The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines (16 page)

If a client couldn’t find something at Browns, I told her where to go in order to find it. Mr. Bernstein once asked me if I had sent a client to Valentino. I told him the truth, how I was trying to maintain trustworthy relations with our clientele, and he loved the idea.

I started getting worried about my finances again the following summer. Aydin had given me the two pieces of calligraphy we purchased in Egypt and asked me to keep them for a rainy day.

I called a dear friend of ours, Dr. Jazayeri, a scholar in Persian art and antiquities, and asked for his advice. He introduced me to Mr. Saeedi, the head of the Asian Art Department at Sotheby’s on Bond Street.

Mr. Saeedi loved both calligraphies, especially the one by Mir Emad. Both pieces were picked up for Sotheby’s upcoming calligraphy auction. The Mir Emad started off with a £1,500 bid, and the starting price for the other was £700. Dr. Jazayeri and I attended the auction. There were about twenty people in the room. The Mir Emad was up for auction first. As I heard the auctioneer announcing the work, I was taken back to the day Aydin and I had found the piece in Cairo’s old bazaar. I started to think about Aydin and how he had gotten married again to a beautiful lady a year after our divorce. They now had a son, Takin. His new wife did not like me and denied having any connection to me when asked if I were related to the family. But if they asked Aydin, he once told me, he would say, “Yes, I had the pleasure of being her husband.”

“Fifteen hundred pounds,” said the auctioneer, awaiting bids. “Seventeen hundred,” said an Arab gentleman in his fifties, neatly dressed in traditional white clothes.

“Two thousand,” said a Chinese man.

A second later, the battle of bids became more heated: three thousand, four thousand, five thousand! Dr. Jazayeri was stunned. He looked at me and said that obviously two collectors were in tight competition. Then we heard the auctioneer call out six thousand.

That alone would have covered my tuition for two semesters at college, meaning I would be able to go to the fourth and final year and get my B.A.

The Mir Emad sold for 7,500 pounds, and the other went for 3,500 pounds.

My third year in college was the best one of all. I had made new friends and my brother Shahram joined me in London to continue with his architecture degree. He had been accepted at Oxford University for his doctorate. He moved in with me, and the two of us studied together. It was nice being around family again.

I WAS WORKING
at Browns on a rainy Saturday afternoon when a woman came in, soaking wet. She was looking for a cocktail dress. Our manager, Christine, asked me to help the lady, so I took her downstairs to show her our dresses. She looked at me and said, “Are you Shohreh?”

“Yes, I am,” I said. She said she was Mahdi’s cousin. I was so happy to see her. I had not heard from Mahdi for a couple of months. I wondered how he was doing. The woman apologized for being the bearer of bad news: Mahdi had taken his life the same way Abbas from the workshop had, with a combination of sleeping pills and alcohol. He’d gotten into a verbal fight with his superior, an illiterate informant in a key position at Iranian National Television. He had cursed the Ayatollah and all his informants. He was then taken to jail for a couple of months. Finally he was released with severe depression. His sister found him and took him to a hospital, but it was too late—he died there a few hours after he was brought in. Mahdi was thirty-four years old.

I did not know how to react or what to say, except for wanting to crash to the floor. The woman left, and I started crying like hell. Christine gave me the rest of the day off. I went home sobbing and called Aydin later that night. It was true. Aydin had gone to Mahdi’s deathbed.

IRAN HAD BEEN
in a bloody war with its neighboring country Iraq, beginning in September 1980 when Ba’athist Iraq attacked Iran after years of border disputes and fear of a Shiite insurgency motivated by the Iranian revolution. The eight-year war planted the fundamental pillars of the religious tyranny that exists in Iran today. War brings countries together and its people closer, therefore no one was left to question the government.

I once asked Aydin how his family dealt with the war, and he said they played games like Monopoly in the basement while Iraqi bombs poured from the sky.

My friends were dying one by one. I had never felt so lonely and helpless in my life. I worried for my mother and father, as well as millions of Iranians who now lived their lives in extreme caution, behind closed, thick dark curtains.

24

Elixir of Love?

M
y fourth year in school was the fastest one of all. I was swamped by books, newspapers, pens and pencils, highlighters, and working at Browns, and then suddenly it was graduation day. I felt like I had achieved something that once looked like a mirage. I invited a couple of friends and my cousins to my big day. I was graduating at the age of thirty-two but felt like a twenty-one-year-old in my black gown and tasseled hat.

Finally my name was called out. I got up to get my diploma and changed the direction of the tassel on my hat, from the left to the right. The direction of my life had changed as well.

Or so I thought.

I WAS NOW
working full-time at Browns while I looked for a job in a media outlet. I was preparing for an interview at my favorite newspaper,
The Guardian
, when Parviz Kardan, a prominent Iranian actor and director who had also immigrated to London, called me and asked if I would like to play a lead in his play. That little actress in me woke up instantly and said, “Why not bring the script over and let me read it?”

I read the play and fell in love with it. It was a political play (ah, my major would get some good use) revolving around a calligrapher’s life in exile.

There were only two characters. Kardan was to portray the calligrapher while also directing the play, and I would portray the woman, whom the calligrapher meets at an Iranian gathering in London. But the calligrapher tells her that he has lost all his belongings. He explains that he has been condemned to death in postrevolutionary Iran for being the Shah’s personal calligrapher but managed to flee the country.

Living in exile, and witnessing all the injustices in Iran, makes him want to send a message to the international media for refusing to shed light on the truth. His plan is to jump off the woman’s balcony with an open letter to the media in his pocket, where it would be easily found after his death. Perhaps this act would draw attention from the British media. In the end the woman convinces him that going to the media directly would be the more powerful way to help his people.

I must confess that the play gave me a totally new perspective on politics and arts, and how interwoven they can be in real life. I had seen it in the movies but had never experienced it firsthand. The thought of the enormous possibilities, of portraying politics through the arts, was overwhelming and surely more challenging to me than becoming a politician, as I had planned. I could be far more beneficial to my people doing what I knew best—acting.

I decided to do the play. I was still at Browns and rehearsed in the evenings for a month and a half. I owed a sum of three thousand pounds to the university and had to pay it back in order to receive my B.A. certificate (which had been taken back after I left the podium), so that I could apply for jobs. Working at Browns would have taken me months to pay the university back. But maybe the play could help me make the money sooner?

Rainbow
, which was in Farsi, opened in June 1984, at the Polish Cultural Center in London, a great venue for the average theatergoer, conveniently located next to a train station. It seated close to four hundred people and had an intimate feeling to it.

Our premiere was very emotional. Iranians had come to see the play from everywhere in the United Kingdom. Many of our friends also came from afar to support us. I was mesmerized by the sight of our audience. They were cheering and clapping. We received a standing ovation every night.

The play paid off, and I paid the tuition due at the university. I got my B.A. and took a few weeks off from my work at Browns. Kardan and I started a tour around Europe through Paris, Nice, Munich, Frankfurt, and Brussels. We were both relaxed about the trip and were never stressed over delays as we traveled through Europe, living out of our suitcases. Fortunately we did not have many props except for a large oil painting of Big Ben, which we used as a backdrop. The rest were replicas of antique French furniture in the woman’s apartment, which we rented locally.

Iranians abroad were more than thrilled to see the play. They told us they had not seen a Farsi-language play (or an Iranian play) in years, let alone in exile, and encouraged us to do it more often.

Kardan received a call regarding a tour in the U.S.A., starting in Los Angeles, home of the largest Iranian population outside of Iran. I was thrilled to visit Los Angeles and to catch up with a couple of friends who had fled there.

I WAS NOW
in the homeland of all the American actors I had idolized from the films and television shows of my youth. Seeing the enormous
HOLLYWOOD
sign sent jitters through my body. I was in a country that defined freedom and valued democracy.

Our first performance at the Horace Mann Theater was sold out days before. And the number of people who showed up was way beyond the capacity of the theater. I was getting ready in a dressing room when they told me that the audience had charged in and broken a huge window at the entrance. My immediate thought was, this is the place I want to live, where the audience breaks down the doors to see a play! Although a cliché, I thought to myself, God bless America.

Kardan and I traveled throughout the U.S.A., performing in New York, D.C., Chicago, Miami, and San Francisco.

EVENTUALLY WE RETURNED
to Los Angeles, and I rented a studio on Ohio Street in Westwood, next to U.C.L.A. One of my colleagues at the workshop in Tehran, Houshang Touzie, was in Los Angeles promoting his first film abroad,
The Messenger
. Houshang was quite good-looking, like Rob Lowe meets Tommy Lee Jones, with a nice build and brooding eyes.

He came to see the play, and occasionally we went on cultural outings together. When he was younger, I used to think he was too much of a ladies’ man. Now he seemed much more mature and looked me squarely in the eyes—instead of at all the beautiful ladies swooning about him. Houshang was familiar with the town, and he had a car.

I asked him why he was still a bachelor, and he told me that he had divorced his wife in New York and had come to stay in Los Angeles to start his own theater company.

An Iranian celebrity friend of mine had asked me if I would introduce her to Houshang, and I did. We went to a party at the woman’s home and I took them out on the balcony and left them alone. Five minutes later Houshang came back to me and told me to stop it. He said he was perfectly capable of finding a girl for himself. We laughed.

A few Farsi-speaking TV shows aired weekly on an international channel in Los Angeles. One of them offered me a job as a talk show host commenting on the social and political environment in Iran. I was not quite sure if I wanted to move so fast, and my British student visa was about to expire. I asked for a rain check and left Los Angeles by the end of the summer of 1984.

LONDON WAS COLD
and looked strange to me. I missed the sunshine in California. I went back to Browns and worked harder than ever, trying to figure out what to do next. I was thirty-three years old and wanted to get married and have children. Arts and politics were now my life and my passion, but the urge to have a baby and a family was so strong that I decided to share the news with my friends.

I told them that I was ready to get married and asked them to look for a good suitor for me. At first my friends thought I was joking, but they agreed to do it once they saw how serious I was.

My first suitor, “Mr. K,” was a tall, fairly good-looking, thirty-five-year-old businessman. He was a self-made man and had managed to accumulate a good fortune for himself. He had recently purchased a luxurious three-bedroom apartment, with tall ceilings and long halls, in a Victorian building on Kensington High Street. He worked from home, and all day long he bought and sold stuff over the phone.

He told me he had been looking for an interior designer for his apartment and had decided to ask me to decorate it. I thought it was a nice gesture: he wanted me to decorate our future home.

My father was right: I am a soldier of my work. I went to work every day at Browns and took my lunch hours to find Mr. K the best available furniture and decorative items.

Harrods and Harvey Nichols were both around the corner from Sloane Street, where Browns was located. I found most of the furniture in those stores. I also discovered a few antiques, including a large, early-1900s painting of a saint on glass on Portobello Road, my favorite antique market in London. It was a great buy, and with the purchase of a couple of cushions, the mission was done. The end result was that the apartment looked chic and posh, without having taken too much effort.