Camelia

by Camelia Entekhabifard

  “Hello. Salaam. I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “Yes, you can see that I’m fine. Is there anything else?”

  “No. Good-bye.” As I left the office I looked around haughtily at the others, and under my breath so the teachers wouldn’t hear, I’d hiss, “Babies! Fraidy cats!”

  We led a double life. Our homes were small islands of privacy, hidden from the Omur-e Tarbiyati, the eyes and ears of the new government. The moment you entered, you had to shut the door quickly behind you lest some stranger steal a glance inside. Many luxury items we considered indispensable to our lives were forbidden under the new government. Playing cards. Music cassettes. My father’s bottles of vodka. All the forbidden books in our library. The VCR. Ali Agha, who we called “Agha-ye Movie,” would come on his motorbike once a week with his black briefcase locked in his trunk. We had only a few minutes to tell him what we wanted. Kati and I wanted Indian movies while our parents wanted the old Nouruz specials from before the revolution, shows featuring Khanum Hayedeh and Mahasti from a time when they could watch the New Year turn over on TV with delight and excitement instead of fear and apprehension. Ali Agha would take back the movies from the previous week, set four new movies down on the dining table, close up his briefcase, put the rental fee—one hundred tomans—in his pocket, and go.

  On the day Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated, a Hezbollah partisan extended a box of sweets to my father, trumpeting, “Anwar Sadat got what was coming to him.” My father declined, saying, “I am not so thrilled when people are killed that I go around eating sweets.” They brought my father from Shir-e Pak factory to prison for “examination of his beliefs.” He was interrogated, blindfolded, for hours while the guards went through his wallet. As the director of the sales department, he was paid a handsome salary. In compensation for the wound he had inflicted on national revolutionary sentiment, he paid a “voluntary” settlement of six months’ salary to the “Imam 100” account for veterans wounded in the war. He had no choice but to work six months without pay, cursing at the ground under his breath.

  My father also put himself in danger by visiting the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery. If one of us two—Kati or I—didn’t go with him, we’d spend the whole day worrying. One morning I woke early to be sure I didn’t miss my chance—I felt it was impossible for me to allow him to leave without me.

  “Baba, I’m coming with you.”

  My father’s voice floated from the kitchen, “No, you sleep. Next time.”

  It was twilight, five in the morning on a wintry Friday in 1983. Fridays are the only days in Iran when everything is closed. My father wasn’t going to work, and we didn’t have school. I threw my nightclothes on the bed. Before my father could finish drinking his unsweetened tea, which he drank every morning, I was standing in front of him, carrying my coat and head scarf, my hands and face unwashed. My father was in a hurry to pick up Afsar Khanum before the traffic started, and we had a long drive ahead of us. When my mother snapped, “Do I have to do your homework for you?” I didn’t answer, and I followed my father to the car with my mother still threatening in a cracked and sleepy voice.

  Tehran had been reduced to a pleasant dream in the clarity of the cold winter morning. Only a few cars stopped here and there at traffic lights, and occasionally a haggard street sweeper would push his worn-out old broom across the icy, tarnished pavement. Afsar Khanum’s familiar figure, dressed in black with a bag in her hand, waited for us in front of her house. She got in the car and took one look at me napping in the backseat and said, “Feridun, why did you bring this innocent child? My dear Camelia, why aren’t you at home resting on a Friday? Would you like to go sleep in our house?” I shook my head no and half-opened my eyes to read the scrawled slogans left over on Afsar Khamun’s home from before the revolution. “100%—Bani Sadr,” and further down, “Brother Rajavi.” Rajavi’s photo was still everywhere; he was the leader of the Mujahedin-e Khalgh party and had nominated himself for the presidential election. He had been popular at the beginning of the revolution when he led the Mujahedin’s movement against the Shah, disseminating Khomeini’s message throughout his networks across Iran. Without Rajavi, the revolution would never have succeeded, but just a few months after Khomeini’s victory the Mujahedin turned in opposition to the Ayatollahs. The next slogan on the wall was illegible; someone had crossed it out with black spray paint and written beneath it, “It’s traitors who run away. Death to the opponents of the velayat-e faqih.” Rajavi had fled to Paris. But he led from exile, and his portrait printed on this cement wall was still in good shape.

  Afsar Khanum was making a fuss, ceremoniously apologizing to my father for having inconvenienced him at such an early hour on his day off. In reply, my father joked that they could settle his payment later. Little by little we made our way from north Tehran to the outskirts. We drove around Meidan Shahyad (Shah’s Remembrance Square), newly Meidan Azadi (Freedom Square), where travelers from the western terminal stood out in the street. Peykans and Fiat minibuses labeled “Azeri Junction—Meidan Azadi” frantically changed gears to pick them up and scattered lovely plumes of smoke around our car. The further south we traveled, the more the landscape changed. Around Meidan Bahman several hundred construction workers gathered, some sitting on the curbs. A pickup truck waited to carry them off to work, and everyone started trying to pile in, with the boss yelling, “Twenty people. No more than twenty needed.” And he cursed in Turkish, saying anyone else had to walk. Work was so scarce these men lined up on a Friday. We reached Yaftabad and there was more hustle and bustle. People waiting outside a bakery in their pajamas and ragged flip-flops stared into our car as we drove past. Small children with their fingers up their noses played with trash in front of their doorways. The houses were wretched hovels. My father looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, “Take a good look and see how people are living and think about the value of the life you lead.” As my father signaled to turn at the billboard that read, “Way of the Mausoleum. Entrance to Behesht-e Zahra,” I thought about whom we were visiting.

  My mother burst into the house in a fit. She tossed her purse in a corner and collapsed on the sofa in the dining room. All afternoon, rather than focus on our homework, Kati and I had been watching anxiously out the window for our mother to return from Afsar Khanum’s house.

  “It’s a good thing I didn’t bring you two. It was no place for children. There were men in civilian clothes standing around on the street staring at everyone. They were keeping an eye on who was coming and going, and watching to make sure there wasn’t any noise coming out of the house. The family didn’t have permission to have a memorial, and we had to pretend we weren’t coming to mourn. Your aunt and I had to go into the bathroom to put on our black clothing. You couldn’t even cry, they would have come and taken us away.” She started whimpering, “Oh, poor Afsar!”

  Guli, Afsar Khanum’s twenty-seven-year-old daughter, had gone to the firing squad four days before. Afsar was the widow of Agha-ye Shahandeh, my grandfather’s cousin who we had been shocked to see confessing to spying on television some years before. He was the first member of my family to be executed. Guli had been in the middle of her graduate studies in England but had come back to Iran at the height of the revolution to marry her cousin, only to find her father on the run. The father and daughter arranged to see each other in a restaurant, and revolutionary secret police followed Guli to arrest her father then took them both. Guli was accused of conveying a message from a foreign agent to her father, and she was held in the dreaded Evin Prison for two years. But this fall we heard that she had been transferred to Ghezel Qal’eh Prison, and we all assumed that, sooner or later, she would be released.

  That Thursday, my father had taken Afsar Khanum to the prison, as he often did on visiting days. But this time the guards announced, “Today you cannot see her.” She asked them at least to accept the sack of food she had brought, but they handed it back. “Guli isn’t here.”r />
  “Why? Where is she?” her mother asked.

  “She hadn’t been corrected. Hajj Davud moved her to Evin to be corrected!”

  Afsar went home dazed with the sack in her hand. The next morning her telephone rang with the news that her daughter was buried in Behesht-e Zahra.

  My father gestured to me and said, “You go down there and sit on that bench till we get back.” I waited in the Behesht-e Zahra’s Rose Garden of the Martyrs with a bottle of rose water in my hand, wondering whether he would allow me into the forbidden area. A fine, stinging rain was falling. In the distance I watched Afsar Khanum’s tiny body clad in black running in the wind, disappearing into the section designated for the executed. They called the grounds where Guli was buried the section of “infidels” or “atheists.” There were neither proper tombstones nor proper names and addresses for the dead, just “six-month-old child” or “five-month-old newborn.” And these small stones had been smashed and scattered about. Even the weeds and shrubs were burned day after day by vengeful hands, lest any blades of green grass appear on the graves of these nameless souls.

  The Rose Garden of the Martyrs where I sat was covered in thousands of signs and plaques. “Shahid qalb-e tarikh ast” (The martyr is the heart of history). “Shahidan zende and Allahu Akbar, Be khun ghalatide and Allahu Akbar” (The martyrs live on—God is Great. They have been rolled in blood—God is Great). A photograph was fastened to each tombstone. “Martyr: Mohammed Ali . . . Soldier martyred for his homeland: Jevad . . . Martyred Pasdar: Mohammed.” All the walkways had benches for the families of the martyrs to rest on. A few mothers and wives had spread prayer rugs over the tombstones and were reading from the Qur’an.

  I watched the silhouette of my father as he stood guard on the main road, in case some revolutionary hard-liners appeared to harass his cousin-in-law as she sprinkled white noql (thrown to symbolize the deceased was of marriageable age) and wheat around her daughter’s resting place, so that birds would gather there.

  “Khanum? Khanum? Please, have some hot milk with cocoa.”

  A young boy of about seven with a tray in his hand called out to me. Steam rose high from the disposable plastic cups. His mother, a little behind him, held a newborn baby in one arm, and in her other hand she had a thermos from which she was filling some more cups.

  “Please take. It’s kheirat.” The drink was to honor the dead, and I understood that they were relatives of a martyr.

  “Thanks.” I took a cup. He probed my face with his eyes.

  “Is your father a martyr, too?”

  “Huh?” I suddenly understood what he was asking. I was sitting facing the shrine of a martyr. I shook my head.

  As we drove away, Afsar Khanum was in her own world, hunched over and crumpled up in the front seat. I gave her the cup of milk. It was still warm.

  “Drink it, it’s good for you.” She took a small aspirator out of her purse and sprayed it into her mouth. I knew she had asthma.

  We came to the gates leading out of the cemetery. In the large fountain, the spouting water had been colored red to represent the blood of the martyrs. Behesht-e Zahra was gradually coming to life. Cars filled with mourners and covered with wreaths of roses were driving in as we left.

  On the way back my father drove much faster than he usually did. He turned on the radio to relieve the grieving, heartbroken atmosphere and asked Afsar Khanum to join our family for lunch. But she politely declined. “I have troubled you enough. It’s Friday. You have things to do. I’ll be very grateful if you would just drive me home.” My father pulled up in front of the picture of Bani Sadr. To me, the former president’s most distinctive feature was his glasses, which looked like the bottoms of little tea glasses. Afsar Khanum walked off with her slight limp.

  Two years later, she, too, passed away. My mother said she suffocated in her sleep, but perhaps it would be better to say she died of grief. My sister, Kati, tells me that when she visits Behesht-e Zahra to pray, she asks her husband to watch out for her as she darts into the section of the “wrongly killed,” as people call the section of the “infidels” now that the government has admitted, in some cases, to mistaken executions. She scatters rose petals in memory of Guli, her father and her mother, and all the others.

  1981

  As the war continued, we heard the sirens and air-strike warnings so often that we became indifferent. The radio would announce a state of danger, and I would stay right where I was, sitting at the dining room table, doing my homework. When the windows rattled, I would step out into the courtyard and try to guess how close the explosion was by surveying the volume of smoke and in which direction it was blowing. But early one morning, I was woken by shots fired right past our house. My mother, overcome with excitement, exclaimed, “They’re the Shah’s supporters! It’s a coup d’état! I told you that a reliable source indicated that, by the end of the month, they would . . .” Kati cut my mother off.

  “Shhh! Shhh! Be quiet. Let’s hear what they’re saying over the loudspeaker.”

  Someone on the street with a megaphone announced, “Respected neighbors, kindly remain in your houses until further notice. A group of troublemakers is operating in your neighborhood, and our brothers in the armed forces are working hard to flush them out of their nest. You are in no danger.” The Mujahedin-e Khalgh had turned against the government and were engaging in street warfare, bombings, and assassinations. The renegade mujahedin hid in residential neighborhoods in timi houses. We could hear machine guns and the megaphones asking the munafiqin to surrender. “The whole area is surrounded by our brothers in the army. Place your weapons outside on the ground and give yourselves up.”

  We went to the window and saw that all of our neighbors were at their windows watching, just like us. I waved at my Zoroastrian friends Nasim and Bahareh who lived across the street. Would the discovery of the timi house mean that we wouldn’t have classes that afternoon? Our crowded schools now operated in two shifts. One week we’d go in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Every week we’d have new additions to our already-full class of nearly forty students, most of us sitting three to a bench. They’d be warscarred girls from Ahvaz, Abadan, Khorramshahr, or elsewhere in the south. Our director would stand at the blackboard and present an olive-skinned girl with black eyes and dark eyebrows, looking from head to toe like a product of southern Iran. We all put on false smiles, but the girls sitting two to a bench would shoot daggers from their eyes, knowing they’d have to share their places with this new student, not knowing whether she’d be lazy or smart, or whether she’d have bad breath.

  Since I was scheduled for the afternoon shift, I was happy when the sound of the clash intensified, as being forbidden to leave the house would mean there was no hurry for me to do my schoolwork. But it wasn’t noon yet when the bearded man with the megaphone in his hand returned and pronounced, “Dear sisters and brothers, we are very grateful for your patience and cooperation. The area has been cleared of dangerous elements, and you are free to come out of your homes. Allahu Akbar! Khomeini rahbar! (God is great! Khomeini is the guide!) Death to the opponents of the velayat-e faqih!” We hurried down from the fourth floor, dying with curiosity. A neighbor who saw the whole thing was narrating the siege with great flair and bombast for an audience that had arrived on the scene before us. She described how the young men and women had been brought out of their hiding places in the house blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs.

  My own Uncle Ali had been accused of turning against the revolution and had disappeared. On June 28, 1981, his young wife, Iran-Dokht, called my father in tears. “For God’s sake, come,” she cried. “They’ve taken Ali . . .” He’d served in the Revolutionary Guard for less than two years when he was dismissed from the outfit. He told us that the conduct of the new government was incompatible with the Islam portrayed in their propaganda and that he was unable to serve in the ranks of thieves and liars. After that, Uncle Ali stayed home, absorbed by his wife and newborn
baby. But that morning we’d heard on national radio that the office of the Islamic Republican Party had been bombed by munafiqin, and a group of government officials had been martyred. Had my uncle taken part in the bombing? I wondered.

  My parents must have wondered the same thing. The Pasdaran searched my mader-jan’s house and my uncle’s house and we expected them to show up at ours next. My father took my hand, and we stole out with the bag of cartridges Ali had given him in the early days of the revolution. We walked to a public phone booth at the end of the street, stuffed in the bag, and ran off. We took stock of whatever else we had in the house that was forbidden—bottles of liquor, playing cards, my mother’s beloved issues of Paris Match with their pictures of the Shah and Farah, banned books, and finally my father’s pistol. Late that night we took everything to the parking lot, and my mother buried it under old newspapers in an empty oil drum.

  Every day my mother sat in fear by the radio, holding her breath as the announcer read the names of those executed. Each time she waited . . . but, no, they hadn’t said his name. She could breathe again. My father worked all his connections, but the officials said they had never heard of Ali. My mother threw a chador over her head and went from standing at the gate of one prison to standing at the gate of another, my baby brother in her arms. She pleaded and got useless answers. After seven months we finally found him. He was in Evin and had been arrested for insulting the values of the clergy. On the morning of the bombing, Ali had been in line at the bakery, and a friend had asked him, “Did you hear that today they planted a bomb in the office of the Republican Party?” My uncle, who had nothing to do with the renegade mujahedin, was in good spirits at being newly released from the guard. He answered, “Tell it to my son’s balls!” He hadn’t yet made it to my grandmother’s house with the warm bread when the Pasdaran stopped him. My grandmother spent that whole day sitting out on the balcony waiting for him.