Houses

Look out of the window on the second floor landing, and the man is sitting in his pajamas on a banquette, looking like he just woke up from his nap.  He is supposed to be an important man, but he looks like any other. No uniform with gilded epaulettes, no medals, no pomp.  Just a man in pajamas sitting in his garden.  A man servant brings him tea.

In my family, we referred to events by indexing them to the house we lived in at the time.  This was the Mossadegh house, because he was our next door neighbor.  My parents were new refugees to Iran in the 1940s and somehow ended up renting a house next door to the man who would become the prime minister of Iran under the Shah. While we were neighbors, Mohammad Mossadegh was a member of parliament. 

At the end of our cul de sac was the Soviet embassy, and several times a day, black cars with red flags flapping on each side of the windshield would pass by and disappear behind a large iron gate.  When it opened to admit the cars, one glimpsed a dark garden with large trees and just a hint of the building they obscured beyond.  Guards stood at either side of the gate, and didn’t make eye contact. This was an important place with important people, and pesky children were not encouraged to approach.

I remember going to nursery school, what we called pre-school back then.  There were some difficult times, and these stick in my memory, whether because I heard about them or I actually remember, I can’t be sure, but there are some distinct images.  While we were living here, my mother went to England for medical care, and she was gone a long time.  She returned with scars on her scalp and stomach and clothes for us. I remember a pink and white angora sweater, and I especially recall the smell of it, a combination of wool and the hand lotion my mother brought back with her.  Years later when I was in England, I found that same Elizabeth Arden hand cream and used it for a while.

Nora teaching Gilda to drive the pedal car

It was at this house that my father’s partner cheated him out of the assets of their joint business and took off for North America with the proceeds.  I recall debt collectors coming to the house and hauling furniture away.  My sisters and I had a toy car from England that one drove by pedaling levers under the hood.  I loved driving the car and was very afraid it would be taken away to repay some debt. I don’t think it was taken but I don’t recall having it at any of our other houses.

In the late 1940s, there were refugees escaping from Iraq, smuggled into Iran on their way to Israel or Europe or Canada or the U.S.  My parents helped these refugees.  I have memories of large groups of people at our house, many of them sleeping on the floor of our living room, but happy to have escaped Iraq.   There were boisterous sing-alongs in Arabic or Hebrew and a party atmosphere. They were mostly young men and women, my parents’ contemporaries.  Among them was my uncle, my mother’s brother, who was astonished to find that the grand house we lived in had no indoor plumbing.  There was a pump outside to retrieve water from the well and bring it indoors.  I enjoyed pumping the water. 

My aunt and her four sons were among the refugees who had managed to smuggle their way out of Iraq, arriving at our house.  My aunt was pregnant, and she wasn’t with us long when she suffered a miscarriage.  I remember my four cousins and my sisters and I feeling very somber.   The adults were preoccupied with my aunt and her condition and we were left to fend for ourselves.  Since we had never met before, it was awkward, but I seem to remember my cousins and my sisters and I having a funeral for the fetus.  We dug a hole and buried a matchbox.  This may not have happened, but that’s what I remember.
 

Soon after my father’s bankruptcy, we moved to the second floor of a duplex. This was the Boat Club house, so called because it was near an amusement park by that name that had a large pool and a few small motor boats that one could ride around the pool.  There was also a Ferris wheel and a kiosk that spun cotton candy, the smell of the burnt sugar pleasantly pervading the whole park.  It was always a treat to go to the Boat Club and go on the rides.  I don’t know how long we lived at this house, but I don’t think it was long.  It was here that I recall my uncle living with us.  He was my father’s youngest brother and had joined my father in restarting the business.  He had come from Bagdad, a young man with a sense of fun.  I enjoyed having him live with us, since the atmosphere in the house became more lighthearted.  

In the way of odd memories, I remember getting the mumps and having a thick black ointment, called “Amrootenjan” applied to my swollen face, and it smelled like bubblegum.  It came in a green tin with Indian writing on it.  I remember a street vender selling leeches in a tub he carried on his head, and once when my mother had twisted her ankle, she applied a few of them to take down the swelling.  I recall my parents delighting us at bed time by singing and dancing to “Hands Knees and Whoopsi Daisy;” the dance required them to clap each other’s hands, bump knees and then bump bottoms.

There were also problems at school for Stella, my older sister, and me.  Stella was already going to the American Community School, but after the principal’s son died, she didn’t want to attend because she was afraid of his ghost.  My parents weren’t sympathetic and tried to persuade her there was no ghost, and every morning for several weeks it was turmoil trying to get her to go. I recall one day my parents became frantic because they got a call from the school telling them she had run away.  

My issue was less fraught. I was still in nursery school, and my teacher was used to Iranian schools where corporal punishment was encouraged.  Every time any of us displeased her, she would whack us on the head with a ruler.  I started pretending to be asleep when my mother would try to get me out of bed in the morning, but my fluttering eyelids gave me away and she asked me what was wrong.  I told her about the teacher and she became irate.  She complained to the owner of the school and the whacking stopped.  The teacher became excessively sweet to me after that. 
  

By the time I was in kindergarten, we had moved to the Cinema Diana apartment, so called because it was next door to a movie theater, a block from the University of Tehran.  Two Armenian brothers owned the apartment building, the movie theater and the movie studio upstairs.  The older brother lived in the flat downstairs from us and was ill and cranky.  He didn’t like it when we ran around in our unit or made noise, and it seemed there was always something that displeased him.  In retaliation, he would turn off the water or the electricity, which were controlled from his flat.  This action and reaction seemed to go on for all the years we lived there, even after we had befriended his niece and she played at our house, making noise along with us.  Her father was usually upstairs in the studio making a movie, and he was pleasant, although cowed by his ill brother. Rosa, the niece, got us into the movies for free sometimes, so we didn’t complain about her uncle and tried to play as much as possible in the movie theater when it was empty. The theater had a terrace on the roof where they showed films in the summer, and that is where we played most of the time.

In the summer, we could hear the sound track of the films from our bathroom, and my mother told us not to turn on the light when we used it at night, because the audience on the terrace could see down into our bathroom. It didn’t occur to anyone to curtain that window.  On one occasion, the film was about Chopin, “A Song to Remember,” I think it was called, and I had grown fond of the Polonaise that played about half way through.  I would try to be in the bathroom when I thought it was about to be played. Seeing that I was enjoying the piano-playing, my mother used this to exhort me to practice the piano.  “Don’t you want to be like Chopin?”   

Listen to Polonaise in A Flat Major by Chopin here:

Because the apartment was close to the university and the movie theater, on a main thoroughfare, there was always a great deal of activity that we could observe from our balconies. On summer evenings, we escaped the heat by sitting out there.  We watched as the city came to life.  People queued up for the movies, or went into the various cafes downstairs. Sometime in the early 1950s the lines for going to the movies started turning violent and soldiers would arrive with billy clubs to club those in line they considered to be the trouble-makers and haul them away in their trucks. The bloody skulls and the violence made me cringe but also mesmerized me, and I recall not being able to stop looking. This scene repeated night after night, especially when an Iranian film was showing and larger crowds gathered. 

Gradually, the evening disturbances were augmented by marches in the mornings.  At first, I enjoyed watching the marchers, thinking it was a parade of some sort.  In Iran, parades were common, either for some national day or for religious celebrations. Sometimes what I considered a parade was actually men flagellating themselves bloody in mourning for some prophet, and when it was one of those religious holidays, my mother made us stay away from the balconies. 

“If they do that to themselves, think what they would do to you if they didn’t like the way you looked at them,” she would say.  

I had visions of these men breaking away from their march and attacking us with their chains and knives the way they attacked themselves, and only stole a glance occasionally.

When the military was called in to break up the marches, I started to understand that these weren’t parades.  The marchers carried banners proclaiming the Tudeh Party and pictures of Mohammad Mossadegh.   By this time, I was also going to the American Community School, and the walls outside the school were scrawled with “Yankee Go Home.”  I liked Americans and didn’t understand why they weren’t welcome any longer.  These disturbances seemed to go on for a long time, until they became the new normal. 

In 1952 and 1953, the marches and demonstrations escalated so that they were a constant occurrence, and the military was not subduing them anymore.  Then one morning we woke up to enormous crowds in the street, not allowing any traffic to pass.  There was a lot of shouting and milling around, and clearly we were not going to school that day.  My father stayed home, and my mother tried to keep us away from the balconies and windows on the street side of the apartment, but I was too curious to stay inside and stole out to see what was going on.  Once in a while, there were shots fired, and people would run through the street.  Some had been looting and carried odd items like mattresses, blankets and pillows or a single shoe, and were jubilant about their cache.  It was all bewildering to me.  Was Mossadegh the good guy or the bad guy in this power struggle?  What about the Shah—where was he?  It was total confusion, and the only news we were getting was from the BBC which only came in intermittently through the static.

That night, the whole family slept in one room on the courtyard side of our home. From our third floor windows we could see the glow of fires all over the city.  Shots were fired incessantly, and the shouting in the streets didn’t stop all night.  I could tell that my parents were anxious about our safety, but I found all of the events exhilarating.  

From the BBC, we learned that the Shah had left Iran and this was a coup d’etat engineered by the CIA and Britain to oust Mossadegh as prime minister and replace him with Fazlollah Zahedi, a general selected by the CIA.  As an adult, I came to understand that Mossadegh was removed because he had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, depriving Britain of its cheap source of petroleum. Britain was supported by the U.S. and this was the CIA’s first and cheapest excursion into nation-building.

A short time later, the Shah returned from exile and there was a new outburst of demonstrations, joyfully chanting the Shah’s name and denigrating Mossadegh.  I remember a chant in Farsi that proclaimed “Mossadegh has caught a mouse. His blanket has caught fire” (Mossadegh moush gerefte. Patoush atesh gerefte), which sounded as insulting to Mossadegh as it was meant to be, when shouted by the mobs.

I made little connection between what was going on in the streets of Tehran and the man sitting on his bench in his pajamas, sipping tea and looking very ordinary.  My father told us that he had been sentenced to house arrest, and not understanding what that meant, I could only imagine him in some country house sitting on a banquette in his pajamas, sipping tea.