Butterfly Stitching

by Shermin Kruse

  “Maman, is this a game?” Sahar cried.

  Maman just wailed the sound of true horror. While still beneath the body of the man who looked like Baba, Maman tore out her hair and Sahar watched as the thick jet-black threads fell on the floor.

  The black smoke moved in. It grabbed Maman’s legs and pulled her from beneath Baba. She screamed, kicked, cursed, but they forced her up against the wall and put metal things around her wrists. As quickly as it had entered, the black smoke went out, taking Maman, leaving everything else.

  From the sky above where she watched, Sahar saw that the dead man who looked like Baba had green eyes that were wide open. These portals to the other world stared at his family but no longer saw them. She curled up with the two little ones on the non-wrinkled couch, crying out, terrified that she was not in the sky but in the room and the man who looked like her baba bleeding on the carpet actually was Baba. She saw their neighbor Nazanin come into their home, pick up the phone, and call someone. She held to the thread of hope that she simply misunderstood.

  Innocent.

  Children.

  Alone.

  10

  “We’re going to cleanse your baba’s body,” Zahra jan said. “Just like we did with your grandfather when he passed. You remember?”

  Sahar did not remember.

  “Well, I guess you wouldn’t. Not even sure you were born then. We’ll move your baba to the funeral hall on Jamshid Street. That’s the most respectable one in the city. Thank God those bastards aren’t preventing us from burying him properly.”

  “What do you mean, Zahra jan?”

  “Well, they don’t usually prohibit a proper burial, even with accusations of crimes against Islam, but you never know. Anyway, the funeral hall on Jamshid is run by a very nice Imam. He’s already talked to your maman and expressed his sympathies for the injustice. The hall has this two-story room with very high ceilings. The washing pool is on the first floor. The three of you can go up to the second floor and watch from the glass windows.”

  “Like a swimming pool?”

  “Smaller, and more shallow, say—no more than a foot or so deep—so that your Amoo Hassan and other men close to your baba can sit in it while bathing him. They’ll leave his body reflecting his soul. Cleansed. Unblemished.”

  “Will Maman help to bathe Baba?” Reza asked.

  “Usually only men can wash other men and women wash other women. But there are exceptions when someone’s wife or husband, parent or child passes. So, if she wants to, Samira can help with the washing.”

  She did.

  ***

  Sahar heard the faint sound of Red Alert in the distance. Probably intended for one of the suburbs. She stood still, a twin on each side held each of her hands, watching the cleansing ritual through the wall made of glass. The air in the second-story hallway smelled sickly. The only request they had made was to be allowed to watch the ritual alone.

  Alone.

  Wishing they had never come to this place.

  Amoo Hassan did the washing; Amoo Maven, their baba’s old army friend, helped. The two men sat cross-legged in the shallow pool, submerged up to their waists. Their black pants swelled with water and their wet shirt sleeves clung to them as they scrubbed his body with sponges.

  Sahar’s Maman was there, too, sitting to the left of the rosewater, overwhelmed in yards of black and barely recognizable. She had cried so much that her eyes had become two slits surrounded by puffiness. She looked like that ever since she came back from the police station where she was the entire night after Baba was killed.

  Sahar did not understand why they had taken Maman away or what had happened to her. She remembered the relief when Zahra jan and Amoo Hassan hurried in through the broken door to hug and kiss her and her brothers. They had rushed over that night as soon as Nazanin Khanum had called them. Lovingly tied broad white pieces of cloth around Baba’s mouth and eyes so that they did not remain open. But seeing Amoo Hassan had also reminded her of his shriveled flesh and purple bruises. Torture. Wherever they took Maman, are they hurting her? So she had inspected Maman’s delicate body from head to toe when she returned. There had been no cuts, no bruises, no gashes and Sahar had cried with joy at this small miracle. Now, two days later, Maman was sitting a few feet away from her dead baba while Zahra jan held her from behind and rocked her gently.

  Sahar wondered if the sun could shine in through the cracks in the stones that surrounded the rosewater pool. She closed her eyes and whispered to the rays, begging them to fight their way in. How difficult can it be? Rain can do it, and will if that’s what I ask it to do . . . rain would worm its way into the room in seconds. Just break in through that spot, or that one over there. The rays tried. They really did. But the cracks were too small and the darkness too vengeful.

  Sponges swam quiet circles around his pale body, cleansing him of this earth. The cloths around his mouth and eyes were still there. As were the sheets that covered his private parts. All soggy now. Soon, after the cleanse, his entire body would be shrouded. Sahar wished they would not do that. She did not want to see Baba disappear. At least, for now, they were still playing their sponge instruments on his body.

  Raumbod looked up at his sister. “Sahar, he looks very tired. Is he sleeping?”

  Sahar shook her head but said nothing. She wanted silence now.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I am,” she whispered.

  “But maybe he’s just sleeping.”

  Silence.

  “He’s always so tired.”

  “He’s not sleeping, Raumbod. Baba’s . . . gone up to Heaven. He went up when they shot him two nights ago. Remember?”

  “Is it true that the water in that pool down there smells like perfume?” Reza looked up.

  “It smells like flowers from Heaven and the best honey you’ve ever tasted.” Sahar wiped a tear from her cheek. “The sweetest honey. Maybe you’ve never even tasted honey this sweet. Like honey from the best of dreams.” As if rosewater dripping from the dead pores of our baba will stop our sorrow, she thought.

  “Why?” Raumbod asked.

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Maybe to remind all of us that he’s going to Heaven. Maybe.”

  Raumbod squinted with worry. “But Sahar jan, do people who don’t believe in Heaven go there?”

  She looked down from one brother to the other. “Yes,” she managed to whisper. “And anyway, he believed in Heaven. He just didn’t believe in Hell.”

  Silence.

  Sahar tried to turn into pink air and chase birds into the sky, but it was taking many minutes for the pink to come into her and the birds could not wait. We have to go home, little girl, and play crossword puzzles and lay down with our baba in the air and the sky and away from the sullen ground. She was too scared to go into the sky without the birds because she might get hit by a truck or taken by the Morality Police into a room that smelled like cat pee and dried-up blood, and so she stayed put. She then tried to direct the cracks in the stones surrounding the pool to play a song for her. It doesn’t have to be the violin. You can play any instrument! Boom bara boom, bara boom, bara boom . . . It was no use. The stones had no interest, and Sahar could not convince them otherwise, so she stood with silence.

  She wondered, though, if Raumbod could be right. Maybe Baba was just sleeping and would suddenly wake up and ask for tea and feta sandwiches. Or maybe, well, it was possible that the naked man down there in that pool was not her baba. This pale and empty man did not really even look like Baba. Maybe there was some kind of mistake that would clear all this up.

  The washers finished. They took his body out of the pool and began covering it in a shroud. Maman helped the men do this. Sahar watched them wrap him in three sheets of canvas like the ones Maman bleached and stretched for her paintings. They began with his legs and worked their way up. Folds and wraps moved the canvas around and over the body of the man who had been her baba, a poet and Maman’s husban
d; tucks and turns moved the fabric and cloaked his lifeless, perfumed skin.

  Sahar summoned a fountain pen to write the short story of Baba’s life on the piece of canvas. Twisting even though there was no breeze and no light. Flowing and hiding him from them. An inch at a time. Taking him away forever. Six hands lovingly molded and crafted the shape of the mummy in their arms, working their way over the slippery dead skin and through the calligraphy of the magical pen. The two hands that belonged to the cursed widow paused over a cold gash, one of the seventeen voids the bullets had left. Her fingers traced around the cavity and softly grazed its gooey insides. Sahar wondered what it felt like to touch a bullet hole. The dried blood that covered it. The tissue underneath. Maybe feel the tip of the bullet that was still inside. Maman’s index finger lingered atop the wound and she bent to kiss it with indescribable tenderness. Sahar’s heart sank through the bottom of her feet, through the floor, and dripped into the pool of rosewater.

  Zahra jan had said that they were very lucky to find a place that would provide services so quickly. “Muslims bury the body as soon as possible to avoid disturbing it through embalming,” she had said. Sahar did not know what embalming was, and did not believe Baba was religious. It seemed to her that his body, slowly disappearing beneath the canvas before her very eyes, was quite disturbed anyway. Soon, only the face remained.

  “There’s no meaning to any of this,” she had overheard Maman say to Zahra jan the night before.

  Why wash a dead man in perfume and wrap him in fabric? Can you honor someone who is not here? Sahar wondered. And what if you can? What difference does that make to anything, really?

  Still, there was something beautiful about the ritual, something peaceful that belied the horror all around. Sahar was grateful for that.

  Maman glanced up through the windows to where Sahar and her brothers stood with their noses pressed to the smudged glass wall. It was as though she said, “Take a last look at your baba’s face, children. You’ll never see it again.” And they did look. Sahar felt a burning inside of her. She watched Maman wrap him around the chin, cheeks and ears.

  Kiss.

  Wrap around the eyes.

  Kiss.

  Wrap around the forehead and tie the ends.

  Hold the body.

  Hold it. Do not let go.

  Fall apart at the seams.

  Then Sahar and her brothers fell on their knees, hands and fingers still pressed against the glass.

  Finally, the men left with the shrouded figure who Sahar knew was like a brother to them. Maman looked up and motioned for her young ones to come down. It was time to pray. The children ran, met Maman in the downstairs hallway, and thrust themselves onto her, grabbing tightly.

  They stepped into the main prayer room of the masjid, where everyone they had ever known stood in ebony. They took off their shoes and placed them in the racks to the side and entered. There were two rows of seats—women sat to the left. Sahar, her brothers and Maman walked to the front of the left rows where several seats were kept open for the immediate family. They sat together. Raumbod and Reza were the only boys who sat in the left section of the room. Sahar closed her eyes and focused on the songs of prayer playing over the speakers, the cries of the women around her, and the words of the men who welcomed mourners as they arrived. The imam was not yet there.

  Trays of tea were offered to the mourners. Maman was urged to take a glass. “It’s hot, be careful,” the person said, not unkindly. Maman took a sip, swallowing the softness of her sorrow. “And take a bit of the halva. Come on dear . . . it’ll increase your blood pressure. Look at you, your skin is like chalk. We don’t want you collapsing in front of the children, do we?”

  Sahar was also offered a glass and halva. She could taste the rosewater added as a sweetener to both. She was given rosewater when she was sick. She remembered love. But now the rosewater was nothing more than the taste of the water in which they had bathed her dead baba only a few moments ago. The rosewater had betrayed her and she wished the tea unsweetened. There was bitterness in her throat. She put the tea back on the tray, thinking herself ridiculous for having even attempted to drink it. She felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Narges, sitting behind her. She had nothing to say, and neither did Narges, but Narges’ hand remained on Sahar’s shoulder for the remainder of the service.

  The imam entered through the door at the front of the room and walked to the podium. He had a gentle face with deep lines. He said a lot of things in Arabic that no one understood, and several prayers that many had memorized and said along with him. He then gave a sermon in Persian.

  He said nothing about the nature of Baba’s death. Nothing about injustice or murder. He talked about Heaven and eternal salvation. When he was finished, several men, including Amoo Hassan walked to the back of the room and rolled in a wheeled casket stand with a plain wooden box on top.

  The imam placed an Arabic-embroidered black velvet cover on the box and said several more prayers. The men wheeled the wooden box outside to the gravesite. Everyone followed to what seemed like a lovely garden but was really a place to bury the dead. The men took the box off the cart and carried it to the big open hole in the ground where a stone tomb had been pre-made and where Baba would lie breathless forever.

  The imam said more prayers, but Sahar’s thoughts were on the Monday morning sky, streaked with slashes of dark fuchsia. She stood, with Maman behind her and her brothers to her sides. She had lost sight of Narges. She did everything in her power not to look ahead, not to catch a glimpse of the casket and the white body inside. She kept her gaze up and found her pink, right there in the sky. It forced itself into her consciousness. So she had someplace to hide her glances.

  The brilliant rose sky walked a fine line between sharp, harsh slashes and fluid snowy curves. It seemed so comfortable up there. A diluted blood of the earth. A cherry blossom glow of the heavens.

  Sahar looked down at herself. Headscarf, shoes, socks, gloves and the wool coat that was handed down from her cousin Pardiss, all black. Maman had even dressed her in black underwear. Sahar was jealous of the colorful sky.

  Her brothers wore matching black suits that they had worn to a wedding three months before. Her aunts and uncles and cousins, her parents’ friends, and many others whose names and faces she could not remember crowded around her. They stared through her. Judged her. She felt her breath trapped inside her lungs. She suddenly longed to run away from it all, jump in the wooden box, and be put beneath the earth with Baba. She would have, too, if not for the inkling that no amount of dust upon her skin could suffocate her mourning.

  Tall men, who religious law granted the right to stand in front during funerals, blocked most of her view. This was fine with Sahar whose eyes darted around to avoid the sight of the encased coldness sitting next to the hole in the ground. Maman, on the other hand, leaned forward and bumped into Sahar and her brothers.

  “Maman, you’re gonna make me fall.” Sahar complained.

  “I’m sorry, aziz.” Sahar heard the anger there. “It’s just these men. In front of me. Me. As if that’s what God wants. For them to look at my . . . murdered . . . husband . . . for them to be closer . . .”

  They opened the plain box and removed the man inside, still wrapped in canvas, and put him atop red ropes suspended over the hole. They turned a wheel and lowered the body.

  Down.

  Down.

  More prayers and then Amoo Hassan climbed into the hole.

  “What’s he doing, Maman jan?”

  No answer.

  The imam gave instructions that the body should be shaken during certain portions of the prayer. Sahar could not see inside the tomb but heard the prayers and the shaking instructions.

  “Why are they shaking Baba?”

  “They’re not really,” she heard someone, she was not sure who, tell her. “It’s symbolic.”

  “Of what?”

  No answer.

  Amoo Hassan climbed back up. T
he men took shovels and poured dirt directly on top of Baba. More prayers. Maman was now using Sahar’s shoulder as a cane, leaning all of her weight into her daughter. Sahar willed her body to be stronger, like a tree, and hold up Maman’s sorrow.

  One of the men in front of them turned his head and looked at Maman, only for a second. He wore tinted sunglasses that hid his eyes but Sahar recognized him as the man from the bazaar. She did not know who this man was, or why he was here.

  Maman gasped and Sahar looked up to find her staring at the man. Then the man looked back toward the digging. Despite the cold wind cutting through the air, Sahar could see the heat rising in Maman, moving through her stomach and into her throat. Before she knew it, Maman pulled her hands away from Sahar’s shoulder to bend over and throw up. Sahar automatically kneeled down and pulled back Maman’s scarf to prevent the vomit from ruining it. Strange that she should be so practical at a time like this. Maman took a handkerchief out of her bag and wiped her mouth as Sahar gently rubbed her back. The twins looked lost amid all of this and could do nothing more than find something onto which to hold. Having lost Sahar’s hands, they moved closer together and held each other’s. No one said a word except the imam who continued the prayer.

  Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.

  God is Great.

  In the middle of the prayer, the man from the bazaar turned around again to Maman, leaned into her good ear and quickly whispered, “I only have a second or two before suspicion arises.”

  Sahar was offended by this interruption of their grief, and Maman must have been too because she turned her head away from the man.

  “I know it’s strange for me to be here,” the man said. “I had to come when I heard. You and the children cannot stay in Tehran. It’s not safe for you now. You must leave. I can help you.”

  Sahar saw Maman turn toward the man with wet eyes so demanding and judgmental that they would make a demon blush.