He noticed Aida counting the coins in her pocket.
‘These ones are half price,’ he told her. ‘On account of their age.’
They both stood in silence as the lie drifted out into the darkness, wafting curlicues amid the candle smoke.
‘Thank you,’ Aida replied.
The young man reached across the counter and handed Niki a chocolate bar.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said, looking up as a new wave of customers entered the store.
‘Let me guess . . .’ he announced, pretending to be deep in thought.
Back at the house, Aida lit a couple of candles. Niki watched with excitement, blowing them out with all the faux birthday strength she could muster.
‘No, Niki, they’re not –’ Aida began, but gave up. ‘Fine, a couple more.’
Eventually Niki tired of this game and the candles remained alight. Aida placed them about the living room, then had an idea.
‘Let’s take them outside. See what the stars are doing.’
They spread out a blanket then sat upon it cross-legged. Aida looked up, the night sky stretching before her. She knew these were foreign stars, upside down and inside out, and that somewhere up there was the Southern Cross. But she knew so little of her own stars, Tehran’s nights too heavy with light and smog pollution, that this sky seemed neither new nor familiar. Beside her, Niki snuggled into her side. She yawned mightily, her heavy-lidded eyes mesmerised by the flickering candle. Suddenly Niki scrambled upright again. She seized a feather from her pocket and held it towards the flame.
‘Wish?’ she asked Aida.
Aida hesitated, then nodded. She moved the candle onto a patch of cement then motioned to Niki. Together, they held the feather over the candle. It trembled as the flame caught hold of it, lifting it into the air as it spewed putrid smoke into their nostrils.
‘Maman, come home now, please,’ Niki instructed the dancing feather.
As the feather burnt into nothing, Niki pressed her eyes shut tight. Aida copied her silently. Niki wished for her mother and Aida wished for her father.
*
They slept that night together on Elham’s single mattress, her scent and worry wreathed around the two exhausted sleepers. Neither dreamt, their slumber as dark as the world around them. Aida woke early, as new light tiptoed through the window. Soft footsteps sounded in the hall and soon the door creaked open. Elham lay down beside her, Niki undisturbed between them. The two women watched each other. Finally Elham spoke, her voice barely audible.
‘I got my letter. Two days ago . . . I . . . I thought she would be better off without me. That they’d take pity on her and let her stay.’
Her face was hard with the reality of what she’d done.
‘But you came back,’ Aida whispered, and with that Elham’s body lost its rigidity, defeated as she pulled her daughter towards her.
They stayed like that for some time, the three of them squeezed onto the narrow mattress. Aida, Niki and Elham, still dressed in her coat. Inside her pocket, the rejection letter wedged itself between them, this new little family. Together again, if only for this moment.
Part 5
30
Aida
At times of seemingly dubious import – existential homework crises, the tail end of dinner parties, various family celebrations and milestones – my father was well known for conjuring silence with a single raised hand and embarking on his prized philosophical treatise. It varied little at each retelling yet never once failed to rouse a tear from his own stoic brown eyes, nor from my mother’s, who often mouthed the best bits along with him. It went something like this: After reminding us all of his remarkable academic prowess in the fields of both history and literature, my father would squint into the distance, tangled deep within his own thoughts, then suddenly seize the air before him as if plucking the very truth of life from amid the atoms and particles. It’s not what history makes of you that matters, but what you make of your history. He would wait then, for applause, before continuing his previous conversation as if nothing had happened at all.
I have thought of this often over the past few years, in these long unrelenting periods where there is nothing to do but think or go mad, or one then the other. My father’s voice whispering gnomically in my ear as I ponder my present situation: what to make of it all when your trajectory does not land as you’d planned? Sometimes I wonder if it is possible to find a single trigger point in my history that set things in motion, each action and decision contributing to the domino avalanche that brought me to this point? Or do they all bleed and blend into one another, largely inconsequential on their own but accumulatively inescapable? If there is one moment, what would that be? Did it start with our decision to frequent Café Naderi, with Lida and Afshar and the others? Or in the tangled sheets of Afshar’s bed, where we promised each other defiant young eternity before I snuck back to my parents’ home? Or with my fascination for stories and truths that led me to study journalism? Was it earlier than this – my father’s tears at the censorship of his work, my anger at having to wear a headscarf when my brothers did not? Or was it all inevitable, this rising tide of frustration and disillusionment the only natural response to all that was happening around us? The stripping of university funding, the job shortages, and the crushing down of artistic and basic freedoms? In the tide of anger gathering as yet another of the magazines Hamid now worked for was shut down, or Shirin’s university cutting scholarships before she could claim hers? Or had it started decades earlier when Khomeini’s revolution failed to turn out as it had promised?
I asked Afshar about this once, cross-legged on the couch while Lida and Shirin smoked by the open window. Their breath tumbled out into the evening chill, escaping into the smog.
‘Nothing happens for a reason,’ Afshar sighed, his recent apostasy at an all-time high. ‘Not for any god-given one, anyway. It’s all brought about by people – you, me, people we know and people we’ll never know. It’s that butterfly in the Amazon thing. Some power-hungry suit gets miffed because he is left off a taskforce and refuses to cast the deciding vote, and we’re the ones who get stiffed. An entire village votes a certain way because they believe the fear-mongering, or a prodigal son returns in a Mullah’s robes and tells them it’s for the best, and women get banned from the stadium. A kid happens to leave his Facebook profile open and his mother recognises his friend in an underground band and the audience gets beaten up at a gig. It’s all chance and luck, really.’
By the window Lida rolled her eyes.
‘Old age is making you bitter,’ she teased him. ‘You really think there’s no point to any of this?’
‘Not that there isn’t a point,’ Afshar replied, reaching across the table to seize a handful of sunflower seeds. ‘But that there’s just so much beyond our control that influences everything in our lives. How much power do I really have over anything if somewhere someone else can make a snap decision and my life comes crashing down as a result? When you look at it like that, does my vote really matter? If there’s one less person in that crowd at the protest is anyone going to notice?’
‘If there’s one less moody punk song will anyone really care?’ Lida teased him, but he shrugged in response.
‘Does anyone really care?’
‘But surely that’s the point?’ Shirin spoke up. ‘Because if everyone thought like that, no one would bother to do anything.’
Afshar didn’t reply, splitting the shells mechanically between his teeth.
‘It’s about what you make of it,’ I said slowly. ‘What you make of your history that matters.’
Shirin grinned, having heard my father’s monologue on countless occasions.
‘Because I might just be one person, but I’m me, and that matters. My voice matters. My story matters. And every single other person out there – they’re “me” too. And we all matter. All of
us.’
Afshar paused, his hand hovering over the bowl.
‘And that’s why I like you so much.’ He beamed, leaning forward to kiss my forehead.
Lida laughed as Shirin tittered red-faced on the window ledge. And it became just another day in the mad rush towards everything that would happen.
If there was one day that led to all this, perhaps it could be this one: On that day in 2009 it all started with Lida’s phone call, four long years since we’d first met in Naderi. The election results had been announced early – before all the polling stations had closed – a bullshit second term for Ahmadinejad. People were taking to the streets, Lida told us. Shirin was on her way. Millions, it turned out, were on their way. Of course we would come, Afshar told her. There was never the thought not to. When we arrived at Azadi Tower the streets were already full, people from all walks of life determined to seize back justice from the rigged election. University students, artists and intellectuals, but also religious conservatives, the elderly – everyone draped in shawls and scarves and cotton strips the vibrant green of our candidate Mousavi and our country itself. We didn’t want a revolution – we’d had several of those and they hadn’t worked out so well. What we wanted was democracy and reform. You could see it in Afshar’s graffiti, his messages clearer and angrier. His music too, no longer sanitised anywhere near enough for Ershad approval. Online and in the streets our world exploded. Enough. Enough of it all.
I wasn’t long graduated from university and these would become some of my first proper assignments. Much of my work piggy-backed on the contacts of more established journalist friends, helping me to publish at home between media bans as well as internationally. We milled about the sea of millions. Mobile coverage was out but I recorded as much as I could on my phone, changing the memory cards each time they filled. For nine days we were on the streets, the dirt and dust Ahmadinejad so easily dismissed as if we were nothing but a handful of belligerent grumblers instead of the seething, teeming millions demanding justice.
After a week or so it was clear the results would not be changed, but we stayed because our anger needed to be heard. We were exhausted, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep. My friends marched in the front – Shirin, Lida and Afshar – signs lifted high above their heads. ‘Where’s my vote?’ ‘Sorry our backs hurt your knife.’ I existed amid it all, a furious blurred line between journalist and citizen, all my worlds colliding. Drifting between my friends and strangers, recording all I could. When the Basiji started killing people – spraying bullets through the air or beating people senseless with rods and canes – at first we couldn’t believe it. Iranians killing Iranians, something none of us thought could ever happen. We found one boy lying on the street with blood pouring from a wound. We used his scarf to halt the flow, the swift crimson staining deep into the proud green fabric. I knew my parents would refuse to let me leave again if I returned home so I stayed with Lida instead in the tiny apartment of two activist friends. She wrote her name on her legs, just in case something happened to her – so they knew how to contact her family.
Arrests increased, my journalist and blogger friends plucked from their homes and tortured into confessions for crimes they hadn’t committed. The government posted photographs from the marches in the streets and on the internet. Do you know this person? they asked, inviting people to turn each other in. I remember seeing Afshar’s face amid a crowd shot, something he laughed off nervously. So many people left then, the fear of arrest and torture too much. A friend of my father had spent time in prison after the revolution because he didn’t support the new regime, and when they found him protesting in the Green Movement he was executed straight away. Shirin was beaten so badly she lost half the teeth from her mouth, her face so swollen I walked straight past her hospital bed. Parents searched the hospitals for weeks after, trying to find their disappeared children, waiting outside Evin Prison to check the prisoner lists. Some searched for a month – a whole month not knowing whether they should mourn their child. I was there amid it all, bearing witness as best I could.
I know you want me to talk about this more, that this is where the crux of my story lies. That ultimately the outcome of my visa will depend on my ability to tell this story, every detail, every horrible memory. Reliving it again and again, for the people from immigration, for the lawyers, for journalists hungry as I was. So many times that it begins to sound just like the stories my father and grandfather used to tell, as if it wasn’t me but some other mythical figure at the centre of this grand cautionary tale, and Lida, Shirin, Afshar and my parents all merely supporting characters. Here is what happened, the paragraph you use to win the audience over to the wretched plight of people like me:
The government crackdown was fierce, a rattled cobra lashing out at everything in its path. Mousavi was placed under house arrest while activists, journalists and bloggers languished in jail. Lida was arrested, plucked one night from her bed while her mother begged the agents for mercy. We were unable to see her for many months and when we did she was a broken, withered shell, her body ravaged by the hunger strike she refused to abandon after receiving a twelve-year sentence for crimes against national security. Afshar was arrested too, cautioned overnight and released because his father had connections within the government. He returned sullen and silent, his casual self-assurance beaten right out of him.
A year and a half after the fraudulent election, protests broke out again. People raged, their Persian anger in solidarity with the Arab Spring erupting across the region. I was there, my phone recording everything I could, my pictures and words beamed out across the world under a by-line I’d made up for protection. This wasn’t enough. My phone was confiscated when I was arrested, hauled into the van with so many others and unloaded at a police station dense with the sweaty beaten bodies of my countrywomen and men. The stench of imprisonment, torture and decay was all-consuming as they marched me into the holding cell.
It’s not what history makes of you that matters, but what you make of your history.
The train arrived at the station and Aida put her notebook away. She could sense the security fences already, waiting patiently for her arrival. It was the proximity to the living that had surprised Aida the most. This had been when she was first released into the community after so long behind wire, first on the island and then in the detention centre in Broadmeadows. A Kmart, some fast-food restaurants, a petrol station, a business park, then there it sat, flanked on all sides by residential houses. Existing, behind its barbed wire and locked doors, amid the everyday. This small unbearable world surrounded on all sides by the normalcy of life. Now, as she walked the final distance from the train station to the detention centre, she trailed her hand along the fenced perimeter. How much power these simple structures had, splitting the world into hope and horror, divided by simple wire and steel. She had thought of this last night – and the night before that, and the night before that – every night since Elham and Niki had gone back into detention. In the warm still night she had lain on her side watching the moon out her window. She was never quite sure if it was coming or going, pregnant with possibility or wasting away into nothing.
Tremors of something – fear perhaps, or triumph – ran through her as she signed into reception, leaving behind her mobile phone and valuables as the guard checked through the bag of gifts she had brought with her. There were others, too, signing in. An elderly Sri Lankan couple laden with spicy-smelling tiffin trays; three young women with political slogans across their T-shirts; a family dressed in sombre colours, the small children bickering despite their parents’ stern warnings. As she made her way to the security door, she paused to let past a woman who was coming the other way. The woman pulled her headscarf tightly around her, her face creased with distress. It looked so different inside now that Aida looked with the eyes of a visitor. Knowing she could leave at any moment made the walls seem higher, the couches and tables more cramped. Two g
uards sat at the desk by the door, one of them fiddling with a small radio. Every bit of furniture seemed occupied by people – detainees and their visitors – as they spoke in restrained voices. The security door behind her opened and all eyes flickered momentarily in its direction. Aida’s body ached with memory of that expectation – that hope – for someone, anyone, to visit. She spotted Elham across the room. Her skin was pale, dark roots spreading into the retreating blonde of Massoumeh’s dye. Elham smiled broadly and they embraced.
‘I was looking at the door and look what it’s brought,’ Elham said, a hand on Aida’s cheek. ‘You don’t have work today?’
‘It’s a public holiday,’ Aida reminded her. ‘For the horse race. Massoumeh sends her love.’
‘Is it going well?’
It was, but Aida felt ashamed to say this.
‘It’s fine. You know how work is.’
‘And the house? Have you found someone else? And the cats?’
Aida tilted her head. Sensing the change in occupants and weighing up future food prospects, the cats were long gone.
‘Have you heard anything? About your appeal?’ she said instead.
Elham sighed, deep and weary.
‘Nothing. The lawyer says wait. As if we haven’t been doing that already. It goes to court, I think, and then after that, nothing. I can’t go back to Iran so . . . Maybe they will send us back to the island? I don’t know. No one tells me anything. The lawyers try to but they’re so busy. They have so many people to help. And I forget, or, I don’t know, I hear but I forget the English, and then I don’t remember what they told me.’
‘And Niki?’
‘She’s here somewhere,’ Elham said, craning her neck. ‘She keeps asking for her friends. The cats too.’
Aida spotted Niki, prowling about the new visitors.
The Book of Ordinary People Page 33
