Pop! Pop! Pop!
We ran to the living room to look outside. “Get away from the windows right now!” Baba said, storming inside at that very moment. He must have left the radio station where he worked early. “There are mobs of people in the streets. It’s a riot around Vanak Square.”
“What?” Maman said. “So close?”
“What are they doing?” I asked. “What’s a mob? What are those sounds?”
“There’s no time! Hurry, over here.” He motioned to the bathroom off the kitchen. “Get inside. We’ll wait until the noise dies down.”
Maman and I scurried into the bathroom. Seeing my father so nervous scared me more than all the sounds around us. He was talking to himself.
“There are no windows in the bathroom. We should be safe. Besides, we’re on the third floor. I’m pretty sure gunshots can’t reach that high up.”
He rolled the kitchen’s round table on its side and placed it in front of the bathroom to create a barricade. Then he closed the door.
We crouched under the bathroom sink and huddled in silence.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
“Baba, what’s going on?” I asked.
“Shh, Nioucha, not now,” Baba said.
I looked at Maman. She had squeezed her eyes shut as she held on to Baba’s hand. I had no idea what was happening, but my heart slammed in my chest so hard I had to gulp for air.
I wondered if all this had anything to do with the man with epilepsy who had had a seizure right under our living room window last week. Neighbors had run into the street to help him. Our landlord put a pencil in his mouth to stop him from biting his tongue. The landlord’s wife put a pillow under his head so he wouldn’t bang it against the pavement. I was terrified by the white foam coming out of his mouth and his eyes rolling back inside his head.
But these sounds had nothing to do with someone having an epileptic seizure. They seemed more serious and much scarier.
We heard a long series of loud bangs, some close, others far away. I kept straining my ears to gauge the distance of the racket.
From my vantage point under the sink, I counted 48 yellow tiles and 26 brown tiles going horizontally between the bathroom door and the shower. My eyes wide, I didn’t blink.
After what felt like a long time, the noise died down. I relaxed into Baba’s lap and began to doze off until Maman whispered to Baba, “What’s going on out there?”
“I think this is IT for the shah.”
Ah! Now the conversation I’d overheard at the party my parents hosted the week before began to make sense. Maman had sent me to bed, but I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t understand what I was hearing because people kept referring to “he” and I didn’t know who “he” was. Now I knew they had meant the shah. The tension in everyone’s voices had kept me glued to my door and awake long after I should have been asleep.
One of Baba’s friends had said, “Everyone says he is corrupt and a puppet of the United States.”
“People—his enemies—have been saying this for a long time,” Baba said.
“But he’s more unpopular than ever,” the friend continued. “There are more and more demonstrations against him around the country. I think this is serious.”
“It’ll probably blow over,” Baba had said. “Maybe he’ll leave the country for a while, and wait until things settle down.”
Remembering what I’d heard that night, I tried to keep still, pretending to be asleep in Baba’s arms.
Maman said, “What do you think will happen now?”
A note of hysteria crept into her voice. I couldn’t help stirring and opening my eyes. Baba shook his head, clasped me tighter against him, and said, “I’m not sure, but let’s hope that was the end of it.”
He stood up and opened the bathroom door. After listening for a few minutes, he said, “It stopped.”
He rolled the table back to its place in the kitchen, but Maman and I still hadn’t moved.
“Come on, my girls, it’s over now.”
We peeled ourselves out from under from the bathroom sink. Baba called family and friends to make sure they were safe. I sat in the TV room with Maman and Baba, afraid to stay alone in my room and trying to focus on my homework again. When Baba turned on the television, he drew his breath in and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. I dropped my pencil and stared at the screen.
The news showed hundreds of people jamming the streets. On the screen, white smoke billowed and chants rang through the air, though I couldn’t distinguish words. People milled around in the intersection. Then suddenly came the same loud bangs we’d heard in our apartment. The crowd panicked and ran in all directions. Then there was black smoke. I didn’t recognize this area of Tehran. In the corner of the screen a van appeared, carrying soldiers with big guns. I began to feel nauseated from the jerky movement of the camera, but then Maman turned off the TV.
“It’s past your bedtime,” she said.
I went to bed, but I couldn’t fall asleep. The sounds we’d heard, those scary bangs, kept ringing in my ears.
When Maman came in to kiss me good night, she said, “It’s all right that you didn’t finish your homework. That’s completely understandable. I can write a note to your teacher if you want.”
“Oh, I forgot I never finished it,” I said.
“Well, it’s been a…difficult day,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I guess so. But, what’s going to happen?”
“I wish I knew, chérie. It’s all a bit confusing right now.”
“But I’m scared,” I said.
“I’ll stay with you until you fall asleep.”
She hadn’t done that in years, but I felt relieved to have her there with me.
The next day, most teachers, including mine, didn’t come to school. With so few teachers present, the principal announced over the loudspeaker: “Good morning, children. Because of the unusual circumstances we find ourselves in today, so long as you behave yourselves, you are free to play games or study until your parents pick you up.”
—
Hearing the principal’s voice brought me back to my first day of school in Iran, three years earlier. I had stood outside my firstgrade classroom crying, clutching Baba’s hand and begging him not to leave. Dozens of children filled the courtyard and played under the large willow trees.
My new school was called Razi. It was for French-Iranian kids like me, or for Iranian kids who wanted to have a dual-language education. We had been given a tour of it when we came for registration. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was the biggest school I had ever seen.
Before moving to Iran we lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At the time of my school tour we had been in Iran only a few weeks. Back in Pittsburgh, Baba had explained to me that he wanted to live near his family, that he missed his homeland. I was sad to leave the friends I had made in my preschool class. My preschool was in a room at the back of a church in our neighborhood.
By contrast, Razi had a large swimming pool, four tennis courts, a track field, a gymnasium, and a theater. The school was divided into several areas for preschool, kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high school. As soon as the bell rang, the children rushed into their classes, leaving Baba and me alone in the concrete hallway. With a gentle nudge toward the classroom, Baba said, “I’ll wait right outside this door until recess, all right?”
“But I don’t belong here!” I