Song of a Captive Bird Read online

  Khanoom Shapour recognized her son’s hand at once, but she was confused. She said nothing. The Colonel guessed she must be illiterate. Why else would she stare, openmouthed, at the letters? He’d have to read them aloud to her, he thought. It was a humiliation for which he hadn’t prepared himself. He gripped the handle of his cane more firmly and reached for the letters, but Khanoom Shapour raised her eyes and lifted her left hand in a gesture that begged his patience. She’d had three years of schooling as a girl and was in fact modestly literate, and so she began to read.

  “My sweet Forugh,” each letter started. “Forugh,” she knew, was the name of the Colonel’s daughter. She remembered me well from the summer holidays in Darband: the wild girl tramping back to the house from the foothills with wet hair, dirt-streaked trousers, and sunburned cheeks. She remembered me, too, from the night of my cousin’s party, remembered my brazen smile and how I’d made her son blush and spill his cup of tea before all the guests.

  For some time Khanoom Shapour had been in pursuit of a suitable bride for her son. Too plain, too poor, too loose—one by one, she’d dismissed all the girls in Ahwaz as unworthy of her son. She then set about surveying the girls of the surrounding villages, all of whom she’d also dismissed in turn. These efforts, however halfhearted, had been met with neither encouragement nor resistance from Parviz. “Whatever you wish for me,” he told her whenever she brought up the subject of marriage. But here, in these declarations of love, she now found evidence of treachery and cunning of which she’d thought her son entirely incapable.

  Calmly, coolly, she refolded the letters, set them on the table, and clasped her hands in her lap. She met the Colonel’s eyes. He did not intimidate her. “What does it concern me,” she said finally, “if you cannot control your daughter?” Her voice, as she said these words, was firm and her gaze steady.

  The Colonel sat forward in the chair, leaning on his cane. “Your son, Parviz,” he inquired with feigned curiosity, “is a man of what age?”

  “Nearly twenty-seven,” she offered.

  He nodded. “Just as I thought. Your son is a grown man, not a boy, and by twenty-seven a man should have long since learned his limits. My daughter Forugh has only just turned sixteen,” he said. After a pause, he added, “She’s still a girl.” He laid emphasis on the word “girl,” a word that in Persian connotes “virgin” as well as “young woman.” He held her eyes as he said this, and only when he was sure she understood his meaning did he continue. “I am a modern man. I had no plan for her to marry yet, but your son has attempted to seduce my daughter, and this gives me no choice.”

  “On the contrary,” snapped Khanoom Shapour, “it’s your daughter who has thrown herself at my son. Everyone knows what sort of girl she is.”

  “ ‘What sort of girl’?” he echoed, raising an eyebrow.

  “Surely, Colonel,” she answered, smiling thinly, “you’re not unaware of your daughter’s reputation. It pains me to speak of it, ghorban, but she’s an unsuitable match for my son.”

  The Colonel was unaccustomed to negotiating with women; in his dealings with my mother, as with me, he brooked no argument and resorted frequently, and without apology, to blows. He’d restrained himself so far, but Khanoom Shapour had now given him precisely the entrée he required to bring the visit to its conclusion.

  “He’ll go to prison,” he said, stabbing the air with his silver-tipped cane. “They’ll be married or I’ll deliver him to the head warden of the Tehran police myself!”

  Her son, the light of her eyes, shut up in a prison cell? At the thought of this, a trickle of sweat ran from Khanoom Shapour’s neck down her spine.

  “Fine,” she said at last. She’d have years—decades, even—to plot her revenge, but she understood there was nothing she could do to stop the marriage, and she now had mere days to prepare for her son’s wedding.

  8.

  Blood. For the week that then followed, my thoughts were only of blood.

  From the moment I found out Parviz and I would be married, I started brooding over blood. Ignorant as I was back then, I’d listened at enough doors and overheard enough gossip to know that to sanctify the marriage, Parviz and I needed to show his relatives proof of my virginity on the wedding night. I knew what happened to me at the Bottom of the City would prevent my providing such proof. The certificate the woman had handed off to my mother would mean nothing if I couldn’t support it with proof. And how could I tell my mother what had happened—the humiliation of it? Besides, I didn’t think she’d believe me. Without proof, I’d be turned from my new husband’s house and from my childhood home. What would happen to me then?

  I suppose I was lucky in at least this respect: In the strange, frenzied atmosphere of those days, no one noticed my mood. Though the wedding itself would take place in Ahwaz, at Parviz’s parents’ house, there was suddenly so much to do that the whole household was pitched into chaos. The gossips of Amiriyeh were busy speculating about the reason for the quick marriage: “She was always a restless girl”; “she tried to run away”; “she lost her honor”; and so on. With all these rumors, we’d have to proceed with tremendous care, following the proper rituals precisely, or else Puran’s impending marriage and even my younger sister’s prospects might be compromised.

  But first things first. To heal my battered lower lip, Sanam fashioned a pungent herb compress, which she pressed to my mouth. “To let down the swelling,” she explained. She cooked me bowls of rice pudding (“To help you gather your strength,” she told me) and fed me fistfuls of fat dates and pistachio nuts. She next turned her attention to the bruise on Puran’s face, but for all Sanam’s care it only seemed to grow more prominent. Eventually my sister became so distressed that she shut herself up in her room and refused to come out.

  Then there was the problem of a wedding gown. With no time to hire a seamstress, I’d have to borrow a dress from my mother’s closet. The only candidate was a plain ivory shift, which fell long and loose as a sack over my body. No sooner did I pull it over my head than Sanam began pinching and pulling at the fabric, sticking pins from collar to hem. “It won’t be so bad when it’s altered,” she reassured me. “Not bad at all, you’ll see!” I said nothing and let her think it was on account of the ugly makeshift wedding gown that I lifted my hands to my face and cried.

  Later that night I lay awake, staring at the walls, begging them for an answer. I couldn’t think of any possible solution to my predicament about the proof of blood. During those miserable hours, I would look over at my sister and wish I could shake her awake. More than anything I wanted to tell her what had happened to me in the Bottom of the City. The familiar shape of her skinny shoulders and the soft sound of her breathing made me feel strangely sad and lonely. Just a week ago, we’d lain awake for hours in our beds, whispering about her suitor and the mysteries of the wedding night. Now I’d be the first of us to marry, and there was talk in the house that she might not attend the wedding at all if the bruise on her face did not fade.

  Despite everything, I still trusted her, and I would have gladly rid myself of my secret. But what, I reasoned, was the point of burdening her with troubles she could do nothing about? Troubles that would only make her confused and upset? Already she’d been punished, and all on my account, and if I were found out, it would not only ruin my own marriage prospects but compromise hers, as well.

  I let her sleep and kept my worries to myself.

  One morning, I sat in the kitchen with my chin in my hands, watching Sanam as she prepared platters of jeweled rice and trays of honeyed sweets. She flew from pot to pot, two circles of sleeplessness under her eyes and her brow sweaty from exertion. Yet for all her frenzied labors, it wasn’t long before she glanced in my direction, pushed up her sleeves, and narrowed her eyes at me.

  “You love him?” she asked. She was slicing oranges, cutting the rinds into thin ribbons for the rice.

  I told her I did.

  She set down her knife and threw her
hands in the air. “Then why this sad look on your face? You’ll be married and you’ll have your own house and a brand-new life. It’s all a girl could want, to marry a man she loves! If you’re ungrateful, God will snatch back all this good fortune, Forugh jan.”

  I nodded. It was true. By marrying Parviz, I’d be luckier than any girl I knew. After all, I’d chosen my husband myself, and at this I felt a rush of happiness and pride. When I first learned it was Parviz I’d marry, I immediately imagined myself sitting at his side during the ceremony, waiting for him to lift the white lace from my face. Since then my mind drifted again and again to this image, but always under such happy fantasies lay the thought that if I didn’t manage to fulfill the proof of blood, everything would fall apart.

  “You’ll be a bride soon, Forugh,” Sanam continued, snatching me from these thoughts. She took up her knife again and continued to slice the orange rinds with clean, steady strokes. “Do you want your groom to see you looking miserable at your wedding?”

  I shook my head. “No, but—” I was tempted to tell her everything at that moment and very nearly did, but she shook her head and waved her hands, silencing me.

  “Then you mustn’t worry about anything! Eat well and rest, azizam,” she said, leaning forward to give my cheek a pinch. “You’ll be a bride soon. An aroos! You have no worries now except to make yourself beautiful for your handsome groom!”

  * * *

  —

  My head was aching the next morning as I made my way through the hammam, my throat tight and dry. The bathhouse was noisy with the voices of women calling to one another and the sounds of children splashing in the fountains and pools. I disrobed, wound a towel around myself, and waited for an attendant to lead me to the private room in the back, an area I’d previously been forbidden to enter.

  The wooden bench was cold and rough under my hands and bare thighs. As I waited, I followed the passageway with my eyes to where the hallway dimmed and curved away, and then I was suddenly overtaken by the certainty that I had been there before, that I’d stood in those very rooms. It was, in truth, my body that remembered, not my mind; my hand went to my cheek and I felt a searing heat as if I’d been slapped.

  I saw it so vividly then. It was a day in this same bathhouse, five years ago, when I was eleven years old. I’d stepped into a stall to undress and discovered a circle of blood in my underpants. My first thought was that I’d hurt myself—I was truly that ignorant then. But such was the custom in those days; our mother told us nothing at all, and we, in turn, asked her nothing, for fear our interest would be deemed perverse—an indication of waywardness. Anyway, I scarcely thought of myself as female. At eleven I was still lanky and extremely thin and had no breasts at all.

  That day I stole through the dimly lit passages of the bathhouse, where I at last found my mother by the sound of her voice. She was sitting by the fountain, chatting with another woman and rubbing her forearm with a kiseh, a coarse washcloth. I tapped her shoulder and she turned around. “What is it?” she said, annoyed by my intrusion. I couldn’t say a word, but my face must have betrayed my fear, because she stood up and led me to an empty corner of the bathhouse. When I showed her my bloodied underpants, she pressed her lips into a tight line. Then, before I could duck, she slapped me—and hard—across both cheeks. Tears sprang to my eyes, and the only word I said was “Why?” Her answer was to slap me again across both cheeks, this time even harder.

  Later Sanam explained it to me: My mother’s slaps were meant to keep the blush on my cheeks until I became a bride. “And now we must sweeten our tongues!” she’d exclaimed, clasping her hands before her and smiling broadly so that all her gold teeth shone at once. She pressed three chickpea cookies into my hand and took three more for herself. “You’re a woman now! We must celebrate!”

  I smiled weakly and popped a cookie into my mouth, but afterward I felt only confusion and, under this, a surge of humiliation and rage.

  Now, sixteen years old and about to be married, I sat alone in the same hallway. I waited on the bench until eventually a woman appeared and led me through the corridors of the bathhouse, toward the area where only married women and brides were permitted, and then she left me before the door. As a child I’d wondered what took place in these rooms. I didn’t know much more than that it was a place to which girls were taken just before their weddings, but I couldn’t imagine what happened to them there.

  I gathered my courage and knocked on the door.

  A sweet-faced, portly woman of about sixty greeted me. A dallak, a bathhouse attendant. Her white hair had been gathered in a single long braid, which she coiled up on the top of her head, and she wore a brightly patterned smock. “Come in, dear one,” she said, urging me inside with a warm smile.

  Still wary, I followed her into the chamber.

  “You poor girl, you’re shaking! What do you imagine I’m going to do with you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ah,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder. Her touch was gentle, her voice soothing. “I’ll do no more than make you lovely for your groom!” she said at last, clucking her tongue and fixing me with a smile. “Like a peach you’ll be, so smooth and ripe!”

  I still couldn’t make out her meaning, but I let myself be led to a table. “Let’s look at you properly now,” she said, bending closer. She smelled like basil and rose water. She took my face in her two hands and studied it from forehead to chin. Then, working quickly, she drew a length of thin cotton string from her pocket and began doubling and twisting it between her fingers. She started with my eyebrows, plucking whole rows of hair to the root, then rolled the thread over my whole face—forehead, cheeks, and, finally, my chin. Next she rolled the string the length of my arms and then from my ankles to the tops of my thighs. The pain was horrible—much worse by far than the pain I’d felt during the examination in the Bottom of the City. A thousand needles seemed to be pricking me at once.

  The worst of it, however, was about to begin. The woman quickly drew the towel from my waist. I was naked. I tried to cover myself with my hands, but she pulled them away and pushed them to my sides. I turned my face to the wall, away from the dallak, and she began rolling the thread over my groin, plucking every last hair out with thread. When, out of an instinct to avoid the pain, my legs would clamp shut, she’d nudge them apart with her elbow and continue with her work. I bit my lip and willed myself not to cry, but soon I was sobbing—a messy, heaving, hiccuping cry that even the old woman’s soothing words and kind encouragements couldn’t quiet.

  My only relief came when the dallak stopped to cut a new piece of string. Every time she finished with one part of my body, she tossed aside the string, reached for the spool of thread, and cut a fresh length. I had kept my eyes shut for most of it, squeezing them tight against the pain, but toward the end of that awful hour, I opened them just in time to catch her slicing the thread with a sharp razor. The blade caught the light from her lamp—quick and sly as a wink—and suddenly I knew exactly how I’d manage to fulfill the proof of blood.

  9.

  On the day of my wedding, I shivered when the white lace-trimmed wedding canopy was unfurled above my head. The scent of wild rue, pungent, smoky, and sweet, threaded its way through the parlor and filled the room. Too nervous to meet anyone’s eyes, I looked down at the wedding spread that had been laid on the floor before me. A plain mirror, a pair of silver candlesticks, one bowl filled with hand-painted eggs, and a smaller bowl filled with honey—it was the simplest wedding spread I’d ever seen.

  Setting out from Tehran, I realized it had never occurred to me how far I’d have to travel for the wedding, how far away my new home would be from all I knew. Ahwaz lay south of Tehran, five hundred miles away in Khuzestan Province. I wasn’t sure why we were moving to Ahwaz, only that Parviz had applied for a new position in his hometown, one I guessed would be more suited to life as a married man. We’d headed out just after breakfast, my mother and my sisters, and after
crossing what seemed like an endless desert, stopping a few times for food and gasoline, we reached Ahwaz in the early hours of the next morning. Peering out the window, I saw that this was a scrubby land, without hills or meadows, a country of stones and stunted blooms. I’d slept for only a few hours in the car and awakened bathed in sweat, a headache thrumming behind my brow. My trousseau, like my wedding spread, was conspicuously modest; it fit into just one trunk set under my feet in the back seat of the car, and most of the dresses, jackets, stockings, and shoes, as well as bed linens, dishes, and tableware, had been plucked from the pile of gifts my mother had been collecting for my sister’s wedding.

  As I settled into a chair now, I didn’t mind the simplicity of the wedding. I was relieved, really, to be free of all that phoniness, all that tired, obnoxious fuss. Besides, I had other thoughts to occupy my mind.

  When I met my reflection in the mirror, set among the wedding spread, what I saw astonished me. With my newly plucked eyebrows, kohl-lined eyes, and painted lips, I barely recognized myself. Sanam had pulled my hair back from my face and pinned white peonies to my wedding veil—one large flower just above each ear. My wedding dress had also been completely transformed. Just yesterday the neighborhood seamstress had taken a hand to it, and the sack-like sheath was now something more than vaguely reminiscent of a wedding dress. I had the outlines of a waist, at least, and the sleeves and collar were trimmed with pretty lace. It was like this, looking prettier and primmer than I’d ever looked, that I waited for Parviz.

  I sat up straighter, and for the first time I took a proper look around the room. The wedding party consisted of only my closest relatives and Parviz’s. The women and girls had gathered for the ceremony in the good parlor, while the men waited together in an adjoining room. I spied my sisters, little Gloria in a pink organza dress and pigtails, and Puran with her cheeks painted with an orangey makeup and circles of rouge to cover what was left of her bruise. Wan and quiet, Puran stood in a corner with her arms folded over her chest. Along with my aunts and cousins, my mother was one of the several older, married women holding the wedding canopy above my head. She stood just behind me, so that for the length of the ceremony I could sometimes hear her voice but I couldn’t see her face.