Da (Mother) 139

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

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

2025-3-2

Da (Mother) 139

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

***

Whenever the boys had some school activity, they would invite me. I tried to get out of it, saying there were only men at the school, but they insisted.

Sa’id was in a song and theatre troupe, which was part of the High School Student Corps. The leader of the troupe, Seyyed Javad Hashemi, a movie and television actor, wanted to take it on a tour of the front. The boys in the group were all between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. I went to the Cultural Institute on Horr Square and, with mother’s approval, saw Mr. Hashemi and signed the papers permitting Sa’id to go to the front. Sa’id wanted to go and fight, but the officials assured families the troupe would only be performing. They entertained troops at bases in Du Kuheh, Hoveyzeh, Bostan, Susangerd, Faw, and elsewhere.

Mansur was wounded in the foot in January 1986 and was laid up at home for eight months. They put a pin in his foot, but as soon as they removed his cast, he went back to the front. One night in September 1987, with military operations taking place in the western part of the country, the martyr Mostafa Chamran appeared to me in a dream. We spoke for a long time, and I asked him what would happen to Hasan, because I was worried about him. He said, “They’re going to bring him away.” I pressed him on other things, but he would answer with a smile, “Certain events cannot be disclosed.” After these and other dreams, I became fed up with everything connected with life. I couldn’t get the dreams out of my mind. Dr. Chamran with his unworldly presence and speech consumed my waking moments. I couldn’t tell mother about my dreams, but I did share them with Fowziyeh Vatankhah.

A couple of days after the dream, I felt ill and asked Fowziyeh to accompany me to the Amir A’lam Hospital on Kushk Avenue. As we were walking, Fowziyeh began to speak, and I had the feeling she was getting me ready to hear some news. “Come on, out with it. What’s on your mind?” I said.

She said, “I saw someone from the Martyr and Wounded Transfer Squad, who was asking about you. We have the interpretation of your dream.”

I couldn’t control myself and with tears in my eyes, I said, “God, mother can’t stand any more pain!”

Fowziyeh quickly tried to reassure me, “I swear to God. Mansur’s not dead, but his wounds are very bad, it seems.”

“For God’s sake, tell me what happened. I’m only worried about mother.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to console you. The official said he would come to your house himself. He only wanted you to know he’d been wounded. Someone from the squad had come to your house twice but you weren’t home. He said nothing to your mother. I only saw him by accident in the hallway.”

Although I still felt sick, I changed my mind about going to the hospital. I went to the squad offices in the Health Ministry on Hafez Avenue. They found Mansur’s name on a list, which said he had been wounded in the leg and was sent to a hospital in Mashhad.

When I called the hospital, they told me they’d operated on him several times, and that he’d need several more operations. Certain Mansur was in the hospital in Mashhad, I bought a train ticket and went home.

Knowing she would not be able to control herself, I didn’t know how to break to the news to mother. She was at her most annoying at such times. Finally I said, “Mother, I’m going to tell you something, but you have to promise you won’t have a breakdown.”

“What is it? I swear I won’t say a word,” she promised.

Hardly was Mansur’s name out of my mouth, when she started beating herself. “I’m not saying another word,” I said.

I got up to leave the room. She said, “Tell me. I’ll be quiet—swear to God.” She merely sobbed.

“Mansur’s been shot in the foot. They brought him to Mashhad and operated. I’m going to visit him in the hospital.”

True to her word, mother stayed calm. With Abdollah and Hoda in tow, we went to Mashhad. After finding the address, we went straight to Kamyab Hospital, which was outside of town. They weren’t letting people enter, and a crowd had formed by the door. I cut through the crowd and told the guard there was only the four of us in Mashhad to see about my wounded brother.

He glanced at mother and the children and said, “Okay. But you can only go in one at a time.”

Not knowing exactly how badly my brother had been injured, I didn’t let mother go in first. I left the kids with her and entered the hospital. Although I had been telling her the whole trip not to break down when she was there, because not only would it get on Mansur’s already frazzled nerves, it might ruin the morale of the other wounded in the ward, as soon as I got in the room and saw him lying on the bed I couldn’t stop from bursting into tears. I hugged and kissed him just the same. He was rail thin, almost half his normal size. Although mother was waiting for me outside,   didn’t have the heart to leave him. I sat down beside him, and he asked, “Who’s with you?”

“Mother, Hoda, and Abdollah.”

Annoyed, he said, “What made you come all this way?”

“We couldn’t bear not to come,” I said.

At that point one of the nurses came in the room, and Mansur asked her to bring mother and the kids. She left and returned with them. Mother started weeping even before entering the room. I couldn’t get her to stop no matter what I did. Her crying caused me to lose control again. She tried so hard to stop the tears that her arms shook and her lips quivered, but they streamed down her cheeks as she sobbed softly. We stayed with Mansur until the evening prayer, when they politely asked us to leave. We went to the holy shrine where Imam Reza is buried and took part in Friday prayers. Later we went to the bazaar to shop and eat, and then returned to the hospital. After the second visit, our thoughts turned to finding a place to stay. We tried every hotel and guesthouse around the shrine with no luck. The air turned chilly around sunset, and the loudspeakers were sounding the call to prayer. I was losing hope and called on Imam Reza to give us shelter in this strange city. We walked toward Fountain Square and roamed around the lanes and alleyways in the old city until we came to a guesthouse called Beyt al-Moqaddas (Jerusalem House).

I went inside and asked the manager if there was a room.

“No,” he said.

I turned around to leave and saw that mother and the kids had come in behind me. The manager asked, “Are they with you?” “Yes,” I said.

“What brings you here?” he asked. I told him we came to see my wounded brother in the hospital.

“This is awkward,” he said. “I told you we didn’t have a room because they’ve ordered us not to give rooms to women traveling alone. You have to go to the Holy Precinct Committee and get a letter of introduction, and then I can do whatever you want.”

I went to the committee and explained to a brother why we were there. “Why didn’t you come to the committee in the first place?” he asked. “The Martyrs Foundation has its own guesthouse for the families.” “I didn’t know that,” I said and went back to the Beyt al-Moqaddas and got a room. It was very small, no more than one and half by two meters, and had a worn carpet on the floor. I had only brought two sheets and a couple of sets of clothes for the kids. I spread one sheet on the floor, and we used mother’s cloak to cover the room’s rickety wooden window. We washed the grapes we had bought on the way and ate them with some bread for supper. The manager brought some filthy blankets and floor cushions for us, but I couldn’t bring myself to use then and sent them back. The kids, who had tired themselves out horsing around, went right to sleep. The room was so cramped mother and I had to sleep curled up next to each other.

We spent the next three days visiting the hospital and the shrine. Abdollah, five at the time, and Hoda, three and a half, were such little devils that they ran me ragged from the time we left the hotel in the morning until late at night when we got back. We said our prayers in the shrine and ate in a restaurant. During visiting hours we went to the hospital. We put Mansur in a wheelchair and rolled him out into the hospital yard.

Mansur’s roommates were able to walk with canes and kept the children amused, while we spoke with him. We asked him how he was wounded.

“One night I was riding behind my friend on his motorcycle, racing across the bridge, when we were caught in a hail of shrapnel and mortar fire. A shell landed nearby, and I was thrown from the bike. I had a machine gun strapped to my back, which was loaded in case we had to fight. I fell with my finger on the trigger and accidently sent several rounds into my foot.” The combination of the fall, the shrapnel, and the machine gun made a mess of his foot below the ankle. His jaw and teeth were broken, and his right foot and pelvis were in a cast.

Because we couldn’t stay in Mashhad long, we asked the hospital authorities to arrange to have Mansur transferred to Tehran. At first they refused, but then they said if we coordinated it with Tehran, they would have no problem with the move.

Three days later we returned to Tehran. One of Fowziyeh Vatankhah’s friends was in charge of transferring patients at Imam Khomeini Hospital, and she arranged the transfer. The authorities called asking what hospital we wanted him transferred to.

I said, “It makes no difference. Since we cannot visit him regularly in Mashhad, we want him moved to Tehran. But, if not, he should be treated just like anybody else.”

The transfer unit telephoned again to say he was to be moved to Mehrad Hospital on Mir Emad Avenue. They told us to be at the airport at a certain time to meet him.

We went to the airport to find that the plane had arrived early and the patients had been offloaded. It was around midnight. We went to the Mehrad Hospital in a car belonging to one of the martyr families at the Kushk Building. When we got there, they wouldn’t let us in, saying everybody was asleep.

I said, “Give me a second to look in on my brother, and I’ll be right back.”

Mansur was awake, and his friend, Mr. Lashgari, was with him. Relieved, I went home. After a while, they released Mansur from the hospital, and, just like the last time he had been wounded, he remained quite a while convalescing at home. He was annoyed that he had to spend so much time on his back or in a chair and groused constantly about how much his leg itched. The doctors had fitted him with braces and a cast from his ankle to his knee and from the knee to the pelvis. The metal screws in the braces jutted out from the cast. Mansur’s body was riddled with shrapnel, and he would dig out the bits that came to the surface of his skin. He poked at his face—especially the area around his eyes—so much the wounds swelled up. I constantly warned him not to fiddle with them because he might sever one of the tiny nerves near his eye, and then he would be in big trouble.

“These are nothing. Don’t worry,” he’d say.

Mansur told us that when he was at the field hospital in the desert, they wanted to amputate his foot. But he wouldn’t let them. After he was transferred to Mashhad, a skilled surgeon, whose name I forget, worked on him for nine hours to fix the foot. Mansur had nothing but praise for this doctor, who told him not expect the foot to be like new, because some parts of it had been so badly crushed they were beyond repair.

To be continued …