The Girl from the Garden

by Parnaz Foroutan

  “She eats well.”

  “Have you tried camel rennet?” asks another woman.

  “It only works if she doesn’t know she’s taking it.”

  “My cousin went to Mashhad and walked beneath the city gates past the stone lion. She bore a son nine months following.”

  “Did it look like the lion?”

  “Efat’s eldest daughter, too.”

  “That was the Pearl Cannon in Tehran she walked beneath.”

  “No, it was the stone lion at the gate of Mashhad, everyone knows . . .”

  “She’s too thin, she needs girth. Put sheep fat in her meals.”

  “Do you get up too quickly after he is done?” another woman chimes in.

  “No.” Rakhel’s voice barely a whisper, she shakes her head no, no, no. She keeps her eyes on the floor, studies the dark green veins of the marble as the women shout all around her.

  “Don’t rise after he is done.”

  “No, stay very still . . .”

  “For an hour.”

  “For more than an hour.”

  “Stay on your back and raise your hips to the ceiling.”

  “Yes, that’s the way to do it, but move your hips back and forth.”

  “Like this!”

  Rakhel does not look up.

  The women laugh, clapping a rhythm to match the woman’s undulations. “Yes, yes!” They laugh and clap. “Shake it just like that.”

  An old woman’s voice breaks in, grave and steady. “Daughter, you should never run or jump, or make any sudden moves of any sort.” The room is silent once more.

  “Yes,” the crackling voice of another old woman chimes in. “You must remain calm, always remain calm. Never raise your voice. Never disagree too wholeheartedly, swallow your anger quietly.”

  “A peaceful woman makes for a peaceful womb.”

  “And he will love you more the less you speak!”

  Laughter again. Laughter rings through the vaults, ripples the humid air, waves of it break against Rakhel’s body. Her eyes burn with tears. She keeps her gaze to the floor.

  That night, Rakhel presses Asher to herself more frantically, wraps her legs tighter against his waist, raises her back off of the bed cloth, pushes her hips against him, pulls him into herself. The muscles inside her hold him as she heaves and pants in her effort to take him in. She grunts, her body damp with sweat as her fingers clutch at his back and her fists pound against his shoulders. And he holds her arms down and says be still as she struggles. Be still, he commands, and she feels the spasms of his body, the slap of his thighs against her flesh. When his breathing evens and she hears the soft, regular snore start in his throat, she turns onto her back, raises her hips and gently sways from side to side, weeping.

  The gate in a neighboring yard slams. For a moment, Mahboubeh can’t place the sound. She looks down at her hands, resting on the lace tablecloth. She can see the blue of her veins. And her fingers, knobbed like the limbs of an old walnut tree. She holds her hands up to the light, then drops them to her lap and looks through the open window. Her garden. Los Angeles. Perhaps noon, a weekday. Photographs from her album lie strewn across the table. She picks them up, one by one, and wonders how they fell from their pages.

  She finds among them a photograph of herself as a young woman, standing beside her father, Ibrahim. Her hand, fine fingers, smooth skin, rests on his shoulder. Her brother Yousseff also sits beside their father, and Yousseff’s young wife stands beside him. Yousseff’s children crowd behind them. They move too much. The photographer peaks his head out from the black cloth and tells them that they will blur in the image. Yousseff’s youngest boy sticks out his tongue.

  “Your face will remain like that, like an ape, forever,” Mahboubeh says. Yousseff smiles, but their father Ibrahim’s face remains unchanged.

  Mahboubeh grew up an orphan in that home in Kermanshah, despite Ibrahim’s presence, who spent his days reading poetry, lost in thought. As a child, whenever she asked him what became of her mother, he’d respond with silence, or else he’d say, “She died from the complications of womanhood.”

  Ibrahim’s gaze seems distant in the photograph, and Mahboubeh feels a sharp pain in her breast. She hurriedly places the picture back in the album before a distinct memory from her lonely childhood can take shape in her mind. She picks up another picture. Family and relatives crowd in the portrait. An engagement party in Tehran. Children sit at their parents’ feet, young women fret with their hair, mouths open midsentence, old men stare with eyes agape. Some faces are caught in surprise, some in exasperation, some in dreams, perhaps, of the past, or the future, the photographer capturing the image one instant too soon, before the subjects have adequate time to compose themselves. In the corner of the photograph, at the far edge of the group, Rakhel stands, her white hair covered by a modest head scarf.

  Mahboubeh recalls watching a reel of film from another party, a wedding of a niece. For a few brief frames, Rakhel stood still amidst a dancing crowd. She looked about her, then looked directly at the camera, one second, two seconds, three seconds. In the film, Rakhel appeared diminutive, vulnerable, bent with age. She hardly reached the shoulders of those she stood among. Mahboubeh had looked at that flickering image of Rakhel on the screen, and even then, in a room certainly too distant in both time and space to allow for Rakhel’s reach, Mahboubeh felt a clenching at her throat.

  She shakes her head, closes the album, and listens to the empty silence of the deserted streets outside her home. The children at school, their parents at work, only the mailman, the gardeners interrupt the lull. She closes her eyes and thinks about the quiet afternoons of the old Jewish mahalleh in Kermanshah, when the men abandoned the streets for a few hours and the women emerged, softly shutting the heavy doors of their homes behind them, and walked briskly to their destinations, their shadows passing now on the other side of the towering walls that enclosed the inner courtyards where they lived out their days. Rakhel would have left for the miqveh to do her ritual cleansing in the silence of those afternoons.

  Mahboubeh imagines Rakhel as a girl, waiting by the women’s entrance to the synagogue, around the corner from the main door where the men enter, in the clutch of the narrow alley. She sees Rakhel peering carefully around the wall, searching for the old midwife. The afternoon sun is languid, the streets empty, save for the hammam proprietor, sleeping on a chair propped against the wall, and the brown and yellow leaves that scatter at his feet with the passing of a breeze. The man coughs and stirs in his sleep. Rakhel hides quickly behind the wall. After a few moments, she peers from behind the wall again. The man’s chin rests on his chest, his limp hands dangle to the ground. She watches the street for the midwife and worries that the old woman won’t recognize her beneath her hijab. She reaches up and unfastens the ruband that covers her face. The air carries a subtle coolness. She closes her eyes and touches her own damp forehead. Autumn, she thinks, another harvest. And still.

  Rakhel has seen Naneh Adeh many times, in the hammam, in the miqveh. Once at the bedside of her own dying mother, though there was nothing even the old midwife could have done then. The women of the mahalleh call Naneh Adeh for births, but also for the grim maladies of the female body. The old midwife enters their households to apply leeches for the cleansing of bad blood and hot glass cups to draw out malevolent spirits. They ask her in whispers about how to apply fresh leaves of the date palm for the ending of a pregnancy. They buy from her the little bundles of chasm-e khorus and taranjabin, which they secretly sprinkle on their husbands’ meals to reawaken baser appetites.

  Three days earlier at the miqveh, Rakhel had stood naked at the top of the stairs that led into the pool of rainwater below when the old woman spoke to her. “No fire in the hearth, yet?” Naneh Adeh had asked her. Rakhel shrugged and shook her head no.

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m in my fifteenth year,” Rakhel said.

  Naneh Adah looked at Rakhel with narrowed eyes. She leaned
in and sniffed the air near Rakhel’s shoulder, then took a step back to look at her again. Rakhel wrapped her arms over her abdomen and breasts. “There is nothing you need to hide from me, child. I can see into the workings of your body.” Rakhel hugged herself tighter and looked down at her feet. “How many years have you been a wife?”

  “Three.”

  Naneh Adah raised her leathery hand, nudged away Rakhel’s arms and placed her palm on the tight flesh of Rakhel’s stomach. Rakhel sucked in her breath. The old woman rubbed her dry palm in circles on Rakhel’s belly, closed her eyes, and tilted her head to the side, as if she were listening for a sound far away. She opened her eyes and pronounced, “Nothing good, child, nothing good.” Rakhel jumped back from the old woman and bent her body slightly forward, wrapping her arms across her middle again. “Don’t be afraid, daughter,” Naneh Adah said. “There may be a remedy.”

  “A remedy?”

  “Ah, yes, child, if G-d sees fit, there is a cure to your problem. Sometimes when a woman wants a child too badly and cannot conceive, it is because the djinn Al has settled deep inside her body.”

  “Al?”

  “Yes, child, sometimes Al takes the form of a beautiful woman, and enters the dreams of men to collect their spilt seeds. Or she comes as a demon, the body of a goat, the head of an old woman, and snatches newborns from their mothers’ breasts. Inside the womb, she takes the form of a fish, swims in your belly, and eats the baby before it even has a heartbeat.”

  “Can you help me?” Rakhel said. “Can you get her out of me?”

  “I’ll see what I can do, child.” Naneh Adeh stared at the mosaic on the wall for a few moments, nodding her head. Then she turned to Rakhel and said, “Meet me in three days after the noon azan, by the women’s entrance to the synagogue. Go, now, cleanse your body in the rainwater below, and empty your heart, too, of its longing, so that you can begin your month in a state of purity.”

  Rakhel clasped the old woman’s hands in her own.

  “The want of the heart is a powerful force, child,” the old woman said and patted Rakhel’s hand before motioning with her head for Rakhel to go.

  Rakhel turned to descend the stone steps to the dark waters of the pool beneath the ground. Naneh Adeh reached out and touched Rakhel’s shoulder. “Though sometimes, daughter, no amount of desire, no potions or prayers or amulets, however strong, can change one’s qesmat. I will try to help you, but the rest is the will of G-d.”

  The stone steps were cold and damp. Rakhel placed one foot down, searched with her toes for the ledge, then brought down the other foot, stood firmly with both feet beside each other, her hands clutching the walls on either side of the stairwell, before her foot ventured out again in search of the next step down. The miqveh was dimly lit, and the farther she descended, the harder she strained her eyes to make out the shape of the hole in the earth filled with dark rainwater. There are no djinns in a holy place, she reminded herself. No djinns waiting in the shadows to pull me under the water and hold me down. When she reached the pool’s edge, she hesitated. Her skin became her eyes, the tiny hairs of her thin arms and back rose, she felt the air for motion, for a slight change in the temperature, she listened to the drip, drip of water, her own heart pounding in her ears. Then, she lifted her foot and touched the dark surface of the pool with her toe as she whispered the prayer for purification, Baruch atah Hashem, allowed her foot to find the submerged step, placed one foot down firmly, there were no more walls to hold on to, her arms stretched out for balance, Elokeinu Melech Ha’Olam, she brought down her other foot and her ankles now below the surface asher kidshanu, her knees now below the surface b’mitzvotav, her thighs, her slender hips v’tzivanu, she folded in her arms to hold her small breasts, her nipples taut, the water to her neck al ha-tevila and then, darkness, no breath.

  She emerged with a gasp, water streaming from her face and hair. She hurried out of the pool, knelt beside it, the skin of her knees against the smooth stone. “Lord, grant me a child,” she whispered to the dark water. “Please, grant me a child. A son, Lord. If only a son, so that my husband will be pleased with me. So that I, too, can have a place in his home. Please, Lord, I must have a baby.” Rakhel sat on the ground, clutched her knees to her chest, and raised her eyes to the darkness above. “If You are there, if You can hear me . . .” Her voice a hoarse whisper, commanding now rather than pleading, she rose to her knees again, her body erect, moving back and forth. “Grant me a son. Like the miracles they say You perform. It is all I ask. It is all I will ever ask of You.”

  “Rakhel Khanum, who are you speaking with down there?” Naneh Adeh’s voice rang down the stairwell and filled the empty space between the walls. “Hurry, there are other women waiting for their turn.”

  “No one, Naneh Adah, I’m just praying. I’m on my way up.” She cupped water in her hands, splashed her face, and quickly clamored up the stairs toward the light.

  Three nights passed after her meeting with Naneh Adeh and each of those nights, Rakhel lay awake beside her sleeping husband, her breath short with the anticipation of the miracle, her palms on her abdomen. She imagined the face of the son she would bear. The dark curls of his hair, the fingers of his hands, the curve of his delicate ears. On the third day she asked Asher’s permission to visit the miqveh, told her mother-in-law about the necessity for further cleansing, and set out for the synagogue during the noon azan, the hour the town settles for their rest. Once the heavy door of her home closed behind her, she clutched her chador tightly below her throat and stared at the abandoned street through the mesh of the black ruband that covered her face. When she saw that there was no one in sight, she ran in the direction of the synagogue. She turned the corner into the side alley and bent over to catch her breath.

  Now, waiting in the empty alley, Rakhel begins to worry that Naneh Adah might not come. Just as she peers from the corner of the building to look into the street once more, she feels the midwife’s strong fingers clutch her shoulder. She turns around quickly and Naneh Adah pulls aside the ruband covering her own face. “Did anyone see you, child?”

  “No, I was careful.”

  “Take this.” The old woman passes a piece of folded paper into the girl’s hand. “It is writing from The Book, the passage when G-d plants Yousseff in Rakhel’s womb so that she wins favor with her husband. Dissolve this piece of paper in water and drink the water. The next morning, bathe yourself and perfume your body, but don’t allow your husband to sleep with you. Just stay close to him so that he can smell you. Hover about him like a moth to a candle flame. For a night. Cat and mouse. You understand?” Rakhel nods her head yes. “After that, make certain he lays with you each night, for a week’s time. He is young, do what you know to lure him.” Rakhel looks down at her feet, blushing. Naneh Adeh takes her chin and raises Rakhel’s head so that she is looking into the girl’s eyes. “Come, daughter, you are no longer a child, you have been a wife for a few years now. No shame in any of this, forget that nonsense and think of it as a grave task, one that you must master, for your own sake. But follow my instructions as I’ve said them, so that your endeavors are met with success.” Rakhel takes the old woman’s hands in her own and brings them to her lips. “Enough, child. It is not I, but G-d who helps you,” Naneh Adah says as she turns the girl by the shoulders and pushes her back out into the main street. “And may I not see you at the miqveh for nine months.”

  Rakhel turns back to say good-bye, but the old woman already hobbles with haste down the alleyway, her black chador taking the wind so that it billows out behind her. Rakhel watches her for a moment, then walks into the empty streets toward home. The hammam proprietor still sleeps in his chair. A fly hovers close to his mouth, and settles on his chin. Rakhel passes him slowly. She does not need to hurry. The town men retire, still, in the curtained rooms of their homes, or in comfortable corners of their shops, or beneath some shade to rest through the heat of the afternoon. She listens to the hollow sound of her own footsteps aga
inst the cobblestones. She clasps the folded paper in one hand and traces with her finger the cracks along the high walls that enclose the mahalleh homes. Then she stops to look at the buildings crowding the narrow street. She feels the breeze on her cheeks and realizes that she forgot to cover her face, but no one is there to see her, to ask her what business a young woman has to be walking at this hour of the day, unchaperoned, with her face revealed. She closes her eyes and turns her face to the sun. She hears the chatter of children, their laughter rising from the andaruni of one of the homes. A woman quietly sings a folk love song from some hidden garden. Rakhel listens to the sound of caged birds, the coo of doves, finches chirping, a yellow canary, mad with song, longing for flight.

  Two

  The finches clamor in the yard, darting in and out of a rosebush. Mahboubeh rises from the table and looks out of the window. It must be late afternoon, now. The scattered leaves in the grass mean autumn. She has lost something. Something has been misplaced. She turns and begins opening the kitchen drawers. Spoons, forks, matches. She opens cabinets. She looks behind boxes of dried goods, bags of rice. A silver tray. Perhaps. This silver tray. She reaches for it and holds it in her hands. She looks at it for a while, until the dusk settles, and the crickets begin, and the hum of the refrigerator lulls her into a wakeful dream, where she finds herself sitting in the corner of her father’s room again, a child of no more than five. Ibrahim finishes his dinner and nods at her. Mahboubeh takes his silver tray, removes the dishes, sits on the floor, and cleans the tray with her skirt. He rises heavily from his place and leaves the room wordlessly. The refrigerator clicks off and the silence places Mahboubeh back in the kitchen once more, though it is dark now. Her hands, oblivious to the passage of time, hold the hem of her skirt and polish the silver tray. She switches on the light.

  The reflection of her face in the tray, that has changed. But the tray itself . . . It is a substantial thing, certain in its weight, concrete in its form. She served her father tea, warm bread in this tray. It held the glass, the crumbs, it carried the print of his thumb. She holds this in her hands. She looks again at her reflection. Nothing remains, she thinks, nothing is left behind.