A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (21 page)

For a full day Agha Mansoori refuses to let her be buried. “I promised Khanom that we would be buried together in the same ground.” He stands alone, looking naked and finished, and the memory he stirs in Saba is of the day the couple watched
Family Ties
with her—American TV people in their glittery world. He said
Shame, shame,
while refusing to let Saba turn off the television. She wonders if there will ever be a person who could be buried alongside her— someone other than Mahtab. Someone who wasn’t born by her side but found a place there.
“But Grand-baba, be reasonable,” Agha Mansoori’s granddaughter, Niloo, pleads. A group of neighbors are standing in Agha Hafezi’s dry storeroom, the only place large and cool enough to place a body. “We have to bury her
now
. It’s Islamic law.”
“Please,” the old man implores in a raspy voice, “just give me ten days to die.”
Saba grabs Ponneh’s arm and is relieved that she’s not the only one shaking.
“Dear Agha Mansoori!” says Saba’s father. “Don’t say such things.”
“After she is buried, we can’t disturb her again. But if we wait . . . I’m sure she would want to wait for me.” He nods to himself, certain of his decision, but when he looks up, all eyes are averted. He looks about wildly, unable to make sense of the world. To his left, Khanom Omidi is weeping into a handkerchief. He turns to find Saba in a corner, her head lowered in prayer. “Saba Khanom.” He looks at her with large, imploring eyes. “I beg you. Convince them. You’re good with words, child. Tell them we can’t send her into the dark place alone. Tell them to wait ten days to put her in the ground. Go on, dear.” With that, Agha Mansoori buries his head in his hands, cries noisily. Agha Hafezi turns and looks at Saba, wide-eyed and unable to decide.
“I . . .” Saba begins.
“All this death talk,” Abbas says. He sounds frail, so obsessed with his mortality. Saba is disgusted with her choice. He excuses himself to go home and doesn’t return.
“You children,” says Agha Mansoori. “I may be old and ignorant, but I know my own wife.” He wipes his face and fixes it into a prophetic scowl. He gathers up all the foreboding in his body and flings it with a small voice. “She will haunt you all.”
Saba goes to him and puts an arm around his shoulder. He sniffs, and wags his prescient forefinger in their faces. Agha Hafezi sighs as he launches into pleas, assurances, grand and eloquent speeches about life, death, and eternity. The old man sobs quietly throughout the speech. Afterward, in the drawn-out silence filled with the collective worry and expectation of the families, he coughs into a graying handkerchief and reveals that he hasn’t been listening at all. “Ten days isn’t good for much. But I’m tired, Agha jan. I don’t think I’ll last very long.”
“I don’t know what to do.” Agha Hafezi, frustrated, speaks to no one in particular. Somehow everyone knows that Agha Hafezi, not the Mansoori family, will make the decision. He rubs his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, exhausted. The old man takes Saba’s arm for support.
“Ehsan jan, I promise to stop troubling you in ten days’ time,” he says.
Saba remembers the day her mother and Khanom Mansoori taught her how to lay dough inside the walls of her grandfather’s
tanoor
in their kitchen. How many days before the airport incident was it? Did her mother disappear a week later? A month later? On that day Khanom Mansoori said the same phrase to Saba’s mother— because no one else had a
tanoor
and she wanted to make bread for her brother who came from the South and wasn’t used to rice for every meal.
I promise to stop troubling you in a few days’ time.
“This is insanity. We’re not leaving you to do
that
to yourself,” says Agha Hafezi.
“Nothing to be done, Agha jan. I’m old. And I haven’t slept well in a long time.”
And so they wait. Khanom Mansoori is washed, shrouded, and kept in Agha Hafezi’s cavelike storage room, just a short walk from the house with its Western kitchen and bags of rice, oldworld
tanoor
from out of town, and Saba’s beloved pantry.
The next day Mullah Ali visits. When he hears of the plan, he is livid. “I won’t allow it. It’s wrong, and goes against Islamic law. She must be buried immediately.”
Saba has never hated the mullah more. Look at all the other laws he has overlooked for his own pleasure. What about the parties? What about Mustafa, who went unpunished? Surely this is not the time to be strict. “What do you suggest?” she says coldly.
The mullah thinks for a moment and turns to Agha Hafezi. “We will bury her now and tell him she is still in the storeroom—just while he’s in the worst of the suffering. Then we will order the tombstone with both of their names to satisfy him. Of course, we will need a real one too. I’m sure he’ll relent after a while, and we can quietly mark her tomb with her own stone,” he adds in Gilaki. “Hafezi, can you oblige us?”
“Of course,” says Saba’s father, happy to pay for whatever will get the body out of his storeroom. It is a good solution, full of convenient half-truths and
maastmali
.
For days Saba keeps a constant watch over the grieving widower, making sure he does no harm to himself. She tells him stories, plays him all her favorite television shows, tries to entice him to eat. She goes along with the lies—that Khanom Mansoori is waiting for him in the storeroom and that he can’t visit her because she has to be kept cool and dry.
Oh yes, everything’s fine,
she mutters, as if she were lying about a relative in jail. Soon she realizes that she shouldn’t worry about suicide since Agha Mansoori considers it a sin. What’s more worrisome is that the old man is determined to die a natural death so that he can join his wife. He does everything possible to fool the fates. He casually peels the labels off his medications so that Saba has to make sure they are in their correct bottles after every use (they never are), “forgets” to turn off ovens and lamps, invites the chilly air and jackals in through the constantly open windows of his tiny wood-and-rice-straw home. On a good day, when he engages in conversation, she learns that he has eaten the same thing every week for fifty years: his wife’s
baghaleh ghatogh
with rice. Saba has seen him eat this dish before, always with a side of pickled garlic and piles of white rice, without utensils, using the tips of his thumb and two fingers to smash the individual grains into a buttery ball. Saba marvels at the impressive morsels he can pick up with just those three fingers. Maybe she will try to make him Khanom Mansoori’s famous dish. After all, it’s her job to keep him alive.
For a few days she forgets about Dr. Zohreh and all the injustices against women and dedicates herself to this one feeble man instead. For days, as Saba attempts to prepare his wife’s dish, Agha Mansoori gives a sad and noncommittal string of commentary. “A bit more garlic, child. No, no, less dill . . . well, doesn’t matter, I’ll die soon anyway.” He cowers just beyond Saba’s shoulder, his body protesting the act of standing upright—as well as eating and breathing—his eyes resolutely following her hand. She soaks the lima beans and peels them. Agha Mansoori watches as she fries them using the exact amount of garlic, dill, turmeric, and eggs that he instructs. She pours the mixture over a fluffy bed of white rice, not sparing the butter in any step of the process. In the end, he takes a bite and says, “You tried, Saba jan. You tried. But I just can’t taste her hand.”
“Will you eat it anyway?” she begs, and when he does, she feels gratified, as if he has done her a great favor.
On the seventh day after his wife’s death, Agha Mansoori oversees the preparations of halva and dates to be given out to the mourners. “We have to have plenty, Saba jan, because if we sweeten the mouths of our neighbors, they will pray for her soul, which is essential if we’re going to be together in a few days.”
“I’m sure she’s in heaven now,” Saba says, certain that even a Christian God would take Khanom Mansoori for himself. She counts the halva anyway, just in case.
He mumbles as if frightened. “Better to be safe.” Then he requests that, when he dies, she match the amount of halva and dates exactly.
As he makes his way through town, passing out the halva with Saba, Agha Mansoori sings adoringly of his wife. Like a young lover, he crows about how beautiful she was on their wedding day, how sweetly she took care of their family, how lovingly she decorated their home. He goes on about his wife’s “delicious hand,” and Saba promises herself that she
will
have this, even if she has to wait a hundred years and outlive everyone. Maybe she will have it with Reza, or maybe she will find her lover many decades from now. She will be his nurse when they are both old and frail and there is no one left to care for either of them.
Eight days pass and Saba grows concerned. She watches the wrinkles in Agha Mansoori’s brown face grow into trenches, engulfing his beady hazel eyes in their folds. She sees his jowls reach for the earth while the bend in his back urgently makes for the sky. What will happen when the deadline passes? How will this poor old man go on? She shares her fears with her own husband, who has experienced the pain of losing a wife.
“He will go on,” Abbas says plainly. “He will move past it.”
“He seems so weak,” she says. “He’s determined to die.”
“Don’t worry, child,” is Abbas’s only response.
Saba look at her husband and is emboldened by the peaceful expression on his face. She remembers the tender way Agha Mansoori looked at his wife as he made her fruit mush and blew on her tea, and the way she once felt about Reza. Such things are possible still, even here. She feels a deep courage, a desire to make an effort on her own behalf, an awareness of her own dying body. And Abbas’s.
“Abbas,” she begins timidly. “Can I ask you for something?”
“Anything,
azizam
.”
“I’ve been very happy with you, I hope you realize.” Abbas smiles deeply, and Saba is encouraged to go on. “But we’re so far apart . . . in age.”
She can see that Abbas assumes—like all men do—that she is already mourning the possibility of his death. “We have many years left together,” he reassures her.
“Yes, but after . . .” Saba looks down.
I’ll still be a virgin.
They haven’t discussed their arrangement since that morning a few months ago. Abbas is silent, so she continues. “Would you want me to marry again?” She wonders if she should assure him that she hasn’t told anyone about his private failures, that she never will. The smile has fallen from his face, and she fears she has already said too much. He can’t possibly enjoy having her youth and the possibilities that await her after his death flaunted before him.
“What is this about?” His voice becomes gruff.
What Saba wants to ask, the thing she hopes for the most, is that he will testify to the nonconsummation of their marriage in a letter intended only for a future husband. Surely this can’t cause any harm. Surely he must realize that it is in her best interest to conceal the truth so that she can inherit his fortune. So, Saba reasons, he must have no fears of her speaking out publicly. And in any case, why wouldn’t he help her in this small way? If it causes him no embarrassment, why wouldn’t he give her this small insurance policy against a second loveless marriage in the event that she never makes it to America? Is she being greedy? Saba braces herself. She has to ask him for this one thing. Otherwise who would ever believe she is a virgin? She would never have a chance with a man her own age, one whom she might love more than even Mahtab.
“I was just thinking,” she begins carefully, “how well-suited we are for each other.” She gathers together every ounce of sincerity she can muster into a tight ball that she flings at Abbas with each calculated word. “I would never say anything to hurt you.” Confusion colors Abbas’s face. “But would you want me to marry again?”
His expression darkens. “I don’t think I’d have much say then.”
She sighs. “You could write a letter. I would never show it to anyone. Write down our secret, and I promise to protect it for us.” Her voice shakes with desperation, and she is ashamed now at having entered this conversation. She touches his hand.
“
Azizam
,” he says, “if I write it down, your inheritance would be in danger.”
“That’s why you can trust me. It’s something we can do for each other.”
Abbas laughs at her cunning. “My smart little wife,” he says, and taps her hand listlessly. Then, without answering, he gets up to go to bed. “I don’t want to talk about death anymore,” he mumbles over his shoulder as he makes his way through the house.
On the ninth night, in a fit of bad sleep likely caused by the impending funeral and their soon-to-be-permanent separation, Agha Mansoori takes a last breath and joins his wife. Afraid of what she will find, Saba doesn’t return to his house to check his medicines. She doesn’t smell the air or browse for guilly purchases. She says goodbye and promises to be his witness before God that he never harmed himself. She passes out the exact amount of halva that was offered during his wife’s mourning period.
Saba and her father help the family shroud Agha Mansoori in the storeroom and carry him out to be buried beside his wife under the double tombstone. Father and daughter stand side by side, each saying a silent prayer. Each missing a lost other self. Saba wonders to which God her confused father is praying now. Probably to the God of his wife, whom he followed devotedly all the time he was with her. His breathing is shallow and pained, his eyes bloodshot. Long after the family leaves with the clerics, Saba and her father remain in the cavelike hollow built into the hillside, silently watching, thinking. How much has changed since her mother left . . .
to go where
?
“Baba, tell me what happened to Maman?” Her voice echoes through the dark length of the open storeroom. It is a long, tubelike structure that narrows toward an invisible end, its walls of mud and rock rough-hewn, its deep crevices unexplored. Saba wraps her arms around her shivering body and glances at the cartons of food, the black-market products bought at steep prices, the foreign luxuries— digestive biscuits, La Vache Qui Rit soft cheese, Johnson’s baby shampoo, Canada Dry, nothing all that perishable—hidden in the deepest clefts.
Agha Hafezi takes a tired breath. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I can’t give you what you want, Saba jan. I have my theories. I’ve looked. You saw how my letter was returned, and they never told me anything. I had to divorce her or risk losing you and our life.”