by Nayeri, Dina
Some years after the revolution, Saba and Mahtab were put under the head scarf and we could no longer use the small differences in their haircuts or their favorite Western T-shirts to tell them apart in the streets—don’t ask me why their shirts became illegal; I guess because of some foreign chert-o-pert written on the front. So after that, the girls would switch places and try to fool us. I think that’s part of Saba’s problem now—switching places. She spends too much time obsessing about Mahtab and dreaming up her life story, putting herself in Mahtab’s place. Her mother used to say that all life is decided in the blood. All your abilities and tendencies and future footsteps. Saba thinks, if all of that is written in one’s veins, and if twins are an exact blood match, then it follows that they should live matching lives, even if the shapes and images and sounds all around them are different—say, for argument’s sake, if one was in Cheshmeh and the other was in America.
It breaks my heart. I listen to that wishful tone, lift her face, and see that dreamy expression, and the pit of my stomach burns with pity. Though she never says out loud, “I wish Mahtab was here,” it’s the same stew and the same bowl every day. You don’t need to hear her say it, when you see well enough, her hand twitching for that missing person who used to stand to her left. Though I try to distract her and get her mind on practical things, she refuses to get off the devil’s donkey, and would you want your son to spend his youth trying to fill such a gap?
The troubling part is that her father is so unskilled at understanding. I have never seen a man fail so repeatedly to find the way to his daughter’s heart. He tries to show affection, always clumsily, and falters. So he sits at the hookah with his vague educated confusions, thinking, Do I believe what my wife believed? Should I teach Saba to be safe or Christian? He watches the unwashed children in Cheshmeh—the ones whose mothers tuck their colorful tunics and skirts between their legs, hike up their pants to the knee, and wade in his rice fields all day long—and wonders about their souls. Of course, I don’t say anything to the man. No one does. Only four or five people know that they are a family of Christ worshippers, or it would be dangerous for them in a small village. But he puts eggplant on our plates and watermelons under our arms, so, yes, much goes unsaid about his Saba-raising ways, his nighttime jinns, his secret religion.
Now that the girls are separated by so much earth and sea, Saba is letting her Hafezi brain go to waste under a scratchy village play chador, a bright turquoise one lined with beads she got from Khanom Omidi. She covers her tiny eleven-year-old body in it to pretend she belongs here, wraps it tight around her chest and under her arms the way city women like her mother never would. She doesn’t realize that every one of us wishes to be in her place. She wastes every opportunity. My son Reza tells me she makes up stories about Mahtab. She pretends her sister writes her letters. How can her sister write letters? I ask. Reza says the pages are in English, so I cannot know what they really say, but let me tell you, she gets a lot of story out of just three sheets of paper. I want to shake her out of her dreamworld sometimes. Tell her we both know those pages aren’t letters—probably just schoolwork. I know what she will say. She will mock me for having no education. “How do you know?” she will goad. “You don’t read English.”
That girl is too proud; she reads a few books and parades around like she cut off Rostam’s horns. Well, I may not know English, but I am a storyteller and I know that pretending is no solution at all. Yes, it soothes the burns inside, but real-life jinns have to be faced and beaten down. We all know the truth about Mahtab, but she spins her stories, and Reza and Ponneh Alborz let her go on and on because she needs her friends to listen—and because she’s a natural storyteller. She learned that from me—how to weave a tale or a good lie, how to choose which parts to tell and which parts to leave out.
Saba thinks everyone is conspiring to hide the truth about Mahtab. But why would we? What reason would her father and the holy mullahs and her surrogate mothers have for lying at such a time? No, it isn’t right. I cannot give my son to a broken dreamer with scars in her heart. What a fate that would be! My younger son twisted up in a life of nightmares and what-ifs and other worlds. Please believe me. This is a likely enough outcome . . . because Saba Hafezi carries the damage of a hundred black years.
Chapter One
SUMMER 1981
Saba sits in the front seat beside her father as he drives first through highways leading away from Tehran, then, hours later, along smaller winding roads back to Cheshmeh. The car is hot and humid, and she is sweating through her thin gray T-shirt. Her father leans across her and rolls down her window. The smell of wet grass floats in. They pass a watery rice field, a shalizar or, in Gilaki, a bijâr, and Saba leans out to watch the peasants, mostly women, in rush hats and bright, patchy garb rolled up to the knees as they slosh in the flooded paddies. Saba can see some of the workers’ daub-covered houses scattered across the field near the tea and the rice. Most landowners like Agha Hafezi don’t live so close to their farms, preferring big modern cities like Tehran instead. But there is a war ravaging border towns, maybe soon the big cities too, and Cheshmeh village—home to a few thousand, and an hour’s drive outside the big city of Rasht—is a simple place. Dotted by water wells and fat rice barns on skinny legs like straw-hatted warlords, it is a moist, sultry northern refuge of thatched rooftops over blue-washed or natural terra-cotta houses, rice-stalk dwellings raised a little off the damp ground and clustered in mahalles at the foot of the Alborz Mountains. The center of Cheshmeh is marked by several paved roads that converge in a town square and a weekly bazaar (jomeh-bazaar, it is called, “Friday market”). Though he may be better hidden in Tehran, Agha Hafezi feels safest here, in his childhood home, where he has friends who protect him.
At the top of a big hill, just after the hand-painted wooden sign that reads “Cheshmeh,” Saba’s father slows to let two bicyclists pass. One is a young man wearing old jeans and a large bundle on his back. The other is a fisherman in loose gray pants. His briny sea smell wafts into the car as he weaves toward the next green hill, then up and out of sight. Both faces are familiar to her. Unlike villa towns closer to the Caspian, Cheshmeh doesn’t attract vacationing throngs, though sometimes tourists wander into town in cars or buses to watch the harvest or buy something at the bazaar. Saba rests her forehead against the windowpane and waits for the inevitable moment when the fog gives way to a burst of trees in the distance. A doctor in an ill-fitting suit drives by in a worn-out yellow truck. He slows down beside them and waves. Agha Hafezi says a few words to him in Gilaki dialect through the open window. Saba knows that for her father, Cheshmeh is where all roads end. It has a hundred unmatched smells and sounds—the heady orange-blossom fogs, shops adorned with garlic-clove headdresses, pickled garlic on fried eggplant, Gilaki songs, and crickets at night. He relishes the quiet of it. As they drive toward the house, Saba knows he will never try to leave again. He is a tired, too-cautious man obsessed with his secrets and with scrubbing away all outer signs of his own strength. And he is a liar.
Now, alone with her father in the front seat, Saba doesn’t cry. Why would she? She’s no Match Girl. No matter how big the car feels without her mother and sister, and no matter how many times her father tries to say that they’re never coming back, Saba holds on to the belief that all is right in the universe. Nothing’s gonna change my world, she sings in English all the way home, and that becomes her favorite song for the next month.
Just inside town, her father tries to feed her the first of the lies. Mahtab is dead. She searches for signs that he is making it up. He must be. Look at his nervous face and sweaty brow. “We didn’t want to tell you while you were sick,” he says, and when she doesn’t respond, “Did you hear me, Saba jan? Put down those papers and listen to me.”
“No,” she whimpers, clutching tighter to her list of English words. “You’re lying.”
She vows never to speak to him a
gain, because he must have planned all this—and Saba knows from her years as Khanom Hafezi’s daughter that it’s possible for just one person in a thousand to know the truth of something. She must hold on to what she saw: a woman in the terminal across the airport lounge—an elegant, stylish woman with her mother’s unruly hair escaping the head scarf and her mother’s navy blue manteau and her mother’s hurried expression—holding the hand of a somber, obedient girl, an eerily silent child who only could have been—was—Mahtab.
No, she didn’t die.
“Saba jan,” her father says, “listen to your baba. You have your friend Ponneh. She will be like your sister. Isn’t that nice?”
No, she didn’t die. There is no need to find a new Mahtab.
Since there is no meal waiting at home, they eat kebabs on the roadside, staring wordlessly at the blanket of trees and fog that hides the sea. Her father buys her corn on the cob, which the vendor peels and drops into a bucket of salt so that it hisses and drips, sealing in the perfect burnt seawater taste. As she eats, the memory solidifies and the gaps fill themselves—like animals in her science books that regrow body parts, a sort of survival magic—forming a decipherable whole: the blurry outline of a tall, manteaued woman. A skinny eleven-year-old ghost of a girl in Mahtab’s clothing. Is that guilt on her face? Does she feel bad for being a traitor twin? Then the hazy, colorless lounge with its hordes of faceless passengers pushing past each other to board a plane to America.
Mahtab went to America without me. The question of how she appeared in the terminal lounge is still a mystery. Probably, Khanom Basir brought her because Saba’s parents didn’t want her to know that they had chosen Mahtab to go to America instead of her. They wanted to spare her feelings, because they had betrayed her and because she is the less important twin. Maybe this is part of some twisted bargain for each parent to get a daughter.
For the next week Saba tries to get the spineless Cheshmeh adults to admit their lies. If Mahtab is dead, then why no funeral? And where did her mother go? Her father must have paid the neighbors to tell his lies. That’s how he gets everything he wants, and so she isn’t fooled by the drumbeat of death and ritual and mourning that follows. It is nothing more than an elaborate ruse concocted by the wealthy and powerful Agha Hafezi in order to give his other, more special daughter a better life—a life that Saba can observe through magazines and illegal television shows.
A month after the lonely ride back from the airport, Saba tries for the third time to prove that Mahtab is alive. She runs away with Ponneh Alborz, her best friend, and Reza Basir, their shared love. Who cares that Reza’s mother will scream and rail and call Saba all sorts of names reserved for wicked children? It is worth the trouble to take her friends along. She coaxes them to hitchhike with her to Rasht, where she intends to visit the post office one more time. Now that a month has passed since Mahtab left, it is reasonable to expect a letter from her—because no matter how much their parents try to cover up their treacherous plans, Mahtab will always find a way to write to Saba.
The three friends walk through the unfamiliar Rashti streets, keeping close to passing adults so they won’t seem to be traveling alone. Saba consults a hand-drawn map every now and then, and straightens her blue head scarf, but mostly she watches Reza, who struts a few paces ahead, carrying his tattered football under one arm, sometimes kicking it between his feet as he runs ahead, as if to create a force field for Saba and Ponneh—because for Reza, there is no use being friends with girls if you can’t be seen to protect them. He has played at this game since the Hafezis’ earliest summers in Gilan. Despite her mother’s insistence that she behave with the conviction that she is equal to the boys, Saba has never minded letting Reza take charge. It is one way she can fit into Reza and Ponneh’s world—their peasant life of thrice-owned jeans, orange juice sucked directly from punctured rinds, mismatched bangles, provincial head scarves in red and turquoise lined with sequins, dirty hair parted in the center and peeking out from underneath. Every detail delights her. Though her father frowns at the thought of Saba entering their houses and touching the bowls in their closet-sized kitchens, he doesn’t forbid it. Ponneh’s and Reza’s families are craftspeople: they weave rush and cloth, make jams and pickles. They have many jobs and little to spare, but they are literate and have respectable homes. Their children attend school for now, and might even go to college if they perform well on their exams. To Saba’s father, they differ from the paddy workers who stop by the house in the off-season to do household work for him—though in reality all people of Cheshmeh are intertwined, with one another and with fieldwork. Who here has reached old age without transplanting rice or picking tea for a day?
Halfway down a narrow road, they hear a sharp voice. “You kids! Come here.” An officer of the moral police lingers outside a windowless store across the street. He has one knee on a stool and keeps bringing a bottle of yogurt soda to his lips. Saba freezes. Pasdars remind her of the airport and the one who barked Who is Mahtab?, tainting her last moments with her mother. She hardly notices as Reza grabs both their hands and starts to sprint behind his ball through the back alleyways, too quick for the officer to follow. He taunts the officer with the Iranian football team chant—which he has heard on the Hafezis’ television—as he runs. “Doo Doorooo dood dood. IRAN!”
You’re going to get in deep trouble with the police one day, Reza’s mother is always telling the threesome. She says this to Saba because of her mother’s underground ways and the foreign music Saba shares with Reza, and to Ponneh because she is obstinate and too beautiful to escape notice. Saba doubts that Reza pays any attention to these warnings. He is too busy playing the hero. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought the two of them along.
Soon the tiny alleyways and zigzag streets in this obscure part of Rasht become familiar. Besides her trips to the post office, Saba came to this part of town once with her mother to shop for shoes. The twins were eight and the pro-hair government had not yet been overthrown by the pro-scarf people—the street screamers that later became the political parties of the twins’ fourth-grade world. That day they each bought two pairs of shoes, Saba’s with slightly higher heels. Her mother arranged this on purpose because of the injustice of the centimeter’s difference in the twins’ heights. Saba knows because she saw the scheming smile on her mother’s face when Mahtab was busy adjusting her straps.
When the trio arrives at the post office, Saba puts away her homemade map, straightens her scarf as she has seen adult women do, and runs right up to Fereydoon at the counter, whose face falls as he sees her bounding toward him. Reza and Ponneh hang back, waiting for her to retrieve her prize so they can visit the ice-cream shop as Saba has promised them. She smiles politely at Fereydoon, who wipes his massive brow with a hairy hand and looks down at her from his window. “Nothing today, little Khanom.”
She ignores him. “Hafezi,” she says, expectant eyes on his pale face, small fingers clutching the edge of the counter between them. “Hafezi from Cheshmeh.”
Fereydoon begins to mutter to himself as he feigns the motion of fumbling through a stack of mail behind him. “No, nothing for Hafezi. Look, girl, the mail will come to you in Cheshmeh. You don’t have to come to us.”
Saba knows that Fereydoon is tired of her. But she felt lucky today, because her friends were with her and because it has been exactly a month. She turns and glances at Reza and Ponneh, lingering now near an elderly man so they won’t seem alone.
For a moment she is frozen—even the smile plastered to her face—and Fereydoon clears his throat several times and looks at the clock on the wall. Finally Reza runs over and takes her hand. He says, in his best imitation of city talk, “Thank you for your time, dear sir.” Then, with two pathetic half-bows, he pulls Saba away.
Reza starts toward the door, but she jerks her hand out of his. She doesn’t need him to intervene. Besides, they are standing in a government office, t
wo girls and a boy alone—a recipe for trouble. When he reaches for her arm again, she pushes him away and runs out of the post office, desperate to hide the tears pooling behind her eyelids.
Ponneh and Reza follow her out of the office, down the street, and into a narrow alley that curves around to a dead end. She knows they are following, because she can hear their hushed words, muffled now and then by hands cupping each other’s ears.
“Don’t pick it!” Reza says to Ponneh—she must be picking the scab on his elbow again. He always protests but never stops her. “Remember about the river of blood?”
Saba remembers about the river of blood, a play on Farsi words that Mahtab used along with one of their mother’s illustrated books on practical medicine to scare Ponneh. Now that Mahtab isn’t around, Saba must correct the imbalance of things, rid Ponneh of her superstitions and find a new co-conspirator. For weeks Saba has had to be twice a person, encompassing Mahtab’s thoughts and feelings as much as her own so that her twin will not be extinguished. If Mahtab was walking beside her, as Saba imagines her doing, she would say just the thing to conjure up all the medical terrors of picking scabs.
