Wedding Song

by Farideh Goldin

  I had difficulty memorizing verbatim, so I took advantage of the situation and gave tests that required thinking. “How do you interpret Nader Shah’s behavior? Was he a good king who brought unbelievable wealth to Iran? Or was he a madman who allowed his soldiers to kill, rape, and steal, and who blinded his son with his own hands in fear of losing his power to him?”

  Mrs. Mojtahedi eyes often closed behind her dark sunglasses, a smile fixed on her face to fool us into believing that she paid attention to every detail.

  My classmates were incensed. They would rather have memorized the entire passage without thinking. Where did these questions come from? they wanted to know. They weren’t written in the textbook.

  I didn’t mind the complaints. I ignored them and enjoyed being in control immensely, even if for a short time.

  A few weeks into the school year, my father’s sisters and their children came for their regular Wednesday visits with my grandmother. The sun had already set; the weather was cool and pleasant. This was the usual time for catching up with gossip and everyone’s problems, since telephone services were unavailable. My grandmother chose a section of the walled yard under the tall sour orange trees and next to the flower beds for the gathering. I helped my mother carry a Persian carpet outside. We spread a plastic cloth over the middle of the carpet and brought the food. Everyone sat cross-legged around the sofreh in front of the spread of fruits, nuts, seeds, Iranian cucumbers, and watermelon slices. I tossed a few lit charcoals into a round wire bowl attached to a long string and whirled it in a circle to make the coal burn hotter. I put them on top of the Persian tobacco leaves in a metal crown on the peak of my grandmother’s hookah. An aunt took the first puff, ensuring the tobacco was burning right, and passed it to my grandmother. Everyone started the taarof ritual, proffering food and exchanging niceties.

  My grandmother told an aunt, “Come on, peel a cucumber. Why aren’t you eating?”

  My mother offered a plate of apples that she had peeled and sliced. “Befarmaid, please have a piece.”

  A few aunts ate watermelon seeds. Each threw one after another into her mouth, positioned it between the top and bottom teeth in the side of her mouth and cracked it open, spitting the shells out. I served limeade in tall glasses on a silver platter with the patterns of Achaemenid soldiers with shields and arrows engraved on it.

  The women started to dard-e-del, to speak of the ache in their hearts, of their new preoccupations and worries. One complained about her husband, who spent too much time with his friends; the other worried about her only daughter who was suffering from a skin condition on her legs, getting worse despite all the doctors they visited and many ointments and pills; the third was troubled about her oldest daughter. A nice man’s family had gone to their uncle requesting him to be an ambassador of good will and to ask her parents for her hand in marriage. The uncle told him that they would not give their daughter to a Kohen. Being from the tribe of the keepers of the Temple, the Kohanim were to be given special respect. Fearing that a regular husband and wife dispute would set the wrath of God upon their daughters and themselves for disrespect to a descendent of the temple priests, many families didn’t give them their daughters. That hadn’t been the case with my aunt’s family. In fact, they had hoped that the man would ask for their daughter. They thought the uncle had done this out of malice and were bewildered what to do since the customs didn’t allow them to approach the family and correct the mistake.

  Much to my surprise and horror, my mother for the very first time joined the conversation to dard-e-del. “I have a complaint with this family,” she started to say.

  My grandmother stopped smoking her waterpipe and swatted the air with the back of her right hand in a gesture to stop her.

  “No, no, no,” one aunt said. “Let her talk. Who else can she talk to? Her family isn’t here. We’re her family. She is a sister. Let her tell us of the pain in her heart.”

  I had a very bad feeling about this. Why was my mother doing this to herself? Didn’t she know better than to complain to them about themselves? Maman looked at the aunts one by one and finally said, “I’m being treated like a maid. I have to cook for your mother, wash her clothes, iron her sons’ shirts, and she still complains about me to my husband. Your mother goes to him and tells him I didn’t take her watermelon juice right away, didn’t buy fresh milk everyday. What I am I to do? I have kids to take care of. I am always tired. I do everything for your mother, my husband’s mother, but I am always told that it is not enough, not been done the right way.”

  I was surprised that they had allowed her to talk for such a long time without interrupting her. I thought maybe I was wrong. There was a silence for a second, then they all attacked her simultaneously—an emotional massacre. I didn’t have the heart to watch how my mother had set up the trap for herself. So I went to the kitchen to get a fresh pot of tea for everyone, hoping that the food might soften them. I came back too late. My mother looked smaller than usual leaning onto her left side, her hand pushing against the ground for support. My aunts looked sweaty and red from the battle. My grandmother smoked serenely.

  Morad’s wife had a smile on her face, since her sister-in-law’s defeat was her victory. She looked at me as I passed the small glass tea cups and exploded: “Who gave Farideh the authority to fail these kids?”

  I was taken off guard, not realizing that the conversation had switched from mother to daughter. Unfortunately for me, one of my classmates was my aunt’s niece, who had complained to her after receiving a failed grade in history.

  My uncle’s wife looked at me with fire in her eyes and pointed her index finger at me. “She has no conscience, making life so hard on them. I bet she can’t answer the questions herself.” Then she turned her head to me and her tongue slithered. “Do you know any of these things yourself? You’re the dumbest of them all, but you act like a queen.”

  I looked at the aunts. They were still cracking the watermelon seeds and sipping the tea I had steeped for them. I bent over and picked up some of the dirty dishes to find an excuse to leave the assembly and got a glimpse of Geeta, Morad’s wife, sitting on her knees now.

  “You get good grades for licking your teacher’s behind,” she screamed.

  I felt as if I were the pit behind our house where the neighborhood kids practiced their stone throwing. I looked at her with fixed eyes. She was turning red now, angry for not getting any reaction from me, no tears, no shaking, just nothing.

  “Instead of being good to the other kids by giving them simple questions, you are being hateful,” she added. Then she turned around and spat in the garden.

  I turned to the faces around me for sympathy. That was absolutely un-called for. I didn’t know what the school had to do with the family. She was right. I was not qualified to teach. I did enjoy giving tough questions. Which teenager wouldn’t have? Her sister and niece should have taken their complaints to the school and the teacher. Plus, I was close family; my aunts barely knew the girl, but to my chagrin, everyone took Geeta’s side.

  “What good can come out of this?” one aunt asked. That was a family motto; keep away from anything controversial.

  “Why would you accept this kind of responsibility?” My grandmother admonished me. “Is it good that people will curse after your last name and by extension we’ll suffer from the bad eye that will be set upon us?”

  I looked at my mother. She asked me to help her take the small dishes filled with the shells of watermelon seeds and get fresh ones. In the kitchen, she pinched my arm until it turned blue and screamed at me. “Am I not miserable enough without the troubles you make? Look what you have done! I will be hearing about this now for a week. Go to school tomorrow and tell your teacher you’re not doing it anymore.” She slammed the arm she was still holding against my body in a display of anger I had rarely seen.

  The following day, Mrs. Mojtahedi made me tell her of the admonishment I received from the family when I resigned from teaching. She lau
ghed and her long gold necklace jingled on her large bosoms.

  I thought everything was going to be okay, but I was wrong. She had taught in the Jewish day school for many years and after this incident she enjoyed talking about it.

  “How come you don’t go to the Jewish school?” she said. “I was surprised to see a Jew in Tavalali.”

  “It’s too far away,” I said, knowing that the others were giggling.

  “You don’t speak like them. How come you don’t speak your own language?”

  She was referring to Judi, a Judeo-Persian language that was spoken only by the older generation or the Jews still living in the ghetto. We were all trying to disassociate ourselves from it in the hopes of integrating into the larger community.

  “I don’t know. We don’t speak it at home.” I said in a small voice, hearing more giggles in the back of class.

  “Shalomalekhem, shalomalekhem!” She laughed imitating the thick Judi accent she had heard the teachers at the Jewish school use as they had greeted each other. The words were from the Hebrew shalom alekhem, meaning “peace be with you.” “I’ve decided today that the Jewish students should not leave the classroom during the reading of the Koran and prayers. It would be good for you to learn.” Then she smiled widely, smearing more of the red lip-color on her teeth.

  I knew I was in big trouble. Moslem students started reading Arabic when they were in the second grade. Although I knew a few things about Islam and Moslem prayers, I had never practiced namaz, the daily prayers that others knew so well. Not only were the words unfamiliar, the body language, kneeling, putting hands over ears, and bowing at the right time, were important and insulting if performed wrong. I had heard my classmates mocking the Sunni Moslems’ method of praying. Namaz was an exact art, I had come to realize.

  I asked a good Moslem friend to write the instructions for me and, to my father’s disbelief, covered my hair, bared my feet, and went through the motions, proclaiming Mohammed as the God’s messenger. My father knew an argument with the school would evoke more hostility and kept quiet. As for reading of the Koran, I soon realized that the very first section of each sura was the easiest to read, so I managed to raise my hand quickly and ask with enthusiasm to be the first to read the sentence that starts all writings in Islam: “Bismilahe rahmane rahim, in the name of the divine merciful God.”

  That year, my last year in the elementary school, the pressure built up in the house, where interpersonal relationships were becoming more complicated as our numbers increased. My father’s brother Morad and his wife had two children by then. The arguments became more intense now that every squabble among the children became a reason for the adults to fight.

  One day, my grandmother gave me a piece of watermelon in the kitchen. Morad’s wife complained that I ate a big piece and didn’t leave enough for her children. Plus, she should have been offered first. Morad and my father fought when they came home that day, Morad taking his wife’s side, my father, my grandmother’s side. Soon, my father’s shirt was torn off him, the bloody imprint of Morad’s nails on his bare chest. We huddled behind him. Baba tried to close the glass doors on his brother. Morad shattered them with his fist, sending glass nuggets flying over me, too stunned to cry or scream. The overt hatred and animosities nibbled at the self-esteem and happiness of my siblings and myself like locusts on green wheat kernels in spring. There was no way out.

  From time to time, someone in the family tried to break away from the suffocating atmosphere. Jahangeer, by then a well-known dentist, found his own apartment and moved out for a short time, but my grandmother cried that the family was falling apart and blamed my mother. She besieged my father to keep the family together for the sake of their father’s spirit. Jahangeer came back, and he and my grandmother moved into the upstairs apartment, which had been without a tenant for a while. My mother still cooked and the entire family ate the meals together downstairs, but my uncle had some autonomy over his own life. He bought a refrigerator, the only one in the house, and my grandmother guarded it against those of us downstairs. She considered the area a sacred space, where her son would eventually bring a wife and establish a family.

  On Fridays, my only day off, I swept and dusted the second-floor apartment, scrubbed and washed its tiled floors and the bathroom under the watchful eyes of my grandmother. She didn’t understand that I wasn’t interested in the material goods, the silver cutlery or the china. Like my siblings, I only stole food items, a tangerine from the tree in the backyard, a handful of pistachios from the neat bundles hidden in the back room, slices of American-style bread that my grandmother carefully tucked away behind dishes in the upstairs kitchen cabinet.

  The issues of ownership had become complicated. Both Morad and my father considered the house to be theirs, wanting the other to move out. We begged my father to leave, but it was a matter of power and pride, and he didn’t want to be the loser. Morad and his family moved out to an apartment after many open fights. I visited their place with my grandmother once in a while, who called it a disgrace that they had been booted out. They moved back.

  Personally, I had a difficult time finding an escape. I lost myself in foreign books, renting instead of buying them to stretch my money. I tried to avoid every family member as much as possible, visited friends after school, and didn’t come home until dark. My father didn’t know because he came home even later, working, enjoying his new business in poultry farming. But I still could see my siblings being abused and again kept silent so we would have quiet, so there would be no blood drawn. No matter how I tried to insulate myself, the conflict found ways to seep into my life like the rain that had brought our mud roof down so many times when we lived in the ghetto. Morad started regularly calling Nahid shashoo, the one who is drenched in her own pee. We were open to insults. Nahid was slapped when she was busy with her homework and didn’t go out to socialize with the aunts; she was slapped when she forgot to announce that the mail had come in. The hatred grew and festered like a giant wound immune to any known therapy. The air in the house became poisonous, but I kept silent, and so did my siblings.

  My period started that year amidst the unrest, the bickering, and the absolute lack of privacy. And as that year came to end, I had a déjà vu of my first grade. I wasn’t able to register for the school of my choice; its principal told me that there were already too many Jews enrolled. I had to ask Jahangeer, who was a respected dentist in town and knew influential people, to intercede on my behalf, as he would again six years later to help me change majors in college. As I was ready to start junior high, I was an awkward teenager, feeling confused, hurt, unwanted, lost, and helpless to save myself, my sister, and my brothers.

  A Piece of Chocolate

  As I had never before seen animal crackers, I didn’t know about other American sweets either. What we called chocolate in Iran was a chewy caramel-colored square candy wrapped in colorful, glittery paper, more like saltwater taffy. I am surprised children didn’t choke on its sweet rubbery texture. Many times I had to put my finger down my throat to retrieve the goo that blocked my air-tunnel. Still, all children loved the troublesome candy, and every time I had a few rials, I ran to the little kiosk a block away to buy a handful. They usually lasted a few days because they were so difficult to eat. Maybe that was the purpose of the formula, to make children eat them languidly and frugally, to learn patience as they took little bites, knowing the fine line between savoring its sweetness slowly or choking on it.

  At the end of my sixth grade, Baba came home from work one day with a treat: small milk chocolate bars with fluffy, smooth sweetness inside— made in America. He gave me two. Boxes of the sweets were donated to the Sohonot, the office of the Jewish agency a block away from my father’s shop, to be distributed among the underprivileged Jewish children. I gobbled up the first bar, inhaling it, not bothering to chew. It was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted in my life. The second one I ate slowly, taking the tiniest bites every day, until it became ha
rd and crumbly in the pocket of my black uniform. Although the chocolate was no longer edible, I kept the crumbs and smelled them once in a while. When I washed my uniform, I was careful to go around the pocket. My mother finally got hold of it when I wasn’t around. She took the inside of the pocket out and washed it a few times, grumbling that the chocolate had embedded itself into the fabric. I was furious at her for washing away the sweet smell of the chocolate, and didn’t know why.

  I tried all different chocolate bars when I moved to America. Many looked like the one I remembered, but none tasted so good. I know now that I don’t really like chocolate. I hadn’t cherished the crumbs as food. The gift of chocolate by the American humanitarians made me realize for the first time in my life that there were people somewhere far away who knew I existed and who cared about me. They had reached out to me. I hung onto these anonymous American benefactors as my saviors for many years. At that moment, I knew that I was going to leave and find a new home, my very own place in the world. I knew that there was hope in my future. For the first time, I started to dream of America.

  Chapter Five

  MARRIAGE: A WOMAN’S DREAM

  Khastegaree: Marriage Proposals

  Around 1908, when my paternal grandmother was nine years old, her mother Bibi took Khanom-bozorg to her future husband’s home to clean sabzee for an herb stew, peel cooked potatoes for shamee, pluck a chicken for Shabbat, draw water from the well, and scrub clothes over her hands with homemade soap. Those were her tests to prove to her mother-in-law that she could be a good housewife, a trainable worker. She passed the tests, but was divorced two years later at age twelve for having run away too many times. Each time my grandmother escaped her in-laws’ house, Bibi hit her own chest in exasperation and returned Khanom-bozorg to her husband’s home, but eventually she was refused. Who needed such an unruly woman? Discarded, my grandmother learned to turn wool into thread with her homemade spindle and to weave socks to make a living.