This was the year of the great drought. The wells and fish-ponds dried up, the fields, melon patches and plantations withered, cellars and barns emptied. But the light burned in the darkened rooms of the brothers Nahidyan. They were besieged not only by the inhabitants of Babol-Sar, but by villagers from all around, who heard the rumour about the sugar mine. The boxes were emptied of the white grains and filled with silver, and when people’s money ran out, the boxes were filled with gold jewellery, diamond rings and pearl necklaces, pots of opium and bowls of hashish, ornamental copper vessels and bolts of silk.
Mashíah and Raphael added another storey to their house, with arched windows fronted with little balconies, laid fine marble on the floors of both levels, covered the outer walls with seashells, and hung the gaping fish above the front door. When Shah Mohammed came to the throne and riots broke out all over the kingdom, the brothers went down to the cellar and buried their treasure in a pit they had dug under the paving. On their way to the city of Yazd both brothers, the clever one and the fool, were murdered, but all that the bandits found in their belongings were a few pistachio-nut shells, some almonds and crumbling sugar cubes. A Bahaï family without sons settled in the two storeys of the abandoned house, and a family of snakes moved into the basement.
‘But I’m not tired now, I slept outside,’ said Flora, and the moths which entered the house with her danced above her head.
Lily summoned the long-armed flunkey and told him to lay a mattress for Flora on the ground floor, then ordered Flora, as if she were a sulky child, to follow the servant to her bed. Flora forgot the promise she had given Shahin when he was binding her wounded knees, and dug in her heels.
‘Flora, go to sleep,’ said Shahin with a warning look, but she stared over her rounded belly at her toes, which stuck out of the tips of her worn felt shoes.
‘Are you listening to me, Flora?’ He came close and took hold of her chin, raising her face to remind her with a look of what she had promised. But Flora shook her heavy head, and her dishevelled hair moved from side to side with her breasts.
‘I want to sleep with you.’
‘Flora, sweetie,’ Shahin hissed, pressing his fingernails into her shoulder until she winced with pain, ‘go to sleep now.’
‘With you.’ She swung her knees rhythmically and shrugged her aching shoulders like a spoilt, unruly child.
Shahin and his two wives walked up the stairs with the little oil-lamps to Lily’s room, which was full of small shadowy recesses. In the dimness Flora noticed that the floor was not covered with carpets laid one upon the other, but with simple hides of cattle and the cured skins of wild beasts. Their odours overcame the salty aroma of the sea that permeated the walls, and they felt good to her bare feet. Her tiredness was gone, and she wanted to explore the room, but Lily abruptly blew out the candle and complete darkness fell.
‘Shahin?’ Flora called out in the dark, hearing the moths fluttering about her ears. ‘Shahin, where are you? I can’t see you.’
‘I’m here,’ he replied hoarsely after a moment. Flora walked towards his voice like a blind woman, her hands outstretched, until she reached him and wrapped her arms around his neck. She wanted to lay her head on his breast and stroke his thinning hair, but he seemed to have grown nice soft hair, and her astonished hands encountered a pair of breasts. She touched them curiously and suddenly felt Lily’s hard little belly pushing against her.
‘Ha ha ha, stupid girl . . .’ Lily laughed gratingly. Flora recoiled, rocked slightly and fell face down on odorous camel skins.
‘Come on, Flora.’ Shahin gave her his hand, raised her and pulled her to his wife’s bed. ‘You must go to sleep.’
Flora felt his hand, found the manly hairs on the joints, and squeezed it between her fat fingers.
‘It’s me,’ said Shahin. ‘Easy now, Flora, easy.’ She took two cautious steps after him. Reaching one of the recesses, he supported her back and laid her down gently, careful not to touch her wounds. Flora felt his breath on her neck. Her body was longer than the mattress, and she drew up her feet. Shahin covered her with a quilt and lay down alongside, turning his curved back to her. Even without touching it, Flora knew that his backbone bulged through his shirt, and her mind’s eye saw his cherished face, and his weak eye twitching persistently.
She wanted to give him a fold of her dress to rub, but she heard Lily’s silk gown rustling on the bed. She heard the Bahaï woman tucking the quilt around herself, uttering a weary little sigh and snuggling up to Shahin. A green snake reached out to his loins and a blue one to his face. Flora clung to her husband’s back, one hand on his hair, the other on his buttocks, and yawned sweetly. Silence fell in the room. Through the susurration of the wind and her gathering dreams, Flora felt Lily’s long nails moving on Shahin’s body and flickering over hers too. Shahin’s hair stood on end, pricking her palm, and her skin tingled. Shahin groaned, trying to stifle the sounds breaking from his throat, and moved between his wives like a dancer between tongues of flame. Thousands of pores burst open in Flora’s skin and gaped like deep pits. She heard their two hearts beating together wildly, and the heavy pounding of her heart by itself. She heard the rustle of clothes being taken off and buttons undone, and in the darkness Lily’s white body gleamed momentarily and vanished under the shadow of her husband’s body.
‘Shhh . . .’ Shahin whispered in his wife’s ear, rebuking her eagerness. His eye squinted uneasily at Flora, while Lily’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling. Flora closed her eyes and a cold sweat broke out of all the pits in her body, reviving the smell of watermelon vomit from the previous night. When she opened them, Shahin was piercing Lily’s body, burrowing into it, and the two of them squirmed. The tattooed snakes writhed over their heads.
‘It’s not nice, what you’re doing, Shahin. I’m going home.’
Flora slid from the mattress to the skins and furs spread on the floor, pushed herself upright, and sought to leave the room which was full of recesses, snakes and shadows. She picked up her shoes, tucked them under her arm and began to move slowly, one hand feeling the wall for an opening, the other covering her ear, to block the others’ rhythmic moans. When she found an iron bar thrust through a wall-ring she tugged it out, quickly opened the door and put out one foot and then another to the stairs, but the sea wind gathered her to itself.
Instead of the door to the passage, Flora’s groping hands had opened a balcony window. She stumbled on the sill and glided on the wind over the low parapet, and her shoes flew with her. Shahin’s donkey looked up and smiled at her when she landed beside it among the trees, while windfall pistachio fruits dropped on her hair and moths circled over her head.
19
When Nazie came out of the mosque the palm trees in the avenue sheltered her and caressed her head with their fronds. The slender fingers of the wintry midday sun passed through and toyed with her hair. Her head burned between her shoulders, still draped in the strange chador. At first she tried to stop the bleeding with her hands, but the blood ran between her fingers and down her neck, collecting over and under the chador. She dropped her hands and let it flow from her split earlobes as from open taps. Her face twitched with pain and her heart galloped. Men from the mosque courtyard stared at her back and the market people at her face.
The peasants on their mules, the pedlars who trundled their handcarts between the bazaar stalls and the housewives in their homes, alley cats, dogs, children – they all stopped and stared at her. The beggars’ empty mouths hung open. The hawkers stopped singing, and their customers turned around to look at the painted face of Nazichi Ratoryan, the Jewish orphan, at her muddied dress and the camel-hair chador which was slowly turning red.
‘One minute she’s a Zafarollah pigeon, the next minute she’s a Delkasht peacock,’ she heard someone exclaiming as she walked past, setting one foot in front of the other along a straight line she drew amid the mucky puddles on the road to the Jubareh, her eyes as always searching for dropped coins that migh
t wink at her from the filthy pavement. But her heart was leaping from her ribcage.
When she left the mosque she tipped her head forward, nodding quickly in gratitude like a pecking pigeon. But the gold earrings no longer tinkled in her ears, and the fishes no longer swung the tiny coins on the ends of their tails. They were swimming in a little pool in the mullah’s open palm and diving into its old furrows. Even before she sliced her ears, she had felt a wave of pain rising from inside her. Despair spun criss-cross threads before her eyes, hiding mullah Ja’afar’s face. But when she tore the gold from her flesh the threads broke and everything became clear. The pain was so rousing, and the gushing blood so astounding, that Nazie wanted more. When she saw it dripping on the hunted deer carpet, she looked straight into the mullah’s goggling eyes and demanded that he grant her request.
At first she did not know where to go. Should she mingle with the crowd in the bazaar and bring the news to Moussa first – the shop was so near, its entrance as usual clustered with idlers and pedlars selling sweets or salt-and-pepper shakers, Moussa’s apron as bloody as her dress, the butcher’s knife in his hand throwing glints on his pimply face – and he is not thinking about Shahnaz Tamizi but only about her, her alone, and he’s waiting for her to come as she had promised, and he would wrap a chicken for her, tie it with a string and tell her what he wanted for supper . . . Or should she run home first, shake the late-rising Miriam Hanoum, confront her morning yawns, and say: ‘Ameh bozorg, ameh bozorg, I can marry Moussa, the mullah said I can marry Moussa today.’
Nazie gathered up her skirts and ran home, to pull the blankets off her aunt’s face and give her the glad news about the wedding, as if she was her mother, because she was very anxious to please her. Emerging from the market-place she passed through the moon gate and did not go past the synagogue straight to the Jubareh, but circled the village wall, to avoid the villagers’ mean eyes and inquisitive questions. Yet even so, when she passed the noisy flour-mill of the Jewish miller Suleiman, the son-in-law of the late Pinhas, the labourers stopped carrying the sacks of grain and followed her with their eyes.
When she reached the turning in the alley she saw Miriam Hanoum standing in the house gate, her head in the black chador turning this way and that, her eyes restless. Homa sat amid the puddles on the lower step at her mother’s feet, resting her hump against a gatepost, her legs apart, the crooked one turning to the house, the straight one sticking out into the street. Homa was waving her arms wildly as she always did when she talked, and Nazie could hear her shouts from as far as the Jews’ gate, but could not make out the words. She wanted to run to her aunt and cry in her lap, but when she came near she saw that Miriam Hanoum’s face was tense and she was spitting curses through clenched teeth.
‘Where’s Flora? Have you seen Flora?’ her aunt barked as soon as she saw her. Homa raised herself awkwardly, her eyes staring, and Nazie remembered the cool bedding on her cousin’s empty bed.
‘Vavaila! What’s happened to you? You think you’ve turned into a lady overnight?’ Homa caught the hem of Flora’s wedding dress and flapped it, and Nazie stumbled and fell. Homa’s fingers pierced the air. ‘And where’s my idiot sister who let you put on this dress to go to the market?’
‘God punish you, Nazie, how did you get all this blood on you?’ Miriam Hanoum shrieked, then bit her tongue. ‘Where’ve you been that this happened to you?’
‘And where’s my sister Flora gone in the middle of the night, huh? You must know where she went.’ Homa pulled Nazie’s arm as though to tear it off. Nazie shook her head and stood up.
‘Look at her. Don’t you lie to us, Nazie. Crazy Manijoun saw her going out in her dream. Where did she go, the idiot – maybe she wanted another watermelon?’
‘She’s not at Nosrat’s and Sultana said she hasn’t been to her house, and Fathaneh, damn her eyes, isn’t home, and Hayim the beggar hasn’t seen her – but they all tell stories as dirty as their faces. Homa and I have turned the alley inside out, and no Flora. Nazie, by your life, where has she gone?’
‘May I drop dead if I know. In the morning I didn’t see her in her bed . . .’ In her agitation Nazie took the chador off her head, uncovering her bleeding, split earlobes. Miriam Hanoum struck herself on the breasts and slapped the back of her hand.
‘God help you, Nazie, what did you do to yourself? By your mother’s grave, tell me where you threw the earrings I gave you!’
‘I don’t have them anymore, ameh bozorg.’ Nazie bit her lower lip. ‘Forgive me, God in heaven saw that I didn’t have a choice, I had to give them to the mullah in the bazaar mosque . . .’
‘Waï, waï, waï!’ Miriam Hanoum broke in, scratching her lovely face. ‘And he, damn him for all time – and you too, wretched child, throwing our honour to the dogs – was it he made you all bloody like this – may his gentile eyes drop out of his head and burn this morning in this sun . . . ?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, Nazie, God take you if you’re lying to me . . .’ Miriam Hanoum’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, and Homa’s eyes flared with fury.
‘I swear, my life for yours if I’m lying,’ Nazie squeaked excitedly. ‘And he said that for the earrings I gave him I can marry Moussa tonight, and that Moussa and me should come to him to the hammam at midday, and he’ll give us a paper, and tonight we’ll give it to mullah Netanel to make Moussa a groom and me a bride, and he said we must do everything simply and quietly, so nobody will give us away to the officials, or we’d be done for, so he said, ameh bozorg, so help me.’ Nazie’s eyes filled with tears as big as stones.
‘Azizam!’ cried Miriam Hanoum. ‘Congratulations, azizam!’
She pressed Nazie’s head to her fragrant bosom and lavished kisses on the dripping and drying blood, on Nazie’s painted face, and on the strange chador. Even Homa stopped pinching Nazie’s arm and hugged her lovingly.
‘Nazie, azizam, swear to me by this sun, by this sky – he said today? Today, he said?’
Nazie nodded, her head caught between the four big breasts. They moaned and stifled the joyous ululation that rose in their throats. She did not want to pull her head out of the suffocating warm nest in which she snuggled, but she did wish that her mother would push in between Homa and Miriam Hanoum and embrace her, and for Flora’s wild laughter to break into their midst and for her snorts to accompany the shaking of the four breasts against her body. The kerchief slipped from her head, and with it her tears began to fall, blossoming like sweat flowers on the women’s chadors, which were warm from their bodies.
‘No, Nazie, don’t cry on your wedding day,’ Homa scolded her, drying her face and smearing the traces of paint. ‘It’s a day of celebration, not of mourning – nobody’s dead, God forbid, right?’
‘Come.’ Miriam Hanoum cupped Nazie’s little face to stop her tears, and wiped her little nose. ‘The sun’s almost in the middle of the sky and we have preparations to make. We’ll fill the pots with water and put them in the sun to warm for the bath of our little bride.’
Nazie and Homa were drawing buckets from the cistern, where the surface ice had melted since morning and the water had cleared, when Nazie suddenly thought about Moussa in the market, cutting up fowls, flies buzzing around his head, unaware that his wedding day had arrived. Homa was sent to tell him and his father to shut up shop and come home.
‘Tell him,’ Miriam Hanoum shouted after her, ‘to load the mule of Parviz, the little porter, with everything we need from the market – he should buy a lot of labash and Barbary bread, and we’ll need dried lemons, won’t we, Nazie?’
‘Yes, and fish too, and eggs.’
‘Yes, fish and eggs for the blessings, and tell Janjan Furush to set aside some coriander and tarragon for me, because we’re having a big feast – but she must keep her big mouth shut – tell her, that big idiot – or better still don’t tell her anything. They made my daughter into a whore in their fantasies. But where is Flora? Where is that girl, damn her, as if the watermelon swallowed
her up – so much trouble she’s brought this house . . . Don’t tell Janjan anything, you hear?’
Miriam Hanoum captured the transparent sun that shone palely in the sky in a big saucepan full of cold water. She gazed deeply into it and raised it up to the sky, doubting the heat of the sun. Finally she set down a couple of stones, placed a small grate on them and built a fire under the pot. The water heated slowly and vapour began to rise from it.
Nazie had not seen Miriam Hanoum so happy and lively since the day she took her in. When Flora comes home she won’t believe what Nazie will tell her. A new spirit, like a demon’s energy, seized Miriam Hanoum, who ran around the house, the braided crown loose on her shoulders and big smiles joining her lips and eyes. Her fine hands came to life and snapped in the air like busy scissors. She opened all the house windows, made a bundle of all the sour bedsheets and tied its corners into a sack. She carried the bags of feathers which were strewn about the house into the girls’ room, together with the small kitchen table and its chairs. Manijoun, too, was dragged into that room, curled up in her basket, and her old woman’s eyes almost popped out of her head.
‘Vavaila! What, what’s happened, is anyone dead?’ she screeched.
‘We have a wedding today,’ Miriam Hanoum trilled. ‘We have a bridegroom and bride today!’ And she kissed her mother-in-law on her wrinkled forehead between the raised eyebrows.
‘A wedding . . . What wedding? Are you going to marry me off? Who’s my bridegroom? Let me out of here, I need a beautiful dress, I need flowers in my hair, oh God, what kind of groom did you get me?’
‘A tall man, strong as a dog, as a wolf, as a horse, Manijoun . . .’ Miriam Hanoum laughed and left the girls’ room. On the carpets in the main room she spread large tablecloths, which still showed faint islands of grease and wine stains from Flora’s wedding. Around the sofreh she arranged embroidered down-filled cushions, and the mattresses were rolled up against the walls. Then she went to the bean shed and dragged out a bag of flour, a bag of rice, packets of sugar and salt, beans and lentils, a jar of wine and many pots of honey.
Persian Brides Page 17