Pomegranate Soup

by Marsha Mehran

  “That’s a beautiful mountain. Such a perfect triangle,” she squeaked.

  “That old heap? It’s nothing special. Nothing like the places you’ve been. What was your old home like?” Malachy inched closer.

  “England?”

  “No—Iran. Isn’t that a very dangerous place?”

  Layla’s almond eyes were suddenly very far away. She slipped her hand out of Malachy’s and planted it deep in the sandy mound next to her, as if to steady herself.

  Now it was Malachy’s turn to blush hotly. He sure knew how to stick his foot in his big gob, didn’t he? What was he thinking of, asking such personal questions? Maybe she didn’t want to talk about Iran; maybe she was just humoring him by coming here; maybe he should apologize— Midway through his consternation came the kiss. It was a quick one, on the lips, but it still counted.

  “Oh,” Malachy whispered, his voice cracking with pleasure. He returned Layla’s soft kiss, drawing her against his thumping chest as he inhaled her cinnamon-rose scent.

  Malachy’s warm arms were a cushion of comfort for Layla’s confused emotions. What was wrong with her? she wondered. Was she ashamed of Iran, of being Iranian? Was that why she had cut Malachy off so abruptly? He only wanted to know about her childhood home; there was nothing complicated in that, was there? This boy with the beautiful sapphire eyes wasn’t afraid of her foreignness, he wouldn’t judge her for the violent country of her birth. But what should she tell him exactly? Where to start?

  Prickles shot up her right arm. Her hand had fallen asleep. Lifting it off the sand, Layla noticed the impression her palm had made in the white powder. A perfect handprint. The deep fate lines engraved in her palm, the forked markers of destiny, rose in curving ridges of sand across the hollow. She lightly traced the lines with her finger, feeling a shiver of recognition run down her spine, other sets of handprints suddenly clouding her mind.

  THE NIGHT THEY LEFT Tehran forever was a September night like no other. It was still the twilight of summer, but the anorexic trees outside had already shed themselves of all delusions, scattering their leaves on the pavement below. From their kitchen window, on the fourteenth floor of the decaying apartment complex they lived in, a seven-year-old Layla had watched the sun set behind the neighborhood mosque, its brilliant turquoise dome changing into a mystical, deep lapis in the gathering dusk. There had been no wailing of bedtime prayers that night, no ardent devotions blaring from the mosque’s high minaret. In fact, there had been no prayers at all since Friday. Even the usual gunfire had died down, with only a sporadic rat-tat-tat coming from the former South Street Bazaar. Most of the neighborhood’s revolutionaries were holed up in the empty bazaar; they had been there ever since the Imperial Guards gunned down demonstrators in Jaleh Square. Only three days had passed since the students, marching peacefully against the Shah’s regime, had been greeted by indiscriminate military bullets. Thousands had met their immediate deaths, falling on the pale stone ground of the open square.

  Layla glanced down the street toward the bazaar before turning her attention to the flow of blood, still seeping, still weeping its way along their leafy boulevard. The bloody handprints were spattered all over the dirty sidewalk, bright and fresh, though the hands that had been raised to the cause were long gone. Several handprints were even slapped on house walls, the blood dripping from the bases of palms like new sets of fingers. The red rivulets seeped into the sidewalk cracks, greeting their compatriots on the ground with a shake, a wave of defiance that acknowledged the mutual source of their misery. Jaleh Square, only ten blocks away from their apartment.

  Black Friday, they were calling the massacre, but all Layla could see was red. Red everywhere.

  “Bahar, can I go to school tomorrow?” Layla asked, even though she already knew the answer. There would be no school tomorrow; there had been no school for many days. That was what martial law meant, Marjan had explained to her. That was what the Shah had declared, sending his Imperial Guards, the “Immortals,” to scour the streets, looking for radicals and the odd, confused Communist.

  “Stop asking me stupid questions and get down from that chair! Do you want someone to shoot you?” Bahar pushed Layla off her perch. As she pulled the flowery curtain across the window, her head scarf slipped, revealing a crusty cut near her right ear. The skin around the wound was blotchy and jaundiced, matching the purple-and-yellow stains on Bahar’s forehead and cheeks. Bruises. Layla couldn’t help staring at them.

  “Stay in the living room until Marjan comes home,” Bahar commanded. “I hope to God she got our passports,” she said, more to herself than to Layla, as she returned to the hot stove.

  “But I’m hungry,” Layla complained. She eyed the pot of pomegranate soup that Bahar was stirring.

  “You’re such a brat. Marjan could be caught by the Guards by now and all you can think about is your own greedy stomach. Move it!” Bahar whacked her wooden spoon against the pot.

  Layla stifled her tears and padded out of the kitchen. She hadn’t thought about Marjan being out on the bloody streets past curfew. What if Bahar was right and Marjan had been caught by the Imperial Guards? What if she never came back and Layla would have to live alone with Bahar forever?

  Salt water blurred Layla’s eyes and landed on her tongue as she crept through the hallway toward her favorite hiding place, the pantry where Marjan stored her dry goods and spices. She opened the wicker door and slipped into the comforting darkness, touching the wooden shelves, the grains and powders asleep in their jars. Reaching behind a tall terra-cotta jug, Layla’s little fingers clasped the familiar glass container of sumac. The ground-up product of the astringent Rhus berry, sumac was a brick red spice that Marjan used sparingly on her kabob dishes. Layla would sneak into the pantry at least once a day, more when she was feeling particularly blue, to scoop some of the lemony spice into her puckered mouth. She was reaching for her second scoop when she heard Bahar scream.

  It was a primitive jungle holler. A bloodcurdling howl that was suddenly cut short by a terrifying blow. To Layla’s young ears, it sounded like the pounding of kubideh—the tender kabob meat Marjan flattened with a mallet, hitting the beef over and over until it sighed, finally defeated. The hammering grew louder and more frequent. The shadowy spices jumped in their jars around her, mimicking Layla’s own lurching, acidy stomach. She clenched the lump of sumac tightly in her fists, so tightly that the sour powder began to burn her palms. Suddenly, a high-octave cry broke from within the pantry’s suffocating walls, shocking her tender senses. She was the one screaming.

  She never heard the pounding stop, her cries were so loud. She didn’t hear the soft feminine sobs outside the pantry walls, or even sense Marjan seeking her out in the darkness. When her eldest sister finally rescued her from the overturned jars of dry fava beans and quince-lime syrup, Layla’s eyes and ears were welded shut in agony.

  “Shhhh . . . Layla joon. Joon-e man. Shhh . . . don’t cry.” Marjan stood in the kitchen holding Layla in her arms, kissing her face and sumac-tainted fists. With her wet lids anointed by her sister’s kisses, Layla felt safe enough finally to open her eyes. The mangled body lying on the kitchen floor made her wish she had kept them closed.

  Legs clothed in dark men’s trousers lay spread apart on the linoleum. Bony, boyish ankles, matured by irregular tufts of black hair, met a pair of green army boots caked in mud. A dark, thick liquid seeped from beneath the thin calves, spreading so quickly that it momentarily lifted the man on its surge before engulfing the body in its crimson flow. Layla’s eyes followed the sharp crease ironed into the man’s rigid pants, the cheap gabardine kind worn by street vendors. Her gaze settled on his thin, splayed knees just as Marjan showered her tearstained eyes with kisses once again.

  Fourteen flights of crumbling stairs never went by so quickly, Layla remembered thinking with surprise. Any other day and her sisters would have scolded her for jumping two steps at a time, but Marjan and Bahar skipped three and four steps themsel
ves on their way down to the street. The fallen leaves and bloody handprints were underfoot, but Layla kept her gaze on the night sky as she held tightly on to her sisters’ clammy palms. Marjan’s face was outlined by her black chador, ashen yet determined, her other hand lugging a heavy suitcase. Bahar was to Layla’s right, her full-length robe and veil covering everything but her bloodshot eyes, which blinked rapidly with fear. Neither said a word to Layla, not when they reached the end of their neighborhood walls, not when they crossed the vacant railroad lines, not even when they made it to Tehran’s Downtown Bus Terminal, which was teeming with other suitcase-carrying, silent, chador-framed faces, and climbed onboard the bus heading for the east.

  East, to the lawless town of Zahedan, a den of opiate dealers set on a scrap of transitory land, a trepidation of shifting sands. Iran’s Dasht-e Lut desert, the province of tribal lords, with their lifeblood of camels, carpets, and caravans. And the last stop before the Pakistan border.

  The bus dropped them off at the edge of Zahedan, where several Baluchi tribal men were busy setting up their night’s camp. Each of the camp’s twenty tents was lined with handwoven kilims, the brightly colored carpets extending beyond the lips of oilcloth and canvas openings. A few of the men loaned them a tent, hitching it up as their womenfolk spooned mast-o khiar, their traditional yogurt and cucumber soup, into earthen bowls. The cooling liquid soothed Layla’s dry throat and brought some welcome color back to both Marjan’s and Bahar’s faces.

  Still, good as it was, the yogurt and cucumber soup did not loosen her sisters’ tongues. Nothing was said about what had happened back there, in the middle of their apartment’s kitchen floor, in the midst of a revolution, deep into a Tehran night.

  “JAYSUS.” MALACHY WHISTLED under his breath. “Did your sisters ever tell you what happened that night? Who that man was in the kitchen?”

  Layla shook her head, unable to speak for the lump in her throat. She did find out, eventually, but that story wasn’t ripe for the telling. Maybe she shouldn’t have shared so much with Malachy, but she needed to confide in someone after all these years of silence.

  “Don’t worry, Layla. You’re safe here in Ireland. With me,” Malachy said tenderly. There were still many questions he wanted to ask, but sensing a peculiar sadness stirring within her, he instead put his arms protectively around Layla and kissed her again.

  Though she felt the burning sensation of love more than ever, Layla’s mood remained solemn. Her mouth puckered up again, the tissue in her cheeks remembering a sourer time, the taste of sumac suddenly everywhere.

  lavash bread

  1 tablespoon quick-rising yeast

  1⁄2 cup warm water

  1⁄4 cup olive oil

  1 cup milk

  2 tablespoons sugar

  2 teaspoons salt

  4 cups all-purpose flour

  1⁄2 cup poppy and sesame seeds

  Preheat oven to 500°F. Mix yeast and water. Set aside for 15 minutes. Combine yeasty water, oil, milk, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. Slowly mix in flour. Knead into a dough. Divide into 3 even balls. Cover with a clean towel and leave to rise for 30 minutes. Roll out one ball of dough on a clean surface with a floured pin until it is paper-thin. Sprinkle with poppy and sesame seeds. Place on a buttered cookie sheet and bake in oven at 500°F for 5 minutes. Repeat with remaining balls of dough.

  chapter seven

  THOMAS WASN’T TERRIBLY surprised when he finally heard that his youngest son was cavorting with one of those “foreigners.” Dervla Quigley had seen him strutting down Main Mall—in broad daylight, no less—hand in hand with that darkie girl.

  Shameless, good-for-nothing gobshite, that Malachy. It was just like him to dip his toe into bog scum, Thomas thought to himself. Probably going back to his own bleedin’ kind, for all he knew. Because self-assured as he was, Thomas wasn’t blind to the obvious: Malachy, with his unnatural mop of black curls and a tongue that named major constellations before ever sputtering a reluctant Da-Da or Mam, was not like the rest of his children. If Thomas could have attributed Malachy’s tall frame and razor-sharp intelligence to his wife’s genes, then maybe he could have looked at the boy without needing to punch something. But squat Cecilia, with her flat features, brittle blond hair, and triple chins, was as different from Malachy as Thomas was. Like it or not, he had to admit that his suspicions about the summer of 1967 were correct.

  Just around that time, Thomas had been busy expanding his empire with a second pub on Main Mall. While he was knee-deep in the new Ale House’s punctured septic tank, a boatload of swarthy Andalusian fishermen had surreptitiously docked in Clew Bay Beach. The frisky Spaniards had come up from Galway, mistaking Clew Bay for the Aran Islands after a drunken night of potcheen poker. Their two-ton fishing boat hit a sharp limestone shelf, driving a foot-wide hole into the Hermosa’s oak belly and leaving the fishermen no choice but to camp out on the beach while they patched their ruptured vessel. Other than a few food and vino runs, the Spanish sailors kept to themselves, so Thomas had no major complaints. It wasn’t until a week after the seamen left for their sunny homeland that the bar owner began to notice an unusually sated smile on his wife’s face. Only then did he detect the strange smell of crayfish that had crept into every corner of his house, and notice for the first time the strings of seaweed that floated curiously into tubs and basins whenever he turned on the water taps. And then a dark-haired Malachy arrived eight months later, premature and completely alien.

  Feckin’ foreigners, thought Thomas, laying their filthy paws on what was rightfully his. And now it was happening all over again. Not only was his so-called son blatantly disobeying orders by stepping foot in that stinking café but he was shagging one of those Arabs as well. All behind his back. Just like his cheating mother, that Malachy.

  Determined to give the young man a fine bollixing, Thomas sent his elder son, Tom Junior, to fetch his wayward brother. It was a charge that the sadistic bully in training carried out with utmost glee, as he had little love in his small heart for Malachy. Marked since infancy by their differing constitutions, the McGuire boys never shared anything minutely resembling a brotherly bond. Malachy did not understand Tom Junior’s penchant for pub piss-ups and violent martial arts films, and Tom Junior hated how the younger boy buried himself in his books and telescope, with that faraway smile like he knew something the rest of them didn’t, as if the pub life was below him. He couldn’t wait to see what their father had planned for the bloody bastard. Tom Junior chuckled cruelly to himself as he pounded down Main Mall. He found Malachy in Fadden’s Mini-Mart, engrossed in a conversation with the shop owner on the origins of fairies.

  “You see, lad, each country has its own race of fairy folk. No two fairies are alike. Anywhere,” said Danny sagely, pushing his thick glasses up the bridge of his bulbous nose.

  “Are there fairies in Iran?” Malachy asked, with a twinkle in his eyes.

  “Oh, yes. The Peries of Persia. Lovely little things with wings. Mind you, you can’t see them with the human eye, but they’re there. Like to roam the forests looking for perfumed flowers.”

  “Fairies! Should’ve known it’d be the sort of thing yer into,” Tom Junior cut in with a harsh laugh from just inside the mini-mart’s door.

  Malachy glared at his brother in silence, though he was surprised to hear Tom Junior address him. Weeks could go by without either of them saying a word to each other, and when necessity called for one of them to speak, it was usually Tom Junior coming at him with a biting insult.

  “Move it, gobshite. Dad wants ya at the Ale House.”

  “What for?”

  “Just get yer arse down there now, ye poofter!” Tom Junior bellowed.

  Malachy turned to Danny Fadden, who was cowering behind a stack of Bisto gravy cans on the counter. “Sorry, Mr. Fadden. I’ll be back soon to hear more about those Persian fairies.”

  “Take your time, lad,” Danny whispered meekly.

  Tom trailed Malachy up to th
e Ale House, muttering insults with every step. A furious Thomas was sitting in a booth at the back of the bar waiting for them both.

  “Here now, boyo.” He sneered, rising from his seat. “What’s this I hear about you and that Arab whore?”

  Tom Junior grinned uncontrollably behind Malachy’s back. The McGuire money was as good as his now. No chance of any of the pubs going into Malachy’s hands when their dad finally croaked.

  “She’s Iranian, not Arab. And don’t you ever call her a whore or I’ll—”

  “Or you’ll what? You better watch who yer talkin’ to, boy! And I’ll tell you something else, whore or not she’s still the enemy. Her and her darkie sisters. They’re stealin’ what feeds that gob of yours nightly, and I better not see you anywhere near them.” Thomas’s face was so close that Malachy could count the burst capillaries on his slack, beet red cheeks. The boy stood his ground and narrowed his eyes, even as his father threatened him with his shaking fists.

  “What’s with the sudden interest in what I do? Didn’t think you even knew I was alive,” Malachy pushed.

  “Another word out of you and yer going to wish you were dead. Am I making meself clear?”

  Thomas had certainly made himself clear, but his threats wouldn’t stop Malachy from seeing Layla every day after school. After all, his defiance was just further evidence of the independent streak that had marked him from birth. Malachy knew the future held in store for him greater things than nights of coughing up tar and misery in one of his father’s pubs. He was going to catch Orion from under an Arizona desert sky and watch as Cassiopeia danced over Norwegian fjords. And he was going to do it all with Layla by his side.

  It was as much of a proposal as an eighteen-year-old could make, and for her part, Layla agreed wholeheartedly to a lifetime of thrilling adventures with Malachy. Neither mentioned their future plans to Bahar and Marjan, though, when two weeks after their first date, Layla introduced him to her sisters. Dressed in a formal button-up shirt and school jacket, Malachy came by the café after closing time. Seated at the round kitchen table, the young man was alternately discouraged by Bahar’s unresponsive eyes and heartened by Marjan’s warm food.