Song of a Captive Bird Read online

  The Colonel continued to entertain his comrades and other guests, except now they gathered around chairs and tables rather than carpets and cushions, and they drank imported whiskey and vodka rather than araq. If he missed the old garden, he never once let on.

  But long after the workers had left, my mother lingered at the edge of the courtyard, twisting her apron in her hands, her face ravaged with grief. Afterward, she no longer took her walks through the garden in the mornings and early evenings, nor did she order the servants to spread carpets there for the afternoon tea. When visitors came, she always received them inside the house. Hassan, our manservant, dumped a handful of small goldfish into the few inches of water that remained in our pool. When the goldfish died, my mother didn’t buy others to replace them, and soon the pool dried up completely and its tiles began to crack.

  As for us girls, we would not be satisfied without revenge. We exacted it finally and secretly on the artificial acacias. One day we plucked their waxy plastic flowers until there was nothing, not a single ugly, scentless petal or leaf, left on those phony trees. Our garden had fallen to ruin, and I would never forgive my father’s sin in destroying it.

  3.

  “God is everywhere,” my mother told me when I was still a girl, narrowing her eyes and pinning me with a look. “He’s everywhere and He sees everything you do.”

  Unveiled, corseted, and lipsticked though she was, my mother’s life would always be a prayer rug spread at the altar of fear. She performed her namaz only at sunrise and sunset—not five times, as the truly devout did—and she often prayed in a hurried and abbreviated form. Still, she believed that everything, but everything, was in God’s hands. When a piece of fruit fell from a tree, it was God’s will; if it rotted and fell to the ground before ripening, that, too, was His will. To my mother’s mind, there was no greater force in our lives than gesmat, fate. At birth, angels wrote our gesmat across our foreheads in invisible ink.

  “You’re powerless to alter God’s inscription,” she told me. “Powerless, Forugh, and also foolish to try.”

  The day after she lost her beautiful garden, two deep lines sprang up between my mother’s eyes, furrows appeared along the sides of her mouth, and the corners of her lips turned down. Her temper had always flared easily and often, but there were now fewer intervals of calm than when she’d had her garden to care for, or so it seemed to me.

  Nothing upset her as much as disorder. Our family was never wealthy, but my father’s position as a colonel earned him a solid salary, and even through the worst of those years, even when Allied soldiers occupied the country and food was strictly rationed in the marketplace, we never lacked for necessities or even certain comforts. We definitely never lacked for servants. My mother could have delegated much of her housework to Sanam, our nanny and cook, the manservant, or one of the series of houseboys my father employed and housed in the birooni, the men’s quarters. Instead, she spent her days in perpetual motion, hair pulled into a tight knot at the nape of her neck and a rag tucked into her skirt, grumbling about the idiocies of her servants, the misbehaviors of her children, and life’s innumerable other cruelties.

  “May God kill me!” she’d wail, shaking her head and lifting her palms and her gaze to the sky.

  She now spent hours every day sequestered in the mehmoon khooneh, the large guest parlor in the compound. The most carefully appointed room of the house, it was decorated in the Iranian style of the period, that is, with an ostentation calculated to conjure seventeenth-century France. There was a maroon banquette, an assortment of gold-footed tables and chairs, and a marble-topped mahogany buffet. Crystal vases lined the mantel; velvet drapes framed the windows and pooled at the floor. In the mehmoon khooneh, too, lay the finest of our carpets, a large pale-blue silk Tabrizi, at once the single concession to native Iranian décor and the detail that lent the room its final touch of counterfeit European grandeur. When my mother finished dusting the furniture and mantel, she knelt on the ground and smoothed the carpet’s tassels one by one by hand. A single stray string pitched her into a frenzy, and she began all over again, smoothing the strands until every one lay flat and straight.

  On all but a few days of the year—holidays or important dinners for my father’s comrades and associates—the mehmoon khooneh had no visitors apart from my mother. We children were strictly forbidden from setting foot in the room, and when her warnings and threats were no longer sufficient to keep us from trespassing there on occasion, she began to lock its doors with a key she kept tucked in the pocket of her apron.

  She locked other doors besides these.

  When Puran and I were little, just two and three years old, every day our mother would take us to the balcony of the interior courtyard, shut the door, and lock it from within. How long did she leave us out there? It seems to me whole days passed on that balcony. In the coldest weather she bundled us in our winter jackets, gloves, and woolen hats, and on the warmest days she dressed us in hand-sewn cotton frocks, but otherwise she made no provisions for our entertainment or comfort. That was our world, four feet across and two feet wide, with a high iron grille that blocked our view of the garden.

  I don’t think Puran and I minded our confinement so much when we were very young. We played with our dolls and told each other stories. That, for a time, was enough. We made our own world on the balcony, Puran and I, and only hunger could make us quarrel. But by the time I was five, I hated to be locked on the cramped balcony while my three older brothers played outside. They set out in the mornings with the other neighborhood boys and spent whole days away from the house, chasing one another in the streets, crouching on the side of the alleyways to shoot marbles, and playing soccer with a weathered cardboard box for a makeshift goal. From behind the walls of our house, I could sometimes hear them laughing and shouting to one another. It made me furious. I wanted to see farther, past the walls, past the alleyway, past my own reflection in the windowpane. At home, I often played with my brothers and took up their dares, but if they ventured into the streets and into the city, that world was closed and forbidden to me.

  * * *

  —

  “Come on!” I called out one hot summer day. It was the hour after sunset. I was seven years old. I grabbed my sister Puran’s hand and pulled her up the stairwell.

  Outside, the heat rippled off the rooftops and forced a stillness over the streets and alleyways. Through the window came the scents of Tehran’s long summer nights: black tea steeped with rose petals and cardamom pods; coriander and cumin wafting up from charcoal braziers; the scent of the city, pungent and dusty, rising from the sidewalks; and the heady mix of honeysuckle and jasmine released by the first hot days of the year. Down in the streets of Amiriyeh, peddlers folded up their trestles, placed their trays on their heads, and set off for home.

  My mother and nanny emerged from the basement, where they always napped in the warmer months. Our house filled with the sounds of their voices and the clank of pots and pans as they heaped fresh coal under the samovar for the evening tea and started in on the dinner preparations: trimming parsley, cilantro, and dill, browning onions and lamb for the stew, rinsing and cooking the rice.

  “Do you think they’re still out in the city?” I asked my sister in the stairwell. “They” were our three older brothers, and they’d been gone from the house since noon. Maybe longer.

  She ignored my question and instead said, “I don’t think we should be doing this.” She gripped my hand and tugged, trying to pull me away from the door to the rooftop. “We’ll get in trouble if someone catches us up here.”

  As usual, I ignored her warnings. My sister was eight that year, just barely a year older than me, and I could coax her into some, but not all, of my schemes. “I bet they’re playing cards outside,” I said. “Let’s see if we can spot them down in the streets.”

  The streets—the whole world was out there, in the city streets. Whenever I thought about my brothers amid the bustle of the droshkies, th
e rickety horse-led buggies that crisscrossed Tehran, and the street vendors and their baskets piled high with treats, my cheeks went hot with envy. Even my little brother, Fereydoun, younger than me by three years, was allowed to play in the alleyway with our older brothers. “Why can’t I go outside, too?” I’d ask my mother. Each time she heard the question, she sighed, shook her head, and wrung her hands—her only answer. But by the time I was seven I understood something of my situation. I was a girl, and girls were forbidden to play outside the house. The streets, I was made to understand, might be a boy’s playground, but for girls it was a turbulent and dangerous place; home was our only refuge.

  But I was bent on joining my brothers whenever and however I could. When they played in the house, I followed them, taking up their dares. One afternoon Puran and I had found them clambering up to the rooftop to shoot pigeons with handmade slings. I didn’t at all care for those sorts of cruel games, but when I cracked open the door to the roof this time, I knew we’d caught our brothers in the middle of some truly tempting mischief.

  I shrugged free of my sister’s grip and studied them.

  One by one, they stepped to the ledge, unbuttoned their pants, and peed into the alleyway behind the house.

  “It’s a contest!” I said, breaking into giggles. “They’re having a contest to see which one can pee the farthest!”

  “Come on,” she said, “let’s go back into the house before Mother finds us here!”

  I shook my head. “Go back yourself!” I told her. “I want to stay.”

  Puran didn’t leave, but she wouldn’t let herself look, either, so she covered her face with her hands. I turned my attention back to the boys, and then, just as they were about to declare a winner, I broke away from my sister and stepped toward the edge of the rooftop. It was not easy to climb out so far—my feet had only the narrowest purchase on the roof’s outer ledge—but once I got there I peeled off my underpants, lifted my skirt, thrust my hips skyward, and peed into the alleyway. Well, mostly.

  When I finished, I hitched up my underpants and pulled down my dress. Then I turned around and walked back toward my siblings. My brothers stood before me, wide-eyed and openmouthed. My sister was now staring at me, but with her hands clapped over her mouth. Her cheeks were bright red.

  “I won!” I hollered, skipping around my brothers in circles.

  No one spoke. I stopped skipping and planted my hands on my waist. “I won!” I announced a second time, daring them to challenge me. None of them did.

  The silence was interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the rooftop and my sister’s frantic cry of “Hide, Forugh!”

  But it was too late. Our mother had seen everything. She stepped toward me, her hand raised in the air, high above her head. “A jinn’s gotten into you again, has it?” she said. I ducked and raced toward the stairs, bounding down the steps two by two, my heart in my throat. Halfway down the stairwell she caught me by the sleeve of my dress and said, “Never do that again, never! Do you hear me?”

  My cheeks burned, not in pain but in humiliation. I cried for hours afterward, but later at night, when Puran and I re-created the scene, we laughed until our sides ached. The contest, our brothers’ faces, even my mother as she stood over me and beat me while my siblings watched—the details grew more dramatic with each telling.

  I’d long since discovered the pleasure of breaking a rule, but that day I coupled it with an even greater pleasure: telling a story.

  * * *

  —

  My willfulness was my mother’s torment. An Iranian daughter is taught to be quiet and meek, but from earliest childhood I was stubborn, noisy, and brash. A good Iranian daughter should be pious, modest, and tidy; I was impulsive, argumentative, and messy. I thought of myself as no less than my brothers, with wit and daring to match theirs. When my sister and I played in the garden as children, my mother yelled at us for messing about in the dirt and ruining our clothes. Puran’s sweet temperament and quick tears ensured she’d suffer only mild reproach, but one glance at a scuffed elbow, scraped knee, or soiled dress, and my mother swept down, grabbed my wrist, and smacked me on the bottom or across the face.

  She spent hours speculating on the source of my rebelliousness, but mostly my mother ascribed it to a wayward jinn, or spirit. Every year at No Rooz, the New Year, I stole into the good parlor, filled the sleeves of my dress with sweets and fruits she’d set out for guests, chose a few for myself, and shared the rest with my siblings. When she discovered I’d filched the treats, my mother locked me on the balcony. I screamed so loudly and for so long that she had no choice but to open the door and let me back into the house, for fear the neighbors would hear me.

  “A jinn’s gotten into her again!”

  Jinn. I loved the word, and it thrilled me to think a wily spirit lived inside me. And who knows if there wasn’t a jinn stirring in my blood? I definitely had a temper, and the force of it could startle even me at times. My clothes were perpetually soiled with ink, paint, or dirt. When I was angry, I tugged at Puran’s braids until tears streaked her face, kicked my brothers in the shins, ran through the corridors, and tore down the stairs. “I’m more of a boy than any of you!” I shouted if my brothers taunted or teased me—and they often did.

  When my mother threatened to punish me, I planted my hands on my waist, lifted my chin, and demanded, “Why?”

  “Bite your tongue!” my mother ordered. Once, in answer, I plunged my teeth deep into the fleshy tip of my tongue until I tasted the sweet iron tang of my own blood. Then I stuck out my tongue to show her I’d done as she’d told me. “May God kill me!” she cried, clawing at her cheeks. But the worse my behavior, the less likely she was to mention it to the Colonel, since he’d only blame her for it.

  Our nanny, Sanam, did her best to calm and quiet me. It seemed to me then that she was the only one who really loved us. She’d come to Tehran from the provinces as a girl of twelve. She never married, and I don’t know if she longed to return to her village or to begin her own family, but she spent most of her life in the house in Amiriyeh, fussing over us as if we were her own children. Her complexion was quite dark, a warm cinnamon brown, and her cheeks were too thickly pockmarked for her to be considered beautiful, but her eyes were a lustrous black and she lined their rims with sormeh. She always smelled of basil and cloves, and when she laughed she threw back her head. I adored her.

  To temper the jinn in me, Sanam dropped a tincture of valerian in my stew, another in my sour-cherry juice. At night, she tipped a speck of opium into my cup of boiled milk. I detested boiled milk, and anyway, I was much too clever for such a ruse. When she wasn’t looking, I emptied the milk into a plant or the kitchen sink or else handed it over to my little brother, who always drank it hungrily and then slept for sixteen hours straight.

  But neither my nanny’s kind attentions nor my mother’s rebukes could rid me of the jinn. Mother devised punishment after punishment. There was a game my siblings and I played as children. You’d sit with your palms facing up and the other person would try to slap them before you could draw them away. We called it “Bring the bread, take the kabob.” When I was very little, one of my punishments went something like this game. “Hold out your hands!” my mother ordered. I held my palms out, as if playing a game, except my mother held a metal switch, and now there was no drawing my hands back.

  As I grew older, she refined her punishments. She routed me from my hiding place in the attic, marched me down the stairs, and locked me in the basement, where the neighbors couldn’t hear me no matter how loudly or how long I screamed. Even if the neighbors did hear, what would it matter? I was a disobedient daughter, and it was her responsibility to discipline me.

  * * *

  —

  By the time I was fifteen, I’d made a vow to myself: I’d never beg anyone for anything. Each year I watched my mother more closely, perhaps even more closely than she watched me. At night I stood outside her bedroom door, too scared to enter but una
ble to turn away. I quieted my breathing, crouched low, and then, through the keyhole—an old-fashioned type, large enough for a heavy wrought-iron key—I watched her. She sat cross-legged on the floor, a pool of light on the embroidery set on her lap. Unbound, her hair fell in waves past her shoulders. Many nights, she didn’t embroider at all but only stared at the wall or buried her face in her hands and wept.

  One year, I watched as week by week her belly grew rounder and higher and her body finally betrayed what she herself would never tell me in words. “Don’t cry,” Sanam whispered in the kitchen that year, nodding her head toward my mother’s belly. “Your tears will reach the baby!” Maybe my mother’s sadness really did seep into the baby, because when she was born, my little sister, Gloria—my mother’s seventh and last child—barely made a sound, only gave a little cough when she was hungry.

  When the Colonel was away, my mother ruled our house and all of us children, but in his presence she grew quiet, timid, and small. She didn’t so much as lift her eyes to him when she spoke. She cowered. Fastidious as he himself was, the Colonel’s hands touched neither white nor black, as the saying went, and his pride far outstripped his hunger or thirst. If my mother left the house to, say, run errands in the city or pay a visit to an acquaintance or an ailing relative, he sequestered himself in his library and wouldn’t even walk to the kitchen for a cup of tea. As soon as she came home, she steeped a fresh pot of tea, and then she quickly carried a cup to his quarters along with a plate of soft cakes drenched in honey and rose water.

  On the first day of each month, the Colonel placed exactly one hundred tomans for my mother on the mantel in the good parlor. From the hallway I sometimes overheard her begging him for more money. “The children’s shoes are worn out,” she said, or, “They need new notebooks for school.” Then without fail this plea: “Won’t you stay here tonight?” Her voice filled sometimes with sweetness and sometimes with despair, but she never, so far as I remember, raised her voice to him. She bit her lip, clawed at her cheeks, and wrung her hands, but she didn’t complain outright about his absences or demand more money from him. Never.