Divided Loyalties

by Nilofar Shidmehr

  Leaving the building, Pari considers Mrs. Hekmati’s last stinging remark. Mrs. Hekmati is good at reading people, and her suspicion that Pari is excited about someone other than her suitor is correct. Pari has many secrets. According to her mother, Dokhi, she is also unpredictable. She even surprises herself from time to time, like in the way she is currently feeling an almost overpowering excitement about Anoosh. No one, not even her mother, who knows all her secrets, would suspect she is thinking about him. Pari tells herself that before she gets to her mother’s she must make up her mind about visiting Anoosh. She conceived the idea exactly one week ago, on the day she heard the radio broadcast about the prisoner-of-war exchange. Mothers can read their daughters’ minds just by looking at them.

  On that day, after turning off the radio and waiting for her heart to slow down, she’d immediately called in sick. Taking the risk that she might run into Anoosh’s family, she’d gone to the office of the Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs to inquire about where Anoosh stood in the lineup for the prisoner exchange. She pretended to be his wife. “Haven’t you been informed?” asked the man behind the counter, who, like authorities in other government offices, sported a beard. “We have already called the families.”

  “We have a problem with our phone. Our line has been down for a week.” She kept her head down as she spoke, something she was not used to doing. Nor was she used to wearing a chador. The female security guard had given it to her to don so that she could enter the building. It helped complete the guise of a wife who’d been waiting several years for her husband’s return. Not that she needed to pretend too much; she really did want to see Anoosh again, even though her excitement was mixed with embarrassment. There she stood, wishing to see the man she’d insisted on divorcing without ever telling him why. She had let him simmer with questions during his captivity, assuming things she’d known would make her look awful and jeopardize her family’s honor.

  The bearded man was clearly only half-convinced, but he agreed to give her the information. Anoosh would be among the second group; they would be released and repatriated on Friday, August 24. Along with other captives originally from Tehran, he’d be flown to the capital. The chartered aircraft was scheduled to land at noon.

  After she dropped off the chador at security and exited the Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs building, she made a promise to herself as she walked to the bus stop: she would go back home to visit Anoosh after his return. She needed to look him straight in the eye and tell him the truth about the terrible act she’d commited in 1985 when he was missing, back before she found out he’d been captured by the enemy. It was an act she’d regretted even before doing it, and it had weighed on her conscience ever since.

  Pari had divorced Anoosh because she wasn’t able to confess to this act in the letters that she’d written, delivered to him in Iraq by the Red Cross. She divorced him to punish herself. Certainly, she didn’t deserve Anoosh. Unlike other women whose husbands were missing, husbands they hoped would be found one day; unlike women whose husbands were martyred, women who remained unmarried and raised their children; unlike women who married war casualties, men without limbs; unlike women whose husbands were captured by the enemy, women who remained faithful to their marriages, she was a disgrace to society. This knowledge created a scar, a knot in her heart, in his heart, in their relationship. Pari’s promise to herself is to see him face to face, to tell him the truth, and to apologize. She hopes that if Anoosh learns why she divorced him, he will help her undo the knot.

  But, Pari asks herself, how soon should she go? Anoosh will arrive tomorrow, on Friday. She knows she should not be at his parents’ house when he arrives; she has no right to be there. Should she go at night, when all the guests there to celebrate his return are gone? No, perhaps she should go much later. But she can’t wait. If she waits until Saturday morning, the guilt might choke her. And if she somehow escapes that fate, she knows that the desire to see the flesh-and-blood, free Anoosh will kill her. The last time she saw him it was only his moving image, a resemblance of him; he was an aseer, a captive — one in a lineup of many, footage projected on a large screen for family members whose loved ones had gone missing in the war.

  * * *

  Other pedestrians walk fast, purposefully, but Pari tramps along the sidewalk toward the rundown International Hotel, which has been occupied by refugees from southern cities since the start of war. Cars pass, men on motorcycles zigzagging among them. Old buses are crammed with people. They pollute the street with their loud engine noise and the heavy fumes pouring out of their exhausts.

  It takes her twice the usual time to make it to where Shariati Street meets the Seyed Khandan bridge. She crosses the street and, as usual, stops at a newspaper stand at the corner. The headlines of Kayhan and all the major newspapers are about the POW exchange. Seventy thousand were repatriated last week, and more will be arriving up to the end of August. Two thousand a day, including wounded and sick prisoners. The papers feature pictures of the Iranian aseers who came back last week. They wear flower wreaths over the Palestinian scarves around their necks and cry in the embrace of their families at the airport. Other pictures show their celebration on their streets, where the whole neighborhood has gathered. Aseers are carried on the shoulders of the crowd to the entrance of their homes, which are decorated with colorful lights and flowers. There, a butcher and a few other men hold down a sheep to slaughter the moment the returned prisoner’s feet touch the ground.

  Pari’s gaze settles on the picture of one particular aseer who is holding prayer beads identical to the ones Anoosh was attached to before going to the war. Anoosh’s were ruby red. Pari can’t tell the color of those the aseer in the black-and-white picture has in his hand. Even the color of the stream of sheep’s blood he is stepping over to enter his home is black. So are the inquisitive eyes of the teenage newspaper seller, watching the people browsing the newspapers and magazines on display. “Do you want to buy this Kayhan?” he asks.

  Pari nods, although she doesn’t need it. She thinks how lucky this boy is that the war is over; otherwise, he would be conscripted soon. She takes five tomans from her wallet and puts the money beside the paper on the ledge in front of him.

  “This is everything for you, Khanoom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure you do not want Today’s Woman?”

  “I am sure. Just the Kayhan.”

  “Is your husband one of those aseers?” The boy points his finger at the man with the prayer beads.

  Pari nods. “He arrives tomorrow.”

  The boy raises his eyebrows. “Does he also like prayer beads? I do.”

  “Yes, he loved his. But the string broke . . . before he went to the war.”

  “Did you repair it?”

  “We did, but then the beads couldn’t turn because of the knot.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “At my home.”

  “The knot must be too big.” The boy wrinkled his nose. “It happened once to mine but I fixed it. Let me show you.”

  He disappears briefly and then reappears with his prayer beads in hand. “I made this small knot. It moves inside and outside the beads. Watch.” The boy proudly turns the large black beads on the string.

  “I see,” Pari replies, “but the thing is, many times in the past my parents have tried to undo the knot by hand and couldn’t. It is impossible.”

  “Your parents are old. You are young. You can do it. You still have time before your husband comes back tomorrow. God willing!”

  “I’ll do my best,” Pari remarks. “And thanks for the tip.”

  Pari turns and walks in the opposite direction of her mother’s house up on Khajeh Abdollah Ansari Street. What is the point of hosting her suitor and his family if she doesn’t want to marry? For her, the last chapter of her life with Anoosh is still open; divorce did not put an end t
o it. And who knows, Anoosh might have a change of heart once he sees her. These things happen. Some day in the future, he might give them a chance to mend the thread of their broken relationship. On that day, Pari will say yes to him, she is certain.

  Pari crosses Shariati Street under the bridge and waits at the beginning of Resalat Boulevard for a taxi. There are two other people waiting under the scorching sun to get a ride from some passing vehicle going close to their destination. At two o’clock, when the telecommunication offices close on Thursdays, there will be a larger crowd here competing to get a ride. Mrs. Maleki will be one of them. Pari needs to leave before she arrives, otherwise the woman will get suspicious and ask why she is not already at her mother’s. A few cars and orange taxis slow down as they pass. Pari and the two men, one skinny and the other burly, bend and shout their destinations into their open windows: Majidieh, Tehran Pars, Narmak. Finally, a beat-up

  ­Hillman stops at a distance, its tires scratching the asphalt and sending up a puff of smoke. The brawny man and Pari run to the car. As the back seat is full, they both cram into the front, Pari leaning her side against the passenger door. She places the paper on her lap.

  As the Hillman takes off, the hot air blows through the car. She turns her face from the window and looks down. Once again, the image on the front page of the newspaper grabs her attention — the man holding his prayer beads dearly against his chest. Anoosh must have felt very lonely without his. In the first two years of their marriage, Anoosh carried his beads everywhere he went: to the dinner table during meals, to the loveseat where they lounged after dinner to watch TV. Often, while the Japanese series they liked to watch played on the screen, Anoosh would hold Pari’s hand with one hand as he turned his beads in the other. The black-and-white Years Away from Home opened with a man’s voice, so serious he could have been reading a war declaration: “Life is a rotating prism . . . ”

  Always, as soon as the show ended, Anoosh would abandon the beads and hold Pari with both hands, pulling her toward him. Then, he’d lift her up and carry her to bed, as if she were living prayer beads.

  By 1984, when the four-year-old war had become a stalemate and Anoosh had decided to sign up, he and the prayer beads were inseparable. “Turning the beads helps me clear my head,” he’d say. He even brought them to their bed. One night, seeking her husband’s embrace, Pari grabbed at his favorite object, trying to pull it from his grasp that was as firm as that of a soldier holding onto his rifle. As Pari let go, the string broke and the ruby-red beads spilled onto the white comforter.

  Feeling a shiver run down her spine, Pari sat up. It felt like a bad omen. “I do not want you to go to the war,” she told him.

  “I didn’t know you were superstitious,” Anoosh replied as he gathered the loose beads. Holding them all in one cupped hand, he used his free hand to hold one of Pari’s and cup it as well. He poured the beads into it. “Let’s fix it together.”

  Anoosh twisted together the broken threads that still held one large bead. Pari passed the other beads one by one to her husband, who strung them together while holding one end of the broken thread between his teeth. Pari took it once her hands were free. She brought her end close to the one in Anoosh’s hand.

  As they knotted the loose ends together, Anoosh recited a poem: “I broke the long thread of love binding us together so that I will mend it again and grow closer to you, my beloved.”

  Pari knew of another verse about a broken thread, a verse her father, Jalal, used to recount: “If the string connecting us together is torn, sure, you can fix it. But then there will always be a knot between us.” She didn’t recite it.

  * * *

  Six years later, Pari knows that that knot is in her heart. She can feel the weight of it, heavier than this burly, rugged man sitting beside her, who leans closer every time the driver changes gears. She doesn’t have even an inch to move farther to the right; she can’t even stir. Why is everybody in her world — her mother, her colleagues Mrs. Maleki and Mrs. Hekmati, and others — pressuring her, not leaving any room for her to live her life as a single woman and make decisions for herself, not letting her breathe? Pressed against the Hillman’s door, she senses heat, distress, and agitation rising inside her. She wants to open the door and throw herself out, exactly like the night four years ago when she’d come so close to getting out of her father’s car and running away from the gynecologist’s office they’d come to visit.

  The doctor was a longtime friend of her father’s, and he’d agreed to do the illegal operation to abort the fetus that was growing inside her.

  Looking out the window of her father’s car, Pari had seen that the building was already closed and the lights in the offices overlooking the street were off. To prevent herself from running in the opposite direction, she’d held onto the car door after getting out.

  “Let’s go home,” she’d said when her father motioned for her to close the door. “Please. I don’t want this.”

  “My poor child.” Dokhi walked to her daughter with heavy steps, panting from being overweight. She put her hand on Pari’s shoulder, resting it on the black chador she was wearing for the occasion. Then she turned toward Jalal, who was locking the car on his side. “We can’t force her to do this if she doesn’t want to.”

  “It’s for the best,” Jalal said, joining them. “And it is best for the baby. God knows how long this war is going to last.” Jalal placed his hand on Pari’s, which was still holding onto the door, as Dokhi wiped her tears.

  “I can’t be a father to your child, Pari, you know that. I am like the sunlight at dusk. I’ll die soon,” Jalal whispered. Then he raised his voice a bit. “And the real father is dead.”

  “Not dead,” Pari wailed. “Missing!”

  “Like his comrades, he is dead. Only his body is missing.” Jalal tried to gently release her grip on the edge of the car’s door by caressing her hand. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking Anoosh will reappear one day.”

  But Pari hadn’t let go until Dokhi’s trembling voice came to her husband’s aid, revealing a secret she had kept until that very moment. “I never told you this, but one day, after Anoosh had gone missing, I ran into the mother of Anoosh’s friend Ali. You know him, the only one who survived the Iraqi attack that night. His mother told me that Ali was at a mental hospital. She said his comrades had exploded into pieces in front of his eyes. All of them — including the ones the authorities say are missing.”

  Now, Pari wishes her father were alive to see Anoosh reappear, to see that he was mistaken about her husband being dead and wrong to force her to make her child with Anoosh disappear. Jalal had said she needed a future, that no single young man was going to marry a woman with a child. Pari knew he had forced the awful act upon her out of fatherly love, but it was devastating nonetheless, to both of them. He hadn’t lived more than a few months after Anoosh was found to be an aseer in Iraq. Confining himself to his room for most of the day, he would try to avoid seeing Pari drowning in pain. Even so, he continued to wane until the guilt and the shame devoured him behind the closed doors of the master bedroom.

  Pari cannot forgive herself for listening to Jalal. Will Anoosh forgive her, tomorrow night or later, when she tells him that she didn’t try hard enough to resist her father? Even if it was because she loved him so, and couldn’t bear to see his growing distress once he’d found out she was pregnant? Anoosh knew well how much Pari loved Jalal, but was love for your father a good enough reason to sacrifice your own child?

  “Stop.” Pari’s loud voice echoes in the taxi. “I’ll get out here.”

  The driver pulls in and stops until he is paid the fare he requests, which is more than the ride should have cost. Pari doesn’t care; she just wants to go home. From there she will call her mother to let her know she’d better cancel the visit from her suitor, because Pari is not going to show up. She’d agreed to meet the suitor only because it would allow
her to reject him more easily later, by pretending to have found a character flaw in him, something as ridiculous as smacking his lips after taking a sip of his hot tea. But now Pari thinks that giving in to her mother’s arrangements was a stupid idea. If Anoosh finds out about it later, whatever slight chance she has of reuniting with him will be ruined. His imaginary accusing voice rings in Pari’s mind: You say you want to give us another chance and mend our marriage. You say you still love me. Why then did you invite a suitor to your house the day before my return? Pari is spellbound. The voice continues, turning scornful. Don’t tell me that your mother invited him and you sheepishly went there to please her, as if you were a child.

  No, Pari cannot afford to let her mother or anyone else talk her into something she doesn’t want to do. Especially now that Anoosh is coming home. At this moment, Pari should be concerned only about how to face him, about how to explain why she’d insisted on a divorce. She had aborted their child. She’d believed her father when he said that Anoosh was not alive. She’d believed him when, with tears in his glossy old eyes, he said, “Believe me daughter, had I thought Anoosh knew you were pregnant, I would have wanted you to keep his child so that his soul could live in peace.” When Pari had found out that Anoosh was an aseer and they’d started exchanging letters, she’d felt a responsibility to tell him the truth. But the truth — the whole truth that the abortion was her parents’ idea — would ruin her family’s reputation. She hadn’t been able to do that to her father, and she cannot do it now to her mother.

  The scandal that ensued after Pari divorced her aseer husband had worsened her father’s depression. Once the news leaked out, Jalal lost his credibility as an elder who had always worked as a mediator to resolve disputes, mend broken relationships, and bring couples or family members back together. Neighbors would cross to the other side of the street and pass him by without saying hello. Even in their extended family, everybody stopped trusting Jalal, blaming him for letting Pari dump a war hero. Pari’s brothers came one night, without their wives, to express their anger. After that, they stopped visiting their parents altogether until Pari agreed to move back to the apartment she had shared with Anoosh, which Jalal had given them as a wedding gift. She would have preferred to continue living with her parents, and they would have preferred to have her in their home, but she wanted peace in the family. Pari’s departure was the last blow to Jalal. He died soon after and left Dokhi a widow at only fifty-five.