Read Online Camelia by Camelia Entekhabifard - Free Book Online Page A

wife and newborn baby. But that morning we’d heard on national radio that the office of the Islamic Republican Party had been bombed by munafiqin , and a group of government officials had been martyred. Had my uncle taken part in the bombing? I wondered.
    My parents must have wondered the same thing. The Pasdaran searched my mader-jan ’s house and my uncle’s house and we expected them to show up at ours next. My father took my hand, and we stole out with the bag of cartridges Ali had given him in the early days of the revolution. We walked to a public phone booth at the end of the street, stuffed in the bag, and ran off. We took stock of whatever else we had in the house that was forbidden—bottles of liquor, playing cards, my mother’s beloved issues of Paris Match with their pictures of the Shah and Farah, banned books, and finally my father’s pistol. Late that night we took everything to the parking lot, and my mother buried it under old newspapers in an empty oil drum.
    Every day my mother sat in fear by the radio, holding her breath as the announcer read the names of those executed. Each time she waited . . . but, no, they hadn’t said his name. She could breathe again. My father worked all his connections, but the officials said they had never heard of Ali. My mother threw a chador over her
head and went from standing at the gate of one prison to standing at the gate of another, my baby brother in her arms. She pleaded and got useless answers. After seven months we finally found him. He was in Evin and had been arrested for insulting the values of the clergy. On the morning of the bombing, Ali had been in line at the bakery, and a friend had asked him, “Did you hear that today they planted a bomb in the office of the Republican Party?” My uncle, who had nothing to do with the renegade mujahedin, was in good spirits at being newly released from the guard. He answered, “Tell it to my son’s balls!” He hadn’t yet made it to my grandmother’s house with the warm bread when the Pasdaran stopped him. My grandmother spent that whole day sitting out on the balcony waiting for him.

    My mother had refused to speak to her brother since an incident in the early days of the revolution. As a zealous Revolutionary Guard, Uncle Ali had been charged with watching the houses of high-profile fugitives on Khiaban-e Sarlashgar Zahedi, a street parallel to my mader-jan ’s in Jamaran. This was while relatives on my father’s side, like Guli’s father, were fleeing house to house. One night we stopped to visit Ali on the way to my grandmother’s, and after passing through the security checkpoint, we came to a brown house with a graded roof. Someone called for my uncle, and he appeared at the entrance in the darkness in his special green uniform. He came right over and lifted me up in a single motion. The fingers of my kind uncle were adorned with gaudy carnelian rings. From his arms, I could see the house in disarray, trampled under the boots of my uncle and his friends. A rag doll lay ripped in half, dragged outside the front door, and peering in, I could see a wooden crib in a child’s wrecked bedroom. I remembered how we used to take walks
in the park with his girlfriends. Was it my same beloved uncle who had laid waste to the home of these children? My mother was upset and couldn’t bear to see any more. I heard her say some nasty, indecent things to him under her breath. We turned the car around and sped down the hill, my mother crying in disbelief. The man whose house we had seen—Khusraudad—was pictured among the victims of the firing squad in the next day’s newspaper.
    Though my mother wouldn’t speak to my uncle, we continued to visit Jamaran as always. In the summer of 1980, Khomeini, in observance of the birth of Mohammed, held a public meeting with the people. A screaming throng was advancing past my grandmother’s house,