The Margaret Thatcher School of Beauty, page 9
“Me, I chose to laugh instead of cry. Instead of lowering my gaze, I looked up into a man’s eyes, the blue eyes of a man who understood all about the weakness of walls.
“And for this they punished me in the worst possible way – they cut me off from her name …
“MY GRANDMOTHER AND I SHARED the same name. We were both called Shahrzad, after the famous storyteller of the One Thousand and One Nights.
“Like that black-eyed princess who saved an entire kingdom of women with her carpet stories, my grandmother was also of royal blood. She was born a Qajar. From a royal line, but not one immediate to the throne.
“Her summers as a child were spent on the Caspian Sea with the rest of the royal brood, and there was a yearly visit to the court during the coronation anniversary, but other than that she lived quite a normal life with her family in the town of Hamedan. She married her father’s physician, a handsome young man who spoke five languages and loved to read out loud to her from books of Western philosophy, and they moved into a large, comfortable home across the street from her parents’ house, a place with a large orchard of persimmon trees.
“She was not the most beautiful girl on her block, my grandmother Shahrzad, but she was by far the smartest and most practical, a quality most of the Qajars lacked.
“While her cousins were falling head over heels with opiated princes, losing themselves in excessive eating and palace intrigues, she was busy building her own little empire, a house filled with a fine collection of Saffavian art, cosy library nooks, and the mess and laughter of her seven children. And when my parents died, it was she who took me in, brought me to live in her house.
“For this, and a thousand other reasons, I cherished the ground beneath her feet.
“Of my grandparents’ seven children, only my two aunts and my father had remained in Iran.
“My uncles had all gone to schools in cold places like Switzerland and Scotland, met ginger-haired women with fire in their eyes, and married them.
“Had it happened to any other mother, it would have broken her heart, but my grandmother was philosophical about having sons who deserted her.
“‘A daughter,’ she would say, ‘is a daughter for life. A son is a son only until he takes a wife,’ a wise observation, but one that was hard to believe if you were to go by my aunts.
“Ameh Latifeh was the eldest. A moderate beauty when she was a teenager, she had accepted the hand of a much older man, one of Hamedan’s wealthiest merchants. He was fat and pockmarked and smelled of fried fenugreek, which he consumed kilos of every day.
“His appetites also ran towards young boys, a cruel discovery for Ameh Latifeh. She became very bitter as a consequence.
“As for Ameh Tahereh, who possessed neither a memory of youthful good looks nor her eldest sister’s cunning, she buried herself in Koran studies, and was known to use the belt on everyone from her children to the neighbourhood dog as a form of personal penance.
“They were so envious of my grandmother’s love for me. They hated how she allowed me freedoms they could never possess – they complained whenever I got a new outfit or whenever I went out with my friends to the movies.
“IT WAS 1974 AND THE country was as free as it had ever been. Mini-skirts and discotheques. Hands being held down every street, lips caressed. At eighteen I did not have a curfew, and was allowed trips to the local cinema and the Italian pizza cafe.
“It was at this cinema, built by the Americans, that I first fell in love with a man. Peter O’Toole. He was an English actor with blond hair and blue eyes.
“He played Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia.
“Oh! My heart beat so fast the first time I saw him there on the big screen.
“I returned every day to watch the movie, until even the theatre owner took pity on me and said I could go in for free.
“He told me to save the ticket money for makeup and pretty female things.
“I didn’t like the way that theatre owner looked at me.
“I didn’t like how any Iranian boy or man looked at me, to be honest. My heart belonged to Peter O’Toole, that was it. I promised myself that the man I married would have to be Peter O’Toole, or someone who looked exactly like him.
“Someone with pale blue eyes and skin so white I could see his veins through it.
“Veins that would be pumping with love for me.
“And I found such a man, not long after turning eighteen.
“David – his name, as I learned later – wasn’t an Englishman, like Peter O’Toole, but the next best thing – an American. An American with blond hair and blue eyes.
“He was an architect, part of a team that was building a new bridge outside Hamedan. The bridge travelled over a brook that also passed by the back of my grandmother’s home. It was bordered by walnut trees and fed by the Alvand Mountains.
“Oh, how I miss my Hamedan! I haven’t been back since I was eighteen, you see, Haji Khanoum.
“I was rounding the street corner when I saw him. It was late September, but the summer heat was still beating down harshly in the mountain town; as early as eight in the morning it was at thirty-two degrees. I don’t know what I expected to see when I turned the corner, my pigtails flying behind me, but it was not a naked man, that was for sure.
“He was naked from the waist up, but that was more than I had ever seen of a man. You would not find an Iranian taking his shirt off in public, of course. But I supposed he had a good reason, working as he was with his team on that new bridge they were building.
“The bridge was at the edge of town and David was part of the contracting team. Americans were all over Hamedan then. All over the country. Ever since World War II, they had been building in America, their offices and shopping centres, houses and swimming pools, gardens for all the neighbours to see. Unlike Iranians, who prefer high walls around their homes.
“‘Americans do not have the problem of walls like we do,’ Grandmother Shahrzad once said. ‘Or maybe it is that their walls are invisible, which is more dangerous.’
“I did not remember my grandmother’s words that day.
“What I did think was how beautiful the American looked, like a movie star. He was taking a break with his foreman, smoking a Camel cigarette.
“His hair was gold, pure gold, and his bare chest was dripping with sweat.
“I didn’t cross over the bridge, of course. I wouldn’t have, even if it were built. As much as Grandmother Shahrzad allowed me freedoms not given to many of my school friends, I would never be forgiven if I were seen accepting foreign roads. My grandmother was brought up in a loyalist household, after all. She hated how the Qajars, and then the Shah, had sold out to the English and the Americans. I would never have been forgiven if she heard that I had crossed that bridge.
“So I took the long path around, as I did every morning.
“I didn’t even look back at the man with the golden head and bare chest, even though my heart was thumping so hard I could see it moving against the apron of my school uniform.
“All day long I daydreamed about the golden man. I saw him turned out in a white turban, just like Lawrence had been in the desert, as he swooped me up on his stallion and took me away. Oh! Why couldn’t I have this man, I thought, instead of the dark, moustachioed boys around me, who all wanted to corner you in some alleyway and probe your virginity with ugly smiles on their faces? I never wanted that for myself.
“‘Be careful what you wish for,’ the jennie told Aladdin, and I should have listened as well.
“I should have thought twice about my desire before turning to it. I should have kept my fantasy locked away behind the gate. Instead, I walked up to the man with the golden hair the following week, and took one of those Camel cigarettes.
“I WAS MAKING MY WAY to school when I saw him again. He was helping his men crank-start one of the cranes near the bridge. My thoughts were consumed by the colour of his hair, the white and pink of his skin; oh, he was so handsome!
“He was my destiny, I decided, and I was going to him. So I took my courage and put it all into my stomach, and let it lead me to the brook and that Lawrence of Arabia. And when he gave me a cigarette and lit it for me, I did not dare say no. I didn’t want him to think me a simple country girl.
“He did not ask me if I wanted one, he just pointed the packet my way. ‘I’m studying law next year,’ I said, in my best American accent, as I took one of the cigarettes. I could speak fluent English from the age of six, as is normal for all schoolchildren, of course. We are all taught such fundamentals, at least we were when I was a girl. His men must have thought we were crazy, a schoolgirl from Hamedan and an American man, smoking every Monday morning and talking of nonsense. We talked about the weather that first day, meaningless things.
“He was twenty-seven, he told me, from a small place in Iowa. Had I ever heard of it? ‘Nothing like the skies over Iowa,’ he said.
“‘Endless. That’s what they are. Go on forever, beating out the Rockies, the fields, everything. That’s what America’s like, Zadi. Nothing to stop you from getting what you want there. Not like what you have here.’
“He threw his finished cigarette into the water and shook his head. ‘Those mountains over there, the ones you love, they stop the sky, see. They’re what we call an eyesore in architecture. They don’t meld. They’re there to keep things out. Keep things in,’ he turned his blue eyes on me. ‘That’s not what you’re like at all, Zadi. You need to know there’s nothing anchoring you down. You need to be free.’
“And so it became our morning ritual, meeting around the bend near the river, talking of silly things. Wondrous things.
“The weather that first day, but then politics and freedom.
“I told him of my ambitions, of wanting to study pre-law at Tehran University, with plans to take it all the way to a degree. Six years to pass the bar.
“He quoted a poem he had recently read in a magazine:
Rise up sister and uproot the roots of oppression.
Give comfort to your bleeding heart.
For the sake of your freedom,
strive to change the law. Rise up!
“It was out of context – the lines meant something else entirely – but it did not matter. He was on my side; he wanted me to rise.
“I was in love with him.
“I had not done anything with him, of course, nothing to be ashamed of, but I still did not tell anyone of those morning meetings. The conversations. I knew I wanted to be with him, go where he would go, but the how and when – it all seemed insurmountable. Everywhere I turned there was a problem. And then there was my beloved grandmother, who had taken me in at the age of seven, giving me all the freedom a girl could get her hands on in Iran. How could I throw that back in her face?
“But there had to be a way.
Our longing is the way.
“The way came suddenly that spring.”
“THE DAY I LOST MY name. It was 20 March 1977. The day before Nourooz, the New Year celebration. What a glorious day it started out as, what joy I felt that morning.
“How precisely pungent everything smelled, how filled with life and springtime promise.
“All over Hamedan, New Year preparations were in full swing. Carpets were hung on walls and beaten until the dust left and the threads were bright. The air smelled of fresh Barbari bread and saffron cookies.
“In the spring season, everything in life is renewed. People who can afford to, buy new clothes, carpets, furniture, decoration and so on; if not, they wash, repaint, and clean everything.
“From gardens and courtyards, daffodils and tulips were being plucked for indoor vases and the smoke of woodsy incense filled the thresholds of houses, barring entry to any lingering winter spirits.
“There was much laughter to be had during this time as well, especially among the neighbourhood children, who were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Haji Firooz, the New Year’s clown who smacked his tambourine and danced at each doorway for a little donation.
“I had always had a certain fear of the Haji Firooz clown as a child.
“There was something sinister about his black face paint and red costume, something of the devil in it, I thought. Whenever I heard the jingle-jangle of his tambourine coming up the block, I would run inside the green metal gate of my grandmother’s home and hide behind the biggest persimmon tree. I would wait under this veil of fruit until my heart stopped tearing at my chest, and the jingle-jangle was on its way to another neighbourhood street. My Grandmother Shahrzad knew of my fear and never pushed me to play with the Haji Firooz like the other children did. She never made any of her children do anything that frightened them. One of her many fine qualities.
“On that day, the one before the New Year, preparations were going on everywhere, none more so than within the walls of Persimmon Palace. Food was bubbling away on stovetops and all the corners of the house were wiped down with rosewater rinse, filling it with the most awakening of smells, that of luscious roses.
“Like the furniture, all the carpets in the house had been washed and made ready weeks ahead of the New Year. But the servants who tended such matters had somehow overlooked the long runner in the hallway. The runner came from Tabriz, that city of hand-woven carpets, and had a design of kissing turtle doves in its centre.
“Instead of letting a servant roll it out in the courtyard and pour detergent on it, my grandmother insisted on washing the last carpet herself.
“It gave her pleasure to push her toes through the silk thread. ‘To feel the pattern beneath the pattern,’ she would say.
“And so no one thought it strange when she took the runner from one of the servant’s hands and started to glide across its foamy surface in the courtyard.
“No one except for my aunts, of course. They were mortified.
“Ameh Latifeh remained tight-lipped, but Ameh Tahereh voiced her objections when she saw her mother doing a menial chore.
“‘Thank God there are walls around this place,’ she said. ‘I would die if the neighbours saw this.’
“‘Isn’t it enough that God sees it? Isn’t it enough that she is completely messing with the order of things, as she always does? Honestly, I think we need to have a serious talk with her. She needs to go to the Caspian for a while and get some salt air to clean that soft mind of hers.’
“Ameh Latifeh huffed up the stone steps that led from the courtyard into the house, throwing me a dirty look as she went. I was sitting in a wicker seat, popping beans out of their string beds. The beans would go into dill and butter rice, one of my grandmother’s favourite meals for the New Year. That whole night, servants and household alike would be staying up cooking, preparing the endless dishes that would be served to the family and guests who would stream into the house at all hours during the thirteen celebration days. Cooking was one chore that was exalted, even by my aunts.
“I remember I was popping a bean out of its house, smiling at the sound it made when it jumped out into the sunlight, when Grandmother Shahrzad’s head hit the ground. It took me a moment to realise that a bean did not make that kind of thud when released from its pod. I let go of the bowl of beans, spilling them as I ran to my grandmother’s side.
“The foam on the carpet rose around her body, but it had not protected her skull. The doctor said it didn’t matter; that she was already dead from an aneurysm, even before her head hit the limestone tiles of the courtyard.
“She had died by the time her feet were up in the air, her eyes looking to the heavens above.
“She was gone. And so was I,” Zadi recalled.
“I RAN. I RAN FROM that house, from the funeral crowd that had come to eat not the food of new beginnings, but the morsels of memory.
“As my aunts covered themselves with their mourning chadors and began to wail the cry of the misbegotten, To whom are you leaving us? To whom are you leaving us?, pounding and tearing at the folds of their veils and chests like crazed animals, I wrapped my hair in my grandmother’s favourite headscarf and tore out of home.
“My mind was blank, my heart untouchable. I could hardly see my way down our streets, past the midnight celebrations that were already beginning in every household but ours.
“I could still hear the mourning, wailing voices of my aunts as I ran.
“‘To whom are you leaving us? To whom are you leaving us?’
“They seemed not to notice anything but their own grief, their own selfishness over the will of what was above.
“Didn’t they know their faith well enough? Were they not aware that their wails were only paining Grandmother Shahrzad’s rising soul, as she took her leave?
“Where was their humility in the face of God?”
“I KEPT REPEATING THESE QUESTIONS in my head as my own form of mourning, for I knew that I could not ask the same questions of my grandmother.
“I could not ask her to stay.
“She had been ready to go, there on the carpet, had chosen that moment when her toes were poised on the wings of doves to leave the earth.
“Or, it was chosen for her.
“It was her time, simple as that.
“Still, I could not stop my running. I ran and ran until I came to the town square. The square in Hamedan is not really a square but a circle, the middle heart of a bigger circle. From this middle, there are six avenues like the spokes of a wheel, going off in every direction, and they are connected by a round road. Go south, and you get to the grave of Avicenna. That is the great medicine man. He is the one who first drew the essence from those rose petals, who discovered how to do it. But even he could not bring my Grandmother Shahrzad back to life. To go northwest would take you to another tomb, that of Baba Taher. He wrote poems for the common man; for his baring of the purest of words, he came to be called ‘The Naked’. But all of this is not as important as the fact that I was still standing in this circle-square, unable to decide on anything, unable to see straight. It was then that I realised I had not been crying as I thought. That the grief inside me had turned into its own skin, had buried itself so deep the moment I heard my grandmother’s head hit the ground.
