A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (2 page)

So when I say that I don’t want Saba Hafezi to set hopeful eyes on my son Reza, it is not because I have a black heart. Even though Saba thinks I hate her, even though she gives all her unspent mother love to old Khanom Omidi, I’ve been watching out for that girl since she lost her mother. Still, just because you cook a girl dinner on Tuesdays doesn’t mean you hand her your most precious son. Saba Hafezi will not do for my Reza, and it salts my stomach to think she holds on to this hope. Yes, Saba is a sweet enough girl. Yes, her father has money. God knows, that house has everything from chicken’s milk to soul of man—that is to say, everything that exists and some things that don’t; everything you can touch, and some things you can’t. I know they are far above us. But I don’t care about money or schoolbooks. I have a more useful kind of education than the women in that big house ever had, and I know that a bigger roof just means more snow.

I want my son to have a clearheaded wife, not someone who is lost in books and Tehrani ways and vague things that have nothing to do with the needs of today, here in one’s own house. And what is all this foreign music she has given him? What other boy listens to this nonsense, closing his eyes and shaking his head as if he were possessed? God help me. The other boys barely know there is a place called America. . . . Look, I want Reza to have friends without jinns. And Saba has jinns. Poor girl. Her twin sister, Mahtab, is gone and her mother is gone and I don’t mind saying that something troublesome is going on deep in that girl’s soul. She makes a hundred knives and none have any handles—that is to say, she has learned how to lie a little too well, even for my taste. She makes wild claims about Mahtab. And why shouldn’t she be troubled? Twins are like witches, the way they read each other’s thoughts from far away. In a hundred black years I wouldn’t have predicted their separation or the trouble it would cause.

I remember the two of them in happier days, lying on the balcony under a mosquito net their father had put up so they could sleep outside on hot nights. They would whisper to each other, poking the net with their painted pink toes and rummaging in the pockets of their indecent short shorts for hidden, half-used tubes of their mother’s lipstick. This was before the revolution, of course, so it must have been many months before the family moved to Cheshmeh all year round. It was their summer holiday from their fancy school in Tehran—a chance for the city girls to pretend to live a village life, play with village children, let worshipful village boys chase them while they were young and such things were allowed. On the balcony the girls would pick at bunches of honeysuckle that grew on the outer wall of the house, suck the flowers dry like bees, read their foreign books, and scheme. They wore their purple Tehrani sunglasses, let their long black hair flow loose over bare shoulders browned by the sun, and ate foreign chocolates that are now long gone. Then Mahtab would start some mischief, the little devil. Sometimes I let Reza join them under the mosquito net. It seemed like such a sweet life, looking out from the big Hafezi house onto the narrow winding dirt roads below and the tree-covered mountains beyond, and, in the skirt of it, all our many smaller roofs of clay tiles and rice stalks, like Saba’s open books facedown and scattered through the field. To be fair, the view from our window was better because we could see the Hafezi house on its hilltop at night, its pretty white paint glowing, a dozen windows, high walls, and many lights lit up for friends. Not that there is much to see these days—now that nighttime pleasures happen behind thick music-muffling curtains.

Some years after the revolution, Saba and Mahtab were put under the headscarf and we could no longer use the small differences in their haircuts or their favorite Western Tshirts 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, and 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.

aba 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 again, 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 headscarf 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.