Da (Mother) 120

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

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

2024-10-20

Da (Mother) 120

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

***

First, we suggested the man’s mother, who was standing by the ambulance, but she seemed incapable. Though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I volunteered. I would never have forgiven myself if the woman had died giving birth. Once inside the ambulance, I noticed the woman was very distressed to have a man see her naked.

The assistant injected her with a sedative, and told me, “You’ve got to try and learn what must be done, ma’am. In a war situation, you’ve got to know how to do all kinds of things, so when the time comes you can act.”

Afraid the woman would die, I turned my back. I stood by silently, responding only when the assistant asked for something. Despite her miserable condition, the poor woman never complained, only squeezed my hand tight when she was in pain.

The baby eventually emerged, but didn’t make a sound. It was blue in the face and seemed to be suffocating. The assistant said to me, “Quick, cut the cord.”

“I can’t,” I said.

He turned to me and shouted angrily, “So, when do you plan on learning?” Terrified, I asked, “Which part do I cut?”

Shaking with fear, I cut the cord. The assistant turned the baby upside down and smacked its behind. He cleared the mucus from its nose and mouth, and the baby began to howl. The girls, who had been standing outside the clinic, came in with a sheet and blanket and wrapped the baby—a roly-poly little girl, cute and cuddly.

The assistant was shouting again, “What’s going on in here? You think this is a nursery or something? Out!”

The girls and I managed to help the miserable woman get inside the clinic, and we attached a serum drip to her arm. Because she wasn’t up to nursing the baby, we spooned sugar water into the infant’s mouth. The father was very put out to learn his second child was another daughter. He didn’t give a damn, it seemed, that he had almost lost his wife and baby. The poor woman seemed to be more afraid of her husband than of dying. The man angrily demanded we let him take the woman and baby home. We explained to him his wife’s condition was serious and she needed hospital care, but it did no good. After the serum had run out, we transferred the woman and the baby to the clinic at Sar Bandar. The nurses there demanded to know why we hadn’t taken her to their clinic in the first place.

We explained that we had no choice because she had been in labor, which didn’t assuage them, but they reluctantly admitted her. A few nights later, something similar happened. It turned out women in the area preferred to have their babies at home rather than at a clinic. Only when there were difficulties did they think of calling a doctor. The woman in this second case was also in distress. After giving birth, she lost consciousness. We put her in the ambulance and brought her to the Sar Bandar clinic. This time there was a real brawl, and they told us they would try to have our clinic closed.

We said, “You’re free to do what you want. We’ve done as much as we can, not being midwives or having any training. The two women were on the point of death when we reached them. Suppose we had tried to take them to your clinic. By the time we got there, they would have died. Which is better—to have them brought in like this or as corpses?”

Another medical team from the cities arrived at our clinic and stayed the night. They slept in the room used for patients, while local staff slept in the room used for injections. Mr. Ateshkadeh, recently made head of the Red Crescent in Abadan, inspected the clinic regularly, supplying us with drugs and equipment. The head of the new team was called Dr. Hoseyni. The first thing he did was to draw up a schedule of specific tasks for each staff person—even the most menial things like washing utensils or cleaning the clinic, which, until that time, had been done by the girls. We told him, “Medicine is your job; let us take care of the other things.”

“What difference does it make?” Dr. Hoseyni asked. “Work is work. Doctors are no exception. We came here to work, after all, and, if necessary, we’ll get guns and fight. We’ve got to do something when there are no patients. You did pledge to keep this place sanitary, didn’t you?”

In spite of all the complex problems of practicing medicine, he remained faithful to the schedule. I found it humiliating to see Dr. Hoseyni eat at the camp kitchen and, after dinner, scrupulously sweep out the clinic or wash dishes. I insisted he let me do those things for him.

“No. It’s my duty,” he would say. “You should go and do your own work.”

The days went by, but the pain in my back and legs wouldn’t go away. The doctors in the hospital in Shiraz had advised me to go to Tehran for more examinations and treatment. With the help of a soldier I knew I got in touch with Brother Jahan Ara and explained the problem. Jahan Ara promised to send a letter of introduction, which I could present at the army hospital in Tehran. When it arrived, I didn’t know what to do. Never having been in the city I didn’t know a soul I could stay with there.

At that time Yunes Mohammadi, the representative of Khorramshahr in parliament, happened to be making a site visit of refugees at Camp B. I managed to speak to him about going to Tehran for treatment.

Mr. Mohammadi said he would help me, as he was about to return to Tehran. But first he had to go to Behbahan to visit with refugees from Khorramshahr. He asked me to accompany him. “As a woman, your presence in the group will make it easier for the families to say what’s on their minds,” he said. After talking it over with mother, I accepted Mr. Mohammadi’s offer. A few days later, Mr. Mohammadi and his brother Abdol Azim, Khosrow No’dusti, a few others whose names I don’t recall, and I went to Mahshahr by minibus. Because there weren’t any vehicles going directly to Behbehan, we patched together a series of rides with anything going in that direction. On our arrival Khosrow No’dusti took us to his home. No’dusti’s mother shouted for joy when she saw her son. I remembered her from the time we were working at the mosque. She had her eyes on a girl with blue eyes, also a worker, for her son. She was always saying how devoted she was to the girl and hoped the war would end soon so the she and her son could be married.

The mother gave me a warm welcome.

Later we went to visit Hoseyn Fakhri, the noted eulogist of the revered Imams, who rented the house next to No’dusti’s mother. Familiar with my financial situation, he told me, “I’ll speak with my nephew to see if it’s possible to get a plane ticket to Tehran for you.”

Apparently his nephew was the governor or mayor of Behbehan. We spent the few days we were there visiting the refugee families. I asked the women from Khorramshahr to tell me about conditions in Behbehan and about their needs and relayed what I had learned to Mr. Mohammadi. When that was over, I went to Mr. Fakhri’s nephew to ask about the ticket. He said, “Getting you a ticket without your being a relative presents a religious problem for him.”

Now I had to figure out how I was going to get to Tehran. I had no money. To that point Mr. Mohammadi had been helping me with my expenses, but he wasn’t all that flush either.

In the end, people managed to raise enough for a bus ticket. Mr. Mohammadi remained in Behbehan to continue his work, while his brother, one or two others, and I set out for Tehran by bus. Before I left, Mr. Mohammadi suggested I visit his family, who had moved to Tehran after the war had heated up. When we got to the south bus terminal in Tehran, we were at a loss, as no one in our party knew the city. We decided to chance it and head for the center of town. We asked a man where that was, and he said, “Artillery Square.”

This was the first time I had heard the name, which seemed so ridiculous to me I checked with several people there to see if that really was what it was called.

It was very cold, and I was still dressed in the same overcoat torn by shrapnel. The only thing keeping my body from showing through the rips in the coat was the short-sleeved blouse given to me by the girls at the clinic. The cold sent shivers up and down my back, and my voice shook. Everyone felt the same way, and we tried to stay in the sun as we walked. I didn’t have anything else to wear, so I couldn’t wash the overcoat and wait for it to dry. I never liked to ask for help—not even the time when Sabah Vatankhah and I were on our way to Abadan and we were waiting for a lift at a place near an aid station. We were really stuck, not knowing what to do. Swarms of people had come for food, and it was a madhouse. One of the aid workers noticed how long we’d been waiting and asked, “Sisters, excuse me, did you want something?”

“No,” we said.

“Food, clothing? Something you need?”

Although we were famished, we refused.

He went and got us food anyway. It was a warm pilaf, which we ate and blessed him thoroughly for it.

He came back and said, “If you need clothing, let’s go to storage, and you can take whatever you want.” “No,” we said, “people need it more than we do.”

At Artillery Square we stood at a bus stop in the shadow of the communications building. Freezing cold, I begged my companions to cross to the sunny side of the square.

While we were standing in the sun, a lone bicyclist stopped to stare at us. But after one look at the weapon in my hand, he began to pedal madly toward the communications building.

I wondered what made him stare at us like that. The G3 I had belonged to Mohammadi, who insisted I keep it with me because, he said, the young men in town were headstrong and might cause problems. A few moments later the bicycle rider returned with an armed guard. He pointed at us and said, “That’s them. They might be Hypocrites. They even have a weapon!”

To be continued …