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

customers, and traditional music blaring. Grandma didn’t believe in buying toys, but she always bought me a little treat.
    One Sunday, we set out early enough to visit one of Grandma’s friends who lived in a small apartment. She was an old, fussy Russian woman with short, curly blond hair, who always wore red lipstick and blue eye shadow and smelled like flowers. Her apartment was filled with old furniture and many knickknacks, and she had the most beautiful collection of china figurines. They were everywhere: on side tables, bookshelves, windowsills, and even on kitchen counters. I especially loved the angels with their delicate wings. She served her tea in the most beautiful china cups I had ever seen. They were white and shiny and had pink roses painted on them. She put tiny golden spoons next to each cup. I loved to drop sugar cubes in my tea and watch the bubbles rise as I stirred it.
    I asked her why she had so many angels, and she told me that this was because they kept her company. She asked me if I knew that everyone had a guardian angel, and I said my grandma had told me this. Looking at me with her pale blue eyes, which seemed strangely large from behind her thick glasses, she explained that we all have seen our guardian angel but we have forgotten what our angel looks like.
    “Now, tell me,” she said, “has it ever happened to you that when you were about to do something kind of bad, you felt a whisper in your heart, telling you not to do it?”
    “Yes…I think so.” I thought of the ashtray.
    “Well, that was your angel speaking to you. And the more you listen, the more you’ll hear.”
    I wished I could remember my angel. My grandma’s friend suggested that I should take a look at all her figurines, and she assured me that my angel looked like the one I liked the most. I examined the figurines for awhile and finally found my favorite: a handsome young man wearing a long white robe. I took it to Grandma to show it to her, and she said that it didn’t exactly look like an angel because it didn’t have any wings, but I told her that his wings were invisible.
    “You can keep it, dear,” Grandma’s friend offered, and I was delighted.

    Grandma took me to the park every day. There was a big park, named Park-eh Valiahd, about a twenty-minute walk from home. We spent hours exploring it, admiring its ancient trees and fragrant flowers. To cool down on a hot summer day, we sat on a bench and licked ice cream cones. In the center of the park was a shallow pool with a fountain in the middle, which shot the water high into the air, and many small fountains gurgled around it. I always stood next to the pool and let the wind spray the water over me. Around the pool, there were bronze statues of young boys, each of them different from the other. One stood tall, looking toward the sky, another knelt next to the water, looking into it as if searching for a precious lost item, the next held a brass stick toward the water, and another had one leg poised in the air, as if he were ready to jump in. There was something terribly sad and lonely about these statues; they looked real but were perpetually frozen into a dark, solid state, unable to break free.
    The greatest fun was being on a swing. Grandma knew I liked to go very high, and she always pushed me as hard as she could. I loved the way the wind brushed my hair and the world disappeared when I was up in the air. In my small seven-year-old world, this was how life was going to be forever.
    One afternoon as I was running in the park, Grandma called me from a distance to say that it was time to go home, but she had called me by the wrong name; she had called me Tamara. Confused, I ran to her and asked her who Tamara was. She apologized to me and said it was better if we headed back home because it was too hot for her, so we started to walk. She looked tired, which was odd, because I had never seen her sick or tired before.
    “Who’s Tamara?” I asked