He realizes that the woman sitting before him refuses to acknowledge his presence, or hear his questions, and so his sentences fall to the floor, unheard. The blood rushes to his face. “Would it have suited you better if I had left you in your brothers’ home? Always ashamed, always the source of shame?” These words feel sharper in his mouth, he waits for a response to their edge, but they, too, meet with her silence. “You are now my wife, it does not matter anymore that you have been divorced, because you are now Asher Malacouti’s wife.”
Kokab turns her face away from him. The veil slips off of her head and onto her shoulders, then off of her shoulders and onto the floor. She does not move to replace it. The candlelight illuminates the black of her hair. Asher can discern a multitude of colors gleaming in that blackness. “My wife,” he repeats. He turns to face the wall, to steady himself. He breathes in a few times, closes his eyes. Why this light-headedness? he wonders. He shakes his head, straightens his shoulders, and turns to look at her, again, sitting before him as though she is made of stone.
“You are now my wife. You will have my children, you will befriend Rakhel, she will help you raise them, you will live without any want, you will eat well, you will dress well, you will grow old well.” At these words, she shudders. He softens his tone. “They will forget that you were ever married before me, you will be known only as my wife, the mother of my children. What more do you want?”
Kokab does not answer. Asher paces the room. His shadow looms treacherously on the walls. When he sees the monstrous form of himself cast on the walls, he puts his hand to his temples and turns away from her again. He keeps his back to her for a few moments, watching the shadow of her profile, her shoulders bent forward. She raises her hand, brings it to touch her cheek. The hand falls limply onto her lap. I have frightened her, he thinks. I am, after all, a stranger to her.
“Forgive me,” Asher says. He waits a moment, looking down at the top of her head, the white of the scalp a thin river, the lobe of one ear visible. He sits down across from her. He wonders if her skin is warm to the touch, soft, like fine gold you’ve held in your hand for some time. He watches her for several moments and tries to find words to comfort her, to assure her that he means no harm, that indeed, he intends on helping her. Finally, he reasons it best to allow her the silence until she feels ready to address him.
Several more minutes pass as Kokab looks at the flicker of the candle. Asher listens to the slight crackle of that humble flame, to the crickets outside, to the occasional voice of strangers passing in the street, to the subtle breath of this woman sitting before him. Then, Kokab speaks, “There is the story of the three moths dancing around the candle flame.” She says her words slowly, her eyes still on the candle. Asher feels the darkness expand and believes, for a moment, that all that exists rests in the orb of light between them. He lowers his eyes to look at his own hands, clasped in his lap. “The first moth spins madly in his ecstasy, drawing nearer and nearer to the fire, but he stops when he feels the warmth and pulls back, and remains content to look with longing at the light from a distance,” she says. “The second moth, in his fervor, singes the tips of his wings and in fear, flies away. And there is the third moth. This one, so enthralled by the light, throws himself fully into the flame and burns.” Silence, again, between them. Asher listens to the rustle of leaves outside. After several minutes, she raises her face and looks at him for the first time, her eyes steady. He feels as though he is looking into the expanse of a deep, deep well, at the bottom of which he sees himself, diminutive, drowned.
“You are that flame,” he says. “And am I the moth that will burn?”
“The flame doesn’t know the moths, Asher. Neither the moth gazing from a distance, nor the one burning.” She does not turn away from his gaze. He looks at the resolution of her lips, the strength of her chin. He swallows. Then frowns. He looks down at his useless hands, then up at her eyes, again, her deep, unforgiving eyes.
“My father died when I was just a boy. He left me some land. It wasn’t much. But something to build upon. Some earth to create upon. The land brought me fortune and I made with that fortune a greater fortune. And through this, you see, through this . . . Something of him continues. But I have no child, no son, to give the work of my days any meaning.” He brings his face closer to her face, leans in because he feels that these words should not be spoken with distance between the person who utters them and the one who hears. “I . . . I want you . . .” He pauses, weighs the consequence of those words. He starts again, in almost a whisper. “I want you to give me children, to give me hope.”
“Children you may be able to wrest from my womb, but hope is not something I can give.”
Asher flinches. Kokab looks at him another moment, then looks down at the candle between them.
“This is not what I meant to say,” he says. “There is more than this. More reasons than this for why you are here, why I have taken you as my wife.” Sitting there before him, she is lost again in her solitude. Perhaps she is not here at all, Asher thinks. Perhaps she is a phantom of my mind born from these many years of longing. He considers reaching across the vast space between them to take hold of her slender hand and pull her into himself, pull her into being, for him. A moment passes, then another, and with each passing second, that space between them becomes greater and greater. Asher panics that he may never reach her. He leans forward again and says, “Every day, I wake and I walk to the caravansary. Every day, the sound of the same merchants, the haggling, the clicking of the abacas, coins and coins and coins. In my hands, they feel so weightless. Inconsequential. And I buy things. Beautiful things, valuable things from around the world. This house is filled with beautiful, valuable things.” He looks around himself desperately, as if searching for the shape of his cumbersome possessions in the dark. “And each night I come home, I walk to my study and stand in the darkness, among the shadows of my gilded horde, and all I can think of is the dust that it is gathering. Dust.” His voice cracks on the last word. He can feel his eyes burn with tears. He waits until it passes, then says, “I want to know that there will be something left other than dust, something living after this tedium of night and day. Something to show that I was. Alive. Once.”
She looks at him as he speaks. He is there, again, small in the black pupil of her eyes. He turns his face from her. Then turns back to look into her eyes once more. “And there is more, still. More that you must know. Kokab, for years, you have been standing in the cool water of that pool for me, beneath a hot sun, bent over and washing apples. I can still hear you singing. For years, your song has haunted me. I’ve dreamed of being the water against your calves. I’ve imagined being the drop of water that traveled down your spine when you put your wet hair back. I have been living in the wake of that August morning, an eternity in that moment when you first looked at me.” He looks down, his hands clenched in his lap. He shakes his head at his own weakness, at the words he has just spoken. It is too late, now, to stop. Enthralled, he thinks, by the light caught in the gleam of her black hair. He leans into her and says, “You burn with life, Kokab. I want to feel the world through you.”
Kokab brings her face close to his, so that her lips are a breath apart from his. “You want to feel through me?” she asks.
“Yes.”
She raises her hand and he looks down at her forefinger as it draws close to the candle. She holds her finger in the flame a moment, then extinguishes the light. Asher flinches and quickly takes her hand, putting her fingers to his lips. In the darkness of the room, he holds her fingers to his mouth and kisses them once, then inhales the musk of her wrist. Gently, Kokab pulls her hand back. The taste of her skin, a trace of the salt of her remains in Asher’s mouth.
“What can I give you?” he asks. “Ask for anything, anything in the world, and you shall have it.”
“I want my solitude.”
Asher pulls back as though she has slapped him. He hesitates. She is so close. He should ta
ke his arms, the leaden weight of them, and grab her shoulders. He should draw her with force toward his body and kiss her open mouth, run his tongue on the flesh of her neck. He raises his hands to clutch her shoulders, then hesitates and stands up abruptly, instead.
“As you wish, Kokab. Tell Zolekhah if there is anything you need,” he says. “I will return tomorrow night.” And with that, he walks briskly out of the room and into the cool night. He waits a moment, with the door into her room ajar behind him, then he closes it gently.
Asher stands in the breezeway, beneath the painting of Mount Zion and the feverish dance of the tribe. He sees the darkness first, then the still courtyard. Slowly, he recognizes the scent of night jasmine, the crispness of the air. He hears the low moaning of a cat in the street. His soul opens its eyes and he sees the splendor of the night. He feels the need of his own body. He walks back toward the room he shares with Rakhel, reveling in the power of his legs. Rakhel will be happy to see me, he thinks.
Khorsheed hears someone singing in the courtyard. She rises from her bed and looks out of the window. In the yard below, Rakhel hoists a bucket of sour plums into the fountain. Khorsheed opens the window and leans out, resting her forearms on the sill. “That’s how I like to see you, Dada, working and singing like a peasant.”
“Not all of us are born to eat and sleep the day through,” Rakhel says.
“Certainly no. Only those of us of certain refinement,” Khorsheed says. “So you are done with the mourning?” Rakhel walks to the window, wiping her wet hands on her skirt. “Good thing, too, Dada. I’ve been meaning to tell you. Your nose gets all swollen when you cry too much.”
“I was only a bit anxious,” Rakhel says. She stands beneath Khorsheed’s window, rises to the tips of her toes, and reaches for Khorsheed. “Though it seems there was no need. Asher didn’t even spend a minute in her room last night, came straightaway back to me. Come closer so I can pull you down by the rope of your hair.”
“And when I break my neck, who will mother my boy?”
“Myself, of course. And a better job I’d do of it.”
“You’ll be too busy wiping the bottoms of Kokab’s brood to care for my little prince.”
“Yousseff would be the apple of my eye. That woman can tend to her own litter.”
“Have you spoken with her yet?”
“To say what?”
“I don’t know, to befriend her somehow.”
“I’d befriend her soon as I befriend the mare Asher buys to mate with his steed.”
“Please, Dada, she may hear you. I’m not interested in living with an enemy.”
“I hope you are not planning on becoming her friend?”
“I just don’t want trouble with her.”
“You know, Khorsheed, it’s best to keep away from her. You heard about why Eliyahoo divorced her.”
“Rumors, Dada.”
“I don’t know, Khorsheed. She seems to have it in her.”
“You haven’t even met her yet.”
“For a reason. It’s best to keep from looking into her eyes, directly. I didn’t want to tell you, to scare you, but they say she’s possessed, you know, by the djinn Al.” Khorsheed stands up and looks down on Rakhel. Rakhel looks back at her.
“What are you talking about, Dada?”
“Well, you know Al doesn’t just snatch babies from their mothers. Sometimes she takes the form of a beautiful woman, who lures men away from their wives. And from the stories I’ve heard about her . . .”
“Enough, Dada. She’s a mother, herself.”
“I’ve heard stories about her daughter, too.”
“Stop creating trouble, Rakhel.”
“That’s the real reason Eliyahoo divorced her. To keep the girl from learning the mother’s lewd nature.”
“Enough, Rakhel.”
“I’m just warning you, Khorsheed. I don’t think she’ll seduce Ibrahim, she seems to have her eyes on my husband alone, but I’d be careful with your baby. It makes sense, no? All that sorrow for losing her own child might make her eyes full of envy for yours, right?”
Khorsheed takes a step away from the window. She turns to look at Yousseff sleeping on the bed. She turns back to Rakhel.
“Don’t worry, though. Just be cautious,” Rakhel says. “Put a little soot on his face each time she’s about. Better yet, keep him away from her sight. Just to be safe.”
Khorsheed frowns. “I have to go nurse him,” she says, then begins closing the window.
“I’m just telling you to keep him safe, Khorsheed. I love him as much as you do.”
Khorsheed looks at Rakhel from behind the closed window. Rakhel smiles and shrugs her shoulders, then turns back to the fountain and the buckets of sour plums. Khorsheed walks over to her sleeping baby. She kneels beside him and watches the gentle rise and fall of his chest. She clenches her eyes shut. “Please, G-d,” she says. “Let no harm come to my baby.”
Seven
Kokab steps into the dim light of the study. She stands for a moment beside the threshold, looking into the courtyard. Then, she closes the door gently behind her. She turns to look at the room. All four walls are lined with towering bookcases. Some shelves hold books, others statues and strange masks. On the topmost shelves are tremendous, heavy vases made of silver with intricate etchings, images of men on horseback hunting gazelles and bare-breasted women holding flasks of wine in the wilderness. Kokab walks from bookcase to bookcase, running her finger down the fabric spines of books, stopping to study strange objects made of precious metal, carved of wood, chiseled in rock. She picks up a stone sculpture of a nude woman, the size of her hand. The head and half the legs are missing, the breasts prodigious over an orb of a belly. She turns it in her hand. It feels cold and heavy. She places it back and turns to the desk facing the window overlooking the courtyard. Fierce dragons are carved into the woodwork of the desk, the whole of it painted a deep emerald green. On the desk is a leather-bound book, which she opens. Inside, beneath meticulous writing, she sees rows and rows of numbers, page after page after page. She closes the book and walks around the desk to a table that holds a gramophone. She puts her palms on the large trumpet and peers into the hollow.
“Do you want to hear it?” Asher asks. He enters the study and closes the door behind him. She does not greet him but turns to the window, instead, and places her hand on the glass. He walks to her. She feels him, close enough to reach out his hand and touch the fabric of her skirt. “After a day of haggling and buying, sometimes on my walk home through the streets of the mahalleh, I feel as though my limbs are slowly turning to lead.” She faces him and looks into his eyes. Without taking his eyes off her, Asher turns the crank, places the needle of the gramophone down and there comes a kheshkhesh as the record turns, before sound pours out into the silence of the room. “I panic in those moments that if I don’t move fast enough, that cold will touch my heart and I will never arrive at my home.” He steps beside her and looks out of the window at the courtyard. “It is a race to beat this slow suffocation. I come to my study first, always, and put a record on this contraption. And when that first note sounds, I open this window into the courtyard so the rest of them, too, can hear the music. It fills the gardens. And death is not so solid, then.” He places his hand on the glass beside hers. “This that you are hearing now is by a man named Beethoven. Moonlight Sonata. I received it the week I married Rakhel, from a dealer I correspond with in Austria. The music reminds me of you. The sweet longing in it.” Kokab moves away from Asher and leans against the desk with her back to him. Asher follows her.
“Did boredom lead you here?” he asks.
“The desire to know who you are.”
“Do you know, now?”
She turns to face him and says, “You want desperately to believe that life can be measured in what it yields.”
Asher laughs. He steps closer to her and fingers the collar of her blouse. Kokab pulls back abruptly. Asher’s hand falls to his side. She
watches a red creep up his neck and into his face. He steadies his breath and asks, “Have you met Rakhel yet?”
“No. I saw her working in the courtyard from the window of my room.”
“And you didn’t go to say hello?”
“How do you imagine that conversation?”
“Well, the two of you will have to meet eventually.”
“In due time, when she is ready.”
“Are you ready?”
“To meet her? Yes. But I am the enemy.”
“I won’t allow that. You needn’t worry about her.”
“She is hurt.”
“That is not your concern.”
“I have to live with the guilt of her suffering.”
“It is her own fault. She will have to learn to adapt.”
“And me? Will I learn to adapt?” Kokab asks. Asher takes hold of Kokab’s shoulders with both hands.
“I pray that you will find this to be your home,” he says.
Kokab becomes rigid at his touch. “But you know that despite your efforts to beat death, there is something that escapes you,” she says. “Something that cannot be measured, something beyond your grasp.”
“Pardon?”
Asher turns and lifts the needle off the record, silencing the music. Kokab strums her fingers on the leather-bound book. “I imagine that you are waiting for the yield of your investment,” she says.
“I won’t demand anything of you that you will not give willingly.”
“What is the weight of one’s will in a prison?”
“I should hope that is not how you deem this home.”
Kokab laughs. She places her palm on Asher’s cheek. Asher closes his eyes and tilts his head down slightly toward her. “Asher, tell the old servant to bring my dinner to my room. I am not ready to join the family yet. And I am tired. I hope to go to bed promptly after eating.” Asher’s jaw tightens.
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