Persian Brides Read online

  In sunshine and in wind the almond alley hummed with women giggling wildly behind their hands, their gowns crumpled and sooty, whining naked infants perched on their tilted pelvis as on a baby seat. They wiped the children’s runny noses with their head-kerchiefs, and the cooking grease from their fingers with the chadors. Over the cackling of the fowls and the shrieks of the children, the neighbours also chatted with Mahasti, Miriam Hanoum’s sister-in-law, Nazie’s mother, whose house stood across the alley, and into which Homa and her husband moved when it fell empty. But as the children multiplied like the chicks in the alley, and Miriam Hanoum’s daughters grew and matured, envy and the over-crowding drove the neighbours apart, and their bitter hate infected the cooking smells.

  Together with the other village women, Fathaneh and Sultana sang mocking rhymes about Miriam Hanoum, laughing into the palms of their hands, but secretly they envied her Flora’s beauty. ‘That one, if she lost one night’s sleep from worry, would turn from a ripe fig bursting with honey into a hard dry one,’ they would say. They were especially provoked by the perfect menstruation of the Ratoryan females, whose sharp odour filled the alley and made people dizzy. They counted the days of the discharge admiringly, and would secretly burn myrtle twigs and stand on tiptoe over the flames, naked from the waist down, their legs apart, and pray that the smoke penetrating their wombs would make their days of uncleanness as easy, regular and sharp as those of Miriam Hanoum and her daughters.

  About Miriam Hanoum they said that she was too lazy to love her husband, and that he had impregnated her in her sleep, while she dreamt that she was sailing on the waves of the Caspian Sea. They said that she had cunningly given him her urine to drink, which made him cleave to her. About Homa they said that she was lucky, because being lame she was too eager for pleasures, and avoided pissing for days on end in order to push her fingers in there and masturbate all night long. They gossiped about Flora too, and also envied her, but they all enjoyed hearing her rolling laughter and smelling the honey scent of her body. Even Fathaneh Delkasht said to her that her ovaries were small and tough as nuts and, smiling, patted her round belly as if it were a watermelon. Fathaneh’s smile always hovered like that of a puzzled, doubt-ridden person, because she was born without lips around her mouth. Lacking the red folds of flesh, Fathaneh seemed to be smiling against her will.

  The women’s envy drove Miriam Hanoum apart from her neighbours, and she withdrew into her house, proud and fearful, with her collection of curses. She would scoop out the eyes of the chickens her husband sold, preserve them and set them in bits of beaten silver, which she hung as good-luck charms on her neck and her children’s. In this fashion she sought to ward off her neighbours’ evil eye: imprisoned in a ring and hanging on the breast, it was less terrifying. But the further she withdrew, the more they gossiped about her. In a place where pride is the worst sin, Miriam Hanoum barricaded herself with her braids wound around her head like a crown. She cast her eyes far over the heads of the women, above their sagging shoulders and lowered brows, and the hen’s eye swinging between her breasts pierced their hearts. Homa, too, who lived not far from her, in a mud-brick house across the alley, closed her door behind her and devoted most of her nights and mornings to desperate efforts to conceive. The village women did not pursue her, but only listened closely and relished her moans.

  But since her childhood Flora had enjoyed going out of the house and into the alleys, and was liked not only by the Jewish women but also by the gentile ones who lived beyond the synagogue. Whenever she passed the window of one of her friends Flora would drop something and, raising her rump high in the air, would stoop to pick it up. Her nose would peep out between her breasts, sniffing the cooking odours which invaded the street, and her friends would come out and invite her to enter and taste something. Flora would forget her mother’s resentment and laugh bashfully, her eyes narrowing to a long thick row of lashes, and the women would take her by the hand and draw her, light as a cottonball, into the kitchen, sit her down and offer her sweets and fruit by the bowlful. While licking the skin of a milk-pudding, she would tell them what she had dreamt the night before, and funny stories she had heard in the street. The women would toil around her, cooking, cleaning, washing, interpreting her dreams, and Flora’s sweet laughter, which gurgled higher and higher, always ending in a short pig’s snort, eased their labours. When she laughed, the chocolate drop in her throat jiggled and her face glowed like a gold coin. They vied with each other for her visits, and tempted her with her favourite dishes and compliments. ‘Betterki, you should burst, Baha, Baha, mashallah, how beautiful you are today, Flora,’ they would wonder aloud, their eyes growing round, and they scooped up fistfuls of sugared peanuts and wrapped them up in the kerchiefs from their heads, to ensure that she would come back to them.

  And in the cold season, when snow fell on the village, they would kindle the coals in the brazier sunk in the floor, and spread a woollen blanket over it, for Flora to tuck her feet into. By and by she would fall asleep. And when she woke up, red-cheeked and dishevelled, the babies of the house were asleep at her side and the smells of supper billowed through the rooms. Flora would play with the children, feed them and herself with hazelnuts and pieces of coconut and tell their mothers the remains of the funny gossip she had heard the day before at the neighbours’, until darkness fell.

  It was in the neighbours’ hot smoky kitchen that Flora first heard about her three brothers who suffocated to death in their sleep before she was born. Then Flora’s smile, which opened like the front of a woman’s dress when she unbuttons to suckle her baby, slowly closed. Then she understood why her mother was alarmed every time an innocent and hungry alley cat slunk through the window into the house, why she ran in terror to her children, why she chased the creature back into the street, though it did them a favour by catching the house mice. That evening, when Fathaneh Delkasht dredged up from the past the sins of Miriam Hanoum’s childhood and youth, the memory agitated the furrows on her prematurely wrinkled brow and the old-woman’s beard she had given up plucking.

  No-one knew why Miriam Hanoum nursed such a hatred for the cats who lived off the village garbage. Those who saw her in her childhood cruelly mistreating them thought it was merely childish mischief. Her bee-keeper parents scolded her when they found out that she shut cats in barrels of boiling water, causing tortured howls to come from inside, but for once they did not use blows to teach her to desist.

  When she was a young girl it was her second nature to persecute cats. When the animals fled from her on their soft paws, she would chase after them across the roofs to the end of the village, brandishing the heavy pestle for pounding the meat like a sledge-hammer. She showed no mercy to her captured victims, but hammered their soft skulls until they smashed and their vertical pupils closed. She would pluck their tails and burn their long whiskers with sulphur until they curled. ‘Aoundareh, poor things,’ the villagers threatened her, shaking their hands in the air. ‘The god of the cats will take terrible revenge on you, aoundareh, bad girl.’

  But Miriam Hanoum did not heed their warnings, and when at last she married and bore her first child on a hot night, her arms were scored with scratches left by the claws of dead cats. Exhausted and happy, Miriam Hanoum fell asleep that night. The apple moon, which gazed through the open window on her and the baby sleeping at her side, was full, yellow and low-hanging. A hate-filled embittered alley cat stretched his lithe body, climbed in through the open window, padded up to the baby and crouched on top of it, covering its nose and mouth. When the baby stopped breathing, the cat rose quietly and slunk back out through the window. The village cats did the same thing to the next two babies, and in their vengefulness did not even bother to unsheathe their sharp claws.

  When Miriam Hanoum found the third baby lying lifeless, with cat’s hairs in his ear, she uttered a long howl, and all the village cats rubbed their paws on their noses with satisfaction. Miriam Hanoum and her husband returned from the cemetery dete
rmined to do all that was necessary to placate the angry god of the cats.

  Sabiya Mansour and her sisters laboured in the kitchen until the crescent on the mosque’s dome pierced the sinking sun, preparing the finest milk and fish dishes known to Persian cooks. They spread a sofreh, a white tablecloth, on the Kashani carpet in the living-room, and on it arranged the dishes for the feast, so ample that it would have satisfied the village poor, who crowded around the house doors until they were driven out of the alley. The windows were opened, the velvet curtains drawn aside, the doors left gaping. They took Manijoun curled up in her basket and went like mourners to the house of the parents of Fathaneh Delkasht and Sultana Zafarollah, to fast and to pray for the curse to be lifted.

  Miriam Hanoum was not in her house when all the village cats entered it like honoured guests, sprawled on the rugs, gnawed the fish and lapped the cheese dishes. When the feast was over they dozed contentedly on the spread mattresses, and when they rose they mated on the heaped sacks in the kitchen. In the morning Miriam Hanoum returned to the empty house and gathered up the abundant white, yellow, grey and black fur, which the cats had shed as a mark of forgiveness. She pressed it into a thick ball, put it into a cloth square and sewed up its edges into a bag. This bag she hung on the gold chain around her neck when she went to her husband to conceive.

  ‘May God forgive me for telling you this, but after your mother paid for her sins and expressed remorse and asked for forgiveness,’ Fathaneh sighed and gave the pale Flora a bowl full of red cherries and purple berries, ‘the cats no longer revenged themselves on her, and she bore poor Homa and Moussa and finally you, darling, may you be healthy, only get married, Flora, get married already . . .’ Fathaneh smiled her lipless smile and Flora, deeply troubled, stuffed her mouth with cherries which she forgot to stone.

  ‘Get married, Flora, get married already . . .’ Fathaneh Delkasht urged her. She warned Flora that with every day that passed without a husband her red hole was drying up and turning white, until one day its sides would stick together and it would close up and disappear.

  Flora rose, the cherries falling from her lap and scattering on the rug, and walking with her legs wide apart as if she had wet her pants, shedding teardrop after teardrop, she went from Fathaneh’s house to Homa’s, to tell her sister that she would do anything for her if she would only save her quickly, because it was already starting to stick together, the big lips were sticking to the little ones, and it burned, and she felt she could no longer pee. Homa laughed like a grown-up, her wild breasts bouncing and laughing with her. She opened the shutter with her thick hands, stuck her head out and yelled into the alley: ‘Ma! Hoy madar! Come out a minute! You must hear this, come on, open a minute, Ma.’ Miriam Hanoum’s head appeared in the window, bearing its braided crown.

  ‘Flora’s crying like an idiot baby, she’s walking as if she’s got date-honey dripping between her legs,’ Homa shouted, and everyone heard, whether they wanted to or not. ‘Fathaneh, her eyes should be scooped out with a teaspoon, told her that her hole was going to disappear, you hear, Ma? Come, tell her that no matter how it burns, the hole doesn’t close up so easily, eh, Ma?’

  Miriam Hanoum did not laugh, she only cursed Fathaneh, wishing that her belly should ache for all eternity, inshallah, and slammed the shutter hard, to close it like her neighbour’s evil eye. Homa sent Flora and her clogs home, saying she should ask their mother to tell her about Fathaneh Delkasht’s belly-ache.

  For directly after her wedding night Fathaneh had gone about the village wailing that her belly hurt. She wailed like a baby crying for its mother’s milk. The tea and lemon infusions which her sister Sultana made her drink did not help, nor did the fasts she imposed on her. Her pains and complaints did not cease. Until one morning Fathaneh laid her head on her sister’s neck, wept and said she would not return to her husband’s house any more. Sultana, the elder, who may be wicked and evil but is merciful to her sister, fetched some carrot oil to rub on Fathaneh’s belly, hoping it would ease the pain. Fathaneh raised her dress above her waist, and the bottle fell from her astonished sister’s hand and the amber-coloured oil spread on the carpet. Blue and purple stains spread on Fathaneh’s belly like ink blots, the black runnels of haemorrhage spreading as far as the shadows of her heavy breasts.

  Since the time of those frightful belly-aches, when she begged her sister to help, Fathaneh had given birth to six children, and neighbourly hatred had sprung up between the sisters and Miriam Hanoum, whose intervening house kept their roofs from touching. Fathaneh gave each of her children a first name of its own, but the village women secretly called them all ‘the belly-button children’, and described a woman who complained about imaginary stomach-aches as ‘suffering like Fathaneh Delkasht when she was barren’. For one whole week the virgin peacock breeder had tried in vain to impregnate Fathaneh through the navel, which winked at him from her belly like a blind man’s eye. Fathaneh would bite her missing lips and her groom would drive his member with all his might, pushing and shoving it into the navel, wondering about the pleasure that men derive from the exhausting and frustrating effort of begetting children. Only after Fathaneh consulted with her sister and revealed to her husband the hairy orifice between her legs was the riddle solved, and he penetrated it joyfully and Fathaneh conceived.

  Usually, Flora returned late from the neighbours’ houses, at the time when the village was going to sleep. Her father and brother would be sleeping when she returned, the wooden clogs ready in their hands to beat her with. But her mother couldn’t close her eyes from anxiety about her daughter’s maidenhood. The benighted Flora would press her ear to the front door, listen to the snores of the household, then take off her clogs and slip cautiously into the darkened rooms, where mosquitoes buzzed hungrily. Giggling with childish excitement, covering her mouth with her hand, she would tiptoe past her grandmother, who lay asleep in the basket like a baby in its cradle, sneak into the girls’ room and curl up on the mattress beside Nazie.

  Though tired from the chores of the day, Nazie was easily awakened from her light sleep by her cousin’s suppressed giggles. She would open her eyes, observe the black silhouette which filled the room, and play with her under the mosquito net until Flora fell asleep.

  After a few minutes Miriam Hanoum would come into the girls’ room. The burning wick she carried in one hand and shaded with the other cast flickering shadows on the walls. She would hurry to close the door behind her and kneel exhausted beside her daughter, muttering about honour and shame and cursing the village women, above all Fathaneh and Sultana, upon whom she called down ailments as yet incurable. Her lovely face gleamed with the oiliness of her healthy skin, her eyes shone under the plucked brows, and her regular teeth ground angrily.

  First she would make sure that little Nazie was asleep, then she would take the cover off Flora, turn her dress up above her waist, loosen the string which held the cloth pants and pull them down quickly. It was as though Flora were a baby who had soiled herself and her mother was about to clean her and change her diaper. Under the thin gauze Nazie saw her aunt’s fingers swiftly uncovering Flora’s long legs, which gleamed white in the darkness. Miriam Hanoum would part the heavy thighs, exposing the black woolly thicket. Flora, her thighs and genitals spread wide, giggled in her sleep.

  Miriam Hanoum’s hoarse voice ceaselessly addressed her dead father, cursing him for marrying her off against her will, and telling him about the disgrace that Flora caused them, the food she ate in other people’s houses, as though there was not enough to eat at home, and again cursed the women of the alley, may their livers burst into flames. The elongated black shadows on the stone wall were restless. While communing with her father’s spirit, she pushed two fingers into her daughter’s secret part and rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

  Through the wavy diaphanous net Nazie saw Miriam Hanoum’s face grow serious and attentive, as if listening to a faraway flute playing, while her hands burrowed into the cavern between her daughte
r’s legs. The tallow dripped from the earthen saucer onto the floor, the light of the flame shivered on the ceiling, and the mosquitoes danced madly around it. Sinking deeper into sleep, Flora uttered a little chuckle of pleasure and embarrassment, and promptly received a sharp slap on her cheek and a vicious pinch on her fat soft thigh. The laugh turned to a sob.

  Miriam Hanoum kept digging into her half-asleep daughter, searching for gold. When she found it she froze for a moment and her face softened. Only then did she pull her moist fingers out of the girl’s heavy body. Glad to have found the family honour, she also examined attentively Flora’s breasts and large waist, searching for marks of bites and sucks. Finally she would dress her again, cover her with the blanket, and go to sleep at her husband’s side.

  Miriam Hanoum was not the only one who feared the wintry wind which fluttered Flora’s skirts, or the honeyed summer sweat which stuck the veil to her breasts, outlining the nipples with big damp patches. The neighbouring women, too, in whose houses Flora sprawled on the cushions, spreading her hair on the lace trimmings, were afraid of the young girl’s big body. When their husbands came home in the evening Flora’s laughter would suddenly lose its charm, and her hostesses would urge her to go home, swearing that they could hear Moussa’s white hound barking. They had all learned the bitter lesson of ugly Nosrat, who failed to hide Flora’s big body, which seemed to burst its garments, from her husband’s eyes, since when there was neither peace in her house nor love in her heart.

  Violating the matchmakers’ rule, ugly Nosrat had married a tall handsome man, who wore a heavy moustache and spectacles. Like all the women who refuse to take a husband as ugly as their fathers, and succeed in marrying handsome, hairy-faced men, it was Nosrat’s fate to live in fear. But God, who had dug all those pits in her skin, had also given her a man’s wit.