‘Don’t you dare talk to me, seliteh! You little Bahaï whore, be quiet!’ Taken aback by the Bahaï woman’s shouts, Flora spat on her silk-gowned belly.
A tall, long-armed manservant came to the woman’s aid, grabbed Flora by the hair and threw her out. Flora stretched her neck to the balconies and shouted to her husband to show himself at a window:
‘Shahin! Who is this woman, Shahin? Come here, tell her that I’m your wife Flora, come, let’s go home, Shahin! Oh God, what will I do now? Shahin, come see your poor Flora. Who is this seliteh who says she’s your wife? Her body should fill with pus, nothing but pus in all her body, yellow, yellow pus . . .’
She flung stones and sand at the stuffed fish above her and howled at the closed door:
‘Who are you, anyway? What d’you want from my husband? Where did you get to know him? Just ’cause he gave you a baby you think you know him? Fm his wife, you hear? And you’re just a little seliteh! He said he loves me, loves the way my backside moves when I walk . . .’ Flora burst into tears. ‘He said I was sweet and wet like a goose, when he gave me our baby he said that I was his girl, that I gave him a fever, you hear? A feee-ver!’
Flora fell silent, slumped on the ground with her head on the doorstep, and the donkey stopped braying too. It looked at her sadly, the white patches around its eyes gleaming like lanterns in the dark. She wept softly and pushed through the crack under the door small stones and curses learned from her mother:
‘You should catch all the diseases in the world . . . You should beg death to come and it won’t come, you whore . . . You should be always too hungry to sleep . . . You should give birth to a pink monster with five legs and a hump, so you should, seliteh . . .’
From behind her came the voice of Shahin, sniffing at her in astonishment: ‘Flora? Flora, is that you?’
Butter melted through her body, her face softened, the stones dropped from her hands and thick, plump tears ran down her cheeks. Snuffling, she asked in a sweet voice, ‘Shahin, my soul, where have you been?’ – as though he had disappeared the day before. His walleye twitched nervously, which Flora interpreted as tears of love. She rose and flung herself, her baby and the plaid horse-blanket into his tense arms, muttering his name eagerly, her nose pecking at his flesh. She was dishevelled and warm and wanted him to play with her loosened hair, undo the knots, catch the lice, massage her scalp and mutter sweet words into her ear, and then her hair would once again be thick and glossy as it had been on the day of their wedding. She wanted him to lie down with her on the floor under the fish’s jaws, to rub the fabric of her dresses and make them rustle pleasantly, and slip a hand up her thighs.
But out of the shell house stepped the snake woman, enveloped in a chador, followed by her long-armed flunkey. Her lips were colourless. She laid a hand on Shahin’s back and simperingly rebuked him: ‘Who is this crazy girl? Why is she shouting that she’s your wife? By your God, Shahin, toré khoda, who is she?’
Flora wanted Shahin to chop the strange woman’s fair hair with her father’s big butcher’s knife, to uproot and pluck it out by the handful, to slit her neck and make all her pearls scattter. The wind from the sea rang in Flora’s ears, scissors jangled in the air, their blades snapping rapidly, and Flora heard Manijoun’s mutterings and Miriam Hanoum’s shouts: ‘Flora! Leave the scissors alone! You’re making little demons! Don’t you know that’s how the demons make children? The house will be full of little demons! Flora, enough, stop it now!’
‘Enough, Flora! Stop it now!’ When she opened her eyes the fish and Shahin were were both gaping at her, and her hands were tearing at the yellow hair of the snake woman, who was squealing in pain.
‘Enough, Flora, beleshkon, leave her alone, I tell you, leave alone . . .’ Shahin yelled.
Flora was standing upright, legs apart, eyes glaring, a handful of yellow hair caught in her fingers. The bitter taste of the watermelon vomit rose in her throat and filled her mouth. She felt the wind drying the tears on her cheeks. Shahin was stroking his new wife’s head with a comforting hand, while with the other he smoothed her silk gown. Flora saw how ugly his embarrassed face looked, how short he was, how deep the bays in his hair, how pale the ringworm scars on his balding pate. She turned around and pursued her own shadow towards the shore. She heard the snake woman screeching behind her: ‘Shahin, come back, you hear me? Shahin, come home at once!’
Flora kept tripping on her own feet, stumbling, rising and running on with bruised knees, trailing the horse-blanket on the ground and raising a cloud of dust.
‘Flora, wait,’ she heard Shahin behind her. ‘Wait, I tell you . . .’ But she did not curb her clumsy galloping legs, her swinging arms, her bouncing chins.
‘Mind the baby, Flora!’
She slowed down and dropped on the sand. Shahin fell to his knees beside her, took the horse-blanket from her head and wrapped it around her body, stroked her flushed face, brushing it with his fingertips and pacifying her the way she loved, whispering, ‘My girl, you’re my girl.’ He took off his shirt and bound her wounded knee with it, his sweat stinging the abrasions which blossomed redly through the cloth. Flora knew that the grasshopper on his tail was rasping and its coloured wings were fluttering. Shahin whispered his lies into her ear, his hand shielding his soft, excited voice from the wind and the booming waves.
He had met the Bahaï woman Lily at her stall in the bazaar of Babol-Sar, where she sold little cloth-stoppered jars of precious snake oil, a cure for rheumatism, weak bones and inflamed joints. She told him that she herself made the preparation, and when he asked who the man was who crushed the heads of the poisonous reptiles for her, her glance turned and wandered over the pavement, and a smile spread on her colourless lips. Her slender, frail body aroused his suspicion and curiosity. When she finally told him her secret, that a family of snakes lived in the wall of her house, Shahin said goodbye to his loyal apprentice, tied his donkey in her courtyard and promptly married her.
In his first few nights in the tall, two-storeyed house Shahin was afraid to fall asleep. Dreaming, he saw elongated silvery serpents rising from the cellars and stinging him to death with their forked tongues. The blue and green snakes which twined on the Bahaï woman’s arms and hands also terrified him. When he shut his eyes they glided down her long fingers and pierced him through her nails, coiling around his neck. Lying sleepless, Shahin listened all night long to the snakes slithering through the walls of the big house and under the marble floor, rubbing their scales against each other. The rustle of their scales sounded to him like a slow, absorbed leafing through the pages of a book, and he wondered who was sitting there reading.
Lily learned to hold him tight on stormy, thundery nights, and Shahin grew accustomed to sleeping with her snake arms around his neck. But he took care to walk about the house in high thick-soled shoes, and hid his thin slippers, which covered only the toes, in the back of a drawer.
Lily’s mother, so she told him, had discovered the reptiles living in her house three years before her death. One night she happened to forget a wooden bowl full of sweetened milk down in the cellar. In the morning the milk was gone, and in its place was a gleaming pearl. The following night she left the bowl in the same corner, filled to the brim with apple cider. In the morning there was a diamond in the bottom of the bowl.
On the third night the Bahaï woman’s curiosity hatched out of the egg of fear. She filled the bowl with olive oil and hid in a corner, wrapped in a blanket. In the early morning she saw through the mists of sleep six gleaming snakes approaching the bowl and sipping the offered oil. Before leaving, one of them took a gold coin from the wall, dropped it in the bowl and undulated back to its hole.
Lily’s mother did not reveal the secret to her husband. She knew that men are foolish and impetuous, and that her husband would demolish the house to its foundations to find the hidden treasure, and the snakes’ vengeance would persecute them to their dying day. When he asked why she went down every night to the cellar
, and who the milk and ale, oil and wine were intended for, she replied vaguely, ‘For the cats, the cats.’
‘Stupid old woman,’ he grinned and made a dismissive gesture. ‘Takes good milk and gives it to cats.’
By the time he died, she had in the cellar three big earthen jars full of gold and precious gems, hidden under a pile of worn goats’ hair blankets.
Before she joined him in the grave, she revealed the secret of the snakes to her only daughter Lily, and made her swear that she would never disclose it to a soul, not even to her husband, even if she loved him dearly. Men, she said, are greedy, impatient and ungrateful. Only women, who brood all their lives on the secrets of life and of the kitchen, are capable of preserving the secrets of the cellar, too, and of extracting blessings and remedies from the snakes’ venom. A year after making that vow, Lily entrusted the secret to Shahin, who kissed her, smiling sweetly, and thought about his father and the silkworm breeding plant he had dreamed about.
One night, soon after they were married, Shahin told his Bahaï wife to bake him a sweet bread with raisins, because he was hungry. As she stood in the kitchen in the middle of the night, kneading the dough, with the oven fire casting long, slim shadows on her snowy face and fair hair, Shahin thought about throwing her into the flames, as his father had done to his mother, who was humming heartache songs to him. When the woman’s white flesh began to sizzle, he thought and his eyes glittered, he would go down to the cellar with a hatchet, strike the six snakes and crush their heads, spattering the walls with their precious oil. Then he would smash the walls, too, dig down to the foundations and gather the sparkling treasure to his bosom. When Lily took the sweet loaf from the oven, Shahin tore its round cheeks and devoured it, absorbed in his glowing visions. Lily gazed at him in wonder, smiling a little smile and humming love songs, thinking that she had not known how much her little husband desired fresh bread. Absorbed in his imaginings, Shahin rose to look for a hatchet and was alarmed to discover that nothing was left of the bread but some crumbs, and of the fire – only ashes extinguished with sand. Lily wiped the cold perspiration from his face with her floured hands, greying his black bristles. His walleye watched her tossing her hair from shoulder to shoulder, extracting a last raisin from his mouth with her tongue, and asking if he was coming to bed to satisfy her hunger, too.
Shahin snuggled between her white breasts with his eyes shut, and imagined that they were the mounds of treasure hidden in the fabric of her house. In his fantasies he heard the treasure calling to him in a shrill yearning voice: ‘Come to me, Shahin azizam, come to me, take me, take . . .’ He sprawled on mounds of gold, diamonds and gems, gathered them hungrily to his bosom, embraced them and delicately pushed his fingers into the openings of oysters from which rosy pearls twinkled at him. When he woke, the snakes of Lily’s arms were wound around his neck, their thin tongues pointing at his mouth, their lidless painted eyes staring, moaning with desire: ‘Aaaaa . . .’
Shahin leapt up: ‘The hatchet!’ he cried in terror, extricating himself from her clasping thighs and holding his moist, erect member. ‘Where’s my hatchet?’
He raised his fist to hit Lily on the head, but she wriggled and evaded the blow, and slid from the bed to the carpet. A satisfied smile lit her face, and a pale dawn lit the window overlooking the pistachio orchard.
‘But Shahin, azizam, what about our baby? Did you forget our baby? Look at my belly, Shahin. I haven’t swallowed a chicken.’
‘Of course I remember, Flora, of course I remember the baby, how could I forget? It was for you that I married the Bahaï, damn her, believe me, for you and for our baby . . . I always thought about you, azizam, about the honey and citron of your skin, and the cinnamon of your mouth . . . Even when I was with her, with that white ghost . . . But I was sure that you were always laughing, I didn’t know you were crying . . .’
‘And didn’t you hear the song I sang to you on the roof, and didn’t you cry when I peed on the chicken eggs, Shahin? And didn’t you wake up when I breathed the espand smoke into my soul, and yawned and yawned?’
‘I heard, azizam, I heard everything.’ He kissed her on the forehead and led her back to the two-storeyed house, with its arched balconied windows that looked like doors. His chest was bare, and Flora laughed and hobbled behind him, limping like her sister, her big woman’s breasts bouncing, her big child’s eyes misting over, and a blush spread on her cheeks as if they had been chafed. He said to her that if she pretended to agree to be his second wife, they would go down to the cellar together, fill the plaid blanket with the treasure and flee to Omerijan, to have the baby in the village and to stick their tongues out at the gentile urchins who had thrown plum-stones at her. Flora tightened her grip on his hand and thought only about the nice coachman who would take them back to Julfah in his carriage, and how in return for his kindness she would give him back his horse blanket filled with pearls and diamonds and gold coins. When they were back among the pistachio trees and under the saw-toothed fish, Flora remembered the Bahaï’s white baby.
‘What will happen to her baby, when we go home and she stays here?’ she asked, and at once regretted it and covered her mouth in dread.
‘He’ll be with his mother, don’t you think about . . .’ Shahin hushed her.
‘Shahin, listen,’ she said in a loud whisper, ‘what do we need so much money for? Maybe we should just take the milk-jugs which are already full of lots of gold and diamonds . . .’
‘Flora!’ he barked at her, wide eyed. ‘Remember what I told you.’ He lowered his voice and narrowed his eyes. ‘You have to do what I tell you, otherwise . . .’ He shook his finger at her, and the Bahaï’s flunkey appeared at the door.
Shahin led her under a tree, spread the blanket and told her to lie down. Speaking softly, he again described the treasure hidden under the ground. The spring water babbled into his story, and Flora at last found the sleep she had searched for the previous night in the alleys of Omerijan. In her dream she was imprisoned with Mamou’s baby in a pickles jar, and beyond the glass the world became immense and its people giants.
The two-storeyed house had originally been a single-storeyed one. Its walls were plastered with thick, rough clay and were not inlaid with seashells. The fish, too, was still swimming placidly in the sea. It was the house of Menashé Nahidyan, a prosperous Jewish merchant who could read the writing of the English, and who left it to his clever son Raphael. Since Raphael did not yet have a wife to fill the rooms with her sons, he let his younger brother, the stupid Mashíah, live there with him.
The brothers Nahidyan could not eat bread or cakes, beans, meat or fowl. If they so much as tasted the forbidden foods, they were immediately covered with itchy red patches on their skin. By morning the rash would be gone, but only after a sleepless night in which they scratched themselves furiously, tormented by urticaria. Their mother heaped their plates with cheeses, fish and fruit, and filled their hands with sweets. Throughout their childhood they had squares of French chocolate melting in their pockets, and their sweat was like sugar, yet they were both thin and feeble. They did not inherit their father’s handsome, sturdy physique, their moustaches were mere fuzz, and the oily pimples never disappeared from their faces. But they did learn from their father how to trade with the English in sugar, almonds and sunflower oil, and to buy gigantic rounds of halva from the Turks.
Yet their great wealth came to them by accident, not through the elder brother’s cleverness, but thanks to the younger brother’s stupidity.
‘Five thousand pounds sugar cubes, five thousand pounds granulated sugar, one thousand pounds bitter almonds, five thousand bottles sunflower oil – and remember to write it in letters as big as spiders,’ Raphael kept repeating from the shelves.
‘Should I say it again, my stupid idiot donkey brother? One more time?’ he said everything three times, quite loud, emphasizing every word to make sure they entered Mashíah’s ears, which stuck out on the sides of his head like big wings. Mashíah
went to the Babol postal clerk and copied the order in the fine handwriting he was so proud of, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth and his eyebrows knitted together into a long sweaty hedge. He drew the letters in india ink, linking their curly tails, decorating the punctuation marks, and worked so hard that he unwittingly added a splendid round zero to the quantity of loose sugar his brother had ordered.
The postal clerk smiled and nodded at the big foreign letters, laid the telegram on the letters scales, quoted a double price and told Mashíah he was going to dispatch the letter on the back of a fast dromedary camel which could cover the distance to Isfahan in ten days, unlike a double-humped Bactrian camel, which did it in twenty. The statement sounded reasonable to Mashíah’s big ears and small wit.
Winter and spring passed, and the ears of the elder brother Raphael caught the tinkling of camel bells approaching from the city gate, bearing on their backs his consignment of sugar, almonds and oil. The tinkling was louder and merrier than ever, and when Raphael put his head out of the window he could not see the end of the golden camel caravan. He drew out his belt and whipped his stupid brother Mashíah until he feigned death. Then the two of them cleared out all the rooms in the house, piling the furniture and carpets by the stream under the pistachio trees. Towers of sugar boxes rose in every corner, completely devouring the stone pavement and darkening the windows. The rounds of halva, bottles of oil and sacks of almonds were shoved into the cellar, and throughout the summer the brothers slept like mourners on a narrow mattress which they laid on the piece of carpet left exposed near the door. At night Raphael hit his brother, slapped him and pinched him, and they both wept and pretended to die. They drank too-sweet tea, grew as fat as their father, and drove away the armies of big black ants by beating big tambour drums.
Persian Brides Page 16