Da (Mother) 52

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

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

2023-7-2

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

***

“Fine. Now don’t dawdle. Get back as fast as you can, so I won’t get anxious worrying about where you are.”

“Okay,” he said.

As I stood there watching him leave, my eyes filled with tears. The Mansur who had raised such hell at home was now so well-behaved, which seemed strange because he wasn’t more than thirteen. Thinking of how he was an orphan now tore at my heart. When he had disappeared from view, I went back inside. I gave the cutlet sandwiches to Zeynab.

She looked at them in surprise. “Mansur brought them,” I explained. She offered me a piece but I pushed it aside. The lump in my throat was almost big enough now to strangle me. Leila was also in a bad mood. I guessed that seeing mother and the children had brought her down. She didn’t let on, but I could tell what was going on inside her. A few times when I tried to speak to her, there were tears in her eyes. I decided to stay the night with her. That way there’d be enough time to get her out of that mood. We said our prayers in the room, then we left and noticed that they had covered the porch floor with a carpet and there was a tablecloth with food laid out on it. The old men, Hoseyn and Abdollah, sat on one side of the cloth and the women sat on the other. Leila and I joined them. They cut up a watermelon and divided it among us. My mouth watered as I took a piece, but my thoughts were on Leila. She answered tersely whenever I tried to engage her in conversation. After dinner, I got up, put on my shoes, and grabbed my rifle, which ordinarily never left my side. “Where are you going?” asked Leila.

“For a walk. Coming?”

“Yeah,” she said and got up.

Sounds of shelling and explosions were coming from the direction of the base, so we decided to walk toward the gate, which gave us a nearly direct view of it. We stood before the gate and looked out at the avenue. It was intimidating to see it so deserted, giving the impression that the Baathist forces were stronger than they actually were. But when I looked out at the base, I told myself that while our forces were around, we were secure. Then I took Leila by the hand and we walked the length of Jannatabad. I tried to get her to speak by bringing up memories of the good times and asking what she remembered of them. She opened up. We stopped at the sign father had touched, and for a moment I wished she had not been there. I so wanted to kiss the spot where his hand had been.

It was hard for me to stay composed, so I kept quiet. We began to stroll again. The moonlit night reminded me of those nights at home in Basra with no electricity. This made me even more heartsick. At that point Leila said, “I wish Ali was here. It’s been about three or four months since went away. If he were here, it would be easier to bear this. Mother wouldn’t be so hard on herself either.”

As we spoke, we found ourselves gravitating to father’s grave, and I couldn’t control myself any longer. I bawled like a baby. Recalling the good times only made things worse. Leila was no better off than I. Watching hot tears stream down her cheeks was unbearable for me. I made an effort to pull myself together so that I could comfort Leila. I got to my feet quickly and said, “It’s late and it’s dangerous here. Get up, let’s go. Zeynab’s probably worried.”

When we reached the building, the old men were sitting on the porch having a smoke. As usual one of them was listening to the news about Iran on BBC. Their reading of the situation made him furious, and he started to say foul things and curse at the radio. A little further along the porch Zeynab, Maryam, and an old woman were leaning against the wall napping. Hoseyn Eidi and Abdollah Mo’avi were busy keeping watch over the area. I thought I would ease their burden by taking a turn at guard duty. I told Leila to sleep while I took my shift. Realizing we didn’t have much time together, she insisted on keeping me company.

The best thing for us, it seemed, was to take the first shift. I told Hoseyn and Abdollah to get some sleep. They refused at first, but after I put my foot down they gave in. Leila and I walked away from the porch so we wouldn’t disturb them. As we surveyed the grounds, we spoke about the war and what we thought was going to happen. “How did it start in the first place?” Leila asked. “Haven’t you heard Saddam’s speeches? He said he wanted to create a unified Arab nation, but he actually had something else in mind. Otherwise it didn’t make any sense to start a war of unification that would kill all these Arabs. You’ve seen yourself at Jannatabad how many Persians and Arabs have been slaughtered. What he says is nonsense. They really want to do away with the revolution in Iran and get their hands on the oil. They want to turn Iran into another Palestine.”

Then she asked, “How long will it last?”

“That’s in God’s hands. Our boys have put up a good fight in resisting them. If Banisadr would let the Phantoms take off and bombard the Iraqi positions, this would end. We also have to put up a good defense for the resistance to bear fruit.”

“Zahra,” she asked, “after father who in our family will be the next martyr?”

“Me, God willing,” I said.

She got all choked up and said, “God forbid! What will we do without you?”

“The same thing we did after father died: carry on. After me, it’ll be your responsibility.”

“No, I’m not like you,” she objected. “I can’t bear up the way you do. The responsibility is too much.”

“I know. I didn’t want it either, but it was placed on my shoulders. Now I have to manage it as best I can. For good or bad, I have to try.”

Then I said, “Leila, pray that I become a martyr. Don’t be afraid of the responsibility. Ali will come back and take charge of the children. You’ll just have to wait till then.”

Mentioning Ali frightened her. “No, I pray to God he doesn’t come back or I hope he does get martyred.”

I nodded and said, “Yeah, there’s no doubt he’ll be martyred. He’s not the one to return and stay at home. Remember what he said, ‘I’m going to put so much effort into the Lord’s work I’ll die in the process and become a martyr.’”

She broke down at this point. To put an end to the conversation I took her by the hand and said, “Get up. Let’s walk around the grounds. Weren’t we supposed to keep watch?”

We started strolling in silence, but I couldn’t stop wondering what would happen when Ali came back. Had he heard that father had died? I asked myself. When would he be back? Was the news reporting what was happening in Khorramshahr? Even if he did want to return, how could he, what with the operation on his hands? What would he do if he did return? God forbid he had already been martyred. But then I remembered what he said about dying for God, that it was exactly like living. Real living was in self-sacrifice. The Holy Imams were martyred. Look how blessed they were. If we want to live on for an eternity, we’d have to follow their example. By this logic Ali had a right to martyrdom, but where? How? Would he be shot? Hit by shrapnel?

Then the scene of father being hit by shrapnel passed through my mind. I remembered the time when we were all together as a family, when father would tell me to be back home before sundown no matter where I was.

How times had changed. Now the two daughters of the family were patrolling the graveyard in the dead of night with the streets in shambles, and the Baathists at the gates of the city. With the two of us together, the grim atmosphere at the cemetery didn’t frighten me. Only occasionally when the wind blew the dry leaves over the ground making a strange rustling noise did my heart beat faster. I took Leila’s hand and we walked quickly between the trees to the end of the cemetery. Because Zeynab had asked us not to walk in the section with the older graves, we turned back. “The far end of the graveyard isn’t safe,” she told us. “The walls are crumbling and somebody could get hurt.”

An hour passed this way. To keep Leila from tiring I said, “Let’s go back.”

When we reached the door of the building, I called out to Hoseyn. Both he and Abdollah answered, which told me that neither of them had gotten any sleep. When they emerged, I told them I wasn’t tired if they wanted to get some sleep.

“No, we couldn’t sleep either,” Abdollah said. “We were talking.”

We sat on the edge of the porch and spoke. It didn’t take long for the sound of our voices to wake Zeynab, who shouted out, “You’ve been on your feet from morning to night, dear. You’re tired. There’s nothing going on now, get some sleep.” “Okay,” I said and we went into the building and stretched out on the carpet. Leila fell asleep quickly. I had trouble keeping my eyes open, but I couldn’t help remembering the bedroom set father had bought recently for us. How much it delighted me to sleep on a bed. Of course, he originally hadn’t intended to buy it for Leila and me, but when he saw how thrilled we were, he said it could be ours.

With that I fell asleep only to have a nightmare. There was chaos everywhere. I also dreamed of father. He was wearing a green turban and walking toward a lush garden. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t reach him. I yelled out to him and he turned to look at me and smiled, but all the while he was receding further into the distance. I struggled to reach him but it was as if my feet were bound together. I screamed and cried, begging him to take me where he was going, but he only smiled. When I saw I wasn’t going to reach him, I cried even harder, wailing and moaning so loud that I woke myself up. Morning was still a long time away. I looked at Leila, who was also awakened by my cries. “You okay?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said. “Go to sleep. It’s nothing.” I fell asleep again and, once more, there were the same agonizing nightmares. I woke several more times before the morning call to prayer.

I heard one of the old men sound the call to prayer. I roused Leila, Zeynab, and the others. Then I did my ablutions and prayed. I waited for it to get light before I went back to the mosque to hear the latest news and eat breakfast.

Leaning against the wall, I overheard the two body washers talking. They hadn’t gone back to bed. One of them was saying, “God Almighty, the number corpses of have I washed in my life! For a while it was like an assembly line, and I noticed that after two hours they had gotten so ripe you couldn’t stand near them; but the martyrs that had been around for a few days still smelled like roses.” The other man said, “You remember how it was in the beginning? If they brought in a few bodies, how we reacted. It was like it was going to kill us. But God knows how many they have brought in.”

To be continued …