The Inevitable Rape
By Mamak Nourbakhsh
A branch of the Alborz Mountain Range, Tochal, boasting a magnificent peak at 3966 meters above sea level, adorns northern Tehran and serves as a refuge to over- stressed, traffic-besieged Tehranis. Sitting on the southern face of the Alborz, Tochal extends from the north west to the south east. Her own southern flank watches over Tehran gracing the city with numerous ridges and offering a welcoming refuge to the residents of a metropolis choking on what is fast becoming the world’s most dangerously air polluted city.
Although arid in most areas, this somewhat parched mountain range covets a spiritual haven: the Darake trail. The endless waterfalls and single river that run through this trail make Palangchal, a peak standing at 2550 meters, a wonderfully relaxing and inviting trek to those who seek an easy ramble and a socially stimulating environment secluded from the forces that dominate black clad, dour faced Tehran.
It was these very factors that first enticed me, a most sedentary person, into approaching Darake. I had not only grown exhausted of the endless monotony of nagging about the never changing life of Iranians rampant in all social circles of this city but I had also reached that ripe age when one’s love of oneself slowly begins to transform into a love of nature and greater humanity for it is the beginning of that final path to the acceptance of one’s physical and biological limitations: 45.
For years I had heard stories of countless treks in Darake as my daughter had come home on innumerable Thursday afternoons to tell me of her encounters with a never ending stream of intellectuals she had met and shared a dizi or kebab with in her beloved Darake. Omran and Seyyed, two teahouses where she regularly enjoyed bowls of aromatic saffron topped rices, had become regular names in our household for she gave me no respite reminding me how short my dishes fell to those of her beloved teahouses in the peaks of Tehran mountain ranges. And yet she did not just torment me with the food but also with her tales of stimulating intellectual discussions she had shared with the frequenters of those teahouses. Eventually, I had come to believe that any civilized Iranian living in insipid Tehran must visit Darake and at the very least enjoy a treat of mulberries or steaming lima beans depending on the season.
So one Thursday afternoon, five respectable years after my divorce, I set out to prove that I too belonged to that limited group of civilized people residing in my city. At that time, to me people simply meant the man of my life for little did I then realize that he had not as yet been, and probably never would be, born of either man or woman.
It was a warm March morning of 2002 when I militantly donned my Adidas sneakers, the omnipresent fake Nike cap that adorns all cap shops in this city and my black Islamic robes to begin an inept attempt at my first trek. Somehow having just given up smoking two packs of Winston’s a day was doing little to help me advance up what was to me undoubtedly the most treacherous mountain trek the world had to boast in the history of all mankind. By the time I had reached the beginning of the gentle upward slope at the foot of the mountain I was not only exhausted but my legs ached, I was puffing like a steam train and apart from a few beggars who had assailed me for money and managed to distract me from what to them must have seemed like the divine comedy of a deranged middle aged matron pretending to be climbing the Everest itself there was precious little sign of those civilized people and even less of anything inviting enough that would possess me to put my life and soul in such danger as to ever return to this collaboration of God and man for the destruction of the human body and spirit.
But I did go back.
Not once but endlessly over the following years.
From that very first encounter with her, Darake wound her way under my skin and into my life to cleanse every part of me as my addiction to her and to the way she simply wiped my frantically teeming brain of all thoughts as I ploughed my way to her summit grew.
Somehow the next Thursday, cursing myself for even daring to venture on such insanity again, I dragged my still aching spirit out of bed and once more donned my primitive hiking attire and trudged out to face my fate believing that I would find him who had not been born on the slopes of my destiny winding up that God forsaken mountain.
But then a strange thing began to happen to me.
As I worked my way step after tormented step up those gentle slopes something that I could not describe began to take hold of me. At the time I had no idea what was happening. All I knew was that upon waking on Thursday mornings I could feel an unknown force literally drag me to Darake, making the need in me to simply be with her ever stronger.
Within a month, I found myself looking forward to Thursdays and to the opportunity to take off from the life of no tomorrows to forget myself in the arms of the streams and waterfalls she would lay out for me to gorge my thirsting soul with. At first it was enough for me to just sit in her teahouses like thousands of other Tehranis and sip tea, enjoy fresh walnuts or other Iranian treats. My poor middle aged legs needed time to strengthen as did the rest of my body need to develop enough stamina for future hikes.
But soon I wanted more.
The teahouses stopped being interesting; the food simply became repetitious and in their stead a longing to go one stop higher possessed me.
By the end of that first year nothing short of sitting outside the drab Palangchal shelter whose crude stone and metal exterior stands in shrill contrast to its magnificent surroundings of waterfalls and snow capped mountains as it marks the very point where a dirt trail quickly gives way to a stony trek would quench my thirst. One summer afternoon, sitting at the summit of such beauty and watching the sun set, it suddenly dawned on me why 20,000 Tehranis face wind, sleet, snow or brilliant sunshine each and every week of the year with only one aim in mind, a solitary goal: the summit of one of the most benevolent peaks of Iran.
Although I diligently set out to climb Darake in an almost reverential weekly rite I never did find those civilized people and soon that thought, like so many that had ruled me for so long, fell away. Instead there rose the magnificence of the mountains with their miraculous capacity to take in, comfort and cure so many of us and to entertain us every day of the year with a novel miracle of beauty and perfection.
However, there was one thing that didn’t fade away: a need to share what had become a mystical experience for me with another person. Sharing an experience with a loved one always heightens the experience and graces it with a certain magic. So it was difficult for me to think there was no one for me to share what had become an extremely important part of my personal life with.
I had tried to share it with my daughter but as a parent I had committed the classic mistake of not realizing that regardless of how close we are to our children we are eons ahead of them in experience. It takes a certain number of years and life experiences to be humbled by the majesty of nature. That is not to say that the young can’t be thus humbled but that in order to submit oneself to the power of nature one first needs to be humbled as only age, the decline of physical strength and beauty, and the learning of loss can bring about.
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One early afternoon in October 2007 I received a phone call from a woman called Maryam Seifi who claimed to be a Swedish Iranian just back from Sweden. She was calling to set a time to meet me. Due to the art gallery, the translations and the fact that although I had never actually gotten the residency of any western country, I was one of those few Iranians who had grown up and lived somewhere in the west before returning to Iran right after the Revolution. Therefore, over the years many expats who returned have called me to ask for help or advice about one thing or another and I am quite used to the situation so when Ms. Seifi asked to meet I immediately set a time for the following evening.
Promptly, at seven o’clock the doorbell rang, an impossible occurrence in Iran. After living here for thirty three years I have still not gotten used to the diligence Iranians put into not being punctual, a fact that still frustrates me to this day. So when Ms. Seifi rang the bell promptly at seven my first reaction was surprise and the second was that I immediately decided that I liked her even before she had climbed up the three flights of stairs to my apartment.
Maryam was a woman of about my own age who, again unlike Iranian women but very much like myself, had committed the unspeakable crime of wearing her age with grace and keeping her silver hair. We are a nation of appearances and there is little more frustrating to many Iranians than age or lack of wealth. In the case of the former evil, as a woman one is reminded of how old one is promptly at forty when every shop keeper in the city begins addressing one as ‘mother’ to be topped by an endless stream of jokes regarding ‘aging women’, a fact often including women even as young as thirty. As for the latter evil, Iranians carry an insatiable thirst for BRANDS. Any piece of sticker with English writing on it that can be stuck to any article of clothing immediately turns the said article into a treasure to be sought and paid dearly for. Hence, it’s close to impossible to buy anything in this country without a label on it and Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton… stickers and tags are stuck to goods ranging from milk bottles to cars… to anything the ingenious Chinese decide to dump into this economy of brand starved shopaholics.
But Maryam had none of this about her. She was dressed in simple, tagless grey pants with an even simpler grey sweater, ordinary handbag and shoes and the oh so lovely grey streaks. What struck me most about her, however, were her eyes: one of the most penetrating and kind pairs of eyes I have ever seen. I instantly took to her, asked her in and offered her the regular hospitalities of Iranians: the sacrosanct istekan of tea, before I settled in the sofa next to hers to see what it was I could do for her.
She explained to me that she, like so many others of our generation, had left Iran just after the Revolution and had settled abroad; in her case it was Sweden. She had a degree in behavioral therapy and had recently decided to come back to her native Iran. As she spoke I enjoyed the fervor with which she talked of her past, her deceased husband, her son and of her job. This woman had a charisma I had rarely known before. Within minutes of encountering her one can’t help but feel one has known her all one’s life. Later, I realized why: Maryam has an almost superhuman capacity to love and soothe. In later years and during the course of many travels together, I got to know this side of her very well. She is a born care giver, a fact that she is innocently unaware of just as she is unaware of how it draws and bonds people to her.
Realizing that I had not as yet understood what it was that I could do for Maryam, she promptly sat back in her seat and declared that she had come to see me because a mutual friend had told her that she and I would become close friends. Upon hearing this Maryam had immediately taken my phone number from the said friend and called me.
So here she was presenting herself and offering me one of the most precious friendships of my life.
Although her behavior was un-Iranian to the extreme I liked her approach and instantly took to her. Before the following weekend , I called Maryam, explained my adventures in Darake to her and asked if she would like to join me for a hike. To my joy she not only accepted but told me that she had in fact been a member of the Mountain Climbing Federation of Iran in her youth and had been preparing to climb the Everest but that alas love and emigration had cut that dream short.
The next Thursday and many, many Thursdays after, Maryam and I would walk the trails of Darake together. Sometimes we were alone; other times we had friends who came with us for a few climbs or only one. We shared endless laughs as various people we came across tried to impress us by boasting of their hiking skills. Initially these meetings would thrill us. In our excitement and believing we had found him who had not been born, we would invite the said people to join us on our hikes only for those events to end in total failures as all that we did achieve was the chance to drag down some sixty year old people with various ailments and conditions who for love of impressing the opposite sex had ventured where none in their condition should have. In the years that followed we found ourselves rescuing people who had just been released from the CCU a mere forty eight hours earlier, ones with extreme arthritis who had come to Omran only to find themselves unable to get back down long past midnight thus presenting Maryam and me with the disagreeable task of literally carrying them down between the two of us and many, many more. But the one thing that we did get was an affinity that bonded us together. This union was based on the ability to savor the sheer rapture that Darake in her exuberance and majesty filled our hearts with. What started in Darake through sheer love of nature quickly became a fast bonding friendship that kept us together as we ooohed and aaahed over each and every scene that the beauty of the mountains drew out of us. Although I had not found my civilized person I had found a friend whose presence completed my joy of sitting before a setting sun at the top of some mountain range, away from man and beast, soaking our souls in a union of complete oneness with each other and with that element in nature that demands true catharsis. Knowing that for oceans of time before us and for oceans more after us these mountain ranges would soak the souls of those who would come to bask in their beauty and knowing that they would allow us mortals to transcend not only death but life itself filled us with peace and gratitude. And this Maryam and I shared.
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Then on February 2, 2011 the joke was on me.
It was snowing that day. When we approached the Darake parking lot there were hardly any cars in sight proving that weather conditions had convinced most but the die-hards or the mentally insane not to venture out onto the trails. With the over confidence typical of those whose hubris has extended far beyond that of any person with minimum sanity, Maryam and I determinedly parked the car, donned our gear and braced ourselves for our hike. It had been snowing in Tehran for ten days and weather conditions were such that snow would turn to slush by midday only to freeze over in the evening and night. By the following morning the rest of the snow that had fallen would innocently hide the treacherous ice of the previous night.
Sure of ourselves and of our skills, we ploughed up the mountain for two hours. Eventually some of my sanity returned and convinced me that it was beyond my regular levels of foolishness to attempt to climb as high as Maryam could. In spite of all the brave faces I put on and all my foolhardy fronts both Maryam and I well knew that I was nowhere near her match. In her natural generosity she often allowed me to keep up the pretense but this time even Maryam’s generosity had found its limits. The final decision was that I would sit in the shelter and wait for her to make the rest of her climb alone.
It took her two more hours to climb the peak and return. Meanwhile I was sipping tea fully engrossed in Dr. Bigdeli’s interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita.
With Maryam’s return we quickly downed some stew to warm us and prepare us for the descent before dark.
Plowing through the billowing snow we chit chatted and kept up a steady quick witted conversation when suddenly I found myself in mid-air. I knew there was only one thing for me to do: keep my head as far up as I could before I crashed hoping that I would be spared cracking it on stones jutting out of the mud soaked ice. I had seen a puddle and thinking it to be water I had put my foot right into it. It was not water: it was ice.
Even before I crashed I knew I had broken my ankle. I was fully aware of my entire weight bearing down on an ankle that had been bent one hundred and eighty degrees backward and now lay mangled underneath me.
As is the norm with mountaineers everywhere, and particularly with those in Iran, within seconds I was staring up into a dozen faces peering down on me as I lay sprawled out and fully drenched on the snow. All I knew was that my right boot was rapidly becoming too small for my foot and needed to be taken off. Maryam, making sure that I was conscious and coherent, had run for emergency help. One of the mountaineers helped me remove my boot and my ankle looked more like an over ripe, rotting potato than a human ankle. This mountaineer was a lady doctor with a love for her fellow men that would shame Hippocrates himself. She sat with me for forty five minutes cradling my rapidly swelling ankle in the air and talking to me to ensure that I didn’t lose consciousness in that cold and to keep my foot elevated to limit the swelling. Her name is Dr. M and I will forever be indebted to her.
Close to two hours later, two men carrying a much worn emergency kit and shoes that could only spell tragedy with the height of their heels gingerly tip toed their way toward us. To all our amazement they were the paramedics! Taking one look at my poor ankle they quickly confirmed that it was indeed broken, a diagnosis that failed to impress any of us.
My first and much paniced reaction was to ask about the stretcher.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ piped out the senior medic, ‘we deal with cases like this every day. You just relax and leave it to us.’
That was just what I was afraid of. In Iran one quickly learns that unless the patient’s life is inconsequential one can never ‘just leave it up to them’!
Almost miraculously a metal chair appeared out of nowhere and the senior medic announced that that would be the contraption I was to be taken down the mountain in. For the life of us neither Maryam nor I nor Dr. M understood how but the senior medic seemed to be in full command which left us little choice but to ‘leave it to them’.
I was circumspectly lifted and placed in the chair. My only concern was to keep my ankle as elevated as I possibly could.
Again, almost miraculously, a teenage Afghan boy, with the same tragedy spelling heels, appeared on the scene and was told to lift the legs of the chair as the medics each held the top of the chair and thus was I air borne.
Three men in pointed shoes and sharp high heels that would wreak havoc on the roughest dance floor carried me down the trail. They could barely keep their own balance and yet they had to keep all of mine as well. Meanwhile Dr. M followed constantly threatening them about dropping me with Maryam fast behind. I am much surprised that my dear doctor survived the ordeal of that day as she seemed ready to thrust my three would be saviors off the cliffs each time they slipped making me lose balance in my quickly disintegrating chair. Fifteen minutes into the ordeal the saviors committed what to Dr. M was crime enough for decapitation: they dropped me on my head.
Having lost his balance and my being just too heavy for him my young Afghan worker simply did not have the strength to hold up his end of the chair any longer and had let go. Trying to prevent my fall one of the medics had tried to grab the bottom of the chair which had in turn tilted it and landed me on my head.
Suddenly I remembered my father’s famous saying, ‘when the rape is inevitable sit back and enjoy it’. On that fateful snowy day in the throes of Darake’s sleet and snow I had little choice but to ‘enjoy it’.
Eventually, I was brought off the mountain and hauled into a waiting ambulance. At this stage I was more concerned about Dr. M’s health than my own and therefore begged her to go home and rest promising that Maryam would call her from the hospital to let her know how things proceeded.
Once inside the ambulance the senior paramedic made sure I was comfortably tucked in and warm. As he was attending to all this I turned to my left and low and behold there it was: an emergency stretcher locked to the side of the ambulance. Stupefied I asked why they hadn’t brought it up the mountain to put me in and was simply told, ‘we’re not allowed to use that unless someone breaks their neck.’
As I had clearly not done so there had, in his opinion, been little need for the life saving device.
Next, the man pulled out an injection filled with a urine yellow liquid. Again I shrank back, ‘what’s that for?’ I quipped.
‘Your pain,’ came the indifferent reply.
‘But I don’t have any pain,’ I protested a little more confidently.
With even more indifference the syringe was capped and flung next to me suggesting that I could inject myself with it for all he cared. A noise from the outside made the paramedic get out of the vehicle to join his colleague. Leaving Maryam and myself in the car alone we started to laugh. It was just one of those times in life when there is absolutely nothing else one can do. We were left there for a full twenty minutes before we realized we weren’t even moving so Maryam got up to go find out why.
She worked her way out of the ambulance to see the two paramedics using a stick to lift what looked very much like a wet bare electric wire dangling from a post off the antenna of the ambulance. When she asked what was going on one of the men promptly replied, ‘you get in and sit with the patient. We’re trying to get this wire off so the ambulance doesn’t get electrocuted!’
Finally, the menacing wire was disengaged and the ambulance began to move when I suddenly realized that it was late Thursday afternoon when no specialists work. By and large over the weekends and on holidays specialists take vacations as well they should but only interns are left to take care of patients.
‘Which hospital are you taking me to?’ I queried.
‘Shohada,’ came the immediate reply.
‘But that’s a university hospital and only junior interns are on call now. Why can’t you take me to Akhtar? It’s an orthodepic hospital with an emergency ward.’
‘We’re a government ambulance so in the case of an emergency we can only take people under thirty there,’ came the hasty rebuttal.
‘So what happens to people over thirty?’ I was clearly not giving up.
‘They stay at home and don’t break limbs on Thursday afternoons,’ was the silencing retort.
Finally realizing that I had truly better sit back and enjoy it I embraced my ill-starred fate and was rushed off to Shohada where a group of junior interns had more fun about a middle aged matron breaking a limb on a Thursday evening, no less, than they had concern for my poor ankle.
I gave in to their goadings and was finally released in a temporary cast to see me through till Saturday when the specialists came back to the hospitals. Meanwhile I was warned to give up trekking and to tend to my grandchildren.
Little did they know it was the very mountains they were chiding me away from that had become my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, my great great grandchildren…