A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (3 page)

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 headscarf, 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 headscarves 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 each other 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.
Pasdar
s 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’ fourthgrade 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, two 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.

Saba drops down on a dirty unpaved alley walkway, crossing her legs and resting her head against a mud wall. She can feel her friends’ eyes on her as she presses her face against it, expecting the scent of cooking from the adjacent house, dry dirt, and earthworms. But the wall smells like fish and wet mud and the sea. She recoils, burying her face in her sleeve. The sea is far away, but its smell is always near—that evil Caspian smell. She is not ready to welcome it back, though once she loved the scent of the sea. Maybe she will again, but now she tries to keep the water from coming. Her hands reach for her throat and her breath grows faster. She tries to expel the nightmare image of Mahtab in the water, on the day she spoke to her for the last time, the day the adults call lucky because Saba escaped unharmed.
Rescued by God’s hand,
they say
.
Saba knows better, because she was there when
both
twins were rescued. Why was Mahtab spirited away? Why did
she
get to go to America?

And what happened in the water? She remembers that she and Mahtab sneaked out of the vacation house in the middle of the night and went for a swim. She remembers playing in the waves. Tasting the halfsalty water of the Caspian Sea. Seeing a fish go by. She remembers the houses on stilts, obscured by the night fog, that drifted out of sight as she floated farther into the sea with her sister. Mahtab kept splashing and singing American songs, while Saba did the one thing she knew how to do at frightening times. She refused to leave her twin, even after she was certain she wanted to go home. She floated on her back and whispered stories to Mahtab, and Mahtab taught her four new English words she had learned that week. Four secret words that Saba didn’t know. Mahtab apologized for keeping them to herself, like taking four extra pieces of candy when counting out portions one by one.
One for Mahtab. One for Saba
.

Then Saba recalls that something forced her to swallow all those mouthfuls of saltwater. A minute passed, the shoreline rising and falling, before the smelly, sandpapery hands of a fisherman lifted the two of them out of the sea. Mahtab sang silly songs all during the sleepy boat ride back to shore. Or was that another day, as the adults claim? In the memory Mahtab is wearing a yellow plastic fisherman’s parka like the one she lost on last year’s trip. Maybe she found it in the water. Or maybe this one belonged to the fisherman. What happened next? Flashes of people yelling at each other. Policemen peering into her face. Patches of black.

A second later she was in a hospital bed in Rasht. Where was Mahtab? Doctors and neighbors twittered around her and said,
Don’t worry
.
Mahtab is okay
. Then, after they’d had the time to hatch their plans for America, they changed their story.

Saba catches Ponneh searching her face with her beautiful almond eyes, and she tells herself to be brave. She repeats words from her English list to calm herself.

Banal. Bandit. Bandy
.
“I had a dream,” she says, almost to the wall, “that my maman showed up at school and told me that I hadn’t studied enough English, so I couldn’t talk to Mahtab.”
Ponneh scratches the tip of her dainty nose and glances at Reza. “Let’s go get some cakes,” she says, her voice a little uncertain.
Mahtab would have asked for every last detail of the dream.
“I think it means I’m going to see her again,” says Saba, choosing to answer Mahtab’s question instead, and looks up at her friends. She smiles grandly and wills them to smile back. “Mahtab too,” she adds, and rests her head against the wall. She pushes her headscarf onto her shoulders and picks a loose thread from her sweater while humming an American tune from one of the illegal music tapes her father tolerates now that she is a delicate, thing to keep watchfully cupped in both palms.
“Let’s play something,” Ponneh suggests. When Saba doesn’t respond, her face grows steely. She sits beside Saba, pulls her hand away from the loose thread, and interlaces their fingers. “You should just admit Mahtab is dead . . . like everyone says.”
Mahtab would have played a hundred games of possibility before admitting such a defeat, especially without proof. How can everyone believe that Mahtab is dead without seeing her body, without putting an ear to her chest and counting the beats? Sometimes Saba wakes up in the night, her skin wet and salty again, after having seen Mahtab’s body in her nightmares, drowned and fished out from the bottom of the sea. It looks just like her own and so it is doubly frightening. Maybe there is no body because Mahtab never existed. Maybe she was only Saba’s reflection in the mirror. Is she trapped there now? Can Saba break the glass with her fist and pull Mahtab out?
Reza is still standing beside them, glancing at the main road now and then and chewing his lower lip raw. Ponneh keeps signaling him to sit beside Saba, to pay her some attention. This is Ponneh’s way of soothing her best friend: offering up Reza as a gift; he is just a boy and good for such things. But Reza keeps his post. “Do you think the
pasdar
will find us here?” he says, and peers down the alley again. He chews his lips and gives the ball a few nervous kicks whispering, “Iran, Iran! GOAL!”
“Maybe she’s not dead, though,” says Saba, like she has done a hundred times in the last month. She touches her throat, rubs it with both palms, a recent tic that she knows worries her family and friends. “Maybe she went with my mother to America.”
“My maman says that your maman didn’t go to America,” whispers Reza from above them. “And she’s not coming back.”
“Your maman is a lying viper,” Saba shoots back. “You’ll see when Mahtab finds a way to write me a letter. She’s a lot smarter than both of you.”
Ponneh puts on that affected look of concern that she perfected by the time she was eight. It is convincing, even comforting—Ponneh pretending to be an adult. “There aren’t going to be any letters,” she says: a fact as simple as the blue sea.
Reza crosses his arms and mumbles, “Why would my mother lie?”
“There are a million reasons,” says Saba. “I saw them—both of them—at the airport. And besides, Baba and I drove Maman there
ourselves
. She had a passport and papers and everything. Ponneh, you remember that, right?”
Ponneh nods and clutches Saba’s hand even harder. “Still.”
“Exactly,” she says, and doesn’t flinch when Ponneh, who likes to pick at things when she’s nervous, begins peeling the polish off Saba’s fingernails. “You believe me. I saw them with my own eyes. Maybe they said she’s dead to throw the
pasdar
s off my mother’s tracks . . . so they’d leave us alone. Probably Baba paid everyone to lie.” With her thumb, she rubs out the dirty spots from her shoes, the last pair chosen by her mother that still fits her feet. After a while she decides that all is well. Mahtab will write soon enough and the facts are unchangeable—the passport, the drive to the airport. No one can deny these things. She wipes her face, takes a last deep breath, and drags herself out from the abyss. She licks her salty upper lip and offers a distraction. “I heard Khanom Omidi has four husbands, each in a different town.”
“No. Really?” Ponneh looks up, all bad things forgotten. “How do you know?”
“The Khanom Witches.” Saba shrugs. “They’re always talking about each other.”
The Three Khanom Witches is Saba’s name for the neighbors who have invited themselves into the Hafezi home since her mother left. They know how to do things that her father can’t, and so they have become her surrogate family. They tell stories, cook, clean, gossip, and best of all, they betray each other in the most entertaining ways.
Khanom Omidi, the Sweet One, says, almost daily, “I have a surprise for you, Saba joon. Big surprise. Don’t show the others.” She lumbers over, dragging all that extra flesh in a colorful chador, a long loose garment she has worn since giving up fieldwork. It barely conceals a tinting mishap that has left her white hair a purplish brown. Sometimes the old woman Scotch-tapes her face to prevent lines. Her lazy eye searches through her stash of coins secreted away sometimes in the folds of her chador, sometimes in a cloth waistband, and she offers some to Saba, who guards these coins more vigilantly than all the wads of bills from her father.
Khanom Basir, the Evil One and Reza’s mother, says just as often, “Saba, come here . . . alone.” Her thin lips utter unwelcome words while her skinny, angular face scans Saba’s body for signs of womanhood. “Has anything special occurred lately . . . in the hammam or the toilet?” Each time she asks this Saba hates her, because she doesn’t know what Khanom Basir is looking for, and what she might be telling Reza.
The third witch, Khanom Mansoori, the Ancient One, just snores in the corners of Saba’s house, once in a while tossing out some ageold truth about children to the other two women. Unlike Ponneh and Reza, who live on a narrow street below the Hafezi home in a cluster of small houses with handmade curtains of lace and cotton and some basic conveniences (small fridges, kitchen tables, gas ovens), Khanom Omidi, the Sweet One
,
and Khanom Mansoori, the Ancient One
,
live in huts made of wood, straw, and clay mixed with chopped rice. Their squat dwellings pick out from under hipped rice-stalk roofs dotting the hills just a short bumpy ride or vigorous walk past the weekly bazaar. Isolated in a wooded area, they let chickens roam near front steps strewn with discarded shoes, and they sell the eggs at the market. At one point over many years, each of them has rolled up her pant legs and stooped in the rice fields—this is how they came to know Agha Hafezi, who chose them as caregivers for his daughters.
To Saba their houses are like pieces of pottery, like art. She loves the comfort of being cocooned in tiny spaces amid thick hanging canopies that separate two musty rooms, or sitting under low ceilings in cozy corners draped with blankets that are heated by coal stoves and oil lamps. In the mornings fresh tea flows from samovars, and four-pane windows opening onto green plains, inviting in the smell of wet grass. She is drawn to the enclave of mothers in hot, cramped kitchens, squatting on tunic-wrapped haunches, building mountains of chicken and garlic skins, eyeing bubbling pots, and squeezing pomegranate juice into cups that Ponneh and Reza pass back and forth, but that Saba is not allowed to touch. Sometimes to spite her father, Saba crawls into their bed mats, intricate hand-sewn throws arranged in all four corners where families sleep together. Their bedding smells like hair oils and henna and flower petals.
To keep Saba out of their homes, Agha Hafezi allows her surrogate mothers to roam free in his house, to use his big Western kitchen and play with Saba in her bedroom, where the bed rises up off the ground and there is a writing desk for her papers.
Now Ponneh seems to be in deep thought on the matter of Khanom Omidi’s secret life. “Well, I know one thing,” she offers. “Omidi has a plastic leg. Once, I saw her take it off and fill it with candy and flower petals so it wouldn’t stink.”
“That’s stupid,” says Reza, who loves the ever-humming, fleshyfaced Khanom Omidi as much as Saba does. “The candy comes from inside her chador.”
How does Reza know about the treasure chador? Khanom Omidi is
Saba’s
Good Witch—the standin for
her
missing mother. “No one believes that anymore,” she says. “I checked her leg when she was sleeping and it’s just full of meat.” Her friends give a gratifying laugh. “But the one about Khanom Basir is true. I heard she’s a
real
witch.”
“You’re lying!” says Reza, ever quick to defend his mother.
The girls look at each other and burst into a fit of giggles. Then come the private jokes about alleged jars of fluid and dried monkey toes strung up on roofs. At first Reza ignores them; then he picks up his backpack and makes a show of preparing to leave.
“No, stay!” Ponneh puts on an affected croon. “I’ll let you kiss me . . . on the lips.”
Reza, still brooding on behalf of his mother, hoists his backpack on both shoulders and says, “You better think of something better than that.”
Saba tries not to laugh, even though Ponneh deserves it for being so arrogant. “I’ll teach you some English words,” she offers. “
Abalone
means . . . um . . . money for widows.”
He glances down at Saba’s backpack. “What’ve you got in there?”
Saba tugs on the zipper because she does have something there that will keep him. Reza too devours American music, though Saba is his only source. He borrows her old tapes and tries to strum the notes on his father’s
setar
, which has collected dust since his father left to be with his new family. “You probably never heard of Pink Floyd,” she says.
“Yes, I have!” Reza says, his voice and fingers all anticipation. “Can I see?”
It is an obvious lie, but Saba doesn’t correct him. She takes out an unmarked tape and holds it out to her friend. “You can keep it,” she says. “I’m done with it anyway.”
“Really?” Reza’s eyes remain fixed on the tape as he drops to the ground and out of his backpack. Saba moves closer and starts to tell him all the words to her favorite Pink Floyd song, which is about bricks and teachers and rebellious kids—a song so illegal that one verse of it would be enough to make a hundred mullahs wet themselves.
“You can’t accept that,” says Ponneh. Reza takes his gaze off the tape for an instant; he stares at Ponneh as if pleading with her to forget their rural pride. Then his shoulders drop and Saba is forced to endure his disappointment, Ponneh’s wounded glare, and the fact that she has united the two of them in their shared poverty. Maybe her friends act this way because they know that Saba would be discouraged from playing with them if any English-speaking city children lived nearby. The sole reason she isn’t sent away to school in Tehran or Rasht is that her father can’t bear to lose another daughter. And no matter how many ragged old jeans or unfashionable flowery headscarves she wears, or how well she fakes their accent or tries to speak Gilaki, she will always be the outsider.
“What if I pay for it?” Reza suggests, digging in his pockets for coins and counting them in his palm. He has a few tomans, not even enough for a blank tape.
“You don’t have to,” says Saba, wishing she knew how an adult would give a gift to someone so beloved without being accused of showing off. Then she reaches into his extended hand and chooses the smallest coin. “Just enough,” she says.
They sit in the alley for two more hours. Saba and Ponneh braid each other’s hair while Reza sneaks out to buy them snacks. He returns with yogurt sodas, and they talk about Saba’s classes, because, even though she attends the same two-room schoolhouse as all the Cheshmeh children whose parents can spare them, she is further educated by city tutors in English, Old Persian, and all kinds of maths and sciences. Reza rifles through Saba’s backpack looking for other morsels of wealthy living that seem to excite him. He pulls out a tattered, yellowing magazine and stares at the beautiful blond woman on the cover. “What’s this?” he asks, and Ponneh shuffles over to have a look. Saba can see that he doesn’t dare ask the question on both their faces,
Is it from England or Germany or France? Or maybe . . . America?
“An old magazine my maman’s friend gave me for practicing English,” she says. “It’s almost as old as I am.” Then she adds, her excitement rising with theirs, “It’s American.” The magazine came from her mother’s college friend, an elegant lady doctor named Zohreh Sadeghi, who lived far away and whispered with Maman about the new regime and the Shah. The twins used to call her Dr. Zohreh. After the night in the Caspian, she visited Saba in the hospital.
Ponneh and Reza press their heads together to pore over the fragile pages—every shadowy photo, every vibrant illustration, every detail of a mystical American life that is no longer welcome here. Saba feels guilty because dreams of such a life—dreams of betterness, otherness, of American entitlement—feel like a betrayal of her friends—of Reza, who at eleven is already a nationalist and full of Gilaki ideals, and Ponneh, who will have to become the new Mahtab. Saba translates the English words on the cover.
“Life,”
she says as she fingers the title in red-and-white block letters at the top. “January twenty-second, 1971. Fifty cents.”
“How much is that?” Ponneh asks.
“A lot,” she says, though she isn’t sure.
“Who’s the lady?” Reza asks, daring to touch the yellow hair on the brittle page. “She’s probably old and gray by now.”
“It says her name here,” Saba says, trying hard to pronounce it, before realizing that Ponneh and Reza won’t know any better. “Ta–ree–sha Nik–soon.”
“Strange name,” says Ponneh. “Sounds like shaving a beard . . .
reesh-tarash
.”
“She’s the daughter of the American Shah,” says Saba, because she has read this magazine a hundred times by now, and she knows.
Reza nods gravely. “Yes, yes, I know this Niksoon. A great man.”
Ponneh rolls her eyes and Saba flips to the center of the magazine, where pictures from this beautiful girl’s life are displayed for millions to see. She is a princess.
Shahzadeh Nixon
. There she is in her expensive American dress (four different dresses in as many pages!), with her flirtatious American grin and her shiny American suitor—a boy so pale and handsome that he could be in the movies if he wasn’t busy beaming over his shoulder at photographers and staring at the fairy girl’s hands as if he were just a little bored.