Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (9781101601990)

by Nayeri, Dina

  Anyway, to bring head and tail to it all: at the airport Saba saw Mahtab.

  Chapter Nineteen

  LATE AUTUMN 1992

  Even before Saba is finished listening to the tape, a strange, unexpected calm washes over her. She has always known this. Nothing has changed. Her decision is made and there is no future for her in Cheshmeh. Oh, but to be a nothing player in someone else’s love story. It hurts—has always hurt—to the bone. She drops the Walkman on the floor and meanders to her private hammam, remembering that in America baths lack a certain indulgence. She sheds her clothes and wraps herself in a towel, turning on both showerheads in the far corners and watching from the bench by the wall as the room fills with steam. Her thoughts drift back to the tape. It is dated shortly before Reza came to see her, and it was obviously intended for Ponneh. But he never gave her the tape. Or maybe Ponneh sent it back. Did he ask her to marry him first? Clearly he did. This must be why they behaved so strangely before the wedding. But instead of anger, Saba feels pity for her husband. Why did Ponneh refuse? Because she didn’t love him? Because she wanted to keep the security of their threesome? Or because of her mother’s rule? Ponneh’s sister was still alive then. As the steam relaxes her, she lets her mind wander down these many paths, but then she finds herself asking, Does it matter? No, she answers, it doesn’t—a comforting revelation now that she is sure of it.

  She thinks of all that happened between the date on the tape and now. Before the wedding, in Khanom Alborz’s yard, she knew from the way Reza stared at Ponneh. He loved her then. And yet he turned away and continued with his marriage to Saba. What a bizarre notion of fidelity. If only he could understand that Saba didn’t need protecting, that he has harmed and caged her with his love, given her a reason to be a coward.

  The three of us forever, they have said to each other since childhood, and it has been true. Ponneh was there when Saba first married, when Abbas died, and for every milestone in between. Reza asked after her daily in the town square and at her father’s house, and came to see her whenever he could. To him this is a natural ending to years of devoted friendship—that he should marry one or the other—like the Zanerooz story they read with Khanom Mansoori when they were fourteen.

  But who is Saba to judge Reza’s choice, his ideas about loyalty? She was raised by the same mothers and longed to be a part of his world before realizing she belonged in Mahtab’s. Briefly she considers the money. Was he motivated by it? She remembers the day she told Reza and Ponneh a Mahtab story in an alley behind the post office. She offered Reza a tape of songs and he refused to take it without paying. She is confident that he would behave exactly the same today. He is an honorable man. It was never class or money that came between them; she is finally certain of this. Now another memory from that day comes to her, when she told her friends the difference between old, inherited money and new, earned money. She smiles at her childish logic, because isn’t it all the same? She should let them have it. What use is money if not to clear the road for cherished friends. They will need it after she is gone.

  She lies back on the bench and closes her eyes as she drips hot water on her belly with a sponge. She considers one of her father’s favorite verses from Khayyam’s Rubaiyat and says it aloud as she douses herself with a cup of hot water.

  Ah Love! Could thou and I with Fate conspire

  To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

  Would not we shatter it to bits—and then

  Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

  A few minutes later Reza enters with the battered guitar her father used to keep in the sitting room closet, the one Reza once plucked, comparing the notes with his setar. The guitar is old and out of tune now, and it has become their habit to take it into the hammam. One day they know the steam will end its life, warping the wood and rusting the strings, but they take pleasure in using it up in this indulgent way. Reza takes off his clothes and joins her on the bench, bringing the guitar and a plate of sweet lemon wedges. He puts the plate beside her and looks at her expectantly.

  “I saw the tape on the floor,” he whispers. She shakes her head to make him stop.

  He strums a few notes, the beginning of one of her favorite songs, as she gets up from the bench. He watches her drop her long hair down her back, the fog enveloping her sinful, overindulged widow’s body. He has an old-style way with the guitar, playing with just two fingers so that the notes drone pure and uncluttered like setar music and echo through the hammam one at a time. He plays “Fast Car” beautifully now, so that it sounds like a twangy Iranian version of itself, and recently he learned “Stairway to Heaven” because she mentioned it once and left a mix tape cued up to it. Through the steam and the water, she catches him looking at her and wonders if he is thinking about how damaged she is. Can he see all that she can still do, her coming legacy?

  She thinks of their best days, all those early mornings when they started the day in this hammam, when he put away the guitar and pulled her to the bench and they wasted the early hours—the time when only jinns come to bathe—covered in fog, reliving those first uncertain wood-shack visits when they decided to forget about dead husbands and Basijis and Ponneh and meddling mothers and discover something illegal and exquisite. At thier best, they might spend hours like this before some buried sorrow surfaces and Saba forces him out of her world. Can they have one more of those days now, a sort of good-bye? There are things that are impossible to let go. But a hammam at the skirt of a mountain, with its softening light and shadowy half figures moving through steam like ghosts, is a place for cures, for good memories. Sometimes the light from a small window catches a watery patch of air above the bathers, revealing the particles of dirt settling around them like clouds. Then you can begin to see the harsher, less beautiful angles.

  “I don’t think we did so bad at marriage,” she says, “considering . . .”

  She tells him she wants to go, but not because of the tape or anything else he has done. He tells her that he never lied about loving her, that he is sorry it wasn’t enough, in that hand-of-fate way from her books. He pulls her to him, her hair dripping against his chest. “My overlooked beauty,” he whispers, because now they both know what will become of them. “I’ll keep your every detail in my memory, like a painting.”

  Later she watches Reza disappear toward the entrance, letting in a cold gust of air as he opens the door. Now that he is slipping away, she recalls the way he brought her tea when she was angry, his guitar songs and village-hero dreams. Soon he will be gone and she will have to bottle up her memories of hammam music and days spent pretending. As he is about to shut the door, she shouts after him. “I need permission to leave Iran,” she says, holding a small hope that he will object or ask to go along.

  But he only says, “Whatever you need,” and Saba’s briny Rashti heart, the part of her that belongs to Cheshmeh and is terrified of the strange and unknown, struggles to find its momentum again.

  He let me go. She drives through the mountains alone, early in the evening. It stings a little. But it wasn’t all false. Reza tried to love her. He tried with every song and every showy kick of the ball outside her window. He wanted to save her, to keep her for himself. The lines from Khayyam meander back to her; maybe now she can love Reza in a new way. It is possible to shatter the old and remold her fate to her own heart’s desire.

  It isn’t Reza’s fault, she thinks, or Ponneh’s. The Reza she married was as much a creation, as much a distortion of reality, as the Mahtab of her stories. She made him up to help her live her life here. He is a falsehood, a phantom, a magic shadow show. We are all invented beings, she thinks, built this way or that to suit each other’s needs.

  The drive to the mountain shack is a blur. She doesn’t even know why she is going there, only that now she is too somber to do anything else and she needs a mother. She surprises herself with the realization that her sadness i
sn’t about Ponneh and Reza. They have been building up to this since childhood. Rather, she is angry at herself for waiting, for never making the brave leaps she imagined for Mahtab. For believing so many lies. How many lies has she told herself over the years?

  The car winds around the mountain and slowly the winter chill seeps in. She parks near the precipice and glances at the landscape before getting out. But as soon as she approaches the shack, she realizes it was a mistake, a step backward, coming here to this familiar place. Every detail reminds her of the life she is abandoning. The smell of woods and a fire and winter cold. The sound of the nocturnal sea rushing toward the shore. The cold grainy doorknob in her hand. This is the place where she first found romance, where she and Reza had their first nights alone. A flood of memories overtakes her. She turns back to her car and is about to climb in when the front door of the house opens.

  Dr. Zohreh calls out to her, “Saba jan, what’s happened?”

  The concern in the voice of her mother’s old friend makes Saba feel foolish. When the doctor approaches, Saba breathes in, summoning strength. “Nothing,” she says. “I was just feeling sentimental.” She smiles for the doctor’s sake, so that she won’t worry, and says good-bye before Dr. Zohreh can invite her inside. She drives down the hill toward the water, remembering long-gone days when she and her family drove down these mountain roads to swim in the Caspian. How long has it been since she dipped her foot in the sea? For years she has crept closer and closer, but has been too afraid to touch. Now who knows when she will see it again?

  She parks near a beach and makes her way toward the stilted houses in the water and the fish shack perched on the pier. Patches of snow dot the darkening horizon. There are no seagulls in sight, but something birdlike calls from afar. She walks along the now calm, now raging sea. The light spray of water on her face reminds her of that day in the summer when she and her sister took a midnight swim. But that was long ago. Everything is decided now, so what is this sudden unease?

  Halfway down the beach, she hears a voice calling her name. She turns to find Dr. Zohreh rushing toward her, trying to keep her scarf from flying away in the wind.

  “Saba, wait for me!” she calls. Saba stops and waits for Dr. Zohreh to catch up. The doctor’s face is red and she is panting as if she hasn’t run in years.

  “You didn’t have to come!” Stunned, Saba takes the doctor’s arm. “I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not,” says the doctor, as if delivering a diagnosis. She clears her throat and reaches for Saba’s hand. “What’s wrong, Saba jan? You don’t have to pretend to be so in control all the time. . . . Just tell me.”

  Saba shrugs, searches for an answer. Nothing is wrong. Cheshmeh is no longer hers. So many people she loved have disappeared from her life, and yet she is still here with her feet on the sand and the rocks. No wave has come to sweep her away. She has handled it all with some grace, she hopes. And now the spray on her skin feels like the old days. She licks the water from her hand—that unique, half-salty Caspian taste.

  Dr. Zohreh touches Saba’s cheek, setting off an unexpected trembling in her chin. “Is it something to do with Reza?” she asks. Saba shakes her head.

  Then an answer appears on its own. It surprises even Saba, because she has tried so hard not to know. “Maman is dead,” she blurts out. A cluster of words lodges in her throat; she forces them out with a new kind of strength. “And Mahtab is dead. I saw her die in the water.”

  Maast and Doogh

  (Khanom Basir)

  At the airport Saba saw her.

  She had been complaining of dizziness and headaches from her illness, but through the grogginess and the commotion of the airport, she said she spotted her holding the hand of a woman in a blue manteau. The woman was walking away with Mahtab, so Saba screamed her name. “Mahtab! We’re here!” Right away Bahareh swept her up in her arms and told her to be quiet. “But what about Mahtab?” Saba asked.

  Isn’t it funny about memory? Her own mother picked her up and told her not to bother the strange woman, and yet, when she remembers, she confuses the two of them so that she can place her mother on a plane. The mind does these things to make life go on.

  I can’t imagine what I would have said to the girl in that state. Bahareh chose to say “Mahtab will meet us. Now, please, Saba jan, behave.”

  They stood in several lines, having their bags checked, having their papers checked. Pasdar after pasdar asked Khanom and Agha Hafezi questions. Where are you going? Why? For how long? Is the whole family traveling? Where do you live?

  “My wife and daughter are going alone,” Agha Hafezi said. “For a short time, on vacation to see relatives. And I’ll stay here to wait for them.”

  The pasdar nodded, but then Saba jumped in. “Mahtab’s going too!”

  The pasdar looked down at the girl and furrowed his brow. Saba smiled and tried to find Mahtab in the crowd. “Who is Mahtab?” he barked at the parents.

  Bahareh laughed uncomfortably. “That is the name of her doll.”

  Before Saba could make a fuss, her father picked her up and said that she could have all the cream puffs she wanted if she could go all day without saying another word. Saba nodded and pretended to zip her lips. Thinking back on the years since, I’d swear that was the last day Saba asked for cream puffs. That was the last day for a lot of things.

  When they were through the final line, Bahareh muttered something about how much trouble children are—which is probably why Saba didn’t say anything when she saw Mahtab again, this time in the arms of a middle-aged man with a brown hat. She pulled on her father’s arm and pointed, but he ignored her. The family was waiting now in the room right before boarding, and Saba could see the planes outside. She knew that once they went through that door, they would be on the plane and Mahtab would be left behind—which frightened her since Mahtab was right over there. Didn’t anyone see that Mahtab was standing there with the wrong baba?

  She pulled her hand out of her father’s hand and ran as fast as she could, because the man and Mahtab were getting away. Her baba was chasing her and screaming for her to come back, and the man and Mahtab were going through the security line in the other direction, and before Saba knew it, she was no longer in the room next to the airplanes, but in a huge room with thousands of people all around. When she saw her father looking for her, running this way and that, wild with fear, Saba hid behind a chair and waited. She was not leaving this country without her sister, no matter what they said.

  We heard later that Agha Hafezi looked for Saba for two hours while she hid under the chairs.

  During that time, Saba must have seen the strange woman again, because when her father finally found her, her story had changed and the man with the brown hat had been transformed back into the woman with the blue manteau. Saba had seen them with her own eyes and was convinced the woman was her mother—that she and Mahtab had boarded a plane without her. Funny, because Agha Hafezi told me that the little girl she kept pointing to didn’t even look like Mahtab. She was just a waif in a green scarf. Or maybe she was just Saba’s own reflection in a window.

  Probably the man with the brown hat, the woman in blue, and the ghost girl in the green scarf were real, a family that looked vaguely like her own. I doubt Saba made them up out of nothing. Whoever they were, they caused Agha Hafezi to lose his wife forever.

  We heard through rumors that Bahareh Hafezi was arrested. An officer of the moral police spotted her, probably with fake or incomplete documents. Maybe one of them recognized her from the arrest on the day of the accident, or maybe they found out she was a Christian and an activist. Either way, they had to blame someone for causing a girl to die, and here was the mother escaping the country. Though even I know that they were trying to cover up their own guilt for Mahtab’s death—all those delays they caused. Later someone said they saw Bahareh in Evin Prison. But n
o one at the prison ever admitted to this, which is a bad sign. Some people said that she must have gotten on that plane and abandoned her family out of grief. I suppose that is why Saba clung to the memory of the woman and the girl boarding a plane without her. But how can she believe such a thing? A mother leaving her daughter behind because she has too much sorrow of her own? Doesn’t she know that a mother’s curse is to grieve for the rest of her days?

  Bahareh didn’t make it onto the plane—of that I’m certain. All her forged papers must have been discovered. She was a criminal, so who knows what they did to her while her husband was searching for Saba. He never saw her again, and at the airport those sons of dogs shoot to kill. Saba rode home in her father’s car, tears covering her face, and accused him of leaving Mahtab at the airport. He put on a song called “Across the Universe,” because that was where Mahtab had gone. Saba played it many times in the years after, when she was contemplating all the things that had changed her world.

  Now you have your answer. The proof that Saba is a broken and cursed thing. The reason I have never accepted her into my son’s life. I like to think of it as a storyteller’s riddle: Now that there is so much earth and water between the sisters, how many scoops of a teaspoon would it take for Saba to reach Mahtab? Well, let me tell you: It wouldn’t take very long to cover the earth between them—but you’d have to empty the sea.

  Khanom Mansoori used to sit under the korsi blanket and say that there are forces joining sisters together, no matter how far apart they drift and how many kilometers separate them, even if one of them leaves this world altogether. I can see that, like her, you wanted it to be true. But a story is by nature a lie and korsis are the place where all lies begin. Sitting with a hookah, all eyes upon you, how can you possibly not be tempted by wild stories? So you should know what comes next, and what should have come out of Saba’s mouth at the end of every tale about Mahtab.