Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [11]
While Ahmadinejad looked aggressive in his posters, Mousavi appeared subdued and modest. An architect and abstract painter, with a graying beard, a big nose, and thick glasses, Mousavi seemed uncomfortable as a politician. Now in his late sixties, he resembled a retired professor who just wanted to get on with life. But he was the man with whom our hopes lay. Hope against all hope.
· · ·
The sun had fully risen by the time I arrived at my mother’s house, just before six A.M. I hoped to not wake my mother, but she was already up and waiting for me. “Mazi jaan,” she said, hugging me—“dear Mazi.” Recently, her hugs had become longer and tighter.
“How are you, Moloojoon?” I asked, handing her two big tins of her favorite chocolates, which I’d bought for her at Heathrow Airport. She didn’t answer. Instead she walked into the kitchen and put a plate of sangak flat bread and feta cheese on the table.
“Have you had breakfast?” she asked. I knew she was avoiding my question. She sat down and drank her tea, with sour cherry jam, in silence. She looked tired, and even older than her eighty-three years. I could see the sadness in her eyes.
In July 2005, my father had died after suffering a stroke. Almost two years later, in June 2007, my brother, Babak, who was fourteen years older than I, died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-four. And then my sister, Maryam, who was the closest person to my mother and me, lost a short battle with leukemia in February 2009. My mother and I were all that was left now, and that had brought us much closer to each other.
“So, how are you, Moloojoon?” I repeated.
She just shook her head and said, “How can I be, Mazi jaan? How do you want me to be?”
I had no answer. I knew that the burden of her grief was so heavy, she was reluctant to share it with me. With her silence, she thought she could protect me.
Sitting in the kitchen, I began to find the silence unbearable, but I didn’t know how to break it. I didn’t want to upset her. I stood and took a bottle of smuggled Johnnie Walker whiskey from a kitchen cabinet and poured a little into my tea, hoping this would help me sleep.
“Would you like to have baghali ghatogh and fish for lunch?” my mother asked, changing the subject, as she unwrapped a chocolate. Baghali ghatogh is a dish from the north of Iran, where my mother is from. It is made with broad beans, a variety of herbs, and eggs. My brother used to refer to baghali ghatogh as “Moloojoon’s specialty,” and we all loved it more than any other dish she made.
“You need to have your lunch before going out to report on this ashghal,” she said, referring to Ahmadinejad. Ashghal, the Persian word for “garbage,” is the strongest insult in my mother’s lexicon.
Good, I thought. My mother, like a typical Iranian, was dealing with her grief through a combination of cuisine and humor. I knew then that there was no point in pressing her to speak about her grief, and turned instead to her other favorite topic: politics.
My mother met my father through the Tudeh Party, when she was a twenty-five-year-old chemistry student at Tehran University. The party had assigned my father to indoctrinate students at the university about the proletarian struggle. Like many educated young people of her generation, my mother believed that communism was the answer to Iran’s underdevelopment. She had read the books of Soviet writers like Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Sholokhov, and had developed a romantic understanding of socialism. To my mother, my father—with his broad shoulders and large, dark eyes—was not only a handsome, articulate party cadre, he was like a character out of a novel.
In 1953, when the shah’s government started to crack down on communists, my mother paid a heavy price. She was dismissed from the university and was suspended from her job as a primary school teacher for one year. Since then, Moloojoon, like my father, had been disenchanted