Wedding Song (3 page)

Maman in Shiraz after her wedding. My mother wears jewelry given to her as a wedding gift. My father made the gold pin in the shape of two roses, studded with fresh water pearls
.

I do, however, know what my great uncle Agha-jaan once said of his child-bride. She wouldn’t let him touch her. Although she had obediently agreed to the marriage, she screamed and wept on their wedding night, wanting to go home, to sleep in her own bed. Even when an older sister went in to sleep between them, the bride was restless and crying. My great
uncle remembered his own outrage. He was young; his body burned. This was, after all, his right. She was his wife!

He beat her up. She still resisted him. He forced himself on her. “She eventually came to understand my needs. She became a good wife,” he said.

My mother had her first period away from her mother, far away from home at my father’s house. She had been married to him for almost a year. Maman approached her mother-in-law with the news, her head bowed low in embarrassment. Khanom-bozorg told her not to touch the food, or wash the dishes, or sleep in the same bed with my father. She showed my mother the closet where the
tamei
mattress was stored, stinking of old blood and sweat. Maman wrapped herself in her winter coat and slept on the floor. I wonder what my grandmother’s reaction was to her daughter-in-law’s news. For a few days each month, she would miss a pair of hands to help with the women’s daily work. It also meant that my mother could get pregnant and produce grandchildren, preferably sons. Instead, a year later, I was her firstborn, a girl.

Like my mother, my father is also the oldest child from a second marriage. My paternal grandfather’s first wife had the familiar fate of so many women of the era who died in childbirth. He had to find a wife quickly to take care of the newborn and two older children. He chose Tavous, who was fifteen years old at the time and a divorcée. She was young with strong legs and arms for hard work and wide hips perfect for giving birth to eight children.

Then, when my father was eighteen, his father died of a simple infection and left him with the responsibility of his mother and seven siblings. As the great rabbi and the communal judge for the Jews of Shiraz, my grandfather had earned the unquestioned respect of both Jews and Moslems. He forgave his fees for weddings and circumcisions if the families were poor. Slaughtering the cows as the community
shokhet
, he let go of his earnings if the animal proved to be unkosher due to lesions in its lungs, recognizing the loss of the poor butcher who unknowingly had bought the unusable animal. My paternal grandfather felt honored that, like his father and grandfathers before him, he had been chosen to serve and guide
the Jewish community. Therefore, after an emotional day during which the community closed down to take turns carrying his coffin from the ghetto to the cemetery, after the boys from the Jewish school walked in front of his coffin with lit candles singing
Tehilim
, after the seven days of
shiva
, when everyone brought food and comforted the young widow and her children, all that was left to my grandfather’s family was the respect, love, and the devotion of those who had known him.

Baba at the time of his marriage
.

Members of the Jewish community kept reminding my father that he was a grown man with great responsibilities, that he had to sacrifice his needs to safeguard his mother and seven siblings. Once, as he ate an ice cream sandwich by a kiosk, a distant relative spotted Baba and hit him on the head, saying that my father was stealing food from his own sisters and brothers. Leaving a movie theatre, he was admonished by a community
elder for his selfishness. Baba learned to let go of his individualism and to see himself as the core of the family unit, whose sole job was to keep them together, and to help them succeed where he could not himself. Later my father expected his own children and wife to live by the same principles of selflessness. We had to exemplify community standards and meet the expectations of the extended family.

My father’s problems were exacerbated when his mother Tavous started showing signs of emotional breakdown after her husband’s death. Periodically she struggled to catch her breath, fainted, and had to stay in bed for days. There was no one to run the household. The attacks, many of which I witnessed myself, continued throughout my grandmother’s life. I think a modern term for them would be anxiety or panic attacks. She was left a pauper in her mid-thirties with a huge debt accumulated by my grandfather’s lengthy illness. With eight hungry children, the youngest only a toddler, Tavous had every reason to be panic-stricken.

Baba approached a few friends and relatives for financial help, but they rejected him. Instead, they suggested that he should apprentice the young boys to shopkeepers and peddlers. Baba refused. Two of his sisters were married very young, partly to alleviate the back-breaking expenses. My father himself had given up his dream of becoming a physician. He decided the younger brothers would fulfill his dreams for him, and no sacrifice to accomplish this would be too great.

My father told me of his struggles to find a job to pay off the debts and feed the younger children. His eyes teared when he remembered betrayals by family members and kindness from strangers. A Moslem man trusted my father with a bag of gold, his first real assignment as a goldsmith. Knowing that this job would determine his reputation as an artisan and an honest man, Baba slept in his workshop to protect the gold. His diligence paid off, and five years after my grandfather’s death, my father had an established business making gold jewelry. He told his brother Morad that he must join him in providing for the family. The two worked at a small shop two blocks from the
mahaleh
, the Jewish ghetto, where they lived in my grandfather’s house with all but two sisters who married around puberty.

Finally there was food on the table, but my grandmother suffered with the burden of housework. When her “asthma” attacks increased, her married daughters had to leave their own families and rush to the house to nurse her, causing tension with their husbands’ families. My father knew
it was time for him to get married, to start a family, and at the same time, to relieve his mother of the grueling daily work of cooking and cleaning.

Baba did try to find a wife with a good social standing in Shiraz. Although the community admired my father’s devotion to his family, they wouldn’t give him one of their daughters in matrimony, dreading the life of poverty and servitude that my father’s bride would endure. My aunts and uncles understood the importance of this decision as well and worried for their own welfare. Soon Baba realized that he must find a wife whose family could not question his larger commitments.

Less than a decade after the devastation of World War II, Iran was an impoverished country in shambles. Being financial burdens, Jewish girls were married off to any men within the religion who could feed them. A bride for my father, the family elders suggested, should come from outside the Shirazi community to ensure unobtrusive in-laws. Someone in Shiraz knew someone in Tehran who knew of a family in the Jewish ghetto willing to send their daughter away. My father’s brother-in-law, his sister’s husband Masood, volunteered to take him to Tehran. The one-day trip by bus took them through narrow passes wrapped around mountains, a most adventurous endeavor for both of them.

In Tehran, they found the house and introduced themselves as
khastegar
s, seekers of a bride. The family welcomed them, and asked them to take their shoes off and rest against the pillows on the floor. Someone brought them tea, flower-essence drinks, and chickpea cookies. Soon family and friends gathered in the house, filling it with their sounds of joy, ululating, clapping, and singing wedding songs. My father heard someone being sent to get the rabbi to perform the wedding, and he realized that he was going to be married to a woman he hadn’t met.

Masood told me years later, “We had two feet, borrowed another two, put our tails on our backs and ran out of the house with our shoes underneath our arms.”

When recounting the incident, my father couldn’t stop laughing. “I don’t know what kind of a girl they were going to glue on me,” he said. “I didn’t know if she was blind, bald, disabled, or old, but I wasn’t going to wait around to find out.”

The residents of the
mahaleh
must have been bewildered by the sight of two strangers running in the narrow alleyways with their shoes under their armpits and little travel bundles over their shoulders. But that day,
being young, inexperienced, and having never left their city before, my father and Masood panicked. They worried that as revenge someone would report them to the authorities, falsely claiming that they had stolen from the Tehrani family’s house.

Fearing the family’s wrath, they decided to leave Tehran. Masood suggested a pilgrimage to the tombs of the Jewish heroes Esther and Mordekhai in the mountainous city of Hamedan. He also suggested that they find the Jewish school and wait outside to see if any of the girls looked suitable. When the school let out, the two men followed one of the girls home. In Masood’s version of the story, he pointed to a bouncy girl. “That’s a girl for you,” he told my father.

In my father’s version, they followed the girl home, and when they were sitting in her house having chai and rice cookies, my father spotted a girl playing with the prospective bride. She had fair skin and wild black curls. “That one,” he whispered to Masood. “That girl is the one I want.”

The day after, they went to this girl’s house with flowers and a box of Gaz, Isfahan’s famous sweet confectionery. My maternal grandmother Touran wouldn’t let them in, fearing they could be thieves, staking the house to steal her belongings. They finally convinced her to take the gifts and to check with a certain person who had given his daughter to a Shirazi and knew my father’s family.

When they came back the day after, not only had Touran checked their credentials, she had also visited her uncle, Dr. Sayed, asking for his advice.

“Give her to them,” he had said.

When I was thirteen, the same age as my mother at the time of her marriage, Maman sat down next to me. Her fingers traced circles around the peacocks and pomegranates on the Persian carpet as her eyes watched me. I was stretched out on my stomach, legs crossed and raised behind my back, one arm under my chin, doing my homework, reading the false history of Iranian kings and their conquests. I wished she would go away.

She picked up a book, turned it around, and leafed noisily through the pages. I wanted to tell her that I had an exam the following day, that I didn’t have time to give her attention, that she needed to leave me alone. Instead, I stabbed the words on the paper in an attempt to lodge them in my brain, already too preoccupied to absorb the information. I reached to grab the
book. “Maman!” I started to tell her to leave, but it was too late. She was reading a poem in a sing-song way. When she finished, she giggled, a child in front of the class expecting applause.

“I was a good student,” she said.

“Okay.” I rolled over, sat up, and collected my books to leave.

“I was good at everything but math.” A muffled laugh escaped her cracked lips; her irises glimmered with green dots I had never noticed before.

I didn’t respond. I wondered if I should go to a friend’s house to study.

Then my mother told me her wedding story for the first time. “I’d just come back from school,” she said, “sitting down just like you to do my homework.”

My mother’s voice was flat. Her eyes lost their green speckles, their light. She took my pen when she explained how her mother had taken hers and told her not to bother; they had to prepare for her wedding, pack her bag to leave for a new city.

I imagined my maternal grandmother rushing about the house. I remembered her unsmiling face, her rough hands, her hair parted in the middle and severely pulled back. I had seen her two or three times, once during her visit when my brother was born. She and her youngest son, my five-year-old uncle, shared the bedroom with us. My father moved to his mother’s room for a few days. Grandmother Touran avoided the members of our large household and constantly snapped at me and my uncle. She kept away from my paternal grandmother, but when in her presence, called her Khanom-bozorg, great lady. Giving respect and honor to her daughter’s mother-in-law, she hoped to soften her heart toward my mother. The children, even my cousins, adopted the title to address my paternal grandmother.