“Rakhel. Rakhel, open your eyes, you must eat. A week has passed. Rakhel. You must eat.”
Zolekhah lifts her head. Fatimeh places pillows behind her back until she sits upright. Khorsheed appears. She carries a bowl full of steam. She sits beside Rakhel.
“Soup,” Khorsheed says. “Made from the most beautiful rooster you have ever seen. Green feathers and a proud red comb. He jumped into the pot willingly, when he heard you screaming all that nonsense. I’ll blow on it. Open your mouth. Good. Open your mouth. Good . . .”
The broth is warm. Rakhel feels it go down her throat. It spreads all across her body. She sees Yousseff, crawling across the floor.
“In The Book, G-d gives Yousseff to Rakhel,” Rakhel says.
“What do you mean, Dada?” Khorsheed asks.
“Let her rest. She’ll drink the rest of the soup later,” Zolekhah says.
Rakhel looks at the women in the room. She opens her eyes again and they are gone.
In the moonlight, the courtyard appears blue. Asher stands beside the window, looking at the frozen trees, the snow-covered ground. He looks up at the sky. Black clouds move to cover the moon, veiling parts of her, then passing to reveal the white orb of her body, before concealing her again. He stands for a long time in silence, aware of Kokab sitting behind him, but lost in the currents of his own thoughts.
Without turning, he says, “This moon, comes into fullness and waxes and wanes, I’ve watched so many of them from this window, and still . . .”
“Sometimes it takes time,” Kokab says.
“Enough time has passed, now.”
Kokab says nothing in response. Asher waits, expectantly, for a word, a promise, something to ease the growing fear that lurks in the corner of his mind. He presses his forehead against the cool of the glass. “Kokab?”
“Yes?”
“What if . . .”
“It is no use, Asher, to think about it. It is out of your hands.”
“But what if I can’t . . .”
“Then that is the destiny G-d has written for you, your qesmat.”
Asher reels around to face her. His brows furrowed deep with anxiety, he clenches his fist and pounds it against his chest. “Then my life amounts to nothing. The value of what I have built is nothing. It would all have been in vain.” He searches her face to see if she shares his suffering. Her face is empty. “Don’t you want a child, too?”
Kokab turns her face away from him.
“All these nights, in my arms, isn’t that the yearning? The fire between us, isn’t it the longing to create?” Asher asks.
Kokab stares at him for several moments, then looks down and shakes her head.
“What is it for you?”
“Perhaps to burn the past, to forget.”
Asher covers his face with his hands, then looks up furiously at Kokab. “You don’t want to give me a child?”
She watches him, her eyes full of pity.
“Don’t look at me as though . . .”
“Asher.”
He buries his face in his hands, again, his body shaking. She rises off the floor and approaches him and places her hand on his shoulder. He moves out of her reach and turns his back to her. He holds his face a moment longer, then wipes his eyes with his sleeves.
“Don’t you want to be a mother? Isn’t it a natural inclination for women, to want to bear a child, to nurture a child? Desire is a means to that end. Unless, like an animal, you act on that desire for the sake of the act itself?” Asher asks. Even after the words are spoken, he hears the waves of them crashing over the woman who stands before him, and she is suddenly carried beyond his reach. Her eyes look past him, past the courtyard, beyond the moon.
He places his hand on her arm. “Kokab?” Her eyes remain distant. “Kokab?” He shakes her arm with his hand. “I did not mean what I said, forgive me. You must understand. Kokab?”
She looks at him, a look so empty, that in her looking, he feels himself erased, the touch of his hand ethereal, the nights of his embrace gone. “Please, I have enough to consider, don’t make more of my words than they were meant to be.” He squeezes her arm. The suppleness of her flesh, its response to his touch, feels cold. For a brief moment, Asher imagines her as an apparition of the moonlight, and wonders if the nights that passed between them only existed in the dreamscape of his mind. He shakes her again, this time more forcibly. “Woman, stop this selfishness, I am not in the right mind at this moment.”
Kokab sits heavily on the floor, her hands folded in her lap. “I cannot tonight, Asher.”
Asher looks down at the top of her head. “You don’t consider me,” he says.
“Please let me be, Asher.”
“For you, I am nothing but a distraction.”
“Asher.”
“So you don’t have to think about how you have failed . . .”
“Asher, please . . .”
“As a woman.”
Kokab throws her head back, her eyes clenched shut. In the silence of the room, Asher hears her breathing, short inhalations, short exhalations, like rapid, dry weeping. Asher kneels beside her. He touches Kokab’s arm. She does not respond, again, to his touch. He flinches. “All day, when I am away from you, I am mad with longing,” he says. “I cannot think to count. I lose words amidst sentences exchanged with clients. I make errors, simple errors at the scales, because my eyes do not see the thing before me, but are lost in the contemplation of you. All I can think of . . . you.” Asher looks to Kokab to see if his words touch her. He yearns to pull her into his arms and bury his face in her hair. “Something must be born of this desire, no?”
“Layli,” Kokab says.
“What?”
“My child. Her name is Layli. You have never asked. The child I have lost, my daughter . . . Her name is Layli.” Kokab keeps her eyes closed. “I know what being a mother means, Asher, I know it well.” Kokab wraps her arms about her own shoulders and buries her face in their fold.
Asher looks back out of the window. Black clouds cover the moon completely. The poplars by the garden walls sway in the wind.
“I miss smelling the musk of her when she rises from the damp of sleep,” Kokab says. She bites her bottom lip to keep it from trembling. She sways gently back and forth. “I wake from sleep, sometimes, thinking that I have heard her voice, calling me.” Kokab looks up at Asher. A long moment of silence stretches between them.
“If the only value of my whole life is in those moments that she slept in my arms,” she says, “against my chest. If all that I have done was to soothe her, to hold her . . .” Kokab’s voice breaks, she presses her closed fist against her lips, then bites her knuckles.
“And I don’t know . . .” she says. “I don’t know, now, when she startles from her sleep and calls for me . . . only the endlessness of the dark night greets her . . . I don’t know . . . if she even calls for me any longer . . . if she is afraid and thinks that I have left her of my own will . . . that I have left her to the despair of night and that terrible man . . .” Kokab’s voice trails off. She looks to the window, the light of the moon illuminates the rivers upon the earth of her face.
So old, Asher thinks, she looks so old. “Have I not made you happy?” he asks. He pulls her into his chest and holds her tightly.
“What joy can I feel, Asher?”
“Don’t tell me you have not felt joy, Kokab, don’t tell me that. I have seen you. I have held you.”
Kokab struggles to pull out of his arms. “I am your prisoner, Asher, your slave. Should I feel joy in this life? Should I feel joy for these crumbs of bread you throw at me and believe to be enough to satisfy the hunger of my soul?”
Stunned, Asher releases her and looks at his arms in the blue light of the room, then looks at the woman sitting before him as if seeing her for the first time. Suddenly, he feels a revulsion, a bitterness in his mouth. All that he has given her, all he has done for her. He rises to his feet. He bends over and clutches her arm, then pull
s her to her feet. She stands before him and looks into his eyes.
“Enough. Enough self-pity,” he says. He pushes her against the window so that her face is pressed against the glass. He stands behind her. “Enough ingratitude,” he says in her ear. He feels her shudder, but she does not move. He pulls her closer to himself and bites the lobe of her ear. She pulls away.
“Asher, you can’t.”
“Don’t tell me I can’t. Of course I can, it is my right.”
“I am in the state of my impurity.”
Asher stops. He steps back. He holds his forehead in his hand, shaking his head. He looks at Kokab. Then he turns and walks abruptly to the door.
“I will spend the next two weeks with Rakhel. When you can, attend the miqveh. When you are clean, we will try again.”
He hears the sound of the trees, branches snapping in the wind. He steps into the cold, cold dark without looking back.
Rakhel does not need to turn to know who enters her room. She knows the sound of the metal latch followed by the firm step. She listens to his heavy breath, the rustle of the qaba falling off his shoulders, the guttural sound of his throat as he raises his arms to lift the shirt over his head, the crumpling of cloth against the floor. She knows he stands behind her, naked in the moonlight, watching the mound she makes beneath the bedclothes. An eternity of waiting and he does not even announce his arrival with words. He simply pulls the blankets back and settles behind her.
She tries to even out her breath, to feign sleep, but she fears that he hears the thudding of her heart. He raises her dress shirt above her thighs and she feels his hands explore her flesh, the heat of his breath on her neck, the urgency of his want against her legs. He doesn’t wait for her to speak, doesn’t speak her name, gives her no time to cry against his chest, to demand an explanation for why he forgot her for so many nights. She weeps, silently, as he finishes, turns and lays on his back.
“I will sleep here for a while,” he says.
Then, more silence until the soft snore begins in his throat. Only then does Rakhel allow herself to turn and look at him. She studies the outline of his face in the blue twilight. She leans over and smells the scent of the other woman on his skin. She brings her face closer to him, to find a trace of herself. She wants to reach with her fingertips and touch the flesh of the arm he folds beneath his head, but she hesitates, her hand midair, and brings it to her own face instead. She watches the rise and fall of his chest until her eyes close and she slips into a dream.
Mahboubeh stares at the ceiling of her bedroom, then turns to the clock on the bedside table. Rakhel won Asher back, once Asher realized that he would never beget children. But he needed a reason to divorce Kokab. And she gave him just that, the day she went to the wheat mill. Mahboubeh remembers that this was one of the stories that Rakhel liked to bring up, from time to time, even after so much time had passed, the day Kokab went to the wheat mill, a place no respectable woman would be seen, and Asher divorced her in order to save the family name from shame.
The minutes pass so slowly that time seems to unwind itself before her, at once present and the past. In this tangled darkness, Mahboubeh finally allows the ghosts to come and go as they please, loud with the urgency of their stories, begging her to give them voice, to explain, to her, to the audience of eternal silence, what happened once upon a time.
Kokab has not emerged from her room for many days. She no longer comes to the sofre for dinner. Rakhel watches from the courtyard as Fatimeh takes food to her. The old servant walks into the farthest room with a tray in her hands, then comes out quickly, muttering Allah Akbar to herself and rushing back toward the kitchen.
“Fatimeh, is everything all right?”
“Too much suffering, Rakhel Khanum. That poor woman suffers too much. She is somewhere else, her body empty of spirit,” Fatimeh says. She shakes her head and looks back in the direction of the room. “The look in her eyes makes the hair on my arms stand. It’s no good. I know this by the white hair on my head. She’s allowed too much sorrow to settle in her heart.”
“Does she eat?” Rakhel asks.
“Eat? Like Imam Hussein in the desert of Karbala, poor woman. I go to take another tray and pick up the last with the food untouched. Not even a sip of water from the glass.” And the old woman turns and walks away, shaking her head and wringing her hands.
Rakhel returns to her room and sits for a long while. The morning creeps toward afternoon, and Rakhel just sits quietly, looking at the motion of the shadows on the wall. But as the hour approaches for Asher’s arrival from the caravansary, Rakhel begins to become more and more agitated. Finally, she jumps to her feet, throws open the door of her room, and runs toward the farthest room. After several minutes of waiting behind the door, Rakhel finally opens it and stands there, holding her breath. Kokab, who sits in a corner and rocks gently, stops, looks up at her and says,“You have finally come to visit me?” She invites Rakhel into the room with a motion of her hand. Rakhel takes a hesitant step, and closes the door quietly behind her. She waits with her back pressed against the door.
“What news do the blackbirds bring from the neighbor’s garden?” Kokab asks.
“That you are no longer welcome here.”
“Asher has sent you to tell me this?”
Rakhel remains silent.
“He does not need to, does he? It is clear that he is done with me.”
Rakhel clenches her teeth and walks up to where Kokab sits on the floor. “You cannot stay here,” she says. “You no longer have a place here. You are just a burden now. A sad reminder to Asher. Another mouth to feed. It is best if you go.”
Kokab looks away, shakes her head sadly, and says, “Where can I go?”
Rakhel straightens her back and tilts her chin up. Her breathing is heavy. She must remain stern, authoritative, she reminds herself. She will not run, she tells herself, this is the time to act. “Perhaps you can kill yourself,” she says.
Kokab watches her for a while, then says, “I want to live for my daughter, if there is a chance I may see her again . . .”
“Then return to your brothers’ home,” Rakhel says.
“They would wish me dead, rather than returned once more,” Kokab says. She looks out of the window. “You are not cruel, Rakhel,” she says. “You are a child, and desperate. You could have been my own daughter, trapped where you are, afraid of losing the little bit of earth G-d has allotted you.”
Rakhel can no longer keep calm. She moves from foot to foot, at once trying to move closer to Kokab, then pulling back. Asher will be home soon. He will ask what business Rakhel had with Kokab. Perhaps Kokab will tell him what they said. And if he goes back to her, despite the fact that there will be no children . . . If he decides to return to her, even still . . .
“Will you go? Please?”
“I am not free to go as I please, Rakhel.”
“You must give Asher reason to divorce you,” Rakhel says. “Give him reason to send you back to your brothers’ home. It doesn’t have to be something big, just an act to give him an excuse, and save him face. Asher will be happier once you are gone. And my life will be better, too. And the family will not have this turmoil. And your brothers are blood to you, you have more a place in their home than here. And your daughter, maybe the day will come when you can see her. If you leave, maybe then everything will be fine. If you go, maybe everything will be fine, again.” Rakhel does not look at Kokab as she speaks, but at her own hands, then the walls, then out the window, any other place, but Kokab. When she stops talking, she finally notices Kokab’s eyes, soft with tears. Kokab shakes her head and sighs.
“So this is how we finally make one another’s acquaintance?” Kokab says. “All this time, I wondered what we might say to one another, once alone.”
Rakhel looks away. She does not respond, but she cannot keep her body still. Her hands fiddle with the hem of her skirt, her feet step back and forth. Her body refuses stillness, and so she starts to spea
k again, to quiet the rest of her self. “If you go to a public place. You don’t need to do much else. You don’t need to create a reason for going, or explain what you did. Just be seen there, alone, with no business. A place where only men go.”
Kokab looks at Rakhel, bewildered. And then she laughs. “Is this how my life plays out?” she asks. “My qesmat written by the hand of a girl child?”
“The wheat mill. Will you go there?”
“Such a serious gamble, Rakhel. The consequences so irrevocable. And why the wheat mill, Rakhel, why the wheat mill to crush your rival?”
“Because no one will be able to think of any reason for why you have gone there, other than the worst reason.”
“Of course. And if he kills me?”
“He won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“You have known him, too. He won’t.”
Kokab nods her head. She draws her knees into her chest and wraps her arms about them. She rocks gently, then places her cheek against the wall and closes her eyes. After a while she turns to look at Rakhel. She studies her for some time and finally says, “Don’t look so worried, Rakhel. I’ll go. There is no life for me here, but for you, there may be a chance.”
Rakhel looks down at her own hands, which hang limply now, tired after their frantic dance. She feels so tired. Her body aches for sleep. She wants to fall to the floor, right before Kokab, draw her knees into her chest, and cry. Kokab reaches out and takes hold of Rakhel’s hands in her own. With effort, she draws Rakhel into the fold of her arms. Rakhel fights for a moment, then collapses into the embrace, burying her face against Kokab’s chest, where she weeps and weeps. They sit thus for some time, Kokab cradling Rakhel until she is spent of crying, until she hiccups with sobs every so often, and then settles into a calm half-sleep. The afternoon advances. The shadows grow longer. The air cools. The muezzins begin to sing the evening azan.
“Go now,” Kokab says. “Go before someone sees you here. I will leave for the mill in the morning.”
The Girl from the Garden Page 17