by Parisa Reza
Talla was married, though, and she longed to celebrate her marriage and wear the jewel her husband would give her. She wanted her own home and children.
But the truth was—contrary to her ardent wish to be a woman, to be indoors running her own household—Talla was still a child who flourished out of doors. What she loved most in the world was working in the open air, in the fields and orchards. She was unhappy when her mother asked her to sweep a room or wash the linen. Not that she was lazy—far from it. She was always willing to work. However hard the task, even in the cold and snow, she was not discouraged. Only, she needed fresh air and space. When she was surrounded by nature, looking at the mountains, talking to God and the Prophet, handling roses, touching water and soil, she remembered the stories people told of fairies and giants, and was happy.
When she stood motionless by the washhouse, though, Talla was dejected, sometimes even anguished. The anxiety that gnawed at her was not fear that Sardar might die or be taken away by an earthquake, an epidemic, or a flood. No, it was something else: another woman coming into her husband’s life . . . and the thought of it was killing her. She spoke of this to holy Fatima and asked for her blessing. “It would kill me,” she told her. Sardar was her man, her man who had had the courage to leave, to go see the world, to live in the capital. She was the wife of this strong man, and no one should take him from her. But she was so weak and he so far away! Her only consolation was in prayer. So she suggested an agreement with God: She would address one hundred salvations to him every day and in exchange God would watch over her husband for her. She believed in God and his promises. But she also had to beware black magic and the spells women could cast. So when she was wracked with anxiety she would address still more salvations to God to ward off all evil. “God is great, he will protect you,” her aunt Gohar told her.
The first winter after Sardar left, Talla told herself she must wait till the spring, because winter is not a good time to travel. Then she persuaded herself Sardar would be back at the end of spring, for the Festival of the Rose, when the fragrance from Mohamed’s flowers fills the air with enchantment for miles around Ghamsar, when people sing traditional songs, ask for God’s blessing, sacrifice lambs, and heat great vats side by side, some for the roses, others for the lambs.
Spring came and went, without Sardar. The following winter was cold and harsh, like Talla’s life.
Talla’s house had an upper floor. The main room on the ground floor was the heart of family life. A host of little recesses carved into the earth walls housed bowls, placemats, lamps . . . At the far end, mattresses and blankets were stacked neatly into two piles as tall as a man. In winter they set up the korsi, a low table covered with a huge blanket under which they kept a heating pan filled with glowing embers and hot stones. The family would come together and sleep huddled around the korsi. In the morning the cock’s crow served to wake them, and each member of the family immediately knew what his or her duty was: one went to fetch water, another lit the lamp, a third made the tea. They breakfasted around the korsi in the warmth of the last embers, under the thick blanket that still harbored some of the night’s heat. Then, from the youngest to the eldest, they each set about their day’s tasks.
The room opened out onto a terrace with three steps leading down to the yard. An exterior staircase led to the upstairs room where the family stored all their wealth: their linen, crockery, and tools, as well as provisions and harvests. In winter, bags of dried fruit and salted meat preserved in fat were hung from the ceiling. In summer, the parents slept in this room, away from the children. A long ladder gave access to the flat roof of the house where large trays of fruit, vegetables, and herbs were laid out to dry every day in the hot season.
The hens, the donkey, and a few sheep lived together in the yard. A well, a basin, and the oven dug into the bare earth fulfilled every domestic need. Beyond lay an extensive garden where all sorts of different fruit trees grew side by side. Talla’s father also owned a parcel of land a little farther south, at the foot of the mountain where the Persian roses grew. Complicated earthworks channeled water from the river to a faraway village but also to Ghamsar’s various neighborhoods and gardens. No one was short of water, and the plantations flourished.
Talla’s family was large, with five children: two girls and three boys. Her younger sister, Havva, was four that year. A good, gentle child, she, too, had green eyes, and she never left Talla’s side. From the moment she was born, Talla had taken responsibility for her. In such families, it was often the older girls’ role to look after the little ones in order to help their parents and learn their future job as mothers.
When Havva was six months old and Talla only six, she had carried her on her back, fed her, wiped her nose, and sung her lullabies. Later they enjoyed running through the valley together. Talla dreamed of having Havva in Tehran with her, she would like to find a husband for her there and send for her.
But Havva had a failing that angered her parents: at the age of four she was still wetting her bed at night. The soiled mattress and blanket had to be washed every time. That winter her father beat her with a stick on several occasions to teach her to grow up, but still she could not.
The two girls went for walks through the thick snow, and when Talla pulled the collar of her sister’s jacket around her neck to protect it from the cold or arranged her scarf to keep her ears nice and warm, she would often talk about this issue. She told Havva she must stop doing it at night, especially in winter, because then they all slept around the korsi, and when she wet her bed their mother had to wash the big blanket, which took a long time to dry. In the meantime they had to cover the korsi with lots of little blankets that slipped and fell off. This let the heat out, and their father would get cold in the night, then in the morning, irritable after a bad night’s sleep, he would beat her all the harder. Like the last time when she was beaten twice for the same nocturnal incident. Havva cried and her tears rolled over cheeks red with cold. Her green eyes went red, too, growing still more beautiful. And she said she didn’t do it on purpose, it happened in the night when she was asleep, that someone or something must want to hurt her, maybe the devil had got inside her. To ward off this idea Talla asked her sister to bite her tongue and stop her nonsense, then Talla bit the flesh of her own hand between her thumb and index finger, then turned the hand over and bit it again, and recited a verse from the Koran. Talla thought they should go see the mullah, he would know what to do. But her father would never agree to that, it was shameful to take your daughter to the mullah because she was wetting the bed aged four. So they would have to go see Mehr, the healer in the lower village who wrote charms and prepared potions. Her parents would not like that either: you had to pay for the woman’s services. “We’re really not going to pay for this stupid urine business!” they would say. Her aunt Gohar said Havva had to drink an infusion of yellow dead-nettle to strengthen her bladder. But their mother had so many children she had no time to make infusions for Havva. Talla would willingly have done it, only where could she find dead-nettles in winter? Her father could have given her money to buy them from the herbalist, Mirza Amir, but he would never do that. How sad!
It was an icy morning when all of Ghamsar was blanketed in snow. In the half light of their mud house the smell of yesterday’s cooking mingled with the sweat of men who stopped washing through the winter, the stench of the animals they tended, and the waft of the embers in the korsi. When Havva woke to the cock’s crow and realized her bed was wet again, her eyes filled with tears and her mouth started to quiver. Terrified, she looked over to her father. With just one glance, he understood and his face hardened immediately. It was as if it was a father’s duty to be merciless at the sight of his children’s fear: Instead of softening him, Havva’s terror sharpened his anger.
“I’m going to teach you a lesson you won’t forget!” he bellowed. And he instructed his wife to remove Havva’s underwear. Her mother mad
e no protest. The thought of having to clean the big blanket that lay over the korsi yet again had made her angry too. Havva’s father took the fire tongs and looked inside the brazier for a glowing log that had stayed alight all night. He found one and told Havva to spread her legs. Havva opened them wide, offered no resistance. Held in the tongs, the log cast the last of its light in the shadowy dawn. No one had thought to light the lamp yet. The ember came closer to Havva, and Talla, whose eyes were wide with horror, started to shake. There was no escape from this abomination, and she knew it. But Havva could not believe it would happen, she watched the scorching ember come closer and could not believe it: it wasn’t possible, he wouldn’t do it, someone would stop him, himself, her mother, someone else, or something out of the sky. In horrified silence the family stood petrified, watching the ember’s glowing trajectory through the darkness. The father brought it down between Havva’s legs and held it there a moment. He actually did it.
A scream of pain and disbelief tore through the half light and hit them full in the face before reverberating around the entire village. Then the wind picked up this child’s wail and carried it off into the mountains. And Talla thinks she can still hear that agonized scream resonating as she leaves the village along Mount Ashke.
But before that, while the ember sizzled against Havva’s delicate skin, Talla shrieked: “Ya ghamar-e bani hashem!”
Havva did not have time to forget the lesson she had been taught by her father. She died within a week. She died in appalling pain, with this burn between her legs, peering with her own green eyes into the green eyes of her sister Talla who sat beside her. Weeping, one for the other’s pain, the other in shame. Each a mirror of her sister, without words, both innocent.
No one but Talla wept for Havva. Children are born in great numbers here and die for nothing. Besides, this child was not in good health, there was something not right about her, she would have gone soon, one way or another. Talla alone wore mourning, convinced that, had her husband been there, had she had her own home, she would have let her sister sleep at her house so she could wet her bed without shame, and the tragedy would never have happened.
When Havva was gone, Talla lay motionless in a corner for days. Until her father booted her in the back and bellowed, “Get yourself up and go help your mother.” So she took herself off to the washhouse and thrust her hands into the icy water.
She carried on weeping in silence, her tears falling on the snow and pitting it with tiny crevasses just as her husband’s absence lacerated her heart. He alone had some right over her, he alone would have stood up to her father, and still he was not here. So she looked up at the sky and wanted to howl with grief, but that was when she saw an eagle. And that eagle flying over her head was a sign.
Winter passed and spring came. It was Talla’s turn to light the oven in the yard in the mornings. When the cock crowed she rose automatically, still half asleep, put on her shoes and cardigan, went out of the house, took some wood from the pile, lifted the small board over the oven, arranged a few logs at the back of the cavity, and lit the fire. One morning, still befuddled by sleep, she had only just put her hand on the pile of wood when a sharp pain made her scream. Her father leapt outside and saw Talla clutching her hand as if she had been burned. He took her hand and immediately recognized a snake bite on her palm. He roared at his wife to bring some belts, and wrapped one tightly around Talla’s wrist, then another around her arm, all the while instructing the children to fetch pails of milk from the room on the first floor. In the meantime he sucked on the bite and spat out the venom in disgust. When he put his daughter’s hand in the first pail of milk it curdled instantly. He moved to the second pail, with the same result. In the third pail, the milk remained unchanged. “She’s saved!” he cried triumphantly. In his euphoria, he uncharacteristically took Talla’s head in his hands and kissed her.
“If you’d died, how could I have told your husband! You can’t give a man a corpse for a wife!”
The snake was never found. For several days the whole village lived in fear, people constantly looking behind them, under mattresses, within blankets. Children were frightened to go near firewood.
Talla, whom the villagers now attributed with the aura of a survivor, was peculiarly pleased by this event. It was the message from the eagle overhead: The snake had come to give her her womanhood and give her back her father. The executioner had become a savior. And, more significantly, three days after the snakebite she had her first period, and the pain that went with it, it was the price she had to pay. “A woman is revealed through pain,” her aunt Gohar told her. “You’ll see, every time you do your duty as a woman, there will be pain. Periods, your wedding night, childbirth . . . you might as well embrace it and cherish it. Drink it like tea which is as bitter as poison the first time, but later, if you accept it, it warms your heart.”
A year later, in the autumn, at fruit-picking time, Talla was gathering walnuts at the bottom of the garden. Her back hurt from all the bending, so she stood up and stretched. That was when she saw a man silhouetted in the distance. She thought of Sardar but immediately chided herself. It couldn’t be, it wasn’t springtime. But as the man approached his face gradually took shape: It could be Sardar. Talla’s heart started to beat so hard she pressed her hand to her chest to stop it exploding. She knew that when she faced him she would never be able to contain all the emotion and resentment she had buried inside her for three years, so she had long dreaded this meeting.
Sardar reeled for a moment. In just one glance he saw Talla’s beauty, the metamorphosis that had taken place in her. He had left behind a nine-year-old, a child, now he saw her at age twelve: a woman. He looked at her openly. It was the first time he had looked her in the eye; even when they had said their farewells he had kept his eyes lowered. Now he discovered a woman’s clearly defined contours, and saw in the deep green of her eyes something untamed, a suggestion of rancor, even a hint of hatred, but also perhaps something more unsettling: desire. At last he consented to say, “Hello.”
By way of a reply, he received a resounding slap. The shock of it made Sardar step back. Then he mastered his emotions but did not react. He did not return the blow, did not raise his voice, ask for explanations, or try to calm her, but kept on looking her in the eye. Something neither he nor she had expected had just happened, something legitimate, something sincere, something that concerned only the two of them. Sardar now knew that his wife was a sensible man’s nightmare, and he did not believe himself to be sensible; she was therefore his dream.
Slowly, ardently, their eyes communicated the inexpressible truths Sardar could not put into words: That he had thought of her every day and every night over those three years, that she had been the source of his strength, that so long as he had slept on a bed of straw with the animals he would not come for her, that, once he was working as a day laborer, he waited till he had decent lodgings and his own flock of sheep before coming for her, that it had been three years because it had taken all that time to escape poverty. Alone as a dog in the merciless rigors of a city filled with battalions of the poor, he had held out, just for her, for her honor and her pride.
Then Sardar spoke at last: “We’ll play this however you prefer. Either you stay here and I send you money regularly, or I agree to a divorce, or you come with me. I’ll accept your decision.”
Talla replied without a moment’s hesitation.
“I’m coming with you.”
Talla wanted to leave straightaway. No marriage ceremony, no banquet. Just leave. There was now nothing and no one to tie her to this place; her life was to be elsewhere, her happiness, too. She told her husband this, right there in the orchard. They agreed: In a week, when the donkey was sufficiently rested, when Sardar had spent some time with his family and the rest of the village, when he had prayed in Soliman’s mausoleum in the lower village and in the Imam Hussein mosque, they would leave together.
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nbsp; Talla’s father knew she still held Havva’s death against him. And he held this rancor against her. He had not meant to kill Havva, he had meant to teach her a lesson, but that lesson had killed her. They were the only two people who deemed him cruel, the two people still tormented by it, his daughter and himself. Let her go, let her go soon. Perhaps memories of Havva would fade with those of Talla? Perhaps . . .
To express his gratitude to Talla’s father for keeping and feeding his wife for three years, Sardar gave him a string of prayer beads from Mecca and some money wrapped in a length of cloth. In her father’s presence, Sardar gave Talla four gold bracelets. He also sacrificed a sheep to protect them from the evils that might befall them on their journey. They gave one haunch to the mullah so that he might pray for them. They also shared out a good proportion of the meat to some of the less fortunate in the village. And with what was left they prepared a farewell feast and invited both families and the village leader.
The evening of the very day Sardar arrived, Talla packed her belongings and joined Sardar’s family. She took little with her, her clothes, her winter coat, and her wedding mirror. As she was to leave the village, the two families had reached an agreement: There would be no dowry or jointure.
That night a nuptial room was prepared for them in Sardar’s home. Talla’s mother talked to Talla before letting her go, explaining frankly what would happen. Sardar only just knew himself. He had had many opportunities to visit brothels in Tehran, but had made a point of refraining: it would not have pleased God or the Prophet, and mostly because a man should take his own wife and not another man’s or a woman who is no one’s wife. But he thought he knew, he had heard talk of this. They were shown respectfully and ceremoniously into the room where the immaculate nuptial bed awaited. They lay down side by side. Talla was calm, intimidated but content, at last her life as a woman could begin. Sardar was far more frightened than Talla. She was surprised: he hurt her. So it really was true that a woman is revealed with pain. She bled, honor was preserved. They left the bloodstained sheet—someone would come to check it—and emerged from the room to join the cheering well-wishers, who had waited outside. Sardar’s mother was no longer alive so it was his older brother’s wife who went to check; and she reappeared intoning the song of a consummated marriage.