On the night when Nazie’s mother appeared in her doorway, spattered with the blood of the geese and holding her dying baby in her hands, mute Sherafat opened her mouth for the first time in many years. An ill, rotten odour rose from her throat and the syllables fell out heavy and unclear, but the words were plain enough.
‘Go away.’ And she slammed her door in Mahasti’s face.
‘Open up! Open up! By your life!’ Mahasti banged on the door with her fists.
The mother’s cries were loud and persistent and Sherafat went out to silence her with a piercing look. Her husband was fast asleep, and her mind was searching through the names of the women he made love to in his shop. To avoid waking him, she pulled Mahasti and her daughter into the house. A strange mixture of perfumes and incense hung in the air, and the dusty shelves were laden with jars filled with poppy bulbs, opium infusions and human embryos preserved in a cloudy fluid.
With dull eyes and tight lips Sherafat took Nazie from her mother, wordlessly spread a sheet on the carpet and undressed the baby. Mahasti crouched over the naked Nazie and gently rubbed the infected skin. Sherafat took crinkled peach stones from a jar, cracked them in her fists and roasted them in the burning oven. Then she took the seeds that nestled inside the hard shells and pounded them in a little spice mortar. The room filled with a strong scent of peach blossom. She mixed the crushed seeds with jasmine oil from one of her husband’s bottles, and with her open palms applied the thick paste to the baby’s thin body, rubbing it thoroughly, letting the skin absorb the fragrant oil, concentrating gently on the open boils. When their discharge was wiped with a piece of cotton wool, Nazie pouted and began to cry again. Her feverish flesh heated the glistening oil on her skin and caused the peach paste to ferment. Mahasti’s hot tears fell on the jasmine oil while Sherafat decorated the baby’s face with great care, as though working on a painting. She smeared her lips with bright red paint, shaded her eyes and outlined them with kohl, and reddened her cheeks with turmeric.
‘Like a virgin bride,’ mute Sherafat whispered to the mother, who was gazing at her daughter in a trance. Though Sherafat’s voice was as brittle as a twig, it woke her sleeping husband from his dreams of market girls, and he came into the room dressed in a chequered nightshirt, burning with old love for his wife, whose mouth had suddenly reopened. Sherafat motioned him back to bed like a sleepwalker, and dressed Nazie in a tiny white gown. Then she tensed, her face grew solemn and very carefully she ripped the collar of the little gown along its seam. Mahasti’s heart suddenly misgave her, because she knew that Sherafat was closer to the demons than anyone else in the village, and for a moment she feared that by tearing the collar she was opening their way to Nazie’s soul.
‘Now,’ said Sherafat, the words hissing like embers in her mouth, ‘leave her with me and go to your husband to make sons for him.’
‘What will you do with her, Sherafat, eh? What will you do with her?’ stammered the young mother, as if her mouth too was unused to speaking, and turned to look at her daughter who was made up like a tiny whore.
If the demons’ children want her for a plaything, explained mute Sherafat, growing breathless from so much speech, scorpions will sting her and hedgehogs will prick her, and she will die. But if they don’t want her, Nazie will be found in the morning with her ripped gown neatly sewn and spotted with blood from the demons’ fingertips. Then she will recover and grow and will be a healthy happy kuchik madar like all the girls.
Hearing that the baby would spend the night lying on her back in a lime-pit full of yellow scorpions and pointy-faced hedgehogs, Mahasti jumped out of her skin. She snatched her daughter from the carpet, tore the white gown off her and rubbed the baby’s painted face to wipe off the vivid colours and their evil spirits. The mother’s saliva mixed with the lip-rouge, eye shadow, turmeric and kohl, and ran into the sores in Nazie’s skin.
Sherafat tried to speak, but Mahasti refused to strike an alliance with the village demons. Once again she flung the baby over her shoulder and went out, not knowing where to go. Crickets chirped in her ears and the houses were shuttered and dark. In desperation she ran through the alleys howling: ‘My daughter! My daughter! God, kill me and give life to my daughter!’ Her eyes being shuttered by loneliness and tears, she stumbled and fell.
Mute Sherafat, her tongue dry and white, her hands oily and redolent of jasmine and peach blossom, came out after the wretched mother, took the baby from her hands and brought them both back to her house. After binding Mahasti’s bleeding feet with clean strips of hessian, she proposed a different method of healing her daughter, so that Nazie would recover, grow up, marry and have children.
When the sun rose Nazie’s exhausted mother dragged her bruised feet back to mute Sherafat’s adobe house. In one hand she held Nazie and in the other a big fish-basket filled to the brim with worn leather sandals and torn felt slippers. At the wise woman’s behest she had gone from house to house, her eyes lowered, and like a beggar collected shoe after shoe – men’s, women’s and children’s shoes, mostly odd ones and hardly any pairs. Their combined weight in the basket roughly equalled that of Nazie’s bones. Sherafat laid the coughing Nazie on the scales and lightly tapped the boils on her skin with branches of rue, for their potent scent to drive away the demons and spirits which squatted with her on the pan to confuse the scales. When the naked baby was quite hidden by the leaves, Sherafat took the shoes one by one from the fish-basket and threw them on the opposite pan. When the scales balanced, she covered her empty mouth and said to Mahasti: ‘Now take your daughter and go to sleep. This child’s life has been saved, and nobody wants to take her away from you.’
11
When Nazie was five years old and weighed fifteen kilos – about as much as the meat that Omerijan housewives bought for a big festive dinner – her parents died of food poisoning, and her father’s twin brother persuaded Miriam Hanoum to take in the orphan girl. She addressed her aunt as ameh bozorg, great-aunt, but she called her uncle Daddy, because his face was one with her father’s. She missed her mother dreadfully. Whenever Miriam Hanoum’s husband saw Nazie’s triangular face looking sad, he would take hold of her sharp chin and shake it lovingly until she smiled, then he pinched it, as though trying to pull off the tip of the inverted triangle. Finally abandoning the chin, he would kiss his fingertips loudly.
When Nazie was six, Flora said to her: ‘Go away, this is not your house, this is not your mama, this is not your daddy, go away!’ Moussa in his rough boy’s voice told his sister to shut up.
In the year of the great drought, when Nazie was seven and did not yet know that she was intended for Moussa’s bed, he sneaked one morning into the emptying coop of the Moslem chicken-breeder and stole a solitary egg, which glowed at him like a whitish oval sun. That year all the cisterns failed, the lakes dried up, and the fish-ponds vanished. On the bottom of the channels surrounding the village, under the broiling sun, twinkled silver coins which had fallen over the years from the hands of children. Even the brackish pools in the valleys turned into dazzling white salt-pans, driving the thirsty and hungry people to despair.
At that time quite a few rogues were found out who converted in turn to Christianity, Islam and Judaism so as to receive food, clothing and money, and having run out of religions ended up wandering hungrily through the alleys. Many of the region’s villagers migrated that year to Shahrud and Babol, hoping to find some employment in the silk industry, but this too failed when the silkworms died, and the mills were reduced to weaving cotton and linen.
In that year of famine the demons of Omerijan did not pamper the village housewives with double and triple yolks in the hens’ eggs. Most of the hens perished of hunger and thirst, their combs having turned blue from desperate clucking for water. The few eggs which reached the village stalls were imported from overseas, like huge pearls nestling in cotton waste. The merchants sold them to the fishermen, who sold them to itinerant pedlars, and by the time they reached the poultry stalls in O
merijan they were mostly rotten or cracked, and cost as much as a young chicken in a year of plenty. Only the wealthy were able to celebrate the annual No Ruz, the traditional Zoroastrian rite marking the day when the bull which bears the world on its head transfers its weight from horn to horn. A mirror was placed in the middle of the cloth spread on the carpet, and on it as many eggs as there were people present. At the moment when the new year was born and the bull threw the world from one horn to the other, cries of joy broke from the rich households which had been privileged to see the eggs tremble momentarily on the mirror together with the whole world.
In his flight home Moussa ran through the bazaar, bumping into people who crept about despairingly. The merchants did not sing the praises of their goods but wearily shook twig brooms to chase away the flies and begged their hungry customers to fill the folds of their robes and chadors with merchandise. The villagers poked mounds of squashy-rotten vegetables, sniffed with disgust at the heaps of open-mouthed fish, and gazed blankly at the stringy beasts and birds suspended from the tenter-hooks.
When Moussa reached his parents’ house, trembling with excitement like a tyro thief, his breath was short and scratchy and he could not utter a word. Nazie turned to go and make him an infusion of jasmine flowers, but he stopped her and made her put her hands together, curled like a little nest. He looked around to make sure no-one saw them and let the egg slip from his sweaty black fingers, which had almost crushed the thin shell, into her cradling palms. Nazie’s eyes shone at the sight of the precious egg that was laid in her hands and glowed white in the dim kitchen. Moussa folded his hands around Nazie’s and the two crept without a word behind the house and hid among the rosemary and laurel bushes. The blue rosemary flowers got into their hair, the scent of the laurels filled their noses and the reflection of the egg in their black eyes was like a white pupil.
‘Let me hold it again,’ Nazie pleaded when they had stood in silence, looking at it for a long time. Moussa rolled it back into Nazie’s cradling hands. Again and again they moved it from the black bedding of his hands to the warm hollow of hers, huddled together like brothers with pleasurable secrecy. Then they decided to bury the egg in the sandy soil under the pomegranate tree, to dream that night about hard- and soft-boiled eggs, and eat it the following day. They were not to tell anyone about it, not even Flora.
The next morning, when Miriam Hanoum rolled across the bed to the side of her husband, who had already left for the empty poultry shop, when Homa rolled over on her back, Flora on her side, and Manijoun snored in her corner, Moussa and Nazie took the egg from its burial place, washed off the soil of the pomegranate tree and danced excitedly around their booty. Nazie boiled a little water on the charcoal stove, as she did every morning, and carefully placed the egg in it. Moussa peered over her shoulder and his pimply face was reflected in the bottom of the copper pan. When the egg-white had set and the yolk was done, the egg danced in the pan, butting against its sides, and the water rolled around it with big, jolly bubbles.
Moussa shelled the egg carefully and cut it in half. When he saw the yolk, yellow as the midday sun, his breath rattled with excitement. He swallowed saliva and ordered seriously: ‘Bring me the salt, Nazie.’ Nazie obeyed him, and when she placed the glittering salt bowl before him an idea glittered in her mind.
‘Put a lot of salt on it, so there’ll be a lot, enough for both of us,’ she said, her toes twitching in her felt shoes and the saliva filling her mouth. Moussa followed her advice, took a pinch of salt between his fingers and sprinkled it, took another pinch and sprinkled it, and then another, to increase the bulk of the coveted egg. The layer of salt on the egg was so thick that the yolk halves turned white as full moons, but the children’s eyes shone like four suns.
Moussa swallowed his half whole, spat it out with distaste and then vomited everything he had eaten the night before. Nazie stroked his back from the neckbones to the tail, poured him a glass of tea from the samovar, adding mint leaves and lumps of sugar candy, which is said to help digestion, and stirred the drink until it cleared. When Moussa had drunk it and recovered, the two of them took the remaining half of the egg and reburied it under the pomegranate tree. Since the year of the drought, and to this day, Moussa does not like to season his midday omelettes with salt, content to use a little pepper and cumin, and when he sees Nazie sprinkling glittering salt crystals on the moist beans his heart fills with love and laughter.
From inside her woollen blanket Nazie could hear Miriam Hanoum preparing tea with mint leaves and sugar candy for Flora. The stirring spoon rang in the glass like a clapper in a bell. Miriam Hanoum added to the drink the saliva of the envious neighbours which had been collected in the goblet, and stirred again to submerge its white foam in the black tea. Before sending Flora to bed she gave her a sprig of rosemary to put under her pillow, calling it ‘a besom of paradise’, like the old women who believed that rosemary sweeps the sorrow from the body, until it is cleansed like the souls of those who dwell in paradise. Nazie thought that Flora did not need a sprig of rosemary under her head but a wash with soap and water, because when she entered the room she brought with her a bad smell of watermelon vomit, and her hair glistened in the dark as though it had been rained on. She huddled on the mattress beside Nazie and sobbed quietly like a little girl until she fell asleep.
Even as she slept, Flora continued to utter soft whimpers, which came and went like the wind in the windows. Her cheeks were round and bulging, as though she had stuffed them with food for an imminent journey, and her eyes were shut tight, surrounded with puffy bluish rings.
Nazie moved her face away from the wall, because the voices of the family echoed in the stones and seeped through the layers of clay between them. She imagined the dull sound of the words sinking slowly through the foundations into the ground, trickling into the water-wells, rising again in the buckets and filling people’s mouths when they drank tea or soup. The voices gave her no peace, like the image of Shahnaz Tamizi smiling at Moussa in the shop. But she was more worried about the demons who were toying wickedly with the baby in Flora’s belly. To pacify them, she stroked the round belly, which looked in the dark like an overturned hump, and begged their pardon: ‘Farhiz . . . farhiz . . . farhiz . . .’
Then she snuggled down in the woollen blanket, making herself small, because she was missing her mother so much. Her belly felt as if it contained a prickly clump, like a bird’s nest entangled with twigs and threads, leaves and feathers. She drew her short legs up to her chest, pinched her earrings between finger and thumb, and prayed quietly with dry lips, carefully enunciating every syllable. She had been given the gold earrings – a pair of elongated fishes with a minute coin bearing the likeness of Reza Shah in his tortoiseshell breastplate – by Miriam Hanoum on the day she learned from her how to cook hormeh sabzi, a winter lamb dish which was Flora’s father’s favourite. No sooner did the autumn rain fall, than he began to speak longingly about its tart flavour.
When the lemons, the sabzi and the meat were bubbling on the charcoal stove, and wonderful odours and smoke rose from the chimney, Miriam Hanoum passed a needle through the fire and threaded it with a white linen thread which she knotted.
‘Now shut your eyes tight,’ she said to Nazie. ‘I’m going to add one other thing to the pot, but you’re too young to see it.’
Nazie obeyed and covered her eyes with her hands. She smelled the lemon peel stuck under her fingernails and her nose sniffed curiously to discover the mysterious seasoning. Miriam Hanoum said in a low sweet voice that on the morning of her wedding day she would lift the hair from her ear and reveal to her what she had added to the dish. Then she pushed the needle into Nazie’s earlobe, hard, as though stitching a thick fabric.
Nazie bit her tongue with pain when Miriam Hanoum pierced the other earlobe and passed the linen thread through it. Both ears bled profusely, like samovar taps, and the threads turned red. The hormeh sabzi was forgotten, boiled and turned sour, and Nazie burned with fever.
Her stitched earlobes swelled and looked like unshelled hazelnuts, filled with pus. Only after several days of deafening pain, during which she was treated with ice water and mint leaves, could they untie the thread which had been tied too tight. They kept the dried pus in a jar, and Miriam Hanoum finally inserted the fish earrings, symbols of fertility, into the healed perforations. But all the village women, knowing that Nazichi had not even had her first period, made fun of the gold fishes dangling from her ears, and the young ones swished their backsides at Moussa’s avid eyes and laughed.
Unable to fall asleep, she repeated the bedtime prayer, slowly and more clearly than ever, for God to hear over the windy rustling of the almond trees and the ululations of the demons who were celebrating the birth of their new offspring. Shahnaz Tamizi’s white teeth shining in the dark poultry shop gleamed before her eyes under the woollen blanket. She kept pressing her earrings between finger and thumb, to indicate to God exactly what she wanted Him to do – make the blood come out between her legs so that she could marry her cousin Moussa.
12
Ever since it was rumoured in the village that the Moslem nurses at the English hospital were snatching newborn Jewish babies, hiding them like bundles of dirty washing in the laundry baskets and smuggling them out of the hospital, the women of the Jubareh went back to giving birth at home, as their mothers had done.
When labour pains began and persisted, and the woman had been laid on a rug in her parents’ home, a child would be sent to bring fine sand to soak up the blood, and another to fetch Zuleikha the deaf midwife. When she arrived, all the neighbouring women would come in too.
With her heels pushing against the birthing stones, her buttocks up in the air, with her mother and sisters sweating as profusely as she did and supporting her so that she would not fall over, the woman was free to curse her husband to her heart’s content. Zuleikha knew when to push her knee into the swollen abdomen, a hand’s breadth below the navel, to make the baby’s head come out. If the woman writhed in labour for many hours to no avail, the midwife would announce in her raw voice that the demons were calling her to come quickly to deliver their babies. She would take off her apron as though ready to leave, and hide behind the door with the other women. Left on her own, the terrified young woman would shriek harder, advancing the birth, and when the head began to emerge Zuleikha would return and pull the baby out.
Persian Brides Page 10