Persian Girls: A Memoir (26 page)

They dared to shout, “SAVAK must be defeated,” and they held demonstrations daily, not only in Iran but in America, too—in front of the Iranian Embassy, the UN, and on university campuses, accusing America of betraying Iran’s trust and blaming America for manipulating the political system.

Once, passing through Harvard Square, I came across a group of demonstrators shouting that they wanted human rights, equality, and democracy. A young man was holding a pile of newsletters and handing them out to passersby. I took one and read as I walked on. The article reported arbitrary arrests, torture, and summary executions in Iran.

Since it was impossible to identify all the Iranians abroad who were actively opposed to the Shah’s rule, any young Iranian who went back to Iran was taken into a room upon landing at the airport and questioned for hours. Many of them were detained, their passports confiscated. They were thrown in jail and some were executed.

One day I was reading a newsletter a young Iranian man had handed to me in Harvard Square. I looked at the photographs of two people who had been executed. My stomach dropped. One was the nephew of Ezat Sadaat, the sweet, gentle woman who used to rent rooms from Maryam when I was a child. A few weeks later I read in a similar newsletter that my beloved composition teacher, Mrs. Soleimani, had been killed by a truck while driving to visit her mother. The article maintained that witnesses had seen the truck driver turn aggressively into Mrs. Soleimani’s car, driving it off the road. The article concluded that the driver had to be a SAVAK member. I recalled her sensitive face, her sympathetic voice talking to us in class, encouraging us young girls to develop our minds.

I
n 1977
Foreigner
was accepted by Norton. Simultaneously, the story I had written years ago about Ardavani’s visit was published in
Redbook.

Pari wrote from Tehran.

That year, the Shah released 357 political prisoners. He promised that Iranians could come and go without questioning as long as they had valid passports and visas. This new approach was the result of international pressure. Amnesty International had reported that SAVAK’s history of torture in jail was “beyond belief.” President Jimmy Carter told the Shah that if he didn’t improve his human rights record, U.S. aid to Iran, including military assistance, would be terminated. Carter had begun to believe that Iranian anger at America was due to the brutality of SAVAK, which had been created and supported by America. Indeed, anger at America was fierce and escalating by the day. An opposition group had bombed several international offices in Iran, including the Association of Iran-U.S. Relations, the U.S. Information Office, and the offices of Pepsi-Cola, American Airlines, and Shell. Several American employees were killed by those bombs.

Still, I thought it might be a good time to go to Iran for a visit. Perhaps now the risks weren’t as serious as they were before. Iranians were going back and forth. But then the news of
Foreigner
not passing censorship in Iran gave me second thoughts about visiting.

Several months before
Foreigner
was to be published in America, I received a call from a young Iranian man who had read excerpts of the novel in
Redbook.
He wanted to translate the book into Farsi. I agreed, enlivened by the possibility that Pari might be able to read my novel.

One Iranian publisher was interested. The censorship authorities sent the translator a list of words and sentences to be deleted: words such as “red,” which symbolized Communism, and “black night” and “high walls,” symbolizing repression and prison respectively. I reluctantly made the changes.

A few weeks later, however, I learned that the censors had forbidden the book’s publication. Though by the end of
Foreigner
the protagonist is won over by her own culture, the censors considered the tone of the book “uncomplimentary to Iran.” It depicted a hotel bed with a bug on it, they said, and a dirty street. Such details might indicate that the Shah’s attempts at beautification had failed.

My mind went to Ardavani, the writer whose visit to our house in Ahvaz I had woven into a story. Father had said he stayed on safe ground. I wondered what had happened to him, if he kept publishing or if even his mild books had gotten him into trouble at some point.

I thought of another, older writer, Sadegh Hedayat, I used to read in Ahvaz. He wrote interesting, surrealistic novels and short stories, some allegorical. His books were forbidden at some point because they realistically captured the suffocating atmosphere and the desperation of many of the citizens; I could find them only at Tabatabai Bookstore.

One of his stories, about a stray dog, outraged the regime because they interpreted it as expressing the brutality of SAVAK.

 

 

I was in a cavernous, cement room with a lamp hanging from the ceiling bathing the space in eerie yellow light. I was standing in the middle of the room and a fire was streaming in through a window. A man who sounded like Howie but whom I couldn’t see said, “Jump out the window in the back!” I ran toward the window, but it kept receding . . .

I woke with a start, my heart pounding. Howie put his arms around me, trying to calm me. “You’re having a nightmare,” he said.

T
welve years after I left Iran, my father sent me his first letter. The mere sight of it in the mailbox shook me. He hadn’t communicated with me since that strange and contradictory good-bye in Ahvaz.

 

 

I stood there, sunk in a pool of emotions. So Father had been angry at me all this time. And now he wasn’t. I hadn’t thought about him for a long time, and now I was suddenly forced into it.

Perhaps the risks of going to Iran weren’t as serious and I had fallen victim to my own fears. Iranians were going back and forth now and only a small number got into serious trouble. I called the Iranian Consulate in New York, where we were living now, and an official confirmed that the Shah was indeed guaranteeing safe return to Iranians abroad. He said, judging by the description I gave him, my novel wouldn’t get me into trouble, even though it had been censored. What about the fact that I had become an American citizen? Though America accepted dual citizenship, Iran didn’t. He said that the rule wasn’t enforced, and many Iranians who went back and forth had dual citizenship. He informed me that I needed a permission letter from my husband to enter and leave Iran, unless my husband was accompanying me. He added ruefully, “Needing a permission letter for a woman to travel is certainly an outdated law; parliament argued against it, but it’s still in place.” My husband thought it would be healthy for me to connect with my family, since he saw his own regularly now.

But what finally persuaded me to go was an urgent letter from Pari. She said she needed to talk to me in person. Howie and I scheduled the trip for October. Father and Mohtaram would travel to Tehran and stay for two weeks. Father had a legal matter to attend to in Tehran during that period. We would stay with Pari.

At some point we decided not to take Leila. The separation anxiety we expected from her was counteracted by fear of complications in Iran, which wasn’t completely alleviated by all the assurances. We thought if this trip went smoothly we would take her on subsequent ones. Our friends in Cambridge, Irene and David, invited Leila to stay at their home and Leila was excited about spending that time with their daughter Susie.

The night before leaving for Iran I slept in fits and starts. Sleeping was as bad as being awake, filled as it was with anxious dreams.

 

 

 

 

 

When we landed at Mehrabad Airport, the official at the passport-check booth scrutinized the photographs on our passports, looked at our faces, and then at the sheets of paper spread in front of him to make sure we weren’t on any lists of anti-government suspects. It was only after we picked up our luggage and headed toward the waiting area that I was able to breathe freely. Hundreds of people stood behind a glass partition, waiting to welcome their families and friends. I spotted Pari, Mohtaram, and Father standing in the crowd, waving to us.

As we entered the waiting area Father took me in his arms and kissed me. Mohtaram wrapped her arms around me as if there had been no history of trouble between us. Then Pari and I embraced and kissed with tears of excitement filling our eyes. None of us said anything; we only looked at each other as if a shyness had settled on us. Father shook hands with Howie and said, “Welcome,” a word he must have learned for the occasion. He had more gray in his hair but Mohtaram looked almost the same as years ago. Pari’s good looks hadn’t diminished but I immediately noticed that her face had lost some of the vibrancy that used to illuminate it. Farzin and Farzaneh had stayed behind, as had Manijeh. Ali had remained with Farzin and Farzaneh.

Father had rented a limousine and we all piled in. As we headed to Pari’s house, we passed the Tower of Freedom, a tall limestone arch that flared out at the sides. It was built in 1971 for the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Iranian kingdom. As the driver zigzagged through the heavy Tehran traffic I looked out the window at women walking by in fashionable clothes—some in miniskirts—side by side with women wearing chadors. Ads for Pepsi-Cola and Disney were everywhere. There were discotheques and boutiques selling imported clothes; skyscrapers loomed everywhere. Red Mercedes taxis, red-and-white double-decker buses, almost every variety of foreign cars, raced by alongside Iranian-made Peykans. The snow-capped Alborz Mountains surrounding the city created a serene contrast to the jumbled and hectic atmosphere. Father tried to communicate with Howie in French (French had been a required language when Father attended law school in Tehran and Howie had studied it in high school).

In a short time, we were at Pari’s house. Mansour opened the door and greeted us warmly, using the
taarof:
“It’s an honor to have you here in our modest abode. It’s below your level but please make it your home. I’m here at your service.” He had an earnest, welcoming face.

There was an absence of symmetry in Pari’s house, which I liked. Not only was each room a different size, they were different shapes, as well—one oval, one rectangular, one L-shaped. Each was painted a different color. The large windows in every room provided a view of the mountains. The pool in the courtyard shimmered in the sunlight. An ornate turquoise minaret and the dome of a mosque rose beyond the courtyard wall.

Pari had a private room on the second floor that was kept shut. “I keep it closed because Mansour thinks it looks childish,” she said. “I suppose it is.”

Inside it was almost a duplicate of her room at home in Ahvaz, with posters of actors and actresses covering the walls. The movie stars were no longer Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor but Meryl Streep, Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty. A pile of
Movie Star
and
Cinema News
magazines lay on a table. Next to them was the large red-covered album of movie star photographs from years ago, some of which we had bought together from the shop on Pahlavi Avenue. A pile of
Zane Rooz
(
Today’s Woman
) magazines lay on another table. The covers showed photographs of Queen Farah or Googoosh, a famous singer, or other women celebrities.

“Pari, I still remember the first time you showed me that album. It was so exciting.”

“Oh, dear sister, it’s such a treat you’re here with me and we can talk like the old days.”

I picked up a framed photograph of a young boy with dark brown hair and eyes and a gentle, appealing face.

“He’s three years old there,” Pari said. “Eleven now.”

“He looks a lot like you.”

“He belongs to me. I want him back. I’m still trying and nothing yet after all these years. I dread that he’s being raised by that lunatic father.”