The Temporary Bride

by Jennifer Klinec

  I slouch with relief that it is finally over and the limbo fills with the noise of our exhaled breath. I try not to attach feelings to the smells nor mental words to the sounds, pushing it all aside for later. The door is thrown open suddenly and bangs on its hinges, and my heart sinks as the second, larger camel is brought in. The young boy who had first tied the camels up outside struts past us with a knife and begins to sharpen it with clumsy strokes.

  “What’s he doing?” I ask Vahid. “Doesn’t it need two men?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispers. “Maybe he wants to kill by himself to show off in front of you.”

  The camel kneels down in response to the sharp hisses, folding itself into a calm, tidy package. The boy looks to be making the most of the tension, circling the animal, his rubber boots squelching loudly in the blood. As he leans forward, his dark, oily hair falls into his eyes and for the first time I feel truly frightened. We are alone in this room with its stained floors and metal hooks, the three of us and the camel.

  The boy aims for the camel’s throat, but instead of the long, sweeping cut that is needed, he makes just a narrow, but deep, incision. The camel bolts upright in terror and runs toward the light of the entranceway, out into the parking lot. A number of older men standing outside their offices yell angrily as it races around in circles, spraying them with an uncontrolled jet of blood. The boy tries in vain to grab the camel’s yoke, but it only becomes more agitated, galloping in a frightened and confused circuit, throwing plumes of gray dust into the air.

  We step over abandoned weighing scales and kicked-over fragments of metal into the life-giving wind outside. The camel struggles for another few minutes until at last it stops to collapse on the pavement.

  “Mash’allah,” says Vahid softly, releasing my hand.

  The camel lies on its side, its papery, brown skin marked with blood and its limbs curled and motionless. We back away as the Kurdish boy advances, slicing stupidly at the gash in its throat, the gesture face-saving and pointless. Two men in plastic flip-flops begin hosing the blood from the pavement and it foams pink as it washes across the parking lot, into a gutter.

  I find a patch of sunlight along the wall and lean against the bricks, wanting to extract some warmth through my layers of clothing. Vahid looks flushed and awkward, his brown eyes suddenly tired and ringed with circles. More camels are being led through the entrance, with more blue numbers painted onto their sides. A group of men approach and huddle together, talking in loud, urgent voices. Vahid turns and speaks to one of them, who replies with an absent shrug. They raise their hands and draw trajectories in the air, pointing from the camel to the back room of the slaughterhouse. One of them leaves briefly, returning with several lengths of rope.

  Two large camels are brought over and harnessed to the legs of the dead animal, lengths of frayed rope are looped around their necks. The last thing I see as we walk back to our taxi is the sight of them, being whipped and pulling obediently, their cargo dragging, leaving a thick, wet trail behind.

  From the subdued way he opens the door for me I can tell Vahid is keen to atone for the miscarriage the morning had become. We are let out at a crossroads I vaguely recognize, close to a pastry shop we’d stopped at a few days before to buy little metal boxes of pistachio and coconut baklava cut into tiny squares and sprinkled with rosewater. I have been eating them ever since. A few pieces popped into my mouth in the morning, a few more as I sit reading in the dim light at bedtime.

  As we walk inside, I can smell honey, lemon and roasted almonds. The men working inside lift scorched trays of Yazdi cakes out of the oven. They stop, looking happy to see us, brushing flour off their hands and extending them to Vahid, clapping him on the back. Vahid seems glad to be interacting once more with men. The environment is mercifully innocent and carefree.

  The kitchen is like a child’s fairyland. Everywhere there are trays of tiny doughnuts ready to be rolled in icing sugar, miniature saffron biscuits flecked with cardamom and raisins, and clover-shaped cookies made from chickpea flour. They turn to me and say the magic words: I wasn’t to leave until I had tasted everything.

  Hands and fingers appear from all directions, bearing trays of sweets, cookies and cakes. One is sticky, one is crumbly, one is covered in date syrup, while another has been rolled in sesame seeds. Stopping only to brush the crumbs and icing sugar from our laps and to lick our fingers, we taste and nibble until our stomachs ache. The owner of the factory, a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair and a short, well-trimmed beard, brings out glasses of rosewater lemonade and asks Vahid whether we’d like to try making pashmak.

  The pashmak machine resembles a giant metal tarantula. As it hums into action, its legs pick up the warm, fluffy strands of yarn spun from sugar and sesame as they come out of a central orb that melts the ingredients together. We collect the delicate, gauze-like fibers and weave them around our fingers, stopping only to place a fine thread into our mouths and feel it melt on our tongues, condensing into hard beads of sugar on our teeth.

  When we finish we are surrounded by a pastel rainbow of spools. Some of it is stuffed into sesame-flecked bread and offered around with glasses of tea. Most of it will be carted away to decorate cakes or to be sold for weddings. One of the men picks up a few strands of pink pashmak and winds it into a kind of necklace, lowering it over my head and smiling at me. I wash my hands at a small enamel sink in the corner and look in the mirror, thumbing my little sugar necklace and glancing at my reflection.

  Behind me Vahid is speaking in the soft, deferential tone I’ve heard him use at home with his parents and uncles. His arms are crossed across his chest as he speaks. I understand the details of their conversation without explanation. I have begun to understand the changing textures of his voice, just as I have become accustomed to the varying natures of his face. At times he is just a shy boy whose life has been spent entirely separated from girls: at school, on buses, at the bakery where queues form—women to the left, men to the right—to buy stone-baked bread. Surrounded now by men with their wide, silver wedding bands, the jutting paunches of their well-fed stomachs and their temperaments softened by their wives and children, Vahid takes on the full stance of an adult, leaning slightly on one leg, slicing his hands through the air as he talks.

  Vahid’s status in life, his family name, his military service and lack of employment are all details to be shared, questioned and discussed among strangers. I feel sad as I watch the grains of his young life get threshed and picked over, its quiet details scrutinized and evaluated. To get a job he will need to show that he has been in the military, that he has no close family in the West and no interest in going abroad. To marry well he will need to have the right surname, then acquire the essentials of a job, a house and a car. Privacy is something kept for other matters—the difficulties within a marriage, sexual longings, the pale forearms of a wife or sister—but the facts and progress of his twenty-five years are public details, open to examination by all.

  As we leave the pastry shop, the afternoon sun is high and the streets are shadowed and deserted. Yazd’s families are indoors, whispering afternoon prayers or sitting around their sofrehs, eating lunches of stew and rice. We walk through the alleyways that run parallel to the main street where taxis still hum and the occasional bus thunders past.

  Vahid walks quickly, his hands slightly clenched at his sides. His scowl has returned and his eyes seem troubled. I let him hurry ahead of me, his short noontime shadow floating at a sharp angle beside him, following him along the stone walls and spilling onto the rough, pot-holed ground. He appears to have forgotten me and it takes him several moments to notice he’s left me behind. Finally, he stops and turns around, his expression tense.

  “Why are you rushing? What is wrong with you?” I ask.

  He takes a few careful steps toward me, breaking the silence with the crunching of pebbles and kicking up a small cloud of dust. I feel him studying me, unsure.

  “Let me make a ph
one call here,” he says, gesturing to a green phone booth in the street. “Just a moment, please. My cellphone is out of credit.”

  I watch him dial a number and wait several moments. Eventually he hangs up without speaking.

  His eyes betray an instant’s hesitation. “Let’s go home. For lunch,” he says.

  We walk to a bus stop and quickly become separated in a sea of black gowns, smoking men and well-behaved schoolchildren. The bus arrives and he boards at the front, while I join the rush of covered faces clambering in at the back. He cranes his neck to ensure I get on okay and I stand among the silent sway of women who hold firm the hands of their children. I allow myself to stare out the window and daydream, knowing Vahid will call out for me when it is time to descend.

  Chapter Seven

  It is nearly two but it feels like evening. Vahid climbs the staircase as if he has something important to do. From four steps behind I notice the loose stitch of the fake Adidas logo on his shoes, the embossed letters on the heels almost fully scuffed away. I feel a sense of homecoming as we pass the mats piled with loafers and rubber sandals, followed by relief when we arrive at his family’s door. I am still parched from the excess of sugar I’ve eaten and craving the cold metallic taste of water from the tap.

  Instead of ringing the doorbell as he always does, Vahid jangles a set of keys in his pocket. I recognize the significance of it immediately, but it doesn’t occur to me to find it strange. If anything I’m glad for the chance to be left alone, spared his father’s routine questioning about the price of a kilo of meat or a tankful of gas.

  “My mom will be home soon,” Vahid says as if to reassure me, leaning against the wall for me to step inside first.

  A linen cloth covers the bowl of fruit on the table. The teacups have all been washed and set in the drainer over the sink. For once the television has been switched off and we behave like a pair of schoolchildren set free. We throw our bags into a heap on the rug, draping our coats on the backs of chairs. Vahid goes to the kitchen to rummage for cups and glasses. It strikes me how nimbly he seems to flit between ages, how quickly he ages and grows young again. Outside this house his stubble seems darker, his face characterized by lines and determination. Back in his mother’s kitchen, he could pass for a teenager. With his jacket removed, he is wearing a T-shirt with thin orange stripes from his shoulders to the ends of his short sleeves. It’s a shirt I’m guessing his mother bought for him, still thinking of him as a little boy.

  Vahid boils the kettle and sets bowls of dates and dried mulberries on a tray while I walk through the living room as if it were a museum. Emptied of people, it seems larger, the mementos covering every surface more careful and deliberate. Nowruz cards are tucked between vases of dusty, plastic flowers. Photographs nestle among stiff twists of lace. I pause, seeing them fully for the first time, Vahid and his sister’s lives curated from infancy. In prints faded with age and sunlight, they perch in the arms of various relatives, their mother rarely straying outside the frame. Gradually they appear separate, both from their parents and from each other, exhibiting the courage and independence that come naturally with youth. Vahid stands poised to kick a football, grinning widely with a missing front tooth. His sister poses in a pale blue school uniform with a satchel of books, a matching headscarf secured with a knot under her chin. As the photographs track her passage through adolescence, her scarf becomes looser and bolder, darkening to shades of scarlet and purple. Eventually it is worn tossed across the left shoulder in the same style I wear mine. Soon after that she disappears.

  I search for her among the remaining frames and pictures but she is conspicuously absent or out of view. On the rare occasion I am able to find her, she appears as a dot on a landscape, an abstract figure like a cloud or tree. It takes me a moment to see the pattern: that when she appears she is always flanked by Vahid’s father or uncles, partially obscured. Sometimes only a shoulder or a part of her face is visible, the rest of her lost behind striped shirts and oiled heads of hair. It’s as though efforts have been made to keep her from standing out, ensuring she stays deliberately tucked away.

  I stand on my toes to grasp at a small pile of padded albums decorated with plastic jewels and glitter, placed up on a high shelf out of reach. The images inside startle me no less than if they’d spilled out and dropped onto the floor. There is Vahid’s sister, again and again, one of a crowd of women surrounding brides in lavish white dresses. Her uncovered hair is set in stiff, shiny ringlets, her clothing covered in sequins and sparkles. In contrast to the photos on display where her hands are clasped modestly in front, she is bent forward, her bare arms dangling over another girl’s shoulders. Her smile is broad and her mouth bright with lipstick, rings of heavy pencil circle her eyes, a look she copies many times. Made up, she could easily pass for ten years older.

  They are the sort of photos I could imagine being circulated to a prospective suitor, upon reaching the mature stages of a khaastegaari; the spacing and symmetry of her features studied by countless relatives while deciding whether or not to proceed. I picture these same photos turned over and over in their hands, her face and body gradually plastered with critical thumbprints. Though I have never met her I can’t help but feel sorry for her, envisaging her being picked over and judged.

  At twenty-three, she is nearly a decade younger than I am, and I try to imagine what that must mean. To shelter and refuge within these boundaries of family and follow a path requiring total and unquestioning trust. I suspect she has never quarreled with her parents as I have, never raised her voice to confront people pushing her on the Tube. That like Vahid she has been raised to fulfill a broad, collective expectation, to conclude her youth in a way that satisfies and pleases all.

  I continue shuffling from one picture to the next, hungrily absorbing the details of the last two and a half decades. It reminds me I am merely a blip, with little or nothing to contribute. This is a home where Iranian lives are lived.

  I reach for another photo that stands out from the others—a mottled black-and-white print under a sheet of glass. The mood is one of order and ceremony, a grand event taking place. The adults are wearing long, formal clothing. A cream-filled rolled sponge cake rests on a banquet table. Four boys are sitting upright on stiff, throne-like chairs, looking uncertain how to behave. The oldest boy is trying to smile for the benefit of the camera, but the others seem to chafe miserably under the attention. They are wearing white knee-length skirts, their row of uncovered knees shining and bare. By contrast the other children in the picture appear carefree and happy, their countless toys and dolls littering the floor.

  “That is my father and uncles in Khuzestan,” Vahid calls out. “It was taken at their khatneh soori. My grandmother waited until my father was five, then she took them all to the doctor together so they would be less scared. Thank God I was too young to remember my own operation. My mom asked them to do it when I was born.”

  At first I think he is talking about the removal of tonsils or an appendix, but it soon becomes plain he is speaking of circumcision. My hands rise to cover my mouth in shock but the enthusiasm in his voice makes it impossible not to smile.

  “Do you know what my grandmother did?” he says, encouraged by my expression. “She asked the doctors to save their parts and she fed them to one of the chickens. Then she killed it and made my father and uncles eat it from the barbecue. It was the tradition and is supposed to bring good luck.”

  The idea is so sweet and perverse it makes me shiver with laughter, pressing my hand to my stomach. It reminds me of the astonished giggles that accompanied my mother’s explanations, when I was a child, of the phenomenon of a bruise or the mystery of a loose tooth. I remember how I used to listen to her in awe, tapping my fingers to my own body, bewitched by her assurances of its ability to heal or regrow. Though I don’t belong in this house it kindles a similar affection, a claiming of its nostalgia for my own; just as I have claimed a regular place to eat and sleep on their carpet, t
heir most prized possession, its rich pattern stretching plushly away under my bare feet.

  Vahid’s mouth is curled into a grin and he sets the tray he has prepared for us on a small table. He comes over to stand beside me, so close I half expect him to reach out.

  He picks up another photograph that appears recent and hands it to me, of himself and his parents among a large group. They are sprawled shoeless on carpets in the shade of trees, the sun behind them fierce and unmarred by clouds. His parents look languid and relaxed in a way I have never seen them, their expressions uncomplicated and droll. The easy slouch of the people in the photograph suggests an atmosphere of being among family, who have seen everything and have no secrets.

  The women are gathered in small circles, sisters and cousins who have coddled and breastfed each other’s children, cooked one another’s recipes for milk pudding and chicken salad. The men lean toward each other in heated conversation, hinting at the competition naturally existing between men. I imagine they must secretly appraise one another’s cars, the beauty of their wives and the achievements of their children, yet can peacefully coexist on the holidays where they squash ten people into two cars to drive to Mashad or Bandar Abbas, all sleeping in two dormitory rooms, in each other’s hair for days at a time.