by Salar Abdoh
His father had said they were going to buy shoes. Instead, they took a taxi to Vanak in North Tehran. There was snow everywhere, but his father insisted that the driver let them out a few streets away from their destination, so that their shoes and socks, even the bottom of their pants, were wet and frozen over by the time they reached the house. They waited for the buzzer, then hiked through the giant metal gates and up a long driveway. Mehdi shivered with cold, but his father had been perspiring since before they left home, and now he had to stop every few minutes and wipe his face with the side of his lapel. On either side of them, tall, naked trees, their branches powdered with snow, rose like ghosts over icy flowerbeds.
The front door was unlocked, so Mehdi’s father, Alireza, had only to push down on the brass handle to let them in. But he had started to shake, and his hand was slippery from the sweat, so he gave up after two attempts and turned to Mehdi for help. Inside, the house was dark and cold and utterly quiet, as if no one had lived in it for decades, but Alireza seemed to know where he was going. Down the long hallway and past a black marble staircase, he led Mehdi into a round dining room with a circular table and twelve chairs. “Stay here,” he said. “Don’t wander out and don’t come looking for me.” But Mehdi followed him anyway, because he was afraid of being alone in this strange house and afraid too that Alireza would not come back for him. He had gotten as far as the bottom of the staircase when Alireza turned around and saw him.
“Go back and close the door,” he snapped, “or I’ll quash you,” but by then it was already too late.
Golnessa Hayim—barefoot, flat-chested, and dark as a Gypsy—stood against the second-floor railing in a purple satin dress with one blooming rose painted on the front, and a single slit carved into the hem right up to the tip of her white lace garters and the mouth of her red, naked vagina. Her hair was a storm of black curls and her eyes were bottle green and transparent as glass, and when she smiled at Mehdi, he saw her one gold tooth and realized, to his utter delight and acute horror, that this was the shameless, ruinous, Jew-whore woman his mother had often raged against in the last few months.
Spellbound, Mehdi had the urge to follow his father up the steps and into Golnessa’s arms and chest and soft, hollow places, though he was only eight years old and still thought his penis was for urinating. His eyes would not relent; they were locked into Golnessa’s green gaze so that he had to walk backward to get away while Alireza, who had forgotten his son already, climbed two steps at a time and fell into Golnessa with a loud, aching moan that coursed through the house and made Mehdi’s legs go limp.
He waited, alone, in the dining room. He was too nervous to sit, too agitated to walk without feeling as if his knees would buckle. Every few minutes, he thought he heard a sound—footsteps approaching, his name being called—only to realize it was just an echo in his ears. When he couldn’t stand the tension anymore he ventured back into the hallway.
The rest of the house felt like no one had lived in it for decades, but Mehdi thought he could sense heat transpiring through the door frame of one of the rooms upstairs. Then he heard the song.
“Dar in haal-eh mass-tee safaa kardaam.”
Golnessa’s voice spilled down the steps like warm water.
“Tow-raa eyy khodaa man seh-daa kardaam.”
It was an ode to God, a plea by a devout subject lost in euphoria and beckoning Him closer—though there was no mistaking, right at that moment, whom Golnessa beckoned.
* * *
That she sang so ably and with such abandon, people said about Golnessa, was no doubt thanks to her ancestors, who were traveling Jewish musicians from Shiraz—city of fine wine and loose morals whose women were considered de facto prostitutes. Besmirched from birth, Golnessa’s mother was dark and similarly flat-chested and plain as a stick figure drawn with coal on a sidewalk. Her only choice in marriage was a gravedigger’s son from that poorest of Jewish ghettos, the mahalleh in Yazd. Golnessa was her fourth child and first daughter, and she turned out to be the last as well because the pregnancy upset some essential symmetry in the mother, thinned out her blood or siphoned the milk of her muscles so that, even after her body had expelled the infant and rid itself of the extra fluids, her legs felt heavy and slack and reluctant, they fought her when she tried to walk and shifted if she stood, no matter how much vinegar and salt and mustard seeds and sage and turmeric she wrapped them in and how much garlic and coriander she added to her food or even how many freshly cut foreskins she swallowed at circumcision parties. She went from walking with a slight gait to dragging one leg around to walking with a pair of wooden sticks to, when Golnessa was about six years old, dragging herself on the ground.
On the bright side, Golnessa had come with her own, albeit unsubstantial, dowry—her lower left incisor, fully grown and permanent at birth, was pure gold.
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 gratificati
on 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.
Donny and Luca had put an ad on Craigslist and interviewed two dozen applicants before Mehdi called. Donny had a hard time trusting anyone; he was raised poor and didn’t take anything for granted. He liked Mehdi’s shyness, the way he waited to be invited before he stepped into a room or sat down. He liked that Mehdi was handsome without being brazen, that he didn’t ask what the salary was or how many hours he would work. He said he lived alone and had no family or romantic connections. When he told them he didn’t have a smartphone they assumed he couldn’t afford one, but he explained, ever so reverently, that that wasn’t it, he also didn’t have a TV or a radio, even in his car. He hadn’t read a newspaper since New Year’s Day 2000, and then only to find out if the world had ended as promised. He ate one meal a day, didn’t smoke or drink, but he was an expert cook and knew his spirits as well as any barkeep.
His reclusiveness and purposeful disinterest in the world had Donny and Luca convinced he was gay and unable to accept it—“almost literally in the closet.” They told him he would have to get a cell phone if he was going to work for them, even if it was only to communicate with them, and that he would be driving their car while on duty. They didn’t mind his being a foreigner; they thought Iranians were delightful people. Indeed, the guy who cut their hair was an Assyrian from Iran; he opened his salon on Sundays just to do Donny’s hair.
Mehdi was such a good employee, they raised his hourly wage without him asking, but their many attempts at having a conversation about his personal life or his past failed completely. They knew he was born in Iran and had come to the United States in 1992; that he had lived on the West Side for a while before moving to the Valley; that he had no religion, no next of kin, no friends, and that he didn’t want any.
Sometimes, when he was especially tired or anxious, he would hum a tune under his breath with Persian words. “It’s supposed to be a love song,” he had told Donny once when he asked, “but in fact it’s a gravedigger’s kaddish.”
Alireza didn’t have money to give to his wife and children when he left them, and he didn’t expect to make any once his perfidy had become public. Until he became chiz-khored by Golnessa, he was a storekeeper for a wealthy antiques salesman who did most of his business with foreign tourists. Afterward, he couldn’t have paid an employer to let him keep anything, much less items of great monetary value. Nor could he convince the most gullible of merchants to enter into a
partnership with a man who couldn’t be trusted with his own brother’s wife. His duplicity toward Davood rekindled within the community the memory of Moshe Hayim’s conversion and his thieving of old widows’ and young children’s inheritances. Then Davood went and tried to kill himself by drinking a fair amount (but obviously not enough) of pure distilled alcohol, which made him completely blind and bore a few good-sized holes in his stomach and intestines but didn’t finish the job, and any scraps of forgiveness or trust that might have been thrown at Alireza were as good as gone.
But while he and Golnessa might have managed to live on sex and song alone, his wife and children still needed bread and rice and maybe even shoes. To that end, Mehdi’s mother took him out of school when he was nine and sent him into the streets to sell lottery tickets and chewing gum and cigarettes twelve hours a day; she took in people’s dirty sheets and comforters, washed them in enormous pewter tubs till her hands were raw from the boiling water and abrasive soap; she begged her own family for handouts and went to the police every few weeks to demand that they arrest Alireza and bring him home to feed his children. A year later, when they were still hungry, she sent Mehdi to Golnessa’s house to ask her and Alireza for help.
* * *
Once a month, from the time he was ten years old with a hollow stomach and a head that had to be shaved regularly to ward off lice, little Mehdi Hakeem drank from the same fountain of rapture that had poisoned his father, and lived to want more. Golnessa didn’t lay a finger on him; that might have quelled some of the fury that had ignited within him the night in Vanak and became more crushing as he grew older. But whereas Alireza was spiteful and dismissive and cruel to Mehdi, whereas his own mother counted him as one of the great burdens of her life, a piece of the flotsam that remained of her wrecked marriage, Golnessa accorded him all her conqueror’s magnanimity.
Who says kindness isn’t more deadly than love?
