“Hossein?” She gulped, the name dropping like lead from her trembling lips. Though he kept permanent residence in a dark place inside of her, months had passed since she had uttered her husband’s name. Something in that whispering wind, that creeping whoooosshh, had brought him back to her. Hossein. The sinister hiss of the middle consonants sent tremors through her entire body. With her hand shaking uncontrollably, Bahar placed the receiver back in its cradle and collapsed into a nearby chair.
A DETAILED REPORT ensued at the Garda station. Shocked by the news of Tom Junior’s attack, Kevin Slattery scribbled Layla’s and Malachy’s accounts in his dusty ledger book while a worried Sean Grogan paced up and down the station’s corridor, unsure of how to tackle this new crisis. It would require some serious officiating, that was for sure.
“Rest assured, we’ll get to the bottom of this soon enough,” Grogan promised as he gently ushered the three of them out of the station. “This here isn’t the sort of town where people can go jumping on each other like animals. We’re not in Dublin!”
After dropping Malachy off at home, Marjan pulled the van over outside the cobblestone alleyway and turned solemnly to Layla in the passenger seat.
“I want to talk to you about something before we go in.” Marjan’s voice was thin and raspy. She paused and looked intently into Layla’s eyes. “I don’t think we should tell Bahar what happened to you.”
“Why shouldn’t we tell her? I could have been raped, you know!” Layla cried incredulously, twisting her face into a deep scowl.
“I know, joon-e man,” soothed Marjan. “And we’ll tell her, eventually. Just not yet. She’s only beginning to calm down after the last time you disappeared, and you know how bad her migraines have been. You and I need to protect her sometimes, that’s all.”
“But how am I going to explain my lip?” Layla pouted. Her cut lip was clean of blood and sand, but the area around it was swollen and bruised. Bahar would notice it for sure.
“It doesn’t have to be a big lie—just tell her that you fell while hiking with Malachy or something like that. Do you understand?” Marjan pleaded.
The younger girl stared sullenly out of the van window, her eyes filled with glistening tears.
“Layla?” Marjan pressed.
“This is history repeating itself,” Layla said thickly, voicing the words that Marjan was thinking but could not bring herself to say.
LATER THAT EVENING, Marjan stood before the food processor in the kitchen. She could hear the bolt on the back gate clanging ferociously in the wind. All of her backyard herbs—the summer savory, the mint and tarragon, were bowing down to the storm that had kept the heavens in a headlock ever since they returned from the Garda station. Looking at the sky now, thought Marjan, no one would have guessed that the morning had been so cloudless and benign.
She let the food processor run on, its angry steel blades grinding the walnuts to a brown pulp. She added pomegranate paste and cinnamon, and allowed the blades to whine for several more minutes before snapping the small machine off. She had to keep her wits about her if she was going to make fesenjoon, the invigorating pomegranate, chicken, and walnut stew that was Layla’s all-time favorite comfort food.
It is the pomegranate that gives fesenjoon its healing capabilities. The original apple of sin, the fruit of a long gone Eden, the pomegranate shields itself in a leathery crimson shell, which in Roman times was used as a form of protective hide. Once the pomegranate’s bitter skin is peeled back, though, a juicy garnet flesh is revealed to the lucky eater, popping and bursting in the mouth like the final succumber of lovemaking.
Long ago, when the earth remained still, content with the fecundity of perpetual spring, and Demeter was the mother of all that was natural and flowering, it was this tempting fruit that finally set the seasons spinning. Having eaten six pomegranate seeds in the underworld, Persephone, the Goddess of Spring’s high-spirited daughter, had been forced to spend six months of the year in the eternal halls of death. Without her beautiful daughter by her side, a mournful Demeter retreated to the dark corners of the universe, allowing for the icy gates of winter finally to creak open. A round, crimson herald of frost, the pomegranate comes to harvest in October and November, so fesenjoon is best made with its concentrate during other times of the year.
The fesenjoon bubbled happily on the stove, blissfully unaware of the brewing crisis. Even the sweet taste of pomegranate could not cover up the bitterness that had risen among the three sisters. Bahar had been just as distressed about Layla’s cut lip as Marjan had anticipated. She gave their younger sister a proper scolding, reminding her of the pitfalls of falling in love, before retiring to her bed with a headache. Layla had opted to lie miserably still on the sofa bed Marjan used as her sleeping quarters, flicking through television channels until she fell asleep with the remote in her hand, a piece of tissue stuck to her lip.
Layla’s foreboding words echoed in Marjan’s head. I could have been raped. This is history repeating itself. It still amazed Marjan how much of the past Layla had retained, especially considering how young she had been back then.
History repeating itself. Was history really that cruel? Marjan didn’t know what to think anymore. She lifted the lid off the fesenjoon and stirred it again. The pomegranate paste had turned the stew a dark maroon, the broth swimming sinfully with a life of its own. History repeating itself. Maybe it was.
NEARLY FOUR MONTHS after her marriage to Hossein and three days after the momentous Black Friday massacre in Jaleh Square, Bahar had crept into her sisters’ Tehran apartment at two in the morning. She slipped so quietly into the single bed she had once shared with little Layla that Marjan did not notice her until the coming of dawn. She had woken up grudgingly with the low light, bracing herself for another day of washing endless dirty dishes at the Peacock Restaurant, only to be confronted by Bahar’s soiled body lying in bed.
An orchid and yellow assembly of bruises, imprints of contorted fingers, started at Bahar’s neck. Burst violet veins moved up to her left eye and down the side of her right ear, ending in a torn lobe from which hung encrusted droplets of blood, priceless for their shedding. But the worst damage was what could not be seen, not until Bahar uncoiled her chador, winced out of her long gray skirt, woolen stockings, and blood-soaked underskirt. Only then did Marjan see the thick baton grooves embossed upon her sister’s upper thighs, a serrated ladder that disappeared deep inside her and left unmentionable wounds in its path.
They packed their bags that very morning.
Out came the two plaid suitcases, bought by their parents at Burberry of London, on that one trip to Europe in the gay 1950s, before any of them were born and when the Shah’s palaces still gleamed with a thousand brilliant rubies. The bags smelled of uncertainty, of mothballs mingled with the chalky skins of shrunken pistachio nuts. As little Layla lay sleeping in her bed, Marjan and Bahar went quickly to work, rolling up mementos that were too dear to leave behind in chunky sweaters and tube socks. In went their grandmother’s samovar, the old photographs, the brass jewelry box. Clothes, bags of dried fruit, jars of torshi, and just-made quince and rose-blossom preserves (drenched in sugar, they would provide energy for hard days to come). The last thing Marjan packed was a folder of stacked lined papers, notes and observations of hundreds of recipes, some inherited from her mother, others compiled over the years from her time at the Peacock Restaurant. Recorded in Marjan’s precise hand were the jewels of slivered pistachio baklava, the reminders to introduce pitted sour cherries to albalou polow before adding the half cup of sour cherry syrup, and a fat botany guide to herb growing she had picked up during her years at the university.
Early the next day, just before morning prayers were bellowed from the neighborhood mosque, Marjan left the apartment with an envelope containing their birth certificates and most treasured documents tucked under a chador she had borrowed from Bahar. She maneuvered her way down archways and dark side streets to Roosevelt Avenue, the downtown
address of the American Embassy. A fortress wall lined with Marines, the embassy was a clear target of hatred for many revolutionaries. On the northwestern side of the cement barrier, a looming teal-colored gate creaked open only at the behest of its keepers—surly-faced, mustached Iranian policemen who looked strangely alien against the brick and marble façade of the embassy building. The line of hopeful visa applicants consisted mostly of bearded young men sprawled on cheap woven kilims and ratty blankets. Spread on the ground before them were the latest leftist newspapers, countless articles forecasting the oncoming revolution, the upheaval of all upheavals that would scald the streets with more young blood.
Praying hard that she would get to file the forms for their American visas, Marjan joined the embassy line on that brisk September morning, but by nightfall the only line that had moved was a steady train of industrious ants on the tall wall overhead. With the Shah’s nine o’clock curfew closing in, Marjan was forced to relinquish her spot and hurry home empty-handed. I will hit the line at dawn tomorrow, she decided, as she climbed the dilapidated staircase of the apartment building they had called home for the last two years. Anything to get us away from this living hell, from this Hossein Jaferi, Marjan thought. She was thankful that Bahar had finally come to her senses and left her husband, though she wished her sister’s decision hadn’t come at such a dear price.
On the tenth floor, Marjan paused to catch her breath, feeling suddenly very weak. She hadn’t eaten since the day before and wondered if Bahar had reheated the pot of pomegranate soup for dinner. Marjan hoped her sister had remembered to add the last dash of angelica powder, a good-luck omen, into the simmering pot. Conjuring fortuity was an act of great faith, something they all needed at this fearful moment in time.
The heavy smell of burning pomegranate paste hit her on the twelfth floor, a sad, sweet, but also slightly acrid sensation that harks back to the cloistered tang of a mother’s womb; by the fourteenth floor it had manifested into a formidable cloud of bitter, mauve smoke. Marjan shielded her stinging eyes with her chador and frantically pushed forward. Gasping, she stopped short of the apartment door. Splintered and with its golden chain lock broken, the door hung purposelessly off one set of hinges, the wooden frame fanned out in jagged, petrified daggers. She stood in shock before the barbed threshold, unable to move until muffled screams from inside shattered her trance.
Marjan saw his muddy green army boots first, then his gaunt profile. Hossein was bent over as if in prayer, his painfully thin shoulder blades grinding together as his head rocked fanatically back and forward. A piercing, mucusy cry came from the far corner of the kitchen. The pot of pomegranate soup was steaming, hissing, its lid lifting off on a crest of creamy fruit foam as Bahar’s small socked feet twitched under Hossein’s bony hold. A large object swooped in front of Marjan’s eyes, and she ducked instinctively to avoid its assault. The descending pendulum, she soon realized, was her own arm, wielding a wooden stake torn from the doorframe. As if guided by a force outside her body, Marjan squeezed her eyes shut and planted the wooden stake deep into Hossein Jaferi’s leg.
He turned in a slow and silent dance, the same man at whose wedding she had thrown rice, praying hard that it would coat her sister through any hardship. The starkness of his long beard and scaly, balding head terrified her; his pitted facial scars pulsed red with anger.
“You motherless whore!”
Hossein lunged for Marjan with the baton he carried to riots—the jagged wooden wedge still implanted in his leg—just as Bahar scrambled up from the floor and grabbed the scalding pot of soup. Left on the stove for too long, the pomegranate soup had become a pulpy mass, the fructose residue sticking to the pot. Half of the soup was already burnt to a black sludge, but the rest flowed freely down upon Hossein’s head. He fell, his forehead struck by the hot lip of the heavy pot, as a scalding deluge of pomegranate juice engulfed his unconscious body.
A shrill cry from the hallway pulled Marjan out of a black abyss. She burst into the small side pantry and salvaged her youngest sister from amongst the sea of dried fenugreek leaves and clotted sumac. She kissed little Layla’s face and checked for bruises, thankful to find only tracks of tears and brick-colored sumac stains.
“Get the papers! And the chadors! The curfew cars will be coming around soon,” Marjan whispered fiercely.
She turned around to find Bahar shaking like sholeh zard, saffron pudding that requires a heavy bowl to contain its almondy, spineless matter. All the color had drained from her face and collected at the base of her mottled throat. Bahar’s nose was bloody, and a piece of scalp tissue hung at a feeble angle from where her husband had pulled her hair out. Hossein hadn’t moved from where he had fallen, but Marjan knew their time was short. With Layla spluttering in her arms, Marjan pulled Bahar out of the kitchen and into the small living room.
“Look at me, Bahar!” Marjan held her sister’s chin in her hand and stared into her dazed eyes. “We have to go now, do you understand? We have to go!” Bahar’s eyes did not blink but kept staring down at Marjan’s chest, where a long tear in her chador exposed her white-collared shirt.
Marjan saw the blood then. Starting at her armpit, it was spreading rapidly across her breast like a blossoming poppy. There, at the juncture where her arm met her shoulder, stood four inches of splintered wood, embedded when she flew past the broken doorframe to save them all.
migraine headache remedy
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 cup warm water
In a clean jar or glass, mix spices thoroughly. A soft brown powder should form. Take 1 tablespoon of medicine, making sure to swallow quickly. Wash down with warm water. Repeat, if necessary, every 4 hours.
chapter eleven
THE CRISP BILL of ownership lay perfectly flat in front of Danny Fadden. Next to the contract sat the bulging manila envelope stuffed with twenty thousand five hundred pounds, five hundred more than Thomas McGuire had previously offered. Ballinacroagh’s major publican was hoping the unexpected bonus would induce the lonely shopkeeper to hand over his life’s work as quickly as possible.
“You sign that bill, Danny, and we’ll be having a pint at Paddy’s in no time.” Thomas grinned and shoved a fat fountain pen into Danny’s pale hand.
Danny stared at the expensive Waterman pen, the kind that important men carried in the breast pockets of their fancy Italian suits. Maybe signing this contract was his ticket to becoming someone important, too. He could invest some of the money in the stock market and live off the rest until he finished his Fairy Encyclopedia. At the moment, Danny was in the middle of the L’s, having just edited an entry on “Leprechaun,” the trickster shoemaker who plays pranks on human folk.
Yes, selling the mini-mart to Thomas McGuire might have been the smart thing, thought Danny, had his own leprechaun, Finnegan, not come back to him that very afternoon. Danny had unlocked the mini-mart door after his half-hour tea break and walked in to find two bottles of Beamish missing from the beer shelf. That little scallywag Finnegan had left a piece of emerald green felt and a note in their place: “Hope you didn’t miss me, on my holiday, IOU on two stout, till I get me pay. IOU. Finnegan.”
“What’s the word, Danny? Time to grab the bull by the horns,” Thomas said, gritting his teeth through a forced smile.
Danny reached under the counter, into a shelf where he kept all of Finnegan’s notes. He rubbed a piece of felt for courage.
“The thing is, Thomas, I can’t—”
Just then, Padraig Carey burst into the mini-mart, soaked to the bone.
“Tom! Tom!” he blurted. “You best get yourself down to the station! It’s Tom Junior!” The councilman’s face was red and bloated, his tie blown over his shoulder by the wet winds.
Thomas shot Padraig a dirty look.
“The eejit hasn’t rammed his car into a telephone pole again, has he? That boy— I’ll tell ya, Danny, best s
tick with girls.”
“The shop’s n-not—” Danny stammered on.
“Stay where you are, Danny. We’ll have this all signed and sealed soon enough,” Thomas commanded before stomping angrily out of the store. “This better be good, Padraig. Had the deal shut before you opened yer fat gob.” He glared at the councilman.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell ya. It’s bad news, Tom,” Padraig replied.
The two men scrambled into Padraig’s tiny Fiat and gunned up rainy Main Mall. On the way to the Garda station, Padraig filled Thomas in on what he had overheard outside the police offices.
“The two of them parked that green van and went inside, with Malachy right behind them! By the time I crossed the square, that Sean Grogan had barred the door. Said there were some ‘confidential matters’ at hand and would I come by later? The bollocks on him, Tom!” Padraig cried petulantly. “I had to sneak under the window to make any sense of it!”
Thomas’s face hardened to stone as he listened to Padraig. Too furious to wait for the councilman to park, he jumped out of the Fiat as it slowed down in the square. The big bully exploded into the police station, startling Kevin Slattery just as the young guard was making himself a cup of weak tea.
“Kevin, what’s this business about my Tom? Where’s Grogan? Who’s in feckin’ charge here, eh?”
Sean Grogan, who was in an adjoining room, quickly tucked away the report of Layla’s complaint. He stepped out into the hallway and leaned his arm protectively across the door’s threshold, clearing his throat.
“There’s probably a fine explanation for everything, Tom. I’ll be needing to ask your boy a few questions, that’s all. If you could just tell me where Tom Junior is . . .”
“Am I hearin’ this right? You’re letting some feckin’ darkie say what she likes about me and mine? Is that it, eh?”
“Thomas—” Grogan could have said more, could have attempted to calm the steaming man in front of him as his position required, but he was enjoying himself too much to stop Thomas’s rant. There was no doubt in his mind that Tom McGuire Junior, that dirty sod, had attacked Layla. He had no reservations about locking the boy away in the station’s small jail cell for a whole year, if need be, he told himself. No matter who his father was.
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