hand, Faramarz’s father seemed to be in a good mood the following day when his son broke the news to him. The old man took the news and the request furiously. Not wasting any time, he immediately went to see Helen, but not to ask for the hand of her daughter, only to tell her that his son would not be allowed to marry Zee-Zee.
“My lovely baby loves your boy, sir,” Helen pleaded as she offered him the sofa on which to sit.
Refusing to sit, standing in the middle of the living room, Faramarz’s father replied angrily, “Love has nothing to do with it! What had happened between those two was just filthy sex! Your goddamn girl wiggled her cute ass at him so much that he lost control. Who wouldn’t? What do you expect from a hot-blooded healthy boy? He took her to bed and made her pregnant. It happens all the time, but it doesn’t mean they should run off and get married! Look, I’m going to give it to you straight. My boy and your daughter are not from the same class. They can’t get married, period!” The man expressed what was on his mind as clearly and as candidly as anyone could.
“What are we gonna to do about baby, sir? It’s your son’s baby after all.” Helen presented the second reason in her arsenal as to why the marriage should take place, keeping the real one to herself – yearning to upgrade her social class, to attain more public respectability.
“I don’t give a damn! I am not going to allow a whore to destroy my boy’s future. Get an abortion! Otherwise, I will cause so much trouble for you both that you’ll wish you had never left your deh [village]! I will destroy you! Do you understand?” The high-class man conveyed his hard feelings to her with those ice-cold words. His threat was working, for even tough-as-nails Helen was visibly frightened. He left not knowing Zee-Zee listened to all those harsh words from behind the door. With a heart full of love for Faramarz, she decided to run away with him the next day and had no doubt that he would welcome the suggestion to elope. But Faramarz’s finger never touched the doorbell of Zee-Zee’s door again, nor did poor naive Zee-Zee ever lay her sad and anxious eyes on that handsome innocent face. Only later, by bribing his servant, did she sadly discover that he had been sent to school in Europe. She ran upstairs to the same room where once their love had bloomed like flowers in spring, but was now washed away in the flood of her tears.
Helen convinced Zee-Zee to abort her baby on the grounds that otherwise it would ruin her career; and besides, Faramarz's father, under any circumstance would not allow the baby to be born. Zee-Zee was overwhelmed with despair, disillusioned. One dark cold night in November, in an abandoned house on the floor of an empty room lit with a flashlight, she submitted herself to an abortion. She lost her baby and part of herself. That was how she was welcomed into the reality of adulthood. She was no longer the little girl who loved to curl her little hands and twist her little body and sing sweet songs. Her innocence was utterly drained from her. The natural smile, the unspoiled face, and the eagerness to please everyone were all gone. She became bitter. Convinced that she was different from others when she was a kid, she now discovered an unbearable painful truth, that her acquired fortune and fame could not fill the gap. That icy reality intensified her bitterness. She was changed.
About a week later, in an early morning hour Zee-Zee was stunned to see Faramarz's father secretly entering her house. Later, looking through the keyhole, she found her nude mother on the edge of her bed on her knees being mounted by the man. The most nauseating part of the scene was all the noises she was making as if she was having the time of her life. The repulsive scene ignited something inside her – a flame of madness. An uncontrollable wrath, so foreign to her, erupted within her. She wanted to scream, but her cry only shattered in her throat. Her heart carried a sorrow as vast as the vastness of her broken dreams and changed her attitude toward men and her mother permanently. If, in the past, she would only known men as creatures to be entertained by her dances and songs, she now thought of them as exploitive, deceitful, hypocrites, toxic who only used women for their self-indulgent filthy pleasure.
She began to despise men, and the seed of contempt for her mother took root in her heart, with intensity very foreign to her. She never confronted her mother about her affair with Faramarz’s father. She just covered her anger and defiance with a mask of permanent gloom. Of course, Helen mistakenly took her sorrow as being caused by the loss of her unborn child and her first innocent love. To relieve her pain, to allow her to forget that unforgettable memory, Helen took her heartbroken Zee-Zee to Europe for a vacation. Like all the hungry Easterners, who unknowingly carry their inferiority along with their pocketful of money, they saw all the places that a tourist must see. They learned how the European dolls dress, use attractive makeup and behave stylish in public. They stayed in expensive hotels and dined in restaurants that served exquisite mouth-watering dishes.
They took pictures of everything they saw to make the folks back home envious, and perhaps to erase Zee-Zee’s memory of her doomed love and substitute it with the splendor and glamour of new memories. But all the entertainments and amusements Zee-Zee experienced in Europe couldn’t erase the memory of Faramarz from her mind, and in her lonely hours only those memories remained her companions. Only by whispering the newly learned quatrains of Omar Khayyam could she prevent herself from falling into a deep depression.
When they returned to Iran, they looked, different, almost unrecognizable. As for “classy” Helen, she even spoke differently by inserting a word or two of English, French, or German into her Persian sentences. And the club-goers, the fun-seekers, had felt the absence of mother and daughter and cheered them wildly again once they reappeared on stage.
A debilitating high fever and sore throat caused by a severe case of influenza in late autumn forced Helen to remain in bed one night, and Zee-Zee had to perform at a nightclub alone. She only sang a few love songs, with cheap, meaningless, shallow lyrics, neither Persian nor European – made-up tunes, accompanied by drums and an electric guitar. The sounds, to qualified ears, were nothing but noise pollution, but to others they were the sweet sounds of modernity, the gift of the industrial revolution, coming through the lips of an artist – a sexy young woman. She took only a few steps, twisted her body a little but was well-received by the drunks, who actually applauded her half-covered breasts, her round buttocks wrapped in a tight dress and her thighs exposed by slits cut to her hips. From that night on she no longer needed her mother on stage with her nor missed her presence.
She was twenty years of age and at the prime of her beauty and fame, a goddess worshiped by any male above the age of puberty, and the epitome of an entertainer.
On the advice of Helen, who had lost her position in the band, Zee-Zee hired a songwriter, a young man in his late twenties. He was the son of a rich man who had gone to America to study engineering, had failed, but had learned a few popular songs. The young man had brought back an electronic synthesizer – a sort of magic music box. He “composed” a few so-called modern songs with simplistic and monotonous rhythms and superficial lyrics for her, and the drunks in the nightclubs responded enthusiastically.
With the appearance of television in Iran, visual exposure became more important. Zee-Zee was a real star, if not the star of the entire Middle East. Her colorful photos appeared on the covers of most magazines, and people cut them out and plastered them on the walls of practically every little shop around the country.
Although Zee-Zee never again cared for a man, she agreed to marry a wealthy nightclub owner, mainly to free herself from her mother’s control and to advance her career.
The groom was so drunk and under the influence of so much taryak on their wedding night that the act of lovemaking was unbearably repulsive to her. The act only became slightly tolerable and gradually somewhat enjoyable when, under the weight of the man, she closed her eyes, reached into the well of her memories and retrieved Faramarz’s face. The groom didn’t have the slightest clue what was going on, nor did he care. At the top of his wish list was a famous beautiful wife, a luscious doll, for whom he could buy jewelry, expensive cars, mink coats and houses. He wished to own someone special, someone he could show off, to possess a
