Some of my memories of that time are like photographs that I can “see.” Others are facts, details, or emotions, things I know but can’t quite visualize in my mind’s eye. My memory of the airport’s bathroom falls into the latter category. I don’t remember exactly what it looked like, but I do remember there were no toilets. That was my introduction to the traditional Iranian bathroom. Where a Western bathroom would have a toilet and a roll of toilet paper, in Iran there was a hole in the floor and a hose on the wall. The result was nauseatingly wretched.
Many family members had gathered at the airport to welcome us. They engulfed us like a swarm of bees, crowding us with hugs and cheers. Perhaps there were only dozens of relatives, but for all the commotion, it could have been hundreds. The women wore black chadors, long pieces of fabric that wrapped around their bodies, revealing only a portion of the face. The chador was held in place from the inside, so even the skin of their hands was hidden.
My father’s parents had both died when he was young, and he had been raised by his older sister, whom I knew as Ameh Bozorg. We were driven from the airport to her house. Inside the iron gate, surrounded by a chaotic mass of people, stood a man with a sheep. Mom held me. We paused to watch as he slit the throat of the sheep and let its blood spill out onto the walkway. I buried my face in Mom’s shoulder as she and my dad stepped over the blood and entered the house. In my father’s culture, this was an extremely high honor, but to me it was traumatic. For a little girl who couldn’t stomach the violence of a Disney movie, the slaughter of a sheep in real life was horrifying.
Ameh Bozorg was the matriarch of the family and thus was treated with the highest respect. I was afraid of her. She had stringy shoulder-length hair tinged with henna. Her nose was long and crooked, and she wore dark green nylons and a matching dress. To me, she easily could have been a stand-in for the Wicked Witch of the West. She and her husband, Baba Haji, lived in a once-opulent house that was literally connected to the Chinese embassy. Their home was redolent with marble, ornate chandeliers, and layers upon layers of Persian carpets, yet it was sparse, cold, and lacked the luxurious feel its refined materials would suggest.
Besides smelly and frightening, Iran seemed very noisy to me. Being an unusually quiet child, I found the commotion unsettling. Perhaps it was because I didn’t understand the language, or then again, it might have been the sheer volume of their chatter.
I’m not sure how many people actually lived at Ameh Bozorg’s house, but there seemed to be people everywhere—grown-ups sitting on the living room floor, drinking tea from miniature glasses, and children running every which way, unsupervised. My dad tried to get me to play with my cousins, but I was overwhelmed by their rambunctiousness and clung all the more to Mom.
For the most part, the adults seemed oblivious to the youngsters as they tore through the house and out into the walled courtyard in back. From the safety of Mom’s side, I watched them cavorting in the backyard among the rosebushes and around the in-ground swimming pool, whose water was green and stagnant. When a child wandered into the kitchen, the nearest woman would tear off a small piece of the previous meal’s lavash (flatbread), stuff it with feta and a sprig of mint, and hand over a miniature rolled treat along with a pat on the head or a kiss on the cheek.
Ameh Bozorg’s house was mostly devoid of furniture. We sat on floors cushioned with handmade Persian carpets. And when it was time for a meal, in traditional Persian style, that is where we dined. A cloth served as the table and families ate in shifts—first men, then women, and lastly children. Despite the social norm, I ate with Mom.
Breakfast was typically served on the floor like the other meals, but there were occasions when we ventured into the dining room. Even at the table, grown-ups sat cross-legged on their chairs. For breakfast we usually ate nan paneer sabzi, a sandwich made of Iranian bread layered with feta, sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, and fresh greens like basil or mint. Sometimes we ate nan paneer gerdu—bread with lots of butter, feta, and walnuts. Occasionally it was bread with butter and quince, sour cherry, or rose-petal jam.
Fresh fruit and vegetables were abundant. We ate little cucumbers the way people in America eat an apple. Bread was purchased hot from the bakery for each meal, and rice was served twice a day, every day.
In a blur of food and family the visit flew by. Our days of immersion into my father’s land had come to an end—or so Mom and I thought. Mr. Bunny and I bounded about the bedroom, excited to go home. Mom did her best to dodge us as she packed, and together we prattled on about those we were eager to see upon our return.
My dad came in. He was quiet. Mom was talking, but an invisible object on the floor held his attention. He stammered something about an issue with our passports. I thought I made out the words confiscated and government. Then, abandoning the lie, he gripped Mom’s upper arms in his fists. Gathering his resolve, he declared, “Betty, I don’t know how to tell you this. We’re not going home.” His voice and his grip intensified with each word. “You are in Iran until you die!” He stood straight, shoulders back, head held high. “Now you’re in my country. You’ll abide by my rules.”
“What are you talking about? Moody, you can’t do this to us. Please don’t do this,” she pleaded. “You promised we would go home in two weeks. You swore on the Koran. You can’t do this!”
His blow struck her with such force that she was momentarily stunned into silence. I had never seen my dad hit my mom before, and it terrified me. I was shocked, confused—more than that, utterly bewildered. What did all of this mean? Who was this man? His violent anger obscured him to the point of unrecognizability. What had happened to my loving Baba Jon—my dear daddy?
From that moment forward, even his footsteps lost their familiar lilt. Plodding down the hall, they sounded deliberate, filled with rage. Their horrid pounding turned my stomach.
That was the day my daddy turned into a monster.
CHAPTER 4
Day after day I clung to Mom crying, “Mommy, I want to go home. Please take me home.” Day after day Mom did her best to reassure me, “Don’t worry, Mahtob. Everything will be all right. I promise. I’ll find a way to take you home.” And day after day my dad vowed, amid shouts and flying fists, that we would never leave Iran.
With no provocation, he would tear off into violent tirades directed at my mom: “If you ever touch the telephone, I’ll kill you. . . . If you ever walk out that door, I’ll kill you. . . . I’ll kill you, and I’ll send the ashes of a burned American flag back over your body. . . . You’ll never escape, but if you do, I’ll spend the rest of my life looking for you. And when I find you, I’ll kill you and bring Mahtob back to Iran.”
My life became a blur of screaming matches and crying fits. Then Mom got sick. Although for the first two weeks the food hadn’t troubled her, almost immediately upon learning our fate, she was struck with dysentery. Mr. Bunny and I sat helplessly at her bedside and watched as she continued to weaken.
Those were excruciating times. Fading in and out of consciousness, Mom begged me to protect her from my father, the American-educated doctor who now claimed to have returned to Iran to save his people. She would wake with a start and look to be sure I was still manning my post. “Mahtob,” she would whisper in part because she was so frail and in part so no one would hear her instructions, “no matter what, don’t let your daddy give me a shot. Please, no matter what he says, don’t let him give me an injection. He could give me medicine that would hurt me.”
“I’ll protect you, Mommy,” I would promise. “I won’t let him hurt you.”
It would take all her strength to get the words out. Drained, she would then drift back into a fitful sleep.
Those bitter days turned into weeks and I, like the other children in the family, was left to fend for myself. Without Mom at my side to brush off my father’s demands, I had no choice but to interact with the other children.
My parents had each been married once before. My father had no other children
, but Mom had two sons. Joe and John, my brothers, predated me by thirteen and nine years, respectively. I remember John sneaking me into the basement to watch cartoons when I was around three. John would have been twelve or so.
In America, I had been forbidden to watch TV unless it was with my father and he picked the program. I was allowed to watch the woman who had a yoga show on PBS. I liked her because she spoke softly and had long brown hair just like mine, except hers was much longer. I hoped mine would be that long one day. Other than the yoga lady, we mostly watched National Geographic specials about animals. I would sit on my dad’s lap in his recliner, and he would teach me the names of the animals in Farsi. It upset him that anytime I saw a baby animal alone I would whimper, “Where’s its mommy?”
“Why don’t you ever say ‘Where’s its daddy?’” he would reprimand.
The day John sneaked me down to the basement, we didn’t watch yoga or National Geographic. He sprawled on the couch, I leaned over the back of a ceramic zebra that was almost as big as I was, and we watched The Smurfs. John and I were so engrossed in the show that we didn’t hear my dad come home. Our first clue that we’d been caught was his voice bellowing from the top of the stairs. “What do you think you’re doing down there? Shut that TV off this instant!” I ran for cover, but before I could get away, he grabbed me and spanked me. I should have known better than to disobey him, and he would be sure I thought twice before ever exhibiting such disrespect again.
Television is a powerful means of cultural indoctrination. Perhaps that’s why it was off limits to me in the States. My dad didn’t want me to be influenced by what he saw as a morally corrupt society. In Iran, however, it was a different story. Wanting me to absorb the culture in its entirety, he forced me to watch television. There, even the cartoons took on a dark, menacing tone.
I have very few memories of the shows I watched in Iran, but I do remember fragments of a cartoon about a bee. The bee was indiscriminately kind, even though there was much evil in his harsh world. Danger lurked high and low, and he was frequently called upon to fight not only for his own life, but also for the lives of those who treated him cruelly. The “bad guys”—other insects like wasps and praying mantises—constantly pursued him, but the cheerful bee did not waver in the face of their attacks. The bright spot in the show was the queen bee, who, though obscure, was gentle and loving.
It was validating when years later, I found the cartoon posted on the Internet. The bee was as I remembered from my childhood, sitting in a red flower, eyes cast upward, lost in a daydream. In the background was the scene he longed for. Floating in the distance, in the image from his dream, his mother, the queen bee, clutched his hands in hers and smiled down at him affectionately.
The little bee’s name was Hutch. They had been separated when the evil wasps attacked and massacred the beehive, killing the honeybees that fought to defend their queen. The wasps looted and pillaged the hive. Not content merely to consume the honey stores, they even feasted greedily on the honeybee eggs. But one egg fell to the ground and was hidden from view by a leaf. Inside that egg was Hutch. That’s how he lived through the invasion. His mother and a small number of survivors flew away in tears, thinking that all the eggs had been devoured by their wicked nemeses.
No wonder I had remembered Hutch. It is surprising that my dad let me watch a program about a bee who spent his life in a tireless quest to be reunited with his mother.
As Mom lay in her bedroom, losing her grasp on life, I would lie on my stomach on the living room floor, head in hands, legs bent at the knees, feet swaying in the air, watching Hutch. I desperately willed him to find his way back to his mom, as if by some miracle his success would translate into my life.
Mr. Bunny and I did our best to stay at Mom’s side at all times, but on the occasions when my dad forced me away from my post, the living room served as an acceptable secondary defensive position. From that vantage point, no one could enter or exit our bedroom without my knowledge. Before I retreated, I would leave Mr. Bunny behind with Mom so she wouldn’t be alone. And if my dad even looked in her direction, I would leap to my feet and rush to her aid.
A few days before my fifth birthday, I tumbled off a stool while playing, and the overturned leg tore through the flesh of my right arm just below the elbow. Blood gushed, and I wailed. My parents rushed me to the hospital, where my entitled father was offended to be told we would have to wait our turn. We sat in chairs haphazardly placed along the wall of a corridor. My father ranted, spitting insults about the degenerate state of his homeland while Mom, who had mustered her strength to be with us, did her best to insulate me from his rage.
When at last we were ushered into a treatment room, I was placed on a table where the doctor examined my wound. It was quite deep and would require stitches, a diagnosis my dad had made within seconds of my fall. When my father, the anesthesiologist, learned that the hospital’s limited supply of anesthesia was rationed, only to be used for victims of the war, he began screaming. But no amount of anger could multiply the scant supply of medicine. I don’t remember the doctor suturing my arm without the aid of anesthesia, but I do recall that for some odd reason there was a cat in the room.
Understandably, I was a bit out of sorts on my fifth birthday. My bandaged arm throbbed, and my heart ached. The extended family gathered at Ameh Bozorg’s house for a feast, complete with a guitar-shaped birthday cake. Somehow the cake was dropped upside down on the floor. But by coincidence, my favorite uncle on my dad’s side arrived at just that moment. He was late, but he hadn’t arrived empty handed.
Majid was the uncle who loved to play with the children. He was tall and thin with red hair, a matching mustache, and the glint of a jokester in his eye. He knelt before me with a smile and extended a bakery box with a clear opening in the lid. My eyes widened. Inside the box was a cake—and not just any cake. It was an exact replica of the cake that just moments earlier had been scraped off the floor and dumped into the garbage.
The weeks gave way to months, and Mom’s health continued to deteriorate. Mr. Bunny and I remained with her as much as possible. Mom had taken a bottle of White Rain shampoo along for the trip. The shampoo had run out, but the smell lingered in the plastic bottle. I used to fill it with water and drink in its aroma. Sometimes I would squeeze the empty bottle in my face, cherishing the brief blasts of a familiar scent from home.
I sat on the floor leaning against Mom’s bed. She slept, and I dreamed of home. I missed the rest of my family terribly and took every opportunity to beg Mom to take me back to them.
I knew better than to discuss such things with my father. Each time I heard his ominous footsteps approaching the door, my stomach gurgled with terror and the beating of my heart echoed in my ears.
What if this time I couldn’t stop him from giving my mom an injection? I worried. What if today was the day he killed my mommy?
CHAPTER 5
Who would think that something as seemingly insignificant as a gum wrapper would change our course? After more than two months of slowly inching her way toward the grave, Mom found a crumpled gum wrapper. Smoothing it out, she tried to write her name on it and was shocked to learn she was just too weak. She realized that if something didn’t change she would die, leaving me in that household. I would be raised believing that my father’s brand of brutality was an acceptable part of life.
She couldn’t—wouldn’t—let that happen.
As Mom lay there feeble and emaciated, she came up with a plan. She would kill everyone with kindness to convince my father and his family that she had accepted life according to his rules. As she set her plan into motion, her attitude improved, and gradually so did her health. She regained her appetite, her strength, and a sliver of my father’s trust.
Knowing that any chance of escape hinged on getting out from under the microscope of Ameh Bozorg’s house, where surveillance was inescapable, Mom proposed that we move in with my dad’s nephew, Mammal, and his wife, Nasserine. Mom
, who has always been a hard worker, would lighten Nasserine’s load by cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their baby boy, Amir. My father assented. But even separated from the relatives at Ameh Bozorg’s house—the ones who, eager to do my father’s bidding, served as our guards—we could not evade my father’s violent outbursts.
His temper tantrums were so frequent and extreme that shortly after we moved in, Mammal and Nasserine moved out, leaving my father to rage on in their absence. The hierarchical nature of Persian society rendered it improper for them to intervene. My father outranked them on some invisible family totem pole.
The apartment complex was a giant concrete box with sharp angles and drab passages. We lived upstairs in a modest two-bedroom unit. Like Ameh Bozorg’s house, the living room was devoid of furniture, and the dining-room table was rarely used for meals. Mom spent her days in the galley-style kitchen, and my parents and I shared a bedroom at the other end of the apartment. My dad’s nephew, Reza, lived downstairs with his wife, Essie, and their children. Vines loaded with sour green grapes tangled their way through their courtyard. I enjoyed the pucker that came with eating the unripened grapes off the vine, but it wasn’t worth having to be near Reza and Essie’s cruel daughter.
Although Iran had been at war with Iraq, early on in our time there the skirmishes had been held to the border regions. That all changed in the course of a night. I was fast asleep between my parents when an air-raid siren pierced the night. Bombs exploded amid flashes of red and orange. The room shook. What terrified me more than Iraq’s attack was my parents’ reaction. Their eyes were wild with fear. Questions shot questions back and forth: “What’s happening?” “What do we do?” “Where do we go?”
No answers.
“I thought we were safe in Tehran!” Mom shouted in a whisper.
“This is your country’s fault,” my father snarled, pointing angrily. “Who supplies Saddam Hussein with his bombs? The Americans are behind this war.”
My Name Is Mahtob: The Story That Began the Global Phenomenon Not Without My Daughter Continues Page 3
