Wedding Song (7 page)

“This is Rouhi? O my God, Rouhi.” She sobbed again, touching my mother’s face in the picture. I showed her my grandfather’s picture.

“Agha has not changed at all! I dreamed of him last night. He was here visiting me. I have not seen him in a long time.”

I didn’t know how to handle the situation.

“Agha is dead,” Mohtaram said. She was used to reminding her mother of the past events that Aziza forgot constantly.

Maybe she should let it be, I thought, as I saw Aziza mourning her father again, her chest heaving.

“Mother, don’t cry. Remember, this world is for nothing,” Mohtaram said. “It isn’t worth upsetting yourself so much.”

It was time to leave. Both Aziza and I were emotionally drained. “Goodbye Aziza
khanom
.” I hugged my aunt again and kissed her on both cheeks. I felt guilty for not taking her out for fresh air, for a walk around the block. I was an outsider, I thought. I couldn’t change their lives. I felt a sudden need to leave the stuffy room. “I will come back to see you again before I leave,” I promised my aunt. Aziza stared at me.

“Who is that woman?” She whispered loudly to her daughter.

“That’s Rouhi’s daughter.”

“Is Agha here?” Aziza asked in her shaking voice.

“He is dead. He died years ago.”

My aunt sobbed again. Aziza mourned the same deaths every day. Every time she was reminded, she mourned them anew.

On the way out, Mohtaram locked the door behind her.

“I am very sad we never met when I could have talked to her, when she could have told me about her life,” I told Mohtaram. “Why we didn’t ever come to visit her, I don’t know.” I paused. Then I asked Mohtaram. “Why didn’t Aziza
khanom
come to visit us in Shiraz? My mom was so lonely, so far away from home.”

Mohtaram looked at me and bit her lower lip. “You know we have other family in Shiraz,” she said abruptly, as if she was afraid she might change her mind if she hesitated.

“No, I didn’t know.” I turned to face her.

“One of my cousins married a Shirazi man.” Mohtaram continued without looking at me. “When Aziza went for the wedding, she and a few cousins stopped by to see your mother. A woman opened the door just a crack and told them she was not at home. They asked, ‘Who are you?’ Where would a young girl go? How far had she gone? When was she going to be back? Without identifying herself, the woman repeated ‘Rouhi is not at home.’ They persisted. ‘When can we come back then to see her?’ Again the reply was, ‘She isn’t here.’”

And the door closed.

On a cold day in January of 1953, two years after my parents’ wedding, my mother, age fifteen, gave birth to me at Morsalin Hospital, a missionary facility. My birth sealed her place in my father’s family, the family she had contemplated leaving every day. Learning that other imported brides had simply taken the bus back home, she had begged my father for a divorce. He refused. She didn’t have money for a bus ticket anyway; and having spent most of her time at home, she didn’t know the city well enough to find the station. And even if she could, where was home and who wanted her? With my birth, her hope of running away and escaping her life in Shiraz ended.

At the same time, she felt that maybe she finally had something of her own—a little girl who would alleviate her deep loneliness among strangers, a daughter to listen to her story, to sympathize with her saga of pain, abandonment, and abuse.

Instead, I distanced myself from her constant retelling of the same tale. What did she expect of me? That I would be the historian of her life, conspiring against my father, grandmother, aunts, and uncles? Impossible!

Giving birth in Iran was often a family affair. Women of the family came as they heard the news of a family member or a neighbor in labor. They used pillows to support the pregnant woman’s back, spread fresh ashes underneath her thighs, and rested her legs on top of bricks. They brought in chai and aromatic drinks, sweets and nuts, a freshly prepared waterpipe, and all their gossip. They sat around the room talking and laughing to distract the woman in labor from her pain. They ate, sang, and exchanged gossip while the mother-to-be screamed and cursed.

Once in a while, a guest would tell the screaming mother, “Calm down, you think you are the only woman who’s ever been in labor?”

On the back of my baby picture, my father wrote, “Farideh is actually a pretty child but she wouldn’t sit still for a picture.”

If they felt the labor had lasted a long time and the mother and child were in danger, they prayed, “O, God! Let one body emerge from the other. Let one life separate from another.”

My mother had witnessed this ritual a few times, once walking out in disgust as women tried to drown the screams in their own laughter. She made my father promise that she would give birth in a hospital. She didn’t tell him that she didn’t want the women to stare down her open legs as they cracked watermelon seeds. Instead, she convinced my father that the midwife’s dirty hands and unsanitary conditions at home could infect both her and their child. To the family’s chagrin, my father sided with her.

Even in hospitals, it was essential for women to help one another in childbirth. Mothers followed their daughters through the pregnancy, labor, and birth, and were often present in the birthing room. My aunt Shams once helped her daughter give birth when the doctors at Namazi Hospital,
a newly built modern facility, were busy and didn’t believe that my pregnant cousin knew that her baby was ready to see the world.

Years later, when I was visiting one of my aunts at the same hospital where I was born, I witnessed the birthing of a baby. The dark waiting room was filled with women from the surrounding villages. It smelled of the fresh soil of wheat farms, the pungent sweat of horses and sheep, the greens of fava bean pods. As the head nun screamed at a Ghashghai woman from a nomadic tribe outside Shiraz that it was not yet her time, the women of her family surrounded her in their multi-skirt costumes and long colorful head covers, reached under the layers of red, green, and gold fabric around her waist, and pulled out a screaming, slippery baby, right there, squatting over the dirty floor. The nun ran to them in her long dark robe, her hair covered in white fabric, her face tired and weary from long hours on her feet, and pushed them away as if they were primitives who had rushed God’s work.

Since my maternal grandmother lived far away and was herself pregnant with her sixth child, she wasn’t there to help my mother with my birth. My father’s aunt Khatoon-jaan, with henna-covered hair and multiple braids hidden underneath a long kerchief, kept my mother company at the hospital. She hung onion bulbs and salt crystals on the door post to keep away the evil eye. From her bed, my mother watched her. Just outside, she could see Moslem visitors getting ready for morning prayers. They washed their arms and legs in the freezing water of a pool, spread their prayer rugs under the leafless orange trees, and barefooted they bowed in the direction of Mecca. A blind priest stopped by to convince my mother to seek comfort in Christ.

One damp rainy day, when my cloth diapers wouldn’t dry, Khatoonjaan sat cross-legged on the cement floor of the hospital room, spread her long skirt about her, and held a diaper over a brazier filled with hot charcoals. When the fabric caught on fire, she threw it on the floor and stomped on it, coughing from the smoke. It was Shabbat and touching fire was forbidden. She fasted every day for a week for the sin of disobeying the commandments and gave her meager earnings as
tsedakah
to the poor. Khatoon-jaan never forgot the incident. Ten years later, when I visited her to say goodbye before she left for Palestine, she cried and hugged me tightly, while reminding me of her love toward me and of the sin she had committed for me. She asked me not to forget her.

The year I was born, 1953, was to be remembered by the historians of Iran. Electrical lines were finally stretched on the tall walls of the
mahaleh
. Little bulbs, with their dim yellow light, changed the shape of shadows in the alleyways. Baba bought a radio, a large square box that sat on the mantel in the common room like a special guest, covered with a pretty doily. It was an amazing change for my family. During World War II, my father had run to the British embassy every day to listen to the news and report back home. Now he could listen to the happenings in the country while he sipped tea with a sugar lump between his back teeth; my grandmother puffed at her waterpipe; my mother nursed me; my two aunts and three uncles living with us warmed their hands over the embers in the brazier and cracked watermelon seeds between their back molars; and the younger ones tried to do their homework in the dim light of a newly installed light bulb despite my grandmother’s protests that they were going to ruin their eyes.

An invisible ray of hope penetrated into the heart of every Jew who could now hear the reports of the State of Israel, established just five years earlier. The sick, the hopeless, the truly downtrodden inhabitants of the ghetto left for Israel first. As the Israeli economy improved, other waves of Jews who were tired of living in the ghetto, who found the anti-Semitism intolerable, immigrated to Israel as well. Those who stayed behind knew that an escape was available if they needed it. If the Iranian economy and the condition of Jews had not improved so rapidly during the reign of Mohammed Reza Shah, they would have left in masses as well.

Around the time of my birth, Dr. Mosadegh, a European-educated lawyer, was elected as the new prime minister in Iran. In that position, he started a showdown with the British government, which wanted to continue its control over the Iranian oil fields. In response, the British administration persuaded Eisenhower to overthrow him. Americans, who were fervently anti-communist, pressured the king as well. Manipulated by the two countries, the Shah dismissed the prime minister in August of 1953. However, Mosadegh’s message was popular in Iran, because he was a nationalist and an anti-imperialist. Thousands of Mosadegh followers demonstrated on the streets of the capital. Fearing a violent coup, the Shah fled the country.

On August 19, American agents in Iran incited the crowds to set fire to the offices of Dr. Mosadegh’s newspaper. They also distributed pro-Shah
flyers and articles in Iranian papers and paid off enough people to rally for the Shah on the streets. The tide quickly turned against Mosadegh. The American government begged, cajoled, and mediated the Shah’s return. Financed, armed, and supported by the United States, the Iranian military gunned down hundreds of civilians in Tehran, and organized a house-to-house search to arrest communist sympathizers.

Uncle Beejan, a student at Tehran University, had come home and taken to the streets with the rioters, making speeches, writing and distributing anti-Shah flyers. Being his guardian, Baba feared for my uncle’s safety and our family’s as well. As the police neared our home, my father tore through my uncle’s room, searched in the Passover dishes in the attic, and dug among the onions and spices in the pantry, looking for illegal documents. He found armloads of anti-Shah literature and tossed them in a bonfire. In his haste, he also burned my uncle’s collection of poetry, short stories, and paintings, along with carefully stored bags of dried herbs and spices. By the time the American-supported agents reached our home, the only traces of the passionate arguments against the king were deliciously spiced ashes flying in the wind.

No one knew then how the 1953 crowning of the Shah by the West would come to haunt us all. Although not witness to this history, my generation experienced this humiliating loss of self-determination through our parents’ memories. Despite the presence of the Shah’s “ears” everywhere, there were those who whispered about our puppet king in the hands of the British and Americans, who had conspired to take over our lives, to make us into a shadow of themselves, to control us. The voice became stronger as I grew older.

During my years in elementary and high school, our teachers told us to dress neatly and bring flowers to school the day before the Shah visited Shiraz. The school administration threatened us by saying that only traitors to the country would not show up. We lined up by the streets from the airport to the Shah’s castle. Our teachers prompted us to shout pro-Shah slogans as we awaited the procession for hours. They didn’t allow us to sit, eat, or drink. There were no bathrooms available. And when the king and queen passed us in black limousines, we threw the flowers, scrambled to see their faces from behind the smoky glass, and screamed: “
Javeed shah
, long live the king.” Then, our teachers tried to form us into lines to march back to school.

When I was a teenager, a new complication arose from the dreaded days when the Shah visited Shiraz. Students from the men’s school took advantage of the momentary chaos as we regrouped to pinch our buttocks and touch our breasts.

Although none of us minded a day off from school, many wondered if the king was so naïve as to think that he was loved; and some asked sincerely if their majesties had to use the bathroom like the rest of us, since they claimed to be appointed by God. In high school, I started noticing people who sat during the rendition of the national anthem in the movie theaters, who refused to clap at the end. Most of us were too afraid to contemplate such disobedience. And in college, a classmate who assured me that Marxism and Islam were compatible, tried to pass me Marx’s
The Communist Manifesto
, knowing that its possession warranted a death sentence. Others started to wear Islamic garbs and openly shunned me for my religion.

And then there were those who embraced the West, wanting to make it theirs. They packed the movie theaters with images of American, French, and Italian icons. Men, lusty after watching naked bodies, poured out of the theaters, molesting women in their way. They danced to the beat of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in fashionable dark discotheques, colored lights pulsating on the floors and the walls. They learned English and fashionably mixed it into their discourse. They dreamed of America.

I grew up in the pull between these two ideologies that paralleled my parents’ opposite plans for me. I struggled to balance my cultural heritage against the enticing Western life style that I secretly read about in my books. I yearned for a home that differed from my father’s, in which multiple families lived together. Yet my mother’s plans for my escape into the unknown, to any place away from the family she had married into, both intrigued and frightened me.

The house in which I spent my early years originally had been a part of a much larger building and gardens owned by my great-grandfather, the chief rabbi and judge of the community. The position, through the first-born sons, was passed down from generation to generation. When he died, the house was divided. My grandfather, who had inherited the position of
dayan
, the judge and spiritual leader of the community, built a
small house on one side with two rooms upstairs, two basement rooms downstairs, and a kitchen and a bathroom at the far end of the garden. The larger side, including the existing house, was given to his father’s second wife, Mori-jaan, and her three sons and extended families. The new front door of each house opened to a shared space that was the entrance to the original house, with its large wooden doors still in place.