Читать книгу Escape From Paradise - Majid MD Amini - Страница 6

If the angel of happiness knocks on anyone’s door only once in a lifetime, for Zee-Zee it took place early on a hot August afternoon. While Helen was taking her long beauty nap in her room on the first floor, young and fragile Zee-Zee was restlessly and innocently entertaining herself by trying on some of her old dresses and practicing dance moves in front of a mirror in a secluded room on the third floor. A large window was left open, inviting the cool breeze from the mountain to come in. She was unaware that a young boy in his late teens was in ecstasy, watching and enjoying every curve of her tender body from a window in a house across the street.

She tried on a dress, twirled around, looked at her body in the mirror and bowed to an imaginary audience, and then tried on another one. She would then appear completely nude delighted by watching the movements of her own proportionate body in the mirror, busy playing a sweet guiltless game of youth.

Each of her coquettish glances at the mirror seemed to be a desperate need for a simple response, for the mirror to tell her that she was indeed beautiful. She, whispering, would ask an imaginary tall handsome young man, chocolate-suntanned, dressed in a white silky suit and turquoise-blue shirt, in the mirror, “Do you think I’m pretty, you devil young handsome crazy man?” She would then laughingly reply as if she were the man in the mirror, “Of course, you are, aziz-e man!”

Completely naked, as she twirled around, thinking she was dancing only for the eyes of the imaginary handsome young man in the mirror, her eyes accidentally caught a glimpse of the young man across the street gazing at her. Frozen, she stood in the middle of the room for a few seconds, gazing back at the man. To avoid his sharp hungry eyes, she dove to the floor and remained there motionless for a few long minutes. She felt a rush of anger at first as she listened to the pounding of her heart throbbing in her chest. But it soon gave way to a sense of shame, then eventually to an ambiguous joy and excitement very foreign to her. She crawled to a corner, grabbed a piece of clothing, put it on and bravely went to the window, only to discover that the young man had vanished, evaporated into thin air. She had never seen him before; then again, they had moved to the neighborhood only recently. As she bent to pick up a dress from the floor and before she could complete her loud expressions of disgust, “A coward, thief ...”, she heard a crackling noise. A piece of paper wrapped around a small rock sailed through the window, hit the opposite wall and fell to the floor. She picked it up, opened the paper and read: “Forgive me for looking at you. You must believe me. I couldn't help it. I was just admiring your beauty. How can one stop looking at a beautiful flower? If anybody should be blamed for this intrusion into your privacy it must be you, because you’re so beautiful. How I wish to see you, to speak to you, to be able to touch you, so I can tell myself that you're not a dream, that you are real, as real as a rose in the garden. Your suffering admirer, Faramarz.”

She liked the words. It was the first time someone had expressed tender feelings with such poetic words to her, those beautiful innocent words, so different from the hollow ones she had memorized in her songs’ lyrics. With a sense of pleasure suspended in her mind she went to the window again, but he was gone and with him those piercing hungry eyes. She was no longer angry, only excited, and even elated, and that was all that mattered to her.

She hid her nervousness from her mother and busied herself the rest of that day. She kept quiet through the night and the rest of the following morning. She waited for him in the same room at the same time, and as soon as he appeared at the window, a thrill went through her body. They introduced themselves to each other only with indulgent smiles. Then, in the scorching heat of that summer afternoon, while everyone else slept, they expressed their feelings of interest for one another with unspoken words, and later with messages thrown through their windows. Over days, she returned his many tender love poems with many of her own.

A few weeks later, inevitably, when neither of them could stand being so far apart, they risked it. As Helen snored in a room on the first floor, Zee-Zee opened the front door and let him in; her heart pounded in her chest with excitement. Even before setting foot in Zee-Zee’s house, he knew he was very much in love with her.

Faramarz, a nineteen-year-old, was the son of a wealthy and influential government official. He was a university student, a tall handsome and shy romantic boy.

A combination of fear and anticipation pushed Zee-Zee’s heart rate higher. It was as if she had run non-stop for miles. She felt her heart was about to burst any second. She searched for his hand, held it tight, and tiptoed upstairs to the solitude of her room. The words he had lined up, the many beautiful verses, love poems, and poetic phrases that he had memorized from books to express his feelings, to mesmerize her, jammed up in his dry mouth. He felt a tremor in his heart once he was alone and a few inches from her.

Shyly, unable to even blink, she sat on the edge of the bed, and he sat next to her nervously. He struggled to contain his passion and act properly as he had repeatedly told himself he would do, but soon he lost control. When, with the slow but tenacious journey of his hands, he touched her soft hair, she trembled, turned and submitted her hot swollen lips to his, and those two moist rose-petal lips melted into his. He became the first man who sucked at her tasty neck, soft as satin and smooth as white marble. He undressed her trembling body with his shaking hands. Inhaling the scent between her breasts and kissing them, and then sliding his lips downward intoxicated him enough to lose all his inhibitions. Intoxicated herself, she submitted herself to him without any resistance. Then the non-calculated movements of his fingertips cruised over the curves of her velvet naked body, and he followed the tracks of his touches with gentle kisses. When his hands reached the mounds of her breasts, he licked the sweetness of her soft skin. And then, the sensation of her soft silky pubic hair under his fingers, the wetness, the aroma that he inhaled, drove him to the edge of insanity. They soon became one; under the influence of their desires, euphoric, basking in the tender glow of passion that raced through their tender bodies. The intense ecstasy of their union was license enough to allow them to ignore the possibility of future regret.

After that encounter, it was literarily impossible for him not to visit her almost every afternoon in the sanctuary of her room, which felt like an undisturbed Garden of Eden to both. They had fallen in love even before they became physically intimate, but after a few weeks of lovemaking, when the uncertainties vanished from their hearts they began to carve a future for themselves in their innocent minds as all young lovers do.

The ecstasy they compacted into those three brief months of daily unions was enough to last them a lifetime. But it had to come to an end, and that began to happen when Zee-Zee excitedly told her mother about Faramarz and the fact that she was pregnant. Expecting a volcanic eruption of anger when she broke the news to her mother, she was stunned by Helen’s receptive attitude and later by her joyful reaction. Helen welcomed the relationship provided he would send his parents to formally ask permission to marry her. Happily Zee-Zee mentioned her mother's wishes to Faramarz, who optimistically promised to tell his father immediately.

Intoxicated with plenty whisky and with a cigar in his hand, Faramarz’s father seemed to be in a good mood the following day when his son broke the news to him. The old man took the news and the request furiously. Not wasting any time, he immediately went to see Helen, but not to ask for the hand of her daughter, only to tell her that his son would not be allowed to marry Zee-Zee.

“My lovely baby loves your boy, sir,” Helen pleaded as she offered him the sofa on which to sit.

Refusing to sit, standing in the middle of the living room, Faramarz’s father replied angrily, “Love has nothing to do with it! What had happened between those two was just filthy sex! Your goddamn girl wiggled her cute ass at him so much that he lost control. Who wouldn’t? What do you expect from a hot-blooded healthy boy? He took her to bed and made her pregnant. It happens all the time, but it doesn’t mean they should run off and get married! Look, I’m going to give it to you straight. My boy and your daughter are not from the same class. They can’t get married, period!” The man expressed what was on his mind as clearly and as candidly as anyone could.

“What are we gonna to do about baby, sir? It’s your son’s baby after all.” Helen presented the second reason in her arsenal as to why the marriage should take place, keeping the real one to herself – yearning to upgrade her social class, to attain more public respectability.

“I don’t give a damn! I am not going to allow a whore to destroy my boy’s future. Get an abortion! Otherwise, I will cause so much trouble for you both that you’ll wish you had never left your deh [village]! I will destroy you! Do you understand?” The high-class man conveyed his hard feelings to her with those ice-cold words. His threat was working, for even tough-as-nails Helen was visibly frightened. He left not knowing Zee-Zee listened to all those harsh words from behind the door. With a heart full of love for Faramarz, she decided to run away with him the next day and had no doubt that he would welcome the suggestion to elope. But Faramarz’s finger never touched the doorbell of Zee-Zee’s door again, nor did poor naive Zee-Zee ever lay her sad and anxious eyes on that handsome innocent face. Only later, by bribing his servant, did she sadly discover that he had been sent to school in Europe. She ran upstairs to the same room where once their love had bloomed like flowers in spring, but was now washed away in the flood of her tears.

Helen convinced Zee-Zee to abort her baby on the grounds that otherwise it would ruin her career; and besides, Faramarz's father, under any circumstance would not allow the baby to be born. Zee-Zee was overwhelmed with despair, disillusioned. One dark cold night in November, in an abandoned house on the floor of an empty room lit with a flashlight, she submitted herself to an abortion. She lost her baby and part of herself. That was how she was welcomed into the reality of adulthood. She was no longer the little girl who loved to curl her little hands and twist her little body and sing sweet songs. Her innocence was utterly drained from her. The natural smile, the unspoiled face, and the eagerness to please everyone were all gone. She became bitter. Convinced that she was different from others when she was a kid, she now discovered an unbearable painful truth, that her acquired fortune and fame could not fill the gap. That icy reality intensified her bitterness. She was changed.

About a week later, in an early morning hour Zee-Zee was stunned to see Faramarz's father secretly entering her house. Later, looking through the keyhole, she found her nude mother on the edge of her bed on her knees being mounted by the man. The most nauseating part of the scene was all the noises she was making as if she was having the time of her life. The repulsive scene ignited something inside her – a flame of madness. An uncontrollable wrath, so foreign to her, erupted within her. She wanted to scream, but her cry only shattered in her throat. Her heart carried a sorrow as vast as the vastness of her broken dreams and changed her attitude toward men and her mother permanently. If, in the past, she would only known men as creatures to be entertained by her dances and songs, she now thought of them as exploitive, deceitful, hypocrites, toxic who only used women for their self-indulgent filthy pleasure.

She began to despise men, and the seed of contempt for her mother took root in her heart, with intensity very foreign to her. She never confronted her mother about her affair with Faramarz’s father. She just covered her anger and defiance with a mask of permanent gloom. Of course, Helen mistakenly took her sorrow as being caused by the loss of her unborn child and her first innocent love. To relieve her pain, to allow her to forget that unforgettable memory, Helen took her heartbroken Zee-Zee to Europe for a vacation. Like all the hungry Easterners, who unknowingly carry their inferiority along with their pocketful of money, they saw all the places that a tourist must see. They learned how the European dolls dress, use attractive makeup and behave stylish in public. They stayed in expensive hotels and dined in restaurants that served exquisite mouth-watering dishes.

They took pictures of everything they saw to make the folks back home envious, and perhaps to erase Zee-Zee’s memory of her doomed love and substitute it with the splendor and glamour of new memories. But all the entertainments and amusements Zee-Zee experienced in Europe couldn’t erase the memory of Faramarz from her mind, and in her lonely hours only those memories remained her companions. Only by whispering the newly learned quatrains of Omar Khayyam could she prevent herself from falling into a deep depression.

When they returned to Iran, they looked, different, almost unrecognizable. As for “classy” Helen, she even spoke differently by inserting a word or two of English, French, or German into her Persian sentences. And the club-goers, the fun-seekers, had felt the absence of mother and daughter and cheered them wildly again once they reappeared on stage.

A debilitating high fever and sore throat caused by a severe case of influenza in late autumn forced Helen to remain in bed one night, and Zee-Zee had to perform at a nightclub alone. She only sang a few love songs, with cheap, meaningless, shallow lyrics, neither Persian nor European – made-up tunes, accompanied by drums and an electric guitar. The sounds, to qualified ears, were nothing but noise pollution, but to others they were the sweet sounds of modernity, the gift of the industrial revolution, coming through the lips of an artist – a sexy young woman. She took only a few steps, twisted her body a little but was well-received by the drunks, who actually applauded her half-covered breasts, her round buttocks wrapped in a tight dress and her thighs exposed by slits cut to her hips. From that night on she no longer needed her mother on stage with her nor missed her presence.

She was twenty years of age and at the prime of her beauty and fame, a goddess worshiped by any male above the age of puberty, and the epitome of an entertainer.

On the advice of Helen, who had lost her position in the band, Zee-Zee hired a songwriter, a young man in his late twenties. He was the son of a rich man who had gone to America to study engineering, had failed, but had learned a few popular songs. The young man had brought back an electronic synthesizer – a sort of magic music box. He “composed” a few so-called modern songs with simplistic and monotonous rhythms and superficial lyrics for her, and the drunks in the nightclubs responded enthusiastically.

With the appearance of television in Iran, visual exposure became more important. Zee-Zee was a real star, if not the star of the entire Middle East. Her colorful photos appeared on the covers of most magazines, and people cut them out and plastered them on the walls of practically every little shop around the country.

Although Zee-Zee never again cared for a man, she agreed to marry a wealthy nightclub owner, mainly to free herself from her mother’s control and to advance her career.

The groom was so drunk and under the influence of so much taryak on their wedding night that the act of lovemaking was unbearably repulsive to her. The act only became slightly tolerable and gradually somewhat enjoyable when, under the weight of the man, she closed her eyes, reached into the well of her memories and retrieved Faramarz’s face. The groom didn’t have the slightest clue what was going on, nor did he care. At the top of his wish list was a famous beautiful wife, a luscious doll, for whom he could buy jewelry, expensive cars, mink coats and houses. He wished to own someone special, someone he could show off, to possess a beautiful woman that would reflect the power of his manhood and the extent of his prosperity. It didn’t matter to him a bit whether she was going to be his sexual partner, mutually enjoying the act of lovemaking. All he sought after was a gorgeous doll to alleviate his sexual desire with. Besides, she was good for business. For Zee-Zee, marriage had only one advantage, to rid herself of Helen and all her toxicities, a mother who had betrayed her. She achieved that by right away moving to her husband’s new mansion, to experience the comfort and security of married life.

If there is any truth to the fact that money has a corrupt influence on people, Helen, with all that money in her purse, proved it by being more vulnerable to corruption than ever. She stayed home, to only entertain her admirers whose numbers were fast dwindling. In her lonely hours she would smoke taryak, and when she couldn’t stand the time it would take to prepare the taryak paraphernalia, and the longer time for its grey smoke to give her the high, she shot up heroin. Nothing, of course, could substitute for her the joy and pleasure of having her “baby” next to her. To cope with her depression, she consumed more drugs, only to go into a deeper depression; and a few months later, on a lonely hot summer depressing night, she died of an overdose.

The entire nation mourned her death. Her funeral was a social phenomenon. A record-breaking crowd of more than two hundred thousand people, mostly men, attended her funeral in Tehran. A nation lost an “artist” – a “writer, composer and singer” of the most popular song, “Is This Ass Crooked?” Shaking her fat bottom on stage she’d then respond: “Who says it's crooked?” to hear the uproar from the audience.

In a society where its citizens were not allowed to express their political and social views openly, some articulated, people used Helen's funeral as an excuse to “bravely” demonstrate their defiance in the streets for the Shah’s regime.

Meanwhile, gorgeous Zee-Zee accumulated and collected in the collection book of men many admirers, a young generation saw her as a symbol of success, fortune and fame, a personification of good living, a leading citizen of the “Great Civilization” promised by the Shah. For the older people, especially the affluent, she was the embodiment of sexuality – a perfect example, an emblem of what the acquisition of wealth was all about.

Zee-Zee's price for performing at rich people’s weddings substantially increased as she became more the main attraction on government-controlled television. There was a long waiting list for her performances in events. Meanwhile, her marriage soured before any meaningful relationship could be developed between her and her husband, and soon their hours together were tainted with more misery. Her wealthy husband found another young girl who was willing to give of herself more and demand less in order to become a famous nightclub entertainer. And with the absence of Helen in her life, Zee-Zee, who had tasted a bit of personal freedom, could no longer tolerate the control of a man who had failed to touch her heart and who had meant nothing to her. She welcomed the news of their sudden divorce. In fact, she thought of it as a golden key to open another door to more careless living. She received a large sum of money and property as a settlement. The news of their divorce captured the headlines of the evening papers and satisfied the curiosity and the interest of a nation that was allowed no other news except the constant praising of a self-appointed egomaniac ruler, the Shah.

With a flock of drug-addicted friends around and without Helen to manage her finances, Zee-Zee spent money unwisely, and every two-bit charlatan that came across her path cheated her big time in one business scheme or another. Soon, her bank accounts began to dry up. She started to sell her belongings; her mink coats, cars and houses had to go. She submitted to another marriage, this time to a rich old land developer whose kinds were popping up rapidly, who had thrown a hundred thousand Tomans on the stage one night during one of her performances a year earlier. He lit her cigarettes with thousand-Toman bills, sent her bouquets of flowers and openly admitted to being in love with her, so much so that he could no longer conduct his business properly.

Her second husband, a new breed of bourgeoisie that could be found on every street corner, had started as a bricklayer a decade earlier. But with the magic of petrodollars pouring into the country, he had become a big land developer by building matchbox houses one on top of the other, without observing any building code, and selling to a frenzy of buyers, great consumers who were beginning to subscribe the proposition that the only road to happiness was to live like those “lucky” Westerners, in high-rises, and to consume Western products as much as possible.

The new push toward the gate of the “Great Civilization” promised by the Shah gathered more momentum. Now, the entire nation was passionately in love with their latest model cars and their TV sets. The younger generation of the affluent was trying to live in the fast lane by showing a great appetite for the glory of rock ’n’ roll. Iran had to import it, like everything else, so her youth could dance to its beat, the beat that represented the rhythm and lifestyle of an industrial nation, not of an old agricultural society with a culture almost as old as the history of man. TV shows were popular only if they exhibited sex, twisting bodies, shaking buttocks and breasts of women, wearing shiny revealing dresses. The music and lyrics were no longer important. The more impudent the song, the more demand there was for it, and Zee-Zee provided it on TV for the entire nation.

In the absence of any feeling, Zee-Zee’s second marriage was based solely on economic necessity. Her new husband took care of her debts, bought her things to replace those goods she was forced to sell, took her around the world and even provided her with drugs. Regardless of all these possessions and consumption, she remained unhappy. Soon her husband got tired of dishing out all that cash and getting nothing in return. It resulted in another messy, publicized divorce with a much larger settlement than the previous one, and more headlines, to satisfy the erroneous curiosity of a nation destined to plunge into the chaos.

Zee-Zee's price for each performance rose even higher, to thirty thousand Tomans for a few songs. There wasn't a night turning to dawn that she didn't appear on TV, an unhappy young woman with a forced smile on her lips exhibiting the only thing she thought she had to offer: her well-shaped body covered with not much fabric and a mask of sexuality on her otherwise sad face. She was the outstanding artist of the “Great Civilization.” She was the symbol of a true artist, a model of womanhood, an example of progress – a typical European doll.

The nature of the profession in which she was so deeply immersed had offered her no wisdom to distinguish the difference between love and lust, true friendship and self-indulgent sexual desire. Taking care of her urgent need for emotional security and saving herself from brutal attacks of loneliness, she thought she was in love with a musician and his music – a drug addict. She married him. And when his presence didn’t fill the void, she spent hours in solitude, smoking taryak in his absence. She continued doing so with him. She desperately needed the blanket of taryak’s sedation to cover her misery. Soon, to no surprise of either of them, their relationship soured and broke down, resulting in yet another divorce and more headlines.

Six months before the revolution, her business slowed down as nightclubs lost their customers. Many were ordered to shut their doors by the government to appease the demands of the religious leaders. With no income, Zee-Zee resorted to Helen’s way of making ends meet, by allowing men to purchase the right to the warmth of her cozy bed with their cold cash. She knew well that when they left they wouldn’t leave even one drop of love, or an ounce of caring, as the going price for the joy they received, not even as a little souvenir under her pillow.