Song of a Captive Bird Read online

  I slipped my hand free from Nasser’s grip and he drifted in another direction. I was halfway to the terrace when I noticed a black-haired woman in a bright-blue dress. Cinched tight at her waist, it flared out in a circle and brushed the floor. Her dark hair was pulled off her face with a scarf in the same shade of blue as her dress. She had porcelain skin and large black almond-shaped eyes, which she’d accentuated with kohl. She was encircled by several men, all of whom seemed engrossed in her conversation.

  I was so busy studying the woman in the blue dress that I didn’t notice Nasser until he stood behind the podium at one end of the drawing room. “Ladies and gentlemen!” he shouted over the din. After a few words of welcome, he introduced some of the honored guests: a longtime publisher of one of the city’s major newspapers, a celebrated poet who’d recently returned from a visiting professorship abroad, and a celebrated novelist who looked to be a young man of no more than twenty. One by one he gestured to them and they tipped their heads in acknowledgment. Then he lifted his arm in my direction. “It’s now my honor to introduce a writer whose poetry embodies the bold voice of the new Iranian woman.” Leaving his place at the head of the room, he walked toward me. “Miss Forugh Farrokzhad,” he announced, taking my hand. “Would you do us the honor of sharing your poem ‘Sin’ with us tonight?”

  I stayed fixed in place, so stunned I couldn’t move. Nasser hadn’t so much as hinted that he wanted me to recite a poem that night, much less this one. He hadn’t asked beforehand because he knew I would likely refuse, but if he asked in front of others I’d have no choice but to recite the poem for them. I felt my face redden, but how could I demur without looking cowardly? I walked toward the front of the room and took my place before the crowd. When I saw all the faces that were turned my way, I almost faltered. A camera popped and flashed. There were coughs and then silence, whispers and what I imagined was laughter, but then I noticed that the woman in the blue dress was watching me. Her look of compassion and encouragement across that room steadied and emboldened me.

  I took a deep breath and began to recite the poem. My voice sounded flat and hollow even to my own ears, but I fought to keep my declamation clear and even until the last line. When I finished, many eyes had fallen to the floor. No one clapped or said a word. But then I saw that the woman in the blue dress had tipped her head and was studying me with interest. Eventually there were murmurs from the back of the room, followed by a faint, scattered applause.

  Afterward, there were other recitations and readings, but I couldn’t concentrate on them. All the anger I’d felt when I’d first seen “Sin” published in such a sensational way surged through me again now. I’d been such an idiot to let myself be used in this manner. I made my way to the back of the drawing room, desperate to be away from Nasser, and it was then that I came across her again, the woman I’d been studying earlier, the one in the blue dress. She was sitting on a banquette, and when she saw me, her face broke into a smile of unexpected sweetness.

  “I enjoyed your poem,” she said, making space for me to sit beside her. “You write very well, you know. And you’re brave.”

  “You’re very kind,” I said, as I sat down next to her.

  “But it’s not kindness,” she answered. “Your work is…” Here she paused, considering her choice of words. “Simple.”

  “Simple?” I asked, and felt my face color again. “Do you mean stupid?”

  She laughed. “Not at all,” she said. “I meant unaffected. Natural.”

  I nodded. “In that case I’ll call you kind again.”

  She smiled again and tilted her head. “So may I kindly call you Forugh?”

  “Of course.”

  “In that case you’ll call me Leila,” she said. She slid slightly closer to me. “How old are you, Forugh?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “And from your poem I gather you’re married?” When I bristled, she said, “It bothers you that I’ve asked. I’ve made you uncomfortable with my forwardness.”

  “Not at all, it’s only that I’m asked that whenever I’m asked about my writing,” I said, remembering my encounter with the editor at Payam magazine.

  “People treat you differently when they hear you’re married. As if you don’t have the right to do what you do. To write what you write.”

  Her directness startled me. “Yes,” I answered, “that’s just how it is.”

  She placed a hand on my shoulder and dropped her voice. “Your writing interests me, Forugh, and I think we have a lot to talk about.” She reached into her pocketbook. “Would you be free to visit me later this week?” she said as she handed me a calling card. “At, say, three o’clock on Friday afternoon?”

  I’d have to stay at my mother’s house longer than I’d planned, but already I knew I had to accept. That I wanted to accept. Flustered, I sputtered a quick yes.

  At that moment, Nasser approached with two wineglasses. Leila’s eyes flicked up in recognition and she returned his greeting with a nod. She rose, plucked a wineglass from his hand, and then she was gone, a flash of bright blue and black curls parting the crowd and then disappearing into another part of the house.

  “Looks like you’ve made something of an impression on Leila Farmayan,” Nasser said after we’d both watched her make her way across the room.

  “Actually, she asked me to visit her.”

  His eyes quickened with interest. “You’re not serious?”

  “What do you mean? Why shouldn’t she ask me?”

  “Do you have any notion who that woman is?”

  I’d been so distracted by our exchange that it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder. “A writer?” I guessed.

  “A writer?” he said, and laughed. “No, she’s not a writer, though I do remember she produced some translations years ago. French poetry, I think it was. Anyway, she’s something much better than a writer, Forugh. Leila Farmayan is a Qajar heiress and also one of the city’s most influential arts patrons.”

  * * *

  Walled with stones and hedged with honeysuckle and jasmine, the garden estate stood under a canopy of plane trees. The air here was cool and redolent. I had hired a taxi to carry me up to the northern suburb of the city, and as soon as I stepped into the lane, I was glad that I hadn’t taken a chance and walked instead. I would have arrived late, if I’d managed to find my way here at all.

  I lingered for a moment outside the gate, then pushed it open and walked toward the house. The door was the old-fashioned type: hand-carved and painted a pale turquoise, with a gleaming brass knocker set up high. For a full minute I stood and looked at it. I’d never called on a woman before, which made me strangely shy. I straightened the collar of my dress, smoothed my skirt, and knocked. After some minutes a figure appeared in the doorway. “Miss Farrokhzad?” the woman asked, and when I said yes, she smiled and opened the door wide to let me pass. She led me through a passageway lined with ornate tiles and decorated with geraniums spilling out of antique pots, and from there we proceeded into the house. Fine paintings lined the walls. The silk carpets shone. We passed through a spacious parlor where an entire wall had been overtaken by leather-bound books. I peered at the covers. There were many titles in French and what I guessed was Russian.

  Until I met Leila, I’d never had any contact with a member of a Qajar family, the dynasty that preceded the current one. My knowledge of the clan didn’t extend much beyond what I’d overheard at my father’s gatherings, and that could be summed up as this: Even after Reza Shah had stripped them of their titles and much of their lands, they were still rich beyond imagining. What I saw now confirmed that and more.

  Eventually we came to an exquisite courtyard that looked as cozy and inviting as a scene from a gilt-edged Persian miniature. Carpets covered the floor, and, in the shade of a jacaranda tree whose branches dripped with bell-shaped purple blossoms, there was a round silver table laden with fruits and bowls of wild mulberries and green almonds.

  “You found me!” Leil
a called out as she saw me approach. She was sitting with her legs crossed on a takhteh, a wooden daybed piled with cushions, but as I came close she stood up, took my hands in hers, and smiled with genuine warmth. She was a little younger, I saw, than I had taken her to be the first time we met. That night I had thought her nearly thirty, but now I guessed her to be twenty-five at the most, and if anything I found her more beautiful. There was something so fresh and unusual about the silver clasp with which she gathered her hair atop her head and the rows upon rows of golden bangles at her wrists. She wore a red flounced skirt and a simple white tunic that fell loosely over her shoulders, and she was barefoot.

  I settled onto the takhteh across from her.

  “Well, Forugh,” she said, her eyes sparkling, “you’ve really caused a stir.”

  “But what does it mean? Am I a curiosity or something more than that?”

  She didn’t answer right away. She took a sip of her tea and her lips lingered on the rim of her glass. “I think it’s both,” she said slowly. “For the moment you’re a curiosity, but I do think there is, as you say, ‘something more’ to your writing.”

  “Which is what precisely?”

  She leaned forward in her chair. “You’ve offered something in your poem that many people would not be willing to give: yourself. That’s an exceptional gift.”

  “Not everyone shares your opinion. One of them called it”—here I searched my mind for the precise phrase I’d read in a review just the day before—“ ‘a spurt of narcissism.’ ”

  “These so-called literary critics of ours!” she said with a laugh. “Their stupidity is matched only by the flair with which they flaunt it!” After a pause, she leaned closer to me and said, “And, anyway, they’re wrong. Your poem isn’t only about you. It’s about what we women feel in the act of love. What we forbid ourselves from confessing to anyone—even, sometimes, to ourselves.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder if it’s worth it, confessing one’s real feelings and experiences.”

  She pressed her lips together. “Think about the writers you’ve most admired. What has given you solace in their words? What has given you courage? I can guess that when you have been moved, it’s been by a writer who has risked honesty.”

  As she spoke, I thought of the thrill of discovering contemporary poetry. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’d like to do.”

  “But you’ve done it already, Forugh! There’s an exceptional unity of form and feeling in your writing. It’s a new Iranian poetry.” She peeled the skin from an almond, revealing the creamy white nut at the center, and held it out to me.

  I smiled and slipped it into my mouth.

  “You’re curious about what people think about your work,” she continued. “That’s understandable. But do you think reading these reviews will make you a better poet?”

  “If anything it makes me worse.”

  “Exactly! Besides, there’s no easier way to dismiss a woman’s achievements than to call her dishonorable, and that, Forugh, is no less true in these uptown literary salons than it is in the most pious corners of the bazaar. They want you to regret writing anything in the first place. That’s their objective. To shut you up.”

  “But I don’t regret publishing my poems.”

  “Of course not! We never do regret our own accomplishments, even though we may put them off or avoid them altogether.” She took a sip of tea and continued. “I have to tell you, Forugh, that I’m sick to death of all these self-appointed ‘masters’ mimicking the poetry of seven generations past. I’m ready for something else.”

  “So what,” I asked, “do you think poetry should be now?”

  “That’s a question you’ll have to answer with what you write. How you write.” She paused to peel another almond, which she then ate. “Tell me, do you plan to publish more poems?”

  “There will be three more in the next issue of The Intellectual, and Khandaniha Magazine has accepted four others.” I paused. “Also,” I said slowly, “I’ve just had an offer from a publisher here in Tehran to collect some of my poems into a new volume.”

  This news had come just that week. I’d wavered at the proposition, uncertain whether putting together a collection would stoke the controversy sparked by “Sin,” but now my misgivings fell away and I found myself talking excitedly about the project. “I’m thinking of calling it The Captive,” I told Leila.

  “But that’s excellent, Forugh! You must send me all your future writing.”

  After a time, our conversation turned to her own work. Nasser had made it seem as if Leila had given up working as a translator, but I discovered that the stacks of papers on the table beside her were translations of a six-hundred-page novel by an Algerian writer, a project that had absorbed her for more than a year and was still at least a year from publication. I marveled at what I guessed were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours represented in those pages and at the calm, steady state of mind necessary for such an undertaking. The various other surprises of our conversation—that my poems impressed her, that she saw them as skilled, vivid, and lasting—all this had the effect of not only bolstering my confidence but also deepening my curiosity about her life. I had the feeling she lived alone and that she had an unusual degree of independence for a woman, but just how this had happened was a mystery to me.

  “Forugh,” she said as she accompanied me to the door at the end of the visit. We walked shoulder to shoulder, so close that I could smell her perfume, a blend of roses and something else I couldn’t place. She stopped and turned to face me. “There’s another reason why I asked you here. Besides your writing, I mean. You see, some lessons I’ve learned too late and others I haven’t learned at all.” For a moment she seemed to be far away, entangled in a memory, but then she returned her gaze to me. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What I want to tell you,” she said, dropping her voice to a near whisper, “is that there’s a lot of speculation going around about the lover you write about in your poems.”

  I stiffened. “What sort of speculation?”

  “Everyone’s saying that ‘Sin’ is autobiographical, and they’re dying to know the identity of your lover.”

  “Everyone, including you?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t go in for gossip, Forugh, but I think that just now you’re up against more than you realize.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Tell me, how well do you know Nasser Khodayar?”

  Later I’d marvel at my complete inability to comprehend what Leila was warning me about and why. At the time I thought she was merely telling me to guard my heart. She’d spoken to me as a woman of the world, and I was eager to match her confidence. I think I even smiled.

  I saw at once that my attempt at nonchalance didn’t persuade her. She pressed her lips together and her eyes darkened with worry. “Take care with him, Forugh. Just take care.”

  15.

  “You have to stop.”

  I was absorbed in a new book of poems by Ahmad Shamlou when Parviz entered our bedroom and issued this demand. I smoothed the cover of my book closed and lifted my eyes. He pulled up a chair next to the table, set his briefcase on the floor, and sat down.

  “Stop what?” I asked.

  He leaned toward me, his elbows on his knees and his hands folded together. “Stop going to Tehran on your own.”

  “Your mother’s been talking to you again, hasn’t she? Going on and on about what people think about me, what they’re saying in town.”

  He lifted his briefcase to his lap and unclasped the lock. As soon as he drew out the newspaper and thrust it before me, my mouth fell open. There, on the front page of Tehran’s leading paper, was my poem “Sin,” accompanied by a picture of me and a lengthy review of my new book, The Captive. Nasser had predicted I’d attract publishers, and he was right. There’d been no want of editors eager to publish my poems after “Sin.” Letters came weekly, soliciting my work. Journals to which I’d been submitting work for years without
any success now reached out to me for poems. Still, this was a major newspaper, with a readership that went far beyond the literati.

  He slid the newspaper onto the table, smoothing the pages flat. I’d anticipated this moment. I’d even rehearsed a defense for myself, but now that the time had come to deliver it, I sank farther into the chair. I read as quickly as I could, skimming the first paragraph. “This woman,” it began, “this Forugh Farrokhzad, believes that it’s through the basest of desires that she can liberate herself.”

  I couldn’t stand to go past that sentence.

  “Read it, Forugh,” Parviz said. “All of it.”

  I forced myself to finish the review. The writer went on to call me “uneducated and uncouth.” What people now called poetry, he claimed, was not poetry at all, and for this there was no better proof than my writing. I was a woman. I had only been educated to the ninth grade. I’d clearly read nothing of importance. But these weren’t the most damning claims. “Miss Farrokhzad uses sex in her poetry to gain notoriety,” the author wrote. “She is one of these women who think that by cheapening themselves like Western women they will become free. We regret that voices like hers will likely only increase with time.”

  I finished in a daze. I had achieved notoriety, just as Nasser had predicted, and now I’d have to pay for it.

  “It’s just one review,” I managed to say when I finished the piece. “One review by some hateful critic—”

  “But it isn’t one review! You’re the talk of Tehran, Forugh! Imagine when an old classmate wrote to ask if my wife was a writer—the one writing those poems everyone’s talking about—and I said, no, you must be mistaken. I told him, ‘Forugh writes sometimes, she always has, but not that kind of poetry.’ ”