Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (9781101601990)

by Nayeri, Dina

  “We can still celebrate,” her father offers before they reach the bus stop. “How about lunch at one of these kebab places? I know a good one not far from here.”

  Saba smiles—because her father is choosing not to dwell on the battles to come. She tries to push away the awful realization that her sacrifices, the scars she has suffered, guarantee her nothing. Like her father, she tries to ignore the sins of today. She reasons that all possessions are fleeting in the new Iran—all of life is a trick—and that she should enjoy her fickle reward while she still has it. A free pass for the girl with the thousand jinns, before she finds her way out of here.

  “Good idea,” she says. “I’m so hungry.”

  “You look thin,” her father jokes. He always teases her when he wants to make her happy, in those rare moments when he is himself and not consumed with work or the hookah or his lost wife and daughter. Maybe this is a new start for Saba and Agha Hafezi, not just an awkward father and child, but a pair of equals—in their hopes, in their wealth, in their grief for all that they have lost. “Time to start making you a fat, happy widow.”

  Heiress—a person (f) who lawfully receives the property of one deceased.

  Hermit—a person who chooses to live alone, apart from others.

  Hermes—Greek messenger of the gods. Also a store with orange boxes.

  Later in the evening she makes a new list of English words and considers her two options: staying with her father or looking for a ticket to America. She could do it now. She could finally try to get on that plane she missed when she was eleven. The resources are available and, after much research, she knows exactly what needs to be done. But somehow each time she begins counting the steps, she loses track of her thoughts and finds herself sinking into the warmth of village life. Maybe things will be better now.

  She wonders what Mahtab would do. She would probably choose America. If her mother were here, Saba would show her the piles of word lists she has amassed and ask if her English is good enough to make a respectable life there.

  She sorts through sheets of visa and passport instructions, her mother’s travel guides, and her bank statements, wondering how long it will all take. One day soon she will have to tell her father about her plans—but not yet. She cooks herself a lamb-and-eggplant stew for dinner. Overcome with gloom and desperate for distraction, she spends an hour skinning, stabbing, salting, and draining the eggplants. She fries them in olive oil and lays them on top of the meat—so tender after two hours that you can eat it with a spoon. When she is done, she realizes that she has made too much eggplant for the stew and so she roasts some tomatoes, adds them to the leftovers, and cooks the mixture with eggs, turmeric, and garlic. This dish, mirza ghasemi, is one of her favorite foods, yet she makes it now only as a way to rid herself of unwanted extra ingredients. When it is ready, she eats it standing up, not as an appetizer but as a part of cleaning up, with old bread, because that too should not be wasted.

  When the food is ready, she makes herself a plate, skins an entire clove of pickled garlic from the giant jars lined up outside, drops the pungent copper morsels onto her stew, and takes it all into the sitting room, where she arranges six pillows and leans back, preparing for an evening of solitary smoking and outdated American television.

  She has already achieved an impressive stupor, far more powerful than any herb or television or despair alone could provide, when there is a knock at the door. She rubs her garlic-and-vinegar-stained fingers on her jeans. No point in washing her hands—pickled garlic, with its skin-penetrating smell, is a long-term guest, invited in only by a certain type of unmarried woman, the kind who is no longer looking.

  Hopeless. Housebound. Hermit.

  She rolls herself off the rug and ambles toward the door. Her feet have fallen asleep so takes her time crossing the front yard and unlatching the tall gate.

  Reza is waiting outside with his arms crossed over his brown jacket, his eyes darting from one side of the street to the other, checking for nosy neighbors or roaming pasdars.

  As Reza slides past her and into the front yard, Saba’s first thought is, Why has he come? There is no reason, now that she has no husband to receive him.

  “I meant to come see you earlier,” he says.

  “Why?” she asks. The fact that she smells like a house cook makes her want to be cruel, but the best she can do is a vague stab at indifference.

  Reza shrugs. He looks a little sad and tries to cover it with an uncertain half-smile. “I thought we could spend some time together. I’ve decided that we should.”

  “You’ve ‘decided’?” she teases. “And why have you decided now?”

  He fidgets. She thinks she understands why he is here, yet neither of them knows how to be anything but the two friends who used to smoke together and talk about American music. “I’m sorry I took so long to visit,” he says. He looks down as if trying to remember a prepared speech. “It’s not easy avoiding gossip around here, you know. But I’m not going to leave you alone twice. You’re unprotected now . . . maybe you need someone to check on you once in a while. To fix things for you.”

  Saba chews on her thumbnail. It tastes like vinegar and oil. Surely he can smell it too. She feels the need to explain the way she looks. “I made a big dinner.”

  Reza looks confused, worried about losing his place in the speech.

  “You can have some, if you want,” she says, as she leads him inside. “But anyway . . . I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “Or you wouldn’t have cooked?” Reza jokes, and momentarily her old friend is back. She has the urge to take him to her father’s pantry and show him her new songs.

  Saba smiles. “Yes, actually, I wouldn’t have,” she says. She gives him a defiant look—a world-weary widow look. When the door is closed, she holds out her hand toward his back, motioning for him to come inside, but he takes it and kisses her palm, pulls her close to him, kisses her lips.

  She glances over his shoulder at the door, but now he has his hands in her hair and she forgets about doors or roaming pasdars or nosy neighbors or the garlic. She thinks of his feet in the pantry—the two of them barefoot and slightly drunk in the dark, daring only to feel each other’s toes. “I’m happy you came,” she says.

  “You taste like eggplant khoresht,” he jokes.

  She pushes against his chest and tries to pull away, but he doesn’t let go. “In that case,” she says, “you can’t have any of it.”

  They spend the evening in blissful seclusion, sampling the many private pleasures in Saba’s house. They have never been alone together for an entire evening. Never had a meal without the families. They eat at the kitchen table at first, but decide to move the food to a sofreh in the living room instead, to sit on a pile of cushions together, lie back, and feed each other morsels of lamb and stew-soaked bread. “Too bad we’re not back in your father’s pantry,” says Reza, and Saba is reminded of her bag of herbs. Reza rolls a joint in a blank back page he rips out of one of her books, and they lie back on the cushions, smoke, and pick at the dinner with their fingers, heads pressed together, Saba’s Walkman stretched taut over both of their ears. They listen to Janis Joplin, Madonna, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and a series of artists Saba thinks the Tehrani has mislabeled. When the honey-rich conch-shell voice of Tracy Chapman murmurs the first notes of “Fast Car,” neither sighs or mentions the last time they heard it. They listen and quietly hum along. Then Saba switches the tape to her favorite songs about the sea. She saves the best for last, “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” and “Downeaster ‘Alexa.’”

  When Reza grabs her by the waist and pulls her to him, she wonders if it’s a mistake becoming involved with him in this way. Did she not suffer to remove him from her heart? Did she not find him weak when she needed him? But Reza was so young when he let her be married. What could he do? And he has since apologize
d. He has been brave and kind, a true friend. She thinks of the day of Farnaz’s hanging, when he came to find them. Certainly Reza has changed, as she has done. And he is choosing her now, despite the predictions of his mother and all of Cheshmeh. Maybe he is using her because Ponneh is still not allowed to marry. But then again, maybe Saba is using him. Why not?

  One day she might be far from this place, and she will think of him—her beautiful friend who used to show off for her, kicking his football with sandaled feet outside her house. If she lets this chance go, she would wonder what his skin and hair would have felt like, what it would have been like to lie across him once or twice.

  “Let’s not do this here,” she says, suddenly afraid of what she might experience, her first time with a man. What about all the damage that waits unseen inside her? Should she tell him her secrets? She rests her cheek against his neck. “The neighbors will know.”

  He reaches for her hand. “Then how do we see each other in this small town?”

  “I know a place we can go. Dr. Zohreh gave me a key.”

  Twice a week at dusk, Saba sits alone in her father’s car and drives to the shack by the sea. If she is going to lose Abbas’s fortune and end up wandering the earth, looking for entry into a new country, she might as well enjoy the here and now. Why should she sit in a pantry, dreaming of things she can reach out and take? She remembers pining over happy memories of the Caspian of her childhood. Of Friday trips to the beach in summer. Of the cold sea leaving salt on her bare skin. Of bare skin. Of fish cooked over open fire. The family car climbing a small, flat, rocky hill on a winter day, barely hanging on to the now dusty, now icy, unpaved road chiseled into the side of the mountain. The sea, gray and foggy, then hills, mountains, and rock. And then in the spring, the bursting green forest, the terns, and the never-ending water. Now seaside trips are tedious. No more breezy picnics. A tattered curtain dividing the beach. The heat of eyes always watching.

  For weeks Reza has visited Saba in the mountain shack, sometimes in the green Paykan he shares or, when he has less time to spend, speeding to her on a borrowed motorcycle, sometimes hitchhiking in the backs of overloaded Jeeps full of day laborers. They have had many afternoons and nights there, in Saba’s secret house. They make love relentlessly, though she was afraid at first. She wondered if she should do this, if it would hurt as much as the Dallak Day. But then, on their first visit, Reza touched her cheek like someone holding a baby bird, and things were no longer awkward between them. He mistook the fear in her eyes for memories of Abbas. What did he make her do? She laughed and they spent the evening talking instead, about music and the old days. Later in the night she discovered that it hurt only a little. And the second and third time didn’t hurt at all. She had expected something searing—like that other day. But always afterward the skin of her fingers hums—a beautiful surprise. How can skin be capable of humming? It seems there are uses for her body that she has overlooked.

  Sometimes she has a hard time getting up right away, and Reza makes jokes—teases her with a vulgar phrase translating roughly to “fucked stupid,” which, in the mouths of villagers, used to shock her, but now makes her laugh. Sometimes he growls, his stubble running over her stomach as if he is trying to whisper to the banshee, the wild hungry thing running barefoot inside, or maybe their future children. It is an animal part of him—and exquisite. But other times, when it is dark, she imagines the shadows on the wall pulling together, coalescing into the silhouettes of the two fleshy women from another lifetime. They are here in the cabin, hovering over her. But they never stay for very long. She pushes them away, stores them in a different compartment of her memory, in an attic or cellar, a place for boxing away items no longer needed for the day-to-day.

  She reads “The Sin” by Forough Farrokhzad, a poem she finally understands.

  I sinned a sin full of pleasure . . . Oh God, I know not what I did.

  Despite the thrill of her new secret, she feels guilty about Ponneh and unbalancing their trio. Even in their teenage days, when Saba mentioned Reza, Ponneh grew quiet, afraid of losing them both.

  As autumn winds down, she stops wishing she could run away. She stops looking for her mother, but she doesn’t discard any of her research. The passport forms, visa guidelines, and California leaflets remain her paper security blanket, though since her romance with Reza, they are no longer an obsession. She begins to consider an alternate future, imagining herself a wife again, but this time one who is beloved, sexy like the actress Azar Shiva, full of life, worshipped by her husband. Maybe one day she can be a mother, a strong, principled one like her own. Secretly she pictures Reza’s chin, his nose, his mouth on the faces of her future children. It is an easier daydream now that her plans for America are tainted by the fear of taking a first step. There is no longer anything stopping her from trying for a visa. Why hasn’t she?

  She tells herself to wait a little longer. When she goes to America, everything will be strange and unfamiliar; she will want to have experienced this time with Reza, to take it with her as a comfort.

  On their fourth visit to the shack, late in the afternoon when the air is heavy and the walls seem to drip with seawater that has traveled in through a window and settled on their bodies, when Reza is tangled up in her arms, her legs, her hair, a discarded Walkman in a corner whispering about a lonely town and a lonely street, she feels a sharp sting below her belly. She asks if he wants her to change position, but Reza, thinking she is worried about pleasing him, kisses her and continues. A minute later he looks down at their legs, naked on a thin sheet on the floor, and says, “What’s this?”

  Saba sits up on her elbows and pushes back her hair. “What?”

  “You’re bleeding,” he says. “I thought today wasn’t one of those days . . .”

  Saba feels herself flush from her temples all the way down to her shoulders. Will she have to tell him now? She takes a deep breath and collects the sheet around her body. “I don’t know what it is,” she mutters. “Maybe it came from you.”

  Reza scans her face, then the bloody sheet. “Don’t be crazy,” he says. “Tell me.”

  Saba takes a deep breath. What is the harm? He might as well know this last intimate detail. After she has finished explaining, there is a long silence. Reza looks away and whispers to himself. Maybe he’s trying to figure out what is expected of him—what a man might do in those times when a boy would be forgiven for running away.

  Then he reaches over and pulls Saba into his arms—a hard, jerky motion because he is overwhelmed. But to Saba, this is a release, a shock of cold and warm. She rests her head on his shoulder; he strokes her hair. Somehow it reminds her of the day Ponneh was beaten, when she watched Reza comfort her with children’s songs and tell her the bruises would take nothing from her beauty. That day she watched Reza’s too-long hair mingle with Ponneh’s as they whispered to each other. And now, as he holds her in their shack, she thinks that maybe he feels the same about her, that they might have the same intimate ways. Maybe she’s no longer Saba Khanom, but someone equal to him.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t do more,” Reza whispers. He chews the corner of his upper lip. “I should have said something. But don’t cry, Saba jan. I’ll take care of everything.” He looks into her face again, pushes back a sweaty strand of hair, and says, “Let’s get married.”

  She looks up at her dirty-haired lover, this careless boy from another world, a peasant world that is in many ways more removed from hers than the ones on television. He is asking for her, though he has nothing to offer, no education or family. The romance of it makes her want to say yes. She hesitates, wondering, does he love her or does he feel sorry for her? Is he attracted to the wounded part of her that needs protecting? When he was a child, he used to think she and Mahtab were princesses. Maybe he still wants to be a storybook hero. And what about America? Can she wait a little longer? He studies her hand and he says, “We
could even have a baby, to make you forget all your troubles.” Her heart leaps at this. It seems her body at least wants a child more than an American life. This could be her destiny, finally to blend into the comfortable, protective tapestry of Cheshmeh. If she has children with Reza, she might never leave. It would tie her to Iran forever, because one thing is certain: Saba would never leave a child as her mother did. So if she stays in the safety and warmth of Reza’s arms, if she forms a new kind of bond with him, one that even Ponneh doesn’t have, what will happen to her other dreams? When she remains silent for too long, Reza seems to falter. “I’ll take care of you,” he says. “I know you don’t need money . . . but it’s not all about money. This is what I should have done from the beginning,” Reza whispers. “We’re already family.”

  For the rest of the night, he wraps himself around her like a winter coat. He darts this way and that, looking for ways to ease her every burden, making her tea, bringing her pillows and aspirin though she assures him she has no pain, softening the cold edges of the shack with the warmth of his concern. It seems that he is desperate to help her heal, to marry her not out of pity but because he wants to protect her from the world and make her whole again. She studies him and thinks he would make a good husband. How beautiful their children would be. A baby might fill the empty space in her heart—someone tied to her by blood, like Mahtab, like her mother. If she were to take on a new role, have a daughter and name her Mahtab, she might never again wonder about the airport day or wake up in a sweat, convinced she is drowning. Reza has brought his setar with him. He toys with the strings and hums “Mara Beboos,” the haunting melody about good-bye as he leans against the wall, his voice revealing a trace of sadness that she has come to love. Saba lies between his legs, her head against his chest, and stares out at the black night beyond the small window.