Song of a Captive Bird Read online

  I grasped her forearm. “I want to speak to him! I want to know why I was brought here!”

  “And so you will, Forugh! But you will want to rest and shower before you meet with Dr. Rezayan. You will want to be at your very best.”

  She stripped off my soiled smock and pulled a new one over my head. My body was sticky with sweat, and my hair stuck to my head and my neck, but even as I perspired I felt cold and I couldn’t stop shivering. Little black specks flickered before my eyes and I realized I was probably going to faint. I let the woman guide me back to the bed and pull the bedsheets over me. Then I closed my eyes, shaking miserably until sleep overtook me again.

  * * *

  —

  I woke to a hand shaking me roughly by the shoulder. My eyes flashed open. The blue-eyed nurse was gone; a different woman was standing over me. Her hair was arranged in pigtails like a girl’s, but wrinkles lined her eyes and the corners of her mouth. She wore a smock identical to mine, and it dawned on me that she must be my roommate. Just beyond her shoulder I saw the barred window and slivers of sky, tinged now with the blush of dawn. I rubbed my eyes and forced myself to think, but before I could speak, the woman pulled me up by the arm. The next moment, her sweaty hand was in mine and we were in a brightly lit corridor, surrounded by many other women hustling down the hall.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, but her soft answer was swallowed by the noise.

  We continued down the corridor until we came to a large chamber with a tiled fountain in the center. A bathhouse. The fountain was empty, but steam filled the room. “My name is Pari,” my companion said as she let go of my hand. “Forugh,” I answered, and fell into line behind a row of women. Along one wall there were several open showers, to which the women were being herded one by one. I watched as an orderly pushed an older woman in a wheelchair toward the stalls, wheeled her under the spray, and shouted, “Clean yourself!” The orderly was a large woman with powerful shoulders and thick arms as strong as a man’s. When it was my turn to step forward, she took a long look at me, slowly, from head to toe, arranged her mouth in a smile, and said, “You’re the poetess.”

  I must have looked startled then, which only increased her pleasure in calling me out in this way.

  “I’ve heard about you,” she said. Her arms strained against her sleeves, and there were rings of fat around her neck. She came closer, and I was assaulted by the sour odor of an unwashed body. “You’ve had an easy time, if you ask me. I’d rather see any daughter of mine in her grave than shaming herself as you’ve done.”

  For a moment she hesitated, and I realized she didn’t want to touch me. In her eyes I was tainted and unclean. In the end, she seized my wrist and thrust a sliver of grayish soap and a kiseh into my hand. “Well, now you’re here, and you’ll clean yourself up sure enough.”

  The room started spinning again, only faster now. “I can’t,” I said.

  “ ‘I can’t,’ ” mimicked the woman, then pulled me forward by the collar of my smock and yanked it clear over my head. Out of an instinct for self-protection, I tried to cover my naked breasts with one hand, my pubic area with the other. “You’re ashamed of yourself now, are you?” she said, and slapped away my hands. Her breath still short from the labor of pushing me into the stall, she held me under the water and began to soap and rub me with the kiseh. At times her eyes looked away and at other times not, and I didn’t know which was the greater humiliation. The water was scalding hot, but each time I flinched she caught me by my neck and forced me back under the stream.

  * * *

  —

  That afternoon I was taken to Dr. Rezayan’s private office.

  He sat behind a large lacquered desk, cradling the phone with one hand and writing with the other. His charcoal-gray suit was immaculate, his tie the same delicate purple shade of my memories. My body still remembered to fear him, but there was nowhere to go. I reminded myself to breathe and to keep my face arranged in a serene expression as I scanned the room.

  We were alone in what looked like a gentleman’s study. The room was vast—many times larger than the other rooms I’d so far seen. From the plush silk carpets to the fully stocked library and immense, gleaming desk, the room stood in stark contrast to the shabbiness of the rest of the clinic. Here everything was perfect—gleaming and grand.

  I turned my attention back to Dr. Rezayan. His eyes were hazel, he had a straight, narrow nose, and his top lip was slightly fuller than the bottom one. If it weren’t for his perfectly accented Persian, I would have mistaken him for a foreigner.

  A clock drummed away in the corner of the room and a bird sang from the tree outside the open window. I shifted awkwardly in my chair. After the bath, I’d been made to wear a plain long-sleeved dress, and my hair had been clipped back from my forehead with metal barrettes. They were digging into my scalp and itching terribly now, but I sat still, with my hands folded on my lap.

  “Doctor, I don’t want to be here,” I said when he finally looked up from his desk. My only chance, I told myself, was to speak in a measured and clear manner. To be sensible and calm. “I want to go home.”

  For a moment he peered at me as if I were a puzzle he was seeking to solve, then he said, “When you are better, Forugh, you will be able to return home.”

  “Better?”

  “Calmer.”

  “I’d like to see my father,” I blurted out, thinking that since my father had sent me to this place, he could also get me out. Perhaps if he came to visit me, if he could see what it was like here, he would take me away.

  That hope was immediately dispelled. “The Colonel wants you here in our care,” he said, adding, “To keep you from harm.”

  He reached for a pad of paper and began to make a few notes. For a moment my eyes strayed to the books on the shelves—they looked to be medical texts, mostly in English but a few in French. Numerous framed diplomas decorated the walls, all of them in foreign languages and stamped with ornate golden seals.

  “Does my husband know I’m here?”

  “Indeed. Both he and your father have consented to your admission and treatment.”

  “Can I write him a letter?” I asked, watching his pen move across the page.

  “I don’t advise it,” he said, setting down his pen and paper to look at me. “Not in your present condition.”

  “My condition?”

  “You’re agitated, Forugh. You’re disturbed.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “I’m told,” Dr. Rezayan continued, lacing his fingers together on the desk, “that you’re often in the streets, that you go out at night alone. Unaccompanied.”

  “And that’s why I’ve been brought here?”

  “You do realize that if you persist in such behaviors you could be molested or hurt?”

  “But I haven’t been—”

  He cut me off. “I understand you have a son,” he said, walking around the table to stand close to me. “That you are a mother.”

  Was it the panic in my eyes that showed him? Was it my stammer when I asked if I could see Kami? Something in that moment told him he’d found my weakness, and he wouldn’t let it go now.

  “Would you really wish for your little boy to see you as you are?”

  I looked away.

  “You do know, Forugh, that you’re not well enough to take care of your son. You know that I’m right?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Perhaps,” he continued, “it will help you to know that your condition is a disease of the body. You see, all mental disorders originate in the body, in this case the brain. Really they’re no different from physical diseases. No different at all.”

  “And if this is true,” I said, raising my gaze, “that I’m sick in the way you describe, what can be done for me?” My voice was shaking, not from fear now but from anger. My resolution to stay calm had deserted me and I felt capable of violence, of striking or biting or scratching him. “Is my ‘condition,’ as you call it, something for w
hich you have found a cure?”

  “There are indeed interventions for someone with your…” He paused, measuring his words. “Needs,” he said finally.

  “And if I don’t want to be treated?”

  He lifted his chin, drew a long breath, and then looked at me squarely. “Your father has put you in my care,” he said. “When you are calmer, perhaps you’ll have visitors. Maybe you’ll even be able to see your son. All this depends on your cooperation. And you will cooperate, won’t you, Forugh?”

  * * *

  —

  After a lunch of watered-down kidney bean and beef stew, Pari and I filed back into our room and the lock was bolted shut behind us. Steel-gray bands fell from the barred window across my bed and down the bare tiles. I looked over at Pari. Her eyes were large and restless, and she had a nervous habit of working her lips into a pout and then relaxing them. She sat cross-legged on her bed, unbraiding and rebraiding her pigtails. That hair, its thickness and luster—it was clearly her pride.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  She stared at me blankly, then looked away. I thought she hadn’t heard me and so I repeated my question.

  “Been where?” she asked dully.

  I didn’t ask her again, but after a few minutes she began to speak. “I used to play the piano,” she said as she twisted locks of hair between her fingers. “I learned when I was very small. Bach, Rachmaninoff, Mozart. Before they made me stop, I could play anything.” For a moment her expression was bright and her face opened in a smile. She dropped a braid, let it fall and loosen on her shoulder. When she held up her hands for me, I saw that they were mottled with brown spots but her fingers were indeed long and tapered in the way I imagined a pianist’s would be.

  “Who made you stop playing?” I asked.

  A strange expression crept across her face, and her hand wandered to her throat. “The tongues,” she said, her eyes fixed on a point in the distance. “One day instead of black keys there were rows of tongues on the piano.” Her eyes flashed to me, she leaned forward slightly, and she asked, “Can you guess who they belonged to? The tongues?”

  I shook my head.

  “Deev!” she said with strange excitement. “They were demons’ tongues!” She moved again, this time returning to her cross-legged position. She explained that whenever she sat at the piano, a demon rose from the keys to pull her deep into its belly. She told me this part of the story casually, as if it were something she’d heard someone say somewhere, a story that had nothing to do with her, but when she finished she said, “Do you believe me, Forugh?”

  I tilted my head and studied her. Her expression had changed and she now looked fearful, haunted. She started braiding her hair again, only more furiously. “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I’m not sure I believe in devils and all that…”

  Her face fell but her fingers continued to fret her braids. It was clear I’d disappointed her, but I didn’t know what else to say. Silence closed over us.

  Then, in the late afternoon, when thin rays of sunshine shone through the window, I tried to coax her out of her restless trance. “Sit in the sun with me,” I told her, patting my cot and gesturing for her to take a place beside me.

  “Don’t you know that demons enter your head through the sun?” she answered, though she lifted her eyes and laughed as she said it.

  * * *

  Years later I’d hear that the mansion’s original owner, the Persian nobleman who’d long since left Iran, made his mark on the village of Niavaran. Sometime in the 1920s he commissioned hundreds of wrought-iron streetlamps to be brought over from France, and ever since then the narrow, winding roads of the village had been graced by the same faintly green glow of Parisian boulevards he’d admired on his European tours. I’m not sure the story was true, but my memory of the Rezayan Clinic would always be wedded to the green-tinged sky I saw on nights when I stood in bare feet by the window, too beaten down and too frightened to imagine I’d ever again be free.

  In my first days at the clinic, I would sink into memories of Kami and weep for hours. All I could think about was how I could get back to him. Nothing mattered but figuring out how to leave this place. I thought if I paid attention to the patients who were told they were getting better, the ones who’d likely soon be discharged, I would be able to figure out how to get myself free. I noticed that the best-behaved patients always took their pills and spent their days in a state of mute torpor. That’s what I had to do to free myself, I thought: not fight back. Instead, I’d pretend to be obedient, pleasant, and calm.

  At night the nurses floated from room to room with trays full of pills. Large white pills that always got stuck in my throat, tiny orange pills that blurred my vision and set my hands shaking, red pills for sleep—a true mercy in this place—oblong pills, round pills, bitter pills, sugar-coated pills, pills without a hint of flavor: I took them all. Mornings I jerked awake, sweaty and shivering; by noon I was dim and disoriented. Nights I fell into a thick sleep from which only more pills could release me.

  Eventually I learned to hold the pills under my tongue and then spit them into the toilet when no one was looking. I spent days in my room, where I turned to the wall and began silently reciting all the poems I knew. At first I couldn’t remember anything—the poems were gone, and nothing, not even a line, remained—but then the verses rose up like a silent chant. I’d have to hold fast to them or they’d disappear again.

  But gradually I came to understand that I was here precisely because my father had sent me away and that there was therefore no home to which I could return. I’d reached a place where I was no longer a wife or even a daughter but a child. No one would come and take me away. At this realization, my temper flared. It was no use trying to be good—it simply didn’t matter. So whatever the nurses demanded, I refused to do. I stayed awake when they told me to go to sleep. I wouldn’t eat and I wouldn’t speak. I spat out the pills they forced into my mouth. I sat in my small dark room and refused to come out, not even when the others walked in the garden in the late mornings, even though I knew I’d cry for joy if I felt the breeze on my skin or saw the sun again.

  At the Rezayan Clinic I learned there are many types of madness. Pacing, ambling, running, and wandering—I was surrounded by women who couldn’t be still. Even in the night they paced in their rooms and banged against the walls. From behind my door I could hear the shuffle of their feet and their voices calling, screaming, singing, and crying to themselves. Others sat in a stupor, their eyes glassy and dull. I learned that their stays at the clinic—and also my own—were described as “holidays.”

  As if we’d all come here to enjoy the gentle climate of the northern foothills. As if we could rest and this was a place where rest could be found.

  * * *

  She was always there, the girl. Her breath, her footsteps—soon they sounded louder to me than my own. She was a girl I’d seen in the parlor on my first day in the clinic, the one who always walked with a flirty swing to her hips. Wherever I went, to the common room, to the toilet, to the bathhouse, she followed me with that walk, though she never spoke to me, not a word.

  This went on for days. I tried to ignore her, but one day I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Go away!” I shouted. She lunged forward and her hands went to my face. Her nails dug into my cheeks, and with all my force I pushed her back and away from me. She lunged toward me again, and this time I bit her in the neck, breaking the skin so that blood began to flow in a thin trickle down her throat.

  The girl gave a long, loud cry. Two orderlies sprang into the corridor and pried us off each other, yanking me by the hair and pinning my arms behind my back. The girl stared at me, her eyes huge but also strangely calm. Blood streaked down her neck and onto the collar of her dress. Her hands went to the wound on her neck, and then she held her hands to her face. There was a tenderness with which she regarded the blood—a quality of complete absorption—and before I was carried away I saw a small smile
play on her mouth.

  * * *

  —

  There are rooms in this world where you can scream until your voice grows hoarse and eventually dies. One curse or one pinch and the nurses take you into the deepest reaches of the asylum, into a room without windows or fresh air. Isolation.

  Here you have a small metal bowl for drinking water and a toilet with rusted pipes and a mildewed string. A single lightbulb encased in plastic in the center of the ceiling. Nothing else. You lie down on the ground and press your cheek against the cold tiles. You entertain yourself with all the stories you remember, with the pattern of the tiles, with the rhythm of your own breath. You say your name over and over, as if such incantations might return you to yourself.

  Hours pass. Days.

  In a room like this you watch yourself from a distance. A thin glass wall separates you from yourself, but you won’t be able to make your way to the other side. You are divided. Split. Sometimes this feels like true freedom, to be so unburdened from what you once were; other times it will terrify you. At certain moments you recognize the ridiculousness of your situation. You’ll begin to laugh, then to cry, and sometimes you’ll do both at once.

  You are a woman alone in a room. You’ve always been here; you’ve never been here. Which is it?

  When you’re finally released from this room you’ll be told you can’t read any books and you can’t write any poems because your brain is sick. You’re told that reading and writing will make you sicker. If you can even form a thought after all the tranquilizers you’re made to swallow in the morning, at noon, and in the night, you’re told you must stop yourself from thinking, because it’s thinking that landed you here in the first place. But it’s impossible. You want to stop thinking but you can’t.