Song of a Captive Bird Page 4
That my mother could only beg—and for what she needed to run the house or, worse, for her husband’s attention and company—was something I never forgot. Even though it was the Colonel’s voice that rang out from behind the door, the thud of his fist against the mantel or sometimes the unmistakable sharp clap of his hand across her cheek, it was my mother whom I wished to take by the wrists and shake by the shoulders, my mother whom I judged and I punished, my mother whom I fought with a force nearly equal to love. And it was there, behind the door to the good parlor, that I would make this vow: So long as I lived I’d never beg anyone for anything.
I’d soon break this vow, it’s true, but by then I’d already lost my name and belonged to no one at all.
4.
“The palace,” I whispered in Parviz’s ear one afternoon in the alleyway behind our house. I’d just turned sixteen; I was still only a girl. “Friday,” I added, rubbing my arms to warm myself, and hustled away.
“Forugh!” he called.
I’d already reached the corner. I whipped around so fast that I bumped into an old woman making her way down the street. “Sorry!” I sputtered.
She grumbled something I couldn’t make out, then peered over my shoulder, looking quickly at Parviz and then back at me. Did she recognize me from the neighborhood? Did she know my mother and where we lived? I couldn’t be sure, but all the same, I turned away quickly and walked in the opposite direction.
As soon as she was out of sight, I returned to the alleyway. Parviz was still standing there, but his hands were now buried in his pockets. He was pacing back and forth and there was a helpless look on his face. He won’t meet me at The Palace, I thought. It was risky—even I, in the thick of my infatuation, understood that—and he was scared of getting caught.
I was wrong. “What time?” he mouthed when he saw me approach.
I held up six fingers, smiled, and then, with my heart in my throat, I raced out of the alleyway and back to the Colonel’s house.
* * *
Darband. It was here, in a village at the foot of Mount Damavand whose name in English means “closed gates,” that my story with Parviz and also with poetry truly began.
That was 1950, the summer when a stupefying heat had clung to Tehran for weeks, thickening the air with dust and soot. In July, my father traveled north for a monthlong seaside holiday with his military comrades, leaving the rest of the family behind in the capital. The heat only worsened as the month wore on, driving us into the basement for whole days and nights, and the confinement made us restless and ill-tempered.
In August, when my mother couldn’t bear the city anymore, we set out by automobile for my uncle’s bagh, or landholding. Outside the city walls, the road led onto the foothills toward the Alborz Mountains, and the land unfurled, lush and fragrant with wildflowers. I’d lived all my life in Tehran, and I hadn’t known the city could fall away and reveal such spaciousness and quiet.
My uncle’s house was full of relatives that summer—his many children, but also other family who’d come to escape the city’s heat. While it wasn’t without limits, our parents allowed us some measure of freedom with our cousins. In those days, cousins flirted with a flair and persistence that would have been unthinkable toward their other peers, and their flirtations often ended in marriage. I’d never had the faintest passing crush on any of my cousins; I thought of them as just another set of brothers, some more and some less annoying than the rest. But now when my brothers and our older male cousins gathered by the stream in the evenings to talk about philosophy and poetry, I was desperate to join them.
“Has anyone read Parviz’s latest essay?” one of my brothers asked one night, holding up a magazine for the group to see.
“Yes, and it’s brilliant!” someone answered.
Murmurs of praise and congratulation followed.
I stepped forward and grabbed the magazine from my brother’s hand. Composing poetry was a common enough pastime, but I’d never known anyone who’d actually published a piece of writing. Sure enough, my cousin’s name, Parviz Shapour, was printed at the top of the page in bold black letters. “Give it here, Forugh!” my brother demanded. I skimmed as much of the essay as I could before my brother snatched it back. As far as I could tell, it was a satire, but it was so thick with literary allusions and political references that I could hardly follow its meaning at all.
I’d left school when I turned fourteen the previous year. I now realized my brothers and cousins were reading books I’d never even heard of and studying languages I would never understand or speak. All that was nothing compared to the envy I felt now that I’d discovered my cousin Parviz had been making a name for himself as a writer.
It was a moment of reckoning, a moment I wouldn’t forget.
* * *
—
I had been only too glad to be done with school, but the boredom of those days was awful. I spent whatever time I could in my father’s library, a large room at the farthest corner of the birooni. The shutters were always half drawn, enclosing the library in perpetual quiet and darkness. Carpets were piled three deep in the corners, muffling every footfall. Here several dozen leather-bound, gilt-edged volumes of poetry, history, and philosophy reached from the floor to the ceiling.
The Colonel spent Fridays—the Sabbath—at home, and we were allowed to spend an hour in the library with him. Back when Puran and I were still in school, he quizzed us about what we’d learned during the week. He invariably questioned my brothers’ lessons more pointedly than ours. I felt grateful to be the subject of less scrutiny, but increasingly I longed to distinguish myself among my siblings. I yearned for the Colonel’s praise. Later, I’d hate myself for this yearning, but as a child I would have done anything to earn his esteem. If not that, I wanted to at least claim his attention. I soon discovered a way.
The Colonel frequently read aloud to us, either from the Shahnameh, the book of Kings, or the Divan-e Hafez, the two heftiest volumes in his library and the most treasured of all his books. He knew every poem in the Divan, or so it seemed to me. When he recited poetry, even if only a few verses, he ceased to be the Colonel and became, for those minutes we spent together in the library, my father. His features softened and his voice relaxed. When I was still little, he sometimes called me forward to turn the pages for him, and in those moments I lost nearly all my fear of him. I stood beside him, gazed at the pages, and felt his warmth. He smelled of brilliantine, cologne, and cigars. Often, he recited the poems by heart. He closed his eyes and lost himself to the words and, seeing this, I did the same.
On other afternoons, while the rest of the family napped, I crept into the library, pulled a volume from the shelf, and sat cross-legged on the floor with the book on my lap. The leather binding was cool and smooth to the touch. I would lift the cover, sinking into the private world of its pages. I traced the calligraphy with my fingers, following the slight swell of the ink against the paper. The letters looped and arched and stretched across the parchment, as if in flight from the page.
My reading exasperated my mother as much as my antics did. When I wasn’t cloistered in the Colonel’s library with my head bent over a book, I hid in the attic or the washroom with one of his discarded newspapers and read it front to back. Dinners grew cold, and my mother threatened to let me go hungry if I did not come at once. I preferred to go without eating, and I very often did.
“But what are you looking for?” my mother asked whenever she caught me reading. “What do you think you’ll find in those pages?”
If I looked up at all, it was only to glare.
“More words to sharpen your tongue and keep away any husband who’d have you!”
She was right in her way, because it was my preference for books and for the world inside my head that left me so incapable of accepting the usual and the ordinary. The more I read, the more I longed to let loose the words inside me.
At eleven, I’d composed my first poem. Paper was scarce, and so I’d
write in the margins of my father’s old newspapers, on discarded food wrappers, or only just in my head. At night before sleep and in the first moments of the day, in whispers and in silent chants, I practiced reciting my poem to myself until I learned it by heart. Then I screwed up all my courage and approached the Colonel.
“I wrote a poem,” I’d announced one Friday in his study.
He raised his eyebrows and studied me for a long moment. “Have you indeed?”
I nodded.
He clasped his fingers over his chest and closed his eyes. “Recite it, then,” he ordered.
My brothers sniggered. I ignored them and stepped forward. My throat felt tight and I was so nervous I could scarcely stand, but I steadied my voice and began.
I remember nothing at all about that first poem except that it was a ghazal, or lyric, composed in the manner of Hafez. When I finished reciting the poem, the Colonel opened his eyes, fixed me with another long look, as if assessing not the poem’s value but mine, and then nodded. He said nothing more, but with this one gesture I knew I’d finally managed to please him.
Many years later I walked into a vast salon, where I was to read my poems aloud before a large audience, an honor rarely conferred on a woman. I was guided up to the front of the room and from there looked out to see a hundred people lifting their eyes to me. In that moment it was so quiet I could hear my own breath. I was a poet. I had written poems. I had published books. But however great my satisfaction that day, it was unequal to the pride I felt the first time I pleased my father with my writing. It was in me already: the desire to be a poet, to speak, to be heard.
I could hardly stop myself from writing other poems after that first one. If the Colonel had foreseen the shame it would bring our family, he would never have encouraged me—I’m sure of it—but for the time being I was free to write all the poetry I wanted. When I produced something I thought was especially good, I recited it aloud, and then waited, breathlessly, for the moment when my father fastened his gaze on me at last.
* * *
—
That night in Darband, I saw how little all my childhood aspirations had amounted to.
Crossing the dark courtyard back toward the house, it occurred to me I might be clever for a girl, but I still trailed pathetically behind my brothers and cousins, and unless I worked out some way of educating myself, I’d only fall further behind.
The next morning I began to study Parviz closely. He was several years older than me and we’d had little to do with each other at previous family gatherings. I couldn’t even remember if we’d ever shared anything apart from the most ordinary passing exchange. The last time I’d seen him—a year ago, or was it longer?—I felt nothing. He wasn’t particularly handsome; he had skinny legs, a narrow face, and slightly sad eyes. But now I saw how when he spoke, others leaned close to listen to his quiet, clear voice. And although he easily drew people’s company and friendship, he had a certain gentleness that set him apart.
I often noticed him heading out for long walks on his own, but it would have been impossible to follow him without drawing the attention of the others. Besides, the more I studied him, the more nervous and awkward I felt around him.
Then, on the final day of our holiday, we met by chance on the footpath leading toward Mount Tochal. My sister and I had set out for a walk and he was making his way down the hillside by himself. Usually he dressed in a white linen shirt and tan slacks, but now he wore his slacks rolled up to his knees and his chest was bare. He’d been out for a swim, I guessed.
In all the time we spent in the countryside, passing each other many times each day, he’d scarcely lifted his eyes in my direction, and he was now staring so absorbedly at the distant hillside that I was sure he’d once again walk by me without a glance. What could I do to make him notice me?
Well, what I did was this: When we neared each other, I pretended to trip a little and then, as I steadied myself, I leaned toward him so that my forearm brushed against his. It was a silly ruse, one for which later I’d fall prey to Puran’s mockery, without too much minding. Anyway, it worked. When our arms touched, Parviz looked up and blinked, as if confused, then he looked at me straight on, and he smiled.
It was nothing at all, that small, slightly lopsided smile. And of course it was everything and the only thing.
Those days of wonder at the body’s secrets,
those days of cautious acquaintance
The blue-veined hand that beckoned
with a flower from behind a wall
to another hand, a small ink-stained hand.
And it was love, that quivering feeling,
that suddenly enveloped us
in the dark passageway
and enthralled us in the hot fullness of
breaths and beating hearts and furtive smiles.
—from “Those Days”
* * *
—
I returned from the countryside with a sickness whose first but least dangerous symptom was a sudden compulsion to study myself in my mother’s mirror. “Vain,” my mother called me whenever she caught me looking at myself, and also “shameless.” So I had to be quiet and quick. I would pull the bathroom door shut and begin my appraisal. My arms and legs, I observed with a frown, were far too skinny. Worse, my chest was flat. Though I hated the taste of it, I’d taken to drinking cup after cup of boiled milk with pools of fat glistening on the surface, but one look in the mirror and I saw it had no effect at all; I was just as skinny and flat-chested as ever. I drew my gaze up to my face. My skin was fair, for which people called me pretty. I pulled my hair from my forehead and studied my features more closely. I’d inherited my mother’s full lips, but I had my father’s square jaw and also his eyes. And then there were my eyebrows. They met in the middle, which gave my face a brooding, old-fashioned look, but there was nothing for it. A girl’s eyebrows were plucked just before her wedding; one day earlier and she’d cause a scandal the likes of which not even I was willing to risk.
I sighed, tilted my face in the mirror, lifted my chin, and looked at myself with heavy-lidded eyes. Next I smiled at my reflection with closed lips and then open lips, with my chin tipped down and then raised up. Not bad, I thought, unscrewing a small, round perfume bottle and dabbing a dot of scent on each of my wrists. As a final gesture I painted my lips with my mother’s red lipstick, though I was always careful to wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and rub hard afterward.
* * *
—
I spotted him first.
It was in late October, a full two months after our holiday in Darband, when I finally saw Parviz again. My cousin Jaleh had recently gotten married, and my sister and I accompanied my mother to her housewarming party. On the chance that Parviz would be there, too, I wore a pretty new turquoise blouse with a pleated navy blue skirt and my favorite sandals, the ones with ribbon straps at the ankles.
He was standing among a group of young men who were talking loudly in the corridor, away from the main party. He wore a gray herringbone suit and a bow tie. The bow tie was slightly askew. He glanced in my direction, and there it was again, the sweet lopsided smile he’d shown me in Darband.
That night I helped serve tea alongside my cousins, a task for which I’d never before demonstrated the slightest enthusiasm. I grabbed the tray from my sister’s hands, ignored her raised eyebrows, and headed for the parlor. I served the elders first, beginning with the men at the far end of the room, but when I stopped before Parviz, I lingered just a little. I stepped toward him and lowered the tray. When he reached for a cup of tea, I smiled. It was a smile I had practiced in the mirror many times, lifting just one corner of my mouth so the dimple in my left cheek deepened and then flicking my eyes up for the briefest moment.
This smile was a bluff. All the time I’d been serving the tea, my stomach was tight with nervousness. Even so, I managed to get his attention. Parviz was so flustered that he tipped the cup, and tea spilled onto the tray.
I crossed the parlor and set down the tray. I took a cup for myself, tucked a sugar cube into my cheek, and sipped my tea, savoring the hot sweetness. Parviz’s mother, Khanoom Shapour, was seated across the room. She had a hooked nose and long face, and unlike most of the women in the room, she wore a kerchief knotted tightly under her chin—a gesture of piety no less forbidding than her expression as she looked at me now. She lifted the tea to her mouth, puckered her lips, and set down the cup with a clatter. The appraisal was keen and measured, and it seemed to me the room grew immediately quiet, though of course this couldn’t have been so.
I looked back at Parviz. He’d dropped his eyes to the carpet.
I remembered that in Darband some of my cousins, even a few very pretty ones, had fluttered about him, vying to capture his attention. Why, I wondered, hadn’t he already chosen one of them to marry? He was twenty-six years old, an age at which a young woman would have long since been declared torshideh, or pickled. But for a man it was, of course, different; he could defer marriage for as long as he could deflect his mother’s appeals.
I took a last sip of tea and then did my best to catch Parviz’s eye from across the parlor. But it was no use. With his mother watching so closely, he was skittish and shy, and it was impossible to make progress.
I tramped out to the garden. A gramophone had been set up in the courtyard, the pool was covered with wide, wooden planks to make a dance floor, and electric lights—a novelty then—illuminated the leafy plane trees. There were dozens of young men milling about the garden, some of them cadets in the officers’ academy, and my sister and I were allowed to dance because our brothers were there to watch over us. I had no use for the cadets, much less for any of the younger boys, but I knew all the dances at least a little, and I wouldn’t give up a rare chance to practice.