Pomegranate Soup

by Marsha Mehran

  “And you, Sean Grogan, yer calling my Tom on it?” Thomas’s eyes bulged out of their sockets. He couldn’t believe his ears. It was taking all his strength to keep from hitting the guard in his fat face. And that Slattery, too, thought Thomas, standing there with his tea mug like the nancy the whole town knew he was.

  “The thing is, ah, Tom. There’s a witness, so. Nothing I can do about it.”

  “Witness? What witness—who’s this witness?”

  “Ah, well now, I can’t say. That’s strictly confidential, you see.”

  “Feck you and yer confidential!” Thomas growled. He turned on his heels and stomped down the station hallway, knocking Padraig straight into the corridor wall. Pausing at the station door, he pointed toward the two officers. “You’re going to be sorry you did this, Sean Grogan,” he threatened and thundered out.

  A silent Padraig shrugged his shoulders nervously at the guards and followed Thomas to the car. The short councilman knew precisely what side of the plate his meat was on.

  BEYOND THE RAIN CLOUDS, above the constant peak that he was now beginning to detest, was the constellation Hercules. The star was a consolation to Malachy as he sifted through his own personal storm.

  The young man stooped in his alcove bedroom stuffing his burlap schoolbag with clothes while his mother and three sisters lingered in the upstairs hallway, watching him with confusion. They were accustomed to seeing Malachy and Tom Junior at ends with each other, but no fight had been bad enough to make one of them want to leave home. Joanne, the youngest of the sisters, burst into tears when she saw Malachy begin to disassemble his telescope.

  “Don’t cry, Joanne. I’ll be back to visit,” he said before turning to his mother. “Are you sure you haven’t seen Tom today, Mam? Are you telling me the truth?”

  “Haven’t seen him since the mornin’, Malachy. Maybe that foreign girl there was the one to take him. I heard a few things about those three in that café. I hope you’re looking after yourself when you’re down that end. Never know what one of them would do if she saw your lovely looks, eh?”

  She went to pat him on his head, but Malachy swatted her away. It was the first sign of defiance he had ever shown his mother, and it made his head burn with unexpected fury. He was glad he hadn’t spilled about his relationship with Layla, as he had been tempted to do so many times in the last four months.

  “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad. You’ll work things out, now,” his mother mumbled vacuously, leaning against his bedroom door. She was decked out in her usual Thursday night getup: a black sequined sweater paired with tight stretch pants that highlighted the grapefruit texture of her cellulite-ridden thighs. Her head was wound in thick, spongy rollers, which she would prop up against four pillows at night to ensure the next morning’s do. Cecilia McGuire never went anywhere without her poodlelike curls.

  Watching Malachy now, Cecilia couldn’t help musing about her long-ago love affair with Juan Carlos Escobar the Second. Being the daughter of a late county mayor had assured Cecilia Devereux the choice of Mayo’s most eligible bachelors, but she had chosen Thomas McGuire for his ambition and attractive, muscled thighs. Thomas’s ambition had its drawbacks, though, as his lonely wife soon discovered, so Cecilia was grateful when Juan Carlos Escobar the Second’s ship came in, that exhilarating summer of 1967. The Spanish sailor taught her words like amor mío, cariño, and pasión while he strummed her inner strings, and although he disappeared before summer’s end, he left her with a living, breathing souvenir in the form of Malachy.

  The boy stuffed the last piece of clothing, his favorite football jersey, into his backpack and, swinging his telescope case onto one shoulder, lumbered out of his tiny bedroom. Patting a tearful Joanne on the head, Malachy gave his other sisters, Delia and Helen, a silent nod good-bye, determined never to return to his damp, claustrophobic room. At the bottom of the stairs, he stopped and turned back to the four bewildered faces gaping down at him from the top landing, his anger softening slightly as Joanne’s whimpers grew louder. Just as he opened his mouth to say something reassuring, Thomas McGuire nosed the Land Rover into the driveway, honking its horn madly.

  By the time Thomas burst in roaring for answers, Malachy had already slipped out of the kitchen door. He looked back one last time at the house of his lonely childhood before disappearing into the shadows of the neighboring forest.

  A MILE AWAY, in the upstairs shoe box of a bedroom she shared with Layla, Bahar lay perfectly still in bed. She had been asleep, caught up in a fitful nightmare, the only dream she ever had, when the smell of cooking pomegranate and flashes of lightning woke her. Downstairs, she could hear the back door clicking shut. It was probably Marjan, she thought, running out to the store for a missing ingredient for the fesenjoon.

  Ripples of pain shot up from behind her ears and washed down the right side of her head to pool in her temples. Bahar turned over in bed and reached dizzily for the small glass jar of brown powder sitting next to her on a wobbly pedestal table. The powder, a mixture of ground nutmeg, cardamom, and cloves, was a potent Baluchi remedy that cured mild migraines within minutes of swallowing. Nowadays, though, it took at least six large spoonfuls to ease Bahar’s migraines, and even then it was never as effective as the first time she had tried it, back in the Dasht-e Lut desert.

  Bahar brought the spoonful of grainy medicine up to her lips and grimaced. She took a deep breath and swallowed all of it in one go, feeling the powder slide slowly down the back of her throat like hot gravel. She could never get used to the harsh taste, its unforgiving texture. Strange, though, she didn’t remember the medicine tasting so bad when it was administered by the Baluchi women. Even now, deep in the fog of another fierce headache, she could clearly recall their tribal kindness.

  The Baluchi women, with their patchwork skirts and sunburnt faces, had presented Bahar with two jars of the headache medicine the morning the sisters had escaped from Iran. After two nights spent with the Baluchi tribe in the desert, they crossed the Pakistan border with the help of an illiterate goat farmer from the nearby town of Zahedan. For a three-pound-sterling charge, he drove them in his dungy truck to the Red Cross refugee camp erected outside the Pakistani town of Quetta. Surrounded by other frightened Iranians on the run, the girls took refuge in the camp for five months before they finally secured visas to the United Kingdom.

  They arrived at Heathrow Airport to the scrutiny of thick-necked immigration officers. Interrogations were fired and passports checked, then double-checked, before the three sisters were granted the sweet stamps of entry. The girls stepped out of the gray, colossal airport and straight into the South London concrete block of apartments appointed to them by the Red Cross. The Brixton Bay View housed an array of personalities: Castro defectors and disco mavens shooting up under rusty stairwells, drag queens who moonlighted as Avon ladies, and half-naked latchkey kids practicing their break dancing in the parking lot. Before long Marjan was working as a pita stuffer in A Thousand and One Kabobs, a shish kabob and falafel takeaway near Trafalgar Square, while Bahar and Layla rejoined the daily humdrum of school life. Things were going well, despite their meager existence on oily couscous and fatty rinds of questionable impaled meats. Within four years Bahar had been accepted into Saint Bartholomew’s School of Nursing and Marjan had moved up in the culinary world, working as a sous chef for Plantain, a Jamaican fusion restaurant in the trendier suburb of Notting Hill. Soon they were able to move from the projects to a nice two-bedroom flat in Lewisham, where Layla could play in a cul-de-sac without running across used needles, and where Marjan could encourage a few precious herbs to grow. Someplace where Bahar could really forget the bruises. But, despite this hard-won tranquillity, it was difficult to ignore what was happening in their homeland.

  Iran in the early 1980s was suffering the digestive heartburn of a revolutionary feast gone on far too long. Civil war had broken out, pitting militant mullahs against Islamic Socialists, each vying for the seat of power and getting no
where in the process. Reverberations of the revolution were felt across the Saharas, as honey-fed princes in the shaken sheikhdoms of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait scrambled to stop their dripping reserves of liquid gold with white robes. And caught in between these upheavals were the young: the thirteen-year-old soldiers who had forsaken puberty for the religious cause. In cemeteries throughout Iran, laminated cardboard tombstones declared their short lives, while shrouded mothers mourned the unnatural reversal of time.

  Marjan watched the worldwide demonstrations against the growing Islamic regime on the BBC nightly news with a mixture of awe and relief. Thank God they had gotten out in time, she would tell herself. Her sister, by contrast, was not so optimistic. Bahar would never sit through the televised images of bombed-out streets filled with men who looked like they could all be Hossein. She was afraid not that he might be one of the dead but rather that he wouldn’t be among the bodies strewn across their television screen. She never should have believed in such a cause, in such a man. What had made her do so? Bahar could no longer remember the reasons she had given herself or Marjan for marrying into it all, for believing, so whenever Jim Muir’s pasty face came on with his nightly reports from Tehran’s bloody streets, she would hastily retire to her bed with the headache that was fast becoming her best friend.

  Time passed again. Marjan got a new job at Aioli, a chichi Italian joint in Lewisham, where she befriended the head chef, Gloria, and was able to unburden some of their pain onto her sympathetic new friend. Bahar graduated with top honors from nursing school and started work at the Green Acres nursing home, an occupation which, if it did not provide close friendships, did at least ease the acute depression she had been suffering under for over half a decade. By the end of 1985, Bahar had returned to stretches of headache-free days and the occasional laughing fit as she and Marjan watched Layla grow up into gawky adolescence. Then, one night in March, just over four months ago, the telephone rang in their flat.

  Bahar was first to answer. “Hello?” Was that an electrical shock in her ear as she picked up the receiver, or was it the chime of Hades’ bell?

  “Did you think that God was on your side, Bahar? That I would let you and your dirty sisters make a fool of me?” The voice grated through the telephone lines like sheets of sandpaper. “I can’t even show my face at meetings anymore, did you know that? My mother won’t leave the house for the shame you’ve brought our family, you whore. If I were you, I’d start praying. Pray for mercy, wife, because the next knock you hear will be mine.” The phone clicked off, so chirpy and correct that it made Hossein’s threat sound even more sinister. Bahar stared at the receiver in her hand with disbelief, feeling sick to her stomach. The BBC news show on the television went to a commercial break, and Marjan turned to her sister.

  “Bahar, who was that?”

  Bahar’s eyes rolled back into her head. Shadows took over.

  Could it be happening all over again? Bahar wondered, wringing the bedsheets in her fists. Had Hossein found her here in Ballinacroagh? Was the eerie hissing on the telephone line this afternoon another warning?

  And what about Layla’s weak explanation later for the cut on her lip? A hiking accident with Malachy. Who knew if any of it was true? Maybe her sisters had not wanted her to know what had happened, what was going to happen, but Bahar had seen it all play out in their eyes. They had wanted to protect her, bless their hearts, but she knew the truth, the real reason behind Layla’s bloody lip and the tremor at Marjan’s chin. The signs were all there; that silent phone call had been for her.

  Bahar sat up quickly in bed. The tribal migraine medicine had worked its magic, dulling her painful headache considerably, but she knew its effects wouldn’t last long. There was no time to lose, she told herself.

  Layla was still asleep on the living room sofa when Bahar took the remote control out of her sister’s fist. She turned the TV off and pulled the blanket up to Layla’s chin, pausing a moment to admire the young girl’s beautiful face. She should have been nicer to Layla, more understanding of her needs, Bahar told herself. Layla was only fifteen, after all. Bahar bent over and gently kissed her sister’s forehead, then turned and crept toward the creaking staircase. A chill ran down her back as she reached the bottom landing. The kitchen had gone so cold so quickly. Bahar’s eyes rested on the pot sitting on the stove. She was right, it was fesenjoon.

  The pomegranate was calling her back. It wanted her to return, to face up to the pact she had made so long ago, a promise she hadn’t kept. There would be no running away this time. Hossein had finally found her.

  AT MIDNIGHT, the lights in the café’s kitchen could be particularly harsh. Without the comfort of daylight streaming in through the stained-glass window, everything in the room looked grim and strangely utilitarian.

  Marjan and Layla sat at the round table in morose silence. Scattered on the tabletop were trails of brown powder, where Bahar had hastily mixed her special headache remedy before leaving. Marjan absently traced a finger through the grainy remains.

  “She must have taken the medicine with her. I can’t find the jar anywhere,” she observed somberly.

  “We can’t just sit here, Marjan!” Layla jumped up, determined to do something, anything. After a frantic search of the nearby flooded streets, they had returned to the café and sat waiting for over two hours, hoping that the note in front of them was a big mistake, praying that Bahar would realize her folly and come back. She had taken her clothes and personal belongings in one of the plaid suitcases, leaving behind a quick note propped against a yellow enamel jug filled with bluebells:

  This is wrong. We’ve been running because of me.

  I can’t anymore.

  Bahar

  —I’ll call soon. I promise.

  “Why is she doing this? I’ve told her over and over again that we’re safe here. There’s no way Hossein’s going to find us.” Marjan shook her head.

  “Call the police again!”

  “I have—twice. They just said to wait. She’s not considered missing for another nineteen hours, apparently.” Marjan laid her face in her hands. She could taste the gritty spice mixture everywhere. “I was only in the butcher’s for ten minutes, fifteen at most.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t find the note until ten o’clock,” Layla said pointedly.

  Marjan slowly raised her eyes and met her sister’s gaze. Layla’s face was filled with disappointment. Layla was right, of course, thought Marjan. She hadn’t noticed the folded sheet of paper leaning against the jug until the fesenjoon had finished cooking and she was getting ready to go to bed. And even then she hadn’t known where to search for Bahar. What was wrong with her?

  “You’re sure Bahar didn’t say anything before you fell asleep?” Marjan said.

  “No, nothing. She was in the bedroom the whole time. Where could she go, anyway? No one can stay out in this rain for long.” The storm was still lashing out in anger, with spidery electric bolts illuminating the sky above the alleyway. “Look, just give me the van keys. I’ll go find her myself!” Layla cried, stamping her foot impatiently.

  “No, you’re staying right here,” Marjan said, getting up from the table. “Don’t let anybody in, okay?”

  Layla nodded, reassured to see her sister in action once again. Her relief was short-lived, however, as a heavy knock sounded at the back door.

  “Marjan?” Layla whispered, frightened.

  “Shhh . . .” Marjan crept slowly across the kitchen. It was too dark outside to see through the door’s glass partition. The shadow of a tall figure moved back and forth across the glass, then there came another booming knock. Marjan’s fingers touched the cold doorknob, pausing a beat before she jerked the door open. Before her stood Malachy, drenched and dragging his telescope and backpack behind him.

  pomegranate soup

  2 large onions, chopped

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  1⁄2 cup yellow split peas, rinsed twice

  6 cups water


  1 teaspoon salt

  1⁄2 teaspoon ground black pepper

  1 teaspoon turmeric

  2 cups fresh parsley, chopped

  2 cups fresh cilantro, chopped

  1⁄4 cup fresh mint, chopped

  1 cup fresh scallions, chopped

  1 pound ground lamb

  3⁄4 cup rice, rinsed twice

  2 cups pomegranate juice

  1 tablespoon sugar

  2 tablespoons lemon juice

  2 tablespoons angelica powder*

  *Optional

  In a large stockpot, sauté the onions in olive oil until golden. Add split peas, rice, water, salt, pepper, and turmeric, bringing to a boil. Lower heat and simmer, covered, for 30 minutes. Add parsley, cilantro, mint, and scallions. Simmer for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, roll ground lamb into medium-siz meatbmalls. Add meatballs and remaining ingredients to the pot. Simmer, covered, for 45 minutes.

  chapter twelve

  “I HEAR THE MIDDLE one took off at the same time as Thomas’s boy. Wouldn’t be surprised if she’s got her hands on Tom Junior by now.” Dervla pursed her lips over her teacup the next day and scanned the room of women before her. “They’re all sluts— mind now, I have to say the word—sluts, and they get what’s coming to them. I’d lock up your sons if I were you, Joan,” she warned.

  The congregation of sour-faced women, most of whom were regulars at Antonia Nolan’s religious relics shop, nodded their heads in agreement. Dervla, happy for such quick compliance, continued to slurp her watery brew. Ballinacroagh’s Bible study members, who gathered every Friday afternoon at Reek Relics, were a complete contrast to the pleasant ladies of the Patrician Day Dance committee. The sanctimonious assembly consisted of the usual spinsters and elderly matrons but had recently gained younger members in Joan Donnelly and Assumpta Corcoran.