These people used to live in the country sides, smaller cities. Now they, opportunists, had come to Tehran to get a piece of this pie. The population of Tehran had tripled since all these things started. All these men had become like an army of ants to attain something unattainable. They could not done this before. There were carpenters, farmers, construction workers, the seller of their farm's vegetables and fruits. Some poor, other poorer; they all had come for a piece of this; they all had come to be a Soldier of Allah.
Neda was in the middle of it, trying to cross the street for a piece of empty space, a mirage. Their Uzis, Kalashnikov few times caught in the sleeve of her coat. Her scarf fell down from her head. But there was not time to stop. She had been stopped for nineteen years. Now time was ripe to move.
She vaguely remembered Arianna's face from a few picture she had from her birth. She reflected: "I must get there now that she found me... I can't stop now. She may think that I'm not going..." She thought about how the religion had taken women back to the Stone Ages, and now all these women were chanting slogans for a religious leader that would certainly would govern with iron fist and would take women even further back. These religious people openly said that women's brains were half the size of men's. She did not want to go through the list of all the belittling and put downs that this religion already had for women. How was it that they were helping men to achieve this goal even more so?
Nineteen years ago when she was only seventeen years old, they ripped off her baby from her heart before she went to unconsciousness. She had never seen her daughter. Just a moment of bliss and a few pictures that her brother, Sohrab, had shot in hurry in the delivery room, were the only memory she had from her daughter. This was the first contact! Nineteen years of searching and living in anguish had come to end with a phone call the night before. She reflected the agony, the wretchedness that she had lived within all these years! She had portrayed all these bitterness, the way she was treated just because she was a woman in her art, writings and poetry. Why was it that in rare occasion of divorce (It didn't happen much at that time), man should get the child or the children? Why not have a fair share?
The poem she had written then suddenly came to her mind. Everyone told her that she had photographic memory. Her father used to admire her for that. As she was still trying to find a little space to push herself to the other side of the street, she began reciting that poem, which she had written it on the hospital bed. Those days were the beginning of her unbelievable career as a poet:
"My trust was gone from people and law!
And in entire town I only saw
The way they took out of my womb the light;
The way they closed my childish eyes to delight;
With their black law of what only men said.
And I felt the squirting blood;
I heard the stormy cloud;
And I understood that I must... must
To love madly without lust."
To Be Continued
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