Pomegranate Soup

by Marsha Mehran

  Yes, Bahar told herself, she had her own set of penances to pay. Layla had her youthful cinnamon-rose promise and Marjan, the ability to create one spectacular dish after another, but those were their journeys, not hers. She didn’t know what her strengths were just yet, but she did know they were there to be discovered.

  At Croagh Patrick’s summit, Bahar stopped hiking and turned around, toward the dazzling blue waters of Clew Bay. The gray clouds were fast departing across the horizon, their liquid wings reflected in the bay below. Climbing this ancient mountain had given her the clarity to claim her ill spirits, she decided. Each rock-strewn step forward had made her feel stronger, as if she was indeed casting off her fear and loneliness, the monsters who had been riding her for such a long time. Just as Saint Patrick had done so many centuries ago, thought Bahar. Whatever miracles that old bishop had performed among these thick clouds, they were still working their magic on her. Even Hossein could not reach her at these heights.

  She stretched her arms and, closing her eyes, drew in a deep, loud breath that made even the more extroverted of the American tourists do a double take. The sweet innocence of their stares brought a small smile to Bahar’s face.

  BELOW ON MAIN MALL, a scowling Thomas McGuire was also experiencing the first of many belated epiphanies. His sense of smell set off the initial alarm.

  The burly publican smelled the soup as he was stomping his way down to Fadden’s Mini-Mart. He had little clue about his own approaching demise. In fact, when he would later recall the whole incident to himself, curled up on the many sleepless nights that would follow him to his dying day, Thomas would swear that it was not the smell that had brought him to the café’s kitchen but the duties of a concerned parent and citizen who had finally had enough. Such, it seems, are the altruistic fantasies of many a skewed, criminal mind.

  Thomas never made it into the mini-mart for another round of badgering poor Danny Fadden. Smelling the cooking pomegranate as soon as he stormed past the Babylon Café, he turned and marched back up Main Mall with a renewed sense of purpose. He veered into the alleyway, sidestepping overturned rubbish bins and a pack of rabid cats to reach the café’s backyard.

  Ballinacroagh’s beer baron didn’t stop to knock on the gate but chose instead to kick his way in. He raised his foot and was about to karate chop through the gate when he saw the note. It was the same lined sheet of blubbering apologies he had crumpled up not two hours ago, Junior’s words living on to taunt him once again. With blood pumping in his ears, Thomas shoved the gate door open and stumbled into the café’s backyard, trampling the remainder of Marjan’s standing herbs with his heavy work boots. The unlocked back door gave way easily to his fist, and he staggered into the kitchen, a place he had secretly dreamt of since he was a little boy, when the Delmonicos still ran their little pastry shop.

  Expecting to be confronted by Marjan chopping up questionable chunks of rotting meat and animal parts, Thomas was somewhat disappointed to find the opposite. There were no intestines flying about or globular fish eyes staring back from bloody chopping blocks. Before him stood a round table spread with a frilly, blanched tablecloth printed with cherries. A little ways beyond, in the middle of the kitchen, was the wooden island, clean but for a bowl of blushing apricots. And on the stove was a bubbling, half-covered silver pot, from which escaped taunting tendrils of pomegranate.

  The perfumed fingers reached Thomas’s curved chin, tickling his jaws like an animated temptress. He gasped audibly as he stepped back against the wall in horror. Disgusting what some people would put in their mouths, he thought, feeling dizzier than he had in his entire life. His breathing came out in short spats, and his head was swimming. After he had partially regained his composure, he stole another glimpse around the kitchen.

  A woven Tabrizi runner that Bahar had bought for twenty English pounds in Portobello Market ran across the room, from the back entrance to the twin swinging doors opening on to the front dining room. Perched above the doors’ dark frame was a rectangular slice of turquoise tile, embedded with shards of indigo glass. The mosaic pieces spelled out the words Nush-e Jan, a robust Farsi expression whose closest translation is “bon appétit!” The warm gesture was lost on the furious Thomas.

  Just look at what those cows have done to his place, the publican thought to himself. That was right; this was his place, always had been, always would be. Where he was standing now, just under his mud-coated boots, was where Polyester Paddy’s dance floor would be. Writhing bodies would be commanded to move to fabulous disco beats here, the sexy whirl of a glittering disco ball throwing light prisms around like rainbow confetti. And there, through those doors, there in that feckin’ empty place, for God’s sake, that was where he’d walk through from adjoining Paddy’s, taking his time to give his hellos to the couples that would be strewn across velveteen couches and chairs. Black marble tables would stand crowded with cocktails, drinks he had been dying to try out but for those feckers who just wanted stout and more stout in his pubs. Here he would have been able to do it all. He might even have hired one of the O’Reilly girls, the one with the big knockers, to take to roller skates and bum-filled short shorts, swirling about with her drinks orders. Why the feck not? This was his place. This was Polyester Paddy’s, where it was all going to happen!

  Caught in his disco dream, Thomas twirled around and around on his boot heels, spinning wildly in the middle of the kitchen, hearing the funky music in his head as he was blinded by the glittering lights. As if possessed, he suddenly lurched forward toward the stove and the pot of cooking pomegranate soup. But for the red tea towel that Marjan had hung on the oven door’s handle, Thomas would have fallen straight into the open flame. Even so, he was able to hang on to the linen towel for only a second before letting go of it on his way down to the cold floor.

  The plastic bags of dance albums from Kenny’s Record Shop shot into the air overhead. They intersected with the airborne tea towel, spinning in such perfect symmetry that for an instant—that brief suspension of time before his skull hit the linoleum floor and his eyes rolled back—Thomas was really in his own discotheque; a fabulous place of rocket-propelled fireworks, falsetto voices, and syncopated synthesizers. But like the era it lived and died in, the disco music came to an end all too quickly, just as Thomas’s arteries, strained from decades of pig’s blood sausage breakfasts and butter and creamed rashers, clamped shut.

  Thomas McGuire’s heart stopped the same instant the flying cassettes landed all around him, sounding a lot like the applause of a hundred plastic hands. The copy of Saturday Night Fever fell into his open palm, a soundtrack to step over with on his way to a white polyester–suited heaven. The tea towel landed on the stove, erupting into an instant fireball that bounced up the adjoining wall.

  Yes, it all came to a stop for Thomas then, everything but the beat that rose above his mammoth body, beyond the insatiable ambition that had led him through all the wrong doorways, all the wrong songs. For it was the eternal beat, the endless tune that stopped for no one, not even him.

  after dinner lavender-mint tea

  2 tablespoons honey

  3 teaspoons fresh lavender flowers

  1 cup fresh mint leaves, chopped

  1⁄2 lemon, cut into thin wedges

  Boil 2 quarts of water. Heat teapot with half of the water. Discard. Fill teapot with honey, lavender leaves, and mint. Add the hot water. Cover and steep for 10 minutes. Serve with a slice of lemon.

  epilogue

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, just as the more devout pilgrims reached Croagh Patrick’s white church to watch the sunrise, the circus came to town. Quite literally.

  A train of four wooden, horse-pulled caravans rambled through Main Mall, their canvas and patchwork coverings stretched to reveal banners written in fluorescent orange and pink—THE MCGUIRE FAMILY CIRCUS.

  The McGuire Family Circus was really the linked caravans belonging to Thomas’s actor brother, Kieran, and his troupe of physical storytellers.
The traveling performers parked their train at the far end of the open field, near the pitched tents and foldout tables of the Patrician Day celebrations. From there the circus troupe showcased their theatrics, an extravaganza of torch jugglers, levitation exhibitions, and a hilarious Punch and Judy show. The circus was not only an enchanting surprise for the pilgrims and tourists who had gathered in the field after their arduous mountain climb but a perfect opening act to Fruits of Labor, Father Mahoney’s play.

  Despite the fact that she’d missed some last-minute rehearsals because of the unforeseen dramas of the week, Fiona Athey’s directorial debut was a smash hit. Following the fortunes of Gino Pepino, a young apple picker who wakes from an afternoon siesta to find himself the only male left in a village of one hundred very hungry women, the play drew roars of delight from its large audience. Layla and Malachy proved to be excellent romantic leads and carried Father Mahoney’s delicious romp to a standing ovation.

  Marjan watched the happy priest bite down on a carrot torshi, one of the many pickles he had consumed from the jar he bought at the charity table. All of the torshis that Bahar had packed were already sold out, but thanks to a generous Benny Corcoran, who had loaned Marjan the use of his bakery kitchen (Assumpta wasn’t talking to him as a result), a panoply of buffet dishes was available for the picking. The pots of abgusht, trays of feta and mint wraps, dolmeh, and elephant ears were being gobbled up faster than the beer that kept flowing from free taps, the only time the McGuire pubs would be so charitable.

  It would have been enough to push Thomas McGuire back through the gates of oblivion had he been there to see it all. As it was, Thomas was in no position to move a toe, even if he wanted to. He was strapped to tubes and machines that kept him barely alive and breathing, though after hearing what had happened to him in the Babylon Café, he sometimes wished he had died.

  Thomas had been legally dead for just over a minute when Bahar, dropped off by the tour bus after her momentous climb, burst into the kitchen with exhilaration that quickly turned to alarm. She forced her way through the pink-black pomegranate cloud that had filled the kitchen, the smoke stinging her eyes and throat. Tongues of vicious orange and black flames darted across the wooden kitchen counter and snaked up the walls above. Panicked, Bahar ran for the stairs to find her sisters and tripped over Thomas McGuire’s lifeless body.

  Using her own hot breath to puff out Thomas’s chest, Bahar pumped his torso over and over until his heart began beating once again. Thomas started to cough, his eyes blinking open only to fall back into a faint; the shock of finding Bahar in the midst of resuscitating him was too much for the fallen lord of Ballinacroagh to handle.

  Marjan, woken up by Bahar’s screams, had tumbled downstairs to find her estranged sister hunched over a large man and the kitchen burning. Thanks to the small fire extinguisher Luigi Delmonico had kept in the pantry, Marjan was able to stop the flames from reaching the refrigerator on the other side of the room, choking the fire just as Thomas McGuire spluttered his first breaths back on earth. By the time Marjan knelt down next to Thomas’s body with a glass of water, the devastating fire had been quenched.

  Dervla Quigley almost fell out of her open window when she saw the lime green hippie van screeching out of the alleyway in the wake of billowing smoke, heading toward the Westport Road with Marjan at the wheel. The old gossip would have keeled over in an instant had she been able to see the van’s cargo that day.

  Bahar kept a close eye on Thomas’s staccato breathing in the back of the van as Marjan drove to Mayo General. A waxy peach tinge had returned to the bully’s flaccid face, but he remained unconscious and his skipping heartbeat was extremely faint. Why had he come into their café, Bahar wondered, as she checked Thomas’s pulse again.

  Marjan thought she had a pretty good idea about Thomas’s intentions, until she saw all the dance cassettes piled up into little hills on the kitchen floor. What a strange man, she thought.

  Thomas McGuire would never really recover from the heart attack that had briefly sent him to that great big nightclub in the sky. He did his best to forget what had happened in the café but found peace only after he had paid Estelle the hefty sum it would take to restore the café to its former glory. Though neither inept guard filed formal charges against him, Thomas McGuire’s long stint of tyranny was as good as over. He would spend the rest of his days listening to his dusty collection of twelve-inches and quietly tending to his wife’s libidinous needs (for Cecilia became even more enthusiastic in the bedroom after her sons were out of the house), trying hard not to die in the process. And from that Patrician Day onward, Thomas’s sister Margaret took full power of attorney over his business affairs; she acted as both his eyes and ears as she set about fixing the family reputation he had shattered in one fell swoop.

  Marjan ambled over to the samovar and poured herself a steaming cup of lavender-mint tea. She and Malachy had carried the big machine out of the café especially for the occasion, using a long extension cord to plug it into the nearby mini-mart’s outer wall socket. Estelle had brought down the mint and lavender from her own small herb garden, and together they had arranged the various teacups and sugar spoons for the town’s second favorite beverage. The weather was no longer threatening to explode into storms, but it had yet to return to the summer heat of previous weeks, so tea was a particularly pleasant drink that Sunday afternoon.

  Taking a sip, Marjan settled into a plastic chair set under a pink and turquoise striped tent. Sitting close by were some of the people she loved most in the world, as well as some she would eventually come to call family. Estelle was reclining in one of the plastic chairs, also sipping on the lavender-mint tea while she chatted away with Mrs. Boylan about the infinite uses of cold-pressed, virgin olive oil. Seated to the little Italian widow’s right were Layla and a skinny young girl with tangled, carroty hair. Marjan recognized the child as the little urchin who had summoned her to the travelers’ camp on that stormy Thursday, only four days ago. The young girl had come to town with a group of campers, the proud itinerants streaming through the afternoon festivities with their own brand of a good time.

  A heroic Declan Maughan claimed a piece of the field near the stage for his caravan but pretty soon had sauntered over to the pink and turquoise tent with redheaded Aoife, his youngest of thirteen sisters. After a slug of Dutch courage in the form of a Guinness (or two), the boxing champion had seated himself on a deck chair and promptly struck up a rather passionate conversation about the state of amateur boxing in Ireland with none other than a blushing Bahar. Marjan could tell that her sister liked the ruggedly handsome gypsy, despite the fact that Declan was doing most of the talking. Bahar’s smile, though quite shy, did not look so different from Layla’s own beaming face just about then—hopeful and unabashedly proprietary.

  The love between Layla and Malachy was the best kind of ownership, Marjan thought to herself, in which the only commodity was the ceaseless flow of affection. The young couple had arrived well after the fire in the café’s kitchen died down. They had bypassed the grittiness to find only blackened kitchen walls and a story that, especially for Malachy, was a bizarre one indeed. It was right that they had not been involved in the commotion, thought Marjan. Their destinies required them for greater adventures, unencumbered by needless dramas. She watched Malachy curl his long fingers around a lock of Layla’s straight hair, gently caressing it as he mused on the origins of stars. The young astronomer knew that in Aristotelian times the word comet meant “the length of luminous hair,” but the word eventually changed to signify the orbiting streak that sometimes, just sometimes, flies a little too close to the sun.

  But Marjan knew those two would be just fine. In fact, she thought, they would all be fine. Of course, there was still a lot she and her sisters needed to talk about; too much had been left unsaid since that dark night they left Tehran for good, in the wake of a revolution and a man she hoped would never cross their path again. But that could all wait until tomor
row. For now, she told herself, for now it was enough just to have Bahar and Layla with her, here in this small village called Ballinacroagh, both with sweet smiles on their beautiful faces.

  The sun began to set over Clew Bay as Marjan leaned back with her tea to watch members of the acrobatic circus troupe, dressed in jumpsuits of green and gold silk, cartwheel across the modest wooden amphitheater. The impromptu show was a dance based on the festival of Lughnasa, that harvest celebration of ancient Celts, which marked their new year. Marjan marveled at the similarities between this ancient ritual and her own version of the pomegranate myth.

  Unlike the classical Greeks, for whom the fruit symbolized the inescapable cycle of bitter death, with a remorseful Persephone returning to the underworld for her six months of required winter, Marjan liked to believe the old stories of Persian soothsayers, who held a different vision of the tart fruit’s purpose in life. She liked to remember that above all else, above all the unfortunate connotations of death and winter, the pomegranate was, and always would be, the fruit of hope.

  The flower of fertility, of new things to come and old seasons to be cradled.

  It had shown even her that some of the best recipes are the unwritten ones, the ones that happen when you pour yourself a generous glass of Shiraz vino, pop on a soothing Billie Holiday song, and just let the bountiful ingredients lead you. Because, like it or not, life will go on with or without you, forever blooming in someone else’s backyard, giving flavor to yet another pot of pomegranate soup.

  Yes, that was how she would like to think of that particular sweetness. The myriad seedling that could only, really, be the flower of new beginnings.

  acknowledgments

  I am deeply grateful to the following people: My agent, Adam Chromy, for his intuition and tenacity. My editor, the indefatigable Robin Rolewicz, whose steady guidance and sweet laugh made all the difference. Everybody at Random House who have rallied behind this book from the very beginning—Gina Centrello, Daniel Menaker, Jon Karp, David Ebershoff, Claire Tisne, Nicole Bond—thank you so much for your hard work and support. The talented visual and production team of Barbara Bachman, Robbin Schiff, Susan M. S. Brown, Vincent La Scala, and my fabulous publicist, Lanie Shapiro. My Irish family, the Collinses of Mayo and Long Island, who provide me with endless sources of merriment; my brother, Sam, and my parents, who shared my first taste of a pomegranate. And most of all, CRC, my anchor and constant companion. Thank you.