Wedding Song

by Farideh Goldin

  “Ya khodaye bozorg,” a woman repeated.

  “In the name of the Great God,” the rest of women echoed.

  “Cover your faces,” the only man among us ordered. “We don’t know how strong this evil is. Close your eyes.” He held the side of the vessel with a metal grip, and, averting his eyes, poured the molten metal into a ceramic bowl filled with water, and jumped back. There was a huge bang as the liquid metal hit the cold water. Smoke gushed out and the bowl broke into pieces. “Pretty strong enemies you have!” he told my grandmother. “See what happened to the bowl?”

  The women gasped, muffled their screams, and huddled together as if in the presence of a ghost. I scratched my mother’s arms in the sudden confusion. She cried in pain and slapped the back of my hands.

  The man searched the ground, found a piece of metal, and held it with a metal tongs for everyone to see. “Look! It is in the shape of a woman.”

  I focused on the shape to see if that was really true. I couldn’t tell.

  Khatoon-jaan pointed to a protruding part of the long object. “He’s right. Look, she’s smoking a waterpipe.”

  “Who could that be?” Aunt Shams asked.

  All eyes focused on my grandmother. She lifted the piece and turned it around. Even I knew she was looking for someone she disliked. “That pagan! She is no Jew,” my grandmother screamed. “This is Simin, the neighbor down the block. She came to visit the other day, when I had come back from the hamam. I should have known the way she looked at the braids around my face. I could see the jealousy in her eyes. She envies me because she thinks I have the time for such luxuries every week. She is the one who put the bad eye on me.”

  My grandmother was back. She was feisty again, full of energy and emotions, even hatred. The magic had worked. I tried to sweep the belief out of my head, not allowing myself to believe in supernatural nonsense.

  The soothsayer packed, but before leaving, he reminded everyone not to leave my grandmother alone. “Watch her at least till this moon dies and the new crescent of moon appears,” he warned.

  Women whispered their remedies. The evil was strong. They had to employ all remedies. They consulted each other about the methods each had learned from her family. My grandmother spread herself on the carpet, a little smile hiding in the corner of her lips. Aunt Shams rubbed wild rue and salt all over her as she let a trilling noise escape her pursed lips to draw the evil out. She threw the concoction into the same fire in which the soothsayer melted his magic metal. Cracking noises accompanied a yellow flame.

  Aunt Maheen rubbed a whole raw egg in its shell over my grandmother’s legs, arms, stomach, head, all the areas hurting and aching. The women started to chant a secret hymn:

  For the giver of the evil eye who knows of it,

  and for the one who doesn’t know;

  For the one who has arrived,

  and for the one who left town.1

  A woman hid the egg underneath the dark cloth of her chador, and headed out to smash it against the wall of Simin’s house. Other women washed Khanom-bozorg’s legs in well water mixed with herbs and the roots of trees that grew only in the desert outside Shiraz. Two women carried the water to pour over the stairs leading to Simin’s house. There was a sense of relief that I felt as well—a feeling of cleansing, of renewal.

  Before leaving, all the women reminded my grandmother to be careful as the new month approached. It could determine her well-being for the entire month. The first time she saw the crescent of the new moon, she had to cover her eyes and to make sure the first person she looked at was happy, healthy, and lucky. That would help the spirits to make the month a good one for her too. That night, and every night until the new moon appeared, Khatoon-jaan and Joon-joone-bandi took turns sleeping with my grandmother, so she wouldn’t be alone when in a deep sleep. In such a state, her soul and body were the most vulnerable to both human treachery and the jinns’ malice. (Jinns are evil creatures that live beneath the Earth.) My grandmother was well for many months after that until the attention dwindled again.

  During all my years with her, I watched Khanom-bozorg cover her face with both hands every time the new moon rose in the sky, calling for this person and that person so she could look at their faces. “Smile, smile, Farideh, so I can look at your face,” she told me if I was the appointed one that month. If she had a bad month, she pointed her finger at me, “See what you did! Didn’t I tell you not to be grouchy?”

  I laughed at my grandmother’s antics for years—such nonsense. Then, many years later, when I had grown children of my own, one quiet evening my husband and I strolled in our Norfolk neighborhood. I looked up and saw the beautiful crescent moon peeking behind the trees. I turned my head to point it out. Instead, I saw the funeral home at the end of the block. My husband felt the sudden change of mood in me. “What’s wrong?” he wanted to know.

  How could I tell him that my grandmother’s superstition had seeped into me, so suddenly, after so very many years? I felt dazed the entire month. I kept a close check on my family members. The very last day of the lunar month, I sighed with relief. The danger had passed. Since when did I believe in superstitious nonsense? I was appalled at myself for allowing the thought to cross my mind.

  The phone rang right before sunset. My sister-in-law’s asthmatic father had died. He was in his home entertaining guests. He went to the bathroom to wash his face and couldn’t catch his breath. With no one around to help, he had a heart attack. So, that was it. Was my grandmother correct after all? I became a believer. I never again opened my eyes after seeing the crescent of the new moon until I was sure my glance would fall on a happy face first. I had become my grandmother.

  I always thought that the belief in the supernatural helped my grandmother and other women who lacked education to gain control over a world that was unknown and mysterious to them. But another reason, at least for my grandmother, was to gather people around her. After my grandfather’s death, she feared loneliness. She worried that her children might get busy with their own lives and forget her. So she found creative ways to have the family visit her.

  Even now, my sister Nahid and I laugh as we remember a day when we helped my grandmother sew the covers on a quilt. I was sixteen, my sister four years younger. Two French doors were left open to bring in the sun and the smell of potted geraniums from the balcony. A handmade quilt with geometric designs on blue satin was spread on top of a white sheet, tinted with a blue hue, still warm from the sun. The three of us sat on a red Kashan carpet with designs of flowers and palmettes. One leg tucked underneath, one planted on the floor, my sister folded the sheet neatly over the quilt as if she were framing a picture in ivory. She secured the fold with a safety pin, expediting the job of my grandmother and me, who hemmed the edges with large needles and long matching thread.

  We threaded Khanom-bozorg’s needle for her, made her a sour cherry drink, and ran down the street to buy a fresh bottle of skim milk (she never drank milk that didn’t have that day’s delivery date). We would do anything she liked in exchange for her memories.

  She spoke of times when we were children and of the era before we were born, recalling family episodes and the way of life. She spoke of the houses in the mahaleh, separated with tall walls, but connected through flat mud-covered roofs, where one could travel the entire length of the ghetto by jumping from one to the other. “Do you remember it at all?” she asked me.

  I remembered Aunt Fereshteh holding me to keep me from falling off the roof as I picked green apples from the top of our neighbor’s tree that hung over our side.

  My grandmother was astonished. “Oh! You remember that?”

  “Yes, a guy in that house converted to Islam.” By virtue of his new religion, he became the first in line to inherit his uncle’s fortune. He was rejected from the community, of course. His Jewish wife and children were sent to Israel by her family so he could not take the kids. In revenge, he took a wife from an anti-Semitic family and moved his in-laws to hi
s house as well. From then on, they threw stones at us whenever we tried to pick the top apples. Our neighbor later regretted his decision, not being able to cope with his new lifestyle, but it was too late. The punishment for rejecting Islam was death. Although the Jewish community never forgave him for enabling a Moslem family to live amongst us, it came to his aid and secretly arranged for him to be smuggled to Palestine to join his wife and children. After his disappearance, the family he left behind cut down the apple tree.

  One reason that the community was angry at our neighbor was that connecting roofs were the last route of escape during pogroms. By giving his house to a hostile Moslem family, he had also given them access to our roofs, jeopardizing our safety.

  The terrace roofs were also our summer retreat to a world above the dust and heat of the narrow alleyways. During the hot summer nights, we slept on the rooftops on mattresses spread on bamboo mats. There were no fences. Parents feared that their young children might wander off in the pitch darkness that engulfed the ghetto at night and fall off the roofs. In the women’s section, I was always squeezed between my mother, grandmother, and aunts to ensure I wouldn’t wander off. But, despite the parents’ vigilant watch, every year the sad stories of a child or two who had fallen to their deaths circulated in the mahaleh. Or maybe the stories were made up to scare us into behaving.

  The desert temperature fell rapidly at night and the gentle breeze flowed freely over the rooftops. The air was fresh and fragrant high above the old city in contrast to the stagnant air mixed with fine dust and the smell of animal and human refuse in the unpaved alleys. With no industrial or light pollution in the skies of Shiraz, the clear sky was a magnificent panoramic backdrop for the stars shining brightly against its blackness. Neighborhood women found each other in the light of candles and gossiped while cracking watermelon seeds between their back teeth. Men spoke of the day’s business, their fears of the unfriendly neighbors, and the events in the Jewish community.

  The flat roofs were delightful but also problematic. On rainy days in spring, or snowy days in winter, large patches of the ceiling collapsed in the common room, forcing the entire household—my grandmother, uncles, aunts, and us—to sleep in one room until the weather was sufficiently warm for repairs. Then, a mixture of mud and straw was hauled to the roof on the workers’ backs, spread evenly, and packed by running the ghaltak on top.

  A ghaltak was a heavy cylindrical stone. It took two men to control its roll. It was often shared by many neighbors and stored on top of a strong joint where the walls met. Pieces of stone and wood braced it when not in use.

  Picking up the story as we sat sewing the quilts, my grandmother said that in those days (this is before I was born), the city of Shiraz opened its water reservoir to run through the gutters once a week. Plumbing wasn’t available. The Jews stored the water in open pools often shared by many families in a common courtyard to be used for laundry and washing dishes.

  On a chilly day at the end of fall, the water ran through the Jewish ghetto in man-made canals and poured into the pool. The women of my grandmother’s family and the neighborhood had gathered for a wash-day. There were about thirty women, grandmothers who directed the activity, mothers who did the wash sometimes with the help of professional washerwomen, young girls who helped run errands and hang the clean clothes on the trees or wires running between them. Wrapped in their chadors, these women sat on low wooden stools around the pool, a wash basin in front of each. They rubbed the clothes on the back of their hands or against the fabric itself. Most Jews used pulverized branches of choobak bush to wash the clothes instead of soap, which was made with unkosher animal fat.

  As women gossiped, sweet aromatic sharbat was passed around to refresh everyone. Once in a while a mother picked up a crying baby and let it suckle underneath her chador. Young children played in the dirt with sticks and pebbles. The boys played alak-dolak: They laid down little sticks that they hit hard to make airborne and then hit them harder with a larger stick and watched to see how far they flew, a dangerous game with the young ones around. The women shouted at them to keep away. The boys finally left the scene. My father, a young boy then, went with them.

  The voice of women sharing stories was the only sound to be heard. Rushing to finish the clothes before dinner, they didn’t notice the absence of the boys, who had found the door to the roof open. Filled with mischief, the boys hopped from one roof to another. Someone suggested rolling the ghaltak. They released the catch and rolled it on the roof. It was fun at first. Then the heavy stone found a life of its own. Picking up speed, it flew off the side of the roof toward the area where the women and children had congregated.

  When the ghaltak hit the ground, it miraculously missed the entire group below. It hit the side of the pool, broke the tiles, and rolled into the water with a tremendous sound mixed with the screams of women, children, and the horrified boys who watched the scene from above.

  Agha-jaan Bakhshi was a neighbor of my grandparents who was famous for his musical ability, especially as a violinist. He was at home that day taking a nap, enjoying the warm rays of sun coming through a window facing the pool. The commotion woke him from a deep sleep. Groggy and shaking, he screamed. “What happened? What happened?”

  A woman screamed back with a shaken voice, “Ghaltak fell into the pool from the roof.”

  Because there is no “the” in Farsi and the language is gender-free, in his grogginess, Agha-jaan thought “ghaltak” was somebody’s name. “Pull him out of the water. Did anyone pull him out of the water?” Agha-Jaan asked.

  “Too heavy,” another woman answered in the confusion.

  Still disoriented from his sleep and horrified that the women had not taken “Ghaltak” out of the pool, Agha-jaan jumped out of the second-story window to save it, thinking that it was a child. He broke both legs and arms and had nothing to comfort him, not even his own music, as he was bed-ridden for months.

  Nahid and I felt sorry for poor Agha-jaan, but my grandmother told the story in such a hilarious way that we held our stomachs and roared, missing the first few knocks at the front door. I looked out the window. “It’s only cousin Yunes, visiting,” I told my grandmother so she wouldn’t worry about covering herself in a chador. I turned around to go downstairs and let him in.

  My grandmother screamed, “Wait, wait!” In a swift move, she jumped into bed, took her false teeth out of her mouth, and deposited them on top of the watermelon seeds. “If he sees me sewing, the entire family is gonna think I’m well. They don’t know how I suffer in pain every day! All alone! All by myself, with no one to look after me.”

  By the time Yunes and I reached the room, my grandmother was moaning through her bare gums, her face pale, her hair disheveled, her hands shaking, and her speech slurred. She would have been convincing even to me had I not been laughing with her minutes before.

  Of course, Yunes used our newly installed telephone to call all the aunts, who came rushing in taxis and stayed all day massaging her back and her legs. My mother made special stews and drinks for everyone. The cousins dropped by one at a time to see how our grandmother was doing. They propped up my grandmother on comfortable pillows as they talked and gossiped. On their way out, each aunt turned to Nahid and me to tell us what terrible grandchildren we were for not taking care of our grandmother. We had giggled the entire time, disregarding the somber mood of the room as their mother lay suffering. Each aunt looked at my mother as they spoke to us, including her in the collective blame. They couldn’t be there. They had their own lives. How could my mother allow her mother-in-law to deteriorate so very badly? Shame!

  Nahid and I escorted them downstairs, closed the front door, knelt on the floor holding our stomachs, and laughed so hard that tears streamed down our faces. In the kitchen, my mother clanged the pots together as she washed them. She softly mumbled curses to no one in particular.

  The First Grade

  My father visited the principal of Mehr-ayeen School again wit
hout me six months after our first visit. I don’t know what transpired between them, if he raged or gave a gift, or if he took a more influential person with him. I was enrolled for the following year.

  For the first month of school, my father proudly walked me to school every day in my new gray uniform. He stopped by the bakery and bought a slice of sponge cake for my snack. In America, I have learned that sponge cake is a symbol of Passover, filled with cholesterol from as many as twelve eggs that make it fluffy. To me, it is still the sign of my father’s love, on which I gorge myself every Passover without any self-control.

  On the first day, I was surprised to find two other Jewish girls in my class, neither of whom I had ever met. I knew all the children in the mahaleh at least by appearance. I knew the boy with the football-shaped skull whom we called khiaree or cucumber-head, who played a game of sticks every time I passed by him, hitting me on the head. I knew the snotcrusted faces of the many children playing in the dirt of the unpaved streets, who my mother complained never got sick while her clean children did.

  Meena was my best friend next door, of whom Mahvash had been jealous enough to convince me to pray for her death. I knew the kids with a lisp, the ones with crossed eyes, the ones with sores on their legs that were a feast for the flies, and the albino kid, of course, with glassy eyes. So many kids had problems that I assumed that was the way of the world. I knew the little boy from an entertainer’s family, who dressed up as a girl to dance at happy occasions. I knew all the girls in a permanent state of curved spines, who didn’t go to school and carried little babies on their hips. I knew all the boys my age who were pa-do-ak, a word literally meaning, “running legs,” who were hired to run errands for shopkeepers. At school, for the first time, I realized that there might be Jews who lived outside the ghetto. Wealthy Jews.