Song of a Captive Bird Read online

  On those drives through Tehran I felt fearless and unfettered, as if all the old constraints and prohibitions no longer applied to me. Of course, I was wrong. Since leaving the Rezayan Clinic I’d become, once again, a fixture in the gossip columns. My breakdown, so public and so notorious, was a topic of endless debate. Some people insisted I’d faked madness, while others claimed I’d always been mad. My poems were forgeries; my poems were filth. I was said to have taken a dozen lovers since my return to Tehran—more, by some accounts. Men who’d sneered at me and wouldn’t meet my eyes just a few months ago now wrote about our purported love affairs.

  These fictions were also seasoned with rumors of what looked to be an unnatural friendship between the daughter of a prominent and wealthy Qajar prince and me. Everyone knew that Leila Farmayan had taken me in, that we were living together at her garden estate outside Tehran, and more than once we were seen riding through the foothills in her car, the city to our backs as we climbed northward toward Damavand, stopping alongside meadows and creeks to share a picnic and take turns drinking from a flask of wine.

  While a woman of her class was freer than most women, Leila’s standing didn’t completely shield her from gossip. Our names were never explicitly linked in the papers, but I guessed that even people who sought Leila’s patronage spread rumors about us. A male lover was one thing, but two women living together? That wasn’t just sinful; it was downright deviant.

  Leila shrugged it all off. “Actually,” she told me one day, “I should thank you. You see, all this gossip has deflected attention from a messy breakup that would otherwise be the talk of the town.”

  “You mean,” I said, picking up on her teasing tone, “that you didn’t realize how useful it would be to befriend a reprobate?”

  She tossed back her head and laughed. “No, but I won’t take it for granted from here on out. I promise you that.”

  We were never lovers, not in the way people assumed. It would seem to me later that Leila’s tenderness toward me was an expression of the warmth and openness that were her nature, and yet there were nights when, sitting on a stool beside the footed tub and chatting with her as she bathed, the air heavy with the scent of rose water and music streaming from the record player in the next room, I felt joy surge through my chest. When I ran a washcloth along her shoulders and then down the slope of her back toward her waist, it was nothing I hadn’t done hundreds of times for my sister, but with Leila these gestures lost their innocence. A soft moan escaped her mouth, she shifted her legs in the soapy water, and it became impossible to ignore her pleasure, which was nothing less than the pleasure of being alive.

  19.

  Our idyll cracked apart one day in January.

  “A letter’s just come for you,” Leila said one morning at breakfast. She pulled it from the pocket of her skirt and slid it across the table. It was a pale-blue envelope, thin as tissue paper and stamped with an official seal. The return address listed a government ministry in Tehran.

  “Here,” said Leila, handing me a clean knife to tear the seal.

  I could sense her watching me. “Do you want me to go?” she asked.

  I lifted my eyes and shook my head. I took a long gulp of tea and then turned the envelope over.

  Inside I found a single sheet of paper in the same shade of blue. It was very thin and the edges were crisp. A legal notice—brief, conveying only and precisely what was necessary. I read it once. Felt my heart drop, blinked hard, and read it again.

  “What is it, Forugh?”

  It took me a moment to get the words out. “The divorce has been finalized and…”

  “Yes?”

  “Parviz has been granted full custody of Kami.”

  Leila parted, then closed, her lips.

  My head was whirring. Children belonged to their fathers—everyone knew that. It was both custom and law. Parviz might have allowed me visitation rights, but of course his mother would have persuaded him against that. He’d pressed for full custody of Kami and now he had it. There’d been no hearing and there was no redress; it all happened quickly and as a matter of course.

  We sat for a while without saying anything. It was one thing to accept the divorce—Parviz and I had been separated for months and I understood that divorce was inevitable—but it was quite another thing for me to accept the consequence it entailed: to be separated permanently from Kami. Despair was sinking into my bones. I thought I might be sick. I slumped down in my chair and raised my eyes to the ceiling. I was staring up in a daze—how long, I don’t know—when Leila pulled her chair closer to mine. Tears filled my eyes and then fell hot and fast against my cheeks.

  “Do you think there’s anything I can do?” I managed to ask her after a time.

  I was still holding the letter, though it now was crumpled and smudged. I held it out to her and then watched as her irises flicked from line to line. “I think,” she said slowly, her eyes on the notice, “that maybe your father could contest this.”

  “He’d never do that.”

  She looked up and nodded. “In that case, from what I know, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “Because I’m a woman? Is that why?”

  “I’m so sorry, Forugh. If there was any way I could help you fight this, you know I would, but I don’t think there’s anything you—or anyone, for that matter—can do.”

  * * *

  —

  I knew that I had to change. A few weeks following the divorce letter, a package arrived from Parviz. It was filled with what I’d left behind in Ahwaz. The little bits and pieces I owned were mostly worthless. A few hand-sewn dresses and a pair of secondhand high-heeled shoes; a cake of soap and a half-used jar of face cream, two tubes of lipstick; some pictures of Kami and my family that I’d kept taped to the bedroom mirror. Down toward the bottom of the box I found a stack of old diaries and copies of my first published poems. I sat down cross-legged on the floor and spread the diaries out in front of me. I paged through them, remembering so clearly the hours I’d spent writing down my thoughts, my memories, my hopes for the future. I’d scribbled letters and poems to Kami in those journals. Even so, it was like gazing at someone else’s past. I thought for a moment of holding on to the diaries, but instead I put them back into the box along with the other things. I kept only the poems and the photographs. Everything else I threw away.

  On my way from the trash bin, I slipped downstairs, rummaged in a storage pantry, and eventually found what I needed: a pair of brass scissors. They felt cold and heavy in my hands. Back in my room I stood before the mirror and looked at myself: blotchy skin, eyes purpled with shadows, long, scraggly hair. I looked miserable and afraid. My father had done this to me, I realized. Parviz and his mother had done this to me. But for the first time in many awful days, I thought, I won’t let them do this to me anymore.

  I raked my fingers through my hair to unloosen the tangles and then lifted the scissors. I cut one inch, then another. When I stepped back and looked at myself, what I saw encouraged me. With this chin-length bob my eyes looked bigger, and my square jaw was more prominent. I was much less feminine like this, but it was as if I’d come into focus, and as I turned my head one way and then another, hope flickered in my heart.

  Day by day pain slackened its grip. It would never stop hurting—I knew this—but eventually I sought refuge in a quiet vow: somehow I’d figure out a way to see Kami again. Until then it was vital that I make something of myself. And this, now, was my chance to do it.

  I had no concrete goals yet, but I’d started making notes in my journal for some new poems. I could stay up writing long past midnight, if the urge struck, and then sleep until noon the next day if I wanted. I could go into the countryside and take photographs. I spent long hours in the sun by the window, staring at the foothills of Damavand. Alone in the library, I ran my hands along the rows of books there. Rousseau, Molière, Dumas. Colette, Sand, de Beauvoir, Verlaine. My English was bad and my French was even worse, but there wer
e several shelves of Iranian poets—Khayyam, Sa’adi, Hafez, and Rumi—and some days I’d pull down a thick gold-embossed volume and settle onto a couch for an afternoon of study. A whole week could pass without my speaking to anyone; Leila’s quiet presence was the sole interruption of my reading and writing. I didn’t have to answer to anyone but myself. I was alone and on my own for the first time in my life.

  “I sent out some new poems today,” I said as I helped myself to another portion of saffron pudding one night.

  Leila smiled. “What are they about?”

  “The divorce,” I said. “Kami. What’s happened to me these last few years. Sometimes I think I’ll never be done with the past, or at least this part of it.”

  “You’re finished with bothering what your husband or family thinks about your writing, that’s the main thing. Now, write the poems you’re meant to write.”

  I did. Not long after I left the Rezayan Clinic, the publisher of my first book contacted me to inquire about a new collection. I got to work immediately.

  “What will you call it?” Leila asked when I was preparing the book for submission. It was far from complete, but as I held the manuscript in my hands now, it felt substantial. I handed her the title page. “The Wall” it read, and under that, in the same bold font, my name, “Forugh Farrokhzad.”

  This is the last lullaby I’ll sing

  at the foot of your cradle.

  May my anguished cries

  echo in the sky of your youth….

  I’ve cast away from the shore of good name

  and a stormy star flares in my heart….

  A day will come when your eyes

  will smart at this painful song.

  You’ll search for me in my words

  and tell yourself: my mother,

  that’s who she was.

  —from “A Poem for You” (Dedicated to my son, Kamyar, with hopes for the future)

  20.

  I remember that first night, when his eyes sought me out from across the room. His trim dark suit, his eager, handsome face, the almost careless way he gestured with his glass as he talked. It was nearly sunset, but heat still rippled the air and sharpened the scents of cigarette smoke and perfume in the room. I knew I should turn away, that I shouldn’t give people more reason to talk, but it was impossible. I watched as his gaze skimmed the guests, drifting past a group of women in full flounced skirts, past their looks of pretty, practiced boredom and their French cigarettes encased in long-stemmed silver holders, and landed, finally, on me.

  To celebrate the summer solstice and the first warm days of the season, Leila always opened her house to her wide circle of friends. Two years had passed since I first came to live with her, but I hadn’t felt up to attending last year’s solstice celebration and had spent the night alone in my room. I was feeling much better this year—I was back to my previous weight, my skin was brighter, and my bobbed hair was thick and glossy, with a saucy flip—though even now my hands still trembled from the shock treatments and my headaches sometimes lasted for days.

  I made my way downstairs a little after five in the evening, stopping on the landing to admire a vase of massive pink peonies. The house looked particularly beautiful that night. All the windows and French doors were thrown open; lanterns were hung from the trees in the garden; smoking pipes were lit and scented with rose water; albums were stacked by the record player. At dusk there was a distant ring of the doorbell—the guests had begun to arrive. Save a few, they were all men, and the ease and confidence of Leila’s conversations with them fascinated me. I observed her from a distance, slowly sipping a glass of wine. She could sit listening quietly for a long time and then suddenly utter the most piquant comment. Just now she’d tossed her head back in laughter, exposing her perfect creamy throat.

  All of a sudden a hand gripped my forearm. “Are you the infamous Forugh?” asked a man. I wrenched myself free and told him I was. He wore one of the skinny black ties that were fashionable then. Between puffs from a thin cigarette, he told me he’d just come from Paris, where he’d been completing his degree at the Sorbonne and working on a translation of some French avant-garde poet. When I admitted I hadn’t heard of the poet, he looked annoyed and launched into a lecture about this “god of letters.”

  I begged off, slinking back into the drawing room, where I caught parts of a heated conversation. There was talk of the streets. Protesters. Shoolooqi—trouble. Just that morning a riot had broken out in Tehran. Windows had been shattered in one of the wealthier quarters of the city, where many Europeans and Americans lived and worked.

  All night I’d been aware I was being watched—a sensitivity I’d never be fully cured of—but for the moment the men were too embroiled in their argument to pay me much mind. I took a few steps closer so that I could make out more of their conversation.

  “It’s the Tudeh,” said a man. “Those communists. They’re stirring up trouble again.”

  “And why shouldn’t they?” someone else chimed in. His hair was white and long, almost like a dervish’s. Despite the warm weather, he wore a brown nubby-looking three-piece suit.

  “How do you mean, Mr. Kamaliazad?”

  “I mean that trouble’s precisely what we need. It’s 1957. It’s been four years since the coup, and look at where we are! The king’s nothing but a puppet for the West.” He shook his head. “What other chance do we have for ending imperialism and the shah’s dictatorship? And who else is better positioned to do it than the Tudeh?”

  “But by supporting the Tudeh, we’d only trade one tyrant for another. Instead of the British and Americans we’d have the Soviets forcing the shah’s hand, and then you can forget about democracy.”

  “That’s true,” came a voice. “Look what happened in China and Cuba.”

  A contemplative silence fell, followed by the assertion: “We’ve made a grave mistake basing our economy on oil.”

  “What choice did we have, exactly? How could we have made any progress toward modernization without selling our oil to the West?”

  “You mean giving it to them,” said the man with the wild white hair. “The men who brokered all those deals with the English and then the Americans have never been on the side of the people. They never planned to share the profits with the rest of the country, and they haven’t. But who is there to blame but ourselves? We were foolish enough to think they’d act in the people’s best interests.”

  “Well, for better or worse, oil is Iran’s best hope for the future.”

  “No. A revolution is Iran’s best hope.”

  “Even if it brings bloodshed?”

  “However much we want to deny it, nothing can change in this country without armed opposition.”

  “But a revolution can’t happen here. Not on the West’s watch.”

  “Open your eyes, gentlemen. Look around. It’s already happening.”

  At this the air in the room tightened and the conversation ceased. I hung back, taking a long sip of wine, watching the men and thinking about what they’d said. The talk of armed insurgency and revolution startled me. I’d been working almost constantly on Rebellion, my third book, and these last weeks I’d been oblivious to what was happening beyond Leila’s garden walls.

  I’d soon come to know the group and their theories well: the leftist philosopher Reza Kamaliazad, with his wild white hair and brown three-piece suit; the avant-garde writer Mansour Javadi, who bullied his way through debates, continuously pulling at his thin mustache and pushing his rimless round glasses farther up onto his nose; and the film director Darius Golshiri, the one who spoke the least but whose authority no one, not even the most sarcastic members of the group, challenged. The Lion—that’s what people called him. I’d seen photographs of Golshiri in the newspaper and I placed him right away. I saw now how well the nickname suited him. He was very tall, with broad shoulders and an athlete’s build that were perfectly accentuated by his tailored suit. Handsome, almost absurdly so. The set of his jaw, h
is way of holding a glass of whiskey, the cigarette pressed between the tips of two fingers—I took in each detail.

  Eventually the talk started up again, but now the subject turned to literature and books. Someone mentioned a new French translation of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. Glasses were refilled with whiskey and wine, emptied and then filled again; ashtrays overflowed; and verses from Hafez’s and Rumi’s poems peppered the conversation.

  Then, during a lull in the conversation, Darius Golshiri glanced in my direction and caught me looking at him. I felt a rush of nervousness. I wasn’t ready for him; I was totally unprepared. He stepped forward and extended his hand as he introduced himself. When he came close I noticed the roughness of his cheek, the fullness of his lower lip, the tiny lines that fanned out from the corners of his eyes.

  Smile, Forugh, I told myself. I held out my hand. “Forugh,” I said quickly. “Forugh Farrokhzad.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I know your name. I just saw a few of your poems in the recent issue of…” He narrowed his eyes, straining to place my work.

  I supplied him with the title of the journal that had recently run some of my poems.

  “Yes, that’s it. Those were the purest, most original things I’ve read in a long while.” He took a drag of his cigarette, then added, “Stunning, really.”

  “Stunning,” he’d said. His exact word. He fixed me with his hazel eyes and said it again: “Stunning.”