His love for his friend also brought him back to the table. It was Trianant who had helped him when he needed it most. Without saying anything, Trianant had noticed how Shazdehpoor’s orders had gone from a full meal to just a demitasse. One day, seeing Shazdehpoor doodling in Persian on a napkin, he had suggested Shazdehpoor try selling Persian calligraphy in one of the city squares.
During their weekly lunch, Trianant always ordered for them both, bantering with their waiter, a former apprentice. His order was always the same—two rare steak frites, which Trianant assumed Shazdehpoor adored.
Shazdehpoor could not bear to correct him. He ate the edges of the steak, carving the browned pieces carefully off, but once he got to the bloody flesh of the animal, waves of nausea left him unable to do anything but smile weakly and sip at his water.
He ended each meal by putting his hand to his chest, complaining of heartburn, and offering his plate to Trianant. He watched in horror as the Frenchman cut into the meat, eating it in three consecutive bites, sopping up the juice with mayonnaise and frites.
On one occasion he could not control himself and began to speak about the invention of controlled fire that had begun man’s transformation into a civilized being. It was fire that brought us down from the trees. Staring at Trianant’s bloody plate, he spoke passionately about fire and cooking. The ease with which one could chew cooked meat, he said, was what reduced the size of human teeth and the time spent digesting. Tribes gathered around fires to cook and tell stories. Clearly, his friend had to understand what he meant.
Busy devouring his frites, Trianant simply smiled and said, “Next week, I’m taking you to a café on Montparnasse for the best steak tartare you’ve ever had. Then, let us see how you feel about that fire of yours!”
“How delightful,” Shazdehpoor said, aware it was his own decorum that caused his suffering. He admired Trianant for the way in which he spoke his mind. If he did not like something, he never hesitated to say so. And if he wanted something, he never hesitated to ask for it.
The first few times, Shazdehpoor had been shocked by his forwardness. Whether it was returning a meal not to his liking or refusing a cup of tea on a visit to Shazdehpoor’s apartment.
“Some tea?”
“No, thank you,” the Frenchman said.
“I insist.”
“No.”
“Please, do!”
“I don’t want any. But I will take some wine if you have it.”
After a while, Shazdehpoor began to envy his friend. Trianant ate what he liked, went where he wanted, leaving if he wished to, and said what was on his mind, even if he was living by his own clock on other people’s time. Shazdehpoor was a prisoner of his own propriety. He sat longer than he wished to, held conversations that nearly put him to sleep, and ate meals that made him gag, all in the name of not offending others. It was a cultural chasm that could never be filled. That was not all: he found himself becoming aware of saying things he did not mean at all, things that, if he were to say them where he came from, would be understood clearly.
The first time Trianant came to his home, he fawned over Shazdehpoor’s beloved silk hand-woven Persian carpet that lay in the center of the room. Shazdehpoor was so overcome by Trianant’s appreciation of the carpet that he graciously offered it to him by saying, “It’s nothing. It’s yours!”
“Really?”
“Of course! Whatever I have is yours!”
Trianant’s eyes lit up as he began to roll the carpet up and thanked his friend for his largesse. Shazdehpoor was so dumbfounded that he did not sleep for several nights. Each time he visited Trianant’s home and saw his carpet, he felt a twinge of anguish rise up in his throat. It lingered there, a black stain on their friendship that only he was aware of. Trianant would always look at the carpet that was now in the study of his home and toast to his friend’s generosity.
Their meals at the café always ended with demitasses, after which they languidly sipped while people-watching.
“Did you know that Persians were coffee drinkers before tea drinkers?” Shazdehpoor sometimes mentioned.
“Really? That does come as a surprise.”
“Yes. The Russians introduced tea to Iran. They also gave us the samovar. And yet we still call our teahouses ‘coffeehouses.’”
“Why abandon coffee for tea?”
“It was popular with the upper classes in the north, especially in the nineteenth century. I suppose more and more people started drinking tea to raise their standing in society.”
“But they still drank it in lowly coffeehouses!”
Shazdehpoor, still standing across the street behind the kiosk, watched the afternoon shift change at the café. He was not meeting his friend, nor would he be going back for his handcart. He felt heartsick and weary. He had not felt this way in more than three decades. He shook out his legs and began to walk home. He would do his shopping. He would buy his French feta and barbari bread. Perhaps some mortadella and a bag of cherries. He would be alone in his room. He would be safe.
BIBI AND AKBAR
Bibi stood in her private bath as the steam from the water filled the tiled room. She looked down at her body, still in fine form for a woman aged fifty-nine, and touched a scar that ran vertically from her navel to the top of her pubis, a thin white sickle that always reminded her of how she had fallen in love with her husband.
At the time, she had been nineteen years old, married already for three years, six months pregnant with her first child. The news about the baby had been a relief. Both families had been anxious about how long it had taken her to conceive a child. She awoke that morning with a cramping in her abdomen. She rubbed her belly and quietly spoke to the baby, as she had been doing from the start. “Settle down. We have some more time to go.”
Her husband stirred beside her, and she touched his face. Akbar was a handsome man with honey-green eyes. His composure and position in society kept her in awe of him. Thus far, their marriage had been a formal affair. Even their sex was proper and benign. They had never fought and always addressed each other in proper terms. Each night when they retired to their bedroom, he turned away as she undressed and put on her nightgown, then he lay beside her and asked her permission to be with her.
She looked at him that morning, filled with a respect and compassion that one has for a man of his stature. But not with love.
He started the morning the way he did each day, lying down on the floor to do his exercises. Bibi watched him lunge and push and crunch but said nothing to him of her cramps. When he was finished, he kissed her on the forehead and left the room. Bibi lay back in bed and felt a sudden sharp pain shoot through her abdomen. She stood up. Wetness gushed between her legs. She looked down. She saw blood. She could hear the distant sound of her own voice calling out her husband’s name before she lost consciousness and all went black.
She woke up in a strange bed, not knowing what had happened. She put her hand on her belly. It was numb. There was a thick pad between her legs. She sat up to call for her husband, but her cramps were so severe she could only roll up in a ball and whimper. Outside the door, she heard whispers. Her husband’s voice. A man. Then footsteps.
As Akbar headed toward her bed, another cramp shot through her body. She began to weep, more from the humiliation and confusion than the pain. He ran to her and sat beside her, putting his hand on her forehead as he said, “I heard you call out this morning and ran back into the room. You were bleeding and unconscious. I brought you here to the hospital and the doctor examined you and said the baby had breached in your womb and must be taken out.”
“Is my boy dead?”
“It was a girl,” he whispered. He put his lips to her forehead and kept them there as she quietly wept. He was weeping too. She could feel it, but he continued in a calm quiet voice, “The doctor had to take your womb.”
A panic rose up in Bibi’s chest with such force that it took her breath away. She struggled to breathe and to contain the
terror inside her. A barren young wife was a fate worse than the mother of a dead, unborn child. Akbar wrapped his arms around her and held tight. It was of no comfort to her. She could not move, speak, or feel anything.
She healed quickly from the surgery but the fear of her predicament didn’t allow her to grieve for her unborn child. She went back to her usual duties of keeping her household running, cooking for her husband and her parents, who still lived in the orchard, and never once discussing what had happened. Her mother did bring up the possibility of her husband taking a second wife who could bear children, which was the only time that Bibi felt her fear rise to the surface. But she took a deep breath and ignored the woman.
One afternoon, not long before his unexpected death, Akbar’s father, who was always called by the honorific title of Haj-Agha, paid a visit to the house for tea. Just as he had when he had brought his son to ask for Bibi’s hand, he fawned over the expensive décor. Then he lavished praise on Bibi, who could hear his insincere tone all the way from the kitchen. When she walked back into the living room to serve tea, she listened as Haj-Agha spoke about the possibilities for a second wife for his son. He had a few young ladies in mind, from good families who would be appropriate for the role. But of course none of them would ever match Bibi-Khanoom in beauty and grace. He also spoke of how helpful the new wife would be around the house. He was a very practical man.
Bibi felt her hands shaking as she bent down with the tray in front of him. He took a glass of tea and a sugar cube and continued to speak. She served tea to her parents and her husband, not looking any of them in the eye, and went back into the kitchen, pacing in circles to dissipate her anger. She did not come out again until she heard her father-in-law leaving, and then only nodding farewell from a safe distance.
The family sat in silence during dinner that night. When Bibi had finished her work in the kitchen, she turned out the lights and went into her room to get ready for bed. Her husband was already there, waiting up for her. He turned his gaze away as she undressed and slipped beneath the covers, turning her head away and wishing him a good night. After a few moments of silence, he said, “We are not animals to be bred like cattle. I have made a commitment to you and I will honor it. It is not your fault that this has come to pass. And if we are to be childless, then so be it. Let the old man live with that. He drove my mother to an early grave, I will not let him drive my wife to hers.”
Bibi broke down and wept in his arms. “My baby is dead,” she whispered as he held her. Not until this very moment did Akbar realize that his wife had forbidden herself to feel the full weight of her loss. She had been held hostage by her fear and the society that had caused that fear. Setting her free gave him no solace. What if he had been like his father? What would have become of her?
For four decades, they lived as equals. They traveled throughout the country. They spent hours alone together in the most intimate of silences. They held Shazdehpoor and Saba’s wedding in the orchard and let Jamsheed and Madjid run wild through its wilderness. They looked after the young boys after the death of their mother and gave solace to Shazdehpoor as he mourned in solitude. They looked after Nasreen whenever her mother’s rages broke down the girl. They took in Mirza and put him in charge of the gardens and trees. They endured the mullah’s lectures and made sure he was welcomed to lunch every Friday. And when the midwife told them of a baby being born to a mother who did not want him, Bibi and Akbar brought a child into their home.
Their orchard was filled with broken lives, stunted lives, lost and half-formed lives. But lives nonetheless. Within the four walls of their land, they had made a home that sheltered people without judgment or fear, that allowed for both silence and song.
After Bibi finished her bath, she went into the bedroom and slipped beneath the covers next to her husband. He was reading the day’s paper.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
“That young man who killed the merchant’s son was hanged this morning,” he said.
“God rest their souls,” said Bibi.
“There was rioting. My brother organized it.”
Bibi felt a twinge of guilt. She had never told her husband about walking to school with Habib when she was a young girl or the hopeful strides he had taken alongside her. “He is playing God with people’s lives,” she said.
Akbar thought about his brother. His pained childhood, their father’s indifference, the fate of their mothers, the daily slights and humiliations—all these moments like a thousand paper cuts that had finally bled his brother’s heart dry. “He is a broken man,” he said. “And broken men only know their own suffering.”
Bibi laid her head on his chest and said, “We have a good life here, Akbar. I thank God for that every day.”
“Yes. Within these four walls. But there is a world outside.”
“I’m afraid for our family. I don’t want our way of life to end.”
Akbar put his paper down and rubbed his eyes. He turned off the lights and slipped beneath the covers. In the cover of darkness, he spoke in a half-whisper. “Everything must come to an end, my love.”
THE SERMON AND THE SOLILOQUY
Madjid stared at the picture in the newspaper of the young man who had been hanged. He had met him several years ago at the mosque. His name was Mahmoodreza. Madjid, like many of the young men from his school, used to spend time at the mosque, not only for prayer but also to engage in debates. It was only when the question of politics arose that certain tensions escalated. Mahmoodreza’s calls to action for national autonomy inspired Madjid greatly but he found it difficult to square religious fervor with individual freedom.
Madjid fasted for the month of Ramadan but he also enjoyed his wine with Mirza. He planned on marrying the woman he loved, but he also wished to be with her intimately before that day. On Fridays, he sat in on the mullah’s sermons, much to his father’s disappointment. His father feared that Madjid might become religious, which for him was worse than his son being an addict. But Madjid saw through his father’s prejudice and ignored him. Even though he would never say it aloud, he, too, thought of his father as a fokoli. He never relied on him for his judgment about serious matters.
On some Fridays, he accompanied the mullah to the family lunch after service. He asked the mullah questions on their walks from the mosque to the orchard. The two had grown close. The mullah’s sermons were often about the dignity of man, his service to God, and his compassion for his fellow human beings. Madjid did not particularly believe in God, but he did believe in the ideas that stemmed from this devotion.
There was one particular sermon Madjid found very moving. It was about the Prophet’s muezzin, Bilal ibn Rabah, an Ethiopian slave whom the Prophet had freed and had made the voice of his faith by calling his followers to prayer.
On the walk to the orchard that day, Madjid had been very excited to speak about the sermon. “Do you believe that all men are equal?” he asked the mullah.
“The Prophet says that, before God, all men are the same.”
“What about women?”
The mullah was taken aback. “What about them?”
“Are they not equal?”
“We have different places in this world. It is our responsibility to protect women.”
“Protect them from what?”
“From the evils of this world.”
Madjid had fallen silent. The mullah took this as acceptance, and continued to speak: “Women have the capacity to bring life into this world. Without them we would not exist. Our mothers. Our sisters. Our daughters. It is our responsibility to protect them. Even from themselves if need be. So you see, in a way, they are more important than we are.”
“Then why is the weight of their word half of ours? Why are their rights half of ours?”
The mullah stopped walking. “What are you getting at, boy?”
“Nothing, Haj-Agha,” said Madjid. “I just want to understand why women are not equal to men.”
�
�There is nothing to understand. Women are the weaker sex and it is our duty to protect them.”
The mullah’s reply was the first time Madjid began to question his authority. After that day, he began to turn to his books for answers and eventually stopped going to Friday prayers altogether.
Madjid stared at the article that accompanied the picture of Mahmoodreza. He read the mullah’s words about “martyrdom,” “social inequality,” and “justice.” On the surface, these words sounded noble and righteous but Madjid knew Mahmoodreza. He had watched the other young man, Ardesheer, die in the square. They were not ideas and symbols for a cause but real human lives, ended before they had been lived.
He headed out of the house. The streets were quiet. He walked briskly by the side of the road that led to the mosque. The townsfolk had gathered to mark the third day after Mahmoodreza’s hanging. The days of mourning came in increments of three, seven, and forty days. This was the first part of that trinity.
Madjid stepped into the mosque, took off his shoes, and entered the main hall without performing ablutions. It had been a long time since he had been there. The pungent smell of body odor mingled with that of rosewater. He covered his mouth with his sleeve as he walked to the back and took a seat. In all the years he had attended Friday prayers, he had never before noticed this smell.
The main hall was filled with mourners. The men sat on one side and the women on the other, separated by a black sheet. The sounds of talking, weeping, and praying bounced off the mosque’s high domed ceiling. Mahmoodreza’s mother sat up front, bent over and covered by her chador as she wept. The women beside her held on to her and rocked with her. Every few minutes she would look up and wail “my child, my child, my child” as she beat her head.
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