Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (9781101601990)

by Nayeri, Dina

  “Do you know what your mother said to me once . . . after the accident?” Dr. Zohreh offers. “She told me, if anything ever happened to her, to make sure you don’t grow up to be too safe and sensible.” She shakes her head and sips her tea. “What a funny thing to tell a daughter in this day and age.”

  Yes, what a funny thing, Saba muses. Certainly her mother would be disappointed to hear of her choices. Marrying an old man for money. Putting aside college to tend to a man who can barely read a word of English. There is a frightening possibility that Saba has made a lifetime of foolish choices. But is Bahareh Hafezi in any position to judge? Whether she left or was arrested for her activities, didn’t she abandon Saba one way or another? Didn’t she leave her daughter to fend for herself? And this is how Saba has chosen to protect herself—it’s the way her surrogate mothers have taught her, and Khanom Hafezi has no right to interject her opinion through this stranger. The mothers who raised her instructed her to follow the old ways, and that is what Saba has done. There was no one around to push her to do otherwise. “That’s all she said?” Saba asks. “Tell me more about her. When did you talk to her?”

  Now Dr. Zohreh looks surprised. “Talk to her?” she says. “Well, same as anyone else, of course . . . years ago, before she was . . . taken.” She examines Saba with her inquisitive doctorly gaze and adds, “I think she means you should have some purpose. Something that’s worth being reckless for. She cared so much about your potential.”

  Saba nods, sips her tea.

  “You know,” the doctor says as she straightens the tea tray, “our work is your mother’s legacy in a way. You should visit one day when we have a meeting—”

  Saba cuts her off. “Can you tell me anything about what happened to her?”

  When Dr. Zohreh gets up and starts lighting a lamp and two candles, Saba thinks she is just creating work for her hands. Soon the frosty windows shine yellow and Dr. Zohreh sighs, pleased. “Isn’t that lovely?” She warms the bread over a hand stove, but Saba is well aware of this trick. Her mother used it to avoid her father’s questions in the weeks—or was it months or a different year entirely?—before her disappearance. Saba sits back and refuses to say a word, determined to wait out the game.

  Finally Dr. Zohreh breathes out again and says, “If you don’t hear from someone after they’re taken to Evin Prison . . . Well, you know.”

  “I don’t,” says Saba, as she considers the reasons for the arrest. Maybe her mother passed out Dr. Zohreh’s leaflets or played too much Gospel Radio Iran for the field-workers.

  “Here’s how I see it,” the doctor says. “Somebody told your father they saw her at the prison, correct? That’s why he began to look for her there.” Saba nods. “But did you know that there was never any paperwork?”

  Saba’s fingers are working through a piece of ghotab bread, breaking it into crumbs on the table. She wishes the doctor would just get to it. “I don’t understand.”

  Dr. Zohreh nods. “The prison claims that she was never there, and of course, I have to be very honest with you, this is what they often say when something unexpected has happened to the prisoner. . . .” She trails off and cleans up some of Saba’s crumbs. “I think it’s easier for your father to believe that she died there. She was so brave, you know. . . . And it really is the most logical explanation, Saba jan.”

  Saba conjures the vision of her mother at the airport. She refuses to believe Dr. Zohreh. Who is she to say definitively that her mother is dead? She takes a deep breath and tries not to touch her throat, because surely the doctor will judge her weakness.

  “But,” Dr. Zohreh continues, “who is to decide that the person claiming to have seen your mother is any more reliable than the prison guards? I say that the lack of paperwork gives us two possibilities.” Saba can see a glimmer of excitement in the doctor’s face, and her mind wanders through the jumbled memories of the day at the airport. Did she see the pasdars take her mother away? In that last moment—before her mother disappeared into the crowd headed for America—did they see each other in the terminal lounge, at the gate, in the security line? Was Mahtab wearing a coat in summer?

  She tries to focus on the possibility that her mother’s best friend is now offering. “She might have died,” Saba begins, “or . . .” She stops there, considering what this other, more hopeful option means.

  “She might never have been arrested at all,” says Dr. Zohreh.

  “Yes,” Saba mumbles. She might have abandoned Cheshmeh and her family.

  Since seeing the letter to Evin, Saba has tried so many times to piece together the sequence of events from that day. How could Mahtab have gotten on a plane with a mother who had just been arrested? But now, with this new possibility, her airport memories could very well be true. Baba might have been wrong about Evin. Now her elegant mother returns, wearing a blue manteau, holding Mahtab’s hand, boarding a plane—a picture that’s suddenly lifelike again, as if someone had turned the knobs on a TV and cleared up all the static and white lines.

  Saba exhales, letting a pleasant calm wash over her.

  It makes sense. After all, how could her father have been distracted enough to lose his wife to the pasdars? Is he too ashamed to admit that she did abandon him? That she did run away without a word? Why isn’t he angrier? Why does he never curse the wife who brought such plagues into his life? Maybe that is a part of his private suffering. Maybe he helped her run away and refuses to tell Saba, because she too might leave him.

  In the early evening, when the candles and lamps have grown dim and the sun is lost behind acres of frosted mountains, when the bread is dry and the windows have lost their warm yellow glow and returned to their gray coat of wet glaze, Saba excuses herself. She doesn’t like to be near the sea at night. “I have to be home before Abbas.”

  “What do you think about coming to our next meeting?” Dr. Zohreh asks again as she looks for Saba’s chador behind the boxes. Glancing out into the black, Saba imagines her younger self, playing with Mahtab that day in the water.

  “Today was nice,” Saba says. “I’m glad I came. But I’m sorry, this isn’t for me.”

  Dr. Zohreh seems surprised. “Are you sure? Your mother—”

  “I’m sure,” says Saba. There is far too much at stake. Her entire future for what? The thrill of broadcasting the country’s collective misery to the world? Shaming hordes of oblivious Iranian men who may never even know that they have been punished? She has no need for that. There is a real man, a flesh-and-blood sinner to punish all she wants, waiting in her own house. “Besides, this is Ponneh’s project. I think I’ll let her have it.”

  Dr. Zohreh smiles, as if she knows this is just an excuse. “Take this then,” she says, and reaches for something in her pocket. She gives Saba an old key on a thick string. “Come to this house anytime you need a place to think.”

  The two part ways—each with a few nostalgic words about Saba’s mother—donning their black-and-gray coverings and disappearing in their cars into the night. All the way back home, Saba pictures the sea just beyond the tree cover. The frightful rocks. The creaking, unsteady pier. The boats tossed by waves. Such misty winter days have a strange effect on the Caspian, giving it the murky, gloomy quality of an unhappy dream. Saba longs for summer. She rubs the key to the shack between her fingers and thinks of the knife-wielding pasdar from her nightmares, the one who says, “On your life, where is Mahtab?” Across the sea, she whispers to him in her mind, certain again after so long.

  Revolution Music

  (Khanom Basir)

  In 1979, when the girls were nine, the Hafezis put them through some bad things for the sake of their religion. Before that, the family had lived peacefully in Tehran and Cheshmeh, just the four of them, with their doors mostly closed. Once in a while I saw their Christ-worshipping friends come and go, and a few of us helped Bahareh in the house, but
that was all. After the revolution, they had to live differently—in more ways than just tossing out the short shorts and doing without foreign chocolate squares. Now the secrets of the house became a point of trouble. Their heads began to smell like lamb stew, as they say, tempting for predators. But Agha Hafezi wasn’t the kind of Christ worshipper who advertised, and he soon realized that the best way to hide was out in the open. Unlike cowards in big cities who shut themselves up in their houses, thinking they were safe, he welcomed villagers into his sitting room. If he was ever accused, an entire village could honestly say, “I’ve dined in his home. He has a Koran and Muslim friends. If he was Christian, I’d know it.” It was a clever thing, oiling the bread of the neighbors, turning them from spies and informants into friends.

  During the revolution, there weren’t any street riots or protests in Cheshmeh, only radio broadcasts and new rules for living—no foreign logos, no more non-Muslim music. Soon, in the bigger cities, pasdars began to appear everywhere in their olive uniforms, piled four by four into camel-colored jeeps, taking people to the offices of the komiteh—the police force that sprang from the mosques in 1979 and started telling people that everything was a sin. It got worse and worse over the years. Your ankle is showing? Sin! Your nails are red? Sin. You have a tan? You must have been naked in sunlight. Sin! Sin! Sin! If you have your sunglasses on top of your head, you are posing too much. If your jeans are inside your boots, you are too exposed. Imagine that. I joked that if they made nose jobs a sin and levied a fine, there would be big money from Tehran. Bahareh fumed against all this. Most of us were too afraid to speak and were glad to be living in a quiet village with fewer pasdars. Gradually, over several years, women felt the chafe of the mandatory head scarf and long, dark manteaus. Even here, where hair coverings are part of our traditional dress, and we still wear colors without trouble, there is a feeling of loss for not having chosen our modesty. I sense this even from the very religious. For the most part, we villagers are noticed only when we travel to the cities or sell straw handicrafts in box stands by roads near the seaside. In big cities, anything can happen. Once, when Ponneh was only thirteen, she was stopped in Rasht because her manteau was buttoned on the side—more fashionable even though it covered everything. Nothing was ever enough for them. They wanted to turn us to dust.

  If you ask someone from the North, someone whose life moves with the sea, they will tell you that one of the worst new rules was about the beach. Before the revolution, we used to go with our families to the sea, eat together, swim together. Women wore shamefully small swimming costumes and changed in beach huts that smelled like wet bamboo and reed mats. Then they began putting huge curtains, old pieces of dirty cloth full of holes and tears, across the beach to separate men and women, husbands and wives, daughters and fathers. Sometimes they divided the beach by the time of day—mornings for men, afternoons for women. Either way, no more swimming with family. No more fun. Women had to swim fully clothed. They were told not to draw attention to themselves. Little girls watched longingly as boys played in the water in shorts, never taking care to be quiet. Maybe that’s why on the day Mahtab was lost, the Hafezi twins thought they would have a better time swimming at night.

  Between 1979 and 1981, we heard about riots from friends in Tehran. We heard about tortures and executions and shootings into crowds. People disappeared sometimes, never to return. The Shah fled. The clerics took over, hanging pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini everywhere, filling the streets with posters of bloody fists and “Death to America.” In the early days of the revolution, schools were closed and the Hafezi girls were locked in their room, reading their books and listening to their foreign music.

  During that first month of not knowing, when the world outside was changing and the girls were shut up in their big, big bedroom, mullahs from Cheshmeh and Rasht started visiting the Hafezi house. Agha Hafezi felt the need to invite them, these new cleric kings, to keep them close and happy. Mullah Ali was one of them, but he was different because he had known Agha Hafezi for years. He lived in Cheshmeh and made himself the grease that kept Agha Hafezi’s sharp edges from grinding against the mullahs’ ears. He offered up loud jokes, laughing at his own stupid wit and telling long-winded stories from the Koran. It worked because none of the mullahs asked extra questions, and after a while, only one or two of them ever came back. If they had discovered the family’s secret, Agha Hafezi would have been jailed or killed because the family weren’t born Christians like the Armenians or Assyrians. They were converts from Islam. If a Muslim killed them, it would be no sin. Of course Mullah Ali knew. So did I. But wise old storytellers like us know that it would be bad for everyone if that were made public.

  Hidden in their fancy prison, the girls made up their own revolution songs and war slogans. For months, the jinns and paris from another time gave way to martyrs and heroes and blood and rifles. One day, at the dinner sofreh, Mahtab said that the lamb had been martyred for our sake, and Bahareh told her to stop talking nonsense and eat. If you ask me, the loss of good stories in favor of all that war and revolution garbage was the worst part of it. To Bahareh, the worst was the loss of her house, no longer private, no longer hers at all. She became angry. She lost her temper more often with the girls.

  There is a rumor that Agha Hafezi spent two weeks in prison in those days. Maybe it’s true. He was gone once for that long and came back with his hair shorn off. When he returned, he listened to all of Saba’s music and let her keep only one English-language tape of children’s songs. He made a show of the new rule in front of the mullahs and other guests, even though he had never been strict with the girls before. But you know what they say, he who has been bitten by a snake is afraid of black and white.

  Ei vai, the trouble this American music caused! I don’t see why those girls were so crazy for it—and once it was banned, they craved it more. That day in her room, I heard Saba crying in her mother’s lap, and Bahareh told the girl that the revolutionaries were wrong. Every beautiful or fun thing isn’t a sin and God loves all people’s music. Jesus loves women’s loose hair, she said, and foreign books, and especially artistic talent. True art, she said, is God’s greatest creation. Then she told Saba she might as well throw away the tape of children’s songs too, because if no one cares about it, then it is pointless, with no power or meaning. She sounded sad, like she wanted to run away.

  Later Saba managed to dig up some of her tapes from the garbage outside.

  “Nothing’s gonna change my world,” she hummed a hundred times that year, so we all learned its meaning—and later too, as she rode in her baba’s car, on a bad, bad day full of green scarves and blue manteaus and brown hats that separated her from her sister.

  Mark my words, God will never forgive Bahareh for her impractical ways, for teaching her daughter to search for meaning in illegal nothings.

  Chapter Twelve

  SUMMER 1991

  According to the customs of women from the North, it is bad luck to cut fabric on a Tuesday. Traveling on Mondays brings ill omens, and if you sweep on a Wednesday, you will have jinns in your house. It is not advisable to clip your nails on Fridays or in the evenings, and when you do, the clippings should be wrapped in newspaper and hidden in the cracks of the walls. Since being married, Saba has found a new place among the women of Cheshmeh, sharing their bawdiness and their tales, their sweets and their superstitions, in an entirely new way. They live by a thousand unexplained rules. But now that Saba has learned to listen, she can hear reason behind every one.

  “I can’t sweep, Agha jan,” Saba’s neighbor says to her husband as she reclines with a book of poems. “Do you want to invite jinns?”

  “I can’t mend your clothes today,” the Mansooris’ granddaughter, Niloo, says to Reza’s older brother, Peyman, as she points to the calendar on their wall. “Tuesday.”

  It seems that in the old days the men of Rasht struggled to comprehend the need for a day of r
est. “The wives are at home all day,” they would say. “They have too much rest.” But the women soon discovered that even though their husbands did not understand fatigue and moderation, they did understand jinns, omens, and bad luck. And so a series of fortuitous discoveries were made. The laziest women made the most astonishing finds: if a person sneezes once, she must drop everything she is doing and wait for the second sneeze—even if it takes all day. Otherwise . . . jinns. And the jealous wives discovered that if a man leaves the house in the morning and he sees a woman in his path, he must go back into the house and start over.

  Saba sits in her front yard and reads about these rules in an old book she found in her mother’s collection. She loves Abbas’s front yard. The high walls painted white. The small fountain with goldfish. The low benches tucked beneath the roofs of Spanish-style covered walkways. Along the rough walls pocked by jutting straw and clumping paint, massive jars of ten-year-old pickled garlic, each tall enough to reach Saba’s thighs, are lined up like sentries. They have been prepared and left there by Abbas’s first wife. Beside them hangs a massive portrait of a long-dead family patriarch. A colorful ghali, a small rug sometimes used on the backs of donkeys, cushions Saba’s favorite bench where she likes to read or watch the fish in the fountain. She imagines that Abbas’s first wife was a superstitious woman.

  After a while she meanders back to her room where her latest books and newspapers await. She has been reading more foreign news lately. The publications are usually out of date, but she is interested to know what The New York Times and The Economist have to say about her country. She picks up an article from an April New York Times, brought to her by her faithful Tehrani. A reporter named Judith Miller quotes a diplomatic source: “The revolution is finally over.” Saba snorts and reads on. The article talks about the komiteh officers and their recent merge with the regular police. It talks about how women no longer wear the unfashionable maghnaeh, the triangular academic Super Scarf required (along with a manteau) for school. It says the pasdars are pulling back and there are no more photos of Khomeini in the streets. “Well, that’s good of you to tell us,” she says aloud—certain that there are still more than enough photos; even one in her father’s office—and envies the female reporter whose name is the only clue about her. Probably she is like Mahtab, headstrong and ambitious. A real journalist.