Читать книгу My Prison, My Home - Haleh Esfandiari - Страница 12

By the time I was born, my grandparents were living near the University of Tehran. They had moved to Tehran from Kerman when my grandfather was elected to parliament.

My grandmother’s home was another world, utterly different from our European household, where we spoke German, followed strict rules, sat around the table to have our meals, and ate Austrian food—schnitzel, boiled meat, soup, roast potatoes, and creamed spinach. Grandmother—Khanum Jan as we called her—ran a traditional Persian household. While my grandfather, who passed away just four years later, when I was five, was no longer the wealthy man he had been (his extensive land holdings had been seized under the previous reign), there was a great deal of coming and going, with visitors from their hometown constantly bringing the best dates and Kerman’s distinctive sweets and pastries. At any given time, the cook would prepare meals for ten or more people. My favorite place was the kitchen, which was dark and smoky from the woodstove, and where the cook would often slip me a spoonful of white rice from the cooking pot. I loved the rice, the aash, a thick soup made of greens; the white cheese and walnuts, yogurt, and the fresh sangak flat bread from the corner bakery that came with every meal.

At home, Mother had been so worried we would get typhoid she insisted on cooking all the fruits and vegetables. At my grandparents’, I was free from all the don’ts I heard at home. We ate sitting crossedlegged around a rectangular tablecloth spread on the floor. Mother sat on a chair at a small table set up just for her.

The house had a large garden with a pond where the household, including my grandmother, made their ablutions before each of the five daily prayers. The garden was divided into four large triangular flower beds. In each, a persimmon tree or a pomegranate tree stood among the flowers, rosebushes, and forsythias. The walls of the garden were thick with grapevines. In the fall, Grandmother would have a servant climb up a ladder and put a small sack around each cluster of grapes so that they would keep, even as the cold weather set in. Before the first frost she would have the sacks removed and the grapes picked. That way, she always had grapes to serve out of season.

The servants’ rooms and the outhouse were at the far end of the garden. There were two toilets in the house, but Grandmother was too old fashioned to let anyone use them. Peddlers came to my grandmother’s door every morning with donkey loads of melons, string beans, cucumbers, and fruit. Then there was the itinerant purveyor of shahr-e farang, or “the wonders of Europe,” which consisted of a copper viewing box on four legs topped with minarets and bells. For a few rials, we could look into the darkened box and view moving images of exotic places and people. The shahr-e farang man offered a running commentary as the pictures galloped across the tiny screen. “Oh, see the queen of England majestically sitting on her throne, her crown on her head,” he would say in a singsong voice and in rhyming couplets. “Now see the fierce tiger of Africa and the lion, king of the jungle.”

In the winter, Grandmother would set up a traditional Persian korsi in her sitting room, which consisted of a low wooden table, measuring about four feet by four feet, placed over a charcoal brazier and covered with a large square quilt. Narrow mattresses were arranged around the quilt, and cushions were placed along the walls to lean against. On winter evenings, the family practically lived around the korsi, snuggling under the quilt to keep warm, eat, read, chat, play word games, recite poetry, and occasionally sleep. Grandmother always retired to her bed, but sometimes allowed the grandchildren to sleep under the korsi as a special treat. The servants had their own korsi, but it was off limits to the children.

Every Monday a mullah would come to the house and conduct a rowzeh-khani, a recital of religious martyrs’ tales. This was the only time we children were not allowed into the sitting room, when adult family members joined the mullah and the servants sat cross-legged by the entrance as he somberly recited the heart-rending tale of the martyrdom of brave Hossein, the Prophet’s grandson and the third Shi’ite imam, on the plains of Karbala in the seventh century.

My time with Khanum Jan helped shape my Iranian-Islamic identity. She read the Quran and explained religion to me as best she could. However, like many in my own and even in my father’s generation, I remained a secular Muslim. Father came of age during the reign of Reza Shah. The king regarded religion and the clergy as obstacles to his furious modernizing. He saw to it that the school curriculum glorified Iran’s pre-Islamic past, not its Islamic heritage. For my father and other Iranians like him, education abroad took care of the rest.

Khanum Jan, whom I loved dearly and who was the most important woman in my early life next to Mutti, was extremely tolerant, despite her religious upbringing. Generally speaking, she was broad-minded and receptive to modern changes—with one striking exception. When the veil was banned by government order in 1936, she stayed home for five years rather than go out into the street unveiled, a reaction not uncommon among women of her generation. The ban was another of Reza Shah’s Westernizing measures. He wanted to bring women into the public space, schools, and the workplace. But the abolition of the veil was a highly radical measure, shocking to traditional society and bitterly opposed by the clergy. One of the first steps taken by the Islamic Republic after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1979 was to reimpose hijab, or Islamic dress, on women. But by then, the situation was reversed. Middle-class women now fought the imposition of the veil rather than its removal.

Despite my grandmother’s own protest, her progressive mind-set was evident in the fact that she let her daughters, my aunts, go to school and did not object that they went unveiled. And when I married Shaul in 1965, when marriages between Muslims and Jews were highly unusual, she gave me her blessing, along with a beautiful pair of pearl earrings.

I don’t recall ever seeing Khanum Jan in a black chador. Her personality was mirrored in the light colors she loved, and she often donned white, flowery chadors, allowing a bit of her hair to show beneath her headscarf. She was kind and welcoming to both her foreign-born daughter-in-law and son-in-law, and with her death in 1973, a piece of the cherished Iran of my childhood vanished along with her.