Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (No Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

eight of her fingers, and Akbar Agha gave us eight bananas.
    We turned left on Rahzi Avenue, a narrow, one-way street with dusty sidewalks. To the north, I could see the blue-gray Alborz Mountains resting against the sky. It was the end of summer, and the snowcaps of the mountains were long gone. Only Mount Damavand, the dormant volcano, had a touch of white on its peak. We crossed the road and walked through a cloud of steam saturated with the scent of clean, ironed linen flowing out of the open door of the dry cleaner’s.
    “Bahboo, why didn’t you say eight in Persian? You know how.”
    “You know very well that I don’t like to speak Persian. Russian is a much better language.”
    “I like Persian.”
    “We speak only Russian.”
    “In the fall when I go to school, I’ll learn to read and write in Persian, and I’ll teach you.”
    My grandmother sighed.
    I skipped ahead. The street was quiet; there was hardly any traffic. Two women walked along, swinging their empty shopping bags beside them. When I entered the small general store, the owner, Agha-yeh Rostami, who had a thick black mustache that looked awkward on his thin, kind face, was talking to a woman with a black chador covering her from head to toe so that only her face remained visible. Another woman wearing a miniskirt and a tight T-shirt waited her turn. This was the time of the shah and women didn’t have to dress according to Islamic rules. Although the store was small, its shelves were stocked with many different goods: long-grain rice, spices, dried herbs, butter, milk, Tabriz cheese, candy, skipping ropes, and plastic soccer balls. Giving me a carton of chocolate milk while handing the woman wearing the chador a brown paper bag, Agha-yeh Rostami smiled at me over the counter. As I drank my milk in large gulps, enjoying its silky coolness, Grandma came in and pointed at everything she needed. On our way back, we saw Agha Taghi, the old man who walked the streets at around this time every year and yelled out: “I card camel wool and cotton!” Women opened their windows and asked him to go inside their houses to prepare their duvets for winter by combing the wool or the cotton fibres inside them.
    When we returned home from the store, I followed Grandma into the kitchen. Our two-burner oil stove was on the left, the white fridge on the right, and the dish cabinet stood against the wall opposite the door. With Grandma and me in the kitchen, there was hardly room to move. The kitchen’s small window was close to the ceiling and beyond my reach and opened above the yard of an all-boys school. Grandma put the old stainless steel kettle on the stove to make tea and then opened the cabinet.
    “Your mother has been in here again, and I can’t find a thing! Where is the frying pan?”
    From the other side of the cabinet, pots and pans spilled onto the floor. I rushed to help Grandma put them where they belonged. The kitchen was my grandmother’s domain, and she was the one who took care of me and did all the housework. My mother spent about ten hours a day in her beauty salon and hated cooking.
    “Don’t worry, Bahboo; I’ll help.”
    “And how many times have I told her to stay out of here?”
    “A lot.”
    Soon, everything was back in place.
    “Colya!” my grandmother called out to my father, who was probably in his dance studio. But there was no answer.
    “Marina, go ask your father if he wants some tea,” said Grandma, putting some of the groceries in the fridge.
    I walked down the dark hallway opposite my mother’s beauty salon and to my father’s dance studio, which was a large L-shaped room with brown linoleum floors where pictures of elegantly dressed dancing couples hung on the walls. In the center of the waiting area—the smaller leg of the L—a round coffee table covered with magazines was surrounded by four black leather chairs. My father sat in one of them, reading the paper. He was five feet eight and fit, with gray hair, an