“Ready yet?” Mama called out to me, a hand on her hip. She was dressed in an elegant velvet overcoat, a simple design that gracefully showed off her curves. She must have picked it up from Tanakora, the reeking bazaar where secondhand Western clothes were sold for cheap. My mother was indeed beautiful.
Chia turned to me now. “Leila? No bleakfast?”
“You’re not so adorable anymore. Speak properly.”
I had spent the previous evening arranging my hair into an elaborate braid, tied with a spotted, forest-green ribbon, and hated that I had to cover it.
Baba and his radio came downstairs. His eyes were puffy and tired. “—and four Kurdish villages were demolished by Iran as the government continues to level five more,” the radio announced.
“Alan, your children want breakfast,” said Mama. “Leila, hurry up.”
I frantically searched for my headscarf, worried that we’d miss the infrequent bus downtown. Our neighborhood had a boys’ elementary school for Chia, but the girl’s school was nearly a two-hour commute away. Chia finally presented the headscarf, all wrinkled. “Did you hide this under your pillow again, meshkaka, you little mouse?”
“Don’t go to school if you hate it!” he said.
“Listen, Chia.” He probably couldn’t understand how a girl had to be either pretty or brainy in this world. “The only way I can buy a camera is to get a job, and to do that I need to earn a degree. You should stop hiding my school stuff, and I’ll show you my new drawing after I color it at school today, okay?”
Mama and I took the faded blue bus to the city where my school and her counseling office were located. I wondered what advice she would give someone who had a family like ours. I stared toward the front of the bus where the men sat; women were not allowed up front. Sitting by the window in the last row, I looked at the weather-beaten houses, the flats stacked on top of each other without much structure, so different from the stunning architecture of the historic houses I’d seen uptown.
During the long rides, Mama would talk to any woman who sat beside her. It always started with a discussion of how expensive everything was getting, and by the end of the first hour, the woman knew the ins and outs of Mama’s life, such as how our landlord lived too far away and was too busy to hound us for the months-delayed rent.
“I’m married to a man who has a doctorate but can’t earn a dime and has a separate bedroom, claiming he does not want another child. God’s rage will break his back one day,” she told a woman sitting next to her today.
Although Mama didn’t say that Baba couldn’t get a job because he had been a political prisoner, everyone could guess why someone so highly educated was unemployed.
“I am the one who has to feed four mouths, and I cannot work and do all the housework too,” she said. By now the bus was so crowded that nobody on it could move, and private conversations were impossible.
I continued to gaze out the window. Most cars already had snow chains on their tires. On several corners, venders sold hot beets. Each time a seller removed the lid of the dome in the middle of his cart to pour out the beets and their wine-red liquid, steam rose and danced in the cold air. My mouth watered.
“Isn’t that your daughter?” asked the woman in a folk dress who had been eagerly listening to my mother’s endless tirade.
I faced the scrutinizing eyes of the matron. She had a whiskered mole on her upper lip. “If I find crayons at school to color my drawing, it would be the prettiest gown,” I blurted out, hoping my talent for drawing would soften her glare.
“Your daughter is big enough to give you a hand. My granddaughter is younger than she is and does all the cooking and cleaning. They’ll do everything for their husbands later. Why not for their poor mothers?” She shrugged, and Mama nodded in firm agreement.
After I got off the bus, I sprinted the whole way to school, splashing through the slush puddles, ignoring my wet socks. In the privacy of a bathroom stall, I bit into the stale piece of bread I had hoarded. The walls of the stall were covered with graffitied curses at Khomeini, Khalkhali, and Rafsanjani, calling them murderers and bloodsuckers. The janitor must have given up painting over them. Recognizing Shiler’s neat handwriting in the upper corner, I added some profanities of my own, wishing the men would be lashed, tortured, and executed again and again in hell because death was too good for them. Then I noticed an amateur drawing of a worm, or perhaps an arrow, and turned it into a beautiful butterfly, white with black dots.
The school bell rang, and I rushed to join all the girls who stood in queues in the courtyard, respectfully listening as one of the older students recited the Qur’an verses that vowed friends of God never experienced sorrow or fear. Shiler stood behind me in line. Her mother was the only one I knew who often looked happy despite her hard life, or at least peaceful.
Neither Shiler nor I wore gloves, and as the principal lectured us on ethics, we rubbed our hands together, blew on them, and tucked them under our armpits. Shiler wore a loose, short headscarf that would certainly get her in trouble again. “I drew penises in all the bathroom stalls,” she whispered and chortled.
I giggled and blushed, realizing just then that what I had seen was neither a worm nor an arrow. I hoped nobody would know it was me who had given the penis wings. Shiler’s neck was turning red in the cold, so I reached to tighten her headscarf.
She pulled away. “No. If I wear hijab fully, they’ll think I believe in it.”
“Aren’t you worried that Mrs. Givi will punish you?” The parwareshi teacher didn’t actually teach any classes; she was an official agent of the government whose job was to browbeat girls into submission and report on teachers and students who didn’t comply with religious and political rules. In fact, the only thing that all of the Kurdish regions had in abundance was intelligence agencies; about six of them were active in our small border town, which neighbored Iraqi Kurdistan, alone. There were innumerable spies around town, from cab drivers to peddlers. Even families whose own members had been executed or rendered disabled by torture sometimes turned in other families for cash.
At only twelve years old, the rebellious Shiler was one of Givi’s most frequent targets.
“Fuck her!” Shiler said, shocking me with her profanity. “She doesn’t scare me and my mother.” My friend struck a defiant pose, but the usual audacious glint didn’t quite reach her eyes today.
“Plus she has such stinky breath,” I whispered to Shiler to prove my solidarity. I secretly believed that the teacher had exchanged her heart for a sewer system in return for the power to intimidate.
Shiler covered her face with her shawl and chuckled, then clutched her belly and winced.
“Are you okay? Did you eat breakfast?” I regretted not sharing my bread.
She swatted away my concern. “I’m fine.”
We followed the Persian national anthem with chants of “Death to America, death to Israel.” It was the only time we girls were allowed, even encouraged, to be heard. Shiler and I shouted with all our strength as a way to fight the cold and to participate in an unofficial contest to see who had the loudest voice. It was also our shared act of defiance that, instead of saying the slogans, we simply yelled out gibberish, enjoying the sensation of screaming with mouths wide open and cackling about our secret insubordination.