The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines (15 page)

I discussed it with Aydin, and he was very happy. He said my father was right. I had missed Aydin and my family and friends and Pasha beyond belief. I knew I would need financial help sooner or later if I were to finish my planned four years of university. Besides, I needed to go back to Iran and see if I could perhaps live there again.

I WENT BACK
to Iran in March 1980. As the government was actively interrogating actors, I traveled not under my husband’s surname but rather used the one on my passport, my family name of Vaziritabar. That way the authorities would not know I was there. Aydin and Mahdi picked me up at the airport. I threw my arms around Aydin and hugged him like I might never let go of him again. When we got home, Pasha wiggled in delight, kissing me until I fell back on the floor. Aydin was happy to see me back at home, wrestling with Pasha. His mother was the happiest one of all.

My father and I went to the Ministry of Science at four in the morning the following day to file the application for a student allowance abroad. There was a line of students already waiting when we got there. We were permitted in at eight o’clock. The guard at the door looked at me and rudely asked me why I was wearing nail polish, which was forbidden. I politely responded that I was in Iran for a friend’s wedding and that’s why my nails were red. I said I never wore it otherwise. He let me in reluctantly. My father liked the way I handled the guard, but warned me, “What you see is the surface, the so-called calm before the chaos. But we see beneath it, things that you do not see and cannot even imagine. Young people like you are being tortured for conspiracy against the regime. Kids, who are helping the various underground oppositions, distributing newsletters against the regime, are now thrown into Evin Prison and God knows what they do to them. Go back, get your B.A. and we’ll see. But do not stay here.”

My father was right. The scene in Tehran resembled a ghost town at high noon in a western, awaiting a long-drawn-out gun battle. People were functioning, but it seemed as if they were holding their breath. They must have known what was going on in the torture chambers of the regime, like my father did. Yet they did not talk about it.
Hijab
was not mandatory yet, but it was lurking in the shadows. Muslim fundamentalists’ were celebrating their victory.

I had seen a couple of friends but had not seen Abbas Nalbandian, the head of the workshop, and I had not heard anything from Dokhi, the friend with whom we’d visited Italy along with her husband, Behnam, the other half of the four musketeers. She had not contacted me since I left. I had called her a couple of times but did not get through. She had visited her brother in the U.S.A. and would send me postcards wherever she went. Her last one came from New York, saying she was going to explore South America with a couple of friends, but that was months ago. I told Aydin that I was going to Dokhi’s house to find out where she was. He asked me to sit down.

Dokhi had had a brain stroke in Brazil right after the revolution and died. She was only twenty-eight years old. Her mother did her best to bring her body back to Iran, but by the time the international police had located her, Dokhi was already buried in a Muslim cemetery on the outskirts of a village in northern Brazil.

The Muslim cemetery did not allow the removal of the body due to Islamic law. When at last the permission was given in light of extraordinary circumstances, a huge flood had washed out the whole cemetery, taking all the stones, the dirt, and the corpses into a valley of wild tulips.

This was what Dokhi had always wanted, to become one with nature. She was not afraid of death. She thought it was a passage that takes humans back to nature.

I could not believe it. I cried all day and night. I could hardly breathe when I went to bed. Aydin sat on the bed with a book in his hand and recited Omar Khayyam’s poetry for Pasha and me until the sun rose. I still do not want to believe Dokhi is dead and have followed women who looked like her on three occasions in London, Amsterdam, and Paris.

I wanted to visit Abbas Nalbandian, but I had to see what had happened to the workshop first. It was indeed a terrible sight: the revolutionary government had shut down the workshop, and its entrance was covered with bricks and mud.

But the sight of Abbas’s dark and stuffy small apartment was even worse. He had been interrogated in jail about a handgun and a book—Mao Tse-tung’s essays on communism and Marxism—which the police had found in his locker at the workshop. Others at the workshop knew that both items belonged to someone else, but Nalbandian had refused to name names and had probably paid the price. He was now dangerously thin and vulnerable.

I did not dare ask him about the interrogations. Instead I asked if he wanted me to make a nice omelet with tomato, his favorite, and eat together, like the old days. He agreed and had a few bites before he passed out from the various painkillers and tranquilizers he had been given. He slept on his stomach, his head tilted to the left, breathing softly. I sat in his small living room, where he had spread his mattress. He refused to sleep in the bedroom since being in jail at the notorious Evin political prison, where the regime interrogated and tortured innocent civilians for having different beliefs or ideologies. I looked at him in despair, feeling awful for not being able to do more for him. I left when Mahdi arrived. He, too, was extremely sad.

Abbas Nalbandian eventually committed suicide. He was said to have mixed an excessive dose of his sleeping pills with alcohol. And with him went another part of my past.

I had decided to stay only two weeks, but what came next made me leave even sooner.

I was visiting an actor friend of mine. She asked me how on earth I had not yet been summoned to the authorities. She said the revolutionary government was looking into every artist’s dossier. She said a well-known female singer, a popular actress, and a director’s wife had already been interrogated and were both under house arrest.

I was so thankful I was there under my father’s name, but to be safe, I decided to return to London quickly.

I left again with a thousand sorrows. Somehow I knew this was it. The airport was chaotic. Passengers had to be dropped by the main entrance. Their families and friends did not get to see them to the terminal.

I got out, hugged my brother Shahriar and Aydin, and then turned around and did not look back until inside the terminal. My face was wet with tears. I cried the whole way to London, despite all the kindness of the Iran Air stewardesses. It was a far shorter journey than the one I had last taken out of Iran.

My father called a week later to tell me not to call home. He said the Comiteh, the self-appointed militia, had been to my parents’ home looking for me as word of mouth had spread that I had been there. Iranians were spying on one another.

THANK GOD FOR
my new friends. A couple of them were going to Valencia, a beautiful city in Spain. They had rented an apartment and invited me to join them for the summer. We had a lovely time swimming, cooking, and partying in our little apartment. I did the shopping and loved going to the market to smell the scents of the vegetables and fruits.

One day I was at the butcher shop, one of my favorite places in the market. The butcher was a broad-shouldered woman in her late thirties, chubby with strong hands.

“Good morning,” I said. She smiled and said something in Spanish while rubbing her bloody butcher knife on her white apron.

“
Shah muerto
,” she said. I looked at her in disbelief. She said it again. “
Shah muerto.
” This time she drew an imaginary line on her throat signifying death. But I understood what she said. I was paralyzed, hoping I had misheard her. I had not.

The Shah had passed away from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1980 at the age of sixty. Iran had lost a man who sincerely loved her. And I, for one, was bewildered, as were many others. If there was once a ray of hope to bring the monarchy back to Iran, it was now nothing but a shattered dream.

I PASSED THE
exam for my first certificate in English in June 1981. I was now ready to go to college.

In autumn, I matriculated into the International University of Europe, in the city of Watford, to study international relations. I was extremely happy. My professors were mostly young, enthusiastic, and quite caring, and the faculty was incredibly supportive. I cut my hair short and started running in the morning.

Studying hard got me through the first year, but in the second year I was afraid of not being able to finish. The Iranian Embassy had refused to extend my governmental-tuition plan, claiming they would only allow three categories of students abroad to receive the governmental exchange rate: medical, engineering, and farming students.

BY THIS TIME
I had discovered the Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, on the corner of Park Lane and Cumberland Gate, where speakers and listeners have been gathering since the Royal Parks and Gardens Act of 1872 to share their political views, shed light on the injustices in the world through political awareness, and make changes. It is well known for hosting political leaders such as Karl Marx and Lenin. Any individual can stand up on a box and share his views with the world. I joined the thousands of demonstrators at Hyde Park Corner in one of the biggest demonstrations against the Islamic Republic in Iran. It was organized by the followers of Shapour Bakhtiar, the last prime minister of Iran. We walked all the way to Tottenham Court Road, about an hour and a half away on our slow-moving feet. We chanted in unison, “We want freedom for Iran, freedom and democracy. Political prisoners must be freed!” And we carried banners that said: “The youth of Iran are now being captured and tortured,” “The world must pay attention to the injustices in Iran,” “Down with religious tyranny!”

MY FINANCIAL SITUATION
was deteriorating. I did not want to ask Aydin for any help. He had done his best, and it was time to let him get on with his own life, even though I still missed him madly. Besides, I did not want him to pay for my decisions. I was still legally his wife and was participating in these huge demonstrations against the regime.

I loved Aydin so much that I decided to leave him and not put him in harm’s way. I did not even call him, in case his phone was bugged. I wrote him a lengthy letter, saying I wished I could live with him again but that I could not conform to religious tyranny. I knew I would put both of us in deep danger if I went back home. In addition, I had now tasted life in a democratic world, and I liked how it felt—more than returning to my husband. I was mature now. I had become logical. First and foremost I needed an education and then maybe I would one day be able to help the people of Iran. The path to enlightenment was far more enticing than traveling this path with another.

“Look for a path rather than path finder,” Grandma used to say.

A few weeks later, Aydin and my father went to a law office in Tehran with my letter requesting a divorce.

I NOW WAS
sharing a furnished apartment with a school friend. It had two stories and a tall church ceiling with a huge piano next to the large window on the second floor. There were two small French windows on the first floor facing a backyard, adjacent to a communal garden and playground. The owner of the apartment was a composer and was living in Austria for a couple of years. The address was 40 Warwick Avenue, near the BBC network.

I was at my new home when my mother called and gave me the news. She said, “You are divorced now.” I said, “Thank you,” and hung up. I felt like an astronaut whose tether had slipped from his space capsule. I felt numb, but my gut was twirling. I decided to take a walk and went to Hampstead Heath, where I cried for what was now a lost love. More pieces of my past were crumbling away.

23

Mahdi and the Shah

S
ince I did not want my parents to purchase pounds on the black market, I looked for a part-time job. A friend of mine was working at Browns boutique in Knightsbridge, well known for such couture lines as Donna Karan, Sonia Rykiel, and many more.

Its owner, Mr. Bernstein, was a Holocaust survivor. He was proud of the faded-blue serial numbers on his wrist, bitter evidence of his days as a captive in the Nazi camps, from the age of seventeen to nineteen.

Mr. Bernstein hired me to work part-time at the shop, where I saw many princesses and movie stars, as well as high-society socialites. I worked a full day on Saturdays and any other free nonschool days, including holidays and in the summer, when many of the other employees took their vacations.

At the back of the shop, next to the stockroom, was a kitchenette where girls or sales assistants would often rest during their lunch hour or fifteen-minute tea break twice a day. I either studied during lunch or took a quick walk on our street, which was in the fashion district, to see what other designers had on display. Knowing the market and understanding high fashion helped me to better assist my wealthy customers and therefore make more money, as our salaries were based on a percentage of our sales.