Escape From Paradise. Majid MD Amini
you're not a dream, that you are real, as real as a rose in the garden. Your suffering admirer, Faramarz.”
She liked the words. It was the first time someone had expressed tender feelings with such poetic words to her, those beautiful innocent words, so different from the hollow ones she had memorized in her songs’ lyrics. With a sense of pleasure suspended in her mind she went to the window again, but he was gone and with him those piercing hungry eyes. She was no longer angry, only excited, and even elated, and that was all that mattered to her.
She hid her nervousness from her mother and busied herself the rest of that day. She kept quiet through the night and the rest of the following morning. She waited for him in the same room at the same time, and as soon as he appeared at the window, a thrill went through her body. They introduced themselves to each other only with indulgent smiles. Then, in the scorching heat of that summer afternoon, while everyone else slept, they expressed their feelings of interest for one another with unspoken words, and later with messages thrown through their windows. Over days, she returned his many tender love poems with many of her own.
A few weeks later, inevitably, when neither of them could stand being so far apart, they risked it. As Helen snored in a room on the first floor, Zee-Zee opened the front door and let him in; her heart pounded in her chest with excitement. Even before setting foot in Zee-Zee’s house, he knew he was very much in love with her.
Faramarz, a nineteen-year-old, was the son of a wealthy and influential government official. He was a university student, a tall handsome and shy romantic boy.
A combination of fear and anticipation pushed Zee-Zee’s heart rate higher. It was as if she had run non-stop for miles. She felt her heart was about to burst any second. She searched for his hand, held it tight, and tiptoed upstairs to the solitude of her room. The words he had lined up, the many beautiful verses, love poems, and poetic phrases that he had memorized from books to express his feelings, to mesmerize her, jammed up in his dry mouth. He felt a tremor in his heart once he was alone and a few inches from her.
Shyly, unable to even blink, she sat on the edge of the bed, and he sat next to her nervously. He struggled to contain his passion and act properly as he had repeatedly told himself he would do, but soon he lost control. When, with the slow but tenacious journey of his hands, he touched her soft hair, she trembled, turned and submitted her hot swollen lips to his, and those two moist rose-petal lips melted into his. He became the first man who sucked at her tasty neck, soft as satin and smooth as white marble. He undressed her trembling body with his shaking hands. Inhaling the scent between her breasts and kissing them, and then sliding his lips downward intoxicated him enough to lose all his inhibitions. Intoxicated herself, she submitted herself to him without any resistance. Then the non-calculated movements of his fingertips cruised over the curves of her velvet naked body, and he followed the tracks of his touches with gentle kisses. When his hands reached the mounds of her breasts, he licked the sweetness of her soft skin. And then, the sensation of her soft silky pubic hair under his fingers, the wetness, the aroma that he inhaled, drove him to the edge of insanity. They soon became one; under the influence of their desires, euphoric, basking in the tender glow of passion that raced through their tender bodies. The intense ecstasy of their union was license enough to allow them to ignore the possibility of future regret.
After that encounter, it was literarily impossible for him not to visit her almost every afternoon in the sanctuary of her room, which felt like an undisturbed Garden of Eden to both. They had fallen in love even before they became physically intimate, but after a few weeks of lovemaking, when the uncertainties vanished from their hearts they began to carve a future for themselves in their innocent minds as all young lovers do.
The ecstasy they compacted into those three brief months of daily unions was enough to last them a lifetime. But it had to come to an end, and that began to happen when Zee-Zee excitedly told her mother about Faramarz and the fact that she was pregnant. Expecting a volcanic eruption of anger when she broke the news to her mother, she was stunned by Helen’s receptive attitude and later by her joyful reaction. Helen welcomed the relationship provided he would send his parents to formally ask permission to marry her. Happily Zee-Zee mentioned her mother's wishes to Faramarz, who optimistically promised to tell his father immediately.
Intoxicated with plenty whisky and with a cigar in his hand, Faramarz’s father seemed to be in a good mood the following day when his son broke the news to him. The old man took the news and the request furiously. Not wasting any time, he immediately went to see Helen, but not to ask for the hand of her daughter, only to tell her that his son would not be allowed to marry Zee-Zee.
“My lovely baby loves your boy, sir,” Helen pleaded as she offered him the sofa on which to sit.
Refusing to sit, standing in the middle of the living room, Faramarz’s father replied angrily, “Love has nothing to do with it! What had happened between those two was just filthy sex! Your goddamn girl wiggled her cute ass at him so much that he lost control. Who wouldn’t? What do you expect from a hot-blooded healthy boy? He took her to bed and made her pregnant. It happens all the time, but it doesn’t mean they should run off and get married! Look, I’m going to give it to you straight. My boy and your daughter are not from the same class. They can’t get married, period!” The man expressed what was on his mind as clearly and as candidly as anyone could.
“What are we gonna to do about baby, sir? It’s your son’s baby after all.” Helen presented the second reason in her arsenal as to why the marriage should take place, keeping the real one to herself – yearning to upgrade her social class, to attain more public respectability.
“I don’t give a damn! I am not going to allow a whore to destroy my boy’s future. Get an abortion! Otherwise, I will cause so much trouble for you both that you’ll wish you had never left your deh [village]! I will destroy you! Do you understand?” The high-class man conveyed his hard feelings to her with those ice-cold words. His threat was working, for even tough-as-nails Helen was visibly frightened. He left not knowing Zee-Zee listened to all those harsh words from behind the door. With a heart full of love for Faramarz, she decided to run away with him the next day and had no doubt that he would welcome the suggestion to elope. But Faramarz’s finger never touched the doorbell of Zee-Zee’s door again, nor did poor naive Zee-Zee ever lay her sad and anxious eyes on that handsome innocent face. Only later, by bribing his servant, did she sadly discover that he had been sent to school in Europe. She ran upstairs to the same room where once their love had bloomed like flowers in spring, but was now washed away in the flood of her tears.
Helen convinced Zee-Zee to abort her baby on the grounds that otherwise it would ruin her career; and besides, Faramarz's father, under any circumstance would not allow the baby to be born. Zee-Zee was overwhelmed with despair, disillusioned. One dark cold night in November, in an abandoned house on the floor of an empty room lit with a flashlight, she submitted herself to an abortion. She lost her baby and part of herself. That was how she was welcomed into the reality of adulthood. She was no longer the little girl who loved to curl her little hands and twist her little body and sing sweet songs. Her innocence was utterly drained from her. The natural smile, the unspoiled face, and the eagerness to please everyone were all gone. She became bitter. Convinced that she was different from others when she was a kid, she now discovered an unbearable painful truth, that her acquired fortune and fame could not fill the gap. That icy reality intensified her bitterness. She was changed.
About a week later, in an early morning hour Zee-Zee was stunned to see Faramarz's father secretly entering her house. Later, looking through the keyhole, she found her nude mother on the edge of her bed on her knees being mounted by the man. The most nauseating part of the scene was all the noises she was making as if she was having the time of her life. The repulsive scene ignited something inside her – a flame of madness. An uncontrollable wrath, so foreign to her, erupted within her. She wanted to scream, but her cry only shattered in her throat. Her heart carried a sorrow as vast as the vastness of her broken dreams and changed her attitude toward men and her mother permanently. If, in the past, she would only known men as creatures to be entertained by her dances and songs, she now thought of them as exploitive, deceitful, hypocrites, toxic who only used women for their self-indulgent filthy pleasure.
She began to despise