Pomegranate Soup

by Marsha Mehran

  Bahar shuddered as the cold water ran over her scorched thumb. In the upstairs flat, a small one-bedroom residence that the Delmonicos had used as an office and storage area, Layla scrambled through open cardboard boxes looking for the green bottle of soothing gel.

  “I can’t find the aloe! Are you sure you packed it?” she yelled down to the kitchen.

  “Yes!” Marjan hollered. “Look in the small box that says ‘Miscellaneous’!”

  “Don’t worry. It’s stopped already. See? I’ll just put an ice cube on it,” said Bahar, sticking out her hurt thumb so Marjan could see the rising welts.

  Bahar tried to put on a brave face, but inside she felt a lot like that thumb of hers. Born, as her name indicated, on the first day of the Persian spring, she had the superstitious nature of people whose birthdays fall on the cusps of changing seasons. She was forever looking over her shoulder for fear that she had stepped on cracks or wandered under a ladder. Bahar’s inherent nervousness had escalated to a deeper malaise in recent years, the result of unspeakable events that had left indelible scars. Although her neurotic tendencies often irritated the more hardy teenager Layla, Marjan’s heart just softened a bit more every time she saw her sister jump so.

  “Are you sure you’re all right? Listen, I’ll finish the dolmeh. Just mix the rice for me, okay?” Marjan gave Bahar an ice cube wrapped in a torn piece of newspaper and placed the piping tray of dolmeh on a low wooden island in the middle of the kitchen.

  Made especially for a man of Napoleonic measurements, this rectangular table had been the centerpiece of Luigi Delmonico’s kingdom, where he rolled, powdered, slapped, and whipped the exquisite paninis and chocolate-filled brioches he would later showcase in his beloved Papa’s Pastries. It was also where Estelle, his bride of forty-five years, had found him dead—three hours after the bowl of meringue he was preparing had stiffened into a pink, cotton-candied tutu.

  Of course, Estelle had failed to mention this last point when she had shown the three sisters around the place five days ago, though in reality, it probably would have made little difference. The girls’ battered boxes were already shipped over and waiting to be picked up in Castlebar. Besides, the shop, complete with all the appliances and utensils of a working kitchen (albeit outdated and a bit rusty), was perfect for what Marjan had in mind. And it came at a bargain price.

  “My niece told me that you are the best chef she has ever seen. Gloria, she’s a very good girl, no?”

  Mrs. Delmonico had stood in the kitchen after the grand tour, the dying afternoon rays entering lazily through a narrow, stained-glass partition in the back door. The sun rays illuminated the dust particles floating above her peppery hair. All surfaces, from countertops to the stacks of pots and dishes, were cloaked in a good inch of the snowy stuff.

  “Oh, Gloria was very good to us when we arrived in Lewisham. A great friend,” Marjan said. Behind her, Bahar and Layla both nodded in agreement. “But I think she was exaggerating a bit about my abilities. I was only a sous chef. She was the real talent at the restaurant.”

  “Yes, Gloria knows how to cook parmigiana and manicotti, but who doesn’t? Maybe to those English that is gourmet, but you should have seen my grandmother cook! Pfff! If she was still alive today she would be rich from her cooking, I tell you!”

  Estelle Delmonico laughed and placed her chubby hands on her hips. The good-natured widow cocked her head and offered a smile to each of the three young women. Fate had it that, although blessed with the welcoming girth of childbearing hips, she had never been able to give Luigi a baby of their own. It was one of her few regrets in an otherwise fortunate and colorful life. But her barrenness had never turned to resentment, a blessing Estelle often accredited to her niece, on whom she was able to practice all the loving criticisms her own mother had lavished upon her. Gloria was a great source of release for Estelle Delmonico, and now she had sent her three darlings to look after as well.

  “Okay, then? You will take the store, eh?”

  Marjan turned to Bahar and Layla, both of whom appeared to be asleep standing up. Their drawn, exhausted faces had the look of torshi, pickled onions that have been pulled from their bed of vinegar and salt. Who could blame them, really? It had been a long four days since they left London, shipping off their hastily packed boxes and throwing a few personal belongings into two worn plaid suitcases, the same suitcases that had seen them through the Iranian desert a long time ago. The plane ride from London to Knock had been painfully tedious, immigration and customs even worse. Answering the same questions about their religion and ethnic background over and over again. Then two days holed up in a backpackers’ hostel in the nearby town of Castlebar, waiting for their boxes to arrive while they survived on white bread and some hard cheese that Marjan had bought from a corner grocery. Layla, of course, had complained all the way (such was the prerogative of her age), but Bahar had remained sullen, her big doe eyes wet with frightened tears.

  But, thought Marjan, the worst certainly seemed behind them. Especially now that they were standing in this dusty little kitchen, with this generous Italian woman. It was time for a new start, time for them to take all the money they had in the world and finally make something of those years of hardship.

  “You stay, yes?” Estelle Delmonico pulled a heavy, corroded key from a hidden pocket in her black dress. Toothy and archaic, it was the kind of key that would have released Pandora’s own demons.

  “Yes.” Marjan nodded, accepting the key. “We’ll stay. How would you like the rent paid? Monthly or weekly?”

  “Agh, don’t worry about that now. You give it to me whenever you have it, yes? I think what is more important is to get you a big bowl of my minestrone soup. That would put some energy in this pretty face, eh?” Mrs. Delmonico walked over to Layla and lightly patted her left cheek.

  Marjan, determined to keep up the momentum that had carried them from London over the Irish Sea and into this land of crazed sheep and dizzying roads, shook her head, more to her sisters than to the jolly widow.

  “Thank you, but I’m afraid we can’t. There is so much to do. Bahar and Layla have to unpack, and I have to get to Dublin as soon as possible for ingredients. It would be much quicker than trying to find some of the food we need here, I suspect,” she said.

  “Hah! You are right! My Luigi would sometimes get so red in the face about these village markets. Mini-markets, they call them! I could find more in my mama’s back garden in Napoli than in most of these mini-markets. ”

  “Yes, Naples—Napoli, sounds beautiful. I hear the erberias there are filled with the most wonderful vegetables. I hope I’ll be able to find everything we need for our menu in Dublin. We want to open the café by next Monday. First day of spring,” said Marjan.

  “Monday? Five days only? No, no. You will give yourselves more time, I think. Why the rushing? Wait a few more days,” said Mrs. Delmonico, shaking her head in matronly disapproval.

  “Monday is Bahar’s birthday,” Layla piped up, suddenly awake.

  “And it’s No Rooz, the Iranian New Year. That’s when Persians start their calendar year, the first day of spring,” Marjan explained. Originally a Zoroastrian holiday marked by thirteen days of feasting and merriment, No Rooz, or “New Day,” is now celebrated by all Iranians. “It’ll be a good omen for our first day. And I think we’ll make it, if we get started soon,” she said pointedly.

  “Oh, you young girls. So much ambition! I will leave you alone to do what you have to do. Maybe I come by on your new year’s, yes? I will tell you a little about the crazy people that live here. To prepare you. Okay?” Estelle Delmonico planted a departing kiss on each of their cheeks, holding their faces in that warm Italian way of hers that took them all by surprise.

  Five busy days had passed since the little widow turned over the key to the old pastry shop, and the girls had worked a great deal of magic in that time. While Marjan took the tortoise CIÉ train across the endless, grassy-knolled countryside to Dublin, Bahar a
nd Layla set about the arduous task of transforming Papa’s Pastries into an Eastern-flavored oasis. With its ashy white walls, peeling posters of gondoliers, a burnt-out neon Lavazza coffee sign, faded flags and maps of the boot-shaped country, the old shop had needed a lot of work.

  Two large wooden display counters occupied most of the terra-cotta tiled floor. When Papa’s Pastries had opened in 1946, a younger Estelle had covered the countertops and the shop’s four metal tables with tartan tablecloths. The green-and-red plaid had turned a sickly yellow and orange in the intervening decades, and much of the binding weave crumbled into Bahar’s hands as she lifted the musty cloths from the tables. Estelle had fashioned the seating area as a place where customers would mingle, soaking the crusty edges of Luigi’s lovingly baked chocolate and anise biscotti in their cappuccinos as they listened to Billie Holiday croon on an old Victrola. But in the thirty-four years the Delmonicos’ pastry shop was open, Estelle’s checkered tables were hardly used at all, except as a place for tired housewives to dump their grocery bags and rumpled children. These exhausted, sallow-faced women would pay nervously for their crusty country loaves—and an occasional macadamia biscuit to shut drooling infantile mouths—before rushing out again into the rainy streets. After the cappuccino machine broke down in the winter of 1956, its pipes frozen by a freak ice storm raging outside, Luigi did not bother fixing it. Instead, he used the gargantuan installation as extra shelving for the model Ferrari cars he built in his spare time.

  The cars were long gone now, but the cappuccino machine had stayed. Bahar and Layla spent nearly three hours disassembling it before unscrewing the whole contraption from its base. Lifting the machine off the wall, the girls discovered the original color of the centuries-old shop—an ugly greenish brown that looked like cold turf. But that miserable color was gone now, as was the whitewash of the other walls. Bahar and Layla had bathed the entire shop with the house paint Estelle Delmonico had given them the day she showed them the space.

  “Take it, take it. There are paintbrushes and rollers too. I bought it all just before my Luigi died, from that good for nothing John Healy. He owns the hardware store near the church. Pfff! I said to him, ‘Mr. Healy, I need some good white paint. No cream or yellow. Luigi liked white.’ ‘Very clean,’ he said, ‘makes everything big.’ So that Healy man, he give me paint on sale. I bring here and open it and look!”

  Mrs. Delmonico pried the lids off of two paint cans in the corner of the upstairs flat. The paint, even in the dark room, pulsed out a vermilion that the three girls had seen in only one other place—within the incorruptible flesh of the fruits from the pomegranate tree in the garden of their childhood home.

  “I take it back and said to him, ‘Mr. Healy. There is a big mistake. This is not white. A beautiful color, but not white.’ And do you know what he said to me, eh? ‘Mrs. Delmonico, I can’t give your money back. You opened the cans already.’ Can you believe this? I tell you, that man, he never had a wife. Has a big house with beautiful furniture, but all alone! Why? Because he is miserable! Agh, look, I am getting crazy all over again, and it was five years ago! Maybe the paint is not so good anymore, eh?”

  But the paint was just fine. After a bit of a stir the color regulated itself to an even brighter version than the spectacular vermilion Estelle had awakened. When the girls stripped the walls and gave them a taste of color, the paint changed again, clotting into the dark crimson of Shiraz wine grapes.

  On Saturday afternoon, after three days of coughing on sawdust and breathing paint fumes, Bahar and Layla both fell onto the solitary mattress in the upstairs flat. They slept through the whole night without stirring and did not wake until Marjan’s return from her shopping excursion early on Sunday morning. Groggy-eyed and with bitter breath, the two girls stumbled down the staircase and followed their eldest sister out the kitchen door. They crossed the small back garden—a fenced-in patch of soggy, overgrown grass—and stepped onto a narrow cobblestone alleyway that was shared by all the businesses on the right side of Main Mall. There, in the predawn moonlight, stood a beat-up, lime green van with peace signs painted on its side panels.

  “I found the van in The Irish Times. Paid some young kid five hundred Irish for it. Not the prettiest thing, I know, but it braved the rocky roads all right. And the brakes are good, too. I almost ran into a sheep—or at least I think it was a sheep—but stopped just in time. Come on, I bought as much as I could.” Marjan motioned to the van’s back doors. As soon as she opened them, the memories came spilling out.

  A treasure trove of spices that would have made the thieving Ali Baba jealous sat huddled in one corner of the van. The motherly embrace of advieh—a mixed all-spice of crushed rose petals, cardamom, cinnamon, and cumin; the warm womb of turmeric; and that spice worth more than its weight in gold—za’feran, saffron.

  Like their home in Iran, their flat in Lewisham was always filled with these and other sumptuous grindings of barks and plant seeds. Bundles of dried flowers hung from doorway arches, and marble mortars held the remnants of nose-tingling powders. Though they had left Lewisham only a week ago, it seemed much longer. And no matter how intoxicating the smells were, this reawakening of the senses came with the price of memories none of them wanted to think about. At least not yet.

  Bahar and Layla helped Marjan unload the boxes of spices, jars of grape leaves, and bags of pistachios, almonds, and dates she had found in an Algerian grocery store on the outskirts of the capital city. Marjan had also purchased five kilos of feta, but she informed her sisters that this would be the last store-bought cheese for a while, as they would start making their own to save time and money. Layla groaned at the thought of squeezing dripping cheesecloth, but Bahar didn’t mind; she would make feta every day if it meant Marjan would not be leaving them for another cross-country shopping trip.

  The last of the van’s inventory came in the form of two long foldout tables and twelve wooden chairs, which Marjan had found at a secondhand store in the town of Mullingar. The long, communal-style tables would complete the cozy look she had in mind.

  Marjan made one more trip in the green hippie van early that Sunday morning, driving to the storage facility outside Castlebar where the shipping company had deposited their eight boxes and four Persian rugs. Unrolled now in the shop’s front room, the two larger Qashqa rugs told stories of primary-colored villagers who poured endless cups of golden tea and danced in honor of their sun god. These two covered up most of the shop’s cold tile floors, while two smaller rugs—woven slowly by blind old men—hung opposite each other so that their delicate, filigreed patterns could be fully appreciated. The vermilion walls complemented the new artwork wonderfully, bringing out the roses that bordered the corners of one rug while contrasting with the mint green leaves of the other.

  From the weary cardboard boxes came the shining tools of their new trade—what would truly set them apart from the rest of the businesses on Main Mall. Bahar unwrapped the items that she had collected over the years from Salvation Army stores and the odd suburban garage sale around London. There were ceramic teapots in aubergine, mustard, and midnight blue (good for one, sweeter still when shared between two drinkers); and forty small, thin glasses with curved handles, set in gold- and silver-plated holders etched with arabesque swirls. Bahar gingerly lined the tea glasses up on the counter where the cappuccino machine had been stationed. She tucked the teapots into the counter’s glass-paneled belly, where they sat prettily next to twenty glass containers of loose-leaf teas, ranging from bergamot and hibiscus to oolong.

  The larger counter, which sat closer to the shop’s front door, had yet to be filled with Marjan’s sweet creations. On the wall behind the counter ran a dark wooden shelf. Layla, the tallest of the three, was given the unsavory task of scrubbing it, driving spatula and sponge through the stony clumps of baguettes and currant bread that had petrified after Luigi’s death. The shelf was now spotless and exhibiting better-preserved artifacts: etched copper and brass trays, a frame
d woven calligraphy that read “Tea” in Farsi, five old-style samovars (one that had belonged to the girls’ grandmother, which Bahar had bundled up in her coat that day they left Iran for good), and a large print of a painting showing a traditional Iranian teahouse (men only), complete with indoor fountain and hookah pipes.

  The brass samovars on display belonged to an older generation, precursors to the large electric machine sitting on the counter next to the tea glasses. The diuretic samovar was plugged in and ready to be filled with water that it would boil for waiting teapots. It was this very samovar, with its enticing golden gleam, that Thomas McGuire had just glimpsed through the cracks in the newspapered window.

  The second tray of dolmeh was ready for the hot oven. Marjan pushed them into the heat and sighed.

  “Well, that should last us the next few days. What do you think?” She fanned herself with an oven mitten. The baklava they had baked earlier that morning was sitting on the kitchen island next to the first tray of dolmeh, but there was still so much left to do. And they had only four hours left before opening! She’d have to get started on the red lentil soup next.

  Layla clunked down the stairs, pausing on the low landing as she leaned over the banister, swinging her legs. At fifteen, she was already fully aware of the effects these long, exquisite limbs had on men of all ages.

  “I couldn’t find the aloe anywhere. It wasn’t in that box like you said.”

  “It’s all right. It stopped hurting.” Bahar held her thumb slanted, like a reluctant hitchhiker. “So much for a good omen.”

  “Bahar, please. No negativity right now. We need all the luck we can get our hands on. Look how far we’ve come already,” Marjan said, waving her wooden spoon around the warm, inviting kitchen.

  Bahar and Layla set aside their private thoughts to survey the fantastic bounty of tastes and colors around them. The ambrosial food and neat, cozy rooms were a real testament to their efforts, a great accomplishment for only a handful of days.