by Marina Nemat
At the age of eighteen, my grandmother, Xena Mooratova, had fallen in love with a handsome, twenty-three-year-old man named Andrei. He had golden blond hair and large blue eyes and was a communist. Xena had begged him not to go to demonstrations and protests against the tsar, but he didn’t listen to her. He wanted Russia to become greater than it was and he wanted poverty to disappear. Xena wrote that he had beautiful but impossible ideas and was very naïve. She started going to protests with him to protect him. During one of the demonstrations, the soldiers warned the crowd to go away, but nobody listened, so the soldiers opened fire.
“People started running,” Xena wrote. “I turned around. He lay on the ground, bleeding. I held him in my arms until he died. The soldiers took pity on me and let me take him to his mother. I dragged his body through the streets of Moscow. A few young men came to my aid; they carried him for me, and I walked behind them, watching his blood drip to the ground. I never slept peacefully after that day. I still wake to see his blood on my bed.”
Xena met her future husband—my grandfather, Esah—a few months later. He was a jeweler and a kind young man. She wasn’t sure how or when she had fallen in love with him. Soon, he asked her to marry him, and she accepted. They got married, had a daughter, and named her Tamara. Soon, they were forced to leave Russia and come to Iran. It was an especially difficult journey for Xena, because she was pregnant with her second child, my father. Once in Iran, the family first went to the city of Mashad, where my father was born, and then to the city of Rasht, where Esah had a few relatives. They didn’t stay in Rasht for long and came to Tehran. Tehran was very different from Moscow, and Xena felt homesick. She missed her friends and family, but it didn’t matter too much to her because she was very happy with Esah. But her happiness didn’t last long. Esah left the house one morning and never came back. Thieves murdered him for the jewelry he planned to sell in order to buy a house.
Life was very lonely and difficult for Xena after this. She longed to go back home to Russia, but everything had been lost; her home and her way of life were destroyed by a bloodthirsty revolution. She had nowhere to go and believed she was to be a stranger forever.
She started a boardinghouse and worked hard. Years went by, her children grew up, and Tamara married a Russian man and went back to Russia with him. Then, Xena met Peter, a Hungarian man who was staying at her boardinghouse. He helped her and kept her company. After the beginning of the Second World War, he asked her to marry him, and she accepted, but they never had a chance. Countries were divided, and Hungary took Hitler’s side. All Hungarians who lived in Iran became prisoners of war and were sent to special camps in India. Peter died there from an infectious disease.
I was in tears when I finished reading the translation. I knew how sad, helpless, and lonely my grandmother must have felt. Revolutions had devastated both of us. The communist revolution and the Islamic revolution had both resulted in terrible dictatorships. My life seemed like a distorted copy of her life. I could only hope that the future had better things planned for me. I had to remember that she had survived, and so would I.
The following Wednesday night, I went to choir practice. Andre smiled at me from behind the organ. I stood next to a woman who had a wonderful voice. Andre came up to me after the practice. Wearing blue jeans and a plain T-shirt, I wished I had nicer clothes on. Although the hejab was mandatory and not wearing it could result in lashing and imprisonment, women could wear what they wanted underneath the hejab. When I went to church, to visit friends, or to relatives’ houses, I could take off my hejab after arriving.
“You have a beautiful voice,” Andre said to me.
“No. I was standing beside Mrs. Masoodi. She has a beautiful voice.” I laughed.
I asked him where he was originally from, and he told me both his parents were from Hungary, but he and his sister were born in Tehran. His sister was twenty-one and had recently moved to Budapest to go to university. He was twenty-two.
It was such a strange coincidence that he was Hungarian. But when I thought about it a little, I realized it wasn’t that strange. Christians were such a small minority in Iran that we were all somehow connected in one way or another.
“Would you like to learn to play the organ?” Andre asked me.
“Is it hard?”
“Not at all. I’ll teach you.”
“Okay. When do we start?”
“How about now?”
Despite the frightening events at the rally in Ferdosi Square, I attended many other protest rallies organized by different political groups from communists to the Mojahedin. This was the least I could do to show my disapproval of the government and its policies. I didn’t say a word about this to my parents, to Aram, or to Andre. All the rallies were more or less the same: young people gathered on a main street, placards condemning the government went up in the air, the crowd began to move, slogans were yelled out, and, after only moments, tear gas thickened the air, making eyes water and throats burn. Then came the sound of bullets. The revolutionary guards had arrived. Everyone ran as fast as they possibly could, keeping their heads down. Everything became focused and clear. Colors became sharper. Avoid military green. Stay away from bearded men. It was a mistake to try to escape through narrow streets; the possibility of being arrested or beaten was much stronger there. The wider the street, the better the chance of survival. A few times, I had to hide behind smelly garbage cans or boxes of rotten produce to escape the guards. Except for the one time at Ferdosi Square, I never saw anyone shot, but someone would always tell me that he or she had seen people fall or had seen smeared blood on the pavement. Every time I arrived home safe after a rally, my heart beat with excitement. Again, I had made it. Maybe I was immune to the bullets and the swinging clubs.
About two weeks before the summer holidays, Gita, who had graduated from high school a year earlier and was waiting for universities to reopen after the Islamic Cultural Revolution, came to see me one night and told me that a friend of hers named Shahrzad wanted to meet me. She explained that Shahrzad was a university student and had been a political prisoner for three years at the time of the shah. Shahrzad had heard about the strike I had started at school and knew I had read a few of her group’s books. She had even read a couple of the articles I had written for my school newspaper. I asked Gita why Shahrzad wanted to meet me, and she said Shahrzad wanted me to join the Fadayian. I told Gita that I didn’t want to join the Fadayian; I believed in God and went to church, so I didn’t have much in common with their group.
“Do you support the government?” Gita asked me.
“No, I don’t.”
“You’re either with them or against them.”
“Even if I’m against them that doesn’t make me a communist. I respect you and your beliefs, but I don’t want to get involved with politics.”
“I think you’re already involved, even if you think you aren’t. Give her a chance. She just wants to talk to you for a few minutes. We’ll catch up with you on your way home from school tomorrow.”
I didn’t want to argue with Gita, so I agreed to meet with Shahrzad.
Shahrzad and Gita appeared next to me as soon as I stepped out of school the next day. Gita introduced us but left right away, saying she had to go somewhere. Shahrzad was different from any other girl I had ever met. She had very sad eyes and nervously looked around all the time.
“From what I’ve heard, you’re a natural leader,” she told me as we walked toward my place. “There aren’t many people who can do this. Others listen to you. I’ve also read your articles in your school newspaper. They’re good. You can make a difference. This Islamic government is going to destroy this country, and you can do something about it.”
“Shahrzad, I respect your beliefs, but we don’t have anything in common.”
“I think we do. We have the same enemy, so we’re friends.”
I told her that I couldn’t look at it that way. I simply had a habit of speaking out, and if we
had a communist government instead of the Islamic one, I probably would have spoken against it as well.
She asked me if I wanted to make a difference, and I told her that the kind of difference I wanted to make was not the same as hers. She suddenly stopped and stared at a young man who had just passed us, said a quick good-bye to me, and disappeared around the corner. I never saw her again.
I wanted new clothes. No more faded jeans, worn sweaters, and running shoes. But there was a problem. The inflation rate had soared after the revolution, and I knew my parents didn’t have extra money to spare. It was unusual for teenage girls to work, so I had to be creative and find a way to make money. Nice shoes were especially expensive.
My parents, my Aunt Zenia, and my Uncle Ismael and his wife met once every couple of weeks to play rummy. They played for money and took the game very seriously. I had watched them play many times and had learned the rules of the game. One night when my uncle’s wife was ill and couldn’t play, I offered to replace her. Aunt Zenia thought it was a great idea and made everyone give me some money so that I could enter the game. I was in. By the end of the night, I had turned a hundred tomans into two thousand. The next day, I went on a shopping spree and bought myself dress pants, blouses, and three pairs of high-heeled shoes, and the day after that, I went to church, wearing clothes I had bought with gambling money: black dress pants, a white silk blouse, and a pair of black shoes with pointy toes.
When my grandmother was alive and my parents played cards with friends and family at our house, she always shook her head and told me that gambling was wrong, that it could hurt families and friendships and this was why God didn’t like it. It was a sin. I knew all this and felt guilty. But I was sure God understood the situation. And just to be on the safe side, I was going to confess to gambling when I went to confession.
I loved the way my new fashionable shoes made a delicate clicking sound as I walked down the aisle to get to the choir pews in the front, and I loved how, with whispering voices, the choir members told me how wonderful I looked. When Andre saw me, his gaze lingered, and, during mass, I noticed him watching me from the corner of his eye.
Andre was persistent about teaching me to play the organ, but the more he tried, the more I realized I didn’t have the gift of music. He spent most of his free time at the church, fixing different things from the pipe organ to appliances and furniture, and he usually asked me to keep him company. I enjoyed spending time with him. He told me about his life, family, and friends. Before the Second World War, his father, Mihaly, who was a carpenter, had come to Iran as a young man to work on a new palace that was being built for the shah. Mihaly had left his fiancée, Juliana, in Budapest in the hope of returning home after the job was done, but the war prevented that. While the war raged on in Europe and Hungary stood by Germany, the Allies entered Iran to deliver supplies to Russia from the south. And like my grandmother’s fiancé, Peter, Mihaly was deported to a camp in India. But unlike Peter, he survived. After the war, he returned to Iran instead of his native Hungary because Hungary had become communist. The people of Hungary weren’t allowed to leave their country at that time, and Juliana was unable to join Mihaly. She was forced to remain in Hungary until the anticommunist revolution of 1956, which opened the Hungarian borders, allowing her to enter Austria as a refugee and, later, to join her long-lost love in Iran after eighteen years of separation. They married immediately and had two children: Andre, and fifteen months later, his sister. Juliana passed away when Andre was only four and his sister two and a half. After her death, one of Mihaly’s sisters, a spinster of about sixty years of age, came to Iran to help her brother raise his children. In time, she proved to be a wonderful substitute for the mother they had lost.
One day as we sat on the organ bench in the empty church, I told Andre about my troubles in school: the strike, the list Khanoom Bahman had seen in my principal’s office, the school newspaper, and the fact that Khanoom Mahmoodi hated me. His large blue eyes were wide with shock.
“You did all those things?” He shook his head in disbelief.
“Yes. My problem is I can’t keep my mouth shut.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t been arrested yet.”
“I know. I’m surprised too.”
He touched my hand, and my heart skipped a beat. His hand was ice cold.
“You have to leave the country,” he said.
“Andre, be realistic. With all the trouble I’m in, there’s no way they’d let me get a passport, and crossing the border illegally is not only dangerous, it needs a lot of money. My parents won’t be able to afford it.”
“Do your parents know about all this?”
“They know some things, but they don’t know everything.”
“So you’re telling me that you’re waiting to be arrested?”
“Do I have any other choice?”
“Hide.”
“They’ll find me. And where can I hide? Is it fair for me to put others in danger?”
I realized I had raised my voice: it bounced off the ceiling. We sat in silence for a moment, and then, he put his arm around my shoulder. I leaned against him, feeling the welcoming warmth of his body. When I was with him, I felt a strong sense of belonging, of being home, of having arrived after a treacherous journey. I was falling in love again, and this made me feel guilty; I didn’t want to betray Arash. But love had its way of doing things; it was like spring crawling into the skin of the earth at the end of winter. Each day the temperature rose just a little, tree branches swelled with new buds, the sun remained in the sky moments longer than the previous day, and before you knew it, the world was filled with warmth and color.
In late June 1981, a couple of days after my mother and I arrived at the cottage to spend the summer there, Aram phoned and asked me if I had heard that under the influence of Ayatollah Khomeini, the parliament had impeached President Banisadr because he had opposed the execution of political prisoners and had written letters to Khomeini, warning against dictatorship. I had not heard this. At the cottage, we only had an old, not-quite-functional radio and couldn’t listen to BBC News, and we usually didn’t bother watching the local television stations. A few days later, Aram told me that Banisadr had managed to flee to France, but many of his friends had been arrested and executed.
On June 28, my mother happened to turn on the television set just before we sat down for dinner, and we found out that earlier that day, a bomb had exploded at the headquarters of the Islamic Republic’s Party during a meeting. The bomb had killed more than seventy of the party’s members, many of whom were government officials, including Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, who was the head of the judicial system and the party’s secretary-general. The government announced that the bomb was planted by the Mojahedin.
In early August, the new president, Mohammad Ali Rajai, took office. He was well known as one of the leaders of the Islamic Cultural Revolution. His presidency lasted about two weeks: on August 30, a bomb went off at the prime minister’s office, killing President Rajai, the prime minister, and the head of Tehran’s police. This was also blamed on the Mojahedin, but I heard rumors that both bombings were the results of an internal war between different factions of the government.
The country seemed to have entered a perpetual state of mourning: at every street corner, loudspeakers broadcasted religious chants and music, and groups of men walked the streets, slapping their chests or hitting their backs with metal chains in the Shia tradition, while the women following them wailed and cried. I was shocked by recent events and sunk even deeper into my books, which usually offered a more reasonable, compassionate, and predictable world.
Before the end of summer, I decided not to go back to school. What was the point of going back? I was incapable of adjusting to the new rules and was only going to get in more trouble with Khanoom Mahmoodi and the teachers.
As soon as we returned to Tehran, I watched my mother’s mood to find the best moment to tell her about my decision. I
was sure she would not easily give in. She was very proud that my brother had a bachelor’s degree, and she had always spoken highly of those who received a good education. But she couldn’t make me go. I knew my situation would only worsen if I spent one more day in school.
We had bought a few pieces of furniture for the room that used to be my father’s dance studio: four large chairs covered with a velvety olive-green fabric, two black coffee tables, a dining table with eight matching chairs, and a sideboard. But the waiting area had remained the same, with the round table in the center and four black leather chairs around it. There was a kerosene heater between two of the chairs to warm the room in winter. My mother had always loved to knit, and, especially since the success of the revolution, she spent most of her time sitting in the chair on the left side of the heater, knitting sweaters for us. She also crocheted tablecloths and bedspreads. When I stepped in the room that day, she was knitting, nestled in her favorite chair with her glasses sitting low on her nose. I sat on the chair opposite hers, remaining silent for a few minutes, trying to decide where to start.
“Maman?”
“Yes?”
She didn’t look at me.
“I can’t go back to school. At least not this year.”
She dropped the sweater she was knitting on her lap and stared at me from above her glasses. Although she was about fifty-six years old and a few lines had appeared around her eyes and on her forehead, she was still beautiful.
“What?”
“I can’t go back to school.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
I told her that they didn’t teach us anything useful in school. If I stayed home, I wouldn’t have to deal with the revolutionary guard teachers. I promised her I would study all the eleventh grade books at home and go for the exams.
“You know I can do it,” I said. “I probably know more than the new teachers.”
