Divided Loyalties

by Nilofar Shidmehr

  It would not be fair to cause her mother any more pain, Pari thinks. When she sees Anoosh, she’ll tell him she found a doctor and went by herself. She will tell him that her parents, like him, never knew what she did. They were innocent.

  Reviewing her speech in her mind and holding the newspaper to her chest, Pari turns quickly in the direction of home. She can’t stop herself from running down the busy 16 Metri Street as fast as if she were a mother and her baby’s life were at stake. A family of four coming from the opposite direction moves to the left to avoid a collision, and Pari almost crashes into a young girl walking beside her. The father of the family turns around and yells at Pari. “What is wrong with you, woman? Slow down!” His wife joins him, shouting after her, “You are not a child playing hide-and-seek with other kids in the street, you know?”

  Pari does not slow down. She runs faster, and in no time reaches her apartment building on Bayat Street, panting and soaked in sweat. After taking a moment to get her breath back, she places the paper under her arm to fish the keys from her purse. As she lifts her head to unlock the door, she feels the weight of somebody’s gaze looking down on her from above. It is her upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Shamsi, who is a friend of her mother’s from a Koran reading group they both attend. The woman is leaning out from her green-framed window and fanning herself with the hem of a white chador decorated with small red roses. “Your mother called. She is worried to death, thinking you had an accident,” she shouts.

  Before Pari can even open her mouth, she continues. “Why are you here? Did you forget about the suitor?” Mrs. Shamsi’s sons appear in the window on either side of their mother and, holding onto her shoulders, crane their necks and sing in chorus, “Bride, bride.” Afraid that in a moment all of the building’s residents will stick their heads through their windows to watch the embarrassment on her face, Pari opens the door, throws herself into the foyer, and rushes up the stairs. She hears the boys running down the stairs toward her, singing “bride, bride” in tandem with their mother’s tromping behind them.

  The boys beat Pari to her floor by a second. She pushes them back by waving the paper in front of them and makes her way to her door. Their mother appears as Pari inserts her key in the lock. “Tell them to be silent, Mrs. Shamsi,” Pari huffs.

  “Boys, the bride says shush!” Shamsi scolds them and then turns to Pari. “Your suitor is coming at six. Why are you here?”

  “You already asked this.” Pari grimaces, whacking the two brats who are waiting as eagerly as their mother for her answer. “It’s a long story, and if I stop to tell you, my mother will need to wait longer.”

  “Oh, a long story. I hope everything is fine and that you’ll make it to your mother’s before the suitor.”

  Pari turns toward the door, turning the key in the lock. “That’s my problem, Shamsi Khanoom, not yours.”

  “I am just worried about your mother.”

  “Don’t be,” Pari snaps while pushing the door to her apartment open. “I am going to call her right away and talk to her.” She slams the door on the boys, who are about to enter after her.

  The heat locked in her living room jumps at her like an armed enemy. She drops the paper on the coffee table and rushes to the window to draw back the heavy curtains and open it. She sticks her head out and breathes. The air outside is muggy, but it’s better than the air trapped inside. Pari surveys the wilted flowers in the neighboring building’s yard, which droop their heads like a bunch of aseers. After a moment, she closes the curtain and turns back into the room to call her mother.

  The phone barely rings before her mother answers. “Where are you? You were supposed to be here an hour ago.” Dokhi’s scream echoes in the receiver. “Why have you gone home?”

  “To find Anoosh’s prayer beads.” The words jump out of Pari’s mouth.

  “To find what?” Dokhi’s voice is so screechy that it hurts Pari’s ears.

  “Anoosh’s prayer beads — the ones Baba gave to him the day after our wedding, when you came to visit.” She tries to speak calmly.

  Her mother’s answer is silence. As it drags on, Pari feels panic begin to rise. She starts to shiver. Has her mother just had a stroke? “Maman . . . Maman?” The last thing she wants right now — at this critical moment in her life, when she needs all of the strength and courage she can find to reveal her injured heart to Anoosh — is to have her mother’s dead body on her hands. “Maman . . . please answer me. I am dying from worry here.”

  “Are you?” Dokhi’s anger breaks the silence. “If you cared a bit for me, you’d have come here right after work. You wouldn’t have gone to home to find some prayer beads. And for what? God knows what you’re cooking up in your head right now! You are my daughter, but I can never understand you.”

  “If you let me talk, I’ll explain,” Pari shouts back.

  “Okay, explain. But be fast, because you need to get here before your suitor arrives.”

  As Pari contemplates how to break the news to her mother, Dokhi continues impatiently. “Listen, Mrs. Maleki and Mrs. Hekmati have both vouched for him. I just talked to them.”

  “You called them again?”

  “Yes, when you didn’t arrive by half past twelve. You’d better call them. I am sure they are worried for you too. Anyways, I was saying that this suitor is so perfect. You have no reason to reject him. Do not spoil this chance. Opportunity never knocks twice!”

  Pari holds the receiver away from her ear for a moment before speaking. “I am not going to reject him, because I am not coming at all,” she says, her voice serious. “You either call them and cancel their visit or tell them on my behalf that I’ve decided not to marry at this time. I am going to keep my options open.”

  “What nonsense are you talking about? First prayer beads and now this: ‘keep my options open.’ This is more than your usual unpredictability. You have gone mad!”

  “I am not mad.” Pari takes a long breath before she delivers the speech she has prepared in her mind. “You must have heard in the news that the aseers are coming back. Anoosh is due tomorrow. I am going to see him and tell him about what I did to . . . ”

  “O imam of martyrs, Hossein! She is determined to cause my death as she caused her poor father’s by insisting on divorce, and then by suddenly leaving us,” Dokhi whimpers theatrically. Pari imagines her beating her chest as she continues. “God, please kill me. I have had enough with this daughter. Three sons have not made us so much trouble as she has!”

  “Maman, you cannot make me feel guilty about this. I already feel guilty enough — for listening to Baba and you and . . . oh God, how could I do this to my —”

  “Bite your tongue.” The receiver crackles with Dokhi’s shaken voice. “Confessing this will only destroy Anoosh’s life forever. Have pity on him and on yourself.”

  “What, ‘destroy’? We can still have another child.”

  “Pari, have you forgotten what he wrote in his letters when you wanted a divorce? He believes that you had a lover, that you wanted to be one of those women with no strings attached. How can you go back to someone who insulted you like this, let alone your father and me? You need to wake up. Anoosh will never take you back, especially if you tell him about the abortion.”

  Pari is boiling with anger, but lets Dokhi continue.

  “I beg you to come here now. I want to see you happy again before I die. You’re my only daughter.”

  Pari feels the heat rising up her neck. She can’t continue this conversation. “No, this time I’ll decide what I want to do with my life,” she says, preparing to hang up. “And my decision is to not come tonight. I’ll decide whether I’m going to see Anoosh or not; I’ll decide whether to tell him about what I did or not.”

  A few moments after ending the call, Pari is still perspiring heavily. It takes a while for her heart, which had thumped in her ears during the entire conversation, to
calm down and get back to normal. It is already four o’clock. She should have cancelled the visit from the suitor last Thursday, when she found out about Anoosh. It isn’t fair to give the task to her mother at the last minute. But until this afternoon, she’d thought she could do it, that she could sit through another proposal visit. Had she cancelled it during the week, she would have had to explain her reasons to her colleagues. But Pari didn’t want to confide in them, especially not to the “investigator,” Mrs. Hekmati, who thinks she knows more about Pari’s life than Pari.

  The minute this thought crosses Pari’s mind, the phone rings. Pari lets it go unanswered, her eyes darting around the living room, seeking an object to rest upon. Nothing of Anoosh is in the room. After the divorce, his family came and took all of his belongings. They even took the wedding album, which she knew they would later burn at their home. The room is furnished with Pari’s dowry, old-fashioned and dusty: the loveseat she never lounged on after Anoosh left; the Rococo chair Anoosh used to sit in when he was distressed, rolling his prayer beads; the cabinet with the large open space in the middle for a Philips TV; and the clock, which ticks madly. This is all that is left behind.

  The phone rings for a second time and Pari struggles to ignore it. She manages only by focusing her eyes on a framed picture that sits above the TV. Three-year-old Pari has her arms wrapped around the shoulders of Jalal, who is holding her up. Her head is turned toward whoever took the picture. Pari doesn’t remember when the photo was taken, but she has been told several sto­ries about how inseparable she and her father were, right from her earliest days. She was always looking up to him, always seeking his approval, always wanting to be the woman he wanted her to be. But if Jalal were alive right now, Pari thinks, she would not have consulted with him about her decision to meet with Anoosh. And what about her other decision, to tell Anoosh about the fetus she didn’t let grow into a baby? Maybe her mother is right and the truth, the whole truth, would only destroy her remote chance of reconciliation. She can tell Anoosh that she asked for a divorce because she was badly depressed, so bad that she contemplated suicide, so bad that she thought she would never get better. She could say she didn’t want to let him see her like that, didn’t want to fail him with her failure.

  The story has a lot of truth in it. But things have changed since the end of the war, two years ago now. Pari has recovered, and the unborn fetus belongs to the time of war. Now it is time for peace, for rebuilding, for reconciliation. Pari closes her eyes, cutting off her view of the old picture with her father; that also belongs to the past. Behind her eyelids, a wish is nested. They say young people are allowed to have wishes, no matter how crazy they look to their elders. Pari’s wish is that on Saturday, after she tells him the “white truth,” Anoosh will say yes. She’ll give him back his ruby-red prayer beads, and when she is accepted, she can ask for his hand!

  The beads once belonged to Jalal, but on the day Anoosh came to propose to Pari, Jalal had given them to his future son-in-law. The beads remember the touch of all three of them; they can connect them to a happy time, long before the bloody years of war, death, and separation. But she cannot give them to Anoosh before undoing the old knot and making a new, delicate one, one that, as the newspaper boy put it, can be made only by young women. But where are the prayer beads?

  They must be in the drawer in her bedroom, in the box Jalal gave her on the day she moved back to this apartment that she’d abandoned for a few years, to the apartment Jalal had purchased in her name, as his only daughter, when she was born after three sons. Pari is about to get up and find them when the phone rings for a third time. This time, she picks it up. “Maman, please don’t call again. I’m not coming.”

  The sound of Mrs. Hekmati’s voice surprises her. “Pari, it is too late to change your mind. Many people’s reputations are at stake! I worked on your suitor’s company file. He called me yesterday, looking for reassurance that you weren’t going to refuse him like you did your other suitors. I didn’t think you were as unpredictable as your mother says! Thinking of remarrying your ex-husband? Will he even accept? He has probably gone crazy under the Iraqis’ tortures.”

  Pari interrupts the woman’s spiteful speech. “I never said I wanted to remarry him. My mother has given you the wrong information. I said I am going to see him and apologize.”

  Mrs. Hekmati continues as if Pari had not spoken. “And I haven’t yet talked about Mrs. Maleki’s reputation. The old woman is the one who convinced your suitor’s mother to tell him to propose to you tonight. If we are nobody to you, think of your poor mother.”

  Pari’s patience finally boils over. “Enough is enough! You, Mrs. Maleki, my mother . . . why don’t all you poor people leave this ‘unpredictable’ woman alone? Deal with whatever you have cooked up in your conspiracy. I am out, and I’m unplugging the phone.”

  She slams the receiver down and her rage turns to tears. She crumples onto the sofa, still in her sweaty work uniform and hijab. She is utterly exhausted, unable to clean her face and nose with a tissue, unable to get up, go to the bedroom, and change her clothes. It is as if she has turned into one of the three fairies in “Pari-ya,” the poem her father used to recite when she was a little girl, lying beside him for her nap. She weeps ceaselessly, exactly like the three fairies who are captured, taken to a cold and dark place by a beast, and abandoned.

  Although her name means “like a fairy,” the poem was nevertheless a surprising one for her father to read to her as a child. Written by the political poet Ahmad Shamlu, it was intended for adults who had given up hope, as motivation to make them struggle to change their circumstances. Now, as Jalal’s voice echoes in her mind, she feels like a hopeless pari, a desperate fairy who needs a nudge, a wake-up call, in order to stop whining, get her act together, and do something about her situation.

  Just then, there is a firm knock at the front door. Pari knows it is Mrs. Shamsi because she can hear her sons’ duet echoing in the hallway. “Bride, bride.” She wipes her tears and moves to the door.

  She opens it just wide enough to push the woman’s rascals aside and shout at their mother. “Look at you! You’re in such a hurry to come pester me that you’re wearing your chador inside out.” She slams the door in her face, but continues to yell through it. “You’d better go back to your place fast. If our male neighbors see you like this, they’ll think you’re available for temporary marriage, for becoming a sigeh!”

  Mrs. Shamsi shouts back from behind the door. “I just came to give you a message from your mother. You are betting on the wrong horse — on a dead horse.” Her voice fades as Pari retreats to the bathroom to cry without interruption.

  As she splashes cold water on her face she thinks of the many hot showers she shared with Anoosh and lets him materialize before her wet eyes. But it’s not the Anoosh who at times surprised her by unexpectedly opening the shower curtain and joining her under the water that she sees; instead, it’s the ghost she’d picked out on the screen as the Red Cross film of new war captives played. A man from the Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs had called her office and told her to go to the screening. Pari sat in the middle of the movie theater while a queue of captured Iranian soldiers with dusty black hair and boots passed before her eyes. Their mud-spattered military fatigues still appeared khaki-colored. To Pari, however, the men all looked similar. She did not tell her father that she went to these screenings; he was sure Anoosh was dead. She did tell her mother, although she asked her not to say a word to her husband.

  On that particular day, like the gray-haired man on her left, Pari held onto the armrests of her seat. Their hands were close, almost touching, but Pari was not concerned about this. She was concerned that she might have missed Anoosh stumping by on the screen. Her eyes were blurry with tears, making it difficult to distinguish between the captives in the line, all of whom kept their heads low. The image almost appeared to be of a single overexhausted aseer stretche
d across the screen, an aseer with drooped shoulders, so dirty it seemed as if he’d been dragged through muddy ground or stomped on by muddy shoes. Pari tried to concentrate on the captives’ faces rather than their boots, but she was still unable to tell one man’s face from another. Still, she continued to squint at the screen, trying to find the familiar face that used to rest beside her on a pillow, until suddenly a woman sitting on her right grabbed the armrest and pressed her hand over Pari’s, causing Pari’s eyes to open wide and, in that split second, capture Anoosh’s face. She heard herself screaming, “Stop the movie! Stop! It is him!”

  She heard the voice of the man sitting on her left, also shouting, “Stop the movie.” The woman on her right, who was still holding onto her hand, joined the chorus. “Stop. It is her . . . son.” Her words startled Pari like the crack of a whip, reminding her of the child she’d aborted a year ago. Pari doubled over, a sudden pain pouncing at her from inside. “My poor child,” she murmured.

  The woman, who thought Pari was Anoosh’s mother, shouted louder. “It is her son!” The certainty in her voice encouraged others to also speak up, demanding that the movie be stopped. All at once, the queue of prisoners on the screen stopped its march, covered by the silhouette of the man operating the projector at the front of the room. The shadow looked like a marshy ground in which the soldiers were trapped. Anoosh was no longer among them. But someone else’s loved one was. From behind her, Pari heard a woman screaming. “It is him. It is him! My son. My Reza. Thank you, God! I found my aseer.”