Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora

Next Year in Cyprus

Next Year in Cyprus H TARSSA YAZDANI My mother was never the typical Southern beauty. Dry and winsome as a Texas sunset, she wore her long blond hair down and loose throughout the pincurled fifties, read Dostoevsky and Unamuno, listened to Lightnin’ Hopkins and jazz, and dreamed of becoming a lawyer.A settlement from a car wreck paid for college.She was the first in her family to go. One night while riding her bike across the North Texas State campus with a bottle of wine in her basket,she came upon my father,a radical,a foreigner,the only man on campus with a beard. He was a Marxist and a revolutionary. She must have liked that about him, although she’s never said. In the nearly forty years since, she has never once admitted to me that she loved him. The most she’s ever shared is that she wanted two things from life:adventure and children. My mother married in black, head to toe, with a little black pillbox hat.Afterwards she tossed her wedding ring into the river in Reno, filled, according to tradition, with the rings of the newly divorced. Soon after, with my brother still a baby and my mother pregnant with me,my family moved to Iran,first to the Tehran mansion of my grandfather , then to the oil company compounds of Abadan. She realized her mistake almost immediately. The epiphany came in a movie theater, when the audience was required to rise and salute the Shah’s portrait. Mom refused, true to her principles,contemptuous of the despot.My father yanked her up by the arm, forcing her to comply, and for the first time she realized both the stakes of real revolution in a foreign land and her utterly vulnerable status as a woman and wife.Through that one gesture,she grasped the enormity of her action. No longer considered an American citizen, she had naively put herself into a situation in which she had forfeited absolutely every civil, political, and human right afforded an American. Almost as soon as she arrived in Iran she began plotting her escape. I don’t know the whole truth, only the family mythology, the few stories codified by time and faithful retellings which never elaborated on 112 TARSSAYAZDANI but only embedded the same incomplete information.Mom was beaten, threatened with divorce and automatic loss of her children. Jars of acid were waved in her face;insults were hurled at her heritage.Years later she would acerbically recount my father’s favorite line:“You and your goddamn American tanks!” She tried to get help from the U.S. consulate, but was told that while she and her son stood a slim chance,her daughter ,born on Iranian soil, was beyond help.So she declined further assistance from official channels. Finally, eight months pregnant with my younger brother,she convinced my father to allow her to come back to the States to give birth. Once home, she said, she would arrange for his visa.We left Iran with one suitcase, packed for a short stay. Mom had my father’s visa permanently revoked, divorced him, changed our last names,and moved us all to California.When my older brother,at two and a half,realized we were not going back,he stopped speaking Persian and soon forgot it entirely.We never saw our father again, and that’s nearly everything I know about it. Our history, the story of my parents,was like an ancient poem with most of the parchment missing, stanzas left untranslated, the result of my half-hearted scholarship. Mom refused to talk about it, and we learned not to pry. All the charming, harrowing, and thrilling anecdotes that she would ever tell were already in circulation.The stories never changed,no new nuances, no late revelations saved until adolescence, adulthood. My brothers and I lost interest over the years. We never envisioned a reckoning,never imagined we would ever be found, knew we shouldn’t be, and lived with a distant fear of kidnapping , distant only because we never thought of our father as real, therefore never a real threat. I grew up fascinated by world culture, anthropology, geography, and languages. But I never sought out information about Iranian culture in particular beyond the surface level at which I studied the world at large. The taboos were so internalized I hardly realized they were there. When my older brother turned sixteen and...