Wedding Song (28 page)

Sick and depressed, Bibi was taken to a doctor, who was horrified to see her breasts lumpy and bruised. “Cancer!” he told the family. That week, he admitted Bibi to the hospital and surgically removed both breasts, with which my great grandmother, the beautiful Bibi Zaghee, had last nursed her favorite daughter.

When Khanom-bozorg finished her story, I was numb. At the same time, I had an uncontrollable urge to see my great-grandmother’s room once more. I wasn’t being logical. Visiting people was understandable, touring the rubble of a room wasn’t. My parents didn’t understand my request. I didn’t quite know myself why I needed to visit a room that I had dreaded as a child. My grandmother’s story had jolted me. Hurting inside, feeling trapped, I sensed that I couldn’t go forward unless I stepped back
in time and understood the women who had come before me. I needed to touch Bibi; to touch a woman who I was told—over and over—had once loved me unconditionally. I had to connect my own pain with hers.

I knew Khanom-bozorg was doing me a big favor by arranging my visit to Bibi’s room before it was renovated to sell the house. Since both her mother and brother were dead, the experience had to be painful. We entered the small courtyard. I remembered it as the place where my grandmother’s brother, Daee-bozorg, had erected a large
tanoor
every year before Passover to bake
matzah
for the community. The uneven ground, once covered with broken pieces of bricks, was leveled and tiled. No more ovens were going to be built there, and Daee-bozorg’s kind face would not greet the nieces and nephews every Passover with the promise of a whole egg baked on a
matzah
, a treat my sister Nahid and I gobbled in excitement. There was a buzz around the Jewish community about imported machine-made
matzah
, every piece looking exactly alike, square with sharp edges. Daee-bozorg’s round, uneven, unleavened bread was going to be a part of history.

I climbed up the narrow stone stairs, trying to keep a balance on their slippery surface. Where once there had been hand-made grooves, the stairs were now worn out like the shells I had seen on the shores of Virginia Beach, smooth from the constant beating of the waves. From the open hallway, I could see the heavy wooden door. I pushed it with both hands and secured it with a stone, the way Bibi kept it open to get fresh air. The room wasn’t as dark as the one in my memory. The bedding was removed, but a small charcoal brazier, where Bibi heated her food, made tea, and warmed the room in winter stood on tiny brass feet. Seeing the empty ledge built into the wall, I remembered how Bibi’s bottles of herbal teas, lighting oil, and
aragh
once sat on its stone face, their shadowy figures frightening me.

Walking across the dirt and stone floor, I smelled my great-grandmother. I broke down and sobbed loudly, frightening everyone. The women ran upstairs to see what was going on. I was mourning. I hadn’t had a chance to grieve for Bibi when she died; now I couldn’t restrain myself.

As I stood in Bibi’s room, I could feel her presence, her suffering and guilt for having sacrificed her daughter to a tradition that was too strong for the mother to have resisted. I felt too the spirit of my little great-aunt
Bagom-jaan, her fear on the night of her wedding, and her pain as well. I said a silent goodbye to them, stepped out of the room, and closed the door behind me.

There was a party in our house for the double births of my first brother, Freydoun, and my aunt’s son, born around the same time. Khanom-bozorg (standing) gives orders to the cook, working in a makeshift kitchen in the backyard. Bibi suns herself in the right corner. The woman sitting in front of the cook is my grandmother’s sister Khatoon-jaan
. Picture courtesy of Nahid Gerstein.

I don’t know at what stage in my life I found the traditions unacceptable and why. I often wonder if my mother’s position as an outsider and her perpetual unmet desire to leave influenced me to feel detached from life around me, from her, and from the customs as an extension of her bondage and possibly mine.

Even now, in the twenty-first century in the United States, my younger cousins and their children who escaped from Iran after the 1979 Revolution, abide by the cultural rules of the country they abandoned. An educated cousin married a woman his mother found for him in Iran and brought over. Repeatedly I hear from friends and family that with the arrival of each new group of Iranian women, men rush to marry them before
“their eyes and ears are opened” to the freedoms of the West. Some of my young educated cousins have been here since childhood, don’t read or write Farsi, don’t remember their country of birth, yet wait for their parents to find them proper husbands. The men may date Americans but mostly marry Iranian women whom their parents recommend.

Naturally, in the summer of 1976, my father and the rest of the family were shocked at my disobedience and single-mindedness at daring to demand control over my own life, and I still don’t know how I became so stony, unyielding, and defiant.

A month after my return to Iran, my father called for a family
moshaverat
, the gathering of elders to make important decisions. I served them tea and cookies as my grandmother, uncles, and father sat around the room reviewing my suitors. Then my grandmother asked me to leave. In a rare show of disagreement with his mother, probably to prove his flexibility and modernity, my father asked me to stay, to review and evaluate the suitors.

“They’re all wrong,” I told him.

My father chewed his mustache, always a sign of his anger. “Not the right answer,” he said. He wanted to know what kind of information I had deciphered from them; how their family lives were; how much money they made; what kind of cars they drove; how much education they had.

“None,” I said. “I didn’t ask those questions.”

“Do you think that there will be a man created to your specification?” He added that he couldn’t lift his head in front of the family out of shame, the shame of having a daughter out of control. He turned red in anger. When chewing his mustache didn’t comfort him enough, he bit into his knuckles.

My grandmother agreed that I was disrespectful to my elders, destroying myself, losing my charm and beauty by not eating and by crying excessively. “Look, what you’ve done to yourself! To your father. Is it worth it?” she asked.

My father must have noticed my gaunt look for the first time because his facial muscles relaxed and his eyes softened. In a gentle tone, he explained, “You are too young to understand what you’re doing. You have to respect the wisdom of the elders, who have seen the world. If you disregard our advice, then you will have to accept the consequences. Your stubbornness will make you
siah-bakht
, will leave you open to misfortunes.”

His words had the opposite effect of what he had hoped for. I shrugged my shoulders and sighed. “Can I leave now?”

He then interpreted a passage in the Talmud, “If you mock your traditions and be disrespectful of us, your children will do a hundred times worse to you. Is that what you want? They will pay for your misdeeds with their own terrible kismet.”

I shivered. Those words chilled me to the bones. I never forgot them. I never could erase their impact. Throughout my life, whenever my children suffered, his prophecy crossed my mind.

After the lecture, my father ran a few other names by me: a doctor, an engineer, a businessman. “When is a good time for them to meet you?” he asked.

“Whenever,” I said. I knew that if I didn’t agree to at least meet these men, the family would find more humiliating ways to present me to them. I didn’t want to repeat the matchmaking episode when I was told to walk in front of the
khastegar
’s family like a model on a runway. I had fought back then by rejecting my family’s set up and protesting to the intended suitor. Now, two summers later, I seemed to have lost the spark to fight back, to oppose my father openly. I ate less after meeting each candidate; the food stuck in my throat and I had to cough it up. After my grandmother’s warning about my colorless cheeks, my father watched my eating the way he had counted every mouthful when I was a chubby teenager. Finally one day, when he pushed the food toward me, I lost my temper.

I had become soft-spoken, never disagreeing, and even covered my mouth with the palm of my hand if I laughed to suffocate its sound, to be lady-like. Now I screamed gibberish as I threw plates of food against the walls and the floor. I pulled the tablecloth from underneath the serving dishes and tore it. Bowls of rice and stew flew in the air, spewing red and green sauces on the Persian carpets. I watched myself shout like a madwoman and wondered how I could have all that sound in me. Somehow all the words that I had shoved back inside, all the words that I never uttered for fear of being
verag
and immodest, poured out in one long spasm of incoherent language. My father, uncles, sisters, and brothers watched my outburst silently. My siblings’ faces turned pale. My sister cried softly. When I finally wore out my rage, I left the kitchen, crawled into my bed, held myself tightly, and drowned in a deep sleep for the first time since I had returned.

When I woke up, I took the keys to my father’s car without his permission. He would have insisted that people gossiped about young women driving by themselves. I didn’t want to be jammed in the back of a taxi with three men who weren’t afraid to touch. I didn’t want to walk down side streets where men cornered women and groped them. In the short time I had been home, I learned quickly that our sleepy city had become increasingly more hostile.

On a busy street, I passed a car that slowed down to let a passenger out. Minutes later, I felt a strong jolt; the same beige Peykan had hit me. I got out and appraised the damage. Other drivers honked, stuck their heads out the car windows and cursed us for causing a traffic jam. Feeling self-conscious and unsure of the next step when the driver didn’t come to me, I walked to him, a man in his sixties with stubble and a fatherly demeanor. “Why did you hit me?” I asked amazed.

“You passed me,” he said accusingly. In the back of his small car with tinted glass, four women sat wrapped in black
chador
s, two with children sitting on their laps. Although I was in the first generation of Iranian women to be given the right to drive, I had thought it an accepted fact. Now, standing in front of this gentle-looking man, I realized that from his perspective I had demeaned him. By daring to pass him, I had eroded his sense of manhood, embarrassing him in front of his women. This was definitely a changing Iran, going back in time. I returned to the car and drove away, wondering whether there was such a thing as car insurance in Iran and mulling over what I was going to tell my father about denting his beautiful mung bean–colored Rambler.

When I reached my friend Shahnaz’s house, she was smoking a cigarette, listening to the Beatles, and cursing the Shah for forcing her to serve in the army. She was on leave from the military for one day, staying with her parents who lived closer to the base. Being a newlywed, she much preferred spending time with her husband who worked at Bandar-Abbas on the Persian Gulf—a much greater distance to travel, especially for an unescorted woman. She argued with her superior officer nonstop, she told me, wishing to be dismissed for insubordination. Shahnaz pressed the butt of her cigarette in the ashtray as if trying to suffocate something more than an inanimate object. “This whole idea of serving in the army is such nonsense. Let her highness, Princess Ashraf,” Shahnaz rolled her eyes, “wear army boots instead of her Italian-made shoes. Let her jog around
the army compound since she was behind this
great idea
for Iranian women. The officers are all lechers. They want us to jump up and down to watch our quivering breasts.” She threw her blond curls over her shoulders, and her blue eyes filled with tears as she lit another Winston.

Shahnaz was my contradictory friend. She wore mini-skirts, didn’t shy away from good wine or aged scotch, and danced in the discothèques until early morning hours; yet she was a devout Moslem. She frequently visited Shah-Cheragh, a religious site in Shiraz, to pray and pay alms, yet her European looks aroused suspicion. When she drank from a waterspout the previous year, an angry mob at the shrine gathered around her, shaking their fists and calling her an infidel, who had defiled water that was used for ablution. She was saved when a family friend spotted her and vouched for her devotion to Islam. Once, Shahnaz made a pilgrimage to the holy city of Ghom and waited in her uncle’s car as he ran into a shop to pick up merchandise. In the half an hour he was gone,
molas
in their black caftans, white turbans, and long beards knocked at the car window, “
Sigheh meeshee?
”—asking if she was available for a
sigheh
, a temporary marriage that could last from an hour to a hundred years. Shahnaz laughed as she told me the story, and only at the end did she admit that she had chewed all her nails as she awaited her uncle. Like most of my Moslem friends, Shahnaz and her family venerated Islam even though they made fun of its peculiarities and lived in a very Western style. Shahnaz’s father served his guests aged whiskey but washed his mouth with soap to cleanse it from the forbidden drink before praying. Once a year he crawled on his knees to a shrine and gave a portion of his salary to the religious leader of a
maktab
, a religious school, in a show of atonement for straying from Islamic teachings.