Da (Mother) 50

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

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

2023-6-18

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

***

“Their relatives might show up any time,” they said. “If we send them away, no one will find them.”

I don’t know why, but whenever one of them started up, the rest would begin to howl. At first it was no more than three, but gradually the pack became larger.

There was only one of them I was fond of: Abbas, the seven-yearold. He was worse off than most. Thin as a rail, he would trip and fall whenever his physical condition worsened. His eyes would go blank, and he would call feebly to his mother, “Yuma, Yuma...”

Seeing him like that brought out the mother in me. He also made me miss Hasan and Sa’id. He sensed my maternal instinct and would come to me whenever he saw me. At times when I was working, someone would take my hand, and I would turn and see it was Abbas. I would pat him on the head and ask in Arabic, “Abbas, what do you want?”

Whenever he would say in that pathetic way of his, “I’m hungry” or “I’m thirsty,” I would rummage through the boxes to find some biscuits or cake for hm. When he asked, “Where’s my mother?” my heart broke. I didn’t know what to tell him. I tried to console him by saying, “God willing, your mother will come.”

The girls and I were in the process of straightening out the yard by bringing sacks of clothes and cartons of food into the prayer room. We first separated out the food, then we opened the sacks. We had been told to find all the clothing that would be of use by the defense forces, whose clothes would get blood-stained and torn during the fighting. Men’s clothing was hard to find, and we waded through the piles to find the odd scrap. When we found things women could wear we would throw them at Ra’na Najjar or Ashraf Farhadi and laugh until our sides hurt.

Around noon someone announced I was wanted outside. I slid down the mountain of clothing, getting my chador full of lint. After brushing off my chador and straightening it, I went into the yard where Hoseyn Eidi was waiting for me. As soon as he saw me, he walked over and I asked him what was happening.

 “They say that the morgue at the hospital is full of bodies, sister. We want to transfer them to Jannatabad. Will you come?”

“Are there any women among them?” I asked.

“There must be,” he said.

“Wait here while I tell the girls,” I said. Then I went in and said, “I’m going to help with the bodies at the morgue. Anyone want to come along?”

“No,” they said.

I didn’t insist. There was a white van waiting outside with two people sitting next to the driver and three in the back. I got in and we were off. When we got to the bridge, the driver put his foot on the gas. I thanked God the bridge had survived the Baathist air strikes and artillery. We were a quarter of the way down the ramp when I noticed the driver had to carefully avoid a hole that was half a meter wide. I could see the choppy waters through the hole. The railings along the bridge were pockmarked by shrapnel. My old fear of water returned, but luckily we soon put the bridge behind us.

The van went toward the Taleqani Hospital and stopped at the emergency room. I got out and entered and was greeted by a nurse in a cape, pants, and a kerchief—all in white. I liked the look. I said, “Hello. We’ve come for the bodies.”

“Tell him,” she said, indicating a man who was limping toward the end of a narrow corridor.

Hoseyn, who was behind me, ran to him and said, “Sir!” The man, who had thick glasses and a bald head with a fringe of hair, turned around. Hoseyn explained why we were there, and the man asked, “Do you have a vehicle?”

“Yes, we came with a van.”

“Good. Go and bring it around the back,” he said.

I knew where he meant. We left the hospital and Hoseyn motioned to the driver to follow us. The morgue attendant opened the double doors in the back and said, “Come in.”

The young men with us guided the driver as he backed up to the loading dock. We entered the through the small back door. The room was about fifteen meters square with a stone floor and stone walls. There was no light, so we had to grope our way forward using the light from the outside. Although I was used to the smell of bodies, the stench of blood inside the room sickened me.

The dead were just strewn about on the floor. On the left side of the morgue there were three bays with three drawers in each bay; these were the only bodies stored in any particular order. I went around looking at them. Except for three old women and two children, the corpses were men burned in Saddam’s fire.

The hospital was running on a generator. Because the emergency rooms had priority, they decided not to refrigerate the morgue and to bury the bodies in it before they rotted. According to the attendant, most of the dead had been found on the streets of the Arab quarters of Kut-e Sheikh and Moharrezi.

I asked him, “Wasn’t it decided that no more people would be buried at Jannatabad?”

“Yes,” he said, “but it’s still better to bury them in their own areas.”

I remembered the time when we had arranged to bring bodies to Abadan and Mahshahr. But if we tried to do that now, who would be there to take possession of them? How could we bury them ourselves? There wasn’t enough room in the van for them, so we told them we would take the ones lying on the floor.

The attendant said, “It’s hot out; none of them should remain here. You have to take the ones in the drawers, too.”

“If we take them,” I said, “they’ll just lie on the ground. There weren’t supposed to be any more buried at Jannatabad because there’s no water to wash them or shrouds to bury them in.”

The young men brought stretchers. I told them to gather the women first and put them in the van. One of the women, around fifty, was terribly overweight. I didn’t want to involve the boys, but because I realized I couldn’t get her on the stretcher by myself, I asked them to help. They were just as bothered by the prospect as I, insisting that they would only carry men.

“It’s not right to leave them,” I said. “There are only three of them. Let’s all carry them out to the van.”

Three of us struggled to get the body on the stretcher and into the van. The two other women were lighter. They were able to get eight or nine other bodies into the van. While the boys did this, I looked at the women’s faces. The two thin ones looked alike; they were probably related. Their arms and faces were sunburned, testifying to how hard their lives had been.

They stacked the bodies in the back of the van and told me to sit up front. I said that I would rather stay in back and lean against the railing. “It’s dangerous,” they said. “You might fall. We even had a hard time back there.”

Hoseyn, who was standing on the fender, said, “Go sister, sit in front. Why cause trouble?” I reluctantly sat in the front, and the van drove off. The heavy load made it go much slower than before, and the motor groaned as the van strained to get up hills. The Abadan-Khorramshahr roadway was under fire, which made me worry about Hoseyn and the other boys in the back. We watched out the window as mortar shells burst nearby. I was afraid they might be hit by shrapnel. When we got to the bridge, the driver gunned the engine, but the van couldn’t make the grade. The boys jumped from the van to lighten the load as the air filled with the smell of exhaust.

We got over the bridge without incident and headed for Jannatabad. I had wanted them to drop me off at the mosque, where there was so much work to be done, but I didn’t have the heart to abandon the corpses. I saw Zeynab standing outside the gate, deep in thought. I said hello to her and asked, “What are you doing here, honey?”

She sounded depressed, “Ever since morning, I’ve had this horrible feeling. I miss my daughter Maryam something awful.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “Wherever she is, she’s out of range. We’ve brought more dead, my sweet,” I continued.

“But didn’t they decide not to take any more?” she asked.

“These were leftover at the morgue and they said to bring them here so they wouldn’t rot.”

“Sister, what should we do? Unload them here?” asked Hoseyn.

There was no need to unload the bodies there because we were not going to wash and shroud them, I thought. It would be better to bring them to the gravesite. I told Hoseyn what I was thinking and he agreed.

He guided the driver to the end of the dirt lane. Zeynab and I grabbed a couple of stretchers. I didn’t see Leila around and asked Zeynab about her. “There was no work for her, so she went to your mother’s with Maryam. The poor thing was so homesick. Afterwards she was going to go to the mosque to look for you.”

We got to the martyrs’ section where there were only a few empty graves. We had to grab picks and shovels and help the boys do more digging. Many of the handles were broken. It wasn’t easy to dig. I wrapped the pick handle in some leftover plastic and got to work. The plastic didn’t stop me from getting blisters; the skin between my fingers was especially raw. I tossed the pick away and began to dig the grave with my hands, knowing that the dirt wasn’t good for the cuts but at least it didn’t sting. My arms were red and swollen, as if they had been scorched. The old men at the body washers’ rounded up some other men to help us dig.

Zeynab and I stopped digging and went to see to the bodies of the women. The two thin ones, the young women, slid into their graves easily, but we needed the men’s help to place the stretcher with the larger woman at the edge of the grave. Zeynab jumped down into the hole and took the woman by the shoulders, and I slid into the grave and took her legs. When the men tilted the stretcher, the woman’s entire weight pressed against my chest. My temples throbbed, and my eyes were about to leave their sockets. This was the worst thing I had ever felt. Zeynab used an expression in Arabic about how the woman must have eaten with blind people, wolfing down their food without them noticing. This made me want to laugh but I hardly had enough breath to giggle.

To be continued …