Wedding Song

by Farideh Goldin

  Nevertheless, I always balked doing errands from our new house to her place in the ghetto. I dreaded the long, forty-minute walk through stillunfamiliar neighborhoods, the sexual remarks made by young men in the dark winding alleyways, and the obscenities exchanged by the prostitutes at the gate of the mahaleh. To avoid entering Bibi’s room, I asked Daeebozorg’s wife if my great-grandmother was in, hoping not, so that I could leave the package. Bibi was always in. I stood on top of the stone stairs in the open hallway, staring into the pitch blackness until Bibi saw me.

  “Come on in. My life should be sacrificed for you,” Bibi called me in with her shaking voice coming through the darkness.

  “Bibi-joon,” I addressed her using the word “dear” at the end of her name. “I am putting the package here at the door. I’ve got to go.”

  “Come in! What are you afraid of? No one is going to eat you. I’ve missed you. Come in. Your eyes will get used to the darkness. Come in. I’ve not seen you for a long time. My heart has shriveled in your absence.”

  I would walk into the dark, taking tiny steps, trying to balance the food, holding onto it tightly in anticipation of a fall. When my feet touched the bedding on the cobblestone floor, Bibi reached with her bony hands and took the package from me, and holding my hand, helped me sit on the mattress. She caressed my hair and blessed me. “May God reward you for your act of charity. May you find a good husband and have healthy children, ensha-allah, God willing.”

  At age nine or ten, I didn’t want a husband; I couldn’t think of children. I drew back from being petted by her rough hands. I didn’t like her juicy kisses. I wanted to get out, to breath the fresh air, and see the light outside. Bibi often picked up a stone from the floor and threw it at an invisible mouse. Terrified, I would draw my feet up on the bed and hug my knees, wondering if the mice were brave enough to jump on the mattress.

  Looking down at my stitches, I told Khanom-bozorg, “Yes, I do remember Bibi.” After a long silence, I stopped sewing and lifted my head to see tears at the corner of my grandmother’s eyes. Not knowing how to react, I asked what Bibi’s name, Zaghee, meant.

  “The blue-eyed one,” my grandmother said, surprised that I didn’t know the meaning of the old Farsi word.

  Bibi’s piercing blue eyes were an anomaly among Iranians, who were either mesmerized by the color or considered it unlucky. Her full lower and narrow upper lips opened to a complete set of teeth that amazed people who had never seen anyone keeping a full set of teeth into old age. She had a large nose for her petite face; her frame had shrunk and her spine was slightly curved. I remembered her well. An aunt brought Bibi over once a week. My mother washed Bibi’s clothes as my grandmother and aunt bathed Bibi in the hamam. Serving the three women a pitcher of sour cherry drink in the bathroom, I almost dropped the tray when for the first time I saw my great-grandmother naked, her chest flat like a child’s with skin stretched over defined ribs and little flesh.

  My mother told me that Bibi’s breasts were “cut off, diseased.”

  I wasn’t frightened by her figure, just fascinated. After all, nothing about Bibi was common. She was the oldest person I had ever known. After her bath, my grandmother groomed Bibi’s long white hair with a wooden comb, but let Bibi braid it herself in numerous strands. Then Bibi put a scarf on her head and wrapped a long black piece of fabric around it like a turban, covered herself in her chador, and sat in the sun with her eyes closed to take in its warmth. She ate little, didn’t talk much—only to bless everyone in gratitude—never wanted to stay long. As soon as she entered the house, she longed to go back to her own room, but Khanom-bozorg kept her the entire day.

  Khanom-bozorg said that her mother lived to be a hundred and ten years old, ten years short of the magic number every Iranian Jew wished for their loved ones, because she was righteous, because she had suffered. I wondered how one’s suffering made her closer to God. My own suffering was distancing me from all I had believed.

  My grandmother sighed again and continued to list Bibi’s virtues. “She was fastidious about staying clean. She wore separate sandals to enter the outhouse, and wrapped her clothes tightly around her, so that they wouldn’t touch the walls. Afterward, she washed her arms to the elbows, her legs to the knees, just the way Moslems purify themselves before praying.” My grandmother wiped her tears. “Poor Bibi ate very little. She said she didn’t want to grow food for maggots.”

  Although I recalled Bibi vividly, I didn’t know much about her life. Her body had shriveled down to a child’s size by the time she died in 1963, when I was ten years old. Unaware of her death, I went to school that morning. When I returned home for lunch, I saw my grandmother, father, and aunts washing their hands and feet at the door with the water from a jug my mother had left outside, the custom for Jews returning from the cemetery. No one told me anything. As always, I had to decipher information by listening. By then I had learned not to ask, not to try to take part in the adults’ conversations. I heard an aunt tell the family how she was taking Bibi for a medical check up, when my great-grandmother collapsed in the courtyard and was gone, “an easy death. She was blessed.” I felt cheated for not being able to express my grief, to speak of her as everyone else did.

  My mother once said that Bibi’s longevity was a direct result of her drinking a shot of aragh sprinkled with pepper every morning.

  Incensed, Khanom-bozorg disagreed, “No, that was to keep her nerves steady. She had a hard life.”

  I had always wondered but feared to ask what could have tortured my quiet Bibi for so many years. On this summer day, watching Khanombozorg so tender and vulnerable, I asked. The answer was as long as all her other stories, as indirect as all conversation in Farsi.

  Bibi Zaghee married a wealthy man, Esghel Ghalgeer, who made a living by retrieving silver and gold from the dust at the jewelers’ shops. My father was named after him. Being relatively wealthy, Bibi’s husband had bought his stunning wife a pearl necklace that was the envy of every woman in the ghetto. Petite, fair-skinned, and bright-eyed, Bibi had enchanted her husband, who would do anything for her, except live long enough to raise their son and four daughters. Although a girl, the youngest, Bagom-jaan, “I say you are my life,” became Bibi’s dearest child.

  Like my mother, women in those days married before puberty and were continuously pregnant. When my Aunt Shams started her period before her wedding night, my grandmother beat her head with both hands: “It isn’t time yet, not yet. What am I going to tell the groom’s family?”

  The Iranian custom of that time dictated that a woman’s first blood was to flow in her husband’s home. Therefore, when she was still a little girl, Bagom-jaan’s extraordinary beauty sent the families of numerous men to ask my paternal great-grandmother for her daughter’s hand in marriage. After the groom was chosen, Bibi spent days preparing for a special wedding for her favorite daughter and spent money that she didn’t have to prepare a feast. Bagom-jaan was breathtaking in her beautiful wedding gown, her long black hair shone from underneath the sheer veil, and her youth and innocence were the crowns that adorned her head. She was a rosebud ready to be opened.

  After the wedding, men escorted the bride and the groom, who rode donkeys through the narrow alleyways of the mahaleh; women walked behind them, clapping and singing vasoonak:

  The alleyways are narrow, yes; the bride is beautiful, yes! Don’t touch her mane; it is decorated with pearls, yes!

  Don’t take the bride through the alleyways; they are muddy, Just as the bride’s lips are clearly rosy.

  The entire neighborhood gathered on the flat roofs of their homes, ululating as the bridal party went by, showering them with sugar candy flavored with rose water. With the beat of their tonbaks, the Jewish musicians met the entourage at the groom’s house and ushered the couple to their hejleh, decorated with silk fabrics and greens. The family sang until their voices gave up. Then they left Bagom-jaan and her husband to enjoy each other’s company and waited outside, still clapping
and singing along with the musicians, waiting for the bloody cloth.

  The groom came out in a short while. The family sang even louder:

  Our bride is a child; early at night she is sleepy From the hejleh, the groom appears, satisfied and happy.

  The groom didn’t look happy, and my great-grandmother panicked. What was wrong? The bride was surely a virgin; she was but a child. Bagom-jaan was suffering from severe cramps, the groom informed the family. Bibi rushed to her daughter’s side trying to comfort her, but no one realized the seriousness of the problem, and Bagom-jaan died on her wedding night. Bibi tore her necklace and the pearls flew in the air and scattered over the dead child. Her true pearl was going to sleep in the cold of earth rather than in the warmth of a wedding bed.

  Bibi never recovered from the shock. She had to be peeled off the pile of dirt in the Jewish cemetery. After pulling out fistfuls of her hair and throwing them on the grave, she beat herself on the head and chest until she fainted. Her grief was too deep to be consoled. Week after week, she fasted and prayed for Bagom-jaan, but her grief wouldn’t dull. She spent her days at the gravesite, crying, grieving, and eating little, trying to fast as many days as possible. After the thirty days of formal mourning, when her pain was still as harsh as the first weeks, Bibi still visited the grave every day, beating her breasts with a large stone, asking for atonement from God, for forgiveness from her beloved daughter, believing that her sins had brought death to Bagom-jaan.

  Sick and depressed, Bibi was taken to a doctor, who was horrified to see her breasts lumpy and bruised. “Cancer!” he told the family. That week, he admitted Bibi to the hospital and surgically removed both breasts, with which my great grandmother, the beautiful Bibi Zaghee, had last nursed her favorite daughter.

  When Khanom-bozorg finished her story, I was numb. At the same time, I had an uncontrollable urge to see my great-grandmother’s room once more. I wasn’t being logical. Visiting people was understandable, touring the rubble of a room wasn’t. My parents didn’t understand my request. I didn’t quite know myself why I needed to visit a room that I had dreaded as a child. My grandmother’s story had jolted me. Hurting inside, feeling trapped, I sensed that I couldn’t go forward unless I stepped back in time and understood the women who had come before me. I needed to touch Bibi; to touch a woman who I was told—over and over—had once loved me unconditionally. I had to connect my own pain with hers.

  I knew Khanom-bozorg was doing me a big favor by arranging my visit to Bibi’s room before it was renovated to sell the house. Since both her mother and brother were dead, the experience had to be painful. We entered the small courtyard. I remembered it as the place where my grandmother’s brother, Daee-bozorg, had erected a large tanoor every year before Passover to bake matzah for the community. The uneven ground, once covered with broken pieces of bricks, was leveled and tiled. No more ovens were going to be built there, and Daee-bozorg’s kind face would not greet the nieces and nephews every Passover with the promise of a whole egg baked on a matzah, a treat my sister Nahid and I gobbled in excitement. There was a buzz around the Jewish community about imported machine-made matzah, every piece looking exactly alike, square with sharp edges. Daee-bozorg’s round, uneven, unleavened bread was going to be a part of history.

  I climbed up the narrow stone stairs, trying to keep a balance on their slippery surface. Where once there had been hand-made grooves, the stairs were now worn out like the shells I had seen on the shores of Virginia Beach, smooth from the constant beating of the waves. From the open hallway, I could see the heavy wooden door. I pushed it with both hands and secured it with a stone, the way Bibi kept it open to get fresh air. The room wasn’t as dark as the one in my memory. The bedding was removed, but a small charcoal brazier, where Bibi heated her food, made tea, and warmed the room in winter stood on tiny brass feet. Seeing the empty ledge built into the wall, I remembered how Bibi’s bottles of herbal teas, lighting oil, and aragh once sat on its stone face, their shadowy figures frightening me.

  Walking across the dirt and stone floor, I smelled my great-grandmother. I broke down and sobbed loudly, frightening everyone. The women ran upstairs to see what was going on. I was mourning. I hadn’t had a chance to grieve for Bibi when she died; now I couldn’t restrain myself.

  As I stood in Bibi’s room, I could feel her presence, her suffering and guilt for having sacrificed her daughter to a tradition that was too strong for the mother to have resisted. I felt too the spirit of my little great-aunt Bagom-jaan, her fear on the night of her wedding, and her pain as well. I said a silent goodbye to them, stepped out of the room, and closed the door behind me.

  There was a party in our house for the double births of my first brother, Freydoun, and my aunt’s son, born around the same time. Khanom-bozorg (standing) gives orders to the cook, working in a makeshift kitchen in the backyard. Bibi suns herself in the right corner. The woman sitting in front of the cook is my grandmother’s sister Khatoon-jaan. Picture courtesy of Nahid Gerstein.

  A Match for Me

  I don’t know at what stage in my life I found the traditions unacceptable and why. I often wonder if my mother’s position as an outsider and her perpetual unmet desire to leave influenced me to feel detached from life around me, from her, and from the customs as an extension of her bondage and possibly mine.

  Even now, in the twenty-first century in the United States, my younger cousins and their children who escaped from Iran after the 1979 Revolution, abide by the cultural rules of the country they abandoned. An educated cousin married a woman his mother found for him in Iran and brought over. Repeatedly I hear from friends and family that with the arrival of each new group of Iranian women, men rush to marry them before “their eyes and ears are opened” to the freedoms of the West. Some of my young educated cousins have been here since childhood, don’t read or write Farsi, don’t remember their country of birth, yet wait for their parents to find them proper husbands. The men may date Americans but mostly marry Iranian women whom their parents recommend.

  Naturally, in the summer of 1976, my father and the rest of the family were shocked at my disobedience and single-mindedness at daring to demand control over my own life, and I still don’t know how I became so stony, unyielding, and defiant.

  A month after my return to Iran, my father called for a family moshaverat, the gathering of elders to make important decisions. I served them tea and cookies as my grandmother, uncles, and father sat around the room reviewing my suitors. Then my grandmother asked me to leave. In a rare show of disagreement with his mother, probably to prove his flexibility and modernity, my father asked me to stay, to review and evaluate the suitors.

  “They’re all wrong,” I told him.

  My father chewed his mustache, always a sign of his anger. “Not the right answer,” he said. He wanted to know what kind of information I had deciphered from them; how their family lives were; how much money they made; what kind of cars they drove; how much education they had.

  “None,” I said. “I didn’t ask those questions.”

  “Do you think that there will be a man created to your specification?” He added that he couldn’t lift his head in front of the family out of shame, the shame of having a daughter out of control. He turned red in anger. When chewing his mustache didn’t comfort him enough, he bit into his knuckles.

  My grandmother agreed that I was disrespectful to my elders, destroying myself, losing my charm and beauty by not eating and by crying excessively. “Look, what you’ve done to yourself! To your father. Is it worth it?” she asked.

  My father must have noticed my gaunt look for the first time because his facial muscles relaxed and his eyes softened. In a gentle tone, he explained, “You are too young to understand what you’re doing. You have to respect the wisdom of the elders, who have seen the world. If you disregard our advice, then you will have to accept the consequences. Your stubbornness will make you siah-bakht, will leave you open to misfortunes.”

 
; His words had the opposite effect of what he had hoped for. I shrugged my shoulders and sighed. “Can I leave now?”

  He then interpreted a passage in the Talmud, “If you mock your traditions and be disrespectful of us, your children will do a hundred times worse to you. Is that what you want? They will pay for your misdeeds with their own terrible kismet.”

  I shivered. Those words chilled me to the bones. I never forgot them. I never could erase their impact. Throughout my life, whenever my children suffered, his prophecy crossed my mind.

  After the lecture, my father ran a few other names by me: a doctor, an engineer, a businessman. “When is a good time for them to meet you?” he asked.

  “Whenever,” I said. I knew that if I didn’t agree to at least meet these men, the family would find more humiliating ways to present me to them. I didn’t want to repeat the matchmaking episode when I was told to walk in front of the khastegar’s family like a model on a runway. I had fought back then by rejecting my family’s set up and protesting to the intended suitor. Now, two summers later, I seemed to have lost the spark to fight back, to oppose my father openly. I ate less after meeting each candidate; the food stuck in my throat and I had to cough it up. After my grandmother’s warning about my colorless cheeks, my father watched my eating the way he had counted every mouthful when I was a chubby teenager. Finally one day, when he pushed the food toward me, I lost my temper.

  I had become soft-spoken, never disagreeing, and even covered my mouth with the palm of my hand if I laughed to suffocate its sound, to be lady-like. Now I screamed gibberish as I threw plates of food against the walls and the floor. I pulled the tablecloth from underneath the serving dishes and tore it. Bowls of rice and stew flew in the air, spewing red and green sauces on the Persian carpets. I watched myself shout like a madwoman and wondered how I could have all that sound in me. Somehow all the words that I had shoved back inside, all the words that I never uttered for fear of being verag and immodest, poured out in one long spasm of incoherent language. My father, uncles, sisters, and brothers watched my outburst silently. My siblings’ faces turned pale. My sister cried softly. When I finally wore out my rage, I left the kitchen, crawled into my bed, held myself tightly, and drowned in a deep sleep for the first time since I had returned.