Persian Brides Page 6

  Flora danced with Shahin in the middle of the festive circle and everyone clapped their hands to her and the bells of her anklet tinkled. With her fingers holding Shahin’s, she drew him to her and pushed him away, coming close and drawing apart, while the drop of chocolate on her throat trembled and her eyes glowed with laughter and happiness. Shahin held the foot of a wine-filled goblet in his mouth, and rubbed two chunks of sugar between his hands, as if striking sparks from two basalt rocks. The sugar lumps clashed together rhythmically, scattering tiny crystals on Flora’s head, whitening her hair and sweetening her life.

  As for the dress worn by Miriam Hanoum, the envious guests said that it had come from Herat in Afghanistan, and was chosen after profound consideration. They said that the Baboli bridegroom had been closeted with the filthy she-cat for a whole day, unrolling all the bolts of silk in his stock, until the finicky woman made her choice. They also said that the bridegroom himself took her measurements and cut the material. Her husband, son and son-in-law wore silk caftans and new patent-leather shoes, presents from the bridegroom who had no family, and whose guests were a donkey and an itinerant apprentice.

  Flora threw smiles at everyone, as one scatters seeds for birds with circular movements. The spinsters of the village, who had not yet been spoken for, clustered together on one side, drawing consolation from their shared misfortune, and their narrowed eyes pecked at Flora’s teeth and eyes. To protect herself and her family from the spinsters’ envy of their happiness, Miriam Hanoum shouted during the meal, ‘Knife! Needle! Pin! Knife! Needle! Pin!’ – to pierce the eyes of whoever envied her happiness and sought to harm it.

  Even Moussa, who prided himself on his discernment, concluded that evening that Shahin was an honest and faithful man, who would be a good husband to his sister. With his shoulders raised above his neck, and his arms extended in puzzlement in the silk caftan sleeves, he looked like a man who could not think of the answer to a question which had been put to him.

  Shahin’s donkey was also decorated with silk ribbons and flowers, and the apprentice served the guests with the ashereshteh, the dish of noodles, lentils and saffron which is eaten on special occasions. Nazie had made it for the wedding feast with the proportions of seasoning known to be favoured by Reza Shah: very little salt and a good deal of dill-weed. But although she had cooked it painstakingly together with Sabiyah Mansour, the ashereshteh was somewhat watery, lacking its famous density. The guests turned up their noses and whispered in nearby ears, saying that Nazie had spoilt the dish by stirring it too much, perhaps because of the belief that whoever stirred the ashereshteh would soon be wed.

  One day, during the wedding preparations, the apprentice had seen Nazie whispering her wishes over the steaming pot, and was emboldened to ask Miriam Hanoum and her husband for the girl’s hand. He told them that her cooking had won his heart, but in reality he could not bear to part from his master Shahin.

  ‘We’ll have a double feast, two beautiful brides and two honoured bridegrooms,’ he said, his pinhead pupils glittering. Miriam Hanoum snorted in his face scornfully, while her husband explained to him that Nazie had been promised to Moussa from her infancy. Moussa himself grabbed him by the collar, pushed him against the wall, slapped him and threatened to kill him in various horrible ways, and only let him alone when Nazie pleaded with him to stop.

  Before the serving of green kidney beans, which indicate the end of the celebration, and also increase the bodily humours – including those of the male and female who are to join in conception – the guests were given peeled apples and sweetmeats of nuts and cinnamon, to sober the inebriated. While they were eating the fruit, the storyteller of Omerijan told tales he had made up about the newlyweds, and legends about the inhabitants of Babol, who were notorious cowards.

  ‘On the birthday of our glorious king,’ he began in a sweet, tipsy, breathy voice, compressing his lips in the manner of storytellers, ‘a contest of bravery and heroism was held at the palace. Every district of our beloved country sent to Tehran a champion who was massive of body and bold of face, and they all gathered in the square before the palace balcony. At a signal from our beloved king, the royal cannons roared and all the war trumpets blared. The terrified onlookers and contestants all fled for their lives. Only two men remained in the middle of the square: the man from Babol and the man from Yazd. But when the king’s servants approached them to give them medals for bravery and heroism, they burst out laughing, because they discovered that the Baboli champion had pissed in his pants and the Yazdi had shat his pants from fright, and only their shame had overcome their fear and kept them from running away . . .’

  The guests laughed and Shahin lowered his eyes to the tips of his shoes. His arm had almost healed, and he was dressed in a light-blue caftan with a yellow cummerbund, topped by a green felt bonnet over an elongated skullcap. Scents of soap and perfumes rose from his skin, but they were overpowered by the smell of kerosene from his hair, which struck the people who approached to congratulate him on his bride.

  In the first days of his married life Shahin still pulled his member out from between Flora’s legs, and allowed it to resort to its familiar silk squares. But when his arm had recovered completely, and he took Flora on a ten-day honeymoon in Babol-Sar, the cloth merchant became accustomed to his new status and impregnated his wife.

  One rare night when the moon was eclipsed, Miriam Hanoum remembered that she had failed to warn her daughter against becoming pregnant on such a night. A girl who becomes a kuchik madar on such an ill-omened night was doomed. Flora, like all girls of her age, had heard about the ban, but her heedlessness, her readiness to yield to every temptation, worried the mother greatly. That very night Miriam Hanoum appealed to the demons, who amiably indicated to her that they had received her signal and would grant her entreaty. Nevertheless, the following day she was filled with unease which turned her stomach. She took pains to vomit three times that day, after the meals, to expel the gut feeling and prevent it from becoming a reality, God forbid. However, to be on the safe side, she also cursed Satan and all his evil angels with deafness and blindness, to ensure that they would neither hear nor see anything when disaster fell. Her husband laughed at her, saying that she was a credulous fool like the damned Zoroastrians, who believed in the sun god and the moon god. But when the young couple returned from their honeymoon, and Flora laughed and snorted at every little nonsense as she had always done, Miriam Hanoum calmed down and forgot her fears and her husband’s scorn.

  On the morning of Shahin Bozidozi’s departure from Omerijan the sky was clear, without a single cloud to worry him. He loaded the owl bag with the few bolts of cloth he had left after dressing the entire Ratoryan family for his wedding, and Flora came out into the alley to accompany him to the southern gate. There she plucked the last ribbons from the donkey’s ears and fed it nuts and raisins, to give it strength to bring its master back soon. Shahin promised to come back in two, or at the most three months, and kissed Flora on the point of her black hairline. She pressed him to her heart and held his head between her big hands, and he took hold of the hem of her dress and felt the cloth with expert fingers.

  In his eyes, Flora was as beautiful as the blue flax flowers from whose stems his fabrics were spun. The scent of her skin filled his nostrils. She scratched her head, and one of the headlice eggs he had left in her hair hatched. Her mother and father, Moussa and Nazie, watched her from their window, and Homa and her husband watched from theirs, and the sisters Fathaneh and Sultana from their respective windows pierced the couple with their evil eyes, and the pedlars in the alley and all the other neighbours likewise ogled the newlyweds. Shahin, whose striped robe fluttered in the wind, signalled to the apprentice to stop chewing the nuts which Flora had given the donkey, and called out farewell to all and sundry, gesturing broadly with his hands.

  A moment before he whipped his donkey towards the Jews’ gate, Flora remembered something and uttered a hiccup of alarm. Hurriedly she pulled ou
t a bundle of little silk handkerchiefs which her husband had asked her to cut for him, folded neatly and scented with rose-water. Quick as a thief, with a frown on his large brow, Shahin snatched them from her hands and thrust them into the owl bag. He hugged her and said, his walleye squinting over her shoulder at the snowy mountain peaks, ‘You’re a good woman, Flora. Whenever I use them I shall think of you, azizam.’

  But Shahin did not return to Omerijan. He did not come back to see Flora’s legs thickening, the veins in her thighs swelling and the purple blood vessels writhing like snakes and bursting like bubbles on her calves. Her eyelids also swelled and grew heavy from crying. She gouged mourning scratches in her cheeks, and her hair fell out in clumps, until it lost its famous thickness. Even the golden chamomile pollen, which Homa kept for her in a jar with a screwed-on lid, no longer helped, and its chill touch made her skin crawl.

  Every morning Flora broke the pissed-on egg under the almond tree in the copse, and watched its shell fall apart and the slimy yolk quiver in the light of the rising sun. The village flies were attracted by the tree’s mixed stench, and the birds avoided it. Regretfully, Flora gave up eating its sweet almonds, because their taste used to wake up the unborn baby, and its joyous kicks reminded her that her husband had vanished, and there was no man to press his loving ear to her belly.

  The days piled up like the mattresses in the parlour in the morning, and an empty space opened up in Flora’s heart. She stopped powdering her face in the hope that her husband would suddenly appear on his donkey at one of the village gates, and began to speak of him in a lowered voice, as one speaks of the dead, imitating the speech of the old Ratoryan aunts. Like them, she sighed a lot, shook her head resignedly, and took deep breaths, showing off her premature ageing. The smoke of the espand buds which she inhaled deeply made her yawn and dawdle more than ever, and she rose from her bed only at meal-times, to weep and sing her song.

  7

  The upturned copper frying-pan grew very hot and columns of thin bluish smoke rose from the burning grease. Using a broom-stick, Nazie rolled out the dough on the floured floor. Swaying from haunch to haunch, she rolled it out until it became as transparently thin as human skin, and threw it skilfully over the torrid copper dome. The doughy membrane turned brown and bubbled.

  Just when Nazie turned the bread over, dreadful screams were heard from outside, the shrieks of a woman who is not ashamed of her pain and does not try to hide it. Flora raised her head and swung it around sharply, her eyes staring wide open at her cousin. But Nazie, whose ears were attuned to the hissing grease, stood calmly, wiping her hands on the ends of her chador, which absorbed the flour and oil between her fingers. Her head was sunk between her shoulders, the slow, dreamy look was in her eyes, and her mouth hung slightly open.

  ‘Vavaila! Nazie, can’t you hear? You don’t hear what I’m hearing? Listen, listen, somebody’s crying terribly.’ Flora moved her knees away from her belly which touched the floor, released the entwined swans from the weight of her backside and grunting with the effort rose on her legs. But Nazie heard the tortured woman’s shrieks only after she removed the incandescent pan from the embers and the noise of the grease subsided.

  ‘Oh yes, I can hear, and how, it must be that Armenian Haidah, the one whose husband sells salt. He must be beating her to death again, poor thing,’ said Nazie. She was holding the frying-pan by the handle, visualizing the man who pushed a cart laden with a heap of coarse salt, its crystals twinkling in the sunlight, shouting with a distorted face: ‘Namak! Namak! Salt! Salt!’ Whenever he came into the alley, Miriam Hanoum would quickly throw on her chador, gather up leftover mouldy bread and exchange it for a little salt, which Haidah’s husband weighed on his scales. He sold the stale bread for animal fodder.

  ‘Let’s go and see who’s crying. Come on, dopey, leave that alone, will you . . .’ Flora wound the colourful chador around her head, pressed her hand into the base of her hollow back and started to walk, pulling at Nazie, who looked around and then bunched up the hem of her skirt before joining her. Reaching the pile of shoes beside the entrance, they fished out their own two pairs, leaning on each other as they shook the insects out of them. Moussa’s dog barked at them when they climbed up to the roof. Up there they found that the screams were coming from the house of Zuleikha, the deaf midwife who lived with her husband and old mother on the edge of the quarter, in a little room adjoining the synagogue. The two women had lived there alone until one night a bright-eyed carpenter knocked on their window and asked if he could sleep on their doorstep till morning. The mother, who wanted a match for her deaf daughter, invited him to join the sleeping Zuleikha in her bed, and the man never left again.

  ‘It’s some poor woman having a baby. Flora, let’s go home, I’m scared,’ said Nazie. On sultry summer nights the two of them would go up on the roof with the rest of the family, to sleep under the moon with the straw mats tucked under their arms. Nazie and Flora would push their mats close together and fall asleep entwined like man and wife, their dreams shimmering with stars. But now winter had come, a prickly sandstorm danced on the village roofs, and Nazie was afraid.

  Flora, who had spent many days on the roof singing to Shahin, ignored her cousin’s warnings. Pushing her belly forward, she skipped across the gap, no wider than a child’s stride, between Miriam Hanoum’s roof and that of Fathaneh Delkasht. From the peacocks’ pen rose a clamour of screeches and tail thumpings with hundreds of green eyes.

  ‘Wait for me, Flora, careful with your baby, it’ll fall and break, wait for me.’ Nazie ran after her along the row of Jewish houses, whose roofs were lower, by law, than those of the Moslems, as were their doors – lest they grow proud. The wind twirled little columns of sand, dimming the afternoon light and shaking the laundry lines strung like fences around the houses, billowing out the washing and driving away the birds. Flora stumbled and almost fell into one of the courtyards, but Nazie hurried after her and supported her.

  ‘See, you almost fell. Come on, Flora, let’s go back.’

  ‘You want to go back, go. I want to see who’s crying like that.’

  When they reached the last roof of the Jubareh they saw the whore giving birth in Zuleikha’s window.

  Nazie, leaning on Flora, was so excited she let out a little trickle of pee. Down below she saw the women wrapped in their black chadors, their brows creased with worry, beating their breasts and slapping their fists, indicating to each other how bad things were and how grave the condition of Mamou the whore, who was in such agony. Quite early in her pregnancy, when her belly was starting to peak, they foresaw a difficult labour. But as her belly rose and swelled cone-like between her immense breasts, the women in the hammam began to say that it was not one of the whorehouse customers who had impregnated Mamou, but the king of the demons of Omerijan in person.

  Nazie and Flora held hands and stared aghast at the whore’s legs, which were spread open like a fan, with the hole gaping between them like a scream. Mamou was hiding her head in the chador, which stuck to her damp hair and to the scarf tied around her breasts. Her shrieks intensified, the sheets reddened like the sun sinking in the moon gate, and all the neighbourhood children gathered around to watch, shouting first from the thrill of discovery, and then from terror. The waves of dust which whirled in the sky above the village like a vast bridal veil reddened their eyes and clogged the spittle which ran from their open mouths. The agitated birds flying over the roofs could not settle down and chopped at the sky with their wings, while from the mosque in the market square rose the sorrowful piercing voice of the muezzin, wailing and making the heart quail. When a head emerged from the whore’s body the children fell silent, and only the wail of the muezzin and the cries of the mother, horror-struck at the baby’s appearance, could be heard in the village.

  Mamou’s foetus had one head with four eyes, fixed in the hollows of the skull where the ears were supposed to be. When Zuleikha pulled him out, wet with his mother’s blood, he almost slippe
d from her astounded hands onto the flagstoned floor. His four eyes looked at her from his flattened face, and she let out a deaf woman’s horrified shriek. One heart beat in the breast, which was dotted with four nipples, and four arms sprouted from his sides. His twenty fingers strained apart. Two tiny members stuck out amid four tiny testicles, and below them twitched four legs. It trembled like all babies, its breath rasping, trapped between the criss-cross ribs. Then the single mouth cried out, revealing teeth.

  The demon twins shook between the hands of the terrified Zuleikha. The village women held their breath at the sight of the distorted creature crying like a human being. They shaded their eyes from the frightfulness and drove away the pregnant women, to stop them from seeing the dreadful sight, and to prevent the curse of the whore’s twins from – God forbid – infecting their unborn babies. Young mothers fled from the scene with their eyes shut tight, moaning in horror and shock, the dust greying their hair prematurely, their children squealing in their arms. Bent old women spun round and round in alarm. Flora looked at Nazie’s terror-stricken face and pressed her head to her cousin’s flat chest, with its small nipples like knitting-needle studs. Nazie hugged the big body as hard as she could, feeling that at any moment her shell might crack open from fear. Flora twisted around between her clasping arms, tempted to look at the monstrous crossbreed, whose little heart could not withstand the crowd’s loathing, and whose single mouth was stilled forever.