Persian Girls: A Memoir (30 page)

And what about Bijan? Another hearing has been set up by my lawyer,
Pari wrote in a letter.

 

 

 

 

 

Then it was too late. The American government refused to grant visas to any Iranian not seeking asylum.

This, after President Carter allowed the Shah, who had lymphoma, into the United States to undergo medical treatment. The Shah had been traveling from country to country—Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico. Iranian students interpreted this gesture by President Carter as part of a ploy to restore the Shah to power, as the CIA had done in 1953. On November 4, 1979, the situation came to a head when students, numbering anywhere from three hundred to two thousand, and calling themselves the Imam’s disciples, gathered at the American Embassy in Tehran. Finding a basement door open, they slipped inside and seized all the Americans in the building. The embassy staff quickly tried to destroy all the secret documents, but they were captured before they finished. Sixty-six were taken captive, including three who were found at the Iranian Foreign Ministry. After blindfolding the hostages and holding guns to their heads, the students marched them outside. With the secret documents in their hands, the students cried, “We have all we need from the nest of spies!” The crowd around them roared its approval. Other students spray-painted anti-American slogans on the walls of the embassy, in both English and Farsi: “Nest of Spies,” “American Murderers.” Then the students took the Americans back inside and locked them up. As a condition of the prisoners’ release, they demanded the Shah’s return to Iran to stand trial.

This was the Iran Hostage Crisis. The American government retaliated by applying economic and diplomatic sanctions against Iran. President Carter ceased importing Iranian oil and a number of Iranians living in the United States were expelled. He froze Iran’s multibillion-dollar assets in America, further damaging the relationship between the two countries. Hatred of Iranians flooded the American news. Caricatures portraying Iranians as barbarians appeared on walls all over America. Some Iranians were evicted from their apartments by landlords. There were incidences of American high school students attacking Iranian classmates—in one case an Iranian student was reported to have died.

Winter turned into spring and the hostages were still kept in Iran. Frustrated and outraged, Americans urged Carter to take stronger action. Once the Shah’s course of treatment was finished, Carter, eager to avoid further controversy, pressed the former monarch to leave the country. The Shah went back to Egypt and died soon after.

As the Iranians showed no signs of releasing the hostages, Carter finally decided to take a chance. On April 11, 1980, he approved a high-risk rescue operation called “Desert One.” Though the odds were against its success, the president was devastated when the mission had to be aborted due to three malfunctioning helicopters. When another helicopter crashed into a transport plane during takeoff, eight servicemen were killed and three were injured. The next morning Iranians broadcast footage of the smoking remains of the rescue attempt, to them a stark symbol of American impotence.

In the United States, the yellow ribbons everywhere and constant media coverage provided a dispirited backdrop to the presidential election season. Throughout 1979-1980, the American public watched footage of Iran on a daily basis. News programs tallied the number of days Americans were held hostage. Nothing else seemed to matter to Americans, and America appeared to be a helpless giant.

During this period I found that my friends who had never been particularly political suddenly became patriots and attacked Iran. Even though their anger at the hostage takers was justified, they lumped all Iranians, myself included, with them. My husband tried his best to be fair, but I was sensitive to his remarks, and, to me, everything he said sounded slanted in favor of America. When I gave readings from my work, people with no interest in fiction came to ask questions about Iran and Iranians. One magazine, which had published several of my short stories as well as a condensed version of my first novel, rejected a story because it was “too sympathetic a portrait of Iranian characters.”

My daughter came home from school one day looking sad; she asked me if she could change her name to Cindy. One of her classmates had asked her where she got her name, Leila. My daughter told her it was an Iranian name. Her friend made a face at the word “Iran.” I didn’t know how to distill the complex political situation into terms that a seven-year-old could understand.

Disasters for Iran were piling up. Saddam Hussein, capitalizing on the broken alliance between Iran and the United States, pressed Iran to relinquish its half of all rights to Shatt-Al-Arab. He wanted to reclaim the channel up to the Iranian shore. Iran insisted that the line running down the middle of the waterway, negotiated in 1975, was the official border. Saddam Hussein also perceived Iran’s revolutionary Shia regime as a threat to Iraq’s delicate Sunni-Shia balance. Khomeini, already bitter over his expulsion from Iraq in 1977, responded in anger. Saddam ordered the invasion of Iran in September 1980.

I thought how strange and ironic that the fetid Shatt-Al-Arab, which had caused so much heat and dampness in Ahvaz, was now a major focus of the dispute between the two countries, with much more terrible consequences than what we used to complain about.

I had only sporadic, indirect contact with my family in Iran. Someone would tell someone else and gradually the news would be relayed to me by a phone call from Great Neck or LA, where many Iranians had fled.

A man or woman would call the apartment and ask for me and say, “I must tell you . . . ,” or, “It’s sad news but I feel obligated to tell you . . .”

One afternoon I had a phone call from a woman in LA who introduced herself as Shaheen. She said she was an old friend of my family who knew not only my parents but Pari and Mansour. She had fled Iran just before Khomeini took over. We commiserated for a while over the state of things. Then she hesitated.

“I have bad news,” she said finally.

My heart sank. What could be worse than all we had talked about? “Your father passed away. It’s already a few months but I just heard it. May his soul rest in heaven. He died peacefully in his sleep.” She elaborated that he had had pneumonia for a few days and then one morning Mohtaram woke and found him still and cold and his eyes wide open. Shaheen added, “He must have died of grief—over all the distance from his children, the devastation of the country.”

I was overwhelmed by a rush of emotions. Father’s caring reception when we visited had brushed away all my anger. He had had so much power over me, had forcibly changed the course of my life, but ultimately much of it had been for the good. I wished I had been able to have a real talk with him, and now it was too late.

Shaheen called a few months later to tell me my grandmother had died of “old age.” She had had a fever for a few days and then died at home. I thought of her sweet wrinkled face the last time I saw her, years ago when she came to Ahvaz for a visit, and the youthful, loving face of her earlier years. She was the one who, so long ago, took me to Maryam.

I received a letter from Maryam, who had been lost to me for a long time, as she kept moving from place to place in towns with important shrines. She said because of the war between Iran and Iraq, Iranians had been expelled from Karbala. She had moved to Dubai, and Mohtaram, lonely and devastated after Father died, was joining her. Both Farzaneh and Farzin were married. Mohtaram had found a village man with limited education to marry Farzin. All her daughters were now married.

D
espite rumors that Carter might create an “October surprise” and free the hostages before the election, negotiations dragged on for months. Carter’s all-night effort to bring the hostages home before the end of his term fell short. On January 21, 1981, the day of President Reagan’s inauguration, the United States released almost $8 billion in Iranian assets, and the Iranians released the hostages. On that same day, now former President Carter went to Germany to meet the freed hostages on behalf of the new president. It was a difficult moment for him, fraught with emotion.

Not long after the hostages’ release, I woke to a loud siren from an ambulance speeding to the emergency rooms of Mount Sinai or Lenox Hill hospital, an ominous and depressing sound I never got used to. I was alone in the apartment that night. Howie was in Boston, and Leila was staying with a friend. As the sirens receded, the phone began to ring. I picked it up and a woman said in Farsi, “Nahid, this is Azar.”

“Oh, Azar, nice hearing from you. Is Pari with you?” Azar was the friend Pari had talked about in a letter, the one whose sister told Pari about Taheri’s criminal past.

“I’m afraid not,” she said, her voice trembling. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.” There was a pause and then the sound of weeping. Her next words went through me like shards of glass. “I’m so sorry, Nahid, your dear sister, my dear friend, had a terrible accident. She lost her balance and tripped down the stairway of their house. It was too late by the time she reached the hospital.”

I began choking on my own breath. I couldn’t say a word.

“It happened a month ago—no, to be exact, five weeks ago, but it took this long for me to get your phone number from Mansour and then get through the international lines. Are you there? . . . Mansour was away for a few days. I was with her, so were Zohreh and another friend, Laleh. It took a long time for the ambulance to come.” The line went dead.

The phone rang again and again, but each time as soon as I picked it up we got disconnected. After trying many times to reach information in Iran, I found there were more than a hundred Mirshahis listed. I didn’t have Azar’s address. I knew she had moved out of their house across from Pari’s.

I had an impulse to call my husband but didn’t. It was as if talking about it would make it all too real. Still the reality was there, and came to me in disturbing images. I saw two medics, both female, shrouded in black clothes, coming to Pari’s aid as she lay at the bottom of the staircase. I imagined them listening to her pulse, her heartbeat, covering her with a sheet and carrying her to the ambulance waiting outside.

Lost her balance.
Something ice-cold slipped into my crowded thoughts: the accident must have been intentional. Pari so closely identified with Furugh Farrukhzad, and she believed that the poet killed herself because she couldn’t bear her situation in life. I’d seen Pari’s perspective on her own life grow darker and darker. No hope. No escape. No passion. I could see her standing at the top of the steep stairs, looking down and telling herself,
Jump, and that will be the end of pain.

I don’t know how long I sat there, feeling broken into pieces. Neither do I recall how I got from the bed to the living room couch. I was filled with dread and doom. And then I remembered everything. Through the window I could see rain falling and thought, in a strange, hallucinatory way, that the rapid raindrops were my own tears. How was it possible that I would never see Pari again? At some level of my existence, in my fantasy, I had always hoped one day, somehow or other, she and I would live close to each other and resume our old intimacy. Now that dream was completely shattered.

 

 

 

 

 

I couldn’t find Mansour’s work number and I didn’t know the name of his company. Mohtaram was still with Maryam in Dubai, and I had no address or phone number for either of them anymore, as they moved around a lot. My relatives in Tehran either had no phones or had changed numbers. I no longer had addresses for most of them. I talked about Pari’s accident with Parviz and Cyrus; they were both shocked and grief-stricken, but how could we offer solace to one another or find answers to our questions about what really happened? I had no idea how to reach Manijeh. I suddenly had an urge to talk to her after all these years, partly to find out if she had been in contact with Pari in recent months.

In the days that followed I played and replayed in my mind my conversations with Pari when I had visited—the loss of Majid and of her acting ambitions, Mansour committing her to that sanitarium, and her dimming hope that she would ever gain any rights to Bijan or even see him.

For so much of my life I had found solace in writing. Maneuvering details into a coherent story had a calming effect. But I couldn’t write about Pari’s death. In fact I couldn’t write about anything. It was as if a part of me had died with Pari. I thought, Pari, too, had always needed the world of the imagination, and she had, step-by-step and to an increasing degree, been deprived of that world. That deprivation cast a darker shadow on everything else in her life. She wasn’t allowed to give her dissatisfactions and disappointments, her losses, shape and meaning and so she became their prisoner.

I must have looked strange to everyone around me. My daughter told me more than once, “Mom, you’re so zonked out.” How could I explain to this little girl, who had led a life so different from her mother’s, what was pulling me inward? In fact she knew very little about my culture. She had never been to Iran, never met Pari, Maryam, or my parents, and didn’t speak a word of Farsi. In my attempt to protect her from the harsh reality of my own culture, I hadn’t introduced her even to the good things.

A friend, Julie, suggested I see a therapist. But how could a therapist help me change the facts of what had happened? Did I even want to stop grieving?

When Azar called again, I told her I would go to Iran to see her and Zohreh and Laleh, who had been with Pari at the time of the accident, and perhaps other people who had been with her close to the end. Then I could also go to Mansour’s office and see him. I knew its location, as Pari had pointed it out to me on a walk. The only way I could cope with feelings of loss was to find out more about what had happened, to get closer to the truth of the accident. It quickly became an obsession.