Song of a Captive Bird Read online

  The sound of his voice in the alleyway or the thwack of his black boots against the tiles in the foyer sent the seven of us children scurrying. For years, our sleep was freighted with fear of him. We could never be sure if he’d spend the night at home, but we always went to bed already wearing our next day’s clothes, our shoes set carefully on the floor next to our mattresses, our bodies tense and expectant. When he did spend the night in Amiriyeh, he woke us the next morning one by one, girls and boys, youngest and oldest, with a single hard kick of his boot against our ribs. We jerked up, hastily combed our hair, and slipped on our shoes. Fumbling and tripping and rubbing sleep from our eyes, we filed out of our rooms, proceeded down the corridor, and descended the curved staircase. The servants were still asleep in their own quarters and our mother hadn’t yet risen for her morning prayers; the house at that hour was therefore completely quiet and still.

  The Colonel stood waiting for us in the hall. He was dressed, as ever, in full military regalia, his hair oiled, combed, and meticulously parted, and the tips of his mustache tweaked up with wax. He stood next to his prized gramophone. Its huge brass funnel gleamed in the dark. With one hand, he held the gramophone needle aloft; with the other he grasped the handle of a silver-tipped cane.

  We assembled before him and he inspected us one by one. “Stand taller!” he ordered. “Backs straight! Chins up!” Tousled hair, untucked shirts, and yawns earned us pinched ears—or worse.

  “Now!” he called out, rapping his cane against the tiles three times in quick succession. He lowered the needle, and military marches boomed from the gramophone. We commenced our morning drills. We bent and straightened our legs, lifted and flexed our arms, marched in place. Always, we kept our eyes fixed on an imagined point beyond him; one look directly in his eyes and he whipped his cane against our thighs or our buttocks. We knew if we cried he’d only bring the cane down harder until we stopped. We didn’t cry.

  You see, the rules of the Colonel’s house would always be the rules of our king, the shah: Strike first, show no mercy, and trust no one.

  * * *

  —

  In his determination to shape his own destiny, the Colonel had much in common with the shah. One day in 1926, nine years before I was born, a former peasant and illiterate soldier named Reza Khan drew a blue pearl-trimmed cloak over his military uniform, marched into the great mirrored hall of Golestan Palace, and crowned himself king of Iran. The spectacle was the latest in an already extraordinary sequence of events. Over the previous decades, as the Qajar monarchs married Oriental opulence to European splendor, Reza Khan, a commoner from one of the remotest and most impoverished regions of the country, watched. He watched as they handed the British, the French, and other Europeans Iran’s land, artifacts, minerals, and, most ruinously, the nation’s lifeblood, its oil. He watched and he seethed. Uneducated and unsophisticated as he was, he had a sharp sense of both his country’s past grandeur and his own destiny. He became a soldier, colonel, prime minister, and, finally, by force of his own extraordinary will, king of Iran.

  Accustomed as they were to the elegance of the Qajar kings and princes, many who attended the coronation sneered secretly at the new king’s gruff manners and provincial ways. It was said that even as he seized the country’s most sumptuous palaces and fertile lands for himself, the shah hadn’t given up his habit of unrolling a mat on the floor each night and sleeping on the ground like a peasant. But those who mocked him did so quietly, because while his manners might have been in question, by the time he crowned himself king no one doubted Reza Shah’s temper or the brutality with which he expressed it.

  At six feet four inches, my father, the Colonel, was one of the few men in Iran tall enough to meet the shah’s eyes. The Colonel, too, had been born in a small village, Tafresh, one hundred miles southwest of Tehran. His people had something of a reputation for learning, but he didn’t care to follow the well-worn tracks of his forebears. At an early age, he abandoned his ancestral home and enlisted as a soldier in the Cossack brigade. By this time, Reza Shah had assembled a massive army and equally massive civil bureaucracy, razed the country’s weathered and derelict buildings, cut broad boulevards where there had once been only dirt alleyways, and, in his determination to eradicate every last trace of Oriental backwardness, proceeded to rid Iran of camels, donkeys, beggars, and dervishes. Through all this, the Colonel stood at the shah’s vanguard, bound in service until death.

  * * *

  —

  His first wife was my mother, Turan. She had thick black hair, full lips, and a slender figure. In previous generations, skinniness was considered undesirable in a woman, but by the 1920s, the years of my mother’s girlhood, it qualified as an asset in certain quarters. Certainly, it proved so for my mother. Standing among her plump, pigtailed sisters in identical drop-waist cotton dresses in the courtyard of their girlhood home, she alone carried off the new style and smiled with a subtle but distinct awareness of her advantage.

  Still, she didn’t know if her figure was sufficient to overcome the handicap of her olive-toned complexion. If modernization had suddenly made skinniness desirable in a girl, it only increased tenfold the value of fair skin. When Turan passed her fourteenth birthday without a single decent suitor, her mother redoubled her efforts to lighten her daughter’s complexion. She resorted to an array of tonics, lotions, oils, and tinctures, but Turan’s skin only seemed to grow darker by the day.

  To her family’s relief, Turan eventually managed to secure not just an adequate suitor but one who was quickly ascending the ranks of the shah’s army. It happened like this: After an absence of many years, the Colonel, now thirty-one, appeared in his family home in Tafresh to announce his intention to marry. He gave his mother curt but very specific instructions. “A slender girl,” he said. With this, his mother set out at once for the bathhouse to make an inventory of the village’s marriageable young girls. In the end, she chose my mother from a bevy of others she herself judged far prettier but whom her son was certain to reject.

  My mother was fifteen when she married. “You’re leaving this house in white,” her own mother whispered in her ear on the eve of the wedding, by which it was meant she belonged now to her husband and should not return to her parents’ home except in a white funeral shroud. She’d seen her husband just twice before their wedding, and both times she’d been accompanied by a chaperone, but this contact was sufficient to qualify in those days as a “love match.” My mother would not have expected happiness in marriage (she’d been brought up expressly to dismiss the hope, much less the expectation, of this), but whatever fear or doubt she felt did not stop her from turning her face toward the future, which is to say toward her husband.

  Her first test came soon after their wedding, when my father was sent to the foothills of the Alborz Mountains to guard the king and his family during their summer holidays. I once saw a picture of her from that time. The photograph had lovely scalloped edges and it carried the royal photographer’s seal. In it, my parents stood two feet apart, sunshine dappling the beech trees and high mountains behind them. The Colonel was dressed in the costume of the Cossack brigade: a white tunic, black trousers, and tall leather boots. He was strikingly handsome, but it was my mother who transfixed me. She wore a pair of riding breeches, a white button-down shirt, and a silk scarf knotted prettily at her throat. I guessed she’d been horseback riding out in the foothills. The wind pulled tendrils of hair across her face, and with one hand she tucked a loose strand behind her ear. She smiled not only with her mouth but also with her eyes. That she might have known something of daring and pleasure was strangely fascinating to me.

  Later, when Reza Shah outlawed the veil, a select contingent of his highest-ranking soldiers, ministers, and associates rounded up their wives and ordered them to appear, unveiled, before him. In the ensuing reappraisal of wardrobes, no accessory proved so telling an answer to the king’s new law as the hats the women wore. The pious wives chose large feathered h
ats pulled low over their eyes—the closest approximation to a veil they could find without inciting the king’s rage—while the less modest preferred tiny hats balanced at jaunty angles, and the downright brazen appeared with no hats at all.

  With a blaring of car horns, the flotilla of unveiled women crept along Avenue Pahlavi at a slowness calculated to give the citizens of Tehran the longest possible view of their women’s future. Soon, unveiled women would be showered with insults and, in some neighborhoods of the city, with fistfuls of stones. It wasn’t only the mullahs who’d protest the shah’s new law; thousands of women refused to set foot outside their homes once the veil was banned. But on that day, the people of Tehran were as yet too shocked to curse the king, stone the women, retreat to their homes, or even, perhaps, appeal to God.

  I have no pictures of my mother from the occasion, but I imagine her sitting beside the Colonel as their black Mercedes proceeds slowly up Avenue Pahlavi. She’s wearing a two-piece skirt suit and a cloche hat adorned with a single sweeping plume. Her legs are crossed at the ankle and her gloved hands are clasped in her lap. Even after the ban on veiling was lifted some years later, she never again wore a veil except when she prayed, attended a funeral, or made a pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad. She dyed her black hair a reddish brown, wore corsets and seamed stockings, tailored her dresses to show off her narrow waist, and never stepped into the streets without a slash of red lipstick on her mouth.

  * * *

  —

  But all of this was before I knew her, before she was my mother and I became the daughter who brought her so much shame.

  In my first true memories of her, she stands in the walled garden in Amiriyeh, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand and holding a watering can in the other. It’s late summer and the garden is full of roses, nasturtium, and honeysuckle. Bees drone in the flower beds; sparrows and robins fill the pine and cypress trees. A long rectangular pool, or hoz, runs the length of the courtyard. Its tiles are a deep blue and the afternoon sunlight scatters diamonds across its surface.

  My mother’s joy was this garden. Here her face softened and her gaze turned kind. She set out huge clay pots of flowers in the courtyard, which she used to decorate the house, and also smaller pots for the mint, parsley, and basil she trimmed for her stews. In the mornings, she pumped water from the cistern and doused her plants one by one with a small tin watering can. For many years, water came to our house from a mountain spring by way of the Water Bearer, a wiry old man who piled giant earthenware jugs onto a horse-drawn cart and rode through the streets of Tehran selling fresh water. The contents of the jugs were stored in an underground cistern and carefully apportioned to last the whole week.

  Come spring, with the first few warm days of the year, servants spread carpets under the loggia in the garden. There, under a canopy trained with thick, velvety roses, my mother and her friends took their tea. On long summer afternoons, as dusk gathered around them, they nibbled on cookies and cracked watermelon seeds, gossiping, bickering, and confiding. They talked until the sky turned dark and the time came to dust their skirts and plant noisy kisses on one another’s cheeks. They always left with promises to resume their conversations the next day.

  My older sister, Puran, and I played at the far end of the garden, spying on my mother and her friends or else lost to our own stories and games. We loved the garden but in the ways natural to children. I’d splashed about in that narrow, blue-tiled hoz, and so did all of my siblings. Mischievous as we were, we wouldn’t dare pick even one of our mother’s roses, but Puran and I freely plucked sprigs of jasmine and honeysuckle that grew so luxuriously along the garden’s stone walls. We looped sour cherries over our earlobes and wore them as earrings; we stuck pink dahlia petals on our fingernails to imitate the women’s pretty manicures. We knitted acacia blossoms into garlands for each other and wore the sweet white flowers on our heads like crowns. Sitting cross-legged under one of the many large fruit trees—quince, pomegranate, pear—I told my sister all my secrets, and she told me hers.

  In the evenings, the garden belonged to our father and his military comrades. Servants spread silk carpets under the loggia and heaped up piles of brocade cushions. The samovar was filled with fresh water and set gurgling with a heap of coal; trays of sweets and fruit were assembled; and the air filled with the thick sweetness of smoke and rose essence rising from gilt-trimmed water pipes. Sometimes my father summoned my brothers to join the gathering, but we girls were strictly forbidden from showing ourselves to anyone. Yet the men’s voices reached us even in the house, and we hid by a window along the upstairs corridor, cracked it open a few inches, and listened from there. Eventually, the men’s talk of politics gave way to poetry. The recitations could begin with a quatrain from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat:

  I need a jug of wine and a book of poetry,

  Half a loaf for a bite to eat,

  Then you and I, seated in a deserted spot,

  Will have more wealth than a Sultan’s realm.

  To which a voice might answer with a poem by Rumi:

  My arrow of love

  has arrived at the target

  I am in the house of mercy

  and my heart

  is a place of prayer.

  These gatherings went on for hours, with one guest after another reciting poems of the Persian masters—Rumi, Khayyam, Sa’adi, and Hafez. That my father, the Colonel, who could make us cower with a single sidelong glance, produced the most skillful recitations both bewildered and fascinated me. His voice had a deep timbre perfectly suited to reciting verse, and the frequent cries of “Lovely!” and “Exquisite!” roused him to ever more passionate declamation.

  I listened from behind the window, enraptured by the music of a language that can sometimes sound like susurrations of a lover and sometimes like the reed’s plaintive song. The words hooked into me and wouldn’t let me go. Rivers, oceans, and deserts, the nightingale and the rose—the perennial symbols of Persian poetry first grew familiar to me through these late-night scenes in the garden, and even though I was still a young girl, only just a child, the verses called me away to different lands.

  No one’s thinking about the flowers,

  No one’s thinking about the fish,

  No one wants to believe the garden is dying,

  that the garden’s heart has swollen

  under the sun,

  that the garden’s mind is slowly

  being drained of its memories of green,

  that the garden’s senses are

  rotting in a distant corner.

  —from “I Feel Sorry for the Garden”

  * * *

  —

  “Make it more spacious, more open!” the Colonel ordered with a flourish of his silver-tipped cane one morning in the autumn of 1941.

  For months the streets of Tehran had been filled with tall blue-eyed soldiers. Planes sputtered overhead. Tanks and trucks rumbled through the city. At night the Colonel retired to his study with a glass of araq to listen to the news on his wireless radio. A few times I listened from behind the door, but the broadcast was in English, and I couldn’t make out a thing. If I’d dared ask what was happening (which I didn’t), he would have said it did not concern me and what could I understand of such things anyway?

  I put it together years later. We were an occupied country. To secure Iranian oil fields and ensure supply lines, the Allies invaded Iran. Forced to abdicate in favor of his young son, Reza Shah boarded the ship that would take him first to the island of Mauritius, then to South Africa. For nearly two decades he had ruled Iran with an iron fist; now he was forbidden from ever returning to the country. Month after month Reza Shah would sit, bitter, proud, and broken, in Johannesburg, his eyes trained thousands of miles away, beyond Africa and across the Persian Gulf, toward Iran.

  As ardent a royalist as he was, the Colonel, I’m sure, thought the new shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, with his timidity and his airs, was a sorry sub
stitute for his father. In just a few years, when news came of Reza Shah’s death, he would be grief-stricken. Still, through the countless abominations and humiliations that followed Reza Shah’s ouster, the Colonel never ceased to walk in the streets wearing his military costume and his Pahlavi hat drawn low on his brow.

  To us children, in our nearly absolute ignorance, his gait and his gaze seemed no less assured under the new king. We had no understanding of what was happening in Iran. What we feared were the Colonel’s dark moods and rages, and these we knew well.

  But then he destroyed the garden.

  A band of workers descended on our house in Amiriyeh to transform our garden into a modern, Western-style one. My sister and I watched them from behind a small, darkly tinted window. They yanked out the trees and shrubs by their roots, the cypress, pine, and yew, the fig and the quince; they hacked away the shrubs, piled them high into a truck, and carted them away. In place of the rose beds and pots of geraniums, they laid sod for a lawn. They tore apart and hauled away the old hand pump and installed sprinklers, hoses, and sprays. They poured cement over the blue-tiled rectangular hoz, transforming this part of the garden into a parking space. They planted artificial acacia trees all around the yard, and then, finally, they departed.

  In the coming years, thousands of gardens would be destroyed in Tehran, but it was only much later that I’d discover our garden in Amiriyeh, with all its gorgeous wild blooming, had been among the first. The old Persian gardens were quickly disappearing into oblivion, but despite all the changes that would take place in the coming years, the old walls between houses remained, and we therefore never witnessed the destruction of one another’s gardens. We couldn’t yet imagine what we had lost would be lost again and again.