by Gina nahai
He put his hand in his vest pocket and introduced an emerald the sfe of a gold coin. It was oval, set in diamonds, so clear and luminous, it could bring tears to a jeweler’s eyes. It had been his grandmother’s wedding ring, the Professor said, willed to him and collected upon her death. It had a tiny crack on the left side that was not readily noticeable and that affected the value of the stone, to be sure, but that made the ring even more of an heirloom to be treasured.
He set the ring before my father, on top of the dress that lay on the rug like a happy corpse, and then he stood up and announced that he would give my father and me a chance to think his proposal over and decide for ourselves what was best.
He CAME BACK twice more that winter, brought my father gifts, sat with my mother and spoke to her in the Aramaic of her childhood until he managed to get her attention. He told my father that human beings should not be tied to posts like animals, that in the absence of other means to control my mother’s madness and save her from her snakes, he should use opium to calm her nerves and put her in sedation. He even convinced my father to give her back the brushes and the henna he had taken away long ago.
Slowly, as the snow began to melt and the earth thawed, I felt my resolve weaken.
It wasn’t that I stopped resenting the Professor, or that I wanted to leave the nomad’s life I loved so much. It wasn’t the ring he offered me, nor the life in America. It was the possibility, however faint, that through it all I could change the course of my own life, lessen the weight of my parents ’ sorrows.
I believed this, I think, and so did my mother. One early morning in the spring of 1951, she came into the tent where I was sleeping and took my hand. I was startled to find her so calm, shocked that she was able to get so close to me, to touch me without fear. I sat up and realised she wanted something, so I followed her out of the tent and saw the brush and the henna she had already set up.
Only this time it was my hands she wanted to paint.
She took my right hand in her left, knelt on the ground, and started to work. I bristled when the brush first touched my skin, but my mother smiled and continued. She painted with her head down and her shoulders haunched, her hair—long again but matted and dirty and in knots—falling onto her eyes and all around her face. I watched her hand move slowly above mine, tracing faint brown lines onto my skin. The images she drew became more vivid as the henna dried and settled, and after a while I began to detect the old picture and wondered what this meant—if my mother, in painting my hand instead of hers, was giving me her own legacy.
There she was—the woman at the center of the ma^e, surrounded and trapped and unable to leave. I gasped at the sight of her, closed my fist and tried to leave, but my mother held me by the wrist and forced my hand open again.
“.Look,” she said. “Look harder.”
Through my tears I saw the line that ran from the middle of the painting down toward my wrist—a narrow river that led out to a sea and, beyond it, to places my mother had left unpainted.
“Look again,” she said. “Foryou there is a way out.”
We WERE MARRIED in 1951, in a Sunni Kurdish wedding at our campsite in the mountains of Iran. I wore a cherry-pink skirt long to my feet, a lavender top with silver embroideries, the traditional red veil over my face. The Professor came dressed in a white suit—the kind, he said, that men wore to the races in England.
He had paid a traveling mullah to perform the ceremony. The mullah recited prayers in Arabic, which the Professor repeated easily because he was fluent in the language, and afterward he signed a marriage contract that stated our religion as Muslim. He did this with a sure hand—the Professor—using a fountain pen with a gold tip, but even as he put his name to the paper I knew he was hiding more than he revealed.
He never lied to us, you see. He never told my father or me that he was a Muslim, but he did not say he was a Jew either. He had the light skin and fine features of many Arab Jews, as my father had once remarked, and he came from Basra, where many of the merchants had historically been Jewish, so it wasn ’t inconceivable that he would be one himself, but he never admitted this and we never asked. He spoke of religion in abstract terms, never stating his origins except to say that, in leaving the East, he had left all its trappings behind.
In the tent he sat next to me on the rug, facing a mirror and a lamp, and he tried to be cordial and kind to the tribe’s members who had crowded around to witness the marriage and who were singing and talking loudly and touching us to show affection. Afterwards he walked with me through the campgrounds as everyone sang prayers and carried the lamp and the mirror—symbols of light and good fortune—past every tent. His face was covered with a thin coat of perspiration, and his body shook with a slight tremor every time the crowd thickened or the singing became too loud, and he was careful not to stand too close to me, so that our bodies would not touch and our eyes would not lock.
I looked at him then and thought that he harbored a deep and bleeding secret; that I had bought into this secret by marrying him; that he would take me now into his house of silence and lock the door for good.
We DROVE IN a car to the Caspian shore, then took a train to Tehran. It was the first time I had been out ofi the mountains in my lifie, the first time I had ridden anything but a horse. It was also the first time I saw the sea.
I was so terrified of my new surroundings, I stayed awake every night and wondered if I would survive this new world, if I would ever learn to sleep under brick and plaster, if those streets we crossed, those buildings we saw, would ever feel like home to me. I thought about my parents back home and wondered if my mother realised I was gone, if the other girls in the tribe still spoke of me, if my father was angry with me.
In Tehran we stayed in adjoining rooms in a hotel. By then we had been married two weeks already, and the Professor had not tried to touch me. He said I had nothing to worry about by being alone with him, that his purpose in marrying me was to raise a wife and not to obtain a lover. He talked to me without looking me in the eye, his gape always fixed on an object directly behind me or next to my face. He went out and bought me Western-style clothes, two pairs of shoes, makeup, sent it all to my room with a woman he had hired to teach me how to dress and paint myself.
I told the woman at my door to go away and take the clothes with her. The Professor did not admonish me for this, but he came in later and hung the dresses in the closet next to my bed, arranged the shoes in their boxes on the floor. My wedding ring sat on the dresser. He touched it gently but did not ask why I would not wear it.
He called on me twice a day—mid-morning and at 8p.m. He came in his suit and hat, sat in the only chair in the room,
asked if I was well, if I had slept enough, if I had enjoyed the meals he had sent to my room. 1 never complained to him, but I think he saw my sadness, and he did his best to respect it.
“In America,” he said, “everything will be better. IVe will start your education, and I will teach you how to function in society.”
On our last morning in Tehran, he came in with a small briefcase and said he needed to prepare me for the journey. He showed me a tube of lipstick, opened a shiny powder case, and a case of eyeliner he had bought. He wanted to paint my face, he said, so I would look older than my age as we passed customs in New York.
I sat on the edge of the bed and let him dab the lipstick on my lips, draw dark lines on the edges of my eyelids, darken my eyebrows with a pencil. He worked with the fascination of a child who is allowed into forbidden places for the first time, smiling faintly as he appraised his own creation, sighing with pleasure every time he opened one of those shiny silver cases that reminded him, he said, of the house of his own childhood—he had grown up among women, he said, all of them bored and nostalgic and always wishing they looked better.
When he was done he asked if I wanted to see myself in a mirror. He smiled when I refused.
“In time,” he said, “you will grow to appreciate the value of
illusion.”
He opened his briefcase then and showed me his own passport, pointed to a page with my picture and a line of Latin letters.
“It says here you are nineteen years old,” he said, then paused to make sure I understood.
“It’s very important that you remember this, that you repeat it if anyone asks you the question.”
He said that in the West marriage to a girl younger than eighteen was frowned upon and considered uncivilised. He said he had lied to the passport officer for the sake of convenience, but that he wanted me to think of myself as nineteen from that moment on.
“I have also stated that you are Christian by religion, ” he said. “In America no one trusts a person who does not belong to a church.”
Then he said he had changed my name.
“Your given name,” he said, “will not resonate with the people among whom you are going to live. It will make them think of you as foreign and therefore strange, and they will punish you for this in subtle ways you will not be able to overcome,” he explained.
“So I picked a direct translation of your name,” he said. “Blue. Like the waters of the Sea of Marmara, the most beautiful site in the world. ”
WE FLEW EIGHT HOURS from Tehran to Germany, waited a day, took another flight for New York. I wore a long gray skirt I could hardly walk in, a beige silk shirt that felt slippery against my skin, black leather shoes that pinched my feet and made me feel as if I were about to topple over with every step. The moment the plane landed in New York, I told the Professor I wanted to go back. He smiled and took my hand, guided me gently through the aisles of seats, off the plane into the customs hall.
The customs agent stared at the Professor’s passport far too long. Then he raised his eyes and examined each of us as if trying to divine our relationship.
“Step aside,” he said.
The Professor forced a smile and grabbed the rim of his hat tighter in his hands.
“He’s going to ask questions,” he whispered, clearly mortified.
IVe stood with our backs against the wall and waited. An hour later, having cleared everyone else, the agent leaned back in his chair and motioned for us to step forward.
He asked me something in English, and the Professor stepped in to explain that I did not understand the language. The agent turned his lips up and leaned farther back in his chair. It was clear he had not bought the Professor’s story, that he was mocking us with his questions, enjoying the level of anxiety he caused in my husband. He asked the Professor a second, then a third question. He paused for a while, then, without turning around, called someone’s name.
I watched as the Professor’s eyelids fluttered and sweat beaded on the back of his neck. Another agent walked up. The first one showed him our passport and said what I assumed was our story. Rushing to convince him, the Professor pulled a notebook from the briefcase he had carried on the plane, pointed to various pages and explained things the agents did not seem to want to hear.
“University of Tennessee,” the Professor said over and over, bristling with rage at the way he was being ignored. “Doctor of Linguistics. ”
The two men on the other side of the booth would not acknowledge the Professor any more. They were looking at me now, talking about me as if my husband did not exist. He must have found me in a slaves ’ bazaar somewhere in Arabia, the Professor later translated their words. He must have paid a good penny, must have blown a year’s salary to get such a young girl.
The first agent closed our passport and threw it on the table in front of him. For a minute, no one moved. When he realised what the agent had done, the Professor reached with a tentative hand, touched the passport without daring to pick it up. His fingers rested on the little booklet and his eyes probed the agent’s face. The second man let out a loud laugh and walked away. Afraid they would change their mind, the Professor snatched the passport off the table and stuffed it in his breast pocket.
“Very well,” he mumbled, his voice barely audible.
The agent was still staring at us. The Professor put his hat back on, took me by the arm, and picked up his briefcase in his other hand. He had managed to take a few steps before his pride got the better of him and he stopped.
He let go of my hand, put his briefcase down on the ground, and walked back toward the agent.
He extended a proud hand at the man behind the desk.
“I thank you, sir,” he said.
His hand remained extended before the agent. “And I wish you a delightful day.”
I remember marching with my husband through the customs hall, under the still-mocking ga^e of the two agents, toward tinted-glass doors that led to the area where our bags had been left. A woman came toward us. She had long hair and white skin, and she wore strange clothes, and I would never have recognised her, I thought, would never have imagined I might know her except for the little man in the sad black suit who walked next to her still holding her arm.
In Knoxville, the Professor had reserved two rooms at the Andrew Johnson Hotel. He wanted us to spend the night there, he said, because it was already late when we arrived, and he did not wish for me to enter his house in darkness. It was an old superstition from the days of his childhood in the East—that one should not enter a home for the first time in fading light; that opening the door onto dusk would let in evil Jinns and jealous spirits.
He called the hotel by its original name—The Tennessee Terrace—told me it was the tallest building in the city. He took me onto the roof and pointed to the Gay Street Bridge, the Tennessee Theater, the university campus which he said had grown from one building into dozens. We went to dinner at the S & IV. IVe were the only customers that night. I remember we sat at a table amid dozens of empty others, spread across a checkered terrapjo floor with inlaid wood and marble, beneath a giant staircase with ornate bronqe railings. IVe ate quietly, under the gaie of a row of waiters who stood, white napkins in hand, watching us. By the time we finished most of the waiters had gone home.
I loved this town from the very start.
I loved its quiet sidewalks, its neglected parks, the spartan gravesites of foolhardy soldiers who had died for the losing cause. I loved its dust-smeared windows, its ghost-ridden hotels, its kud{u-filled backyards. I felt as if I had stepped into a fairy-tale world where all the women were asleep in beds of feathers, and the prince who was destined to awaken them had lost his way in a maqe of brown lines drawn upon a snow-white hand.
In the morning, we walked from Hill Street down to Fort Sanders, then onto Clinch. There was a house with blue paint and white wooden railings, a Victorian frame with a rounded porch and a turret. The paint, then, was not chipped, the railings not broken. The porch was lined with flower pots that the Professor paid a student of his to water twice a week. The yard was well kept and green.
It was the house of the Professor’s dreams before he lost the will to sleep.
He went in ahead of me to open windows that had been shut for months.
“Come inside,” he invited. “Feel at home.”
I walked into a place of velvet drapes and Tiffany lamps, down-filled armchairs and silk-upholstered daybeds. I saw cabinets full of china, drawers filled with starched linen, a dining table set with silver candlesticks.
The kitchen counter displayed a hundred different spices, each measured and labeled and arranged by color. The powder-room downstairs had wallpaper made of fabric. There was a grand piano in the living room, a hand-carved wooden desk in the Professor’s study.
Upstairs in the bedroom, a four-poster bed with a dark mahogany frame sat under a sheet of mosquito netting that rose around it like a pyramid. The ceiling fan was painted in soft pink. A wind chime on the balcony hung perfectly still.
“This is where you’ll dress in the morning,” the Professor showed me around the bedroom. “This is where you’ll bathe.”
In the bathroom was a porcelain tub with enamel faucets, a white-and-yellow-tiled floor, a set of towels stacked
on a brass stool. I sat on the edge of the tub and turned on the water. I watched it pour out, imagined standing naked in the tub, water filling the space around my ankles, rising to cover my legs.
Back in the bedroom I opened the window, pushed back the mosquito netting around the bed, and lay down with my clothes on. I listened to the water still pouring in the tub.
I dreamed that the water filled the tub as I slept, that it spilled onto the tile floor, seeped under the door and into the bedroom. It flowed slowly, consistently, until it had covered the entire bedroom floor, and then it began to drip through the wood and into the rooms below. I dreamt that it poured down the stairs and through windows, filling the house from the bottom up, rising around the dining room table, across the hand-carved desk, over the grand piano. When it reached my bed, I remained asleep till it had covered my body and risen to the ceiling. Then slowly I opened my arms and started to swim.
I swam through the flood I had created—the white mosquito netting gathered around me like a veil—toward the front door. I went past the Professor who stood terrified in his black suit, his features distorted by the weight of the water, his mouth moving in a plea for help. On the other side of the door was a dry, quiet town with wide streets and empty buildings. I swam past my husband and into the town, leaving him to drown in the waters of the Sea of Marmara.
For YEARS AFTER I arrived here, my husband spent each morning educating me.
He taught me how to sit in a chair and use utensils at the table, how to make a bed and hang my clothes in a closet, how to do my hair the Western woman's way, and how to iron my clothes. We sat in the downstairs study—the Professor in a high-backed chair that made him look even smaller than he was, across from a desk on which he spread books and papers meant to teach me to read and write English, to speak properly, to carry myself as the wife of a distinguished gentleman of letters. The lessons were long and tedious, but he was always patient, and he never scolded me for my mistakes. At the end of the morning, he packed his notebooks and put away the pens, told me he was impressed with my progress, and left for the university.