Song of a Captive Bird Page 17

  “I’m proud of the poems I’ve written. I’d publish them again.”

  “What you write isn’t poetry, Forugh. It’s filth. Filth and nonsense.”

  “What would you have me do about it now?”

  “I would have you put an end to all this and return to your husband in Ahwaz.”

  “And if I won’t?”

  The words stopped him. For a moment he neither moved nor said a word. Only looked at me. “I will allow you to stay here for a fortnight—by which time the worst of this sordid business should be over,” he said. “During this time you won’t so much as write your name on a piece of paper or set one foot outside this house. You will stay in the andaroon at all times and you are forbidden to leave for any reason.”

  “But you can’t stop me from going to see Kami—” I said, faced with real terror at the prospect. I hadn’t left my son for more than a week before, and a fortnight seemed an eternity.

  “If you wish to see your child, Forugh, you’ll straighten yourself up and return to Ahwaz, where you can resume the responsibilities to which marriage and motherhood bind you. Otherwise—”

  “Yes?”

  “There is no other way.”

  Oh sky, if one day

  I want to fly from this silent prison

  what should I say to my weeping child?

  “Forget about me,

  for I’m a captive bird”?

  I’m that candle that illuminates the ruins

  with her burning heart.

  If I choose darkness,

  I’ll destroy everything around me.

  —from “The Captive”

  A fortnight. Fourteen days, thirteen nights.

  It must have been quite clear, when my father left the house, that something serious had transpired, but neither my mother nor Sanam chose to press me for details afterward. I’d told them that I’d come to Tehran because I needed a rest, and they continued to understand this as a temporary period, a time for me to gather my strength before returning to my husband and my son.

  My mother spent most of the time in her own room, and the few times she came to check on me she was strangely calm. She didn’t put up her hair, make up her face, or dress in anything but an old housedress, and she showed an uncharacteristic lack of interest in my plans. Sanam’s response was much less muted. Days, she sat at the foot of my bed, her hands working her worry beads and her lips silently saying prayers. She cooked my favorite foods—thick saffron puddings, pomegranate stew, barberry rice. In the evenings she prepared pots of burning rue, circling the smoke over my forehead to ward off the evil eye. It had always made me happy, that fragrance of crackling wild rue—something to do with feeling safe and loved—but I barely noticed it now.

  At night I dreamed of Kami and woke to the feeling of his body against me only to realize I was alone and back in my father’s house, reaching for something that was not there. Each time I left him, it took longer for him to ease into my arms and for his eyes to lose their fear of me. How long would it be before he completely forgot me? As the days went by, loss took hold of me, and it would not let go. There were times when that loss was so great, so suffocating, that I thought I’d die of it.

  Anxious, overwrought, I sprang from the bed and paced the floor. I would go back to Ahwaz, I told myself; I’d go back to my child. I told myself that if I returned I’d have a decent life. I’d have a husband who’d maybe forgive what other men would never have forgiven of their wives. Parviz hadn’t divorced me, and I guessed that he would accept my decision to return so long as I consented to his terms: no more publications or trips to Tehran. The scandal would ebb, the newspapers and gossips would seize on some other story, and soon enough people would forget my name. I could make the best of my fate. I had my books, having acquired a decent reading library of my own in Ahwaz over the last few years. And I could write poems, if just for myself. I could watch my son grow up. It would be what many considered a good life, maybe even a better life than I had any right to expect after what I’d done.

  But just as soon as I decided to go back, all my old worries returned—the frustration over my seclusion, my mother-in-law’s disapproval, and the endless arguments with Parviz. All of it would start again if I returned to Ahwaz—again and again. How could I stop writing? And what would it mean to stop? Under all these thoughts lurked the worst fear of all: You don’t know how to be a mother. No, it’s worse than that: You can’t be a mother. You’re incapable of it.

  I hated myself for it, but I knew I couldn’t return to my life in Ahwaz. I’d tasted freedom, and my sense of the world and of myself had changed because of it. I’d learned that life was harsher, but also more varied and pleasurable, than I’d imagined. I’d traveled to Tehran on my own many times. I’d made my way through unfamiliar streets, had let the city’s chaos, danger, and promise become part of me. Sure, I’d fallen for a man who’d betrayed and humiliated me, but I was making a name for myself as a poet. Writing had cost me so much, but it was also the thing that saved me, that allowed me to live. I wasn’t the woman I wanted to be yet, but I was beginning to resemble her now.

  And yet I’d never heard of a woman surviving away from her family, without a father or husband to protect her. It wasn’t just beyond hoping; it was beyond imagining.

  * * *

  —

  The longer I was confined to my room, the deeper I sank into confusion and despair. Often I wouldn’t wake until afternoon or only in the night. I stared at the darkness for hours. Every night I closed my eyes and watched myself as if through a mirror, my reflection so close that I felt if I could just touch it, sleep would enfold me, but night passed into day and then again to night.

  One morning something urged me to pull the linens from the mattress and pile them in the center of the room. I dropped to my knees and started to tear them with my hands. It made a harsh, ugly rip that startled me at first, but then I wanted only to hear that sound again and again. I remember looking at my shaking hands at one point and feeling that they were not really mine. They seemed disconnected from my arms, which in turn were disconnected from my body. I was unable—or perhaps unwilling—to stop myself from what I was doing. It was the work of hours, and it took all the strength I had, but evening found me on the floor, nestled among a pile of shredded bed linens. When Sanam came to the room that night, I saw in her expression what I had done. What I had become. Mad. Crazy. I closed my eyes and let her fold me into her arms. “Oh, my daughter, my darling daughter,” she murmured, smoothing my hair and rocking me softly against her chest as she cried.

  * * *

  —

  The fifteenth day arrived and with it the man in the lavender cravat.

  I’d received no further word from my father and he’d made no more visits to the house. How would he answer my refusal to return to Ahwaz? What would he do with me now?

  I didn’t have to wait long for the answer. At the beginning of September, a loud knock came at the bedroom door. Before I could rise to open it, one of my brothers entered the room. “My beloved sister,” he said, greeting me with the graciousness of a stranger. He’d recently completed his university degree in Europe, and there was a certain glossiness to him now, an authority and swagger he hadn’t possessed before.

  Two men followed him into my room. One wore a gray suit and lavender tie and carried a small black valise. My brother introduced him as Dr. Rezayan and the man with him as his “associate.”

  I shuffled to my feet. I’d spent days in the room without bathing or changing, and although it was already past noon I was still in my nightgown and my hair was unkempt.

  Dr. Rezayan cocked his head and studied me through heavy-lidded eyes. He took a long time just looking at me, his eyes traveling from my face to my feet and then back.

  “The Colonel tells me you haven’t been feeling well,” he said eventually, snapping the two brass locks of his valise open, “and that you need a rest.”

  I remember how calm and fla
wless he looked, leading me to the edge of the bed, guiding me down, standing over me. I remember his gray suit and the glint of the diamond pin in his silken lavender tie. I remember the quiet in the room as he filled a syringe from a small glass vial. I remember how my brother held me against the mattress by my shoulders, firmly but without much force, because I was so listless and weak that it took nothing for him to restrain me. I remember that in those moments no one spoke, and I remember watching the needle plunge into my arm until I swam into darkness and I remembered nothing at all.

  16.

  I speak from the depths of night.

  From within darkness

  and out of the depths I speak.

  If you come to my house, dear friend,

  bring me a lamp and a window

  to gaze out at the fortunates,

  at the ones outside.

  —“The Gift”

  In another time—but one not so distant from my own—a woman like me, a woman who lost her reputation, a woman who persisted, despite various punishments, in bringing shame to her family, might have been taken to Tehran’s public lunatic asylum, the timarestan. Built in the last century, the timarestan housed the city’s most severely misbegotten: epileptics, opium addicts, and all those judged mentally defective or else ravani—psychotic. Once there, the wayward woman would’ve been shackled to a cot and locked away in a cell not much bigger than a coffin. Most likely she’d never be allowed to leave.

  By a mere trick of fate, I wasn’t taken to the timarestan but instead to the Rezayan Clinic. I didn’t go mad there, or not for long, but my time at that clinic changed me in ways I could never undo.

  The clinic stood in the lush, hilly hamlet of Niavaran, ten miles northeast of Tehran. Like other palaces built in the late nineteenth century, the main building boasted marble columns, intricately hand-painted tiles, and mirrored mosaics. Its three acres had been planned by a French landscape architect and included no fewer than four formal gardens ringed by plane and cypress trees. The shah’s summer estate, with its sprawling formal gardens and grand pavilions, its hunting lodges and park of pine trees, was less than two miles away.

  People had lived here once. A nobleman and his many wives and children; maids, chamberlains, houseboys, grooms, and gardeners. But that was all a very long time ago. The nobleman left for France and, except for those left to sleep undisturbed in a nearby mausoleum, his family followed. The house withdrew into itself, moldering in neglect, until one day Dr. Faramarz Rezayan, an esteemed and enterprising doctor of psychiatry, happened on the property and decided it would make a perfect home for the privileged insane.

  In what had once been vast guest parlors and majestic private quarters, there would now be dormitories, communal showers, isolation chambers, examination rooms, and an operating theater. At the Rezayan Clinic, order replaced dereliction and the tortures were called “treatments,” but the secrecy that governed the old timarestan not only survived but flourished here. From the outside, the clinic was wholly indistinguishable from any of the other splendid mansions in Niavaran, and, surrounded as it was on all sides by high stone walls, its purpose was hidden from those who passed, with no sign or other marker to betray what went on there.

  If for some reason you should have come looking for me at the Rezayan Clinic you would never have found me, I’m sure of it. But let’s say you somehow made it as far as the three-foot-thick asylum walls. You can be certain that you wouldn’t have been allowed past the clinic’s iron gates. From your vantage point under the canopy of plane and cypress trees, only the grounds would have been visible to you, and those grounds, you would have discovered, were not merely lovely. They were perfect.

  * * *

  The sky had been cut into pieces. I remember the feeling of terror as I opened my eyes and saw the strangeness of a blue sky sliced by thick metal bars. Images came in quick succession—the Colonel, my brother, the man with the lavender tie—but when I tried to remember how I’d gotten to this place, I couldn’t conjure anything.

  I lifted myself up slightly onto my elbows and looked around. The room was about ten feet square, with bare walls and no decoration except a single ceiling light. The air was stiflingly hot and smelled of bleach and lye, which only intensified my nausea. A second narrow metal-framed bed was pushed against the opposite wall. That morning it was empty, but I could make out the impression of the body that had lately occupied it.

  No sooner had I swung my legs over the bed than I felt the room shimmy and tilt, and I collapsed back onto the mattress. When I finally focused my eyes, I saw that I was wearing a hospital smock. The front was smeared with fresh vomit, and I made an effort to wipe it away with the corner of a sheet, but my fingers felt strangely heavy and I soon gave up.

  I stared up at the ceiling and tried again to remember how I’d come to this place, but there was something wrong with my head. I couldn’t think properly.

  After some time, I made a second attempt at standing up. The bed in which I found myself was covered in a plastic sheet that made a hissing sound as I shifted my legs. I discovered I could make it, if just barely, to the window. Holding the wall to steady myself, I peered outside. There was a small courtyard below with a fountain and some shrubs, but I couldn’t see over the garden wall.

  Legs quivering and head spinning, I staggered out of the room and made my way down a long, wide corridor. Here the ceiling was punctuated with skylights, and light fell like a soft crystal dust onto the bare tiles. My head had cleared up a little, but I thought I might be sick again. The hall was empty and still, but as I proceeded I could make out voices coming from an open door.

  At first I thought I’d stumbled onto a party of some kind, but even in my strange, disoriented state I quickly understood that this was no ordinary gathering. I braced myself with one hand against the wall and looked more closely at the women in the room. A few seemed like ordinary housewives, dressed in simple skirts and dresses, but others wore hospital smocks and were extremely disheveled. They straddled stools, sprawled on couches, leaned against the walls. Some walked about aimlessly, some screamed and shouted, while still others stared into the distance. I saw an elderly woman with thickly rouged cheeks and heavily made-up eyes. I saw a girl not much older than me pacing the room in circles, swaying her hips as she went. She swept past me and for a moment her gaze fastened on mine. I saw an older woman of perhaps forty or fifty sitting on a divan with her hands folded demurely on her lap, her face fixed with an immovable smile. I saw a large woman in a purple dressing gown sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth. Her sobs and screams garnered no reaction from any of the others in the room.

  My gaze was drawn up to the ceiling. Judging from the scale, the room was, or rather had once been, a large guest parlor, but aside from a few gold-footed settees, all the chairs were plastic and had been scattered around the room so that they stood at odd angles from one another. Still, something of the room’s original grandeur survived in its architectural details: the intricate woodwork along the walls, the chandelier dangling from the ceiling, the ceramic tiles set into the walls, and the five large carved doors, all but one of which was now shut.

  I felt a hand grip my shoulder and then a voice say, “Forugh? Is that you?”

  I flinched, swinging around to face a woman with wire-rimmed glasses, bobbed hair, and startlingly clear blue eyes. A foreigner, European most likely, but I wasn’t sure from which country. She was perhaps thirty, with the slender figure of a teenager but the assured manner of a much older woman, and she wore some sort of nursing costume: an all-white ensemble consisting of a collared blouse, long flared skirt, apron, and peaked white cap.

  “We didn’t expect you’d be up for a while, but here you are, Forugh!”

  She pronounced my name with a distinctly foreign accent, so that it ended in “k.” She spoke with a clipped but not unfriendly manner, but how did she know my name? I still had no notion of how I had come to this place, and yet it was clear from
the woman’s familiar manner that I was known here.

  I wrestled my arm away. “Where am I? Why am I here?”

  At this a few of the women in the room lifted their eyes. The attention seemed to annoy the blue-eyed nurse, and she quickly linked her arm under mine and pulled me away and back into the corridor. “You’ve been sick, Forugh,” she said when we were alone, “and you’ve come to stay with us so that you might feel better.”

  Her Persian was awkward and half the words she spoke were English, but I understood her well enough.

  “I’m not sick!” I snapped, but as soon as I pulled away I felt dizzy, and without her arm to steady me I felt I would collapse. If I could just speak to her in English, if I could only keep my words clear and sensible, but I felt so sick that even in my native tongue the words came out thick and staggered. Worse, I was seized by a ferocious thirst, which I’d later realize was an effect of whatever medicine I’d been made to take.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” I managed to say.

  “But, my dear!” she said, taking my arm again and guiding me down the corridor. “You’re very fortunate to have found your way to us. What is it you say in Persian? ‘This is your own home.’ ”

  Fragments of memory returned to me as she led me down the hall. The black valise, the needle. I stopped walking and gripped her arm. “There was a man in a lavender cravat. He was a doctor, I think….”

  “Dr. Rezayan!” she said, her eyes brightening as she turned to face me. “But of course you would have met him already! He pays a visit to all his patients before they come to stay with us.” We’d reached the room I recognized as the one I’d recently fled. “He took his degree in England, at Oxford. You’re familiar with Oxford, yes?” She didn’t wait for me to answer before continuing in the same breathless manner. “After obtaining his medical degree, he practiced at some of the most prominent private hospitals in Europe. I was a nurse in a clinic he directed, you see. He gave up many opportunities abroad in order to return to his homeland. It’s really rather extraordinary how—”