Persian Brides

by Dorit Rabinyan

  The bride was expected to display her skills at cleaning and chopping the sabzi, the seasoning herbs which Janjan sold in the bazaar. Nazie was nine years old and Flora thirteen when the joyous ululations, li-li-li, burst out around Homa, and the bride’s kohl-painted eyes widened in alarm. The women of the family and the village formed a circle around her, pressing their breasts together and shaking them as they danced with widespread legs, laughing and beating on drums. Nazie and Flora, barefooted, pushed through the dancers’ legs. All the women sniffed with pleasure at the giggling Flora and scolded Nazie for not sprouting breasts. Nazie was as tense as if it was she and not Homa who was going to marry the singer’s son. She ignored the teasing and observed everything closely, learning and absorbing, so as not to fail the sabzi test when her time came.

  Mahatab removed from Homa’s shoulders the great chador, which was interwoven with gold and silver threads and fringed with bells, folded it four times, until it fitted the bride’s head. Having tied the shawl-turned-into-a-handkerchief behind Homa’s neck, she tucked her black curls into it, so that they would not cross the boundary of her eyebrows and fall into her eyes. With pale and compressed lips she kissed Homa on both cheeks, and said in her rich voice that she wished her success. The women trilled with joy as she placed a silver tray before the bride, heaped with bundles of celery, tarragon, sage, rosemary, mint, leek and parsley. Homa sat cross-legged on the floor and the green mound of the sabzi reached her breasts.

  Miriam Hanoum sat beside Homa and rubbed her back, whispering to her that it was bad enough having a crooked back and leg, she must not let anxiety twist her face too. She observed the level of the green pile, because if it was too high it meant that the bridegroom’s mother was unhappy about her daughter-in-law. But Mahatab Hanoum was fair, and Miriam Hanoum signalled to Homa to start. Homa nimbly separated the celery stalks from the leaves and root, the leek stalks from their bulbs, the sage from its scented buds, and dunked them all in the big bowl of water. Then she rinsed the mint leaves, the tarragon and parsley. When the sand had sunk in the bowl and the sabzi showed bright and green, Homa tore off the limp and yellowing leaves, while the women cheered her on, warbling songs of encouragement and competition. Homa arranged the washed herbs in bundles and laid them side by side in rows. Nazie trembled with fear. She did not take her eyes off Homa’s fingernails. Her stomach muscles clenched, as though gripping something to stop it falling, and even Flora choked back her laughter for fear it would break out and cause Homa to fail.

  Homa took the well-honed knife. Its blade flashed and the women hushed each other. Nazie knew that the examined brides sometimes cut their fingers in agitation, even cut off a finger, which they gave their mothers to keep and went on with the test, bleeding before time. But if not a single drop of blood fell throughout the test, and in the end the herbs were chopped extremely fine, the women would sing and dance around the bride who had learned the craft so well in her parents’ kitchen.

  Just before the women began to dance in her honour Homa raised her chin from the herbs to catch her mother’s encouraging smile, and the knife nicked the back of her hand. Being accustomed to pain, she bit it back and stirred the blood into the eager green of the herbs. Mahatab Hanoum did not notice the cut and the few such as Nazie, who did, said nothing. The house filled with loud rejoicing and the fresh fragrance of the herbs, and when these had been thrown into the pot and cooked in oil along with chunks of veal, grains of wheat and slices of beetroot, and were served to the guests on the henna evening, the beetroot hid the disgrace of Homa’s bleeding.

  The following day Homa and the son of Mahatab Hanoum were married, and the bridegroom’s consumptive father was breathing his last. His body was even thinner than his son’s, and on the eve of the wedding he smelled of garlic, vinegar and urine. When the festivities ended and the guests left, he was found dead in his chair, his fingers frozen in a drumming movement. Joy turned to mourning, and the tired guests returned from their houses to console Mahatab Hanoum the widowed singer and the new bridegroom. Miriam Hanoum searched everywhere for her daughter, and when at last she found her dragging her leg in one of the alleys, she warned her not to couple with her husband that night, because she was supposed to feel grief, and misplaced lust was bad for any conception, much less the first one. ‘He’s your husband and you will be able to enjoy him all your life. Restrain yourself, Homa, restrain yourself . . .’ she said, because she knew how hot she was.

  But when the two lay down at midnight on the coir mattress Homa forgot her mother’s injunction, her husband forgot his father’s cooling corpse, and his slender body grew hot between her stout arms. The following morning, when Homa assured her mother that she had obeyed her and that she and her husband had not touched each other, Miriam Hanoum fed her celery, for her children to be healthy, made her drink an infusion of laurel flowers, to make them beautiful, and gave her slices of citron, for their skin to be fine and sweet-smelling. As soon as the dead man was buried, her husband’s sharp pelvic bones again bore into Homa’s blubber, and she conceived.

  Homa writhed in labour for seven whole days, and her husband’s sisters said it was her mother’s pampering which was holding up the birth. Only on the seventh morning of Homa’s screaming did Zuleikha, the deaf midwife, understand that the girl was not spoilt and the baby was not contrary. She stuck her head between Homa’s legs and smiled. Homa was a virgin. When she fell with the kite her hipbones broke and her maidenhead was pushed up towards the womb. Her skinny husband’s member never broke it, and the baby had been butting against it in vain for a week. Zuleikha emerged from between Homa’s spread thighs and returned with a pair of tiny scissors. When the membrane was cut and its blood stained the sheets, she beamed and said in her thick voice:

  ‘There, Miss Homa, I made you a Missis. Now push and you will be a kuchik madar.’

  When the baby’s head was out of its mother’s body they all saw that its wet face bore an amazing resemblance to his dead grandfather. Like him, he had a round owl’s face, his hair grew in a triangle from a bump in the middle of his forehead and his black eyes were very close together, ringed with light-coloured fuzz. Miriam Hanoum went pale with grief and rage. She plucked five hairs from the baby’s head, so that the demons would not confuse him with the dead man, and turned to question her daughter.

  ‘It wasn’t me, ma, honest, it was him, he touched me first on the wedding night,’ Homa sobbed, exhausted.

  ‘All right, close your legs,’ said Miriam Hanoum and covered her with the sheet. She took the owlet from its mother and called in the whole family to bid him goodbye.

  ‘Ma, just let me suckle him. They are bursting with milk,’ Homa pleaded, holding her swollen breasts. ‘It hurts.’

  ‘No. The grandfather’s soul is in the child,’ said Miriam Hanoum. ‘He’ll die in a few hours and will punish his mother and father.’ Then she attached a leech to the baby’s pink back. When the leech swelled she removed it, passed a razor over the rounded baby fat, and again attached a leech to the scratched flesh, to draw off the blood with the curse. But the baby died early in the morning. Miriam Hanoum wept, Mahatab Hanoum wept, and so did Manijoun, Flora and Nazie. Homa squeezed her aching nipples and pressed her nose to the baby and kept sniffing him, because she thought he smelled of garlic.

  Homa never conceived again. Miriam Hanoum caught geckos in the village windows and set them loose in the house of Homa and her husband. But the geckos escaped, taking their lucky tails to the neighbours’ houses and filling them with children. The women undid their bodices at every whimper, stuffed nipples into mouths, and the warm smell of the milk inflamed Homa’s envy. ‘Homa doesn’t think with her head anymore,’ said Miriam Hanoum sadly. ‘Now she can only think with her hole, which is burning with grief.’

  Every spring Moussa would wander off with his white hound in the fields of Omerijan to look for mandrakes. He dug up the man-shaped roots, which had arms, legs and a head, and brought them to his sister. The he
avy scent of their purple flowers with yellow pistils filled the house and intoxicated Homa. But the mandrakes availed nothing, nor did the psalm notes written by rabbi mullah Netanel the widower, which Homa swallowed with her meals. In her longing for the dead baby owl she fed her husband fenugreek seeds, scratched his back with her finger-rings, and his thin member did not come out of her body all night long. The cries of lust which rose from her house entertained the entire village, and spread lewd smiles on the faces in the Jubareh.

  14

  That night Nazie dreamed that Miriam Hanoum was presenting her with a heap of old yellowing sabzi with dry and shrivelled stems. When she woke at dawn she was greatly puzzled to see that Flora’s bed was empty. The smell of her watermelon vomit still hung in the air, and her dress was thrown on the rug, but her blankets were neatly folded and her sheet was smooth.

  Nazie ran barefoot to the privy, to pee and check if she had grown up during the night. On her way there she saw that Flora was not in the house, and when she took off her underpants there was no trace of blood. Drops of hot urine spattered on her elbow-sharp ankles and her upturned heels. She whispered: ‘Farhiz . . . farhiz . . . farhiz . . .’, to warn the demons to move their tender babies away from the scalding stream.

  Returning glumly to the house Nazie saw Moussa’s back, broad as a mattress, curled on the Kashani carpet in a corner of the sitting-room. Going back into the girls’ room she thought sadly that she was tarrying while Moussa kept growing all the time and had no time for her. She felt Flora’s stretched bedsheet, her properly folded quilt, and passed her fingers over the cool bedding. Flora must have left the house a long time ago, she thought as she stacked up the mattresses.

  First she lighted coals in the brazier, as she did every winter morning. Then she raked the cinders from the stove and added pinecones and the scraped pieces of watermelon shell to its fire. After warming herself at the fire she went down to the cistern where the water was nearly frozen. Returning to the kitchen, she filled the samovar, cooked eggs, kidney beans and porridge, and baked flat bread. Having scraped the gondi fat from the saucepans with a bald corn cob, she quit the sooty kitchen and swept the floors, ejecting into the alley moth corpses and Flora’s hairs, which had been torn out in sorrow and formed dustballs in corners and on the rugs.

  She heard a mouse slipping out into the alley, stood on tiptoe and opened the window high above her head. Cold air blew into the stuffy house. Breathing deeply, she watched a solitary bird which twittered on top of an almond tree, and the snow shovellers, early risers like her, sweeping the snow from the roofs.

  Ever since her parents died, Nazie rose every morning at dawn and immediately set to work on the household chores, but it was only the odour of the rye bread which she baked in the late hours of the morning that broke into Flora’s sleep and dragged her from her bed. Even before washing her face in the water-butt, while her dreams still lingered in her half-opened eyes, Flora would sip the hot milk and chew on the bread Nazie gave her. She still slept late when she yearned for Shahin, but despair made her slumber lighter. She reacted to every rattle of Nazie’s saucepans with an irritable moan and turned on her back. She also complained about the rousing mixtures of spices, saying that their mad odours were bothering her, dispelling the effect of the espand seeds and destroying her rest.

  The night before, the strange unpleasant taste of envy, which clung to Nazie’s tongue ever since she was taken in by her aunt, had scalded her throat as hot urine scalds the skin of an infant demon. She tried to swallow its bitter taste with her saliva and to put Flora’s odd disappearance out of her mind. When she woke Moussa and his father by gently shaking their shoulders she did not tell them about Flora’s empty bed, nor did she mention it afterwards, when they sat, washed and dressed, sipping the black tea she served them. Every morning she looked at the reflection of her face in the teacup before handing it to Moussa and, on Sultana’s advice, checked every feature so as to preserve their love. Even when she sat down with them, plaiting her long hair while they fished the fragrant pine needles from their cups and swallowed the remaining tea, Nazie did not recall Flora and did not tell them that she had disappeared.

  Moussa stood beside the door, holding his broad-brimmed felt hat – a recent fashion, suggestive of faraway lands beyond the Caspian Sea – and looked at Nazie’s little face, her pointed chin and the cheekbones widening above it, like an inverted drop of water. With her eyes lowered, she indicated to him that there was no news between her legs. It struck her that the lemony pimples were multiplying on his face. When he asked if she would be in the market that day and would come to the poultry shop, she replied that she would be there at midday, and thought about Shahnaz Tamizi.

  She looked through the window as Moussa walked with his father out of the alley, and noted sadly how bowed his strong shoulders were in the morning. Although they ran the family poultry shop honestly and diligently, they had a harder time than Rohollah, the butcher whose stall adjoined theirs. Moussa’s father was the fourth in a line of butchers, but their strange family name – Ratoryan meaning milkman’s son – put many customers off. They said they would rather buy their poultry from a gentile butcher than from a Jewish one whose name was tainted with soured milk.

  The price of the birds sold by the family decreased from generation to generation, and only the poor villagers bought an elderly chicken from them once a fortnight. Their wives prepared soup for a week from its fatty flesh, and then used it, wrapped in muslin, to enrich their humble dishes. On other days they bought dombeh and feathery skins, seasoned the fat with cumin and pepper and roasted it on charcoal, spread it on bread and stuffed it into their children’s mouths.

  Only before Flora’s father and brother did they shed their pride and admit their poverty. They hid their hunger from their neighbours and pretended to be too full to eat anything, even when only tea and bread were available. The women set pots of water to boil with some dill weed, to make their neighbours believe that they were cooking a thick khoresht soup, and when their children cried for food they would pound the pestle in the empty mortar for the neighbours to think that they were pounding meat for the midday meal. In the year of the great drought all the women of the Jubareh pounded air, and the odour of imaginary khoresht rose from all the kitchens.

  When Moussa and his father disappeared beyond the houses of the Jubareh, Nazie quickly undid her plait and loosened the hair on her shoulders. She opened Flora’s cosmetics box avidly and powdered herself with its powders. She rubbed three drops of fragrant rose-oil on her neck and three more on her face. With untrained fingers, more accustomed to pickling fish and pressing cheese than titivating, she painted her eyelids. She worked quickly, before Miriam Hanoum woke up and caught her in the act. In the weak light from the window the mirror reflected a dim, pallid image, but when she approached the lighted stove she saw that her face was painted like the faces of the women who stood in the entrance of Mamou’s whorehouse, slapping their buttocks and praising their flesh to the men. She licked her thumbs and rubbed her face with them, but the paint smeared and her face looked uglier. Her looks in the mirror frightened her, but Nazie was determined to appear as mature as possible.

  She tried on two of Flora’s flowered dresses but took them off again and stood naked and perspiring. Finally she decided to wear the full silken dress that Shahin had made for his wife on the eve of their wedding. She tied up its ample folds so that it would not drag on the ground as she walked, and put on Flora’s patent-leather high-heeled shoes. But since there was no way to make them fit her feet, and they clattered on the floor, she took them off and put on her plain cloth shoes, which disappeared under the dress. Before leaving the house she threw a final glance at the queen’s sad green eyes. It seemed to her that a subtle smile had appeared overnight between the woven cheeks. Nazie tied her kerchief on her head, glanced at her grandmother snoring in her crib and went outside, dragging the white train through the puddles.

  Flora had married
Shahin on a beautiful spring evening, and her wedding dress, though ample, was light and delicate. Now the fierce winds of early winter whipped it, shook and filled it, and almost threw Nazie to the pavement. Nazie, who always walked carefully and straight, as though someone had drawn a line on the ground for her, stumbled and swayed like a drunkard. She pressed her arms to her sides, not because of the cold, but because she feared that the hem of the dress would fly up and reveal the plain cloth shoes hidden underneath. Despite the early hour and her choice of byways, wherever she went she was followed by astonished looks, loud laughter and jeers.

  The young workmen, thinking they had discovered a new girl, flirted with the strange coquette and approached her, buzzing like bees. When they realized that it was Nazichi Ratoryan dressed like a gipsy they became uproarious, trailed after her and harassed her like gnats. She would have liked to slap them down, but the gnats multiplied and became a swarm of wasps. In the maze of alleys children tried to grab the train of her dress and she stumbled again and again. Finally she gathered up the mud-laden flounce and with short, quick steps and bowed back ran out of the Jubareh, exposing her cloth shoes for all to see. Pieces of washing tossed about by the winds seemed to her like bodiless people chasing after her.

  When she reached the house of mullah Hassan, his servants were amused by the sight of the ridiculous child, and one of them asked with a toothless grin: ‘What happened, Nazichi, you want to be a gentile orphan?’ When she said that she needed to see the mullah urgently, they told her that he had gone the week before to the holy city of Qom, and would return the following day.

  Walking close to the garden walls of the houses Nazie made her way to the house of the kadkhoda, the village head, which stood on the other side of Omerijan. Like her pregnant mother, she circled the perimeter of the village and her heart trembled with fear. The kadkhoda’s two wives stood in the doorway, one big and one small, both pregnant, frowning and flaring their nostrils. When Nazie asked to go in and speak to their husband, but would not say what she wanted of him, the smaller wife swept her from the threshold with her prickly twig broom, and the big one chased her as far as the gate, yelling at her never to dare approach the house of a respectable Moslem dressed like a little Jew whore.