Da (Mother) 63

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

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

2023-9-18

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

***

This made me feel a little better, nevertheless there were times when I just got furious with myself. The soldier explained again how to load the shell into the tube, saying I should only have my hands near it. Then he raised his voice and said, “To the good health of Imam Khomeini and prayers to the blessed martyrs!”

The soldiers and the men standing nearby echoed his cry. I fired the mortar exactly as he had told me. Then the men said, “God is great!” The blast was so loud it made my ears ring. Despite this I felt something novel and strange. I had never felt this way before. Wanting to know where the shell would land I watched as it flew through the sky. “Do you want to fire another?” I heard the lieutenant ask.

Although it was something I wanted to do, I knew I had no business there and said no.

I said goodbye and walked toward Zeynab. I saw them fire a few more rounds from a distance, and then they moved the mortar further in the other direction. I realized I hadn’t said my evening prayers yet and went inside to pray. Toward the end I heard the sound of people talking outside. I finished the prayer and went to see what was happening. Three men and two women were standing near the office talking to Zeynab and the others. As soon as she saw me, she pointed to them and said, “That’s her. Go and ask her yourself.”

They turned to me. Their faces were red and raw from crying so much. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

They surrounded me, all speaking at once. Finally, one of the men who was older than the others said, “They say our brother has been killed and they brought his body to the hospital, but when we went there they wouldn’t give him to us. They said they would only give the body to the person who brought it. We’ve been everywhere trying to get an answer. We went to the Congregational Mosque and they told us the people at Jannatabad handle the dead and the wounded. Your colleague told us you did that sort of thing.”

“That’s true, but why didn’t the hospital hand him over? It’s strange.”

At the hospital they normally recorded the details of every corpse in a ledger and would hand the body over to anyone who could identify it. That’s why what they said was odd to me. As I thought about it, a woman who seemed older than the others said in a thick Arab accent, “Come with us. It’ll count as your good deed for the day. My son is missing. They say he’s been killed. Come and find out what’s happened to him.” Then she began to wail and hid her face in her cloak.

“Why didn’t they give you the body? You gave them a detailed description, didn’t you?”

The man said, “Sure, and they said they had somebody like that, but they wouldn’t give him to us. Let’s go, God will reward you for it.”

“What was the description you gave?” I asked. “Sixteen year-old boy, tall, thin....” he said.

Since I had been running around constantly, I couldn’t remember. I asked for more details. I remembered then we had brought someone of that description to the Mosaddeq Hospital.

“I’m going with them,” I told Zeynab.

“Are you coming back?” she asked.

“God knows.”

“If you can, stop in at the photographer’s and see why he hasn’t come.”

“Sure. Please keep an eye on Leila for me, will you?” I asked her.

“Go, don’t worry.”

Seeing I was about to go with them, the woman blessed me in Arabic.

Their car, a white Arya, was parked outside Jannatabad. I sat in the back with the women, and the men sat in front. The woman whimpered and muttered as we drove. Another woman, thinner and shorter, who might have been the wife of one of the men, was sobbing quietly. From what the mother of the missing boy had said, I sensed she hoped the news her son had died was a mistake.

When we got to the hospital we first went to the nurses’ station. I told one of them the situation. She told us to see the person in charge of the morgue.

I went to the morgue, but the person in charge was not there. We asked at the emergency room and the other wards. Finally somebody said, “He’s gone out.” We waited in the yard for him to come back. He was a man over forty, tall with glasses, olive complexion, in a white coat and boots. We knew each other well. As soon as I saw him, I went up to him and asked, “Where were you? We’ve spent over an hour searching.”

“Everything’s okay I hope. What do you need? Have you brought us more dead?”

“No,” I said, “I’ve come to find somebody from this family they say is dead. According to them, you said the person who brought him must take possession.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Is this a new law?” I asked.

“Not a law, but they instructed us not to hand a body over until we’re sure it belongs to the family. This is because a number of people have come and taken possession of bodies in the names of the families, stealing them in effect. Later we found out that they were Hypocrites, who want to claim the bodies as martyrs to their cause and stage burials for propaganda purposes.”

Then he asked, “Are you sure about the family?”

“Do you think they have nothing better to do than to turn the hospital and Jannatabad upside down looking for a body? The name and particulars that they gave match.”

We accompanied the man to the morgue. The women waited outside while the men entered with me. The place was littered with bodies, some on stretchers, others on the wet floor, some covered with sheets, others without them or wrapped in blankets. Row upon row of women, men, and children. I began to search for the boy. Armed with the particulars, the man in charge began looking from the side opposite me. The two men stood to one side, stunned and saddened at the sight of all the corpses. It appeared the hospital generator was working; the overhead lights in the morgue were on. I stooped in the glow of the lamps and pulled aside the sheets from the faces of corpses. The sight of the lacerations and various other wounds on the bodies of the dead tormented me. Eyes open, eyes fallen from their sockets, tranquil stares, each spoke to me of their suffering. I thought: Here am I bringing in bodies like this, but there’s no telling how they’ll bring me in when it’s my turn. Will I be whole? My face recognizable? Decapitated? I had heard of someone running frantically when shrapnel suddenly took off his head, while the rest of his body went on going.

I pulled the sheets back over the faces of each corpse I passed. I noticed the men sighing each time in relief and intoning again and again in Arabic, “Hope we don’t see him here. Hope we don’t find him here.”

This made me feel worse. Not finding him on the floor, I went to the drawers. They had put a rather chubby man in the first one. Opening the second drawer, I saw it was the boy, thin, wheat-colored complexion, a bit of thick frizzy red hair on his forehead. He was dressed in a white shirt and jeans, not blood-stained, his body apparently whole. “Come here,” I said. “It’s him.”

One of the men slapped his hand and said, “Oh, no!”

That confirmed it; this was the boy they were looking for. The older man approached the drawer and put his head on the feet of the corpse and started to wail. The other rushed out to the where the women were. A few moments later I saw the boy’s mother in the doorway. She cast a hurried glance at all the corpses, shrieked, and then ran to the boy. Striking herself in the face, she came forward, her shrieks echoing in the room. “Momma’s here, my boy. I’m here.” She pushed aside the man who was kissing the corpse and screeched, “My boy’s just asleep. Why did you put him in a drawer?”

Then she threw herself on the body. With tears streaming down her face she said, “My darling boy, my big, strong boy, my pride. Why didn’t I die so I wouldn’t have to see you like this? How can I live without you, my sweet boy?”

She shook the drawer as if trying to yank it out. She was in a horrible state. She began to run around the morgue among the bodies, staring wildly at them. Then she went to her son again and hit herself. She also cursed Saddam, “Goddamn you, Saddam. You love Arabs, do you?”

Seeing her beat herself and tearing at her face that way, I tried to calm her but couldn’t. She kept shouting and wailing. The man responded to her lament with tears of his own. The younger woman, who was faint from seeing the boy or weakened by the sight of the bodies lying there, was standing in the doorway crying. I took the old woman by the arm and stroked her head and said, “Don’t hit yourself. It’s sinful. It’s not right to torment the boy’s soul this way. The Lord gives and He takes away. Thank the Lord the boy died a martyr and not the victim of some accident. May He grant you patience and serenity.”

This did not comfort her and she said, “You have no idea what’s in my heart, what’s going inside me.”

“I do, my heart has also suffered like this,” I said.

She became less hysterical, looked me in the eye, and asked, “Who have you lost?” Choked up, I said in Arabic, “My father.”

“May God also grant you patience. May the Lord strike Saddam dead for slaughtering all our young men!”

She began to whimper, “O, father, my heart is on fire. Inside I am ashes because of my boy.” Her words went through me like a knife—I wept as if I were mourning the blessed Imam.

Her moaning didn’t last long. She got up and, out of her mind, began to run about screeching. Then she returned to the boy’s corpse and stroked his face. The fire that raged in her breast seemed to spread. The men bellowed at her to calm down, but it had no effect. I found this so stressful I didn’t have the strength to watch. I told the men, “If you have no further need of me, I’ll leave.”

They thanked me. I passed the young woman as I left. Crying pitifully, she said, “We’ve been a lot of trouble, forgive us.”

I nodded and went out. I thought I’d visit the photographer’s before I returned to the mosque. He had said his shop was on Imam Avenue or Saheli Avenue, in the fishmonger’s bazaar.

I reached Saheli Avenue from the Forty-Meter Road and stopped before the fishmonger’s bazaar. I scanned the signs but didn’t find the photographer’s. Instead my attention was drawn to the bazaar itself. I had fond memories of the place. Mother and I would often shop here. It wasn’t far from the Safa Bazaar. With memories of those days in mind, I entered the bazaar. It rested on pylons driven into the Shatt bed. The bazaar was a pavilion lined on both sides with cement benches, in front of which there were metal tables and platforms of various heights. The fish mongers would lay out a variety of fish—javelin grunters, pomfret, pampus, wolf herring, flame tail snapper—on round metal trays or in reed baskets. Iranians of every stripe living in Khorramshahr and working at the Customs House or the port were regular customers at the bazaar.

Some of the mongers would gut and cut the fish the way their customers wanted. There also were Arab women in nooks and crannies, selling fish on trays. As we passed them they would call out to us in accented Persian. Everything combined to make the bazaar a pleasant place: the smell of fresh fish, the bright sheen of their skin in the lights; the expressions on some of the fish, especially the pampus, which always seemed to be smiling. The sharp teeth of a few species protruded enough to seem threatening. The fish were fresh, seemingly alive with their tails flapping. Most of them were caught in the Arvand and the Bahmanshir rivers. The mongers would fish with their nets at night and in the morning present their catches to the customers. The ever-present gulls flapped their wings and made a racket as they feasted on the trimmings the mongers threw into the grated openings in the bazaar floor.

It was painful to remember the wonders of the market at that point. There was no sign of them now. The place was dead quiet. No fish, no mongers. The stalls were a shambles. A few straggly fish lay on the cement slabs. The place had received its share of shelling through the roof, and the walls were dotted with shrapnel. I left the place and sat on the metal stairway by the water. After regaining my composure, I started to walk.

End of Chapter Eleven

To be continued …