Song of a Captive Bird Page 16

  My cheeks went hot. “What do you mean, ‘that kind of poetry’? What kind of poetry do you imagine I write?” When he didn’t answer, I asked, “Have you even read anything I’ve published, or does your mother forbid you to do even that?”

  “I don’t need to read your poems to know your complaints against me, but did you think I’ve been so distracted by my happiness that I wouldn’t notice what you do? Over the last few months you’ve sought every opportunity to leave this house.” A pained look crossed his face, but he cleared his throat and continued. “When you went to Tehran all those times before, I defended you. I made excuses. I lied for you. Over and over again I said you were going to see your mother.”

  “I was!”

  He shook his head. “But she wasn’t the only reason you went to Tehran, isn’t that true? And these poems you’ve written, they’re not about me, are they?”

  There was, of course, no answer to this.

  Parviz pressed on. “Do you remember how you asked me on the night of our wedding if I’d wanted to marry you?”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t understand why he was bringing this up now. We’d been married for three years, and the memories of our early affection for each other, our flirtation, had faded long ago, overrun by the months, years, of silence, resentment, and loneliness.

  “I did want to marry you,” he continued. “Despite everything, I was glad to be married to you. All this time I’ve tried to understand you, but it’s you who hasn’t been content with the concept of marriage.”

  Watching him as he spoke, it occurred to me that he wasn’t so different now from when we’d first met. He was as thoughtful in his manners as he had always been, and he still had the sad eyes and slight build that made him seem younger than he was. The same uncertain posture and his slightly unkempt hair. I was used to his habit of trying to calm and counsel me, but I was shocked to hear him speak now with such determination.

  “Do you hate me?” I asked, my gaze on the table. It was the first time we’d spoken about the circumstances of our marriage, and now I was the one who was unable to meet his eyes.

  “No,” he said quietly. “I don’t.”

  The air in the room was stifling. I crossed the floor and cracked the window open. For some moments I stood staring out at the ivy trailing the wall. “But now,” I said, turning to face Parviz again, “you’re asking me to stop? Stop writing, stop going to Tehran, stop—”

  He raised one hand in the air, interrupting me. “If you decide to go to Tehran, I won’t stand in your way.”

  I couldn’t have been more perplexed. “You mean won’t prevent me from going there alone?”

  “I will not. But I also won’t accept a marriage on the terms you’ve set up for yourself.”

  The surprise passed out of me, replaced by a new awareness. “Are you planning to divorce me?”

  “I’m telling you what I can and cannot accept.”

  I drew a breath. “If we were to divorce…” I said slowly, setting down each word carefully. “That is, if I wanted a divorce, what would happen with Kami?”

  He looked at me calmly. “I’ve told you I won’t prevent you from going to Tehran, and I won’t. And if you want a divorce I’ll give you one.” Until now his voice had a certain soft brokenness to it, but here his words turned decisive. “But whatever you choose to do now,” he went on, “Kami will always belong here in Ahwaz.”

  * * *

  —

  From there everything unfolded quickly.

  The scandal over “Sin” had morphed into speculation about my love life. People no longer wondered who my lover was but rather which one of my many lovers the poem memorialized. Every day some new man stepped forward with an article or interview claiming he was the one I’d written about. There was Massoud Gilani, with his boast that we’d been meeting secretly for years, which, by his calculation, meant that we’d been together even before my marriage. There was Shahriar Shekarchian, who claimed that I’d picked him up at a party one night last spring. According to Mr. Shekarchian, I had a wicked taste for champagne and poker. There was a certain middling poet who stated not only that he’d been my mentor but that our relationship had blossomed into an affair. And so the rumors spread.

  The more speculation, the more attacks on my honor, the more I withdrew into myself. For a while I stopped traveling to Tehran. I think I disappointed people by not refuting the rumors, but actually it sickened me not to defend myself, and as furious as I was with Nasser, I had no plan to reveal his identity. I never mentioned his name to anyone, and so far as I knew, Leila was the only one who’d worked out the connection between us.

  Then one day in July, I flipped through the pages of an issue of The Intellectual and discovered the first installation of a story called “Bruised Blossom.” The author was listed as Nasser Khodayar. I remember thinking this was strange, since Nasser hadn’t mentioned anything about writing a new story. Gripping the pages between my hands, I read faster and faster as I realized that this wasn’t fiction at all. It was a story about me.

  The plot was simple. A would-be poetess from the provinces travels to Tehran. Desperate to be published, she seeks out a celebrated editor and tries to seduce him. Her moods are volatile and her judgment childish, but her every move is calculated and cunning. The editor dodges her advances, but she eventually succeeds in seducing him and blackmails him into publishing her poems in his journal. The story closed with a love scene rendered in minute, near-pornographic detail.

  “To be continued in the next issue of The Intellectual,” read a note at the end.

  I held the magazine in my hands for a very long time. I read it again, more slowly this time. Part of me was desperately searching for proof that this was a hoax or that I was only imagining the resemblance between the story and our affair, but it was unmistakable. Nasser had given his heroine my rope of pearls and my lipsticked smile. He’d given his character my ambition to become a writer, which came off not only as opportunistic but as grossly misguided since she had no talent whatsoever. The illustration that accompanied the store bore an uncanny resemblance to the one of me that the magazine had printed alongside “Sin.” Worse than all this, in his crude rendition of our story, Nasser had embedded dozens of lines, images, and metaphors he’d lifted straight from my poems.

  When I finished reading “Bruised Blossom,” I pressed my forehead to the page, closed my eyes, and wept. All this time we’d been meeting, I’d been leaving behind my husband and my child, which Nasser had known, even if we didn’t speak of it. He could have guessed what it would cost me to have our affair confirmed in print. He must also have known I’d see the story; he knew I read every issue of The Intellectual. But how long had he been plotting to reveal his identity by writing this story? From the very moment he suggested publishing my poem? And what else would the next installations of “Bruised Blossom” reveal?

  I wanted to shut myself up in my room, close my eyes, and not speak to anyone, but if I didn’t confront Nasser after such a betrayal, what else would I accept? Who would I eventually become?

  I went to see him. I went the next day, still in a haze of fury. I can’t even remember how I made it there, as I was completely unaware of anything except the necessity of making my way to Nasser’s apartment.

  It was past eight o’clock when I arrived. I’d never been to see him at this hour of the night. I climbed the stairs two at a time, and I was breathless when I reached the second story. Light spilled out onto the landing from his flat and I could hear music from the apartment. I knocked on the door. Hard.

  He came to the door with a glass in his hand, his tie undone and his shirtsleeves rolled above the elbow. He didn’t smile or greet me. I glanced over his shoulder and into the apartment. From the voices, laughter, and cigarette smoke, I guessed he was hosting a party. Was that a woman’s voice? I stepped forward, making to enter, but he pulled the door closed and led me by the wrist onto the stairwell.

  “Why did you d
o it? Why did you write that story?”

  “Why shouldn’t I have written it?”

  “It wasn’t your story to tell!”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Is it only your story? Does what happened between us belong only to you?” he said. He was still holding my wrist. “Is it only yours to tell in your poems, however and whenever you like?”

  “But I showed you all my poems before I published them! If you objected to what I’d written, you could have said so.”

  “There was nothing to object to, Forugh.” He was speaking to me in that slow, even way that one addresses a child. “You are free to write whatever you please. After all, I’m not your husband. I’ve never had any expectations of you.”

  It was true. He’d never laid any claim to me, but until now I’d managed to take this as proof of his feelings for me. But I didn’t know him. Not at all. The realization, when it came, unmoored me. He’d learned nearly my whole life story through my poems, but in all the time we’d been together he’d told me almost nothing about himself.

  Another thought streaked through my mind. “How much money did they give you?” He didn’t answer, which was answer enough. He’d been offered a price and he’d taken it—it was as simple as that. Simple but also unforgivable. I wrenched myself from his grip and lurched toward him, pummeling my fists against his chest. “How much did it take to sell me out, to make me look ridiculous, to—”

  He grabbed my arm, his hand tightening on my forearm. For some moments we stood together in the landing, staring at each other with an almost calm regard. I wanted to curse him, but then, before I could stop them, tears welled in my eyes. “Nasser,” I said, struggling to control my voice. “Please don’t publish any more of that story. I beg you!” What crossed his face in that moment was something I’d never seen from him: pity. He let go of me very quickly then. He walked toward the door and reached for the doorknob, then hesitated and turned back. The pressure of his grip had left a throbbing welt, and I lifted my hand to my face so that he wouldn’t see my tears. “You don’t own the stories that happen to you,” he said. It was the last and also the most honest thing he’d ever say to me.

  * * *

  I never found out afterward whether Nasser meant to write “Bruised Blossom” from the very start—whether he’d intended all along to publish my poems and subsequently profit from them—or whether he’d made the choice to betray me only after my poems sparked such controversy.

  While his intentions eluded me, there were two immediate consequences to his story’s publication. First, “Bruised Blossom” undid the spell under which I’d lived for more than a year. I was furious at myself for not having anticipated Nasser’s betrayal. All sorts of things became clear to me now. I’d followed his advice and accepted his decision to sensationalize my work. I’d let him make a spectacle of me, which I’d justified to myself as part of his vision for my career. But I was done with that now. In one instant I was in thrall to him, and in the next moment his betrayal, and my own stupidity in trusting him, completely ended my infatuation.

  The second result was more complicated. Without the publication of “Bruised Blossom,” the scandal surrounding my poems might have been confined to Tehran’s literary scene. Instead, it found a much wider audience. Each installation of the serial was more salacious than the last, which boosted sales and spurred criticism. Emboldened by the public’s anger over the loosening of morals under the shah’s regime, especially among young women, editors were on the lookout for controversial—or, even better, inflammatory—stories about the “New Iranian Woman.” The details of “Bruised Blossom” were soon repeated, but without the pretext of fiction, in a story that ran in the city’s major newspapers under the headline FARROKHZAD’S SHOCKING AFFAIR. Until then the Farrokhzad name had been associated only with Colonel Farrokhzad, but it was precisely this fact that drew so many readers to the piece. The writer made much of my father’s brilliant career as a colonel and his inability to control his teenage daughter. As for my writing, he dismissed “Sin” as “a parable of ruin to which the nation should give heed.”

  FARROKHZAD’S SHOCKING AFFAIR appeared on the front page of one of the city’s most widely circulated papers, along with a photograph of me wearing a sweater that accentuated my breasts and a skirt that barely skimmed the top of my knees—a shot that I realized had been taken in the street just a week before without my knowing it. It made me uneasy to think that I was being watched. I stared at the picture for a few moments, then read the article’s concluding lines:

  Ms. Farrokhzad has betrayed her husband, denouncing both marriage and motherhood. She has taken up with a man who we can only hope will eventually disentangle himself from the sins into which she has led him. One can only wonder how much damage she has inflicted on her son. A mere child now, he will grow up and one day learn of his mother’s shameful actions. She has left her child no legacy except the unintelligible babbling of a woman who lives only for herself and her desires. Worse, she has usurped the idiom of faith only to mock our cherished customs. These may seem like the isolated indiscretions of a single misguided young woman, but it is in this way that the finely wrought tapestry of our culture fades and frays.

  It was, in short, an onerous argument against women’s liberty. Laughable, yes, but also dangerous, as soon became clear. One day, when they were making their way from the marketplace back to Amiriyeh, my mother and Sanam were attacked by a gang of teenage boys in ragged clothes. The boys had given chase, cursed at them, and pelted them with stones. It was impossible to imagine how a group of teenagers could harbor such hatred toward a pair of women as old as their own mothers, which raised the more alarming prospect that they’d been dispatched by a larger organized faction. Then, not a week later, we discovered the brass knocker of the house pried loose and tossed in the gutter. A note had been hammered onto the front door with this message: “The daughter of this house is a whore.”

  Shortly after Parviz delivered his ultimatum, I returned to Tehran to clear my head. That’s when I learned what had happened to Sanam and my mother in the streets. What would stop these people—whoever they were—from entering the house and attacking them again, or worse? Now under siege, the house fell quiet. Except for my little sister, Gloria, my siblings had all left home. Puran lived on the other side of Tehran with her husband and couldn’t easily get away, and all but one of my brothers were still studying abroad. Hassan, the old manservant, ran all the household errands now. I spent long evenings with Sanam in the kitchen, while my mother shut herself in her room or paced the hall, her hands clasped in front of her and her unbound hair hanging down the sides of her face.

  I’d planned to stay a few days, but now I couldn’t go back. It was too dangerous and, besides, I couldn’t abandon my mother, sister, and Sanam. It was no longer possible for me to walk in the streets, even with a chaperone. I couldn’t even go to the public bathhouse, so every other day Sanam would heat some water and I’d bathe at home. For once I didn’t complain. At first I’d managed to shrug off worries about my own safety, but fear now seeped into the whole house, and I was loath to cause more trouble.

  According to Hassan, who’d heard the news from some neighborhood gossips, the next thing to happen was that a bundle of newspaper clippings appeared on the doorstep of the Colonel’s other residence. These were articles from the so-called “progressive” journals that had reprinted my poems alongside pictures of barely dressed women, as well as fundamentalist publications decrying my poems and asserting that in failing to control his daughter, the king’s trusted colonel had shown the true face of the regime. Mine was a cautionary tale of lust, licentiousness, and the so-called “emancipation of women” at the cost of the nation’s cultural and social decay.

  Then, one day, a second anonymous note was tacked onto the Colonel’s door. It read: “Silence your whore of a daughter, Colonel Farrokhzad, or one day soon you’ll come home and find your house burned to the ground.” The note stayed up for sever
al hours, plenty of time for the neighbors to see it and start gossiping. I don’t think he actually believed anyone would dare make good on the threat, but now his name had been sullied, and that he wouldn’t stand for.

  Early one morning the Colonel marched into the house in Amiriyeh and asked Hassan to summon me to his library. He hadn’t set foot here for many months, yet this was as much his house as it had ever been, no matter where he now chose to spend his nights or whom he called his wife.

  I found him pacing the room with his back toward me. He was still wearing the jacket of his military uniform, which told me that he didn’t plan to stay long, and that whatever he planned would happen quickly. When he turned around, I dropped my eyes in deference without willing it—the habit of a lifetime, and one not easily shed.

  He didn’t bother with a greeting. “You’ve dishonored me,” he said, stepping toward me and pointing his cane so that its tip nearly stabbed my chest.

  It was as if two of me stood before him in that moment. One was the young girl who lived in a state of dread, fearful of his blows and harsh words. The other was a woman who had taken risks and stripped away her fear. It was this second me who answered: “And this time you can’t save face by marrying me off.”

  His eyebrows arched up and his face reddened. “Marry you off?” He raised the cane above my head as if to strike me, but then he dropped it to his side. “It was only through my efforts that you retained some measure of dignity after that business with Parviz, and now you come back here as a wife who’s been turned out by her husband.”

  “But I haven’t been turned away by my husband! I chose to come to Tehran on my own.”

  “Parviz knows you’re here now?” he asked with a surprised look.

  “Yes.”

  “And he’s read these things you’ve written?”

  “He has.”

  “Then he’s more of an idiot than I reckoned. No man would allow his wife to publish such poems. Never.”