Disoriental Read online

  Sara was funny. She knew how to speak tchalémeïdouni, the slang of Tehran, and to make us scream with laughter.

  Sara was: a mother, a teacher of history and geography, a political activist, president of the homeowners’ association, president of the PTA, and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Djombesh (Movement), which she’d founded with her husband. Up at five-thirty every day, after having gone to bed between twelve-thirty and one o’clock in the morning.

  Sara was: overflowing with love and anxiety for the entire human race. As soon as the sun rose every morning, even before she’d put her feet on the floor, she was thinking of what to cook, buy, and prepare to please her family and friends. When she woke us up (with Mozart) at six forty-five exactly, breakfast was already ready (and sometimes lunch too), the bathrooms cleaned, the plants watered, and the troop of stray cats gathered at the kitchen window, fed. We called her “The General,” or “Corporal Sadr.” Or sometimes “Associated Press,” because of her astonishing memory.

  She remembered everything. Everything she had ever seen and done, everything anyone ever told her. Her memory was dense and compact, a challenge to time and science, and to people who thought their gossip would be forgotten. She knew every telephone number, every address, every date by heart. Historical dates, with a specialization in events relating to her two heroes, Napoleon Bonaparte and Mohammad Mossadegh.3 Birthdays, including those of her countless nephews and nieces, her colleagues, her friends, our neighbors, their children, and even my dad’s brothers, who were hardly aware of the fact that they’d been born in the first place.

  And then, suddenly, none of it. Nothing, anymore. Nothingness.

  Her brain became like something drowning in the ocean. A cork floating in the immensity of oblivion. It happened a few months after THE EVENT.

  For a long time, I was convinced that she needed me, my presence, to heal. That was why I came back to Paris, little by little giving my life a comforting direction, in the absurd hope of making her well. But she didn’t need me, any more than she needed the television that stayed on all day in a corner of her room.

  Sara was my mother. The other one has become Mom.

  I had just hung up, realizing all of a sudden that I was standing out in the street, when I had a vision of Uncle Number Two. He was there in front of me, right in the middle of noisy Belleville. I could see him as clearly as I saw the Chinese prostitutes clustered on the sidewalks.

  I’ll try to paint that image of my uncle for you, to show him to you, with his faded colors and his surface battered by the vagaries of life, like the Super-8 movies he used to film with his old Beaulieu camera on the beach. Look at his thin, rigid figure coming down the main staircase in his house, lit by the sparkling glow of the big crystal chandelier. Clean-shaven, his salt-and-pepper hair swept back, his torso swathed in a custom-tailored tweed jacket buttoned ostentatiously over the stomach. His pocket handkerchief is orange; his trousers brown corduroy. His black leather shoes shine against the carpet, which is blue silk with the geometric floral medallion typical of Isfahan rugs. With his swaggering walk, Saddeq could be a character in an American comedy from the 1970s, a Peter Sellers movie, where he’d play the role of a rich, gullible big shot. Now he’s walking toward Sara, who is sitting at the table in the lounge. It’s morning, and Sara is drinking her tea out of a large glass with a handle.

  “Don’t you look chic!” she exclaims, with a genuine smile, while behind her Leïli and Mina giggle into their quince jelly-stained napkins (as for me, since the moment I heard Uncle Number Two leave his room, I have been waiting by the door that leads to the garden for his permission to go outside and play). Saddeq tilts his head to the right and laughs like a shy teenager who has just been paid a compliment by the prettiest girl in the neighborhood. Chic (pronounced Iranian-style as sheeeek) is his favorite word. The one he hopes to hear every morning; the one he always deserves, no matter the situation.

  That image of Uncle Number Two is from the winter of 1978, a few months before the end of the Revolution, part of which we spent in his house, the house where my parents were married. I don’t remember it snowing that winter, though in Tehran the snow usually piles up for months, as high as some low walls. Didn’t I hear Sara say it was a Parisian-style winter? Was she talking about that winter, or another one? I’d memorized the expression even though I didn’t know what winter in Paris was like. But it seemed wonderful, like everything French, from its politics to the smell of the shampoo. In the years before the Revolution, Sara used to take us to a French supermarket that had opened on one of the posh streets in the northern part of the city. The place was intimidatingly spotless, and filled with every kind of merchandise that we found terribly exotic. Little bits of France, taken from a whole as inaccessible as a dream, which had, through the miracle of oil, found their way to us. Vache qui rit, Nutella, Danon yogurts, Caprice des Dieux Camembert, Zest soap, Gitane cigarettes. These products in their shiny packages were displayed on iron shelves, easy to see and reach, rather than piled in a precarious mountain, like at our grocer, Agha Mohabati’s. The prices, given in both tomans and francs, were so exorbitant that we could barely buy half of the things we wanted. We left the shop with a small bundle of purchases and the feeling of leaving behind us a fascinating world that might, like in the cartoons, disappear forever.

  One day, when I was home from Brussels, Sara told me that Uncle Number Two and his wife had moved into an apartment near the city center. A few years earlier, during the Iran-Iraq war, the foundation of their ancient house had been seriously weakened by the bombings, and the interminable process of restoring it was more than they could handle. Situated in a narrow street in the center of Tehran, the apartment was enormous. Staircases led to numerous rooms whose walls were loaded with mirrors. Tapestries and objects inherited from the ancestors joined massive pieces of furniture, all wood and gilding, bought from antique dealers at the marché aux puces (Mahrtshay oh Pous) in Pahrees. The result of all this was a collision of eras and styles as disparate as they were inappropriate, with the overall impression being one of horrifyingly bad taste.

  I took the news with calculated detachment, determined not to let Sara stir up any feelings of nostalgia in me that were as painful as they were pointless. I knew Uncle Number Two was sick, stuck at home and unable to get out of bed. I knew it the way you know a piece of information whose real scope is difficult to grasp. An earthquake, an explosion, a distant reality that affects and touches you but remains outside of the present. I was incapable of imagining what he must look like, sunk in old age and illness. In which bed was he lying? In which room, which apartment, which neighborhood? And even if I’d known the name of their new neighborhood, I wouldn’t have known where it was. Since the Islamic regime had taken over the country, all the names of the streets and quarters had been changed, Ayatollah-ized, confusing and blurring landmarks and memories. I could have called him, but to say what?

  “You won’t even talk,” Sara told me. “You won’t need to. Just say hi, and your uncle and aunt will talk for you.”

  But even that was beyond my capabilities. Hearing their voices, imagining them in a place that had once been my home too, where I had been happier, surely, than I’d ever be again. How was it possible that that place still existed and that I was no longer part of it? How could something so ridiculous possibly be true? Of course, I knew the answers to all those questions, and a whole lot of other ones too, but nothing could explain the crushing sense of cruelty and injustice that overwhelmed me, and still overwhelms me when I think about it. The truth was that Uncle Number Two had disappeared a long time ago, and the announcement of his death only confirmed what I already knew: that I would never see him again. Like I would never see Iran again. I’d known that the second my feet, wearing my mother’s boots, stepped past the virtual line of the border between Iran and Turkey at around four-thirty in the morning on March 25, 1981.

  For various reasons, out of all my uncles, he was the one I was closest to. We’d stayed with him for the first time in August 1978. The protest movement against the Shah’s regime had radicalized over the summer. While in the larger cities the demonstrations grew larger and occasionally erupted into bloody events, the repression intensified as well, leading to the establishment of martial law. Not a day went by without political activists being arrested or killed. At Saddeq’s request, our neighbors, the Nasrs, had taken me to his house the day after Sara was taken to the hospital. She had been involved in a violent altercation with a high-ranking army officer, General Mansour Rahmani, who had been so enraged that he’d tried to kill my father. Wanted by the secret police, Darius was hiding somewhere in the depths of Tehran. He had left our apartment two days prior, at around noon, on a stifling summer day, urged and escorted by friends with worried faces. Following a fire at the Rex cinema in Abadan,4 the tension had risen to a fever pitch. For the first time, Darius did not resist and agreed to leave—but as he walked out the door, the expression on his face was like that of a goalkeeper after letting a penalty kick slip through—defeat.

  From that day forward, he embarked on a series of comings and goings of varying durations, capped off by a long period underground from which he only emerged in February 1979, two weeks after Khomeini returned to Iran.

  Leïli and Mina were already at Uncle Number Two’s house when I got there. He was alone. Or rather, alone with Bibi, the loyal servant that had followed Nour here from the paternal andarouni. Saddeq’s wife, the wealthy heiress to another great Mazandaran family and an unrepentant and likeable snob, had withdrawn to her Mazandarani lands, far from the tumult of the Revolution. Their two offspring were grown with lives of their own; the daughter was married with three child
ren and lived a few streets away from the family home, and the son was busily wasting his parents’ money in the United States.

  Uncle Number Two was determined to keep us with him, well-sheltered in his double-locked house where everything that might have reminded us of the outside world—television, radio, the keys to the door leading out to the garden—disappeared a few hours after our arrival. During the day he taught us to cook, sew, and knit, to make dolls out of chiffon and table-linens from cushions. He kept us in a state of artificial normality that was outside of time, like orphans in an Andersen fairy tale who, despite everything, had to be prepared for life as respectable wives. In the evenings he told us his stories, in which Mother always ended up martyred, and he in tears.

  The keeper of the family legend, Uncle Number Two had, through the years, thanks to a careful proportioning of reality and fiction, consolidated most of his stories into a personal narrative that seemed to suit his brothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins of varying degrees of separation. On summer evenings, on the terrace of his Mazandaran villa, sitting in a chair turned to face the Caspian Sea, he would serve up these tales with the mastery of a gourmand, puffing from time to time on his narghile and adding just the right touch of comic effect. Sometimes he burst into laughter himself, his head cocked to one side, watching his audience out of the corner of his eye. And we laughed too; the adults, who understood the sexual allusions, laughed even harder than the children.

  But now, since he had gathered us under his roof, drama had metastasized in his stories. Not only did we not laugh anymore, now we inevitably ended up clutching one another to the accompaniment of Uncle Number Two’s weeping. According to Leïli, who was a font of explanation and analysis, our uncle’s sadness wasn’t due to his excessive love for Mother, but rather to his love for our dad. Anxiety and fear, she said, had taken over his stories, erasing the comic episodes and replacing them with other, terrifying ones. Beatings, abuse, torture, murder. All horrors that our activist parents were in danger of being subjected to at any moment.

  One night, my nose glued to the window, I hatched a secret plan to escape. Leïli took me by the arm and turned me to face her with a jerk.

  “You’re so selfish you can’t even see that he’s taking care of us. He acts like everything’s fine, but at night he falls apart. That’s called depression!”

  Leïli’s vocabulary, spectacularly enriched by all the reading she did, included words whose meanings were totally lost on me. Those words were all in French, the teaching language of choice from nursery school onward at the very posh Lycée Razi, the French school located in a residential area in north Tehran. Despite its exorbitant fees, Sara had been determined to have us educated there. The reasons that had driven her to such a choice, which was totally at odds with our life in a middle-class neighborhood, her political beliefs, and her work as a teacher in a public school, were complicated. Of course, she wanted to give us every possible chance at success, which without question meant conducting our university studies abroad. Of course it was her plan that, after those studies, we would return to Iran in order to contribute to the country’s development. But her outward pragmatism concealed an immoderate passion for France, where she had spent a year herself thanks to a university scholarship obtained as part of her thesis on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Just one year, like a mirage in the middle of the desert. Where some mothers, dreaming of being beauty queens themselves, entered their daughters in Little Miss pageants, Sara had enrolled us at the Lycée Razi.

  Unlike my sisters, I didn’t like French, a language I found both convoluted and overblown, and which I refused to have anything at all to do with outside of school. I wouldn’t touch the Bibliothèque Rose et Verte books inherited from my sisters and which Sara had carefully organized on the shelf above my bed. I read Astérix and Tintin, but not in French; I read them in Persian, forcing myself to laugh extra-loudly to annoy my sisters, who thought the translations were ridiculous.

  Truth be told, it wasn’t French that I was rejecting, but rather the unspoken obligation shared by Iranian students at the Lycée Razi, issued by the upper crust, some of whom were outrageously rich, to consider it as superior to Persian. That led to the certainty that, because they spoke this language, they were themselves superior to other Iranians, to the teeming uncultivated masses lost in the depths of the Middle East, eating rice with a spoon as if it were soup. In class, it was all about competing to see who could express themselves best in French, spend the longest holidays in France, dress in Cacharel or wear Moon Boots in winter. Some of the students even spoke French with their brothers and sisters, calling their fathers “Papa” instead of the vulgar and backward “Baba.” The students who were actually French were treated like gods who had been magnanimous enough to come down to our level, so that a little of their refinement might rub off on us. Being accepted by them was the main recreational activity. I mocked their self-importance, even though secretly I dreamed of having a pair of Moon Boots, too.

  Two weeks later, Sara left the hospital, pale and much thinner. After a week of convalescence at Uncle Number Two’s house (where the TV, radio, and garden keys made a miraculous reappearance), she called a taxi and we went home. My happiness made me forget that claustrophobic sojourn during which I had, nevertheless, learned to sew and to make quince jelly and herbed flatbread.

  Despite the daily threats from SAVAK, which continued its Antigonesque pursuit of the political activist’s wife, Sara insisted that we return to our ground-floor apartment. She knew that soon something else would happen, something necessarily terrible, to drive us away from there—but in the meantime we had to put on a brave front. We, the family of Darius Sadr, who a foreign journalist had recently dubbed “The Sakharov of Iran.”

  “There’s no reason to be afraid of these jackals, my darlings. They’re the ones who should be afraid of us!” she declared a few hours later, as she propped the old mattresses from our cribs up to cover the bedroom windows.

  Bear in mind that those mattresses, which we had wet copiously over the years, were intended to absorb any bullets that might be fired by said jackals at our windows in the middle of the night!

  All four of us were on the balcony, and my sisters were helping Sara. I watched them, disbelieving. How was this old, flimsy bedding supposed to protect us? How could Sara believe that this would discourage the Savaki and send them wandering off to spend the rest of the night somewhere else? If I were a Savaki—I pictured them bulging with muscles and carrying weapons, like the killers in the American films Darius loved—I would climb up onto the balcony, shove the dirty mattresses to one side, and let loose with both barrels. I was about to open my mouth to share these reflections when Mina, who was visibly entertaining the same doubts I was, elbowed me in the stomach. The dark glance she threw at me—can’t you see this is making her feel better, idiot?—shut me up immediately.

  I continued to watch my mother as she completed her ludicrous work, filled with fear. Before she revealed the probability that we might end our lives riddled with bullets, the thought had never crossed my mind. That our apartment would be put under surveillance, yes. That our parents would be arrested and taken to secret government jails, yes. That Darius would go off to one of his political meetings and never come back, yes. But not that we would die. Now, every time I looked at the blocked windows of the bedroom I shared with Mina, anxiety roared in me like a wild animal. I couldn’t sleep. I kept my eyes open all night, flinching at the slightest noise and praying to God not for our lives to be spared—the chaos happening on earth seemed beyond even His reach to me—but for the bullets to hit all of us at the same time. Please, God, let my mother, my sisters, and me die together!

  Before I tell you about Sara’s altercation with General Rahmani, I have to introduce you to Barthelemy Schumann.