‘Oh Flora . . . What I’m going to do to that girl when she comes home – I’ll break her arms and legs, see if I don’t – running around in the middle of the night . . .’ The odour of the melting dombeh spread through the house like the smell of fire.
‘Come here now, Nazie, come over here, azizam,’ Miriam Hanoum called her from inside the bean shed. ‘All this is yours,’ Nazie heard her saying. ‘Your mother gave me these things for you, to give you on the day of your wedding with Moussa.’
Nazie stood in the doorway as Miriam Hanoum raised the creaking lid of a large wooden chest in the corner, its cracks and locks thick with dust. Nazie, who had always assumed that it was one of Flora’s dowry chests, discovered that it was filled to the brim with things that had belonged to her mother. There was a mirror with its casing, an embroidered coat and a short one, three dresses and a négligé, a comb with some of her mother’s hairs caught between its teeth, three Bokhara rugs, a spouted jug with a copper bowl, silver candlesticks and pewter bowls, and a perfume spray filled with a red fluid whose strong scent spread through the shed. Then Miriam Hanoum opened a purple velvet bag and took out a turqoise jewel set in a tarnished silver chain and a gold ring embossed with pomegranates.
‘Before she died,’ Miriam Hanoum said, ‘your mother owed me ten eggs which she borrowed but never returned. If she hadn’t taken them I’d have had ten fat chickens, and by this time they’d have produced many eggs and chicks and a lot of money. So, Nazie azizam, I’ll take this necklace now and we’ll forget about your mother’s debt to me . . . Well, come on, what are you looking at? Take everything and let’s go, half the day is almost over.’
Miriam Hanoum carried the boiling pot from the yard into the house, and set it down in the girls’ room, which looked like an untidy store-room. Manijoun was sitting in her corner, all excited, her feet tucked under her, her black fingers undoing her braids and loosening the yellow-white corn husk hair. Giggling like an excited bride, she licked her palms and wiped the saliva on her hair. ‘I’ll build a bath, la la laï . . .’ she sang as she washed.
‘I’ll build a bath, la la laï, with forty columns and forty windows, la la laï . . .’ sang Miriam Hanoum as she peeled off Nazie’s chador. She pulled the butterfly knots in Flora’s wedding gown, and the dress fell below Nazie’s childish nipples, which stared like a pair of bold eyes.
Miriam Hanoum caught the folds of the dress and lifted it up in the air. Left in her worn cotton underpants, Nazie hugged herself. The chill made the tiny hairs on her body stand on end. Miriam Hanoum’s cold fingers pulled her underpants down, and Nazie leaned on her aunt’s shoulders to step out of them. She felt her bones boring into Miriam Hanoum’s flesh and her goose pimples pricking it like thousands of tiny needles.
‘How small you are, azizam, how small.’ Miriam Hanoum clapped her hands, her eyes examining Nazie all over, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘We should feed you peanuts and almonds to fatten you up . . . Come on then, get in, half the day is gone . . .’ Nazie stepped into the heavy iron tub and curled up in it like Manijoun in her basket. Miriam Hanoum poured the hot water from the pot into the tub.
‘Hot! Ameh bozorg, it’s hot!’
‘Forty columns and forty windows, la la laï, la la laï . . .’ the scalding water reached Nazie’s neck, and turned rosy from the blood.
‘I’ll fill the bath with rosewater, to bathe my bride in. La la laï, la la laï, my bride’s hair flows like water, her face glows like the moon . . .’ Miriam Hanoum’s hair flowed in waves over her shoulders and her face grew round and shiny as she sang. She scrubbed Nazie with soap and a scratchy herb sponge until the girl’s skin turned crimson. Her fingernails scraped her scalp and worked up a lather in her hair. Soap bubbles burst in Nazie’s ears and drops of water ran like tears from her burning earlobes. Nazie gritted her teeth.
Coated in honey as in a thick blanket, she felt the pain fading slowly. Miriam Hanoum scooped handfuls of honey from the jars and spread it on her skin until her bones stopped trembling. The coating of honey was cooked by the body’s heat like salt on the fire and softened the tiny hairs which stuck out of the open pores. Smeared with sweetness to her eyebrows, Nazie was intoxicated by the warm scent, and her rounded face shone like a golden Shiraz orange. Miriam Hanoum did not overlook a single part of her body, and she glistened all over. The sticky fingers flitted on Nazie’s armpits and nape, like a belly dancer at a betrothal party. The pores of her skin opened like thousands of little mouths and greedily sipped the honey.
‘You want a little gold, too, Manijoun, our bride?’ Miriam Hanoum, her eyes glittering, teased her mother-in-law, and smeared a little honey on her moustache. Manijoun, her hair damp and flattened with saliva, stuck out her tongue and licked her upper lip. Nazie sucked a pointed knee, and the honey ran thick and sweet into her throat. Festive twinkles of light danced in through the window.
The sounds and smells from behind the bead curtain told Nazie that Miriam Hanoum was chopping onions and throwing them into the seething mutton fat, to glaze and turn golden. She thought about her mother’s jewellery, hidden from her among the sacks of lentils and grain, and felt angry about the years she had lived without a comb, a mirror or scent, envying Flora her jewellery.
A donkey bell rang in the alley and stopped. Crates were dragged along the paving stones and sacks were flung down on the ground. The low front door creaked on its iron hinges, and the voice of Miriam Hanoum’s husband, bringing home the rumours which were flying in the village, mixed with that of Homa searching for Flora and Miriam Hanoum’s raging curses. Parviz the little porter took advantage of the tumult to demand excessive payment, and Homa’s husband haggled with him. In between curses, Miriam Hanoum welcomed her son joyously and fell on his neck with kisses. But to Nazie’s torn ears Moussa’s excited voice overcame all the others.
‘Where’s Nazie?’ she heard him shouting. She wanted to shake off the heavy coat of honey and run to him. She stood up, but a sudden wind blew in from the alley, shaking the windows and slamming them against the walls, and before Nazie’s wide-open eyes overturned the bags of feathers which had been heaped beside Manijoun’s basket. Goose-down chased chicken feathers, filled the air, spinning like snowflakes, followed by dust and leaves. Nazie tried to escape, but the windblown stuff stuck to the honey on her naked body. She saw herself looking like a partly-plucked fowl and wept sweet tears. Her lips stuck together and could not be parted, her sweat mingled with the honey, fluffy down filled her ears, and her whole body itched as if it had grown a fur coat. Manijoun shrieked at the sight of the demon child who had blown in from the alley, and Miriam Hanoum burst in like the wind.
‘Vavaila!’ she bawled. ‘What have you done to yourself? Get up, get up – again you’re crying? Didn’t I tell you you mustn’t cry today? It brings bad luck – because of your tears the demons turned you into a chicken. I told you, didn’t I? Get up, what’s the matter with you, you want to drive me crazy? Isn’t it enough that Flora has disappeared now of all times? Who knows where that girl is and what she’s doing with herself.’
‘Ma,’ they heard Moussa’s tense voice, ‘what’s happened to Nazie?’
‘It’s all right, she’s coming right out,’ Miriam Hanoum replied hastily, shutting the door and bolting the window. ‘Get up, wash yourself again. Moussa’s here and is waiting for you outside. How long can a groom wait for his bride?’
The water was tepid. Nazie floated on it, the honey on her lips as tasteless as wax. Her aunt plucked the pointy feathers off her, scratched her skin with her fingernails, exposing the gluey, darkening honey. Nazie bit her own shoulders and with her teeth pulled off some stubborn feathers.
‘Nazie?’ she heard Moussa calling her through the door. ‘Nazie?’ His dog howled in the alley like a wolf pack, and Manijoun sobbed with fright.
She had to make haste, Moussa could not contain himself, he could wait for her no longer.
Miriam Hanoum expressed all her rage against Fl
ora and the rumours her husband brought from the market, all her grief and anxieties, in brushing Nazie’s hair. She raked the hair with the comb, and ploughed the scalp with her fingers. ‘Don’t move, azizam, sit quietly and let me comb you,’ she said through gritted teeth. Nazie held her breath and stifled her moans. Her forehead creased with pain, then stretched with the rest of her body to the roots of her hair. Odours of cooking spread through the bead curtain and entered the room through the cracks around the door.
‘What stinking stories people invent out of their dirty heads, they should be covered with dust.’ The teeth of the comb, with the hairs from her dead mother’s head, pricked Nazie’s scalp like the tines of a fork.
‘I swear to you by this midday sun – Shahin should die a gentile’s death, and leave me my girl in the house, with her watermelon belly and all. That would be better – a widow, not a slut that follows her hot hole all over the village at night.’
Mahasti’s hairs and Nazie’s were knotted up into a tangled dusty ball.
‘It’s because of him, just because of him, that we got all these troubles on our house. He took a lucky child and made her into a crazy woman – all on account of the moon eclipse. There,’ said Miriam Hanoum, extracting a soft little goose feather from Nazie’s hair. ‘One feather was left in your head.’ She waved it before Nazie’s eyes, and tapped it with a fingertip to make it drop.
‘Wait, I need it,’ she changed her mind and caught the feather as it floated slowly down to the floor. Her fist swallowed it and she bent down to catch more feathers, but they were insufficient and she took a few scoops from the bags. Peering through the curtain of her hair, Nazie saw Miriam Hanoum stuffing feathers into a pair of socks from Flora’s cradle. She opened a gap in the curtain and watched her aunt tearing a white bedsheet into broad strips.
‘Up, up, azizam, Moussa is waiting for his bride,’ Miriam Hanoum raised her from the carpet. She pressed the feather balls to Nazie’s flat chest, one on each nipple. Nazie’s hair hung down over the feather breasts.
‘Now we’ll tie them,’ said Miriam Hanoum and wound the bedsheet strips around Nazie’s chest and shoulder-blades.
‘Mashallah, Baha, Baha, see how you’ve grown, azizam, how you’ve grown!’ Her aunt hugged her, her great breasts pressing the featherballs to Nazie’s beating heart.
When at last Nazie emerged, washed and barefooted, from the girls’ room, fish were sizzling in oil in Miriam Hanoum’s iron skillet, Homa was stitching pullets stuffed with rice, raisins and chipped carrots, Homa’s husband was rinsing the sabzi in water, and Miriam Hanoum’s husband stood in the doorway, asking the passersby if they had seen Flora. Many pedlars arrived in the alley, following the bell of little Parviz’ donkey, which was laden with all kinds of good things.
‘Spinach, marrows! Spinach, marrows!’ shouted a man pushing a loaded barrow and swinging a pair of scales. After him came the shepherd, his arrival announced by the bleating of his flock. ‘Your daughter Flora?’ he shouted. ‘No, I haven’t seen her. Maybe she drank too many cups of spit from the neighbours and got drunk, poor thing.’ The other pedlars around the house guffawed with him.
‘Shut the door!’ Miriam Hanoum shouted to her husband. ‘I don’t want them coming into the house with their eyes. Homa, damn you, what did you say to Janjan Furush that brought this crowd outside?’
‘Nothing, on my life!’
‘Miriam Hanoum, beetroot red as blood, tomato sweet as honey!’ came the cries from the alley.
‘So how come all the sweets and pistachio sellers are turning up here, you idiot? You told her we’re having a wedding?’
‘No, ma, no! She asked me, burst her eyes, she asked how come I need so much sabzi – I hope all her sabzi sticks in her throat . . . I didn’t know what to tell her . . . Ma, I only said that Shahin and his donkey were back in the village, and she said, so where is Flora, and I said she’s gone to do the henna and to bathe for him in the hammam, and she said, so how come your father’s looking for her all over the village? She also said that people say they saw her last night walking . . .’
‘Shut up, Homa, shut up, or I’ll stuff your mouth with eggs, you should choke from talking so much!’ Moussa broke into his sister’s speech, and her embarrassed husband gazed into the water pot.
When Nazie came into the kitchen she saw that Moussa was still dressed in his butcher’s clothes, and was shelling boiled eggs with his black fingers. He cracked each one on his bent knee and crushed the shells.
‘There’s the lady bride, at last – washed yourself till it turned night-time,’ grumbled Miriam Hanoum. Everyone looked at Nazie and at Moussa, who approached her, tall and smiling, shedding bits of eggshell.
‘The wind came in . . .’ she apologized with a flushed face, and his heart went out to her. He saw the split earlobes, the soft feather breasts, the tears glistening in her eyes.
‘Look, I bought you new shoes,’ he murmured quickly, so that her tears would not fall on the eggshells. ‘Bride’s shoes.’ High above her head he held a white box, tied with string. Nazie looked up at the box sliding between his arms, and in her mind’s eye she saw the pair of laquered white high-heeled shoes which had called to her from Shimshon Shaharudi’s stall in the bazaar, and that she dreamed of wearing at her wedding. Moussa knelt at her feet on the Kashani carpet and put down the closed box.
‘I measured them by my hand,’ he said, laying his open palm on the carpet. He took her ankle as carefully as if she were a fledgling, and gently placed her bare foot on his palm.
‘You see, Nazie, exactly! Your foot is exactly the size of my hand,’ he whispered, and Homa sighed with relief.
‘I told him to leave the shoes, because there’s no time,’ she said to Miriam Hanoum, jabbing at the air with the poultry needle. ‘And she’d have to try them on.’
‘She could’ve taken Flora’s shoes, like she took her dress – God punish her for disappearing like this,’ Miriam Hanoum added, her eyes hidden by the smoke that rose from the fish skillet, her ears pricked to the sounds outside.
‘I told him, but he wouldn’t listen to me and didn’t let me go until he found shoes for her. He turned the stall of Azet Shaharudi’s husband upside down, searched and searched, and I swear, he’s got the exact size of her foot.’
‘Could have taken a bigger size, to last a few years,’ Miriam Hanoum said sourly. ‘What, he imagines she’ll always be a little girl? – She’ll grow up in his hands.’
‘He didn’t listen to me, but see how she’s laughing now,’ Homa cooed.
Moussa untied the string and with a proud gesture took out of the box a pair of white, high-heeled shoes with silver buckles, but because they were plain unlaquered leather Nazie thought they looked ordinary and unattractive. She searched for her mother among the women in the room, for a lap in which to hide her disappointed face. Moussa took her feet and slipped them one by one into the shoes, which fitted her perfectly. He did not notice that the tears in her eyes were not tears of joy.
‘Aï, aï, they are small on me, Moussa, take them off, they’re hurting me,’ said Nazie, and burst into bitter tears like a spoilt child.
‘No, Nazie, don’t cry,’ Moussa groaned in surprise. ‘Don’t cry, there, I’ve taken them off, and we’ll change them at Shaharudi for a bigger pair, please don’t cry . . .’
‘Vavaila, again she’s crying – and what for?’ screamed Miriam Hanoum, choking from the smoke. ‘Today’s her wedding day and she’s bathing in her tears like a newborn baby! What’s the matter, aren’t you ashamed – you’ve got shoes, you’ve got breasts, and you’ve got a nice dowry – so what more do you want, Khodaia, what more?’
Everyone stared at Nazie with suspicion, at the girl who had torn her ears that morning in the mosque, had fluttered all over the village, and already her feet were bigger than Moussa’s hands.
20
When the first star appeared in the sky of Omerijan Nazie wanted to go to sleep. She rubbed her eyes with her fists an
d her head drooped on her shoulder. The day’s events flickered under her closed lids.
She lay down on the rug, letting her head sink into the ball of bedsheets bundled up by Miriam Hanoum, pressing her feather breasts together against her beating heart. She had tied a white kerchief on her head, so that the guests would not see her torn earlobes. The rain pattered in the almond tree alley, but indoors the rooms whispered: ‘Flora . . . Flora . . . Flora . . .’
Nazie thought about the neighbourhood children who, when darkness fell, spread their mattresses on the soft bedding of rugs. At this time brothers and sisters were hugging each other, falling asleep snugly like yolks in egg-whites. When she and Flora, Moussa and Homa were small children, they too used to push their mattresses together at bedtime and rollick boisterously, jumping on the sprawling white bed, laughing and shouting, throwing pillows and tickling each other under the covers, until Miriam Hanoum swore and screamed at them to go to sleep, and then they would press buttocks to bellies, tuck heads into napes, and giggle softly until sweet slumber covered them all.
But once Moussa became a man he was not allowed to sleep like a baby swaddled in girls’ bodies, and had to curl up in the main room. Homa got married, and Flora – where was Flora now?
‘A little bride we have today, kuchik madar she will be tomorrow . . .’ Manijoun hummed the bridal song. She had trimmed her nails with her teeth and collected the yellow crescents neatly on the rug. She filed the trimmed nails by sucking them between her lips, then took them out one by one, spread her palms and gazed proudly at the manicure. She had rubbed the greasy sauce of the lunch rice on her face, making it shine turmeric-yellow like the plate.
Nazie’s hair was drawn tight, with a solemn parting running down her head. She was wearing a white velvet dress from Mahasti’s dowry chest, with a moth-eaten embroidered hem. Its skirts trailed on the floor, but below them gleamed the laquered shoes that Moussa had run and brought from Shaharudi’s stall to replace the pair with the silver buckles. They were too big, but Nazie kept lifting her riddled skirts at every step to relish their beauty.
Persian Brides Page 18