Da (Mother) 130

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

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

2024-12-29

Da (Mother) 130

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

***

I was hospitalized for about eight days, being injected twice a day with penicillin. Mohsen had no idea what had happened to me. I had told Habib I was coming to Abadan with Mohsen, but I wasn’t able to contact him for several days. Habib was responsible for a district in the city called Moharrezi.[1] When Mr. Jabbar Beygi came to visit me, I asked him to tell Habib I was in the hospital (at the time he didn’t know we were married).

Habib came at night and was shocked to see me in bed. I explained what had happened, and he got word to poor Mohsen, who had been desperately trying to find me.

After I was discharged from the hospital, Habib moved Mohsen and me to a place assigned to him by the army. It was a two-story house on Line 1 in Ahmadabad. Two other soldiers lived there with their spouses. Habib had scrubbed the place clean before our arrival and stocked it with the things he had received as a marriage bonus: several blankets, a kerosene light/stove, four plates and spoons, two pots, and one pressure lamp.

According to Habib, the place had been vacant for a year and a half and only recently had the army allowed him, Seyyed Mozaffar Musavi, and Rahim Eqbal Pur to move in. The house had a small front yard. The door opened to a narrow passage that led to a foyer. On the right of the foyer were two adjoining “sitting” rooms. On the left were a bedroom and a relatively small kitchen and a bath. Then came the stairway to the second floor. The first floor was carpeted. Each couple had their own bedroom.

Although I was settled in Ahmadabad, it didn’t feel like home because the family wasn’t with me. Habib could only get away once a week, arriving around noon and leaving the next morning, but Mr. Musavi and Mr. Eqbal Pur were there more frequently. Even when there was a call-up, at least one of the men was present. Being back in Abadan brought memories of what had happened to me during the defense of Khorramshahr. It seemed as if I was reliving all the pain and suffering of those days. That was when I missed mother most; I needed her emotional and spiritual support. Having Habib around was a joy, of course; it took my mind off the negative thoughts for a while. When he left, I tried to pretend I wasn’t affected by all of that—but I was. My own crises of nerves, on the one hand, and my worries Habib would be killed, on the other, were tearing me up inside. I tried to take comfort in the thought that everybody in the sector was in the same boat. I had to be ready for the worst. Each time Habib and I said goodbye I imagined it was for the last time. “Just get word to me you’re safe,” was all I’d say.

He closed the door and I would remain behind it, listening to him get in the car and start the ignition. Then I would open the door again and wait in the doorway, watching as he disappeared down the road. He drove toward the police station, turned left at the traffic circle, and headed for the Persian Hotel. Feeling I would never see him again, I tried to keep the car in sight as long as possible, so I wouldn’t be sorry later on that I hadn’t. Afterward I learned he was also watching me in his rear view mirror, but he’d never admit it.

Making friends with our housemates was one way of taking my mind off the morbid thoughts. We’d go shopping and cook together. The yard had a small garden, and we bought some bulbs from a druggist in the bazaar and planted them in it. I was very fond of plants and would sit by the garden remembering the times when father planted lantana, and we kidded him about how the name of the bush was also mother’s last name.

One of the women, Mrs. Eqbal Pur, had a small radio, and we’d pass the time listening to the news and other programs on it. Some days after we arrived, Mr. Musavi brought home a television. At one point a guest, Sakineh Hurosi, a friend of Mrs. Musavi, came for a visit with her six-month-old baby Mehdi. The baby was a welcome diversion from the war for everyone—especially since none of us had children of our own.

One of our biggest headaches was an infestation of rats. In the lane beside the house was a wastewater channel where they bred. They had no trouble finding their way from the channel to the nearby alleys and homes. They even nested in the sandbags piled up by the windows to shield them from mortar blasts. The worst thing was that they got into the house from the sewage pipes by gnawing holes in the grating over them. Whenever I stepped outside our room, I would see rats scatter in all directions.

I was terrified of them; they were so big even the cats didn’t dare go near them. One time a cat came into the yard, and so many rats attacked it, it let out a howl and went flying over the compound wall. The rats ate all the food that had been stored in the house. They even gnawed on onions and potatoes. You could see their half-eaten leavings in the stairway. Whenever I opened the door to our room, a dozen rats would jump up and scamper away. I would scream and slam the door. Even when I was in the room with the door closed, I could hear them munching on the gunnysacks. The idea of them eating their way through the doorframe and coming into the room terrified me. We tried and tried to get rid of them but nothing worked. There was no poison to be had on the bazaar.

Habib and Mr. Eqbal Pur tried to kill the rats. They blocked up the places were water entered, but the rats would gnaw through everything. Fortunately my neighbors, especially Mrs. Eqbal Pur, weren’t as terrified of them as I.

One day I was horrified to see Habib come home covered in blood. “I’m not hurt,” he assured me. “One of the boys took some shrapnel, and I brought him to the hospital.”

Habib also felt the blast. The wounded boy, Ayad Baramzadeh, lost his sight as a result of his injuries. Habib would often come home in this state. Whenever one of his comrades was hit, he would ferry him to the hospital, ending up soaked in blood in the process. Although I was thankful to have the neighbors around, living under these conditions was not pleasant.

The Hypocrites and the Fifth Columnists were a constant threat to families in the sector. To guard against these people our husbands devised secret ways of letting us know it was they who were outside the door. Mr. Eqbal Pur rang the doorbell three times, Mr. Musavi knocked twice, and Habib honked his horn and knocked once. From time to time we would change the codes.

For added protection, Habib kept a G3 at home and took us for target practice at the army garage. He would tell us, “Suppose you’re face-to-face with the enemy. Now fire.”

One by one we sat taking aim with the gun while our husbands held our shoulders to keep us from being jolted by the recoil. With Habib propping up my shoulders, I took aim at the wall and blasted away. Apparently the wall had been coated with tar, because it suddenly burst into flames. Men came running to put the fire out. Habib said, “Thought you were killing Iraqis, didn’t you? But that wall was government property!”

Because the G3 proved too heavy, they added a Kalashnikov to our home arsenal. Whenever anyone came to the door, one of us would stand in the foyer with the weapon, while the others asked who was there. Then we would slowly open the door.

One day when none of the men were at home, someone knocked on the door. “Who’s there?” we asked.

“Open the door,” a voice said. “Something’s wrong with the electricity.”

“There’s nothing wrong with our electricity.”

“There is; the whole neighborhood is out.”

Pretending our husbands were home, we said, “Wait for us to go and wake the men.”

The voice said, “No need to bother them. Turn on the light in the passage, and we’ll fix the wire from the outside.”

“We can wake them up, if necessary,” we repeated, and that was the end of it. We had heard many such stories about the Hypocrites and the problems they caused inside the country, while, at the same time, we were under constant attack from abroad. Being bombarded by enemy planes had become a regular feature of our lives. Explosions were so routine that when they stopped for half an hour, we felt there was something missing.

In the past the Iraqis would use intelligence supplied by the Hypocrites’ spotters to identify inhabited parts of the city and bomb them. In time things got back to normal, and people were less wary of returning to their homes. During our first days in Abadan, there was no activity in the bazaar to speak of, but soon Arab women would come to sell dairy products made with milk from their flocks. A soup person and a kabob place soon joined the bakery that had been operating. Once I was at the bazaar with Mrs. Eqbal, and we saw a shopkeeper selling sweets and okra. We asked him for a kilo of the sweets. He didn’t have a box so he grabbed a plastic bag and used his hands to fill it. Mrs. Eqbal asked, “You’re using your hands?”

“What should I use, my feet?’ the shopkeeper asked.

“But your hands aren’t clean.”

“Where am I supposed to get plastic gloves? If you want them take them, if not, don’t,” he said.

Water presented another challenge. At times there was too little, at other times none at all. The public bath didn’t have enough hot water to shower. We had to heat some at home and bring it to the bath. I was terrified to go there because of the rats, which would jump down from the walls, landing on our heads and shoulders. To avoid that I was forced, despite my aching kidneys, to stand in the yard fully clothed and wash with cold water. On windy days I was chilled to the bone. After showering so many times in cold water, my skin became very sensitive to chills. My entire body ached, and my arms became chapped and started to bleed.

On April 1, 1982, the army of Khorramshahr invited all the martyr families to Abadan to celebrate Islamic Republic Day. The ceremony and reception, which were attended by many of the families, were held at a building the city called Martyr House. The ceremony also brought mother to Abadan. Not having seen her for months, I rushed to greet her. As we hugged, she whispered endearments in my ear. I laid my head on her shoulder and cried my eyes out. I was so overcome with emotion I couldn’t speak.

To be continued …