The Blood of Flowers

by Anita Amirrezvani

  I was delighted, for I hoped for a child as much as she did. Then it would be certain that we would have a home of our own, and would be taken care of by Fereydoon for the rest of our days.

  That evening, my mother spent a long time on the roof reading the stars. When she returned to our room, she told me the child would be a boy, for Mars was in ascendancy. “He will have your father’s good looks,” she said, more pleased than I had seen her in a long time.

  Gordiyeh encouraged my mother’s hopes. “You’re looking very round today,” she said to me one morning, staring at my face and my stomach. And then, turning to my mother, she said, “Being a grandmother is even better than being a mother.”

  “I hope I will hold my grandchild soon,” she replied. But I didn’t feel any different. I began counting the time remaining until the end of my contract, feeling more restless with each passing day.

  THE AFFECTIONATE TIES between Gordiyeh and Gostaham never ceased to baffle me. I had seen my father perform kindnesses for my mother—massaging her feet when they were weary, or surprising her with new leather shoes—but I had never seen a man give as much as Gostaham gave to Gordiyeh. He was always bringing her gifts, such as date cookies, bolts of velvet, or flasks of perfume. Why did he love her so? What did she do to bind him to her like a moth circling a flame? From the outside, she had little to offer. Her face was doughy like unbaked bread, and she moved heavily, her flesh lumpy and dimpled. She often wielded a sharp tongue, especially when she was worried about money. And yet Gordiyeh was like a diamond, hard but with a flash in her eyes that made her desirable.

  One afternoon at the midday meal, Gordiyeh came into the Great Room dressed in a fine silk tunic the color of a lake, the curve of her large breasts visible beneath the fabric. A single emerald on a gold chain drew the eyes there. She had covered her hair with embroidery, drawn a line of kohl on her eyelids, darkened her lush eyebrows, and put a touch of color on her cheeks and lips. When Gostaham arrived, she told him she had spent the morning helping Cook make one of his favorite dishes, rice with lentils and lamb. As I brought hot bread into the Great Room, I watched her offer him the most tender bits of lamb and refill his drinking vessel with sweet pomegranate sharbat. She even brought out some wine, closely guarded in her storerooms, and served him a few glasses with his food. Gostaham’s eyes softened and his round body relaxed into the cushions. Before long, he began telling jokes.

  “Once there was a woman who married three times and was still a virgin,” he was saying to her as I brought in some of the candied almonds we had made earlier that year. “The first husband was a Rashti who couldn’t do anything because he was as limp as old celery. The second was a Qazvini who liked boys, so that’s the only way he took her.”

  “And the third?” asked Gordiyeh, with a teasing smile.

  “The third was a language teacher who only used his tongue.”

  She laughed deep in her belly, and I saw Gostaham’s eyes alight on the opulent flesh that trembled around her emerald. She was courting him! But why? It was not something I imagined that older couples needed to do. And what did he mean by the teacher who only used his tongue?

  By the end of the meal, the air around Gostaham seemed heavy with desire. When he suggested it was time for an afternoon nap, Gordiyeh arose and followed him out of the room with a long, husky laugh. I watched her go with him into his rooms rather than her own, which was peculiar. I had never seen her behave this way before.

  My mother and I helped Cook clear the dishes from the Great Room and put them into buckets for washing. After I cleaned the serving plates, she rinsed them and stacked them to dry. It wasn’t long before I began to hear Gordiyeh make a noise that sounded like small repeated screams. I strained to hear what she was saying, bracing myself for bad news, but her cries were wordless.

  “What’s wrong with Gordiyeh?” I asked Cook.

  She was putting away the leftover rice. “Not a thing,” she replied, avoiding my eyes.

  My mother and I continued washing in silence. After we finished the serving spoons and vessels, we began scrubbing the oily pots used to cook the meat and rice. All was quiet for another half hour, at which point I heard the same loud cries again.

  “Voy!” said my mother. “Even after all these years!”

  “That’s how she gets what she wants,” replied Cook. “Just wait and see.”

  “It doesn’t sound real.”

  Cook laughed so hard she began coughing and had to put down the pot she was scrubbing.

  “You may be right, but it still works,” she said when she had finally recovered.

  What exactly was making her scream with such abandonment and pleasure? With Fereydoon, I had had occasion to pant, but nothing I had ever done with him had made me feel like howling like that. I wished I knew why.

  Early the next morning, Gostaham sent a servant to summon me to his workroom. He looked better rested than I had seen him in weeks; even the bags under his eyes were less dark than usual. I wondered if that was because of what Gordiyeh had given him the afternoon before.

  “Sit here,” said Gostaham, patting the cushion beside him. “I need your help on a sewing project.”

  He unrolled a scrap of carpet about two handbreadths long. It had a coarse pattern of wild red tulips and had been abandoned before its fringes were finished.

  “I bought this yesterday evening for Gordiyeh,” he said.

  I must have looked surprised, for surely she would not appreciate such an ordinary carpet when her husband was a master of the craft.

  Gostaham laughed at my expression. “Here’s the real gift,” he said, pulling something out of his sash. It was a heavy gold chain with rubies set in square mounts, each of which was surrounded by hanging pearls. I caught my breath.

  “I want you to sew this onto the surface of the carpet, trying your best to conceal the rubies among the humble tulips,” he said.

  Gordiyeh would unroll the carpet, thinking it was nothing, and would have to search for a moment to uncover the hidden gems.

  “She will be dazzled,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be a wonder to knot a whole rug with jewels like these!”

  “It happened once,” replied Gostaham. “The most famous treasure of the last Sassanian shah, Yazdegerd, was a jewel-studded carpet. That’s what gave me the idea, although my approach is necessarily more modest.”

  “Where is it now?” I asked, eager to see it.

  “Destroyed,” Gostaham replied. “Nearly one thousand years ago, the Arab general Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqis marched to Yazdegerd’s white stone palace and stormed it with an army of sixty thousand men. When they entered the palace to loot its booty, they were awestruck by its wondrous carpet, a lush garden whose roses gleamed with rubies and whose river sparkled with blue sapphires. Even its trees were knotted in silver, with white blossoms made of pearls. Sa’d and his looters slashed the carpet into parcels of booty—according to their own accounts!—extracting the jewels to sell and using the remaining scraps as trophies.”

  “It is an outrage,” I said softly.

  Gostaham smiled. “But what a story!” he replied. He left me to go to the royal rug workshop, and I returned to the andarooni to borrow a thick needle and some red thread from Shamsi. Back in Gostaham’s workroom, where I knew I would not be disturbed, I held the necklace against my own bosom. The stones were deliciously heavy and cool on my chest. I wondered what it would be like to be so admired that a man would want to please me with such a costly gift.

  Threading my needle, I pushed it through the back of the carpet in the middle of a tulip and lightly affixed the first ruby in place. It almost seemed to vanish, except for its sparkle. I continued that way with every gem, arranging the gold chain so it looked like vines spiraling through the carpet’s surface.

  I had a lot of time to think as I sewed Gordiyeh’s gift. She was not beautiful, and she was often ill-tempered and capricious. Yet with a single afternoon of love, she had made her husband’s heart soar
and loosened his purse strings. Perhaps it was because she was a seyyedeh: The descendants of the Prophet were known for having sexual powers beyond those of other women. After years of marriage, Gordiyeh was still getting her husband to do exactly what she wanted, while I could hardly keep my husband’s attention for three months. I longed to know all the things Gordiyeh knew so that I could bind Fereydoon to me.

  WHILE I WAS waiting to hear from Fereydoon, I was not idle. To keep myself from thinking about him, I worked long hours on the Dutchman’s carpet. Sometimes, when I was stiff from knotting, my mother helped me. She’d sit beside me in the courtyard and I would call out the colors for both of us, since the pattern was complicated and unfamiliar to her. It was then that I had a bold idea: What if I could find a few women knotters and hire them to make my designs? That’s exactly what they did in the royal rug workshop and in the rug factories that dotted the city.

  I even knew who I would ask. On one of my trips to the bazaar, I had noticed a woman selling her own rugs among the other peddlers at the Image of the World. She had made several woolen carpets in the Isfahani style, with a sunburst in the center radiating out to a starry sky or to a garden bursting with flowers. I had stopped to look at her work.

  “May God praise the blooms of your hands!” I said. “Your work is very fine.”

  The woman thanked me but looked uncomfortable. I asked her if she had been selling carpets in the bazaar for a long time, knowing that most women would prefer it if male family members peddled their wares.

  “No, only recently,” she replied, again looking uneasy. “My husband is ill and can’t work. I have two boys to feed—” And here her face crumpled, as if she might burst into tears.

  I pitied her. “May your luck soon be brighter!” I said. “With such fine work, I know it will.”

  Her shy smile made her face look radiant. From then on, whenever I went to the bazaar, I stopped and said hello to Malekeh. Her carpets did not sell until she offered one of them for almost nothing. She nearly wept when she told me about it, for she had barely recovered the cost of the wool.

  “But what could I do?” she asked. “My children had to eat.”

  She was in an even worse position than my mother and me, and I wondered if there might be some way to help her.

  The first thing I had to do, though, was finish the Dutch- man’s carpet. I worked on it steadily with my mother’s help, and now that I was a much faster knotter, it grew quickly. Although I still burned with rage that Gordiyeh had given it away without consulting me, I also felt comforted by the beauty of the pink, orange, and magenta flowers that were blossoming on my loom. In the future, I would use what Gostaham had taught me about color for my own gain.

  The day that my mother and I lifted the rug off the loom and made the fringes was a happy one for everyone in the household. For Gordiyeh and Gostaham, it meant they could satisfy an important client with a fine gift. For my mother, it meant that I could start another carpet that might help us earn our independence. For me, it marked the end of a long, bitter apology.

  When the Dutchman came to claim the carpet, I hid myself in the nook off the stairwell to observe events in the Great Room. Gostaham called for coffee and melon, batting away the Dutchman’s eager requests to see the rug until the proper amount of conversation had occurred. Then he had Ali-Asghar fetch it and roll it out before the Dutchman’s feet. From my perch, I had a view of the carpet that allowed me to see it in a new way. If I had been a bird flying overhead, that’s what a garden might have looked like, with its wealth of blossoms in joyful shades.

  The Dutchman’s eyes opened wide for a moment. “It makes me think of the gardens of heaven,” he said. “May we all hope to see them when our time on earth has expired!”

  “God willing,” replied Gostaham.

  The Dutchman fingered the carpet. “I am certain that even Queen Elizabeth of En-gland never possessed a carpet that could rival such fine work,” he said. “Please accept my thanks for such an unparalleled treasure.”

  My heart overflowed with joy to hear my work described as better than anything owned by a great queen, even if the Dutchman was exaggerating. Perhaps now Gostaham and Gordiyeh would see my value.

  “I am delighted that you are so satisfied with the product of my looms,” Gostaham said, and he beamed his broad smile toward the carved plaster, where he knew I was listening.

  The men began discussing the carpets that the Dutchman had commissioned on behalf of the wealthy merchant, which were being made by workers at the royal rug workshop. They arranged an appointment for him to see them, and then a servant showed him to the door.

  THEY SAY THAT the glorious Prophet Mohammad, who wiped the sweat off his brow while ascending to the throne of God, spent seven lifetimes in each of the seven heavens, yet returned to earth before his sweat reached the ground. How is this possible? They say it’s possible for time to expand into years for one person, while for another it consumes only an instant.

  Indeed, each day that I didn’t have word from Fereydoon seemed to stretch longer than the last. As I squatted in the courtyard two days before the expiration of my marriage, cracking walnuts and pulling out the tough dividers that kept the two halves of the flesh apart, I felt as if I were living out a lifetime in every breath.

  Not long after dawn, the sun was already hot, and I paused to wipe the sweat off my face. More out of distress than hunger, I put half a walnut in my mouth without looking at it. It was so rotten my tongue curled. Just at that moment, before I could swallow my theft, Gordiyeh came out of the kitchen, crossing the courtyard in the direction of the storerooms.

  “Are they flavorful?” she asked, making it clear she had seen me eating.

  I swallowed with difficulty and smiled at her as if I hadn’t understood her meaning.

  “Salaam aleikum,” I said.

  “Cook is making pomegranate-walnut chicken—isn’t that your favorite?”

  “All except for her lamb with sour lemon,” I replied, knowing that Gordiyeh liked to remind me where my bread and salt were coming from.

  Gordiyeh peered into the mortar, which was full of nut meats. “Be careful—you’ve got a shell in there,” she said.

  It was so jagged it could have cracked a tooth. I was not usually so clumsy at my work, yet perhaps it was no surprise, since my mind kept straying. I tossed the shell away, but now Gordiyeh was dipping her fingers into the ground nuts to check their size.

  “Make them more like powder,” she said. “They need to almost dissolve in the syrup.”

  Cook was distilling it right now, boiling the juice of pomegranates with spoonfuls of sugar. The air was heavy with the tart-sweet scent, which normally made my mouth water, but not today.

  “Chashm,” I said. Gordiyeh looked satisfied, for she liked me to be obedient. Under my breath, I muttered, “They’re better crunchy.”

  I launched my pestle at the nuts, grinding them into nothingness. The sweat rose again on my forehead, and I began to feel sticky under my clothes.

  A few minutes later, Gordiyeh emerged from the storerooms with her hands full of onions.

  “Ay, Khoda!” she said as she came out. “The way everyone has been eating, there’s nothing left in there.”

  I tried to look sympathetic, although I knew the storerooms were packed with pyramids of costly red saffron, fat dates from the south bathing in their own sugary juices, casks of strong wine, and enough rice to feed a family for a year.

  “Shall I pound fewer nuts?” I asked, hoping her concern about wasting food might save me work.

  Gordiyeh paused, as if she couldn’t decide whether more work or less wasting would be better. “Go ahead and pound them—we’ll save them for later if we don’t need them,” she finally said.

  I tipped out the nuts I had finished pulverizing and scooped up others, trying to behave as though this were any other day. Gordiyeh paused for a moment longer, her eyes on the walnuts. “Still no word?” she asked.

 
If there had been a letter, with Fereydoon’s signature swooping like a bird in flight, she would have heard about it from Gostaham. There was no need to ask, other than to remind me that my status was falling in the household. I already felt it in the type of tasks Gordiyeh assigned to me, like the nut pounding, which was normally Shamsi’s job. Perhaps she had already given up on him, and indeed, if I didn’t hear from Fereydoon today, I probably never would. I was too overcome for a moment to continue my work.

  “Poor animal!” said Gordiyeh, as she returned to the kitchen. “Insh’Allah, you’ll receive a message from him soon.”

  Whenever I thought about the last time I had been with Fereydoon, it was like touching a pot that had been stewing over a fire. I drew back quickly, blistered to the core. When he had wanted to talk, I listened, and when he wanted my body, I let him do as he pleased. I didn’t understand how I had failed him.

  I continued slamming the pestle into the nuts. How much had changed since my mother and I had moved from my village to Isfahan! I had been as protected as a silkworm in its cocoon. I longed to be a fifteen-year-old virgin again who knew nothing of the impetuous shifts of the stars.

  At the midday meal, I couldn’t eat much, which surprised Cook, who knew how I relished her pomegranate sauce. “Akh!” I cried out when I crunched on a sharp shell hidden in the sauce. Otherwise, the meal was quieter than usual, and my mother looked worried whenever our glances met.

  Afterward, I helped clean up and scrubbed the burnt rice out of a pot until my fingers were raw. Before everyone went to take their afternoon rest, I asked Gordiyeh whether any errands needed to be done. With a pleased expression, she told me to go to the bazaar to buy gaz, the sticky nougat with pistachios that her grandchildren loved. I left Gostaham’s house, wrapped in my chador, with my picheh covering my face, and walked quickly to the gaz shops in the Great Bazaar. I made my purchase and then, instead of going home, I traversed the Image of the World and entered the bazaar at its south end. Taking a long route to the river to avoid seeing anyone I knew, I walked past tunic makers, fruit and vegetable hawkers, and pot and pan sellers until I was outside the bazaar near the Thirty-three Arches Bridge. I looked around quickly to make sure no one recognized me before I crossed it and walked upstream to the new Armenian part of the city.