The Age of Orphans

by Laleh Khadivi

  She wears a loose skirt and a thin blouse and nothing covers her head as she proficiently shoulders a basin of hot water. A white cloth towel curves over her arm, stiff from yesterday’s soap, and her eyes stare only at the floor, the faucet, and the pattern of blue and gray squares. Never at him. The only sound between them is the clap of her wooden bathhouse slippers as she maneuvers into and about the small, loud room. They snap judicially in Reza’s ears.

  Clack. Clack. Clack.

  She squats somewhere about his knees and pours the hot water on his feet.

  Clack. Clack. Clack.

  She adjusts and adjusts around him to the side and the back, her hair a frizzy luminescent halo of black. Implicated by the incessant cannon-fire of her small feet, Reza looks away as she washes him inside and all over with scented water.

  Through these ablutions Reza smokes and smokes. He cannot help but take pleasure in the steam that rises to meet the smoke and he sits subsumed in a gray cloud, folded in a nebulous blanket of delicate touch and particulate gas, and it is all he can do to stare away from her as she is unearthing him, sloughing off all the skin he has borne to cover and sheath himself, disarming an already naked man. She washes the nipples, the anus, the back, the stiff neck and the underarms with a generous soaping, and all of the places in between get a finger-full of lotion and oil.

  Clack. Clack. Clack.

  Reza closes his eyes and goes deaf to the gavel footsteps that march out their invisible accusation. He sits and smokes in his own dark and thinks of her face: the broad mouth, an expanse of cheek that spreads from here to there, the expression in her eyes that shines out every night in doughty confidence to let her new husband know:

  You are my exit from this place.

  And:

  I am a determined girl.

  He feels the cream she lathers on his face and listens for the high and tiny ring of the hair as it is shaved away by the edge of the blade. Every once in a while he can hear her strop the blade carelessly against her smooth forearm to clean it. They are fresh in a marriage less than three months old and the heels speak for them both.

  Clack. As if to say: I know the Kurd in you. I care not.

  Clack. As if to say: I cannot clean your sullied self. I care nothing for your silly sins.

  Clack. This love is born of ambition, and I will keep your secrets insofar as I am allowed permissions both great and small.

  With closed eyes Reza finds his lips with the cigarette, breathes the gray haze of smoke and steam and imagines the wife before, beneath and around him who washes and clacks and he knows he is naked and weak. And yet he sits to look at the back of his eyelids, where the black pandemonium shrinks and expands like a gas, like the great tides of tears that rise and fall with her every touch.

  Before she takes out the towels he makes an attempt to engage his wife with a gentleness that does not come naturally to him. He smiles. He touches a finger to her chin. He thanks her with the flowery language that the madam at the whorehouse uses once the coins are in her hand, the kindest way he knows how. For her part, Meena adjusts and clacks and adjusts and clacks and keeps her eyes downward in a farce of obedience, uninterested in the face he cannot hide from her: the face that confesses, the face that begs. She washes and adjusts and clacks. She dries the limp hairy limbs and refuses him absolution or affection. She takes the empty basin and the wet cloth with today’s skin and soap and leaves behind the new man, her husband, in the damp and smoke, to suffer the infliction of desire’s clean ache.

  It is the fourth month of marriage and little has changed. He still sits in their den with the brothers and uncles, tells stories and lies, and still comes to his wife, craven, morning, noon and night. She washes him, lies beneath as they fuck (when he can catch her smiling occasionally at some surreptitious thought), but still does not love. He has told all of his secrets and received nothing in return. What ever softened in him in those first weeks now begins to harden. In the space left by want bitterness brews, and each night after their cold conjunctions (which are always silent and without friction and leave him craving the noisy whores that he seeks out whenever he can) he lies next to her, propped up on a bent elbow in the dark, and takes in her porcelain body, hinged elegantly at the limbs, as it rises and falls. He does not know how this came to be, this woman, himself, the empty night. He cannot remember the proposal, the polite asking, Your daughter . . . I am a soldier for the shah . . . yes, ranked . . . , and he cannot recall the motivations that drove him to knock on their lattice gate. Extended, here beside her body, Reza can only remember her as she was during the funeral march: unveiled and open, open to his possibilities for her. That afternoon she walked whole and he watched her, enviously, with his various halves. When the matchmaker came with her winking eye and whispering tongue he considered the union a type of purchase: one whole and true heart, head, belly and back for the price of his soldier suit, and Reza agreed, satisfied with the trade.

  * * *

  In the dark he can only just make out the fine features of her face and knows they are relaxed and washed over with the assuredness of mother’s steady love and brother’s steady love and even dead father’s steady ghost love.

  It is a beauty Reza dares not disturb, though it disturbs him to no end. He cannot sleep in its presence and so lies down and imagines doctoring her, opening the clean flesh encasement, prying apart the chest cavity and pulling out, one after another, the organs and slushy innards and gore-covered bones. To inspect and fondle them, as they are the proper parts of an Iranian and she is a pedigreed Tehrani girl. In his dreams he wears no gloves, licks his fingers often and throws the uninteresting bits out the window for the neighborhood dogs to fight over. Meena sleeps the sleep of the sanctified and Reza dreams and digs around to find the right chunks, lumps and wedges, the ones that will make him more right, more erect to the eye and true to the soul—the parts that he can sew into himself and so draw in the love he craves and she withholds.

  It is the fifth month of marriage and spring winds blow through the city to arouse life incipient in branch, bud and bulb so that they all might bloom, reveal and run to rot. It is the fifth month of marriage and Reza sits in the bathing room, with the bloody dream still fresh in his head. He holds in his smoke and pinches his nose so as not to smell the stench of his wife’s vomit, which has filled up the bathroom as of late. She cleans him and vomits and cleans and clacks and he objects not at all to the mess and stench, preoccupied instead with thoughts of the budding half of himself that grows inside her, unborn and already ill at ease.

  The Dead Book Seller’s Second Son

  He cannot read.

  I know because our house is full with books and I have watched him walk from room to room touching their spines with an empty look. Never once has he pulled one from the shelves, never once has he turned their pages. He doesn’t tell anyone and nods yes yes yes when we are discussing the latest translations. He doesn’t make mention and so neither do I, but if Baba knew that Meena married an unreading man he would smack his cane about in his grave loud enough to disturb the dead. Baba told us that only idiots can’t read, and that is why we are all reading people—me, Meena, Maman, Shireen, Arash and Kashiar—so that we will not be idiots. I am only ten and I have already read a library full. Science books, mostly.

  Because I do not want my new brother to be an idiot I have asked him to meet me every afternoon, in secret, to teach him how letters make words and words make stories and stories make smarts. He sits beside me, smokes and looks out the window and never at the book, unless there are pictures, like in the Shahnameh or the book of Hafez. Even then he looks down with just his eyes, careful not to turn his head. He is a difficult student.

  I am a determined teacher and I bring him more books with pictures, science books, since I am a science boy: the planets, the oceans, the weather, the animals, the human body, everything that lives and moves. When we start the British encyclopedia of animals he stops smoking and stares without
distractions at the photographs of giraffes, zebras, snakes and rabbits. I read for him. The Himalayan Gazelle. Move in male-led herds. Distinguished by a large hump between the shoulder blades, a black stripe down the middle of the belly and lyre-shaped horns. The females have black skin, though white fur surrounds the teats of the udder. This is helpful for the young to locate the source of milk. Herbivores. He sits beside me as still as a good schoolboy.

  Now we make good progress; though I do all the reading, he is interested every day and every day we meet in the hyatt after nahar when the rest of the house is napping, and every day he is less of an idiot (and I am doing a great service to the family, and Meena especially, because she has little patience, especially for the stupid). Every day he asks me to start with the hawk. It is his favorite. The Levant Sparrowhawk. Kingdom: animalia. To tease him I take my time getting to the part he likes best. Phylum: Cordata. Class: Aves. Their flight is distinguished by “flap-flap-glide” movements. Females are smaller with reddish undersides. The sparrowhawk reaches sexual maturity at three years of age. Here he folds his hands and closes his eyes. Their ritual mating techniques consist of high-flying circles between male and female. The ornate flying patterns and caws draw the two closer and closer until they collide, midair, and conjoin to spiral downward in a locked free fall during which the male inseminates the female, the two splitting apart just before a sure death crash in the sharp treetops. Here, my new brother listens without inhale or exhale. I try to imagine what he is imagining.

  Meena Wife

  In the hammam they whisper.

  Look! She is rounding now. Beabeen! You can see it already.

  Na, na. It’s too early. That’s just the newlywed cushioning, though now that you mention it . . .

  On our own street! And now in our clean hammam? A bastard grows in that girl. I don’t know how you two can stand the sight of her.

  They are indelicate women, yet they whisper anyway. And because the walls are marble and the floors are tile and the ceilings are covered with stained and thick glass, each murmur, however slight and offhand, explodes like a smack, loud enough for the whole bathhouse to hear, myself most included.

  Her baba must be turning in his grave. Such a good man, an educated man, and now grandfather to a half Kurd! Imagine!

  I cannot see them through the steam but I know their faces well enough. In the white light I can just make out their eyebrows as they curl disapprovingly in the mist.

  The hags continue on, throwing a breast over a shoulder and washing the sweat-stained skin beneath and running their hands through their mud- and dye-soaked hair. The water streaks along their stomachs and shins and down the drain in rainbows of gold, burgundy and black. I watch the outline of their limbs as they wash the soles of their feet and reach down in between their thighs. Through the loud chambers of the hammam sighs echo all around in a hushed and desperate chorus of whispers.

  They are old women, naked and heavy, but they are not wrong. The child grows inside me, half the blood of this old street and old city, half the blood of my husband, scion of stones and mountains that God himself forgot. A new babe for this new Iran. I am determined not to allow them the righteousness of their judgment and walk toward their octagonal inlet, my bath shoes clapping heavily against the tiles, just as they do when I give Reza his morning wash.

  Excuse me, khanoums . . . do you have a bit of soap? I’ve left all of mine at home.

  With mouths shut and eyes wide open they fumble and I stand before them, my body exposed and smooth-lined and not yet trespassed by baby after baby and so: perfect. They look through their bath baskets and buckets for the soap and I gently rub a hand across my breasts, across my rounding belly, and sigh for dramatic effect.

  These shah soldiers, khanoums, let me tell you, enough energy to tire any girl . . . but such pleasure. Some nights I can barely see anything but desire in the dark . . . their bodies are made for the love union.

  The search for the soap stops and now they stare at me, three faces of worn wonder.

  Well, no one suffered too much love. The gifts are nice (I lie) and his monthly check is enough to take care of Maman and the boys for a year (I lie) and after his posting to Kermanshah we will have a house with French chandeliers in every room and two cars with drivers and a kholfat to do all the cooking. I can’t really complain about a few exhausting nights, now can I?

  A sliver of soap lands at my feet. I bend down to pick it up, slowly, to give them a long look at my smooth, unburdened back.

  Yes, pregnancy is a difficult thing, as you know, but alas, for our new Iran a woman must make her sacrifices—so she is not forgotten like the women of the old time who just disappeared into history, like your own mamans, I imagine . . . I have even heard of city girls mixing their blood with the old tribes for the sake of the country, so that all the blood may one day bleed together harmoniously and we can be as great as France or England. It is for sure those women will keep a place in history for themselves.

  I clap the soap between my hands.

  Merci, khanoums, for the soap. I will return what’s left.

  I walk to the arched entryway and throw a toothy smile over my shoulder. Behind me the women sit in shock, naked, heavy and long unloved, and smile back at me, for they may be meddlesome and mean in their afternoon gossip, but they are not wrong.

  I take my sliver of soap to the hammam maid, who lays my body down across the warm marble slab and takes to it with her coarse burlap gloves, rough like a mother of many. Under her touch I can feel the babe in me move, make its way around my belly, avoiding her harsh hands. The bath house women are quiet, tired, maybe gone to their homes and hot kitchens to wash the greens, brew the tea and bustle about in their scrubbed skin, calm and convinced of my curse.

  A Succulent Wrist

  The mandarin summons applies only to soldiers recently married, and so Reza goes to the central barracks to receive a certificate valid in any of the small shops on Jomhuri Street, where international fashions for women are sold. The shined glass windows display hangers of suits and lines of shoes. In the same proud and precise manner with which he dresses himself he selects for his wife what he thinks she will like. A pair of laceless black shoes of shined leather with heels that push up from the ground. Two dresses: one of cotton with a delicate pattern of bunched flowers, and another a suit, like his own, of dark olive gabardine, thick wool, both cuffed at the elbow and hemmed at the knee. He knows the handsome costumes will please her; they always do.

  The wrists are a great show these days, eh, sarbaz?

  From behind the wooden counter a sparsely toothed shop-keeper grins at Reza.

  Some talk of the ankles and others of the calf and the knees, but I myself, I am a man of the tasty wrists. Heh, heh, heh.

  Reza picks a white hat with a wide stiff brim and gloves to match and walks back to Abadaan Street with smells of France and Germany and Italy under his arm. The weather is warm and he smokes one cigarette after another until he and the clothes reek of tobacco.

  The dead bookseller’s widow stands all day long at the door. When she sees the packages she holds her dirty white handkerchief to her lips and wails.

  Khodahr-eh-shokr, Meena! Daughter of mine, you are the most fortunate.

  What generosity from your husband, what beautiful fabrics!

  European! Modern!

  Ay Khoda, what can we do to thank such a man?

  He pretends not to watch Meena as she lifts the fine fabrics to her nose.

  They smell like smoke.

  She chides. He sees her face flush pink. She unwraps and lifts and lingers about the cut shapes before gathering the dresses and their tissue-paper wrapping in her arms to stand before him, a girl clutching the woman to her chest. She curtsies briefly and runs from the room, the awkward bundle slowing her escape.

  They are regulars in the Noruz procession: a soldier and his wife indistinguishable from the others. Here their union works best. She is tautly uniformed in the sho
rt-sleeved suit and gloves and squared heels, and he is beside her with buttons affixed and gleaming, epaulets straight across the shoulders and a collar that cinches tightly about his ever-stiffening neck. They are striking and strict and forward looking: the captain and the wife of the captain. At the behest of the lieutenant they ride in the open-air automobile that leads the cavalcade to the Meiydan of the Marble Throne, where the shah gives his annual New Year’s speech. Behind them march lines of cadets, followed by the slow-rolling tanks and then by horses and finally by boys who shout and cheer at the passing and the passed. The narrow streets and new avenues are full of people celebrating spring, indifferent to the blandishments of nation and king. Vendors sell roasted nuts and tea from tall and cumbersome samovars; burnt and salted corn; prayer beads; sweets and wooden toys cloyed by children whose parents watch the procession with the same intrigue they allot a passing storm.

  The Meiydan is square and perfectly manicured. Clean water washes through fountains of cut and gilded marble and everywhere green grass grows. In the bright white light of spring the assembly makes its formation: cadets in standing lines; tanks surrounding, on display; officers seated with their wives in the first rows of wooden chairs. There is a small orchestra of European instruments just below the lip of a stage that holds politicians from the new Majlis, foreign statesmen and an enormous marble chair, ill fit for any human or giant, of a size compatible for an imaginary king alone. The shah sits on the chair in a brocaded sash, a jewel-encrusted crown and a moustache that covers the entirety of his mouth.