A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (29 page)

“No,” Ponneh whispers. “No, no. It’s supposed to be fake.” Tears stream down her blotched, cracked cheeks, forming rivulets that foretell the coming end of Ponneh’s beauty. She jerks away from Reza. She takes the camera from him and begins to snap photos, oblivious, her bare arms jutting out of her robes. Before Saba can react, Reza has pulled Ponneh away, taking the camera from her and motioning for Saba to follow. Across the square, Dr. Zohreh is heading toward her car. Probably she has come to do the same thing: to bear witness and document. As Reza tries to navigate through the crowds, Ponneh convulses. Big racking sobs seize her body and cause her to shudder and collapse into feverish, almost deranged spasms.
“Stop it,” he whispers through clenched teeth. “Ponneh, stop it right now.”
When they reach the cars, Saba notices that her face too is damp. But Ponneh has known about this event, suffered over it for months, without telling anyone. Despite her own scars, Saba knows she can never understand Ponneh’s pain. She fixes her chador and helps Reza put their friend in her car.
Dr. Zohreh reaches the parking area. “Is she okay?”
Reza nods. “We’re going home.” He looks to Saba, who introduces them.
When Ponneh sees Dr. Zohreh, she starts to scramble out of Saba’s car. “Dr. Zohreh,” she says, her voice gravelly. “I’m going with you. We can print the pictures today.”
“What?”
demands Reza, but Ponneh ignores him.
“Of course.” Dr. Zohreh glances around. “If you want—”
“No need to trouble the doctor,” says Reza, “Saba will drive you and I’ll follow.”
“No!” Ponneh is becoming very loud now, and Saba eyes a
pasdar
watching them from across the street. She nudges Reza. Ponneh continues her rant. “It’s my fault!” She takes a shallow breath. “She refused that man because she loved me. You know what’s worse?” She swallows hard. “I’m not . . . I mean . . . I did love her, but I’m not—”
“Yes, I know.” Dr. Zohreh doctor lifts Ponneh’s face and whispers, “Farnaz wouldn’t want you to feel guilty.”
Ponneh laughs bitterly. “You know what Khanom Basir used to say?
Only die for someone who at least has a fever for you.
Someone should’ve told Farnaz that.”
“What a thing,” Reza whispers, “my poor girl.” The words land hard on Saba’s chest.
“No, no, Ponneh jan,” Dr. Zohreh says. She strokes Ponneh’s hair over her scarf. “You are wrong. She didn’t die for you. Farnaz wanted to live her own way. She died for that. It was her calling and
that
is a very good reason to die.”
A good reason to die
. What a stupid thing to say,
Saba thinks. How can Dr. Zohreh expect Ponneh not to feel guilty? Doesn’t she realize that Ponneh’s guilt isn’t for anything she has done, but only for being alive? Saba has no clear memories of struggling to get out of the sea with Mahtab. She doesn’t quite recall letting go of her hand. What she remembers most is Mahtab in the fisherman’s boat. But sometimes in her nightmares, she watches her sister disappear and is consumed by the guilt of not letting herself drop into the depths beside her, of failing to leave the world the way she entered it, with Mahtab, and opening a chasm between them that all the teaspoons in Iran couldn’t fill.
The
pasdar
is walking toward them. Ponneh is half inside the car, her feet scraping the gravel outside. Dr. Zohreh lifts Ponneh’s legs into the car. Reza’s eyes are already fixed on the approaching
pasdar
and he takes a step away from the women.
“
Salam alaikum,
” the
pasdar
greets Reza. “Who are these women to you?”
Reza doesn’t stoop as he used to in front of
pasdar
s. He does nothing to hide his height. In fact, Saba thinks she sees him pull back his shoulders.
“I saw they needed help,” he says. “They’re my neighbors. I’m parked just there.”
“Papers,” the
pasdar
barks at Dr. Zohreh.
Dr. Zohreh reaches into her purse for her identification. Saba prays the officer doesn’t look into the cars, that he doesn’t see the cameras. Dr. Zohreh shows her papers with perfect calm. “I’m a doctor,” she says. “These girls are my patients.”
The
pasdar
bends and glances in the backseat at Ponneh. Saba holds her breath, willing him not to spot the cameras. “I saw this girl in the square. . . . Why the hysterics?” He waits for an answer, but Ponneh just glares at him with red eyes and swollen cheeks. No matter how much she tries, it’s hard to be threatening with a runny nose and bewildered eyes that have just witnessed death. He mutters, “We shouldn’t allow women and children to these things. It’s undignified.” Then he straightens, and Saba thinks he will ask to look inside the car. But the officer nods and turns back toward the square. He says to Reza as he walks away, “Go to your own car. This isn’t your business.”
Without another word, they each fumble for keys and drift away. The gloom of dusk settles all around as Saba follows Dr. Zohreh’s orange Jian and Reza’s green Paykan north toward Cheshmeh.
Ponneh lies in the back of Saba’s car and they ride silently for a while. Saba counts the passing seconds, willing her friend to come back to life. They drive out of the village, past the sloping dirt roads leading to the highway. As they pull onto the main road, flanked by the familiar rocky embankments that signal the way home, Saba struggles for something to say. She thinks of how small Farnaz looked, hanging in the air with her feet crossed one over the other like a lost child in a too-big chair, and she knows that Ponneh is thinking of her too. That Farnaz will haunt her for a long time.
The forest appears on the horizon. Ponneh is slumped, her body crumpled in a corner of the wide backseat, her eyes so bloodshot that the whites are gone. Saba glances from the road once or twice, reaches back and gropes for Ponneh’s hand. Then she turns and blurts out, “Ponneh jan, I can’t stand you thinking this is your fault.” She thinks of a day when she too was in such a state. What did Saba need to hear then? Maybe Ponneh should open her eyes to how uncontrollable things are in this new world; that Farnaz’s fate wasn’t about one or two afternoons of experimentation, but about an unmarried girl who wanted to outwit her captors. “If this is your fault,” she says, “then what happened to me has to be my fault too . . . and I don’t believe that. It’s tempting, but no . . .” Ponneh sits up. “It’s about Abbas.” Saba’s hands move on their own down the wheel. The sun’s rays jut past the felt visor and warm her skin. “I used to think it was my fault,” she says, “because I should’ve annulled the marriage and let them disinherit me.”
“What are you talking about?” Ponneh asks.
Saba exhales.. “He never slept with me. He’s completely impotent.”
Ponneh is wide-eyed. “That’s good,” she ventures. “Right?”
Saba laughs a little. She rubs her neck and tries to push the heavy feeling out with her fingers. “Maybe,” she says. “Except he hired these women to attack me.” She waits for her meaning to become clear. “You know . . . because of his reputation. Two
dehati
s
. . .
maybe Basiji, I’m not sure. He let them into our house and paid them to hurt me.”
Ponneh’s face grows more ashen. “Oh God, Saba,” she whispers.
“I’m okay now,” says Saba, deciding that there is no need to tell her about the bleeding. “But see what I mean? Is that
my
fault?”
“Of course not,” says Ponneh. “But it’s different.”
“It’s not different,” she says to Ponneh. “None of us can prevent these things. This garbage happens all the time, and you and I can’t change any of it. We can’t even see it coming! Blaming yourself is crazy. You have to take care of yourself, Ponneh jan.”
Ponneh leans in, her head between the two seats. “I hope you told your father,” she says. “Those women should be in jail.” Saba shakes her head. She doesn’t want to reveal her hopes for the money or a future abroad—
when will it be time?
She has such an urge to run. “You haven’t told him?” She grabs the headrest, her voice shrill. “You’re going to let Abbas get away with it? Haven’t you learned anything from Dr. Zohreh? You
have
to say something. It’s not only about you. What if they do it again?”
The orange Jian disappears behind a mountainous curve ahead. The air is stifling and Saba rolls down the window. The smells and sounds of the road pour into the car. She turns and gives Ponneh a pleading look. “Just don’t tell anyone, okay? Things are different for converted Christians. Baba and I can’t have a legal battle with a devout Muslim. If they start digging around . . . Look, Ponneh jan, I’ve already waited so long . . .” Her face grows hot. “You can’t tell Reza. Promise?”
“Fine,” says Ponneh. “But I think it’s wrong.” Saba is glad to see the fire back in Ponneh’s voice. “You should go right up to them and slap them across the face.”
“Next time I see them,” Saba mutters, and they drive silently through the trees.
That night, when Abbas knocks, she ignores him. She listens to “Fast Car” and decides she is finished here. Would it be so hard to try to leave? She falls asleep with images of suspended pink-striped sneakers and red high heels swimming through the foggy places that separate her from her dream universe. And she thanks God that he plucked Mahtab out of Cheshmeh just as the world was about to crumble down.

year before the revolution, when the children were eight years old, Soghra and Kobra captured their attention for a full three months. It was all any of them talked about. Soghra and Kobra were sisters who lived in the next town—distant cousins of Ponneh’s, who told everyone about Soghra’s marriage plans. Soghra was twelve, but her parents were desperate people, stricken with poverty and oldworld thinking. They said that she had already “become a woman” and so she was ready to marry. Shameful! They married her off to a man whose sister had come to a local hammam to examine Soghra’s body, as was customary in my parents’ time. And what was so fascinating about her marriage? What made the girls follow her in the streets and tell stories of her to their eager friends? Well, the man Soghra was engaged to marry was forty years old.

“Are you sure he’s forty? Maybe he’s fifty!” one of them said as they spied on the man’s shop in the marketplace.
“It doesn’t matter if he’s forty or fifty,” Mahtab announced. She was always sure of everything that she said. “Because you stop counting at thirty when you’re officially old.”
“It
does
matter, stupid,” Saba said, “because fifty means he’ll die ten years sooner.” They had this same ridiculous conversation half a dozen times.
After her marriage, we adults watched Soghra for signs of what the man might have done to her. The girls could sense it too. “What do they do?” I heard Saba asking, and Ponneh said she had
some
idea. Apparently she and Reza whispered about it sometimes. Mahtab asked them a hundred dirty, dirty questions before I lost patience and separated them. Usually we laughed at the children’s curious talk, but on that day, because of poor Soghra, my ladle hit the bottom of the pot, and I ran out of good humor.
The next time the children saw Soghra, they went on and on about how she didn’t look different at all. I tried not to laugh at their shock. She didn’t walk funny as Reza had said she would, and her face hadn’t sprouted moles. Her feet hadn’t swollen, and she didn’t grow giant breasts. And—here’s the part that’s my fault—she didn’t have blood coming out of her nose. Fine, so I had told them that married women get a lot of nosebleeds, and that is why a sheet is needed to catch the bride’s first nosebleed on the wedding night. What do you want, that I tell them the truth at eight years old?
I did notice two small changes in the bride. As she paraded around the Cheshmeh food market, pulled from place to place by her thick-mustached husband, twelve-year-old Soghra seemed taller and damn disappointed with her fate. But then again, I could be mistaken. Maybe it was just the high heels her husband forced her to wear because he had always wanted a sophisticated wife (and these were, after all, prerevolution days). And maybe it wasn’t sadness clouding her eyes, but all that blue eye shadow.
“It’s a shame. A real shame,” Agha Hafezi said when he was sipping tea with his wife and me and Khanom Omidi. “How can the law allow the rape of a
child
?”
I reminded him that in Iran rape is a very specific thing.
Too specific
.
But why dwell on sad things? Here is the reason I tell this story. Afterward, when the children were sitting in a circle with their feet touching, Saba said the strangest thing for a girl so young. She said that it was good for Soghra to have her own house to govern and no sister to share it with. A logical choice, she called it, since Kobra was such boring company. I wonder if she would still say that to Soghra if she ran into her today. Even though I can’t imagine what goes on inside Saba’s marriage, sometimes I see that same sad, haunted look, all covered in eye shadow, in the faraway gaze of poor Saba Hafezi.

eople say that twins feel the force of each other’s movements from afar. Saba has read magazine stories about a miraculous few who have felt change overcome their twin while completely unaware that the other exists. In the frightening first days after witnessing death again, Saba tries to feel the forces in Mahtab’s world. She gives herself up to dark thoughts of her sister sinking into the water, of a
pasdar
gripping her with his knife, forcing her to admit truths that she still doesn’t know. When the images threaten to undo her, she fights them off by recalling better ones, Mahtab singing in the boat back to shore and holding her mother’s hand in the airport.
Yes, there is a good chance
.

On quiet mornings she imagines her sister, her TV-quality life, and talks to her like one of her American friends would do.
What do I do now?
she asks Mahtab the day after Farnaz’s hanging. Mahtab’s voice swirls in her head, repeating the same command again and again:
Get out! Get out! Get out!
That night she begins to entertain an enticing possibility. What if she ran away to America
now
? She could try for a visa, forge Abbas’s signature, tell them she’s leaving behind a husband to make it easier. But the fear of
pasdar
s and border controls holds her here like it does so many others. One day soon—before she turns twenty-two, or twenty-four, or thirty at most—Abbas will be gone. When that day comes, what will keep her in Cheshmeh? If she is patient, she will be an independent widow in New York or California. Maybe she will go to journalism school. She did, after all, save herself for an American university. She digs up old travel guidebooks collected by her mother before the revolution, and even finds piles of papers from visa offices, passport agencies, and airlines—a treasure of information that her mother amassed just in case. There is comfort in knowing that this desire to run is inherited, a piece of her mother that can never be taken from her. One day soon her feet will loosen their hold on this sodden Gilaki soil and she will go.