by Nayeri, Dina
One day we were cooking smoky rice in their kitchen—do you know this rice? It is the best in the world. So rare and produced only here in Gilan—and the girls were hanging about under our skirts. Their mother said that if they behaved they could join us for tea, so they sat still and whispered, Mahtab feeding Saba some crazy story (kalak-bazi!).
The girls had a lot of books, but their favorite stories were the kind you hear in the village square from the hundred-year-old toothless goats with long water pipes and tiny stools. Those men talk all day about jinns and paris and how to bring good luck. They tell old stories like Leyli and Majnoon, Rostam, or Zahhak, with the snakes growing out of his shoulders. I recognized the story Mahtab was telling Saba because it came from one of these old men, but I assumed Mahtab didn’t believe it.
“What are you telling your sister, Mahtab jan?” I asked.
“Don’t interrupt me,” she said. “I’m behaving!”
So I just listened as Mahtab told Saba about the Sun and Moon Man, who takes down the sun every night and puts up the moon. Saba played with a teaspoon she had stolen from a bowl of honeycomb, while Mahtab lectured on and on. “He takes longer in the summer to do it, because he likes to play outside,” Mahtab said, and Saba believed her. And some small creature in my belly said that Mahtab was playing at something.
Then they changed topics for twenty minutes until Mahtab brought up yesterday’s hiking trip in the mountains—the one Saba had missed because she had been too sick to travel. “I saw the Sun and Moon Man there, you know,” Mahtab said with a careless, fox-eyed look. Saba didn’t interrupt as Mahtab talked about having seen him and his yellow shirt and yellow pants and yellow basket where he kept the sun and moon. She only licked honey off her teaspoon, and Mahtab talked about the Sun and Moon Man’s office, with its pulleys and buttons and levers, a big teapot, and papers everywhere. Then Mahtab taught Saba the song you have to sing to him to get him to work fast, “Hey, Mr. Sun and Moon Man, put up the sun for me.” She sang it to the music of a foreign song that their mother said was called “Tambourine Man,” which was one of their favorites.
The little devil. All that spinning, just to make her sister jealous.
I guess that’s what you get when you’re lucky enough to learn English and listen to English songs and have a foreign education. Devilry disguised as cleverness. Mahtab liked playing these naughty cat-dance games with her sister. She liked being the smart one, and she had a big imagination and a wicked little heart. Sometimes I too blame Mahtab for abandoning Saba, who was so much more the dependent one. I just can’t help it—may God forgive me—but without her sister, Saba has lost her magic. I remember all this now that the distance between them isn’t measured by tiny fingers or by gossiping lips to eager ears, but by so much earth and water. How much earth, Saba asked me once after the big loss of half her family. How many scoops of my teaspoon would get me all the way from here to there? She held that spoon poised against the earth as if she were ready to start digging to her sister. She knew just how to break my heart.
“He isn’t paid enough,” Mahtab said that day about the Sun and Moon Man. “The sun is hot, especially to carry by hand.” And Saba knew it was true, because at the end of every tale, the storyteller is required to do the truth-and-lies poem, the one that rhymes “yogurt” and “yogurt soda” (maast and doogh) with “truth” and “lies” (raast and doroogh).
Up we went and there was maast,
Down we came and there was doogh.
And our story was doroogh (lie!).
Or:
Up we went and there was doogh,
Down we came and there was maast,
And our story was raast (truth!).
We mothers know to respect this poem, and so when we tell made-up stories like Leyli and Majnoon, or the city mouse and village mouse, we do the first version, and when we tell the history of the Prophet Muhammad or King Xerxes we do the second. After telling her story about the hiking trip and the Sun and Moon Man, Mahtab did the second version, and so she said her story was true. That’s why Mahtab wasn’t a real storyteller, little rule-breaking rat. Now Saba has learned her sister’s lies, because Reza told me that after her Mahtab story in the alley in Rasht, Saba did the second version too.
Chapter Two
AUTUMN 1984
The autumns of Saba’s adolescence are spent battling the Gilan sky. She is ever suspicious of the wet, insatiable months after most of Iran’s rice crop is harvested from lush fields. These dewy shalizar mornings have a way of distracting from truth—everything bursting out in eerie contrast and forcing the people to crave the fresh and the new, to pretend nothing has been lost since the last harvest. In the fall, leaves in a hundred shades of orange and red break into little pieces and mix with airborne drops of the Caspian. They create a vapor that slithers into noses and invades bodies, causing people to forget all but the sea and its fruits. It makes them ravenous for fish and rice. It erases the memory of last year’s sorrows and faraway relatives. But not for Saba, who has been in the deep parts of the water. The constant rainfall frightens her. She is baffled by the white nimbus of mist that hangs just below the top of the Alborz Mountains and above the sea (at the point where the two seem to crash into each other), and by the stilt houses disappearing in both directions, their tops and bottoms lost in water and in cloud.
Every year the vision of her mother in the airport lounge, holding Mahtab’s hand, grows hazier. Was she standing by the gate or in the security line? Saba used to be sure that it was at the gate, but now she knows that it couldn’t have been, because Saba and her father didn’t make it past security after she ran off to chase Mahtab. And what was her mother wearing? A manteau? A scarf? She used to think that it was her favorite green one, but a few months ago Saba found the fading scarf in the back of a storage closet. Then, just as she was on the verge of releasing the vision to the chasm of forgotten daydreams and spotty memories, she stumbled on a copy of her mother’s visa to America. Proof. But of what? Saba conjures the airport image often and the faces never blur. Her mother and sister rushing toward the plane and floating away into an oblivion filled with magazines and rock music and movies of men and women in love.
Now at fourteen, Ponneh and Saba spend their free days watching workers in the rice fields or videotapes at Saba’s house. Today, in the Hafezis’ enormous hilltop home, they busy themselves with Madonna and Metallica, Time and Life magazines, Little House on the Prairie, Three’s Company, and the Three Khanom Witches. The girls tiptoe through a sort of recovery, because two days ago, they had their biggest fight.
It started when Saba sat in her pantry with Reza—a secret place where only she and Ponneh used to meet—with her Walkman, listening to a bizarrely named band called The Police. She was whispering the lyrics into his free ear when Ponneh appeared, surprised and angry. She was in the pantry for only five minutes, doing a poor job of feigning interest, when she cut her hand on the sharp edge of a tomato can lid.
“Reza, help!” she cried. And this was the biggest injustice, because the last thing Ponneh needed was rescuing. But nowadays, when Reza is around—and especially when he is listening to Saba’s music, or humming American tunes, or asking what this or that lyric means—Ponneh is always getting hurt toes and scratched fingers and holes in her shirts. Then she uses every Band-Aid that Reza fetches and every pencil lead he squeezes out of her forearm as proof of his devotion. But Saba knows that none of these are signs of love. Her mother has said that real love is based on shared interests—like Western music.
But after Ponneh cut her hand that day, Reza sat beside her and sang bits of a French song that Saba had shown him a few days before. “Le Mendiant de l’Amour” became popular in Iran because of its easy-to-mimic chorus and manic Persian-sounding melody. “See,” he said to Ponneh, “it’s about a girl named Donneh, which is almost like Ponneh.” He started to tap his hands on his kne
es and tried to sing the lyrics with his thick, uneducated accent: Donneh, Donneh, Do-donneh . . .
“That’s not what it means,” shot Saba, feeling personally injured by Reza’s blatant mistranslation, by his awful accent, and his lovely voice. “Donnez means ‘Give me.’ It’s French. I told you already.” She wanted to repeat her point, but didn’t want to be accused of showing off again. Reza didn’t respond. He studied Saba’s face. Then he hummed the verses he didn’t know and kicked Ponneh’s legs to get her to cheer up.
Before he left, he whispered to Saba, “Are you missing Mahtab?” For three years Reza has asked this—a placeholder for all the emotions he cannot yet diagnose. Whether Saba is sad or angry or jealous, he asks her the same question, putting on a concerned tone. Saba replies with shy smiles and nods. It is their private routine.
Later, Ponneh accused Saba of excluding her again, revealing their secret pantry, and showing off in English. Saba accused Ponneh of cutting her hand on purpose, not truly caring about the music, and stealing her song. But in a world without Mahtab, Saba can’t last long without a best friend. Soon more important things distracted them. Ponneh discovered that with the right color chalk, she could draw entire scenes on the inside of an old white chador. They spent the next two days cocooned in hijab, decorating the secret parts of the tattered cloth with images from storybooks and American magazines. They sat cross-legged with the fabric pulled low over their eyes, trying to see the drawings from inside. When it didn’t work—only made the cloth itchier—they moved on to standing bare-legged over a portable fan laid on its side so the chador would blow up around them like bat wings, baring their newly rounded legs like Marilyn Monroe’s.
Today they run around Saba’s house, belting out a song from a 1960s Iranian movie called Sultan of Hearts. “One heart tells me to go, to go. Another tells me to stay, to stay.” Saba has the better singing voice, so she serenades a giggling Ponneh with elaborate and dramatic bows and gallant gestures.
“Saba, bring me my sack,” says Khanom Mansoori, the Ancient One, who has been left in charge of the girls while the other women run their own household errands. Saba’s father trusts the old villager to teach his daughter respectable, womanly ways. But even at nearly ninety years old she projects a childlike mischief. Saba thinks it’s the combination of her deceptively tiny body and all the trouble she must be dreaming up in the hours she spends pretending to sleep. She pulls her shrunken face into a wrinkled scowl and—desperate for amusement and suffering from failing ears—pretend whispers to an eager Saba, “I have a new you-know-what! Bring Ponneh and get rid of the adults.”
This is Saba’s favorite sort of summons, because it means an afternoon with the only Iranian magazine she likes to read: the prerevolution copies of Zanerooz. Today’s Woman. Though the magazine covers serious topics now, such as women’s rights, in the Shah’s time it focused mostly on fashion, hair, and gossip. Each issue contained one tantalizing story called “Fork in the Road” about love triangles, or estranged husbands, or the midnight creeping of lecherous stepfathers who assumed girls didn’t talk, followed by a good revenge. Pages of delicious scandal and temptingly forbidden descriptions.
Ancient and bored, Khanom Mansoori likes the cheap thrill of racy stories she cannot read with her own fading, untrained eyes. Who can blame her for enlisting a pair of curious fourteen-year-olds as co-conspirators when she is left unsupervised with them, and when her equally ancient husband isn’t around to entertain her?
On this September afternoon, when Saba is trying hard not to let the autumnal Caspian vapors erase her memories of Mahtab, she reads Ponneh and Khanom Mansoori a story about a young man with two lovers. One is beautiful, the other charming. One is quiet, the other exuberant. One makes him want to go on adventures around the world—the other makes him dizzy with romance and contentment. The story enraptures Saba, the strange contrasts and the rivalry. Whom will he choose? She glances at Ponneh, who rolls on her back and settles against a wall of colorful pillows.
“Khanom Mansoori,” Ponneh wonders aloud, “which do you think the boy should choose?” Saba places a finger between the pages and closes the magazine. She too wants to know, but she would never have asked.
Khanom Mansoori nods her small roundish head and says, “What does it matter what I think?” She smacks her lips together and her eyes begin to close.
“I think it matters,” says Saba. “Come on, pick!”
“Well,” Ponneh interrupts, “I think he shouldn’t choose. I think the girls should decide for him. He should marry neither or both. That way they can still be friends.”
Saba considers this for a moment. She decides not to let Ponneh finish and returns to the article. These stories always end with an unsolved dilemma. What would you do? the author goads. When they reach the end, old Khanom Mansoori tells Ponneh and Saba her own love story of a husband who has doted on her for seventy years. In return, the girls tell Khanom Mansoori about the unfairness of being fourteen and loveless.
Beautiful Ponneh with her almond eyes laments over being forced to tolerate a budding unibrow until she is married or, by some miracle, allowed to pluck early. Saba complains silently, never aloud, that her Persian nose has grown unwieldy and her body is starting to curve. She has pockets of fat, so graceless, and she is sprouting—becoming tall—while Ponneh is dainty. She too wishes she could pluck the tiny hairs around her eyes and lips, and that she wasn’t so dark, with her black eyes, black hair, and olive skin. Ponneh’s skin is the color of porcelain and her eyes an impossible shade of hazelnut.
And then the old lady, though half asleep, says something to make them both sit up. Like a prophet she opens her mouth and infects the room with awed silence. “I wonder if Mahtab is growing a big backside like you.”
Ponneh glances at Saba and begins to object. “What are you—”
“Oh, hush, hush, Ponneh jan,” says Khanom Mansoori, waving a hand in Ponneh’s direction. “Saba knows what I mean. Don’t you, child?”
Saba licks her dry lips and squints at Khanom Mansoori as if trying to peer through a crack in a wall. “Mahtab’s dead,” Saba mutters, because she has been told that this is the truth. Ponneh beams with pride and nods, which helps Saba with the guilt of having told a kind of lie, and of growing up and surrendering to the slow, bleak workings of adult logic. Saying the words aloud brings on a flutter of panic, like admitting out loud that there is no God after a lifetime of faith. A voice whispers, I saw them get on a plane.
But Khanom Mansoori is shaking her head, making her scarf slip and revealing henna-colored tufts. “Hmmm . . . They said you were smart, full of book-reading and intuition. And here you are, believing everything they tell you to believe. You don’t know what’s true”—she shakes a finger at Saba and glares—“ultimate truth, real truth like most people don’t see. You can’t even unlock the magic of being a twin.”
Saba is bursting with the hundred responses that bubble up all at once, but before she can choose, Ponneh jumps to her feet. “Come, Saba,” she says. “We need lunch.”
Saba doesn’t move. She looks into the unfocused gaze of this tiny old-world fortune-teller who, through her curtain of cataracts, has seen more of Saba than her own father has. “Mahtab’s dead,” she repeats, her voice betraying a hint of encouragement.
Khanom Mansoori leans in. “What about that letter?” she whispers.
Saba stares wide-eyed at Ponneh, her best friend, who looks both disapproving and ashamed—because who else would have told old Mansoori about the letter? She tries to remember if she ever asked Ponneh not to tell. Is this a betrayal? Will Ponneh be angry if Saba considers it so? Finally she decides.
“I’m too old for those stories,” she says, her voice all confidence and maturity. She knows what Khanom Mansoori is trying to do. She is close to the end of her life and she enjoys this abstract talk, the kind of what-ifs that take away the st
ing and foreverness of death. Maybe she wants Mahtab to be alive as much as Saba does. Or just to know that even if Mahtab is dead, someone keeps her memory fresh. Regardless, Ponneh’s opinion is much more vital to Saba’s happiness—and Ponneh is a realist.
“Too old for your own sister?” Khanom Mansoori tuts. “Not good.”
“The letter was only make-believe,” Saba offers for Ponneh’s sake. Then she adds, because it sounds so adult to say the words, “I was a kid. It was a way of coping.”
Khanom Mansoori chuckles. “Make-believe? Well, I don’t believe you,” she says, laying her head against the wall and slipping into sleep even as she speaks. “Come back when you’re older and not too grown-up. . . . Go on, both of you. I need a nap.”
Saba wishes Khanom Mansoori wouldn’t fall asleep. She wants to reach out and shake her awake. But Ponneh takes both her hands and pulls her up with all her strength, so that the momentum launches them into a manic run toward the kitchen. As they rush off, Saba hears the old woman’s faint snores, a last chuckle, and the mumbled words: “See me when the kid and the coping come back for a visit. They always come back when you think you’re grown . . . always, always.”
Agha Hafezi attempts to leave lunch—or at least hints of what to do for lunch—for Saba almost every day when he is busy in his office and his rice fields. On his worst days he leaves cash, or a note for Saba to deliver to one of the khanoms. Usually it says something like: “May I trouble you to cook lunch for my daughter? And tomorrow please come to the house and we will have a feast with our friends.” This translates to a bargain: Feed Saba today and tomorrow you can use our well-stocked kitchen and invite whomever you wish—two chores, but well worth a social event funded by the Hafezis. On his best days he leaves a plastic container of Saba’s favorite stews, left over from one of these parties. Today Saba spots an enormous white fish thawing in a bucket in the sink, with a note. “Saba joon, do you know how to cook this yet? If not, fetch Ponneh.”