That day I thought only of a treat as we walked down the busy street. Unusually quiet, my grandmother cocooned herself tighter in her chador. I left her in her own world and enjoyed the sounds of shopkeepers inviting the customers in: fruit stands, selling long yellow Persian melons piled up in a neat row, the bakery, tempting me with chickpea cookies, zulbia, and koolooche masghati arranged in skillful pyramids.
Khanom-bozorg allowed me to linger by the kiosks and to explore displays: head coverings in Indian motifs, bright tribal colors, or simple black ones for praying. We passed by a salesman, his merchandise displayed on the sidewalk: plastic shopping bags and colanders, naked dolls, and striped balls.
“Look, look at those dolls,” I said excitedly. “Can we look, pleeese.” We stopped. I touched one. “Aren’t they wonderful? Aren’t they beautiful?” I looked at their little naked bodies and dreamt of sewing little dresses for them; maybe Maman could help. There was always a little extra fabric left over from a dress made a long time ago. Maybe she could even knit a little jacket with the leftover yarn, I thought.
I looked at my grandmother. I hadn’t ever noticed so many wrinkles around her eyes, which were set in deeper than usual—sad eyes. I was surprised to see that she didn’t have her teeth in; she never appeared in public without them. I ignored that and knowing that it was inappropriate for a child to be greedy and demanding, I still slowly lifted my head and, in a small, very small voice asked her, “Could I, Khanom-bozorg, could I have one? They are very cheap,” I reasoned.
She looked at me and absentmindedly asked, “You don’t have any dolls, do you?”
My heart pounded like an iron pestle smashing turmeric sticks in our stone mortar. “No, Grandma, you know I don’t.” She asked the shopkeeper how much it was.
“Five rials, only.” He pushed the toy into my hand.
I prayed. I would be a good girl. I would do anything for that doll with yellow hair and blue eyes.
“Let’s go,” Khanom-bozorg said, turning her back.
I was used to the methods of bargaining. I assumed that was the game being played. So did the shopkeeper.
“Okay, come back, four rials.” But my grandmother kept going.
“Khanom-bozorg, it’s cheap,” I cajoled her.
“Yes, and you don’t need it.”
“Cheap Jews!” The shopkeeper screamed at us. People turned around and stared. A few laughed.
I wanted to go home. I thought she took pleasure in my shock, and I didn’t want her to see my tears. I held my head up, swallowed hard, and didn’t say a word, fearing that I would lose control and cry, not realizing that tears might have convinced her to buy me the toy.
I followed the little floating flowers of her chador moving fast past the kiosks and the hotels that housed Arabs during hot Arabian summers. From their billboards I had learned my first Arabic word, the word for hotel. A few Arabs with their long, white summer caftans sat on platform beds on the roof, watching the street. We passed by my father’s little jewelry workshop and didn’t stop. Now we were very close to the gates of the mahaleh, and had only the teahouse to pass. The men there especially scared me. I hid myself in the folds of my grandmother’s chador and I wished for her to speed up. We were almost home.
A few men with mischievous looks on their faces sat outside the tea-house drinking chai and smoking ghalyan under the shade of an old tree, next to a meandering stream. The city allowed the water to run through the open gutters of the main streets to help shopkeepers wash and cool down the sidewalks. To my horror, my grandmother slowed down, trying to release me from the tight grip of her chador, as though I was a fly on the flowery fabric, and started to talk to them.
“Come on, come on, what’s your problem? Got to talk to these people. They’re in our neighborhood. It isn’t good for them to think the Jews are disrespectful. Just a little small talk.” She held her chador tight around her face and prostrated herself to the laughing faces. “Salam, what a nice day!” She greeted them in her heavy Judi accent.
“Yes it’s a nice day, but it’s even nicer outside the city in the mountains, cooler. Say, a few of us are going to Babakoohi, wannacome?” He talked in poor Farsi without taking a breath in between words, then grinned, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “What do you say?”
“I hope that your kindness will always be great,” my grandmother taarofed. “I have to go home, but thank you.” I wondered if they would dare ask a woman of their own faith to go to the mountains with them. I didn’t know why my grandmother, who demanded much respect for herself in the synagogue, would invite such disrespect. I wanted to go home.
“What about the little girl?” They laughed. Now the situation was truly grave. I just wanted to leave. The gates of the mahaleh were visible and promised security. I tugged at her chador, trying to give her a reason to leave.
“She is not worthy of you,” she taarofed again. I had always thought that there was a bit of truth to the custom of niceties, and I was horrified. I pulled on her chador again, trying to turn myself invisible in its folds.
“Do you want to go?” she asked, laughing at my fear, trying to peel me from her body covering. My heart ached. My legs took off. I covered my ears not to hear the laughing voices, trying not to see anything but the gates. When I finally stepped down from the smooth, hot pavement down to the dirt road under the arch, I realized that my face was cold and wet. I hated myself for crying. I had lost the battle.
After our day out, my grandmother was sick again, too exhausted to get out of bed. She couldn’t catch her breath. My father took her to a well-known, American-trained doctor.
When the doctor asked my grandmother what was bothering her, she responded, “Everything!”
The doctor prescribed many bottles of pills, and Khanom-bozorg took them religiously for a few days, but she still hurt. My mother squeezed watermelon juice for her, but it was too cold and made her weak. I had learned by then that there was a second kind of temperature for all food. Cold sapped the energy; hot gave it back. There had to be a balance or one became ill. My father went to the bazaar and purchased a collection of herbal teas: white tea and green tea, tea made of tree barks, and tea made of flowers. I stood on a stepstool and watched my grandmother make her potions. She felt cold in her bones and that meant that she needed hot tea to give her energy, to revive her spirit, to put heat under her chilled skin. She chose the bark of some magical tree, combined it with cracked fruit of wild bushes, and boiled it with crystallized sugar. I strained it for her in a cloth; even with all the sugar, it tasted bitter and repulsive. To balance the humors in her body, she drank the foul tea with dates and dried mulberries, with soft halwa made of rice flour and the hard one made with sweet date syrup. Nothing helped. Her body was out of balance. Her stomach hurt; she was cold in her bones, dizzy in her head. And now I had a stomachache too from feasting on the dried fruit and the sweets without the tea.
Her women friends stopped by every day to bring new remedies. What about tattooing? Khanom-bozorg already had large green dots tattooed on her forehead and wrists to alleviate her unknown pains and aches, but the magic had worn out. What about letting out the dirty blood?
No, no. My father wouldn’t allow that. Absolutely not. He was going to take Khanom-bozorg back to the American-trained doctor.
The word “bloodletting” horrified me. I imagined relatives gathering around my grandmother cutting her skin with razor blades, opening her veins with my father’s sharp knife when he wasn’t around.
My father warned his mother before leaving the house every day: “Mava, my life should be sacrificed for you. Don’t do it. On my life, on my kids’ lives, promise you won’t do it. You’ll expose yourself to disease, risk your life.” The ritual constituted voodoo, forbidden by Jewish laws, he emphasized, appealing to my grandmother’s strong religious beliefs.
I took a sigh of relief; my grandmother would live.
My grandmother’s sister Khatoon-jaan came for her daily visit one day
, but didn’t enter the house right away. Esghel-khan home?” she asked.
No, my father had left early that day for work.
She bent back, holding her blue chador tightly around her with one hand, and with the other motioned to someone. Khanom-bozorg’s best friend Joon-joone-bandi appeared at the door, her usual jolly self, and, before I could defend myself, she put two juicy, drippy kisses on both sides of my face, her white mustache tickling and repulsing me at the same time.
A short woman with a fat stomach followed the two women into the house, her middle clanking and swishing. “No men at home?” she asked.
“No, no men,” I said.
She took her chador off and there was a bucket where I had imagined a fat belly. Had I known the contents, I would probably have run to my father’s shop, screaming and warning him of the mischief, but instead, I followed them to the main building and went upstairs to tell my grandmother her guests wanted her to come to the yard. I thought Khanombozorg looked pale; that my grandmother could be scared of anything that day didn’t cross my mind. Khatoon-jaan piled up a few pillows by the wall and helped Khanom-bozorg sit on one and fluffed another to support her back.
The brass knocker hit against the front door again in urgency. My mother, who was working in the kitchen at the end of the yard, must have opened the door. My two married aunts arrived flushed from their quick walk. Relieved to discover that nothing had happened yet, they threw their chadors on the limb of the rose tree and sent me to the kitchen to see if my mother had prepared the large omelet with the hard-to-find eggs that they had brought with them. They fed Khanom-bozorg every single morsel that I hadn’t picked on the way from the kitchen.
“Eat, eat,” Khatoon-jaan said as she rolled up my grandmother’s sleeves and bared her thick, hairy legs.
The leech-lady gathered her skirt around her. She knelt on the floor, and ladled the thick brown silt from her bucket onto my grandmother’s right arm and then the left. I watched black slug-like creatures attach themselves to her as if they burrowed into her flesh. In just a few minutes, they bloated and grew fat. The women inched their way to my grandmother, asking if enough blood was sucked out. The leech-lady scraped the creatures off and let them fall into the bucket, where they vomited my grandmother’s pomegranate-colored juices.
Khanom-bozorg’s eyes rolled back and she slumped over the pillows. The three women rushed to her side, massaging her body, her toes, her legs, her shoulders, her hands, and her arms. She closed her eyes and called for my father. I ran to the kitchen and made mint tea, sweetened with honey. Khanom-bozorg opened her eyes, her color still white, her hands trembling. The women covered her with blankets, but Khanom-bozorg’s fingertips were blue, her body cold and heavy. I wanted to go to her and hold her but I was afraid to touch her. What if she died?
When my father came home for lunch and saw the women gathered around the pile that was my grandmother, he was terrified. “Mava, Mava,” he called his mother. “What have you done?” he asked in Judi.
Later we learned that he had gone to all the butchers, begging to purchase a cow’s liver, which he threw directly on hot charcoals. Then he slowly fed my grandmother as if she were the child and he the parent.
The following day, Khatoon-jaan and my grandmother’s best friend visited to inquire of her health.
“Not good!” Khanom-bozorg moaned, still under the covers. Someone must have cursed her, she said. That was it—pure, unadulterated evil eye.
The other two nodded. Khatoon-jaan said that the women had to take matters into their own hands. From her bundle, she retrieved the bark of a tree, the size of a half coconut, put a few drops in its curve and, with a back of a teaspoon, rubbed it for a few minutes. A white paste oozed out, which she tenderly rubbed on Khanom-bozorg’s forehead.
Joon-joone-bandi drew a puff from the waterpipe, held it for a second, and, as if she was whispering a secret, she blew it into my grandmother’s ears. “A doctor! He is nothing but a coat and a tie,” she said. “That’s what your son respects, and what good came out of it? What did he do for you that we could have not?”
Khatoon-jaan rearranged pillows around Khanom-bozorg. “Is women’s wisdom for nothing?” she asked. “All these years, we took care of everyone, but now we are discredited.”
My grandmother agreed that the women needed to take charge. The three discussed a list of women to be invited to a private ceremony at the full moon. She gave Joon-joone-bandi the task of finding a soothsayer.
My father didn’t oppose the idea, although it deviated from Jewish beliefs. He allowed it for its psychological impact, he told me. At age six, I had never heard that word before. I knew it had something to do with my grandmother’s mind, that if she felt cured, she would be okay. I knew I shouldn’t believe in such nonsense: a bunch of old women getting together for hocus-pocus. My father didn’t want me there, but I begged. Such fun! I had to be there.
As the daylight disappeared a week later, the guests entered our yard without knocking and made themselves comfortable on a Persian carpet in the middle of the bricked backyard. The orange trees looked like creatures with arms and legs. I sat on my mother’s lap, wrapped her skirt around my legs, and wouldn’t move. Women sipped sweet fruit-essence drinks and took turns on the waterpipe, drawing smoke from its long wooden mouthpiece. Bbllllla, the water gurgled at its blue glass base, from which a gold-painted, surly Ghajar king stared at me, dressed in his fineries and crowned with jewels and feathers.
A woman tapped rhythmically on the back of a brass platter. Others joined her, clapping, making music with their hands. Joon-joone-bandi slowly raised her thick body with the pulse. She wrapped her chador around her waist, twisted her wide bottom around, clasped her hands over her head, snapping four fingers at each other to make a crisp, crackling noise like charcoal burning in a brass brazier. Her surname “bandi” was a reflection of her job, weaving strings to hold men’s pants up at a time zippers were not commonly used in Iran. A widow, having hired other poor women to work for her, she made a small fortune. She pulled a long bundle of strings from underneath her chador, attached it to her front, and thrust her hips, singing a song about my father’s virility. The women roared. My mother giggled. I was astonished.
“Come on, Joon-joon,” my grandmother laughed for the first time in months. “Stop it! There’re young girls here.”
Slowly, the light dimmed in the yard. The full moon crawled to the center of a star-studded sky. I had fallen asleep in my mother’s lap in the comfort of the women’s chattering. I woke up with a start from a deep silence around me, fearing that I was left alone. My mother rubbed my back to calm me, then I saw the man’s shadow moving on the courtyard wall. I noticed that the women had pulled their chadors tightly around them as the soothsayer approached our circle. He held a canvas bag thrown over his shoulder. His eyeballs looked like watermelon seeds folded in fleshy droops around his eyes, reflecting the secret of something extraordinary, something unconnected with this world. Although his eyes were black, I thought of them as somehow connected with the stars.
Khatoon-jaan put the brazier filled with hot charcoals in front of the fortune-teller. He slowly undid the cord around his bag to reveal small bundles wrapped in old cloth and tied in small knots. He touched them one by one, turning them over, getting a feel for their shapes and weight. He finally picked one and slowly unwrapped it. We looked at him, mesmerized. The fire crackled and sent flames and amber in the air, its light blinding me. Then I saw it. He held a shiny block of metal in his bony hand.
“Is it silver?” I whispered to my mother.
“Shh! It is tin.”
The other women looked at us disapprovingly, “Sshhhh!”
“Tell me about your problems,” the soothsayer asked my grandmother as he wedged a thick, round vessel into the middle of the coals.
My grandmother’s eyes glimmered with anticipation, I thought, or maybe with hope. She rubbed her hands again and again. She wet her lips, dry and cracked,
with her tongue. Khatoon-jaan put a glass of willow essence into her hand, which trembled as she took a little sip.
“I don’t know what to say.” My grandmother started her monologue without pausing to breathe between the words. “I was all fine, no problems, all healthy.” She sighed. “Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I am hurting all over. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat well. Everyone says my color is no good.” She poured out the words in rapid succession and sighed again.
The fortune-teller’s vessel turned red from the heat. He broke off a small piece of the metal, looked at the moon directly above, mumbled a few prayers, and dropped it in.
“Everyone says I was hit with bad eyes,” my grandmother said.
The fortune-teller nodded as he held his vessel with a thick cloth on top of the fire and swirled it around.
One aunt mumbled, “Yes, of course. That is the truth.”
My grandmother went on, “I’ve heard that you’re good at finding out the source of this evil.”
Adding small pieces of tin to the pot, the soothsayer said, “You’re right. I’m the best.”
I watched the metal melt and shine. It still looked like silver to me.
The magic man looked at my grandmother, “Are you ready? Let’s hope that the evil isn’t so strong that it can hide its identity.”
Khanom-bozorg nodded.
“Say a prayer and concentrate on your pain.”
The only prayers I had ever heard my grandmother say in Hebrew were the shema and the brakha over the candles. She imitated the voice of men rising to the balcony at the synagogue, distorted and unintelligible. Khanombozorg mumbled some prayers, pleading with khodaye bozorg, the Great God for mercy and help.
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