I’m not exactly sure when it was that I decided to do it. But at some point I knew that something needed to be done. I could make it stop if only I could get past the shame.
None of the doors in the house had locks on them, except for the bathroom door, which had been my sanctuary for years. It was where I had hid my adolescent body. Where I had run to for moments of solitude. Where I had spent hours reading books deemed too adult for me. But for this, the bathroom would not do. Everything I had read and all the lectures I had heard told me so in no uncertain terms. My bedroom was the right place: I could do it facing the window, my blue-flowered curtains drawn to keep out prying eyes. But the bedroom also ran the risk of discovery. Of my parents walking in. Of them knowing that I was too weak, too scared.
I threw myself on the bed with all my might and snuck my head underneath the pillow. The sounds of the household became muffled so I could now clearly hear the staccato drumming of my heart. I’m going to make it stop, I thought, as I turned my head toward the wall and began to count the tiny beige squares of the wallpaper. I went over my options again and realized this was the only one. I was truly desperate. Perhaps I would not get caught. Perhaps there would be no shame.
I got up from my bed, opened my closet door, and pulled out the prayer rug and my grandmother’s tattered chador I had carefully snuck into my room and hid days before. As I rolled out the rug, I quickly glanced over my shoulder at the door. The three piles of books, stacked door-knob high would, if not keep out intruders, then alert me that someone was trying to get in. As I placed the clay prayer stone on the rug, the shame of praying in a home where no one prayed set my face on fire. If I was caught praying then everyone would know about my fear and desperation. They would know I was willing to do anything to save the shy soldier on the television screen whose expressionless face would peer out of bus windows heading to the south, anything for the young man who stretched his languid body in the trench along the border with Iraq. My parents will not think any less of me for becoming a believer, I assured myself as I carefully placed the chador over my head, and with my right hand tightly held the cloth under my chin so it would not move. Bismellah-e rahman-e rahim, I said loudly in my head, and began to pray.
***
Six months after the war started, my parents went back to Iran. I would hear them on the phone in our tiny living room in San Diego arguing loudly over the static with their loved ones. “Don’t come back!” my grandmother would plead. “This revolution isn’t what you think it is. Food’s rationed here. There’s a war. How’re you going to live? Think of your children!” “We’ll live as you do mom, we’ll live like all of you live. I miss you mom. I miss all of you. We have to come home,” my mother would respond. My young parents weren’t ready to be immigrants. They had given names with too many consonants to their children. They had prepaid for a house in Tehran. And so they sold all their belongings, packed them in sixteen suitcases, and went home.
At first the war was over there in the parched desert and inside the television. The boys it consumed looked nothing like my cousins. Those boys were older, they were bearded, and they looked stern. My cousins were young, their smooth smiling faces carrying sparse hints of manhood to come. But then one day the war stepped off the screen and sirens went off somewhere nearby in the city sky. “Turn off your lights!” a neighbor screamed into the night. “People! Turn off your lights!” My head was still in my book when my grandmother rushed to flip the light switch. My mother ran to the kitchen where a tiny window faced the street, turned off the light, then picked up my 2-year-old brother and sat him in her lap. My dad jumped up and in the dark groped for his transistor radio. I could hear him tuning it this way and that to find the Voice of America. All he got was static. I was too scared to breathe. I opened my mouth and gasped for some air. “Here azizam, hold my hand,” my mom said. It was soft, warm, and damp. “Eww mommy, your hand is wet,” I whined and let go.
When you’re ten and there’s a war, you don’t wonder if you’re going to die. Death was for old people, for people in movies, for people in newspaper obituaries. Death was for other people. When you’re ten and there’s a war, all you want are answers to a simple question: “Daddy, what’s happening?” But before he could answer, a thousand invisible firecrackers went off in the sky. “Daddy, what’s happening?” I could feel tears building up in my eyes. My dad was looking out of the windows facing my grandmother’s yard. “Let’s all move away from the windows,” he said and grabbed my hand. “There is no power but Allah’s” my grandmother muttered as she slapped her knee. The firecrackers were still going off. I scooted towards my dad and sat there with my knees grazing his. “Don’t worry,” he said in a voice two pitches too high. I nodded in the dark. No one said a word. We just listened to the sky.
Just as suddenly, there was quiet. You could feel the entire city still holding its breath. The white siren went off telling us it was ok to turn on the lights but none of us moved. Finally, my mom got up and flipped the switch. The light from the single bulb hanging from the ceiling was blinding. “I’ll go check things out,” my dad said getting up. I watched as he stood at the doorway, found his brown plastic slippers from the heap of shoes standing on guard by the threshold, slipped his feet into them and walked down the hallway to the metal door that opened onto the street. I shot up and ran after him. “Don’t you go out barefoot,” I heard my grandmother yell after me. I hesitated, recalling her warning that girls who ran barefoot grew big feet and could never get married. But I had already decided to never get married plus the cold stone tiles of the hallway soothed my drumming heart. I ran down the hallway and poked my head out the door.
The streetlamps were back on and the entire neighborhood was standing in clusters. Voices rose everywhere like puffs of smoke. My dad was standing with Fatemeh Khanum, the neighbor to our right, and her three sons, going through the perfunctory chit-chat that serves as a prelude to any conversation, big or small, between Iranians: “May you not be tired. Yes, everyone’s well. Yes, yes, life is passing well. The kids are also doing well. Thank you for your kindness. Are you in good health?” I looked down to the ground and noticed all the men were wearing the same brown plastic slippers. Suddenly I was conscious of the impropriety of my bare feet. “Have you heard anything?” My dad addressed this to Fatemeh Khanum’s oldest son. I debated for a second whether I should go back and put on shoes but didn’t want to miss anything so I stepped onto the asphalt street, wincing at the gravel poking at me, and walked up to my dad. I took his hand. He looked down to make sure it was me and smiled. I directed my polite inquiry of health to Fatemeh Khanum and ignored her sons as my cousin had told me to do. “Good girls don’t talk to boys. This isn’t America. You can ruin our whole family’s reputation you know.” Her directive was fine with me. Lately when I talked to boys, they made my stomach feel knotted and weird.
“Aqay-e Sohrabi, I humbly submit to you that I heard Iraqi planes had entered Tehran’s airspace,” Nasser said. “So, all that noise were bombs?!!!” I blurted. I knew my dad didn’t care if I spoke to the boys. “No, it was the anti-aircraft missiles we use to shoot the plane in the air,” Nader, the middle son said to me as he bent over and pinched my cheek. “Were you scared little lady?” I glowered at him and held my dad’s hand tighter. “With your permission,” my dad said after a while, signaling that we were going in. “Maybe there’s something on the radio now.” “May you live a long life. Give my regards to Fakhri Khanum and your wife,” Fatemeh Khanum said and shooed her sons into the house. I ran ahead of my dad to relay my knowledge to my mom and grandmother. “May god strike them down,” my grandmother said upon hearing what’s going on. “Who Maman Fakhri? Iranians or Iraqis?” “Both!” my grandmother said as she waddled to the kitchen to prepare dinner. “Think of all those sonless mothers.”
For fourteen days, things seemed almost the same. My parents went to work and I to school where we collected rumors of war like trading cards: The more you had, the more popular you were at recess. But for fourteen nights, as the cold February air filled with the evening call to prayer from the mosque around the corner, things also slightly changed. My grandmother would no longer spread out her prayer rug by the window but across the room by the wooden door. We didn’t go to anyone’s house for dinner and no one came over. And as the sun went down and down, our ears perked up and up waiting for that inevitable wail of the red siren telling us that it was time. And every night, it was, and very soon, I didn’t even bother running barefoot to the street with my dad to get the latest news.
Then one night, I woke up to the silence in the sky and the gentle snoring of my grandmother nearby. I kept my eyes open to the ceiling, certain that the Iraqi planes were quietly waiting for me to fall asleep before they attacked. If I stayed awake, I figured, they’d get tired and turn around. I got up quietly, tiptoed to the windowsill that came up to my knees, and waited for day to come. The dawn call to prayer woke me up. Alarmed, I peeled my right cheek off the cold stone of the windowsill, jumped into my mattress, and closed my eyes. I knew it was only a matter of minutes before my grandmother would get up for her ablutions and morning prayers. I didn’t want her to know about my heroics. A hero is always humble. Like the Prophet, our religion teacher had said.
That morning I skipped into school, bleary eyed. “No skipping in the halls!” the vice principal yelled right as I bounced into the classroom. Mercedeh was sitting at a different desk than our usual one, holding a fine needle. Months ago, we’d discovered that you could pick at the grey oil paint that had been layered repeatedly on our desks and peel it off in bits and pieces. It was like popping a ripe zit. Deeply satisfying. We had taken to it with excessive zeal. “Do you have a needle for me?” I asked her as I slid into the bench. “Nope. Just use your nails. This desk is really good. The paint just comes off.” “Do you think it’s over?” I asked as I found a nice spot and peeled off the paint. “Don’t know. My dad says he heard that for now it is.” “My dad says the same!” I lied cheerfully.
When you’re ten and there’s a war, you really don’t think about death. All you want is an answer to a simple question. “Do you think it’s over?!!” I asked my dad as he bent over his transistor radio that evening trying to find the BBC. “We don’t know yet, why don’t you help with dinner while your grandmother finishes her evening prayers,” my mom answered from the kitchen. I glanced at my grandmother. She was prostrate, her forehead touching the prayer stone as she loudly said “Allah is great,” her way of commanding me to help my mother. Her prayer rug had moved back to its spot by the window. “Yes, it is. For now,” my dad finally said and turned off the radio. My grandmother, sitting on her shins by now, turned her head to the left. “God is great.” Then to the right. “God is great.” Then she picked up her rosary, kissed it, and folded the prayer stone into the rug. She took her chador off her head, slowly folded it, placed it on top of the prayer rug, and put it to the side of the room. “Oh my lord,” she said as she heaved herself off the floor, “protect us all.” Then she waddled to the kitchen.
***
Six years passed and I grew up. I became eleven then twelve then a teenager. We moved out of my grandmother’s old house in the south of the city to a newly built apartment complex near the airport. I went to a new school, I made new friends, my body changed, I read Harold Robbins novels, I gained a sister, I broke some hearts and had my heart broken, I decided to become a physicist, a chemist, a filmmaker, a novelist. I was going to win a Nobel Prize, the category irrelevant. And through it all, the war played in the background.
When you’re sixteen and there’s a war, you do think about death. You think about it every time at school when they celebrate the martyrs of the Sacred Defense. You think about it every year, when around the same time, the war spills out of the desert frontlines and into the dense city. You think about it when the sirens go off and you grab your brother’s hand and with your parents and little sister in tow, rush down the stairwell, and join the neighbors in the windowless basement. You think about it when in the deep darkness, your neighbor lights up a cigarette and defiantly turns to the tightly packed crowd and says: What difference does it make? And you think about it when your cousins leave for the front with floppy hair and shiny faces, and come back with shaved heads, bushy beards, and secrets in their eyes. “How’s the front?” you ask every single one of them, not knowing what else to say. “Oh fine,” they lie. “I just want my hair back,” they joke. “I don’t want to talk about it,” finally one of them says.
Six years of war. Six long years of listening to the sirens of ambulances in the middle of the night as they transport the injured from the airport. Six years of watching boys on T.V., eighteen, clumsy, and shy, leaning against tanks and katyusha rocket launchers in the desert, smiling for the cameras and pledging their lives for the Imam and revolution. Six years of wondering if your cousins would come home in one piece. Six years of watching your grandmother slap her thigh and say as if singing a dirge: “Oh their poor mothers…”
I could not do this anymore. I could not. This had to end and if praying to a god I was not sure existed was going to do it, then pray I would. I could make it stop if only I could get past the embarrassment of my desperation, the shame that I had resorted to praying in a household that did not.
For two weeks I led a secret life, finding excuses to slip away at prayer time. “Don’t come into my room,” I would say sternly, “I’m studying and need to focus.” And then I’d run into the bathroom, rush through the ablutions, and race through the prayers. For fourteen days, five times a day, I ended my prayers seated uncomfortably on my shins, my toes resting under my buttocks, haggling with god: Please, if you end this war, I will be good. I will believe in you. I will pray all the time. I won’t be so sarcastic. I won’t talk back to my parents. I won’t write on my baby sister’s butt with magic markers. I’ll be nicer to my brother. I’ll stop prank calling people during siesta. Just end it, and I’ll do what you want.
On the fourteenth night, I finished my homework in the living room and stood up to perform my ablutions. My dad was watching the latest news report from the war front on T.V. The camera panned the trenches strewn with papers and discarded helmets. It focused on a young, bearded man, busy attaching a rocket head to his katyusha. With the help of another soldier, he put the rocket launcher on his shoulder, aimed at the palm trees in the distance and pulled the trigger. A loud boom went off as a cloud of dust rose around him. The camera shook. Then it panned out to a cloud of black smoke in the distance. A sonorous voice intoned something about the bravery of the soldiers. I had seen this all so many times before and as I stood there I realized, I will keep seeing it forever.
I didn’t even bother giving god one more chance, one more haggle, one more prayer. I didn’t even give god an ultimatum. I walked to my room, folded the prayer stone inside the rug, quickly bunched up the chador into a ball, and dumped them both without a word on my parents’ bed.
Naghmeh, such a vivid account of a child’s perspective of war. I hadn’t realized you’d had that experience. Your writing is so beautiful and compelling. Thank you!
I have heard numerous accounts of the Iran/Iraq war, but non through the perspective of a young girl growing up in the midst of that tragic war. So beautifully written. Thank you Naghmeh. You are the voice of the voiceless children whose lives are altered, or ended, by wars initiated by zealot grown ups.