Song of a Captive Bird Page 19
You are a woman who’s been disowned by her father and cast out by her husband, a woman whose son knows her less each day and very soon won’t know her at all. You are a woman living in a room with locks for which you have no key, with windows that cut the sky. You are one of many women, young and old, who’ve been turned out of their homes for reasons you’ll never really know, much less understand, and like them you’ve been shut up behind the walls of a mansion in a district famous for its fresh air and the genteel glow of its French-imported streetlamps.
* * *
—
And beyond this there are other rooms still. One day Pari showed me a room where no one ever came out. “There are things that happen here, Forugh. Bad things. Sometimes they come at night and take you like they took her.”
“Took who?” I asked softly. Pity, not curiosity, spurred me to ask her to tell me more. I thought her tortured mind had conjured this story and that if she could take me to this place and I could show her that it was not frightening, it would calm her nerves. “Who did they take, Pari?”
She dropped her eyes and didn’t answer.
“Please show me where they took her,” I said, linking her arm with mine.
The clinic was a dark, rambling place, with long passages and unexpected chambers. We were quiet as we slipped from the ward, even quieter as we climbed to the second story and then to the third floor. Pari gripped my arm as we mounted the steps together. At the end of the corridor we came onto an open door. Together we peered inside.
“There,” said Pari, and lifted her hand in a small wave. In a corner of the room, a woman sat on a chair. Her hands were on her lap and her legs were crossed at the ankle. On her head she wore a brightly patterned kerchief that stood in strange contrast to her gray smock and the neglected and stifled look of the room. Though we were less than ten paces away, the woman gazed at us as if she didn’t see us at all.
“Who is she?” I whispered.
Pari shrugged, her eyes still pinned to the figure in the room. “Her room was across from mine. I saw her sometimes in the bathhouse. She cried a lot, but she was…nice.”
“What happened to her?”
Blinking nervously and working her mouth, Pari said, “They took her away. It was early in the morning, when everyone else was asleep. They took her away and they shaved her head. Told her to close her eyes. She closed her eyes. Told her to sing a song. She sang a song.”
“And then?”
“They drilled a hole in her skull and then they started cutting the sick part of her out with a knife. ‘Keep singing,’ they told her. She sang as long as she could. When she stopped singing, they knew it was done and then they stopped.”
The woman inside the room gazed ahead in a still, unsettling way. She was so close and yet oblivious to our presence. “The nurses talked about it later,” Pari continued. Her voice was smaller now. “Late at night. That’s how I know what happened. She couldn’t walk or talk after what they did to her. Just stared at the wall and picked at the bandages on her head. Her hair was brown when she first came here, but it grew back in patches, some white and others black, and then one day the nurses started covering her head. Not because it bothered her. No. Because it bothered them.” Her eyes darted across my face. “Do you believe me?”
It didn’t make sense, not exactly, but when I felt Pari’s hand slip into my own, I gripped it and whispered, “Yes.”
She nodded, then continued with the story. “She was empty. Gone. A long time passed like that. Then a strange thing happened. Her husband came to visit her. She hadn’t spoken or shown a reaction to anything for weeks, but when she saw him she sprang to her feet and bit his finger right through to the bone. He didn’t come again after that, and then they took her out of the ward and moved her here.”
“She never leaves this room?”
Pari shook her head.
Suddenly it seemed wrong to watch the woman anymore. I dropped my eyes to the floor, only to look again. “And no one comes to visit her?” I asked.
“Nobody knows she’s here.”
One day, not long after this exchange, I returned to my room after bathing and found a newspaper on my bed. It had been folded to a photograph of me, the same one that had accompanied FARROKHZAD’S SHOCKING AFFAIR. “Rumor has it that Ms. Forugh Farrokhzad has gone insane,” the article read. “Let’s pray this is only a rumor, or that she’ll soon recover, but woe be to the daughters of Eve who spurn God’s will and take up their pens to write. This is the fate that awaits them.”
I sank onto the bed and read the piece through to the end. My marriage, my writing, my affair, my comings and goings between Tehran and Ahwaz—every detail was explained as an essential part of the story of my madness.
I kept the newspaper, folded it neatly into one square and then a smaller square, and then I hid it under my mattress, just as I’d once hidden poems as a girl. It was a cruel, hateful piece of writing, but it was also proof—my only proof—that people knew I was still alive.
17.
Immodest. Impetuous. Disruptive. Depressed. Slovenly. Excitable. Impertinent. Dishonest. Obsessive. Secretive. Erratic. Nonsensical.
Some ten years later, in an attempt to make sense of that time of my life, I acquired the medical records from the weeks I spent in the Rezayan Clinic. It was a thin file, held together by a rubber band, and in its pages I met the cramped but meticulous handwriting of Dr. Rezayan for the first time. They were terse entries, none longer than a paragraph. His notes from our first meeting, on September 5, read:
The patient admits to having left her husband and infant son on many occasions. She indulges delusions of pursuing a literary career and shows no insight into her present condition or the consequences of her actions for either herself or her family. Her behavior has been more stable since her admittance, although she is still rather high-strung. She has an arrogant attitude and appears to live in a fantasy. The clinic has obtained copies of the patient’s writings, and upon careful review these documents support the conclusion of a disordered mind.
I was struck by both the brevity of the entry and its assuredness. At the time of its composition Dr. Rezayan had seen me on two occasions, the day he came to my father’s house and the day he interviewed me at the clinic. Each occasion had lasted less than fifteen minutes.
Riffling deeper into the file, I encountered a medical certificate. Under a column dedicated to NATURE OF ILLNESS, I read the words “mental defectiveness.” I read this calmly—almost without feeling—but when I came to the section denoted PROPOSED COURSE OF TREATMENT, I felt my heart drop. There, in the same terse hand, was written “electroshock.”
* * *
—
It always began with the blinking of a red glass bulb set into the wall. A red light blinking and shapes shifting in the darkness, then the smell of rotten eggs mixed with the smell of bleach.
I was taken away early one morning by two men in white smocks and white trousers. In all the time since I’d come to the clinic, I hadn’t seen any men apart from Dr. Rezayan, and many days had passed since then. One of them grabbed my shoulder and gave it a rough shake. They marched me to a part of the clinic I hadn’t seen before. The pills made me sleepy and I had no fight in me. We continued to the end of the corridor, past the bathhouse. The rooms were silent now, the faucets still, the only sound the slap of my rubber slippers and the men’s heeled boots against the tiled floors.
“Miss Farrokhzad,” came a voice as I was led into a dimly lit room.
Another man in a white smock. It took me a moment to realize it was Dr. Rezayan, as I had never seen him without his suit and lavender tie. I was lifted onto a high table, and the men tied my arms and my legs to the bed. The blue-eyed nurse appeared and snapped on a pair of black rubber gloves. She smeared a gel on my temples, and I remember watching her hands with a slow fascination. I remember my gown sliding up my bare thighs, the heaviness of the restraints at my wrists and ankles, the nearly tender smile w
ith which the nurse readied me for what would come next.
The red light pulsed on and off. From the corner of my eye I saw a pair of long metal clamps, and then I heard the snap of the rubber against my head. Fear shot through the fog and all at once I was awake. But it was too late. When I opened my mouth to scream, a piece of black rubber was thrust between my teeth. The blue-eyed nurse bore down on me with her hands, pushing my legs against the table. I heard a strange clanging noise, and then a steady electric whine started up from somewhere behind me. The red lamp blinked on and off frantically, the first jolt of electricity ripped through my skull, and the room filled with the scent of my body’s burning.
That night I witnessed my own burial. In my dream I was lowered into a grave and covered with soil. The dark squelching earth shifted and heaved around my body; dirt filled my mouth and worms crawled over me; the hairy roots of the trees encircled my neck and entangled my arms and my legs. I jerked about, desperate to free myself, but with each movement I only buried myself deeper into the earth, deeper into death and decay. Then the dream changed. All at once there was no earth, no worms or roots, only my body caught in a vast white expanse.
I woke to sheets wet with perspiration, my gown twisted in my legs, and four pairs of bright red welts encircling my wrists and my ankles. I was gasping for breath. Pari was gone, though it would be days before I registered her absence. The first effects of the treatment—anxiety and jitteriness—only confirmed the need for more treatments. Whatever my reaction, stupor or violence, it ensured only more-frequent sessions of shock and heavier doses of pills. That dream burial came again and again, haunting me all day and flooding me with dread. Too scared to even close my eyes, I lay in bed, the shock reverberating through my bones. I studied the walls, the textures of light, the now-constant trembling and twitching of my hands.
* * *
—
“You’re better,” the blue-eyed nurse told me with the gentle smile reserved for the insane. “Much calmer. Much more at peace,” she said, patting my hand. “It won’t be long now until you’re well enough to go home.”
Home? The word snagged in my mind. Did she mean back to Ahwaz or to the Colonel’s house in Tehran? I had no idea.
I couldn’t rid myself of my nightmares, but I’d lost my memories. I didn’t remember the treatments. I simply had no recollection of what had been done to me or even of how many days had passed since I’d been brought to the clinic. Faces that were familiar to me—Pari’s face, the face of the blue-eyed nurse—became unrecognizable. Worse, I could remember hardly anything from the time before I’d been brought here. I forgot that I’d been married and that I’d left my husband. I forgot the words to every poem I’d ever learned, including the ones I’d written myself. I didn’t forget Kami—something in me held him fast—but for a time I did forget his face and, I think, even his name.
When my memory started coming back, with it came the worry of where I would go if I were ever released. Not long after the shock treatments began, I received a letter from one of my older brothers—a short, cold letter, asking and admitting nothing but stating that I should be grateful for his help. “I am sorry you have been ill, sister,” my brother wrote. “I am pleased to know, however, that you’ve made such good progress in these last few weeks. I have spoken with Parviz and he does not forbid your return. It has been difficult to prevail over his mother’s objections, particularly after so long a separation, but I am hopeful you’ll be able to return to Ahwaz whenever it’s determined that you’ve fully recovered.”
I pushed away my thoughts of home and turned my attention to one question: Who else besides me was getting shock treatments? It suddenly felt very important to figure it out. Maybe if I knew that, I could figure out how to make it stop. At first I thought only the women who caused trouble were punished, the ones who cried at night or screamed in the halls, but then I saw it was also the women who never spoke. I knew it from their hands. The woman who painted her eyelashes with thick coats of mascara, two circles of rouge on her cheeks, and the bright pink lips of a doll—she got them, too. Limbs could be still or restless, expressions mild or anguished, but we all had the same shaking fingers.
Apart from the time I bit that girl, I hadn’t been violent, but one day I thrust my hand between the metal bars and punched through the window of my room. I didn’t feel the pain, not when the glass shattered and not when shards cut my hands. I wanted to see the sky. That day I was taken to the chamber to be stripped of my gown and confined for two nights in the isolation chamber, the only torture worse than shock. After that I learned not to scream, because when I screamed they came with their needles, their pills, their restraints, and by then I knew it was better to hide my fear than to cry out.
* * *
One day in October, just after two o’clock in the afternoon, two women slipped through the gates of an old mansion in Niavaran and into a car parked under the shade of the plane and cypress trees. One wore a blue coat draped over a plain white nightgown, the other a green silk dress and high-heeled shoes. They walked shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm. When they reached the courtyard, the one in the nightgown looked up at the sky, shading her eyes and working out the last time she’d seen the sun.
Most of my memories of the Rezayan Clinic would return to me as memories often do: splintered and strange. Others I’d lose forever. But my memory of the day Leila came for me would always be whole, perfect, and true.
She appeared at the foot of my bed one morning. I was alone in the room—Pari was gone and I hadn’t been assigned another roommate. Leila leaned toward me and smoothed her gloved hand over my forehead. I woke to her dark eyes watching me. I had the feeling she’d been standing there for some time. It must have startled her to see me so changed—my puffy face, my bloated stomach—but when she spoke she said only, “You’re leaving this place today. I’ve arranged everything, Forugh.”
She pulled open the closet and found it bare except for one skirt and a pair of shoes. I was drowsy, my movements heavy and slow, and when I stood I had to lean on her arm to steady myself. When she saw that the zipper on the skirt wouldn’t close, she pulled the skirt off and hung it back in the closet. She took off her coat and dressed me in it, pulling my arms through the sleeves and straightening the collar for me. Next, she placed my shoes before me. When I stepped into them they felt strange on my feet—tight and bulky. Leila took a comb from her purse and pulled it through my tangled curls, unloosened her scarf from her neck, and used it to tie my hair back in a low ponytail. All this she did with a quiet and sure touch.
When she finished dressing me she took my arm, hooked it under hers, and led me from the room. In the hallway, a few of the women lifted their eyes to watch us as we made our way down the hall together. When we passed her, the blue-eyed nurse looked up for an instant, then turned quickly away. I was sure someone would try to stop us, but no one did.
Outside, the light was so bright I had to squint. I lingered for a moment by the door, staring at the mottled yellow leaves at my feet. Later I worked out that I’d been at the clinic for a month, though at the time I couldn’t have said if days or years had passed. That morning all I knew was that I’d missed the first days of autumn. The plane trees were bare, and it wouldn’t be long before the year’s first snowfall. I threw a glance over my shoulder for one last look at the clinic, but Leila pulled me away, gently but insistently. I followed her. We’d met only twice before this day, but I never questioned the conviction in her voice when she said, “I’ve arranged everything, Forugh.” She drew me close, and I bent toward the balm of her voice. I had no idea how she managed to secure my release or where she’d take me from here, but it didn’t matter. My brain still hummed from the force of the electric shocks, the terror of the isolation room, and the vast quantity of tranquilizers and sedatives, but I wasn’t too far gone to know that by taking me away, she was doing something no less astonishing than saving my life.
PART THREE
Reborn
18.
I’ll greet the sun again.
I’ll greet the stream that flowed within me,
the clouds that were my tallest thoughts,
the aspens in the garden
that endured seasons of drought with me,
the flock of crows that brought me
the scent of the fields at night,
my mother who lived in the mirror and
reflected the face of my old age,
the burning womb
my lust has filled with green seeds.
I’ll greet them all again.
—from “I Will Greet the Sun Again”
Years ago, when spring came to Tehran, the gypsies walked down from the mountainside with their arms full of branches from the white mulberry trees. Even the little ones came with the branches balanced on the tops of their heads or clutched against their chests. The gypsies had black eyes and wore bright patterned kerchiefs and flounced skirts that skimmed the ground. Their feet were always bare. The mulberries they brought down from the mountains were sweet, round, and hard. When people in the city saw the gypsies approach from the distance, they went down to the street to greet them, and the longer and more bitter the winter, the greater people’s delight in their return. From street to street, alleyway to alleyway, everyone pressed fat coins into the gypsies’ palms because it was the New Year, the time for generosity, forgiveness, and hope.
When spring came that year, anybody passing through Tehran would have looked up toward Mount Damavand and seen it, the promise of a new beginning. The meadows in the foothills were thick with poppies, tulips, and hyacinth; the plane trees were heavy with new leaves; the winds that came down from the mountains cleared the smoggy air. I’d lost my husband, my son, and, very nearly, my life. All that was left, the one thing that survived, but also the thing that pulled at me most fiercely, was my desire to write. I was sad and I’d never be rid of my sadness, but I wasn’t frightened anymore.