Persian Brides Read online

  Sabiya Mansour, the grandest and severest of the aunts, being the eldest of her father’s daughters and able to read the zodiac signs, which made her opinion a final verdict, said that for the burnt espand seeds to achieve their purpose Flora had to yawn profusely and deeply, filling her lungs.

  ‘The more you yawn, child,’ Sabiya said, and a hush fell on all the aunts, ‘the more the rascal will dream horrible dreams, his strength will fail him, and he won’t be able to get into the holes of the whores that he takes into his stinking bed, his soul will know no rest and the image of your lovely face will haunt him wherever he goes, everywhere, my poor child.’

  In addition to the pee and the yawns, Flora was also made to sing the sad song which had been composed especially for such troubles of the heart. The old women drew their cracked lips into the dark caverns of their mouths and agreed with Sabiya Mansour that even husbands who sailed beyond the Caspian Sea to the end of the world could hear this song plainly, and the sadness of its bitter melody brought them back to their wives. That was the song that Gulistan had sung to her lover Horshid, the women chorused squeakily, their eyes moist, their souls yearning and their flesh astir.

  Gulistan was the beloved of Horshid, the royal sculptor. He had carved her form in snowy, purple-veined marble, like her skin, and set it in the middle of a gushing fountain in the palace court. When Horshid heard that Gulistan had been betrothed to the son of Reza Shah he thrust the heavy chisel into his forehead and died. The following day Gulistan found his body floating in the palace fountain, the goldfish swimming in the caverns of his ears. But when she sang him this song and told him that the story of her betrothal was a lie spread by the prince to alienate her sculptor lover, Horshid revived and the fracture in his skull healed immediately with a fine purple scar.

  Enchanted by the ancient legend, and believing wholeheartedly in the power of the song to restore the vanished Shahin to her sweet bosom, Flora hauled her heavy body to the roof of her parents’ house, spread a straw mat under the laundry line, taut as the dome of the heaven, chased the birds skywards and sang Gulistan’s song loudly and devoutly from dawn to dusk. In the first days her voice was full of passion which echoed through the rusty rain-gutter, and all the villagers coming and going below the Ratoryans’ roof paused to wonder about giggly Flora’s cries and to mock her longings. Some raised their heads from the alley, shaded their eyes with their hands against the fierce sun, and scolded her for disgracing the village and perplexing the young children with her desire for her husband. Flora did not answer them, only raised her voice till it squeaked, fixed her sad eyes on the distant horizon, and with the hanging washing stroking her hair, aimed her song straight at the hairy passages of her husband’s ears.

  Finally even the sanctimonious stopped coming to the almond tree alley, to shout and warn and order her with a threatening forefinger to come down at once at the command of rabbi mullah Netanel the widower. The women, too, stopped coming with their infants hanging from their breasts to pity her for her hard love. Only the gentile children came in gangs to throw pebbles and plum-stones at the rutting Flora. ‘There she is, Flora! Flora! Flora the whora! The whora!’ they would sing, clutching their as-yet-hairless bellies and chortling like mice. And Flora would sing and cry, sing and cry, and the rain-gutter echoed her tremulously.

  Only when her voice had grown hoarse and all but vanished, and the neighbours complained to her abashed parents about the noise she was making, and threatened to throw her from the roof into the garden, did Flora agree to come down and lament in the sooty kitchen. Raising her chin up to the chimney opening, spreading the rolls of her fat neck, she would send her roughened smoky song to the clouds. Flora never doubted for a moment that Shahin would soon return, captured by the melody until its words pierced his ears: ‘. . . On the wings of the wind, beloved, I shall sail to you. I shall tear out my eyes, beloved, azizam, for their light to shine in your heart alone. My long tresses I shall cut, fill a pillow with them to place under your head. With the dust I shall scrape from your feet I shall paint my eyelids, beloved, azizam . . .’

  2

  Flora was head and neck taller than Nazie, and in the cold nights before Flora got married they would fall asleep in one bed to keep warm. They would tickle each other with their feet, and Nazie would tuck her head between Flora’s breasts and pray that she too would have such big round ones. Flora’s loving body, and the sweetness of her fingers which toyed with the black down on her back, until the tiny hairs stood on end with delight, protected orphaned Nazie from her awe of the handsome face of her aunt Miriam Hanoum, Flora’s mother.

  Like all the females on her mother’s side Flora was as healthy as a man and as spoilt as a baby. She got her first period at the age of eleven, and thereafter it appeared at precise intervals as a few scant drops. However, the women of the family were known not only for their robust health, but also for their burnt saucepans and scrawny hens, and like them Flora too was lazy and married late.

  Homa, her lame older sister, married badly when she was fifteen, by which time it was already said about her that she should be pickled in vinegar water together with cabbages and carrots. Her groom was thin and feeble-minded, still tied to the apron-strings of his mother, Mahatab Hanoum, the village singer. She came with him from the far end of the almond tree alley to seek Flora’s hand, but had to settle for the coarse paw of her sister.

  For that matter, Miriam Hanoun, their mother, had been in no hurry to leave her apiculturist parents’ house, over which spread golden fans of bees, hovering and buzzing against the sky. She exchanged her father’s honeyed comforts and the slothful pleasures she had learned from her mother for her mother-in-law’s black kitchen when she was fourteen, only after she had all but driven her bee-keeper father’s soul out of his sweet body. For six months her father slaughtered chickens at the entrance to the synagogue, and their pale blood clotted into a thick black paste on the threshold. Though the blood blended with the mud and stuck to their thin soles, the village poor rejoiced in Miriam Hanoum’s prolonged spinsterhood, but they too eventually agreed that it was time the girl was married, perhaps because they had grown tired of chicken dishes and were hoping that the wedding feast would be varied with the flesh of cattle.

  Following her father’s frequent visits to the poultry shop, Miriam Hanoum ended up marrying the son of the vendor of fowls, and their wedding guests ate the flesh of geese in honey and black plums, and turkey chicks stuffed with herbs. Peering over the drumsticks which they tore with their teeth, and the thick gravy which dripped on their robes, only a few of the villagers noticed what Miriam Hanoum did under the wedding canopy, and their full mouths gaped with amazement. They remembered the proud excited look on the chicken vendor’s son’s face after he crushed the wine-glass underfoot, and then, they said, Miriam Hanoum stamped with her heel on his polished shoe and the glass fragments crunched once more, proclaiming her dominance in her husband’s house.

  Her husband and his twin brother inherited their father’s poultry shop and the two houses in the almond tree alley. Miriam Hanoum bore him three children who suffocated and died at birth, and three who breathed and grew up, and then could not be bothered to bear any more. She put Manijoun, her crazy widowed mother-in-law who refused to die, in a small wicker basket which fitted her snugly, and stuck her in a corner of the parlour of the house which had once been her domain. Whenever Manijoun managed to escape from the basket, her trembling legs were so far apart and her knees so low that she seemed to be dancing as she walked. But in the end she got used to the basket, and sat in it, braiding her yellowish-white hair, the colour of cornsilk, into childish pigtails, and made no attempt to leave it until the day she died.

  The utter failure of the women of the family at housekeeping was established when Miriam Hanoum was nicknamed by the village women gorbeh kesafat – the filthy she-cat. They said that she was the dirtiest housewife in Omerijan, that she was even dirtier than her late mother, a native of Tabriz,
a city notorious for its sluttish women, that she was even dirtier than the Shiite women, who, it is said, do not distinguish between lentils and brown beetles, and cook the lot in a single pan with rice and chopped dill. The insects marched in troops into Miriam Hanoum’s neglected house, creeping in under the door, flying in through the windows, whole swarms invading it through the gaps in the door-frames and walls, seeking out food which had been forgotten and turned sour, rotten and stinking.

  In the first year of Miriam Hanoum’s marriage, Manijoun’s mind was still wavering, and she would look at her son from her basket. She gazed at him with scorn when he meekly swallowed the burnt and tasteless meat his wife dumped on his plate, with sorrow when he fled from the stench of her kitchen to the elusive honey scent of her body, and with rage when she heard the china dishes falling from her hands and smashing. And although he pretended to be unaware of his wife’s sluttishness and the broken fragments hidden in the bean shed, his mother saw him secretly removing the shards and selling them to the glass pedlar for a few pennies. She sent messengers to his aunts, who came one by one from the nearby villages, led by the eldest, Sabiya Mansour, who also lived in Omerijan. Miriam Hanoum’s sisters-in-law, too, who had heard the horror stories about the wormy rice and the halva shrouded in grey webs, also hurried over, mincing as they walked. They all tried to teach Miriam Hanoum the skills of a housewife, and volunteered to beat her on behalf of her weak husband and her old mother-in-law. But Miriam Hanoum stayed in bed, did not bother to receive them and, following her mother’s counsel, pleaded headaches. She did not even serve them black tea. Finally they grew impatient, tied their hair up in kerchiefs, removed their rings and bracelets and demonstrated how the chores should be done, muttering: ‘Just like her mother, exactly like her mother, kesafat, filthy, God carry her off.’ Energetic and furious, they polished Miriam Hanoum’s house, filled it with mouth-watering odours, and she grew even lazier.

  ‘You saw her slim waist, her pretty backside, her big black eyes, and thought you’d found an ant for your son? Zakhnabut, you should suffocate, what a misery you’ve brought down on him. Your daughter-in-law is not a bee-keeper’s bee daughter – she’s a wasp, like her Tabrizi mother, God spare us,’ they scolded Manijoun in their Isfahani dialect, which dozy Miriam Hanoum neither understood nor cared to understand, until the old woman burst into tears of sorrow and remorse and curled up in her basket.

  It was an incident from her childhood which had turned Miriam Hanoum against wifely striving to please her husband with zealous housework and culinary delights. Until that day Shirin, Miriam Hanoum’s thick-armed Tabrizi mother, had laboured every morning with her rags, polishing the windows and the floors of her house in preparation for husband’s return from his bee-hunting expeditions. In that far-off evening, when he entered his house, clods of damp mud dropped from his road-crusted shoes, leaving a trail of muck on the stone floor which reflected his image like a crystal mirror.

  The man stopped and set down the cloth bundle which contained fleshy wood mushrooms whose tips rose from their caps like nipples from breasts, the two bleeding hyraxes he had carried on his shoulder, and the chest of humming bees, in whose furry bodies was stored the rare nectar of the flowering rue. The brightness of the window-panes and the glass dishes delighted him. Shirin and her children heard his heavy footsteps and gathered around him gaily.

  Miriam Hanoum was five years old when she saw her mother standing on tiptoe, her black eyes shining at her husband, as though they too had been burnished for hours with the iron-bristle brush. The father, with the children hanging chirpily from his legs and shoulders, stood and stared at his wife. Then he hawked up from his throat a gob of thick phlegm, filled his mouth and squirted it in the mother’s face. Great was the humiliation in the eyes she lowered to the cracks between the floor-tiles. Shirin wiped the yellow phlegm from her face with the end of her sleeve and asked her husband tremulously what she had done wrong.

  ‘I had to get it out,’ he told her. ‘And the house is so clean and beautiful, I didn’t want to soil it. Then you came in and I saw your dirty face, and your dry white hair, and the rags you wear, and I was glad that you’d left me one place to spit on.’

  From that day on Shirin’s spirits fell, and in her sorrow she neglected the chores of the house, which gradually took on a coating of grease, black as an Armenian mourning dress. The rugs stank of the urine of the children, who crawled on them and ate the insects they found in the wall cracks. She was beaten by her husband throughout her life, and she inculcated in her daughters the vanity and idleness which keep the wrinkles away, and in this way the sturdy girls of her family acquired their lazy natures.

  But the shine returned to the red copper skillets which Miriam Hanoum had brought as her dowry from her parents’ house, and the beetles ceased to swarm in the house in the almond tree alley, because its smell improved. This happened shortly after her husband’s twin brother and his wife, Mahasti, died of food poisoning, vomiting black blood. During the seven days of mourning Miriam Hanoum saw how hardworking their little daughter Nazie was, and willingly acceded to her husband’s plea to raise the orphaned girl in their home, on one condition only, that she should call her by the respectful title ameh bozorg, great-aunt.

  3

  The skin on the faces of Miriam Hanoum and her daughters was as taut as the animal skin on a tambourin frame. Their black eyebrows were as thick and wild as a young man’s hair, and when plucked revealed a greyish forest of needle-pricks. There were no deep fissures like knife-cuts in the soles of their feet, as in the rock-hard soles of the village women, who walked barefoot, letting the dust of the roads and plantations settle in their cracked flesh. Nor did swollen veins run down their thighs like mountain streams.

  Miriam Hanoum had learned from her mother Shirin to neglect the house and pamper the body. When her children were still in her womb she took pains with their skin and its odour. She ate citrons, rubbed her belly with powdered myrtle and jasmine oil, and nibbled cinnamon sticks. After they were born she tucked aromatic cloves in their armpits and in their fat creases, and once a week until they were grown she would smear their bodies with spring-flower honey, which is famous for its fragrance. The children would hide in their room for fear of the bees, and lick their sticky skin with their little tongues. In the evening Miriam Hanoum would bathe them in boiled water, rubbing their limbs with date fibres until they shrieked with pain, and then spread soothing bees’ wax on their skin. Their cheeks reddened, their weight increased, their sweat smelled sweet. When Shahin Bozidozi left Omerijan, that was the smell he took from the folds of Flora’s skin and carried in his wanderings.

  About Miriam Hanoum it was said that young men fainted on her wedding night. It was said that even after she had borne Homa and Moussa, and was already carrying Flora in her belly, she was still receiving delayed love-letters from lads threatening to commit suicide if she dared to marry another.

  Her daughters were also famous for their beauty. Before Homa fell from the roof and grew the hump on her back that drew mockery in the alleys, the gentile boys would run after her, forelocks flying, paste a loud kiss on her cheek and run away crowing with delight. And when Flora passed by the sesame-oil press of the brothers Nasser and Mansour, the two would come out, their black hair glossy, and dance around her with tiny steps and hungry eyes, cooing like demented pigeons: ‘Baha, Baha, mashallah, what a beauty, come to me, azizam Flora, come to me . . .’

  Miriam Hanoum’s house stood between the house of Fathaneh Delkasht and that of Fathaneh’s sister Sultana Zafarollah. Fathaneh and Sultana would both peer from their roofs into the Ratoryan house, and their eyes would meet, grinning. When they sent their children to climb on the windows and spy into their neighbour’s yard, or when they climbed on chests and cooking pots to get a view of it, Miriam Hanoum would throw things at them and wish them blind. She believed it was only their evil eyes which had caused Homa to fall off the roof, and Flora to be unlucky in her marriage. T
hese witches have been studying the curves of my daughters’ breasts since they were olive-sized, she said to Nazie, and in the end the crows will peck out their eyes.

  ‘The day will come,’ she warned, ‘when Sultana and Fathaneh will crumble a rock with their envious eyes, the foundation of our house will collapse, and their ceilings will fall down too, may God carry them off, and then we shall all die.’

  Sultana Zafarollah’s husband flew carrier pigeons from the chimneys on his roof, while on the paving stones of Fathaneh Delkasht’s garden yard strutted peacocks with staring eyes in their fans. Her husband sold their flesh to gentiles in the village, and their feathers to gentiles overseas. Like the peacocks, Fathaneh walked about the village in colourful Bokhara gowns, waggling her backside like an outspread fan. Over the almond tree alley hovered the peacock feathers of the Delkasht family, the Zafarollahs’ pigeon feathers, and the feathers of the geese and chickens which Miriam Hanoum’s husband sold in his butcher shop, and which she used to stuff pillows and quilts.

  In their youth the sisters on either side of the low stone walls were friendly to her and let their children mingle with hers, like the feathers in the wind. Fathaneh fed the peacocks their mixed grain, her sister watered the pigeons, and Miriam Hanoum emptied her feather-filled sacks into a steaming pot under the almond trees. The heavier feathers would sink to the bottom and the fine goose down floated to the top. When one of the women was unclean, her neighbours would do the cooking for her, even taking special care with the dishes, so that the diners would say that her hands were blessed, and note how separate her rice-grains were and how succulent the meat. And when one of them carried a heavy burden the others would say, ‘Here, love, let me help you, mashallah, by night he climbs on your belly and now you have to carry this on your back,’ and they would all laugh.