Pomegranate Soup

by Marsha Mehran

  “Layla tells us you’re an astronomy buff. Is that what you want to study after high school?” Marjan flashed Malachy an encouraging smile as she handed him a cup of oolong tea.

  Malachy nodded. “I’d like to take a year off and travel first,” he said. “See the world.”

  “Travel?” Bahar said, sharply. She squinted disapprovingly at Malachy, her lips pressed in a hard line.

  Marjan shot Bahar a reproachful look.

  “Malachy loves your plants in the backyard, Marjan,” Layla offered, rescuing the awkward moment.

  “It’s a grand looking garden,” Malachy said. “Astronomy and gardening aren’t that different, when you think about it. Mythically speaking.”

  And with that inspired observation, Malachy charmed his way into Marjan’s heart. A few minutes later he found himself standing at the kitchen island with Layla, peeling onions and sifting through piles of basmati rice for Marjan’s chelow. The young man had never known there to be such joy in cooking, subjected as he was to the gristly pork sausages and limp carrots of his usual home meals. Marjan, the eternal gardener, was only too happy to answer his questions on the fickle nature of Irish topsoil and the medicinal uses of sweet basil leaves. Together they spent the afternoon detailing the similarities between the heavens above and the earth below, marveling at the diverse palette of creation. Bahar remained silent throughout the boy’s visit, but it did not go unnoticed by anyone in the room that she got up to refill Malachy’s teacup not once but twice.

  After Malachy left, with a good amount of zulbia packed in his schoolbag, Layla turned to Bahar and Marjan, unable to hide her excitement any longer.

  “Well? Isn’t he beautiful? Do you like him?”

  “He’s wonderful, Layla! Your first boyfriend! And those eyes, my goodness! He reminds me of a boy I knew in school. Before the revolution, of course. He had green eyes,” Marjan said, wistfully.

  She stopped wiping the kitchen island and stared dreamily into space as she thought of Ali, the green-eyed boy of her youth. Such thoughts were usually limited to private moments when Marjan could sneak into the flat’s tiny blue bathroom and lock the door behind her. Reaching into the upper shelf of a four-tiered medicine cabinet the Delmonicos had bought on their Moroccan honeymoon, Marjan would gingerly remove a small brass jewelry box etched with beautiful desert roses. Inside she kept a few golden trinkets and the childhood identity bracelets given to them by their father. The box’s rose satin lining was worn in spots, and grains of sand had become embedded in the holes, reminders of their flight through the Dasht-e Lut desert.

  Settling on the covered toilet seat, Marjan would pull a faded photo out from beneath the jewelry. The picture, now slightly yellowed and crinkled at the edges, was taken on a school field trip to Istanbul. Her senior class had caught a ferry on the Black Sea shore, arriving in Istanbul just as the sun was setting over the city’s Grand Covered Bazaar. Ali had led her through the Grand Bazaar’s labyrinthine aisles, past insistent bazaari hocking their wares, clusters of carpet stalls, and tents filled with copper serving trays and brassy samovars. At the center of the Grand Bazaar sat the jewelers’ booths, piled high with gems and stones that would eventually be brought home by eager husbands. It was in one of these bejeweled stalls, alongside a line of half-price, multicolored bangles on a low table, that Marjan first saw the brass jewelry box. Although it was humble in appearance, to her the jewelry case looked like it could hold all the treasures of the Magi. On the ferry heading back home to Iran, Ali surprised Marjan with the small box and made her promise to keep a picture of him always tucked inside its satin pockets.

  For ten years Marjan had kept that promise. Whenever she felt like breaking down, she would cling to the fading photograph of Ali, sitting there in his white polyester shirt and frayed bell-bottom jeans, with the Turkish sun in his eyes. He was smiling then, life pulsing through his beautiful body. But of course, Marjan reminded herself, that was before the revolution, before everything changed.

  Unaware that her two sisters were witnessing her tender reminiscence, Marjan smiled sadly at the cleaning rag in her hand. Bahar’s stern voice brought her out of herself, and she blushed for her indulgence.

  “Well, he’s smart, I suppose. But that still doesn’t mean you’re ready for a boyfriend, Layla. You’re fifteen, for God’s sake! Still a child!” Bahar slammed the kitchen table with opened palms. “Besides, we haven’t even been here two months. Certainly not enough time to start trusting people.” She pushed her chair away from the table and walked tiredly up the stairs. Her left hand gripped her temples, the right held tightly on to the banister. “I’m going to lie down. It’s in your hands now, Marjan.”

  “Don’t worry,” Marjan whispered, sensing that Bahar’s pessimism had dimmed Layla’s excitement. “She’ll come around. Did you see how she offered Malachy another helping of baklava when she thought we weren’t looking?”

  Layla nodded slowly, but Bahar’s sadness was infectious; she could taste its metallic flavor in her mouth. Still, no matter how much Bahar’s neurotic behavior aggravated her, Layla understood why her sister was so anxious, so untrusting.

  “Marjan?”

  “Yes, joon-e man?”

  “What ever happened to that boy with the green eyes?”

  “We just lost touch with each other after Baba died, when we moved to the south. These things happen sometimes.” There was no point in telling Layla the truth now, Marjan thought. Best to spare her the details.

  JAVID AMINPOUR DIED not long after that senior class trip to Istanbul, more of a lonely heart than from the attack doctors diagnosed. He was happy at last, joining their mother where she lay in Zahirodoleh cemetery, but for Marjan it was more tragedy than she could bear. At seventeen, she became sole guardian of fourteen-year-old Bahar and baby Layla, who hadn’t even turned five yet. Their great-aunt Homa, cousin Mitra, and the rest of their closest relatives had heeded the sinister winds of an oncoming revolution and escaped to a land of endless sunshine and fertile valleys—California. With no family to take them in, Marjan was forced to sell their childhood home and move into a small apartment on the southern edge of Tehran, where the pristine Alborz mountains were obscured by the New City, a rampant brothel settlement only a few blocks away. Marjan took a job washing dishes at the Hilton Hotel’s famed Peacock Restaurant, and it was there that she picked up the tricks of the trade while cleaning up the chefs’ messes. Two years would pass before she saw Ali again, this time in the laboratories of Tehran University, where she was studying for her degree, cramming classes in between restaurant shifts.

  Marjan had been in the lab for half an hour, legs stretched across the stool in front of her, hands cupping her chin. She was listening to the splat of the city rain outside and trying hard to ignore the rapid germination taking place on the slide under her microscope. There was nothing affirming about molecular parasitology, Marjan decided. She abhorred the slaughterous trails of cannibalistic cells, their lack of compassion, the endless specimen slides. Botany had been her first choice, but botany wasn’t going to put food on the table, or school uniforms on Bahar’s and Layla’s backs.

  Closing her left eye, Marjan squinted through the microscope once again. When she lifted her head, she found Ali staring at her in disbelief. He was standing in the doorway with transfer papers in hand, his light brown hair shorn tightly at the sides. He had grown a beard, which bristled against Marjan’s face as she buried herself in his chest.

  Not long after their reunion in the university lab, Ali introduced Marjan to the revolutionary students who constituted his circle of friends. They were beginning to distribute their own underground newspaper, The Voice, printed in the basement of Ali’s uncle’s house with a rotary printing press from the era of Reza Shah, a time of complete stupidity and ignorance, Ali explained to her. And now his idiot son was squeezing the country dry and senseless. Claiming an improbable connection to the great Zoroastrian rulers of the Persian Empire, the short Shah crow
ned himself King of Kings and robbed the last shreds of dignity from the Persian people. As most of his subjects rotted away in mud huts devoid of electricity and proper sewage, barely existing on pittance wages, the Shah filled his coffers with American-bought weaponry, African diamonds, and Parisian furs, financing it all with the land’s vital bloodline, oil. But they weren’t going to let him get away with his pillage, Ali told her. Did she want to join him in his journey to freedom?

  At first Marjan found Ali’s radicalism frightening. She felt especially uncomfortable around the girls in his group, whose gray faces and black chadors were so different from the rest of the women on campus, who preferred liberal coats of lipstick and swinging miniskirts. Marjan couldn’t see how covering herself would better society, but she soon came to accept it as one of the many facets of the new Iran they were all dreaming of. Taking up the chador was too drastic a change for her, but she did stop wearing miniskirts and makeup, and covered her hair with a roosarie, a head scarf of dark colors. For his part, Ali made no comment on the addition to her wardrobe. He just smiled his beautiful smile. He never pressured her but merely coaxed her with those eyes. Soon enough, Marjan was in the middle of it all, writing and printing revolutionary articles for The Voice, organizing weekly meetings, painting banners, and stuffing straw effigies of Uncle Sam in the newspaper’s underground offices, all the time not realizing the consequences, the inevitable price of her involvement. For unbeknownst to Marjan, her world was about to break open, bursting and bleeding like the rich yolks of quail eggs cracked over a hot skillet.

  Late one spring morning in 1978, as she was arranging type on the aging printing press, an ax broke through the basement door and immediately reduced it to splinters. Marjan later remembered feeling thankful that no bullets were fired, as Ali’s desk was close to the door and he would certainly have been hit. How naïve of her really, to give such quick thanks, to have such belief. She made a desperate play for the telephone on her desk, but the handcuffs were quicker. The cold metal sliced into her soft flesh, forcing her hands to her back. There would be no calling home from where she was going.

  A rough blindfold was yanked up her face, tightening over her eyes. The final glimpse Marjan had, before the light was extinguished by the dark rag, was the back of Ali’s shorn head. It was the last time she ever saw him.

  GOHID DETENTION CENTER. A maze of interconnecting injustices, where the walls were covered in shame. A temporary ground where revolutionaries were taken by the Shah’s secret police, slated either for a quick death or for days of torture and mind-bending interrogations. If, God forbid, you ever find yourself inside Gohid’s walls, Ali had once warned her, don’t say a word. Don’t tell them anything, Marjan.

  A hand grabbed Marjan’s neck and led her, still blindfolded, deep into the center’s subterranean levels. These floors, assigned to female revolutionaries, were hollow-sounding and smelled of kerosene and burning skin. A high-pitched wail echoed in the distance, then faded. Countless footsteps and metal hinges clanged, doors opened and slammed shut. Then, suddenly, the black blindfold was ripped away and the iron door of her cell was bolted behind her.

  Marjan’s pupils slowly adjusted to the harsh light; a naked bulb dangled on a chain in the center of the cell, shining on rough brown walls that curved in a semicircle from the door. A strange, slobbering creature sat slumped in one corner on a straw mat. At first, Marjan thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, because the leering woman was an almost identical twin to her cousin Mitra. Or, rather, she could have been her cousin had Mitra spent the better part of her life hopping beds in flea-infested brothels.

  Khanoum Zanganeh was a rather jovial prostitute whose body rose in bumps where fat had accumulated and then sank into bony, hungry areas that were black and blue with bruises. She was dressed in a tattered black shirt and red miniskirt whose sequins she picked at for entertainment.

  “Welcome to the Palace!” She chortled. She patted the stony ground next to her. “Sit, sit!” When Marjan did not move, the prostitute narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “Who do you work for? No, don’t tell me—you’re one of Toothless Taraneh’s girls, aren’t you?”

  Marjan swallowed hard and slid down to the floor, closing her eyes. Frenzied thoughts looped through her head as she pictured her sisters waiting for her back at the apartment. Who would make them dinner if she wasn’t there? What would happen to Bahar and Layla if she didn’t make it out of this terrifying place? How could she have been so stupid, getting involved with Ali and his friends? Curling her knees up to her chin, she laid her head in her arms and began sobbing deeply. Fortunately, Khanoum Zanganeh had stopped her alcoholic banter, leaving Marjan room to mourn her fate alone. She cried for most of the night, never looking up from her arms until the cell door was thrust open once again.

  A yellow-skinned, big-boned woman dressed in military fatigues strode into the cell, her heavy boots pounding the damp concrete. She wound a woolen blindfold tightly around Marjan’s eyes, her breath stinking of cheap fried meats and stewed okra. Two sets of muscular hands painfully clasped under her armpits and dragged her through the crumbling corridors, her feet skimming over cracked tiles, then tumbling down steep stairs to lower, denser levels. Soon a stool was shoved under her, and grating male voices knocked around her head and body.

  What was your role in the newspaper? Who is this Ali you’re working for? What were you planning to do with all this propaganda?

  The booming voices echoed over and under her like an earthquake.

  Your boyfriend Ali is in for a good, long bleeding session if you don’t talk. Did you hear me? Your little editor is going to rot in here! Did we tell you about his accident? No? We didn’t tell you how he tripped over his own shit and knocked his ugly eye out? All because of your disgusting deeds. We know what you did already!

  The laughter of animals in heat; panting and the smell of sweat surrounded her. Someone touched her breasts then, cupping them in his grubby palms before tweaking her nipples so painfully that she was forced to break her silence with a gasp.

  Tell me, which would you like more, your pimp’s lips or that sausage of his you love to eat so regularly? We know what your real occupation is, Khanoum Journalist!

  She remained silent amidst the roaring voices, remembering Ali’s advice. Don’t say anything, Marjan, she told herself. Don’t say a word about Ali, or The Voice, and for God’s sake, don’t tell them about Bahar and Layla, waiting back at the apartment, all alone. It was the same routine, every day, for an hour; a volley of violent groping and unanswered questions, after which the voices threw her back into her cell, unable to be satisfied. Not even starvation—a denial of her daily rations of water, lavash bread, and rancid sheep’s cheese—would induce Marjan to speak.

  “Khanoum Aminpour, take this piece of lavash bread from me. Go on, don’t be shy! I’ve the fat to stave the hunger, believe me.”

  The stale piece of lavash bread crumbled in Khanoum Zanganeh’s hand. When Marjan finally accepted the rationed food, the weathered prostitute settled back against the cell wall and told her how she had come to be arrested by the Shah’s secret police.

  “The bastards think I know something about the Committee. Me! What do I know about these political things? I’m just a whore with good teeth!”

  Marjan had heard about the infamous Committee, a militant minority that had ballooned seemingly overnight, bringing with it a plethora of undernourished beards and a hunger for vengeance against the capricious Shah and his supporters. Fundamentally inclined, this ragtag group of Islamic vigilantes answered only to the Turbaned One, the exiled Ayatollah with all the answers, as they set about intimidating local neighborhoods in the name of God. Although the Committee was the most powerful organization to emerge in the last year, it still held loose associations to many revolutionary movements, especially those involving university students. Friends of Ali’s, supporters of The Voice. The Committee.

  “Don’t worry,” Khanoum Zangane
h continued, cocking her henna-colored head toward the cell door. “You’ll be out of here in no time. The secret police have no patience for women. It’s the men they want.”

  Somehow, Marjan knew then and there that she’d never see Ali again. She had been mistaken about so much, gotten involved in a business she didn’t really understand, didn’t really want a part of. And for what? For love? Was that it? How could she have bartered safety for a taste of romance?

  By the time she was released from Gohid four days later, thrown out of an unmarked van with a kick of disgust, Marjan had an excuse lined up for her disappearance. She would tell Bahar and Layla that an emergency had kept her from calling them, maybe a fire in the Peacock Restaurant’s kitchens. She’d tell them that she had been injured—only a slight burn, nothing major—and had spent the last four days in the hospital, recovering. And then she’d take her sisters and run. They would go to America, to California. Do anything to get there. Sell everything and try for new lives, away from this revolution, this murdering. Just go.

  But she was too late. By the time Marjan got home, the revolution had already begun.

  “KHANOUM AMINPOUR, take this piece of lavash bread from me.”

  Eight years on, and the memory of the old prostitute’s kind offering still set Marjan’s stomach rumbling with unexplainable hunger. And as much as she loved the smell of baking lavash bread, she couldn’t deny the hint of dread she felt each time she rolled out the dough for a new batch.

  Marjan bent over the wooden work island in the café’s kitchen, the soft morning light illuminating her floury hands as they kneaded the tough dough before her. There was definitely something wrong with her technique today, she thought to herself. No matter how much she pushed and prodded the white mass of yeasty flour, it kept catching in chalky clumps beneath her fingers.