A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (7 page)

very woman has a talent, and if you ask me, every talent is worthwhile and important. But as always, Bahareh Hafezi didn’t agree with me. She told her daughters: If you don’t prove yourself smart enough to heal bodies alongside men or design heaven-onearth structures like the thirty-three arches or write beautiful verses like the
Rubaiyat
, then the world might decide that you will be the lady who makes the best cakes or the most savory stews or the best opium pipe for her husband. That will be your role.

“A sad fate! Worthless work!” she said, when she wanted the girls to read a book.
What crazy
bazi
! The woman was as one-sided as a mullah’s coin. After all, Khanom Omidi’s talent was cooking, and if she had chosen to be a brain surgeon, who would make the perfect saffron rice pudding, exactly thick enough, full of almonds, never clumpy? The girls used to watch her make the pudding, patiently grinding the long fiery tendrils of saffron with a fist-sized mortar and pestle, the
scratch scratch
of pollen against rock, releasing the aroma of both a heavy feast and a soft perfume, and staining her fat, already yellow fingers a deeper orange. Like a magician, she had so many tools she wouldn’t let me borrow. A cherry pitter. A flower-shaped mold on a long stick for Window Bread. The tiny mortar and pestle.
That woman was the Sorceress of Saffron.
And this was the reason she was happy and still healthy at such an old age, because as everyone knows, saffron makes you laugh. When the sun sets at the end of each day, all the women in the soggy rice fields in the North go home tired, with their pants rolled up and their legs soaking and diseased, a bright triangular cloth, the
chadorshab
, tied securely around their waists to protect their backs and carry this and that. Elsewhere, women who work in the rose fields of Qamsar or the tea fields here in Gilan go home smelling of roses and tea, their skirts full of the leaves and petals they have spent all day pulling. But in other parts of Iran, still, women in saffron fields arrive home in tight, jolly clusters, crazy with laughter, and they continue on like this, well into the night.
The Hafezi girls were told that their talents lay in their brains, and that this would make them different. They would continue the family tradition of success and moneymaking. This expectation was there in every word, every gesture, every promise.
“Can we go to the beach?” they would ask their father.
“My daughters, I will take you to the sea and dry you with hundred-dollar bills,” he would say, because that was a sign of his love and commitment.
Later, after the day their plans went wrong and he was left with Saba only, he said to her, “Saba jan, you don’t need to go to America. You are brilliant and you have fine taste.” And that meant that Saba would still shine here in her baba’s eyes.
Talents, the Hafezis believed, transcended location and circumstance.
You know, I too have a gift—the best one, a power over words, over legends, truth, and lies. For money I weave rush into baskets and hats and small rugs, but for my friends I can weave a tale so subtly, so beautifully, with such rises and falls, such whispers, that children and adults are lulled like snakes in a pot. They sway with me, allow me to carry them away. Then when I’m finished, they wait eagerly to hear:
Up we went and there was . . . which one? Yogurt or yogurt soda? Maast? Doogh? Truth? Lies?
Under the
korsi
blanket draped over a hot stove, where feet are warmed and stories are told, I reign supreme. Though . . . they say that the
korsi
is the birthplace of all lies.
I was the one who first told Saba about her body, about marriage, because her mother hadn’t. Okay, so I didn’t tell the full story. I gave it the usual flourishes of the storyteller, jinns and diseases, untimely deaths and the smallish possibility of some vague fulfillment. But most of all, I told her this: books kill a woman’s sexual energy, the allure you’re born with. It can be snuffed out, you know. And Saba and Mahtab were doomed from the age of three, far too educated to ever understand how to appeal to any man. Sure, they could get into trouble like anyone else, but could they lure with their eyes like Ponneh can? Girls who can read books cannot read men.
Their mother is the one who gave them this fate, with her notebooks and her ideas and her fears. She used to watch the girls and chew her lips raw because she wanted them to have grand storybook destinies; and when you have a task like that, you can’t sit around bonding over tea, plucking each other’s eyebrows. You have to stamp out the distractions. That was her kind of mother-love. Grand, useless.
She ruined those girls. Deep inside where no one could see, something was stunted. Their father didn’t help the matter either— because, tell me, how can a girl who has been told to dry herself with hundred-dollar bills ever be a good wife to anyone?

y eighteen, Saba has collected five hundred pages of simple and fancy English words, not only to someday show her mother— though after seven years without a word, hope is waning—but also because the word lists have become a part of her life. Having studied the language since early childhood with an intensity unheard of in Gilan, Saba feels a tingle of pride each time she catches herself thinking in English.

Vile
.
Vagrant. Vapid.
Saba glances at a trio of aimless girls in the alley behind a local store—an impossibly small square box that somehow has everything for sale, not just eggs and sugar, but milk in plastic bags with snip-off tops to drop into a jug, a dozen kinds of pickles, saffron, soap, piles of pencil erasers, toy watches, dried fruit, olives, and nuts. Every corner is crammed full—loosely categorized stacks one behind another, stretching deep beyond the inner walls, burlap sacks of rice around the register, garlic cloves hanging over the door. Saba clutches her rush basket, now full of tea and sugar, and turns away from the girls crouching close together in the far corner of the alley. Though they hide it well, Saba is expert enough to know what they are doing. It is an intimate act, a shared risk, smoking together in public. She smiles at the fumes wafting subtly out of the front folds of one girl’s blue chador, an unnecessary extra covering since her colorful, layered Gilaki garb is modest enough. But chadors are ideal for hiding things. The girl has pulled hers up high over a tight scarf and a long skirt of greens and reds not because she is pious. No, this girl is just bored, playing games, as Saba does with her friends in her pantry.
Up above, a crow calls out from its perch on a phone line.
It is autumn again. The ground is covered with trampled wild berries, pieces of orange rinds, and crushed cans. Cool breezes carry plastic bags into treetops. Wet and dry, red and yellow leaves drift over the streets. The air smells like rain, like a fistful of wet morning grass held up to the nose. Saba feels trapped here, with the blissful poor, in a world made up of the scattered parts of many different eras. A group of older women passes by her. Over their long-skirted, brightly mismatched village dresses, they have draped the austere black of city women. They are probably headed to catch a bus to Rasht or to a holy shrine, where they will be black crows pecking and preening in a line. She takes the time to notice the parts of them most unlike her mother, with her elegant clothes, her illegal books and her defiant red nails. The village women flap their fabric wings and cluster together. One of them has double-wrapped her chador tightly around her chest and tied it in front—rural practicality, very unfashionable. Saba looks at their sizable hooked noses and the way another one clutches the loose cloth with her teeth so her hands can be free to hold bags. Her lips disappear behind mouthfuls of black and suddenly she has a bird beak. Is Saba more like Bahareh Hafezi or this woman?
She nods hello and continues on. Minutes later, she turns toward a small dirt road at the edge of the town center and lingers. She shouldn’t be here alone. Her father doesn’t like it when Saba makes herself a target, as he puts it. But this is where the Tehrani promised to meet her, so this is where she will wait. He appears after fifteen minutes, an oily, opium-addicted twenty-year-old with uneven stubble, yellow teeth, and a premature bald spot in the middle of his too-long hair. He waves a black plastic bag in her face.
“A thousand tomans,” he says. No greeting, as usual. Saba doesn’t even know the Tehrani’s first name. Just that he’s someone’s cousin’s cousin, and that he comes from Tehran carrying illegal treasures for sale. Most video men are cleaner, more careful with their dress. But Saba prefers this one because he knows his material. No bumbling analysis of movies he hasn’t seen, no worthless advice. (“Yes,
India Jones
,” one of the video men recommended once, “a very nice Hindi romance.”) The Tehrani is a connoisseur.
She reaches into her pocket and hands him some bills. He chuckles.
“
Each
,” he says. “I brought good things. All arrived this month.” He glances around the corner. “The price covers the trip and the special order. I do it only for you.”
“It’s still expensive. Let me look first,” she says, and when he hesitates, she adds, “What, you think I’ll run off with it?” He smirks and hands over the bag. Saba peers inside. She tries not to gasp for fear that the price will jump—because inside the bag there are six magazines, half of them fashion issues, none of them more than a year old, two videotapes, and five audiocassettes. At the bottom of the bag she digs up a tattered novel with no cover. “Oh my God,” she whispers.
The Tehrani smiles. His shoulders tense as Saba looks behind her and throws an arm around his sweaty neck. “Okay, okay,” he says, “I told you I’d get it, didn’t I?”
She picks up the book again.
The Satanic Verses
, by Salman Rushdie. Saba has never read a novel in the same year it was published. Let alone one that could get her killed.
“That book is more . . . as we agreed,” says the Tehrani, but Saba doesn’t care, though this is one volume she will have to read and burn. She turns one of the tapes over in her hand. “It’s just what you asked for,” the Tehrani says proudly. “My man in America taped the Top Forty off the radio, plus the usual: Beatles, Marley, Dylan, Redding, U2, even Michael Jackson, the devil’s mouthpiece himself. The videos are TV shows from
this
year. Clear sound this time, hardly any white lines or shaking. Trust me, you’ll like.”
Saba thrusts a wad of bills into the Tehrani’s hand. He counts them and says, “I have a surprise from America for my best customer.” He pulls out a yellow bottle—a treasure that Saba has hunted for daily since the revolution, along with many other foreign things she used to love. “Neutrogena, all yours,” he says. “Go make your friends jealous.”
Saba opens it and breathes in. “You’re the only good soul left in Tehran.”
He coughs and says, “How about a kiss, then?” tapping his cheek. Saba raises an eyebrow, wishes him a safe trip, and moves quickly to her own end of the village.
A few paces outside the house, she hears voices pouring from the open windows of their large sitting room. First the high-pitched whines of the
khanom
s, strained and out of breath, followed by the low drones of village men, meandering slowly, struggling to do so wisely. None of them her father’s voice.
Someone lets out a low-pitched belly laugh. Someone else says, “I swear I’m not exaggerating. May God strike me dead right now . . .”
Saba enters through a back door that leads into the hallway next to her bedroom. She tosses her basket onto the bed, tucking the bag of Western contraband under her mattress. She stares into the mirror. Tufts of reddish-orange have escaped the headscarf loosely draped in an urban style over her shoulder. Last month she let a seventy-year-old woman with a secret salon in her living room color her hair
—
a costly mistake.
Someone calls from the living room, “Saba. Saba, come and join us, child.”
She grabs a cloth and wipes her face clean of makeup while straining to make out the individual voices. Is Reza among them? What about Ponneh? She tries to decipher the conversation to see if her friends are already establishing the alibi the three of them will use in an hour or two to escape—but the buzz of voices doesn’t include theirs. She pulls her scarf behind her neck: if she can’t let her hair fall free, she favors the traditional Gilaki way of wrapping the fabric around her neck and tying it in back, taking care to show off a finger of center-parted hair. Before she leaves, she eyes her pile of English textbooks, the only Western books she can keep in plain sight without fear of fines, arrest, or at least a long fatherly scolding. At the top of the pile, a science book is open, revealing a photograph of a flower in a delicious shade of orange. The caption says: “California Panther Lily.”
Vibrant,
Saba thinks, repeating the list of English
v
-words she memorized today. She says the words to herself over and over as she checks the room one last time.
Verdant.
If her mother was here, Saba would use
verdant
in a sentence. If Mahtab really
did
go to America, how many good English words would she know by now? Probably all of them—more than a person can learn from smuggled novels and magazines, or from browsing a tattered children’s dictionary, or even from the best Iranian tutors. But Saba is eighteen now and she knows the world of adults. She doesn’t talk about Mahtab in this way because girls who are supposed to be dead can’t learn English. Still, the mystery of her mother’s departure keeps Mahtab alive—one day Saba will know the whole truth.

In the hall, she almost collides with her father, who likes to walk and think about four different things at once. He isn’t a large man, but he has solid, imposing features that remind Saba of a wrestler. There are dark lines above his cheeks and his jowls are speckled with gray. His watery eyes, sad even when he’s smiling, give him an air of kindness. He doesn’t talk much, likes to keep his thoughts and explanations short. But he is firm in his opinions, one of which is that he’d rather be safe than express them. He likes fine things, which is why, he often tells her, he married a woman with a master’s degree and had daughters who studied English for fun before they could ride a bike.