Stranger No More

by Annahita Parsan

  The stress was palpable, and I worked hard to make sure Asghar had no cause to complain about anything, from the food I served to the way I spoke to him. Because I had made my dad Daniel’s legal guardian before we left Iran, he could still take him back home if he wished. Twin fears stalked me: the possibility of losing Daniel again if my parents refused to leave him with me and the possibility of seeing Daniel hurt if my parents did choose to leave him with me. What would happen when my parents’ three months were up and they returned home? How much longer would Asghar’s anger remain in check?

  My dad and mom were asking the same question, almost outright at times. “Is Asghar treating you well?” they asked, more than once, but only when he was out of the apartment. “What happened to you in Turkey? Why did you not call for all those months?”

  I was so used to hiding the truth from everyone around me, the lies came easily.

  Though there were times when Roksana was excited to have a new big brother in her home, she did not always take kindly to Daniel’s presence. On the first night he was with us, she put his bag, coat, and shoes outside the front door, exclaiming loudly in Danish, “She’s my mommy.”

  Daniel started school within a week of his arrival. I was nervous, especially when his teacher informed me that in Daniel’s third week the class was going on a five-night camping trip out to the country. But it turned out I didn’t need to worry at all, as school became the place where Daniel was most at peace. To all our amazement, as Mom, Dad, and I waited by the school gate to welcome him home from the trip, he bounced down from the bus, laughing and joking in near-perfect Danish with a new friend.

  Yet the joy of knowing that he was making friends and having fun at school was dampened by a conversation I had with his teacher soon after. I was waiting to collect him from school one afternoon when she asked me to step into the classroom while Daniel waited in the corridor outside.

  “I’d like you to see this,” she said, handing over a picture of tanks and dead bodies lying in the street, covered in blood. “He’s been writing about it too,” she added. “Maybe he needs some help?”

  Later that night, when the lights in his room were low and Roksana was sound asleep, I sat down on the edge of his bed and asked him about the picture. Daniel hesitated at first, and turned away, but then he surprised me.

  “Grandpa told me that we had to go and help Khanoum because some bad people had been fighting near her house. We went, and there was a house that was all broken because of a bomb. I saw dead bodies in the street too. There was a lot of blood.”

  We sat in silence. I knew about the bomb already, how the war against Iraq was no longer confined to the western border as it had been when Mohammad was alive. The Iraqis had started bombing the cities, and Isfahan had been hit a few months earlier. Dad said that the planes must have been aiming for the mosque, but they missed. The bombs had hit right on Farshadi Street, a few hundred feet away from Khanoum’s home.

  I sat and stroked his arm. It was Daniel who broke the silence. “I don’t want to go back to Iran. The teachers there are bad men. They beat you if you get anything wrong. The teachers here don’t do that. I want to stay.”

  That first conversation unlocked others. Over the coming days and weeks Daniel gradually revealed the truth about his life in Iran, stories that were even more shocking than the first. The more Daniel told me, the more I understood that the biggest threat to life back in my homeland was not the brutal war with Iraq, but the cruelty of the regime.

  As much as I worried about what might happen in our home if Daniel did stay, from everything he had told me, life in Iran was even more unpredictable and dangerous than it was here with Asghar in Denmark. And I think perhaps my parents knew this too. It was best for Daniel to stay, wasn’t it?

  A few days before they were due to return to Iran, my parents witnessed a scene that I feared would make them change their minds about leaving Daniel. I was working in the kitchen while the others were sitting in the living room watching TV one afternoon when Asghar and my dad got into an argument. I had no idea how it started, but I came into the room to see Asghar standing up, screaming at my father. Then Asghar picked Roksana up from the floor and hurled her toward the couch. She hit the wall above it and slid down to the cushions below. She cried, and I went to her as my dad yelled and left.

  Dad did not come back for hours. Asghar disappeared, too, and I spent much of the time after both of them left feeling the fear rise within me. Was my dad okay? What would he say when he finally did return? Would the conflict between him and Asghar resume?

  When at last there was a knock on the front door, I opened it to see Dad standing next to a stranger who had found him, lost and anxious on the street. I thanked the good Samaritan and ushered my dad inside.

  Nursing a cup of sweet tea, Dad and I sat in silence at the table awhile. When he finally spoke, he only did so briefly about how angry Asghar had made him. “There are so many like him back home,” he said. Then he tried to talk a little about life in Iran. I listened, silently, but his words were halting, as if blocked somewhere deep in his chest.

  Eventually he placed the cup carefully on the table and looked up at me. He sighed. “Daniel will be safer here with you.”

  As soon as I said good-bye to my parents at the airport, I started counting down the days until Asghar next exploded. He had already started to crack, with angry whispers in the middle of the night if Roksana wanted to sleep beside me. It didn’t matter to him that, for the first year of her life, she had slept on my chest and now sleeping alone seemed unnatural to her. Asghar hated any show of affection toward the children, and I learned to wake up the instant either of them cried at night. If I didn’t, he would go to them first, and their cries would only grow louder.

  It was late in the afternoon the day Asghar’s violence toward Daniel returned. A few days had passed since my parents had gone, and I was standing at the kitchen window, watching Daniel play outside with some friends.

  I heard Asghar approach from behind. He leaned over, opened the window, and shouted down to the boys below. “Daniel, come!”

  Daniel looked up and froze. He was fifty feet away, but I could see the terror on his face.

  A minute later he was back inside, out of breath.

  Asghar slapped him hard around the head. “Why didn’t you ask me if you could go out?”

  “Asghar,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “It’s all right. He did ask if he could go outside. I said it was okay as long as he stayed where I could see him.”

  Asghar turned to me, his body blocking Daniel in against the wall. He stared hard, his eyes cold. When he spoke he spat the words out as if they were poison. “But he didn’t ask me.”

  I pushed past, trying to reach Daniel, who had started crying, but Asghar’s arms were too long and too strong. He pushed me back, and I lost my footing. Daniel’s crying only got louder as Asghar turned to him and shouted. “Your mother can’t teach you how to behave properly, but I will!”

  I scrambled along the floor to Daniel and wrestled him away before Asghar could hurt him again. Asghar spewed a sewer’s worth of obscenities at us and slammed the door behind him as he left.

  I kept my voice quiet as I tried to encourage Daniel to come away from the wall he was now curled up against. “It’s okay. He’s gone. It’s okay, Daniel.”

  The trouble was, I didn’t believe what I was saying. I was desperate inside. How could we cope if life was already like this just a few days after Mom and Dad had gone?

  Four months earlier I had been feeling lost and aching with the pain of missing Daniel. Now I had a new nightmare playing out within me. I was terrified of what might happen if I ever left the kids alone with Asghar. I spent every moment thinking about Daniel and Roksana and how I could keep them safe. I knew that life at home in Iran was dangerous in so many ways and it was better to be here in Denmark, but would things ever really be okay?

  Having spent months marking the days o
n the wall in the Turkish jail, I continued to live my life by the clock in Denmark. Only, instead of counting days, I counted minutes.

  If I was at college and the final lesson was in progress, I would know precisely how much time I had until I could spring up from my chair, sprint to collect Roksana from preschool, and then hurry back home before Daniel’s bus would deliver him home.

  If Daniel went to the bathroom at home and I couldn’t see Asghar, I would only wait so long until I went and checked that my son was okay.

  And if Asghar was raging, I would try and keep his anger directed at me long enough that Daniel and Roksana could run and hide in the cupboard under the sink.

  I could never relax.

  The only time I ever laughed was when I was with friends at college, but even then the happiness was short-lived. Within seconds I would be reminded of Asghar or worry about what might happen next when one of the children woke up. My chest would once again feel as though it was full of stones.

  I was constantly worried about the children, and I couldn’t eat more than a few mouthfuls of food before the nausea would take over. Adrenaline ran throughout my whole body constantly, robbing me of sleep, putting me in a state of constant high alert.

  In the mornings, while Asghar slept, the children and I would eat in near-perfect silence. We used plastic cutlery instead of metal to minimize noise, and we whispered our conversations behind doors, which we had closed with gentle care.

  Asghar often slept in late and went out in the afternoon, not returning until the early hours or the next day. On those precious afternoons when the house was our own, the contrast to our silent mornings was immense. There would be singing and laughing, music playing, and jokes cracking. But once the door handle turned and Asghar walked in, the spell would be cast. Winter would descend. All joy would vanish.

  There were times when Asghar would be calm. Whenever he invited guests over he would often be the charming host, a perfect blend of warmth and wit. I knew that he wanted me to play along and pretend that all was well, and I did the best I could to smile and laugh when he joked. But for Daniel and Roksana, the unpredictability of it all only made things worse.

  We were approaching the second anniversary of Daniel’s arrival when Asghar informed me one day that he had invited some friends over to eat that night. By then, I had worked out how to make sure we didn’t starve, in spite of the way money seemed to evaporate in Asghar’s hands. Since I was the one who cashed the monthly welfare checks, I made a point to head straight to the store and load up on enough rice, tomatoes, and beans to last the next four weeks as soon as we had the money. But if, for some reason, Asghar found the money before I could get to the store, we learned to live without the luxuries and still survive.

  The thing about this particular night, though, was that Asghar had already taken the last of the money for the month. I looked in the kitchen cupboards and wondered what I could make out of the half dozen ingredients I found. I thought about asking Asghar for some cash to go buy some meat to maintain our façade in front of his friends, but then I stopped myself. Why was I doing all this? I was done pretending. If he wanted guests to come and eat with us, they’d have to eat like us.

  When the couple arrived, we welcomed them in. I’d not met them before, but they seemed nice enough. They were Iranian, of course, and Asghar talked with the husband, a smartly dressed man named Soleyman, at length about politics. They filled the apartment with cigarette smoke and bragged to each other about how much they were doing to support the Shah and take down the regime. The wife—Sadaf—remained quiet throughout. I wondered if she was pretending too.

  When Asghar waved his hand in the way that I knew meant he wished me to tidy the dishes away, I set to work. My arms were full of plates when Asghar pointed at an ashtray that was overflowing onto the table. “Clear this too,” he said before reaching out for the bottle of whiskey that was rapidly going down.

  “I’m busy,” I said. “Can’t you clear it?”

  He snapped instantly. His chair flew back, and he swung his arm out toward my head, the bottle of whiskey just missing my eye as I ducked. The dishes crashed to the floor.

  “What are you saying? You don’t think I’m the man of the house? You clear it up!”

  I tried to shout him down, but he was in my face, his hot breath a stench of booze and tobacco. His free hand pushed me back against the wall, the whiskey bottle poised above his head, ready for another shot.

  He was a little drunk already, and as he lost his footing I slipped under his arm and back around the table. Sadaf and her husband sat in silence, both of them staring at Asghar. I didn’t care that they were seeing it all. I was done trying to cover for him.

  “I’m going to kill you!” Asghar waded through the chairs, and I ran to the bathroom. I heard our guests try to calm him down, and I strained to listen for sounds that would tell me whether the children were awake. They had heard these fights so often there were times that they just slept right through them.

  Then I heard the front door slam. Footsteps approached the bathroom. After a gentle knock, I heard Sadaf’s voice.

  “Annahita, are you okay?”

  “Has he gone?”

  “Yes.”

  I unlocked the door. Sadaf reached for my hand. “Is this normal, what he did?”

  I closed my eyes and nodded. I wanted to be free from all this hiding.

  “Annahita, I can help you. I have a friend who works for Social. I know you’re afraid, but you don’t have to live like this.”

  I panicked. Social was the government department that kept us alive. They paid our rent and paid for our food. If Asghar knew that I was talking to them about him he would be even more enraged.

  I begged her to say nothing. “Please, Sadaf, you must leave. I must clear up.”

  She did as I asked. I closed the front door behind her, once again hoping to hide the secret of Asghar’s violence. I had been in this situation so many times already, wanting to let someone help me but terrified of what might happen if Asghar found out. Life couldn’t carry on like this forever, could it?

  Asghar was off on one of his trips one weekend, and I spent that Saturday morning looking through the classified section of the local newspaper and listening to Roksana and Daniel laugh out loud at the cartoons they were watching on television. My eyes rested on an advertisement for a cheap, small piano, and, on impulse, I phoned the number, visited the seller that afternoon, and knocked the bargain price down even lower.

  The next day, the apartment was home to a squat little wooden piano. Its lacquer was chipped and the wood stained with coffee cup rings and cigarette burns, but it was mine. I carefully wiped clean the keys until they shone as best they could. I had never had any lessons and played no other instruments, but I loved simply the idea of being able to play, as well as the prospect of my children growing up in a house where they could make their own music. That felt like the kind of thing a good mother would do for her kids.

  Of course, Asghar was dismissive of this when he finally came home on Sunday evening, but I ignored him. I practiced playing every day, trying to let my fingers become familiar with the keys and the different notes that hid behind them. I couldn’t play any tunes that anyone would recognize, but if I let myself, I found that for just a few moments I would fall into the music. Everything else, for just a few seconds, would fade away.

  A month after the piano arrived I came home with the children to see Asghar sitting around the apartment with a man I had not seen before, a strange-looking rug on the floor between them, and no piano. I spoke carefully as I took off my shoes.

  “Where’s my piano, Asghar?”

  He didn’t look at me, but smiled at his friend, put on his calm and gentle voice, and spread his hands wide like a politician. “I gave it away, Annahita. My friend here was in need of it.”

  I looked at the man he was taking to. He nodded and smiled back at Asghar.

  “He was kind enough to give us t
his carpet,” Asghar added.

  I looked down. It was old, stained, and, the closer I looked, the more obvious it became that it was in fact made of two separate, equally old and shabby carpets sewn clumsily together. It was a joke of a carpet. It was almost funny.

  But I wasn’t laughing. Inside I felt such anger rise within me. I looked back at Asghar and his friend, grinning at each other like a pair of fools. “Why did you do that?” I spat.

  “It is not your choice,” Asghar said, his voice less cheerful now. “This is my life, my home, and these are my things. If I want to give anything within it to my friends, then I will.”

  “And get something like this in return?”

  Asghar shot up, but then checked himself. His smile was gone, but something was different about him. He was holding back. I didn’t stop to wonder why, but pointed back to the carpet. “Look,” I said. “It’s pathetic.”

  Asghar’s friend stood up, coughed loudly, wished Asghar well, and headed for the door.

  Once Asghar closed it behind him, he turned around and stared at me. Daniel and Roksana knew to be quiet and invisible whenever we walked in on Asghar, and they hadn’t said a word since we got back. But as Asghar glared at me, they slipped out of the room and down the corridor toward the bathroom.

  I was glad they didn’t see Asghar pull the box cutter out of his pocket, or watch him as he marched toward me, turning over furniture, pulling at the blinds, destroying everything around him like a tornado.

  I don’t remember much after the first hit. I do remember being on the floor, desperately trying to kick him away. I remember the blade in his hand and him slashing at my feet. Nothing more.

  I was in the hospital when I woke up. A nurse was checking the bandages around my foot. She tried to ask me some questions, but I said as little as I could. I was desperate to get home and make sure that the children weren’t alone with Asghar for one minute longer than they had to be.