The Girl from the Garden

by Parnaz Foroutan

  Rakhel sits on the cold stone floor. She feels a rustling behind her and turns to look, but the cellar is full of light. She hears Asher’s voice above, full of concern for a baby that is not his. Zolekhah complains about the immaturity of her sons’ brides. The servant girls join the conversation, shrill with concern.

  “Brother, you need to be more strict with her, she does not know the value of what she carries,” Asher says.

  “All that is left for me to do is to forbid her to walk,” Ibrahim says.

  “A great danger, G-d willing, has passed us,” Zolekhah says.

  “Best not speak of it yet, Zolekhah Khanum,” Fatimeh says.

  “Tie a white cord about her belly,” Sadiqeh says.

  “It can be white or of two colors,” Zahra says.

  “Fatimeh, can you recite the Ya Sin Sura?” Sadiqeh asks. “You must recite that particular sura seven times while she ties seven knots in the cord. My older sister had a terrible scare when she was pregnant. We tied a padlock to the cord, blessed by mullah Sayyed Khan, the one from Qom. Her boy was born without a flaw. I can ask her for the padlock.”

  “Zolekhah Khanum, perhaps someone has looked at the child with an evil eye?”

  “We’ll burn some wild rue to protect against it.”

  “Blow three times, Khorsheed.”

  “We mustn’t praise her progress anymore, we must say Masha ‘Allah, praise G-d instead.”

  Rakhel listens to the voices. She waits for someone to remember her.

  Three

  Dada, Dada, Dada. Mahboubeh remembers how even the mention of Rakhel’s name made the women and the children of the household nervous. She was all everyone ever talked about. The only authority. Mahboubeh walks into her garden with a length of rope in her hand. The rain fell for a long while, for days and days, with fierce winds. Mahboubeh’s feet sink into the mud. She walks slowly. Should she fall, who knows how long before someone comes. The fig tree leans dangerously to one side. Mahboubeh wraps the rope around its trunk several times, then walks to the line of conifers growing behind the fig tree. “Which one of you shall bear the burden?” The tree tops sway. Beaded drops of rain sit on their needles. Mahboubeh raises a trembling finger and takes a drop. “Such diamonds,” she says. “For my eyes only?” She chooses the middle tree and wraps the end of the rope around its trunk. “Hold her, for now, until I can hire a man to build her a crutch.” She pulls on the end of the rope, then knots it. She walks back to the fig tree and plucks a dried fig from its branch. She remembers how the other children ran to their mothers whenever Rakhel caught them picking fruit from the garden trees. Rakhel chased them, cursing and yelling that she’d summon a djinn to visit them in their sleep and choke them for their thievery. Mahboubeh had no one to run to, no one to protect her from Rakhel’s anger and spite.

  Mahboubeh knew that if she asked her father, Ibrahim, how her mother died, he’d respond with silence, or else he’d repeat what he always said, “She died as most women died in her time, from the complications of womanhood.” So she stopped asking him.

  When she finally summoned the courage to ask Rakhel, Rakhel replied, “Your father killed her.”

  Mahboubeh walks slowly to the single pomegranate tree in her yard. The garden in Kermanshah boasted several pomegranate trees, raised from the graftings of the pomegranate trees that grew in the garden where Mahboubeh’s grandfather Rebbe Yousseff spent his own childhood. She remembers a game she used to play as a child, walking through the garden in Kermanshah. Mahboubeh would see a rose, then she’d think about her mother smelling a rose, and Mahboubeh would lean in, close her eyes, and breathe in its perfume. My mother loved this scent above all else, she’d tell herself. Or she’d sit beneath a tree and say to herself, my mother sat beneath this very tree, and what she saw then, I see, now. This way, she felt her mother’s presence, felt as though she shared that garden with her.

  When Mahboubeh escaped from Iran after the revolution, after everyone she knew had either left or died, she placed a scion from a pomegranate tree in her suitcase, thinking, no need to hide this, though it is more valuable than anything I have sewn in the lining of my coat. Now, with each autumn that passes, the tree grafted with that scion fruits for her. And when I am gone, she thinks, someone will buy this house and this pomegranate tree will fruit for them, and they will not know who cared for it, who pruned it and watered it and buried fish heads near its roots, and who spoke to it stories about its distant relatives, from a place this tree must know of, somewhere in its memory, in the kernel of its ruby-coated seeds, in the fiber of its wood, the tapestry of its leaves.

  Mahboubeh touches the delicate, supple branches of the tree. She can’t remember when its leaves turned yellow. Amidst those yellow leaves, the scarlet fruits hang. The topmost ones are hollowed combs. Mahboubeh notices a crow watching her from the branches. “Thank you for leaving me my share.” She reaches up and plucks a pomegranate, wipes it dry with her sleeve, and drops it in the pocket of her coat. The crow flies off the branch, calling out. “Tell the dead to wait for me,” Mahboubeh calls after it. She looks at the clouds, gray and swift. A drop of rain falls on her forehead. She closes her eyes and imagines her mother.

  “What did my mother look like?” she had asked Rakhel once.

  “Nothing like you. She was beautiful. Had thick, black hair. Wore it long and hung little golden trinkets in it. Real gold. Vain about her hair and all else, too.”

  “Her face, what did her face look like?”

  “Like any face, two eyes, a nose, a mouth. Big like yours. Stupid girl with your stupid questions. Go on. There must be something you can do to make yourself useful. Lazy just like your mother was. Do nothing but eat and sleep and talk nonsense all day.”

  Mahboubeh listens to the wind and watches the shower of dry, yellow leaves before her. She imagines Khorsheed’s abundant hair, loose, black sheened like a crow, adorned with gold. She pictures Khorsheed’s face, round and radiant like the sun, eyes full of kindness. She must have smiled easily. And her arms, always welcoming. Mahboubeh sees Khorsheed as she must have sat beneath the pomegranate tree, pregnant, young, staring absently at the exposed earth brick beneath the white plaster of the garden wall, and twisting a strand of her long hair with one hand, while dipping her fingers into the loose earth with the other.

  Khorsheed looks down at the hand holding the brown soil and studies the blue web of veins that are now visible beneath her skin. Her breasts feel tender to the touch. The skin on her stomach itches. Her appetites are ferocious, and unpredictable. She listens to the birds sing madly from the treetops, the sound of the fountain from the andaruni, the constant gurgle, interrupted by the occasional splash of a fish coming to the surface to feed. The street and the household settle deep into the slumber of afternoon.

  Khorsheed looks at the shiny brown earth in her hand. In an instant, she sees the dissolution of her form into a thousand forms, decomposing, growing, nourishing. She imagines her body wedded to worms, crawling with ants. She sees pieces of herself clamped by tiny, powerful jaws, dispersed, fed to a thousand hungry larvae, little by little, her flesh moving away from her bones, until she crawls the glistening earth, becomes food for birds, then flies all over the whole wide land. She smells the earth in the palm of her hand, then allows it to slip between her fingers. She hesitates for a moment to look behind her, then clutches another handful.

  Not so long ago, she played with dolls in the courtyard of her father’s home. Then, one day, Zolekhah came from a town some distance from Khorsheed’s village to visit with her mother. She turned to Khorsheed and said something to her about her beauty. A few days later, her father’s sitting room filled with men and Khorsheed’s mother whispered urgent instructions to her about how to serve the tea and how to keep her eyes on the rug. One of her aunts pulled her aside and pointed to Ibrahim, who stared intently at her.

  “That one will be your husband,” her aunt had said. And Khorsheed remembers accepting it, as easily as
if someone had pointed to a chair and said, “That is where you shall sit.”

  After the men came and went, she continued to play with her dolls, but her aunts paid closer attention to her. They told her how, soon enough, she would have real babies to play with, and when they told her this, she thought how wonderful it would be if her dolls called her maman and cried for her. Then came the day they dressed her in fine clothes, and painted her cheeks. They celebrated with much ceremony and food. On the seventh night, she lay nervously beneath the blanket of a different bed, waiting for this stranger she had wed, this person now called husband, to enter this unfamiliar room in a new home that replaced the old. She remembers the following day. She stood weeping in the courtyard, pleading to go back to her mother and her dolls. She smiles to herself. It was a period of brief sorrow. She quickly learned to cling to her husband, to win his favor and his affection.

  She places her hand on her stomach, and feels for the tiny flutter that suggests the other exists. “I’m here,” Khorsheed says out loud. She hopes that the baby inside can hear her voice, or at least feel the reassurance of her palm against the tightness of her skin. She hums a song from her past. Who sang it to her? She closes her eyes and hums, trying to remember. Darkness. All she feels is the hum itself, the tremor of its chords and the vibration of her own flesh in response. In that darkness, she tries to make out the face of the child growing inside her, the curve of the lips, the rise of the flesh of the cheeks, the softness of lashes.

  Instead, she imagines a young boy. Long-limbed. Black curls. He walks the street outside of their home, from the direction of the synagogue, a book in his hands, a bounce in his steps. The merchants in the streets pause a moment as he passes them and the boy greets each of the merchants by name. He stops before the barber to ask something, and Khorsheed waits to hear the barber pronounce the boy’s name, this beautiful child with his rosy cheeks. She listens closely, but instead she hears the unfamiliar rattle of something metallic, a horn, shouted oaths. The sounds fade, the sunlight becomes brighter, and she sees the shadow of the boy’s body turn toward the house, step to knock against the door. In her mind’s eye, it is Rakhel who lets him in.

  Khorsheed opens her eyes and notices that the day has turned ashen and the air cold. Perhaps the vision means that Rakhel will soon have a son, Khorsheed reasons. She senses that she is being watched and turns to look behind her again, but sees no one. A breeze passes.

  The pomegranate tree sheds more leaves. The rattle of something metallic again, a horn, shouted oaths. Mahboubeh can’t remember how long she has been standing outside, but her legs feel numb and her hands tremble when she holds them before her face. She studies the blue veins, now visible beneath the thin parchment of her skin. Winter approaches, she thinks, looking at the gray skies. But she cannot remember the passing of any season in this land. Only the periods of fire and the times of flood.

  Mahboubeh places her hands on the small of her back and begins to walk slowly toward her home. She thinks about brewing tea. Her socks feel damp. A blanket. She remembers the snow in Kermanshah. She passes the fig tree and tests the rope she wrapped around its trunk. “A blanket of snow would have covered your branches, settled upon you, allowed you to sleep deeply, and dream of blossoms, humming bees,” she says as she pats the trunk of the tree and continues to the kitchen. “Here there is no rest,” she says, “just this partial wakefulness.” She walks into her kitchen and to the stove. She lifts the kettle and fills it with water from the sink. She turns on the stove. The hiss, the blue flame. She sits at the table in her darkened kitchen and watches through the window as the shadows conquer her garden.

  “Hurry,” Rakhel says. She pushes the door open only halfway so that it does not creak on its hinges.

  “What about our shoes, Dada?” Khorsheed says.

  “We’ll go barefoot, go.”

  “You go first.” And Rakhel, impatient with the need to breathe fresh air, slides out of the door and runs through the breezeway, beneath the fresco of Moses parting the Red Sea, down the marble steps, across the empty courtyard toward the outer gardens, with Khorsheed at her heels. The wind catches the fabric of the girls’ chadors, whips it off their heads so that they clutch it at their waists as their hair trails behind them. Their feet fall into the soft earth, the mud splatters against their bare calves, their tumbans rolled up to their knees. Once they round the corner of the house, they stop to breathe. Their cheeks are flushed with the excitement of their escape. Khorsheed bends over her protruding stomach and rests her hands on her knees, breathing heavily. “Ibrahim forbids me to run, Rakhel.”

  “We didn’t run so much.”

  “Yes, but if he finds out. Or worse, if Zolekhah sees us out here, barefoot in the mud?”

  “We’ll be quick, and wash our feet in the pool before returning to the house.” Rakhel looks down at her feet and curls her toes into the earth to feel the cold, smooth mud squeeze between them.

  “I told you to ask the maids to pick some for us, Rakhel. I can’t play with you like this anymore, I need to be much more cautious.”

  “It’s different if we do it.”

  “There is no difference, you’re just being childish.”

  “If we do it, the blessing would be a gift from our hands.”

  The pomegranate trees are heavy with fruit that have skin like worn leather, some already cracked into a smile of ruby teeth, some almost half empty of their seeds, the white combs left hollow by the black crows or the squirrels that dangle from the limbs, stuffing their fat cheeks. Rakhel takes her chador from around her waist, holds two corners, and watches the cloth ripple out into the wind as she lowers it to the wet grass. She stands on the tips of her toes and reaches her arms up to the nearest branch. She clutches the fruit with one hand and pulls the branch lower until there is a snap and the branch bounces back, leaving her holding the pomegranate, surprised by the sudden drops of water that fall from the wet leaves onto her face. She tosses the pomegranate into her chador, the fruit bounces and rolls like a red ball. Khorsheed reaches both her arms to lower a branch so Rakhel can pick more fruit. After Rakhel’s arms are full, Khorsheed releases the branch suddenly and the tree rains down on them. Each time, the girls turn their faces up to the drops of water falling from the leaves that land on their eyelids, their lips, their cheeks.

  “My feet are cold, Dada, I’ll get sick.”

  Rakhel looks at Khorsheed, her cheeks red, her jaw trembling, her face damp, strands of her wet, black hair against her forehead, painted across the white of her neck. Khorsheed’s breasts are full and Rakhel notices the insisting bulge of her belly beneath her shirt. Fat drops of rain fall from the gray clouds against their foreheads and arms.

  “Come on,” Rakhel says, gathering the corners of her chador and throwing the bundle over her shoulder, her back bent slightly under the weight of the fruit. They walk across the garden, then peer from the corner of the wall to see if anyone is in the courtyard. “I’ll take the bundle and leave them by the kitchen, you start washing your feet,” Rakhel says and quickly crosses the courtyard.

  Khorsheed walks to the central pool and sits on the ledge with her feet up, cups water from the pool and washes her ankles, rubs between her toes with her fingers. Rakhel returns, rolls the bottom of her tumban farther up, and steps her thin legs into the cold pool, scattering the goldfish this way and that, the water up to her knees. She walks around the pool, making waves, clutching her shaliteh high up around her waist, shivering. The water flows over the edge of the pool. Khorsheed jumps up, turns, and with a swoop of her hand against the surface of the water, splashes Rakhel, drenching the front of the girl’s shirt. Rakhel bends and cupping water with both her hands, throws it out toward Khorsheed, who runs from the pool’s edge, her feet slipping in the mud, her arms out for balance. The rain becomes steadier. The girls’ eyelashes are wet, water streams from their faces, their clothes stick against their bodies.

  “Khorsheed, come back and wash your feet,
we have to go back inside before Zolekhah finds us.”

  “Promise you won’t splash me.”

  “You are a pregnant woman, you must be treated with great care. Petted and fed and pampered like an exotic bird from Hindustan. Now come back.”

  “Promise,” Khorsheed says, standing in the rain. “Or I’ll tell Zolekhah you dragged me out here against my will.” She walks back, puts her foot gingerly on the edge of the pool, and bends forward.

  Rakhel grabs a handful of Khorsheed’s hair and with her other hand, splashes water into her face. “Your nose is dirty,” Rakhel says. “Let me clean it for you.”

  Khorsheed clutches Rakhel’s wrist with both hands. “Dada, you’re hurting me.”

  Rakhel laughs and releases Khorsheed, who spits out water and begins coughing violently. The rain comes down hard now, sheets of it break against the surface of the earth, against the water of the pool. Rakhel steps out of the pool, her tumban wet and sagging, drops of water falling from her fingertips. Khorsheed takes the hem of her short ruffled shaliteh and twists it with her hands, squeezing out the water. The two girls walk back to the sitting room, the door blown wide open by the wind. Rakhel closes the door behind them and they stand soaking the edge of the thick red rug.

  “Take your clothes off, quickly,” Rakhel says when she sees that Khorsheed’s lips are blue from the cold. She helps Khorsheed pull off her clothes, then removes her own. She drops the wet clothes in a pile and shakes her head back and forth. She walks across the room to the small brazier, takes a match and lights the coals inside it with trembling fingers, kneels on her bare haunches to blow so that the fire catches. Once the fire starts blazing, she closes the metal door, places a short-legged table on top of it, and drapes a blanket over the top of the table. Khorsheed walks across the rug on the tips of her toes, both hands clutching the small curve of her belly. She lays down beneath the blanket and Rakhel pulls it up to their chins. As the heat spreads from their feet, over their thighs, toward their hearts, the two girls fall fast asleep.