Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

  I wrote more letters to Parviz, begging him to try to persuade Father to send me to America. I received no replies.

  I was standing on the riverbank by myself when a male voice shook me out of my reverie. “Salaam, halet chetoreh.”

  It was a boy I often saw on the way to school. Our eyes sometimes locked as we passed. He had blue eyes and was clearly at least half foreign.

  “Will you go on a boat ride with me?” he asked.

  I accepted, not giving myself time to think beyond the moment, to allow the fear of doing something forbidden to take over me. He told me his name was James.

  Rowboats for rent were moored on the bank. Except for the owners of the boats, mostly Arab boys, no one was around. James rented a boat, telling the boy that he wanted to row himself. Then he took my hand and helped me onto the boat. The water shimmered gold in the sunlight. I couldn’t believe my own daring to get into a boat with this boy in broad daylight.

  James’s father was English, his mother Iranian, he said. His father worked for the oil company. “I’ll be going back to England if I get into a film school there.”

  When we reached the other side of the river, he helped me out of the boat and tied it to a tree. He took my hand and we walked on a quiet, empty backstreet. It had cooled off somewhat after weeks of wretched heat, even though it was only April. The hot, damp wind blowing from Shatt-Al-Arab had finally ceased and was replaced by the cooler breeze from the Karoon River. American women were sitting on lawns in front of their Tudor-style houses, drinking from tall glasses. An American boy and girl passed by, both laughing in a carefree way.

  Nahid by the Karoon River

  After a few minutes we entered a park filled with palms and khar zahreh bushes. The spiky green leaves and bright red flowers of the plant supposedly killed mosquitoes and then devoured them. A few American children were playing catch in one corner. Others had gathered around an ice cream truck. James bought vanilla cones for both of us, then we wandered to a secluded corner. We sat on a bench, ate the ice cream, and talked. Rabbits darted out of the bushes and roamed around on the grass, then ran back to their hiding places. The air was fragrant with the scent of flowers, masking the smell of petroleum that at times permeated the air. “Do you live on this side?” I asked James.

  “No, my mother likes the other side, so we live there.”

  After a moment of silence between us James reached over and kissed me, theatrically like the actors in American movies. Suddenly I understood what Pari meant when she spoke of being inflamed. James pulled back. I saw why—two Iranian men were coming in our direction.

  “We should go back,” I said, wanting to get home before dark.

  James rowed us back, and after we landed he asked me to meet him at the same time the following week. He asked if I wanted to hear a concert at the Armenian church. I nodded faintly. How alluring he was.

  Then we went in different directions. Pahlavi Avenue was crowded with traffic and people going in and out of shops or walking on sidewalks. The blind flute player was now sitting against a sooty wall next to a row of sad beggars, playing a soft romantic tune. A line had formed in front of Javani Cinema, which was showing Casablanca. Across the street a sermon from Friday Mosque, with its large gold dome, warned against sinful pleasures.

  As I sped home I caught glimpses of my reflection in store windows. My reflection seemed unfamiliar. There was a glow on my face, as if something was about to open up for me. I felt light, as if flying in unison with the tiny circular balloon designs on my dress.

  Around the corner from our house the owner of the barbershop was closing up his shop early. He gave us free haircuts in exchange for Father’s free legal advice. I took advantage of their agreement when my money ran out. He stared at me in a strange way, making me worried that perhaps something was written on my face, giving away my secret.

  A boy had climbed the tall palm tree on the sidewalk and was picking dates that had dried up in clusters between leaves. His eyes looking down on me produced the same anxiety in me. I tiptoed up the back stairway and went directly to my room.

  The following week James was waiting for me near the boats. The concert was Western chamber music, unfamiliar to me. Afterward there was a reception and everyone, all foreign except for me, drank and talked and laughed. Then a man came in and announced that a turbulence was breaking out on the river and those who came by boat should leave as soon as possible. No one was concerned as they all seemed to live on that side, but James and I left hurriedly. The water was already a little agitated and our boat swayed back and forth, falling forward and backward.

  “Can we meet again?” he asked as we landed. “I’ll think of a private place next time.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  Two days after that meeting with James, I was aware of cold, hostile glances from Mohtaram and Manijeh at the dinner table. Father wasn’t there and Farzin and Farzaneh were sleeping.

  “Pass the fish,” Manijeh said, addressing no one in particular.

  “She’s asking you to pass the fish,” Mohtaram said to me. “Is that too much for you?” She reached over, picked up the platter of fish, and put it before Manijeh. “I know you have no feeling for your sister or else why would you ruin her chances with her suitor? You’ve given us a bad name. And now Javad has backed away. This town is full of eyes.”

  “She hates me, she’s always been jealous of me,” Manijeh said and began to cry. She got up and dashed out of the room.

  A few hours later Father came into my room.

  “From now on Ali will take you back and forth to school.” His eyes were bulging and his posture was stiff. He raised his hand, about to slap me, but then lowered it, turned around, and walked away.

  For a few weeks Ali escorted me to school and picked me up every day. He and Fatemeh had married quietly in the village they both came from. She worked for us three days a week and he spent his one day a week off with her at her parents’ home where she still lived. On our walks, he told me how he wished he and Fatemeh could have children and how hard it was under the circumstances. Fatemeh was much younger than him and very pretty, but she seemed to really like Ali, maybe because he was gentle and kind and projected intelligence, though, like her, he was illiterate.

  Feeling that I was his friend because I read to him, Ali talked to me confidentially. He said he aimed to eventually quit being a servant and work at Fatemeh’s family orchard, but he didn’t want my parents to know that yet. He told me Fatemeh believed that beneath her insolent front, Manijeh was shy and insecure. Manijeh had always been kind to Fatemeh, and even gave her a silver bracelet. I was as surprised as I had been when Mohtaram told Zeinab that I treated her like an enemy.

  One day James was standing in a store doorway, and as I passed he slipped an envelope into my hand. If Ali saw he didn’t acknowledge it, and I decided not to say anything. When I reached school I opened it. His letter said that he was leaving for England, where he had been accepted to a film school; could I see him before he left? But of course I couldn’t, I was so closely watched.

  Not long after that, I saw a photograph of him in the window of Dream Photography on Pahlavi Avenue. He was wearing a tweed jacket. His hair was parted on the side and he was smiling in a crooked, winning way. He must already be in England, I thought enviously.

  Manijeh was now wretched because Javad had backed out of the marriage. She refused to go back to school. I heard her tell Mohtaram that she would feel shame in front of other girls because of what had happened. There was gloom and an edgy atmosphere in the house.

  I was more keenly aware than ever of Father watching me. Every foot-step, every door opening, made me think he was approaching my room. If nothing happened I breathed with relief. If he came in to preach to me I exploded now, screaming, “I hate everything, this house, this town, I want to go away, send me away.”

  Once I awoke to noises in the middle of the night. Then I realized someone was crying intermittently on the b
alcony. I looked out the window. Manijeh was standing there, barefoot, in a long blue nightgown, her hair tumbling down her shoulders, just staring at the moon, round and full that night. In the bright light I could see, pinned to the neckline of her gown, the rose brooch Javad had given her as a present. She looked lovely, I had to admit. What was the real reason for Javad abandoning her? I wondered.

  I don’t know if she became aware of my presence at the window but she suddenly turned around and tiptoed back to her room.

  What had she been doing on the empty balcony in the middle of the night? Did she expect Javad to miraculously drop from the moon? Was she sleepwalking? (Mohtaram had said once that Manijeh had sleepwalked a few times when she was a child. She attributed it to Manijeh’s susceptibility to the slightest stress.) For the first time I could see the fragility in Manijeh, which so often prompted Mohtaram to say, “She’s weak, needs help.”

  “Whore,” she mumbled the next day as she passed me on the porch.

  Manijeh’s dowry—exquisite, carefully chosen—lay in the room, collecting dust.

  Seventeen

  Some weeks later, Manijeh’s suitor inexplicably changed his mind and sent his mother and aunt to ask for forgiveness and to patch things up. Father was reluctant to accept the suitor again but Mohtaram, giving in to Manijeh’s wishes, urged him to do so. “This man can’t be trusted,” Father protested. “He’s unreliable.” But finally Father gave in.

  “Relax, breathe, and when you speak, exhale to allow for pauses between words,” Mohtaram told Manijeh before the wedding.

  “Stand straight, enunciate your words, and make eye contact with the guests but not with the groom.

  “Don’t apologize for anything. If you don’t highlight your mistakes, no one will notice them.”

  Neither my brothers nor Pari attended the wedding. Cyrus and Parviz were still in America, and Pari was in Turkey with Taheri, where he was showing his carpets to merchants.

  The reception was in the same garden restaurant as Pari’s had been. Javad had asked the musicians to play classical Persian music and the singer to sing old songs. As the musicians played violin, tar, and santur, the singer, a woman with long hair and arched eyebrows, sang one old song after another. One was a loose translation of a Hafiz poem: With its fragrance, the morning breeze will unlock those beautiful locks. The curl of those dark ringlets has shredded many hearts to mere strips. Trust in this traveler who knows of many paths.

  Don’t be afraid of the dark midnight, turbulent waves, and the whirlpool.

  I know the path of love . . .

  I thought it was ironic and sad that Javad’s taste and his manner were what Pari would have liked in a husband. In fact, he reminded me a little of Majid.

  At the end of the evening Manijeh and Javad left for a hotel. The next day they would go on a weeklong honeymoon to Shiraz. After that they would settle in Abadan, where Javad had his practice and was affiliated with the oil refinery’s hospital. They would live in a modern apartment in a modern area, where many of the American employees of the hospital and oil refinery lived as well.

  “Next is your turn,” Father said to me at breakfast. His smile was hesitant, as if he was unsure if he wanted to be gentle with me.

  “I don’t want to get married.”

  “Do you want to be an old maid?”

  “I want to go to a university in America,” I said.

  As if my not wanting to give in to marriage signaled other kinds of trouble from me he replied, “Are you careful about what you say in public? SAVAK is tightening its grip. The Shah is afraid of the mullahs. He can’t count on the CIA again if he’s forced out.”

  Though Father was preaching at me I was flattered that he was talking to me the way he used to with my brothers. Was he seeing me differently? Would he soon change his mind and let me go and join my brothers?

  That flicker of hope was rudely extinguished a few days later. I was sitting in a shady corner of the courtyard, reading the novel Mother, by Maxim Gorky, another white-jacket book I had bought from the Tabatabai Bookstore. I was usually careful to do my reading alone, but because Father wasn’t home, I was sitting in the open with it. I saw a shadow pass behind me, then Father was standing over my shoulder, looking at the book.

  “Let me see that,” he said. I handed it to him. “Where did you get this communistic book?”

  “I found it in an empty classroom,” I said, not wanting to give away the bookstore man. I had been drawn to it because of its title, preoccupied as I was by the issue of motherhood.

  “Don’t you know Communism is outlawed?” he said. “Your brothers never gave me trouble like you do.” His voice escalated as he said, “If I’m caught with that book in my home I’ll lose my license and be sent to jail. Three years for owning that book.” Like an interrogator investigating a crime, he asked, “What else have you been reading?” Without waiting for an answer he began to pull out the pages from the book and tear them into pieces. He was in a frenzy. He collected the pieces that fell to the ground and walked away with them. I remained frozen in the same spot where I’d been when he appeared.

  In 1962-1963 the Shah launched his White Revolution. The White Revolution (“white” as opposed to the “black” revolution of the religious conservatives, or the “red” revolution of Marxism) consisted of a package that included land reform, profit-sharing for industrial workers in private-sector enterprises, nationalization of forests and pastureland, sale of government factories to finance land reform, and establishment of a “literacy corps” made up of high school graduates sent to teach in villages instead of serving in the army. In addition to these reforms the Shah also announced that he was extending the right to vote to women.

  “Father, do you like all the changes the Shah is making?” I asked him at breakfast.

  “None of it should concern you.”

  “Women can vote now,” I said.

  “Girls wouldn’t know whom to vote for,” he said scornfully. “It’s better if they didn’t.”

  Criticism of the White Revolution leaked out in spite of widespread censorship. Almost everyone had a family member or a friend in a country with a free press; then there were newspapers and radio stations that reported such news before they were forced to shut down.

  Some newspapers and stations criticized the Shah and said his White Revolution wasn’t doing much—that most of the oil money was still going into the pockets of the royal family and the “One Thousand” (families connected to the Shah) while the majority of Iranians were poor. That the Shah had his suits made by the best tailors abroad and that they cost six thousand dollars each, millions in toomans. His office and his palaces were decorated with solid gold and jewel-studded panoramic mirrors and rugs woven with gold threads. He owned luxury homes in European countries. His assets totaled more than a billion dollars, which were valued as trillions in toomans. His court was described as lavish and, worse, depraved. He and Shahbanoo Farah, his third wife, took a private plane to Italy and France each week to dine in the most expensive restaurants, get a haircut, shop, or go to St. Moritz to ski.

  One article maintained that while on the surface the White Revolution seemed as if it would be beneficial to people, it came with traditional colonial trappings. Thousands of American technicians, support staff, and military men flooded Iran. Furthermore the U.S. army personnel and their staff and family members had been given diplomatic immunity in Iran. In the Majlis (parliament), which was usually tame, one outspoken deputy had asked why an American refrigerator repairman should have the same legal immunity as Iran’s ambassadors abroad.

  Another article complained that the Shah allowed companies to pay Americans and the English several times more than Iranians employed in the same jobs. They bitterly condemned the brutality of SAVAK, which hadn’t changed since the White Revolution, as well as the United States for helping the Shah to form the police force and keep it going. Now SAVAK directly controlled all facets of political life in Iran. Its
main task was to suppress opposition to the Shah’s government and to keep people’s political and social knowledge as minimal as possible. SAVAK had become a law unto itself, having legal authority to arrest, detain, interrogate, and torture suspects. SAVAK operated its own prisons in Tehran, the notorious Evin prison among them. Many of these activities were carried out without any institutional checks.

  Jalal carried in his bookstore an underground newspaper, Bidar Sho (Wake Up). It came out weekly and I read it cover to cover and then discarded it before Father could find it. One week the issue was full of articles that debated the pros and cons of the Shah’s White Revolution.

  One article said the White Revolution had lifted Khomeini, an ayatollah (the title, meaning “sign of God,” was given to major Shiite clerics), to national prominence. He had taken a leading role in opposing the Shah. He said that the Shah’s reforms were there only to satisfy his American allies. He criticized the Shah’s catering to American values—allowing liquor to be sold in stores and consumed in public, allowing women to walk around without being covered. He also criticized the Shah for giving immunity from prosecution to Americans living in Iran.

  In his sermons Khomeini said, ominously, “If the Shah should run over an American dog, he would be called to account. But if an American cook should run over the Shah, no one would have any claim over him. If the men of religion had any influence, it would be impossible for the nation to be at one moment the prisoner of England, the next of America.”

  In 1963 Khomeini issued a fatwa against the Shah’s reforms. In response, the government-owned radio station began a campaign designed to ridicule the clergy. On the radio the Shah announced that his reforms would take Iran into the “jet age,” whereas the mullahs wanted to remain in the “donkey age.” This comment led to demonstrations by theology students and clergy. The Shah cracked down on the dissent.