A Mirror Garden

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

"Who are you talking to?" As he squared his shoulders I fled, pulling the chador tight across my face and mumbling through it that I would head for my mother's house. I ran across the street and hailed a taxi.

Half an hour later, Mostafa showed up at my mother's door with a proud grin under the blood that was streaming from his nose: "Khanom, you got me into a good fight!" I fussed over his wounds as my mother groaned over my ill-conceived disguise. I had forgotten to remove my makeup. A chador worn with lipstick and eye shadow was anything but a signal of modesty; it was the normal advertisement for a prostitute.

Eventually the collection grew to nearly sixty paintings, though both my own family and Abol's criticized me mercilessly for wasting money on this "garbage that smells of opium." Two artists figured especially prominently in the collection, Hossein Ghollar Aghassi and Mohammad Modaber. Both had earned a considerable reputation as coffeehouse painters in Tehran, but to my eyes Modaber was the better.

(It was he who had done the paintings at the coffeehouse near Sepahsalar Mosque.) When I heard about an exceptionally large pardeh that he had painted, I immediately sent Mostafa to the owner to make an offer, sight unseen. He refused to sell it.

I went myself and begged him. In all my searching, I had never seen such a masterly work. It was more than five meters wide, divided into small panels that portrayed, in sequence, the complete story of the martyrdom at Kerbala. The story unfolded in passionate detail with a surrealistic vision of the universe emanating from this core of the Shi'ite faith.

The owner was a deeply religious man and feared to see the painting fall into the hands of an unbeliever. I myself feared that if it ever got into the hands of a dealer, believer or not, it would soon be sold out of the country. For a year I tried sincerely, over and over, to win his trust with every angle I could think of. It was no use. Finally, I realized that I would have to lie, even if I boiled in hell in the same pot as Reza Shah.

My sister Sediqeh, who was bound to a wheelchair by then, agreed to back up my story. I told him that I had vowed to donate the painting to a shrine in hopes that my prayers for Sediqeh's recovery would be answered. At this he finally agreed to sell. The painting was mine, the particular shrine became vague, and poor Sediqeh stayed in her wheelchair. What will happen in hell remains to be seen.

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

Her rare and iconic beauty opened doors for her — which might be why Shahroudy often seems to realize things about herself only when they are affirmed by others. She claims that it was only over time, by deducing that there must be some reason she was in demand for dances, that she came to think of herself as pretty: "If I was aware at all that I stood out in a crowd, I felt it awkwardly," she writes. "I was dark, all black hair and eyebrows, and I felt my difference as a darkness, a little cloud that shadowed me in brighter company."

It is around this ambiguity — such passivity in a woman of such vigor — that Shahroudy's own art seems to crystallize. The mirror is Shahroudy's favored art medium. She takes mirrors, has them cut into strips, and reconfigures them so they lose the usual straightforward address to the eye that we associate with mirrors, and reflect their own fractures and recombinations instead. She took this idea from the traditional mirror mosaics used in Shiite shrines in Iran; multiplying a depthless surface gives the surface depth – as if the mirrors are forced, by reflecting their own surfaces, to become more than mirrors.

In the same way, the multiplication of Shahroudy's energies and enthusiasms deepened her. When her marriage to Abol gave her entrée into Iranian society, she seized the moment to make a small place for herself in her country's history. Unlike, say, Farah Pahlavi, whose memoirs are an exercise in ancient regime resentment, Shahroudy has not allowed the past to either trap her in nostalgia or corner her into defensive bitterness. In every world she has traveled, she has never been petty. This is quite a feat, considering that many of the circles she traveled in are hothouses of pettiness. She labels one of her photographs — a study of herself with elbow thrust toward the camera, head turned to look straight at the lens, dress the height of unassuming chic — "A Woman in Full." The reader will come away from these pages agreeing wholeheartedly with that judgment.