Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (9781101601990)

by Nayeri, Dina

  She bent over Bahareh, pulling out hair after hair from her most private places with fleshy hands twisted up in the thread, one end of it in her teeth. The web moved almost on its own, unseen strands all tangled up, taking her fingers and pieces of Bahareh with it. The woman looked at Saba, her crooked teeth biting a string, and the poor child ran out as fast as her legs could carry her.

  Chapter Nine

  LATE SPRING 1990

  Saba walks home from her father’s storeroom by narrow mountain roads, forgoing the bus for the freedom of climbing up and down the dirt paths leading to the next village. The trees, bursting with blossoms a few weeks ago, are now lush with new fruit, but she is transfixed by thoughts of prisons and halva and double tombstones. Rebellious mothers with photo cameras screaming into the Western void. Legal testaments to virginity and unwilling husbands. Younger men and the happy memory of a not-so-innocent kiss on the cheek. She wonders if Ponneh is longing for such things. Her oldest sister lingers but is getting sicker. Khanom Alborz’s rules have turned the poor girl into a relic, a village curiosity. All anyone can think is, When will she die and free her trapped sisters?

  Saba grasps the doorknob. She calls out to Abbas. The house looks empty, and she wanders through the kitchen, dropping her bag on a low stool near the window. She leans across the table to inspect the bowl of fruit—delivered this morning by a local gardener Abbas favors—stems still intact, skin glistening and bruised from the humid Gilan air and the ride in the back of the merchant’s rickety truck. She rearranges a few pieces according to color and picks out a cucumber—a staple of the Persian fruit bowl—slices it lengthwise and sprinkles salt onto the flesh. Even as an adult, Saba never skips the childish step of rubbing the halves together to create a salty foam. She brushes the wet tip of her nose as she makes her way through the house, calling out Abbas’s name in every room, not because she needs him but to confirm that she is alone. Finally she finds herself outside her room, the room where she sleeps but has yet to keep any of her clothes. Certain now that no one is home, Saba sloughs off her head scarf and jacket, leaving on only a thin blouse and a gray skirt. She opens the door, ready to toss the garments onto her bed, and then she stops.

  Abbas is standing against the end table. There are strangers in her bedroom with him.

  She greets the two unfamiliar women who are sitting on her bed, amorphous in urban chadors, sprawling with a maternal ease. They look like Basij Sisters, the black-clad Islamic women of the volunteer Basij militia who help impose postrevolutionary rules on fellow Iranians. Why are they here? Women such as these are rarely seen in small northern villages. They are both covered to their eyebrows—not a single strand of hair visible, but so much dizzying black. They speak to Abbas in hushed tones. At first Saba doesn’t fear their presence, marveling only at their bulk, the way they fill her room like black clouds. Like vultures clad in raven dress. But then she sees one of them break into a lipless grin, the kind that sinks deep into the face and overtakes the eyes with its severity, and she thinks she has seen her before. Isn’t this the dallak she saw once when she wandered past an open door and spied her mother under a handful of thread? Throwing bands was their term for it. Isn’t she the one who hunched over her mother’s lower half, two fingers of each hand entangled in a mesh of shiny string, plucking away like a hunchbacked musician? In the old days, dallaks, usually men, used to do everything in bathhouses, scrubbing, massaging, even performing circumcisions. Their female counterparts, with their loofahs and pumice stones, are largely out of work now that most public hammams are closed because of indoor plumbing. They have moved on to other work—underground salons, tailoring, housecleaning. Maybe this one has become a Basiji. Many poor women have. Saba can see that neither woman is local, at least not anymore. She eyes these foreign creatures, so different from her mother, the scholar-activist in London blouses, and from her colorful surrogate mothers with hennaed hair, bejeweled scarves, and many-hued skirts worn two or three at a time.

  “Shut the door, Saba,” says Abbas. Saba complies.

  He takes her hand and pulls her inside with a certain resolve that she doesn’t associate with him. He nods for her to sit on the bed. The women make room for Saba between them, greeting her with excessive formality. The thought occurs that maybe someone else has died. Oh God, not another death so soon. The former thread artist puts a hand on her leg. Abbas kneels down and looks in her face, as if at a wayward child. “Saba,” he begins. “It is my job to look after you and our best interest. To protect us from harm. Even if that means protecting you from yourself.”

  She wrinkles her brow, failing to understand him.

  Abbas pulls himself up, straightens his pants, and smooths his shaggy hair nervously. He nods to the women and says, “I’ll be waiting outside with payment.”

  Saba hears him mutter something as he slams the door. The bargains of women.

  Now a primal fear takes over. A banshee wakes inside, sensing danger, and lunges toward freedom, pressing its weight against the inner wall of her chest, crushing her heart in its panicked fist and making her ribs ache. What is this?

  When she thinks of this moment over the coming years, she always remembers this: a thick hand grasping her from behind. The painful recoil and the nausea as she is yanked backward by a forearm around the stomach. A giantess pulling her writhing, screaming body onto the bed, pinning it with the weight of her sizable arms and chest, which are now planted squarely on Saba’s torso.

  “Get the bag,” she says in a thick dehati accent from somewhere in the South, a peasant accent with the unmistakable tones of field-workers, hammam attendants, and housecleaners, women with no steady income, no ties to families like hers. Most likely these two are stricken with a deeper poverty than any of the mothers who have passed through Saba’s house and won her father’s trust. She has heard that many desperate women—former prostitutes, destitute mothers—join the Basij Sisters and that it is possible to hire them for unthinkable things, dirty acts that must be hushed up. The Basij have never been above such things, especially if they can tie it by the thinnest fiber to God and Islamic law. What has Abbas paid them to do? How did he find them? Did he ask around the old bathhouse? In a fit of calculation, Saba considers telling the familiar one who her mother is. Will she care? Will she even recall her former life? Now the memory intensifies, and for a single blink the woman reaching for her bag isn’t covered in black but is bare-breasted, a lungi around her waist as it was on the day Saba last saw her.

  She frees her right arm and lands a desperate punch to her captor’s nose. She hears a crunch and the woman shrieks, spitting curses in all directions as she clutches her face and loses her grip on Saba just long enough for her to dash to the door. As Saba reaches for the doorknob, she turns to see the woman bent over the carpet, barely able to contain the cascade of blood escaping through her interlaced fingers. The sight makes Saba pause; in any case, the door is locked. Realizing that she is trapped, she feigns bravado. “Do you want more?” she shouts at the bleeding Basij or whatever she is. “I swear if you touch me, I’ll have you killed in your sleep.”

  The second woman, her mother’s former thread artist, takes her by the waist and lifts her off the ground. She tosses her onto the bed.

  “Just hold her. We’ll put your nose right after,” she says.

  As the thread artist pries open a gray, pyramid-shaped handbag, Saba manages to raise her head just enough to see a sliver of movement beyond the blurry folds of the blanket and discarded chador that are now covering half her face. In the sack, she sees rags. They fly in every direction as the woman rummages through the bag. Saba sees something shiny. It reflects the light from the window, and for a moment it blinds her with its glare. She turns her head and makes one more attempt to break free.

  “What do you want?” she shouts. “Do you want to be arrested?”

  And then the instrument is above her and Sa
ba can see that it is just the broken head of an ordinary metal fire poker—or at least that’s Saba’s best guess. The uninjured peasant woman, the one who was once as close as this to her mother, pushes Saba’s skirt over her knees and makes a crude joke. Something about needing her threading services. She takes the fire poker and, her breath reeking of stale milk and garlic, her body lumbering and strange, holds it with the casual precision of a doctor.

  Saba tries again to dissuade them. “You’re both going to jail if you touch me.”

  They ignore her. “Yala. Yala.” The injured one tells the other to hurry. She is bleeding all over Saba’s bed. Her companion obeys, reaches beneath Saba’s skirt as the bleeding woman on top of her tears her legs apart, and then Saba understands.

  “Please,” she begs, blurting out whatever comes to her mind through mucus and tears. “Are you Basij? You can still go to jail. My father . . . he’s . . . Do you need money? I have money.” They seem determined not to hear her so she closes her eyes and turns her head, thinking that at least she isn’t being murdered, a fear that had briefly entered her mind. She says a prayer, hoping for some miracle, and when she knows it won’t come, she prays that the fire iron has been cleaned.

  Then the sharp head of the crude instrument is in. She feels its hard, metal point prick a little at first, then with an excruciating twist as it makes its way all the way inside. She screams. She dreams up images of how she will make these women suffer later when her father knows what has been done.

  She tries to leave this place, to shut off her mind and conjure a low, crooning voice from America that once reminded her of tea and cardamom. She imagines herself far away from here, somewhere inside the song.

  By the sea. In a place called Georgia.

  Sitting on the dock of the bay.

  She is humiliated by the hot stream of angry tears falling down her cheeks. The injured woman puts her hand on Saba’s forehead as if to reassure her. She wipes the sweat from Saba’s brow and shushes her with singsong humming. Saba wants so much to hurt this woman who seems to believe she knows her best interest—or why soothe her as a nurse soothes a child afraid of a needle?

  How funny that Abbas hired a former dallak for this, a purveyor of feminine allure, an artist suddenly turned against beauty. It’s probably all the same to Abbas, this particular line of work. Who else does every wife call when she needs to tend to some dark female nuisance? This is just another distasteful, lavatorial task, like scrubbing off old skin in a hammam. She pushes the woman’s hand away. “Don’t touch me, you dirty dehati. Wait till I tell my father.”

  The woman snickers. “You’re so smart. . . . What will your father do? Tell the judge your husband is no man and have you disinherited?” She turns to her partner. “Is it done? Check and let’s go.” Through the space between her legs, Saba sees the uninjured woman’s head disappear behind her trembling knees. A funny smell rises from the sheets and mixes with the sour stench of the peasant woman’s breath and clotting nasal blood. Saba feels something warm and sticky as she forces her thighs together. A pair of cold hands releases her knees, and they snap shut, causing her to roll over onto the soaking sheets, dark with her own blood and her captor’s, like an abandoned battleground at dusk.

  “Yes,” says the Basij’s muffled voice. “Let’s go.”

  The duo, their faces now fixed in her mind, strip her sheets for payment and rush to the door without another word. She watches them go, a weight in her chest moving painfully when one of them turns back to look at her. She tosses Saba a pitiful glance, her own version of female kinship. Outside they bark something to Abbas before collecting their fee and leaving the house in a dark, looming silence that is to be Saba’s home for . . . how long? Maybe forever. Maybe a hundred black years.

  For days Saba lies in her bed, alternately weeping and feeling like a fool for her tears. Is she no longer a virgin? Was this her very own twisted wedding night? Should she remember it always? The bargains of women. Abbas is right. She was a fool to try to bargain with him. She was a fool to ignore his fears and focus only on her own, to think she could marry and abandon him for an easy visa. What an idiotic plan. She was stupid enough to deserve this. And now she is here and married—for how long? She remembers the day she comforted Ponneh after the encounter with Mustafa. If only Mahtab were here to comfort her. She laughs at herself for judging Dr. Zohreh and her friends, thinking that they were yelling out into a faceless void in the West, while she was in complete control. She curses the vanity of her so-called logic. Now she reconsiders telling her father, because what is there to say? The peasant woman was right. He cannot seek justice without endangering her fortune. Beyond that, as a Christian convert he has to be discreet. Inviting legal battles or drawing the attention of the Basij would put them both at risk. The law frightens Saba. What if she told her father, anyway, even though he can’t act on it? The information would make him suffer and he would behave even more strangely toward her. No, she decides, telling him would be a mistake.

  She replays the event in her mind over and over, but is unable to pinpoint what has happened to her. Was it a crime? Does such a crime exist between husband and wife? Would it be wise to try for justice on her own? Ponneh never got any. What about leaving Abbas, moving to Tehran, and staying with a relative? Right away she rejects the idea. Things have changed. The worst has happened. It is no longer enough to slink off to America, become a taxi-driving, factory-working immigrant like the kind her cousins have described in letters. She wants much more for her sacrifice. I’m not leaving without the money. This isn’t, after all, her father’s vulnerable wealth that might be taken away by a whim of the government, but safe Muslim Widow Money that she has earned. One day she will flee Iran, find her mother, but she will take no steps that will leave her disinherited. Now is the time to be strong and rational. She forbids herself to betray Abbas’s secret out of revenge or anger. Unlike Mahtab, she cannot say no and walk away without loss. She will maast-mali the matter and collect her Yogurt Money, like the coins Khanom Omidi squirrels away from her yogurt sales. This kind of reward is her only consolation now that she is a wounded thing. It is her only means of freedom.

  “Bésame Mucho”

  (Khanom Basir)

  Lately I have been thinking about good-byes. In the year after the loss of Mahtab and her mother, Saba began to rebel in school and so her father sent her less and less, calling more often on tutors, men and women from Rasht who had once lived in America. They didn’t just teach her from books, but also explained all the slang from her TV programs and how to have a fast ear in English. Sometimes she would go to school when there was a test, and even then she caused trouble—wearing a brown maghnaeh (the ugly triangle-shaped school scarf) instead of a gray one as required, or wearing it backward, leaving the neck and ears exposed, or drawing fake tattoos with red marker on her own skin. She would come home and hide the angry letters from teachers. I told her, It’s no use riding a camel bent over. That is to say, if it’s obvious what you’re doing, don’t make a pathetic effort to hide it.

  She was so lost then. One day, from the Hafezis’ kitchen, I overheard Saba crying in the sitting room because of some small thing, a program that no longer aired because of the new government. She grumbled and chewed her nails over it, adding so much meaning. What was left for her now? So many of her favorite things slipping away with each passing day. As I peered around the corner, I could see on her blotchy face that she was thinking of Mahtab, all the dreams they had together. Look at them now, the Hafezi twins. What has become of them and their grand future . . . their mother’s plans?

  When her father got home, Saba had fallen asleep on a cushion in the corner of the room, tears dried to her face. He looked bewildered. He took off his jacket and put on a very famous song by Vigen. I can see that to this day, Saba has a special love for Vigen, this handsome Christian artist who brought western guitar music to Ir
an and whose first song was called “Mahtab.” The song Agha Hafezi played that day was “Mara Beboos,” or “Give Me a Kiss.” If you ask anyone around here what the two most beloved Iranian songs are, they will name that one, along with “Sultan of Hearts.” There’s a story that says the words of “Mara Beboos” were written by one of the Shah’s prisoners as a father’s good-bye to his daughter just before he was executed.

  Kiss me for the last time, the doomed man says, may God keep you for all time.

  Saba told me once, when she was a few years older, that this is just another pretty Iranian lie, because the song is exactly like a Spanish tune with the same name.

  Some time later Saba began to wake. She must have heard her father singing this haunting, wistful melody over and over to himself. He was sitting on the cushions around the living room floor, staring at nothing, thinking. I peeked in every now and then—there was no bottle or hookah around, but he was in another world. Then Saba crawled over to him and he pulled her onto his lap. He sang the words in her ear, and they sat together for a long time, her head on his chest, humming a father-daughter song.

  My spring has passed. All pasts have passed. Now I will go toward the fates.

  Afterward her father told her the story behind the song. “This is how all fathers feel about their daughters, and only their daughters. It is the same across time and the universe, and no mothers or sons or cousins or any other pair can replicate the hopes that lie beneath it.”

  Isn’t it funny how some memories are lost until one day they decide on their own to come back? I remember now that it was on that day that I first heard Saba tell a story about Mahtab—just a few words that made Agha Hafezi chuckle, about Mahtab’s plane ride to America. She did it for her father, to give his lost other daughter back to him.