Martyrdom Street

Maybe Mendelssohn

70 Maybe Mendelssohn Fatemeh A man wearing a ski hat and thick gloves runs down a dirt trail. Toward the main yard, a group of schoolchildren awaits a tour of the surroundings. I enter the botanical garden from the left entrance. Next to me, a little girl looks at the tropical flowers at her side, but as she reaches for the petals, she’s cautioned to stop. I try to appear inconspicuous, but I listen carefully to the guide, who labels the various species of flowers around us. “These are my . . . something, scor . . . something,” he says, and the kids laugh when they hear the Latin name. “We call them forget-me-nots.” The schoolchildren gather outside a food stand to buy lunch. At the teacher’s request they link arms, like a human locomotive, waiting for her orders. I find an empty bench nearby and sit down to read a book. From time to time, passersby drift into the botanical garden to eat lunch in the sun. I make room for a woman and her two boys on the bench. A water fountain stands in the center of the yard where we are sitting. Though the fountain is dry, the children are attracted to it. They grab their sandwiches from the bench and run along its edges. “Be careful,” their mother yells behind them. As they run around the fountain, their laughter grows animated, and I find myself drawn to their antics. One of them catches a baby frog and proudly presents the prize to his mother. “Let him go,” she says sternly. Reluctantly , the boy lets the tiny frog leap out of his palm. Then the mother gathers their belongings and the trio marches out the gate. As they leave, I look around for the troupe of young students, but they too have gone. Like my garden, the courtyard longs for the company of laughing children. But I can sense that Nasrin has not embraced motherhood. Maybe Mendelssohn 71 • While the girls are at work, I prepare supper. Despite the amenities of my lifestyle here—no coupons, no long lines, no Komiteh—I don’t belong. Even in the elevator , people’s eyes seem to follow me. I see women with outfits worth more than my husband’s biennial salary. They stare and take mental notes of my outdated skirts, and I return their gaze with calm. Women like that don’t belong in Iran, women who have not known the dual responsibilities of family and war. During wartime even something as basic showering is an extravagance. To conserve energy, the government obliges the country to endure daily power failures that last up to six hours. Warm water flows out of the faucet from dusk to dawn, when citizens least require it. Blackouts last longer than the night. Scant items of produce acquired after a day-long wait in the winding queues outside a grocery store wilt in the refrigerator. In shame, hands that discard the brown lettuce into the wastebasket stretch out for forgiveness. Without electricity or artificial light, home activities rapidly dwindle to none. Reading strains the eye. Vacuuming and laundry are relegated to nighttime chores. In the absence of bombing, only sleep sates any lingering passions. Here, I can shower at any hour. I am enjoying the water, now, trickling down my back. Steam hugs my body the way clouds wrap around a plane. I massage my scalp slowly and scrub out the two-day-old grime. The citrus fragrance of the shampoo fills the tiny space between the shower curtain and the bathroom wall. Suds swirl down the drain, and I feel clean. I put on one of my progressive-looking suits. Muhsin would be pleased. When we’d attend receptions at the university, he liked choosing my outfits for me. He preferred me to wear Western clothes to impress the luminaries. Maybe he began noticing other women—the sort of women who flaunted their bodies and exceeded all bounds of propriety, wearing bikinis and drinking alcohol—when I insisted on wearing the veil during the revolution. These same women lived at the hairdresser’s, molding an image invented by the Americans. In the sixties, they grew their hair long. In the seventies, they curled their hair. Although she never forgave me for telling her so, the Farrah Fawcett look didn’t suit Zhaleh’s mother, even after she dyed her hair blond. Such superficialities never belonged to our culture . They were imported values, sold...