Persian Brides Read online

  Like him, Shahin would be invited to enter, laden with his bright materials. He was met by the sour odours of sleep and the yogurt which had been eaten for breakfast hanging in the rooms and exhaled by the housewife’s mouth. Shahin would imitate his father’s broad gestures and his mincing steps as he unrolled the bolts like great rivers on the floor. And before the yawning housewife could protest, the entire room was flooded with varicoloured textiles, and Shahin had launched into stories about his wanderings in China, whence he had brought his fine merchandise. The housewife’s imagination sailed with him, and the flapping fabrics blew a soft, seductive breeze into her dishevelled hair. When at last she chose the material she liked best, Shahin would compliment her, saying that its hue and texture suited her well, and flatter her at length about her beauty and good taste, even if her complexion was shrivelled and greenish and marred by pockmarks. Then he would begin to measure.

  He would take the goatskin tape and measure the housewife’s length and breadth, around her waist and bust, his squinting eye skimming hungrily and nervously over her body. Some women gave in to him at once while he was measuring their curves, flattering their big bosom, or pressing against their back, rubbing his member against the warm backside. Others succumbed to him and his artificial silk later, when he cut with infinite care the material they had chosen for their new dress, and to show them how good it was and pleasant to the touch, he would pass it over their throat, press it firmly to the nipples till they stiffened, or rub it skilfully between their legs.

  Another important rule he had learned early from his father was never to insert the worm that hung between his legs into the cocoons of alien women, lest gentile butterflies issued from them. Faithful to the vow he had made to his father, Shahin always kept a small silk square handy, for dumping his seed and wiping his member.

  Afterwards Shahin would re-tie his trousers, put on his cloak and roll up the fabrics, which had been wrinkled by the bodies’ movements and stained with their sweat. He would leave the vain housewife the length of material free of charge, pat her flesh and praise its ample charms. The housewife, doubly delighted with her good fortune, and certain that she would never again set eyes on the Baboli pedlar who had seduced her, would begin to plan the new dress she would make from the gift of silk. After thanking him and wishing him a safe journey, she would provision him with bread and pastries, and all but push him out of her house before her children, who were running around naked outside, should see him.

  But that evening, when the memory of Shahin’s body had almost faded from her heart, he would show up again on her doorstep, his squinting eye spinning around and a merchant’s smile spread on his face.

  ‘Eh . . . Good evening, sbaab khair, sir, good evening, ma’am . . .’ he would say politely, lowering his glance humbly to avoid the eyes of the blanching woman and the astonished man.

  ‘Bebakhshid, forgive me, honoured sir, for disturbing you at this late hour. Allow me to ask you, sir, has your honoured wife already shown you the material I cut for her this morning? Did you like the colour and the embroidered pattern? If you wouldn’t mind, could you pay me now? I am a hungry itinerant and have not eaten since yesterday, and I wish to proceed on my long and difficult journey.’

  And while the husband shouted at his wife for wasting his money and frittering it on clothes, cosmetics and jewellery, and she swore that it was the last time, and begged him tearfully to pay the merchant the excessive amount he demanded, only get the rascal out of their house, Shahin rested his back against the doorjamb and toyed with the little silk bag which the seed of Babolian cloth merchants had stiffened since the morning. When at last he returned to his donkey with the triple price he had extracted from the gentile woman’s husband, his blinking eyes would again water with admiration for his late father, who had raised him on his own from childhood, and bequeathed him a way in the world.

  ‘The cocoon always longs for its worm, you clot!’ he would shout triumphantly at his apprentice, and whip the donkey’s hindquarters to stir him up and make him bray.

  But the father’s business method did not always work. Some women drove him out of their houses with shouts and blows for his impudent fingers. There were also some days of pleasure at the end of which Shahin was left with neither the cloth nor the money, with only his little seed bag to toss in his hands, every limb in his small body beaten and sore, because he had fallen between the legs of a woman whose husband was jealous, miserly and strong.

  In the third month of the spring, a little before the feast of Pentecost, Shahin reached the village of Omerijan in the foothills of the Alborz range. The money he had made selling the scarlet cloth of the prince’s cape was almost gone, and he was badly bruised due to an unfortunate incident, following which he resolved to give his paternal heritage a rest. He had succeeded in seducing an old spinster of seventeen with a length of red silk which he tied around her bare hips, saying, ‘Shake it.’ Her father, who was sleeping in the next room, was awakened by the rustle of the artificial silk, and when he saw his naked daughter waggling her hips and bleeding between her legs, he beat Shahin repeatedly and at length, until the anxious apprentice broke into the house, carried his master in his arms out into the street, and saved his life. When he married Flora Ratoryan, Shahin’s right arm was still encased in a plaster containing egg-yolks and cumin, and his good eye looked as if painted with kohl. On their wedding night Flora discovered a long-winged grasshopper tattooed over his tailbone.

  Shahin Bozidozi and his apprentice rode in on their donkey through the darvazeh moshtari, the wide itinerants’ gate in the northern side of the dentated village wall, through which the merchant caravans came and went. They left through the southern gate, darvazeh jaudan, close to the crowded Jewish quarter, the Jubareh. Through the eastern, solar, gate the sun shone and entered the village every day, as later did the moon.

  When they entered the village Shahin seized the donkey’s ears and his apprentice clasped him from behind, clutching his cummerbund and embracing his waist. No sooner did they pass through the gate than they were hit by the stench of the village, their breath grew short, and a dizzy spell made them lose their balance and fall with the bolts of cloth off the stumbling donkey’s back. Shoulder to shoulder, they stood on the southern side of the village and pissed into the canal at the foot of the wall, into the water which flowed, chill and turbid, down from the snowy mountaintops. The sweet scent of the flowering almond trees filled their nostrils. The dense almond copse enveloped the Jews’ neighbourhood, screening it from the other quarters as its alleys wound among the trees. It did not protect the inhabitants like the fortified stone wall which surrounded the Armenian quarter, but in the spring the fragrance of its blossoming trees overcame all the village stinks and enveloped the Jubareh like a cloud.

  Flora and Shahin met on that morning of dizziness and headache. Shahin, who had resolved to abandon temporarily his father’s method of selling the fabrics, planned to dispose of his remaining bolts by more conventional practices. When he knocked on the Ratoryan door, neither spitting first for luck nor grooming his eyebrows with spit, Flora’s mother invited him into the house to show her the materials stacked up on his outstretched arms, with only his forehead and thinning hair showing above them. Despite the injunction of her husband and son not to let anyone into the house, and allow no stranger’s eye to glimpse the body of the captive Flora, the vain Miriam Hanoum could not resist the temptation. She only poked her head quickly into the street, to make sure that the tattle-tales did not see whom she was pulling into her house, but all she saw out there were the dizzy donkey and apprentice, bathed in the spring sunlight.

  ‘Quick, quick, come in, come in, vavaila, before my husband shows up and sees you here . . .’ she said and closed the low door behind them. Shahin stumbled slowly into the house, scratched his sun-freckled, fungus-infected bald patch, and grinned uncomfortably. He found it hard to believe that the fame of his amorous exploits had spread so far among the
women, covered the distances as he did and wandered from village to village, until they waited for him in the morning, in possession of the house, urging him to untie the coloured threads of his trousers-string. But although he had sworn always to follow in his father’s ways, Shahin had promised himself and his apprentice to abstain for a while, at least until his bones knit and his bruises faded.

  ‘But see, lady, I don’t do these jobs any more . . . no no, nah nah, if you want to buy . . . me, I . . .’ he said and fingered his broken arm sadly, recalling the pain his trade had cost him. He was relieved when he realized that Miriam Hanoum had never heard about his package deals, though the pride of his awakening loins was slightly hurt. Unfamiliar with normal methods of salesmanship, and not knowing what to do without his voyager’s tales and nimble fingerwork, he stood on the Kashani carpet as thoughtful and unsure as a tyro. But Miriam Hanoum, fearful that her husband or son might arrive suddenly and raise hell because Flora’s punishment was violated, commanded him to spread the materials before her, and he followed her orders obediently and in silence.

  While she greedily felt the fabrics and stroked her cheeks with them, Shahin stood in a corner of the room, smelled the hot peppers which were being fried in the kitchen together with chopped onion seasoned with cumin and turmeric, and looked at wrinkled Manijoun lying curled up in her basket, smiling at him in her sleep like a toothless puppy. It dawned on him that there was more than one woman in the house who would want a new dress for the summer, and more than a single dish for the midday meal.

  When Miriam Hanoum ordered him to cut the material she had chosen – a grey one with silver pears woven into it – he restrained himself and did not wrap it in his usual manner over her partly covered breasts. He smelled river fish roasting on charcoal, and when he saw a little girl going out with a knife in her hand to cut vegetables in the garden he guessed that there would also be a cucumber salad, cabbage and radishes, and a heap of fresh basil leaves to chew. Then, when Nazie returned from the garden with the white skull of a cabbage, and could not decide between a plain velvet and a floral one, and called Flora to come and help her choose – and Flora emerged from her darkened room, flushed with sleep and laughing to see a stranger in their house – Shahin understood that there was dessert, too, and it was sweet.

  6

  To make sure of the quality of the match, Miriam Hanoum and her husband went to Azizolla the fortune-teller, who was also famous as an expert maker of charms. At first Miriam Hanoum thought that she could manage without him, because she believed she had a natural gift for interpreting dreams. She wrote a dervish charm and went and sat down at the mouth of the alley leading to the bath-house, to hear what the passers-by were saying. If they talked about their children, about the fish they intended to buy in the market, or the heat of the approaching summer, it would mean that the match was a good one, and she would not need Azizolla’s skills. But the passersby seemed to make a point of talking about the death of their loved ones, about their poverty and ailments, and the terror-stricken Miriam Hanoum, convinced that misfortune awaited Flora, hurried with her husband to the fortune-teller’s house.

  The man sat cross-legged on a rug, whispering a prayer with his eyes shut. He gestured with his purple-veined hands to the visitors to come in and sit down before him. He passed the fingertips of his right hand over the edge of the closed book of fortunes, moved them up and down like a blind man, and abruptly opened the fateful page which would reveal the quality and future of the match. Then he opened his eyes and studied the text closely, and his face darkened. He remained silent for a long time, his eyebrows arched, as if at the sight of a gloomy future, and the purple veins in his hands turned blue. Miriam Hanoum cursed all her enemies, calling down an earthquake to swallow up their houses, but then Azizolla’s face suddenly cleared. He discovered that he was holding the book of fortune upside down.

  Having turned it around and leafed through seven pages forward and seven back, and read the text correctly, he hastened to allay all Miriam Hanoum’s doubts and anxieties. In exchange for three coins he declared that Flora and Shahin’s future would be blessed, and concluded with his usual words of wisdom: ‘Ten bridegrooms will come to the house, ten bridegrooms will look at the girl through the window, but only one bridegroom will enter and take her to his own house at last . . .’

  The bride and groom spent the last three days before the wedding in the sun, he with his eyes shut, and she washing his hair with kerosene to expel the hundreds of headlice which swarmed in it. Once his hair had been rinsed and dried, Shahin rested his backside on the embroidered swan cushion and his head between his future wife’s legs, and Flora picked the lice out one by one, baring her teeth with the effort, her fingers proceeding gently from hair to hair. She cracked the kerosene-dazed insects between her fingernails, each sound a tiny knell of crushing and death. Shahin surrendered to the sun and the fingers stroking his scalp, and dozed off between the soft thighs. He also got rid of his intestinal lice, having inserted coarse salt and raw pumpkin seeds into his rectum, and the long white worms came out with his faeces.

  But Flora’s hair was washed by Homa with an infusion of chamomile flowers, to make her curls glossy. To whiten her yellow teeth she rubbed them back and forth with a green pecan shell, until her gums bled. Homa also made up their eyes with blue henna, which added a bluish cunning to Flora’s mischievous eyes, and widened her own like a demon’s eyes.

  The village hair-stripper smeared Flora’s legs with a thin layer of melted sugar, stripped the hair off her legs and armpits, where it had grown long and stiff under her clothes, and the thick black pubic hair, which extended to the back of her fat-dimpled thighs and marched uniformly and stubbornly towards the buttocks. The hair-stripper was known for her delicate and skilful fingers, but Flora shrieked with pain. Angry that Miriam Hanoum’s pampered daughter was giving her a bad name with her shrieks, the woman hurt her on purpose, lacerated her skin, and Flora’s screams grew louder.

  The woman used tiny iron pincers to pluck the soft hairs which writhed down the spine to the tailbone, branching at the waist in opposing directions, the fine fur clothing its curves. When she began to pluck the strip of fuzz that grew between the breasts and continued like a downy tail over the sweet childish belly, Flora howled like a tortured captive. All the village women cheered her loudly, urging her to be brave. The cheers grew louder still when the hair-stripper dipped cotton threads in the melted sugar, wound them like scissors around the thumbs and forefingers of both her hands, and rubbed them up and down to remove Flora’s moustache and the fine down which grew under her ears.

  Flora saw the woman’s eyes bulging with the effort of uprooting all the hairs, determined to leave not a single one. Observing her from kissing distance, she saw her lips squeezed into a circle, the furrows on her upper lip forming a wreath of age, rage and concentration. Irritably, the woman joined the others’ singing, and Flora, breathing in her stale exhalation, was astonished to see that despite her craft, the hair-stripper’s face was covered with thick masculine bristles – under her nose, on her cheeks, even on her black forehead. She kept thrusting her head forward, like the birds which strutted in the alley, and the flabby flesh of her arms swung like wattles. And when Flora’s nose was stuck between the woman’s breasts she saw in the recess of her armpit a thicket of curly black hair.

  ‘What will you do when you give birth, Flora? How much will you scream when you give birth?’ the hair-stripper muttered, uprooting, stripping and hurting, while gripping Flora’s legs between her knees to prevent her from moving or escaping.

  Flora’s face was red and burning. She could not stand the pain any longer, and refused to let the woman strip the down that grew under her other ear. On the eve of her wedding only one of her cheeks was smooth and red, and the other was as hairy as in her spinster days, and all the village women agreed: beautiful like her mother, and just as lazy. But only after she was allowed to pluck the excess hairs from the eyebrows and
around the crimson nipples did the hair-stripper agree to smear the red henna Flora was longing for. The powder which had been soaked in water and turned into a thick paste with a sharp sweat-like smell was spread thoroughly on the palms of her hands, on her neck and between her toes. Given a mirror to admire herself in, Flora saw the orange stains blooming on her red skin, and thought they were lovely.

  At the end of the seven weeks from Passover, at Pentecost, the wedding was held at Flora’s parents’ house. The bells rang out in the tower of the village wall, and torches flared in the house wall, attracting guests and moths. The ketubbah (marriage contract) was decorated with peacocks and imaginary birds, strangely coloured and winged, such as had never been seen in the village. The rabbi mullah Netanel, who was also a matchmaker and a scribe, had written the ketubbah in red and silver on parchment paper, with a frame of gilt curlicues.

  All the villagers came in droves to see, at long last, the laughing bride, who was wearing flat shoes so as not to embarrass her short husband, and a floating dress of rich white material. Shahin had told her that it was an especially fine and costly fabric, which he himself had imported at great risk from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. She wore the bridal nose-ring, a glittering gold hoop, and silenced the mocking chants of the children, who had stolen out of their beds, their faces sweet and smooth, by sticking her tongue out at them.

  When the thar and violin players had taken their place on the terrace facing the garden courtyard, and were warming the drumskins by the fire, they received the first glass of arak, poured from a potbellied, narrow-necked bottle, which contained a yellow citron as big as a man’s heart. The citron was a mere bud on a branch in the courtyard, no bigger than a fish’s eye, when its life’s bottle was carefully slipped over it. The bottle was tied to the branch and the citron matured inside, after which the spirit kept it from rotting. Having poured the arak from a height into the copper goblets, raising a rich foamy head which testified to the liquor’s fine quality, Flora’s father gave one to each of the players and took one for himself. Before rising and tossing back the drink, the musicians stared fixedly at the bottled citron, because it was well-known that whoever looked at it would keep his eyesight into old age. They strummed on the thar strings with a fine feather, producing delicate sounds accompanying the voice of Mahatab Hanoum, the village singer who was Homa’s mother-in-law. By the end of the evening the musicians were completely befuddled, their eyes rolling, Mahatab Hanoum’s voice was hoarse, and Flora’s father’s moustache curled more than ever from smiling so much.