Pomegranate Soup

by Marsha Mehran

  Yes, they had come very far. Very far indeed.

  red lentil soup

  2 cups dry red lentils

  7 large onions, chopped

  7 garlic cloves, crushed

  1 teaspoon ground turmeric

  4 teaspoons ground cumin

  Olive oil

  7 cups chicken broth

  3 cups water

  Salt

  2 teaspoons nigella seeds*

  *Ground black pepper

  may be substituted

  Place lentils in a saucepan, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Cook, uncovered, for 9 minutes. Drain and place aside. In a large stockpot, fry 6 of the chopped onions, garlic, turmeric, and cumin in olive oil until golden. Transfer lentils, broth, and water to the pot. Add salt, nigella seed or pepper to taste. Bring soup to a boil. Lower heat, cover, and simmer for 40 minutes. Fry the remaining onion in olive oil until crisp but not blackened. Add as a garnish over individual bowls of soup.

  chapter two

  FROM HER BEDROOM WINDOW, in a flat above the Reek Relics shop, Dervla Quigley could see the universe. Or its equivalent, which for her was the comings and goings of all who ventured up and down Main Mall.

  A proud Ballinacroagh native through and through, Dervla had lived with her spinster sister, Marie Brennan, ever since her husband of forty-one years passed away. Although most in town knew the circumstance of Jim Quigley’s ignominious death (a horse breeder from County Kildare, he met his grand demise being squashed under the flanks of a spotted filly), no one dared speak about it. As Ballinacroagh’s primary gossip, Dervla kept mouths shut with a combination of canine hearing and a vicious tongue that knew no boundaries.

  At most times of the day—except during six o’clock Mass— Dervla could be found spying out of her bedroom window. Bolstering her hunched torso with large pillows, she stared with beady, rhubarb gray eyes out into the damp street below, determined not to miss a minute of provincial drama. It was an admirable feat of endurance, this constant watch over all Ballinacroagh, especially considering the old gossip’s unfortunate medical condition. At the height of her autumn years, and without warning, Dervla Quigley had been stricken with incontinence, an embarrassing bladder problem that left her housebound and dependent on her long-suffering sister. Unable to control her own body, Dervla soon became obsessed with manipulating everyone else’s. Gossip was not only her friend and solace but a source of great power.

  The week that the Aminpour sisters moved into the old pastry shop would prove especially fruitful for Dervla Quigley. By Sunday, she had almost met her weekly quota of scandals: on Wednesday, at 1:17 A.M.: Benny Corcoran stumbled half-blind and drunk out of Paddy’s, his hand on the arse of someone other than his saintly wife (Dervla blamed the broken streetlamp over the pub for obscuring the floozy’s face); on Friday, at 2:47 P.M.: a caravan of ten decrepit trailer homes—tinkers with no shame to them, no shame at all—climbed up Main Mall toward the lower levels of the craggy mountain heap.

  Tinkers. Just the word made Dervla shudder. The old gossip’s fury, of course, was a direct product of her ignorance. Despite her boundless curiosity, Dervla had never stopped to learn the tumultuous history of Ireland’s traveling people. Tinker, or “Tinceard” in Gaelic, referred to the tin pots and cooking pans that, until only a few years ago, were mended and peddled by the freckly, pale-eyed Celtic nomads. Before plying their tin trade, these travelers had been storytellers, descendants of medieval Irish bards who earned their daily bread by belting out high-pitched ditties:

  She went to live with a gentleman; one day came a

  tinker to solder her pan.

  He slyly got her behind the door, and gave her kisses over and o’er.

  Fa la la lero liddle lie day, fal la la lero li gee whoa!

  This clan of caravan dwellers, having survived centuries of famine and the follies of wigged Englishmen, no longer traveled in horse-drawn trains. Instead, they opted for mobile homes topped with shiny roofs of chrome, peach, and Tipperary gold.

  No matter how colorful they may have seemed to the outsider, Dervla told herself, she had little patience for the train of itinerants who took hold of road and field alike. Maybe she couldn’t change Ireland’s ridiculous bylaws, which allowed travelers to squat in any open field, but it didn’t stop the old gossip from trying. Dirty, disgusting things, those tinkers, Dervla muttered. Dirty, disgusting things. She picked up the telephone and dialed the town council office. Someone had to tell Padraig Carey about those filthy beasts. If she wasn’t around to look after things, just imagine what sort of scum could come cruising down her beloved Main Mall!

  What came in the form of a bright green van, Sunday morning, 4:00 A.M. sharp. Dervla awoke to acrid exhaust fumes billowing into her open bedroom window. Annoyance turned to gratitude when she spotted the peculiar vehicle, for Dervla knew a juicy bit of news when she saw one. The van ambled around the corner into the back alley, its bright orange peace sign reflecting in the moonlight. She might be sixty-two, Dervla thought to herself, but she was well aware of what went on in the backs of those hippie vans: lewd animal acts and drug use, that was what. No two ways about it.

  Dervla sat frozen with anticipation, waiting for the shadowy driver (some sort of heathen hippie no doubt) to park and saunter into view, but nobody came. She waited an hour, then two, hobbling out of her bedroom only for an urgent toilet run. No one was on the street at that time of morning; it was too late for pub crawls and too early for the delivery vans, so any suspicious footsteps could be heard easily. Dervla waited and waited, but nobody came.

  The foggy light of morning brought Dervla little relief. There was the usual pedestrian bustle of Sunday bests parading toward the church, the same penitent drunks peeling themselves out of roadside ditches with warbled promises to do better next time. No mysterious hippie, though; no details of back alley dealings, no chugging exhaust fumes. Hours of sitting and watching, and all she had to report back to the hungry beaks of Ballinacroagh’s ten o’clock parishioners was a sinful Benny Corcoran and a bunch of dirty tinkers. It was simply not good enough for a week’s work.

  Monday would prove to be much more rewarding. Not only did Dervla spot a light beaming through the cracks in the newspapered windows of the old Delmonico pastry shop but her sharpened ears detected murmuring voices coming from behind its red door. She couldn’t understand what was being said, but it didn’t sound like English, that was for sure. Italian, more than likely. No doubt a version of Latin the Pope himself wouldn’t have approved of. Had Estelle Delmonico lost her marbles altogether and decided to start up that sad excuse for a shop again? Hadn’t she learned her lesson the first time around?

  Dervla sniffed the air outside her bedroom window.

  Yes, a nasty reek of foreignness was definitely in the air. It was a different smell than what she remembered coming from Papa’s Pastries all those years ago. She recognized the same unyielding yeasty scent of rising bread and perky almond intonations, but there was also a vast and unexpected array of under- and overtones she could not name. The wicked, tingling sensation taunted Dervla’s sense of decency, laughing at her as if it knew her deep, dark secrets, as though it had heard all about her dead husband’s wanton ways.

  When the crusty gossip witnessed Thomas McGuire’s own fierce reaction to the new scent, she knew that she was on to something all right. She watched with glee as Thomas stormed up Main Mall (to the town council, no doubt) in his Land Rover, rubbing her wrinkly hands over her thickly veined thighs in a moment of unrestrained happiness. She was sitting over a gold mine of news, enough to last for weeks to come!

  Dervla Quigley would not have to wait long for further entertainment. Soon after, Thomas charged off toward the town council building, the shop’s red door opened, and out walked Layla.

  It seemed that Marjan, in all her meticulous attention to the extraordinary details on her grocery list, had failed to buy sufficient bags of white onions, those humble servants of so many magical
dishes. Her initial stock was already used up in the dolmeh and the pot of red lentil soup simmering away on the stove top, and she would need more to complete her opening day menu. Panicked, Marjan pushed Layla out the shop door with instructions to buy as many bags of onions as she could carry in her long, slender arms.

  Red lentil soup, although quite seductive in scent, is as simple to make as its name suggests. Marjan preferred to boil her lentils before frying the chopped onions, garlic, and spices with some good, strong olive oil. Covering the ready broth, lentils, and onions, she would then allow the luscious soup to simmer for half an hour or so, as the spices embedded themselves into the compliant onion skins.

  In the recipe book filed away in her head, Marjan always made sure to place a particular emphasis on the soup’s spices. Cumin added the aroma of afternoon lovemaking to the mixture, but it was another spice that had the greatest tantric effect on the innocent soup drinker: siah daneh— love in the midst—or nigella seed. This modest little pod, when crushed open by mortar and pestle, or when steamed in dishes such as this lentil soup, excites a spicy energy that hibernates in the human spleen. Unleashed, it burns forever with the unbound desire of an unrequited lover. So powerful is nigella in its heat that the spice should not be taken in by pregnant women, for fear of early labor.

  Indigenous to the Middle and Near Easts of the girls’ past lives, nigella is rarely used in Western recipes, its ability to soothe heartburn and abolish fatigue quite overlooked. Modernity, it seems, prefers over-the-counter pills to the advice of ancient seers. Marjan, aware that the spice would not be readily available in Ireland, had packed several envelopes of seedlings in the boxes they had shipped over from London. Layla would never fully realize how fortuitous a move this shipping of seeds had been, for she was already following the destiny its perfume had assigned her, undulating as it was from Marjan’s simmering pot all the way out to the sleepy street.

  Benny Corcoran, owner of Corcoran’s Bake Shop, was the first townsperson Layla encountered as she made her way down to Fadden’s Mini-Mart. Rather than buy a van for delivery runs, Benny transported the loaves and rolls he packed for Fadden’s in a large red wheelbarrow. He had just finished his second delivery trip to the grocery store, sweat running down the creases in his freckled face and onto his wheelbarrow of bread, when he saw Layla. Almost at once, Benny was stung by the cloud of nigella that had blended with the young girl’s own rosewater and cinnamon bouquet. The poor man didn’t know what hit him. One minute he was wandering around in his own lonely vacuum, the next he was in an Eden of tempting fruits, standing before an Eve whose long, dark hair and fragrance soothed his very heart.

  It would be easy to attribute Layla’s effect on the opposite sex (and the occasional Sapphically inclined female) to her youth or sweet, natural perfume, but the real reason behind her attraction was far more complex. Of course, there was no denying her beauty, the consistency of her angled, porcelain features, that tilt in her almond eyes, which shined like half-moons across her celestial face. Unlike her two older sisters, who sported wayward brown ringlets, Layla had hair that was long and jet black. Tied up or let down, moussed or gelled, nothing could excite her stubbornly straight locks. They were a definite throw-back to some latent Oriental chromosomes roaming deep inside of her.

  Had he still been alive, their father would have wasted no time in making a point of this Eastern descent. Javid Aminpour often boasted a lineage to Genghis Khan, beating his chest while yodeling Mongolian war songs, in imitation of an ancestry he was determined to stake a claim to. He died two months before Layla’s first birthday, so she could barely recall her father’s theatrics, but Bahar’s many bedtime stories over the years had given Layla ownership over her own set of memories.

  Layla never knew her mother either, for she died shortly after pushing her out into the harsh world. After a nine-year drought, it seemed that this last child had released in Shirin Aminpour an inner tourniquet that kept on flowing until there was nothing more to give. The weary doctors in Tehran General Hospital had no explanation for the merciless bleeding and just shrugged with defeat when they told her father the news. They failed to mention that, as the last drops of blood seeped into the hospital’s sea green bedsheets, a tiny bud had popped out of his wife’s womb. When the flower seed fell into the pool of blood, it blossomed into the face of a full-grown rose. The fearful doctors had kept this to themselves, partly to avoid a malpractice suit, and partly because the rosewater and cinnamon scent that accompanied the flower’s miraculous unfolding reminded them of a time when military guards did not hover behind every surgery room door. So it is that people who are denied hope become greedy hoarders when granted even the smallest of drops.

  But the doctors’ selfish motives had made little difference in Layla’s fate. Even from those first minutes in the outside world, she was charming all who crossed her path. In Layla’s hopeful aura, men like Benny Corcoran were free to relive the ambitions of their idle youths, dreams that were once entertained behind closed doors as they rubbed away under sweaty teenage quilts. Those were the moments of pure self-indulgence, before the repercussions of manhood were thrust upon them in the form of soul-breaking jobs and nagging wives.

  Sensing Benny’s adoring eyes on her, Layla quickened her pace down Main Mall. A gaggle of primary school children milling about outside the news agency were too busy sucking gobstoppers between crooked teeth to notice her. On the opposite side of the street, a beauty salon, Athey’s Shear Delight, was just opening up its flamingo pink window blinds. Still too early for customers, the three hairdressers were enjoying their morning tea inside as they flipped through old magazines. When Layla walked by, the beauticians dropped their Irish Women’s Weekly and Celtic Hair and stared with open mouths out the window.

  “Now who do you suppose that is, then? Would you look at the length of skirt on her!” Joan Donnelly, hair colorist and sister to the proprietor, slammed her teacup down and marched over to the window, widening the gap between two blinds with her fingers. Joan was a small, nervous woman. Although blessed with a talent for both hiand low-lites, she had found no cure for the barrage of dandruff that fell daily from her own bowl-cut fringe; the flakes sat like a conscience on her pointy little shoulders. “She looks right foreign to me. Spanish or Italian, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Haven’t ya heard, so? Sure, I was meaning to tell ya!” Nineteen-year-old Evie Watson’s sparrow voice piped up. “That Delmonico woman, she’s got the old pastry place up and running again. With some sort of foreign hippies, no less. To listen to Dervla Quigley tell it she’s ready to put Corcoran’s out of business.”

  In spite of her bulimic frame, or perhaps because of it, Evie was always hungry for approval and did her best to gather tidbits of Ballinacroagh information that might prove useful. Evie’s eagerness, though, was quite different from Dervla Quigley’s lust for gossip. Her chatter was grounded on good intentions and hopes that it would boost her position from salon apprentice to full-time stylist, like she had always dreamed.

  “If you ask me, Estelle Delmonico has better things to do than break her back in that dustheap again,” said Fiona Athey, chief stylist and owner of the salon that bore her name.

  Fifty pounds and another lifetime ago, Fiona had been on her way to great glories, reenacting the entire opus of Irish fairy tales before delighted audiences in the theatrical capital of Ireland, Galway City. But an illicit romance with Gerhard, a German puppeteer, had rendered her bed bound with a pregnancy that would produce the bane of her existence, her seventeen-year-old daughter, Emer. After having her child, Fiona suffered a double blow of indignity when she discovered Gerhard under the theater rafters, in a compromising position with her very own understudy. The upstart bottled blonde—a primary reason why Fiona stuck to cutting hair and left coloring to her sister Joan—had taken advantage of Fiona’s incapacitation to move in on her man and her starring role. Heartbroken, and vowing never to tread the boards again, Fiona had returned
to her hometown with baby Emer in tow, taking over her sickly father’s barbershop and eventually turning it into a nifty little business. Athey’s Shear Delight was popular with the town’s children and womenfolk, but most men steered clear of its peroxide-filled rooms—mainly to spare themselves the embarrassment of donning one of Fiona’s flowery smocks. Pass Athey’s Shear Delight on any given afternoon, and you will find it a hotbed of estrogen, where gossip mingles with the acetate fumes of nail polish and hair spray.

  Fiona, who had endured tittering giggles and reproachful shakes of heads when she first arrived back in town, usually refrained from voicing her opinions. She detested the constant gnawing condemnations that went on inside her small, pink salon but understood the necessity of such gossip for the health of her business. Because of her neutrality, when the odd moment arose that Fiona Athey actually did make her thoughts known, anyone within earshot would pause and pay her particular deference.

  “I’d say Estelle’s done the smart thing and rented the place out,” Fiona reasoned. “That might be our new neighbor, so. Let’s hope it’s not another salon, that’s all.”

  “Sure, I was walkin’ past the other day and saw the lights on through the small bit of window there. Something was cooking. I can’t put my finger on it, but it wasn’t anything like the Eye-talian food in that spaghetti place in Westport. It was something different altogether,” Evie keenly offered.

  “Humph! Well, I don’t care who they are or what they do, so long as that there hussy doesn’t go distracting my boys from their Leaving Cert studies. They’ll be going to seminary school whether they like it or not,” Joan retorted, pursing her lips and releasing the vertical blinds with a snap.

  Fiona and Evie both nodded, well-acquainted as they were with the drama of Joan Donnelly’s identical twin boys, Peter and Michael. Convinced that her precious boys were intended for a higher power, Joan had been pushing nightly catechisms into their mushy brains since an early age. Her ecclesiastical ambitions, however, had done little to curb the twins’ appetite for weekend carjackings, brothels, and drunken cow-tipping parties. The boys were a constant source of worry for poor, neurotic Joan, and the real reason behind her falling scalp tissue. Lucky for Joan, she was not watching when her devilish sons nearly knocked Layla off her feet in front of Fadden’s Mini-Mart.