A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (5 page)

“See?” says Saba, getting up and dusting off the dirt of the alleyway from the back of her pants. “How’s that for a good story? A hundred times better than TV.”

“That’s it?” Reza asks. “That’s all there is? Does she go to Harvard or what?”
Saba tries to contain her anger. “We’re eleven,” she says. “Obviously her letter doesn’t say whether she got in. What do you think this is, your mother’s story time?”
“I thought—” Reza mumbles. “I’m sorry.”
“Saba just means that a good storyteller doesn’t give everything away at once,” says Ponneh with a seriousness that makes Saba smile. Ponneh is always adding weight to the things Saba says just by agreeing with her.
“Exactly,” says Saba. “It’s like
Little House.
One problem per episode.”
Ponneh and Saba follow arm in arm as Reza leads the way back to the main road—because he claims to know how to handle policemen with his masterful command of big-city ways. There they will find a phone to call Saba’s house, where all their panicked parents and the Khanom Witches are likely gathered. Reza doesn’t seem very worried. Ponneh picks at some dry skin on her elbow and says, “Too bad we never bought any sweets, since we won’t be allowed any for the next ten years.”
Saba unlinks her arm from Ponneh’s and takes out a wad of bills from her pocket. “We should save the money for something better,” she says, thinking of Khanom Omidi’s hidden coins and the fact that Ponneh will never have her own private wealth, no matter how small. There live too many older sisters with needs greater than Ponneh’s in the Alborz home. “Let’s start a dowry for you, for when you’re older.” When Ponneh’s face darkens and she starts to object, Saba says, “Our secret. We’ll take care of ourselves.”
Khanom Basir says that Ponneh will need a dowry to escape the moral police. In five or six years she will be a woman. According to the adults, beautiful single women often find that they’ve broken some rule. So who knows what will happen to someone who dares to have a face like Ponneh’s.

aba thinks I don’t like her, but she’s too young to remember everything. When the girls were seven I started to notice that one of them was the
real
trouble. Mahtab used to watch us cook, and she used to concentrate so hard that I would get nervous and send her away. She obeyed, but I knew better than to let that girl put a fool’s hat on my head. Saba may have been loud, but Mahtab was always quietly doing something bad, and I knew every time Saba got into trouble that the onion had been hanging with the fruit. Saba blamed her sister each time they were caught and I believed her.

It is a mother’s job to teach a girl to be crafty. But Bahareh Hafezi didn’t pay attention to village ways. She was too young and she thought being a good mother meant being strict with the small rules, the ones about candy and
pesar-bazi
(playing with boys), and
kalak-bazi
(playing tricks), and
gherty-bazi
(playing at vanity), while teaching the girls to rebel against impossibly big ones. She didn’t bother to teach them how to make ordinary moments turn their way. But Mahtab already knew how. Saba never learned.

One day we were cooking smoky rice in their kitchen—do you know this rice? It is the best in the world. So rare and produced only here in Gilan—and the girls were hanging about under our skirts. Their mother said that if they behaved they could join us for tea, so they sat still and whispered, Mahtab feeding Saba some crazy story (
kalak-bazi!
).

The girls had a lot of books, but their favorite stories were the kind you hear in the village square from the hundred-year-old toothless goats with long water pipes and tiny stools. Those men talk all day about jinns and
pari
s and how to bring good luck. They tell old stories like Leyli and Majnoon, Rostam, or Zahhak, with the snakes growing out of his shoulders. I recognized the story Mahtab was telling Saba because it came from one of these old men, but I assumed Mahtab didn’t believe it.

“What are you telling your sister, Mahtab jan?” I asked. “Don’t interrupt me,” she said. “I’m behaving!”
So I just listened as Mahtab told Saba about the Sun and Moon Man, who takes down the sun every night and puts up the moon. Saba played with a teaspoon she had stolen from a bowl of honeycomb, while Mahtab lectured on and on. “He takes longer in the summer to do it, because he likes to play outside,” Mahtab said, and Saba believed her. And some small creature in my belly said that Mahtab was playing at something.

Then they changed topics for twenty minutes until Saba brought up yesterday’s hiking trip in the mountains—the one Saba had missed because she had been too sick to travel. “I saw the Sun and Moon Man there, you know,” Mahtab said with a careless, fox-eyed look. Saba didn’t interrupt as Mahtab talked about having seen him and his yellow shirt and yellow pants and yellow basket where he kept dina nayeri the sun and moon. She only licked honey off her teaspoon, and Mahtab talked about the Sun and Moon Man’s office, with its pulleys and buttons and levers, a big teapot and papers everywhere. Then Mahtab taught Saba the song you have to sing to him to get him to work fast, “
Hey, Mr. Sun and Moon Man, put up the sun for me
.” She sang it to the music of a foreign song that their mother said was called “Tambourine Man,” which was one of their favorites.

The little devil. All that spinning, just to make her sister jealous. I guess that’s what you get when you’re lucky enough to learn English and listen to English songs and have a foreign education. Devilry disguised as cleverness. Mahtab liked playing these naughty catdance games with her sister. She liked being the smart one, and she had a big imagination and a wicked little heart. Sometimes I too blame Mahtab for abandoning Saba, who was so much more the dependent one. I just can’t help it—may God forgive me—but without her sister, Saba has lost her magic. I remember all this now that the distance between them isn’t measured by tiny fingers or by gossiping lips to eager ears, but by so much earth and water. How much earth, Saba asked me once after the big loss of half her family.
How many scoops of my teaspoon would get me all the way from here to there?
She held that spoon poised against the earth as if she were ready to start digging to her sister. She knew just how to break my heart.

“He isn’t paid enough,” Mahtab said that day about the Sun and Moon Man. “The sun is hot, especially to carry by hand.” And Saba knew it was true, because at the end of every tale, the storyteller is required to do the truth-and-lies poem, the one that rhymes “yogurt” and “yogurt soda” (
maast
and
doogh
) with “truth” and “lies” (
raast
and
doroogh)
.

Up we went and there was
maast,
Down we came and there was
doogh.
And our story was
doroogh
(lie!).

Up we went and there was
doogh,
Down we came and there was
maast,
And our story was
raast
(truth!).

We mothers know to respect this poem, and so when we tell made-up stories like Leyli and Majnoon, or the city mouse and village mouse, we do the first version, and when we tell the history of the Prophet Muhammad or King Xerxes we do the second. After telling her story about the hiking trip and the Sun and Moon Man, Mahtab did the second version, and so she said her story was true. That’s why Mahtab wasn’t a real storyteller, little rule-breaking rat. Now Saba has learned her sister’s lies, because Reza told me that after her Mahtab story in the alley in Rasht, Saba did the second version too.

he autumns of Saba’s adolescence are spent battling the Gilan sky. She is ever suspicious of the wet, insatiable months after most of Iran’s rice crop is harvested from lush fields. These dewy
shalizar
mornings have a way of distracting from truth—everything bursting out in eerie contrast and forcing the people to crave the fresh and the new, to pretend nothing has been lost since the last harvest. In the fall, leaves in a hundred shades of orange and red break into little pieces and mix with airborne drops of the Caspian. They create a vapor that slithers into noses and invades bodies, causing people to forget all but the sea and its fruits. It makes them ravenous for fish and rice. It erases the memory of last year’s sorrows and faraway relatives. But not for Saba, who has been in the deep parts of the water. The constant rainfall frightens her. She is baffled by the white nimbus of mist that hangs just below the top of the Alborz Mountains and above the sea (at the point where the two seem to crash into each other), and by the stilt houses disappearing in both directions, their tops and bottoms lost in water and in cloud.

Every year the vision of her mother in the airport lounge holding Mahtab’s hand grows hazier. Was she standing by the gate or in the security line? Saba used to be sure that it was at the gate, but now she knows that it couldn’t have been, because Saba and her father didn’t make it past security after she ran off to chase Mahtab. And what was her mother wearing? A manteau? A scarf? She used to think that it was her favorite green one, but a few months ago Saba found the fading scarf in the back of a storage closet. Then, just as she was on the verge of releasing the vision to the chasm of forgotten daydreams and spotty memories, she stumbled on a copy of her mother’s visa to America.
Proof
. But of what? Saba conjures the airport image often and the faces never blur. Her mother and sister rushing toward the plane and floating away into an oblivion filled with magazines and rock music and movies of men and women in love.

Now at fourteen, Ponneh and Saba spend their free days watching workers in the rice fields or videotapes at Saba’s house. Today, in the Hafezis’ enormous hilltop home, they busy themselves with Madonna and Metallica,
Time
and
Life
magazines,
Little House on the Prairie, Three’s Company
, and the Three Khanom Witches. The girls tiptoe through a sort of recovery, because two days ago, they had their biggest fight.

It started when Saba sat in her pantry with Reza—a secret place where only she and Ponneh used to meet—with her Walkman, listening to a bizarrely named band called The Police. She was whispering the lyrics into his free ear when Ponneh appeared, surprised and angry. She was in the pantry for only five minutes, doing a poor job of feigning interest, when she cut her hand on the sharp edge of a tomato can lid.

“Reza, help!” she cried. And this was the biggest injustice, because the last thing Ponneh needed was rescuing. But nowadays, when Reza is around—and especially when he is listening to Saba’s music, or humming American tunes, or asking what this or that lyric means—Ponneh is always getting hurt toes and scratched fingers and holes in her shirts. Then she uses every Band-Aid that Reza fetches and every pencil lead he squeezes out of her forearm as proof of his devotion. But Saba knows that none of these are signs of love. Her mother has said that
real
love is based on shared interests—like Western music.

But after Ponneh cut her hand that day, Reza sat beside her and sang bits of a French song that Saba had shown him a few days before. “Le Mendiant de l’Amour” became popular in Iran because of its easy-to-mimic chorus and manic Persian-sounding melody. “See,” he said to Ponneh, “it’s about a girl named Donneh, which is almost like Ponneh.” He started to tap his hands on his knees and tried to sing the lyrics with his thick, uneducated accent:
Donneh, Donneh, Do-donneh . . .

“That’s not what it means,” shot Saba, feeling personally injured by Reza’s blatant mistranslation, by his awful accent, and his lovely voice. “
Donnez
means ‘Give me
.
’ It’s French. I told you already.” She wanted to repeat her point, but didn’t want to be accused of showing off again. Reza didn’t respond. He studied Saba’s face. Then he hummed the verses he didn’t know and kicked Ponneh’s legs to get her to cheer up.

Before he left, he whispered to Saba, “Are you missing Mahtab?” For three years Reza has asked this—a placeholder for all the emotions he cannot yet diagnose. Whether Saba is sad or angry or jealous, he asks her the same question, putting on a concerned tone. Saba replies with shy smiles and nods. It is their private routine.

Later, Ponneh accused Saba of excluding her again, revealing their secret pantry, and showing off in English. Saba accused Ponneh of cutting her hand on purpose, not truly caring about the music, and stealing her song. But in a world without Mahtab, Saba can’t last long without a best friend. Soon more important things distracted them. Ponneh discovered that with the right color chalk, she could draw entire scenes on the inside of an old white chador. They spent the next two days cocooned in
hijab
, decorating the secret parts of the tattered cloth with images from storybooks and American magazines. They sat cross-legged with the fabric pulled low over their eyes, trying to see the drawings from inside. When it didn’t work—only made the cloth itchier—they moved on to standing bare-legged over a portable fan laid on its side so the chador would blow up around them like bat wings, baring their newly rounded legs like Marilyn Monroe’s.

Today they run around Saba’s house, belting out a song from a 1960s Iranian movie called
Sultan of Hearts
.
“One heart tells me to go, to go. Another tells me to stay, to stay.”
Saba has the better singing voice, so she serenades a giggling Ponneh with elaborate and dramatic bows and gallant gestures.

“Saba, bring me my sack,” says Khanom Mansoori, the Ancient One, who has been left in charge of the girls while the other women run their own household errands. Saba’s father trusts the old villager to teach his daughter respectable, womanly ways. But even at nearly ninety years old she projects a childlike mischief. Saba thinks it’s the combination of her deceptively tiny body and all the trouble she must be dreaming up in the hours she spends pretending to sleep. She pulls her shrunken face into a wrinkled scowl and—desperate for amusement and suffering from failing ears—pretend whispers to an eager Saba, “I have a new you-know-what! Bring Ponneh and get rid of the
adults
.”