Divided Loyalties

by Nilofar Shidmehr

  * * *

  Pari emerges from the bathroom feeling elated. Her mind is finally made up, and she has sworn a new promise to herself: she will go to see Anoosh on Saturday, but she won’t tell him about their unborn child. Every woman has a secret and this is mine, she thinks, a secret I am going take to the grave. She heads to the bedroom she once shared with Anoosh to find his prayer beads. But first she needs to change her clothes. She opts for something unusual: the scarlet lingerie she wore on their wedding night, with its crimson laces and ribbons decorating the edge. The last time she wore this was the last night she’d spent with her husband. The night she became pregnant. They had made love all night to kill the feeling of dread that was hanging in their bedroom.

  Pari looks at her sunken face and her slim figure in the mirror. Although her body is much older than it was on that last night with Anoosh, she still looks young. She reaches behind the mirror where she has hidden a picture of herself and Anoosh together. It is their happiest photo. They are on their honeymoon by the Caspian Sea. Pari has dropped her white scarf. She has short hair and is wearing pearl earrings. They are leaning into one another, head resting on head, arms around shoulders, and are laughing wholeheartedly. Their hair, the same shade of black, looks so similar that it’s hard to tell their heads apart. It is as if one person has leaned toward a mirror, touching her hair to that of her own image. As if a woman has grafted herself to her image with one breath.

  From the bottom drawer of her dresser she pulls out the box she thinks holds the prayer beads. It is a small wooden box with a line of Hafiz’s poetry carved on the top: “Any breath drawn seeking love and peace is a good breath / Good deeds do not require permission.” Pari carries the box and the picture into the living room, where she sits down in the Rococo chair to open it. Yes, the prayer beads are there. “Seek and you shall find,” her mother would have said if she were here.

  But something else is also in the box, tucked under the beads: a piece of paper. She hangs the prayer beads from the arm of the chair and takes out the paper. When she unfolds it and reads what’s written, in Jalal’s handwriting, her heart squeezes in pain. It is the same pain she felt forty days after Jalal’s funeral when she’d discovered a paper inside an old copy of Hafiz’s book of ghazels that was very dear to him. On that day, the family, including her brothers, had gathered to sort through their father’s belongings. The writing on the paper is a list of baby names: girls’ names on the left and boys’ on the right. The names her father had had in mind for her and Anoosh’s baby. She’d refolded the paper, put it back inside the book, and taken the book as her only inheritance.

  Pari clips the paper to the corner of the picture with Anoosh and puts them on the coffee table, on top of the newspaper. Then she returns to the chair to deal with the knot that prevents the prayer beads from rolling. The knot that they made, and that to this day nobody can open. One time, Pari had wanted to cut the string, but he wouldn’t let her. Perhaps it was because he was a man who could never sever any of his ties or replace an old thing with a new one.

  But that is exactly what needs to be done to this knot, Pari thinks, examining it. Her parents’ attempts to undo it by hand and her own attempts to undo it with her teeth have just made things worse. The only way out of this predicament is to thread the beads along a new string. Pleased with her solution, Pari gets up, removes the prayer beads from the chair’s arm, lays them on the coffee table beside the other objects, and returns to the bedroom to fetch her sewing box.

  When she returns a moment later, she notices that the living room is getting dark. She draws back the curtain, allowing the remaining light of this long day to fall on the coffee table. She sits down on the Persian carpet close to the coffee table and, leaning against the lower part of the loveseat, pulls the table closer to herself. She has everything she needs for what she is going to do. First, she arranges the newspaper under her hand; next, she chooses a thread thick enough to not break easily; and finally, she picks up the scissors.

  Holding the old thread taut in her hand, she cuts the Gordian knot, letting the beads fall and spread out over the images of the aseers — the first group, who arrived home last Friday, on the day of mass prayers. Pari guides the new thread through the eye of the needle and, once more, strings the beads together. When she is done, she leans back against the edge of the loveseat and looks up. The clock on the wall reads six o’clock, the time her suitor was supposed to arrive at her mother’s house. It doesn’t matter if he has or not. Unlike Anoosh, he is history now.

  Let Go of My Hair, Sir!

  The first thing I do when I get up is listen to the message Victim Services left on my answering machine yesterday. I’m still hesitant about whether or not to follow up with the case I filed against Antonio. This morning, however, I feel certain I want to take back my complaint, but I want to remember all the thoughts that ran through my head during the night. That is why before doing anything else — even before fixing myself a drink (you heard me right, a drink, as I do almost every morning if I have the supply), before waking my daughter, Mojgan, and putting her into dry clothes (if she, yet again, wet herself in her sleep) and preparing her for kindergarten, before going grocery shopping with the money I have borrowed with much difficulty from my friend (I have already spent my welfare check and the fridge is almost empty except for a piece of bread, the remainder of the jam, and a cup of chocolate milk I have saved for Mojgan’s breakfast) — I unplug my phone from the wall and stand in front of a mirror to give myself a pep talk. I have three good arguments as to why I, Gisou Ghafoorzadeh, am not a victim — a ghorbaani. Before presenting them, however, I look myself in the eye and say out loud: “Don’t ever call yourself a ghorbaani. Do you hear me, Gisou? Not ever.”

  First Argument

  I am not a ghorbaani. Ghorbaani always reminds me of the sheep people sacrifice in Eid-e-Fetr, when Ramadan is over. Several folks from our neighborhood went to Mecca to take part in hajj, and on the day of their arrival, in order to welcome them, their families sacrificed a sheep.

  This is how the sheep becomes a ghorbaani. The butcher lays her flat on her side on the hot tarmac with her neck placed on the edge of a gutter. To prevent the sheep from kicking him away, he kneels on her. Then, when the time comes — when the new haji approaches him, and his companions cheer in the name of Our Prophet Mohammad — the butcher cuts the sheep’s head off with one quick swish of the knife. The headless sheep still kicks and tries to get on her feet as the blood gushes from her body, but then she goes into a tremulous fit, which recedes after a while. It is at this very moment that the sheep turns into a ghorbaani — when her body becomes still, when her large eyes are caught in disbelief and her tongue is partly sticking out.

  As a ghorbaani, the sheep does not kick anymore. But I still kick. So I am not a victim — not even on that night when Antonio came over, nor on the next day, when I called the Vancouver police. I called because I needed their help to make Antonio leave me alone; it didn’t mean that I was a ghorbaani.

  That night, the Italian bastard kept calling. I had already told him that I didn’t want to see him anymore, and that I’d already met a new guy through Lava­life — another Italian, but a different type — and that I was waiting for his call. No way did I want to see him again. I know: he liked to drink and I liked to drink. He was rich and could afford to pay for us to party every night. He could have been the perfect guy, if he hadn’t become a snoring corpse after we downed the bottles of wine he brought over. Every time Antonio called I repeated that our relationship was over and then hung up, but he called again. The bastard rang so many fucking times that he finally woke up Mojgan and she went into one of her screaming fits. I tried to put her back to sleep as the phone rang and rang. It was impossible. So, after twenty rings, I finally picked up and screamed in Farsi, “Vel kon zolfo!” He said, “What?” and I gave him the literal translation: Let go of my hair, which is a common expression that i
s sometimes used in exasperation. This was a mistake. I should have shouted the English equivalent: “Get off my back.” Or “fuck off.” That would have served him even better. The idiot was so drunk that he wasn’t listening to me, anyway.

  It happened that while I was seeing Antonio I slept too long and failed to pick up Mojgan from the daycare on time. This wasn’t my first time. Once I was an hour late. My poor baby was the only child left, and she’d cried so much that her face was swollen. Her teacher was totally pissed. She told me that she’d called me a million times but I didn’t answer. After the third time, she called my social worker, and he called the Ministry of Children and Family Development and they threatened to take Mojgan away from me if I was late one more time. They wanted to know what my problem was.

  Of course my problem was Antonio. He was no good for me. That’s why that night I told him, “Vel kon zolfo, agha” — Let go of my hair, sir! But he didn’t. He was at my building fifteen minutes after he’d hung up the phone. Meanwhile, I was trying to put Mojgan back to sleep, but she kept crying, clawing my face, and pulling at my hair. It was a recent development that she’d go crazy when her sleep was disturbed, and nothing could calm her down except chocolate milk, her favorite. It was fortunate that we had some left. Chocolate milk, though, was only a temporary solution. I knew I had to do something before Antonio called again and made her even crazier. I could think of no better way to calm her than to give her one of the pills the doctor had given me the year before to help me with my sleep. I warmed up her chocolate milk and dissolved a quarter of the sleeping pill in it. She stopped screaming when I gave her the glass. In a few gulps, she finished her chocolate milk. It worked very fast: she was out before Antonio got there.

  A ghorbaani, I thought, when I looked at my drugged-out baby. Her innocent face resembled the face of the sheep when the last drops of blood had drained from her body and fallen onto the asphalt. I know I shouldn’t have given Mojgan my medicine. But I had no other way, because now it was the buzzer instead of the phone that was ringing nonstop.

  I wasn’t going to let Antonio in.

  But I did when he started yelling from downstairs and throwing things at my window. I should have called the police then, before the scandal happened, before I ran out onto the terrace with my Mojgan, looking more dead than asleep in my arms, before I shouted out for help so that the neighbors called the police for me.

  The police told me I should call Victim Services in case Antonio called and harassed me again. They let him go the next morning because he hadn’t hit me yet, and it was me who, voluntarily, as the police put it, opened the door for him. Antonio called me as soon as he was released. He said he wanted to come over and play with my hair, which meant: Let’s have sex. Antonio was good with foreplay. He knew how much I loved the way he would passionately stroke my hair, lick my earlobes, and make me feel special all the way down my body. Of course this happened only on nights when he wasn’t dead drunk.

  After reporting his call to Victim Services, the next thing I did was to get a haircut. It was a painful experience. Very painful. I could hardly look at myself in the mirror for a few days. I hadn’t cut my hair so short in years. All of my passport pictures were with long hair: the Iranian passport I’d left the country with to go to Turkey; my second passport that the Netherlands immigration officer confiscated when he noticed it was fake and sent me back to that shithole, Turkey, and to that asshole, Abbas the smuggler. Finally, a year after I left home in 1995, I arrived in Canada with the third passport that Abbas had forged for me.

  After the Amsterdam police sent me back to Turkey, I had wanted to cut my hair short, but Abbas forbade me to do so. He said that with long hair I looked more like an Italian. Like Sofia Loren. I looked like shit when I arrived in Toronto. I hate the photo the immigration officer took at the airport, the one stapled to my refugee paper. With a yellow face and limp hair, I looked like someone who had just been released from the hospital. Mojgan, too, looked awful. She was only a year old then. Those large black eyes of hers which are her special feature, like my hair is mine, looked sickly and lifeless in that photo.

  Perhaps it was a good thing that I cut my hair. When I came out of the hairdresser’s I told myself, “You did it; you still kick; you’re not a ghorbaani. Understand? Don’t you ever say it to yourself, Gisou. Ever.”

  Second Argument

  I am not a ghorbaani. Ghorbaani always reminds me of the story of Ibrahim and his son Ishmael in the Koran. Ibrahim would have certainly cut off his son’s head if God hadn’t blunted his knife and sent him a sheep to sacrifice instead of his son. Unlike crazy Ibrahim, I would never sacrifice my Mojgan; instead, I have made sacrifices for her. I have always fought for her life. That’s why I told Antonio to get lost. I didn’t want the ministry to take Mojgan away from me and put her in foster care.

  The ministry people do not understand how much I care about my cheshm siyah — this is what I call Mojgan, “the black-eyed.” My social worker says I shouldn’t call my daughter belittling nicknames. He has never paused to look into her beautiful, dark eyes. Maybe he thinks cheshm siyah is the same as cheshm sefid, “the white-eyed,” which is an expression for people who are bold and continue doing things their way even when they are told not to. But probably not, and I certainly don’t care to explain the difference to him. He doesn’t get such cultural subtleties. Like Antonio, he does not stop picking on me after I tell him to “vel kon zolfo.” He doesn’t understand that it is impossible to get a job when your social insurance number starts with nine, not with seven, showing that you are a refugee and not an immigrant. He doesn’t understand that I have no love life as a single mother. I’ve lost at least three men — Kevin, Ali, and Ebi — over my cheshm siyah.

  My social worker tells me that I should stop telling him about Ebi, the love of my life. He is not a family counselor or a psychologist, he says. He is there to make sure my welfare checks keep coming and to help me find a job. The psychologist I am seeing is no better. He also tells me I should forget Ebi.

  But how can I forget him? He was the funniest, sexiest man I ever met. The problem was another woman, Firoozeh. He talked about that woman all the time. When I first met Ebi, Firoozeh had just broken up with him. I did everything to cheer him up. I became a new woman: got up early in the morning, cleaned my place, watered the flowers, went shopping, bought fresh vegetables for dinner, and made Persian food. Ebi loved my cooking. I let him talk as much as he wanted about that woman over dinner while he stuffed himself with homemade food. He was not a big eater but became one when I cooked. I lit the candles, put on nice music, and wished that it was me on his mind and not Firoozeh. But it didn’t happen that way. All he could see in his head was that woman — the woman who never cooked for him, never did anything for him except tell him that she was too good for him. Iranians say that the more you avoid men, the more they become attracted to you, and the more you go after them, the more they escape you. Men are all cheshm sefid.

  I could not escape my cheshm sefid, Ebi, no matter how much I told myself, “Gisou, vel kon zolfo.” I was totally attracted to him, to the degree that even after dinner, when he had his head on my lap or on my breast, I let him talk about Firoozeh. I don’t know how I tolerated all of this but I did, maybe because I knew that soon Ebi would reach into my dress or my panties and turn into a completely different man.

  Nobody would tell by his appearance that Ebi could talk dirty in bed. He also was very funny, funny in a dirty way, when he forgot all about Firoozeh. Sometimes he fucked me three times during the night. I was all for it. In the morning when he left, I became depressed. My home suddenly became empty. I spent all day making myself ready for when he would come back at night. At least once a week, I went to a thrift store on Lonsdale, two streets up from my place, and bought a new dress to put on for Ebi. He was smart, though: no matter how new and clean the dresses were, he knew where I had bought them. He told me that Firooz
eh never shopped at thrift stores; she was “high class,” and used to be an architect in Iran. I never bought second-hand clothing in Iran either. I had also gone to university and studied Persian literature; I had a job too, working as a typist for a notary public. The difference between Firoozeh and me was that she was already an immigrant. And she didn’t have kids.

  Ebi says he broke up with me because Firoozeh started talking to him again. But I know this is not true. I think that he suddenly realized how involved he was with me and became scared that he would be stuck with a single mother. He was someone who had escaped commitment all his life. That’s why he was still single at the age of forty-six. Still, I hoped that one day Ebi would eventually give up his own apartment, one street up from my home, move in with me, and become my husband and Mojgan’s father. Since the first day of our relationship, I had wanted him for life. Ebi, however, never wanted a life with me.

  After a while he started spending more and more time at his own place, where I wasn’t allowed to go if Mojgan was with me. He said the life he lived with me was not the life he wanted to live. He wanted to go to nightclubs, to do different things than staying at home every night and eating Persian food. He knew, because of my cheshm siyah, I couldn’t go out to nightclubs with him. I had nobody to take care of Mojgan and I could not afford a babysitter.

  I told him that we didn’t have to stay at home all the time. I could go out with him to the beach or to other places on the weekend. Of course, with Mojgan. He agreed to give it a try. At that time I still lived in North Vancouver. One Saturday in June, I woke up and prepared sandwiches for our picnic. He said he would be at my place at ten. When he arrived in his convertible fifteen minutes late, Mojgan and I were waiting for him by the door. He said he had changed his mind and didn’t want to go. He said that Ambleside Park was full of Iranians and he didn’t want his acquaintances to see him with Mojgan and me.