A Canopy of Rose Leaves

by Isobel Chace

  As the day of her departure drew closer the temptation to get in touch with Roger grew within her. Once she thought she saw him at the other end of the street, and once in the bookshop close to the hotel where she had first stayed in Shiraz, but on both occasions he had vanished when she rushed up to speak to him.

  ‘Have you heard from Roger at all?’ she asked Maxine the evening before Reza was to collect her and take her to his mother.

  Maxine nodded, her face thoughtful. ‘I asked him round to meet David and he said he’d come.’

  Deborah gave her a concerned look. She thought the American girl had been looking pale ever since Howard had first told her of David’s coming.

  ‘They ought to have a great deal in common,’ she said aloud.

  Maxine twisted her lips into a semblance of a smile. ‘He’ll probably agree with Howard about David. Most people do. He’s the most selfish person I’ve ever met. He doesn’t care how much he hurts anyone, even those closest to him. He says if they don’t like it they should get out of his way.’

  ‘And so you came to Persia,’ Deborah prompted her.

  Maxine shook her head. ‘When we were kids, he asked every other girl out in the school, but he never asked me. He had a newspaper round in the mornings and again after school in the evenings, because his parents didn’t have much money and he had to buy his own extras. I used to tell myself that he didn’t ask me out because my family was rich and his wasn’t, but I was just kidding myself. I wasn’t what he wanted.’

  ‘But you wanted him?’

  ‘Oh, sure! He seemed like a man when all the others were still boys. Then one day when he came back from university he found out I was trying to paint too and he called round to take a look at my work. He was just the same, and I guess I was too, and he still didn’t have any time for me. He said when he wanted a girl he didn’t want a keeper. That was what was wrong with my work, I wasn’t involved in real life, and I wouldn’t let him live as he wants to live if he let me into his life. He even said that when we’d been at school I’d have done his newspaper round for him so that he didn’t have to get up early in the mornings!’ The pain in her voice told Deborah clearly how much that had hurt.

  ‘Would you have done?’ she asked gently.

  Maxine nodded. ‘I’d have given him the whole world on a plate if he’d asked me to. I hadn’t realised that he knew it, though. My pride took a real battering that day and I took off. I came straight to Iran—anything so that I didn’t have to see him any more!’

  ‘Well, it looks as though he’s coming after you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I doubt it. David’s always had an admiration for the Indo-Persian civilisation. I don’t flatter myself it’s me he’s coming to see. He won’t have given a thought to my feelings about his coming!’

  Deborah hesitated. She didn’t think the other girl would welcome any advice that she might proffer, but she felt obliged to say something. ‘Why don’t you write and tell him that you don’t want him here?’ she suggested.

  ‘Because I do want him here. He’ll have my hide for not doing any work since I’ve been here, and I need that. He may not see me as a woman, but he does as a fellow artist. He’s the only person I know who’s genuinely interested in my work.’ She smiled a crooked smile. ‘Besides, one can’t help hoping, can one? It’s different from you and Ian,’ she added. ‘David isn’t married.’

  Deborah accepted that. ‘I wasn’t really in love with Ian,’ she said. ‘He was an acceptable idea of what I thought my future ought to be. If you ask me I think I had a lucky escape.’

  ‘But it hurt all the same, I expect,’ Maxine murmured. ‘These things always do.’

  ‘It was unbearable,’ Deborah admitted. ‘Ian was the least of it. Funny really, because I was sure that my heart was broken!’

  But Maxine didn’t join in her laughter. She looked as though she hadn’t heard a word that Deborah had been saying.

  Reza’s vehicle was a jeep of a type Deborah had never seen before. It was a tough-looking car, reminiscent of the strong lines of the Range Rover, with a long body and plenty of clearance to make it easy to traverse the rough terrain off the main roads.

  ‘You are packed and ready to go?’ Reza asked as soon as he saw Deborah coming out of her bedroom.

  ‘Just about,’ she agreed. ‘Have I time for a cup of coffee before we go?’

  Reza’s reluctance to linger would have amused her at another time. Today she found his impatience irritating and knew that she didn’t really want to go with him.

  ‘If you like. But, Deborah-jun, my mother awaits your arrival and there are many, many things to show you on the way. You will wish to see Persepolis, no?’

  ‘Yes, but I hadn’t thought—’

  ‘Another day!’ he exclaimed. ‘We have many days when we can be together! You will have a fine time!’

  ‘I hope so,’ she said.

  Toobi brought the coffee, her toothless mouth clamped tight behind pursed lips to show her disapproval. At the sight of Reza she broke into speech, flailing her arms in the air and pointing frequently in Deborah’s direction.

  ‘What does she say?’ Deborah asked at last.

  Reza shrugged. ‘She was quoting an old Persian proverb. “A house without a woman is a body without a soul.” She is right—I have been thinking so myself. A woman’s place is in the home, not earning her own living as you have to do!’

  ‘But I prefer to work!’ Deborah exclaimed.

  ‘Toobi was speaking about after you are married,’ he returned. ‘It will not be suitable then for you to work for another man.’

  ‘What does she know about it?’ Deborah demanded. She had long ago abandoned any attempt to explain that she didn’t work for Ian, but that they were equal partners in their business venture.

  ‘Much,’ Reza assured her. ‘She has spoken with Professor Derwent about you. The man is his brother and she thinks this gives him the right to look after you while you are here. He brought you to this house.’

  ‘Yes, he did. What of it?’

  ‘You are leaving the house with me. She wanted to make sure that you had his blessing. She does not believe me that the Professor has no jurisdiction over you.’

  ‘He hasn’t been near me for days!’ she said.

  ‘She is afraid he will come while you are away. What shall I tell her?’ His bright eyes searched Deborah’s face and she saw the quick flash of triumph when she answered:

  ‘Tell her the Professor is nothing to do with me. Tell her that I am my own mistress and do as I like and that it is my affair if I choose to go and visit your mother!’

  ‘Is it true?’ Reza pressed her. ‘Is it true that you prefer to be with me?’

  ‘It’s true I’m going with you because that’s what I want to do,’ she compromised. ‘Why should Roger care what I do?’

  Reza translated quickly, his eyes never leaving Deborah’s face. ‘It’s strange to us,’ he said at length, ‘to hear a woman being so definite about what she wants. Here, even when a woman is wed she refuses to answer at least twice when she is asked if she accepts the match. If you live long among us, my mother will insist that you appear more modest. It’s a pity, for it pleases me to hear that you like to be with me.’

  Deborah gave him a uncompromising look. ‘Reza, you must understand that I’m going with you because your mother can help me get the Qashgai tribal goods I want to sell in London, not for anything else. I like you, of course, but I’m here to work, not to play around—’

  He grinned at her, spreading his hands in a gesture of abandonment. ‘The Toobis of this world are ignorant women. They understand little of your ways in the West. She accepts now that you are going with me.’

  Deborah drank the rest of her coffee in silence. It was a lonely departure, she thought, with Maxine still asleep and Howard totally uninterested in whether she went or stayed. Only Toobi showed any anxiety about her, plucking at her sleeve as she wound her scarf round her head to keep t
he dust out of her hair, and muttering under her breath long sentences that Deborah had no means of understanding.

  Reza picked up her suitcase and put a hand on her shoulder, giving her a little push towards the door. ‘Come Deborah-un, I can’t leave the jeep any longer in this narrow street.’

  Deborah bent her head and kissed the maid’s walnut-wrinkled skin to put off any further remarks. She was acute enough to know that whatever the badji was saying was making Reza angry, even though he was trying to hide it from her. She wished, as she had never wished before, that she spoke Farsi and could have reassured the old woman that everything was going to be quite all right. It was very unsatisfactory to have to rely on someone else to translate every word that was said to her.

  ‘Oh, let’s go,’ she said, ‘though I wish I could have said goodbye to Maxine and wished her luck with David Edgar.’

  Reza shook his head at her and there was a slight note of censure in his voice as he said, ‘Miss Maxine will know that you are thinking of her, but it is well that you do not see this man. With Miss Maxine there are always men. She even went to school with some of them. It is not what I would expect of a well-raised young girl!’

  Deborah repressed a smile. ‘How do you know what kind of school I went to?’ she asked.

  His expression softened. ‘I can see at once that you have had little to do with other men—’

  ‘Even though I was engaged to be married before I came to Persia?’

  He looked surprised that she should ask. ‘This man could have been your brother, he said gently. ‘Professor Derwent told me that it was like this with you, so he must be like another brother to you when you see him. Isn’t this so?’

  Deborah thought Professor Roger Derwent had been a great deal too busy in the information he had retailed about her in Shiraz. Ian had not been her brother, and as for Roger, why, she didn’t think he had a fraternal bone in his body! A brother indeed! She averted her face as she stepped into the cabin of the jeep in case her feelings were as obvious to Reza as they were to her. How could Roger talk about her, first to Toobi and then to Reza of all people, the last person she would have wanted to know anything about her that mattered?

  Reza edged through the narrow streets and turned into one of the main thoroughfares, quickening his pace as they joined the stream of traffic hurrying across the city.

  ‘We go out by the Koran Gate,’ he told her. ‘There used to be a Koran kept there for travellers to say a last prayer before they departed the city, or to make their thanksgiving for their safe arrival. It’s a good custom. When I first went away from home to study medicine in America, my mother herself held the Koran for me to kiss and sprinkled me with water, praying, “May God be with you. May God travel with you.” ’

  Deborah smiled. ‘Is your mother a Muslim too?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I suppose your father insisted?’ she murmured.

  Reza shook his head. ‘She was always a Muslim.’

  ‘But if she’s an American,’ Deborah asked, ‘how can she have been?’

  He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Why not? There are Catholic Americans, and Jewish Americans and Maronite Americans, and there are Muslim Americans too. My mother was one of these.’

  Deborah’s mental image of her hostess changed dramatically. There were Black Muslims in America, that she knew, and she supposed there were the more orthodox Sunni and Shi’at branches of the faith too, but she had never, pictured Mrs. Mahdevi as belonging to any of these. Rather had she seen her as a long-legged blonde in the same mould as Maxine: bright, beautiful, and confident that all things are possible if one only goes about them the right way. Now everything was changed and she didn’t know what to expect.

  ‘Your mother can speak English, can’t she?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh yes, she learned to speak it well at school,’ he consoled her. ‘She has an American passport still, but she lived there only a few years. When she was fifteen she came to Iran to be married to my father. Sometimes though, even now, she speaks of the freedom she knew in the States and what life was like for her there, but my father was an old-fashioned man and he would never allow her to travel on her own and he would not travel anywhere except on the long trek from the garmsir, the winter grazing land, the thousand miles northwards to the summer pastures. He was a true Qashgai Khan. A very great man.’

  ‘What should I call your mother?’ she said.

  ‘Madar-i-Khan is a suitable title. It means the Mother of the Khan—’

  ‘And that’s you?’

  ‘My elder brother. It is he who now leads the tribes on their long march. He has many houses where he stays on the way, but my mother stays mostly at our home near Shiraz. This is the best time of year for us, the springtime, when the tribes are moving north. You will see some of them beside the road as we go by.’ They went out of the city, as he had told her they would, through the Koran Gate and into the Allah-o-Akhbar pass, called that because so many travellers were supposed to have exclaimed at their first sight of Shiraz glimpsed through the gateway that there was none greater than God that such a beautiful place should exist. It was not for nothing that Shiraz became famous for her roses and nightingales, her trees and her wines, the domes of her buildings, the beauty of her gardens and the lyric qualities of her poets.

  It was not long after that that they saw a group of Qashgais moving slowly along the side of the road. Their multi-coloured sheep snatched at the few dry blades of vegetation that came their way. They were smaller than any English breed, their backs were rounded instead of flat, and many of them had the fat tails that are considered such luxurious eating all over the Middle East. In amongst them moved the donkeys, the new-born lambs stuck into the sides of their panniers and sometimes a very young child as well. The men organised their passing from the backs of stocky ponies of uncertain temper. This was the traditional work of the men and they did no other, leaving everything else to their womenfolk, who cooked and wove their blankets and carpets, kept the houses and their families clean, and bore the children that would give them their status in society, often while they were on the march, going either northwards in the spring, or back southwards at the beginning of winter.

  It was the women who attracted Deborah’s gaze more even than the animals. They wore several skirts of the brightest colours imaginable, their blouses glimmering with metal threads and their necks loaded with jewellery. They were beautiful as well, and, although their hair was invariably modestly covered by their veils, one or two of them had eyes that were quite as light as the blues, greens and greys that predominate in more northern climes.

  Deborah rather hoped that Reza would stop and introduce her to some of these people, but he ignored her impressed exclamations and hurried on, hooting at the few strays who were doing their best to escape their keepers by crossing the road under his wheels.

  ‘Remember to be careful of the dogs you see with the sheep,’ he said suddenly. ‘They are very fierce and may hurt you. Never go up to any of them. You understand?’

  She said she did, though they looked friendly enough, their long-plumed tails waving in the air. There would be few animals inoculated against rabies in these surroundings, she told herself, and these were working dogs, not pets, but they looked intelligent and healthy as they kept the sheep moving forwards, ignoring the fleeter goats who were apparently expected to look after themselves.

  There were many other small groups traversing the hot plain and Reza hurried past them all, ignoring their shouted greetings when they saw who he was.

  ‘My mother will be waiting,’ he kept saying. ‘She will have lunch ready for us when we arrive.’

  The outside of the house that he pointed out to her as his family’s home was disappointing to her. It looked rather like a child’s sand castle, with long fortified walls that almost hid the crenellated house in the centre, made of the same sun-dried mud and left without a lick of paint to merge into the surrounding landscape
of unrelieved reddish, grey-brown.

  ‘It looks like a fort!’ she said in surprise.

  ‘That is exactly what it is,’ he answered. ‘Until recently we had to defend ourselves against our enemies. There were no gendarmes to keep order in the countryside then, and all the tribes fought against one another. Nowadays we are at peace and seldom fight, but we keep watch just the same. Our friends we know, but a stranger could well be an enemy come to destroy us.’

  He drove off the road and the dust rose in a cloud behind their wheels as they picked their way through the half-cultivated fields towards the strange structure where Deborah was to stay. The dome of the mosque at one side of the entrance had been washed away in the last heavy rains and a couple of men were making valiant efforts to repair it before it fell down completely. A green flag flew from a mausoleum nearby which was completely surrounded by a warren of tiny adobe buildings where most of the villagers lived. The jeep could only just make its way to the Mahdevi house which was cut off from the others by yet another high wall, in which was set a solid metal gate.

  Reza flung it open and turned to help her down from the jeep. He stood up very straight and his teeth flashed in the sunshine as he held out his other hand to a closely veiled figure within.

  ‘My mother! It is just as I told you, Deborah-jun!’ You see how eagerly she awaits you!’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘How do you do?’ Deborah extended her hand, her back very straight and her head held high. ‘It’s very kind of you to invite me to visit you—’

  ‘Reza insisted,’ Mrs. Mahdevi said coolly.

  Deborah blinked. It wasn’t quite the welcome she had expected. Mrs. Mahdevi was taller than the average Persian and, as Reza had said, she was fair—only it was her face that was fair, her hair was black as night and her eyes were a peculiar shade of green that in some lights could be described as hazel, but in others were more like the green of the sea.

  ‘You see,’ Deborah struggled on, ‘I’m very interested in the handcrafts of the Qashgai. I help run a shop in London and we specialise in stuff from the Middle East. I’d like to get some firm supplies from Persia and Reza said you might help me.’