The Girl from the Garden

by Parnaz Foroutan

  “Do you feel a falter in your own heart, Father?” Mahboubeh asks out loud, sitting on the earth of her garden, beneath a cloudless blue sky.

  He does not hear her. The room has become very clear for him, filled with the desperate motion of his young wife, clutching his son to her breast, pushing herself against a wall, bending over the child, burying it in the folds of her arm, beneath the black curtain of her hair, hushing, hushing him. Ibrahim stands silent, in awe of what he has done.

  Ibrahim begins a series of logical sentences, constructed as though they are bricks in the hands of a blind man trying to piece together his recollection of a house.

  “Yousseff will not be far from you,” he says.

  “You will see him every minute of the day” and “You must take into consideration Asher’s sorrow and need. What does he have in this world if he does not have a child?” and “We will have more sons, we will be rich with children, this is an act G-d smiles upon.”

  He speaks these words to Khorsheed, not daring to step closer to where she kneels in the corner, rocking back and forth, murmuring to her baby. She looks up at him, his hands in a plaintive gesture, in the middle of the room, standing like an uncertain child, waiting to hear the pronouncement of consequences in the aftermath of the shattering. Her look, however, is unfamiliar to him. He has known this woman, his wife, the intimacies of her being, and now, he can’t bring himself to use her name, nor place a hand on her shoulder. In the silence of this bafflement, he resolves to move forward with what he does know, that a decision has been made, that there was a promise to his brother and that he must prove himself a man and keep his word.

  Khorsheed grasps her child firmer to her body and hisses the accusation, “You want to tear my son from my breast?”

  Ibrahim, before becoming stone, trembles a moment, the fine hairs of his skin extending to feel the subtle motions of air that follow her utterance. But this is only a moment, when he listens to her and the depth of the wound he feels proves too much to bear, so, instead, he hardens his body and becomes ethereal, a torrent of words, no longer beseeching. Now, severe, he takes a step forward and she lifts herself off the floor and runs about the room frantically, the baby screaming, and Khorsheed, not finding anywhere to go, sinks to the floor, again, and weeps. She lifts her wild eyes, her face framed by her hair, and she screams for Ibrahim’s damnation. She pleads with heaven to turn the day black, to hide her from the mercilessness of her fate.

  Zolekhah hears her from her room. She sits up with effort in her bed, her eyes moist, her legs lead, and mutters soft prayers. Fatimeh, too, hears the girl’s cries and raises her eyes to the soot-colored ceiling of the kitchen to plead for G-d’s mercy. Asher sits pensive in his study, behind his desk, staring at nothing, thinking of nothing.

  Khorsheed stands outside of Rakhel’s room, her feet bare. Her face unwashed. Her clothes soiled. Dark hollows encircle Khorsheed’s eyes. Her long hair knots at the ends. She shifts her weight from one foot to another. She waited that morning until Asher and Ibrahim left for the caravansary before leaving her room. Then, she walked across the courtyard, up the marble stairs, beneath the painting of Moses in his wicker basket, past the sitting room to the door that led to Rakhel’s room. The curtains have been drawn tightly for days and the door is always closed. She waits a moment outside and listens. She hears Rakhel talk softly. Khorsheed strains and hears the baby, a low mewing sound. She knocks. Something rustles in the room, but no answer. She knocks a little louder, shifting her weight from one foot to another. She breaks into a cold sweat and pounds on the door. The latch lifts and Rakhel’s face appears in the doorway, blinking at the sunlight.

  “It’s time for Yousseff to nurse,” Khorsheed says. She pushes past Rakhel into the dim room. Khorsheed looks around the room, her eyes adjusting to the light, until she sees Yousseff beside the bed.

  “Why is he on the floor? There is a draft from beneath the door.”

  “I placed him for a moment so he wouldn’t roll off the bed. I don’t think he’s hungry just yet,” Rakhel says. “He hasn’t started to cry.”

  “You shouldn’t wait for him to start to cry before bringing him to me. Then he becomes too fussy and can’t suckle properly.”

  Khorsheed picks Yousseff up and begins undressing him frantically. “You’ve bundled him too warm. He can’t breathe like this.”

  She lifts him to her face and buries her nose in his hair. She closes her eyes and inhales deeply, then presses her lips against his chest, his shoulders, his arms.

  “I was afraid he’d catch a cold.”

  “You don’t know what you are doing.”

  Khorsheed hastily touches the child’s clothes. She holds Yousseff up and looks at his legs. “He’s wet himself,” Khorsheed says.

  “I just changed him an hour or so ago.”

  “The urine has burned his skin.”

  Khorsheed puts him on the rug and grabs the pitcher of water on the low table by the bed. She pours water from the pitcher onto a corner of her skirt and dabs Yousseff’s legs.

  “Khorsheed, you don’t have to do that, I have clean rags.”

  “He’s been in his own urine long enough for me to wait a while longer for you to find your clean rags.”

  “They’re right here.”

  Rakhel extends a rag and Khorsheed grabs it from her. Rakhel squats next to Khorsheed. “Let me do it.”

  “No.”

  Khorsheed lifts Yousseff to her breast. He turns his head away and Khorsheed turns his face back to her breast, pressing her nipple against his closed lips. Yousseff turns his head again.

  “I don’t think he’s hungry,” Rakhel says.

  “You only brought him to me once in the middle of the night. He hasn’t had milk for hours. He must be starving.”

  “He hasn’t cried.”

  “Perhaps he is too weak to cry.”

  “Khorsheed, I won’t let him starve. I can sense when he needs milk.”

  “Not the way I can sense it. My body feels the pull of his hunger.”

  Khorsheed continues to struggle with the baby, inserting her index finger into his mouth to pry it open a bit, then pushing her nipple against his barely open lips. Yousseff begins to cry. Khorsheed tries to place her breast into his open mouth, but he struggles to turn his face.

  “Khorsheed, you’re going to suffocate him, he’s turning red,” Rakhel says.

  Khorsheed continues pressing her breast into the wailing child’s mouth.

  “Khorsheed, stop, he isn’t hungry.” Rakhel reaches out her arms to take Yousseff from Khorsheed.

  Khorsheed looks up with a hot anger in her eyes. “Don’t touch my baby, you’re upsetting him.”

  “I’m upsetting him? You are about to kill him. He’s crying so hard he can’t breathe and you keep smothering him with your breast.”

  “What do you know about how to care for a baby?”

  “I know enough to know when someone is about to kill one. Give him to me, let me calm him.”

  “What are you two doing, again, making such a racket?” Zolekhah stands in the doorway, then limps into the room and takes Yousseff from Khorsheed. She cradles the baby in the crook of her arm and bounces him gently. “My sons’ brides are the talk of the town. Everyone hears this war the two of you make daily.”

  “I came to feed my son.”

  “Yousseff doesn’t want to feed,” Rakhel says.

  “What do you know about what he wants and doesn’t want? You are not his mother.”

  “Enough,” Zolekhah says. “Enough of the two of you. Khorsheed, we decided that when Yousseff is hungry, Rakhel will come fetch you.”

  “I don’t want to leave my son alone with her.”

  “Khorsheed,” Zolekhah said, “we’ll discuss things with Ibrahim and Asher when they get back home. For now, allow Rakhel to care for Yousseff and tend to yourself. Have you forgotten the one growing in your womb?”

  “There is a reason G-d didn’t see her fit to h
ave a child,” Khorsheed says.

  Rakhel looks to the ground.

  “It will be difficult to adjust to this, Khorsheed,” Zolekhah says, “but you must think about the unborn child you carry. This rage is not good for that innocent baby, or this one. When the other one arrives, you will be more than happy to have this one off your hands. The two of you will raise Yousseff together and you will have enough time for the new one. Now leave the room and go tend to yourself. You have neglected your body for too long. G-d forbid, you may harm the baby in your womb.”

  Zolekhah hands Yousseff to Rakhel. Khorsheed watches Rakhel holding Yousseff. Rakhel rocks him in the cradle of her arms, clicking her tongue to calm him. Khorsheed narrows her eyes and clenches her teeth. “You are the djinn!” Khorsheed says.

  Rakhel looks up from Yousseff and takes a step back. Khorsheed steps closer, pointing her finger an inch away from Rakhel’s face.

  “Like all those stories you yourself told me! You snatched my baby! You stole my boy!”

  “His own father gave him to my husband. I did not snatch him from you at all,” Rakhel says.

  “That’s enough, Khorsheed,” Zolekhah says.

  “All this time, trying to persuade me of this and that, when you’ve been watching my child with your envious eyes, plotting and waiting!”

  “Khorsheed, that’s enough I said,” Zolekhah says.

  Khorsheed grabs Rakhel’s braided hair. “Tell the truth!” she says. “You made this happen! Because of you, they took my baby!”

  Rakhel bends her body over Yousseff and tries to free herself from Khorsheed’s grasp. The baby starts to cry. Rakhel frees one hand and hits Khorsheed in the stomach. Khorsheed’s breath catches and she falls backward. For a moment, there is a frozen silence. Khorsheed remains sitting on the rug, gasping for air.

  “See what the two of you have done?” Zolekhah says. “See what the two of you have become? Both of you, like the unnatural mother who stands before King Solomon.”

  Khorsheed heaves to catch her breath and weeps. “She . . . She is Al. She has taken my Yousseff and she tries to kill the one I carry, too. She will be the death of me!”

  Zolekhah struggles to lift Khorsheed off the floor and guides her out. “Come,” she says. “Come and pray that the one in your womb still is.”

  Khorsheed cries in Zolekhah’s arms and holds her stomach with both hands. At the door, Zolekhah turns to reprimand Rakhel, but the words catch in her throat. She looks at Rakhel, who cradles Yousseff and coos softly, her face wet with tears.

  Mahboubeh does not want to imagine Khorsheed’s death, but it is night, and dark, and nothing crowds her mind so that the thought of death creeps in. She rises from her bed and walks to the window of her room, to gaze at the moon. She tries to picture her mother sitting at an open window, gazing at the moon, before they took her Yousseff, before sorrow killed her, when Khorsheed could still dream.

  It is a stolen moment in the silence of the night. Khorsheed rests in her bed and turns her attention to the movement of her own body. She feels the shift of her bones and the stretch of her sinews. She looks at the expansion of the flesh of her taut belly and waits for the slight flutter that surprises her each time so that she has to put her hand to her stomach. Only in this darkness does Khorsheed feel that her body, and the fruit of this body, belongs to her alone. She waits each night for her husband to fall asleep, for the lanterns in the household to dim, for the voices in the yard to become whispers, the concerns of the day finally settled by the chirping of crickets. Then, she rises from the bedding beside Ibrahim, removes her undergarments, walks to the window, pushes it open, and sits down to bathe in the cool night air that floods the room and carries in its ebb and flow the scent of orange blossoms in full bloom. Khorsheed sits long enough to watch for the moon to rise, for her to disrobe from behind the cloak of dark clouds, to bare her spectacular fullness in the still black pool of the sky.

  It isn’t the familiarity of the moon that draws Khorsheed, though. It is the urgency of the orange tree, the desire to fruit so heavy that all living things become drunk with it. She knows this desire, and knows that it is a good thing, and so she breathes deeply and imagines the scent reaching into the small universe of her womb and carrying with it the promise that the loneliness of that existence will end in a paradise where the air itself is of honey.

  Mahboubeh wants to reach out the tips of her fingers and touch Khorsheed’s cheek. “Paradise is a Farsi word, Mother,” Mahboubeh whispers. “It means an enclosed space, a garden set aside from the surrounding wilderness.”

  Mahboubeh sees the seasons pass that orange tree in rapid succession and then, in one simultaneous instant, she sees Rakhel praying, two girls in the rain, Asher lost in the thought of Kokab singing, Khorsheed birthing, Ibrahim bleeding, locusts. A tall mountain. A man waiting beneath the mute heavens, beside a pile of wood, a firestone and the knife in his hand. And then, another birth.

  And snow.

  “Paradise,” Mahboubeh repeats, and tries to picture the courtyard in moonlight, again, the orange tree laden with blossoms. But

  Bare feet. Blue. Cracked.

  “Paradise,” Mahboubeh repeats. She clenches her eyes shut, to shut out the darkness, to keep out the sound of

  A door left ajar. Creaking in the wind.

  The wailing. Wind.

  Khorsheed stands barefoot in the snow. She does not feel the cold, nor does she hear the wailing of the infant in her room. Her eyes are black, swollen. Her eyes. Her eyes are vacant. Hollow.

  How did my mother die, Father?

  Your mother died from the complications of womanhood.

  How did my mother die, Dada?

  Khorsheed degh marg shod. From sorrow. Your father killed her, with sorrow.

  Milk drips from her breasts. Her thin blouse frozen against her skin. Her nose is running. Her mouth slightly parted. Her breath escapes in small clouds. She stares across the courtyard at the marble steps she is forbidden to ascend, at the door she is forbidden to open.

  I just want to smell him. Once more. Just once. Please. Just allow me to hold him to my chest and bury my face in his hair, to put my lips to the crown of his head. Just his scent. Please. Then just a dirty shirt of his, a shirt he wore? Allow me that? Allow me to hold that to my face?

  No.

  There is nothing left.

  What about your newborn child? Your daughter, Mahboubeh?

  There is nothing left.

  The trees above her cross their naked limbs. Jagged black lines bar and break a white sky. Her dark hair tangled. Bramble where vines were. Stems and thorns. Broken lips. The howl of the wind. Hers, too. Khorsheed howls, too. She calls him and her voice fills the skies with blackbirds. In the silence that follows, the snow falls.

  Yousseff, she cries again.

  Zolekhah rushes from her room, throws a blanket over Khorsheed’s shoulders. Khorsheed’s knees give. She falls onto the snow-covered ground. She wails and plunges her hands into the snow, clutches handfuls of it and smashes it against her face. The old woman tries to lift her from the ground. She tries to pull her in the direction of the room where the hungry infant cries for milk, for the heat of her mother’s arms. Fatimeh appears beside Zolekhah. They weep and struggle to raise the girl from the frozen earth. The two women finally lift Khorsheed to her feet and drag her back to the room. Across the courtyard, behind the curtains, Rakhel sobs silently, too, and holds Yousseff to her chest.

  Twelve

  In her garden, the rosebushes have grown thick stemmed, their thorns large, their perfume bewildering. The fig tree leans heavily against the wooden crutch Mahboubeh placed against its trunk for support. The nasturtiums teem in shades of orange. Mint invades any open space. And that vine that grows unruly has bloomed. Blue flowers. It creeps up her trees, crawls along their branches. It strangles rosebushes, tangles itself among the grapes, weaves through the honeysuckle. It allows a uniformity to Mahboubeh’s days, the shocking blue of its delicate flowe
rs at dawn. The fuchsia of their wilted deaths by late noon. And time, itself, has become lawless, too, shifting in a moment from afternoon shadows and birdsong to the song of crickets, frogs, the coyotes in the hills yelping, cars on the dark, distant highway without much passing in between.

  “There once was a garden, in another home, in Kermanshah,” Mahboubeh says out loud. The sun, round and big and red, sets behind the hills. The skies turn orange and pink. Crows become black markings. The house grows unfamiliar. Mahboubeh turns and walks toward it. “That home, in that other place, belonged to two brothers, who would sacrifice anything for one another.”

  Mahboubeh turns to look, once more, at her garden in the failing light of day. Gladiolus pierce out of the naked earth any which way. The pomegranates, never harvested, hang from the branches, half eaten by crows, empty combs, dry shells. Mahboubeh stops before a rosebush. She brings her face close and inhales deeply, searching in the scent for something she has lost. She closes her eyes and says, “The eldest brother married a woman named Rakhel . . .”

  Mahboubeh opens her eyes and notices that the vine, with its beautiful, delicate blooms, holds captive this rosebush, too. She raises her finger to begin untangling the vine from the stalk, but then stops. She looks at her garden, teeming with life. Time passes.

  “And when Rakhel failed to conceive, the eldest brother took a second wife, and when she too failed to conceive, the younger brother gave his own son, as a gift, to his brother. And that child’s mother . . .” Mahboubeh stops to watch the garden recede into the long shadows of evening. She turns toward the house, its windows dark. “That child’s mother . . . she died from too much sorrow. She died from the complications of womanhood.”