Children of the jacarand.., p.3
Children of the Jacaranda Tree, page 3
Although Azar had not been born here, Tehran had always been her home, where she had felt she belonged. She loved the city, with its traffic and its soiled white buildings and its overpowering chaos. She loved it so much that she’d once believed she could change its destiny. That was what she told Ismael when she informed him of her decision to continue her political activity. This is not what we fought for, what we risked our lives for, she said, we cannot let them take everything away from us.
Ismael came along with her, hand in hand, at every stage. Whatever we do, we shall do it together, he said. Whatever happened to them, it would be their shared destiny. He was quickly, readily infused with her fervor. He went with her to the underground meetings in stuffy rooms, helped her print leaflets, carry messages in cigarette packets, spoke of the future at his university. When it was time, when the persecutions began and it was too dangerous to keep contact with their families, they stopped calling and answering their parents’ phone calls, stopped visiting them. They shed tears together, desperate, no longer certain what was the right thing to do. No longer having the strength to move forward and knowing it was too late to turn back. The door of their apartment became menacing, glaring at them askance, expecting responses to the unuttered questions that their parents impressed upon it with their persistent knocks. That was when they decided to move and hence wipe out their traces forever. It was easier that way. No one would be knocking on the door anymore. Cut off, they found it easier to pretend to forget.
Was it worth it? Azar wiped the strands of hair away from her face. Would Ismael ever forgive her for putting her fight before everything? Before him, their life together, the child growing in her womb? Would they be given a second chance?
The thoughts agitated her. She pressed her thin elbows against the windowsill and her forehead against the warm window. The traffic huffed and puffed slowly across the bridge. Although far from them, Azar could see the tiny, agitated faces in the cars, the restless bodies impaled on the motorbikes with not enough space to maneuver through the jam. Above the traffic, hovering overhead like a gigantic cloud, was a billboard with one of the maxims of the Supreme Leader written in careful, elegant cursive. Our revolution was an explosion of light. Painted next to it was the depiction of an explosion, like fireworks.
On the sidewalk, underneath the billboard, a man was standing and staring at the cars, dazed. He looked tired, much older than his age. The sun struck at his sallow, haggard face. When Azar saw him, her heart skipped a beat. She felt her face light up. She opened her mouth, flabbergasted.
“Pedar!” she screamed, banging on the window with her open palm.
Her father didn’t hear her. Or look up. He put the bags down on the ground and slipped a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe the sweat off his forehead. His wiry body looked hunched by something that was not age.
Azar’s face twitched and twisted. Never in the months of prison had she felt her father to be so far, so unreachable. Never had she felt so alone, so afraid of what was to become of her.
“Pedar!” she cried out with the last vestiges of strength left in her. Her voice was nothing but a throaty whimper. It barely traveled beyond the thick glass of the window.
Her father picked up the bags and began walking away, never lifting his head. Azar watched, wide-eyed, panting as his tall, stooped body dwindled into the hazy afternoon light. He got on his motorbike and rode away.
The traffic began moving. Azar’s hand lay motionless on the window, against the reflection of shabby leaves and empty nests and a black billboard that spoke of light.
• • •
The next time the door swung open, Sister was alone. The child was not with her. Neither were the midwives or the doctor. With stunned eyes, Azar watched Sister carrying her clothes. She was still shaken. The image of her father, his hunched body, his tired face, spiraled through her mind. Sister put Azar’s clothes down on the bed. Azar inquired in a faint voice where her baby was.
“We’ll get her on our way out,” said Sister, and Azar realized that the doctor’s insistence had been in vain. Sister had won. It was time to go.
Sister’s foot hit the empty plate and made it rattle noisily on the floor. She was standing directly in front of Azar, her eyes fixed on her. “Have you seen Meysam?” she asked.
“Meysam?” Azar knew who Meysam was. He was the Brother who told stories in the car, the recipient of Sister’s prurient guffaws. Azar had seen Sister, visibly older than he, frustrated yet unrelenting, following him around in the dark corridors of the prison and the concrete-laden courtyard. She had heard the ring of that laughter across the hall. She had seen Sister bring him gifts: plates of food, woolen gloves. She had seen her bribe the younger man, the young Brother, in a desperate hope to lay claim to his body.
“The tall Brother with the big brown eyes. The good-looking one.” Sister’s linear eyebrows pulled into an excited frown. “He was there with us earlier. Haven’t you seen him?”
Azar stared back at Sister. It dawned on her that Sister’s insistence on leaving the hospital today had nothing to do with security, with regulation, or with protocol. It had nothing to do with Azar’s life or death. It was simply due to Sister’s lust; she wanted to be with Meysam.
“No, I think he’s gone,” Azar lied. She could barely remember anything. She might have even seen him. But in that moment, as she looked at the spinster’s face sprinkled with the irregular shadows of the sycamore leaves as she readied to lock the handcuffs again, disappointing her gave Azar a pleasant thrill.
Once they were out in the corridor, Sister left momentarily to retrieve the child. Barely able to stand, Azar lowered her shaky body onto one of the white plastic chairs that lined the empty hallway. Naked bulbs hung from the ceiling, giving off a feeble, hazy light. Her eyes burned.
From a few doors down, an elderly woman stepped out, closing a door carefully behind her. She stood looking at the posters on the wall in front of her, her hands folded on top of each other. She was wearing a knee-length navy blue manteau and a white headscarf and seemed to be waiting for something or someone. A child, a grandchild. She looked oddly neat and unperturbed in her grim surroundings.
She sat down and placed her brown leather bag with its worn-out strap on her knees. She stole a glance at Azar only to immediately avert her gaze. It hurt, how she looked away. There was fear in those gray-green eyes. And foreboding. Was there something in Azar’s face that spoke of her destination? Was there something in her face that warned of iron doors and handcuffs and interrogation rooms? Life inside the prison walls was no different from existence beyond. Everyone carried fear, like a chain, carrying it in the streets, under the familiar shadow of the sad, glorious mountains. And in carrying it, they no longer spoke of it. The fear became intangible, unspeakable. And it ruled over them, invisible and omnipotent.
Azar looked at her own loose gray pants, at her black chador, half of it dragging, sweeping the floor. The prisoners were not as skilled with the chador as the Sisters. They fussed and fumbled with it, like children trying to put clothes on a doll for the first time—a broken doll with a hanging arm and dead legs. The chadors dragged on the ground half of the time.
Azar gathered her chador about her, pulled it over her face, and hid her handcuffed hands under it. Under the protection of the chador, she touched her bony cheeks, her small chin. She must be looking gaunt. An unwanted specter. An image emerged in her mind. Of herself, leaflets in hand, running down a deserted street, the roar of the Revolutionary Guards’ patrol shaking the air behind her. She remembered how her heart raced, like it was no longer part of her body, like it had a life and a speed of its own, as she hid behind a car. She remembered the pothole in the asphalt, the candy wrapper that floated away in the drain next to her feet, a glimpse of the oilcloth covering on the table printed in yellow roses behind a window of a house, the smell of hot steel, the violent, explosive thumping in her temples.
It all felt like it was centuries ago. That day with its cloudless sky. Who was she then? What had happened to that Azar, with her determined voice and swift feet and the doubts about where all of this was going, which she never voiced, not even to Ismael.
At the sound of approaching footfalls, she lifted her head. The old woman was standing in front of her.
“Are you okay, dokhtaram?”
Azar looked at the woman, taken aback. She was tongue-tied. She had not expected the woman to approach her. The thought of speaking to someone outside the prison shook her.
“You look pale,” the woman commented.
In the woman’s manner of speaking, Azar immediately recognized the Tabrizi accent, just like her mother’s, the same weightless cadence, as if they were tiptoeing on the words when they spoke Farsi. She opened her mouth to reply, but her eyes brimmed over with tears.
“I’m waiting for my daughter,” she said, her voice tangling up in her throat. The image of her mother washing her face with the cold water of the fountain, preparing for the Morning Prayer, rushed through her mind.
“Where is she? Is she in the babies’ ward?”
Tears streamed down Azar’s face. She didn’t know when, how, where they had come from. It was as if a dam had broken inside her and tears were gushing down, engulfing everything. Her body shook at the force of sobs she was trying to hold back.
“Don’t cry, azizam, why are you crying?” the woman repeated in a distressed, surprised voice. “Nothing to cry about. Your baby is out. Inshallah, she is healthy and beautiful, like you, although you should eat more. You’re too thin. You have to feed two people now. In these times of war, we must stay strong. If we stay strong, not even Saddam can bring us to our knees.” The woman spoke in a soft voice as she wiped away Azar’s tears with the end of her white headscarf. Tears that seemed to have no end only flowed and flowed like waterfalls.
“Why don’t you go and get your daughter?” The woman’s eyes glittered with the apparent hope that the idea would distract Azar, put an end to her tears.
“Sister went to get her.” Azar sniffled, bending her head low into her chador to wipe her face.
“Oh good, your sister is here,” the woman said enthusiastically. “You’re not alone. That’s good.”
“She is not my sister. We just call her Sister. She is—” Azar stopped.
The old woman waited for her to complete the sentence. Then it seemed as if something changed in the color of her eyes. A thought, fear, the unspeakable scuttled across them. Her thin wrinkled face fell. There was no longer that determination to bring a halt to Azar’s tears, to speak to her of her daughter. She placed a hand on Azar’s head.
“I see,” she said finally. It looked like she wanted to say more; her gray-green eyes looked laden with words, with questions. But she did not. She kissed Azar on the forehead and quietly walked away as Sister appeared at the end of the corridor, holding a tight red bundle in her arms.
Forgetting the old woman, Azar rose to her feet. There was something excruciatingly wrong with the image before her. Her child in the arms of Sister, her wardress. Azar felt a rush of desperation so powerful that it left her weak. But no, she should not think about that. There was her child coming to her. She had been lucky. Her child was alive. Nothing else mattered at that moment.
She curled her fingers into a fist and watched Sister getting closer. Excitement battered through her. She could not get her eyes off the bundle in Sister’s hands. Her frustration, her anger, was being swamped over by an acute sense of tenderness, of protection. She stretched her arms out toward her child, trembled with the prospect of holding her. But as Sister got closer, Azar saw more clearly what kind of blanket the child had been wrapped in. It was a rough prison blanket, and her child was naked. Azar winced at the sight of her child unprotected against the coarseness that clamped its teeth into the fragile newborn skin. She stood with her arms outstretched but could not speak. She knew if she opened her mouth, nothing would come out but a shrill, twisted wail.
“You’re still too weak,” Sister said as she strutted to the elevator. “You’ll drop her.”
Azar dropped her arms. She could not tear her eyes from the bundle. She imagined snatching it away and racing off down the corridor and into the streets and across the bridge, where, somewhere under the shadow of a tree, her father would be waiting for her.
Sister’s face lit up when she looked at something or someone down the hallway. Azar followed her gaze. It was Meysam walking up to them, his slippers proudly slapping the tiled floor. His white polyester shirt hung loosely over his black pants. He walked slowly, his head held high, adhering fully to his role of the guardian of the revolution, omnipotent in his intentionally modest clothing. The beard he insisted on wearing was sparse. Not an adult beard yet. His gait was that of a boy who seemed to have just won a war. And at that moment, the thought flashed through Azar’s mind that soon he and so many like him would be sent to that other war blazing along the borders of the country. It would be soon, for the country had nothing but bodies to defend itself with, and bodies were going to be sent, more and more every day. Bodies that might never return. Azar blinked, looking at Meysam, the thought filling her with despair.
Next to her, Sister snatched one of her hands away from underneath the child to tug a strand of hair inside her scarf. She lowered her gaze to the ground in a ghastly act of timidity. Azar looked apprehensively at Sister’s uncontrolled arms. With every move Sister made, Azar’s hands shot forward for her child, lest Sister, gripped by passion, dropped her.
“Salaam Baraadar,” Sister said, beaming. “I thought you’d already left.”
“I’m still here. Are you ready to go?” Meysam asked, calling the elevator.
“Yes, with the help of God, it is all finished.”
Along with Meysam, another man walked into the elevator. When his gaze met Azar’s, his jaundiced eyes widened with recognition and astonishment. Azar hurled a glance at Sister, who, having forgotten her scripted coyness, had turned her body away from Azar while speaking animatedly to Meysam. Azar edged closer to the man, whose appearance had changed since the last time she had seen him. His face had hardened. His beard made him look old and severe. He had buttoned up his white polyester shirt all the way to his Adam’s apple, as the dress code for the pious demanded. Just like Meysam, he wore plastic slippers.
As she slunk closer to him, Azar wondered if he still lived next to her parents’ house on that dead-end street, if he still went over to their house for the evening tea, if he still informed her father of available government coupons for sugar and vegetable oil, which were becoming harder to find as the war continued. Or had becoming a man of the revolution, with his authoritative beard and plastic slippers and hardened face set him apart?
There was shock in his eyes as he looked at her. Obviously, her parents had not told him about her arrest. Azar was not surprised. They had been afraid. How could they not be? She shuddered at the thought of how her parents may have found out. She imagined the Revolutionary Guards swarming into their house, asking questions, threatening. And her parents in the corner, shaking as they slowly understood, while they watched the mayhem around them, why Azar had disappeared for so long.
Azar held the man’s bewildered gaze with hers. “I’m fine. Tell them I’m fine.”
Boggled, the man nodded. Another of Sister’s guffaws dovetailed Azar’s whisper. It spun through the closed elevator, bouncing off the walls and the neon lights.
Azar turned to Sister. “Let me hold her. I can handle it.”
Sister hesitated before she placed the coarse bundle in Azar’s arms. The child was sleeping. Tiny breaths hovered over the pink parting of her mouth. Azar wished to squeeze her to her heart, that small, soft body. She wanted to squeeze her so that the pressure would make it real. The mouth, the pink wrinkled skin, the black fuzz covering the forehead.
She was too weak. She only held the baby, feeling the tough skin of the blanket scratching her palms. It barely enclosed the child’s body. Azar felt a rush of sorrow and guilt rise up the column of her body. What had she done by bringing a child into this world, where not the mother but the wardress first held her?
She hid her face inside the bundle and inhaled the sweet aroma of her child. She kissed her forehead and her shoulders and her chest. She kissed and inhaled deeply, glutting herself with the proximity of her body, asking for forgiveness. The child made a tiny move with her shoulder and opened her eyes.
Black as the night. The whites of her eyes looked almost blue. She opened and closed her mouth and looked around. Azar watched her with bewilderment, those large eyes that rolled around the elevator with a gaze so penetrating, it seemed she wanted to arrest someone. It was almost frightening. That gaze, that sharp look in her child’s black-and-blue eyes—severe, unsparing, much like Sister’s. Her heart almost skipped with fright. Azar lifted a tremulous hand and held it over her daughter’s eyes.
• • •
There was an effusive buzz in the cell, with its walls that glistened because so many heads and backs had rubbed against them. The buzz that could happen only once—when life was about to change shape.
Seething with excitement, the women awaited the arrival of the newborn. They had cleaned everything, scrubbed the walls, washed the carpets. That day, no one had been allowed to exercise, lest they raise dust. One of the corners was decorated with all the windblown leaves found in the courtyard, gathered in an empty aluminum jar. The iron bars of the window cast thick linear shadows on the lemon-yellow headscarf that hung as a curtain.
The women had carried their excitement around with them all day. They were restless, barely able to stay put. Since daybreak, when Azar was first removed with her taut, throbbing belly, the women, unable to hide their glee, had grown nicer to one another. The hostile silence had burst open and words were spurting out, even between enemies who had despised each other’s political parties and thus each other. They seemed to have put a pause on the wrathful rivalry and the usual sinking into ideological lagoons, suspending for at least a day their belief that the other was to blame for a revolution gone astray.
