Song of a Captive Bird Page 10

  * * *

  —

  All day my mother-in-law watched me. She studied my complexion, my appetite, my walk. Most of all she appraised my religiosity. Morning after morning she greeted me by asking, “Did you go to the hammam, Forugh?” By this she meant to find out if I’d performed my ablutions. It was, you see, a sin to stand uncleansed before God in prayer, and among the devout an early-morning visit to the baths was also a sure sign of intercourse. Young brides like me were expected to appear at the bathhouse before dawn every day, though it was understood that their visits would lessen with the waning of their husbands’ desires and the exigencies of childbearing and motherhood. In Tehran, where more and more homes were now outfitted with private baths, I might have been spared these exchanges, but here in Ahwaz I relied totally on the bathhouse and was thus the object of Khanoom Shapour’s constant scrutiny.

  It’s possible that I could have loved her; I certainly didn’t hate her when I first came to live with her in Ahwaz. In those first weeks of marriage, I was desperate for company. I’d grown up in a large family, and I especially missed Puran and Sanam. Here in Ahwaz I had no friends and knew no one apart from Parviz’s family. So I think I could have loved my mother-in-law had she made the slightest overture of kindness toward me, but she didn’t, not once.

  I did feel close, in a way, to Parviz’s father, Agha Shapour. He was a short man and wore thick glasses. A few years earlier he’d collapsed in the street from a heart attack. Khanoom Shapour treated him like a child and otherwise ignored him completely. His sole occupation was to survey the acre of land that stretched from the house to the neighbor’s walls. Some mornings I walked out to the garden and sat down by the small pool and watched as he strolled among his fruit trees, thumbing his amber prayer beads and tilting his face occasionally to the sky. His eyes were covered with the milky white film of cataracts and he limped a little as he walked, but though he was half blind and crippled, he’d managed to coax figs, pomegranates, and sweet lemons from the hard silt of the land.

  My escape was always short-lived. “Forugh!” Khanoom Shapour called out. She emerged from the house with her hands on her hips, tucked one of the hens under her arm for the day’s stew, and then gestured me back inside with a toss of her head.

  My mother-in-law prayed five times a day, every day, and each time she retreated to her room to perform her namaz she threw a look over her shoulder to see if I would follow. I never did. My own mother observed her prayers and had taught us to perform the namaz when we were children, but my sisters and I had never been expected to perform our prayers daily, much less five times a day. The Colonel had forbidden my sisters and me to wear veils; following the shah’s mandate, he considered such displays of piety backward.

  Though they weren’t commonplace in Tehran, such attitudes were considered outright scandalous here. The Shapours’ house was in Ahwaz’s oldest neighborhood. Here, the call to prayer rang out five times a day, and custom was sacrosanct. I found the muezzin’s voice beautiful and soothing, but I didn’t find God in these rituals and gestures. It was always in the garden or in the countryside where my heart opened and I felt myself in the presence of the divine. I couldn’t pretend I felt differently, and so when my mother-in-law retreated to her room for her namaz, I never followed her.

  “Didn’t your mother teach you how to cook?” Khanoom Shapour asked me the day I prepared my first pot of rice.

  “No,” I said. It was an honest if curt answer. I’d been brought up with servants and with the expectation that I’d someday have servants of my own. True, I’d spent countless hours in the kitchen at Sanam’s side, but I’d been so busy listening to her stories and songs that I’d paid little attention to her work. Which spice did she dust over her rice pudding? Cardamom, or was it cinnamon? Did she layer her rice for this or that dish with spinach or dill? I had no clue.

  “Well, then,” she said, “it’s time for you to learn.” She dumped my rice into a slop jar for the chickens. “A proper rice needs to soak in salted water for at least six hours before cooking,” she instructed as she picked out small pebbles from the grains. “This is the only way the grains lengthen,” she continued. “The rice should be boiled once briefly, then drained and rinsed with cold water before you put it back onto the stove. When it’s done cooking, the rice should fall from a spoon in individual grains, each one infused with the scent of saffron and oil, and the crust should be crisp, golden, and thick.”

  I thought that if I pleased his mother by improving my cooking, things might get better between my husband and me. And so I bit my tongue. I washed and soaked the rice. I picked the pebbles from the grains. I boiled the water, drained the rice, and stirred saffron and oil at the bottom of the pot. But it was no use. The grains were never long enough, my crisped rice too thin or too soggy or horribly burnt. Worse, in the wake of each attempt at cooking, I left piles of charred pots in the sink. My mother-in-law cast a critical eye over the proceedings. Her arms crossed, her lips set in a thin line of disapproval, she scolded, “You’re hopeless, Forugh!”

  One night I managed to cook a perfect pot of rice, but the triumph brought me more misery than all my failures. Khanoom Shapour usually served the evening meal, but this time I reached for the plates, heaping thick slices of crisped rice for Agha Shapour, Parviz, my mother-in-law, and, finally, for myself. I took a seat at the table and lifted my spoon to my mouth, savoring the tender, buttery grains. I think I expected surprise and even praise for my efforts, but when I looked up I saw that my mother-in-law hadn’t eaten a spoonful. I couldn’t imagine what fault she’d found with the dish, and then, suddenly, I understood: I hadn’t performed my morning ablutions or prayed before setting the food before her. It made no difference how well I cooked this pot of rice—or any other in the weeks to come. My touch, I realized, was najes.

  This was a word my mother often used when I was a girl. It meant “unclean” and also “unholy.” I’d never forget the first time I heard it. I was six years old and a mangy dog had come around the house, limping and begging for food. My mother kicked it so hard that it had hobbled out of the alleyway. “Najes!” she called out after the dog. Tears filled my eyes. I begged her to let me help it, but she forbade me from touching the dog, and in this way I was made to understand my own touch could become najes and I myself impure.

  As the memory of that day brightened, then faded from my mind, I understood that my mother-in-law wouldn’t accept food from my hands because they were najes. I was furious, but what upset me most was Parviz’s refusal to eat the food I’d prepared, a refusal that owed less to religious piety than to his unwavering deference to his mother. Except on those rare occasions when she was away from the house and we dined alone, Parviz ate only his mother’s dishes. By the blind logic of pride I continued to cook, but it was only old, sweet-tempered Agha Shapour who ate the food I prepared—Agha Shapour and I myself, though very often I was so angry I felt no hunger and ate nothing at all.

  * * *

  —

  There was only one solution.

  “When can we move to our own house?” I asked Parviz one day in the second month of our marriage.

  We were in our bedroom. The smallest and least furnished room of the house, it contained a wooden daybed, a small table, two chairs, a carpet, a copper basin, and the leather trunk I’d brought with me from Tehran. The first time I saw it, my heart constricted. This was my home now, I thought, this small airless room, and the weeks that had passed had only intensified my feeling of entrapment.

  “That isn’t the way things are done here, Forugh. You know that.”

  “But I can’t stand it, Parviz! I want to live in my own house.”

  “Well,” he said slowly, “I’d have to save up some money first.”

  “How long until we have enough?”

  “A year,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Maybe two.”

  “Two years! But we only need a small apartment! Just two rooms would do—even one room,
just so long as it’s our own. And I could work, too, Parviz. I could help us save up money for a house.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “What kind of work can you do?”

  I bit my lip and then after a minute I said, “I can sew. I’ve always been good at that. Maybe I could open a small shop.” I paused, warming to the idea. “I could sew party dresses and skirts, that sort of thing.”

  “You want to open a fancy shop in Ahwaz? The women here all sew their own clothes or hire seamstresses.”

  “But that’s just it! They have to travel all the way to Tehran to buy modern clothes. If I opened a shop I’d have no competition. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

  His only answer was silence and a slow, sad shake of the head.

  * * *

  —

  I spent hours sitting at the small table in my bedroom, writing long letters to Puran. Neither she nor my mother had the means to visit me in Ahwaz. She would be married soon, and unless Parviz drove me to Tehran, my sister would celebrate her wedding without me. In my letters home, I was careful not to give away my feelings about my new life, which had less to do with shame than with pride. Puran sent me letters in return, as well as little parcels of candies and small gifts—an embroidered shawl, some silk stockings, a pair of silver barrettes. “Are you happy?” she asked, and “How are you and Parviz getting along?” But that wasn’t the worst of it. “When are you coming to Tehran?” my sister asked at the end of each letter. Six words, impossible to answer except with the pathetic line: “I’ll come visit you when Parviz can bring me there.”

  As the days wore on, I didn’t especially want to visit my family, since I knew I’d have to endure my mother’s sharp looks and my sister’s curiosity. Still, I felt desperate to leave Ahwaz, and Tehran was the only place I could imagine traveling to.

  “Can we go next week?” I’d ask Parviz.

  “I’ve only just started this job. I can’t ask for a vacation already, can’t you understand? We have to be practical.”

  “Well, can we go for my sister’s wedding? For just two days?”

  “I’m very sorry, Forugh, but we can’t. Maybe we can go for the New Year. By then I should be more established, but right now it could cost me my position. I’d come off looking lazy.”

  In those days, Ahwaz was a full day’s travel from the capital. We had no car and, anyway, I didn’t know how to drive. For a while I let the subject drop, but then I remembered that Parviz had always traveled to Tehran by train. When I discovered that trains ran daily from Ahwaz to Tehran, I thought I’d found a solution to at least this one predicament.

  “I’ll go by myself, then,” I said.

  “And what will people think about you going all the way to Tehran without me?”

  “What do I care what they think!”

  He shook his head. “Why can’t you be patient, Forugh? When I save up some money, we’ll go to Tehran together. I promise we will.”

  * * *

  It was in Ahwaz that I was first called kharab. Broken, bad. Behind their windows and veils, along the streets and alleyways, on the banks and bridges of the Karun River, the wives, mothers, and daughters of Ahwaz followed me with their eyes. I could easily imagine what they said of me: My skirts were too tight and too short, my heels were too high, my pleasantries and compliments merely cursory. “Tehran,” muttered those inclined to trace every vice among them back to the capital—and there were many people like that in those years, in that town where I was once a bride. “She’s been trouble since she got here,” they said. “She doesn’t do her namaz or lift a finger in the house.” “Crows,” I called them (but only to myself), these women with their ta’arof, their phony manners, their “yes, khanoom,” their “may I die for you,” their thousand muted but unmistakable cruelties.

  In Ahwaz I was known only as “the Shapours’ bride.” I was a bad wife. Shameless and wayward. In the bazaar, at the public baths, and in the alleys where they passed one another, the women dropped their voices and shared stories about how I was always running off to do God-knew-what with God-knew-whom. In answer to their stares and their whispers, I hemmed my skirts even shorter. When I walked in the streets, I exaggerated the sway of my hips. To keep from going crazy, I drew out my errands. I went alone, with no chaperone. One day I’d walk to the marketplace to buy a bolt of cloth; the next day I’d set out for a sack of lentils. And so on.

  For the first time in my life, I dressed to please only myself. I owned a single pair of high heels—round-toed with straps at the ankle. I’d found them in the marketplace in the first weeks of my marriage and bought them because they matched the idea I had of myself as a fully grown-up woman. I imagined myself wearing them to parties with a pair of sheer stockings—a delicious thought—but in Ahwaz there were no parties apart from visits to Parviz’s relatives, all those aunts, cousins, and elders who clucked their tongues and pressed their lips in tight lines at the mere sight of me. So one day I just decided to wear my round-toed heels to walk to the marketplace. They clattered noisily as I made my way down the streets, drawing all eyes to me, but I pretended I saw nothing, and I refused to feel a trace of shame.

  Most weeks, there wasn’t much left over from the housekeeping money Parviz gave me, but my sewing was more than passable, and I could always take an old, simple dress and make it pretty with a hem or a tuck or a pleat. It was a good thing I was clever in these ways, because I had few clothes and no jewelry at all apart from my thin gold wedding band and the rope of tiny pearls my mother had placed around my neck on my wedding day. I now wore those pearls long on one day, double looped on another, or knotted at the hollow of my throat. Once I wore them in my hair like a headband, and another time I wrapped them around my wrist three times like a bracelet.

  At first I could trick myself into moments of happiness, but more and more I found I could barely summon the enthusiasm to get dressed and go out. I now lived hundreds of miles from my childhood home, but even across this distance I heard the echo of my mother’s voice in my head, as clear as if she were in the room speaking to me. “Ungrateful,” she called me, and also “selfish” and “shameless.” Often, I was genuinely sickened by my ingratitude. I’d consider the women around me and wonder what it was about me that made it impossible to share their devotion to the simple comforts of family life. Why couldn’t I be more like them? What was wrong with me? These thoughts would linger a day, sometimes longer, and I would try to make myself content with my marriage and the rituals of the house, but these intervals of self-recrimination were invariably followed by a succession of black days.

  I remember Ahwaz as it was on those Fridays of the Sabbath, choked and desperate. The house was always quiet and empty, the doors locked and the windows shuttered. Alone in my room, the days went by like sleep—a long, deep sleep punctuated by a list of senseless dictates I issued to myself.

  Find your fortune in swirls of cigarette smoke

  or the thick black grains

  at the bottom of your coffee cup

  or the carpet’s faded flowers….

  Hide your beauty like an old black-and-white

  photograph in the bottom of a trunk….

  Place images of the condemned, the conquered,

  and the crucified

  in the empty frame of your days….

  Like a doll with two glass eyes,

  sleep for a thousand years

  in a felt box lined with tinsel and lace.

  —from “The Windup Doll”

  My desperation led me back to poetry.

  When we married and moved to Ahwaz, Parviz brought the books he’d collected during his bachelor years in Tehran, as well as copies of the journals that had published his essays and satiric sketches. He’d dreamed of a literary career, and before our marriage he’d enjoyed some success as a writer, but all that had been cast off now. He’d taken a job in a government ministry in town, and he’d stopped writing altogether. If he regretted any of this, he never confessed his disapp
ointment. So far as I could tell, he’d given up writing altogether, and he also read less and less, not even the books by Nima and Ahmad Shamlou that he’d once shared with such enthusiasm.

  Those books saved me. I dragged the old wooden daybed in our bedroom over to the window that looked out onto the orchard. Mornings I pulled on a dressing gown, eased into that bed, and read my way through Parviz’s books and literary journals. I still read very little contemporary poetry, and much of it left no impression on me at all, but from time to time I came across a poem that moved me deeply and I felt a faint but familiar prick of ambition.

  Then one day I pulled a half-empty notebook from the leather trunk that held my trousseau. I placed it on the table and parted the pages. It had been a long time—many weeks—since I’d stolen away to write a poem. I realized that for the first time in my life I could write whatever I pleased. On a whim I slid a cartridge of green ink into my fountain pen. I started scribbling so fast that at first it didn’t seem like writing at all, just chasing my thoughts across the page, cramming words up and down the margins. Then I went over what I’d written and revised it. I read the verses aloud, only to cross out so much that only a few words remained. I did this many times. When I finally looked up from my work, the sky outside my window had turned dark. It was already night and I hadn’t realized how much time had passed.