Song of a Captive Bird Read online

  Parviz interrupted my thoughts. “Are you sure your sister won’t tell anyone you’ve come here?”

  “My sister?”

  He nodded.

  “She’d never tell on me!”

  “How about your brother? Can you really count on him not to squeal?”

  I looked at him evenly. “Listen, if you’re so worried, you could just leave.”

  “Oh no,” he said quickly. “I don’t want to do that.”

  “Why not? I mean, your mother’s probably got a wife picked out for you, right?”

  “No,” he said, then added, “Not yet.”

  I’d touched a nerve—it was obvious from the way he looked away—but I wasn’t pleased with myself for it. I didn’t want him to look away from me. I wanted him to be how he was in the alley, sweet, teasing, and bold, and I wanted to be like that, too. I leaned toward him and lowered my voice. “So, you don’t want to leave. Good. I’m awfully happy about that, but what would you like to do now that we’re here together?”

  His cheeks flushed a little and he flashed me a nervous smile. I relaxed and took a sip of my café glacé. A new song started up. I tucked my hair behind my ears and turned my attention to the dance floor and the band. I tapped my foot to the music, working out the rhythm. They were playing a rumba. Puran and I had danced it together many times before, and I figured I could dance half as well as any of the women there, so why not try?

  “Well, I know what I want to do,” I said. I got to my feet, smoothed my skirt, and held out my hand.

  On the dance floor, I placed my arms on his shoulders and he reached for my waist and pulled me up toward him. We went round the room and back, my skirt swinging under me and brushing against his legs as we danced. He smelled wonderful—of soap, cotton, and cologne—and the whole time we danced, I could feel his warm fingers through the fabric of my dress.

  * * *

  —

  I was still smiling when I returned to the movie house. I glanced at my watch. Five thirty-two. More than ten minutes to spare before the film ended! I bought a sour-cherry juice from the concession stand in the lobby and slipped back into the theater. I picked my way through the dark to join Puran and Fereydoun, ignoring hisses and sharp looks along the way. After stumbling a few times, I at last reached the front row, only to find all three of our seats empty but for my black coat and a half-eaten cone of cashews.

  * * *

  “Who is he and where did you go with him?” the Colonel demanded when I returned to the house alone that day.

  I glanced over my shoulder into the alley. I could run, I thought. It seemed so easy. I’d run and I’d catch up to Parviz at the train station. I knew he’d be taking a six o’clock train to visit his parents in Ahwaz. But I was suddenly seized with a horrible thought: My father would follow me, and then he’d come face-to-face with Parviz. The way I saw it, I was more capable of handling the Colonel than Parviz was.

  I stepped into the house and shut the door. My mother and Puran stood together at the foot of the stairs. My sister’s eyes were wild with apology. But why had she and Fereydoun left the movie theater before the film ended? And how much did my father know about the day’s events and about what had come before?

  I guessed it couldn’t be much or he wouldn’t have asked me anything at all. I lifted my chin and crossed my arms over my chest.

  “You tell me where you went with him, Forugh, or by God you’ll regret it.”

  “What will you do? Hit me? Lock me in my room?”

  We stared at each other. I was sixteen years old, but I’d never spoken to my father in such a tone. His eyebrows arched up and his face reddened. Three steps, low and even, sounded in the dark hall, and then he stopped just before me.

  He turned to my mother. “Do you see what kind of daughter you’ve raised?” He gripped my arm, digging deep into the muscle, and pulled me toward her. “Kesafat!” he shouted—filthy!

  She winced and lowered her eyes. “I knew nothing about it, I swear….”

  “Kesafat!” he shouted again, this time much louder than before.

  He marched me up the stairs, still gripping my arm and his other hand clutching the back of my neck. When we reached the library, he shoved me inside and slammed the door shut. I inched toward the wall, but it was useless; there was no way out but past him.

  When he struck me, I staggered and stumbled back. He hit me again, and that second time his ring must have caught the inside of my lip, because my mouth filled with blood. I lifted my fingers to my lips, then felt inside my mouth. One of my teeth had been knocked loose. I pressed my tongue lightly against it and it slipped free. Cupping a hand over my mouth, I spit the tooth into my palm. I was staring dumbly at it when he struck me again, this time so hard that my legs buckled under me and I fell to the floor.

  When I opened my eyes, I met his black boots. I pulled my arms quickly over my head and screwed my eyes shut.

  “Who did you meet in the streets, Forugh?”

  I shook my head.

  “Who did you meet and where did you go with him?”

  “I didn’t meet anyone,” I said. My lower lip was throbbing and the words came out thickly. “I went alone, and I didn’t meet anyone!”

  “You are shameless and disgusting and you are lying to me.”

  For some moments, he stood over me with his boot still raised above my head. The pain in my arm was ferocious. I kept my arms pulled over my head, my legs drawn up, and my face buried between my knees.

  “Out!” he said at last, and I struggled to my feet.

  When I reached my room, I slammed the door shut and collapsed onto the bed. My lip was still bleeding heavily. I felt inside my mouth with my finger. There was a gap toward the back where my tooth had been. I yanked the sheet from the bed and stanched the blood with a corner of it. All at once a searing pain shot through my belly and bent me double. Sanam would give me a sliver of opium to quell the pain, but I’d have to go down to the kitchen to ask her for it.

  I got up and crossed the room, but when I tried the door, it wouldn’t open. I tried a second and a third time, rattling the knob and blinking back angry tears. It was no use. Sometime in the last minutes, the door had been locked from the outside.

  * * *

  Two strangers waited for me the next morning in a room in the Bottom of the City. One of them was just a girl herself, a girl who held down other girls while her mother parted their legs and pried them open and looked at them there, in the place too shameful to be named. They had already worked in this way for years, this mother and daughter, having examined hundreds of girls together, and they would work together until the daughter became a woman and took her mother’s place and her own daughter grew up and took hers in turn.

  The door closed. The air hummed around us, the two strangers and me. It must have been clear from the awkward way I held it that I’d never worn a veil in my life, nor had I had reason to find myself in this place before. Like the others waiting in the vestibule outside, I’d been brought to this part of the city precisely because it was unfamiliar and there was at least a chance I wouldn’t be recognized.

  They were always frightened, the girls who were taken into such rooms—even the ones who knew exactly why they were there. Most often they were too stunned or too scared to do anything but submit, but however dim or precise their knowledge of sex, they were all intimate with shame, and so they closed their eyes and they waited.

  But something different happened to me here. I fought. I fought to free myself, but the two strangers only forced me down harder, pinning me against the table. Still I wouldn’t settle down. I wouldn’t submit. I twisted and kicked and clawed. I surely wasn’t the only one to fight back during this examination, but for me the cost wouldn’t be a bruised cheek or scratched arm. No.

  Fate or accident, call it what you will, but the truth was this: My hymen tore, I bled, and now my girlhood was gone.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward,
I was the one who locked the door.

  When we returned from the Bottom of the City that day, my legs were still shaking so badly I could barely stand. I had told no one, not even my sister, what happened in the examination room—about the virginity test, about the sudden pain I felt between my legs when I jerked away and tried to free myself, about the blood-streaked cloth I’d seen in the wastebasket. A girl’s virginity was the sum of her worth, and though she ascribed its loss to my stupidity and willfulness in resisting her, the woman who performed the test would never have divulged the truth to my family. It would have been not only my ruin but hers, and so she’d simply signed the chastity certificate and sent us on our way.

  As for me, was it an instinct for self-preservation or the beginnings of a plan that kept me silent? I only know I was seized by a desperate need to be alone and to think through what had happened to me and what I might do about it now.

  That night, when everyone in the house was asleep, I slipped into my mother’s bedroom. I knew exactly what I needed, and I moved quickly and quietly in the darkness. At the foot of her bed stood a bench where she always laid her blue apron before sleep. I tiptoed over to it, reached inside the front pocket and pulled out the ring of keys. Then, closing my hand tightly over the keys so they would not clink, I crept back out of the room. Then I descended the stairs to the basement, shut the door, and pulled the heavy iron bolt closed; with the key in my possession, no one could get to me.

  That night, I sat against the wall, just beside the basement door, with my legs drawn up and my forehead pressed against my knees, the key pressed between my palms. There was a small basin in the corner where I could relieve myself, but I had no food to eat and no water to drink. My arm was hurting even worse than before, and it was so cold that even after I found a blanket and pulled it over me, I couldn’t stop shivering. Worse, my head was whirling with thoughts, and I couldn’t make it stop. I had no idea what to do next or whom I could go to for help.

  “Forugh!” Sanam called out from behind the basement door the next morning. “For God’s sake, open the door!” she shouted, and then rattled the doorknob.

  I refused to answer.

  From behind the door I heard my mother say, “Even if she comes out, she’ll be good as dead with all this shame and dishonor she’s brought on us all.”

  Some time later, Sanam returned by herself. “I’ve brought your favorite pomegranate and walnut stew, Forugh,” she said, “and a plate of crisped rice. I’ve died and come back to life ten times since last night. Please come eat something, sweetheart.”

  My stomach writhed. I’d eaten nothing since that glass of café glacé at The Palace, and that was two days ago, but I observed my hunger as from a distance.

  All through my childhood, I was taught only to obey. I’d always considered myself daring and clever and different from other girls. Now I saw that all my rebellions had been nothing. No, worse than nothing. I’d done no more than exchange a handful of letters with Parviz in the alleyway and meet him just once in the city, but already I’d lost what little freedom I had. “Your daughter is still a virgin,” the woman had told my mother in the Bottom of the City. Despite what had happened to me during the examination, my parents now had proof of my purity—a certificate that could be presented to any suitor who might come for me. The piece of paper offered no consolation, though; my flirtations with Parviz would only hasten, rather than forestall, my marriage. That much was certain.

  On my second day in the basement, my mind grew sharp and clear. What I wanted was a home, somewhere, anywhere, that was not the Colonel’s house. I still couldn’t see how I’d get myself free and to such a place, but when I thought of the small, dark room in the Bottom of the City, that hand cupping my mouth to stifle my screams, and those fingers prying into me, my resolve tightened and it made me brave.

  The next morning a peculiar lightness overtook me. Suddenly I didn’t feel even a hint of hunger or thirst, only exhaustion accompanied by a total clarity of thought. I’d passed nearly three days in the basement by then. I lay on the floor, my cheek to the bare tiles, and I slept—deeply and soundly.

  Once, I woke to the sound of metal scraping against the keyhole. Someone was trying to pry the lock open, though meeting with no success. I jerked my head up. “I’ll die, I swear!” I shouted. “I’ll kill myself if you don’t let me marry Parviz!” After so long a silence, the force of my screams exhausted me, and I pulled my arms over my head and closed my eyes again.

  All the next day I drifted in and out of sleep. One after another Puran, my mother, and Sanam banged on the door and begged me to open it and let them in. I refused. Eventually I must have fainted, because all at once their voices fell away and I heard nothing at all.

  Then, sometime in the night, there was a hard, incessant rap against the door, and I woke. “Forugh,” came a voice—my mother’s—from the other side. It was so quiet in that moment that even from behind the heavy wooden panels I could hear her sigh. “Your father’s arranged a match for you,” she said. “You’ll be married next Saturday.”

  7.

  Imagine it like this. Imagine it like I’ve imagined it countless times. Before dawn one morning, on the fourth day after I locked myself in the basement and refused to eat or speak or open the door to anyone, the Colonel slid into the back seat of a black Mercedes. The medals on his breast shone; the creases in his trousers were knife-sharp. “Ahwaz,” he told his driver, and laid his silver-tipped cane across his lap.

  Usually, my father had no patience for gossip, dismissing it as “women’s nonsense,” but by the third day of my self-imposed confinement the whispers in the neighborhood had changed from rumor and speculation to statements of fact. “She’s been meeting a man in the streets,” they said of me. “When I saw her last,” a neighbor reported, “she and her sister both had bruises on their faces, though they wore veils to try to hide it.”

  The Colonel set out from Tehran before sunrise. An hour outside the capital, the road opened onto a different country altogether. The trees became scattered and eventually disappeared, and the earth turned to sun-cracked clay. The age-old villages and caravanserai were indistinguishable from the desert that rose beyond it; all was a sea of gray and brown, except for the occasional turquoise dome of a distant mosque.

  That day—the day the Colonel’s boots crossed Khanoom Shapour’s threshold and blackened her fate—was a Wednesday. At sunrise, after completing her first ablutions and prayers of the morning, she headed to the chicken coop behind the house, chose the plumpest inhabitant, and tucked it under the crook of her arm. Standing before the sink, she went to work with her strong hands. She snapped the chicken’s neck with one hand and set about plucking its white feathers with the other. Its blood was soon hot and thick on her fingers and palms.

  Parviz, she thought, and smiled to herself. Her only son, her cheshmeh cheragh, the light of her eyes. Three years ago he’d left the provinces to work in Tehran. Ever since then, on Friday afternoons Khanoom Shapour could be found, without fail, at the train station, waiting for her son. “May I die for you,” she told him by way of greeting and, two days later, of goodbye.

  Later that afternoon, Khanoom Shapour finished preparing the chicken, tossed back a small cup of bitter black tea, and set about peeling the mound of eggplant for the day’s stew. When she finished, she glanced at her wristwatch: five. She still had two hours—plenty of time to prepare Parviz’s favorite chicken-and-eggplant dish and maybe also the fresh dolmehs and stuffed peppers he loved. She pushed up her sleeves and began frying the eggplant. She was about to set in on the rice when the brass knocker sounded.

  She stopped by the entry. The door had two separate brass knockers, one for men and another for women, each with a distinct sound. Khanoom Shapour listened again for the knock. The visitor was a man. She reached for the veil she kept in a small alcove. It occurred to her that Parviz might have borrowed a car and driven back home early to surprise her, but when she pulled the do
or open, it wasn’t her son but the Colonel’s unsmiling face that greeted her.

  Manners forbade any show of surprise at this unexpected visit, much less any show of annoyance or displeasure. “You honor us with your visit, ghorban,” Khanoom Shapour said, bowing her head and averting her eyes. “My husband’s resting, but I can call him if you please?”

  “No, my business is with you, madam.”

  She couldn’t at all imagine what business this might be, but the Colonel’s clipped words told her it was best to ask him nothing here, on the threshold to the house, where they might be overheard by the neighbors.

  She led the Colonel through the courtyard and into the modest guest parlor toward the back of the house, then retreated to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of tea. The Colonel waited with his silver-tipped cane firmly in his grasp. He’d traveled all day over rough roads and through thick clouds of dust, yet the creases on his trousers were still as sharp as when he’d set out from Tehran before dawn.

  It was an unusual meeting and certainly an unexpected one. Marriage negotiations were women’s work, though the final word rested with a girl’s father. In this case—in my case—there was no time for custom, or for women’s wiles, but the visit couldn’t unfold without certain niceties. After all, the Shapours were my mother’s relatives, and it wouldn’t do to begin with demands or threats.

  When Khanoom Shapour returned with a clinking tray, the Colonel took a cup of tea but refused the sweets. She bowed her head slightly, set down the tray, and assembled herself in a chair on the opposite side of the parlor.

  It was time. Time for pleasantries to be cast aside in favor of the real business at hand. Just as Khanoom Shapour brought the cup to her lips, the Colonel cleared his throat, unbuttoned his jacket, and pulled several cream-colored envelopes from his jacket pocket. He deposited the letters on the table before her. He didn’t retrieve the chastity certificate; there was no need of it—not yet, anyway.