The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  She had been such a marvel as a baby—a loud, undersized creature with a fountain of curly black hair already longer than her own infant body, shiny dark skin and glass-green eyes and that one tooth gleaming in her mouth every time she let out a cry—that people lined up in the courtyard of the gravedigger’s house just to catch a glimpse of her, even reached into her mouth and tried to wiggle the tooth or pull it out, held a magnet up to it to see if it was real gold, and went away convinced, yet again, that God was full of surprises.

  The parents were going to leave the tooth in her mouth as a savings account of sorts—something of value she would take to her husband’s house—but as she grew older and her mother’s health declined, they decided to cash in early. One night when Golnessa was six years old, her father strapped her to a chair, poured a full glass of arrack down her throat, and launched a full-on attack with a pair of steel pliers. He pulled at the tooth till his hands blistered, grabbed the arms of the tool with a towel wrapped around them and pulled again. The harder he pulled, the less her jaw gave. He oiled Golnessa’s gums and tried again, blew some opium smoke into her nostrils to put her to sleep, and cut the gums of her lower jaw along the length of the tooth to where he imagined the root should be. He even tried reasoning with the mouth—this is just a baby tooth; a bigger, stronger one will grow in its place if only you relinquish this one.

  All the while Golnessa sat motionless on the chair, her eyes wide open and her senses immune to the wine and opium, and stared at her father without uttering a sound.

  The next day, the father brought home one of the wooden, three-wheel carts they used to haul corpses at the cemetery, set his wife in it, and attached a harness to the handles. Then, as if in punishment for denying him the tooth, he put Golnessa in the harness and told her she would stay there until she either let go of the tooth or got married and left the house.

  * * *

  Her first husband, when she was barely fourteen, was a sixty-seven-year-old Zoroastrian bache baaz—molester of young boys—which was a polite name for men who did not like to be considered homosexual but saw nothing unmanly about spending quality time with youngsters. He had married Golnessa because he was getting on in years and wanted a young woman to take care of him. Given his well-known disinterest in the female sex, he wasn’t expected to consummate the marriage. The night of the wedding he went into the “conjugal chambers” for formality’s sake, took off his socks and shoes and asked the bride to rub his feet while he slept. He yelled for the relatives who had gathered outside the room to go home already, there would be no deflowering of the virgin that night, no presentation of a chiffon-and-lace handkerchief bloodied with the evidence. But oh, how wrong he was!

  She must have chiz-khored the old man—secretly fed him a potion that put him, unsuspecting, under her spell—because not only did he emerge an hour after he had called it a night, looking radiant and self-satisfied and so very, very virile, to present the handkerchief as well as the bride’s gown all smeared with proof of her deflowering, he never again showed the slightest interest in a boy. Instead, he applied himself body and soul to mining the depths of carnal gratification with Golnessa, maintained a strict diet of a dozen raw eggs for breakfast, twenty-four pitted dates stuffed with walnut for lunch, and ripe figs and goat head or devil’s eyelashes with dinner. Whatever poison she was sneaking into his food or drink improved not only his constitution but also his luck, because from the day she stepped into his house till she left, six years later, one early morning in the midst of a rainstorm, the old bache baaz went from being utterly impecunious to more than moderately wealthy.

  That’s how she bought her freedom from the old man, how she would convince others to grant her a speedy divorce: she promised they could keep the luck she had brought them.

  * * *

  Her second husband was a forty-some-year-old Muslim carpet seller from Shemiran with a wife and half a dozen kids.

  The third one was a thirty-year-old Jew from Tehran; he had been married two years and had no children—just a wife—to abandon for Golnessa.

  The thing about her was, she had no fear. The worst fate that could befall a woman—being considered a harlot—had already happened to her at birth because of her family’s inherited profession. The next few worst things—being poor, having a mother who could not care for her, being so dark and unattractive that she would be written off as a likely candidate for marriage to anyone at all—had also happened to her before she opened those green eyes of hers onto this world. The eyes, in fact, fooled some people into believing that she might be that rarest and most mythical of creatures—a good-luck woman—because they were, indeed, striking in their clarity and vividness, but then there was the Moor’s skin and Mongol’s body, the Berber hair and those African lips, and there was the fact that she had made a cripple out of a perfectly healthy mother, and that she was born to a man who washed corpses for a living, and soon enough it didn’t matter how radiant the eyes were, you knew the girl was bad news.

  Any other woman of her caliber would swallow the proverbial scorpion and resign herself to being less worthy than a bald canvas rug on the doorstep of a poor man’s caravansary. Golnessa, instead, became the scorpion.

  She had no fear, no shame, no (it seemed) need or desire for that most valuable of commodities in Iranian society—a good name. The only quality she seemed to favor in a man was youth, and the only compensation she offered for getting him to betray his family and become a social pariah was that certain euphoria she sang about, and the undeniable good fortune, albeit only financial, that traveled with her from house to house.

  Not that the money—sudden, easy, and abundant as Golnessa’s luck made it—couldn’t have induced the euphoria, but greed alone, no matter how dire, would hardly account for the depth of devotion she inspired in her men, or the lengths to which they were eager to go for her. Her fourth husband, Davood Hayim, “stole” her from an employer who had treated Davood with greater generosity and more genuine kindness than his own father.

  * * *

  Davood’s father, Moshe Hayim, was a Jew who converted to Islam so he could take advantage of the law that assigned sole rights of inheritance to any jadid al-Islam—new Muslim—no matter how distant the family connection might have been or how many male heirs were standing in line. Given the benefits, and the ease with which conversion was possible—all one had to do was to be sure he wanted to be a Muslim, and a Shia at that, and say the words, La ilaha il Allah, Muhammadun rasulu-llah, wa aliyyun waliyyu-llah—I testify that there is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the messenger of God, and Ali is the vice-regent of Allah. You could do this with or without witnesses, then wash yourself, and you were done—Moshe Hayim became a jadid al-Islam in a matter of minutes, changed his name to Muhammad Hakeem, added a seyyed wa aliyyun waliyyu-llah—descendant of the Prophet—as a bonus, and even took a Muslim wife. He kept the new wife in a separate house from the first one, visited them on alternate nights, and let each raise the children in her own religion.

  Moshe Hayim, a.k.a. Muhammad Hakeem, had many daughters, but only two sons: Davood from the Jewish wife, and Alireza from the Muslim.

  Touched with Golnessa’s good luck, Davood became increasingly wealthy. He relished both the money and the social status that came with it, and was eager to keep it, but the richer and more popular he became, the easier it was for him to defy Golnessa, leave her side, forget that she was to be worshipped. That’s why she chiz-khored Alireza.

  * * *

  For weeks after the visit to Vanak, Mehdi prayed that Alireza would take him back to the house. He dreamed of Golnessa even when awake, heard her voice, the words to her song, even in his sleep. At home, he went around sniffing like a bloodhound for that cold, bitter scent his father carried home on his skin and clothes some nights. It was the smell of Golnessa’s house—her room or sheets or maybe just her breath—and it stuck to Alireza like a scar and caused his wife to erupt in anger and accuse him of being less honorable
than a dayoos—a man whose wife whores around. For Mehdi, though, the scent was all that stood between him and absolute despondency. A few times in the ensuing months he ran away from school and boarded a bus to Vanak, trying in vain to find the house. He even asked Alireza if they could “go see the lady with the gold tooth again,” but the only response he evoked was a firm slap and a bloody lower lip. He had nearly given up on ever seeing Golnessa again when Alireza had one fight too many with his wife, spat on the ground to mark the momentousness of the occasion, and declared he was leaving to marry his brother’s wife.

  To his mother and siblings, this was a calamity they would not overcome; to Mehdi, it was proof that God did exist, and that He did, in fact, hear young boys’ prayers.

  End of Excerpt

  More about Tehran Noir

  ___________________

  Launched with the summer ’04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

  Includes brand-new stories by: Gina B. Nahai, Salar Abdoh, Lily Farhadpour, Azardokht Bahrami, Yourik Karim-Masihi, Vali Khalili, Farhaad Heidari Gooran, Aida Moradi Ahani, Mahsa Mohebali, Majed Neisi, Danial Haghighi, Javad Afhami, Sima Saeedi, Mahak Taheri, and Hossein Abkenar.

  From the Introduction by Salar Abdoh:

  "There is something of both the absolutely spectacular and positively disgraceful about Tehran. But most writers around the world are inclined to think that their own sprawling metropolis is the capital of every imaginable vice and crime, of impossible love and tenderness and cruelty and malice in measures that seldom exist anywhere else. For me, Tehran’s case is no different—except that there really is a difference here. The city may be a hothouse of decadence, a den of inequity, all that. But it still exists under the watchful eye of a very unique entity, the Islamic Republic. The city enforces its own morality police, and there are regular public hangings of drug dealers and thieves. Because of this, there is a raging sense of a split personality about the place—the imposed propriety of the mosque rubbing against the hidden (and more often not so hidden) rhythms of the real city . . .

  There is always an element of the end of the world about this place. A feeling of being once removed from the edge of the precipice. Elsewhere I have called it the “Seismic City”—the seismic sanctuary. All of this will end one day. Yes. And maybe sooner than later. And when it does, by God, we will miss it.”

  Tehran Noir is available in paperback from our website and in bookstores everywhere. The e-book edition is available wherever e-books are sold.

  GINA B. NAHAI is a best-selling author, columnist, and full-time lecturer at USC’s Master of Professional Writing Program. Her novels have been translated into eighteen languages, and have been selected as “Best Books of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. She has also been a finalist for the Orange Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and has won the Los Angeles Arts Council Award, the Persian Heritage Foundation’s Award, the Simon Rockower Award, and the Phi Kappa Phi Award. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the Huffington Post, among others. She writes a monthly column for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, and is a three-time finalist for an LA Press Club Award. Nahai holds a BA and a Masters degree in International Relations from UCLA, and a Master of Professional Writing from USC. She’s a former consultant for the Rand Corporation, and a frequent lecturer on the politics of pre- and postrevolutionary Iran.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2014 by Gina B. Nahai

  Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-321-3

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-320-6

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-329-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938697

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