Maman’s palm never left the window as she looked back at the golden dome. Where was Abdollah? What had happened to him?
Now, of course, it is obvious that we all knew something terrible had happened – but did not want to know. It is amazing how the mind plays tricks when a person doesn’t want to know more… The most extreme conclusion I ever considered was that Abdollah had been convicted and sentenced to life in that bleak prison.
When we asked about Abdollah, Baba’s voice went high with strain and he said, “He went away to study.” Maman did not say anything
We didn’t want to know the real answer and intuitively, we understood that to question this version would also cause our parents more pain. For the next three months, we were four siblings living with an invented story about our brother and our family. Perhaps he had gone on another humanitarian mission as he had at thirteen when he went with Baba to help earthquake victims in central Iran. Maybe he was in America. Could we drive there?
Instead, we headed for Tehran, one child short, awkward and afraid, with each mile further away from grandparents and cousins, our childhood home, our schools, our friends, and our beloved Haram.
REPRIEVE
Maman
In the dream, Maman sobs and hits herself, slaps her cheeks hard, when Fatimeh, the daughter of Prophet Mohammad, appears holding a large platter of walnut-sized grapes.
Every night since Abdollah’s disappearance, when Maman is wakeful enough after Valium to pray, she does so in private to Fatimeh. “I’m pleading with you. I ask you to show me how he is. I beg you please. Let me see my son just one more time, for one moment, I beg you.”
Maman also asks God to bring her back to life. Her children are strangers to her, and she feels nothing for them. “It feels as if Abdollah was my only child.”
Fatimeh enters Maman’s troubled dream with a gentle smile, telling her to eat from the platter in her hands.
But Maman can’t open her mouth; her throat is swollen shut, filled with a ball of heat.
“Are you ready to see him?” Fatimeh asks, holding out the platter again.
Carefully, Maman takes a grape and, as she places it in her mouth, a radiant white light descends before her. The glow slowly dissolves, and Abdollah’s face, now recognizable, reveals a peaceful expression. With his hand on his chest, he says, “Maman, Salaam.” The circle of light brightens. “I miss you very, very much. I can’t stand to see you weep so much. I beg you, please, stop crying. The kids worry for you. They need you.”
Maman stretches a hand toward him. “I don’t cry in front of them, azizam.”
“I beg of you, don’t shed anymore tears for me, please. Maman, I’m at peace now. Those six months in prison, they felt like six million years, but now, here, I am happy. I’m with angels. Grandpa is here. Please know I have the best life here in this beautiful place.”
Maman’s tears begin to slow.
“I have to go now, dear Maman.”
“No. No, please. I’m not done seeing you, son,” she pleads. Maman reaches for him again. “Please, no. Don’t go.”
With his hand still on his chest, Abdollah repeats again and again, “Ba ejazeh” – with your permission, dear Maman, I must return. You see, I have a wife and children. I have to return to them.”
Abdollah’s voice fades. “I’ll always be with you,” he says and the light slowly disappears.
Maman cries, “Allah O Akbar,” and suddenly an enormous white butterfly fills the room. She hears his voice: “Stay calm and settle your heart, sweet Maman. I’m free now.”
BURYING THE SECRET
Tehran 1981-1986
Sunlight bounced off the orange cherries hanging on the tree outside. I wanted to reach across Maman’s windowsill and touch one. Pushing a pillow under my knees, Maman knelt beside me, and we watched the chickens scurrying beneath the fallen persimmon and plum blossoms. The chicks were like fuzzy yellow billiard balls, changing direction and bumping into one another. Bursts of laughter drifted up through the lemon-colored flowering forsythia bushes as my cousins were teaching Iman to ride a bike. Careful not to disturb us, seven-year-old Zain entered and pressed his head on Maman’s back, his eyes closed, a warm breeze tugging at his hair.
Like the light reflected on round cherries, a beam of sunshine also lit up Maman’s face, brightening the pink in her cheeks, and she smiled, something I hadn’t seen for over a year. Maman turned to me, and I saw myself, a little girl, again reflected in her eyes. I rested all the heaviness I felt on her shoulder.
In that instant, we were perfect, connected; I wanted to stay that way forever.
Perhaps Baba’s plan to help our family go on was working; perhaps we could move through the days without our brother and believe somehow that he hadn’t left us; perhaps life would return to some sort of normalcy. Our father must have imagined this when he moved us from our home in Mashhad to the cloistered twenty-one-room estate in Tehran six months before. Perhaps here, far from the turmoil of the Iran-Iraq war that began shortly after the Revolution, our traumatized family would find a way to come back to life.
Baba had worked tirelessly for months to sell the Rose Hotel to the right buyer. Even though some so-called “men of God” had politicized his religion and destroyed his life, and even though they were confiscating property, falsely arresting religious minorities, mass murdering people, and changing the face of Iranian society, it did not shake our father’s faith in God or his belief in his beloved Islam. Besides Khomeini, who is well known for his writings on theocratic political rule, there were other Marja – men of emulation. And Baba had always followed the ones who believed religious leaders should act as advisors and guides to elected officials. When it came to the sale of the hotel, Baba donated the equity of the hotel to a religious school that matched his view. With the remainder of the proceeds, he paid his investors, including his debt to his best friend, Mr. Gaffari; he paid off his bank loans and bought an estate in the finest neighborhood in Tehran.
THE MANSION WITH THE GREEN DOOR
Tehran
Later in my life, I came to appreciate my father’s bold moves: the way he reinvented himself and did what he could to heal his family.
When he uprooted us all, without warning, and transplanted the family to Tehran, this was another sort of shock. But, as usual, he had chosen a valuable property, somehow gotten “a deal” on a newish mansion in one of the loveliest parts of Tehran, in an area known for its lush greenery and mixed in with the embassy residences near the end of Parvaneh – Butterfly – Street.
The estate was nearly nine hundred kilometers from Mashhad, and it was beautiful.
We began to set down new roots – but would they take? Whatever we achieved, we were fragile and an unspoken tension threatened to shatter us at any moment.
The estate was so large, it gave the effect of a posh sanatorium, which was, in effect, what it became for us. The grounds were especially soothing to behold and cultivate; the garden in particular had an impressive array of lush red, yellow, orange, and white rose bushes.
The mansion itself was someone else’s grandiose dream: a bleached stucco and tile exterior, well camouflaged by birch trees and a fertile fruit orchard. The estate offered itself up as a miniature Garden of Eden: the trees were polka-dotted with bright cherries, peaches, and apples.
Inside, the house was 21,000 square feet, with two ballrooms, ten bedrooms, and white marble staircases. Outside, there was a greenhouse, pool, and a lawn that took ten minutes to cross.
Baba set to work remodeling one of the ballrooms of the house in order to hold religious gatherings for over a hundred guests on Thursday nights and Friday mornings. The ballroom was the one room where we children weren’t allowed to enter. Painters spent more than a month covering the walls with hand-painted domes framed in gold-plated Qur’anic writing. Decorative cabinets held copies of the Qur’an, and an enormous Persian rug with large red flowers kept the cold cement floors insulated. The only thing that
differentiated this space from a mosque was a real dome, which Baba would have built on the top of every room if he could have. My parents were devastated, disillusioned with the Islamic Republic, but my father and mother could separate their devotion to their faith from the politics of the painful land in which they lived. They cherished the Qur’an and turned to it, despite everything, more often, and they often fell prostrate on the Persian prayer rugs.
Although my brothers and I each were assigned huge individual bedrooms upstairs, we continued the sleeping arrangement of our house in Mashhad, sleeping altogether in one of the downstairs rooms closer to our parents’ room. We continued to play the same games we had in Mashhad; and when we weren’t outside in the garden, we would spend hours inside, creating make-believe cities. Hadi was always the realtor – buying and selling buildings in our city and always negotiating the corner lots. Zain liked being the police officer and sometimes the lawyer; I held multiple roles as the banker-florist-teacher. And our little brother Iman always wanted to run the car dealerships.
This play engaged us for hours with buying and selling and trading until we were interrupted by the sound of Maman calling us to come and eat a snack of fresh fruit like watermelon slices. Maman had to work hard to pry us loose from our pretend-city in order to come to the dinner table. For days on end, we left and entered our magical city together, consumed by the play and lives we constructed. In our playroom, we felt powerful, grown up, and in control of our lives.
One time, after what seemed like days of endless play, Hadi called us outside to show us a surprise. Although he had gotten permission to go buy one chick, he came home with more than twenty. He knew that if Baba disapproved, Maman would calm our father, and make way for these happy new family members. We ran around the yard, playing hide-and-seek with the chicks as they scurried and hid behind bushes, flapping their little wings. We ran around the yard and called out potential names for each chick. “Prince Hadi!” “Haji Zain!”
“I want to name it Tala’i. Yeah, that’s it, Goldie.” I yelled back.
“Yeah, that sounds good. We’ll call her Goldie from now on.” Zain and Hadi agreed, pointing to the thinnest and fastest chick with a single gold feather on her head, just like Zain’s few gold strands of hair on his head. Even though I knew the chicks belonged to all of us, in my mind, Goldie was special: she was mine.
In our mansion, we still maintained a regimen of good Muslim practices, attended the top religious schools, and spent the rest of our childhoods protected from the tensions unfolding in Iranian society.
Leaving Mashhad greatly benefited Maman. After her dream, the days passed like the beads strung together in Abdollah’s tasbeeh. Maman lived one moment to the next and appeared to have grown stronger. She began to eat, then sleep, then took fewer pills, and spent long hours in the garden, watering her new plants and trees; slowly, she found more energy to see and engage with us.
The joy and whimsy she once had – such as when she would cut orange and apple peels into little human figures – did not return, but the fruit bowl was filled with fresh peaches and imported bananas. She always peeled our cucumbers and salted them the way we liked.
Every day, it seemed as if the light in each room grew a little brighter. She had yet to regularly regain the full pink color of her cheeks or put on her lipstick, but slowly the color was returning to our lives. Almost every morning, she rose from the prayer rug where she now slept, and made her way to my bedside, where she changed the wet sheets before I could try to do it myself, or hide them. She seemed to understand my body’s reaction and never shamed or scolded me. In our silence, I felt Maman’s full presence and affection were returning.
I imagined how pleasing the acre of blossoming trees – peach, sour cherry, apricot, and fig – would be to Abdollah. I told myself that when he came home from his studies, we would be able to crack open a giant pomegranate. I imagined Baba peeling it and feeding us the kernels just like he used to do in Mashhad. But instead, I felt a chill settle on the backs of my legs and rest in my belly. When I looked at the empty fifth children’s bedroom and wondered why Abdollah didn’t write or call from abroad, I pushed the question away. Instead, I inhabited the same limbo as my brothers – not asking, not wanting to know but filled with longing for him, for our missing Dadashi.
Soon, my other brothers began to act out in varying disturbed ways – protesting. When Abdollah rebelled, he disappeared.
One morning, I heard shouts and looked outside: Baba was screaming and chasing Hadi. Baba held a menacing pair of battery-operated hair clippers. He was intent on recapturing his son with his half-shaven head.
Maman heard the commotion, too, and her body went stiff at the sound of Baba yelling. She rose and balanced herself on the windowsill with her fingertips, looking old and sad in her black clothing.
She stepped down from the window and went outside. She seemed angry and irritated with Baba, something we had begun to see as almost routine since she had stopped sleeping in their room.
Hadi dashed past us into the ceremony room, “I don’t want my head shaved, Baba!” he yelled.
Baba gripped the doorframe with one hand. “I said stop!”
Hadi kicked the Qur’an cabinet hard, shattering glass. “I don’t want to wear a uniform for that stupid school. I don’t want to go there at all.”
Baba had bought Hadi an expensive Samsonite briefcase and spent hours explaining to him every good thing about his new private religious school. It was going well until he gave Hadi a tour of the place. During a school visit, Hadi had watched his soon-to-be classmates line up with precision, all in crisp uniforms, and with the prescribed appearance: polished, close shaven heads. They stood, hands folded in front of them, reciting morning prayers.
Hadi had backed away. After that day, he had come home and smashed his toys.
Maman caught up to Hadi and placed a hand on his shoulder. He stopped running. Maman turned toward Baba, “Haji, is this really necessary? The school is an hour away, and he doesn’t like it.”
“I’ve made my decision. He’ll start there tomorrow.” Baba left the room and returned with a sofreh and a chair to finish the haircut.
Hadi dropped into a crouch, his fists balled up. “I won’t go! I don’t want to go to that stupid school.”
“Haji, listen,” Maman began.
But before she could finish her sentence, Hadi’s shrill voice interrupted her. “You didn’t do this to Dadashi!”
We all looked at him and a heavy silence descended. We were shocked – that he defied Baba, and that he mentioned our brother.
Baba, holding the clippers stopped. He relaxed his finger on the clippers ON button; the buzzing stopped.
Before anyone could react, Iman climbed up into the chair. He was little but he knew the secret rules: don’t mention Abdollah, don’t upset Maman, and listen to Baba. To disobey would be to shatter this delicate peace.
After Maman lifted Iman from the chair and kissed his cheek, we waited patiently to see who would sit in the makeshift barber’s seat. When the curtains had rustled against the windows for several seconds and Hadi didn’t move from the corner of the room, Zain settled himself in the chair. “Baba, you can shave my head first. I’ll like a buzz cut.” Unlike Hadi, Zain was looking forward to a new beginning, glad to be away from the third-graders in Mashhad who had teased him when he showed up sucking on a pacifier at school after he had seen Abdollah in prison. The change of schools had made him more hopeful: he hoped he would make friends and learn to read better and find some concentration. It was all about new beginnings. That was what Baba believed anyway, and Zain was happy to show his support for the new family plan.
Even though I did not show it, I was excited, too. Baba had also chosen a rather strict all-girls Islamic school for me. I was determined to be the most religious student at the school. No one would be as pious and good as me. At six years old, a full three years before I was legally – or religiously – mandated to wear a h
eadscarf in public, I was determined to attend the first day of school in a chador. I would be the youngest girl in my extended family, and it turned out, in my school, to wear one. After I begged her for weeks, Maman bought the material, and together we sewed a black chador that covered everything but my face. So I wouldn’t have to hold it at my chin with one hand, we made a seam in the middle and added sleeves that allowed both my arms and hands to remain free. Maman always wore a chador outside the house, and so did most women that Baba knew and respected.
If I ever doubted that I might put on the headscarf, those doubts died when I remembered seeing Abdollah drive off with the girl without a headscarf. He never came home again.
The boys submitted to their haircuts, to Baba’s will – cooperatively, like Zain and Iman, or still in rebellion – like Hadi. When Hadi finally dropped into the chair, his stiff posture and grimace showed his feelings. The buzzing clippers cut the heavy silence.
As Maman watched, anger crackled around her like electricity. “There you go again – making a decision for all of us without including me. Remember the last time you ignored my advice?”
The air was full of tension. I began to shake and clenched my thighs – to control myself – I might wet the rug. What had Baba done? What advice had he ignored?
When I went to bed that night, I tried to lull myself with the image of Maman’s shining smile as we watched the chicks scurry through the grounds under the radiant cherry and peach trees. Instead, I dreamt about my handprint on the oily glass window – Abdollah on the other side.
While the sun was out, we would keep busy in the yard; as the sun began to set, we engaged in our city play with our car toys inside. But when dark descended, Iman rarely spoke, Zain woke up screaming with nightmares and had to sleep next to Hadi, and I wet the bed almost every night.
The Rose Hotel Page 9
