Persian Brides

by Dorit Rabinyan

  At that moment, when its bald head was out while its body was still gripped by the pelvic muscles, the midwife declared the sex of the newborn without waiting to look between its legs. If the baby emerged face up with its eyes open and searching, she knew it was a male child. And even before the body with its tiny member appeared between the mother’s thighs she would pronounce the preparations for the circumcision rite:

  ‘Go to the market,’ she would carol in her loud, awkward voice, ‘slaughter a cow, rip out its intestines and sprinkle salt in its blood . . . la la la, hoy hoy hoy – we’ve got a boy . . . stuff the intestines with rice and pine-nuts, sew them with needle and thread and give . . . la la la, hoy hoy hoy – we’ve got a boy . . .’

  Hearing the song of male children, the women in the next room would join in the singing and go out into the Jubareh to fill the village with joyous ululation, announcing the boy’s birth and singing his father’s praises. Sometimes the new mother’s bliss on hearing the singing was so great that the hot afterbirth leapt excitedly up to her lungs and suffocated her to death. This was why Zuleikha customarily pricked its fine membrane with a heated needle while it was still inside the woman, without waiting for it to emerge slowly in the natural way. She dabbled her fingers in the thick dark fluid that dripped from the afterbirth and used it to draw circles on the foreheads and cheeks of any barren woman present.

  But when the foetus emerged from its mother’s belly facing the earth, with the back of its head to the midwife, she knew that another female was coming into the world. Even before she held the wet baby, she would round her mouth, shade it with her hands and utter a piercing long wail: ‘Hoo . . . hoo . . .’ And when the neighbouring women, whose ears were pressed to the door, heard the jackal wail rising from the room they too would round their mouths and hands and join in the keening for the poor mother who had borne a daughter.

  It was enough for Zuleikha, the deaf midwife, to see Nazie’s tiny head emerging from her mother’s tunnel to know that it was a female and to utter the female wail. Mahasti had heard the sound four times, and each time it was cut short, because the little girl was born dead.

  But Mahasti did not need to hear Zuleikha wailing to know that she had a daughter. Ever since she found she was pregnant she knew it was not a son she was carrying. Four times before she had had that bad feeling in her belly, and this time she was determined to empty her womb before her abdomen rose like an anthill and the pregnancy became known.

  When the embryo was three months old, the mother circled the village of Omerijan seven times, as if chasing the tail of a cunning demon, and when she returned to her house in the almond tree alley, sweaty and exhausted, she drank a jugful of apple vinegar.

  Sultana Zafarolla stroked Nazie’s gloomy face and told her never to doubt her mother’s love for her, because Mahasti’s heart had wearied of her husband’s threats. He had vowed that if she bore one more daughter, dead or alive, he would kill her and take a new wife, one who was strong and obedient, whose belly was sturdy and blessed, who would bear him sons.

  ‘You are something else, azizam,’ Sultana said to Nazie. ‘You’re not Flora. She’s like a soft-boiled egg, but you’re a hard-boiled one. You hung on to the walls of your mother’s womb and you didn’t fall out – not even when your mother rolled herself down the wet stairs in the hammam, God preserve us, all the way to the bottom.’

  For when Mahasti stood up her underpants were dry and the embryo had not fallen into them. Its obstinacy strengthened her resolve. If he were a boy he would not have clung to life so, but would long before have slid into the latrine. Time was running short, her belly threatened to push through the covering clothes and reveal itself to Nazie’s father. She went to the husband of Fathaneh Delkasht and asked him to pluck the longest feather from the tail of his largest peacock. Fathaneh’s ears opened and turned red, because she understood Mahasti’s design, and at once told her sister about it. Mahasti dipped the hairy feather in a half-filled bottle of arak until its royal blue turned black, the green eyes turned blue and the silver freckles green. When the feather was quite soaked in arak and a powerful smell of aniseed turned her head, she remembered her distant wedding day and began to cry quietly.

  She knelt on the carpet, leaned backwards with her knees apart and loosened the waistband of her dress, which she had previously tied as tight as possible on her navel in order to strangle the baby. She also raised her thin underskirt and exposed her gaping nakedness. The shutters were closed and a yellow butterfly which found itself imprisoned in the dusky room fluttered like a lost soul between the walls and watched what she did. Mahasti pressed on her rounded belly in order to see the red hole between her legs. With her heels in the air and her knees trembling with terror, she pulled the feather from the arak bottle, held it by its stem like an inverted writing quill, and pushed it into her body, until she felt the fine hairs tickling the nose and neck of the forming female. With one hand she twisted the feather and with the other she stirred the blood which flowed on her thighs and trickled into a red pool on the carpet. She rubbed her bloodied fingers all over her body, her face and hair, until she passed out.

  When she was found, all covered with blood, Miriam Hanoum and the neighbouring women did not know where it was coming from. Expecting to find the wound on her head, they dipped a cloth in cold water and cleansed her face, searched through her hair looking for cuts, wrung out the cloth and passed it over her back and her belly, which had begun to swell – and then, when they turned her over, they discovered the stem of the peacock feather sticking out between her legs, like a red flag.

  Her crime was exposed, and all the villagers talked about her wickedness and pitied her poor husband, whose wife sought to kill his children. Mahasti armoured herself in silence, which was variously interpreted. Daily the learned doctor, the son of Armenian Janjan, passed his listening tube over her belly and frowned at what he heard. He ordered her not to leave her bed unless the house was on fire. But every time Mahasti saw smoke rising from the chimney of her neighbour, Goli Psar Zaideh, the mother of sons, she would quietly get up, slip out of the house and secretly peer through the window of the fortunate mother.

  It was not because Goli’s cooking was so appealing that Mahasti stood on tiptoe and peered through her window, nor was she driven by the whims of pregnancy, which confound the appetite. Goli Psar Zaideh had borne her six sons in the secrecy of her house, behind the doors which she barred and the windows she shuttered as soon as her labour pains began. Quietly and with self-restraint she bore them, without a midwife, without curses and the chorus of envious women. Before going out into the alley she would stuff a bundle of rags under her dress so that they would not know she had given birth, and pretend to be still pregnant, resting the small of her back on her palm as though feeling the weight, and sighing. To Mahasti, peering in through the window, Goli’s sons with their red hair and cheeks looked like brilliant carrots and pumpkins, and their colour fuelled the burning envy in the heart of the mother of dead daughters. Goli pretended not to notice Mahasti’s prying eyes, but quietly whispered things to urge the demons to harm her. Returning to her house Mahasti would refuse the honey and dates, butter and bananas, which Manijoun told her to eat, and made herself a meal of basil and celery with dry bread together with some potatoes swimming in fat – like the meal she had seen through Goli Psar Zaideh’s window.

  Nazie was born in the middle of a torrid summer Saturday. The air was redolent with the odour of sabbath eggs hardening in the hamine pots, luring down the people who had gone up on the roof in search of a fresh breeze. The Jewish families gathered in their houses, mildly soothed by their cool walls. The men dozed, full-bellied, moustaches shining with grease, bodies slumping as sleep overcame them. Only Nazie’s father did not sleep. Withdrawn in his childless house, he prayed to God to let him have a son at long last. The neighbours’ children peeped through windows, and the women went out one by one into the almond tree alley, carrying pots of charcoal. Wi
th honeyed tones they asked passing gentiles to light a flame for them. Having found a beggar willing to help, they set the charcoal pots in a row. The gentile put a burning ember in each pot and fanned hard until the coals caught fire. While he was doing this, the women’s tongues wagged about Mahasti, who was writhing in labour pains.

  When the women’s wail rose, carried by a gust of hot heavy wind, Nazie’s father went out to the stable behind his house, lay down on the ground with its straw and manure and hid his head between bags of hay and bran. His horse swished its tail above him, its hoofs stamped on the ground and white foam bubbled between its teeth. When the neighbouring women came to console him and bring him cooked dishes, he drove them away with curses.

  The women’s wail passed from house to house, emerged from the Jubareh and reached the village square, to the house of Mamou the whore with its low roof, green doors and black crows perching on the window sills. Mamou smeared blue henna on her plucked eyebrows, pressed her breasts together with wires and went to the almond tree alley. Behind her swinging backside walked two of the girls she had bought at birth from their disappointed fathers and raised in her house. They were seven years old, almost as fat as she was, and their eyebrows were also plucked and painted blue. When the three approached Mahasti’s house the women at their windows clucked and shook their heads. Coming out of their doorways they said to each other: ‘Better for this baby girl to die and join her sisters than to grow up at Mamou’s to be a little whore, vavaila, God spare us . . .’

  The horse neighed and stamped when Mamou’s breasts burst from her neckline into the stable. Her painted face was streaming with sweat. She threw a cloth bag filled with coins at the feet of the father who was lying prone in the corner. When the bag hit the ground the coins gave a jolly, metallic tinkle.

  ‘If that poor little daughter of yours weighs more than a kilo and a half,’ Mamou shouted at Nazie’s father, ‘I’ll give you another bag like this one. Just don’t try to teach old Mamou her business.’ She laughed in the loud voice of a fat woman and slapped her own buttocks to prove her point. ‘But if she weighs less, you’d better keep the female to yourself. God knows I don’t need little sickly Jew females to stink up my house. I got nothing to do with them later . . .’ she added and nodded at the seven-year-olds who stood behind her, to show him how plump and healthy they were, in case he wanted to comfort himself with one, or perhaps with both of them together.

  But Nazie’s father got up, and speaking in the broken voice of a father mourning his son, asked the whore to leave him to his grief. When the whore smiled at him shrewdly, convinced that he was pretending so as to raise the price, and again indicated that he could make use of the girls, he uttered a dreadful howl. He fell on Mamou and her protégés with blows and curses, driving them to the end of the alley, where they escaped with dusty dresses, straws in their hair and broken red fingernails. He returned to his house full of rage, threw out his mother Manijoun and his sister-in-law Miriam Hanoum, and while his wife lay hurting and bleeding from childbirth, he turned his back on her.

  13

  Homa was fatter than Flora, her breasts were swollen from lust and her thick arms were powerful. When she was sent as a child to gather kindling for the fire she ripped whole branches from the trees. One day, when she and Flora were still children, they climbed up on the roof and together they squatted and urinated. The two yellowish streams mingled, shimmering in the sunlight, and flowed together into the rain gutter, ringing like a rusty tambour, and ran into the foul street ditch. Then the two of them rose on their toes and shouted nonsense into the mouth of the chimney, so that Nazie, who was sitting in the kitchen shelling peas, would think that demons were speaking to her from the oven. ‘Naa-zie . . . Naa-zie . . .’ the chimney echoed weirdly. The soot blacked their hands and the olive skin of their faces. They untied the string of a kite that Moussa had made for them from brown wrapping paper and thin wood slivers.

  As soon as the string was freed from the hook the kite filled with life and rose ecstatically to heaven. Homa rose on tiptoes and, with her arms outstretched and her hands together, ran along the roof struggling with the wind. The serpent of coloured ribbons which Moussa had attached to the kite’s tail also teased the sun’s rays, writhed between them and leaped happily up and down like the two sisters. Entranced, the girls shaded their narrowed eyes with their forearms and peered at it from under their elbows.

  ‘Nazie, hey, Nazie you dope, you must come out, come and see, come out, Nazie!’ Flora shouted into the chimney, and ripples of laughter echoed her words. Nazie left the peas and went outside, wrapped in an apron, and standing in the shadow of the house she looked for the girls on the roof but saw nothing. With her back to the almond trees and her face to the sky she walked backwards, step after step, until the colourful paper serpent flew out madly before her eyes. Below it she saw Flora, her face blackened, hopping from side to side, and Homa holding the end of the string, looking down at her and falling from the roof to the ground.

  The next day Moussa went up on the roof and built a low parapet from wooden beams which he sawed and planed. Homa, lying indoors, heard his hammer beating out rusty nails which he straightened and brightened. She sweated inside the heavy plaster cast in which she had been encased from her heels to her waist by the expert bone-setter, and screamed that she was going mad. All day until the sun went down she felt swarms of stinging ants on her skin while the hammer banged on her head and summer blazed throughout her body. In the evening Moussa came down to eat and Homa fell asleep.

  At the end of the summer, when Zuleikha’s husband came to cut off the sweat-and-grease-blackened plaster cast from Homa’s legs, he had difficulty sawing it because she had grown very fat. The sharp metal teeth scratched her skin, which had paled from olive to almond in the course of the summer. When the saw finished scraping through the plaster and the white dust had settled on the floor, Homa tried to walk. She moved a tremulous leg towards the outstretched arms of Miriam Hanoum, who murmured, ‘Come, Homa, come,’ but the other leg collapsed under her and she fell on her face like a baby and burst into bitter, offended tears. Miriam Hanoum stood over her daughter and looked at her legs. Her face in its braided frame did not move, her lips were tight and her eyes hard as nails as she bent over her weeping daughter and stroked her face gently. Seeing that Homa was comforted by her love, Miriam Hanoum took a deep breath and slammed both fists on Homa’s hipbones, which had not knitted properly in the plaster shell. Crick-crack went the breaking bones, and Homa fainted. Tears replaced the hammers in Miriam Hanoum’s eyes, she rubbed her daughter with egg yolks, turmeric and cumin, bound her legs with reeds and sheets, and Homa remained in bed until the end of winter.

  Ever since then Homa dragged her crippled leg as if it were unwanted, raising a cloud of dust behind her. Her limp kept the suitors away and left her an embittered spinster in her parents’ home until she was fourteen, at which time, for want of a better choice, she was betrothed to Mahatab Hanoum’s slow skinny son. She used to pound her little sister’s blooming rounding body with her hands, which had grown very stout since she became lame. When ragged Hayim the beggar passed their house, Homa would point to him and shout: ‘Flora, Flora, here comes your bridegroom.’

  ‘Not true!’ Flora would pout when she had looked through the window.

  ‘It is so true,’ Homa would reply calmly, studying her fingernails. ‘He’s the father of your babies, go and dress up for him!’

  Her mother-in-law, Mahatab Hanoum, had the finest voice in the village. She sang at all the festive gatherings, but only after lengthy and ceremonial urging. Her flesh spread and glowed, because at every celebration, big or small, her hosts would press on her delicacies, wine and compliments, to make her sweet voice rise from her corpulence up to the stars. One evening she came to the Ratoryan house and kissed every member of the family as if they were her long lost relatives. In a clear, rhymed song she asked Miriam Hanoum for Flora’s hand, while her son, the prospectiv
e bridegroom, accompanied her playing a fractured melody on the flute.

  Before she reached the first refrain, Miriam Hanoum pulled the flute from the son’s mouth. The languid notes faded in the hashish and opium smoke which hung in the room, and the boy’s mouth remained open. He looked up at his mother, his lower lip drooped to his chin and his mouth arched as his shoulders rose bashfully to his ears. But though the flute fell silent, Mahatab Hanoum, with her eyes shut and her lashes trembling with emotion, went on rhyming Flora’s beauty with her son’s charms.

  ‘Enough,’ Miriam Hanoum raised her hand above her head. ‘We’ve heard how beautifully you sing.’ She told the singer she wouldn’t give her Flora, who deserved a better bridegroom, but she thought that the match would suit Homa.

  ‘The lame one?’ said Mahatab Hanoum.

  She examined Homa from top to toe, looked at her son’s imbecile expression, and agreed. But since it was not Homa or her limp she had intended for her son, she never missed an opportunity to offend her. She would send her to press grapes for wine and vinegar, pushed her when she was holding pots of hot soup, beat her with fists and sticks, and at festive family gatherings forced her to dance and amuse the guests with her hobbling.

  On the morning of the henna feast, a day before the wedding, when the bridegroom’s mother puts the bride through the sabzi test, to examine her modesty and her quality as a housewife, Mahatab Hanoum’s song was so derisive, and her sisters’ eyes were so fixed on her crooked leg, that Homa nearly failed.