Camelia

by Camelia Entekhabifard

  chapter seven

  Tulips Sprouted from the Blood of the Young

  THE LATE 1980S

  We were standing in front of the Shaqayeq pastry shop in Shahr Ara, when Kristian’s mother happened along. She teased me, asking, “Do your chicks have beaks?” She wanted to know if my breasts were growing. I crinkled my eyebrows and acted like I didn’t hear her. She turned to my mother and said, “When did she start getting her period?” My mother responded with a pointed look. All our relatives and friends buzzed with this question. In Iran, like so many other Middle Eastern countries, this is a big issue. When a girl gets her first period, she’s no longer a child and must behave like a woman. It’s not an easy process. They don’t educate you at all about it at school, but it’s openly discussed among women in the family, though an embarrassing topic for girls to raise themselves. My mother, however, simply didn’t know the answer—I refused to tell her.

  I was fourteen, and we fought constantly. For whatever reason, my mother had never been able to speak honestly with me about entering the world of womanhood. When I got my period, I was caught off guard, bewildered and angry, like a child whose mother has let go of her hand in the street and run off. I felt fragile and emotional, and she didn’t seem to understand me, or if she understood, she just shrugged her shoulders and said to herself, “She’ll say something about it when she’s ready.” And the longer we didn’t talk about it, the more the distance between us grew. I’d hear the chatter of all the women in the kitchen. Frowning and sour-faced, I wouldn’t answer anyone, not even Kati, when they asked, “Did you get it yet?” My cousin Elham was sent on a mission to ask me in private, but I lied, “No, and don’t ask me again.” I knew it was my mother who really wanted to know.

  I didn’t have to share a room with Kati anymore, and in my own private bedroom, I’d write poetry, paint, and read novels by Daphne du Maurier. Having my own room also meant that it was no longer a hassle for me to dispose of my sanitary napkins every month. I hid most of them in a box in my wardrobe. My mother and Kati kept a stock of pads in the bathroom, but I wouldn’t use them. I’d ask my friends to buy them for me instead, and they would shake their heads with sympathy. And sometimes I’d use tissues, sticking the dirty ones in my schoolbag and discreetly tossing them with my soiled underwear into piles of trash on my way to school. Even washing my underwear might have exposed my secret. The cold war of my puberty seemed endless. Eventually, my mother stopped prying, but what was I supposed to do with a giant carton of used pads?

  One day I was welcomed home, as usual, with the sound of my mother’s shouting. But that day she didn’t greet me by telling me to wash my hands and face. Mohammed Agha, our weekly housekeeper, was sitting in the kitchen eating his lunch. “You filthy girl, aren’t you ashamed? You know how to do everything except this one thing?” I was clueless as my mother yelled. She grabbed my hands and pulled me toward my bedroom. At first I thought she must have read my poetry notebooks and inferred something of my secret infatuations. In the doorway, I froze. All the bloody tissues I’d hidden were piled in the middle of the room. They looked different in broad daylight. They’d changed color. My skin was crawling, as if I were standing naked with everyone laughing at me. “Mohammed Agha opened the wardrobe to clean it with a rag, and he called me and said that it smelled like a dead animal and that maybe there was a dead mouse in there. Fine, you have no decency! But I melted with shame in front of Mohammed Agha!”

  Still carrying my schoolbag and wearing my uniform, I went and sat in the courtyard, angry as a wounded tiger in a trap. I dreamed of running away. But where? What should I have said? And why should I have said anything? For hours I sat miserably alone while the gossip spread throughout our building. From Jinus’s mother, Khanum Bayat, it reached my father and Agha-ye Bayat. They decided they couldn’t put the box in the trash out front, since people would certainly come rummaging and stumble upon its contents, and the reputation of the entire building would be ruined. After nightfall, my father and Agha-ye Bayat dug a pit out back and buried it. And so not only my mother, but our housekeeper and our whole building found out my secret.

  Tired of war and the high cost of living, we looked back fondly on the days before the revolution. Once-common items were now coveted as luxuries—chocolate, bananas, pineapples, chewing gum. I’d ask Kati, “Remember when they’d bring the poppy cart to our street?” We’d pluck the green tips off the flowers, drop their tiny pearly seeds in a bowl, add a spoonful of sugar, and eat them. Our mouths watered at the memory. I conjured up flavors in my mind that I hadn’t tasted in years, just so I wouldn’t forget them. Kai Khosrou was born too late to remember these delicacies himself, but he would see my drooling mouth and say, “I want some!”

  Kai Khosrou had discovered the taste of bananas thanks to the gifts of our former neighbor Agha-ye Qarekhanian, who was a flight engineer at Iran Air. He always brought something colorful back from his trips—boxes of Swiss chocolate, fashion magazines and perfume from Paris for my mother, and Chiquita bananas for Kai Khosrou. We were forced to ration the small bunch so Kai Khosrou wouldn’t start nagging Agha-ye Qarekhanian before his next trip. He’d cry and beg my parents for bananas. “Don’t mention them by name,” my father would say. “He’ll start crying.” Years went by when you couldn’t find bananas in any of the shops. The U.S. navy blockaded the ports in the Persian Gulf; no cargo ships were allowed to dock at Iran’s ports. More importantly, the government preferred to spend money on basic goods instead of bananas or other luxury items. Iran was politically and economically isolated, and we thanked God when we able to garner our daily necessities.

  Then, one snowy day, I saw a vendor holding bananas at a stop-light at an intersection on Parkway. Kati and I started bouncing up and down in the back, yelling, “Bananas! Bananas!” until my father pulled over to the side of the highway and called the vendor boy. The boy said he had brought them from Pakistan. They were small, scrawny, black, and astronomically expensive at twenty tomans for one little banana. But after that we were regular customers for the boy at the intersection.

  The anarchy of the revolution and the war that followed had filled our childhoods with misfortunes and regrets. My generation, by the age of twelve, was sharp witted and cynical—we had had to grow up too fast. As teenagers, we put the days of brainwashing behind us. We “children of the revolution” unfortunately turned out to be not all that revolutionary. We had learned the hard way how to live under Islamic law.

  Of all the do’s and don’ts and taboos, the hardest thing to accept were those ghastly school uniforms. The overcoats were so long they fell below the knee, the matching pants had to cover the tops of our shoes, and we wore long veils that reached down to the elbow. We’d have to roll up our pant legs for the vice principal’s inspection. If by accident we wore white or even cream-colored socks, we’d be sternly reprimanded, and our grade for conduct would be penalized. Our socks had to match our dark uniforms, which were always brown or navy blue. I prayed every year that the school would choose a new color. Even black was too much to hope for. They knew black was chic and attractive. You couldn’t wear black even if you were in mourning.

  The Omur-e Tarbiyati would regularly barge into the middle of a class and make us lift up our veils, checking whether we’d plucked our eyebrows or dyed our hair. I’d be the first to be summoned to the office for insubordination. I had shiny brown hair, and they never believed that this was its natural color. My mother would be called in to the principal’s office, and she’d angrily tell them to look carefully at the roots of my hair. Then I’d go back to class, and a few months later they’d forget, and the whole ritual would start all over again. We weren’t allowed to bring pictures of our families to school; we couldn’t even have portraits of our parents in our wallets. We couldn’t wear brightly colored shoes. Having beauty products or cosmetic mirrors was forbidden. Our schoolmates who belonged to the Islamic Association would search us daily. These spies for the Omur-e Tarbi
yati hung a heavy tarp just inside the school’s front entrance, and every morning five or six of them would be stationed there with two more flanking the tarp to catch anyone sneaking by. They’d look in our purses and through our notebooks and in our plastic lunch bags and our pockets and under our veils and in our shoes, and finally they’d search our bodies to be absolutely certain that we didn’t have anything dangerous like a tube of lipstick. They confiscated anything they’d found and would read the covers of our notebooks, always with a crooked smile, to be sure we didn’t give them a false name. However obsessively the girls at the door went through our purses, I’d always find a new way to conceal my forbidden items, such as photos of family birthday parties or weddings, or pictures cut out of magazines of Western celebrities like Madonna or Michael Jackson. Under these conditions, how could I be bothered with my studies?

  My father would write all my compositions for me. Always. And my grades always oscillated between 17 and 18 out of 20. Then one night in my second year of junior high school, I was waiting for my father to come home so he could write my assignment as he had been doing for years. But it turned out that he had to stay late at work. For half an hour, I paced around my room. Finally, I came to the conclusion that I’d have to write it myself. I was an avid reader; I had read almost the entire school library, and I was a good student of grammar and Persian. I loved reading. All summer I read novels and books of poetry, but I hadn’t yet discovered how reading inspires better writing.

  In composition class, we’d have to bring our notebooks up to the blackboard and read aloud. For the first time, I read my own work, and everyone in the class clapped for me. My teacher, Khanum Allahyari, gave me a 19. She was suspicious, and it was decided that the following week I’d write my assignment in front of her. I wrote it and I got a 20! “Thank God I don’t have to write your compositions anymore,” my father said.

  After I found the confidence to write for myself, I started composing poetry. One day, at the beginning of the school year, our wonderful literature teacher, Khanum Shahrudi, handed me a postage-paid envelope addressed to a post office box in Tehran. “Camelia, I think that if you had a good instructor, you could be a fine writer and poet in the future. At the Club for Creative Literature and Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, there is a center called Afarineshha-ye Adabi where they look at the creative writing of young people and provide them with feedback and guidance. You should write to them and tell me how it goes.” The envelope glowed in my hand like a winning ticket. For me, it was a ticket that could take me to the other side of the world. I was so happy I couldn’t contain myself. At home, I picked out dozens of pieces from my poetry notebook and copied them onto nice paper to mail. They were poems about love and the beauty of nature, about the sky and the sea and the forest, about my love for God, much inspired by the poetry of the well-known contemporary Iranian poets Forugh Farrokhzad and Sohrab Sepehri.

  At first, my correspondence wasn’t taken very seriously at home. But with keen deliberation, I’d write two letters a week to the center. They would read my new work and send it back in a white envelope with a critique. Two months of this and my parents issued a serious ultimatum: “We are going to tear up any letters that come from the center on the spot. Poetry time is over. You need to spend your free time on your studies. You have final exams this year.” I was astonished to receive a 20 for my final exam essay, and the principal commended my writing to my parents. “You should take you daughter’s talents seriously.” But my mother sniffed and said, “But what good is it when she got a 17 in science!”

  That summer I had more time for my clandestine letter writing. My bedroom window faced the courtyard, and I’d keep my ears open, waiting for sound of the postman. As soon as I heard his motorcycle, I’d find an excuse to go outside, and I’d take the letter from him and stuff it in my underwear. As the months passed, the letters from the center were joined with correspondence with new writer friends I’d met through the center, which put us in touch with each other to read and review the work of our peers. I didn’t have enough room in my clothes to hide them all. Over the next couple of years, the letters from my wonderful friend Mandana, who was from Abadan, the oil city in southern Iran, were sometimes sixteen to twenty pages long, although my replies were never as long as her shortest letters. To keep the letters out of my mother’s claws, I would jump from my window down into the courtyard, grab the letters, and quickly climb back up to my room.

  “No more literature!” My mother threatened to divorce my father if he allowed me to attend the Dabirestan-e Olum-e Insani, the High School for the Humanities. So I reluctantly agreed to the Dabirestan-e Olum-e Tajrubi, the High School for Applied Science, called Fayazbaksh. But when I was asked in class what field I planned to pursue in the future, I answered, “Journalism.” I’d fallen in love with reading the newspaper. I’d read the daily paper from alif to yeh, even the classifieds and the obituaries.

  During the war, we had a limited number of newspapers to choose from, most of them conservative government papers: Kayhan, Etela’at, Jumhuri-ye Islami, Abrar, and Resalat. We subscribed to Kayhan. The front-page headlines were devoted to the latest update from the front: a tally of the advances of the Army of Islam and the retreats of the outlaw enemy, the numbers of Iraqi soldiers killed and the numbers of Ba’athists captured, the funerals of martyrs after Friday prayers in front of the University of Tehran. Then they would fill the rest of the pages by regurgitating yesterday’s news, while other events were never reported—there was no news about the taking of Karbala. The war seemed endless, and the newspapers never predicted the defeat of the enemy or mentioned peace.

  There were two State-run networks on TV. It didn’t make a difference what channel you turned to—both invariably featured a mullah droning on about Islam or Ahangran, the famous rhapsodist of the frontlines of the war, wailing away. Behind him a group dressed in black would be crying, “Hussein!” and beating their chests, while he sang:Bahr-e azadi-ye Qods az Karbala bayad guzasht

  Az kenar-e marqad-e an sar juda bayad guzasht.

  Pish ay rasmandeh shir!

  Khane az dushman begir!

  For Jerusalem to be free we must cross through Karbala,

  Through the resting place of that severed head.

  Onward, O lion warrior!

  Wrest your home from the enemy!

  My father would turn off the television and curse the world that had confined us to two black-and-white channels. He said it was because turbans came in only two colors. “Either they are black or they are white.” On Fridays, as my father fanned kebabs on the grill in the empty courtyard with a cigarette in his mouth, he’d yell, “Camelia, turn up the radio!” We all listened carefully to the sermons of the Friday prayers. The food would appear on the table amid the Allahu Akbars of the “Minister of Chanting” (as my father called whoever was chanting at the Friday prayers). I’d tell Kati to pass me the quarter-pound hunk of butter, and I would put a large slab of it under my white rice. Rafsanjani, speaker of the Majilis (and later the president of Iran), would talk about world arrogance. Ignoring my mother’s glare, I’d pick a large clump of basil leaves out of the other greens. A thousand times she’d said, “They’re ‘edible greens,’ not ‘pickable greens.’ Put a handful on your plate and eat them all.”

  We’d eat our chelow kebabs in silence and listen to the speech. As soon as they started with Allahu Akbar again, we’d turn off the radio and try to guess the truth behind the proclamations of the mullahs. We might guess a portion was a series of excuses for the high price of gas, or we might have gathered that there were secret behind-the-scenes talks in progress with the United States, the government wasn’t going into decline, and that the war was going to continue as before. If there were any mention of poorly covered women, we knew that the next day there’d be Basijis on motorcycles armed with clubs making surprise sweeps in shopping centers and restaurants. The leader of Friday prayers would give them the necessar
y justification to attack.

  Many years passed since the war had broken out with Iraq when in addition to the now-familiar language of “war-stricken refugees” and “martyrs,” a new phrase was added to our vocabulary: “the victims of chemical weapons.” Our hearts gasped at harrowing images of victims killed or horribly disfigured by Saddam Hussein in the 1988 chemical attacks in Halabja. And it wasn’t only Iranian soldiers that were targeted. We were afraid. How could we defend ourselves if we were attacked? We listened anxiously for radio warnings. And we knew mustard gas had a pleasant odor, so if we ever detected a sweet smell, we had to cover our mouth and nose with a damp towel and rush around shutting the windows and doors and plugging all the vents and cracks to save ourselves. In Tehran, we had a way to deal with everything.

  Families sent their sons out of the country any way they could. The Pasdaran would stop young men in the street to check their identity cards, searching for draft dodgers. Some parents sent their sons over the border legally before they came of age. Others were smuggled out. They’d travel from hideout to hideout in the mountains and plains, disguised as rams in herds of sheep, until they reached Turkish soil. My cousin Omid was sent to England before he reached sixteen, and Mino Khanum’s son Ali, most of my friends from school, and our old leftist neighbors, Nima and Mani Vaqadi, all safely made it outside Iran’s borders. But not everyone was so lucky. Some were killed in the cross fire between border police and the smugglers, while others were taken alive and sent to prison and then pressed into military service.