Three soldiers were posted at the entrance to my alley. Would they let me through? To the left I could make out another alley. I thought it would be better to follow that one even if it meant having to come back later down the right alley. I walked on, avoiding looking in the direction of the soldiers. A few more steps and I would not be able to be see them any more, nor they me.
‘Stop!’
What should I do? Stop? With the very first question they asked me they would discover that I could hardly speak Persian, they would ask to see my papers and arrest me. Should I run off? They would not have much difficulty catching up with me, I would have been acting in a guilty fashion and would not even be able to plead in innocence. I had only a split second to make a choice.
I decided to carry on my way without hurrying, as if I had heard nothing. However there was a new commotion, the sound of rifles being loaded and footsteps. I did not give it a second thought but ran through the alleys without looking back and threw myself into the narrowest and darkest passageways. The sun had already set and in half an hour it would be pitch dark.
I was searching my memory for a prayer to recite, but could only manage to repeat: ‘God! God! God!’ in an insistent pleading, as if I had already died and was drumming on the gate of Paradise.
And the gate opened. The gate of Paradise. A little hidden gate in the mud-stained wall at the corner of the street. It opened. A hand touched mine and I grasped on to it. It pulled me towards it and shut the gate behind me. I kept my eyes shut out of fear. I was breathless with disbelief and happiness. Outside the procession went on and on.
Three pairs of laughing eyes were watching me — three women whose hair was covered but whose faces were unveiled and who were looking at me lovingly, as if I were a newborn babe. The oldest, in her forties, gave me a sign to follow her. At the end of the garden I had landed up in there was a small cabin where she seated me on a wicker chair, assuring me with a gesture that she would come to rescue me. She reassured me with a pout and with the magic word: andaroun, ‘inner house’. The soldier would not come to search where the women lived!
In fact the noise of the soldiers had come closer only to get more distant again, before fading away altogether. How could they have known into which of the alleys I had vanished? The district was a maze, made up of dozens of passages, hundreds of houses and gardens — and it was almost night.
After an hour I was brought some black tea, cigarettes were rolled for me and a conversation struck up. In slow Persian phrases with a few French words they explained to me to whom I owed my safety. The rumour had run through the district that an accomplice of the assassin was at the foreigner’s hotel. Seeing me flee they understood that I was the guilty hero and they had wanted to protect me. What were their reasons for this? Their husband and father had been executed fifteen years earlier, unjustly accused of belonging to a dissident sect, the babis, who advocated the abolition of polygamy, complete equality between men and women and the establishment of a democratic regime. Led by the Shah and the clergy, repression had been bloody and, aside from the scores of thousands of babis, many completely innocent people had also been massacred upon a simple denunciation by a neighbour. Then, left alone with two young girls, my benefactress had been waiting for the hour of revenge. The three women said that they were honoured that the heroic avenger had landed in their humble garden.
When one is viewed as a hero by women, does one really wish to disabuse them? I persuaded myself that it would be unseemly, even foolish, to disillusion them. In my difficult battle for survival, I needed these allies, I needed their enthusiasm and courage — and their unjustified admiration. I therefore took refuge in an enigmatic silence which, for them, lifted their last doubts.
Three women, a garden and a salutary misunderstanding — I could recount forever those forty unreal days of a sweltering Persian spring. It was difficult being a foreigner; I found it doubly awkward in the world of oriental women where I did not belong at all. My benefactress was well aware of the difficulties into which she had been thrown. I am certain that the whole of the first night, while I was sleeping stretched out on all three mats laid on top of each other in the cabin at the bottom of the garden, she was the victim of the most intractable insomnia for at dawn she summoned me, had me sit cross-legged to her right, sat her two daughters to her left and gave us a carefully prepared speech.
She started by hailing my courage and restated her joy at taking me in. Then, having observed some moments of silence, she suddenly started to unhook her bodice before my startled eyes. I blushed and turned my eyes away but she pulled me towards her. Her shoulders were bare and so were her breasts. With word and gesture she invited me to suckle. The two daughters giggled under their cloaks but the mother had all the solemnity of a ritual sacrifice. I complied, placing my lips, as modestly as possible, on the tip of one breast and then on the other. Then she covered herself up, without haste, adding in the most formal tones:
‘By this act you have become my son, as if you were born of my flesh.’
Then, turning towards her daughters, who had stopped laughing, she declared that henceforth they had to treat me as if I was their own brother.
At the time the ceremony seemed both moving and grotesque to me. Thinking back over it, however, I can see in it all the subtlety of the Orient. In fact my situation was embarrassing for that woman. She had not hesitated to hold out a helping hand to me at great peril to herself, and she had offered me the most unconditional hospitality. At the same time, the presence of a stranger, a young man, near her daughters night and day, could only lead to some incident at some point in the future. How better to diffuse the difficulty than by this ritual gesture of symbolic adoption. Then I could move around the house as I pleased, sleep in the same room, place a kiss on my ‘sisters’ ’ foreheads and we were all protected and kept strictly in check by the fiction of adoption.
People other than me would have felt trapped by this performance. I, on the contrary, was comforted by it. Having landed up on a women’s planet and then to form a hasty attachment, through idleness or lack of privacy, with one of the three hostesses; to try bit by bit to edge away from the other two, to outwit and exclude them; to bring upon myself their inevitable hostility and to find myself excluded — sheepish and contrite at having embarrassed, saddened or disappointed the women who had been nothing less than providential — that would have been a turn of affairs which would not have suited my nature at all. Having said that, I, being a Westerner, would never have been able to come up with the solution which that woman found in the never-ending arsenal of her religious commandments.
As if by a miracle, everything became simple, clear and pure. To say that desire was dead would be telling a lie, everything about our relationships was eminently carnal yet, I reiterate, eminently pure. Thus I experienced moments of carefree peace in the intimacy of these women who were neither veiled nor excessively modest, in the middle of a city where I was probably the most wanted man.