Camelia (10 page)

It was after nine when the doorbell rang. It was after nine when the doorbell rang. I grabbed my schoolbag and bounded down the stairs. Outside, on the street, I saw my mother, facing away from me, and she was dressed exactly as she had been four years earlier. Black coat and skirt, black festooned lace veil, and a black snakeskin handbag in her hand. A gentle snow had started to fall and was swirling around her, landing softly on the ground. I was afraid to come any closer, but when she heard my footsteps she turned. Her eyes were blood red. She gazed at me and burst into tears.

 

I didn't have any black clothes in my wardrobe for Uncle Mussayeb's memorial, so I wore dark blue. In my aunt Turan's house, there was an undulating sea of people dressed in black. It was the sixth
day after my uncle's death, and this gathering marked the eve of the final day in the weeklong funeral. My mother, Kati, and I had visited the home every day for the past week, as is traditional in Iran. My father was staying over with his sister for the whole month, to keep her company in her grief.

A photograph of my uncle Musayyeb smoking a pipe had been placed in front of the door in the middle of a wreath of roses. He had died of heart failure in Nurabad. His royal colleagues were there, the ones who hadn't fled and who'd been spared from the vengeful wrath of the revolutionaries. The whole family. Those we knew and those we didn't know. A dignified old man with a cane and formal dress was standing next to my father and my uncle's brothers, greeting the guests. “Who is that?” I asked. My sister whispered into my ear, “That's Agha-ye Vaziri, Uncle Musayyeb's old colleague. He hasn't been paid his salary in five years, and he's waiting to get it from the crown prince.”

My cousins, Mahta and Gita, were two perfect ladies, greeting and kissing the mourners with solemn faces. Gita had been married the year before, and Mahta had just finished high school. They knew how to delicately salt a cucumber and how to descend the stairs in style and how to gracefully cross their legs. They had practiced walking with books balanced on their heads. They were raised to be courtly, but courtly days were gone. Mahta, with her white face, used to always say as a child that she'd marry the Shah's son. But where was Reza, the Shah's son, today? Was he thinking of us? Mahta kissed Kati and me, and then she said, “Children in the back room.”

Every day that we visited that whole week, the children were all stuck in the same back room. If I ventured out to talk to my mother or father, Mahta or Gita would stop me and bring me back again. I was tired and bored as I watched Bita, my aunt's youngest daughter, playing with a toy that looked to me like a makeup kit for Barbie. When I was her age, I would also carry my Barbie dolls
from room to room in a blue basket, happily telling myself stories. My fat cousin Omid, with his drooping stomach, had been kept content with all the meals coming from the restaurant Sarv. Sinking his teeth into some chicken, he asked us skinny girls to give him our leftovers.

Then I suddenly remembered something and snuck out once more to the front. All the lights were off and a
rowzekhan
was singing in anticipation of the seventh day after the passing of my uncle. I stumbled through the commotion, tripping over the feet of weeping women.

“Today is my birthday.”

“What?” my grandmother asked softly.

Straining my voice, I said again, “It's my birthday.”

When the singer came to sensitive verses and sang “father” or “orphaned children,” the sobbing would swell. It was January 16th, and everyone had forgotten me, again. My grandmother blew her nose and whispered, “Happy birthday, but you see, your uncle is dead.”

“Zari dear, these are Musayyeb's things. I don't know anyone who could use them. If you know someone in need of them, take them as a
kheirat
for Musayyeb.” My widowed aunt was packing up the house to move to a smaller apartment on Kucheh-ye Mahmudiya. Their large old house on Khiaban-e Fereshteh had a warm, carpeted basement that made a perfect hiding place when we'd play and an old courtyard with jasmine bushes clustered around the trunk of a pine tree. But I didn't like their salon. It was dimly lit with thick velvet curtains. Even thinking of it gave me nightmares.

After Friday dinners, my aunt would summon the spirits. My father called her “Turan, the ghostbuster.” She said that on Friday evenings the spirits were free. She'd lay a sheet of paper covered
with drawings and inscriptions flat on a small table. It must have been some kind of conjuring spell. Then she'd turn off the lamps and light a candle, and Mahta would send the children to the back room. We could hear my aunt's calm, strong voice.“Oh spirit who art here in this room, we greet you in peace. Oh spirit who art here in this room, kindly give us a sign.”

We would sneak out to watch from behind the door of the salon, but when the tea glasses started to quiver on the table, my blood would freeze, and I'd run back before the spirit could appear in front of our eyes.

My father told us that my aunt was moving because the house wasn't safe without Uncle Musayyeb—that they were afraid of thieves. But my aunt told my mother and me that she'd heard the sound of the hooves of djinn and that at night they'd hear the rattling of glass cases coming from the salon.

I swallowed hard.

“Why? Are the spirits you called still in the house?” I asked. My aunt narrowed her eyes and said, “Evil spirits dwell in houses. Haven't you heard of evil spirits? You can't reason with them. And besides, this house has a very long history.”

My eyes popped out of their sockets. What if a spirit should seize me one night by the neck when I went to use the toilet or get a drink of water? Then what would I do?

My aunt turned to my mother. “Zari, that old pine tree in the courtyard? Thirty years ago a little boy hung himself from it. He lived here with his grandmother.”

“Who told you that?” my mother asked casually.

“I've heard the sound of weeping and moaning coming from the courtyard at night for years. My next-door neighbor Khanum Tasheyyud will back me up. She knows!”

I asked, “The tree with the jasmine sprouting up around it? A kid . . .”

My aunt interrupted me. “That is precisely why spirits are attracted to this house.” She pointed out a thick book on the table with the title
Speaking with the Spirit World
and a ghostly figure on the cover. “I want to establish contact.” My aunt went on with excitement. “For thirty nights you must grip a pen and press its point onto a sheet of paper and close your eyes and concentrate. Then you can ask questions, and your hand will start to move by itself, guided by the spirits, and they will answer.” Then she winked at me and said, “Your little cousin Bita is reading the book, too.” She smiled, and I could see her sharp silver-plated teeth.

When we got home, my mother began sorting through my uncle's things. I asked her, “Maman, is Aunt Turan telling the truth?”

“About what?”

“About the spirits in the sideboards of their house . . .”

My mother interrupted me. “Your aunt is a little cuckoo.” She pulled a pair of leather shoes out of some yellow tissue and stared at them. “These shoes, they're the shoes that . . .”

“Did you know my uncle? Agha-ye Musayyeb Vafa'i? He was your father's personal calligrapher.”

I was in the United States, in Virginia, interviewing Reza Pahlavi. For me this was the most important question in the world. As a child, I had stood in front of his photograph at the museum at the palace at Sa'adabad and asked, “Do you remember us?” In the picture, Reza was a little boy in shorts standing in front of his toy car in the gardens. Today a young man in a white button-down shirt sat across from me. I had waited years and traveled a long way for this moment. I had waited ages for his answer. Shouldn't there be someone who hadn't forgotten us?

Reza politely stared at his hands and tried to give a sincere answer. “Yes, yes, I do remember something. But I don't remember his face very well.”

I pressed the button on my tape recorder and started the interview for my newspaper. The next day in New York I put a new photograph of Reza Pahlavi in an envelope for my mother and wrote: “To all those who have waited. To Uncle Musayyeb and his waiting brown shoes. To my father who sleeps peacefully in section seventy of Behesht-e Zahra, waiting for the mullahs to fall. To my uncle who died suffering on the staircase up to the roof, his eyes burned by the sun. To those who were never able to tell us when these dark days would pass. To my childhood spent in hope and longing. And Mother, to your youth, full of regret. This is Reza Pahlavi today.”

This room was not your fate
When you were in love
With the window and the sparrows
In the cool summers of the peach.

Your fate in August is a shadow
With a book on your childhood knees.

—Mandana Sadeqi

 

 

I stood at the mirror murmuring a poem by my friend Mandana. She had written “Camelia in Chains” for me while I was in prison and had mailed it to my mother about two months ago. It was the first thing my mother handed to me when I came home. Throughout our adolescence, Mandana and I went together to poetry festivals in cities around Iran. She was from Abadan, in southern Iran, and we had met in 1990 at the poetry and short story evenings held
by the Club for Creative Literature and the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Mashhad. I applied a thick layer of green eye shadow. The color suited me, and I opened the Chanel rouge case. My face was pale. I put mascara on my eyelashes and lipstick on my lips. I recited her poem to myself:
Sahm-e tu az mordad, sayeh-i ast / Ba ketabi be ruye zanuvan-e kudaki
. . . (Your fate in August is a shadow / With a book on your childhood knees . . .).

In my heart I said to Mandana, “I remember that child with the book on her knees. And today, again, I am going to the Club for Creative Literature . . .” But my appointment was not to read poetry. That morning, the phone had rung, and I'd picked up the receiver. A familiar, firm, and measured voice had said, “
Salaam aleikum
. Don't forget—one o'clock this afternoon, at the club.” Then a dial tone had emanated from the phone in my hand.

I had left prison only yesterday, looking like a hairy monster—my eyebrows had grown together like when I was in grade school, while I lost half the hair on my head. My face was covered with red splotches, and none of my clothes fit. I'd actually gained weight as I lost muscle, sitting alone every day in my cell. I went directly to the hairdresser with my mother. She didn't want to show me in that state to any guests who might stop by. The staff of the beauty salon shrieked when they saw me but then tried to pretend I hadn't changed all that much. They wept with both happiness and disbelief, and the other customers couldn't understand this emotional outburst. But after two hours of frantic effort by experts, I looked only a little better.

The day before my release my interrogator had come to set our “appointments” on the outside. And to deliver his ultimatum: I would be released on the condition that I sign my
tak nevesi
and begin spying for the Ministry of Intelligence. It seemed that he'd made me scrawl my signature thousands of times. As he reminded
me of our dates, I just nodded my head. I was burning inside. As always, I was seated facing away from him, my eyes blindfolded. But he could see my hands as I signed.

“Good. I'll see you the day after tomorrow. Bear in mind that you must observe your
hejab
well and definitely come wearing a chador.”

“At the ministry who shall I say I am coming to see?”

In a mocking tone, he said, “Who said anything about the Ministry of Intelligence?”

Meekly I answered, “Anywhere you say.” I kept my tone quiet, acting as if I were confused. And I honestly was confused—I expected I would be made to prove myself and that the first place I'd report would be the central office of the Ministry of Intelligence. I'd written a role for myself to play, and I told myself that I would have to keep it up until I was truly free. My freedom meant more than a conditional release from Towhid Prison. I believed I could somehow keep playing the role until I was a free journalist again, until I could live free from threats to my safety and to the safety of my family. And pretending I was in love had inspired real love. In my heart, I wasn't ready to give up the role. I didn't want to become a spy, to criticize and investigate my colleagues. My stomach turned at the thought, yet I agreed to everything. I had entered into an agreement not to be “me.” I melted at the sound of my interrogator's voice. I let him mold me into a new person, the person he wished me to be: a soldier waiting on the orders of her commander.