A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (34 page)

In the pantry, they tell Ponneh their plans. She kisses them both, wishing them a happy life. Later Saba gives her father the news over tea in his kitchen. He looks at her with sullen eyes. “Saba jan, you’re almost there. Just a bit more waiting and you will have your own undisputed wealth. Look, I’m not saying to abandon your friends . . . you’re a kind girl. And I’m past caring about the differences between our families. They are good, hardworking people. But you’ve had a lot of sad times. You’re finally starting to be happy and you want to cage yourself
again
?”

“Baba!” Saba looks at him wide-eyed. It warms her to know that he has noticed her small day-to-day burdens, the loneliness and confusion and boredom. “Reza is the
reason
I’ve been happy.”

“But are you sure you want to marry a poor villager?” he says matter-of-factly. “You won’t be able to take him to Tehran. People will talk. You know how they are.”

“I don’t care,” Saba says. “I never go to Tehran. I barely know our friends there.”
He starts to object and seems to change his mind. “If you’re happy, I’m happy,” he says. “I’m sure your mother and Mahtab are happy too . . . up in heaven.”
She moves her chair beside him. “Up in heaven,” she whispers back because she doesn’t want to argue now. Neither of them has mentioned the faded possibilities in a while.
She thinks of making a joke to lighten the mood but decides against it. Her jokes always misfire with her father. They are either inappropriate or too close to the truth.
But then her father pats her hand and whispers into her ear, “Or America.”
She lets out a shocked laugh. “Or America,” she says, unable to hide her disbelief.
He sighs and touches her cheek. “Oh, to be so certain of things. To
know
is half the battle, and my Saba always wins.”
My Saba always wins
. Her father has never been unkind to her. He has never withheld anything from her, but somehow this seems like a new triumph—like something she has toiled and longed for, because Iranian men are so rarely impressed.
Saba jan, you’ve done so well,
she imagines him saying. Funny, she thinks, how a person can wait her entire life for something and it can be a hundred times sweeter when it comes than the farthest boundary of her imagination.

et us be honest, Saba would make a bad mother. Her own mother had so many jinns. Though, I admit, she wasn’t
all
crazy until the revolution. Then in 1980 the Iraq war started. In those days the Tehran bombings and such horrors hadn’t begun yet—only news of young people killed in border battles. But funny enough, the thing that drove Bahareh Hafezi into a deep, deep depression was Khomeini’s rule that all universities must become Islamic. The news made her hysterical and selfish. It put such dirt on her head, made her rant, sent her to her bed. She stacked up illegal books and buried them in the yard. She thought people didn’t see, but I did. She flitted around the big house, looking for something to do, to protect her girls against what was to come. She gave them long speeches about the new government and the way things would be now, and told them to keep reading banned books—that’s how crazy she became. When she was finished ranting, she would look for something to do again, and when she didn’t find it, she would repeat the advice she had already given, word for word, like the crazy beggars on the street who repeat the same thing over and over like an
ayah
from the Koran.

One day I brought over a ragged old chador for the girls to play with. They were trying it on in front of the mirror, posing and finding ways to tuck it behind their ears, waving the long fabric around, making it into wings. It was such a sight, little girls playing with a colorful thing. Then Bahareh walked in, and when she saw Mahtab with the chador wrapped around her body, her eyes filled with rage. She screamed. She ripped the chador away, making her own daughter stumble to one side, and tore it in two with her bare hands so that her palms turned red. She took the pieces of fabric and put them in a garbage bag outside. “Not inside the house,” she said, as if that means anything to small girls.

wo days before her second wedding, Saba wakes to the sound of the telephone. She reaches inside her underwear, as she does every morning. No blood; she breathes out. She hasn’t bled for fifty-one days. Khanom Omidi, who never uses a phone, screams into the mouthpiece the way people do in old movies, “You have to come now.”

“What for?” says Saba, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
“Poor child . . . The poor Alborz girl has died. I made the halva.” The room is quiet. She lets the seconds slip through her fingers.

Her best friend has lost her sister. What pain she must be suffering now. Saba must go to her house. She will be a placeholder for Ponneh’s sister, just as Ponneh has been for hers. She feels foolish for once believing that Ponneh was waiting for the freedom to marry, waiting for her own sister to die. How could she have thought this when her own greatest obsession has been the loss of Mahtab? She touches her belly, where a baby might be forming even now, and thinks she should take some food for Ponneh’s mother.

Despite this, as she runs to her bedroom, a selfish part of her wonders,
What will happen now?
Reza is technically unmarried. Will he cancel everything and marry Ponneh? Since their engagement, his mother has refused to speak to her—making excuses and broadcasting her disapproval through friends.
Why wasn’t there a proper
khastegari
? Why no chance for his family to negotiate the marriage terms? Are we too low to follow the customs?
If only she knew about Saba’s baby plans.

Saba dresses carelessly, barely stopping to brush her hair before throwing on her manteau and scarf and rushing to the Alborz home. The house is loud with wailing. People spill out into the tiny yard and the floor is covered with plates of halva. The women gather inside with the family, while the men linger outside, talking softly about practical things. They loiter around the old wash pool in front that is filled with rainwater and leaves, useless since the arrival of plumbing (except to rinse dusty hands or feet under the faucet, or to drape clothes on the thick outer edge). In the dead girl’s room, Khanom Alborz tears at her hair and buries her face in her daughter’s empty blankets. She pounds the bed mat with her fists and curses God and all the people lined up against the wall, who are silently observing but refusing to leave.
So ugly,
Saba thinks,
losing a child.
Ponneh and her two older sisters cry together in one corner of the room. A young man in a white medical coat stands a short distance away, watching the girls. His hands are folded, and he wears an embarrassed expression. Saba finds Khanom Omidi just inside the main entrance of the packed home next to two piles of visitors’ shoes and sandals.

“It’s so sad,” says the old woman. “So sad. But I’m telling you, Saba, this was the will of God. Those girls need to live.” Saba gives some kind of assent and remembers her own first days without Mahtab. Does Ponneh feel like she is drowning? Does she want to wander the streets, trying to decide which way to turn now that her sister is gone?

“See?” says Khanom Omidi. “It was good that no one made them brother-sister.”
“Huh?” Saba is watching her friend. Reza is nowhere to be seen.
“I’m talking about the doctor, Saba jan.” Khanom Omidi’s beady gaze roams as she pulls Saba closer to hide her lazy eye. “Remember Mullah Ali’s scheme about the milk and . . . uh, Saba, don’t make me say it. It’s not good to talk of funny things now.”
“Fine, I remember,” says Saba. “So what?”
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? He can marry one of the girls now.” Khanom Omidi nods happily three or four times and quickly clears the smile from her face.
“Is Reza here?” Saba asks.
“Oh, my dear,” shrieks the old woman, as if she has just remembered that Saba is about to be married. “I’m so sorry this happened during your
aghd
. This is not good. Not good at all, poor girl.”
Just then there is a noise from outside. A high-pitched shriek followed by a flurry of male voices. She rushes outside, old Khanom Omidi waddling slowly behind.
“Let go of me. Let go, you useless donkeys. Let go, I have a right to be here.” Khanom Basir is screaming as Ponneh’s uncle and a bewildered man in a patched gray suit and black Gilaki skullcap try to silence her. When she sees Saba, her rants take on a new pitch. “You,” she spits at Saba. Her eyes are wild and Saba grows frightened, thinking that maybe Khanom Basir has taken a bad drug. “You scheming girl. You tried to manipulate my innocent son. . . . Evil little
jadoogar.
You can’t marry my son now.” She waves a finger at Saba as Ponneh’s uncle begs her to stop. “Let go of me. I only came to talk to my friend. She will have no objection to giving up her daughter now. She will want to see me. Let me go.”
Saba’s stomach turns and she thinks she might vomit right here.
Does she really hate me so much? Am I so awful a person?
Strangely, in the face of Khanom Basir’s taunts, she wishes for Ponneh.
She tells herself that Khanom Basir suffers from wounded family pride. That she regards herself as important in this village and that Agha Hafezi has insulted her and her son. The contract with Reza is even tighter than the one with Abbas. Reza has nothing of his own, and when it was time to negotiate, her father asked him to sign twenty pages of text before he was satisfied. He made Saba promise never to combine finances, never to share her bank details, to name him, not Reza, as her closest male relative in every transaction.
The men hold back Reza’s mother, looking over their shoulders every so often to make sure the mourners inside cannot hear. Someone runs to close the front door. “It’s not time for this, Khanom,” says Ponneh’s uncle. “Please, control yourself. Come back tomorrow.”
Khanom Basir drops her shoulders. She breathes heavily and tries to calm herself. “There is no time,” she says in a hoarse whisper. “My son will marry the witch in two days. There is no time.” Saba is numb with disbelief and fear that this insanity might succeed. Should she speak up? Maybe stand up for herself or for the respect owed to Ponneh’s dead sister?
Ponneh’s uncle whispers to Khanom Basir; Saba imagines he is trying to reason with her. Reza’s mother shakes her head so violently that her headscarf slips onto her shoulders. Her hair is a mess, her eyes desperate. There is nothing left now of the vibrant storyteller or the sensible mother figure who stood with her in a smelly toilet and told her she was lucky to be a girl. Saba hates this vile stranger.
She doesn’t notice the eyes on her until Khanom Omidi tries to lead her inside. But she wants to stay. She is overcome by the fear that Reza
would
want a choice.
He arrives moments later, quietly greeting the men gathered around the front steps until he sees his mother in hysterics and charges past them. He pulls her away, tries to comfort her as the men whisper the details of her errand into his ear.
Reza listens, his face growing more and more impassive as the picture becomes clearer. The men watch Saba, a few of them wearing amused grins, the older ones, those who know her father, lowering their heads in sympathy. She wants to run away. But then maybe she should walk over and slap one of them like Ponneh might do. Then the door opens and Ponneh stands there, sent by the women to see what has happened. She sees Reza and turns to go back inside, but Khanom Basir calls out to her, begins pleading again. Ponneh freezes, her face pale. Does she think Reza will change his mind? She doesn’t look at Saba, her good friend. But she is bold enough to lock eyes with Saba’s fiancé, right there in front of their friends and neighbors. Reza waits. He seems confused. He waits too long.
What is that on Ponneh’s face? Expectation? Accusation? Hope? Maybe it’s just annoyance at the scene his mother has created. Reza seems to wither under her glare, and though neither of them speaks, what passes between them feels like the worst betrayal.
Someone whispers. Saba catches fragments: “. . . He’s only a man . . . couldn’t wait forever.” And then someone says a bit louder, “It’s easier with a widow, no waiting
.
”
“Just in time, though,” says one man. “Unless she’s caught him with a pregnancy.”
She tries to push away the overwhelming fear of going home alone, of canceling the wedding, of having to attend Ponneh and Reza’s marriage ceremony disgraced—maybe pregnant. What if Reza chooses Ponneh and she has to care for their child alone?
At least a dozen people are loitering on the grass in front, watching or whispering. Khanom Basir sits on the edge of the wash pool, wetting the seat of her tunic with rainwater. Every eye is on the trio, an electric triangle, staring at each other, dumbstruck. Saba counts the seconds.
One more,
she thinks,
and he will choose her. He’s considering it now. Just one more second, and I’ve lost him.

The seconds tick away, and Saba, desperate for a moment alone, turns to leave. As if awakened from hypnosis, Reza tears his gaze from Ponneh and hurries to Saba’s side. He takes her hand, kisses it deliberately. His awareness of the audience is tangible, like a thick, airborne vapor slowing his movements and keeping her from feeling his lips on her hand. A strange unease takes hold, as if she has escaped disaster but come out missing a limb. What was it that just passed between them? A part of her still wants to run, because she heard every unspoken word between her best friends. She felt the tension as they looked at each other, so different from the meaningful glances she and Reza shared across
sofreh
s and bazaar stalls—those giddy, mischievous looks meant to remind the other of everything they had done and would do again. Reza looked at Ponneh with grief and longing. He looked at her with something other than concern.

Ponneh rolled her eyes and went back inside, receding into the house like a tired matron behind familiar hand-sewn curtains.
As Reza collects his mother and they leave the Alborz house with its baby blue windowsills and modest flowerpots, Saba recalls that in the past weeks, whenever Reza entered a room, Ponneh did her best to leave it; and Reza developed a habit of asking after Ponneh’s mother.
What has happened between Ponneh and Reza? Why are they no longer friends?
Is Ponneh angry with him for his choice? Is she confused by the new Reza who isn’t scared or impressionable, no longer a boy she can control? Probably she’s just sad for her sister and wishes to have her best friends back. What if the three of them could return to the old days when they sat in a pantry unburdened by marriage or romance? Just three friends in danger of getting caught.
She wants to wash away the stench of this day. She knows now that despite all that she and Reza feel for each other, he loves Ponneh also.
After the funeral, the Gilaki marriage machine works quickly, and within the next day, the two older Alborz girls are visited by eager
khastegars
—men in such a rush that they flout custom and ignore the mourning period. Probably secret lovers, the town whispers. The older daughter is promised to the doctor, and her sister to another close family relation. Both men strut about the town elated, their chests pushed out, as if they are some great divine example of dignified patience to the world. Lovers not to be outdone. Modernday Rumis and Saadis. No one comes for Ponneh, whom they have long called the Virgin of Cheshmeh, cursing her mother for letting such a beautiful girl become pickled. Ponneh, it seems, has not had a
khastegar
marinating behind the scenes. She busies herself with the preparations for her sister’s burial, receives well-wishers for her older sisters, and pulls back from the Basir-Hafezi wedding arrangements. At times Saba wonders why her friend does not come. And then she admonishes herself for her stupidity. Maybe this one time Ponneh needs to be selfish.
On the first day of the new year, Norooz, which marks the spring equinox, Saba and Reza are married in a traditional
aghd
in Saba’s own house, the one she once shared with Abbas. They sit under a canopy and read Hafez and Nezami instead of the Koran to show off their youthful rebellion, while two women thought to be lucky rub giant cones of sugar over their heads to protect them and symbolize a sweet life. Saba tries to ignore the erratic pacing of her mother-in-law. “The first thing you must do is learn to laugh,” says Khanom Omidi. “Be amused by her wickedness and you will always be happy.”
“It’s a mother-in-law’s job to do
jadoo
to sabotage the bride,” says her aunt, Agha Hafezi’s sister. “All the tricks of burning hair and soaking this or that in vinegar. Replacing sugar with salt. It is to show that without evil there can be no good.”
Saba decides to accept this. Rashtis have a way of making everything seem less serious, less grave and worrisome.
Life is life.
They coat bad things in layers of sugar. They cover ugly truths with yogurt.
I can laugh at the small things
, she tells herself.
She starts with the ceremony—tittering with Reza at the old Zoroastrian custom in which the cleric asks the couple to promise not to “cooperate with fools” or “cause pain to their mothers.” And a tradition from farther west that has a female relative—Saba’s Azerbaijani cousin—sew a cloth in the corner and say loudly so everyone can hear, “I am sewing the mother-in-law’s mouth shut. I am sewing the sister-in-law’s mouth shut.”
She only flouts one of the old Persian rules. When the cleric asks if she wants to be married, she is supposed to stay quiet the first time. The ladies in the room know to say things like “The bride has gone to pick flowers.” The cleric asks again, and again the bride must be silent. The guests then cluck, “The bride is off to the mosque to pray.” Finally, on the third attempt, the bride must say yes so softly, so coyly, that she is barely heard. Then all the guests scream and claim they heard it first. But today Saba answers clearly the first time, and when the guests pretend to be shocked and the cleric looks up with raised eyebrows, she shrugs sweetly and eyes Reza, and their friends whistle and hoot instead.
Later, when the guests are lulled with food and wine and good gossip, Saba’s father finds her alone and takes her outside to greet two of his oldest friends. One of them, a tall, oddly shaped man with sunken cheeks, a concave stomach, and long spindly legs, holds a golden basket with metal handles—an
esfandoon
—in one hand. The sides of the
esfandoon
are ornately decorated in old Persian style and it is half filled with hot coals. Saba recognizes it, the same one that was used on neighborhood children years ago to ward off evil and the jealous eye. “Are you becoming superstitious?” Saba teases her father. But his expression is serious. “After the Alborz girl and that outrage by Khanom Basir. My poor daughter. The jealous eye has been on you for a long time. I want to give you this extra protection.” Then he adds, his speech slurring a little, “These Zoroastrian practices belong to everyone. It’s not a Muslim practice, you know.”
Another one of the men, a shorter one with a full head of black hair and a thick black mustache that comes down over his lower lip, takes a bag of
esfand
seeds from his pocket. He tosses the chocolatecolored seeds onto the hot coals. They crackle, making loud popping sounds and emitting tufts of aromatic smoke. Saba breathes deeply. It is this rich smoky smell that is said to ward off the jealous eye. Her father takes the basket and moves it in a circular motion over Saba’s head—as he did when she was a little child, as will be done again and again tonight with Reza beside her—reciting an ancient incantation to a long-dead Persian king. When he is done, he gives the basket to his friend and leans over and kisses his daughter on both cheeks.
“You always said not to believe in nonsense,” Saba says.
Her father nods. He looks at her with solemn, watery eyes. “I’ve reconsidered things . . . ever since I got a teacup full of salt at your engagement party.”
Saba starts to say something, but there is little point. Of course Khanom Basir replaced the sugar with salt—a standard trick for cursing an event. Her father laughs his deep, throaty laugh. He waves the
esfandoon
a few more times (“One more for your mother-in-law”) and ushers his friends away. Saba stands in her courtyard next to the little fountain, examining her hennaed hands and savoring the possibility that her father wouldn’t have gone to this extra trouble for Mahtab. She remembers competing with her sister over which of them had their father’s love—one kind act versus another.
She finds Reza again, and for the rest of the evening, scarves are flung aside. Sugar cones are ground down to nubs, and Reza and Saba exchange a glance as guests remind them of their sordid beginnings—that day cousin Kasem caught them kissing behind the house. The party drifts into the front yard, where the roses and hyacinths are beginning to bloom. Some early petals have escaped the grassy lawn and are scattered on the concrete walkway and in the fountain. Fragrant blossoms trickle down from the orange trees, showering the guests with undeniable spring.
Later when the sun goes down and Norooz, the first day of the year, is fully upon them, they pluck stringed instruments in the yard, Reza no doubt thinking of his absent father, who first taught him to love music, and showed him how to play the
setar
and
dutar
and
saz
. Because Saba loves Suri Wednesday, a celebration that passed a few days ago while she was busy with wedding preparations, she has insisted that they build the traditional bonfire on her wedding day instead. She jumps hand in hand with Reza over a flame inside a ring of rocks and singes her dress at the hem, but no one notices except the boy who puts it out with his sneakers. They clap and sing loudly, and fall exhausted on the benches along the outdoor walkway. All down the street, windows glow orange and dot the dark sky as other families welcome the New Year with songs and dancing. For one night it is safe to celebrate, and for one night Saba doesn’t dream of where her mother and sister might be.