Wedding Song (19 page)

My parents reminded me years later how I went home everyday crying and not wanting to go back to school. Eshrat tortured me all year, pinched me whenever she thought I was taking too much room, stole my sponge cake, and hit my hand when I was writing and ruined my handwriting. I was afraid to complain. Although a
verag
at home, I was timid and quiet at school, fearful to voice my discomfort. My parents didn’t try to find the reasons for my uneasiness. Once more, I learned not to count on them for protection.

“You used to be a good student,” my teacher admonished me one day, “look at you now. You’ve become just like Eshrat and I was counting on you to change her!”

The second Jewish girl in my class, Golee, was a short, chubby girl with light, curly hair. Her father was also a physician. One day, as we lined up with our folding cups for milk, courtesy of the United States government, she started bragging about how her father loved her and always wanted to be the one to put her to bed. He caressed her back, and, every night before he left, he put his hand in her panties, massaged her private parts, and licked his fingers before leaving. She was surprised to find out that none of our fathers did that. Her story circulated around the school during recess and made her our pastime activity. We laughed and made her cry. She refused to go back into the classroom.

The principal called her older sister and demanded that Golee stop telling wild stories that corrupted the other girls, or else she would be expelled.

Golee’s sister came to a group of us screaming from the top of her lungs: “You cruel, hateful, nasty kids. My sister would never say such lies. You’ve made up the story! You’re evil.”

I joined the others to answer her accusations with my nervous laughter. For the rest of the time I was at Mehr-ayeen, Golee never spoke to anyone her age, and walked around the yard alone at recess. Her only companion was her sister. I always wondered if she told her parents about the incident or if she too had learned to keep quiet.

I transferred to a new school the following year after we moved out of the
mahaleh
. My father rented the upstairs of our new house to an American family to make ends meet. My uncle’s family, my grandmother, my unmarried aunt and uncle, and my family lived downstairs, occupying as much space as the two foreigners, a husband and wife, did on the second floor. I saw Mary visiting our neighbors one day as I sat on our outside steps. I said “
Salam
,” timidly.

“
Boro gom sho
,” she said with her American accent. She told me to get lost, assuming that I was pestering her like many Iranian kids who often followed the Americans on the streets, sometimes harassing them. She had never noticed me in her first-grade class.

Fariba and I never made friends. I didn’t try and neither did she. She was of a different breed. She came from an educated family who traveled abroad often and had a nice home in an exclusive part of town. She probably was told to keep clear of those who came from the ghetto. She and I crossed paths in high school and again in college, where I struggled with English, which she spoke beautifully. She also knew French from her many trips to Europe. I was still puzzled. How did a Jewish family become so wealthy and cultured? How was she ever going to find a Jewish husband from her social class? I heard that she married a Tehrani man after immigrating to Los Angeles.

As for Golee, we saw each other often at the synagogue and later in college. She always avoided me, never making eye contact.

Midway through my first year at Mehr-ayeen, my father learned about a piece of land for sale in a faraway neighborhood. A well-known man, the owner had minor financial problems and needed to sell the land quietly, preferably to a man of little influence, who would not be among his circle of friends. My father and uncle Morad shared a small shop, making jewelry. The land was an impossible dream, but one they could not relinquish. They mortgaged the house and the shop. They borrowed money from the bank, family, and friends. The land was theirs. Building a modern home on a corner lot in one of the most progressive neighborhoods became their daily joy and pride.

By the time I was ready to register for the second grade, the house was half finished. The masons sat on the street chiseling stones all day for the
outer facade of the house. The construction of a metal roof kept the main welding shop in Shiraz busy for months. No more clay roofs for us. No more leaks. No more patching and thatching. But, in the excitement, no one thought of slanting the roof to make the rain and snow run off easier. We still had to hire workers to shovel the snow off the flat roof every winter. Also, no one envisioned the heat absorbed by the metal roof during the hot summer months when the temperatures rose to dangerous degrees.

A market place in the
mahaleh. Picture courtesy of Dr. Laurence D. Loeb.

My father, however, foresaw the school problem for me and found one closer to the new house, hoping that we would move in the fall, before school started. That was not to happen. I had to commute to the distant neighborhood every day, and the hour-long walk made it impossible for my mother or father to accompany me both ways. My father walked me to school in the morning. He asked Mehdi, an apprentice at the shop, to pick me up at twelve o’clock.

I didn’t mind going home with Mehdi. He invented funny riddles to make me laugh. He brought dried peaches for me, knowing that I was often starved on the long walk, and made a little game for eating the peaches.

There was a lazy boy who sat under a peach tree every day, he told me. Instead of climbing the tree, he laid underneath and screamed: “
Hooloo beoft to galoo
, Peach, fall in my mouth.”

One of the many alleyways in the
mahaleh. Picture courtesy of Dr. Laurence D. Loeb.

“Did it work?” I wanted to know.

“Close your eyes and open your mouth,” he said. “Yell ‘
hooloo beoft to galoo.’
”

When I did as he said, he put a small piece of the dried fruit in my mouth. It was delicious, but it was always too little.

“More please,” I begged, closing my eyes and yelling the rhyme.

“Okay, but you have to give me a hug and a kiss first.”

In the space of the five months he took me home, I gave away lots of tight hugs and kisses for the taste of the dried peaches. Although I found the entire thing a nuisance, I never thought much of it.

Once a man saw us in an embrace in the quiet alleyway leading away from the school. “Who are you, little girl?” he asked.

Mehdi said, “Don’t tell him. He is a stranger, a Moslem.”

But I was in a good mood, giggling and chewing the fruit. I told him my name, and when he said he wanted to buy some jewelry from my father, I gave him the directions also.

My father asked me that night if Mehdi had been bothering me.

I said “No.”

Was I sure, he asked me.

Terrified, I denied any problems. Mehdi had made me swear I would deny the Moslem man’s accusation or else I would get in big trouble. Baba picked me up from school from then on. About a week later, I came home to find him holding his head in his hands, looking exhausted. I felt as if I had been a deceitful daughter, a liar. So, I told him the truth.

“Okay, forget it,” he told me. He then walked away absentmindedly, leaving me confused and disappointed.

Later that day, I learned that Mehdi had slipped while moving heavy containers of acid to wash the floor. The acid drenched his clothes, burning much of his body. The other workers rushed him to the hospital, but by the time they managed to secure a taxi and drive through the crowded streets filled with cars, bicycles, mules, and people, he was too far gone.

I felt guilt-ridden. Had I told my father the truth earlier, maybe he would have been fired and not died such a horrible death. Maybe if I hadn’t told the stranger the truth, Mehdi would not have died. For some strange reason, I carried the burden of his horrible end as if I had committed an unforgivable sin.

He visited me in my nightmares, skinless, dripping with acid and blood, offering a dried peach in his deformed hand: “Open your mouth. Close your eyes:
Hooloo beoft to galoo
.”

1
. Quoted also in Laurence Loeb’s
Outcast
.

The day finally came. We were moving out of the
mahaleh
to our new house—only thirty minutes from the Shah’s residence in Shiraz, five minutes to the medical school. We were moving to an all-Moslem neighborhood.

There was total chaos in the morning as I prepared to leave for school. I would have preferred to stay at home, to be a part of the hubbub and fun of the move.

No! No one needed a child around. Not even if I could help with my little sister. No one was going to pick me up from school that day either. Could I find my way home?

Of course I could; I was a big girl; and the school was only a fifteen-minute walk to our new address. I was giddy with excitement. We were finally “moving to the street,” a term used to describe those who left the ghetto.

After school, I joined the students lining up to march to various neighborhoods. I jogged gently in place, shifted my weight from foot to foot; the waiting was unbearable.

The teacher in charge of organizing the groups counted the students until she reached me, calling me by my last name as it was the custom, “Calm down! What are you doing here? Where is your father?”

I convinced her that we had truly moved—and yes, I knew how to get to the house after the line crossed the main street.

I was hungry and couldn’t wait to have my first lunch in the new house. Uncle Morad was leaning against the door frame as I approached and was
surprised to see me there. I was lucky, he told me, that he had stopped by to wait for someone from the city to connect the water and the electricity; otherwise, I would have come to a locked house. He had to go back and help with the move; he smirked and told me that since I was there—such a big girl and all—I would be in charge of the utilities connection.

I watched him as he walked away rapidly in long strides, and the smaller he became, the larger the house loomed over me. Our new house was a duplex, separated by frosted, sculpted glass doors that led to a winding staircase. I ran around the large rooms, enjoying the feel of the open spaces. I jumped up and down with no one to tell me to stop, screamed and enjoyed the echo of my voice bouncing off the bare walls. When I ran out of games to play, my stomach reminded me that it was past lunch time and there wasn’t even a drop of water in the shiny clean pipes. Lunch was the biggest meal of the day, and the
sofreh
was usually spread on the carpet by the time I got home from school. But in the new house, the pantry was completely empty, shining brightly from its new coat of white paint.

The man from the water department finally came, and, although he told me it was okay to stay, I waited outside as he connected the water inside the house. But no one from the electrical company showed up that day, and, as the sun languidly dipped behind the buildings, imaginary demons hovered around me. Spooky, dark thoughts occupied my mind: What if the family decided not to move; what if they had forgotten me?

I heard the distant voice of the
muezzin
chanting the prayers at dusk. I went outside and sat on the front steps, but kept the door slightly ajar, ready to retreat and lock it if a stranger approached me. The light bulbs on the wooden beams lining the street came to life with a yellowish glow. I was afraid of the unfamiliar street, yet more fearful of the dark, empty house. Panic found its way into my stomach and bounced. I wrapped my hands around myself, my head on my knees, and played with my braid the way I used to rub my grandmother’s before I went to sleep.

I sat there for maybe an hour before the neighborhood kids discovered me. First, there was a young girl with short, straight hair, from the house around the corner. She stood afar for a few minutes until she was joined by another one with curly hair and a darker complexion, then another, and another. When a large group had gathered, they finally walked over, examining me, eyeing me with curiosity.

Was I really Jewish? one asked.

How did they know that, I wondered, and did I match the description their parents taught them, the specifications they had learned about the Jews? They circled me with wondering eyes. Their suspicion of the Jews wasn’t surprising to me, because the first day at my new school, I had caused a near riot as I had tried to drink from the water spouts in the yard. A few girls had knocked me over the head, protesting that they used the water to make themselves
taher
, to clean before saying their prayers. If I made the waterspouts
najes
, they wouldn’t have clean water to purify themselves. Other girls had joined the group, deciding if they should designate one spout for the Jews. Yet others thought the entire thing nonsense. I stood there paralyzed until an administrator broke up the group. She told us that it was unsanitary for anyone to put her mouth to the spout. “Make sure you drink out of your hand,” she added, and then walked away, not quite satisfying those who believed that my touch alone defiled the water source.

Now that I was meeting Moslem girls from my new neighborhood, I wasn’t quite sure if I should be happy or afraid.

Did we use the blood of Moslem kids for our Passover crackers, one wanted to know.

I shook my head, not knowing from where the outrageous idea had sprung.

A debate broke out between the ones who were certain that I was lying and were cautioning against getting too close to me, and those who didn’t think a child could be that harmful, especially when they outnumbered me. We finally spoke about other matters. Which school was I attending? Where were my parents? How many people in the household? They too had more than their immediate family living with them, although the size of my family sounded a bit unusual to them. To take care of one’s grandparents at home was customary—but aunts and uncles living in the same house?

We talked a bit longer from a distance. I assumed that they worried that my touch would defile them. I was afraid to ask for a piece of bread or a glass of tea. What if the food wasn’t kosher? What if they poisoned it to kill me? Would they allow me to touch their utensils anyway? They surely feared that I would make them
najes
.

At some point, when the speculations had been exhausted on both sides, when our patience for arguments had ran out, they looked at the
sidewalk in front of the house and thought it unusually wide—a perfect spot for hopscotch. The first girl, Zari, ran home and returned with a piece of charcoal. The second girl, Paree, found the perfect stone. We played game after game, laughing and screaming, fighting over nothing but the scores, and the fairness of the judgment: What if someone’s foot had brushed the line? Or if the stone was still inside the square when it touched the line?

By the time the two trucks overloaded with carpets, pots and pans, bedding, and tired faces showed up in front of the house, there were two separate games going on with half the neighborhood children clapping and encouraging the kids hopping on one foot, hitting the stone from one square to another.

My family, horrified to see so many Moslem kids in front of the house, shooed them away. Dismayed at the drawings on the new sidewalk, Morad sent me to find a rag and wipe them out. “The last time! The very last time I’m going to see you bring all those Moslem kids to our home; they will become brazen and learn our comings and goings and rob us clean,” he spewed the words at me.

My hunger came back. I was starved now that the fun was gone and the regular life of discipline and chastisement had restarted.

My sleeping baby sister in her arms, my mother giggled in her usual style of exonerating herself from responsibilities of adulthood. She used the plural “we” instead of the singular “I” to communicate a participatory neglect. “
We
kept asking what had happened to Farideh-oo,” adding the usual Shirazi accent of “oo” at the end of my name to ensure my third person position, as if I were not in the room.

No, there was no food in the house; they ate before leaving; they didn’t know where anything was. Who told me to come here instead of going home anyway? They had been so busy—such a horrible, taxing day!

I didn’t ask why no one had been waiting at the school to take me home, if I were supposed to go to the old house. They had forgotten about me. It was as simple as that, and no one was willing to take the blame. So in the end, I was at fault; I had worried them; I wasn’t at the house to help at least with the baby. How dare I ask for food when they were so busy moving the furniture with no light to guide them through the house? Someone asked, “Do you ever pay attention?” Another voice chimed in from within the darkness that I must have been too busy making trouble with the neighborhood kids to notice the man from the electrical company.
Now someone had to scramble for candles. “When are you going to grow up?” yet another relative grumbled from behind the shadows the candles had etched on the walls of our new house.

I didn’t dare ask why Morad hadn’t mentioned me. I went through the packages as they were being unloaded and found a small snack bundle in the corner of the room that my grandmother had put aside for herself. I tore through it, greedily eating the leftover bread and cheese from the cloth wrapping as I sat on the bare floor in the dark, wishing for a hot cup of tea.

I was the only Jewish student at my new school until many years later when my sister Nahid was old enough to enroll, and the only Jewish child in our neighborhood until my friend Mahvash and her family moved to a nearby street. I had no choice but to make Moslem friends, well aware of the restrictions from both my family and theirs.

Baba, so suspicious of everyone outside the immediate family, couldn’t understand my need for friendship. He himself had been scolded by the members of the Jewish community after his father’s death whenever he had “selfishly” made plans with a friend for a picnic, or if he had strolled down the street with one. Was that a time he could afford
rafigh-bazi?
The Persian word has no synonym in English. It means the game of having friends, as if they were an addiction like gambling or smoking hashish. In return, my father tried his best to educate me in the lessons he had been taught himself, the codes of community life that he had been subjected to and had come to believe.

The more Baba watched me, the more secretive I became. Once my father observed me happily walking home with a few neighborhood girls, hopping at times, laughing at their jokes. He was incensed.

I defended myself: “It’s not that I wanted to make friends with these girls, but they were going my way …”

“Then, just mind your own business and walk on the opposite side of the street. I don’t want my daughter to run like a farmer’s girl after the chickens. Lower your head and walk modestly. No hopping, no laughing like a fallen girl.”

I told my friends that I had to separate myself from them on the street leading to our house, knowing that my father stood watch from the second-floor window, smoking a cigarette.

Baba’s mistrust of the Moslems had a valid foundation. Not only had
he witnessed the raid against the
mahaleh
as a child, but he had also seen his father beaten bloody as they walked home from the synagogue one Shabbat morning. The ghetto alleyways being muddy, they had decided to walk on the street although it was forbidden for Jews to be outside the ghetto on rainy days. My grandfather, the chief rabbi of the community, respected not just by Jews but by many Moslems as well, looked pathetic and humiliated—his caftan torn, his
kippa
a toy for the thugs, his long white beard smeared with blood and mud. My father had been too young and too frightened to protect him against strong and angry young men.

Baba had seen unprovoked violence against the Jews, who were hated for being meek and poor, yet despised when wealthy and strong. The week we moved into the new house, our neighbor’s son raised a bright red, glass swastika in his bedroom facing our house. We couldn’t escape its colossal presence: at night, it shone under a display lamp, and during the day, it glittered in the sunlight—sickeningly beautiful.

My friend’s grandfather routinely dumped their garbage by our sidewalk, and one summer night, as we slept in our backyard, someone set fire to our pine trees. We could hear steps receding and loud cackles of laughter, and my father was convinced that Zari’s brothers were behind the destruction.

I had my own experiences as well. The
hajee
, a title the grandfatherlylooking grocer had taken after pilgrimage to Mecca, rubbed his hands, sticky from handling dates, on mine as he passed a bag of lentils, making me feel queasy. I was disgusted at myself for being lazy and not walking the extra twenty minutes to another shop. But then, a Jewish merchant had also tried to put his hands under my skirt when I was looking at socks in his shop. I didn’t tell my parents of either incident. I knew that the basic nature of people was the same beneath the divisive layers of religious beliefs. Baba himself had told me that whereas close family members left him and his young siblings to starve after his father’s death, a Moslem man trusted him with his gold when he was a young, inexperienced jeweler, and saved the family from hunger.