The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines (7 page)

AYDIN AND I
lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a two-story complex on Kakh Avenue, in the heart of Tehran, near the prime minister’s headquarters and within walking distance of my parents’ new apartment. (They had decided to sell our old home, as they no longer needed the space to impress a suitor for their daughter.) Our complex belonged to a friend of Aydin’s, a renowned critic and writer who lived on the first floor with his beautiful wife.

We were getting ready for our honeymoon in Lebanon and Algeria, when Aydin told me that a friend of his, Fraydoon-Ave, a painter and an art designer who worked with the City Theatre, had mentioned something about the Theatre Workshop of Tehran’s auditions for its upcoming play
Narrow Road to the Deep North
, by Edward Bond.

I asked him to call Fraydoon and see if I could audition for a role. The answer came quickly. I was to go to the drama workshop in two days and audition for one of the lead roles, the young British queen living in Japan.

I could not believe it and was totally skeptical. I had no theater experience and had no training except for those plays I’d put on with my cousin Nasrin. I’d performed at family gatherings and parties, entertaining an enthusiastic audience, but this was different and required at least some formal theatrical training.

Still, I had asked for it and had to do it. All of my life, I thought, I had yearned to be an actor, and this was my chance. It was a great opportunity to find out whether I had what it takes or not.

The audition took place at the workshop. I wore a summery cotton black dress with hundreds of miniature yellow birds printed on it, and a pair of dark green sandals with a wedge.

When I arrived, there were more than twenty people waiting their turn. After a while, the assistant director called my name, now Shohreh Aghdashloo, and before I knew it I was shoeless, on my knees, begging the character of Shogo, the brutal killer and revolutionary samurai who was against British colonialism in Japan, to have mercy on my children and spare them their lives.

I had memorized my lines, so I had no problem turning around freely and acting as though I were really surrounded by the enemy army in the forest with my children by my side.

Among other important people in the room was Abbas Nalbandian, a brilliant playwright, who had created his own genre of storytelling in pure Farsi, eliminating foreign words imported into the Persian vocabulary. He was the head of the workshop.

When the audition was over, I was asked to wait in the office. I was thinking I had better go home and kiss my dream good-bye, when Abbas called me to his office and said they loved the audition and were willing to hire me for seven hundred toman per month (about a hundred dollars at the time).

I was speechless. Rehearsals started in two weeks, and they were planning to put it onstage in fewer than two months.

I was remorseful on my way back home. I should have asked my husband first before making any promises. After all, we were going on our honeymoon, and I knew how excited he was about the trip. It was all mapped out and the arrangements had been made.

Aydin was already home when I arrived. He looked at me and just knew. “Why are you so worried? The honeymoon can be postponed, but you cannot postpone Edward Bond’s play.”

I threw myself into his arms and kissed him dearly. No one had ever understood me so well. No one before him had cared enough to see what I wanted to do with my life.

I became all ears when rehearsals started. All the actors at the workshop had to join the morning session, which consisted of workouts, physical training, and yoga. This was followed by voice-training class, where we learned how to breathe from our stomach, and how to sing. We took an hour lunch then rehearsed until four o’clock.

The actors were encouraged to do extra work at the workshop, for which they would be paid, like selling tickets at the box office, ushering the audience, and giving a hand to the lighting and sound people. Sweeping the stage was an honor, and all the actors gave an arm and a leg to do this. Sweeping was a job designed to break us away from our ego and teach us humility, to help us question our biases and feel for the people beneath us.

I was overwhelmed and exhausted by the amount of work we had to do, but I loved it. Aydin was a great support.

In the end, the play was a hit, and I received my first standing ovation. One critic wrote, “A star is born.” The workshop offered me a permanent position, and I would be in many of their plays. My parents refused to see my performances, or hear me talk about them. I owed my triumph to my husband.

9

Sunrise, Sunset

I
had no experience running a household when I married Aydin, and he was very patient with me. For the first couple of weeks, we dined mostly at our favorite restaurants, depending upon our budget—Exanado and Cartier Latin. Then I took a recipe, a traditional dish of rice and chicken, from a women’s magazine and prepared a meal.

It took me hours to cook the dish, and I felt like a chemist more than a chef. I prepared the table and added a few roses. I lit the candles and waited for my husband. He was so surprised when he walked in, but it didn’t take long to discover that the rice was undercooked and the chicken was far from tender. I apologized profusely and offered bread and cheese instead.

Aydin laughed. “You did your best. That’s what makes it precious. But you should not waste your time like this. You should read and further educate yourself. We are born to serve a purpose. Find yours. Ask your mom to find you a housekeeper like hers.” And I did. Maids were affordable for the middle class, so we decided to get one for our home.

Our maid was named Mahbobeh. She was a young single mother from the slums of Tehran, with absolutely no knowledge of housekeeping. I tried to keep the secret to myself and cover for her. One day Aydin came home early and saw me doing the dishes while Mahbobeh was resting on Aydin’s dark brown leather armchair, browsing through the pictures in a weekly magazine. First he laughed at me and then said, “Ask your mom to teach your servant how to cook. Or are you afraid of her?”

Eventually Mahbobeh learned how to do the household chores, and I went to work. Aydin was still at the advertising agency, but his heart was more in his paintings.

The painting that he dedicated to me and claimed to be my portrait is a portrayal of the young princess Dorothea of Denmark, originally painted by the Flemish Jan Mabuse in 1530. She holds in her hands a kind of celestial globe dictating the course of the planets. Aydin repainted it with the utmost precision, duplicating all the details in their entirety except for her face, which was sheltered in wood. I once asked him why my portrait was faceless, and he said, “Shohreh, it is because I can never tell whether you are laughing or crying.”

I WAS CALLED
to meet with the new director of the workshop while I was doing the last performances of
Narrow Road to the Deep North
.

He was invited to join the workshop and stage a play and had decided on two short ones:
The Stranger
written, by August Strindberg , and
The Lady Aoi
, by Yukio Mishima.

His name was Ashurbanipal Babela (Ashur, for short). He had studied theology in Lebanon to become a priest, but his love for theater and art made him change his path and become a stage director.

Ashur had an angelic face and looked humble in his knee-length pants, faded yellow T-shirt, and a pair of flip-flops.

He wanted me to portray Mademoiselle Y and had offered Madam X to another unknown actress. I asked him to give me two weeks. After all, our honeymoon was long overdue.

AYDIN AND I
took a tour to Istanbul and Beirut, the paradise of sightseers. In Istanbul our tour guide had become totally dependent on Aydin, because Aydin knew more about the sights than he did. The guide had fallen in love with a lady in her late thirties, and the two ran off on day one. My husband became the tour guide, elaborately explaining every detail, telling stories about the places we visited. I became the head of entertainment.

This meant it was my job to find the best restaurants, cabarets, and nightclubs in Istanbul, and find out what they charged per person. I collected money from those who were interested in going, then took them out to the designated club.

I’ll never forget the day we visited the Topkapi Palace Museum and spent the entire afternoon trying to restore an Iranian artist’s identity. There was a beautiful poem, handwritten by Mir Emad, the renowned Iranian calligrapher, displayed at the entrance of the calligraphy section at the Topkapi. But the display said that he was Turkish. Aydin was a collector of calligraphy. In fact, he had an impressive collection, which he had gathered through years of hard work. Aydin and I went to the museum’s main office and asked for the supervisor. Aydin spoke Turkish and explained to the supervisor that Mir Emad was Iranian.

The supervisor replied that “Mir Emad was given amnesty by the Ottoman Empire, who lived in the Topkapi generation after generation. In fact, if they had not saved his life, he could not have created the piece. Therefore he is Turkish and not Iranian.” The supervisor spoke with the utmost determination.

Aydin was furious but said nothing. Years later, he told me that the “moron” had no idea what he was talking about. “The reason Mir Emad was assassinated in Iran was because he was not given amnesty by the Ottomans,” he said. “He had to return to Iran, and his enemies made the king believe that Mir Emad had converted into the Sunni sect, a branch of Islam that the Safavid dynasty did not tolerate, and the king, Shah Abbas, ordered his assassination.”

Next up was Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, a city of old mansions, villas, and newly built apartment buildings, located on a peninsula next to the Mediterranean.

We walked on cream-colored sand at the beach on our first evening, watched the full moon, and had dinner in a restaurant on Ebnesinia Avenue, the popular road of restaurants and nightclubs in Beirut.

The next day, the two of us went to the gigantic temple of Baalbek, or Heliopolis. The temple is so ancient that it predates the earliest historical records. It has been restored over the centuries and has survived many empires and dynasties. It took us a few hours to get there, and to our dismay we found that it was closed due to renovations. Aydin’s eyes filled with tears. He looked at the guard standing by the entrance and managed to say a few words in Arabic. The guard looked at me and smiled. He then opened the gate and let us in. I asked Aydin what he had said, and he told me, “Thou brother, I came with my beloved wife to visit this divine temple. Do not send us home empty-handed.”

The two of us explored the temple and watched the incredible sunset from its highest place in peace. We were drunk on the divine beauty we had witnessed.

10

Visiting Bardot

A
fter our return to Tehran and a critically acclaimed performance directed by Ashur, I had promised Aydin that I would go on an exotic trip with him. The memories of our first trip with the tour made us want to travel on our own. We went to Egypt first, then Algeria.

Cairo was astonishing. The number of historic sites was overwhelming, and the nightlife was infinite. We watched an Arabic film in a magnificent cinema located in the heart of Cairo, and had dinner in a local Egyptian restaurant. We explored the pyramids and its Sphinxes. Climbing up the dark narrow stairs inside the pyramids, hunched over, was pretty claustrophobic. But being able to see the interior of the plundered tombs of Egypt’s most notorious rulers, who demanded that their wealth and servants be buried alive with them, was well worth the trip.

We dined in a huge tent next to the pyramids in the Sahara known as the Sahara Cabaret Restaurant, when the full moon took over the Sahara’s cobalt blue sky. The faded yellow tent was surely a couple of thousand square feet with at least a hundred seats. We were both exhausted, but the magic in the air made us stay till the end of the show and watch the mystifying finale, a group of belly dancers moving to traditional songs, bearing huge candelabras with lit candles atop their heads.