by Nayeri, Dina
When Saba and Ponneh return to the living room ten minutes after Reza, they find the adults occupied in similar ways. Telling bawdy jokes. Letting scarves fall onto shoulders. They sit on a carpet near a pile of pillows. Ponneh loosens her scarf around her neck and pushes it back farther, showing off four or five centimeters of silky brown tufts parted loosely just off the center. She does it with such a flourish. Saba tells herself that it’s the hashish making her paranoid. She smells her fingers, that delicious earthy dust. Saba too wants to cast off her hijab, but she has to wait longer. Saba is taller, shapelier—beautiful in sinful ways that make other women shake with furious piety, while Ponneh radiates an innocent loveliness they worship.
Saba busies herself by bringing more water with mint and lemon. When she returns, she hears her friends whispering, feigning casual talk.
“But why not?” Reza pleads. “We’re both eighteen. We’re old enough.”
“You know I can’t,” Ponneh whispers back. “You know Maman’s rule.”
“I’ve never heard anyone else with a rule like that,” he says.
“Well, there it is. I have three older sisters, and none of them are married. So that’s that.”
“And the sick one? She can barely stand up. We both know she’ll never—”
“That’s cruel,” she snaps. “You sound like Mustafa with his ridiculous suffering.”
There is some mumbling. He is whispering something in her ear. He is trying to comfort her, convince her. No one is listening to them and Saba too decides not to hear this. Reza is only a man and men are weak. Who knows what he would be saying if she was the one sitting beside him now. Saba knows Reza is confused. He believes in the old ways, yet he is obsessed with Western culture. He recites the oldest poetry and convinces himself that he can live in a world where men have enough love for four women and romance is a series of storybook snippets full of longing and revelation. He doesn’t understand politics, hates religion, and has never dreamed of anyplace outside Gilan. He follows Saba’s father because he imagines that one day he too will be a landowner in Cheshmeh and that he will be a hero to his family—that a dozen old women holding babies will sit in front of the house and watch him kick his old football between two trash cans, and he will reward them with songs as they squat in his tiny but well-stocked kitchen and cook him his favorite dinner. He lives in a world of women. To be deprived of any of them—Saba or Ponneh or his mother—would be unfathomable to him.
Later the younger mullahs leave and she is left with her father, her two best friends, the women, and Mullah Ali. When the cleric is nodding off and the others are free to have a sip—the small soda bottle holding the homemade liquor is now in plain sight instead of hidden under Khanom Omidi’s skirts—and Saba’s father has had a few puffs as well, the women laugh loudly and Saba crumples her scarf under a pillow. Even Khanom Basir has an indulgent look, having forgotten Saba’s inappropriate skirt. Then the requests begin. “Saba jan, please dance for us,” says Khanom Omidi.
“Yes, Saba, you have to dance,” Ponneh says, and starts to clap.
Her father laughs with real mirth, the way he once did. “My daughter is good at many things. She is like her mother. A creative soul.”
Mullah Ali nods sleepily. “Yes, yes.”
Still they wait till he has fallen into deep sleep. Since the revolution, no one dares to dance or sing in front of anyone but the most intimate friends. And though Agha Hafezi has received much protection from the mullah, Saba’s father is already tempting fate by having a party with unmarried men and women in the same room.
But soon the cleric is asleep and suddenly it is no longer this year, or this solitary season of life. Suddenly Saba is a girl from many decades ago, in an old Iran that may never have existed. Was it only an invention? Tall tales from her parents’ generation? Oh, but it must have existed because in those days Saba’s mother, despite her education and Western ideals, was known for indulging her untamed self, dancing immodestly in public, displaying her naked bliss or sorrow on sofrehs long cleared of food and tea.
Reza is already getting up to retrieve the guitar hidden in the closet behind Saba’s father. He settles across from Ponneh and the older women. Khanom Basir and Khanom Omidi clear the sofreh and Saba moves barefoot to the center of the carpet. Reza begins an old Farsi tune, slow and meandering, full of long, somber notes on which Saba’s arms and legs can linger. His fingers rouse the strings with the same miraculous ease with which his sandaled toes kick a football. She lifts her arms so they become a winding halo around her face and torso. She bends her head back and lets her long hair fall, knowing that in this hazy secret hour no one disapproves. No one will claim to remember. She is loved though she teeters on the edge of danger—a mullah sleeping just there in the midst of so much crime. How intoxicating! Despite the risks, her throat doesn’t constrict. She is alive—no sea waiting to swallow her, no Mahtab in the mirror.
Reza has closed his eyes and is moving his head to the music. Just before the end of the song, she turns and catches his melancholy look across the room to where Ponneh is leaning against a pillow. He fumbles a few notes and mouths, I’m sorry, but no matter how she replays the words in her mind, Saba can’t decide if they were meant for her.
She banishes the question. This is too rare a moment to waste. Her hair flutters over her arms and cheeks, awakening a hundred sleeping sensations. Her fingers reach for each note as if chasing feathers in the wind. They hover over her body and face, the body and face of a newly grown-up Mahtab across the sea, and she spins on the faded carpet to Reza’s song until all propriety is gone and she is herself again.
Marriage Proposal
(Khanom Basir)
You might say the girls were raised here, by a great many of us. Before the revolution, they came only in summers, danced around in pink dresses without sleeves sent from big London stores, and the other children followed them, mesmerized. They picked oranges and lounged under trees, reading their English stories. They went to mixed-gender beaches with their parents. They let their hair fly on the backs of motorcycles and watched workers in fields. They loved the moist air of the North, the endless green of Shomal. But the Shomal that Tehranis knew was a different world from ours. It still is.
You see, half an hour’s drive in one direction leads to the Caspian Sea and to well-dressed English- and French-speaking tourists with foreign degrees doing who-knows-what in Western villas. Half an hour’s drive in another direction leads into the dirt roads of the mountain. If you ever come to Shomal, this is the sight to see: donkeys and horses carrying men in skullcaps and women in bejangled, colorful clothes into the forest, to their unpainted baked-mud or clay houses all grainy with hay. And the straw jutting from walls and covering their low, low roofs. I like these peaceful parts of the mountain, the wildflowers and jackal songs, the water wells and feather-paved coops.
Before the revolution, Tehranis came to escape a world of loud music, Western television, fashionable parties, and clothes measured by a hundred tailors. And what did they find here? Just us villagers in our Gilaki coverings, farming rice. Now they come to escape pasdars everywhere and riots and secret living. And what do they find here? Just us villagers in our Gilaki coverings, farming rice. In Cheshmeh, where we believed in modesty before 1979, and where we refused to go to extremes after, there are days when you might forget the world has changed—unless you are a Hafezi.
In the old days, the Hafezi girls ran in and out of our houses and we fed them from our kitchens, warmed by how little they knew of the differences between us. Of course, there were rules. The Hafezis made it so we could never treat the girls as our own. Proper Farsi only, Agha Hafezi said. No Gilaki with the girls. He demanded this, though he spoke our dialect to the workers in his rice paddies. Saba eventually learned to switch between Farsi and Gilaki (Khuda daneh, she would drone constantly like an old woman). Mahtab nev
er spoke anything but Farsi and English. This was one easy way to tell them apart.
I saw back then that Saba was the twin who had inherited her father’s Gilaki spirit instead of her mother’s crazy foreign one. There was an incident when she was seven, when she proposed marriage to my son. Sweet, yes, yes. She wanted to be one of us. But it salted my stomach with worry. The twins spent all day putting together a khastegari present, full of pastries and coins they had saved, and—my favorite because it was a token good only for your distant aunt—a picture of their mother as a young woman to prove how beautiful Saba would be. They stole some makeup and painted her seven shades of blues and reds. It was a spectacle. They even bought a piece of lace for the veil.
Outside my house there is a winding dirt road that leads around the hills. And if you stand at the window you can see the Hafezi house in the distance. It rests higher on a hill by itself, on a bigger road. So I saw them coming from far off, one sister watching from behind a tree nearby as the other sister knocked on my door. I answered. “And which are you?” I said, even though I knew. I wanted to spare Saba the embarrassment, with that ridiculous veil. And then out comes Reza, showing up at the door in his underwear, not putting the clues together, poor boy. How is he to know what goes on in the minds of girls who read too much?
When I tried to send Saba away, Mahtab ran out from her hiding place, put her little hands on her hips, and said to me, “You’re a mean old lady. We saved all our money for this khastegari. We even went through Khanom Omidi’s treasure chador!”
Hah! You see, when you leave girls to their own minds, they grow a tongue—not to mention a long, sneaking hand that’ll surely land them in hell.
Being smart girls, they knew I would call their parents. So apparently they spent the afternoon hiding out, messing around with that donkey-brained cousin of theirs. They used to spend a lot of time making up stories for him, because Kasem was ready to believe anything. One of the biggest mysteries of this world is how a boy like him can be worshipped and waited on like a pasha, when he’s so clearly a fool. But that’s how it is with boys. Don’t think I don’t see it just because I have sons. I know what girls suffer. I may not be one of those big-city feminists, but I’m not blind. My heart broke when I saw their father praise Kasem or pull him onto his lap while Saba and Mahtab watched like hungry orphans in overpriced dresses.
Every day I watched from my window as their father left for work and the girls followed him down the road, trying to see who could hold his attention longer. And when we were all at their sofreh for dinner and the house was buzzing and no one was listening to the girls, I heard them competing over who would get to walk on his aching back or bring him his tea later. And they argued over which was better: the time Agha Hafezi went to their school to demand that some filthy boy Mahtab “loved” be forced to play with her, or the time he came home full of celebration—a new piece of land—and picked up Saba only and danced and danced around the room until she pretended to faint.
Still, it isn’t Agha Hafezi’s fault that the girls were starving for his love. He didn’t know any other way. He was a happy, hard man. He had Bahareh to take care of the girls’ daily needs. His job was to provide, to protect them. What man without troubles spends time thinking of how to bond with his young daughters? They are not simple like boys.
But he did worry and work hard for them—that I will swear is true—rolling up his pant legs and walking through the sodden fields with the workers. I have never seen another landowner do this. He grew up here, you know. His father built the big house and the son has grown attached to it despite his city wife. He is Gilaki at heart, like Saba. Sometimes you see him with a fancy raincoat and a long umbrella, inspecting this or that. Sometimes he is in breezy cotton work pants and a knit cap in the local coffee shop, smoking with the old men. Once I heard him say a few words of Gilaki to Ponneh when she came to play with his daughters. He said to her, “How’s school? I’ll give you a new dress for every year you finish.” But Ponneh was too proud even then—and now she can sew her own clothes from old patterns or new ones she copies from tourist women.
Lately Agha Hafezi has taken to bad habits. He failed to protect his family, and Saba is the only one he has left. He is softer, full of mourning, obsessed with questions of the spirit. He feels her value and he keeps trying to mend things, but how can he know the way? He never learned her heart when she was young and willing.
Maybe it’s too late for the two of them. Maybe Saba should abandon these games with my son and get a husband who can also replace her father . . . someone older, stronger. But she will never admit this. She is the kind of girl who wants both the dates and the donkey, never compromising. But she will have to compromise. My son is already in love. As for Saba, I am thinking Abbas Hossein Abbas is the perfect choice for her.
Chapter Four
AUTUMN 1988
Having Khanom Mansoori and her husband over to the house is like having no guests at all. Saba calls Khanom Mansoori the Ancient One not only because she is twenty years older than the other caregivers in her life but because she is always either dozing or talking to herself. She requires no company, no hostessing, no effort. When her husband accompanies her on a visit, Saba and her father feel no obligation to remain in the room. The old couple will talk to each other for a while, eat something, drink tea, and eventually one of them will notice something off—a pillow in a color she doesn’t like or the telephone or a picture of Saba’s mother in the corner—and they will realize that this is someone else’s house and leave. Agha Mansoori likes to make a show of caring for his wife, and Saba knows that in order to avoid insulting the old man, she must bring out a tray of apples and cucumbers and place them in front of him, never his wife. He will then take twenty minutes to scrape out the insides of the fruits into a bowl and serve them to her himself. Saba wonders if he has always done this, or if it’s his way of feeling useful in his later years—because when the women gather alone, his wife seems perfectly capable of eating solid apple slices with her healthy back teeth.
Today the couple has stayed longer than usual and Saba has decided to watch a video instead of listening to their discussion about whether the big rainstorm that destroyed their first house happened in the fourth or sixth year of their marriage. She sits on the floor of the living room and switches on the television and VCR. She chooses a tape containing random episodes of a number of popular American television shows she has asked the Tehrani to record for her. The sound is a little scratchy, the dialogue hard to understand, but, aside from a few lines of impossible American slang, it’s decipherable for someone with Saba’s excellent English. A few seconds into the first sitcom, the music catches the couple’s attention. First Khanom Mansoori nudges her husband and then he too is captivated. “What in God’s name are they doing there?” he shouts.
It’s the opening credits of an American show called Family Ties. “Why are they all hugging there?” Agha Mansoori asks. Then when he sees TV-husband Agha Keaton kissing Khanom Keaton, his eyes grow wide. “Vai, did you see that, Khanom?”
“It’s an American show,” Saba says, amused. “Do you want me to explain it?”
The old man waves for her to be quiet as the first scene opens. He moves closer to the television as if he can understand the fast-paced, crackling English words.
In the show, Khanom Keaton hangs up the telephone and Agha Keaton scolds her. “Ei vai,” says Agha Mansoori, mesmerized. “Look at that. They’re fighting now.”
Khanom Mansoori chuckles, probably at the urgency in his tone.
“They’re not fighting,” says Saba. “He’s only saying—”
“Hush, Saba jan,” says Agha Mansoori. And then he throws his hands up in the air. “Vai, look what they are showing there! No shame . . .” Khanom Keaton sits on her husband’s lap. Kisses his lips, his neck, and murmurs soothing words. Agha Mansoori slaps the top of one hand with the o
ther. “God help us . . .”
Saba has seen this episode twice already. It’s yet another one in which Alex P. Keaton tells his laid-back American parents that he must, must, must go to Princeton. What is this Princeton? Saba mused the last time, because as far as she knew, only one college was worth mentioning in America, and that college was called Harvard. Sort of like Tehran University—a core academic hub surrounded by village institutions. But now Saba is well informed. She has researched this Princeton—a place that also educated Sondra Huxtable of The Cosby Show even though she is no pale princeling—and all the colleges like it with names unfamiliar even to the highly educated in Iran.
Saba relates to Alex’s struggle with his parents. Like ambitious Alex, she is a capitalist. But this is Gilan, the birthplace of the Communist Party of Iran, the land of Mirza Kuchik Khan and his socialist Jangali movement that fought for the downtrodden and the peasant class in Gilan’s forests back when the Mansooris were very young. If the old couple understood English, they would agree with Alex’s hippie parents.
But Agha and Khanom Mansoori ignore all of Saba’s attempts to explain the plot. When she tells them that Alex P. Keaton is visiting the Princeton dorms, Khanom Mansoori says, “No, no, that boy there must be his cousin. They look exactly alike.” When Saba explains a line of dialogue, Agha Mansoori ignores her and touches the screen just over the orange-and-blue bedspread. “We had a blanket like that one. Do you remember, Khanom? The day Hasan brought it and we spilled the tea?” To which his wife responds, “It was soup. Where is that old thing now? Was it really an American blanket?”