Nasreen said, “I just went for a walk.”
Jafar followed, trying to keep up with the women’s brisk pace. Mirza grabbed his satchel from his shack and caught up by the time they hit the dirt road toward the dunes.
As they came upon the midwife’s shack, they heard a thud from inside. Bibi-Khanoom started to run to the door. Entering the house she saw that the midwife had fallen a few paces from the chair, presumably trying to make it back to her bed. Seeing Bibi-Khanoom, her eyes filled with tears of pity and shame.
Mirza carried the old woman to her bed, the women quick to cover her up. Nasreen brought over the chair, and he sat down, opened his satchel, and laid out his instruments. He gently placed the bell of his stethoscope over her heart and looked away as he listened. He then wrapped a cuff around her upper arm, pumped it up, and listened again with the stethoscope.
“Are you in any pain?”
She shook her head.
He put his hand on her abdomen and pressed down on the left and said, “Now?”
She shook her head.
He moved his hand to the right and pressed down and said, “Now?”
She shook her head.
“Do you have an appetite?”
Again, no.
He lifted the bottom of the covers and looked at her feet, noticing that they had begun to swell. The women stood around the bed, speaking to the midwife, asking her what she needed. Mirza took Bibi-Khanoom aside. “She is dying,” he said. “Her blood pressure is very low and her heartbeat is irregular. Her systems are failing. She might not make it through the night. I have some pain medicine if it is needed. Other than that, there is nothing to be done.”
“Thank you, Mirza-jan,” Bibi-Khanoom said. “We can take it from here. You should go home and let the men know we will stay tonight. And please, take Jafar with you.”
The sun was setting on the midwife’s shack as the women settled in. Nasreen lit kerosene lamps, putting one on the table, one by the bedside, and one by the window. She noticed the prostitute standing by her window looking at the midwife’s house. “Who is that woman across the road?” she said.
Ghamar whipped around. “Get away from the window. That woman is a disgrace.”
Bibi-Khanoom was sitting by the midwife with a washcloth doused in hot water and scented oil. “Ghamar! That’s enough!”
“What, Auntie? She’s a prostitute. That’s not disgraceful?”
“She’s also a human being. Where is your compassion?”
Nasreen was now glued to the window. She wondered how many men the woman had been with. She wanted to see inside the house. To see her bed. Her makeup. To know if she loved any of the men. Or if she was afraid of them. Were they cruel to her? Did they even see her? She hadn’t noticed that the prostitute was now staring at her.
“I said get away from the window!” Ghamar said.
Nasreen jumped at her mother’s voice. Bibi-Khanoom shushed Ghamar and went back to wiping down the dying woman’s limbs. She gently cleaned her face, combed her hair, and adjusted her covers, kissing her on the forehead and holding her hand. The midwife, whose given name was Fatemeh, watched Bibi-Khanoom the whole time through half-closed eyes. “Will you please see that she takes over the tanoor? She deserves to make a decent living.”
Bibi-Khanoom cast a disappointed look at Ghamar. She then turned to the midwife with a smile and said, “Many years from now, when the time comes and you leave this earth, I promise, if I have not left before you, I will.”
The midwife squeezed her hand as hard as she could. “Bibi-jan, I am dying.”
“Fatemeh-jan, we all are.”
“My friend, we have no time for doublespeak.”
Bibi-Khanoom stared into her friend’s face, remembering the countless afternoons they had spent smoking the ghelyan and sharing secrets and confidences in its blinding smoke. She remembered the first days after Jafar’s arrival at the orchard, when the midwife stayed with her, showing her how to care for the delicate infant. She remembered the old woman’s undying love of all things girlish, be they bejeweled bobby pins or flower-print chadors. “You are dying and I don’t want you to die,” she said. “You are a piece of my life.” She looked away from the midwife, casting her head down as she continued, “I am ashamed at my selfishness.”
“Don’t be,” the midwife said. “It is a relief to hear the truth.”
The midwife closed her eyes. Bibi-Khanoom watched her breathing for signs of change. Ghamar brought over a platter of bread, cheese, and greens and placed it on the table. She spread a sofreh on the floor, setting it up for three. Nasreen and Ghamar sat together, while Bibi-Khanoom went off to the corner of the shack with the midwife’s prayer rug and prayer stone. That night, she did not engage in the usual rites and ablutions but simply knelt down and turned her hands up to God, praying for a peaceful end for her dying friend, for the health of her husband, for the safe return of Madjid, for a happy union for Nasreen and Madjid, for a resolution to the war of Ghamar and Mohammad, for Ghamar to make room in her heart for compassion, for her son to finally speak, for Mirza’s broken heart to heal, for Shazdehpoor to love Jamsheed as he was, for the prostitute to be treated with kindness, and even for Habib, that he may finally accept the love of his family. Last, she asked God’s forgiveness for asking so much.
Throughout the night, the midwife breathed on rhythmically. Nasreen sat on the floor, making lace with a few bobbins she had found, while her mother played solitaire at the table with a deck of cards. Bibi-Khanoom held firmly on to her friend’s hand. Shadows from the kerosene lamps wavered over the walls. Wind howled through the sand dunes, along with the lonely songs of the few crickets that braved the arid landscape.
Bibi-Khanoom turned to Nasreen. “I can’t tell you how excited I am for your wedding,” she said in a sudden burst of happiness. “The veil you made is the most beautiful lacework I’ve ever seen. Ghamar, isn’t her lacework wonderful?”
The two women were confused about the shift in mood but Bibi-Khanoom continued, “We have so much to do. The guest list, the food preparation, your dress.”
Nasreen smiled. “I’ve been talking to Baba about the dress. White satin.”
Ghamar put down her cards. “Then you will have to wear a girdle. Satin is very unforgiving.”
“I hate girdles,” Nasreen said. “They are so uncomfortable.”
“And so are lumps!” said Ghamar.
“She does not have lumps, Ghamar!” Bibi-Khanoom said.
The three women began to bicker, sucking their teeth and pouting about the festive occasion to come, occasionally laughing and interrupting one another. The sound of their voices lit up the room and Bibi-Khanoom felt the dying woman’s hand squeeze hers.
It was time for sleep but the midwife’s condition remained the same. Ghamar found some blankets from the linen cabinet. She laid them out on the floor and took her spot at the end and said, “I’m going to shut my eyes for a little. But I’m a very light sleeper, so if anything happens just whisper and I’ll wake up.”
She turned her back to them and immediately started snoring.
Bibi-Khanoom and Nasreen looked at each other and laughed. Then stopped together.
“This must be difficult for you,” said Bibi-Khanoom.
“I don’t know what to do,” Nasreen said.
“No one ever does.”
Nasreen studied the flickering shadows of Bibi-Khanoom and the midwife. She thought of her Madjid. “I feel guilty. We are here and I can’t help but think of him.”
“He will be home soon. I promise.”
“How can you be sure? Everything is in chaos.”
“I am sure.”
Nasreen looked at Bibi-Khanoom and felt better. Bibi-Khanoom smiled and stroked her hair. “What was the first thing you loved about him?”
“His eyes,” Nasreen said. “The brown in them has a reddish quality.”
“Like Saba.”
“When I’m talking to him he looks at me.” Nasreen cast her
eyes to the floor. “I mean really looks at me. It’s almost unnerving. It’s the closest I have ever come to the certainty that I exist.”
Bibi-Khanoom kissed her on the forehead. Nasreen laid down on her blanket and watched the shadows on the wall as she prayed to God for Madjid’s safe return. Bibi-Khanoom could not yet fall asleep. She held the midwife’s hand to let her know she was there. The lamp by the bed dimly lit her friend’s face and the night grew silent, save for the sound of the wind.
Bibi-Khanoom awoke from a deep sleep, her friend thrashing the covers off. The midwife was burning up and moaning. Nasreen and Ghamar stirred, not fully aware of what was happening. Bibi-Khanoom ran to the sink for a washcloth. She wiped the midwife’s face and laid it on her chest, calming her. The heat emanating from her skin was shocking. The midwife opened her eyes and looked at Bibi-Khanoom, clear and wide-eyed, a slow smile turning on her lips. Then she closed her eyes. Her breathing resumed and over the next two hours became more and more labored, her entire being focused on the act of breathing until it stopped, taking her life and the truth of Jafar’s birth with it. Bibi-Khanoom never moved from her spot on the bed, never let go of her hand, never once took her eyes off her dearest friend.
The prostitute stood at her window and watched the scene unfold at the midwife’s shack. Two men carried the linen-wrapped body of the midwife and loaded it onto a platform attached to two mules by chains. They slapped the mules on their haunches and walked beside them. The three women from the night before stood in the doorway, in broad daylight, watching the cart pull away. The oldest one held her chador over her face and did not take her eyes off the cart. The burly one stood with her hands on her hips, inaudibly arguing with the youngest one. It was the youngest one who had been watching her from the window the night before. When the cart was out of view, they all turned and went back inside and shut the door.
The prostitute sat at her table and let the tears roll down her face. It was a face ravaged by circumstance and the elements. She had lost the only two people in this world who cared for her. First Saba and now the midwife. The prospect of taking over the tanoor so that she could stop selling her body meant nothing to her in the face of such loss. A hundred tanoors could not replace the concern and kindness these two women had shown her.
Bibi-Khanoom sat on the midwife’s unmade bed and watched Ghamar and Nasreen go through the linen and clothes closets. They made piles of the midwife’s things on the floor, arguing as they went along. Ghamar sucked her teeth at her daughter and said, “Don’t put that chador there. It was her favorite.”
“Then where should I put it?”
“Make a pile of things that won’t be given away.”
“Fine. But how will I know what goes where?”
“I will tell you as I am doing now!”
“Don’t yell at me. I’m trying to help.”
“Then do as you’re told!”
“Enough!” said Bibi-Khanoom in a deep guttural voice, terrifying the two women. Neither had ever heard Bibi-Khanoom yell.
Bibi-Khanoom began to weep. Nasreen and Ghamar dropped the clothes and rushed over to her. Nasreen grabbed her leg and began to cry too. Ghamar comforted her the only way she knew how to. “Don’t you worry, Bibi-jan. I will make sure that everything is done right to honor our beloved Fatemeh. I won’t let that Sekeneh anywhere near the midwife’s things. I bet everything I own that she will come to the funeral. She always has a way of showing up in times of calamity. Vultures have more decency than her. They wait a few days.”
Against all odds, Ghamar managed, once again, to lift Bibi-Khanoom’s spirits a little. Bibi-Khanoom shook her head and said, “For God’s sake, Ghamar. What is it about Sekeneh that gets you going so?”
“She’s a rotten woman. It’s probably why her teeth fall out.”
Ghamar went back to putting things in piles. Bibi-Khanoom noticed the midwife’s favorite chador. It was the one with the flower print she had worn to the first spring lunch a few weeks earlier. She unfolded the bundle, and there inside was the bra that held her most precious belongings: a ring, cotton pads, pins, the bejeweled bobby pin, and her amjid. Bibi-Khanoom stared at the items. What surprised her was how these things no longer had any meaning for her, as if the soul of them had left too. She looked out the window and saw the prostitute standing at her window watching them. When their eyes met, the prostitute stepped away from the window. Bibi-Khanoom picked up the amjid and headed for the door. “Where are you going?” said Ghamar.
Bibi-Khanoom turned around and shot Ghamar a stare. “Stay here and mind your own business.”
After a few moments of knocking, the prostitute’s door slowly opened. She was fully covered in her chador. Bibi-Khanoom smiled and said, “I am Bibi-Khanoom. As I’m sure you know, the midwife passed away last night. We are putting her things away and I thought you might like to have this.” She held out the amjid. The prostitute looked at it and said, “I don’t have a ghelyan. And even if I did, I don’t much care for smoking.”
“You can take it and come to my home whenever you wish and sit with me.”
The prostitute let go of her grip on her chador, exposing her face. “Do you know what I am?”
Bibi-Khanoom was taken aback by the prostitute’s candor. She did know what she was. Everyone knew what she was. But no one, not even Saba or the midwife, knew who she was.
The prostitute had been the daughter of a prominent cleric in Mash’had who had all but ignored her, turning his focus and attention to his two elder sons and his congregation. As far as he was concerned, his daughter was nothing more than a receptacle for breeding and cleaning. She sat silently in doorways, following the lessons for reading and mathematics that her father lavished on her brothers, quietly mouthing words and rounding numbers under her breath, bewitched by the communion of the men in her family. She never spoke, fearing the low register of her voice would draw unwanted attention, and so the family thought her mute and dumb.
It was in the fifteenth year of her life that she finally received the attention of a man, twenty years her senior. He was a traveling salesman from the south passing through Mash’had on his way to Naishapur. He smiled at her as she stood behind her father and brothers, who had stopped to look at his wares. As he pulled his horse-drawn cart away from the crowds, she ran to his side and whisper-yelled, “Take me with you.” And he did. And when he had had her and was done with her, he loaded his cart and left Naishapur for home, where his wife and children waited for him, leaving her and some trinkets behind. She had been in Naishapur ever since, living by selling the only thing she had. No one from Mash’had ever came to look for her. When the midwife told her that a family in Mash’had had taken the son she had given up, she liked to imagine that it was her family. That her father lavished the love and attention on her son that he had never given to her.
She asked Bibi-Khanoom again, “Do you know what I am?”
“Yes,” Bibi-Khanoom answered, “but I don’t know your name.”
“Mehry.”
“Mehry. Take the amjid. And I have left everything in the tanoor as the midwife instructed. It is yours now to do with as you please. In fact, I would like to order some bread to be brought to the orchard on a weekly basis. Twenty loaves to start.”
She reached into her dress pocket beneath her chador and took out some paper money, handing it to her as she said, “For the bread.”
Though still a bit leery, Mehry took the amjid and money.
“We will be leaving soon to go to the burial site,” Bibi-Khanoom said to her. “Then everyone is coming to my orchard for lunch. You are welcome to join us.”
Mehry was almost offended by the naïveté of Bibi-Khanoom’s offer. She said “no” and “thank you” as she shut the door.
Bibi-Khanoom stood there for a moment, the image of Mehry’s face still in her mind’s eye. A face so weathered for one so young. She returned to the midwife’s shack to the sound of Ghamar complaining. It was oddly comforting. Sh
e said, “Ghamar-jan, we need to go. I want to be there when they wash her.”
At the cemetery, Bibi-Khanoom stared, unmoved, through a glass window at two mordehshoors washing her friend’s lifeless body. The two burly women’s lives were dedicated to washing the dead, an act that had hardened their resolve and roughened their hands. Bibi-Khanoom kept her eyes on her friend; the aged, ashen hanging skin, the wiry white hair with shocking orange traces of henna, the mouth hanging open, while thick, strong, indifferent strangers’ hands flipped over her body, the water bouncing off, not one drop absorbed by her corpse. This all played out against the stark white marble stage of the washroom and ended with the midwife’s body wrapped in linen and placed on a slab.
It was in that moment that Bibi-Khanoom panicked at the thought of never seeing her friend again. Bibi-Khanoom racked her brain trying to remember if she had any pictures of her. The personal effects that only hours earlier seemed insignificant to her were now everything. She almost regretted giving Mehry the amjid. She told herself that she would go back to the shack and take the things that the midwife kept close to her heart.
The whole family had come to the small cemetery, where they had buried everyone they knew. It sat atop a hill that looked out to the sand dunes on one side and Old Naishapur on the other. The sun mercilessly beat down on the headstones and the black-chadored mourners visiting the dead.
The mullah stood over the hole in the ground, looking down at the body wrapped in linen. Jamsheed stood behind him. Akbar-Agha and Mohammad stood together on the other side of the hole. Burying decomposing corpses in the ground seemed horrific to Akbar-Agha. He thought about the ancient Zoroastrian practice of excarnation. If Madjid had been there, they would have engaged in a long discussion about Zoroastrian burial rites and the ossuary where the bodies of the dead are left exposed to the elements and scavenging birds. In that moment he missed Madjid terribly. He looked at Mohammad and said, “God rest her soul.”
Shazdehpoor had quietly slipped off to his wife’s grave. The flowers that he had laid on the horizontal black marble tombstone on his last visit had wilted and dried. He picked up the bouquet and used it to sweep away the dust and dirt that had gathered on the stone. He looked around him to make sure that no one was looking, then sat next to the stone and touched it. It was scalding from the midday sun. A professional mourner walking by saw how he was nursing his burned hand. She had a bowl of cold water for cooling a grave that she was due to weep over. She bent down and poured it on Saba’s grave instead. Shazdehpoor thanked her but she didn’t move. He realized why and reached into his pocket for some coins and handed them to her. She smiled and walked away. “Barbarism,” he muttered under his breath, turning his attention back to the wet stone. In his mind, he asked his wife to look after Madjid and bring him home. Then, in a rush, he asked her to forgive him for his indifference to Jamsheed.
To Keep the Sun Alive Page 17