I came to know fear very early in life, when I was five and a half on the day I went to school with my father. There was nobody in the playground except my father, the headmistress and I. The headmistress and my father were talking together.

"What is in there?" I asked.

"Hiss," my father said and continued to talk to the headmistress.

"What is in there, father?" I asked again.

"Hiss! Somebody is asleep there. Don't ask so many questions."

"Since last night?" I said in a low voice so as not to wake him up and then added, "Wow! He must be really sleepy. He has been sleeping since last night, wow!"

The headmistress was talking to my father.

"Father…" I said.

"Silence," my father said.

"Will I wake him up?" I asked.

My father and the headmistress were talking.

"Hiss, he will wake up," I said.

"No, he will not wake up," my father said.

I raised my voice and asked, "Never?"

My father was talking to the headmistress. I pulled his coat. "What is it? Yes, never," my father said.

"Is he dead? Then he must be dead," I said.

Nobody asked: "How do you know that if somebody sleeps and does not wake up, it would mean that he is dead?" Nobody asked: "Since when? How and from whom I have learned that word?" It was not necessary. . Everybody would learn and accept it one day; I learned it when I was five; some would learn it sooner and some later.

I peeped through the key hole. The place was not a basement, but it looked like a basement, dark and humid. In the middle there was a tomb, and the rest of the floor was covered with tiles, swept and cleaned. There was a candle-holder without a candle standing above the grave.

So, dying means sleeping, sleeping forever, sleeping in a dark, humid place, not waking up, not seeing the light, not playing.

I was scared. "Let's go father, let's leave this place."

And that tomb stayed with me for nine months of the year and for the following six years; for the whole period of my primary school; with its engraved marble stones, and its locked inlaid door, and the inscription on the tiles of its façade: the tomb of the school's founder, Amir Firooz Kuhi.

But the fear of the tomb was there only on that day and once more when we were rehearsing a play and I stayed at school until late at night. I was alone in the soundless playground of the school with the tomb. I ran the whole way to our home and fear was running with me shoulder to shoulder, sometimes before and sometimes behind me. For the rest of those six years, the tomb was there exactly like the six toilets, the tin water containers, like the little room of the old farrash [2] in a corner of the playground. It no longer provoked fear. Perhaps because in the midst of the clamor that the children created, the fear of death seemed meaningless; perhaps because in the silence of the classrooms, a more important fear inhabited our minds, a fear that at the beginning was not anything like the familiar, habitual fear of darkness, strange shadows, and nightmares of overfed nights.

I sat in the classroom and sucked my cheek from the inside to look like the teacher.

"What are you eating?" the teacher asked.

I looked around.

The teacher touched my forehead with the tip of her fingers and said, "I am talking to you. What are you eating?"

The soft inner flesh of my cheeks was lying comfortably between my teeth and I did not feel like letting it go. I just nodded my head.

"Are you dumb? Or did you leave your tongue at home? Speak up."

I let go of sucking the inner flesh of my cheeks and stared at her with astonishment.

The teacher seized my shoulders, shook me and said, "Would you speak or should I make you speak!"

I could not understand the cause of her anger. I had forgotten her question and what she wanted me to say. I was scared. I feared the teacher; I feared reaching school late; I feared not having a handkerchief and a glass for drinking water; I feared the piles of dictations waiting to be re-written; I feared exams. At school, I did not only have our singing teacher, our painting and calligraphy and sport teachers to fear, but if there was any empty space still remaining for fear and dread, it was filled with the fear of our headmistress and the supervisor. Later, the fear of homework and lessons became as familiar and habitual - as having a scar on the face or a sixth finger-- it was always there with me. Sometimes I regretted its presence, but most of the time I did not think about it.

Meanwhile there were other fears; unfamiliar, unknown.

The school was not far from our house. There was the school, then a carpentry and then Doctor Sheikh's house; opposite the carpentry was Vaziri Hospital, and then it was our house, and after that the pharmacy. Going to school meant running and returning home, hopping.

I was hopping and hitting a stone with the tip of my shoe. There was a big black car waiting in front of Vasiri Hospital. A few black-wearing people were standing there too. The hospital's porter was also there. The porter was a tall, stout man who had leprosy and his nose was just two big holes.

The porter opened the large iron door of the hospital. Four men passed by the black- wearing people and put the wheelbarrow that they were carrying on their shoulders on the back seat of the car. There was a white sheet covering the wheelbarrow. Nothing could be seen except a toe - white, cold, with a dark blue nail. The nose-less porter pushed the wheelbarrow into the car and pulled the sheet down. The toe disappeared; I thought that the formless heap under the sheet said, "Ah!"

I could not even run. In the silence of that black-wearing group, any movement was a sign of disrespect. It was like that moment of a dawn, a noon, an evening when the whole world seems still and immobile. The shopkeepers and passersby all looked perplexed. The four men who had brought the dead were lined up by the hearse. Only the nose-less porter did not respect the moment and like death hovering in the air, peered around. The black car started to move; it was the termination of the still moment of the dawn, the noon, the evening. The procession began. Everybody left. There were only the hospital porter, the weeping place of the black-wearing group and me.

"Why don't you go? It is over," the porter said.

I looked at the holes of his nose. I was paralyzed.

"Are you scared? One should fear the living, and not the dead," he added.

I was scared of the living; I was scared of the porter; I was scared of his huge nostrils; I was scared of his courage before death. I could not run. I could not walk. I dragged myself against the wall the whole way to our house. Once in the hallway, I vomited. The maid said, "She must have eaten a lot of cold food;" and she made me a glass of hot sugar water. While caressing me, my mother said, "Please don't eat so much junk."

>From then on, whenever I saw the nose-less porter, I started to run away. I felt scared and the fear stayed with me until the day that my father was trapped on the roof. I don't know why he had gone to the roof in the first place, but he could not climb down the wooden ladder.

"Climb down facing the ladder; don't look down," my mother shouted from below.

"I can't. My head is dizzy."

Everything sounded funny at first. But gradually a noticeable apprehension appeared on my mother's face and in her gestures. It was not funny anymore. Nobody could do anything, least of all my father. So they brought the nose-less porter. He climbed up the ladder and threw my father over his shoulders like a sac of flour and climbed down the ladder.

The next day, when I saw the porter, I greeted him while running, leaving the alley, the porter and the daylight behind. . And there was no more fear since that day.

For the next few years, fear was just an abstract noun, like intelligence, in the grammar book; like an atmospheric event, such as an earthquake or a volcanic eruption in the nature and geography books. It was absent, and if there, it belonged to others.

But it reappeared. It reappeared with love.

My father moved the notebook back and forth under my nose and in an angry voice he said, "What is this?"

"My journal! It is mine; why did you read it?" I asked.

"Be quiet!" he replied, and immediately started to read loudly, `I went to a movie with F. Then we went and had an ice-cream.'" At this point, he stopped and asked, "Who let you do that! Who is F? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

The feeling I had was not shame; it was fear. I had felt it even before that fight. In the cinema, we were sitting next to each other holding hands and our arms touched each other. We heard the people sitting behind us talking about disgrace and shame while eating their nuts. One of them mentioned the well-known proverb, "The young people of today have swallowed the shame and thrown up the dignity." Another said, "They have no shame; in front of everybody's eyes…" And yet another one said, "It would be very nice to beat them hard as much as possible."

Those sitting in the front row turned their heads around and hit each other with their elbows, showing us to each other. And the glances were more terrifying than words. They loosened the hands sewed to each other with their eyes; and they made the eyes gazing at each other, turn down; and they turned the pleasure of looking into fear.

And the fear stayed - the fear that I have done something wrong, something filthy - and devoured the love. The only memory left was the film that I did not watch and the ice-cream that melted. It started with the passion of two shadows accompanying each other from school to home, and it terminated with the connection of two eyes and the touching of two hands, and it never saw the mixed heat of two breaths and the soft contact of two bodies.

And when the subject of intimacy and love-making was formally brought up, it arrived without love; it arrived with the clergy and the Mullah and Arabic sermons. I moved to a new house and in that new house nothing was new except fears.

"Why did you say it like that?"

"Why did you see it like that?"

"Why did you do it?"

I was scared; I was scared of fights and quarrels. I was scared of love-less jealousy, a jealousy out of habit, out of sickness, out of contempt. I was scared that life was that and nothing else.

This fear was terminated with the clergy and the Mullah and a divorce sermon… And when I was alone and I thought: I am free, and I can continue breathing, living, working, and I have no claimant - everybody became my claimant.

The relatives stung their lips as a sign of regret and said, "Why did it have to happen this way?" And they planned for my next life.

The men asked meaningfully, "Why did she divorce?" And they were expecting of me.

The women asked sarcastically, "Why doesn't she marry?" And they were vengeful.

The colleagues said angrily, "Why doesn't she express herself?" And they sabotaged me.

And the local police station inquired, "Why is she alive?" And they ran an investigation.

Again the fear appeared-and this time it came forever.

So life means fear; fearing alienation from others; fearing policemen and sheriffs; not watching the sunshine; not breathing freely.

I am standing inside the tomb and the only outlet for air is the keyhole on the inlaid door; and the only light opening is the porter's nostrils; and what is surrounding me is silence and darkness and dampness. If there is a candle-holder, it is candle-less, and sweeping and mopping for the goal of outer purity only adds to woe and grief.

I am scared. I am scared of this fear that lasts and remains strange and seems endless, and as long as I am, I am going to be scared. I am scared of Being. I am sacred of Here and Now. I am scared.

1. Taken from "Mahshid Amirshaahi, Selected Stories," Toos Publishing House, Tehran, 1972.

2. The school servant and maintenance person.