Camelia

by Camelia Entekhabifard

  Another way to avoid military service was to enroll immediately in university. But Shahryar Nakha’i, my third cousin, was in his final year at high school and not very studious. The year before, he had used a tak madeh, a special allowance to drop your lowest grade, to gain entrance to Arabic class. You could use a tak madeh only once. The vice principal suggested that he volunteer to go to the front. Volunteers enjoyed particular privileges in their education, so Shahryar went to war to compensate for his low marks in Arabic.

  “Don’t go! Son, don’t go!” His mother went crazy. Shahryar’s father, Sarahang Iraj Nakha’i, had been a commander in the gendarmerie in western Iran. He sadly failed to convince his son that it would better to fail out of school than to gamble away his life. Shahryar was a tall boy with broad shoulders. In 1986 we heard that he had shipped out, and then the next month the news came that he had been wounded. In an operation at Fav, a rocket hit his troop’s boat, and everyone fell into the marshes around the island. He was hit in the back, and the marsh water led to an infection. Shahryar lost both of his legs. One had been amputated above his thigh, the other a little lower. It was terrifying. All of us, even those he didn’t know by name, cried for him.

  I didn’t see him again until years later at a family gathering at my uncle Manuchehr’s house. Shahryar had a beard and was wearing the kind of green overcoat usually worn by the Basij and the Pasdaran. He was walking without a cane. My uncle told us that they’d attached prosthetic legs and that he was getting payments from the martyrs’ foundation. When Shahryar sat in his seat, I could see bright red plastic in the gap between his pant legs and his socks. My mind struggled with what it meant to be crippled. I asked myself how one event could alter a person’s life forever.

  Then my father told us that it seemed that, in order to hold onto his job, he would have to spend a few months at the front. He started attending the firearms training classes set up by the Islamic association of Shir-e Pak factory. I found the class manual, and as I read the descriptions of locking and loading guns, my heart sank. I was fed up with the manuals and the war and death. Why should my father fight? He wasn’t a part of all this death, he didn’t belong to Khomeini’s revolution.

  “Baba, come, let’s run away,” I said. Startled, my father asked, “Run away from what?” and he looked at me in wonder. I was ashamed to look in his eyes and say, “Let’s run away for your sake, so you don’t go to war and get killed.” Instead I pleaded, “What I mean is let’s leave Iran.” My father stared off into the distance and replied, “What would we do anywhere else? This is our country. Where would we go?” Luckily, he was never called to the front.

  The bombing of Tehran stopped for several years in the middle of the war, though the red alert still sounded at school. Then construction workers appeared and dug a giant hole in the middle of the school’s large courtyard. This was turned into an underground shelter with a thick concrete ceiling. It had four stairways leading into it, and we’d sneak down to poke around. “Don’t go in under any circumstance,” my mother would say. “If a shell hits, you’ll all be buried under the rubble. It doesn’t have any ventilation. You’ll all suffocate.”

  The shelter was a harbinger of worse times to come. Seven years into the war, in early March 1987, only three weeks before the Nouruz holidays, Tehran was once again targeted. We were jolted awake by the sound of a monstrous missile exploding. Voice of Iraq warned that they would keep attacking until they toppled the mullahs’ regime. As soon as the missiles showed up on the radar screen, the Ministry of Defense would announce a general state of emergency, but we never knew where they might hit. With the intervention of the United Nations, all the schools were again closed, until almost the end of the year, when the Department of Education blundered through a poor excuse for end-of-the-year exams and gave everyone a passing grade. Kati needed to pass to graduate, and she got her diploma without a hitch.

  My aunt Turan was visiting her old neighborhood by the Hesabi intersection when a missile exploded in the vicinity. When we heard the news, my father came home quickly to take us to see her. She was lying stretched out on the sofa with a hot water bottle. My cousin Bita was in better shape, but they were both faint. My aunt had cut her hand on broken glass, and it was wrapped in bandages. We listened breathlessly as she described the attack. “Bita went to see her friend while I was shopping for groceries. When I was finished and Bita still hadn’t come back, I went to a public phone to call her . . . and I heard the air-raid sirens sounding, and I saw that everyone was looking at the sky. I looked up and saw something bright the size of an oil tanker coming straight at us, the sound of its jets drowning everything else out. Everyone was stunned, nailed to the spot. It landed a few dozen meters from me, and after an instant all the windows came crashing down, and there was the sound of an explosion.” My aunt raised her wounded hand. “Thick smoke poured out from the next street. I wanted to run, but it was like my feet were stuck to the ground and I couldn’t move. Bita was right there where it landed.”

  Bita broke in. “When I saw it, Morwarid and I just froze. Then I automatically turned my back to the window, and there was a huge shock wave. The door and the window and the glass all came down, and we were thrown on the bed. . . . I thought I was dead. I lifted my head and saw that the window frames and the curtains had fallen on top of us. And there, where the neighbor’s house had been, there was nothing. The sky was on fire, and there was ringing in my ears. We got up and automatically started running and screaming.”

  We turned to my aunt. “Everyone was running away, and I came to my senses. ‘Bita! Bita!’ I screamed and ran like crazy. My shoes came off, but I kept running. I could hear the ambulance’s siren in the distance. I was screaming and running. I couldn’t feel my heart beating. No more sound would come out. I sat down right there on the ground. It was impossible to tell which house had been struck, and I just sat and cried.”

  We let out all the air that had been trapped in our chests as Bita finished. “My ears were burning as I ran . . . I found Maman sitting on the ground like a gypsy, beating her head.”

  “I don’t know how we got out of that inferno,” my aunt wailed. “When I saw Bita, I started shaking. Like my soul was leaving my body right there . . .”

  As missiles hailed down on Tehran, people left in droves—not for the Nouruz holidays, but for safety. Several acquaintances of ours had been killed, and we, too, fled for a villa in Karaj belonging to our close family friend, Aunt Mahin. Her garden was in disarray, and the house was packed with other refugees. Amid all the traffic, there wasn’t enough room to drop a needle. We slept next to each other on the ground. When the air-raid siren sounded, most of us crowded into a corner while a few stepped outside to watch the missiles soar over Tehran. Afterward, everyone would sit by the radio and listen to the foreign Persian-language broadcasts on Radio Iraq, the Voice of America, or the BBC.

  We stayed in Karaj through the critical peak of the war. Then we returned home, and the hot summer descended. On July 18, 1988, I heard our neighbor screaming uncontrollably from the hallway. As usual, the door was unlocked, and Khanum Bayat had entered without knocking. “It’s over! It’s over! Khanum Entekhabi, the war is over!” My father stood shocked, still in his underwear. We turned on the television. Khomeini had, in his own words, “drank the cup of poison” and agreed to the United Nations Security Council Resolution 598. We all cried, “The war is over!” It was hard to believe, but it was finally over. All afternoon, people handed out sweets in the streets. We didn’t have to worry anymore about my little brother, and soon the soldiers would be coming home.

  Then, only a few days after this joyous occasion, we heard about a massive attack on the border town of Islamabad Gharb carried out by the Mujahedin-e Khalgh, who had regrouped under the leadership of Rajavi in Iraq. With the protection of Saddam Hussein, the mujahedin had organized their own radio station and television network and carried out acts of terrorism. Now they had taken advantage of the ceas
e-fire agreement and captured Islamabad and advanced to Hassanabad, moving toward Bakhtaran (also called Kermanshah). Four days later the air force and an army of Basijis and Pasdars crushed them, and thousands of mujaheds were killed on Iranian soil. The TV showed the images of the young men and women who’d died. The mujahedin called the operation Forogh-e Javidan (The Eternal Radiance) and the Iranian authorities called it Mersad (Ambush). Khomeini’s wrathful response was a massacre of political prisoners, atheists, mujaheds, and tudeh-is—all burned in the fire of his vengeance. Once again, we had family members who sat sobbing in mourning for a loved one who’d been executed without even being allowed a proper memorial. My father’s cousin’s husband, who’d been a tudeh officer, was among those executed, after seven years in prison.

  We were not aware of the extent of these executions until years later, when human rights organizations released information about the silent murder of thousands of political prisoners. At the time, confusion reigned. One day national radio broadcast that Khomeini had disinherited his successor Ayatollah Montazeri, who I later discovered (via his online memoir) had written a letter to the Imam about the massacre. That very morning, when we passed Meidan Fatemi, we noticed with utter disbelief that the giant mural of Montazeri had simply disappeared.

  FALL 1987

  “Not a chance. Don’t even bring it up. You father will skin all of us alive.” My mother was washing dishes in the sink, and I was whining incessantly.

  “I said don’t talk about it.” Then she shouted, “Get out of the kitchen!”

  Once my father said no, it was impossible to change his mind. Everyone said it was unthinkable that my hardheaded father would give his daughter permission to go to Mashhad by herself on a two-week-long bus trip. I had been invited to the National Youth Festival of Writers and Poets. Students from all over Iran would gather in Mashhad to listen to one another read their work. My school surprisingly hadn’t said a word, not one. They, in fact, were quite pleased. The Club for Creative Literature had promised constant supervision and secure dormitories, and that boys and girls would be kept strictly separate, except during the public readings.

  That left my father, and I had only three days left to get the consent letter signed. A light bulb went off in my head—Uncle Manuchehr! He was the only one who spoke my father’s language. I went to the phone booth with a two-rial coin and invited him over. My father was closer to Manuchehr than to his own brothers. Manuchehr was about five years older, and they had been friends since childhood. When all my father’s family was opposed to his marriage with my mother, Manuchehr was the one who went to my grandmother’s home to propose on his favorite cousin’s behalf, and ever since then he and my father had always stood behind each other.

  Though my father wasn’t religious, he was traditional, and he didn’t trust the new ruling social class. He didn’t want me, his daughter, out alone in the world with these kind of people. He believed that all the urbanized, educated, intellectual people had fled or been killed and that the nouveaux riches of the postrevolution society were disgusting poseurs. They were unknown to him, and he didn’t want us to fraternize with them. “There is no more respect for women in this country,” he would say. “You have to stay away from these kinds of people.” But I wanted so much to meet other writers my own age, to make new friends, and have the chance to learn from them. And my uncle Manuchehr knew exactly how to lead into the subject when he visited. Then I presented the invitation, and incredibly, my father consented.

  How lucky I was! My father began looking at me with new pride and respect in his eyes. “My daughter, bring your book of poems!” he would ask in front of our guests. Nervous and embarrassed, I’d rush through a broken and unintelligible delivery. “Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah,” my father would murmur with approval. The bemused audience, not having understood a thing, would have no choice but to nod their heads appreciatively.

  Then once, when we were alone, he asked again, “Bring your notebook.” My father was sitting in the just-watered courtyard smoking a cigarette.

  “Read.” I read the poem haltingly.

  “Dear daughter, a good poet must have good delivery. The way you read, no one is going to take you seriously. Poetry must be read calmly and with great feeling. It must be read with conviction. Try again.” His words stayed with me as I practiced diligently and memorized my poems, and my shyness turned into self-confidence.

  With a thousand good-byes and salvats, I boarded the bus and set off with my face to Mashhad and my back to Tehran. We passed through Feiruz Kuh, Gunbad-e Kavus, Shahrud, and Quchan, stopping to sleep in a different city every night. My father had advised me to sit in the last row of the bus, so I did. And he had advised me not to eat meat on the road, so all I ate was bread and yogurt or cheese. In the end I caught a cold, but as night fell and we drove into Mashhad, I was full of energy. It was after midnight by the time the driver told us to stand up to greet Imam Reza, the eighth Shi’a imam. In the distance the dome of his shrine shone bathed in spotlights.

  “As-salaamu aleik ya Musa bin Reza!” (Praise to you, Imam Reza, son of Imam Musa!) we called out to the golden dome.

  Our instructor, Azar Fakhri, who had held my hand and let me rest my feverish head on her shoulder, said, “After we have supper, we’ll go to the shrine at three o’clock in the morning.”

  Our dormitory was enormous; girls were spread across the floor, asleep, with a few whispering softly to one another. They gave each of us newcomers a blanket and a pillow. Designed to receive caravans of pilgrims, the house, like others in Mashhad, had a large salon, a fully equipped kitchen, and multiple bathrooms. The boys were housed elsewhere, far enough away that there couldn’t be a chance for contact between us. I picked a spot in the corner and pulled the blanket over my head. At three o’clock, when Azar called me to go to the shrine, I couldn’t get up. A girl with big black eyes and dark skin looked up at Azar and with a south Iranian accent said, “Don’t worry about her. You go. We’ll look after her.” And then she turned and smiled at me.

  And so I met Mandana from Abadan. Mandana was a victim of the war, and she lived in a refugee camp in Bandar-e Abbas. She introduced me at breakfast to dozens of others, including Vida from Shiraz and Nasrin from Azerbaijan. With my pink valise full of clothes, I felt I’d turned overnight into the spoiled little rich girl from Tehran. The rest had nothing. I gave the pocket money my father had given me to the group leader for safekeeping and kept my suitcase hidden behind a cushion. No one had any money, and I looked completely out of place in my modern blue jeans and yellow tunic blouse. I refused for days to change that outfit and draw attention to my packed valise.

  On the way from the dormitory, we cheered when we saw flags hanging from streetlamps announcing our program: “The First Annual Nights of Poetry and Short Stories Series—Fall 1987, Ferdowsi Hall, Mashhad.” Our beloved mentors, distinguished poets Asadullah Sha’abani and Ja’far Ebrahimi, introduced us one by one. I read my poetry with increasing feeling, my voice rising—until I saw my friends in the audience pointing behind me. My veil had gotten stuck on a lit candle and was now smoking. One of the instructors came up and put out both the candle and my veil. We all laughed long and hard for the rest of the night. My veil had a hole in it bigger than a two-toman coin. Nasrin later sent me a letter from Azerbaijan with a caricature of me reciting with a headdress trailing smoke.

  When I came home, my mother took one whiff and said, “Ayeesh! Your clothes stink! Why didn’t you change your shirt?”

  “It just wouldn’t have done!” I called out from under the shower.

  When Mandana and I began writing to each other, she came to know everyone in my family. She sent a card for my mother’s birthday and comforted us when my father died. When Kati was getting married, it was Mandana who took my hand and said, “You’re tired, sit down. I’ll help in your place.”

  Mandana wrote me horrifying accounts of the refugee camps in Bandar-e Abbas. Of a girl who’d become pr
egnant by her father-in-law. Of the poverty and decay and displacement. Of Khorramshahr and Abadan. Of the siege of Abadan when her brother Bahman was lost, and she and her mother searched the drawers of all the morgues one by one. Of her memories of her neighborhood in Abadan and her longing for the war to be over so she could return to Kucheh-ye Parvaneh.

  On the day she returned, she wrote me that her house had been hit by mortars and bullets, and their furniture had been looted. “This is a burned city. Like our hearts. We have been welcomed back by a burned city.” My father had come home late, and we sat around him so he wouldn’t have to eat dinner alone. I had been crying for Mandana, and he told me to bring the letter and read it to him.

  “Camelia, I am writing you from Kucheh-ye Parvaneh. From a street deserted by all signs of life. I am writing you from Abadan. From the city of the suffering, of those who sit in the blood and the dirt. My heart is swollen and decayed like the corpses cast out into the windswept lifeless desert. Our house is a ruin with three walls. My childhood bike still stands in a corner of the basement after being burned a thousand times.” My father listened with his eyes fixed on the television, but he was looking at Mandana and her burned city. His throat was choked with sobs.

  Everyone was silent, mourning Iran’s scorched earth. “The people of Abadan defended the city with empty hands, and our sons and brothers fell to the ground like flowers in the fall. My friend, believe me, today the date palms are broken. Tell me, when will our youth, our date palms, when will they be green again?”

  WINTER 1989

  Seda va Sima, the television station, appeared on our doorstep about a week before the February memorial celebrations for the revolution. They asked to see “Khanum Camelia Entekhabifard.” It was a Friday. We had eaten our chelow kebabs, and my father was sleeping in his bedroom downstairs. My mother brought out tea and pastries, and they explained that they were producing a program for the commemoration that featured the country’s successful and distinguished teenagers. The Club for Creative Literature had recommended me, Camelia, girl poet and painter.