Scent of Butterflies by Dora Levy Mossanen

Author:Dora Levy Mossanen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2013-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

chapter 20

I first saw similar cauldrons of vengeance on the television screen when I was seventeen years old.

It was 1979.

A stiff, stern seventy-eight-year-old Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini descended the stairs of a chartered Air France plane, knelt down, and kissed Iranian soil. His vengeful stare pierced through the jubilant crowd gathered in the airport to welcome him. After fifteen years of exile, first in Iraq, then Neauple-le-Chateau in the suburbs of Paris, his eminence arrived to the overwhelming chant of: “Agha amad! Our Sir is Here!”

“Vaveilla!” Mamabozorg had cried, in the ancient wail of mourning women. “He is back to take revenge on us all. Revenge!”

“It’s the end of us Jews!” Baba declared as he paced the room with cane and gloves in hand, as if ready to leave at the next sign of trouble. “We’ve lost the Shah, our only ally in the Muslim world.”

Baba had tears in his eyes as he vowed not to abandon everything to our cook, driver, and guard, naming just a few, who were waiting for us to flee, as many of our friends had, in order to confiscate our house, furniture, carpets, antiques, and cars, and then inform the authorities, whoever they might be at the time, of our vast real estate holdings and demand, in exchange for their loyalty, a portion of that fortune, too. The prospect of living among Muslim fundamentalists without the backing and support of the Shah sent a collective shudder through our core.

That day, in my parents’ home, crowded by antiques and art, the grounds adorned with ancient plane, mulberry, and walnut trees, Baba and Madar, Mamabozorg Emerald and Butterfly, who had joined us to find answers to her own future, pondered the possibility of the CIA arranging the royal couple’s return. This had happened in 1953 when the Shah and his second wife, Soraya, had fled Iran after a coup Dr. Mossadegh, prime minister of the time, had initiated. It could happen again, Insha’Allah. The Pahlavi dynasty is not dead.

“Such an uprising was inevitable.” Baba said, “First, the Shah turned into a cotton-brained megalomaniac, forgetting he was America’s puppet, after all. Second, he ignored the importance of religion to his people and of oil to the world. Once he did that, his fate was sealed.”

“Oil?” Butterfly asked in a reverential tone, as if afraid to agitate the sacred aura my father wore like a crown.

Baba brought fingers of both hands together like a prayer dome. “Black gold! A blessing and a curse.” In 1971 the Shah had raised the price of oil, stoking the first embers of the revolution. By 1973 he had quadrupled the price. By 1977 Iran was acquiring weapons as if preparing for World War III. Baba slapped his thigh with his gloves.

“Someone should have told him: ‘My man, America depends on oil. You depend on America. Don’t forget that the CIA reinstated you, or you would have rotted somewhere in exile. So don’t play political roulette with America. Don’t yank at the lion’s tail.’

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