Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

  But what finally persuaded me to go was an urgent letter from Pari. She said she needed to talk to me in person. Howie and I scheduled the trip for October. Father and Mohtaram would travel to Tehran and stay for two weeks. Father had a legal matter to attend to in Tehran during that period. We would stay with Pari.

  At some point we decided not to take Leila. The separation anxiety we expected from her was counteracted by fear of complications in Iran, which wasn’t completely alleviated by all the assurances. We thought if this trip went smoothly we would take her on subsequent ones. Our friends in Cambridge, Irene and David, invited Leila to stay at their home and Leila was excited about spending that time with their daughter Susie.

  The night before leaving for Iran I slept in fits and starts. Sleeping was as bad as being awake, filled as it was with anxious dreams.

  When we landed at Mehrabad Airport, the official at the passport-check booth scrutinized the photographs on our passports, looked at our faces, and then at the sheets of paper spread in front of him to make sure we weren’t on any lists of anti-government suspects. It was only after we picked up our luggage and headed toward the waiting area that I was able to breathe freely. Hundreds of people stood behind a glass partition, waiting to welcome their families and friends. I spotted Pari, Mohtaram, and Father standing in the crowd, waving to us.

  As we entered the waiting area Father took me in his arms and kissed me. Mohtaram wrapped her arms around me as if there had been no history of trouble between us. Then Pari and I embraced and kissed with tears of excitement filling our eyes. None of us said anything; we only looked at each other as if a shyness had settled on us. Father shook hands with Howie and said, “Welcome,” a word he must have learned for the occasion. He had more gray in his hair but Mohtaram looked almost the same as years ago. Pari’s good looks hadn’t diminished but I immediately noticed that her face had lost some of the vibrancy that used to illuminate it. Farzin and Farzaneh had stayed behind, as had Manijeh. Ali had remained with Farzin and Farzaneh.

  Father had rented a limousine and we all piled in. As we headed to Pari’s house, we passed the Tower of Freedom, a tall limestone arch that flared out at the sides. It was built in 1971 for the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Iranian kingdom. As the driver zigzagged through the heavy Tehran traffic I looked out the window at women walking by in fashionable clothes—some in miniskirts—side by side with women wearing chadors. Ads for Pepsi-Cola and Disney were everywhere. There were discotheques and boutiques selling imported clothes; skyscrapers loomed everywhere. Red Mercedes taxis, red-and-white double-decker buses, almost every variety of foreign cars, raced by alongside Iranian-made Peykans. The snow-capped Alborz Mountains surrounding the city created a serene contrast to the jumbled and hectic atmosphere. Father tried to communicate with Howie in French (French had been a required language when Father attended law school in Tehran and Howie had studied it in high school).

  In a short time, we were at Pari’s house. Mansour opened the door and greeted us warmly, using the taarof: “It’s an honor to have you here in our modest abode. It’s below your level but please make it your home. I’m here at your service.” He had an earnest, welcoming face.

  There was an absence of symmetry in Pari’s house, which I liked. Not only was each room a different size, they were different shapes, as well—one oval, one rectangular, one L-shaped. Each was painted a different color. The large windows in every room provided a view of the mountains. The pool in the courtyard shimmered in the sunlight. An ornate turquoise minaret and the dome of a mosque rose beyond the courtyard wall.

  Pari had a private room on the second floor that was kept shut. “I keep it closed because Mansour thinks it looks childish,” she said. “I suppose it is.”

  Inside it was almost a duplicate of her room at home in Ahvaz, with posters of actors and actresses covering the walls. The movie stars were no longer Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor but Meryl Streep, Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty. A pile of Movie Star and Cinema News magazines lay on a table. Next to them was the large red-covered album of movie star photographs from years ago, some of which we had bought together from the shop on Pahlavi Avenue. A pile of Zane Rooz (Today’s Woman) magazines lay on another table. The covers showed photographs of Queen Farah or Googoosh, a famous singer, or other women celebrities.

  “Pari, I still remember the first time you showed me that album. It was so exciting.”

  “Oh, dear sister, it’s such a treat you’re here with me and we can talk like the old days.”

  I picked up a framed photograph of a young boy with dark brown hair and eyes and a gentle, appealing face.

  “He’s three years old there,” Pari said. “Eleven now.”

  “He looks a lot like you.”

  “He belongs to me. I want him back. I’m still trying and nothing yet after all these years. I dread that he’s being raised by that lunatic father.”

  “Have you not had Bijan with you even for visits?”

  She shook her head. “Taheri took him away from Tehran, and no one can track their address; it keeps changing. Even my lawyer, who is very good in his field, hasn’t been able to force Taheri to come to court. I can’t give up hope. . . .”

  Next to Bijan’s photograph stood a photograph of me, not a recent one but one from Ahvaz. I was standing by the Karoon River and my hair was blowing around my head.

  “Remember those walks on the bridge and all the dreams we shared?” Pari said.

  Mansour called us into the living room. We joined him and the others to have pastries and sharbat with orange petals floating in it.

  Father clearly wanted the visit to go smoothly and to show his foreign son-in-law what a good family he had married into. It was hard to tell what he really thought about my marrying a man from another country and religion, whom I had met on my own. If Father had any reservations he did not reveal them. He smiled a lot and spoke about history and politics, as he used to with my brothers. He described Iran as being on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The Shah was pulled and pushed between the clergy and America, each demanding something different. Competing with the loud pulse of modernity was the equally loud pulse of opposition, not only from the religious segment of society but from intellectuals, too. Father admitted he himself was caught in the same ambivalence: he wanted to maintain traditional values and at the same time was won over by some aspects of modernity. He went on to say how in spite of SAVAK’s close watch on people, corruption was rampant in Iran. It wasn’t unusual for someone to sell the same piece of land to two people and get away with it; lawsuits took many years to settle and usually the person who paid the higher bribe won.

  After an hour Mansour left to go to work, from which he had taken time off in the morning. He said he would stay in his office and work through siesta time. Father invited us to lunch at the restaurant of the Tehran Hilton Hotel, where he and Mohtaram were staying.

  The restaurant was filled mainly with Americans, but the menu featured a number of Iranian dishes. Howie and I ordered lemon chicken and cherry rice, gormeh sabsi, and joojeh kabab. For dessert we had gaz and tea, which tasted like sweet, hot perfume.

  I looked at Father across the table. He seemed softer somehow. Perhaps he really had forgiven me. If I had gone my own way, at least I hadn’t gotten him into trouble. And although Mohtaram didn’t address me directly, she smiled faintly when she looked at me, as if trying to reconcile with me, a daughter whom she had more or less abandoned. After I left home, I never heard from her: no letters, no packages like the ones other girls in college received from their mothers, no acknowledgment of my marriage or even my baby. It had all been incomprehensible to me for so long, yet I could see a frailty about her; she wasn’t the cold, agitated mother I recalled. She seemed even more enveloped in my father’s shadow than during those years when I lived with them.

  “I didn’t always predict my children’s future,” Father said suddenly. “My sons now live in America.” He stopped s
hort. After a pause, he began instead to talk about the advantages of Tehran.

  Thirty-three

  A few days into the visit, Mansour said, jokingly, “Your sister is cut off from reality.” I didn’t know what he meant, so I didn’t respond, but I had noticed a remoteness about Pari in the company of others. Mansour was domestic—he supervised the household, told Pari what to prepare for meals, brought home large bags of produce and dairy products, and helped her with the cooking.

  Once my uncle Ahmad took the afternoon off to show Howie around. He was eager to meet and practice his English with Howie. (Ahmad was a clerk in the Petroleum Ministry and hoped to be promoted. Since many of the employees at the ministry were Americans, being fluent in English was very important.) The American Embassy was near his office and he dropped in there every day to pick up free English-language newsletters. He was a lively, attractive man; when I lived with Maryam he often visited and entertained my cousins and me with jokes and card tricks and marbles. Like Father, he had married a nine-year-old girl—in his case eighteen years younger than himself. His wife, Mahtab, was blond and blue-eyed, from the north of Iran bordering on Russia, and she had some Russian blood. Mahtab sometimes visited Maryam by herself and complained that Ahmad stayed out late every night. Maryam told her, “He has you, a young, beautiful wife. Isn’t that enough?”

  I liked Uncle Ahmad in spite of his faults because he was full of dreams. He played the violin well and with emotion. He looked romantic as he held it on his shoulder, his eyes focused on something far away. He regularly went to the zoor Khaneh (House of Strength), where men exercised ritualistically, with classical Iranian music playing in the background. He even kept a photograph of himself showing off his muscles.

  That night, Howie told me he liked my uncle but felt bad for him: he was an ambitious man searching for something that he didn’t seem to find in the Iranian culture.

  “Your uncle told me Pari is depressed and miserable about many things in her life,” Howie said, looking concerned.

  “I know she’s upset about her son, and the custody battle that has been going on for years. Was there anything else?”

  “Your uncle didn’t elaborate. He said it in the context that he thought Pari should have gone to America, too, like you did.”

  The fact that Pari had confided in Uncle Ahmad shook me up, made me feel she was overflowing with unhappiness.

  One afternoon everyone went out, leaving me alone with Pari.

  “Pari, we haven’t been alone together for years. I’ve been yearning for it,” I said as we sat on the living-room sofa.

  “Yes, and there’s so much I want to talk to you about, it’s hard to know where to start,” she said. She told me she was still struggling for personal and artistic identity in Tehran with its fierce double standard and sexism. The whole city was the same tension-inducing amalgam as Ahvaz. True, in some of the ultramodern sections of Tehran, girls mingled freely with boys at parties, drank alcoholic drinks, danced to Western music blaring from sophisticated sound systems—what we used to crave when we were teenagers. But now she realized those were only superficial elements in the context of a larger lack of freedom for women, and men in certain areas.

  There was all the censorship and oppression that kept down both men and women. And then there were all the limitations for women. Even though the government supported some official opportunities for women, the situation hadn’t improved much because of the prevailing paternalistic attitude. Only a very small segment of the female population was employed. When a woman achieved success or prominence in the public arena, it was often due to her relationship to an influential man—as his mother, wife, sister, or daughter, or because of governmental tokenism. There had been a female senator, but she was never allowed a real voice. Her proposal to abolish the rule that a wife must have permission from her husband to travel to another country was rejected with no reason given. Angry and frustrated, she resigned from her post.

  The few women who managed to succeed in the arts—such as the popular singers Googoosh and Hayedeh, the actress Aghdashloo, and the poet Furugh Farrukhzad—were referred to as “promiscuous” or “pushy.”

  The notion of progress was a matter of pride for educated and professional Iranians, yet they were merely paying lip service when it came to their attitudes toward women. The women who were walking around all made up, in miniskirts, still had to obey their fathers or husbands. So did the intellectual women who sat in cafés and argued about Descartes and Hegel and Marx. Like Pari, women were forced to leave their children with their husbands if they initiated divorce. The 1975 amendment to the Family Protection Law gave women equal rights in divorce, custody of children, and marriage settlements, but these reforms weren’t actually put into practice; in court women almost always lost.

  Before Taheri took their son and left for other cities, Pari used to stand in doorways or behind a tree near their house in Tehran just to get a glimpse of Bijan. Once she knocked on the door and asked Behjat, Taheri’s sister, if she would let her have her son for a few hours. Behjat refused. Pari then went to Bijan’s school, introduced herself to his teacher, and asked permission to see him. Bijan was brought to her, but when she tried to pick him up and kiss him, he broke away and ran back to his classroom.

  “It all starts at the top,” Pari said. “The Shah’s conflicting values apply to his attitude toward women, too. With all these claims of improving women’s situations, the Shah is totally sexist. When a monarch condones something, it trickles all the way down to every man. Did you read that interview by the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci? A section of it was translated into Farsi and printed in a magazine, which was then quickly closed down because of it.”

  I had read Fallaci’s Interview with History, translated into English. In one section the Shah said:

  Women are important in a man’s life only if they’re beautiful and charming and keep their femininity. . . . This business of feminism for instance. What do these feminists want? You say equality. Oh! I don’t want to seem rude, but . . . You’re equal in the eyes of the law but not, excuse my saying so, in ability. . . . You’ve never produced a Michelangelo or a Bach. You’ve never produced a great chef. . . . Have you ever lacked the opportunity to give history a great chef? You’ve produced nothing great, nothing. . . .

  Not long ago, the Shah had repeated the same comments to Barbara Walters in an interview.

  I recalled from my childhood the Shah’s wedding to Farah Diba, a woman nineteen years younger than him. She was indeed beautiful, graceful, and feminine.

  Pari said it made her happy that I left Iran and was able to fulfill my dream of becoming a published writer. We began to reminisce, the things half forgotten by one and fully recalled by the other. That magical afternoon when the little boy handed Pari a rose. That evening on the Karoon River bridge when boys followed us, whispering endearments. Me reading to Pari the stories I wrote. Her playing Laura onstage. It was as if nothing that had happened since equaled in intensity and excitement those moments Pari and I had shared.

  Pari and I left the house and walked to Café Miami, where she sometimes met with friends.

  At the café, tables were set on a platform over a stream. The air was clear, and from our table we could see the mountains against an azure sky. Also in our view was the Moulin Rouge cinema showing The Castle of Fu Manchu; teenage boys were lined up in front of it. Next to us a group of Iranian men smoked water pipes and sipped tea.

  “You used to love ice cream with vanilla pieces in it,” Pari said. We ordered two.

  As soon as the waiter left, I poured out my problems in America. “I had many dark years before I found some peace,” I said. “I was so lonely in the provincial college. In New York, at first, I was penniless. And now I’m not quite American or Iranian. It pains me to think that I’ve drifted away so much from Maryam’s way of life, her beliefs. I wish so much that she, and you of course, were a part of my life.”

  The voice of
a woman singing reached us from a radio inside the restaurant, mingling with the murmur of water flowing in the stream. The song was based on a Furugh Farrukhzad poem dedicated to her son:

  On a parched summer dusk I am composing this poem for you.

  This is my final lullaby as I sit at the foot of your cradle.

  Against a shut door I rest my forehead in hope.

  When your innocent eyes glance at the confused book,

  you will see a lasting rebellion in the heart of every song.

  A day will come when you will search for me in my words

  and tell yourself: my mother, that is who she was.

  We listened to the song for a few moments.

  “I don’t think Furugh’s car crash was an accident,” Pari said. “You know that she was killed driving her car in Tehran. It was years ago, but I still remember all the talk and speculation that it was self-inflicted or murder by the SAVAK. I’m convinced it was suicide. The public praising and condemning her at the same time must have been so hard to take. And then there was her losing custody of her son.”

  “Pari, I read that Mrs. Soleimani was killed in a car crash, too, that it was really not an accident but murder by the SAVAK.”

  “Yes, I heard that, and in her case there was evidence that someone ran into her car deliberately. I was upset for days.”

  “So was I.”

  “Didn’t I write to you about it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Letters weren’t getting to places they were meant to all the time.” After a contemplative pause, Pari added, “The way Furugh died, running her car into a tree . . . It wasn’t murder by the SAVAK for a change; it was her own doing.” A sheen of sadness spread over Pari’s face. “So often I wish I could smash my life into pieces and put them back together in a different way. It’s the putting back that’s hard, when you have so few choices.”