Butterfly Stitching Page 2

  The veil felt particularly tight on her throat. Her eyes jumped with restless curiosity from side-to-side, trying to compare her growing height to the girls around her while still keeping her head facing forward. She had devised several sneaky tricks to do what the fanatics required while still secretly defying them. She felt winter’s cold pinch her face a cherry red and imagined the shadow the sun cast on her cheekbones. The thick blue-gray polluted air around her reeked of nervous energy but, as usual, no one seemed to notice other than her, or at least none of her classmates mentioned it. Sahar had not mentioned the stale smell either, afraid of sounding like a bit of a lunatic. Noticing smells, colors, and sounds that others did not was a preoccupation of hers lately and she was used to keeping her feelings to herself.

  The drill was the same every morning. The girls arrived in their form-hiding, hair-disappearing, navy-blue uniforms and dropped off their book bags in the classrooms. They made their way to the yard where they obediently stood in descending alphabetical order, perfect row after row of short people. First, there were fifteen minutes of stretching. “Now to the left, stretch, stretch, stretch. Now to the right, stretch, stretch, stretch. Now reach up high, higher, higher.” The school principal, Mrs. Abrisham, led the drills. Stretching was followed by some on-the-spot jogging and rope jumping. It was after the jogging that the chants began.

  Mrs. Abrisham wore her hejab very tightly around her face so that not one hair was visible. There were lots of lines on her forehead, proudly displayed, unlike the rest of her. Anger collected behind her frown-accented eyebrows.

  Anger gives you lots of energy, Sahar thought. Mrs. Abrisham’s anger was like a giant ball rolling downhill. Never tired or sleepy. A body in motion tends to stay in motion, Sahar remembered from her science class. It was the same with Mrs. Abrisham’s downward spilling ball of anger, feeding on itself. Sahar closed her eyes and imagined the ball, crumbling Mrs. Abrisham’s face as it rolled through it. There were spots on her face where the ball of anger had chipped away at her skin. No one else seemed to notice the spots.

  She must be so mean to her children, Sahar thought. But then she remembered the summer before when Baba was taking a long stroll in the park. He had run into Mrs. Abrisham and her kids, picnicking! Baba told Sahar that Mrs. Abrisham’s kids were “full of teethes of smiles.” So if her kids smiled, they were happy. So maybe Mrs. Abrisham loved them. Maybe she was nice to them. Maybe she drew circles around them with a crayon and then colored those circles with love while shading everything outside of them with anger. Maybe.

  Shouting.

  Mrs. Abrisham was shouting.

  “No talking. Do I hear talking? No talking. Chant: MARG BAR AMRICA MARG BAR AMRICA! MARG BAR AMRICA!”

  “Marg bar Amrica,” Sahar chanted with the others, “Marg bar Amrica.”

  “Fists in the air!” Mrs. Abrisham yelled.

  Fists. Up.

  Sahar tried. She dared not be disobedient. She had only asked Maman about it once. “Do we want America to die?”

  Maman was shocked. “What a horrible thing to say. We do not want anyone to die. I thought you knew better, Sahar!”

  “Then, should I stop saying the ‘Death to America’ chant at school?” she asked, feeling the sudden heat of shame. “I don’t want anyone to die either.”

  Maman softened. She took Sahar’s face in her hands and kissed her on the forehead. Twice. “No, my dear. You keep on chanting. Loudly. You keep on pretending. Pretending’s safe. But you know in your heart what’s true, right?”

  “Right!” But Sahar was not really very sure at all. And as she stood there in her schoolyard on this particularly charged Wednesday, she tried to understand it again. She threw her fist up into the air and pulled it back down again, up and down, again and again, chanting with perfect concentration and pretend hatred against America, England, Israel and Iraq.

  “MARG BAR AMRICA! MARG BAR AMRICA!” said Mrs. Abrisham.

  “Marg bar Amrica. Marg bar Amrica.” Sahar chanted.

  Fist. Up.

  “MARG BAR ISRAEL! MARG BAR ISRAEL!”

  “Marg bar Israel.”

  She did not have to believe the words. They were just words, thrown to the sky where three birds flew.

  “MARG BAR ENGELESTAN. MARG BAR ENGELESTAN.”

  “Marg bar Engelestan. Marg bar Engelestan.”

  And there was a cloud, smooth as a puddle of water on the street. Sahar wanted to splash into it and get her socks wet. She wanted to rip off the choking veil.

  “MARG BAR IRAQ. MARG BAR IRAQ.”

  “Marg bar Iraq. Marg bar Iraq.”

  The word Iraq reminded her of their neighbor, Mrs. Mehrnia, whose husband was off at war. Mrs. Mehrnia had once caught Sahar on the street without a veil and said, “Cover your hair, child. It’s titillating.” Funny word. She did not know what it meant. Tit. Ti. Lai. Ting. Like a song! Tit. Ti. Lai. Ting! Cover your body it is titillating!

  Giggle!

  “Stop giggling, child,” said Mrs. Abrisham.

  “Sorry, Khanum.”

  Fist.

  “Marg bar . . .”

  Cloud. Puddle. Jump. But if her socks got wet, she would catch a cold and Maman would scold her. Perhaps she would just drop a stone into the cloud-puddle and watch the ripples move through it. Maybe she could pick up one of the frogs in her backyard and place it in the puddle and watch it swim with its slimy, skinny legs.

  Up.

  “Marg bar . . .”

  Mrs. Abrisham walked down the rows of chanting girls to supervise their enthusiasm. She came to a stop by Sahar.

  “Tighten your fist, child.”

  Sahar tried.

  Mrs. Abrisham thrust a fist in the air toward Sahar, her face echoing the violence of the movement. “You see?” she said. “Like this. Pull in your fingers and squeeze.” She grabbed Sahar’s fist and wrapped her own hand around it as though playing Rock-paper-scissors, forcing Sahar’s overgrown fingernails to sting the inside of her palm.

  Sahar winced. The cold air smacked against the beads of sweat collecting on her forehead. She was really choking.

  “It only hurts because your fingernails aren’t befitting an Islamic girl. Tell your mother she must cut them tonight or I’ll have a conference with her.”

  Sahar felt a tear spill down her face and unfurled her palm to see the crescent moons in her hand. To make the perfect Muslim-little-girly-fist you had to have moons in your palm. She struggled to understand all of the rules of the games of Mrs. Abrisham’s schoolyard. The truth drained from her hand down through the bottom of her wiggling toes, like the ripples in the cloud-puddle-splash in her thought bubble. To keep from falling into this misery, she imagined what all the navy-blue uniforms around her were hiding.

  “Marg bar Amrica.”

  Green, blue, red and yellow shirts with pictures of penguins or alligators—or maybe even butterflies. Yes, lots and lots of butterflies, waltzing through the air in cheery colors and singing with their antennas. They leapt off the girls’ shirts and over to Sahar and she whispered to them that there were birds flying free as they should. And they did. Sahar smiled.

  “Marg bar Israel.”

  With maybe pink underwear with lots of mini-ducks on them and itchy white waistbands.

  “Marg bar Engelestan.”

  Maybe, if she were very clever, she could figure out the length of each girl’s hair. Azadeh Abbas stood directly in front of her in the alphabetically organized row. Azadeh never had bangs slipping out onto her face from beneath her veil. Maybe Azadeh’s family was devout and they did not want her to have bangs for the same reason that Sahar always wanted bangs—they are difficult to contain under the veil.

  “Marg bar Amrica.”

  Also, Azadeh’s veil never puffed out too much. When the wind blew at it from a weird direction and lifted up the bottom just an inch or two, Sahar could not spot any hair. It must be that Azadeh had shorter hair above her shoulders, with no bangs at all. So dreary.
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br />   “Marg bar Israel.”

  Now she set out to figure out how long Shirin’s hair was, the girl to her right.

  Red Alert!

  Sahar jumped up with fear as sirens screamed through speakers on the streets. The same speakers that sang the call to prayer. But the alert was no meditation. Here was warning. Sahar knew about the sirens, knew what to do.

  “Vay Khoda. Not again,” Mrs. Abrisham said. On cue the teachers herded children to be picked up by their parents, first moving the girls to their classrooms where they retrieved book bags amid shouts about homework and then outside into the parking lot. Already there was a chaos of cars and frantic parents. Sahar watched adults braving the streets, dodging and weaving through traffic to grab their children. Car horns and cursing rang down from the sky. She felt with them the sadness of a mournful prayer, then detached herself from the zoo around her. With a boom bada boom she converted the noises into the drumbeat behind an angry vocalist. Doom bada doom bada boom daba boom. She tried to make the sounds rhyme, to tell the tale of today through a verse like Baba always did when they played poetry games. The verses were caught on the tip of her frightened tongue.

  Narges, her best friend, emerged into the corner of Sahar’s eye. She was her usual hysterical-Red-Alert-self. Narges’ maman, Maryam jan, even more anxious and always one of the first parents to arrive, swerved her car over the curb, launched out to scoop Narges over her shoulder in one smooth movement, and hurried off without even noticing Sahar.

  Sahar was at Narges’ house when the knock on the door came that day. “You mustn’t cry, sister,” the woman at the door, holding a Qur’an and a smile, had told Maryam jan. “Your son has joined the honored Kingdom of Martyrs.”

  “Bijan? Bijan’s . . .”

  The stranger was stern. “A martyr. Yes. And any tears are an insult to his blessed status.” One in every forty citizens was dead, but as Sahar learned at Narges’ house that day, it was those who lost children but were not allowed to cry for the martyred, whose forbidden tears turned inwards and drowned their minds.

  Sahar watched now as her friend was carried off, and worried that days of insanity would invade her home, too. So far, she had only lost two third cousins. They had died clearing mines with their bodies, plastic keys to Heaven hung around their necks. She had also lost one aging aunt who had died of a heart attack during a heavy series of blasts a few months ago. Her family had mourned, but these deaths had not changed their day-to-day life in any child-losing mania way. No. Their minds lived in the periphery of the war. Maddening battles with Red Alert traffic. Hours in the basement bomb shelter of their building. No bread, meat or fruit. Outage after outage. Cold baths in a cold home. Loud sounds. Shaking ground. Shattering walls. Crying babies. This was their every day.

  Sahar knew it would be a while before Maman showed up to get her. They only had one car. Maman used it to run all the household errands and take Sahar and her brothers to and from school. Baba took the bus to work or got a ride from someone at the office. Whenever Red Alert sounded, maman always picked up the twins first. The Pouyesh Elementary School, the only acceptable choice after many other boys’ schools shut down, was near Sahar’s school, but the insanity of Red Alert traffic made the five-minute drive much longer.

  “Your brothers are younger, Meymoon,” Sahar was told many times, “and less able to take care of themselves. You need to be a big girl and stay calm and out of harm’s way until I can get to you.”

  Sahar hated her age and wished she was seven years old, like her brothers. But her long nine years of life pressed on her. Being forced to stay at school for more than a minute longer than she had to during Red Alert was worse than having a cockroach come out of the sink drain when she tried to wash her hands. The crazy mob of the scared. The loud thuds that shattered bricks and bodies. Even the just sound of the alert itself, worse than if someone put a speaker directly into her brain and screamed into it.

  She waited outside, even though it was calmer inside, because she wanted to see Maman the second she pulled up to the school. She walked to the spot where she typically waited—a bend in the burnt-orange brick wall by the side entrance. The cold bit her neck though she was still stifled by her veil. She zipped up the oversized green puffy coat she wore over her rupush and pulled her hand-me-down gray hat over her veil. Cozy, she repeated to herself like her mother had taught her. I’m cozy. I’m safe. Maman is on her way. She cursed herself for forgetting her gloves again and tucked her cold hands into her pockets. As she watched the other children clear out, a couple of curls wiggled onto her forehead from underneath her veil. Tickle. She kept her eyes wide for Maman with increasing impatience.

  The shrieking noise of the Red Alert had continued for nearly ten minutes now, but Sahar had not heard any blasts. False alarm, maybe. That happened if the missiles were actually headed for some other city and not Tehran. After a few more explosion-free minutes had passed, Sahar imagined the squawky sound of Yellow Alert. Maybe it would come soon. It was like a whizzing sound and meant only mild danger. It would come soon, and then she could take a breath. After that, the sweet sound of the Green Alert, safety, would follow. A beloved flat sound—a return to normalcy. Then she could take two breaths and maybe even smile. She was waiting for it. For the squawky sound to wail. For the flat ring to trail off. Certain that it would come. Any second now. Any second.

  Instead, the earth loudly belched an expected yet unexpected blast, shaking the ground beneath her. Screams of chaos harmonized with high-pitched screeches of child-retrieving frenzy. A sharp spark moved its way from Sahar’s feet to her heart in a split second, knocking her knees in and her head forward. She instinctively leaned as far into the bend in the wall as she could, then slouched down to the ground with her knees tucked into her chest. Forgetting the cold, her hands popped out of her coat and pressed against her ears. Sounds of life-taking machines and shouting of those in fear of being taken softened a bit.

  There was a strong smell of something burning in the distance and people were yelling things she could not understand. She tasted the smoke on her tongue and tried to imagine no one killed, no homes destroyed, no babies burned alive in fires.

  Cozy. She told herself amidst the full-blown jungle of a mess outside her mind. I am cozy.

  It was not working.

  Windows shattered. Shockwaves were cruel. She turned her head toward the noise. Why didn’t they put scotch tape in X-shapes across their windows like Baba did with theirs? she asked herself. I hope their shutters were closed. She imagined tiny shards of glass shooting from the walls. Heard a crying child’s glass-cut ears and neck. Maybe that sound isn’t real. Cozy. I’m cozy. A safe, warm, cozy baby ball in the brick bend in the wall. But there was too much for her to think away the horrible, desperate as she was. She focused her mind back onto the multitudes around her that could camouflage Maman’s car. But the crowd quickly thinned and Sahar spotted a royal blue Peykan around the corner. The rope holding up the bumper confirmed it was their car. A second later she could see Maman’s pretty face through the window. Sahar let her hands release her ears, amplifying the still ear-splitting Red Alert, and leapt inside the back-seat.

  “I heard windows breaking everywhere.”

  “Oh, baby, look at your scared little hazel eyes.”

  “Everywhere!”

  “I heard it, aziz.”

  “It was so crazy and everyone was screaming and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to see you.”

  “I know, my love. I know. You’re okay now, azizam.”

  “Where’s Raumbod?”

  “Violin lesson,” Reza answered.

  “Why does he get to leave school for that?”

  “His teacher cancelled tonight’s lesson but had an opening in the morning,” Maman explained. “We have to get him before we go home.”

  “Maman dropped him off right before the sirens rang. I wanted to go too, but she didn’t let me.”

  “She didn’t let you?” Sahar
asked. “You’re the one who doesn’t want to play the violin.”

  Maman sighed. “It’s been a long day. I dropped off Raumbod, went home, and five minutes later the sirens rang. I swear I spend half my time in this Iran of ours undoing the very thing I just finished doing.”

  The Peykan wheeled and circled through the streets, coming to abrupt stops when other cars cutting in front of them did the same. A motorbike containing a family of five zipped by and ran a red. A handful of Afghani-looking laborers squatted down on the bed of a truck pulled up next to the Peykan. Sahar hoped they had enough work to feed their babies. Deafening Red Alert sirens continued to wail while hurried feet and wheels rushed to bomb shelters.

  “Why don’t you tell me how school went today?” Maman tried to distract.

  “Raumbod’s best friend, Ali, didn’t do his homework, so the teacher put two pencils between his fingers and then squeezed them together! See, like this.” Reza took off his mitten and extended his hand toward his maman to demonstrate. “Sahar, open two of your fingers so I can show Maman.”

  “No.”

  “Come on.”

  “No!”

  “I won’t squeeze hard I just want to show Maman for one second.”

  “I don’t want to! I’ve seen the teacher do it before and it really hurts.”

  “Reza, you don’t need to torture your sister. I get the picture.”

  The car screeched to a halt in front of the violin teacher’s apartment building so suddenly that Sahar and Reza nearly fell off the seat.

  “I’m going to run in and grab your brother.”

  “What?” Reza complained.

  “I’ll be right back. Just three minutes.”

  “No, you can’t go!”

  Fear ripped open the sky, letting loose a flood of rain onto the car’s windshield.

  “Vay Khoda. Sahar jan, is there an umbrella on the floor back there?”