BANDAR ABBAS, IRAN
SUNDAY, 3 JULY 1988
She’d never been on a plane before that day, had never had occasion to fly. It wasn’t that they couldn’t afford it—her husband’s job was decent, and though they weren’t rich, they were surviving better than many. She’d seen it: old matriarchs rolling up the rugs on top of which they’d raised their children, their own and often their brothers’ and cousins’ as well. They’d drag the carpets, one heavy roll under each armpit, into the market, selling them for next to nothing.
It was like that everywhere in Tehran. Men were raising chickens in their bathrooms, in their closets—these houses you could smell from a block away. Meat had gotten so expensive. Every Sunday an old man from Tajrish would drive into the city with his son and sell baby chicks out of his truck bed. There was always a long line to buy. Dozens of men and boys would wait there all morning for the chance to fill their pillowcases with writhing baby birds. Those who returned home with pillowcases still empty would be scolded by their wives, slapped by their fathers. Some tried throwing rocks at pigeons, sparrows, not wanting to arrive home completely empty-handed.
At night, desperate young women walked the sidewalks along Reza Shah Street—now called Revolution Street—hoping the men who approached would be solicitous, clean, wealthy, and not of the secret police. Mostly they were right, but sometimes they weren’t. Once, walking with her husband back home, the woman had seen a girl, just a teenager, being pushed into an idling white van. The girl was screaming, “Why?! I am peaceful! I am peaceful!”
The men said nothing, only pushed her in and drove off. Remembering this gave the woman chills. She stirred in her seat and her feet kicked an empty bottle of mineral water, left behind on the plane by some previous passenger. For some reason, this settled her. Proof that, in the past, the plane had indeed gone up and come down. She’d never been on an airplane before that day, but her first flight early in the a.m., from Tehran to Bandar Abbas, was mercifully dull. Half-empty, and nobody sat near her. The flight attendants served tea, sesame bread with butter and sour cherry jam. She took none, then tried to remember if she’d eaten anything before leaving home that morning. The morning felt like a week ago, a month, a second. This flight, she’d be sure to eat whatever was served.
When she’d stepped onto this plane, her second of the day, second of her life, going from Bandar Abbas to Dubai, she found it was nearly full. Strange, because the gate had been relatively sparse. A couple had been trying to hush their two crying boys, infants, whose wailing gave her an eclipsing sense of relief, then guilt.
Quietly she’d moved to the back and tried to sit down in a seat next to a portly middle-aged man with a severe mustache and yellow-tinted glasses. He glared at her wordlessly with a mix of contempt and menace. An attendant quickly scampered over to check her ticket: “27D, not 25D, dear,” and showed her to her correct seat, a window next to an older Arab woman wearing a black chador who smiled absentmindedly before returning to her book.
As the airplane safety procedures played over the intercom, she stared out the window, trying to think about nothing, watching the little men hurry about the tarmac. Even with the plane on the ground, they looked so small. Ridiculous. She patted her coat pocket for her passport: still there. The passport, the face inside, was precious. She hunched over herself a little, as if to protect it.
The plane began rolling, the men on the tarmac fading away. The woman, eager to vent her anxious energy, opened the Iran Air flight magazine tucked into the seat in front of her. Flipping through, she scanned an article titled “Kashan Rugs: Most Famous in the World.” Another, “Travel to Shush, the Center of Ancient Civilization.” In that one, a full-page photograph of a winged stone sphinx. “From the Palace of Dariush,” said the caption underneath, “Older than the Roman Colosseum!” Some solace in history, perhaps, knowing other civilizations had also destroyed themselves. In fact, the record seemed to suggest such destruction was inevitable, the endpoint of every people.
Around Iran, statues of the shahs had been torn down and replaced with statues of the ayatollahs. Scowling men. In Qom, future mullahs studied those faces, practiced their own glowers in bathroom mirrors. “More Holy Men Than Any Other Culture,” the local posters bragged.
In Isfahan, the old capital, soldiers showed up unannounced at the doors of old women, saying, “Congratulations, your sons have been martyred.”
The mothers would have to hold back their tears, wringing their lips into the eerie not-quite-smiles they’d spend the rest of their lives perfecting. They were the lucky ones. Inside Tehran’s Revolution Square, the sons of other mothers hung from cranes.
Once the plane was in the air, she finally found herself relaxing. At least for a time, she was leaving that horror behind. Horror, which lived on the ground. In the past. In the air, in the present where she was, it was calm. Still. The plane chimed peacefully. The Arab woman next to her had folded her book across her lap and was now drowsing lazily, head tilted toward the aisle.
She tried not to think about the people she was leaving. She’d earned that. More than earned it. She refused the hot knot of guilt rising up in her throat. You will not be needed, she said to it in her mind, swallowing. So much could still go wrong, of course, but for the first time in as long as she could remember, she could inhale fully, feel the air filling the bottom of her lungs. Even this, breathing, felt freighted, suddenly more meaningful, the way money means more to the poor than the rich.
“Emkanat.” That was the word. Possibilities. She couldn’t recall when she’d said it last. Staring out the window, she tried to remember. She’d awoken so early that morning in Tehran, it was like her brain was still turning on. The sun, blistering pink around its edges. Clouds beneath her like a thin cloth drawn over cooling milk. Beneath that, ocean. Blues and blues and blues. In the distance, two tiny floating pebbles of white. Were they moving? Getting nearer?
Her husband, her family, her friends—everyone she knew in Iran was cynical, believing that to hope was ignorant, even murderously naïve. But tomorrow would be better than today. For the first time in ages, she really believed that.