Women Without Men

by Shahrnush Parsipur

  She was fed human milk for three months. Toward the end of April the pressure within her had reached explosive force. It burst out suddenly and violently. Although it was an explosion, it was not an instantaneous blowout; it was nuanced and in stages. It was as if her tissues were coming apart slowly and jarringly. In a perpetual transmutation Mahdokht was separating from herself, suffering excruciating, unbearable pain like birth contractions, almost causing her eyes to burst out of their sockets. The water was no longer a mass of droplets but fractured into infinite tiny bits of atoms of ether.

  It all came to a sudden end. The tree was now a mountain of seeds. A strong wind scattered them into the river. The seeds traveled with the water to all corners of the world.

  Fa’iza

  (Reprise)

  DURING AUTUMN THE CITY AIR was fresh. By late morning it was pleasant to take a walk in the streets. Almost every morning around eleven Fa’iza met Amir Khan for a stroll. She would arrive in Victory Square on the bus from Karadj and he would be there to meet her. He often grumbled about his wife and she listened patiently. The wife was slovenly, he complained, and didn’t know how to cook. She couldn’t even take proper care of their baby. Fa’iza sympathized with him and tried to give him helpful advice.

  A month into their assignations, the company where Amir Khan worked penalized him for excessive absences. This was a blow to him, and he had to change the time of their meetings to five in the afternoon. Now she would arrive from Karadj in late afternoon to meet Amir Khan. They would meander the streets near Victory Square and talk. Sometimes they would take in a movie or have dinner in a restaurant. After a while, it was apparent that the routine was becoming monotonous. Besides, they were running out of things to talk about.

  “I don’t know how to put this,” Amir Khan said one day, “but it is not a good thing for you to commute from Karadj every day. I’m afraid something might happen to you. A woman shouldn’t be traveling by herself late at night.”

  “What should we do?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you come back and live in Tehran?”

  “Where? In whose house?”

  “Go back to your grandmother.”

  “What makes you think she’ll take me back? She doesn’t understand our lifestyle. She’d think something bad has happened to me and be even more strict than before.”

  Amir Khan thought for a moment. “Perhaps it is better if I rent you a room,” he said.

  “Shame on you,” Fa’iza objected diffidently. “What makes you think I’m that kind of girl?”

  “What if we enter into a concubinage?”5 Amir Khan proposed. “That will at least formalize our relationship.”

  Fa’iza disliked the term “concubine” applying to her, but said nothing.

  They went to see a notary public one afternoon. “We do not handle concubinage,” said the registrar, “only permanent marriages.”

  They went through the formalities and registered their marriage with the understanding that there would be no announcements until Amir Khan had prepared his wife for a separation. They spent the night in a hotel room.

  The morning after, Amir Khan woke up in a depressed mood. He kept moving around the room looking for things. Fa’iza, for her part, ignored him as he stood in front of the window gazing at the street below. He felt his life was in a shambles and he had no one to complain to.

  “We must look for a small house,” Fa’iza broke the silence.

  “Wait a minute,” barked Amir Khan. “I’m taking you to my own house.”

  “Over my dead body!” she retorted. “What makes you think I’m going to live under one roof with another wife of yours? No way!”

  Fa’iza started looking for a place to live and soon found a place on Salsabil Avenue. Amir Khan looked for and found a new job at a trading company to support two households, still hoping that Fa’iza would put him in contact with Mr. Atrchian.

  Life goes on for the two of them—not ideally, but not too badly either.

  Munis

  (Reprise)

  MUNIS STAYED BEHIND to help the gardener for three months. Together they nurtured the tree with the milk from Zarrinkolah’s breasts. In the middle month of the spring the tree was adorned with magnificent flowers in bloom. One morning they found that the tree had turned into a huge mound of seeds. A wind came and scattered the seeds on the river.

  “Munis,” the gardener addressed her in a serious tone, “it is time for you to become human.”

  “But I want to turn into pure light,” Munis told him. “How do I become light?”

  “The day you conceive the essence of darkness,” he answered. “That is what you have to comprehend. That is the principle. Don’t seek to become light; that is a journey of no return. Look at our mutual friend: she wanted to become a tree and she achieved her aim. She thought it would be difficult, but it was not. Sadly, she did not achieve humanity. Now as seed, she will have to restart the journey toward humanity, a journey that will take eons.

  “Now I tell you to go in search of darkness anew. Descend to the depths, to the depth of depths. There you will see the light aglow in your hands, by your side. That is being human. Now, go become human.”

  In an instant Munis turned into a tiny whirlwind and rose to the sky in a cloud of dust. She was then in the desert, an endless desert.

  Seven years passed and she passed through seven deserts, fatigued and aged, devoid of hope and vision, but replete with experience. That was all.

  She arrived in the city after seven years. She bathed, put on fresh clothes, and became a simple schoolteacher.

  Farrokhlaqa Sadroddin Golchehreh

  (Reprise)

  ALL WINTER FARROKHLAQA STAYED in the house she had rented in the city. The portraitist was almost a continuous presence in the house. He was twenty-five years old and full of dreams for his art—which he shared with Farrokhlaqa. An exhibition of his portrait and sketches of Farrokhlaqa had been held. A large crowd of admirers and cognoscenti had turned up on the opening night, praising the works on display. But attendance had dropped drastically the following days and the young painter was devastated. Farrokhlaqa spent all winter trying to build up his self-esteem. But by the spring she was tired of his whining. She gave him some money to go to Paris and train with great masters.

  In the absence of the painter Farrokhlaqa felt lonely and bored. She thought of returning to the garden, but she did not think she could stand the women.

  Mr. Merrikhi paid her a visit one day. He was an old friend of Fakhroddin Azod and privy to her affair with him. He was very respectful, reverential in fact, toward her. He believed she had a remarkable potential for social advancement, except that it had not been channeled in the right direction. He proposed marriage to open new venues for her to achieve her goals. She consented.

  They both made progress. Merrikhi went to the parliament. Farrokhlaqa got involved in charitable activities. He was awarded a medal for meritorious service. She became the honorary head of an orphanage. He was appointed to a foreign-service post in Europe. She went with him.

  They have a fairly good relationship, not torrid by any means, but not frigid either.

  Zarrinkolah

  (Reprise)

  ZARRINKOLAH MARRIED KIND GARDENER and became pregnant. In time, she gave birth to a morning glory. She loved it as her own child. The morning glory flourished on the bank of the river.

  “Zarrinkolah,” her husband called to her, “we must go on a journey.”

  Zarrinkolah cleaned the house and packed a bundle of clothing for the journey.

  “But we don’t need clothes where we’re going,” her husband said. “Leave your bundle behind.” She obeyed, and took her husband by the hand.

  They embraced the morning glory. The morning glory wrapped its foliage around them and they all rose to the sky in a puff of smoke.

  Author’s Note

  WHEN I WAS AN EIGHT- OR NINE-YEAR-OLD GIRL, my mother and I raced each other to finish reading books. I
t was our favorite leisure activity. There was a small thrift store around the corner from our home in Tehran that sold trinkets and things. The shop owner, Mr. Roshan, also repaired women’s hosiery, a newly available luxury item, which was too costly to throw out after the first run (we are talking the early 1950s here). Mr. Roshan also had several rows of books that people could rent for about a penny per night. I would go there and rent two books, one for myself and one for my mother. We read the books quickly and then swapped them.

  Translated by Shahbaz Parsipour

  Most of these books were from France. For the book covers, the Iranian publisher had used pictures of actors from the movies that were based on the books. I have forgotten the names of these actors, but their beauty, as well as their expensive clothes, affected me deeply in those years.

  We also read American detective stories. That is why one name has been etched in my mind since childhood: Jack Smith. I cannot recall whether this Jack Smith was a policeman, a detective, or maybe even a criminal. But the name stayed in my mind so stubbornly that for years before I came to the US, whenever anyone spoke of America, the name Jack Smith would instantly pop up in my mind.

  My mother was in her early thirties at the time. For a while she ordered my brothers, Shahram and Shahriar, and me to kiss her hand every morning, and to greet her with, “Good morning Dear Princess!” She was from the Qajar dynasty, a descendent of the kings of that house, but the sad yet funny aspect of our life at that time was that we were living in a single room in my grandmother’s very old house. We were extremely poor and our dinner consisted of only bread and milk for nearly a year. This was very little food for me, and especially for Shahram, who had just recovered from typhoid.

  Father, who had quit working for the Ministry of Justice as a judge, had left us in utter poverty to travel to the south of the country, hoping to try his luck there as a lawyer. And since Mother did not have money to socialize, she contented herself by reading books about French chivalry and American crime. And of course she was also happy when we kissed her hand and called her Dear Princess. But that didn’t last long. We carried out our duty for only a week perhaps and then, laughing and joking, we stopped altogether.

  Mother was an outgoing and quirky woman. “Come and record my voice,” she once suggested to my brother Shahriar, years later, “so that when I die and people attend my funeral, you’ll play the tape at the end of the service. I’d like to thank everybody for having done me the favor of attending the ceremonies.”

  “But my shajun,” responded Shahriar, “some people may just be scared to death if we do that!”

  Shajun was the title our mother had given to herself. In the Persian language, shah means “king” and jun or jan means “dear.” Shah-zadeh means “prince” or “princess,” but the zadeh usually gets dropped. And so at moments, she was still Dear Princess.

  “If I were Mrs. Fakhrodoleh,” Mother often said, “then I’d know what to do with my money!” Mrs. Fakhrodoleh was a wealthy woman, also of the Qajars, who had performed important social services, including building a hospital for the poor.

  So, I knew a number of things about my mother. One, she loved to sit on the bed as if it were a throne. Two, she was an imaginative person, and considered herself very important in her own daydreams. Three, she loved literature and read a lot of books, although she was unable to write poetry as her mother and stepsister did. And last but not least, she loved another man instead of my father. “I’d have divorced your father,” she would tell me on an almost daily basis, “if you weren’t around!”

  That remark has caused me a great deal of psychological pain. I suffer from shyness. For years, I thought that I might have done a great favor to my mother if I were not born. These feelings propelled me to try to get away from my aristocratic family when I was older, and I became a socialist. Yet when I began to write Women Without Men, my mother’s characteristics were gradually woven into the character called Farrokhlaqa Sadroddin Golchehreh. This character is actually somewhat based on a cousin of mine as well as my mother. My cousin, also a very beautiful woman, decided suddenly to become a poet at the age of thirty-seven. Becoming a poet has become a common practice in Iran. People, without knowing anything about the rules of poetry, put words together abruptly and, using weird thoughts, believe they are creating poetry.

  For example, “Light’s affection is running in electric wires,” or “The scream coming to the surface of existence was violet in color,” or “Earth’s Red told the Blue of Presence: I don’t like destiny.” And so on. Some of these poems are interesting, but they become ridiculous when, in order to cover their own illiteracy, some poets claim that the grammatical conventions in poetry are nonsense and have to be discarded altogether.

  Is this desire to throw out the old the reason why millions of people poured into the streets and kicked the Shah out without understanding what could happen next? The new government turned on them and their loved ones, executing hundreds of thousands, even their own teenagers, who wanted to create a new government.

  Anyway, my cousin was one of those who decided to write poetry. Years later, she stopped just as suddenly because she was suffering from extreme breathing difficulties, which eventually caused her death. I knitted the personalities of my mother and my cousin together to help me create the personality of Mrs. Farrokhlaqa Sadroddin Golchehreh.

  I chose “Farrokhlaqa” because it is the name of an extremely beautiful woman in Iranian mythical stories. She is one of the main characters in a famous story, “Amir Arsalan Namdar” (The Famous Prince Arsalan), which is a long tale once told by an ancestor of mine named Naqibol-mamalek (known as Naqib). He recited the story in a loud voice for a Qajar king of Iran, while one of the king’s daughters wrote it down. The tale tells of the love of a young Roman named Amir Arsalan, for Farrokhlaqa, the daughter of King Petrous. Of course Naqib’s notion of Rome was more like today’s Turkey, which, in fact, used to be called “The Eastern Rome” in Iran.

  Many of the other characters in this book were inspired by people I knew. There is the character I named Zarrinkolah (Golden Hat). One day, when going to the local grocery on an errand from my grandmother, I met a very beautiful woman, tall and slender, wearing bright lipstick. There was a strange smile on her face. She was holding a large watermelon in her hands and staring at a constable with a very sexy look in her eyes. It was a look I had never seen before, even though our house was close to what was then Tehran’s official brothel.

  I was inspired by that woman’s presence and that smile when I was creating Zarrinkolah’s character. One day many years later, while I was imprisoned by the leaders of the Islamic Republic, jailed for writing this very book, I walked with a prostitute in the prison’s courtyard. She was old and tired, arrested because she was an addict. Since she had no one to come visit her in the prison, and since the prison food was terrible indeed, I shared with her the food that I bought from the prison’s store. That day in the courtyard, she told me she was forced into prostitution at the age of ten. Then, as she was walking away from me, she turned back toward me, smiling, and suddenly I knew it was the very same woman I had met as a child. So, my prostitute was now old, an addict, and very lonely.

  One of my aunties had been given away at the age of fourteen to a fifty-year-old man in an arranged marriage. She gave birth to two children. After her son died at an early age, she realized that she could not live with her husband anymore, and divorced him. She had learned how to type and was employed in a government office. She was now standing on her own feet but she was very lonely. Living in the brutally traditional, religious Iranian society of those times, she was not allowed to have a boyfriend. So she became a dervish, following a certain old dervish guru. She also tried her hand at writing stories and poetry. I never heard her bad-mouth or gossip about anyone. She gave a portion of her small income to the poor. I mixed her character with parts of myself, and I created Munis.

  This aunt had a daughter who was terribly s
hy. I have never seen anyone like her my entire life. She had a very beautiful and clear voice but being a god-fearing person, she did not sing. She suffered from anorexia during the latter years of her life and when lowered into her grave, she weighed less than sixty pounds. Mahdokht’s character is based on her.

  Another cousin of mine was a good girl who turned bad unexpectedly. She truly believed that I was an idiot because my face is round. She was right in a way, because she took advantage of me often, and I was deceived every time. She would tell me that if a certain woman saw me, she was going to attack me. Then, when my cousin was sure I would avoid that woman altogether, she would tell her that I had told her husband that she was having secret love affairs. The character of Fa’iza in the book is not really like my cousin, since Fa’iza is deeply in love with a man and my cousin never fell in love, but I always had her in mind when I was creating Fa’iza.

  When I was fourteen years old, and very sensitive, as teenagers often are, I went to Karadj with some relatives. I had lived in Tehran all my life and did not have even the slightest clue about village life. At the time, Karadj was a small vacation resort near Tehran. The town had only two or three streets and was surrounded by farms, large and small gardens, and tiny villages.

  We went to one of the gardens that belonged to a wealthy family. It was night and I was lying on a bed in the middle of the garden, watching the full moon in the sky. There were tall trees reaching toward the sky all around me. The weather was cool, much like the climate I would find in northern California years later when I was forced to leave Iran. The way the trees were arranged, and how they seemed separated from the sky and the earth, gave me the impression that I was sleeping on a theater set. People around me were talking but I could not hear them. I was absorbed in the beauty surrounding me. That was why, years later, I had all the women in the book along with The Kind Gardener go to Karadj. Now Karadj has expanded into a frightening, large city and I am not sure if those beautiful gardens still exist.