Persian Brides Read online

  Every night Nosrat would wait for her husband to start snoring, then leave his bed and go to the well. Under its lid she kept a jar of fresh goats’ butter. To guard the flame of her husband’s love she would smear a thin layer of butter on the lenses of his spectacles, then go back to their room and place them by his side. At daybreak he would put them on and be well pleased with his wife’s face. Her complexion glowed as in a dream, her pockmarks vanished and her nose was shorter. In the evening, by which time the butter had melted away in the midday sun, darkness veiled her ugliness.

  One night Nosrat fell asleep before she had spread butter on her husband’s eyesight. In her dream she descended to the bottom of the Black Sea and there she saw strange, blue-faced women rubbing their bare breasts against the rough coral reefs, their fishtails quivering. She woke from the dream as from a nightmare and ran to the well, but in her hurry she dropped the spectacles, which smashed on the stone pavement. In the morning, when she returned from the glazier to her husband who was waiting at home for his spectacles, she recalled having promised Flora that if she came that day, she would make her a sesame-oil-and-nuts cake.

  Flora was then thirteen, generously curved, her hair gathered like the tail of one of Shah Pahlavi’s thoroughbred horses, her red dress embroidered with euphorbias. Nosrat’s husband met her at the door and saw her through his mended and clean spectacles. She looked to him like a necklace of fiery red peppers. His tongue burned and he put out his hand to pluck one and taste it. Since that day Flora ceased to visit Nosrat, and Nosrat gave up tucking sugar cubes in the thickets of her armpits and putting them in her husband’s mouth, for the salty sweat and the sugary sweetness to run together on his tongue.

  4

  The boiled chickpeas, which had been soaking in water since the night before, had softened and shed their transparents skins, revealing their yellow faces and clown-like pointy heads. Nazie pounded them with the heavy pestle in the stone mortar, and every dull thud crushed them more, until they became a soft yellow paste. Then Nazie pounded the chicken pieces, which she had earlier torn apart with her fingers and cooked with dried lemons. The steady pounding of the pestle in the mortar dictated a regular stone-on-stone rhythm to Flora’s singing, and slowed down Nazie’s thoughts.

  Then she shook herself, thrust under the pot a few chunks of wood she had gathered that morning, and added the stripped bones of the cooked chicken. In between the bones she put lumps of olive pulp and a smouldering ember she had scooped up with a skilful bare hand from the oven, then she filled her lungs and blew on the flame.

  ‘Nazie, you dope, why are you making so much smoke!’ Throttled by the smoke, Flora stopped singing and rubbed her eyes with her fists. ‘Can’t you see what you’re doing? You’re making me cry. Don’t I cry enough without it?’

  Nazie did not answer, but her reddened eyes, narrowed by the stinging smoke, shed tears while the fire caught. The flames danced between her tears and she shaded them with her dirty hands, the fingers with their bitten nails stiff and straight, pushing them closer and closer to the lively, provocative tongues of the cooking fire. Chinks of light shimmered and twinkled through the skin between her fingers. She held her breath until the fire licked her fingertips. Flora, coughing, did not take her eyes off Nazie, and she uttered a little shriek when Nazie pulled her hands back from the fire and quickly put her scorched fingers in her mouth. She sucked them like an infant, and the traces of houmous under her nails dissolved in her mouth.

  ‘Dopey.’ Flora laughed in alarm, and her smile was like the parting of a heavy curtain. Nazie also laughed, rose on tiptoe, stretching over the oven to open the one little window in the walls of the sweltering kitchen. She pressed her body to the sooty, greasy wall and her skirt was pulled up by her arms, the hem rising above the thin, childish calves. When her hand reached the window a grunt of strain broke from her throat and from its hinges, and it opened. A chilly breeze of an early winter evening blew into the kitchen and made Flora huddle on her swans. The rustling of the shaken almond trees in the alley also entered the girls’ hearts. The flame trembled and the thick smoke rose to heaven.

  Nazie in her sad shell did not know where Flora’s big laugh bubbled up from into her mouth, did not understand how it was possible for Flora to be beaten murderously all over her body by Moussa, until her cries alarmed the whole village, yet go on laughing till her big eyes narrowed like a Chinese girl’s. Even on the eve of Passover the year before, when Moussa could no longer stand her laughter and whipped the leather belt out of his father’s Sabbath trousers, Flora went on laughing fearfully and snorting like a piglet. The demons of Omerijan toyed with Moussa’s mind, playfully rolled his eyes, yelled through his throat about honour and shame, while the belt in his hand flogged his sister’s legs as though it possessed a life of its own. Flora grasped her bruised feet with one hand, while with the other she covered her mouth, to suppress the wild laugh and protect her teeth from the writhing belt.

  The furniture and other household objects had invaded the street to be aired, while Nazie laboured in the kitchen preparing the holiday feast. For the past week she had scoured and polished the house, and the family ate outdoors, sitting in a circle on a rug in the shade of an almond tree. At the end of the meal they would carefully step into the circle and shake their clothes thoroughly. Nazie was roasting hazelnuts, almonds and peanuts in the oven and extracting the stones from the soft juicy flesh of dates, when she heard, over Manijoun’s demented murmuring, Flora’s welling laugh and snorts and the whistling of the belt which flogged her flesh. The sounds led her to the closed bean shed. Nazie tried to open its door, but Moussa was leaning against it with all his strength, and she sent Miriam Hanoum to fetch Homa from her house and her husband from the poultry shop – quickly, because Moussa was killing Flora.

  Nazie pounded on the door with her hands, yelling to him to let her in.

  ‘Stop, Moussa, by God, let me in!’

  ‘Don’t you come in, Nazie, go away right now, don’t come in,’ his voice shook through the door.

  ‘Come, Nazie, please come, he’s killing me,’ laughed Flora.

  Outside, Moussa’s hound barked as if he too were being chastised by a demon, and the door finally gave under Nazie’s blows. The closed shed contained Flora’s dowry – bedding and sheets in wicker baskets, copper dishes and crystal platters for Passover, garments for winter and summer – as well as dried foodstuffs, roasted fruits and pickled vegetables, liquors in glass bottles clad in woven straw, and tins full of opium to be smoked for pleasure and to ease Moussa’s painful breathing, for he had suffered from asthma since childhood. Flora was squeezed between a wooden barrel filled with cabbages pickled in salt and a loose bag, half full of brown lentils. She had torn it with her fingernails and the lentils had scattered all over the shed floor, like insects come to nibble the foodstuffs. Her feet, which were tied together like the legs of a rebellious fluttering hen, were bleeding. To make her pain worse, Moussa had sprinkled on them coarse salt crystals he had taken from one of the sacks. Flora was close to fainting, and still her hair was trapped between his fingers.

  ‘Aoundareh, mercy, Moussa, aoundareh . . .’ Nazie thrust her little body between him and Flora and hugged him with both arms. She pressed her head to his belly, and the stink of the butcher-shop carcasses filled her nose. Sweat dripped from Moussa’s face, which glowed with a strange light, and his adolescent pimples burned in his cheeks. Above his coal-black, narrowed eyes his even blacker brows met in a single dense hairy line. His ears and nostrils were as red as Flora’s legs, and fresh scratches showed on the plum-skin of his neck. His breathing was noisy and shallow, like his dog’s grunts, and saliva ran from the corners of his open mouth.

  ‘So you’re not laughing any more? Ah?’ Moussa yelled, drawing away from them both and moving to the corner of the shed, all his teeth showing. ‘So help me, inshallah, if I don’t take you to the synagogue tomorrow, when everybody comes for the prayer of the three pilgrimages. I’l
l take your right leg and tie it to this gatepost of the synagogue, then your left leg, see? Ah?’ He turned to his parents and Sabiya Mansour, who arrived in a panic at the shed, while the mice fled in panic between their legs towards the alley. ‘And tomorrow morning all of Omerijan will come with the women and children and pass under the synagogue gate to look at my sister’s hole and see that she’s a virgin. A virgin! A virgin! Then they won’t say that the Ratoryan girls run around the village like hungry she-cats, they won’t say that, ah? They won’t say that Flora’s brain and her hole are playing backgammon together, ah? I swear by this holy festival, I swear, if I don’t do this thing, ah? I’m a dog, myself, I am, if I don’t do this to you, ah? God carry you off . . .’

  He did not stop talking until Nazie returned with a copper bowl filled with water and a handful of jasmine flowers in her hand, to soothe his coughing and his shaken lungs. He wiped the spit from the corners of his mouth and drank the water in one go. Fresh drops ran from his lips, but the grimace of rage did not leave his face. When he had calmed down, Nazie brought a glass for Miriam Hanoum, who had turned pale, and one for her husband, who stood in the door of the shed, his trousers hitched up above his waist and his butcher’s apron soiled with blood. Sabiya Mansour crossed her arms on her breasts, shook her head and clicked her tongue.

  Outside, Moussa’s dog had ceased to howl and the neighbouring women, who had gathered at the door with their children, scattered to tell the villagers what had transpired in the Ratoryan household. In the silence which fell the only sounds were the lentils falling one by one from the torn sack, and the screams of Manijoun from her basket, begging God to take her at last.

  During the Seder, Moussa again beat Flora when they all hit one another with the scallions and leeks and sang Dayenu. The strong odours made her eyes sting till her tears ran, at long last, and Moussa was triumphant. But the next morning Flora’s legs were not spread on the synagogue gate, nor by night when she slept, because from Passover Eve until the end of Pentecost she neither left the house nor saw a single stranger. When Miriam Hanoum wanted to go shopping, her husband would leave Moussa in charge of the poultry shop and hurry home to guard his daughter. Or else Homa was summoned to guard her sister, and when their mother returned she would find them quarrelling as they used to do in their childhood, and Flora’s skin was all red from pinching. Flora was not even allowed to go to the privy on her own. Nazie was sent to accompany her, and supported her when she limped on her wounded feet.

  To neighbours who asked about her, Moussa and his father replied that Flora was very ill. But no-one believed them, because Fathaneh and Sultana had talked about the screams in the bean shed, and the Ratoryan females were known for their good health. The village women tried to visit her. Bearing in their hands their young friend’s favourite pastries and sweets, they knocked on the door with the iron knocker shaped like a roaring lion and peered curiously and longingly around Miriam Hanoum, who blocked the entrance with her body. After they left, Miriam Hanoum would rest her back against the door, shutting her eyes tight and cursing them that on the happiest day of their lives they would suffer from toothache.

  But in the end everyone believed that Flora was ill, even Fathaneh and Sultana. They said that the girl was yellow and thin like the moon at the end of the month. They said that she had an infection of the kidneys, because her mother, the filthy she-cat, had neglected the house and her children’s health, and that she should be treated with the smoke of goats’ droppings. And Fathaneh Delkasht told everyone that she had glimpsed Flora from the roof, and she had permanent pockmarks, her lips had dried and roughened, their colour had faded, and she could no longer part them to laugh as before. Her sister Sultana added that her period came only once in three months, in the form of black clots, causing her much pain, and all the women grinned with satisfaction.

  Nazie shook herself again and cut a piece from the dombeh, the solid chunk of sheep fat, which was kept above the cool water-well. The dombeh was stripped by the sheep pedlar from between the hind legs of a mature ewe. The lump of fat, which dangled like udders when she followed his flute, was pulled off without protest. Nazie melted the rancid piece in a pot and its sharp smell spread through the house. Shallots glazed slowly in the hissing fat. Now Nazie compressed the chickpeas-and-chicken paste into balls, pushed them into the rice and placed the lid on the pot. Even before Moussa and his father closed the poultry shop and returned home hungry, to see what Nazie had done with the feathered hen they had sent her wrapped in brown paper, she had also quickly baked on the back of an upturned copper frying-pan the labash, the thin dry wafery bread. But as soon as she had turned the dough over and browned it on the other side, Flora dragged her to the roof, which tempted the eyes and ears to penetrate the neighbours’ yards, because she heard from afar a woman’s cry sounding like a dying wail.

  5

  Although he was short and stubborn, Shahin Bozidozi was not an especially talented cloth merchant. He had learned the art of trading from his father, whose legs were even stumpier than his. When Shahin was five years old, his father pushed his mother into the mouth of the burning oven. From that time on, the son accompanied his father on his business travels, and learned how to sell cheap linen cloth for the price of silk.

  On the day she died, Shahin’s mother had been baking bread with floured hands. She hummed old love songs to her son, who was sitting in the kitchen with her. When the father returned home he pressed his ear to the door to listen to her singing, and was overcome by jealousy. Suspecting that she was humming those wistful songs because she had fallen in love with another man, and perhaps had even betrayed him, he threw her into the flames, and Shahin was left orphaned and hungry for his mother’s bread.

  Shahin spread on the back of his father’s stolen donkey a large bag of Arab cloth, embroidered with owls for good luck in their business. The father smeared avocado pulp on his son’s face, to protect his young skin from the sun of the roads, and they set out together. They tied the bolts of cloth to the owl bag, and on the donkey’s neck they hung a nosebag full of fodder, so that it could feed at will, and as they walked, the bag and the rolls of cloth swung from side to side. Shahin led the way, pulling on the donkey’s neck with a strong palm-fibre rope, while the widowed father ambled behind the animal’s tail, green in the face, dreaming about a silkworm breeding plant that he planned to set up some day, his head full of butterflies and money.

  When his father died, Shahin inherited his dream of silk butterflies and the stolen donkey, a few tricks of the trade, and the shameful surname Bozidozi, goat-stealer. Shahin buried his father in their town Babol, by the side of his mother, mounted the donkey and set out to wander all over the country, whose outline resembled a startled cat, with its ears pricked and its back arched. On the first evening of his travels the towering clouds in the sky hung so low, so heavy and black, that Shahin thought they were about to collapse on Persia and crush it. A thin yellow streak of light separated heaven and earth. When the strip of sunlight vanished behind the clouds and the sky became completely black and blended with the earth, a frightful storm burst out of the darkness. Tremendous rolls of thunder beat giant drums and a satanic bolt of lightning hit the donkey’s tail. The terrified beast howled, flung Shahin off its back and fell down, dead as a lump of coal, beside him.

  Shahin rose, scraped the mud off his robe and continued his journey to Tehran on foot, shaken, as anyone would be if the angel of death had tapped him on the nape and then vanished. He stuck the scissors like a dagger in his cummerbund, and carried the colourful bolts of cloth, soiled with the dust of the road, in his arms, struggling against the powerful wind which blew on them and caused them to flutter like banners.

  In Tehran he stole a new donkey, a foal whose white belly matched the patches around its eyes, to be his surrogate in the next thunderstorm. En route to Isfahan, which lies in the Persian cat’s navel, he also picked up a Moslem apprentice, a tender young lad whose pupils were as small as pin
heads. On stormy nights, when the dreaded silvery lightning which was intended for Shahin flickered over his head, the apprentice would hold his hand and stroke it, and on hot summer nights his little moustache tickled his master’s neck when he kissed him.

  The apprentice knew how to lead him to the wealthiest and vainest Shiite ladies in every town and village they passed, and Shahin repaid him generously. First the apprentice would point to a handsome stone house surrounded by a low wall of sunbaked bricks, and smile. Then the two would seek a suitable hiding place nearby, unload the donkey and spread the embroidered owls on the ground. The apprentice would turn on the little tap of the tea-urn, which was full of plum liquor, pour some into his glass and blow on it, as if it were hot tea. While the apprentice sipped the liquor, Shahin smoked opium in his long-stemmed pipe. When they finished drinking and smoking, the apprentice would turn his back to Shahin and his face to the east, so that the first light would fall on his eyes, and they would fall asleep, entwined together.

  When the sun rose and the sky over Persia turned blue, Shahin and his apprentice would watch the householder and his sons emerging from their house into the street. Shahin would smooth his unkempt eyebrows with spit-moistened little fingers, then spit right and left for luck, and order the apprentice to stack the bolts on his outstretched hands and tuck them under his arms. Finally the lad was to bang on the door with the knocker and then make himself scarce.

  Whenever Shahin employed the sales method his father had taught him, tears of respect would rise in his eyes. His weak eye would flutter like a butterfly, and the good one squinted excitedly in sympathy. When he stood on the threshold, his smile gleaming like oil and his eyebrows moist and combed, he would hear his father’s voice crowing: ‘The worm always longs for its cocoon, you clot!’ In his lifetime, this triumphant cry sealed every successful deal he brought off.