Camelia (21 page)

Iran is a nation of poets—you can't find a family in Iran that doesn't claim a poet. And Iranian poets love to write about love. My poem to the soldiers was in the popular contemporary style called
sher-e azad
or
sher-enou
. Yet I was also inspired by the history of Iranian poetry. Hafez, one of the most celebrated Iranian poets, writes beautifully about love and sex, and it's clear to Iranians that the women he writes about are God. People read Hafez's poems like divine fortunes, consulting them like an oracle. Through his writing they find God in their daily lives. My poem's romantic imagery was common for all Persian poets. I wondered . . . If Hafez had been a student at Hoda, would even
he
have been expelled for writing controversial poems?

 

My mother was called into the school, and she came out of principal Hassani's office seething. She said that I had been dismissed for the day. She quarreled with me all the way home. “Aren't you
ashamed? They told me that my daughter has fallen in love with Nava Rouhani and has been writing poetry to her. I wanted to die from shame. Why aren't you ashamed?”

It was true that I cared for Nava. She liked my writing and flattered me by borrowing my notebook full of poems. She was different from the others. She had a distinct poise and was a pianist, the daughter of the famous Iranian pianist Anoushirvan Rouhani. It was because of her prominent antirevolutionary father that Khanum Hassani wanted to punish us. My “love” poem was a convenient excuse. And it was true that I had brought a rose to school for her on her birthday. But our friendship was nothing like the lurid image swimming around our principal's head.

My mother blazed ahead. “Khanum Hassani said that she's been watching you and Nava for some time now, and she's noticed that this ill-intentioned girl has been using you and”—she stopped herself midsentence and then thundered, “If we tell your father, he'll kill us all. Dirt on your head when you let them spread these rumors about you. Has anyone even once said such things about Elham? Why can't you learn proper manners from your cousin?”

I wanted to kill Khanum Hassani. I screamed back at my mother, “You! How could you let her say such shit to you? Why didn't you smack her in the mouth? Why didn't you say that this school is a madhouse and that she is a raving lunatic?” and I broke down, crying bitterly.

“What should I have said? Should I have told that Madar-e Fuladzere-ye Div that she's a liar and sick in the head? And she would have said that this Nava is a Baha'i and unclean and that she molests girls! You must never speak to her again or Khanum Hassani will kick you out of school.”

 

For a long time after these accusations, my poetry just floated away. It was as if Khanum Hassani had banished my muse to a dark island
in the middle of a vast ocean. Mandana wrote me, “Where is your new work? Don't let the typhoon carry your bird's nest away with it. It is needed in the wind.” And my teacher from the club wrote me, “Be patient. Let the poetry trickle out by itself like water droplets. It will come shortly of its own accord.”

I begged to be sent back to my old school, to my friends Faranak, Bita, Masumeh, and Newsha. I kept ducking out of class to go visit them. I wrote Mandana, “My house is black, and today only crows are singing in the street outside. My street is filled with a frenzy of crows.” I was plagued by nightmares, and I didn't have the strength to study. I failed my exams and had to repeat my junior year. Finally, because it was so embarrassing to repeat a year at the same school, my mother allowed me to return to Fayazbaksh.

When I failed my exams, I didn't come out of my room for a week and a half. I sat and stared at the walls in misery. Shocked and confused, I thought about running away from home or killing myself. I had always been a good student, and this shameful failure hurt me and my family. Then one day my father came in, sat on my bed, and said, “Camelia, I want to talk to you.” I was afraid at first that he was going to punish me, even more harshly than a few years ago when my grade in my English class fell. He'd banned me from my best friend Leila's wedding (she was married at fifteen). He never discovered that I had snuck out to attend the ceremony briefly, in a nervously planned escape that kept my blood pressure up for weeks.

On this sad day, though, I was punishing myself so much that it wouldn't have mattered if he grounded me for the whole summer. I wanted to die. Incredibly, in contrast to the wrath I expected, my father had come to counsel me about self-reliance and hope, about struggling to achieve one's goals, about success and believing in better and happier days.

He calmly asked me to follow him to the kitchen to talk, then
closed the door and lit a cigarette. We sat at the table. “I don't want you and your sister to marry young. I want both of you to study hard. You have unique talents, you're different—there's so much you can achieve. In our society, where it's a sin to be a woman, I want you and your sister to be powerful and respected. Even when you do get married, if you fight with your husband, if he yells at you or treats you badly, I want you to be able to make your own decisions. If you're educated and have a job, you can take care of yourself, and you won't be forced to stay with some horrible husband for financial reasons. Learn from this failure . . .”

As I listened to him, I watched the thin line of blue smoke rising from his cigarette sitting in the ashtray, an unbroken line that rose up to the kitchen ceiling. He picked it up to take a deep puff, and the line dissolved in all directions. “The situation in our country is so uncertain and unbalanced that any day we might be forced to leave. And if we must leave Iran, your education may be your only currency. An education is cash you can spend anywhere—no one can take it away from you, it's an asset that can't be seized. Trust me, when I can't be with you anymore, it will be your education that keeps you girls safe.” I was crying quietly, the tears running down my cheeks. I wanted to kiss his hands, to hold him and cry in his arms. But my father didn't like his daughters to be emotional, I knew. He wanted us to be strong. “Okay, go now and wash your face, then concentrate on the new semester. There's a solution for everything—except death. And you are alive, and I'm still with you, and you can stand up again.”

When I left the kitchen, I felt I had grown years in that conversation. It was one of the few times in my life that I had seen this side of my father. My defeat had broken his usual strict composure, and he was speaking to me from the heart. My empty days of sitting in solitude and mourning my failure gradually disappeared in the confidence he'd inspired. I went back to my old school, and after a
while my little butterflies of poetry also returned to land gently on my shoulder.

 

The cultural revolution took place a year after the revolution, and the universities were closed for two years. When they reopened, the Ministry of Higher Education and Learning was formed to investigate students and judge whether they could be admitted to college. Students who were accepted to a university still had to prove that they met Islamic moral standards before they were allowed to enroll. Every year, our neighbors whose sons and daughters had taken the entrance exams would come around begging everyone to speak generously of their children. When they were evaluating Maryam, our fourth floor neighbor in our old apartment in Shahr-Ara, the investigator knocked on our door. He had a beard and thick glasses and cotton shoes. He wouldn't look at my mother as he questioned her but turned his gaze to the wall, nodding his head and recording his findings in his file. Men who were very Islamic believed that in order to abstain from sin while talking to women, they had to abstain from looking at them directly. It was the same at all the ministries and official institutions. If you were among a few women standing together, it was difficult to guess who was being spoken to, and you had to ask, “Who are you addressing?” Or, “To whom is the brother speaking?” My mother said that Maryam was the most virtuous girl on the block and that her parents were pious and that “this girl doesn't go running around with anyone but stays at home and studies.”

The investigators also visited parents' workplaces and local businesses to enquire after a family's reputation, how well they observed the
hejab
, whether they participated in Friday prayers, and so forth. And so the fates of university-bound students were in the hands of their neighbors, many of whom harbored some hostility, spite, or envy. But no matter how well we did on our exams and even in the
investigative screening, it was still hard for families like ours, in the same way that it was easy for the families of martyrs, of soldiers at the front, or of prisoners of war. The only variable that mattered in the equation was the number of afflictions suffered in the war. There were special provisions for the war-torn southern provinces, but we Tehranis, who'd done nothing for the revolution, who could claim no martyrs or combatants, we had to resort to flattering those in power. I remember how, as she filled out her forms, Kati would break down. We were classified as region “one,” but Kati would cry that “this ‘one' stands for last, not first!” Some of her friends even transferred to dangerous war-stricken regions in their senior year just to get into college.

Luckily, by the time I graduated, the investigations had ceased. There was a new window of hope. Katayun was one of the first students accepted into the newly established Azad Islamic University. So I also submitted my exams for a program in political science at Azad while I was still in high school, during my last year. My grades weren't high enough for the Tehran campus, but I was passed to the next round where I could be evaluated for up to three alternate cities. I chose only one—the city of Shahreza. I considered this a test, an experiment. My true goal was to apply to an even more prestigious state university the next year. In the meantime, my greatest gift to my father would be for him to see my name in the newspaper among those accepted to Azad. I wanted to give him this sweet satisfaction after my bitter academic failure two years earlier. When I gave him the news that I'd passed the first round, even though I wasn't accepted in Tehran, he came home from work that evening with a big box of sweets in his hand. Grinning from ear to ear, he kissed me and said, “You've made me very proud.”

We waited impatiently for the daily paper. One week passed since the promised date of the Azad University announcement, and every day the newspapers published a vague postponement. My
father asked me about it every night. His restless excitement was contagious. He'd ask, “No news? When are they going to announce the names? Weren't they supposed to be announced last week?” And I'd reply, “Yes, they were. I don't know why they don't announce them. But soon, maybe tomorrow . . .”

One of my fondest memories of my father is of visiting Maman Pari's house with him, with its red roses, grand old persimmon, and the cobalt tiling above the door that read “Nakha'i.” The Nakha'i are one of the most well-known families in Tehran. My great-grandfather had the honorable title Entekhab-e Lashghar and held a high-ranking post at the end of the Qajar Era, at the time of Muzaferuddin Shah Qajar. One century ago, an Armenian youth fell in love with Entekhab-e Lashghar's beautiful daughter Zarin Taj and asked her father for her hand. But the match violated religious laws, social conventions, and moral principals, and his answer was no. The Armenian youth hired thugs and sent them under the cover of night to surround Entekhab-e Lashgar's house. They say that Zarin Taj was so in love that she opened the outer door for her father's killers. On that night, my five-year-old grandfather was asleep in his father's bed. Again and again, this is how he would tell the story of his father's death: “When I opened my eyes, there were dozens of masked men holding daggers and spears standing over us. They gestured for me to put my head under the covers. When I stuck my head out a few minutes later, I saw that the walls were splattered with blood. My father's body lay beside me just as before, but it had been punctured dozens of times over by spears.”

My grandfather's childhood was plagued with nightmares of his
father's tragic death and with harsh treatment at the hands of his uncles and half-brothers, with whom he waged legal battles for years over his inheritance. Disgusted with his family, he decided that he was no longer a Nakha'i, and he fashioned a family name as close as possible to his father's title of honor, Entekhab-e Lashghar. My grandmother says they sent Zarin Taj to the village of Nurabad, where she was so grief stricken by her father's death that she suffered a nervous breakdown and died there.

Every fall, the family hired someone to climb the tree and pick the persimmons. Each of my grandmother's children would get about a hundred persimmons, sometimes more, for their families, evenly divided on a large copper tray, and my grandmother would ask the gardener to leave a few persimmons up in the tree for the crows and other birds. In the beautiful Tehran autumn, the red persimmons would shine like lanterns from the ashy leafless tree. Then one year the house and the persimmon tree and the apple tree and my swimming pool and the cellar—all of it—was sold. All that is left of the cellar now are my memories of it, the cellar that, in the heat of the summer, was cool and comfortable, and where my father loved to take his midday naps. I'd follow him down there. He would take two freshly picked apples in one hand and a bottle of rose water, a grater, and some sugar in the other. He'd grate the apples and put the rose water and sugar on them, and after we'd drank the mixture, my father would go to sleep.