared at it, riveted. I had been told that the photograph was taken just before my grandmother took me away. In the photograph Mohtaram is holding me, an infant, on her lap. She looks pretty with her hair cut neatly to the nape of her neck, wearing a white dress with a low neck, and white high-heeled shoes. Was Mohtaram painfully disengaging herself from me then or had she always, for some reason, been detached from this one child? If she had fallen in love with me in those early months of my life, would she have changed her mind and not given me to her sister?

Ali accompanied me to the airport in a taxi. The rain had stopped and sunlight glittered at the treetops and on the surface of buildings and houses. I was leaving this home and going where I deeply wished to be.
Free, free, free,
I sang to myself.

I
stood by the window of my room in Green Hall, one of the five dormitories that accommodated Lindengrove College’s four hundred students. It was as if years, not just a day, had gone by since I left Iran and only hours since Parviz picked me up from the St. Louis Airport and dropped me off on the campus in St. James. I was so remote now from my family and Ahvaz. The campus, with its colonial and Greek Revival architecture, wide old shady trees, flowers in bloom in rectangular beds, and sets of swing chairs in different spots, looked glorious in the pale, late-afternoon sunlight. I watched with fascination the girls walking about the campus or sitting on the swings. They reminded me of the women I had seen in American movies with Pari, or on the other side of the river. One girl with curly short hair and dimples was an older version of Shirley Temple. Another, with pale blond hair, the color of straw, and milk-white skin, reminded me of Marilyn Monroe. I couldn’t wait to write to Pari and tell her all about them.

I pulled out a photograph of Pari from my suitcase and put it on the desk. Then I spread the paradise tapestry, which I had brought without its frame, on the back of a chair until I could frame it and hang it on the wall. I didn’t have a good photograph of Maryam—only a small one with her hair covered in a black chador, only her eyes showing. After taking a shower in the common bathroom, I sat in bed and wrote a long letter to Pari and one to Maryam. I went to bed early, exhausted from the eighteen-hour flight from Iran. I fell into a dreamless sleep.

I woke late the next morning and made my way to the college dining room. It was nearly empty. I took some food from the buffet and sat at a table with two other girls. I asked one of them, in broken English, what I had put on my plate.

She stared at me for a moment. “Grits,” she said, pointing to a white lump. Then pointing to a hunk of bread, she said, “Corn bread.”

In a moment they got up and left. I lingered in the large room by myself.

I registered for as many courses that didn’t require fluent English as possible—piano, swimming, home economics. In home economics, the professor taught us how to set a table and seat guests. She also taught us “charm”—not much different from
taarof
in the Iranian culture. We should always say, “Yes, ma’am,” she said, when addressing a woman older than ourselves; we should write a thank-you note to our hostess and it should be phrased in a certain way. At the required introduction to English literature, I could absorb only some of the lecture. The one English course I had taken in high school hadn’t prepared me adequately. Between classes I sat in my room or on a swing chair and tried to understand the assignments and make sense of my notes, poring over my Farsi-English dictionary.

After dinner I went to my room, leaving the door half open to create a draft with the breeze coming through the window. As the evening wore on other students began to come back, holding Cokes or instant coffee, cellophane-wrapped crackers, cheese, and cookies. Some of them stood in the hall in clusters and talked. When the weekend came most of the girls went out together or on dates with boys from nearby colleges. I stayed in the dormitory, studying.

My isolation felt like freedom at first. But soon the reality of the college and my separation from the other students began to hit me.

Beauty contests, mixers with boys the school invited from colleges in the area, sermons in the Presbyterian chapel at which attendance was required no matter what your religion—all just floated around me without meaning. The ideal young girl, one whom the staff and parents approved of and promoted, was a good Christian who dressed properly and was agreeable and sociable. If a student didn’t go on frequent dates with boys she was “antisocial” or “a loser.” If a student had plans with a female friend and then a boy called and asked her out at the same time, she would automatically accept the date and cancel plans with the girlfriend. If a student dated a boy from outside her religion it created problems. Smiling was compulsory. One girl in my dormitory said, “Smile,” every time we passed in the hall.

The pocket money Father sent me through Parviz shrank when converted from
tooman
s to dollars. The other girls flew home often for family gatherings or to reunite with a high school sweetheart. They had their hair done in expensive beauty salons in St. Louis, then went shopping and returned with packages of hats, gloves, blouses, shoes. They often skipped dormitory meals to buy their own food. The girls who didn’t have cars took taxis everywhere, rather than buses, which ran infrequently on limited routes. They decorated their rooms with their own personal furniture.

I was out of the prison of my home, but I was here all alone. I didn’t have easy access to my brothers. I didn’t know a single other person.

 

 

 

 

 

One day toward the end of the semester I found a note from the dean in my mailbox inviting me, along with the three other foreign students on campus, to participate in Parents’ Day. She asked that I stop by her office. The dean was wearing a linen suit, her blond hair set in neat short curls. She greeted me with a warm smile. “I’m telling this to all the foreign students on campus,” she said. “You should wear your native costumes on Parents’ Day.”

I was silent, feeling awkward. I had no costume. She was waiting.

“In Iran, some women cover themselves in chadors, but they wear them on top of regular clothes, similar to what people wear here,” I said.

“Then wear a chador,” she said.

My awkwardness only increased.

“I never wore one in Iran,” I said finally, my voice drowned in the sound of laughter and conversation in the hall.

“I still want you to wear it for this occasion, to show a little of your culture to us,” she said, smiling cheerfully.

To me the chador had come to mean a kind of bondage, as religion had. It felt ridiculous to wear it in this American college. “Maybe I can think of something else to wear,” I mumbled.

“No, no, the idea of the chador is excellent. I’ve seen pictures of women in Islamic countries wearing them. It fascinates me. What is the point?”