|  Return
of Shahrzad
Part 11
By Eric J. Jerpe
April 26, 2004
iranian.com
The trio disembarked from the car. The last one out,
Roxana, removed the novelty item from its wrappings. "The
Fravahar," she said, proudly displaying the stone candleholder
to her husband. The three of them walked towards the temple with
Romeen's wife holding and keeping clearly visible the ancient
Iranian symbol.
A crowd of several dozen people, mostly adolescents
and young adults, was camped out upon the steps. A few of them
held signs saying,
"Azadi." As a congregation, they listened to the dynamic orator
who stood at
the top of the steps, a young man clad in bohemian-student garb.
He spoke in an impassioned voice without the benefit of microphone
yet loud and clear.
"We are at a crossroads in time. This may
be our last chance. If the Guardian Council succeeds in rendering
the parliamentary
elections
a sham, then we will no longer be the Islamic Republic of Iran.
We will instead be the Caliphite of Iran; in effect, the monarchy
restored, albeit with a new dynasty."
As Romeen and his two female companions passed by
these demonstrators, the orator shifted attentions. He pointed
to Roxana and announced,
"The Fravahar!" Roxana halted out of politeness. She displayed
the Fravahar, turning in an arc to encompass all present. The
orator cordially motioned for her to come over to him. She did
so. "May
I hold the Fravahar for a moment?" he asked. She replied, "Yes,
you may," and handed it over.
Holding the Fravahar at its center with two hands,
one covering the upper portion of its statue of the Prophet of
Iran and the
other covering the lower portion, the orator displayed the spread
stone wings whose tips were candleholders. He extolled the congregation:
"This is the symbol of the Iranian nation. It has been so for
thousands of years."
In response, the crowd cheered and clapped. The
orator was about to return the candleholder when Roxana reacted,
"No, you
keep it. You can do much more good with it than I can."
Romeen, Roxana and Shahrzad departed from the outside
crowd. At the entrance to the Fire Temple, Romeen commented to
his two
companions, "The sons and daughters of the revolutionaries
who overthrew the monarchy are now trying to overthrow the theocracy.
It shows that revolutionaries should not have children, because
when they do they breed counter-revolutionaries."
The three of them entered into the Fire Temple.
Inside, they found only Porzand, standing in the back by the wall,
and a woman on
her knees facing the Sacred Flame. Roxana approached the kneeling
woman, who was wearing a headscarf, winter coat, bluejeans and
sneakers.
This might be the Mystic Woman, thought Roxana,
somehow freed from prison by her own wit and wile.
Roxana moved forward; she halted just behind the
woman who seemed to be praying. She waited about a minute before
asking with trepidation,
"Shahrzad of Chek-Chek, have you returned to us?" The woman rose to her feet, turned around, and pulled
back her headscarf, revealing herself to be a young and pretty
brunette.
Sadness was evident in her countenance as well as her voice when
she answered, "I have not seen Shahrzad of Chek-Chek
since I was released from prison."
"What!" exclaimed Roxana. "You have seen her?" "More than seen her," said the woman., "I was close
to her for five months."
"When you were you released from prison?" probed
Roxana.
"Yesterday," she informed, speaking in the morose
tone of one experiencing survivor's guilt.
Roxana took a few moments to organize her questions. She first
asked, "What is your name?"
"Anaheita," she answered.
Roxana introduced with words and gestures: "I am
Roxana... .This is my husband Romeen... This is my sister-in-law
Shahrzad... Do
you know Magi Porzand?"
Anaheita stepped forward and spoke directly to Roxana's
sister-in-law. "You are a Shahrzad? For five months we prisoners
were granted
the
blessing of another Shahrzad. She told us many tales, and invited
us to contribute tales of our own. I had the honor of adding
my tale to her collection."
"What is your tale?" asked Shahrzad.
Porzand intervened: "Let's all go and sit down over
there, where we can comfortably listen to Anaheita's tale."
Romeen, Roxana, Shahrzad and Anaheita all shifted
to a side region of the temple. Porzand fetched five cushions.
Anaheita found
comfortable seating to address the small but captive audience.
Porzand and the Sharifis gathered around to listen to her.
Shahrzad, remembering that, in the many tales of
the Thousand and One Nights, the title was more often a person's
occupation
rather than a person's name, asked, "Anaheita, what
is you tale called?"
Anaheita answered, "The Story of the Belly Dancer."
For the first time, Porzand and the Sharifis saw
Anaheita smile. She rose to her feet, opened up her coat and struck
up the pose
of a professional dancer. She stood there posing for a few moments,
then sat down again. Romeen, Roxana, Shahrzad and Porzand listened
attentively as Anaheita began the Story of the Belly Dancer.
"I was born in Isfahan one year after the revolution.
My earliest memories are of the war years. When I was quite little,
my father
died as a soldier in the war against Iraq, leaving behind an
impoverished wife and daughter. My mother had it quite rough, struggling
to
find odd jobs to feed and clothe me. When I was ten, a rare opportunity
presented itself: a Turkish hotel owner visited Isfahan and took
an interest in my mother. He offered her work at his hotel in
Turkey. She gladly accepted. Mother and I traveled overland to
the Aegean
coast of Turkey. There in Kusadasi, a lovely beach resort town
close to many impressive archaeological sites, my mother took
a job as a maid in a hotel.
"The next eight years of my life were pretty good,
even though we remained poor. I grew up in the idyllic setting
of Kusadasi,
where
jobs abounded during the summer. I adapted to my new and much
freer environment, perfecting my Turkish, preserving my Persian,
and
learning English in school. I took advantage of numerous interactions
with tourists to become fluent in English and to pick up smatterings
of Greek, French and German. Partly as a move to supplement the
meager family income and partly out of love for the art, I became
a proficient belly dancer. I got the chance to show off my skills
and earn a little money at hotel performances.
"I graduated from high school and spent one last
tourist season with friends and family in Kusadasi. Towards the
end of the summer,
I was offered a contract to become a member of a belly-dancing
troupe headquartered in Istanbul. I read the contract carefully;
it looked good and I signed. Early that autumn, I said good-bye
to friends and family and departed for Istanbul, there to begin
a belly-dancing career that I planned to happily work at for
the next few years, in the process making good money and having
opportunities
to travel. I was determined to enjoy my years of youth.
"I became part of a sorority of belly-dancers and
made many friends. I had a sequence of boyfriends, nice flings
but of the kind not
meant to last. About half the time I spent in Istanbul, the other
half on tour. The longest tour was for five months in the U.S.A.
In Los Angeles, our performances were captured on film and made
into a movie, a feature presenting dances of the harem-fantasy
variety as well as individual dances wherein each of us was allowed
to exhibit what she did best. A sizable number of VCR and DVD
recordings were made of this excellent movie. I was proud of these
audio-visuals
and glad they were being produced in both the American and the
European formats. I took a sizable quantity of them back home
to Istanbul.
"Those were good times for me, but after Nine-Eleven
things began to go downhill. The terrorist attack had devastating
repercussions
on the tourist trade in Turkey. We always did our best to create
a magnificent floor show, but often we would find ourselves performing
in nightclubs with three out of four tables empty. We were offered
the chance to make some music videos of the Britney Spears variety,
and, being hard pressed economically, we as a group accepted.
We made several overtly erotic dance music videos. I considered
them
entertaining perhaps but not artistic; but then, neither did
I consider them pornographic, as they contained neither graphic
sex
nor nudity.
"Four years after I joined the troupe, I received
a letter from my mother. She said she wanted to return to Isfahan
and spend the
last days of her life there among friends and relatives in the
place where she had been born and raised. This came as a shock
to me, for I was unaware that my mother had any serious medical
problems. I immediately called her up and requested (actually,
I insisted) that she come to Istanbul; I would pay her expenses.
"She came to Istanbul and stayed with me. I took
her to several doctors, and discovered that her liver was rapidly
deteriorating
to the point where she probably did not have much longer to live.
Her only hope was a risky liver transplant, which was very expensive
and required her being on a waiting list for a donor. I tried
to talk my mother into taking the chance, but she was adamantly
opposed
to that course of action, regarding as obscene the very thought
of having another person's organ transplanted inside her,
foreign tissue prone to rejection by the new host. She preferred
to die peacefully among relatives in the place of her pleasant
childhood memories. I eventually accepted my mother's reasoning,
not really knowing how we could afford a liver transplant anyway.
"It was slack time for my dance troupe's employment;
so, I told them that I had to leave for awhile and return to Isfahan
with my mother, who by this stage could hardly sit up in a chair.
My friends all wished me luck, and we said our good-byes with
tears
and kissing. One month before the Roman New Year, I went with
my mother to the Istanbul airport. We both had Iranian passports;
we were still Iranian citizens. We flew to Tehran on Turkish
Airways,
and then to Isfahan on Iran Air.
"I spent my mother's last days with her in the same place
we had spent the first ten years of my life. I renewed acquaintances
with relatives I had not seen or heard from in twelve years. They
talked a lot about my father. I felt both sadness and pride when
I saw his picture on a billboard, eulogizing him as a martyr who
had died defending his country.
I did some touring with my mother. Isfahan is indeed
a beautiful city, with its Safayeed Palace as a vision of paradise,
its Mosque
as a reach to Heaven and spectacular acoustics, its bazaar as
a friendly place where merchants offer tea to prospective customers
and sip with them over a haggle. I remember so vividly the winter
solstice evening, when I witnessed sunset with my mother from
the
bridge over the river, and prepared myself for the last good-bye. >>> To
be continued >>> Previois
parts
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