Persia monir biography

More AA Chapter 2. Damed Genes mother often repeated that from birth I rejected her. Having been born, I immediately coughed with blood, and everyone thought that I would die. She loved to tell how in infancy I threw her breasts and later refused food, agreeing only when they began to threaten me with injections or terrified me with an enema. She did not allow me to eat cucumbers and for some reason nuts.

Once I poured so much fish oil into me that I was covered with a rash. When my brother and I fell ill with a scarlet fever, for forty days we were held in a dark room: my mother believed that from the light, children with scarlet fever could blind. Later, already being an adult, I sometimes told how one morning she gave me so much grape juice that I was sick.

Then for thirty years I could not eat grapes, until once at home at a friend I dropped a couple of grapes in a glass of wine and found how nice it was to flatten them with my teeth. We often quarreled because of my toys that my mother locked in the closet. She always cleaned my toys and sometimes took out and allowed me to play with them, but not for long, and then she hid it again.

I had a small doll that was able to crawl on all fours, and my favorite bunny, whom my friend Monir-Jun brought from Paris. The bunny played on the drum, was white and fluffy, but because of the drum to hug and stroke it. How I liked the soft white wool of this bunny-non-train! Already when I left the house, my mother continued to replenish the collection of dolls, assuring that one day she would give it to me.

And when she died, no one could find these dolls. They disappeared along with its rare antique carpets, two silver chests, gold coins, porcelain, which remained from the first marriage, and almost all jewelry. When I was first allowed to play with one of my favorite dolls - blue -eyed, porcelain, with long blond hair in a turquoise dress - I began to throw it into the air and catch it, and in the end it fell to the ground, and her face broke.

In subsequent years, I will have lost or destroy the most expensive things for me more than once, especially those that my mother gave. Rings and earrings, antique lamps, figures - I remember all of them perfectly. The loss of these objects - what did it mean to me? Maybe I was just such a person - careless, losing people and things? Our first real clash of foreheads occurred when I was four years old.

We argued where my bed will stand. I wanted to put her to the window: I liked this window with a large windowsill, where you could plant dolls and lay out a pantry porcelain service. Mother wanted to put a bed against the wall next to the closet. She was inferior to me, then again began to insist on her original plan. Once I returned home from our Armenian neighbors, with whose daughter I was friends-with this timid four-year-old girl we were inseparable-and found that my mother pulled the bed back to the wall.

That evening, I cried inconsolably and refused dinner. Another day, she would make me eat, but then she made an exception, and I cried and fell asleep. I loved this porcelain doll very much, but broke it, as soon as I was allowed to play with her the next morning, I woke up in the corner far from the window, which I hated, and tears of indignation sprayed from my eyes. Father came and, smiling, sat on the bed.

My father and I had a ritual: in the evenings he came and told me a fairy tale for the night. But that morning he brought me a treat. He put a small porcelain plate with chocolate sweets on the bedside table and said that if I behave well and smile at my widest smile, he will reveal me a secret. What is the secret, I asked? Sad girls who frown with foreheads are not supposed to know secrets, he replies.

But I am stubborn and do not obey him: he must reveal a secret to me just like that.

Okay, he answers, anyway you will smile when you hear my plan. Let's come up with something new, with the view of the conspirator he says. We will invent our stories. What, I ask? Their own; Any. I don’t know how, I answer. No, you can; Think about what you most want, and compose a story about it. I don’t want anything, I answer. And he says: maybe you want to move the bed to the window, but do you know what your bed wants?

I shrug. And he says: let's compose a story about a little girl and her bed ... I heard someday about a talking bed? So the new ritual arose: from that day, my father and I had our own secret language. We composed stories in which our feelings and needs were embodied, and built our world. Sometimes these stories were the simplest and most everyday.When I deserved something disapproval with something, he expressed it in the form of a story, for example: “There was one person who loved his daughter very much, but when she promised not to fight with his nanny and could not keep his promise, he was very offended by other secret methods of communication: when I began to behave poorly in society, my father put a index-induced finger in my nose.

If I had to remember something important, I hit myself on my nose seven times, each time repeating what I should do, I still use this method. In our secret world, there was no place for my mother. So we took revenge on her for tyranny. Then I found out that in a fictional world you can always take refuge; There I can not only move the bed to the window, but also fly out on the bed in the window and go to a secret place where the entrance is closed to everyone, even my mother, and where no one can control me.

In the age of five in the early X, my father published three children's books based on classical texts. One of them was a retelling of “Shakhname”, “Books of the Kings” of the epic poet Firdousi. In the preface to the book, the father explains that he told us these stories to his children, when we were three or four years old, and continued our training later, introducing us to other classic masterpieces of Persian literature: “Masnawi” by Rumi, “Gulistan” and “Bustan” Saadi and the fables “Kalila Va Dimn”.

He also writes that then we read these books ourselves. In the preface, he emphasizes that modern Iranians should learn more about their ancestors and their values, and in this the attentive reading of Shakhname will help them. He says that he is happy, that through the book “We see, hear and feel in our house Iran; He warms our hearts ... ”When his father spoke of Firdousi, his voice became respectful.

He taught us that poets should be treated with special respect, differing from the respect with which we treat teachers and elders. Once, when I was very small-I probably was four years old-I asked my father to tell me some other story written by Mr. Firdousi. He is not a “gentleman”, my father corrected me. He is a poet of Firdousi. After that, I asked for a long time to tell the stories of the poet Firdousi.

And my first idea of ​​Iran was formed under the influence of the paternal retells of Shakhname. As long as I remember, my parents and their friends always talked about Iran as a beloved but non -impedal son and constantly argued, discussing his well -being. Over the years, Iran has become for me a paradoxical essence: on the one hand, it was a specific place where I was born and continued to live; I spoke Persian and ate Iranian food.

At the same time, Iran was something mythical, a symbol of resistance and betrayal and a place that cultivates virtues and values. There was no other country for my mother. She sometimes remembered the places where she visited, admired them, but Iran was her home. The father constantly thought and argued about what it means to be Iranian, but there were no such problems for the mother.

Some things were undeniable for her. She absorbed “Irania” with genes-it was transmitted to her from the ancestors, like beautiful dark eyes, so dark that they seemed black and light olive skin. She could criticize the Iranians and disapproving of some members of her clan, but in her perception their shortcomings were not related to Iran. Like all Iranians, the mother respected Firdousi, but despised our passion for literature, considering it a waste of time.

Later I found a more interesting explanation of the hostility that she had for writers: it occurred to me that she did not want to have competitors. She came up with her world and her own mythology and treated with rejection with the one who earned it. Thinking about my father, I first remember his voice. It sounds in different places - on the street, in the garden, in the car, in my room, when he puts me to sleep.

I still feel the peace that I experienced when he told me something. I listened carefully, stories were postponed in my mind, as even real life experience was not postponed. Later, my father broke my heart, and since I loved him and trusted him, like no one else, I also offended him and broke his heart. And stories - they partially rehabilitate it in my eyes. Only these joint moments remained unsented by a series of mutual attacks and betrayals.

I was afraid of seizures of maternal coldness and her non -reprising requirements, but there was even a stronger fear of losing my father. I remember in the evenings I sat by the window and waited for his return, listened to his steps in the corridor and finally went to bed. Over time, I became his most devoted ally and defender. It seemed to me that he, like me, was a victim of his mother’s tyranny and therefore was not to blame.

She hated us because we sympathize with each other, and sometimes because of this exploded. Mother loved to command and demand, but his father lured and deceived, like Tom Sawyer, who made his friends paint him a fence.Our relations with him were always the connection of two conspirators: when we walked along the street and he said something, or when we planned to please the mother or appease her.

My father and I had his own secret world, we were randomed by general stories, and this connection allowed us to break out of the surrounding reality and to move to other spheres, consisting of teasing fragments woven by his voice. On Fridays, my father woke me up early in the morning and led me for a long walk. So that I do not complain, brought me a cup filled with water from our favorite fountain.

He called this our “special time”: he told stories and sometimes stopped to buy ice cream.