Song of a Captive Bird Read online

At this all eyes turned toward me. Even the man with the round glasses looked my way, his indifference punctured by Golshiri’s compliment of my work. “Have you published a book?” the man asked loudly.

  “I have. Two, actually.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” I continued, careful to keep my mouth set in a smile. “And I’m putting together a new manuscript just now. It’ll be out next year with Amir Kabir Press.”

  He drew on his pipe and tilted his head to study me, and I watched his eyes narrow behind the round frames and then disappear in the hard white glint of his spectacles. “I see,” he said, and then turned to his companion. “It’s truly extraordinary how many women have taken to scribbling poems these days, isn’t it, gentlemen?”

  The smoke from his pipe enveloped me in a spicy, acrid odor, and I gave a cough.

  “A true mark of progress,” answered Javadi with a barely muted smirk.

  I felt myself bristle, but already they’d introduced a new topic.

  “We were just discussing the new film by Max Ophuls. Have you seen it, Miss Farrokhzad?” Javadi asked.

  “I haven’t.”

  “The lady is a writer,” Kamaliazad interjected. “She can’t exactly be expected to follow the latest European cinema!”

  “But surely she takes an interest in other artistic forms?” Golshiri said. This last part of the discussion had unfolded as if I weren’t present at all, but now the men turned to face me. “Wouldn’t you say, Miss Farrokhzad, that a broad interest in the arts is necessary to the development of one’s poetic sensibility?”

  “Absolutely. An artist should expand her education beyond her own discipline, but such an education doesn’t come easily to everyone, and to most women it doesn’t come at all.”

  Javadi narrowed his eyes. “Are you a feminist, Miss Farrokhzad?”

  “Don’t harass the woman!” Kamaliazad said, presumably in my defense.

  “You do read fiction, though, don’t you, Miss Farrokhzad?” said Javadi, amused behind his spectacles.

  “Of course—”

  “Then perhaps you can offer us your opinion of a recently published work.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Void. Do you know it?”

  I was worried he’d bring up an unfamiliar title, but I recognized this one immediately. Touted as the season’s must-read, the story wasn’t even a story. It was an obscure and rambling philosophical meditation, the work of some pretentious hack whose name I couldn’t recall.

  I turned to Javadi. “While I haven’t had the opportunity to attend university or familiarize myself with foreign films, I’ve always thought that in a work of art the audience matters much more than the artist. The Void fails on that count.”

  “Do tell us more, Miss Farrokhzad,” Kamaliazad urged.

  “Well,” I started, “it seems to me the only point of that story was to prove the reader’s stupidity, and to me that’s an arrogant and hollow gesture.”

  A strange silence fell over the group. “Mr. Javadi,” said Kamaliazad, addressing the man in the round spectacles, “you must thank this young lady for offering you such an honest critique of your work.”

  I looked at Kamaliazad, then at Javadi, desperate to know if this was a joke. It wasn’t.

  “I’ll forgo the thanks,” Javadi said, his eyes locked on mine, “but I do have a question for you, Miss Farrokhzad.”

  My face burned. “Yes?”

  “What if people are stupid?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Let me put it this way: Should an artist reduce himself to the lowest level of intelligence of the people around him—or indeed of those in front of him?”

  The hostility of these last words erased my embarrassment. “By insulting people’s intelligence you lose any chance to educate them, and in refusing the validity of their perspective you’ve denied yourself the main purpose of making art.”

  It was Darius Golshiri who spoke next. “Which is what?” he asked.

  “You surely have your own theories, Mr. Golshiri.”

  “But if you were to say, Miss Farrokhzad?”

  “Connection,” I said. “Not just between one idea and another, but between people.”

  He nodded just slightly, then smiled in a way I took as assent. Perhaps even admiration. I lifted my chin, drew a deep breath, and smiled back.

  * * *

  —

  Whatever force it was that had led me so far from where I should have been, from the sort of life I was supposed to be living—well, I hadn’t left that part of myself behind. It was still inside me and now it was pulling me in a new direction.

  The party ended hours after midnight, when darkness began to give way to the tint of dawn. “Tell me about Darius Golshiri,” I asked Leila when the last of the guests had left. “Do you know him well?”

  She was well past tipsy and her eyes shone. With a glass of wine still in one hand, she slipped her other arm around my waist and together we climbed the stairs. “Our families were close, so I’ve known him for years, but nobody really knows ‘The Lion,’ which of course only convinces people of his genius. He started out as a stringer for American news outlets. Now everyone’s saying he’s the first really important Iranian director. International audiences and all that.”

  When we reached the landing, she paused to fix the strap on her dress. “I’ve heard he likes hiring people with very little—sometimes even no—experience making movies. Poets and writers especially.”

  “Poets and writers? Why’s that?”

  “Don’t you know, Forugh? Ten years ago everybody wanted to be a poet. Now everyone wants to be a filmmaker. They imagine it’s the surest route to fame.” She rolled her eyes. “Darius Golshiri started off as a writer himself, actually. The difference was, he was quite good at it. I don’t really know why he gave it up. Anyway, since opening his own film studio he’s been fetching up writers from all over town and setting them up with work. I heard he just hired Sadeq Chubak to work for him as a screenwriter.”

  “And what’s he like?” I asked as we crossed into her room. “I mean, apart from his films.”

  “Arrogant,” she said, and sat on the edge of her bed. “Uncompromising.” She unclipped her earrings, stepped from her shoes, and started rubbing her feet. She looked up at me and studied my face. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve been thinking of looking for a job,” I said. The words came out quickly. I had no particular plan and it hadn’t occurred to me to ask this question until just this moment, but I felt the argument take on more weight and conviction as I spoke. “If he’s hiring writers, maybe I could find something there. What do you think?”

  Her features creased with worry. “You know you can stay here as long as you like? That you don’t need to worry about work for now?”

  “I know. It’s only that I want to. To work, I mean.”

  She tipped her head to the side and studied me. “And you want to work at Golshiri Studios?”

  “I think I might.”

  She hesitated, and I braced myself for the questions and protests I guessed were coming, but when she spoke she said, “I think that’s a splendid idea.”

  21.

  I pulled up in front of Golshiri Studios in a trim blue sports car. It had been a gift from Leila, the most generous gift I’d ever received. “So you can get back into the world,” she’d explained when she bought it for me a year ago, waving off my protests, “and not have to depend on anyone.” She’d delighted in teaching me to drive. We’d spent a week practicing on the winding back roads behind her house. I loved it at once—loved the feeling of freedom and the momentum pushing me forward, that excitement when I downshifted perfectly, the feeling of the car as an extension of my body, coaxing it through the twisty mountain lanes, getting pushed back against the seat as I floored it down a straight stretch of road.

  Still, that morning I was so nervous that my hands shook as I gripped the steeri
ng wheel, and I drove so slowly I was nearly late to work.

  “So you’re the poet Forugh Farrokhzad!” said a slim-hipped young man named Amir, who met me in the studio on my first day.

  “I am.”

  He looked me up and down. I was dressed in a trench coat, a flared black skirt, and a polka-dot blouse. My heels were low and red. When he was done looking me over, he flashed me a smile and said, “I’ve read your poems.”

  “Really?” I said, shrugging off my coat. “Which ones?”

  “All of them! We used to pass them around at school. The girls were crazy about them. They could recite every single one by heart.”

  I’d heard rumors that “Sin” and some of my more recent poems were circulating among high school– and college-aged girls, but this was my first outright proof of it. I grinned. “How about you? Did you share their enthusiasm?”

  “Oh, I knew more than a few myself. They were very good poems. I bet I could still recite one for you. Would you like me to?”

  “Maybe when we know each other better,” I said, and smiled.

  I expected him to laugh and he did, which told me we’d get on fine.

  I followed Amir to the front room, where he pointed out a bare desk and explained that I’d be working as a receptionist. In the slower hours of the day I’d also be typing out film treatments and synopses. This last part made me nervous. I had no skills, strictly speaking. I wrote my poems by hand and had no occasion to use a typewriter.

  “You’ll catch on soon,” he said when I told him my misgivings. “By the way,” he asked offhandedly, “do you know anything about making movies?”

  “About as much as I know about being a receptionist and much, much less than I do about writing poems.”

  “Well, if your writing’s any indication, you’re more than qualified for this job,” he said. “But why waste your time here?”

  I laughed. “How many poets do you think survive on what they make from their writing?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Exactly, Amir jan. None.”

  I spent that first morning before a small desk in a badly lit, poorly ventilated room, struggling to make sense of the switchboard. The most junior-level assistant in the studio, Amir was also the best copywriter. He worked with furious attention and for most of the day he barely registered my presence, which I understood as the freedom it was. I was lucky to be employed at all; most women rarely worked outside the home. If anyone else at the studio took notice of me at all, they expected me to be barely literate, at best a decorative element, and they didn’t engage me in conversation.

  In the afternoon I ventured in the direction of Darius Golshiri’s office, holding my breath hopefully as I poked around. I hadn’t seen him since Leila’s party, but I’d cast my mind back to that night at least a hundred times. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Couldn’t stop my thoughts from returning, again and again, to his wry smile, the gleam of his hazel eyes. Couldn’t stop trying to guess what his attentions meant, if they meant anything.

  At four o’clock I screwed up my courage and asked Amir when I could expect to see our boss. There was a charged silence in which I felt as if everyone in the building could hear our exchange.

  “Mostly he’s out shooting footage,” he said, and continued marking up some press materials. “Otherwise he’s in his studio in Darrus, up in northern Tehran. He edits everything himself by hand. He’s meticulous. Tireless. Sometimes he stays up there for weeks at a time and we don’t see him around here at all.” He looked up from his work. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” I answered, casting my glance down and pretending to study the file in my hands. I didn’t see Golshiri at all that day—nor would I see him on the second or third. I imagined that after the warmth of our connection at the party he’d be eager to find me at his office, even seek me out, but he didn’t. When he did finally appear at the studio, nearly three weeks later, there was little indication he even knew I’d started working for him.

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon, I arrived home from work and mounted the steps to Leila’s room hurriedly, peeling off my gloves as I went. Amir had solicited my help editing a new script, and I was eager to tell her about it. As it happened, I didn’t get to talk to her at all. Stepping onto the landing outside Leila’s bedroom, I stopped abruptly. Voices were coming from her room. Was it crying I heard? The door was ajar and I peered in cautiously. I caught sight of the back of a man’s long torso, the shine of his black hair. He was young—I guessed about twenty-five or thirty—and tall, with his shoulder blades jutting out from under a thin shirt. Leila was sitting on a chair, her hair covering much of her face. Her palm was flat against her forehead, and tears wet her cheeks.

  I thought if I moved they would see me. I had a vague idea the man might be her lover, and from the whispers and urgent low voices it sounded as if they were arguing. For a moment I stood in the hall, wondering what it all meant. I waited another few seconds, then backed away, my steps muted by the thick carpet that ran down the hallway.

  I found her in the kitchen shortly after six in the evening, chopping cilantro and parsley for dinner’s stew. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, but she didn’t mention her visitor. Instead, I told her about Amir’s offer to let me help edit a script and she listened generously, asking me about the story and my opinion of it.

  But she was distracted. Quiet. Working through a pile of herbs, she dropped her knife and it clattered to the floor. She bent down and picked it up, only to fumble it and cut the heel of her hand with the blade.

  When I grabbed a towel to stop the blood, her eyes flicked up. For the first time that night, she looked right at me, and I realized then that she knew I’d seen someone in her room.

  “My brother, Rahim, was here,” she said. “You see, he’s gotten himself mixed up with the Tudeh Party and—”

  “Your brother’s a communist?” I broke in. From what I’d heard, communists were impoverished young men who gathered in dark, dingy basements to read forbidden foreign books, though I couldn’t have said what those particular books were or why they were banned. I tried to imagine Leila’s brother as a bearded revolutionary in tattered shirtsleeves, but it didn’t make sense.

  She caught my confusion. “About half the communists in this country must be from prominent, if not titled, families, Forugh. Who knows their excesses better than their own? The coup changed him, but he’s always been idealistic, uncompromisingly so. He wanted nothing to do with his inheritance or with this house.”

  “And now he’s in trouble with the government?”

  “I think so. He’s been going off about the shah for years—the corruption at court, the need for change. Of course he’s right about all of it, but ever since the coup there’s been a crackdown against dissidents. And not just against communists, but nationalists and Islamists. Anyone who opposes the monarchy is being blacklisted.”

  “Do you think he’s in danger?”

  “He says he isn’t, but I don’t believe him. Why else wouldn’t he tell me where he was staying?” She closed her eyes, drew a long breath, and then looked back at me with a worried expression. “Forugh?”

  “Yes?”

  “You can’t tell anyone he was here. I shouldn’t have told you, only—”

  “Only we can never have secrets from each other.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “No secrets,” I repeated. “Do you hear me?”

  “Of course not,” she said. She smiled a little and let me take her hand in mine, but she’d turned quiet again and her eyes were fixed on a place I couldn’t see.

  * * *

  —

  “Mr. Golshiri needs a woman’s voice.” I’d been working as a receptionist at the studio for more than six months and by now I’d discovered I could do my work in half the time, which left me plenty of time during the day to work on my poems. I was struggling with a new composition when Amir poked his head into the
reception area and summoned me. I had no idea what he meant about Golshiri needing a woman’s voice, but I shuffled my poem under a stack of other papers and then followed him down a corridor and into the recording studio.

  I’d stopped thinking about Golshiri—well, not entirely, but at least that’s what I told myself. Now, as I approached the studio and heard his voice, I felt a tinge of anticipation. The room was dark and filled with cigarette smoke, and at first I couldn’t even see him. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw there was a long table toward the back of the room, and Golshiri was sitting there with his brother, Shahram, and several other men. I walked toward the table and eased myself into a chair. When he finally looked up from some papers, Golshiri nodded at me but didn’t smile.

  “Would you please read this for us, Forugh?” Shahram said, motioning to a script on the table and handing me a set of headphones. He had the same olive-toned skin and hazel eyes as his brother, but his manner was light. Friendly.

  I smoothed the page and leaned toward the microphone. The room was completely quiet. I drew a deep breath and began to read aloud. Once or twice I stumbled over a line and had to start again, but after a while, I realized it wasn’t so different from reading a poem. I forgot the others were watching and my voice grew steadier. When I finished, I looked over at Golshiri and saw that the others were looking at him, too—everything here was up to him. Someone played back the recording. My voice sounded soft but also more assured than I recognized it.

  “That’s all, then,” Shahram told me. “Thank you.”

  I rose from my chair, but Golshiri waved for me to sit.

  “I’d like to have your opinion on something, Forugh,” he said.

  He motioned to someone in the screening booth. The room went quiet, the only sounds the hiss of the projector and the beating of a film reel, and then some images flashed across the screen. Long shots of the desert, the land, the face of a child. The images were black and white but sometimes tinged with watery colors. In several shots, a character stood off-center or in the background, looking away. It was unlike any movie I’d seen before.