Divided Loyalties

by Nilofar Shidmehr

  In the front, new passengers are on board, their bodies pressed against one another. It’s a good opportunity for men to grope women, which is just what a skinny man wearing blue jeans, a flashy T-shirt, and trendy black leather shoes is doing by rubbing himself against a young woman sandwiched between him and another woman in a navy-blue coat. The girl moves forward slightly and leans over Parvaaneh. Her heavy breathing makes Parvaaneh squeeze herself toward the window to make more room. Parvaaneh can tell she is bleeding again. Her body is soaked in sweat, and she feels trapped — the same way she did in the small room in the police station. She wishes the bus would get to the last stop as soon as possible. But the bus is stuck, and so are Parvaaneh and the young girl above her. Parvaaneh can see a chain of sweat forming on her forehead. The old man in front who, like Parvaaneh, has been on board from the start, again bids the passengers to send their blessing to the Prophet Mohammad and his family, as if it will make the bus grow wings and fly over the traffic.

  “Allah-o-ma sale ala Mohammad va ale Mohammad.” Several people, including the woman in the navy-blue coat and a man in green military pants, chant after him.

  Parvaaneh and the girl stay silent, one choking because of what is being inflicted on her in the present by the young man who again presses his crotch against her behind, and one choking because of what happened to her two days ago, the memory of which she is unable to push out of her mind. The black butterflies are back in her throat, flapping their wings against the knot in her scarf from inside. Soon they start to multiply and swarm her entire body.

  * * *

  At the bus station in Astara, where Parvaaneh had waited to be shuttled back to Tehran, she’d considered slipping away to the village closest to the Aras; she could ask the locals whether they had found anyone who had drowned. But the corporal hadn’t left her alone long enough to try. She’d even thought of getting off the bus midway through the journey and going back, but it was too risky. What if she were arrested again and sent back to the sergeant?

  Lacking any concrete knowledge about what had happened to Navid, she’d decided to ask her heart for an answer. When her mother was still alive, she had always said, “Mothers know in their heart how their children are doing. They don’t need to see with their eyes.” And Parvaaneh was like a mother to her brother. She’d gazed down toward her heart and asked if Navid was alive. She waited for an answer.

  But her heart had been silent, just like the Aras. She’d caught a glimpse of it from the bus window where she leaned her head. It was calm and muddy that morning, nothing like the churning she’d witnessed the previous day.

  Unlike her heart, her mind spoke — loudly and outrageously. And it gave her orders: Get off the bus, go down to the river, drown yourself. You are nothing but that piece of dirty sheet between your legs. And Navid is dead. Without him, you are nothing. You sacrificed yourself for him last night. Get out, go down to the river, and throw your corpse into it.

  For the eight hours of that bus ride, which had felt like a lifelong incarceration, Parvaaneh clenched her teeth against the orders issued by her commanding mind. To others, she must have looked like she was asleep, or maybe unconscious. The bus had stopped three times to give its passengers a chance to stretch their legs, but she did not get out even once. The feeling between her legs was damp and sticky, but she didn’t budge from her seat, not even when the driver himself came to check on her. “She is breathing,” he’d announced to her concerned bus-mates. “The corporal who bought her ticket said she was sick. Perhaps she took some medicine that has knocked her out. I’ll shut the door and let her sleep.”

  • • •

  * * *

  “Last stop! Everybody off!”

  Parvaaneh opens her eyes to the yelling of the driver and the bustling of passengers toward the exits. It takes her a few seconds to realize which bus she is on. It’s the one in Tehran, the one taking her to Sima. Still disoriented, she watches the sweaty girl move down the aisle, keeping a safe distance between herself and the young man in the jeans and T-shirt.

  Soon, however, she tires of watching her fellow passengers file out. Her mind drifts back to her journey to the Aras with her brother, and her own journey back to Tehran, alone. She had gotten off the bus feeling as if she’d woken from a deadly sleep, sick with the knowledge that she’d returned to the city without the information she had sacrificed so much to discover. On the bus she took from the terminal to go home, she’d pulled her scarf down over her eyes and cried quietly as she turned yet again to her heart for an answer about Navid’s survival and did not hear a thing.

  The memory makes Parvaaneh anxious again. How is it possible to feel nothing, to know nothing? What about the saying that goes: “A mother’s heart is said to be working like a magic mirror, like Jamshid’s sacred mirror, revealing how her children are doing wherever they are at the moment.” Was this just nonsense? Hadn’t she mothered Navid? Why was her heart silent?

  Fighting the feeling of being smothered from within, Parvaaneh takes a deep breath and slowly lifts her head from its inclined position, forcing herself to look away from her heart. She is about to slide out of her seat when she sees Navid’s face reflected beside the driver’s in the rearview mirror. Shocked, she immediately sits upright and stares. Navid’s hair falls outside the frame, but the face is surely his, especially those black Tatar eyes and that certain childish innocence.

  Parvaaneh grips the handrail and shudders as Navid looks back at her, patiently, without even blinking. From time to time he presses his lips together, stressing the line of his cheekbones. She doesn’t take her eyes off her brother until she sees the driver turn around, looking at her and beyond her. Does this image belong to the man who got on the bus after the Saadi Street intersection — where it had almost collided with the taxi — and who now sits a few rows behind her? The young man who stumbled on the steps?

  As Parvaaneh squints, trying to test her speculation, the Navid in the mirror imitates her gesture. His stare is so intense that, for just a moment, Parvaaneh looks away, turning her attention toward the empty seats on the right side of the bus, which are fully bathed in sunlight. The blinding light shining off the iron bar hung above them illuminates a floating river of dust and particles. Parvaaneh’s gaze crosses this river and returns to the mirror. Transfixed, it lingers there until it finally dawns on Parvaaneh that she has been looking at her own reflection; it is her own face that she took for Navid’s.

  Instantly, the recognition brings total relief from the suffering caused by the question that has occupied her mind ever since she left Navid at the bank of the Aras and ran up the trail to meet the soldiers. Her heart has finally answered. It has shown Parvaaneh her own face as a confirmation: like her, Navid is alive.

  Parvaaneh shakes her head, and a small smile turns up the corners of her mouth. The answer has been here, right before her eyes, from the moment she got on the bus. Had she seen it earlier, she would have known she did not need to hear any news from Sima. She exhales a sigh of relief, which releases the black butterflies inside her. They fly out and exit the bus via the front door. Now, only Parvaaneh and the driver remain on board. “Last station!” he yells again. “I am turning around.”

  “I am coming with you,” Parvaaneh announces with the new power she has found inside. “I am going back home.”

  The driver shrugs and closes the automatic doors. In a second, the bus is rolling again. I still have two weeks to cancel the sale of the house, Parvaaneh thinks, if I can pay back the deposit I received plus the 5 percent penalty. She decides that upon arriving home, the first thing sh
e must do is to reach out to Nasser. If he cannot help, she will ask Sima. She is determined to start a new life for herself, and her childhood house is where she will do it.

  With this fresh thought, she takes another look out of the window. The monument in the middle of Revolution Square rises amid the yellowish grass as the bus turns around.

  Yellow Light

  I have come to see Arman’s girlfriend, Aazin. I am half an hour early. She and Arman finish work at five. I heard from her former boyfriend that Aazin recently got Arman a job at her office. He has given me the address. I wait in an alley.

  It is one of Tehran’s windy nights; if I were filming, the shadows would be playing havoc with my camera’s exposure. I have disguised myself in the same black chador — one that fixes tight around my face with an elastic band and that I used to wear during the ten years I spent visiting Arman in prison. This morning I had to rummage in my storage closet to find it crumpled in a plastic bag under an old shoebox containing my childhood photographs. I am wearing my green headscarf underneath so that the chador, never washed and still holding the filth of those years, will not touch my hair.

  People pass by as I shuffle along a brick wall, awaiting Arman and Aazin. Most of them seem to be rushing home to have dinner with their families. I am in no hurry. My family used to be Arman. I catch a glimpse of him walking past the alley, so I move and follow him down the sidewalk. He is with Aazin, the woman whose name means “bundle of lights,” as in a bundle of lights used for celebrating, for showcasing, for illuminating something else. That something else is Arman, a political hero in many people’s eyes, whom she highlights with her youthfulness and naïveté. Otherwise — as Mehrdaad, Aazin’s ex-boyfriend and Arman’s ex–best friend put it — there is nothing special about her. Not like me, he told me. He also told me to come and discover this for myself.

  I follow Arman’s every step like a camerawoman on a movie set following an actor, except he doesn’t know I’m there. He strides along, with Aazin at his side but slightly behind, walking briskly to avoid falling behind. So this is the woman he started dating when he was still living with me, the woman he talked to on the phone for hours, the woman whose name I had to learn from Mehrdaad. Aazin, a bundle of lights who adorns Arman’s life.

  A couple with their children turns onto the sidewalk in front of me and joins the line by a bus stop. I wait until they pass, keeping an eye on Arman as he moves farther away and listening to my racing heart thump in my ears. Gripping the strap of my shoulder bag with one shaking hand and holding the chador under my chin with the other, I quickly cut through the crowd and run up the street. “Idiot,” someone shouts after me.

  I arrive at the intersection of Valiasr and Revolution Streets almost out of breath. They are heading to Tehran’s City Theater, perhaps to see a show. A crowd is waiting for the traffic light to change. Searching for Arman, I stand on tiptoe and finally spot his bald head. He and Aazin are standing at the front of the pack. I push myself into the crowd and close the gap separating me from him. Now I am near enough to keep his profile in view but not near enough to be noticed. As soon as I start marveling at Arman’s new goatee, he lowers his head toward his girl, which makes me venture even closer. For a moment, I think of ripping the filthy chador from my body, pushing Aazin aside, and taking her place. Instead, I stop beside a tall man with a peaked cap and hide myself behind him. From here I can safely watch Arman without having to see Aazin. He looks different, even behaves differently, like a typecast actor who’s found himself in a new role alongside a star.

  The red reflection of the traffic light shines on Arman’s face. It reminds me of how I fell in love with him when I saw him onstage at the University of Tehran’s Performance Hall, bathed in a red light. It was our class’s final production. We were both theater majors in the Department of Dramatic Arts in the class of 1978, and lucky to graduate before the first waves of the revolution rolled through the city. I’d been afraid that they wouldn’t let Arman graduate, as he’d devoted himself entirely to bringing down the shah. Even before the demonstrations, he was being watched by SAVAK for his open opposition to the regime. When the Islamists took over in early 1980, they attacked leftist and Mujahedeen students on university campuses and expelled many. That was in April. In June, they closed down the university; it stayed shut for three years. If I hadn’t graduated in 1978, they wouldn’t have readmitted me until after their so-called cultural revolution was over and the universities reopened.

  By then, I had become the wife of a political prisoner. My former classmates thought I was the luckiest woman alive for marrying him. Arman was the Prince Charming of our class, desired by many girls. Since he always got the lead male role, they would compete to win the lead female role. I heard from my close friends that Arman’s mother had died when he was a boy, and that he was an only child. His father never remarried and dedicated himself to raising him. According to Arman, his father had showered him with so much attention and love that Arman had never felt the absence of a mother in his life.

  Arman’s allure was not strictly due to his looks. He was a good speaker, too. Women were attracted to his progressive ideas and the leadership role he always seemed to take. And all of our classmates found him willing to take time away from his political activities as a Fadai-ye-Khalg — a devotee of the people and the working class — to listen to their stories. They would find reasons to bring these stories to him frequently, enjoying his advice and empathy.

  Unlike many of my female classmates, I did my best to hide myself from Arman, afraid that he would see the flame of desire in my eyes. But in our final class production, in which I played his lover, he saw what I was trying to conceal. My gaze wasn’t that of the legendary Shirin (played by me) for Farhad (played by him), but the burning gaze of a woman in awe of her hero — a man she believed capable of doing things much greater and more significant than carving a way through Mount Bisotoun, as Farhad had done. That night, wearing a green dress he later said he found very attractive, I stood face to face with him, watching his lips move. He whispered in my ear that he, Arman, was in love with me, Sedighe.

  Now his lips are whispering something in the ear of the woman leaning on his shoulder.

  I peek over the shoulder of the man beside me to get a glimpse of Aazin’s face, but she’s too close to Arman for me to see. My fists curl on their own; they want to punch Arman in the face. But that’s not the real me. I still desire Arman. I still hope to be able to gather my strength, shove this woman aside, draw my husband to me, and inhale his breath instead of this cold wind that is gusting in my face.

  He is right there, not behind bars. Only a few steps away. Alive. My fists are still clenched. The day he left me I promised myself that the next time I saw him, I’d raise my hand and slap him right across his face. In my imagination I assumed he’d be standing with Aazin, and that I wouldn’t let that stop me. If I couldn’t take revenge, I could at least humiliate him in front of his girlfriend. Mehrdaad, however, says that Arman did not walk out on me, that I was the one who threw him out. He is right: I did tell Arman to leave. But he made me do it. I didn’t mean anything I said that night, and he knew that very well.

  When I first contacted Mehrdaad, he told me, “Sedighe, you should have given Arman more time. He would have gotten tired of Aazin soon enough and dumped her. This infatuation he has with young and inexperienced girls ends quickly. You know this, don’t you?” Mehrdaad makes me angry, saying such strange things to the woman who spent years visiting Arman in prison! I know how old and bitter I have become, thanks to all I have gone through. Unlike me, Aazin is young. She is, after all, a bundle of lights. Every time I say this, Mehrdaad laughs. “Even if she is,” he says, “those lights are cheap; they will burn fast.”

  Mehrdaad tells me that Arman is a fool, a coward. I should forget him. I deserve someone who does not take me for granted, someone who sees me as the real deal. “Arman
cannot see that you are the real light, the real delight.” He wants me to replace Arman with him, not realizing that even if I were attracted to him, my infatuation would soon fade. He is too dumb to ask himself why I would ever want to be with Aazin’s ex. I am not as simple as my name suggests. Nevertheless, I did want the information about Arman’s new job and the address of their office, so I promised Mehrdaad I would go to his place tonight after seeing Aazin.

  I do not regret the promise, even though I hate degrading myself like this. I feel small for deceiving a young man to get something out of him, and I’m embarrassed to be debasing myself by chasing my former lover and his new sweetheart down the street. I can’t help it, though. I need to see Aazin for myself, to assess whether Arman is going to stay with her or not. If I decide he will, I might go to Mehrdaad’s and sleep with him. I am stubborn. I am still the same woman who decided to marry Arman on the night of our graduation performance when he confessed his love. If I can’t have my Arman back, I’ll slide to the end of this slippery slope and into Mehrdaad’s bed!