Wedding Song (26 page)

I returned to Iran; I had no choice but to go back and face the family once more. I had a round-trip ticket in my hand and a renewed passport. At worst, I could take the flight back, I comforted myself, as I watched the ocean disappear underneath the Iran Air flight home.

As we reached the mountainous region bordering Iran, a returning student asked, “Isn’t it wonderful that it’s so easy to get an exit visa? They’re really trying to make it easy for students to return for visits. I sent my passport to the embassy in Washington and had it back in a week.”

I checked my passport—no exit visa.

“Do you have your grades?” The same young man asked me.

“No, what for?”

“You can’t get a return visa from the American embassy without them.” He looked at me with critical eyes.

I felt stupid. I was stepping into a trap. My heart pounded as the passengers broke into singing a nationalistic hymn. We were flying over Iranian airspace. I was light headed, my breathing labored, the mountains closing in on me. At the time, I didn’t think it important that the returning passengers had chosen a song about their love of Iran, not the national anthem that glorified the Shah.

The Tehran airport was filled with jet-lagged passengers, some welcomed by the entire extended family, grandmothers covered in
chador
s, little girls carrying flowers, young women in mini-skirts, men in ties and suits standing stiffly and holding back tears of joy. The modern conveyer belt went round and round with our luggage, but two porters kept the passengers away, grabbed all the suitcases, piled them on top of huge carts, and collected tips before handing over the bags. Exhausted from the long trip and irritable from jet-lag, older male passengers with designer ties and younger ones in American blue jeans screamed and shoved their way to their suitcases. It wasn’t proper for a woman to squeeze herself between all those shouting men fighting for luggage, so I stood on the side, confused, helpless, and dazed. On the Iranian soil for just fifteen minutes, my reserved nature was back already. “I need a man!” I thought, surprising myself by acting like the vulnerable woman that I had left behind a year ago. I was relieved to see my father walking toward me.

Baba had aged and looked fragile. I felt guilty for having been the cause of his worries. He hugged me and wouldn’t let go, sobbing in front of the gawking crowd as if I had been resurrected from the dead. If I were so alive, I thought, why did I feel so dead inside? What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I be happy like all the other students laughing and hugging their families? I had missed my father, the familiar sounds and sight of the country I had tried to escape from, but, at the same time, I didn’t want to be back. A woman and a Jew, I didn’t belong to my country of birth. I didn’t want to go back to a house that had never been home.

To my surprise, when I returned to Shiraz, the entire family was at the house, aunts, uncles, and cousins, their arms open in a warm welcome. Being my usual cynical self, I wondered who had arranged it and what their reward was. The women ululated as if I were a bride coming to my husband’s home for the first time, but my mother stood in a corner, pale and teary. I took a few big steps, hugged and kissed her. I had missed her vulnerable look. I felt guilty for failing her with my return, for I had freed a part of her too by my escape. I had done it for both of us.

Pregnant a year earlier, Maman now held my baby sister, whom I was seeing for the first time. Suffering with chronic high blood pressure, she had been forbidden by her doctor to have another child. I could have lost her with this last pregnancy. I wanted to be alone with her and my siblings, who had grown and changed in my absence, but the extended family pushed me toward the kitchen in an orchestrated manner.

I stood on top of the high step leading to the sunken kitchen. There was a calf lying on the floor, its legs held tightly by four men. Our eyes met, big black eyes, scared eyes, and I felt an affinity with the familiar look. Time stretched. We stared at each other’s eyes as a hairy arm reached over with a sharp knife and sliced through the long neck that was pulled back tightly. Blood gushed out and showered the walls, the ground, and my shoes still dusted with American soil. I held my neck tight, trying to push the words out:
no, no
, but my vocal cords would not obey.

Kilililii
, women ululated.

My mother giggled over my shoulders. “I told you she wouldn’t like it,” she said to my father.

I knew that I was given the greatest honor, a man’s honor, and that Baba was trying to make up for an incident the previous year. At the same ceremony, performed for Jahangeer who was about to get married, I had stepped unknowingly into the kitchen at the moment of the sacrifice.
When my grandmother screamed that I took the blessing away, I left teary under the disapproving gaze of family members. A year later, my father was trying to make up for his silence and to buy me back, but I didn’t want the blessing.

I felt as if the event was an omen, and that my fate was sealed with that of the animal. I forced myself to watch the butcher as he blew air under the calf’s skin with a wooden tube to separate it from the flesh. My grandmother supervised the distribution of pieces. The liver went to an uncle who had married my parents, the kidneys, the heart, and the brain to various aunts. With each piece leaving, I felt as if my own body was being torn apart. We kept the legs and some of the muscles.

My mother made kabob for us, but I couldn’t eat. It was cannibalism, eating my own flesh. My grandmother broke the legs with a hammer, took the hooves off, and made my favorite stew. My broken legs; I couldn’t eat.

My father walked around with his hands clasped behind his back, smiling. We would have a visitor the following night, a suitor, and he would be the one. American-educated and handsome, he was the right man. “Wait till you see him,” he said with confidence. “He’s been anticipating your arrival for months.”

I went to the bathroom and threw up. The man came the day after with his father and uncles. My father, uncles, grandmother, and I joined them, sitting around the salon upstairs in stuffed chairs. My mother offered fruit. He obliged, took an apple, and slowly, methodically, peeled it in one piece to show his mastery, his good manners, and then he offered me a piece. I thanked him and put it down on a plate.

My father offered him his black-labeled Johnny Walker on ice and a piece of salted cucumber. “
Besalamati!
”

“To your health,” every one responded.

I refused a cold drink. I took a cup of tea and set it on the table. This wasn’t my life. I wasn’t living inside my body. I watched myself from above, my hair in a short bob around my face, hands folded on my lap, eyes fixed on a windowpane, an artificial smile on my lips, politely answering questions. Who was that woman? Was it really me?

That summer, I never unpacked my suitcase. The second day I was back, I opened it, took out a pair of jeans and a T-shirt to wear, left it closed in the corner of the room, and went to visit a Jewish friend, Taraneh. My
body language must have changed, since most people on the street mistook me for an American. Some tried their English on me. Others spat. My friend and I walked down the street, stopped by a café, and asked for Pepsi.

The waiter spat on the floor. Didn’t we know it was made by the Bahais? he asked. He didn’t sell anything made by the Jews or Bahais—such filthy people! He looked at us suspiciously as if trying to figure out if either one of us were a non-Moslem.

I asked my friend about the political situation in Iran. In the fall of 1974, the year before I left for the United States, the uprising against the Shah’s government had been apparent. The engineering students had thrown two soldiers from the Shah’s elite army who studied at Pahlavi University out of the library window. Another four students were blown to bits as they assembled a bomb in their dorms. Army officers, suspected of disloyalty to the Shah, disappeared silently. I assumed that the situation had worsened during my absence from Iran, but Taraneh said, “Everything is fine.”

In the library riot of 1974, I had seen Taraneh in the crowd as well. But as I left that day, horrified, she stayed behind in a show of solidarity. This wasn’t a matter of religion, she had told me angrily the following week, calling me a coward. She argued that as Jews we had to protest the Shah’s brutal rule.

I had thought Taraneh out of touch then as she was now, two years later. I didn’t think noticing a change in people’s behavior was purely my sensitivity. Such displays of open hostility and religious bigotry would not have happened in this particular neighborhood. Anti-Western and anti-Semitic sentiments weren’t unusual in a religious section of town, but they were surprising in the heart of shopping and entertainment areas, where restaurants relied on money spent by the Westernized segment of the community, where most shopkeepers were Jewish. I wondered if it was possible that the Shah’s government had lost its tight grip on the people, enabling them to openly display a hatred that had been just underneath the surface when they were afraid of SAVAK, the Shah’s secret service listening to their every single word. As Jews, we had always avoided involvement in political issues, but political was quickly becoming personal in our lives.

As my friend and I said goodbye at the side of the road, a cyclist passed closely. Eyes bulged out, he extended a hand to touch us, lost control of the bike, and brushed an old woman draped in a black
chador
. The woman
screamed at us, “Whores!” She shook her covering as if trying to shake off the touch, an invisible filth. “Look at you, walking around without
hejab
, stirring up the men, and now I am defiled because of you.” She spat at us before turning her back, still mumbling curses.

I told Taraneh that the situation seemed to have worsened in the year I was gone, that the smell of a revolution was in the air, and I asked her if she could see the change.

“Not really,” she said. “You’re sensitive because you just returned from America.” She was almost apologetic as if it was her fault for choosing that particular café.

When I returned home from visiting Taraneh, I tried to convince my father to sell everything and move. I told him that a revolution hid in the wind, promising to churn the hatred of the Jews deep within the Iranian psyche. I pleaded, “Sell the farm, the house, get your money out of the bank, take the family to Israel or America before it’s too late.” My Moslem friends had changed during the last few years, I added, electrified with the anticipation of a holy man who was going to lead them to create a just country according to the laws of Islam, where they thought every Moslem was going to live in financial equality and freedom. There would be no room for the Jews under this new government. There had been warnings from the Israeli embassy; he knew that, I reminded him. I was going to leave and he should too.

Baba laughed. Did I think he was a child, an inexperienced youth? His beard wasn’t white from working in a flour mill, he told me. He had seen riots and uprisings, and eventually he had seen all of them squashed. He had lived through pogroms in his childhood, famine and war in his teenage years, a Marxist revolt as a young adult, and hatred and humiliations during the Arab/Israeli wars. “This too shall pass,” he said. “These are good times for Iranian Jews, never better. Take my word for it,” he told me.

“I don’t want to be here,” I told him. “I’m leaving.”

“Why do you want to be a wandering Jew?” he asked. Those years under Mohammed Reza Shah constituted the best of years, the pinnacle of the Iranian-Jewish revival. “Where would your younger siblings go,” he asked, “if you, as the oldest child, set such an example for them? Africa? China?”

Baba had arranged another date for me. He was being very modern, letting this man I didn’t know take me out to a restaurant.

I sent Norman a letter asking him to send me my transcript so I could obtain an American visa. He called a week later, but my father picked up the phone and hung up without talking. From my mother’s giggles and innuendoes, I suspected there had been letters for both my father and me. First I looked in the garbage and then broke into my father’s briefcase to find them. I wrote Norman that I couldn’t get out. I explained that the American consul wouldn’t see me because I didn’t have my grades and that my every movement was being watched.

That week, my father’s favorite suitor showed me the house of his dreams. We were going to live with his parents, his two brothers, and their families in a house with four separate apartments and a common yard. My father was excited. I cried. The man took me to a fine restaurant. I drank the water, moved the food around the plate, and worried that I couldn’t secure a visa, that my ticket would expire soon.

My father demanded that I should pick one of the suitors. “These are all the men left that you haven’t said no to,” he told me.

My mother came to me with red eyes, a bruise on her arm, and a shaking voice. “Who do you think you are to keep yourself above everyone else? Is it good to live so far away from all your family? Is that what you want? Do you see what has happened to me without the protection of my family?”

She wouldn’t look into my eyes. Her words weren’t hers. I wanted to remind her that she was the one always telling me to leave. Why wasn’t she standing by me now that I was struggling so hard to fulfill her dreams of escape? My hands clenched tight into a fist. I wanted to beat her chest, to bruise her breast so badly she would never heal. I wanted to hit her, to scream at her for sacrificing me to a marriage custom that had already taken too many victims. I wanted to beg her, “Please help me even though your mother didn’t help you.”

But in the end, no words came out of my mouth. My fists relaxed. I turned my back. I had only myself now, me and the ghosts of all the women whose stories were embedded in me.

As soon as I returned to Iran, my grandmother and I fell into our old pattern of mutual love, dependence, and underlying resentment. Being the
force behind the ideal of family togetherness, she criticized my choice to leave more than anyone else, often calling me irresponsible. She told me that I would be the cause of my father’s death. Insignificant gestures enraged her. Whenever I took my shoes off at the door with one resting on top of the other, she screamed, “Line them up! Have them face the room.” She warned, “Otherwise you’ll have bad luck. You’ll become a wanderer.”