Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

  When we got home, Father, Mohtaram, and Pari were gathered around the television. When they saw us come in, they looked relieved.

  “I heard in the courthouse that things are getting really bad for Americans and English in Iran,” Father said. Father, who had so wanted us to come for the visit, encouraged us to leave the country as soon as possible.

  When Mansour returned from work a few hours later, he, too, said he had heard at work that things were getting bad for Americans and English.

  The images of the protestors Howie and I had seen in the square flashed across the screen.

  As we prepared dinner, I watched Pari and Mansour talking about all the tension in the country. But seeing them interact congenially made me reconsider what Pari had told me about Mansour. I tried to brush away my negative feelings toward him. In many ways, he seemed very tolerant of my sister. He hadn’t divorced her in spite of knowing or at least suspecting that her heart was with another man, something that in the Iranian culture was so condemned. I remembered when I lived in Ahvaz reading about a woman being stoned to death by her husband and his relatives in Bandar Abbas. The husband didn’t pay any penalty.

  We crowded around the TV again when the news returned. They showed the same images of demonstrators in the square. The same scene appeared again and again on the streets of other cities, too, all over the country.

  “The fact that a state-controlled TV station shows people’s dissatisfactions is a sign that things are getting out of hand,” Mansour said.

  “The Shah opened the lid a little and people are encouraged,” Father said.

  I couldn’t tell if he was approving or disapproving of the Shah; he was cautious, as usual, when talking about him. “It’s so much the nature of our country, upheaval after upheaval,” he added.

  Thirty-five

  Before we left for the airport, Pari took me to her bedroom and said, “I want to give you something.” She went to her jewelry box on the bureau and took something out and handed it to me. It was a striking gold pendant with turquoise, amethyst, and rubies embedded in it.

  “Are you sure you want to give it to me? It looks expensive and is so beautiful. Don’t you want it for yourself?”

  “It’s a piece I managed to hide from Taheri. But I never wear it anymore.” She hung it around my neck. “I like it better on you.”

  Father called to us to hurry up.

  “I wish we had had more time to talk,” Pari said, her voice tinged with sadness. “There are more things . . .”

  “I’ll come back again when things are calmer,” I said.

  Once we returned to New York, the rebellion in Iran only accelerated.

  After being expelled from Iraq, Khomeini went to Paris, where he was more accessible to a large body of opposition forces. From his exile he preached that he would enforce traditional and religious values and redirect Iran’s wealth from the Shah and from large industrialization schemes to the common people; he would make the country “democratic and Islamic.”

  Khomeini came from a religious family with an established clerical heritage that claimed descent from the Prophet Mohammad. He was born in 1901 in Khomein. He became an ayatollah in the 1920s and, following tradition, took the name of his birthplace. When Khomeini was only five months old, his father was murdered. Life in Khomein was miserable at that time because of three predatory khans who oppressed the population. Khomeini’s father decided to do something about the situation and he went to Arak to ask the provincial governor for help. But the khans followed him to Arak and shot him while he was on horseback. He died instantly. Khomeini was a strong and energetic boy who excelled in sports. After his mother died, he left his birthplace and turbulent childhood behind and went to Arak and then to Qom for his education. Did the murder of his father create in him a spirit of revenge against its supposed instigators, the authorities?

  As Khomeini gained popularity while in exile, religious groups, too, grew in number and status. Even intellectuals, more and more disillusioned with the Shah, began to back Khomeini. (They had become particularly unhappy with the Shah’s formation of the Rastakhiz, which he made the only legal political party, banning all others, making the country a one-party state controlled by him.)

  Then in January 1978, when a government-planted article in a leading newspaper ridiculed Khomeini as a medieval reactionary, the protest movement took a new turn. Senior clerics denounced the article, and seminary students took to the streets in Qom in larger numbers than ever before, clashing with police. Several students were killed. Anti-government demonstrations escalated, sweeping across dozens of towns and cities. Gradually all segments of the society, including women, united in protest.

  In August more than four hundred people died in a fire at the Rex Cinema in Abadan. Many believed that SAVAK had set the fire so that religious fundamentalists could be blamed. In September more than one hundred thousand people took part in public prayers to mark the end of Ramadan, but the ceremony became an occasion for anti-government demonstrations that continued for two days, growing larger and more radical. The government declared martial law, and the next day troops fired into a crowd of demonstrators at Tehran’s Jaleh Square. Hundreds of protestors were killed when tanks and helicopter gunships were called in. The shootings that day, which came to be known as Black Friday, made compromise with the regime, even by moderates, less likely. Any support the Shah still enjoyed was now gone. Khomeini sent messages to the rebels urging them to keep going until they overthrew the Shah. He called for a general strike across the country, precipitating even worse riots. Rich, poor, religious, secular, men and women, illiterate or highly educated, all stood behind the revolt.

  In the fall of 1978, strikes against the oil industry, the post office, government factories, and banks demolished the economy. In November the Shah broadcast on television a promise not to repeat past mistakes, to make amends. He even had some prominent members of his own regime arrested. But his grip on people had weakened, and on December 10, 1978, eight million Iranians took to the streets to protest.

  One-fifth of the protestors were from the government, forming a growing mass of opposition. The military was melting away; soldiers were no longer willing to fire into crowds. They accepted the flowers that demonstrators put into the muzzles of their rifles and joined in to support Khomeini. Public services were shut down, and revolutionaries seized government buildings, radio stations, and armories.

  Khomeini openly called for the assassination of the Shah. People roamed the streets, shouting, “The Shah must leave,” “Khomeini is our leader,” “Arrest the murderer, the American king, punish him, kill him,” “President Carter is the incarnation of Evil.” In the crowds were women covered by chadors, male and female students in jeans, merchants in suits, mullahs in long black robes and turbans. They waved toomans with the Shah’s picture cut out of them. Some of the rebels invaded police stations and Tehran’s main arms factory for weapons. On the Tehran University campus, they pulled down the statue of the Shah, one of hundreds that stood in public places, and broke it into pieces with sledgehammers. The British Embassy was set on fire.

  Communication with my family in Iran was severed. No letters were going back and forth, no phone calls were possible. I had no idea if they were out on the streets protesting. I reached out to my brothers to find out if they knew anything about the family but they were just as cut off from them as I was. They both believed that the Shah had become even more tyrannical than when we lived in Ahvaz. A new government couldn’t be worse than his, they said. Our conversations were always filled with anxiety about our loved ones back home and their total inaccessibility to us.

  On January 16, 1979, after a year of nonstop public outcry, the Shah fled Iran, saying he was going on a “vacation.” Carrying a small box of Iranian soil in his jacket pocket, he boarded his silver-and-blue Boeing 707 and flew to Egypt. He left the government in the hands of the regency council and Prime Minister Shahpur Bakhtiar, a former member of t
he National Front. In the following weeks, the Shah moved from country to country, seeking political asylum.

  This time the Shah didn’t have the support he had in 1953, when the CIA put him back on his throne. The Shah had become unpopular in much of the world, especially in the liberal West. Ironically these were his original backers and the ones who had the most to lose by his downfall. President Jimmy Carter, who at one time praised the Shah as a wise and valuable leader, now refused to intervene in the uprising against him. As a champion of human rights, he refused to allow the Shah to come to America.

  In an Iranian specialty shop in New York, where I was a regular, the owner kept a shortwave radio tuned to an Iranian station. I tried to get the day-today news there. Things were barely functioning in Iran and I rarely got more than a few bits of information.

  Then one day, as I listened, an announcer said, “This is the voice of the Iranian nation. The cruel, oppressive Pahlavi regime is finished and an Islamic government has been established under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. We hope to receive a message from him now. Please keep listening,” but then the radio went dead.

  Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1, 1979. He denounced the materialism of the recent past and called for a climate in which social justice would prevail. On April 1, 1979, he declared an Islamic Republic that promised democracy. He was named the political and religious leader for life. Now the country was called the Islamic Republic of Iran, instead of Iran or Persia.

  Alas, a reign of terror followed. Political vengeance was taken, culminating in the execution of hundreds of people who had worked with the Shah’s regime. Khomeini condoned the assassinations of different people abroad and other terrorist acts. The small gains women had begun to make under the Shah were set back. Now all women were required to wear chadors. Women and men had to sit separately on buses, men in front and women in the back.

  A cultural purge was unleashed against anything Western. Nightclubs and cinemas were burned or shut down. Pop singers like Googoosh were ordered to stop performing. Only a certain kind of music and Islamic propaganda programs were allowed on TV. Censorship of books was worse than ever—the publisher who kept Farrukhzad’s poetry in print was forced to close down.

  During those years many Iranians—minorities like Jews, Christians, Bahais, as well as more modernized citizens—escaped from Iran, legally or illegally, fearful of living under a fundamentalist Muslim government. My brothers urged Father to bring the whole family to America, but Father wouldn’t hear of it. He was eighty-nine years old now and couldn’t bear to leave Iran—his friends, his language and customs. He couldn’t imagine, at this stage of life, starting out in a new country, and he had no intention of becoming dependent on his sons. He said, “I prefer to die in Iran.”

  I urged Pari and Mansour to leave Iran and come to America. Pari said that Mansour had the same attitude as Father: he wanted to stay in his own country.

  And what about Bijan? Another hearing has been set up by my lawyer, Pari wrote in a letter.

  Then it was too late. The American government refused to grant visas to any Iranian not seeking asylum.

  This, after President Carter allowed the Shah, who had lymphoma, into the United States to undergo medical treatment. The Shah had been traveling from country to country—Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico. Iranian students interpreted this gesture by President Carter as part of a ploy to restore the Shah to power, as the CIA had done in 1953. On November 4, 1979, the situation came to a head when students, numbering anywhere from three hundred to two thousand, and calling themselves the Imam’s disciples, gathered at the American Embassy in Tehran. Finding a basement door open, they slipped inside and seized all the Americans in the building. The embassy staff quickly tried to destroy all the secret documents, but they were captured before they finished. Sixty-six were taken captive, including three who were found at the Iranian Foreign Ministry. After blindfolding the hostages and holding guns to their heads, the students marched them outside. With the secret documents in their hands, the students cried, “We have all we need from the nest of spies!” The crowd around them roared its approval. Other students spray-painted anti-American slogans on the walls of the embassy, in both English and Farsi: “Nest of Spies,” “American Murderers.” Then the students took the Americans back inside and locked them up. As a condition of the prisoners’ release, they demanded the Shah’s return to Iran to stand trial.

  This was the Iran Hostage Crisis. The American government retaliated by applying economic and diplomatic sanctions against Iran. President Carter ceased importing Iranian oil and a number of Iranians living in the United States were expelled. He froze Iran’s multibillion-dollar assets in America, further damaging the relationship between the two countries. Hatred of Iranians flooded the American news. Caricatures portraying Iranians as barbarians appeared on walls all over America. Some Iranians were evicted from their apartments by landlords. There were incidences of American high school students attacking Iranian classmates—in one case an Iranian student was reported to have died.

  Winter turned into spring and the hostages were still kept in Iran. Frustrated and outraged, Americans urged Carter to take stronger action. Once the Shah’s course of treatment was finished, Carter, eager to avoid further controversy, pressed the former monarch to leave the country. The Shah went back to Egypt and died soon after.

  As the Iranians showed no signs of releasing the hostages, Carter finally decided to take a chance. On April 11, 1980, he approved a high-risk rescue operation called “Desert One.” Though the odds were against its success, the president was devastated when the mission had to be aborted due to three malfunctioning helicopters. When another helicopter crashed into a transport plane during takeoff, eight servicemen were killed and three were injured. The next morning Iranians broadcast footage of the smoking remains of the rescue attempt, to them a stark symbol of American impotence.

  In the United States, the yellow ribbons everywhere and constant media coverage provided a dispirited backdrop to the presidential election season. Throughout 1979-1980, the American public watched footage of Iran on a daily basis. News programs tallied the number of days Americans were held hostage. Nothing else seemed to matter to Americans, and America appeared to be a helpless giant.

  During this period I found that my friends who had never been particularly political suddenly became patriots and attacked Iran. Even though their anger at the hostage takers was justified, they lumped all Iranians, myself included, with them. My husband tried his best to be fair, but I was sensitive to his remarks, and, to me, everything he said sounded slanted in favor of America. When I gave readings from my work, people with no interest in fiction came to ask questions about Iran and Iranians. One magazine, which had published several of my short stories as well as a condensed version of my first novel, rejected a story because it was “too sympathetic a portrait of Iranian characters.”

  My daughter came home from school one day looking sad; she asked me if she could change her name to Cindy. One of her classmates had asked her where she got her name, Leila. My daughter told her it was an Iranian name. Her friend made a face at the word “Iran.” I didn’t know how to distill the complex political situation into terms that a seven-year-old could understand.

  Disasters for Iran were piling up. Saddam Hussein, capitalizing on the broken alliance between Iran and the United States, pressed Iran to relinquish its half of all rights to Shatt-Al-Arab. He wanted to reclaim the channel up to the Iranian shore. Iran insisted that the line running down the middle of the waterway, negotiated in 1975, was the official border. Saddam Hussein also perceived Iran’s revolutionary Shia regime as a threat to Iraq’s delicate Sunni-Shia balance. Khomeini, already bitter over his expulsion from Iraq in 1977, responded in anger. Saddam ordered the invasion of Iran in September 1980.

  I thought how strange and ironic that the fetid Shatt-Al-Arab, which had caused so much heat and dampness in Ahvaz, was now a major focus
of the dispute between the two countries, with much more terrible consequences than what we used to complain about.

  I had only sporadic, indirect contact with my family in Iran. Someone would tell someone else and gradually the news would be relayed to me by a phone call from Great Neck or LA, where many Iranians had fled.

  A man or woman would call the apartment and ask for me and say, “I must tell you . . . ,” or, “It’s sad news but I feel obligated to tell you . . .”

  One afternoon I had a phone call from a woman in LA who introduced herself as Shaheen. She said she was an old friend of my family who knew not only my parents but Pari and Mansour. She had fled Iran just before Khomeini took over. We commiserated for a while over the state of things. Then she hesitated.

  “I have bad news,” she said finally.

  My heart sank. What could be worse than all we had talked about? “Your father passed away. It’s already a few months but I just heard it. May his soul rest in heaven. He died peacefully in his sleep.” She elaborated that he had had pneumonia for a few days and then one morning Mohtaram woke and found him still and cold and his eyes wide open. Shaheen added, “He must have died of grief—over all the distance from his children, the devastation of the country.”

  I was overwhelmed by a rush of emotions. Father’s caring reception when we visited had brushed away all my anger. He had had so much power over me, had forcibly changed the course of my life, but ultimately much of it had been for the good. I wished I had been able to have a real talk with him, and now it was too late.

  Shaheen called a few months later to tell me my grandmother had died of “old age.” She had had a fever for a few days and then died at home. I thought of her sweet wrinkled face the last time I saw her, years ago when she came to Ahvaz for a visit, and the youthful, loving face of her earlier years. She was the one who, so long ago, took me to Maryam.