Da (Mother) 34

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

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

2023-2-14

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

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 A short time after he hung up, two young men on a motorcycle arrived. They said, “Brother Jahan Ara sent us.” They brought several bolts of denim with them. The body washers put in a call to Parvizpur asking him to come and help with the shrouding. We lit some pressure lamps, but only enough to give off a dim light; the bodies were male and we didn’t want them fully exposed. The women only cut the fabric for the shrouds outside the building. The men carried the bodies inside, cut their clothes off, and dry-washed them. Then they wrapped them in the shrouds. One of the young men who had arrived on motorcycle recorded the particulars of each corpse on the shrouds. I glanced at the bodies in the darkness, and I was so torn by the sight that I felt justified in going again to the Congregational Mosque or anywhere to raise hell on their behalf. Some of the ones I saw had died in battle; they had given the last measure of their lives as soldier-martyrs. It was a disgrace for their bodies to be neglected like this. The only one I recognized among them was Esma’il Sa’bari, the son of our neighbor and the most precious one in the world to his mother. I can’t say how much my heart went out to her when I saw him lying there. There was no sign of motherly affection for his corpse, which had been out in the sun for three days, so long we feared it would swell up and explode. I thought: If Esma’il’s mother saw the state her son was in, she’d burn the place down.

Before the job of shrouding the dead had been completed, I went to Parvizpur’s office to call the mosque. Even at that hour of the night, Ebrahimi picked up the phone. I said, “Brother Jahan Ara promised to send a truck in the morning to pick up the dead and transfer them to another city. We’re in the process of getting the bodies ready. I’m asking you to see to it that the truck actually comes.”

He promised to have the truck reach us at the crack of dawn. I said goodbye and walked back to the building to find the shrouding was over, and Parvizpur and the young men were leaving.  After they left, I went into the other room.

I was so tired that, unlike the previous night, I curled up next to Leila and was fast asleep quickly. In the middle of the night, I woke up in a strange state of over-exhaustion. I desperately missed home and wanted father to come and bring Leila and me home, where I could then sleep for a couple of days straight—sleep so much it would wipe from my mind all the things I had seen at Jannatabad. Then suddenly I could hear father saying: You’re responsible for your mother and the kids until Ali returns. Then the word “treachery” rang in my ears ... “treachery.” I could see the look on father’s face when he had pounded the sign; his face seemed to spin as it came and went in my imagination. I raised my arms to put them around his neck, but he wasn’t there. The scene returned several times that night as the air grew heavier.

I turned over and looked at Leila; I could only fee heartache for her. I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with me. I wanted to hug and kiss her and cry, but I was afraid she’d wake up. I was in a really bad way, wanting to scream, to cry out for father, so loud that he’d hear me wherever he was and come to me. Then I felt something weighing down on my lungs, and I couldn’t breathe. The only way to remove the weight, I thought, was to go outside and shout. At that point I sensed Zeynab was also awake.

“Mama, are you awake?” I asked, calling her that because she wanted us to.

“Yes, my darling. You haven’t slept?” she asked.

“It’s not that; I just woke up.”

“You got some sleep, thank God,” she said.

“You want to go outside and take a walk?” I asked.

“What for?” she asked.

“I don’t know—maybe to see if someone has come. To look in on the boys.”

“Okay,” she said.

We got up and quietly left the room. We stood for a moment on the porch so that we wouldn’t make Hoseyn and Abdollah jumpy. When we saw Abdollah pacing in front of the body washer building, we approached him and said hello. Zeynab asked him, “You haven’t slept, son?”

He said, “We’re taking turns sleeping so we wouldn’t be tired at the same time. Since Hoseyn was tired, I took the first watch.”

His eyes looked so tired we knew he didn’t even have the energy for a stroll. I asked, “Anything to report?”

“No, nothing,” he said.

We walked over to the bodies with him and walked around the area. Then we went back to the building and Zeynab said to Abdollah, “You want us to stay with you, baby, so you won’t fall asleep?”

Seemingly taken by surprise, Abdollah said in his peculiar accent in which “r” almost became “q,” “No, I won’t fall asleep. When my shift is over, I’ll wake up Hoseyn.”

We went back into the building.

End of chapter 7

To be continued …