The Age of Orphans

by Laleh Khadivi

  She spits like they are dirty dog shit stuck to the bottom of her slipper.

  Rotten inside through and through, with only their guns and high boots and belts to mask what they really are: dirty boys, stolen from filthy tribes without even a coin to their dead family’s name. Ack-toph.

  I let her go on.

  Daughter of mine, do you want me to ruin our faultless reputation and mix them with the clean blood of our Tehrani girls, doktaher-eh-man? What rubbish the shah drags in for us to sweep up.

  I let her talk, but I know better and I know more; that is our job: to know everything unknown and see all that is unseen. Abadaan Street is our street as it belonged to my maman bozorg and her maman before and will one day be the street my daughter knows. For such a long sure reign one must be gifted with sharp eyes and ears, for love hides in the tiniest crook and only talented matchmakers like us can dig it out. While my maman is in fact her mother’s daughter and has the steady charm to run a house known for its successful unions, bloodlines run thick and thin through time and everyone knows that I can see more than she. Where she makes note only of the furtive glances, the scent of puberty and desire, I can see into the buildings, above the high hyatt walls, through chests and ribs, behind eyes and inside ears. To me all of Abadaan Street is exposed. And though she is a proud woman, Maman occasionally allows my insights, as they are fine for us and better for our future khanavadeh and fortune.

  I see that the soldiers are good for business and I tell her quietly, as I peel cucumbers and salt their fresh flesh.

  Ahh, Maman, this new Iran will be a mixed thing and soon all of the children will have blood in them from here and there and these soldiers have fortunes to spare.

  Ack-toph.

  She spits invisibly into the cauldron of green osh in front of her.

  Mongrels. The girls of Abadaan Street have always wed the boys of Abadaan Street and this is how things have been because this is how we have made them. All the blood joined in good, clean matches.

  She is a stubborn old maman and not until the day we saw the dead bookseller’s daughters and made the season’s most profitable match did she agree with me and stop spitting at the worth of soldier boys.

  It was a regular day and my sense was set high as Maman and I went to stand on our upper veranda, to watch the street and chew on our salted pumpkin seeds. As usual I saw easily into everything beneath my gaze, behind all solid or secreted; a full view. I watched neighborhood women pull stools up to windowsills in preparation for something. They licked salt sweat off their lips, adjusted scarves around heads, massaged arthritic hands and waited as their girls gathered around them, giggling, pulling hair, anticipating for the sake of it. Men and boys loitered outside, on driveways in front of gates with cigarettes and stones. Ivy, bougainvillea and jasmine draped the weights of their flesh dully from the high marble walls blocking neighbor from neighbor, street from home. All comings and goings stopped and only used water, running down descending stone ditches on either side of the street, moved. Just before noon, just before prayer, before lunch and nap, Abadaan Street quivered deliriously in the gaseous heat of midday but was otherwise still. The residents stood at the ends of their properties, pulled like magnets of audacious curiosity: the attraction of positive to negative. Here a curtain swept aside to reveal a face or two; there a servant’s eyeball pushed up against the hole in the concrete washroom wall; everywhere the child’s toothless mouth gumming a peeling windowsill. But for the rivulets draining off to some unknown stream, the street came to pause, captive and eager, to watch the parade death made. They waited and did not complain, reassured that while all else goes into the wrought iron gates and high walls of the houses on Abadaan Street—love, deceit, comfort, beatings, caresses, disgust, devotion—only death comes out.

  For a week now everyone has anticipated.

  The young boys, who played on top of the cobblestones every afternoon with beaten-up balls or kites, knew first. Slowly fathers and old men heard the news at smoky tea houses, and before eating the cheese and honey at the evening’s sofre, they told their wives, and the listening daughters heard: Iraj Ebadi, the old man down the street, is dead. So what? thought the daughters (for the lives of young girls existed only within the walls of the house and what lived and died on the street was irrelevant to them, insofar as it was not the neighbor boy they flirted with on the rooftop). Interesting . . . thought the mothers and grandmothers chewing on the news like the food in their mouths, wondering about the Ebadi widow. Will I be next? sighed the fathers and grandfathers as they thought of death’s inescapability. Pass it to me! Here! Here! the boys shouted in the street, the information sliding over their slick careless youth like grease on a wheel.

  Iraj Ebadi: the old man with the family, neighbor of many years with the limp and occasionally the cane; owner of the only bookstore that sold foreign books in Tehran’s bazaar; a respectable bookseller (everyone assumed from the stiff felt hat he donned every morning and carried home each afternoon). The man with the wave and the smile, the man down the way, across the street, next door; the man with the light-eyed sons and fabled daughters, the oldest of whom attended school and harbored a beauty only whispered about. A man so rarely associated with calamity that even death made it impossible to fatten his gaunt, lifeless frame with suspicion or suspense. If nits were to be picked off the body of the corpse, as the residents of Abadaan Street were eager to do, the education of his oldest daughter at the Armenian school in the Christian sector would serve to raise a few scrutinizing brows. Send a girl to school? With Armenians? For what? All their girls turn out to be whores, nah? But the daughter was young and without mark and left the house five days a week, escorted by her father or older brother, in a black chador that covered even the front of her face with thick, heavy gauze. Of course rumor (which cannot see more than a fraction of what I can, as it is speculation without charm) had it that she was beautiful as well.

  All week long I stood on the balcony to look and listen to the curiosity of the women of Abadaan Street. For if what they say is true, and she is a beauty of rare sorts, then a bounty is to be made for Maman and I.

  In the days after Iraj Ebadi’s death and before his funeral I focused intently, looking in on breakfasts and naps and even the evening washings, when, with a slathered hand across a bony shoulder or a supple slippery haunch, mothers and older sisters probed their naked boys for more information from the street. So how old is she? What color are her eyes? Is it true that she goes to school with the daughters of Armenians? The boys, wet with bubbles that float off them, held back, pretending to know more than they did, and remembered the offhand words of Iraj Ebadi’s sons, fourteen and twelve, who played football with them in the street. She’s got men calling already. We can’t wait until she’s gone, she doesn’t do anything around the house, thinks she’s too good. Baba spoils her. The games would continue, the boys quickly forgetting the brotherly complaints. Only at home, with a piece of honey candy dangled in front of them by the fingers of their tired mothers and sisters, did they associate a value with the seemingly irrelevant information. She’s fifteen. Eyes glazed. She doesn’t do any work. Mouth watering. Her eyes are blue. Snatch. Unwrap. Suck. Ywess (mouth full). Zzthey are bluuu.

  And so we gathered on the morning of the burial, not to wish old Iraj Ebadi a happy time in paradise, but for a clearer view: of the tragedy of death, the moving feast of sadness that belongs to someone else, and, of course, for a glimpse of that older daughter, the menace of beauty like a drop of liquid gossip to replenish the well of whispers long since dry.

  For some time now I have kept an eye on the shah soldier who spends every afternoon on the rooftop of Agha Hajii’s teashop. Many soldiers have come and gone from Agha Hajii, as he is a kind old man with a reputation for being generous with the smoke and the arak, but few are as sour as this young sarbaz, none so handsome or brooding. I have watched the street boys follow him in the afternoons when he makes his way to the agha’s door
. They like the look of him, stern and impenetrable. They like his long gun and high shined boots and tug on the straps and try to twirl the spurs and yell at him, Eh, sarbaz! Let me play with your gun! And even though he whisks them away with his hand and says, Na na na, there is always a smile curled under his lips. Otherwise the street ignores him as just another soldier, but I know better. I know more.

  The afternoon of the burial I spotted him, six rooftops away, crouched over one of the round copper tables, drinking tea and cleaning out his fingernails with the blade of a knife. Today, like most days, he was in a foul mood, concentrating on the task at hand and impervious to the hushed activity of the street. I could even hear him mumble, You can never leave the whorehouse clean, a little bit of the whore always comes with you . . . , while below us the street began to buzz as the gates of Iraj Ebadi’s house opened with loud metal cries. When the widow’s scream rose from the end of the street he was digging deep at a stubborn clump beneath his thumbnail and the sound startled him. I watched him flinch, pierce himself and curse. Mother of a dog! Only then did he look up to see the circus of grief gathered below.

  The wife of the dead bookseller pounded her chest with a rhythm the soldier found appealing. With each step she fired out a fist, retracted it and released a wail. The soldier moved to the edge of the balcony to watch, pulled to the procession like all the other residents of Abadaan Street and leaned his pelvis against the bar of the balcony to inadvertently rub himself on the metal banister. He could not resist the sensation that washed over him in a heady mix: curiosity, desire, calm, desire, arousal, desire, serenity, promise.

  For what? I could not tell. It was not the coffin, not the pallbearers, not the widow, with her screeching sobs and one drum rhythm of grief (though her sharp blue eyes did call to something in him). Not the still street or the body covered in white cloth. The soldier pushed and pushed his pelvis up against the bar, arousing not so much a feeling but assuring himself that something was coming, entranced by the possibilities. I must admit I stared at him with some degree of excitement; for once I could not see everything happening in the human heart and had to watch and wait with the rest.

  At the end of the formal procession, last to leave the gates of Iraj Ebadi’s house, the girls emerged, covered but for their clasped hands. Ah ha. The soldier swayed his hips back and forth, never once losing contact with the bar. Ah ha.

  A taller and a shorter. This much everyone expected. A young and an old. The veils, the same ones they wore to school, were not as much a surprise as a disappointment. Old women relied on the experience of age to gauge weight through the black draperies falling around round heads, across one set of sharp shoulders and one set of curved shoulders, down one chest formidable and round and the other still lean and girlish. On the street, the men left scrutiny aside and imagined the breasts beneath, the faces, the plump cheeks and red lips, so expertly had they spent their lives weaving their imaginations around and through the dark chadors.

  And I saw that the soldier who knew nothing of Iraj Ebadi, his death or his daughters, wanted to take the taller girl for himself, swallow her like a black nugget of licorice and walk out into the empty western desert with a belly full of dead bookseller’s daughter. Why? my maman asked, and I could not say until the girl reached the center of the street, pulled loose the chador off her head and glowed like a ground-bound star.

  The scarf fell off her hair to her shoulders and for a moment the street froze. Quickly the youngest sister pulled it back up. Quickly she tugged it down and shook her hair out from its confines, pushing it away from her eyes, getting a clear view of a street she had never seen.

  I looked to Agha Hajii’s rooftop to find the soldier and in that moment it became as clear to me as the sky after the storm. I tugged on my maman’s sleeve, and though she is normally reluctant to deal with my particulars, this time she listened carefully as I whispered.

  See that soldier on the rooftop over there? The one who leans against the banister? When he was young, just a small Kurd boy, he loved his maman very much—she was once a girl with a basket of onions on her hip—and they spent many mornings together in her dead garden, he at her breast and she tangled in nightmares and dreams, sighs and songs. Now and again she would place him in between her legs and show him the center of her, the scar from which he was born, and the boy would touch it, and when he did a whole history would come over him, the history of pain as caused by strange men, his baba and even his own slick oblong body. The history of the land and of his people was buried in there too, the battles and losses and dry, empty spaces. All of these sensations flashed through his young head like a flood, a drowning, and the boy would pull his finger out, upset his own maman was so corrupted through and through. At night he goes to the Armenian whorehouses to clean himself off on the women and moves from whore to whore to stick a finger in here and there and probe for some sensation to calm him, to clear out the racket that plays in his head, so he can invent himself anew. And every night he pulls out annoyed as they are all finished girls, full of the same chaos of overuse and unlove that plagues his own orphan soul.Yes, yes, Maman, he is an orphan, more a son of the shah than anything else, but look, can you see him now? He is all craven bones and heart and head for this girl, Ebadi’s oldest daughter, who won’t cover herself at any cost, whose beauty promises the soldier some clean truth. A new start.

  I see how weak he is with desire for her set family and good life and city blood and how desperately he wants to costume himself in her, in them, to pass himself off as the man he’s invented and not the boy in which he was born.

  You know as well as I do, Maman, that matchmaking is just as simple as balancing accounts. For her own reasons this girl is brave enough to take a life with a broken soldier and this soldier is broken enough to take a life with this brazen girl. Yes, yes, I know her loveliness blankets the street like fog and there will be other suitors, but he will be the best match. Trust me.

  My maman nods as the girls pass beneath us. We gaze down at the dead man’s oldest daughter as she, unsheathed, fair, defiant, illuminates the street.

  How much will he pay us?

  I tell her what I know. A soldier seeking out the privilege of a blank canvas, a place to make an original carve in a lifetime’s shape of pain . . .

  Any price you ask, Maman-joun, the sarbaz will pay any price.

  A Proposal

  The matchmaker and her daughter specified: You are to take Agha Hajii and his wife as if they were your parents, as if you belong to someone and are not some un-loved orphan that comes from nothing . . . your chances are better this way . . . At first Reza turned away from the idea, embarrassed that the mother and daughter knew he was an orphan. But tonight, with the memory of the girl still fresh in his mind, he walks to the Ebadis’ gate in the company of Agha Hajii, owner of the tea house, and his one-eyed wife. He has filled their arms with gifts for the widow and his bride-to-be and the el derly couple walk weighed down like mules alongside the strong soldier. With little else to do the neighbors of Abadaan Street crane their necks to watch the theatrical trio make their way to the dead bookseller’s door, where the gates open and close and leave nothing to be seen.

  The introductions: men embracing men, discreet nods between women, the tedium of standing greetings that lead immediately to condolences—God rest his soul. God rest his dear and departed soul—prayers and calls to Allah and finally the seating. The divan has been cleaned of all character to serve as a flat stage, where Reza is placed like a peg between his mother and father on a couch too small. In his boredom at the ceremony of passed fruit and nuts, he searches the room for any sign of her, a scent, a fallen unswept thread of hair, anything. From what was witnessed on the street, Reza has extrapolated much. She is fair skinned and petite with the wide-set eyes of a doe. Because that is all he knows for sure (and that was enough to make him seek out the matchmaker and her daughter, inquire into fees and percentages and agree to adopt these clumsy temporary pa
rents) he has imagined much more. He envisions her laid out beneath him, flat and pure as a pail of milk that he alternately drinks and dirties. When he thinks of the sound of her voice he hears the soothing coo of a warbler or thrush and excites at the possibility of this new pet and thinks not at all of her mind, the self within the skin.

  With renewed interest, he turns to the mandatory conversations between men—news of the world, news of the nation, news of the neighborhood, all of it returning back to death. The widow cries quietly and publicly. Agha Hajii’s old woman pours tears forth too, madly, from her one eye, though she never met the dead bookseller and cannot read. Reza clears his throat to express regret and the muscles of his neck strain as he bows his head to shake it from side to side. God show mercy on his soul. Abadaan Street’s one true thinking man, and so young . . . The air in the room grows dismal and he cannot bring himself to say the words the matchmaker, for her 15 percent, instructed him to say: Khanoum Ebadi, I come with the best of intentions to ask your daughter’s hand in marriage. But it is not time yet and the youngest daughter is paraded out as if to distract him. The khanoum wipes her nose.

  This is Haleh, the youn gest. She is a good girl, not as smart as her sister. Meena can speak French. You know her baba, God bless his departed soul, was determined they both become “modern” Iranian women. But I said nah, nah, nah. One at a time. Who knows how long this modernity is going to last. Best be safe.

  Reza nods once at the sister but does not see her. He looks around the room. They are all sitting on chairs, high off the floor. The table is stocked with sweets he has never seen, cream-filled dough and tiny colorful candies and small dark squares that have little smell. Their divan is crowded with color and light and Reza gets nervous and impatient as he waits for the tea ceremony (of which he was warned by the matchmaker and her daughter) where the oldest daughter, the bride in question, the hand he’s after, will serve him from a silver tray.