Strange Times, My Dear
Page 26
When Mahbubeh opened her eyes it was still dark outside, and the light was on inside the room. She saw a woman sitting in the middle of the floor, peering into a mirror she had taken off the shelf, applying kohl to her eyes. “Who are you?” Mahbubeh asked.
The woman had a pleasant laugh. “Who do you think I should be? I’m your aunt, Hajar.”
“You’re supposed to be dead. Your husband cut you to pieces.”
Hajar shrugged. “Such is the way of the world. So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to just sit and wait until they cut you to pieces, too?”
Mahbubeh was about to say, “I don’t do the things the likes of you do,” but she bit her tongue and remained silent.
Hajar said, “When your good-for-nothing husband comes home, tell him what the sergeant did to you. Let him eat his heart out.”
“But what will he do to me if I tell him?”
“He’ll chop you to pieces. Tell me, do you like the way I’ve done my eyes?”
“I can’t see. My eyes are burning. I’m tired.” She fell back asleep.
When she awoke in the morning, she put the mirror back on the shelf, gathered up her makeup from the floor, and told herself, “I’ll tell him. May he burn in hell.” Calmly, she put on several layers of makeup.
But her husband was brought home that day wrapped up in a bloody blanket, his bones all broken. His truck had gone over a cliff, and he had gone flying into the mouth of death.
It took two or three years until he came back to the land of the living and was able to return to work. During those years, they were forced to sell almost everything they owned, down to the nails in the walls, in order to eat. Mahbubeh didn’t want to lose the house, too, so she went knocking on doors to plead for help. Finally, after the birth of her daughter Masumeh, her uncle found her a job in a canning factory.
Mahbubeh’s firstborn was delivered free of charge in a hospital for the poor. She was so preoccupied, and the hospital so crowded, that she forgot that every girl born in their family was in danger of becoming Ahl’s property. It so happened that an escaped criminal had been shot and was undergoing surgery. The hospital was emptied of regular visitors and policemen were all over the place.
Sara was the name she had chosen for her baby, but her husband, who had never forgotten the stories she related to him on the day she mistook him for the green prophet, preferred to call the baby Masumeh — and that was that.
The factory was on the other side of town, and it took her an hour on the bus to get there, so she had to leave the house early in the morning. There was much loud honking, and great plumes of dust were kicked up from the road. Even before she arrived at work, Mahoobeh felt drained and sickened.
The bus was usually packed, and often she had to stand the whole way, hanging from a pipe, sweating profusely, milk flowing uncontrollably from her breasts. One day she came down with a cold and developed a fever. In spite of her illness, she continued going to work until the cold turned chronic and her lungs lost some of their function forever.
One day a man sat next to her on the bus; his mere presence made her insides churn with revulsion. She gasped for air as the world seemed to spin around her, and she got off the bus a stop before her destination. But the man got off the bus, too, and started following her.
“Will you come with me?”
“No,” Mahbubeh cried.
“Why not?”
“I’m married.”
“So what? I’m married, too. As many times as the number of hairs on your head.”
“Let me be, sir.”
The man laughed. “How can I let you be, sweet morsel? You were mine from the moment you were born.”
Mahbubeh furtively glanced at him. The man had no nose. A dirty dishrag had been stuffed in the middle of his face. She was too sick to feel scared. “What do you want, sir? For God’s sake, let me be.”
“How can I let you be? You women enslave us.”
“I’m not scared of you. Go!”
“You know you’re coming with me. I’ll wear you out.”
The conversation she had had about sorcery many moons ago with the old woman ricocheted in her mind like a bullet. She roared, “Get lost, monster!” And in her heart she prayed: “In the fearsome name of the Almighty, All Powerful One.”
At night she told her husband, “I saw Ahl today.”
“Wretched woman, Ahl is here right beside you. You’re looking at him.”
“No, you’re not Ahl. You’re just a sick man.” “So talk to me. Tell me what happened?”
But she had sunk into sleep, and the husband, bored and depressed, had little interest in her story. When her mother came into their room later that night with the news that her cousin had been arrested, she didn’t even wake up. Her husband grumbled, “He probably asked for it.” And when Mahbubeh did wake up, she couldn’t remember what she had heard while half asleep, so whatever her bitter husband said, she simply nodded in agreement. “You’re right, a wise man never meddles in the affairs of the state.” Then she rushed out to catch the bus.
Little Masumeh and her father learned to walk at the same time. The father limped, and the toddler took tiny steps as Mahbubeh watched, smiling wearily, like a mother to them both. In spite of everything, the past few years had been good to her. The child was growing, her husband was able to stand on both feet, and a second child was on the way.
Slowly Masumeh walked on her own. The husband bought a truck on installment from his company and was on the road again. The second child arrived. Mahbubeh returned to her duties in the kitchen, the yard, the little pool, and the patch of garden. The years accumulated. A third child arrived. The husband was drinking heavily and had forgotten all about the cousin and the minstrel with the mustache. He didn’t even pay much attention to Mahbubeh anymore. His interests were mostly outside the house.
Motherhood was the sole preoccupation of her day-to-day existence. No matter how much she swept their little yard, it never seemed clean. No sooner had she served a meal then she’d have to start preparing the next one. No matter how often the water in the pool was changed, it turned green with moss in no time. The tray with its mound of rice was always waiting for her to separate the grains from the dirt and droppings. Her husband was either off in the wilderness somewhere or home drunk. To add insult to injury, he had begun to snore. On the nights he was home, Mahbubeh could not sleep. And when she did sleep, she was beset by raw, distressing dreams. She felt like an empty, rusty, old chalice. Sometimes, during her chores, she’d dream with her eyes wide open, talking to the beans or lentils as if they were the days of her life, asking, “Who am I?”
She was thirty now, and the years were rushing past. Once in a blue moon her husband would wrap his legs around her, and as on earlier occasions, tell her that it was time to crank up the machine and make another chicken. Even on her eldest daughters wedding day, she was pregnant. When she was pregnant, she felt as if the baby were slowly killing her, taking her place. Often, she’d remember the words of the old woman and the savage night when her son, the sergeant, had assaulted her. The memory of it made her feel as if her very bones were on fire.
It was during Masumeh’s wedding that she heard about the upheaval that turned the world upside down.
On Masumeh’s wedding day, the men were assigned to a neighboring house and the women were entertained at their own house. Mahbubeh’s eyes were tearing up because of the smoke from the cooking fires in the yard.
Her mother cried out, “Open your eyes and see who’s here!”
It was her aunt who hugged her and began to cry. Twenty-five years had gone by since the day her aunt had opened her shielding arms to her and taken her into her home.
“Your cousin wants to see you,” her mother said.
The aunt added, “He was freed from prison just yesterday. He heard Masumeh was getting married, and so he has come.”
Wiping her stinging eyes, Mahbubeh said, “He’s most welcome.”
She was about to greet him and, as was traditional, welcome him, but her tongue tricked her. “Cousin, where have you been all these years:
“Dealing with Ahl. That’s all.” Her question and his answer made them both burst out laughing. She recalled their last meeting.
“That green prophet you sent me was an odd one. Instead of rescuing me from Ahl, he himself turned out to be an Ahl of sorts himself.”
Her cousin replied, “Ahl is everywhere. He’s from another planet. Just like us.”
With the corner of her chador she touched her smoke-stung eyes and said, “I know. He conquers our life and soul and then takes our place.”
They walked out to sit by the pool, where tea was being served from a samovar and sherbets were being made. Awkwardly, in sentences broken by pauses, they related abbreviated versions of the lives they had been living the past twenty-five years until Mahbubeh suddenly asked, “Don’t you think it’s time you married?”
“Not until the revolution has achieved its aim,” he vowed.
Then, with the same enthusiasm he had had when he wanted to become an engineer and marry Mahbubeh, he told her that the world was in turmoil, that the king and the army, who were the earthly representatives of Ahl, were about to be killed once and for all.
“You say such strange things, Cousin.” Mahbubeh sighed. “If you want to know the truth, Ahl is everywhere on earth. Once he was on the bus with me. He even followed me.”
He had so much to tell her, and Mahbubeh was all ears, but somebody called her and reluctantly, the mother of the bride rose.
“You haven’t changed, Cousin. You’re still like the little boy who’d get into sword fights with other little boys.”
The most sorrowful smile in the world appeared on his lips as he said good-bye. “By the way, did you know that Hajar’s husband was also released with us?”
Since the night of her wedding — that windy night her husband had come to bed dead drunk and the house had caught on fire — this was the first time she yearned to make love.
Her husband, like most nights, was tired and restless. His face was locked in a frown; he was in no mood for anything. But Mahbubeh was dreamy. The festive spirit of the wedding had taken hold of her. It seemed that seeing her cousin had broken the wall that for all these years had held her back from her husband. For the first time she wanted him — her rider through many a wilderness. She put her hand behind his head and caressed his coarse hair.
“Are you sleeping?”
“I’m tired.”
“I saw my cousin today.” “ Congratulations.”
“Poor thing. He’s gotten so old. They gave him hell in prison.”
As on other occasions when she had mentioned her cousin, she expected her husband to say that her cousin had gotten what he deserved. And the moment he opened his mouth, she planned to cover it with kisses. But this time he said nothing. She held his shoulder and gently pulled on it. He told her to save her story till the morning. She pulled on him again and, irritated, he asked if there was something wrong with her. With lips turning to lead, she said, “I want... I want you. Hold me in your arms.”
The husband roared, “You should be ashamed of yourself. It’s your daughter’s wedding night. At your age, it’s downright vulgar to be horny.”
“I’m not yet forty.”
“Your breath reeks of old age.”
After a brief silence that chilled her to the bone, she heard him begin to snore. She wanted to die. She shook him again. By now he was in a dark and dangerous mood, wondering why she wouldn’t let him sleep, the bitch. Mahbubeh said she had something important to tell him. And then, in the gloom, as yellow flames gathered in his eyes like little streams of poison, slowly, solemnly, she told him about the terrible deeds of the army sergeant, as if narrating a fairy tale.
The husband slowly rose from bed and vanished like a bubble into the night. For the first time in her adult life, she completely undressed and slept as peacefully as a child.
A few days later, she heard that a retired army sergeant, a giant of a man, had been hacked to pieces, and she hoped that the victim was none other than her sergeant. That was the year of the great upheaval, when the world turned upside down. According to the solar calendar, it was the year one thousand three hundred and fifty-seven of the Hijra.8
Six months later the husband was back, bearded and disheveled, wearing dusty green fatigues. It was a warm afternoon toward the end of summer, the last days of her pregnancy. The children were at school, and her youngest daughter was by the pool playing with water. The husband casually said hello, ignoring her shock and unease. He went straight to the pool and did his ablutions in preparation for prayer. When he went upstairs to their room, he called her. Mahbubeh dragged her heaviness up the stairs. He was in the midst of praying, so she waited for him to finish. He looked up and announced, “The noon prayer is done. Later I shall recite the evening prayer. You know that the evening prayer contains four verses?”
His eyes were yellow. Really yellow. The scab on his cheek was redder than before. It was the first time she had ever seen him pray. Her heart sank.
He pulled out a long slim knife that was tied to his ankle, raised it above his head, brought it down, and half buried it in the floor by the prayer rug. The knife caught the sunlight and flashed an ominous, bluish glint.
“You know — or don’t you — that the evening prayer has four verses?”
Mahbubeh said that she knew. The husband explained that today he felt like reciting it with only three verses.9 “You understand?”
Mahbubeh said that she didn’t. It’s simple, he said, he wanted to say the evening prayer in three verses. Did Mahbubeh understand now? She said she understood. After the third verse, which ends with the prayer of salutation, he added, if she or one of the children were still in the house, he’d cut them to pieces with his knife.
“The children are at school.”
Wherever the hell they were, he didn’t want to see them ever again. He swore by the glory of the Almighty Vengeful God that when he was done with the prayer of salutation, he’d kill her and the children unless they all left the house forever. Mahbubeh was about to ask where were they supposed to go, when he rose and began the evening prayer. During the second verse his eyes turned solid white. When he prostrated himself, she saw her clay necklace on the prayer rug writhing like a snake. Mahbubeh realized that Ahl had captured her husband’s soul and taken his place. During the last moments of the prayer, she pulled the dagger out of the floor and plunged it into his left shoulder blade, a soft spot that seemed to have been created for that very purpose. Then, like the riders of years gone by, those who rode with longing for her aunt, Hajar, wandering all the lonely places of the world, she straddled Ahl and twisted the knife in the wound.
The first day of autumn seemed to have arrived with a gale. It was so sudden that when her children returned from school and started crying behind the locked door, the wind was blowing too loudly for her to hear them.
She fetched four garbage bags and got down to the hard work of undoing the spell. Only once, through the howling wind, did she hear the voice of her children calling her name, and she told them, “Mahbubeh is gone. Hajar is here.”
— Translated by Ashurbanipal Babilla
Footnotes
1 The calendar of the Muslim era begins in 622 C.E., the year of Mohammad’s departure from Mecca to Medina.
2 Masumeh is a girl’s name meaning “innocent and pure.” This was the title of Imam Reza’s sister who is buried in Qom, Iran. Imam Reza was the eighth Shi’a Imam, or leader. Mahbubeh is a girl’s name meaning “beloved.”
3 Ali is the first Shi’a Imam, the Pr
ophet Mohammad’s son-in-law.
4 According to Persian folklore, Ahl is an ogre who usually appears as a large man with a nose made of clay and yellow or red eyes. He steals and kills children as they are born, and eats the livers of women as they are giving birth. In folklore, Ahl was used to explain the death of a child or a mother during childbirth.
5 Persian speakers have to learn how to read the Quran, which is in Arabic.
6 Sura means chapter.
7 The first and second months in the Muslim calendar, Moharam and Safar, commemorate the days of fighting against the Ummayyid leader Yazid, and the martyrdom of the grandson of the Prophet, Imam Hossein, in Karbala in 680 C.E. The deaths of the Prophet Mohammad, the second Imam Hassan, and the eighth Imam Reza are also commemorated in the month of Safar.
8 The year 1357 is the equivalent of 1979, the year of the Revolution.
9 Muslim law permits shortening the evening prayer into three verses when there is an urgent matter at hand. Here the husband is emphasizing the urgency of his ultimatum.
Goli Taraghi
Goli Taraghi was born in Tehran in 1939. She studied philosophy and literature at Drake University in the United States, and upon her return to Iran taught at Tehran University. She began her writing career with a collection of short stories, I Am Che Guevara Too, in 1969. Her first novel, Winter Sleep, was published in 1973 and has been translated into English and French.
Taraghi probes the inner emotional world of her characters through a stream-of-consciousness narrative technique. She is an expert storyteller with an ironic sense of humor. Her story “The Great Lady of My Soul” received the Contre-Ciel Award in France. Her most recent books are Scattered Memories, In Another Place, and Two Worlds. Two of her recent collections, The House of Shemiran and The Three Maids, have been published by Actes Sud in France. This is the first time that her novella In Another Place appears in translation. Taraghi lives in Tehran and Paris.