Wedding Song (31 page)

I saw his wife quickly withdrawing from the circle. I followed her, called her name, shook her hand, and wished her
mazal tov
too. She pulled her hand away as if she had touched fire. The animosity had reached second and third generations by now, but the touch was strangely calming for me. The demons died. The sediment of the past leisurely settled in time—until the next storm.

Jahangeer was at the wedding with his family, and his daughters bonded
with mine as if they had always known each other—as if blood transcended time and distance.

My parents didn’t come. The trip from Israel, across continents and an ocean was hard on old bones, uneasy minds. My father lost just about everything he had worked for all his life, the farm, the house, his status, his dignity, and prestige. In his first years in exile, still hoping to return to Iran, he spoke constantly of his apricot trees—little Persian apricots, the kind that simply melted in the mouth. Now with the apricot orchard gone, along with the poultry farm, the house, and the car, he couldn’t bear to talk about them. He dreaded humiliating himself in front of us. A man crying. But I could always tell when he missed his orchard. He had known every stone that had to be cleared, every piece of dirt dug out of his well to water the land. Thinking of his apricot trees, his wrinkles deepened. He put his balding head between his two hands, hiding tears.

My two brothers and a sister live in the United States, while our youngest sister Niloufar lives in Israel with our parents. At the wedding, we lined up for a picture to commemorate the rare occasion of being together. We have only four of these pictures of the five siblings shoulder to shoulder, hands laced around each other’s waists in the same city, in the same country. My sister Nahid and my brother Farzad speak to Niloufar in Hebrew, but my brother Freydoun and I, who aren’t fluent in the language, prefer English. We never communicate in Farsi.

My sister arrived in Israel for the first time in 1979, when she was four years old. Ayatollah Khomeini was on his way to replace the Shah of Iran, and the country bubbled in the heat of an oncoming Revolution. As anarchy ruled, my family members were virtual prisoners at home, frightened to attend school, to shop for food, to visit friends and family. My father alone ventured outside to buy provisions and to find out the news not broadcast on the radio. The entire Jewish community feared mass attacks by young angry crowds, carrying American weapons of the Shah’s military. Funeral processions of Moslem “martyrs,” those who had died fighting against the Shah’s army, passed by our house daily. When my family heard chants of “Allah-O-Akbar, death to America, down with the Shah,” they trembled. As any procession went through our neighborhood, men banged on the doors with their fists and a few threw rocks at the windows. “Come out dirty Jews. You are next!” they shouted. The revolutionaries
attacked the Bahai section of town one week, mowing down residents with machine guns. The killers promised that the Jews would be next.

Not being a citizen yet, I could not obtain American visas for my family. My father found out about two El-Al planes landing in Mehrabad airport in Tehran to help evacuate the Iranian Jews. My four-year-old sister left the country on my mother’s lap, in one of those planes, jammed with frightened and crying Jews. Most of them had never left their cities of birth and had never been on a plane before. They sat in the aisles or two and three to a chair, their luggage abandoned on the tarmac to make room for bodies, and in the darkness, the plane took off without the use of the tower, its own lights off.

A few weeks later, when I visited them in Israel, my mother and I took Niloufar to the preschool. Excited to be with other children, she spoke nonstop until she realized that the words she heard in reply didn’t make sense to her. She shrieked and ran back to us. “Don’t leave me!” After learning Hebrew, she refused to speak Farsi even to our parents. She wasn’t Iranian, she told everyone. For many years, as I lived in the States and she in Israel, my sister and I didn’t have a common language. We now communicate in English, a borrowed tongue for both of us.

Relearning it, Niloufar speaks Farsi to our parents with an Israeli accent and Hebrew syntax. The language doesn’t carry the cultural experience for Niloufar as it does for our parents, so they constantly misunderstand each other. Speaking in Farsi, they slide by each other, throwing words at one another like stones. Afterward, emotionally exhausted, with no shared words to convey their love for one another, they heal their wounds with hugs.

Niloufar forgot her Farsi when my father went back to Iran to salvage some of his belongings. His passport was confiscated upon arrival, so he became
mamno’ol khorooj
, forbidden to leave the country. For four years he tried to reclaim his passport since he didn’t want to leave the country illegally.

For four years, Niloufar didn’t have contact with our father. She lived with Maman, who had slid into a deep depression and was paralyzed with uncertainty, indecision, and fear. After all, she had never before been allowed to make decisions on her own. Living with a silent mother, Niloufar turned to her Israeli friends and their parents for love and support. She
adopted their European lifestyle, distancing herself from our mother and refusing to speak Farsi.

During those years, either pregnant or tending babies, I didn’t have the energy to make the long trip to visit my mother and Niloufar. At the same time, the American embassy in Israel refused to grant them a visa to visit us because they carried Iranian passports at a time when Americans were kept hostage in Iran, and because the American immigration office feared that once they arrived in the United States, they would seek refugee status.

When my father finally received his exit visa, he boarded a plane to the United States. Waiting on the runway, ready to taxi, the plane was turned around. An anonymous phone caller had claimed that his passport was forged. His papers had passed scrutiny a week earlier, but now the inspectors were afraid to verify the passport’s authenticity. So, he stayed in Iran for another six months, enduring beatings whenever he dared to go back to various offices to reclaim his passport. At the end, a
mola
asked him to come back with all his money in a cashier’s check, took the envelope, and signed for his release. When I picked him up at the airport, he was only a shadow of the forceful man I remembered. Bent over, he followed me with downcast eyes.

The decision to take my mother and siblings away from Iran despite condemnation from the family and my grandmother’s pleas for him to stay must have been the most difficult decision my father made in his life. The entire family dissuaded him from leaving. An aunt told my father that these things were “in the hands of God,” not man, that he couldn’t change his fate by removing himself from the family and the country. Another aunt asked him why Baba thought his family’s lives were more precious than the others. How could he be so selfish to act independently of the rest of the family? My grandmother verbally attacked my mother, telling her that it was her fault my father was leaving the family behind and, in her high emotions, her breathing became labored and she fainted.

Khanom-bozorg died shortly after my father had finally made his escape. Baba called Iran to learn that his mother was already on her death bed, asking for him. I had never seen my father so tender, crying softly. He held the telephone receiver lovingly as if holding his mother’s hand, whispering his words of comfort and love to Khanom-bozorg in Judi, our forgotten language. I couldn’t understand all the words, but then I didn’t have
to. My father sat on the floor for hours with his head in his hands, moaning. “How could I not be at my mother’s side?” he kept asking himself.

My father murmured a retold story, its words vague this time in his grief, but clear to me who had heard it so very many times. One single image of Khanom-bozorg had always overtaken the rest in my father’s mind, one that had erased any shortcomings she could have had. One day, Baba, a mere teenager during the post–World War II famine, went home excited, bringing a prized sheet of flat bread he had fought for vigorously at the bakery. Khanom-bozorg told him she had eaten already, and that he should feed the kids, the little starving one first. After the bread was gone, my father went looking for his mother and found her crouched in a closet, gnawing on the tender bark of a tree.

My grandmother had tried to keep the family together, sometimes at any cost, because she feared being alone. The last years I spent in Iran, my father often slept next to her to calm her nightmares, her sudden anxiety attacks that were pronounced in short spasms of lungs trying desperately to pull in air. The sound reverberated throughout the quiet of the sleepy house, like the noise of a cat clawing the walls. It frightened us, kept us awake. One night, trying to rush to her side, my father broke his arm against the bed post. At our grandmother’s death, my siblings and I did what we knew best: We kept silent, hid our sorrow, and sensed the past fading away, dying.

At my cousin’s outdoor wedding, I couldn’t help but remember my Khanom-bozorg; she had been at the same spot for my wedding with her waterpipe and colorful kerchiefs, hesitant at not covering her body with a
chador
in public. Because this was the kind of event she always loved, being surrounded by her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, I couldn’t help but think that her spirit hovered over all of us.

We didn’t talk about Khanom-bozorg at the wedding. Instead, most aunts and uncles approached me to say, “Your father’s place is empty!” I did miss him too. I couldn’t remember the last time all of us had been together as a family.

“My mother too,” I answered back. “I miss Maman too.”

The blunt answer surprised the well-wishers, who quickly replied “Yes, of course!”

In the eyes of the family, Maman’s job had been to take care of my
grandmother. My siblings and I, and even my father now, recognize that she did her best at a cost to herself. The rest of the family often complained that Maman didn’t serve her mother-in-law well. Anyhow, my grandmother was dead now, leaving no need for my mother. She was erased.

Yet I couldn’t be bitter. At such a beautiful wedding, under the clear sky, by the waters of the Elizabeth River, among the white lace and laughter, we had all gathered with our own unique stories. What a long journey this had been for us all, filled with biblical-like tales of our wanderings from Iran. Through the deserts of the east, some had struggled across Afghanistan and Pakistan. Through the western mountains some had made their way to Turkey on donkeys behind molesting smugglers. They had been processed in Italy, Austria, Tel Aviv, and New York. They had endured scud attacks in Shiraz, Tehran, and Israel. They had prayed in lonely Iranian jails and Turkish prisons and in sealed rooms in Israel. Many were still trapped in Iran, but others, dazed and unsteady on their feet, had finally come to be cradled in the arms of America. Our last refuge. Our only safe place in the world.

And two days later came September
II
.

My mother leaves myrtle branches at her mother’s grave in Israel
.

Writing her autobiography, said Gerta Lerner, took “more nerve than jumping off a cliff into cold water” (
Fireweed
, Temple UP, 375). For me, letting my book be published took more daring. I feared hurting people around me, those whom I love, and even some people whom I might not favor. The purpose of writing this book, and publishing it, was simply to tell the truth as I knew it, my truth. I have changed names to preserve the dignity and privacy of many in this work of creative nonfiction.

The writing, though painful, has been cathartic. I have come to appreciate the men and women I have known, to understand how oppression can warp lives, characters, and deeds. Reaching a stage of empathy, I have come to understand myself as well, to forgive and to ask to be forgiven.

After finishing my book, I went to visit my parents in Israel in June 2002, after the “Passover massacre,” when the country was numb from frequent acts of violence against its civilians. I needed to see my parents before the book was published, fearing our relationship—one that I had nurtured and tried to mend for many years—might change afterward. For the first time, I visited them as a true adult, not needy, not bitter, not wanting
to change them. Now I understood their pain and their boundaries as parents.

I also visited the grave of my maternal grandmother Touran for the first time. No longer angry, I felt humbled by her courage and endurance. My mother and I washed the stone on her grave with care and deep sadness. We lit candles. We put myrtle branches into an urn on the grave. I silently asked for her forgiveness.

Anita Clair Fellman, Nancy Bazin, Janet Bing, Carolyn Rhodes, Janet Peery, Luisa Igloria, and Sheri Reynolds have been my teachers, friends, and mentors in the Women’s Studies and Creative Writing Departments at Old Dominion University. Thank you for putting the pen back in my hand. Thank you, Sheri, for understanding my work, for having the vision to sculpt it, and for your many insights that have guided me with my writing for the past two years.

I would especially like to thank Carolyn Rhodes, my friend and mentor for the past seven years. Thank you, Ernest, too.

My dear friends Annie Laurie and Art Sandler gave me constant encouragement and opened many doors for me. I am grateful.

I am deeply indebted to The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, its founding director, Shulamit Reinharz, and its senior research director, Susan Kahn. They have empowered Jewish women around the world.

I would like to thank my editors, Phyllis Deutsch and Mary Crittendon.

For their constructive comments and encouragement, I thank Marjorie Agosin, Helen Epstein, Joseph Skibell, Marita Golden, Edward Jacobs, Madison Smartt Bell, and Farzaneh Milani.

Thank you, Gina Nahai, for paving the road for Iranian Jewish women writers.

Finally, I am indebted to my siblings Nahid, Freydoun, Farzad, and Niloufar. They have enriched my memories by sharing their own stories. And thank you, Steve, Alisa, and Suzy.