Tadjrish, Iran
Winter 1970
I was a tiny anchor on a long chain of hands as I was pulled by my aunt, my cousin and my sister through the noisy streets of Tadjrish in the early morning on our way to my first day of school. My red rubber boots barely made a sound on the cobblestones and I took three steps for every one of my sister’s down the endless narrow alleyways. Car sounds were in the distance, but the alleyways were void of cars, just people, black-haired and foreign, disapearing off in different directions. I looked up at the back my sister’s head as I followed, her wavy auburn hair bouncing around her shoulders. I was aware of the fact that I was about to embark on a very grown-up adventure of which I knew nothing about and in that moment my sister could surely serve no greater purpose than to be my life preserver in this vast and lonely expanse of the unknown. I was six months past my third birthday and School was a concept of mythical proportions. I was very clear that I did not want to go – but my protests were not weighed in the decision to enroll my me and my sister in the local public school.
“You will learn the language a lot faster at school,” I overheard my mother say to my sister. “It will be better than running around this courtyard all day.” What could be better than running around the courtyard all day with my mother and my sister in easy reach? I complained, I cried, but the decision had been made.
So, the day before our big day, my mother sought to appease me by buying the stiff leather book bag which now sat on my shoulders. I already owned an orange nylon backpack that I had carried on the plane. I had been allowed to bring as many toys as I could carry in that bag, so I knew its dimensions intimately, its seams which I felt with searching fingertips as I reached for crayons during our long 18 hour flight. But knowing how much I needed something to distract me from the idea of School, my Mother had walked from booth to booth, with uncharacteristic patience, while I explored the cavernous covered bazaar from the safety of her grasp until I had found just the right one. I stood there with the bag folded tightly in my arms and waited for my mother to begin noisy negotiations with the leather seller, until he finally accepted her money and we could weave our way back out of the noisy maze.
When I brought it home that night I practiced opening its heavy metal clasp over and over until I was satisfied I could do it by myself, and then filled the bag with a few drawing pencils and a sheet of my grandmother’s feathery light airmail stationary. In the early light of morning, rising from my crib, it was the placing of that bag on my shoulders which captured my attention, as my Aunt whisked my sister and I away.
I held my sister’s hand tighter and feared that every step I took brought me closer to the moment that I would have to let go. My Aunt, faceless as we walked, did not speak. She had no words that I could understand anyway. Her presence was of no use to me except to pull this long chain of hands from which I floated behind.
“Sissy?” I called out. She turned to look down in to my face.
“How long is School?”
“Not long. Mom said we’ll have lunch there and then we’ll be home by three.”
“When’s three?”
“It’s in the afternoon.”
“When’s that?”
“It’s later, that’s all. Don’t worry.”
I felt tears begin to well up in my eyes. “I don’t want to eat lunch at School.” A whine escaped my lips. “Why can’t we go home for lunch?” I had already suffered the injustice of being rushed through my morning ritual of breakfast with my grandfather in the courtyard, salty white cheese and tart cherry preserves barely settled on my tongue. A glass of steaming tea, the color of my sister’s hair, cradled in both hands left to become lukewarm, the crumbly white sugar cubes left to rest on the glass saucer instead of dissolving slowly in my cheek. The loss of that slow and familiar pace amongst the cherry trees had left me feeling irritable and raw. I squeezed my eyes tight and let myself be led blindly as a single tear escape down my cheek. It was a new sound, the sound of children’s voices which began to swim in that abandoned glass of lukewarm tea, that forced me to open my eyes once again.
It rose as a hum through the grey bars of an iron gate, a chorus of playground sounds swirling in gusts. We left the last alleyway and more slowly now crossed the street in front of School. I knew these sounds. I recognized them from my sister’s school back in the US. I knew I needed to keep these sounds at a distance but didn’t have a chance to protest as we hurried right in to the eye of its storm.
“Sissy?” Her attention was completely captivated by the scene in front of us. I knew she could not hear me, but I said it anyway. “I don’t want to stay here.”
I turned my head to follow my sister’s gaze and saw as she did the swarm of dark-haired children which flowed in every direction all around the schoolyard. Through the iron gate and with few words my Aunt was suddenly gone. I was stricken with the idea that my sister might not know the way home. My cousin, a first-grader, strolled confidently on to his turf. Emboldened by his pace, my sister followed him.
There were so many of them, all around, and as they drew closer I began to make out their voices and their language. I let go of her sweaty hand to grab a fistful of her t-shirt, burying my face in her back as they began to close in around us. I let out a quick moan and sought comfort from the weight of my book bag on my shoulders hoping it could ground me and not let me float away in the swarm. Voices. My cousin’s, other children. I would barely allow myself to peek out from behind my sister, my pillar of courage. My socks had slipped down and I could feel the cold rubber of the boots on my calves.
Will it be afternoon soon?
I heard a woman’s voice. Was it my aunt? I peeked one eye out and saw a black-shrouded figure. My aunt did not wear the black shroud, but I did know it was a woman hidden inside. I had seen others dressed like her at the covered bazaar. I’d seen my grandmother wearing one similar, but of a thin pale-grey cotton, as she prayed in the quiet of a dark spare room of her house. This woman’s scratchy voice rattled at the crowd around me. A single fleshy hand emerged from the blackness and with a wave it parted the sea of children. I let my sister pull me along by her shirt as I followed her up the front steps of the school.
We made it through that day, my bookbag and I, even through the injustice of being pulled off my sister’s t-shirt, now moist and stretched out from the pulling. And even when my bag was later hung on a hook in the classroom, and it watched as I cried for my sister and won the right to have her squeeze in beside me at my hard wooden desk, through lessons that I could not understand, during the lunch out of massive aluminum pots with steam rising in columns to the ceiling; until the Afternoon, when I rejoined that chain of hands and found my way back to my courtyard and my grandfather. That bag did keep me from floating away; the memory of it still hanging there on that hook, watching over me.
