The next morning, she scattered bread and awaited the bird, but he did not return. Nor did he return the next day, nor the next, nor all through the long winter months. The girl grieved for him every day. To honor his sacrifice, she melted the golden bird, dipped the white wool in his molten blood, and knotted the golden thread into her rug.
When the girl had finished, she asked her captors to allow her to present the carpet to the shah. His retainers spread it before him, and its golden threads seemed to fill the cold hall with sunlight. The shah put his hand to his earlobe and wiggled it in disbelief, for he thought he could hear the carpet’s golden songbirds extolling the glories of love.
“What kind of sorcery is this?” he demanded.
The girl told him about the bird that had kept her company for so many days. When the shah commanded her to prove it, she showed him the single white feather that had dropped to the floor. She had attached it to a thread and worn it around her neck ever since.
The shah summoned a wizened old woman known for her magical powers and ordered her to untie any unholy spells from his royal presence. The woman held the feather in her fingers and muttered incantations, ending with, “By the power of God above, you are released from your spell!”
The feather quaked until she lost her hold on it, and then it transformed into a tall man with downy cheeks, lips like tulips, eyes as dark as night, and blue-black tresses like hyacinths.
“Surely there could be nothing stranger than this, not even a carpet that sings!” exclaimed the shah. “Who overmastered you?”
“An evil demon,” the youth replied. “He had been chased away by my parents, and he punished them by enchanting me. To torment me further, he gave me the power to transform into anything except myself.”
“And what have you to do with this girl?”
The man’s voice softened. “When I saw her innocence enslaved, my heart became one with hers,” he replied, “for I was in thrall, too.”
The shah remained unmoved. To the youth, he said curtly, “You are henceforth my property.”
To the girl, he added, “And now you and I shall be married.”
The girl jumped to her feet and cried, “By God above, did you not say that you would release me if I should knot a carpet finer than any you possess?”
“I did,” the shah admitted.
“And can you swear that there is one finer?”
The shah pointed to the vizier who had replaced her father. “Bring me my finest carpets,” he told him.
The vizier rushed to do his bidding, and when the three carpets were laid out to be inspected, the girl examined them each in turn.
“My pattern is finer than the first one,” she said. “My carpet has far more knots per radj than the second. And none of these carpets sings to the eye, the ear, or the heart, as mine does!”
The shah did not reply, for he could think of no evidence to contradict her. The girl added quickly, “Nevertheless, I shall agree to give myself to you as your wife, on one condition. Release this man from bondage to you, for he all but relinquished his life for me.”
The shah seemed ready to agree, but the wizened woman interrupted. “Great Shah, I beg you to show mercy,” she said. “Allow these slaves their liberty, for by sacrificing themselves for each other, they have already become legends.”
“It is true that I have never seen two such wonders in a single day,” the shah exclaimed, “and yet why should I let them go?”
In a voice of authority, the woman declared, “Because they will be remembered forever—and your munificence will be recognized through the ages.”
The shah, who cared deeply about his own reputation, was prepared to improve it. To the girl he said, “I release you, for you have achieved what I commanded. Your carpet is finer than any I possess.”
To the youth he said, “I grant her to you, for you let flow your life’s blood for her.”
The shah gave them a wedding feast that lasted three days and three nights, and they were married on the carpet that had knotted them together. Its golden birds sang to them as the girl gave her consent, for she had found the lion of her heart. Then the two former prisoners served one another with joy and tenderness until the end of their days.
Acknowledgments
This book would not exist in its present form without the unflagging support of my father, Ahmad Amirrezvani, and my stepmother, Firoozeh Firoozfar Amirrezvani. During my three trips to Iran to research this book, they drove me around the country to visit historic sites and museums, indulged me while I made notes and poked around, and answered my endless questions. I owe much to their patience and love.
I would also like to thank my faithful readers, Janis Cooke Newman, Rosie Ruley-Atkins, Bonnie Wach, and Steph Paynes, and my longtime friend, storyteller Ruth Halpern, who shed light on the art of telling tales.
I owe a great debt to novelist Sandra Scofield, whom I met at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. A born teacher, Sandra offered insights, encouragement, and helpful advice at every juncture.
Bringing a novel to term is demanding not just for the writer, but for everyone close to her. For his unwavering love and support, I would like to thank Ed Grant.
My heartfelt appreciation goes to the hardworking staff at Little, Brown, especially my editor, Judy Clain, and publisher Michael Pietsch, and their equally dedicated counterparts at Headline Review, in particular my editor there, Marion Donaldson, and deputy managing director Kerr MacRae.
Special thanks also to my agent, Emma Sweeney, for her advocacy and thoughtful suggestions.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge the dedicated scholars who have devoted their lives to understanding Iran. Without their extraordinary work, this book could not have been written.
Author’s Note
During the nine years I worked on The Blood of Flowers, I felt like Ali Baba in The Arabian Nights, who utters the magic words “Open, sesame!” to reveal a cave illuminated by gold and precious gems. In my case, the riches emerged in the form of books about pre-modern Iranian history and culture, which were similarly hidden away on dusty library shelves where few people ventured. I spent hours examining these treasures, and the more I read, the more fascinated I became.
During my explorations I kept returning to the reign of Shah Abbas (1571–1629), a historical period that’s hard to rival for great calamities and equally great deeds. When the Shah took power at the age of seventeen, Iran had endured a bloodbath in which members of the Safavi royal court were blinded or murdered in a struggle for power, and many soldiers and large chunks of the country were lost during wars. Shah Abbas was able to chart a course through this chaos. During his forty-one-year reign he proved to be a brilliant administrator, although his approach to justice was harsh by today’s standards. For his bravery, ingenuity, and contributions to Iranian cultural life, he is known as Shah Abbas the Great.
I set The Blood of Flowers in the 1620s, at which point the Shah had succeeded in defending the borders of Iran, vanquishing his internal political enemies, and creating a climate where the arts could flourish. One of the arts the Shah promoted vigorously was carpet making. Iranian carpets had become coveted in Europe by kings, noblemen, and wealthy merchants and were catching the eye of artists such as Rubens, Velázquez, and Van Dyck. Always alert to a good opportunity, the Shah set up carpet workshops around the country, such as the one described in this book. According to Iran scholar Roger M. Savory, “under his patronage, carpet weaving was elevated to the status of a fine art,” so that in addition to being created by individuals working on their own looms, carpets were woven by urban specialists who were trained to make masterpieces for the court. Remarkable examples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iranian court carpets survive in museums and private collections, and a number of rug scholars believe that the carpets of the Safavi period (1501–1722) rank among the finest ever produced.
When the Shah first came to power, his capital was located in Qazvin, a northwestern Ir
anian city. By 1598, the Shah had moved his capital to Isfahan, a more defensible site in the center of the country, where he undertook one of the most remarkable renovations in urban planning history. Under the guidance of his city planners and architects over the course of about thirty years, the Shah built a city that’s still magnificent today. The enormous Image of the World, which earned its honorific because of its size, was bigger than most European city squares of the time. The Shah’s palace, his personal mosque, the Great Bazaar, and the huge Friday mosque described in this book are still a wonder to behold, and you can even see the marble goalposts that were used for polo games, which the Shah liked to watch from the upstairs balcony of his palace. Thomas Herbert, a young man who visited Iran from 1627 to 1629 with English ambassador Sir Dodmore Cotton, described the square as “without doubt as spacious, as pleasant and aromatic a market as any in the universe.” Like Herbert and many other travelers, I fell under Isfahan’s spell when I first visited at the age of fourteen. The city made such an indelible impression on me that decades later it was the only conceivable choice for the setting of my novel.
Although the main characters in The Blood of Flowers are fictional, I have tried to stay true to events that would have shaped their lives and ways of thinking. For example, the comet described in the first chapter, and some of the misfortunes associated with it, were recorded with consternation by Eskandar Beg Monshi, Shah Abbas’s official historian, who produced a thirteen-hundred-page chronicle about the most significant events of his reign (I used the Persian Heritage Series translation by Roger M. Savory). However, I have taken the liberty of compressing events within the novel even when they occurred outside of its time period.
Every great historical period deserves a great travel writer, and seventeenth-century Iran found one in Sir John Chardin, a French jeweler. Chardin traveled to Iran in the 1670s and wrote ten detailed volumes about his experiences there. Few chroniclers are as thorough in their reports or as entertaining to read. Chardin’s observations were an important source for me about the customs and mores of the Safavi period, especially since he was astute enough to record intriguing contradictions such as these: “Wine and intoxicating Liquors are forbid the Mahometans; yet there is scarce anyone that does not drink of some sort of strong Liquor” and “Two opposite Customs are commonly practis’d by the Persians; that of praising God continually, and talking of his Attributes, and that of uttering Curses, and obscene Talk” (from Travels in Persia: 1673–1677).
During his travels, Chardin obtained an almanac from Isfahan and recorded its prophecies, upon which I have modeled the prophecies described in chapter 1. The prediction about the behavior of women is a direct quote from Voyages du chevalier Chardin en Perse, et autres lieux de l’Orient (the translation from the French is my own).
Many travelers have been fascinated by Persian carpets, and they have been a small but cherished part of my own life ever since I received my first rug from my father when I was a teenager. The carpets described in this novel are generally based on Iranian designs, color choices, dyeing methods, and knotting techniques. Although I consulted dozens of carpet books, two key sources of information were Hans E. Wulff’s The Traditional Crafts of Persia and Leonard M. Helfgott’s Ties That Bind: A Social History of the Iranian Carpet. The ideas about the spirituality expressed in Middle Eastern carpets have been discussed in many publications, including the exhibition catalogue Images of Paradise in Islamic Art, edited by Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, and in essays such as Schuyler V. R. Cammann’s “Symbolic Meanings in Oriental Rug Patterns.” Related ideas about buildings are articulated in The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture, by Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar.
Several readers have expressed curiosity about the prevalence of the temporary marriage contract described in this novel, which is known as a sigheh. This form of marriage has been part of Iranian culture for hundreds of years and is still actively used by men and women. My main source of background information was scholar Shahla Haeri’s Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’i Iran, which includes interviews with contemporary practitioners and provides a detailed portrait of this complex and unusual institution.
While researching this book, I also became interested in sharing Iran’s extensive oral tradition because of its prevalence in pre-modern times. Many travelers have remarked that the most illiterate of Iranian peasants could recite long poems; even today, Iranians play a game in which they challenge each other to remember poems and prove their knowledge by reciting them. In addition to poems, the literature that was traditionally shared orally includes a large body of folktales, legends, fables, discourses, and teaching stories about spiritual growth.
The nesting, or layering, of stories was a common practice in the Middle East, one familiar to readers of The Arabian Nights. I was much influenced in this regard by the twelfth-century Persian- language poet Nizami, who wrote a book-length narrative in verse about a shah’s exploits, called Haft Paykar (Seven Portraits), which includes seven thoughtful tales about love. In my view, Nizami’s layering of stories parallels the layering of designs in Iranian carpets, creating a weave of infinite richness and depth.
Of the seven tales interspersed between the chapters of my novel, five are retellings of traditional Iranian or Islamic stories. In cases where I thought it was necessary for the novel, I adapted the original stories freely. The words that begin each tale, “First there wasn’t and then there was. Before God, no one was,” reflect my rough translation of an Iranian expression that is equivalent to “Once upon a time.”
The story at the end of chapter 2 was recorded in Henri Massé’s Persian Beliefs and Customs. Massé’s original source was a book of Iranian tales, Tchehardeh efsane ez efsaneha-ye roustayi-e Iran, collected in the Kerman region of Iran and published in 1936 by Kouhi Kermani.
The stories that appear at the end of chapters 3 and 4 were written in verse by the aforementioned poet Nizami. The tale after chapter 3 is based on parts of the tale of Layli and Majnoon, which existed long before Nizami retold it and made it his own. My main source was The Story of Layla and Majnun, translated by Dr. Rudolf Gelpke with collaborators E. Mattin and G. Hill, but I used the Iranian name Layli. The story of Fitna the slave girl after chapter 4 appears in Nizami’s Haft Paykar; my source was the translation by scholar Julie Scott Meisami. Her extensive notes make this wonderful book easy to enjoy and understand.
The tale at the end of chapter 5 is adapted from a traditional Islamic story, while the tale following chapter 6 is modeled on the one that opens the poet Farid al-Din Attar’s Illahi-Nama (Book of God), in the translation by John Andrew Boyle. Attar, whose long life spanned the twelfth century, may be better known to readers as the author of the famous Sufi parable in verse called The Conference of the Birds.
The tales that appear at the end of chapters 1 and 7 are my own. Those tales, as well as the main narrative of this novel, are deeply influenced by the use of language in traditional Iranian tales, as well as by their approach to characters and plot. I was also much inspired for the language of this novel by eminent scholar Annemarie Schimmel’s A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry.
The title of the novel is drawn from a poem. Called “Ode to a Garden Carpet,” the poem appears in Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman’s monumental Survey of Persian Art, a forty-three-hundred-page encyclopedia and labor of love published in 1939 by Oxford University Press, which I used as a reference on everything from carpets to coins. The poem is described as “by an unknown Sufi poet, circa 1500,” and it portrays the garden carpet as a place of refuge that stimulates visions of the divine.
The narrator of this novel is purposely not named, in tribute to the anonymous artisans of Iran.
About the Author
ANITA AMIRREZVANI was born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in San Francisco. For ten years, she was a staff dance critic at newspapers in the Bay Area. She has received fellowships from the National
Arts Journalism Program, the NEA’s Arts Journalism Institute for Dance, and Hedgebrook. She worked on The Blood of Flowers for nine years, during which time she made three research trips to Iran. She lives in northern California.
The Blood of Flowers Page 37