The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines (21 page)

THE SHOOTING OF
the film started again the next day at LaGuardia. We were all exhausted and looked tired, but I was fine with my appearance, since I was supposed to portray a drained-looking woman who is seven months pregnant and terrified after having entered the U.S.A. under a false passport. Since our permit to shoot at the airport was good only for one night, and the production had already cost the producers tens of thousands of dollars, we worked long into the night.

We went back to our hotel at three in the morning, and I packed for the trip to Istanbul the following evening. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the hypnotic view of New York City: sleek modern skyscrapers next to buildings in an old-European style of architecture. All were illuminated by thousands of glistening lights. It was a living tableau of the past, the present, and the future.

Houshang sat next to me and asked me if I was all right. I told him I was thinking of the woman I portrayed in the movie and felt sad that she had no one to go to once she landed in the United States. He hugged me and told me that I had him. He then asked me if I wanted to rehearse our romantic kiss in the movie.

I reminded him the scene had already been shot, but still I could use a good kiss. I needed to reconnect with our love, passion, and humanity. It was time to kiss and care for each other and make love.

Houshang was not needed for filming in Istanbul and was not going with us any further. It was the first time Houshang and I would be apart since our marriage, and we both looked lost when kissing each other good-bye. He was going to join me in Germany after the shooting was done, to start our theatrical tour of
Café Nostalgia
in Frankfurt.

MY COLLEAGUE MOHSEN
and I flew to Istanbul, where I had asked my parents to join me. (Turkey never closed its borders to Iranians even during the revolution and the war.) We had not seen each other since their last visit to London, three years before, and I missed them deeply. It is not easy to live so far away from your loved ones. My mother looked almost the same, but my father had gotten older. The poor man hated the regime and what it was doing to the people of Iran. They were so happy to see me, and I was on cloud nine having them there. I even asked them to play the part of the two pedestrians in one of my scenes, and they agreed to it gladly.

The two weeks in Istanbul with my parents made me feel much better, but I was still suffering from panic attacks and kept fighting them off by trying to understand their roots.

Though we’d started filming already, the Turkish authorities had not yet granted us permission to shoot at Istanbul Airport. But the assistant director decided to go ahead and shoot the scene according to the schedule, regardless of what the authorities might say or do.

Mohsen and I got to the airport in the early morning and joined the crew laying their equipment out by the only entrance to the airport. The cinematographer was stepping behind the camera when a policeman asked him if we had a permit to shoot. He said we did. The policeman did not ask to see it and instead suggested that we use real people in the background. Our cameraman looked at us and said, “What are we waiting for?” Mohsen and I joined the actual crowd at the entrance while the extras waited in the parking lot.

In this scene, the two characters are trying to fly to the Netherlands with false passports. This is their first attempt to flee Istanbul and join family in Amsterdam. The irony was that most of the Iranian passengers who were flying out of Istanbul that day shared common stories with the characters of our movie. Many had fled Iran and were lucky enough to get a visa to America. I was having an emotional breakdown that day. I wanted to be back in America and I felt such compassion for those who hoped fate would take them there as well.

My tongue felt like a piece of dried wood in my mouth, and my heart was in my throat. I still do not know how I managed to work twelve hours that day. I wished Houshang was with me. He could have helped me. But I had to overcome the fear myself.

We were almost done with the interior shots when a high-ranking Turkish general entered the airport and became angry at what he saw. He couldn’t believe two actual policemen had volunteered to be in the film. The general asked them what the hell they were doing, posing in front of a camera while on duty. They said they were just trying to help us by portraying policemen in our film.

The general shouted, “You are not actors! You are peasants! You are supposed to be policemen, you idiots!”

MY PARENTS AND
I celebrated our last night together at a Turkish cabaret, listening to the beautiful voices of its regional singers and feasting on Turkish food. My mother was surprised by how little I ate. She said I might be pregnant. I asked her why she thought so, and she said, “Because you have lost color and have eaten too little.” She did not know anything about my panic attacks, and I did not intend to tell her.

My heart sank when my parents left. I wondered when I would see them again. They were getting old and I was their first child. They had given my brothers and me a great life, and had done their best to take good care of us. I could not be there for them now, and take care of them in return. I wished I was rich and could get them out of Iran. I yearned to provide them a decent life abroad. But I could not. My father would not have accepted it even if I could. He was a proud man and would always stay in Iran.

I took my parents to the airport the next day and watched them disappear behind the entry doors. Then I leaned against a handrail on the curbside and cried, cursing the political divide that had separated us from each other.

NEXT UP WAS
Amsterdam, where the last piece of the movie was to be shot. This time we did have a proper permit to film, and the airport authorities did their best to accommodate us.

During a break, I was asked by the airport immigration police if I would talk to an Iranian passenger who did not speak a word of English, or any other language except Farsi. They did not have a Farsi-speaking translator on hand and were wondering if I could help them.

Two policemen took me to where the Iranian woman was waiting for a miracle to happen. I saw a young pregnant woman in her early thirties with her five-year-old son clutching his mother’s skirt. It was as though my character had jumped out of the film and was facing me in real life.

I explained to the young woman that the police wanted to know which country she flew from, and why she did not have a passport. She was shaking, and her son was crying. The child was hungry. I asked the police if we could give them some food from the film’s craft services, and it was soon delivered to us. The poor kid took a large bite out of his ham sandwich and gulped it down with a Coca-Cola. He wouldn’t take his teary and puffy eyes off of his mother.

She then started to whisper to me in Farsi: “Please do not tell them this. I tore my Iranian passport into pieces and flushed it down the toilet on the plane. I was smuggled into Pakistan. The opposition helped me. They gave me some money, and I bought a fake Pakistani passport and a fake visa to Holland to get on the plane. I am coming from Pakistan now. But please do not tell them what I told you or I will be deported to Iran.”

She was told by her opposition friends that the authorities in Holland would not deport her as long as she did not have a travel document on her that indicated her country of origin. She told me that her husband had been a member of an Iranian opposition called the Mujahideen Khalq. It was the Islamic Republic’s most infamous opposition group. The mujahideen believed they were engaged in a long-term guerrilla war against the Islamic Republic. Her husband had been executed at Tehran’s Evin Prison shortly after being captured at their home. She said she would be killed, too, if she went back to Iran, for she was a member of the group as well. I was speechless, and knew she was right. Hundreds of mujahideen, mostly young people, men and women, had been tortured, raped, and killed in prison.

Women of Iran were deprived of their basic rights. Many had been jailed, tortured, raped, and hanged for being members of ethnic or religious minorities or being involved in political activities.

Mona, a sixteen-year-old Baha’i girl, was hanged in July 1984 for refusing to conform and sign a petition for mercy, in which she would denounce her birth religion, the Baha’i faith, and convert to Islam. Her tragic death made a huge impact on concerned citizens all over the world.

In 1985, the United Nations’ special representatives to Iran began issuing regular reports documenting allegations of sexual violence and rape in Iran’s prisons. A 1987 report noted that six sympathizers of Iran’s mujahideen testified about experiencing and witnessing many forms of torture. One woman, Mina Vatani, reported that she witnessed seventy people being executed in Evin Prison in early 1982, and that the victims included a pregnant woman and women who had been raped.

In 1988, the same year we were filming
Hotel Astoria
, representatives held informal hearings at which sixteen former prisoners testified about their experiences in prison, which included torture and rape. Seven were Baha’is and nine described themselves as sympathizers of the mujahideen. One witness testified that a woman in her sixties had been raped and executed; another stated that she witnessed Revolutionary Guards raping young girls.

I was torn between the truth, risking the woman’s life, my conscience, and my responsibility as a translator. Then I remembered what my old friend Shamim once taught me.

He had been at our place in Tehran when my first husband and I were arguing over something. I turned to Shamim and asked him who was right. He said my husband was right. I looked at him in disbelief and said I thought he was a fair-minded intellectual. I asked him, “What would you stand by, the truth or your friend?”

He said he would stand by his friend regardless of the truth.

I knew the woman was going to be killed if deported to Iran. So I gathered all my strength and stood by her.

I told the policemen that she refused to tell me the truth and that I did not understand a word she said, as she spoke a different dialect of Farsi. I never knew what happened to her, but I heard from the policeman who escorted me back to the set that she was going to be taken to the city of Amsterdam for further inquiry.

I hoped she was able to obtain political asylum without having a passport. I wished she could stay in the Netherlands, that peaceful country and beautiful land of magnificent tulips. Its democratic law would treat her as a human being and give her child a chance to grow up in a civil society, where his mother would not be tortured, raped, and hanged for having a different ideology.

I left Holland as soon as possible and joined Houshang in Germany.

28

Caravan

H
oushang had already flown to Munich to start rehearsing with our new
Café Nostalgia
cast in Germany. I was thrilled to see him and hugged the poor man nearly to death. I was so glad to be with my best friend and lover once again.

Taking our own theatrical group would have been a lot easier for us, but the high cost of flying them to Europe and providing their accommodations forced us instead to use local Iranian actors in each country where we performed. Many of them had been well-known actors in Iran who were now working in menial jobs. We were more than willing not only to give them a chance to act again but also to participate in a Farsi-speaking play that aimed to keep the lights of the Iranian theater on in exile.

Houshang and I were offered the opportunity to stay with our sponsor and his wife, and we gladly accepted, knowing the hotel prices in Munich. Our sponsor called himself Mark, and he and his wife and their oddly large parrot, Fraulein, lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment, perhaps a little more than a thousand square feet. Our room was next to the living room, where the yellow and turquoise parrot sat on top of her cage all day, constantly whistling and reciting bits of verses of Persian poems. His favorite word was
khoshgeleh
, which means “beautiful,” and he kept repeating it every time he saw me. Our sponsor was proud of his parrot and loved him to death.

I, on the other hand, could not stand any kind of animal with feathers. I had once been attacked by a fighter rooster on one of my childhood trips to a village and was afraid of birds in general, let alone a parrot half my size. Our sponsor assured me that his parrot was extremely gentle. But I was not sure if it was me or my environment that was making me feel so drained and vulnerable.

EIGHT HUNDRED SEATS
were in the theater, and all were occupied by the Iranian audience who came to see the play. They laughed and cried and cheered. Houshang and I were thrilled to see the play thriving but were disappointed to find out that our sponsor was not honest with us. He was claiming a lot of expenses, such as the cost of building the set. He added all these imaginary numbers on a scrap of paper and handed it to us with no receipts. He then deducted the expenses from the revenue and gave us what was left, which hardly covered our performers’ wages. We decided not to argue. We should have asked for a legal contract but we had not.