Da (Mother) 13

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

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

2022-9-20

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

***

The next day I saw to Ali’s pack, as I normally did. There were some bloodstained clothes and a pair of boots in it. I pulled the clothes out, washed them, and hung them to dry on the clothesline. A couple of hours later, Ali returned. As soon as he saw the clothes on the line, he let out a deep sigh and said testily, “Why did you touch those clothes? They belonged to Abbas and I wanted them to stay the way they were— with the blood from his passing and all, to remember him.” Then he gathered the clothes along with the boots and put them in the wardrobe. Now I felt sorry about washing those clothes. I went to the wardrobe and, when saw them again, I felt sick.

The death of Musa and Abbas affected Ali deeply. He had changed in a way that I had never seen before. The old Ali, who had infected us with his verve and enthusiasm, was now very unemotional. It seemed he was thinking about leaving home. Several days passed, and I thought Ali would snap out of it. That day I had gone to grandfather’s house for a couple of hours. When I returned I saw Ali beside the window that looked out on the courtyard; he was dressed in black and was holding a framed picture. It was a photo of himself, which I had never seen. Mother was sitting in the yard. I said hello to both of them and asked, “What’s this about, Ali? Why did you frame a picture of yourself?”

“I want it for that day,” he said calmly and turned to mother with a smile. But I could tell from the expression on her face how much these words upset her. I knew Ali was her favorite; she was always singing his praises and saying how devoted she was to him. The rest of us accepted that he was the best, for the way he was always helping and,  despite all his own problems, how he would try to shoulder others’ burdens. I desperately wanted to know whether he was thinking about martyrdom, so I asked, “Which day, Ali?”

“The day that I’ll make all of you proud,” he said.

“The day of martyrdom, you mean?” I asked.

Mother’s angry look stopped me from saying more. Ali said, “I had this picture taken so that after I’m martyred you’ll hang it up on one of those columns with the mirrors and lights, and people will see that my heart and soul were in the path I chose.”

He stopped for a moment and began again, “I don’t want you to cry when I’m martyred. You’ve got to be like Abbas’s mother. Come to it with patience and quiet defiance. You be the ones to comfort others.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. But with mother on the verge of hysterics, I tried to relieve the tension by joking around.

From the time Ali joined the army, handling a weapon was very painful for him. Two of his fingers on both hands were fused from birth, and when he cocked the weapon they would get caught. His fingers were always bandaged and sometimes the bleeding was very bad, making washing for prayers torture. At times the cuts were very deep, requiring stitches. He played down the pain, telling us not to worry, but it upset mother, who would complain to him, “Why do you have to bring this misery on yourself?”

Father wanted more than anything to save enough money for an operation, but in those days he didn’t make more than 1,300 tumans, and the surgery would have cost around 20,000. Not only were his fingers joined; two toes on both feet were also fused. His skin would swell up when he took his socks off. It was difficult for me to see this, and I would rush to him with lotion but he wouldn’t let me apply it.

Eventually Commander Jahan Ara asked Ali to think about doing something about this. The army arranged for him to go to Tehran for an operation. The day he left was the darkest one of my life. On the one hand, he was leaving for a good cause; on the other, his absence, even if for short time, would be hard to take. Ali wasn’t only my brother; he was my friend and confidant. I told him things that I couldn’t even tell mother. When I told him what I wished for, he would try to make my wishes come true. When he couldn’t do anything he would raise the issue with father in such a way that he couldn’t tell it was my wish. Leila also loved Ali very much. The day father bought him a wardrobe, Leila and I insisted that he put it in our room so that Ali would visit us more. Although after he joined the army, he didn’t come home more than twice a week, we still would straighten it out and dust it every day. We consoled ourselves when he was away by just looking at his possessions.

The day before he was scheduled to fly to Tehran, he came home very late. I packed everything I thought he would need in a suitcase: clothes, camera, tape recorder, prayer mat. When he came home, I showed the suitcase to him. He thanked me. That night I couldn’t sleep and in the morning when he was about to leave, I hugged him and, all choked up, I told him how devoted I was to him and kissed him. He said, “Stop. That’s enough. Why are you going on like this?” But I couldn’t help it; I stroked his beard and kissed his hands. This made him angry. I held up the Quran so he could pass under it and all the way to end of the alley I kept clasping his hands. Father then pulled me away, and he and mother took Ali to the airport. Mother was also on her way to Tehran for an appointment for an eye operation.

When I got back I felt that the light had gone out of our house. I was very worried; they said Ali’s operation would be complicated. A team of surgeons was going to operate on his brain, nerves, arteries, and bones. They were going to straighten out the bones in his foot and graft skin from his legs on to his hands. Imagining what he had to go through made the pain of his being away several times worse. I went to the shelf where the picture was, the one he wanted for his martyrdom memorial, and I kissed it several times.

We had expected Ali to return after two weeks, but it was a month before he came home. They had only operated on his right hand. He said that mother didn’t have the patience to stay. He spent that night at home and was off the next day, and I felt worse than when he had left the first time. I had a bad a feeling about it, as if something had been wrenched from my being. I even wished Ali had not come home if it was only going to be temporary. Why did he have to come only to leave so soon? Something deep inside me said that this was the last time I would see Ali.

I called the hospital regularly to ask about him. He would always ask me about what was happening in town. I could tell how much it bothered him to hear about the death of his friend Seyyed Jafar Musavi and the skirmishes on the border. He tried to hide the emotion in his voice from me. I stopped telling him the bad news, but he was in contact with his friends in Khorramshahr. During those last days of summer, the situation for our border forces got worse and worse, and there were more incidents, which would be hard to keep from him.

As the fighting on the border intensified, people from those areas started to leave their villages and come to the city. Most were farmers who tended the date palms and sold their produce by the side of the road. Some also sold things like milk, cream, and yogurt at the market in town. The skirmishes wiped out all the livestock and herds of these ranchers and farmers. A number of these poor folks found shelters in the building that was burned during the Arab separatist crisis.

Sleeping on the roof gave us a chance to see the fire fights between our forces and the Iraqis. Father explained that we didn’t let any Iraqi firing go unanswered, so as not to give them a pretext, but we could see them getting more brazen by the day. Their assaults got to the point where their naval vessels entered our waters. They also invaded on land and shelled our positions, leaving our forces with no choice but to engage with them.

To be continued …