Moon at Nine

by Deborah Ellis

  A construction crane sat in the middle of the square. Around it, the guardsmen waited. They were dressed all in black and hooded, with masks covering their faces.

  Farrin reached for Sadira’s hand and squeezed it.

  She couldn’t see, but she heard the crowd go quiet. Several of the guards shouted something through their megaphones, but the sound was so muffled, Farrin couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  And then the crane jerked upward. On the end of the line, where there should have been a wrecking ball, was a man.

  His hands were bound behind his back, his legs were tied together, and his face was uncovered so that everyone could witness the agony of his last gasps for breath. He swung and twisted on the wire. In a futile attempt to escape the tightening of the noose, he jerked his legs and tried to spin himself away. Two jerks, three, five. Farrin lost count.

  It took the man many long minutes to die.

  The Revolutionary Guardsmen made more indecipherable speeches through their megaphones, then they let the crowd go. Her father led Farrin and Sadira away.

  It was a relief to get back inside the car. After a short period of confusion, the cars sorted themselves out and they were back on the road again.

  Sadira gripped Farrin’s hand all the way back to Tehran.

  TWELVE

  ‘Don’t be more than others

  So I urge my heart…’

  IT WAS RUMI Day at school.

  The youngest junior class was up on stage, reciting a few short verses. Their eyes were glued to their teacher, a smiling young woman who encouraged them every time they fumbled the words.

  Farrin’s school put a lot of emphasis on maths and science, expecting that many of its students would go on to study medicine.

  ‘But knowledge without appreciation for culture creates only half a person,’ Principal Kobra was fond of saying to new parents as she toured them through the school. ‘Your child will know her Ferdowsi, Rumi, and Hafez as well as her multiplication tables.’

  Once a term, the school displayed its poetic knowledge. Parents and officials were invited. Farrin’s father had to work and she hadn’t bothered to ask her mother, so neither of them was there.

  Sadira’s father wasn’t there, either. ‘He already knows I can recite poetry,’ she said.

  The presenters grew in size, and the length of their recitations increased. Farrin became more and more nervous as the time approached for her class to present.

  She had been assigned a long poem about Solomon meeting with the birds and understanding all their words even though the birds had so many different calls. The message of the poem was about how it was possible to communicate the important things even if there are different languages involved. It was a long poem, but Farrin was not worried about that. Learning something by memory was simply a matter of concentration. She could recite the poem backward and forward.

  But she was still worried because the poem she had been assigned was not the poem she was going to present.

  In the days following the Shiraz trip, something had become very clear to Farrin.

  She was in love with Sadira.

  There was no other explanation for it. Sadira was the first thought in her head when she opened her eyes in the morning and the last thought she had before she fell asleep. Every evening at nine o’clock she went outside to look up at the moon, blow it a kiss, and whisper secrets for it to deliver to her friend.

  When she was in a room without Sadira, the room felt empty. When Sadira was with her, no matter how crowded the room was, no one else was there.

  And no matter how much time they spent together, it never felt like enough.

  Farrin had been trying to get up the nerve to tell Sadira how she felt. Sometimes when they studied together, she came close to a confession, but then Sadira would ask for help with a trigonometry problem or ask if she could remember the source of the Euphrates River. They would talk about schoolwork and Farrin would get tongue-tied about the important things – and not be able to say it.

  Today, she was determined. She was going to do it in front of everyone, in a way that would make it absolutely clear how she felt and how happy she was about it.

  After that, she could worry about whether or not Sadira felt the same way.

  She was going to do it in a poem.

  At first she tried to write her own poem, but nothing she could write described the ache and joy of what she felt for Sadira. She went looking through the classics, and in the end came back to Rumi.

  But not a Rumi poem ever assigned at school.

  Her class was called. She walked with them up to the stage and stood in rehearsed formation for the choral reading.

  When that was done, she stepped forward. It was her turn now.

  She walked to the center of the stage, right down to the front. Her tiptoes, in their shined black oxfords, hung over the edge of the platform.

  She looked right at Sadira’s face and began to recite.

  ‘Exquisite love, what exquisite love we have,

  How fine, how good, how beautiful,

  How warm, how warm, this sunlight love keeps us

  How hidden, hidden, but how real…’

  Sadira’s eyes were shining and she was smiling.

  ‘… Once more, and again once more, what mad passion is this …’

  The door to the gymnasium banged open. A dozen members of the Revolutionary Guard, their guns pointed, stomped through the crowd of students.

  The girls’ shrieks were cut off as the soldiers pushed them aside with their rifles and shouted at them to be quiet.

  ‘What right do you have to come bursting in here?’

  Principal Kobra strode up to the commanding officer and brushed aside his rifle as if it were no more powerful than a wooden ruler.

  ‘We go where we choose,’ the officer said. ‘We don’t explain ourselves to you.’

  ‘Watch your tone,’ Principal Kobra said. ‘This is a school. These are my students. I am their principal. If you want to speak to them, you will go through me.’

  The guardsmen ignored her and marched onto the stage.

  Farrin was too shocked to move. One of her classmates pulled her back to rejoin the others.

  The commander of the guardsmen spoke in a loud voice.

  ‘I want the student who is responsible for this.’

  He pulled out of his pocket a folded sheet of paper, opened it, and held it out. It was one of the women’s rights pamphlets that had been floating around.

  ‘We have been informed that a student from this school has done this. I want to know who it is, and I want to know now.’

  Principal Kobra came up on stage.

  ‘I am the principal,’ she said again. ‘Leave this with me. I will find the culprit and turn her over to the authorities. There are young children here and you are scaring them.’

  The commanding officer shoved Principal Kobra so hard she fell to the stage floor. Farrin was the closest. Without thinking, she helped the principal to her feet.

  The commander spoke again.

  ‘I ask again, who is responsible for this?’

  No one came forward.

  ‘Nobody will answer me? Then I will decide for myself who is responsible.’

  He spun around and looked at the group behind him on stage. He walked up close to each one, looking into her face intently before moving on to the next one. When he came to Farrin, he stopped.

  ‘You were the one who picked up your principal,’ he said. ‘Did you write this pamphlet? Did you write, ‘Iranian women overthrew the Shah only to be betrayed by the Ayatollah?’’

  Farrin was too frightened to speak. The commander was bigger, louder, and meaner than anyone she had ever encountered before. She could not open her mouth to speak.

  ‘Take her,’ he said to his guards.

  Two guards grabbed Farrin’s arms and dragged her off the stage.

  Farrin struggled but there was no escaping the grip they had
on her. She heard Sadira cry out. She heard the teachers pull students out of the way. She heard the principal argue with the commander.

  And then she heard another voice.

  ‘I wrote the pamphlet!’

  This voice was so loud and so strong, it rose above the others.

  The soldiers hauling Farrin stopped and turned around.

  Standing in the center of the stage was Rabia, Head Girl of the school.

  The students froze.

  ‘I wrote the pamphlet,’ Rabia repeated. ‘I wrote it and typed it and printed it myself. No one helped me. I am responsible for it, and I stand by every word in it. My mother fought for the revolution and she – ’

  Whatever else Rabia was going to say next was lost as the guards engulfed her.

  Farrin heard a few stray words as Rabia was dragged away, words like ‘Freedom’ and ‘Fight for rights.’

  Rabia was popular. The crowd surged forward to follow her. The girls ignored their teachers’ attempts to keep them out of the Revolutionary Guards’ way. In the confusion, the guards holding onto Farrin released their grip. In that instant, Farrin was yanked away and swallowed up by the student body. She became just one more school uniform in a sea of others.

  Farrin found Sadira. They made it outside, but it was too late.

  Rabia had been taken away.

  THIRTEEN

  TRIGONOMETRY HAD LOST its appeal.

  Farrin and Sadira sat on the floor, their books spread out before them as usual, but neither could study.

  After Rabia’s arrest, the girls had been led back to their classrooms. The Rumi Day assembly was over. The rest of the morning had gone on as usual.

  The teachers had tried to resume lessons, but Farrin doubted that anyone had listened. Finally at lunchtime, Farrin and Sadira had escaped to the privacy of the gym.

  ‘What will they do to her?’ Farrin wondered. She was thinking of the village, where they watched the man swing from the crane.

  ‘They don’t hang girls, do they?’ Sadira asked, voicing Farrin’s thoughts. ‘They wouldn’t do that, just because she wrote something.’

  ‘How does that pamphlet hurt the country?’ asked Farrin in return. ‘The government says education is important, but if they educate us, then we will start to think. And if we start to think, then we will have opinions.’

  ‘They won’t hang her,’ said Sadira. ‘I’m sure they won’t hang her, or even torture her, like they did to my father. They’ll probably just lecture her and scare her a little. It wouldn’t make sense for them to hang her. Rabia’s really smart. Iran needs smart women.’

  The girls picked up their trigonometry books again and pretended to study. They pretended it was an ordinary day and they had a class to prepare for.

  Farrin stared at the page but could take nothing in. She was about to ask Sadira if she was having the same problem when the other girl spoke.

  ‘What was that poem you were reciting? Weren’t you supposed to do the one about the birds?’

  Farrin put her textbook back on the floor.

  ‘It sounded like a good poem,’ Sadira said. ‘At least the bit you were able to get out before the guard came in. Do you know the rest of it?’

  ‘I know all of it,’ said Farrin.

  ‘Feel like giving me a private recitation?’

  The floor of the gym was not the right place. Farrin got to her feet and held out her hand. She pulled Sadira up and led her to the stage, where she found a high stool for her friend to perch on. Then Farrin stood before her and recited.

  The poem came from her lips with all the love and passion she felt but had not been able to express. When it was done, Sadira rose from the stool and took Farrin’s hand.

  As though they were speaking with one mind, one heart, one voice, they said together and with the same sense of wonder,‘I love you.’

  And they embraced.

  Farrin was floating ten miles in the sky above Tehran. Sadira loved her! This wonderful, beautiful, heavenly girl loved her! She wanted to dance and sing and leap from mosque tower to mosque tower, proclaiming from every loudspeaker in Iran that Sadira loved her and she loved Sadira.

  They were still kissing when they heard the door slam.

  They had thought they were alone.

  But someone had seen.

  I feel too happy to care, Farrin thought.

  And she kissed Sadira again.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘I SAW THEM.’

  Of course it was Pargol. It had to be her, on monitor duty, checking out all the places where students might go to get into trouble without being seen. Sometimes she caught students with illegal fashion magazines. Sometimes she caught juniors, their heads bare, wearing their hijabs like capes or backwards for a game of Blind Girl’s Bluff. Sometimes she didn’t catch anybody doing anything wrong, so she made things up, like, ‘Don’t you know this area is off-limits to students on Tuesdays? Get out. The next time you’re caught here, you’ll go on report.’

  ‘We were doing our trigonometry prep,’ Sadira said. ‘We’re allowed to study in the gym. There’s lots of room to spread out our books, and it’s quiet, so we can study without interruption.’

  ‘You were not studying,’ said Pargol.

  ‘We were taking a short break,’ Farrin said. ‘Sadira wanted to hear the poem I started to recite at the assembly. So, just to stretch our legs a bit, we went up on stage. It was a poem by Rumi,’ she added, ‘because it was Rumi Day.’

  She directed this last bit to her mother and father, who were sitting in uncomfortable chairs in Principal Kobra’s office. Sadira’s father was also there. His chair was slightly more comfortable, but he did not look any happier than Farrin’s parents.

  ‘It was disgusting, what I saw,’ Pargol said. ‘The sort of thing that should never happen between two girls. They are freaks.’

  Farrin was shocked to hear her mother speak up. ‘My daughter is not a freak. Farrin has been attending this school for years. I attended this school when I was a girl, before – well, before. I don’t know where your monitor comes from, but I can assure you, if any girl here is a freak, it’s certainly not my daughter.’

  Her mother was not helping.

  Her mother would be angry at being forced to come back to a place she considered to be taken over by savages and peasants. She would also be mad at Farrin for drawing attention to herself when she had been so often ordered not to.

  Farrin’s father was also looking furious. He had not looked up at her once since entering the principal’s office.

  Farrin could deal with her parents’ anger, especially her mother’s; it was an everyday event at her house.

  But there was something more that made her afraid, and it was related to what her grandmother had said. Was she about to be crushed?

  ‘May I ask what arrangements have been made for them once they graduate?’ Principal Kobra asked.

  ‘You mean, what university will Farrin apply to?’ her father asked.

  ‘She means a husband,’ snapped Farrin’s mother. ‘She wants to know if we have arranged her marriage yet. Tell her it’s none of her business.’

  ‘You can speak to me yourself,’ Principal Kobra said. ‘I’m sitting right in front of you. I suggest that if you have not made marriage arrangements already, then you should do it quickly. And if a marriage has been arranged, I suggest you consider moving up the date. They are smart girls. The right marriages will protect them from unnatural tendencies. They might even continue their educations. I could arrange for them to take accelerated studies so they would be ready to sit their final exams in a few months. Then they could graduate high school before their marriages.’

  Farrin started to panic at this. There was too much going on in that small room, and none of it was in her control.

  Would Sadira’s father force her to marry? Her own parents would not really make her get married, would they? They were so modern and Western in their thinking. Hadn’t her father been mad at her
grandmother for suggesting a husband for Farrin?

  Sadira was standing by her father, her head down. Farrin vowed then and there that she would do everything in her power to keep any marriages from happening. She and Sadira were in love. They were supposed to be together.

  We’ll run away, Farrin thought. I’ll steal money from my mother and make Ahmad drive us to Turkey.

  She pictured the two of them riding horses across the desert, crossing the border at night on foot, creeping silently so they would not alert the border guards.

  She was so caught up in her vision that the principal’s voice took her by surprise.

  ‘We cannot have this sort of thing happening at our school,’ Principal Kobra said. ‘There are already men in the community who think that by teaching our girls to be smart and confident, we have turned them into immodest troublemakers. If word gets around that we’ve allowed this kind of immorality to flourish, we will all be in trouble.’

  ‘Immorality?’ Farrin asked, speaking up even though she knew that it would be better to keep her mouth shut. ‘We’re in love. We’re not hurting anybody. I don’t see how this is anybody’s business but our own.’

  ‘I really should expel them both,’ Principal Kobra said, ignoring Farrin, ‘but they are top students and could have excellent futures. Perhaps this is just a childish phase they are going through. So, I will permit them to stay for the next few months in an accelerated program. But they are on probation. Any further incident and it will be out of my hands.’

  ‘You’re not going to report them?’ This came from Pargol, who looked almost physically ill with disappointment.

  ‘No, I am not,’ said the principal. ‘And let me say now, before all of you, how very grateful I am to Pargol for bringing this matter to our attention. I don’t know how the school would function without the eyes and ears of my monitors. Pargol, I have a further task for you.’

  Pargol stood up straighter. ‘Anything, Principal Kobra.’