Da (Mother) 21

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni
Translated from the Persian with an Introduction by Paul Sprachman

2022-11-15

Da (Mother)

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

Translated from the Persian with an Introduction by Paul Sprachman

Persian Version (2008)

Sooreh Mehr Publishing House

English Version (2014)

Mazda Publishers

***

I left the building. The Jannatabad administrative office was one of three adjoining rooms not far from the body washers’. I knocked on the door and entered the office, where a tall, thin man around thirty-six was sitting behind a desk. He had a fair complexion and was wearing horn-rimmed glasses. There was a large registry in front of him. I had seen him several times before out of the office when he was wearing sunglasses. He was working with another man around his age recording the particulars of the dead given to them by two other men, who were grieving. I stood there waiting for them to finish. As people came in and out of the office, I learned that Parvizpur was the one behind the desk; his colleague was called Salarvand. With his jacket and vest Parvizpur seemed more the teacher type rather than someone in charge of a graveyard.

After the room had cleared, I greeted him and said, “They sent me from the body washers’; Mrs. Rudbari needs more cotton and camphor.”

Parvizpur got up from his desk, went to a metal cabinet, and got what I asked for. From that time on, they always sent me to the office for supplies. He knew my father and, after learning I was the daughter of a Seyyed, showed me a lot of respect. Though normally a serious and humorless man, Parvizpur handled my requests with immediate attention. The second or third time I came to the office he asked me to help him with recording the particulars of the females unclaimed by their relatives. Someone waited outside the door while we described these poor souls to him. He took a registry out of the desk drawer and handed it to me, saying, “Write down the particulars of the women without names here and give them to me so I can record the statistics in the main registry.” In the body washers’ I drew columns in the book and recorded physical descriptions of the dead lying in a corner waiting to be washed: their skin and hair color, approximate ages, whether they were Arab or Persian, height and body types, and occasionally other particulars. I also told the people cutting the clothes from the bodies to pin sample swatches in the book. I thought this might make it easier for their next of kin to identify them. If they found valuables on the body, I would put them in bags and record them in the relevant registry page. The bags were kept in a cabinet. A representative of the courts would come and we would prepare minutes. Then we would hand over the valuables to him.

Sometimes when I was outside the body washers’, I noticed that a municipal pickup would come with gravestones and black metal placards, and workers would place them at various spots in the cemetery. Workers would write the names of the dead on the placards with a calligraphy brush and plant them in the ground at the head of the graves. Often, when I couldn’t find a city worker, I would write the names myself. When there were no placards, I would write the names on broken pieces of cement that couldn’t be used as gravestones. Ordinarily we would run out of placards and stones and the pens by sunset. At that point I had to use a piece of wood for a pen and pieces of cardboard that I stuck in the ground by the grave.

At times I’d get bitter, but remembering father’s words made the mood go away. He gave me the energy and courage I needed to help with the corpses. One afternoon Maryam and two other women were lifting the body of a woman off the ground. She was around forty and, although she was wearing a head cloth, her hair was showing. She didn’t seem Arab on the surface; her pants were dark with cream-colored designs and she was wearing a black shirt. I folded her arms over her chest. When I raised her head a little, she seemed to sit up, and I noticed that her body was still soft and supple. By contrast the bodies that had been lying around for hours felt stiff like pieces of wood when we hoisted them. Maryam and the two women grabbed the woman by the waist and legs, and, when we tried to lift her and put her on the slab, a horrifying noise echoed through the room, giving everyone a jolt.

The planes had come again, making the windowpanes rattle. The old wooden door of the building vibrated so much it seemed that someone was trying to break in. Maryam and the two women who were bent over the body remained frozen in place, staring at me questioningly. The roar of the airplanes came again and suddenly there was pandemonium in the room. The clothes cutters and the shroud makers all stopped what they were doing. I put the corpse back on the ground and joined Zeynab, who was looking out the window. We both tried to follow the course of the planes in the sky, but no matter how much we crooked our necks, the trees and the cemetery wall got in the way. People outside the building were in an uproar. Women ran from it seeking shelter outside. I went to the door and saw that the crowd had scattered. It was a sight; women and children running around screeching. A person was shouting, “Enemy planes! Take cover!” Another person said, “Don’t be afraid; those are our Phantoms. They’re bombarding the Iraqis.” After a while the sounds died down and, feeling things had returned to normal, we got back to work. I don’t know how long it was, but once again there was a sound again, loud enough to split open the sky and shake the building to its foundation. Because the planes hadn’t dropped bombs the first time, people were less afraid. The person who had tried to assure the others asked, “Didn’t I say that they were ours?”

The other man contradicted him, “No those are Iraqi planes, only they have come to reconnoiter, not to bomb.” As soon as he said this there was a terrible explosion and more yelling from the already terror-stricken crowd. Another person tried to calm the crowd by saying that the bombs landed by the bridge and the municipal building; but people, ignoring him, continued to scream. The planes left but the crowd remained as terrified as ever. It was quite a while before they settled down.

By evening I couldn’t stay in the building any longer. All of us were exhausted. The body washers grumbled that no one had come to relieve them. “How long,” they asked, “must we tear away at these corpses? It’s driving us out of our minds.”

At other times their bickering would turn ugly, and I looked for any excuse to escape. I didn’t want the others to know how little strength I had left. They counted on me; everybody around us said to Leila and me, “I swear, you two have stuck it out really well considering how young you are.”

When I heard a man say from behind the door, “Someone come and help me bury this woman; she’s been here since morning and nobody’s come by,” I saw my chance. I said to Zeynab and Maryam, who were busy with the shrouds, “Come let’s help bury this body he’s talking about. It wouldn’t be right for a man to do it.”

Maryam, never without a cigarette, didn’t have the strength to lift anything. On the other hand, Zeynab, who couldn’t wait to get out of the room with its suffocating odor of camphor and blood, nodded and said, “I’m coming as soon as I finish with this.” Then we went outside.

The three bodies or so, which we had sent out since morning, lay next to the building. A man had pulled aside the canvas bags to reveal their faces so their loved ones could identify them. The similarity of their faces, and that fact that they had all been found together, made me think they were members of one family. They brought some stretchers and, with the help of some others there, we piled them on the stretchers and brought them to the small mosque at Jannatabad. Hajj Aqa Nuri and another cleric they called Hajj Aqa Sedaqat said the prayer for the dead over them. The large number of corpses forced them to chant the prayer over seven or eight bodies at a time. After the prayers, we carried the corpses to the gravesites. One of the men issued a loud “There-is-no-God-but-Allah,” and the rest gave the response. We got to the graves and put the dead on the ground. Zeynab climbed down into one of holes. The women lifted a body by the shroud, which was bloody, to pass it to Zeynab. When I noticed she didn’t have the strength to take the body by herself, I got into the grave myself so the men wouldn’t touch the corpse. For a moment thoughts of the torments of burial, which I had heard from the time I was a child, flashed through my mind. I thought: There’s nothing to fear—it all seems ordinary enough. A person’s actions are more important than what happens in the grave. The men untied the straps on the stretcher, and three women passed the body down to Zeynab and me. The weight of the body put so much strain on my back it took my breath away. I didn’t waste any time resting the corpse on the bottom of the hole, but there was not enough room for us to position it the way Zeynab wanted: on the right side. So I quickly got out of the grave to make room. Zeynab uncovered the face. The old man in charge of saying prayers for the dead came over and recited two verses from the Quran. The poor man was nearly out of breath there were so many dead. With some of the men helping, I went and dragged over some stones to serve as grave markers. I gave the heavy stones to Zeynab and together we covered the grave.

Despite all our efforts, there were still ten or twelve bodies of women to be buried at sundown, but we were so tired that as soon as one of the body washers declared the workday over, we all agreed to see to them the next day. Everyone it seemed was just waiting for her to call it quits. Leila, who had been working all day without complaining, gave me a look that said she welcomed the end with all her heart.

After they had delivered the last of the unnamed dead, Zeynab told me to burn the clothes we had stripped from the bodies. A large pile of clothing had grown in a corner since noon. I got a wheelbarrow from the garden and shoveled the clothing into it. It wasn’t my favorite thing to burn the clothes, so I wheeled them to a barren spot near the prewar graves and dug a half-meter hole in the soft sand there. You couldn’t call them clothes really; they had been torn apart by shrapnel and cut from the bodies by us. The pile was not as large as it could have been because the rags were damp. After putting them in the hole I patted them down with the shovel. I put quicklime that I had found in a bag by the building over them and covered the pile with dirt so the wild dogs wouldn’t dig them up.

Leila was waiting for me when I returned. We said goodbye to the others and searched and searched for father but couldn’t find him. He had told me the day I kissed his hands that he would no longer be coming to Jannatabad; however, I had seen him there working a few times. He probably had gotten fed up and left.

As we were leaving the cemetery, we saw several of his coworkers. They had also knocked off for the day and were about to leave. I said hello and asked about father.

One of them said, “The Seyyed stopped working around noon and left.”

Another said, “He was very upset. By noon his patience had run out, it seems.”

“Where did he go?” I asked.

“Don’t know; maybe to the mayor’s.”

“So he hasn’t been around since noon?” I repeated.

“No.”

I walked back to where Leila was standing. I was very worried about father, but I couldn’t share my fears with her.

To be continued …