Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman

Epilogue: September 2001

Epilogue 8 SE PT E MBER  Nightmares I left Iran for the first time on July th, , then returned to visit my birthplace for the last time the following summer. Upon my return to the United States in the fall of , I began to suffer from nightmares. I would wake up screaming, soaked in sweat, shivering and shaking uncontrollably . Night after night I dreamt of Iran, of the fate I had escaped. I was back in Shiraz. The mountains looked taller, closer, looming over me. I couldn’t breathe. I stood in the crossroad in front of my parents’ house and tried to remember which way led back to America. It was a long journey, I knew. A man with white stubble stood by his little kiosk. He straightened his curled body. Laughing through his yellow teeth, he pointed his trembling finger at me. “Whore, Jewish whore.” I wanted to ask the jeering old man with yellow teeth if he remembered selling me candy when I was a little girl, when he was not such an old man. I wanted to tell him that I was smacked with a ruler at school because I wrote my homework with the diluted ink he sold me. The letters were faint. I was a cheap Jew, my teacher said. My classmates laughed. My bare legs were numb. I bent down to massage them, to get the blood flowing, so I could walk, run, escape. My feet were hidden among opium poppies, like those growing in farms beyond our neighborhood. When I was a child, my mother once found me running through the red flowers and wheat stalks in a white dress, laughing, screaming in delight. “Keep away,” she scolded, then warned that the pollen would blind me. [ ] Now in my dream, I covered my eyes for protection. When I opened them again, everything was in black and white. The old man was still there. “Hee, hee!” He laughed and coughed with a throat filled with phlegm. What was he pointing at? Then I saw them. Those weren’t flowers on the ground, just red droplets, the only image in color. I headed toward my friend’s house for shelter, wanting to ask if Paree knew where the blood came from, and why it was on my legs and my bare feet. Her brothers stood on the roof, their zippers open, their penises pointing at me like arrows. “Here! Is this what you are looking for? Here, here.” Their laughter traveled from the rooftop and pierced my eardrums. I backed up and stood in the middle of the crossroad again. From another corner, I saw Shahnaz and Firoozeh coming toward me, wrapped in black chadors. “My good friends, my good friends,” I cried joyfully as I ran to them, “Save me, save me!” I stretched my arms toward them. “I am lost. Which way are the oceans?” They spread their arms and their chadors flew in the air like the wings of angels in black. They opened their hands and threw stones at me, which changed into daggers as they hit me in the stomach, slowly disappearing WEDDING SONG [] On one of his trips to Iran, my father brought my daughters the costumes of the Ghashghai nomadic tribe outside Shiraz. into my flesh. The skin closed over the wounds before I could extract them. “We don’t know you,” they said. “Away, away, filth, filth.” My stomach filled with hurt. The other neighbors joined them—the boy who hung the red swastika in his room facing our house, the teacher who invited my grandmother and me to hear a mola cursing the Jews in a ceremonial prayer in her house during the month of Moharam, and the young men down the street who leaped from hidden doorways in side streets to stick their fingers in me. From every door, every window, and every storefront, the young and the old emerged. They darted at me with nails that my body absorbed, my stomach now bursting. “That girl kissed a foreigner, impure, impure,” they told one another. I looked toward the doors of my house to see if I could find a refuge, but my aunts and uncles blocked them, sticks in their hands, my parents’ faces hiding behind them. They took turns shaking their fingers at me. “Shame, shame! You’ve brought us shame.” Or sometimes I dreamt that I was dressed in...