Wedding Song (20 page)

I didn’t find it possible to build a cage around myself. Instead, I found it ironic that my father, who struggled and sacrificed so much to get us out of the ghetto, was obviously missing the security of its tall walls and insulated community, where all faces were familiar, where he didn’t have to keep on a mask of politeness, humility, and even servitude at all times to
present the neighbors with the opposite of what he thought they expected of a Jew.

In our new neighborhood, my mother and grandmother stayed home to cook, clean, and receive visitors, mostly family and old neighbors from the ghetto who were curious about the house. Their outside interactions were limited to the area shopkeepers. Maman came back complaining every day. The man at the fruit stand didn’t allow her to select her own because his customers wouldn’t buy
najes
food if her Jewishness rubbed off on the fruit; he put overripe peaches and rotten apples in my mother’s basket. The baker gave her leftover
naan
that no one else would take, and since everyone in the neighborhood had maids who stood in the long line for bread three times a day, the humiliation was heightened for her. She was lower than the Moslems’ servants in stature.

My experience differed from the rest of the family, since I had a balance in my relationship with the Moslems. Abuses did happen, but so did friendship, love, and kindness. Members of Paree’s family were devoted Moslems. Unlike our chaotic house, hers was always clean and orderly. Persian carpets covered the entire large common room; a brass samovar with a pot of tea placed on top stood at the furthest corner of the room from the door. Over the mantle, the usual portraits of the Prophet Mohammed and Imam Ali hung above the family pictures. Koranic verses embossed in silver and framed in Shiraz
khatam
hung on the wall asking for Allah’s protection. Paree’s father bowed to me and never looked at my face, protective of my modesty. Her mother wrapped herself in a
chador
even at home, never saying anything but kind words, asking about my family’s health, praying for good grades for me, offering a glass of sour cherry
sharbat
, chai, and sugar lumps with rice cookies.

One day I visited Paree, knocked at the door, and impatiently waited for her to open before someone from our household could see me visiting.

“Shhh!” Paree asked for my silence as she moved aside to let me in. Her mother was in the middle of her noon prayers. We took our shoes off and tip-toed quietly to the corner, sat cross-legged, and waited for her mother to finish. She had a large white kerchief wrapped around her head and fastened under her chin with a safety pin. It covered her shoulders and most of her back. Bare-footed on top of a prayer-rug, she was now bending, now kneeling and putting her forehead on the prayer stone at the head of the carpet. She looked serene, content, at peace, the opposite of my
mother, who was filled with repressed anger, hatred, unhappiness, and feelings of abandonment bubbling like molten lava inside her.

I wanted Paree’s mother to be mine.

I had imagined us having such freedom in the new house, without the eyes of the community scrutinizing our every move. I had envisioned open spaces for me and my family in a big house. Today I can say that I never lived in a place more confining.

When the house was under construction, I went with Baba often to check on its progress. Fascinated, I watched the Moslem workers from nearby villages who had moved to the site, working, sleeping, and eating around the foundation of our house. They sat on the ground chiseling stones all day with long nails and hammers; fine stone dust covered their beards and eyelashes and gathered in clumps around their mouths, where they had coughed it out.

A bare-footed bricklayer hauled buckets of mortar up on a pulley; yet another man, with his legs hanging on either side of the wall, rested the bucket next to himself, scooped and slammed the mortar on the wall with a spatula, at which point the man at the bottom threw him a brick. He grabbed and set it tightly on the mortar. They were quick, efficient, and precise, building a wall around my house to give us our own private space, to free us from the claustrophobic ghetto.

As the house came together, I was ecstatic about my room on the right side of the foyer, about which I bragged nonstop to my unbelieving classmates. One day, his pencil mustache twitching, Uncle Morad smirked and pointed it out to me on the blueprint, “That’s
your
room. How do you like it?” I looked at him, then at my silent father, and again at the small space on the paper, and jumped up and down in delight.

Finally, Uncle Jahangeer heard Morad building up my expectations and told him to stop teasing me. My room was the only toilet downstairs. Morad was right, however, to tell me that the bathroom was mine, since I had the responsibility of scrubbing it every Friday until I left Iran in my senior year of college.

None of us were destined to have a room of our own. The dining room with no windows was Uncle Morad’s, soon to be married and his wife
added to the crowded house. A small room was my family’s. My parents slept on the platform bed, my sister and I and soon two brothers slept on mats strewn on the floor. A large room connected with a smaller one accommodated my grandmother and her two youngest children, Uncle Jahangeer and Aunt Fereshteh—my uncle slept in the back room, the two women in the front room that doubled as the living quarters and dining area.

Years later, we accepted the modern idea of using the large foyer as a common room, conquering our distaste of being so close to a lavatory, but my grandmother cringed whenever someone used the toilet as we lounged in the hallway. She believed a toilet belonged in the backyard, far away from where we ate and slept.

Shortly after we settled in the house, the realtor found an elderly American couple to rent the second floor and help pull us out of the huge debt that my father and uncle had accumulated. The separate quarters with their beautiful curved staircase, large glass windows, living and dining rooms that stretched the entire length of the house, terrazzo floors, gold-embossed handmade plaster moldings, and wooden and glass built-in china cabinet seemed to have been designed from the beginning with the idea of someone else living in it. My father had also had a
toilet-e farangee
, a Europeanstyle toilet, built to replace the hole in the floor. There was already a bathtub installed in the bathroom with a hand-held shower that didn’t cease to amaze us. I used to walk around the tub and touch it, enjoying the feeling of being so close to such unbelievable, exotic luxury. Unlike the mudcovered, charcoal-burning stoves in the gloomy kitchen downstairs, there was a gas stove upstairs, and a window opened conveniently into the dining room to pass the food. Our American neighbors brought a dishwasher, a washing machine, and a dryer along with their truck and large boxes of canned and packaged food from the States. They also had enough communication gadgets to fill an entire room. They ran a large antenna from the attic to the roof and spent much of their time at night listening to the ham radio, whose muffled beeping traveled through the walls and could be heard on rare occasions, when the house was not noisy and chaotic.

We didn’t have a telephone until I was a college freshman. Uncle Beejan, who was doing a medical residency in the United States, periodically sent us tapes in additions to the letters that were always read and reread, kissed, and stored neatly high on a mantle out of respect. Since we didn’t have a tape recorder either, the
farangee
s lent us one. They excitedly let us
use their machine and listened with us. We briefed them on the messages my uncle so painstakingly addressed to every single person in the house, including the children; therefore, it was fortunate that when he decided to speak to his sister, Aunt Fereshteh, in English our tenants were attending a dinner party. “Are the Americans spies?” my uncle asked.

Spies or not, they exposed us to a taste of American life. We never used their names to talk about them; we rather called them
Aamrikaioo
, the Americans. The tall man, whose robust figure dwarfed the shorter Iranian men, lined up Baba, Morad, Jahangeer, and even some of the neighbors around the large traffic circle in front of the house and taught them the basics of baseball. They stood there with their large leather gloves, learning to throw and catch balls. Self-conscious, Baba chewed his mustache. The neighborhood kids stood around with their mouths wide open, ready to run after each stray ball; the women giggled and pointed to anyone who missed.

When our American neighbors sprinkled salt on the sweet watermelon, we made faces: “Yach, yach!” They boiled their corn instead of roasting it: “Ooo! How nasty!” we all agreed. They pulled some of the flowers out of our flower beds and planted tomatoes that grew large and fleshy, which they reaped when still green. They wouldn’t listen to us that they would taste better ripening on the vine; instead, they lined them up on their window sill. My grandmother thought that maybe those strange
farangee
s ate them green.

To our dismay, they bathed every day, wasting our precious resources. Yet most of us avoided their touch. They didn’t wash their bottoms in the bathroom as Iranians did; instead, they wiped themselves. How disgusting! Americans held their dogs, the most defiled animal in an Islamic country, and even kissed them. They smelled funny. As Jews, we felt hurt whenever Moslems considered us
najes
, impure to touch because of our religion. Nevertheless, it was easy even for me to go along with the societal beliefs and to think of Americans as
najes
and cringe if touched by them.

Every Wednesday, our entire family visited my grandmother in the courtyard. If the weather was mild, they sat in a circle on a Persian carpet on the bricked-backyard. I played hide and seek with my sister and ten cousins. We chased each other with a water hose, threw shoes at each other, which had to be hunted later from underneath the bushes, from the tops of trees, and from inside the neighborhood yards. The women took
turns smoking a waterpipe and cracking watermelon seeds. On these occasions, the Americans stood on the balcony watching us and laughing. They showed us their generosity by throwing candies or boxes of animal crackers down like the king and the queen of the Mardi Gras from a float, watching us scramble, push, and shove like animals for a piece of America.

I don’t remember much about my sister’s birth. When I was four, I once saw my mother folded over the flower beds in the morning, vomiting mushed bread and cheese that smelled like rotten pickled apples. I ran to my grandmother and screamed, “Maman is dying!”

She laughed.

Then, my sister Nahid was born, but I couldn’t play with her as I had hoped. She was back in the hospital with a severe infection shortly after her birth; and I was jealous because Maman spent her time with the newborn. I don’t know who took care of me then—probably my grandmother. I don’t know if I cried, if it mattered to me that at a time when I rarely saw my father, who worked into the late hours of night, my mother was not around either. Early in the morning, Maman left for the hospital on her daily visits to Nahid. Upon returning, she cried softly as she cooked, and she wouldn’t eat her lunch because a big lump was always blocking her throat. Unaware of the seriousness of my sister’s illness, I kept away from my grieving mother as if she were a stranger, afraid to enter her morbid sphere.

A deep sadness hung in the air. The birth of a second daughter wasn’t a joyful occasion to begin with in a culture that prized boys. My sister’s illness that would lead to a physical imperfection added to the agony of our parents’ lives. A female’s destiny was marriage, and what did a girl have to offer but a good name, beauty, and physical flawlessness? Later, as an adult, I learned that my mother had miscarried a child late in her pregnancy after I was born. “A son!” she sighed. She thought hard work, bending and carrying heavy objects contributed to the death of the fetus. Sometimes she blamed the miscarriage for my sister’s problems; maybe her womb hadn’t had the strength to produce a healthy baby. But then she said that it was her fate. Later, the family discovered that my mother’s brother, Shimon, had undeveloped arms, a hunched back, and crooked short feet. My maternal
grandmother Touran blamed Thalidomide for the deformity. But my father’s family and even my father blamed my mother’s genes.

The mausoleum housing the tombs of Esther and Mordechai in Hamedan, my mother’s birthplace
. Picture courtesy of Farsinet.com.

Later, as an adult, I learned that my mother had insisted on giving birth to this child at a newly built hospital to avoid a dirty midwife. But, ironically, as the result of unsanitary conditions at Morsalin Hospital in Iran, Nahid suffered from osteomyelitis, which began from an infected umbilicus at birth. Poor diagnosis and medical mistakes exacerbated the infection that had nested in Nahid’s hip. She was given massive doses of antibiotics to help fight the infection, followed by surgery to drain the affected area. Despite the efforts, the top of Nahid’s right femur was eroded by the infection, which would leave her with a hanging hip and a severe limp.