by Nayeri, Dina
She eyes the plastic bag Ponneh pulls out from her backpack—white rice and smoked carp, a simple money-saving dish. She moves toward the fridge, but Ponneh is already taking two spoons from the drawer. “Don’t worry. I brought enough for both of us.”
“Thanks.” Saba takes a spoon. She nods to the bucket and the expensive white fish flopped inside. “You can maybe take that to your mother.”
Ponneh’s face darkens. “I can afford to share one stupid lunch.”
“Sorry,” says Saba, as they settle on the ground at the center of the cavernous Hafezi kitchen. The room is full of contrasts, with its old-world tanoor from Ardabil—left over from the time of her grandfather who loved bread more than rice, though he didn’t make a show of it in Gilan—next to an industrial refrigerator and burlap sacks of homegrown rice in a corner beside a restaurant-quality oven and a huge rectangular sink. To make up for her mistake, Saba makes sure to eat out of Ponneh’s bowl—though her father has told her not to share food so intimately with any of the villagers. She takes a bite of smoky fish and buttery rice so plump and light, the grains float off the spoon and melt in her mouth. She tries to think of a way to restore Ponneh’s pride and says through a mouthful of underspiced food, “What if I just eat all this myself and you go on a diet?”
Saba heaps another spoonful, knowing that this will please Ponneh, that she will tell her mother and they will both feel proud. In Cheshmeh the quality of your food determines the quality of your family, and this is something Saba can give to Ponneh that no one else can, because the Hafezi stamp is hers. Maybe it will help make up for all the times that Ponneh offered Saba these intangible gifts—like during the first big rainfall after Mahtab left, when Saba wouldn’t get out of bed and Ponneh blindfolded her and forced her into the kitchen pantry for a surprise. After a few moments in the dark, Saba felt someone’s soupy breath on her face and heard a familiar whisper, “I don’t want to,” followed by a cry of pain. Saba yanked off the blindfold and saw Ponneh twisting Reza’s ear and scolding him until he ran off. “I’m sorry,” she said to Saba, her tone irritated, “I was going to get you your first kiss, so you can be happy again.”
Now a sad look passes over Ponneh’s eyes and she says, “You want me to diet so I can be a stick. Then you can win Reza for yourself and leave me out . . . like in the ‘Fork in the Road’ story, where one girl gets left out.”
Saba stares at Ponneh and tries to work out what game they’re playing now. She searches for a response. “That’s different! You can’t be in love with two people.”
Ponneh shrugs. “Who says? You don’t like it because you want a big Western-magazine love story that doesn’t happen in real life. And you like to fight. You and Mahtab were always competing for things. Now you’re trying to compete with me.”
The mention of Mahtab sparks a heat in her chest that Saba wishes she could rub out with her fingers. How dare Ponneh say that? Who does she think she is to mention Mahtab’s flaws? “We didn’t compete,” Saba snaps. “I just don’t think your way works.”
“It could,” says Ponneh. “And Reza agrees with me. His baba left to be with a new family when he could have brought them back here. They could have all stuck together. It’s better to have good friends for life than to win one stupid love contest.”
“It’s not a contest. . . .” Saba wants her friend to understand, but Ponneh has always been one of many—never part of a pair.
Ponneh interrupts. “I say three is always better than two. In the end, it’s your friends who help you. Look at Khanom Omidi and Khanom Basir and all those women. They do more for each other than they do for any husbands.”
“That’s peasant talk,” says Saba. “It says so in the Bible and every place.”
Ponneh looks thoughtful. “Maybe . . . But I think it’ll be the three of us forever. You, me, and Reza. Even if we get married to other people, or if you go to America.”
“Okay,” Saba mutters. Her stomach hurts. “Whatever you want.”
Ponneh continues. “Maybe we can all run off to America and dye our hair yellow. And you and I can wear red, red lipstick all day outside like in Life magazine!”
“Fine.” Saba drops her spoon and gets up to leave. She is still angry because Ponneh hasn’t apologized for speaking badly of Mahtab. And her back aches.
Saba stomps out of the kitchen. As she heads to the living room she hears Ponneh’s scream follow her down the hall: “Oh my God! What is that?”
Khanom Mansoori stirs on the floor pillows. “What is all this noise?” she hums, smacking her lips several times before opening her eyes. Saba turns to see Ponneh now standing behind her, mouth agape. Khanom Mansoori is snickering. “Oh, for God’s sake, I’m too old for these girl-bazi things.”
Ponneh runs to Saba and says, “Don’t worry! I’ll go get my mother and we’ll take you to a hospital in Rasht. You just wait right here.”
Saba follows Ponneh’s gaze over her own shoulder and down to the seat of her pants. She lets out a shriek when she sees the blood. She is covered with it, and now both girls are screaming. Khanom Mansoori is trying to hoist her child-sized body up, muttering, “Aieee . . . No need for hospital. Stop the screeching and the drama-bazi, khodaya. Let me just get my thoughts together.” The bewildered look on a face lined with years of experience makes Saba panic even more. It must be cancer. Or a burst tumor. Or internal bleeding. The old woman drones on. “Ponneh jan, you better call Khanom Omidi or Khanom Basir, or somebody else . . .”
It takes Khanom Omidi and Khanom Basir only ten minutes to arrive, and when they do, they are laughing and gossiping as if nothing were wrong. Saba wants to scream at them. This is her death, and they could at least muster as much concern as they showed when they all faked Mahtab’s death and sent her off to America.
“Let me see how to say this,” Khanom Omidi says, as she chews on a piece of basil. She must have been caught in the middle of a meal. She adjusts her girth and pats Saba’s trembling hand as she tries to explain. “In the old days, we would have to tell the whole town . . . and there is this story . . . let me see.” She moves to sit and, never forgetting her lazy eye—visible only when she looks up or down—pulls Saba into her line of vision. “There was a girl named Hava. And God decreed that the price of sin—”
Khanom Omidi is mumbling, looking for bits of wisdom in her memory. It is her habit to dole out advice generously on all things (whether or not she knows anything about them) like coins and dried mulberries from the thousand little pockets sewn in the folds of her fabric coverings. This indulgent woman reminds Saba of the Victorian doll on her desk, the one with dusty pockets sewn all over her dress for hiding jewelry where no one will expect. Sometimes Saba tucks coins in the hems of her own clothes to bring on the sheltered feeling of having a secret plan. She could use a secret plan today.
She strains to recall a section about blood and womanhood in one of her mother’s medical books, something about cycles and hormones. And did a calamity like this happen in a novel? Usually in books, if a passage seems odd, she blames her English and moves on. Now Khanom Basir, the Evil One, takes Saba’s hand. Saba tries to pull away, but raising two sons has given the awful woman a strong grip—and an expression like a snake preparing to strike, all beady eyes, sunken cheeks, and crafty, lipless smirk.
“Enough now,” Khanom Basir snaps at the other women, snickering behind their hands. “Laughing at a girl in her first messy state, it’s like poking at a sleeping camel.”
Saba and Khanom Basir spend the next half hour alone in the dim toilet past the living room. “You are not dying,” she tells Saba in her no-nonsense tone. Then she explains it all—almost as scientifically as Saba’s mother would have. “It’s not the worst as far as curses go. We bleed once a month and in return men have to toil and suffer until they die. They smell. They grow hair everywhere. Their bodies are shameful to look at—ever
ything splayed out on the outside like that. . . . I’ll tell you, Saba jan, I love my sons, God knows they’re perfect, but . . . On your wedding night, when you see it, you’ll know what I mean and you’ll thank God for what He gave you.”
Afterward Saba thinks that none of the other women could have done a better job of revealing the mysteries of womanhood without fuss or embarrassment. Of course, had Reza’s mother realized that Saba was imagining all these wedding-night discoveries with one of her own precious sons, the cunning woman would have been much more careful with her words. Still, Saba wants to please her. She relishes Khanom Basir’s rare kindness, her attempt to make her comfortable with her body. Maybe her mother would have done the same. Only it would have been just the two of them, and Mahtab.
“Should I call my mother?” Saba asks. “I want to call her.”
Khanom Basir’s body seems to tense. “She can’t get calls where she is.”
“Why not?” Saba asks—maybe now that she is a woman, she is entitled to some truth. “I know she’s in America. I want to call her. Why can’t I call her?”
“Oh, God help us. . . . She’s not in America,” Khanom Basir says coldly. “And it’s your father’s decision when to tell you everything. So don’t use this as an excuse to create yet another Saba drama. Okay? Part of being a woman is accepting things that happen and not making your pain the center of everything. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she mutters. If her mother was here, Saba would tell her that her back hurts. She would tell her the definition of all the words she has looked up in the dictionary. She would show her the lists she has made since the separation—lists of her favorite songs, of English words she knows, of movies she has watched, and of books she has read. On the day they meet again, her mother will want to know these things.
Back in the living room, Ponneh jumps up and cheers. Apparently, she too has had an explanation. “Good job, Saba! You’re a woman now.”
“Hush, child,” says Khanom Omidi, tossing some dried jasmine from her chador in the air around Saba. “Do you want the whole world to know her dirty, dirty business?”
But Ponneh ignores them. She steps aside and waves at a tea tray on the floor with so much flourish that one would expect a Norooz feast instead of the tea, kouluche pastries, and chickpea cookies that Ponneh seems to have found in the back of Saba’s pantry. “I made you a becoming-a-woman snack. So you don’t faint or freeze from blood loss.”
She gives Khanom Mansoori an eager look, and the ancient woman nods her hennaed head slowly, her heavy eyelids half closed with sleep and erudition, as if to say, Yes, Ponneh jan, you have learned the science of it.
A few minutes later, Reza shows up at the door with his muddy football and a stack of blank tapes he hopes to fill with Saba’s music and is shooed away by the women making the most embarrassing fuss. “Go away, go away. None of your business!”
Saba wonders if Mahtab too experienced this milestone today—because aren’t they identical and tied together by shared blood? If her mother was here, Saba would tell her that she actually feels older. Maybe Maman would reply that, yes, she certainly looks grown-up. But then Saba considers that it might be ungrateful to focus on her mother now—when these other women made such a show of tending to her and even endured the shame of discussing topics that every self-respecting Persian knows to push under a rug.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” she says to Ponneh, and takes a becoming- a-woman chickpea cookie directly from her best friend’s unwashed fingers.
The Storyteller
(Khanom Basir)
Every woman has a talent, and if you ask me, every talent is worthwhile and important. But as always, Bahareh Hafezi didn’t agree with me. She told her daughters: If you don’t prove yourself smart enough to heal bodies alongside men or design heaven-on-earth structures like the thirty-three arches or write beautiful verses like the Rubaiyat, then the world might decide that you will be the lady who makes the best cakes or the most savory stews or the best opium pipe for her husband. That will be your role.
“A sad fate! Worthless work!” she said, when she wanted the girls to read a book.
What crazy-bazi! The woman was as one-sided as a mullah’s coin. After all, Khanom Omidi’s talent was cooking, and if she had chosen to be a brain surgeon, who would make the perfect saffron rice pudding, exactly thick enough, full of almonds, never clumpy? The girls used to watch her make the pudding, patiently grinding the long fiery tendrils of saffron with a fist-sized mortar and pestle, the scratch scratch of pollen against rock, releasing the aroma of both a heavy feast and a soft perfume, and staining her fat, already yellow fingers a deeper orange. Like a magician, she had so many tools she wouldn’t let me borrow. A cherry pitter. A flower-shaped mold on a long stick for Window Bread. The tiny mortar and pestle.
That woman was the Sorceress of Saffron.
And this was the reason she was happy and still healthy at such an old age, because as everyone knows, saffron makes you laugh. When the sun sets at the end of each day, all the women in the soggy rice fields in the North go home tired, with their pants rolled up and their legs soaking and diseased, a bright triangular cloth, the chadorshab, tied securely around their waists to protect their backs and carry this and that. Elsewhere, women who work in the rose fields of Qamsar or the tea fields here in Gilan go home smelling of roses and tea, their skirts full of the leaves and petals they have spent all day pulling. But in other parts of Iran, still, women in saffron fields arrive home in tight, jolly clusters, crazy with laughter, and they continue on like this, well into the night.
The Hafezi girls were told that their talents lay in their brains, and that this would make them different. They would continue the family tradition of success and moneymaking. This expectation was there in every word, every gesture, every promise.
“Can we go to the beach?” they would ask their father.
“My daughters, I will take you to the sea and dry you with hundred-dollar bills,” he would say, because that was a sign of his love and commitment.
Later, after the day their plans went wrong and he was left with Saba only, he said to her, “Saba jan, you don’t need to go to America. You are brilliant and you have fine taste.” And that meant that Saba would still shine here in her baba’s eyes.
Talents, the Hafezis believed, transcended location and circumstance.
You know, I too have a gift—the best one, a power over words, over legends, truth, and lies. For money I weave rush into baskets and hats and small rugs, but for my friends I can weave a tale so subtly, so beautifully, with such rises and falls, such whispers, that children and adults are lulled like snakes in a pot. They sway with me, allow me to carry them away. Then when I’m finished, they wait eagerly to hear: Up we went and there was . . . which one? Yogurt or yogurt soda? Maast? Doogh? Truth? Lies? Under the korsi blanket draped over a hot stove, where feet are warmed and stories are told, I reign supreme. Though . . . they say that the korsi is the birthplace of all lies.
I was the one who first told Saba about her body, about marriage, because her mother hadn’t. Okay, so I didn’t tell the full story. I gave it the usual flourishes of the storyteller, jinns and diseases, untimely deaths and the smallish possibility of some vague fulfillment. But most of all, I told her this: books kill a woman’s sexual energy, the allure you’re born with. It can be snuffed out, you know. And Saba and Mahtab were doomed from the age of three, far too educated to ever understand how to appeal to any man. Sure, they could get into trouble like anyone else, but could they lure with their eyes like Ponneh can? Girls who can read books cannot read men.
Their mother is the one who gave them this fate, with her notebooks and her ideas and her fears. She used to watch the girls and chew her lips raw because she wanted them to have grand storybook destinies; and when you have a task like that, you can’t sit around bonding over te
a, plucking each other’s eyebrows. You have to stamp out the distractions. That was her kind of mother-love. Grand, useless.
She ruined those girls. Deep inside where no one could see, something was stunted. Their father didn’t help the matter either—because, tell me, how can a girl who has been told to dry herself with hundred-dollar bills ever be a good wife to anyone?
Chapter Three
AUTUMN 1988
By eighteen, Saba has collected five hundred pages of simple and fancy English words, not only to someday show her mother—though after seven years without a word, hope is waning—but also because the word lists have become a part of her life. Having studied the language since early childhood with an intensity unheard of in Gilan, Saba feels a tingle of pride each time she catches herself thinking in English.
Vile. Vagrant. Vapid.
Saba glances at a trio of aimless girls in the alley behind a local store—an impossibly small square box that somehow has everything for sale, not just eggs and sugar, but milk in plastic bags with snip-off tops to drop into a jug, a dozen kinds of pickles, saffron, soap, piles of pencil erasers, toy watches, dried fruit, olives, and nuts. Every corner is crammed full—loosely categorized stacks one behind another, stretching deep beyond the inner walls, burlap sacks of rice around the register, garlic cloves hanging over the door. Saba clutches her rush basket, now full of tea and sugar, and turns away from the girls crouching close together in the far corner of the alley. Though they hide it well, Saba is expert enough to know what they are doing. It is an intimate act, a shared risk, smoking together in public. She smiles at the fumes wafting subtly out of the front folds of one girl’s blue chador, an unnecessary extra covering since her colorful, layered Gilaki garb is modest enough. But chadors are ideal for hiding things. The girl has pulled hers up high over a tight scarf and a long skirt of greens and reds not because she is pious. No, this girl is just bored, playing games, as Saba does with her friends in her pantry.
