Song of a Captive Bird Page 14
From now on, as often as I could manage it—about once every month or so—I took the train from Ahwaz to Tehran. A third-class ticket cost close to nothing, which was lucky since I had little money to spare. I never asked permission to go or announced my plans to anyone before leaving. I simply packed a small bag and got on a train.
“She goes to visit her family,” I once overheard Parviz tell his mother.
“It makes no difference! She shouldn’t go alone,” she told him. “I knew she’d bring us nothing but shame. You need to control your wife, Parviz. They’re talking about her all over town.”
“She only goes to see her family,” he answered weakly, then added, “Her mother isn’t well, you see.”
And for all Parviz knew, that was true. I spent more and more time holed up in the house with Kami, and eventually it must have seemed I was truly in the grip of a terrible homesickness, because I no longer went into the streets of Ahwaz by myself or took Kami out for long walks. I was far from free, but soon I discovered that as long as I found my way to my mother’s house and passed the night under her roof, I could travel to Tehran once and sometimes twice a month.
Now when I set out from Ahwaz by train, it was still always in secret but anticipation completely displaced my nervousness. I’d never outrun my guilt at leaving Kami, but as soon as I reached Tehran my doubts and indecision receded. I always headed straight for the tangle of buildings where Nasser kept an apartment, my heels clapping against the pavement, pausing every so often to switch my small valise from one hand to the other. I was learning to walk the Tehran streets as though I had always belonged to them, and as I discovered the pleasure of looking out upon the world, I realized the prohibitions of my girlhood had been meant not only to hide us girls from others but also to hide the greater world from us.
Once on my way to meet Nasser in the city, I caught a glimpse of myself in a storefront window. I’d recently bought a pair of black cat-eye sunglasses, and now I watched myself pushing them up onto my head, opening my pocketbook, and painting my lips. The girl I’d been was gone. Growing up I’d been forbidden from stepping foot outside my father’s house or showing myself to men, but now I had as little shame as the European and American women I glimpsed from time to time in the streets. I drew my sunglasses back onto my face and made my way to a little café squeezed between a bakery and a bookshop. It was Nasser’s favorite meeting place. Sitting in the back room of the café, waiting for him to appear, I lit a cigarette, brought it to my mouth, and slowly let out a stream of smoke. I smiled to think of myself doing what I’d been forbidden to, and when I drew stares from others, from men as well as women, I met them evenly.
We’d spend an hour together in his apartment, sometimes two—not much time, but enough to forget what I’d left and what I could lose by continuing to see him. I remember the steadiness of his gaze, how easily he could make me yield to him. He always left without offering any apology or explanation except to tell me we shouldn’t be seen leaving the apartment together. He’d rake his fingers through his hair, tuck his shirt into his trousers, and remind me to lock the door when I left. I didn’t say when I would be back, but we both knew I would.
Often, I wandered through those two rooms hoping I might find some trace of him to bring back with me. The walls were empty of photographs, the shelves free of mementos. I riffled guiltily through his drawers and closets, searching for some old picture of him or maybe a note written in his hand. But there was nothing intimate or personal in that apartment, nothing for me to find and take. He never asked me to spend the night and I never brought it up. Still, I would have stayed there until he returned, waiting hours or even days, and it was only my love for Kami that led me from Tehran and back toward the dusty, barren streets of Ahwaz.
* * *
—
From time to time I couldn’t help but see the trouble waiting for me. I remember one day when I climbed the stairs to Nasser’s apartment, I met a woman carrying a large bunch of white tuberoses toward her apartment. “How pretty!” I said to her, and reached my hand toward the bouquet. I only meant to compliment her on their loveliness, but she flinched and pulled away. The woman’s eyes met mine, and she glanced across the landing to Nasser’s apartment and then back at me. I stiffened and let my hand fall to my side. In that moment I not only understood the woman’s estimation of my character but also began to realize that other women had been to visit Nasser before me and that there would be others when I no longer made my way here.
Meanwhile, Kami was now a toddler. His hair had grown in thick and he had my black eyes and his father’s high forehead. He’d been a quiet baby, but he now screamed and cried if I so much as made a move toward the door. I was always exhausted in those days but also distracted and restless. One day were sitting outside in the garden together. I was wearing a red skirt, which was long and flared, and I’d spread it out so that it made a circle on the ground. Kami sat across from me, rolling a ball toward me. I’d made up a game of sometimes grabbing the ball and hiding it behind my back. Each time he’d toddle toward me and snatch at the toy, I’d lift it out of reach, then suddenly let him grab it with his small, chubby fists.
We’d been playing that game for a while when I noticed a small stain at the hem of my dress. Something strange came over me then. The stain seemed to swell before my eyes and, even more inexplicable, I felt sure that it would somehow contaminate Kami. I dropped the ball and began frantically wiping at the stain with my sleeve. Kami started to cry, which thankfully freed me from my crazed attempt to scrub the stain on my skirt. I lifted him up and held him to my chest. He settled down almost at once, but from that moment I held the terrible knowledge that I didn’t have full possession of myself.
Months passed. I knew it was a mistake to continue meeting Nasser. Worse, I missed Kami so much when I went to Tehran. With each trip it seemed he was adjusting himself to my absences. Now, if he fell and cried when toddling around the house on his unsteady legs, he sought comfort from Khanoom Shapour, not me. She’d heft him onto her hip and disappear into another part of the house. Maybe soon he’d forget me altogether? It was an awful thought, but it didn’t stop me from going. Not then.
I told myself I’d go to Tehran just one more time, and maybe that’s what I really believed—that I could see Nasser once more and then stop altogether. I could never explain the power he had over me, my lack of concern for consequences, except that my body had lost all interest in reason. Despite the shame I’d already brought my family, I had little real experience of men. Before, when I was alone with Parviz, I’d wanted so much to please him, which is, of course, a longing of a kind, and one sufficient to pitch a young woman into restlessness and unreason, but it was pure desire that shot through me now, desire that made me both brave and weak.
But there was something else that bound me to Nasser. Even if I knew we had no chance for a life together, being with him gave me the notion I might yet break into Tehran’s literary scene. He was my one connection to that world, and that wasn’t a connection I could easily give up.
* * *
—
The affair with Nasser was the only experience in my life I’d ever truly regret, but despite all it would cost me, it also gave me much for which I later felt grateful.
Nasser did what he wanted and never apologized for it. I’d had that quality myself once, but it seemed a long time since I’d let myself be guided by my own needs and desires. Nasser gave me this quality back—had, in fact, given it to me the day he drove me up into the foothills outside Tehran: the sure, quiet confidence of simply taking what I wanted from life.
And I can say this without hesitation: Without him I wouldn’t have become the talk of Tehran. For all Nasser refused me in our love affair, he encouraged me not only to write but also to publish exactly those most candid, revealing poems I might have kept for myself.
It happened only gradually. Every time I came to Tehran, I brought along some new poems. Each one con
fessed something true about my life, offered some revelation about marriage or motherhood. One day it had occurred to me I might submit a few poems to a small literary journal by mail. “The Rebellion” and “The Wedding Band” were accepted, which gave me the courage to send others out. If my poems didn’t exactly attract the attention of the literati, I knew no better pleasure than undoing the brass clasp of my trousseau to add a new publication to the small collection I kept there.
Nasser’s response to these first publications had been warm but short of enthusiastic. “Push yourself further,” he told me. “Write about yourself as you are here with me, in this room, in these hours.”
One afternoon we sat at the table in his apartment with a cup of coffee before each of us, and he read through a sheaf of new poems I’d brought him. I remember sitting across from him, watching him as he read. More and more, I was not merely writing about love in the abstract but writing to Nasser, seeking him out through my words and hoping to insinuate myself in his mind. Whatever I couldn’t tell him in person, I put into verse.
I was nervous to have him read them, intensely so. I felt an urge to leave the room, but I forced myself to sit still and wait for him to finish. To distract myself I fiddled with the pearls wrapped round my wrist, worrying the beads. I was so anxious that when I finally remembered my tea and brought my cup to my lips, it had already grown cold. When I put it down with a clatter, he didn’t look up but continued to read in silence. He read quietly, slowly, taking his time with each poem, reading some of them two or three times before moving on to the next one, sometimes mouthing the words quietly or tracing the cadence with his finger on the page.
“That’s the one,” he finally said, placing it before me on the table. It was a poem I’d titled “Sin,” which closed with the lines:
I’ve sinned a sin of pleasure
beside a body trembling and spent.
I don’t know what I did, Oh God,
in that quiet empty darkness.
There was no dedication, and I hadn’t included his name in any of the lines, but every last detail would have been recognizable to Nasser. It was his poem—his and mine.
“You’re sure?” I asked. I’d worked on the poem for many hours, fretting every word, every pause, revising the lines until they finally satisfied me, but even as I wrote it I knew such a declaration of passion by a woman was not permissible. It could never be published.
But Nasser would not give up. “Don’t you want to be part of something new? Something bigger?”
“Of course, but—”
He frowned. “This is your best poem by far and also the most daring. You must publish it, Forugh.”
I was silent, considering his words.
“We’ll run it in next month’s issue,” he continued. “There’s time, though just barely. Everything’s already been sent to the typesetter, but I think I can rearrange things to make room.” He stood up and was pacing the room with “Sin” still in his hand. “But you really should take a pen name,” he said. “Especially with a poem like this.”
A pen name? How, I reasoned, could I tell the truth about myself if I couldn’t even call myself by my name? I knew that when women published poetry, they nearly always did so under pen names. It was as if they thought that by taking a pseudonym they could simultaneously protect and liberate themselves. Most male poets took pseudonyms as well. But writing under a false name would only make me feel like a coward.
“No,” I said. “I want to publish under my own name.” I hadn’t planned it exactly, and despite Nasser’s prediction I had little sense I’d just chosen the name and also the poem that would soon carry me into a new life.
14.
Mine was a country where they said a woman’s nature is riddled with sin, where they claimed that women’s voices had the power to drive men to lust and distract them from matters of both heaven and earth. Yet, when I leafed through magazines and opened volumes of poetry, I found that men had always described their love and their lovers with utter frankness and freedom. For thousands of years men had compared their beloveds to whatever they pleased, voiced all manner of amorous petitions and pleas, and described all the states to which love delivered them. And people read this poetry with complete equanimity. No one screamed out in protest. No one cried, “Oh God, the foundations of morality have been shaken! Modesty and purity are about to collapse! This writer is dragging down the morals of our youth! We’re doomed to perdition!”
Because I was a woman, they wanted to silence the screams on my lips and stifle the breath in my lungs. But I couldn’t stay quiet. I couldn’t pretend to be modest or pure or good. No. I was a woman and I couldn’t speak with the voice of a man, because it was not my voice—not true and not my own. But there was more to it than that. By writing in a woman’s voice I wanted to say that a woman, too, is a human being. To say that we, too, have the right to breathe, to cry out, and to sing.
* * *
“Sin” arrived by post one afternoon.
For several days I’d contrived to time my visits to the marketplace in Ahwaz to coincide with the postman’s arrival. As soon as I lifted the parcel and felt its pleasing heaviness, I knew what it was. I debated taking the magazine into the house, where I could read it in my bedroom, then thought better of it and headed outside. I hid the package under my shirt and hurried to the garden, behind the chicken coop. Sitting down with my back against the wooden slats of the building, I tore the parcel open and freed the journal from the wrapping. Knees drawn up, I opened the magazine and began to read. I must have been smiling as I thumbed through the pages. My eyes searched hungrily for my own name, and there it was—“ ‘Sin,’ a poem by Forugh Farrokhzad.” Then, directly above my poem, I found this editor’s note:
In this issue of The Intellectual we introduce a daring new poetess, Forugh Farrokhzad, a young wife and mother. In “Sin” the poetess repudiates our country’s traditional strictures and confesses the explicit yearnings of her sex. With this poem, Forugh promises to be the voice of the new Iranian woman, a spokeswoman for a new, uncensored brand of femininity.
My hands were shaking. I read the words a second time and then a third. “The explicit yearnings of her sex”? “Sin” was a sensual poem—there was no denying that—but it was neither “explicit” nor was it a confession on behalf of womankind. And what was the point of announcing my status as a wife and mother? To punish and shame me for what I’d written? If this wasn’t enough, what I saw next stopped me cold. On the page opposite my poem, there was a silhouette of a woman’s naked body. I turned the page and there, on the next page, beside another one of my poems, was an interview with Brigitte Bardot, along with a photograph of the actress in a bikini. She stood with her head thrown back and her glossed lips open.
* * *
—
Three days later, back in Tehran, I confronted Nasser. “Why did you do this?” I said, holding up the magazine to him and blinking back angry tears.
He looked at me with disbelief. “We only emphasized your daring—nothing more. No woman has ever written a poem like this, Forugh. Not even close! It was bound to attract attention. Surely you realized that when you agreed to have it published.”
I threw my hands in the air. “If I only wanted to attract people’s attention, I could have done it with much less effort!”
“The point is not that you have people’s attention,” he said. “You do, and you would have had it no matter what. The editor’s note and illustrations only announce your relevance as a modern woman writer. The only question is, what will you do with this attention now that it’s yours?”
* * *
—
All the next week I swung from regret at having published “Sin” to a grudging acknowledgment of Nasser’s justification for presenting my work in the manner he did. Eventually I reasoned that “Sin” was a testament to my efforts as a poet and also to trying for a life on my own terms. Even if I only just barely knew who I was and what I wa
nted, that poem was part of my refusal to be silent and small, and I wouldn’t regret having written it.
That, in any case, is what I told myself as I prepared to attend a celebration for the new issue the following week. The Intellectual was a thriving magazine, and I knew that much of Nasser’s work as its editor in chief was to cultivate relationships with other editors, writers, and arts patrons. Still, I’d been surprised by his suggestion that we attend the event together. We’d been out together in public on just a few occasions, and even then we’d only frequented places where it was unlikely he’d meet anyone he knew. The coffeehouse in Karaj, the little café by the bookshop—these places had been chosen by him for discretion as much as for their charm. This party, on the other hand, would be hosted in a large private house, and the guests would all know him well.
“You need to get out and mix with people,” he told me when I voiced my hesitation. “You need to be seen out in society if you hope to have a career as a poet.”
I guessed the invitation was consolation for having published “Sin” in the way he had, but even so I wasn’t prepared for the ease with which he slipped his arm around my waist and led me into the gathering.
“Won’t they wonder if we’re together?” I whispered as we made our way toward the drawing room.
He laughed and drew me even closer. “Do you think we’re the only ones here with secrets?”
At first, nervous as I was, I didn’t really see anyone at all, but as we walked through darkened rooms filled with cigarette smoke and conversation, my worry quickly gave way to fascination. With their black cocktail dresses and beehives, the women resembled models from the latest European magazines. We passed a couple kissing passionately in a hallway, another caught in a heated argument by the bar. And then there was the music streaming from a record player outside. Jazz. I heard it for the first time that night and loved it at once. This, I thought, was music to loosen your limbs and quicken your heart.