Da (Mother) 141

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

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

2025-3-16

Da (Mother) 141

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

***

There were four other apartments on the fourth floor. In the first was a woman from Tehran living on her own. She was what they called an “oppressed” person, who was given the apartment because of her economic circumstances. In the second was the family of a father martyred in the war who had been married to an Afghan woman. The woman remarried, and the Imam himself officiated at her wedding. The woman and her first husband had a boy Abdollah’s age. The stepfather was a very respectable man, who stayed away from the building as much as he could. He did look in on the boy and provided him with the best things—including toys and clothing— money could buy. The third apartment contained an Azeri-speaking mother of a martyr, who objected to our getting the apartment instead of her son. “I am the sister of a martyr and my son is the brother of one,” she complained. “It wasn’t right to give them the apartment.” I spoke with the woman, pointing out that her son was quite comfortable living on his own with a job in Tehran, while my husband had to be quite far away and couldn’t check in on us. The woman’s daughter-in-law also told me that she would never live in a place like our building. But the woman never stopped complaining.

The fourth apartment was occupied by a family in which the father was usually away on a mission or at work from morning until evening. The Azeri-speaking mother, a very neat and tidy woman, lived by herself. Although very admirable for her sanitation, the woman was a real nuisance to the neighbors. There was a communal kitchen on the fourth floor, but any time one of us used it to wash a pot or something, she would show up to complain about how long we were taking. Living on her own without anything better to do, she griped constantly about the children playing in the hall. We had to set up specific times for the kids to play, and, although I told the boys again and again to be considerate of the older people and the sick in the building, they ignored me and played soccer in our hallway. I would regularly hear the racket made by the boys followed by the woman’s shouts and curses.

Sometimes I sensed the woman was kind hearted, and it pained her to show an ugly side. I thought that she must have a reason to behave the way she did. One day we had a heart-to-heart chat, and I asked her about her life. She said when she was nine she was married to a much older man who already had a wife. She found being a second wife extremely difficult. No more than a child, all she wanted to do was to play, but her mother-in-law insisted she do the housework and would get furious and beat her when she didn’t. It was clear to me that, having been abused as a child, the woman herself had become an abusive adult. After our chat, I tried to be more understanding of her moods.

The Afghan woman was a strange character. As soon as she became friends with a person, she would open up about every detail of her life, from the trivial to the important, droning on and on to the point of driving her listeners crazy. If she fell out with a person, she would do her darnedest to bully the offender into submission. Hating it when people called her Afghan, she protested, “I am the wife of an Iranian, the mother of an Iranian martyr.” I would ask her, “Why is it so upsetting to you to be called Afghan? Didn’t you yourself say they were a brave people and proud warriors?” But it had no effect on her.

Early one morning the wife of the man always on a mission came to me, saying she needed money. Pleading poverty I said, “I’m sorry. It’s the end of the month and Habib hasn’t sent his salary yet.”

She left my place and then ran into the Afghan lady, and, after apologizing again and again, she borrowed money from her. This led to a loud argument between the Afghan and her husband. She was considerably older than he was and would constantly bring their age difference up to him. All the residents of the fourth floor, especially the woman who borrowed the money, had to endure her vile accusations for months afterward. My room and theirs shared an inner door, which the previous residents had bricked up. Although I had put furniture in front of the door, I could still hear the woman screeching at her husband late into the night. I was pregnant with my fourth child, and the sounds went through my skull like a drill. Unable to sleep, I tried everything I could to drown out the sound of that voice. I played Quran tapes and said prayers, but nothing worked. The next morning, the fights with her husband developed into skirmishes with the neighbors. She would go to the kitchen and was so obsessive about her exclusive right to be there, no one dared disturb her. I tried to keep out of her way, which explains why she was less fierce with me than the other neighbors. But there were times when I would go to the kitchen and find she had gone off somewhere, leaving the water running for no reason.

As I said, most people on the floor took turns policing the common areas: the hallways, stairs, kitchen, and the bathroom. The oppressed Tehrani woman usually was not home, and, when she was, she usually had guests. They would use the common facilities, but she never lifted a finger to clean up after them. It made no difference to her that the mothers of martyrs did the cleaning for her and her guests. It was particularly galling for me to see strange men on the stairs and in the hall, because I would normally hike up my chador and tie it around my waist when I cleaned. If I let it hang down, it got in the way and would get filthy. Because the stairwell was out of the way, not everybody bothered cleaning it. Having strange men about wasn’t a problem for the Azeri woman or the Afghan, who, being older, could hike up their chadors without causing a scandal. No one could get the oppressed woman to work. Therefore, I had no choice but to clean late at night or early in the morning, but it didn’t take long for the place to become filthy again. Then people said accusingly, “It’s your turn. Why didn’t you do some cleaning?”

At the end of our place there was a small room partitioned off by a low wooden wall. The superintendent allowed me to use this room as a kitchen, which was easier on me, because I could use it anytime I wanted without a chador. Mr. Siyahpush also allowed me to extend the walls and create a kind of hallway leading to our door. I also raised the height of the walls so I could work in the kitchen without being seen. The mother of the martyr, who wanted her son to have our place, objected to these alterations. She complained that raising the height of the walls blocked the sunlight, but the only light in the hallway came from small windows at the ends. Because the neighboring buildings came up to the fifth floor on both sides of ours, very little sunlight got through anyway, forcing the manager to keep the fluorescent lights in the hallway on day and night. When there was a power outage, it got pitch dark inside. In spite of all this, I restored the wall to its original height just to mollify the woman.

To be continued …