The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

by Shokoofeh Azar

  A faint smile crept over her lips as she thought of Sohrab’s poem:

  Last night somebody died

  and still, wheat bread is good

  and water flows down, horses drink.

  Just as Dad moved from the garden in front of the house to the garden in the back, to cut some yellow roses, Mum got up from the green velvet armchair with the carved wooden armrests, crossed the parlour’s pale green handwoven carpet, entered the living room, and from there went out onto the porch. She calmly descended the seven steps to the mosaiced courtyard, and from there put her foot on the first of one-hundred-and-seventy-five steps that led to the grove and were lined with Japanese quince, yellow jasmine, Spanish broom and verbena. At the bottom of the steps, as her toes felt the moisture of the morning dew on the clovers, saxifrage, and grass, she felt her mind slowly emptying of names and of the thoughts that just minutes before, had made her happy. She tried to think of something, anything. But as soon as she stepped through the grove’s iron gate and onto the dirt path leading to the village, her mind suddenly stopped. It became silent. Empty. As she crossed the village square and the people looked at her in confusion, she realised she could no longer even think about the hollowness of her mind. All she could do was go.

  It was thus that when Dad entered the house with his bouquet of red, yellow, and white roses and heard the splashing of water boiling over onto the gas burner, his heart flooded with sudden fear. He turned off the flame on the stove, put the flowers on the new kitchen counter and went to the bedroom to find Mum; then checked the other rooms. He woke Beeta to ask if she knew where Mum was. Then he went out onto the porch and called her name—which he had always thought was the most poetic in the world—over and over again: “Roza! … Roza! … Roza!”

  That bouquet of flowers was never arranged in any vase; it wilted there on the kitchen counter. Even Beeta, until the day she left the house, wouldn’t allow herself to touch those dry stalks and petals that would disintegrate to dust and mix with the air at the slightest touch. Dad continued to call Mum’s name from time to time, and didn’t get up from the porch chair for three days. When he did, his hair had gone completely white. White as snow. Just like Mum’s hair after the enlightenment of the greengage tree.

  Dad stopped gardening and making frames. The only thing he could do was sit in the rocking chair on the porch where once he sat with Sohrab and Mum and Beeta; but now he listened to the silence of nature, broken occasionally by a distant cooing or mooing of a cow. Months went by, and though I visited them every day, neither Dad nor Beeta were recognisable. Beeta didn’t even take the time any more to think about her forgotten dreams, or wipe the dust off her pink ballet slippers that, by now, had become much too small for her. She had to fill everyone’s role herself. She cooked. She cleaned the house. She spoke of books. She put cassettes of Marzieh or Banan on in the stereo. She gardened and recited poetry, aloud:

  That which leads to truth

  itself it lacks as

  only truth

  sets free

  it is our fate

  perhaps

  that which we want

  either we do not get

  or escapes us.1

  She washed the dishes and sang, all the while talking of plans she knew would never come to pass. She felt she had no other choice but to talk constantly, because the silence was so heavy it could easily shake the foundation of that strong, new house and bring it down on both of them.

  Finally, one morning on an ordinary day while Beeta was washing the dishes and looking out from the kitchen at the tall grass in the grove, the unpruned trees and untended soil, she thought it would be good to bring some life to the grove now that it was emptied of family members. It was thus that she went to the village to hire a gardener. Everyone pointed to Issa’s house. He was perhaps the only young man of the village who had escaped the war and could manage the five-hectare grove on his own. When Beeta crossed the village square and reached the path that led to Issa’s house, she didn’t know that she would soon be entering a house that, even though it had been years since anyone had knocked on its door, stories of what had happened there were still talked about by all the villagers; stories that neither the Revolution nor the war, the forced recruitment of soldiers nor the martyrdom of the young men, the black snow nor the transfiguration of the orphan mothers, could wipe from their memory.

  The fate of some is infused with the nature of death just as simply as the fate of others is with wealth, poverty or disease. Issa doesn’t have a mother. She died giving birth to him. Issa doesn’t have a father either. His father followed the First Soothsayer into Razan’s fire and burned. Nor does Issa have a sister. His sister, Effat, who came to my treehouse and sought to sweeten some of the village’s bitter memories by showing me the treasure had, with one glance, contracted black love for a shepherd boy passing through Razan with a hundred head of sheep, and had died for the love of him.

  Issa’s mother, Razan, and all the distant forest dwellers’ only midwife, died giving birth to Issa because she had broken a promise made years before to the forest jinns. Razan’s younger generation might call it superstition, but the older people had seen the whole thing with their own eyes and believed in it as they did the sun rising every day in the east. From childhood, Issa’s mother, Parvaneh, had healing and midwifery power that she had received from the jinns because one day Parvaneh’s mother, Homeyra Khatun, saw a young jinn in her courtyard drinking water from the well. The young jinn looked just like a human except her feet were hoofed, her body was covered with hair, and she was so dirty that she gave off a putrid stench of death that could be smelt from several metres away. Homeyra Khatun immediately used the nail she had in her hand to nail the young jinn’s skirt to the ground, and the young jinn who was terrified of iron just like all of her kind, wouldn’t even touch it. So that the very same day, Homeyra Khatun bathed her, removed the nits and lice from her hair, dressed her in clean clothes and nailed horseshoes to her feet. From that day forward, the jinn, who in the house was called Jinni, became a servant and cook for Homeyra Khatun who, finding herself alone to raise six sons and one daughter, had to take care of the house as well as work in the rice paddies.

  Homeyra Khatun knew that Jinni’s mother was looking for her, so she didn’t allow her out into the courtyard. The young jinn’s mother spent years looking for her daughter— going from grove to grove, from courtyard to courtyard, from bathhouse to bathhouse, until one ordinary summer afternoon on one of many ordinary days, she caught sight of her daughter removing the ashes from the cooking stove as she was passing by Homeyra Khatun’s basement. Jinni’s mother sat down right then and there and sobbed. Later, she went to the forest jinns to discuss how best to rescue her daughter from the humans. One of them came up with a plan: it was thus that Homeyra Khatun’s headaches began. At first Homeyra Khatun thought the headaches were due to heat exhaustion and excessive work in the paddies. But then when her headaches got worse by the day, not letting up for even a minute, they brought in the First Soothsayer. “What are your headaches like?” he asked. “It feels as if someone keeps hitting me over the head with a copper dustpan,” Homeyra Khatun replied. The Soothsayer recited some incantations and, as soon as he had placed the mirror in front of Homeyra Khatun, he saw a jinn hitting her over the head with a copper dustpan. As the Soothsayer waved incense, he told Homeyra Khatun what he had seen. Before leaving, he stared at the jinn in the mirror and tried some common de-jinning methods. But in the end, he said, “The charm they put on you can only be broken by you, yourself”. And so in the middle of that very night, Homeyra Khatun took Jinni out into the courtyard and began to sweep. As soon as the jinn mother heard the frrrt … frrrt … frrrt of the broom, she had no choice but to appear and say loudly, “So you know all our tricks! I wanted to come and bargain with you for the return of my daughter. But now it appears you have summoned me and that you want to do the bargaining.” Homeyra Khatun quickly got to the point, saying
“If you want your daughter back, you have to give seven generations of my family’s daughters healing powers”. When the jinn heard this, she said to the woman, “Open your mouth”. The woman opened her mouth, whereupon the jinn spat inside and said, “From now on, seven generations of your daughters and your daughter’s daughters will be able to heal with their saliva”. Then she added, “Now your side of the deal”. But Homeyra Khatun did not keep her promise, instead saying, “I have one more condition. My condition is that seven generations of my daughters must be the best midwives of Razan and all the surrounding forested area so they become wealthy and more powerful than their husbands.”

  The jinn had no choice but to say, “Give me your hands”. The woman stretched out her hands and once again the jinn spat, this time on her hands, saying, “Here, from now on seven generations of your daughters will be the best midwives in the region and they will be swimming in wealth”. At this, Homeyra Khatun removed the horseshoes from the young girl’s hooves with a wrench. As soon as the mother had taken her daughter’s hand in her own, the jinn said, “But since you didn’t keep your promise, mark my words. From this moment forward I will be your enemy and the enemy of seven generations of your family. If you tell your daughter of their powers, the charm will be broken. They must discover their powers on their own.” Then she pulled down her stinky hemp breeches and peed into the well. Unable to do anything, Homeyra Khatun just stood there looking at the jinn whose urine was flowing into the water. Whereupon, in the blink of an eye, the jinn and her daughter disappeared.

  From that day and for seven generations until now, no one touched the well water. It increased so much every year that it overflowed into the courtyard, the garden and then the grove, bewitching and poisoning all the plants. It was thus that the jinn’s first act of enmity towards the family became problematic. However, it wasn’t long before Parvaneh, Homeyra Khatun’s only daughter discovered that her touch not only relieved the pain caused by the villagers’ rotten teeth so that she could pull them out without inflicting pain, but she could also cure, forever, the aches felt in the crooked, damp joints of old men and women. She wasn’t yet the talk of the town when she discovered she could painlessly deliver the babies of expecting mothers; even though she was young enough to still wet her bed at night and hugged her cloth doll to her chest to fall asleep, her fame soon spread from the village to the surrounding villages and the forested area beyond.

  She had not yet turned eleven when she assisted her hundredth birth. Homeyra Khatun, whose wish for wealth had come true, wanted to make a votive offering of food to distribute to the people. But that very evening, a jinn came into Parvaneh’s room. Parvaneh, who had heard stories of forest jinns from her mother and grandmother, recognised her immediately and said, “What is it you want with me?” The jinn answered, “Respect for tradition! For every hundred human births, you must also assist one of ours.” Before Parvaneh could answer, she saw herself passing through the wall of her house, through the roof, and flying over the forest, pulled along by the jinn who had taken her arm and was leading the way. When they finally landed on the forest floor under a dense canopy of trees, the jinn snapped her fingers. In the blink of an eye, what had previously been as dark as death and terrifying, was illuminated with dozens of candles and torches. Parvaneh saw dozens of jinns, small and large, with ugly black faces, matted hair and hoof-like feet all doing something. One was spinning invisible thread, another was leaning against a tree memorising ancient incantations from an invisible notebook. One was writing a vagabondage jinx with urine from a baby jinn, and yet another was preparing food in a large pot, the stench of which made Parvaneh’s stomach turn. Lying on the ground in the middle of all of this was a jinn, screaming with labour pains. Parvaneh, who all along the way had told herself she wouldn’t help the jinns, suddenly took mercy. She stepped forward and, as soon as she had placed a hand on the pregnant jinn’s stomach, the baby was born without any pain. Nearby, Jinni’s mother recognised Parvaneh and her miraculous touch, and recalled her oath to Homeyra Khatun, but said nothing. When the job was done and she had returned home, the jinn placed several onion skins under the corner of the rug in Parvaneh’s room and said, “This is your payment. If you keep this a secret and tell no one, in the morning you will find a gold coin under the rug. However, if you say anything to anyone, not only will you be severely punished, but you will be left nothing but onion skins.” No sooner had the jinn spoken these words than she disappeared.

  For years, things continued accordingly and, before falling in love, Parvaneh owned ten hectares of rice paddies, twenty hectares of groves, hundreds of hens, roosters, ducks and geese, and a vat full of gold coins, the provenance of which nobody, not even her mother, was aware. When Parvaneh was only sixteen years old, she fell in love with Qorban, son of the village leader. Their wedding celebration lasted seven days and seven nights. Less than a year after the birth of their daughter Effat, Qorban was awoken in the middle of the night by a nightmare. He had dreamed that his wife had died giving birth to a son. He reached out in the dark towards Parvaneh but found no trace of her. He became even more frightened. The more he searched, the less he found. It seemed as if she had disappeared into thin air. It was almost dawn when, after having dozed off for several minutes out of fatigue and anger, Qorban awoke to find Parvaneh sleeping in her usual place. He was seething with jealousy. That very morning, he grabbed several gold coins and went to see the Soothsayer, and told him what had happened. The Soothsayer looked into the mirror and explained everything. Then he said, “Keep count of the births Effat delivers. After the hundredth delivery, you can expect a jinn to appear. That night sprinkle sawdust on the floor after your wife has gone to sleep. The sawdust will stick to her skirt, and through my powers, will light up like the Milky Way so that you will be able to find her. But you must remember, no matter what happens you must not reveal yourself.”

  Weeks and months went by until one night when the jinn returned. Taking Parvaneh’s hand, she led her up into the sky, with Qorban following, running until he reached the middle of the forest. He hid behind a tree and was watching the birth ritual with amazement when suddenly he was shoved into the midst of the jinns. Everyone screamed. They cursed in an incomprehensible language and, in the blink of an eye, disappeared. When Parvaneh saw him, she fainted out of fear. And so it was that Jinni’s mother managed to take her revenge on Homeyra Khatun, for she knew how the fate of every member of that family would change as a result of the mere pressure of her hand on Qorban’s back.

  When Parvaneh re-awoke, she saw no sign of the jinns. The two of them groped blindly in the dark towards their house, while Parvaneh cursed Qorban in her heart for his stupidity and meddling, all the while expecting a mysterious death to strike at any moment. From that night on, and every night before going to sleep, Parvaneh told Qorban to take good care of Effat if the jinns took her life and she didn’t live till morning.

  It was the first sign, but the most important one: Parvaneh’s left arm began to itch, and didn’t stop until the day she died. When the itching in her left arm didn’t even let up as she slept, she knew she would soon lose her wealth. The second sign revealed the limits of her physical reality; she lost her miraculous touch. Now she had two hands just like everyone else and saliva that couldn’t even cure bloating in a cow or diarrhoea in a mule. By the time the third sign appeared, she was so worried and frightened that she had lost ten kilos; and had taken up praying again, something she had given up at the age of ten. One night, an unknown fever hit the chickens and, before dawn the inhabitants of Razan were awoken by the smell of their carcasses. That foggy morning when Parvaneh stepped on the ducks’ putrid bodies, poured petrol over them and set fire to them, she knew what it all meant. In the thick fog, away from the noise of the flames that were spreading the smell of burnt wood and roasting meat in all directions, she sat down and thought, this is just the beginning. It wasn’t long before her citrus trees and rice paddies were attacked by paras
ites, which destroyed the whole harvest but didn’t even touch neighbouring land. When this happened Qorban consoled himself by saying, “Let them take all we own”. But even when Parvaneh fell pregnant upon the advice of her mother, Homeyra Khatun, so that with the birth of a daughter she might rid herself of the malevolence and curse of what had happened and ensure another generation of healer-midwives, Parvaneh wasn’t so calm. So when one early morning nine months later, Issa opened his eyes to the world, his mother Parvaneh, without as much as a metre of land to her name, closed her own eyes forever, and Qorban was to spend years, thereafter, searching for her vat of gold coins; the very vat he found, years later, filled with onion skins in the poisoned well. With Parvaneh’s death and the birth of a son, Homeyra Khatun hoped that at least Effat would continue her path, win the jinns over again, and regain all the riches and property that had been lost. However, these hopes were dashed years later with Effat’s self-immolation. Stricken by black love, Effat set herself on fire before discovering she had powers of healing and midwifery.