Persian Brides

by Dorit Rabinyan

  In massaging Flora’s belly to calm her, Nazie had been infected by her cousin’s craving for watermelon. When Moussa broke it open her eyes grew round with envy, her nostrils flared and its aroma touched her throat. When at last only shells were left, Flora burped aloud and they all thought that she was feeling better, but a moment later she had a belly-ache. She ran outside to vomit on the stinking almond tree, and Miriam Hanoum said that her stomach hurt because of the whore’s cursed baby and because of the evil eye – only this time she did not have Fathaneh and Sultana in mind, but Nazie. They had all seen her eyes widen and her tongue licking her lips. Nazie veiled her eyes, gathered the striped shells which were scattered on the rug, and withdrew shamefaced to the kitchen.

  Before throwing the shells into the rubbish sack she scraped with her fingernails the traces of rosy flesh which remained on them. She licked and sucked her fingers and looked back in the dark, to make sure no-one saw her. But there was no-one there, they were all bent over Flora who was leaning on the almond tree with her hand. They cursed Shahin and his donkey with insomnia, talked about the treachery of the Babolis, and commiserated with poor Flora.

  Nazie too wanted to go outside and say poor Flora and what a shame, but her eyes filled with tears and she did not move. All she could think was – poor Nazie, shame about poor Nazie. Flora had in her belly a pink baby and a red watermelon, its black seeds being vomited at this moment under the tree. In Nazie’s belly threads wove themselves together into a thick winter garment. She pressed the shells to her mouth because she wanted to yell that she too craved watermelon, that she too wanted fruit of a different season, that she too wanted Moussa to go out with his hound and bring her from the neighbours a bowl full of peaches, plums and grapes. The watermelon shells slipped from her hands. She stood and listened to the harsh retching in the garden, followed by the splashing vomit and the family patting Flora’s back and tut-tutting.

  Through the curtain of coloured wooden beads that hung in the kitchen doorway Nazie could see the face of the queen of Persia. She was gazing wearily at the girl from her regular place in the entrance hall, which was also the parlour, the dining-room and Moussa’s bedroom. The queen’s portrait was woven of cheap woollen threads, black, green and white. The craftsman who had woven the delicate moon face had no red wool with which to make her thin cherry lips. He had coiled her raven’s wing black hair on top of her head, wove her famous green eyes very closely, but left out her mouth. In Nazie’s eyes, the beautiful barren queen looked sadder and older than ever.

  Nazie tore her own gaze away from the unsmiling queen’s face, washed her flushed face in the water bucket, so that her envy would not be observed, and went to bed to check if her wish had been granted. Shivering from the chill of the bedding but full of hope, she curled under the wool blanket and searched with a finger between her legs. The finger came out clean, no blood on it. Still, she licked it, but there was no hint of a strange taste, only the usual taste of her body and with it the trace of watermelon. Again her eyes overflowed, and with the tears came the image of the rabbi mullah Netanel, the matchmaker, shaking his old finger at her and muttering that she must hurry, because time is awasting. The image of the women who washed their clothes when she did in the hammam looking at her askance, as if the blood was already flowing between her legs but she was not telling. Their thin plucked eyebrows rose higher and higher in their foreheads and their mocking voices echoed in her ears.

  9

  On washday mornings Nazie would pack the dirty clothes into bedsheets and knot their corners together just as she knotted the ends of her kerchief on the top of her head. Moussa would come home from the shop, hump the bundles on his back and Nazie followed him like a beggar, picking up the socks that dropped out. When they reached the lane which led from the market to the hammam and further towards the mountains, Moussa would stop, raise the load high in the air and drop it with a thump on the flagstones. Nazie insisted on going the rest of the way to the hammam by herself – so that the women would not gossip more than they already did, she said.

  There she divided the heavy bundles into smaller ones, flung them over her bowed back and carried them one by one, until they made a big heap at the feet of the woman gatekeeper of the hammam. She would wipe the sweat from her brow with her forearm and shade her eyes from the sun’s glare to see Moussa watching her from his hiding place in the sheepfold, bent double, waiting for her little smile. He crouched among the bleating lambs and watched as she paid the woman gatekeeper, took off her felt slippers, tucked them under her arm and disappeared into the underground bath-house.

  Wednesdays, as well as the early hours of every morning, were the regular bathing times of the demons and spirits who lived in the village. The hammam was left empty for them. Anyone who wandered accidentally underground during the demons’ bathtime reported that he heard them blowing bubbles in the water like children, and a chant of ‘blub-blub-blub’ rose from the baths. But on other days of the week the place thronged with human beings. At the end of the week the men would entrust their heads to the barber at the hammam, who groomed their locks or polished their pates, and they would plunge into the hot pools and moan with pleasure: ‘Ahhh, that’s good . . . oh, so good . . . Baha, Baha, wonderful . . .’ Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays were the women’s days.

  During the morning, long slender shafts of light filtered in through the wall slits like God’s fingertips. The sun’s rays revealed the dust motes dancing in the air, broke in the water pools and cast pale reflections on the stone walls. In the corners where the water was hot the women bathed their bodies. From there the water, now tepid and dirty, drained into the laundry pool.

  The bath-house attendants kept the steam going by throwing bucketfuls of water on stacks of heated stones on the hearths. Nazie loved the vaporous fog which covered her face with sweat. Like the other women, she padded her knees with straw against the hard stone floor. From the soap seller, whose cries of ‘Soap! Soap!’ echoed hollowly, she bought two greasy lumps, pushing her finger into them to check if they were good and dry. If the soap was damp she would haggle with the pedlar and knock the price down.

  Looking for a spot to kneel on, Nazie tried to keep close to the Tamizi women, the laundresses who washed the clothes and bed linen for the wealthy village wives. They were silent and industrious, because this was their living. There were four Tamizi women, with smooth, shining faces and ruined hands. The bent old grandmother would give the wash its first dunking in the pool. Her daughter would scrub the clothes with soap, one granddaughter rinsed them again and another wrung out the clean wash and stacked it in a heap. But one day Nazie had seen Shahnaz Tamizi, the rinser, turning her head at Moussa in the poultry shop, as if admiring herself in a big mirror, and since that day she avoided her and her family and worked alone.

  Shahnaz hid her pockmarked cheeks in the chador while carrying the kachakul basket her mother had given her to fill with slaughtered chickens. Inside the dusky shop her face gleamed like a pitta spread with egg yolk, and her black hair looked soft and shiny. Standing under the tenter-hooks, Moussa caressed the black hair with his eyes, but Nazie wanted to seize and pull it sharply until Shahnaz grimaced and screamed.

  The women liked this day of washing and bathing. Though they worked hard until evening, dunking and scrubbing and wringing clothes and linen, nevertheless it was a day of contentment and ease, of chatter, singing and laughter. They would put the babies in the shallow tubs, and at the end of the day take them out wrinkled like old people or newborns. Far from masculine eyes, they would strip quite naked, their breasts swinging from side to side, letting the steam soothe and purify their skin. They smeared black and red henna on their hair, with pomegranate rind and egg yolk, and tied it up with a piece of muslin, until it turned the colour of tea leaves and gleamed. They rubbed each other with olive oil mixed with ground almonds and other nuts to sweeten their skin. The hammam maid walked among them, and for a penny she would scrub their backs with a
loofah and beat them with bundles of sage. She rubbed their feet with black basalt stones, peeling the hoof-like skin. Now and then she passed among them with a tray, offering glasses of chilled faloudeh, a sweetened whipped starch drink with chipped ice.

  The women chatted endlessly, discussing the husband whose lust was insatiable, the daughter who had the runs and the heaves, the boy who refused to be weaned and was driving his father mad with his screams. As they talked they cracked salted watermelon and pumpkin seeds, so that by the end of the day their sandals were buried under a layer of moist shells. The best-kept secrets in the village were discovered in the foggy steam, the pregnancies which had been painstakingly hidden under dresses were revealed, and every rumour was verified. The unmarried girls strutted like the Delkasht peacocks, showing off their taut bodies, the nursing mothers pampered their sucklings with milk warmed by the steam, and the barren women bathed their bellies in the bowl of keys, a consecrated recess carved out of the hammam wall. Forty copper keys, greening in the water, covered the bottom of the niche, one for each of the most fertile women who had ever lived in the village. The barren woman’s mother would pour forty tumblers of water into the niche and bathe her daughter’s sealed belly, whining piously for her womb to open so she would bear many children.

  Nazie took no part in the women’s commotion, she did not even join their shrieks when they discovered a boy who had climbed up on the roof to feast his hungry eyes on their nudity through the glazed portholes. She did not unbutton her dress all morning, and grey flowers of sweat bloomed under her arms. She undressed at the end, when the washing was already drying on the stones above the bath-house. Bashfully she took off her dress and washed herself quickly under the thin stream.

  The more she withdrew into her work and silence the more the women teased her with their inquisitive questions. They called her by the mocking name Nazichi, little Nazie.

  ‘Where is Moussa, why isn’t he here today to help you carry the washing?’

  ‘Don’t you have a tummy-ache, Nazichi? Go and check, Nazichi, go check . . .’

  Fathaneh and Sultana, who saw through their respective windows how Nazie slaved for her aunt, whom they both detested, pitied the orphaned girl and said her period was delayed because Mahasti, her blessed mother whose soul was in paradise, was descended from the Levites, and it was known that the period of Levite women was a sacred one which arrived late, sometimes only when they were wed. The kindlier women agreed with them, but others said that she would never menstruate, that Nazichi would never be a kuchik madar, a little mother, because she had been born prematurely, and it was plain to see that she had a child’s body.

  Ever since Homa buried her baby and pregnant Flora was abandoned by her husband, the women did not bother to lift the curls from each other’s ears to whisper behind a discreet hand about the Ratoryan women. Their loud voices, which echoed from the sweating walls of the hammam, made Nazie’s little body cringe, overwhelmed her heart with their malice and haunted her all the way back to her aunt’s house. Only when she worked alone in the kitchen did the droning voices subside, but they never fell quite silent.

  The women counted Nazie’s misfortunes on their fingers, clucking and looking at her reproachfully: she has no parents, her aunt has appropriated her dowry, not a drop of blood has dripped from her hole, and she is as thin and flat as a sickly chick. These things were true, and they caused Nazie sharp and prolonged pain. But when the women made up tales to amuse themselves, amazed by the horrors of their own invention, Nazie’s pain quickly vanished. They said that forbidden acts were being done in the house of Miriam Hanoum, who was too lazy and perhaps too wicked to put a stop to them. The slanderers bit their clenched fists with horror, begging God’s pardon for allowing their innocent ears to hear what their mouths were saying – the things Moussa Ratoryan did every night to his little orphaned cousin, under the protection of his mother, that darling of the demons, who nightly brought her onion skins which turned into gold bracelets, and because of whose childhood sins the cats never stopped revenging themselves on the village.

  ‘Aoundareh, poor little orphan,’ they would sigh, glancing at Nazie sorrowfully. ‘At her age one should be counting chicks, and she has not even laid the first egg, poor thing.’

  ‘Without Flora’s big tits, God carry her off she’s so pretty, the children Moussa gives Nazie will surely starve . . .’

  After soaking for hours in the murky water Nazie’s hands were as pallid as the faded old bed-sheets, and their skin was dry and peeling. She looked at her reflection in the pool and drowned the women’s falsehoods by stirring the washing in the water and causing whirlpools. The sound of the ripples overcame the noisy chatter, and Nazie bit her tongue.

  10

  When Nazie was born her body was so tiny that the local healers clapped their hands in amazement and refused to treat her, saying that the demons wanted her as a toy for their children.

  That was what Sultana Zafarollah told Nazie. Having seen through the gap under the roof that Miriam Hanoum had left the house and Flora had disappeared into one of the neighbours’ kitchens, Sultana would climb up to the murmurous dovecot on her roof, select a plump, rosy-frilled pigeon and bring it to Nazie who was working in the kitchen. Lingering in the kitchen to wring the bird’s neck and pluck its feathers, she would tell Nazie stories about her dead mother, Mahasti, all of which Miriam Hanoum would later dismiss as a lot of nonsense.

  The year Nazie was born, germs of smallpox spread in the currents of the village canals in which the children splashed, barefoot and laughing, all summer long. It was said that the Shiites returning from their pilgrimages to the holy city of Mashhad had brought the contagion to the foothills of the Alborz and the cities of the coastal plain. The Shiites used to take their lunatics to Mashhad, where they tied them to a mosque or a saint’s tomb to restore them to sanity. The addle-brained returned with clear heads, and their relatives with strengthened faith, but they brought the disease in their blood. When the seeds of death spread to Omerijan and the surrounding villages they struck the Moslem inhabitants first, and then spread like a breeze to the other neighbourhoods.

  The disease flowed with the sewage in the street, flew with the mosquitoes’ stings and swarmed in the rats’ teeth. It easily overcame the fortifications of the Armenian quarter, and bloomed repulsively on the skin of the Jews who lived amid the almond trees. In the early days the Moslems thought that the disease was sparing the Jews, due to the wine and beer they swilled all the time, but their envious fury subsided when cries of pain rose from the alleys of the Jubareh, and there too wails of bereavement slunk like homeless cats.

  The villagers hung red cloth in their windows. They wrapped the afflicted in deerskins and blankets which had been steeped in tubs full of wine and beetroot liquor. The women stuck red feathers in their hair, sprinkled chicken blood on the rags in which they bundled their babies, and smeared earth, date paste and henna on their cheeks. The wealthy ones decorated their houses with red gems, and everyone wore scarlet ribbons around their wrists and necks. At sundown the whole village turned rosy and crimson with the blazing colour which stirred the blood to protect people from the plague. Draped in a fiery-red robe, with a woman’s red woollen headscarf tied around his white amameh’s bonnet, his face smeared with rust-coloured henna but his lips pale with fright, mullah Abbas, speaking from his pulpit, informed his florid congregation that the disease was maddening its victims’ blood because one of the dead who was buried in the village land was chewing his shroud. The villagers dug up the graves on the hillside to find the guilty corpse and make him stop nibbling on his shroud and dragging them after him into the ground. A bad smell of corruption hung in the air and the English hospital, a day’s walk from Omerijan, filled with twitching patients whose faces bubbled like the mill pond under a heavy rain.

  During the plague year childbirths were difficult and noisy. The women’s wombs shrank and produced stillborn, yellow and bloated babies. Babies who
insisted on being born alive emerged from their mothers’ bellies tiny and feeble, lacking the strength to cry, and most did not survive their first day. Premature Nazie survived in her woven palm-frond cradle, but remained tiny. On the advice of Miriam Hanoum, Mahasti rubbed her black nipples, enlarged by frequent childbirth, with clear royal honey, but the milk and honey which Nazie sucked did not spread sweet infantile fat under her skin. At the age of six months she weighed no more than a seven-month foetus, and her big almond eyes bulged in her pallid face like the eyes of tadpoles. Rabbi mullah Netanel the widower told Mahasti to feed her verses from the Book of Psalms which he wrote on slips of paper, and to keep whispering threats in her ears, to urge her to grow. The neighbours advised her to feed the baby crumbs of sheep’s entrails stuffed with rice and swimming in fat, which made all the villagers lick their fingers in anticipation. But nothing helped. The healers who had refused to treat her were astonished by her pointless, prolonged existence and waited for her to die.

  ‘Vavaila! Not yet dead, that little one? A garlic skin is thicker than hers, how come God hasn’t taken her yet?’ said the women in the gardens of the Jubareh. Many of them had lost children in the epidemic, and their sharp eyes glared at the palm-frond cradle which Mahasti had woven for her daughter and pierced the minute infant who clung to life. ‘She’s no bigger than a newborn bat,’ they said, delighting in Mahasti’s terrors. ‘It must be some cursed creature of the demons, God send it to all our enemies . . . Poor little thing, she doesn’t have enough strength to draw breath from her nose into her body . . . Come wintertime she won’t have enough flesh on her to protect her from the cold. No matter how close you hug her to your breast, Mahasti azizam, the mountain winds will carry her off, don’t you see? Go give your husband some sons, and let this poor little thing die.’