The Girl from the Garden (12 page)

Zolekhah and Kokab ascend the stairs, walk past the purple blossoms of the wisteria, glide down the breezeway toward the farthest room. Hidden behind the curtains, Rakhel watches them walk by her window. Rakhel tries to catch a glimpse of Kokab’s face behind the ruband, to see a lock of her hair. She looks at the drape of the fabric and tries to discern the shape of the body veiled beneath it. Zolekhah opens the door to the room at the farthest end of the build
ing and waits for Kokab to enter, before she walks in herself and closes the door.

By late afternoon, the courtyard is still empty. Fatimeh finishes preparing dinner and retires to her own room to say her evening prayers. Sadiqeh and Zahra take their leave for the day. Rakhel watches them go from the slit in the drawn curtains. They walk with their arms about each other’s waist as they whisper. They laugh out loud and turn to look over their shoulders in the direction of Asher’s home. Rakhel darts away from the window. She touches the flesh of her burned palm with a forefinger. Her lips are cracked, her throat is dry and her stomach empty.

Rakhel did not intend such a vigilant fast to mark the arrival of Asher’s second wife, but after Asher left that morning, she stayed in the tangled sheets of the bed, her knees pulled into her chest. Her husband had risen from bed, finished his ablutions, and dressed as he always did. But when he took his leave, he paused for a moment, his back to where she sat, his hand on the door latch. She waited for him to turn, to take her in his arms, but he only stood there. He sighed, shook his head and left without looking back.

She wept then. Wept most of the morning. She buried her face in his pillow and inhaled the scent of his sleep. She crawled out of bed to where his nightshirt lay crumpled on the floor and held it against her cheek, repeating his name until her voice cracked and she felt a sharp pain in her throat. Then she took up her station at the window
and waited and watched the comings and the goings of the household. Everyone had forgotten her, even Khorsheed. No one knocked to ask if she was thirsty, if they could bring her some water, if she needed witness to her suffering. The day proceeded like any other day, except for her absence and the anticipation of Kokab’s arrival.

By dusk, Rakhel sits motionless on the floor, spent of crying. She thinks about Kokab sitting in her room, dressed in fine clothes, adorned with jewels, waiting for Asher. Rakhel tries to imagine Kokab’s body, the feel of her skin. She pictures Kokab’s arms embracing Asher, and the thought shakes her so violently that she falls into another fit of hysterical curses, damning Kokab, her own barren womb, and the G-d that created her for this life of suffering. Exhausted from her fury, she lies back down and takes up her weeping once more.

Rakhel hears muezzins all across the city begin the evening azan. She sits up to pray, mimicking Fatimeh’s gestures, prostrating over and over, chanting Arabic words she doesn’t understand, but hopes that G-d will hear and either take mercy upon her or strike her down in His wrath. In the silence that follows the muezzins’ song, Rakhel finally hears the sound of Asher’s voice in the courtyard. She reaches under her shirt to where she keeps the iron key tied about her waist. She clasps it and shuts her eyes. “Please, please, please,” she whispers.

She runs to the window to see Asher through the crack
in the curtains. He lights a lantern and walks across the courtyard in the direction of her room. She hurries to the mirror, wipes her nose with the end of her skirt, then pulls her fingers through her hair. By the time he reaches the door, Rakhel is standing behind it, straining to hear his footsteps. He knocks once and she catches her breath. “Rakhel?” She can hear his breathing behind the closed door. “Rakhel?”

“Yes?”

“I came to say that I am home. Did you help Kokab when she arrived?”

Rakhel clutches the key at her waist with her burned hand and winces.

“Rakhel?”

She breathes in gulps, tries to pull enough air into her lungs so that she can say something. She touches the smooth ungiving surface of the wood. She imagines Asher’s hand on the other side of the door. She presses her lips against the wood, strains to feel, through the surface, the stroke of his fingertips.

“Rakhel,” Asher begins, a tremor in his voice, but the sentence ends there. “Listen to me,” he says, this time with a firmer tone, “I won’t be seeing you tonight. Go to sleep.”

Rakhel bends forward and wraps her arms around her body. Tears drip from her nose and chin, her sobs audible now. She hears the cold steel of the latch lift and she holds her breath. She waits, but he does not push the door open. She listens to him whisper to himself. Then, the cold steel of the latch settles softly back, and Rakhel hears the rustle
of Asher’s qaba and the sound of his feet recede down the breezeway in the direction of the farthest room.

Mahboubeh holds the
tip
of the pomegranate branch close to her face. She touches the small, hard red buds gently with her forefinger. “So much longing,” she says, “all here, enclosed in this sheath, waiting to blossom.” She smiles and releases the branch. Her garden is on the brink of blooming. A few more weeks. A bit more sunshine. And then, one morning, she will wake to tender green leaves. And blossoms. She sees the green vine that has been climbing her rosebushes all winter, insistent in its path. She holds it, the fine hairs irritating the skin of her hand. “You, too, will blossom soon,” she says. She does not tug on the vine to uproot it but lays it back gently in its path. “We’ll wait, then, to see.”

Mahboubeh sits in a chair and looks at her garden. Kokab’s arrival must have been something like this. On the end of winter, with so much life held fast within her. They said something awoke in Asher Malacouti when she arrived. Something opened in him and he changed. Mahboubeh imagines her uncle waiting hesitantly before the door of that farthest room, the moment before Asher opens it that first night when Kokab enters his home. He holds the lantern and breathes in once. He straightens his shoulders. Then, he cracks the door ajar and peers into the dim room.

Kokab sits before a lit candle, her hair veiled. The candle provides the only light in the room and its dimness
comforts Asher. He places his own lantern outside and enters quietly. Kokab remains seated, staring at the flame. He stands before her, hesitating. Perhaps he should sleep this first night in his bedroom with Rakhel, give the woman some time to settle, ease Rakhel’s anxieties. He needs to be more diplomatic, he thinks. Then he notices that Kokab sways slightly back and forth. The folds of her skirt gather beneath her, allowing for a faint outline of her legs. The skin of her throat is bare, gold in the warm light.
Though not the skin of fresh youth,
Asher reminds himself.
This act is a mitzvah,
he thinks.
Certainly no other man would have her, if not for the scandal, then for her age.
He continues to study her sitting before him, quiet, motionless, as though willing herself invisible. Her lips are still moist, though, and the thick of hair beneath that veil. . . . When he realizes his trance, he clears his throat and calculates that she has perhaps fifteen years of childbearing left. Enough time, no doubt, to bear a son.

The silence becomes too ponderous. He steps forward and speaks. “Would you rather be alone tonight?” he asks, though he isn’t certain if he has spoken at all. “Are you comfortable?” He tries his voice again, still uncertain if the words he forms in his mind leave his lips. “Have you had dinner?”

He realizes that the woman sitting before him refuses to acknowledge his presence, or hear his questions, and so his sentences fall to the floor, unheard. The blood rushes to his face. “Would it have suited you better if I had left you
in your brothers’ home? Always ashamed, always the source of shame?” These words feel sharper in his mouth, he waits for a response to their edge, but they, too, meet with her silence. “You are now my wife, it does not matter anymore that you have been divorced, because you are now Asher Malacouti’s wife.”

Kokab turns her face away from him. The veil slips off of her head and onto her shoulders, then off of her shoulders and onto the floor. She does not move to replace it. The candlelight illuminates the black of her hair. Asher can discern a multitude of colors gleaming in that blackness. “My wife,” he repeats. He turns to face the wall, to steady himself. He breathes in a few times, closes his eyes.
Why this light-headedness?
he wonders. He shakes his head, straightens his shoulders, and turns to look at her, again, sitting before him as though she is made of stone.

“You are now my wife. You will have my children, you will befriend Rakhel, she will help you raise them, you will live without any want, you will eat well, you will dress well, you will grow old well.” At these words, she shudders. He softens his tone. “They will forget that you were ever married before me, you will be known only as my wife, the mother of my children. What more do you want?”

Kokab does not answer. Asher paces the room. His shadow looms treacherously on the walls. When he sees the monstrous form of himself cast on the walls, he puts his hand to his temples and turns away from her again. He keeps his back to her for a few moments, watching the shadow of her
profile, her shoulders bent forward. She raises her hand, brings it to touch her cheek. The hand falls limply onto her lap.
I have frightened her,
he thinks.
I am, after all, a stranger to her.

“Forgive me,” Asher says. He waits a moment, looking down at the top of her head, the white of the scalp a thin river, the lobe of one ear visible. He sits down across from her. He wonders if her skin is warm to the touch, soft, like fine gold you’ve held in your hand for some time. He watches her for several moments and tries to find words to comfort her, to assure her that he means no harm, that indeed, he intends on helping her. Finally, he reasons it best to allow her the silence until she feels ready to address him.

Several more minutes pass as Kokab looks at the flicker of the candle. Asher listens to the slight crackle of that humble flame, to the crickets outside, to the occasional voice of strangers passing in the street, to the subtle breath of this woman sitting before him. Then, Kokab speaks, “There is the story of the three moths dancing around the candle flame.” She says her words slowly, her eyes still on the candle. Asher feels the darkness expand and believes, for a moment, that all that exists rests in the orb of light between them. He lowers his eyes to look at his own hands, clasped in his lap. “The first moth spins madly in his ecstasy, drawing nearer and nearer to the fire, but he stops when he feels the warmth and pulls back, and remains content to look with longing at the light from a distance,” she says. “The second moth, in his fervor, singes the tips of his wings and in fear, flies away. And there is the third moth. This one, so
enthralled by the light, throws himself fully into the flame and burns.” Silence, again, between them. Asher listens to the rustle of leaves outside. After several minutes, she raises her face and looks at him for the first time, her eyes steady. He feels as though he is looking into the expanse of a deep, deep well, at the bottom of which he sees himself, diminutive, drowned.

“You are that flame,” he says. “And am I the moth that will burn?”

“The flame doesn’t know the moths, Asher. Neither the moth gazing from a distance, nor the one burning.” She does not turn away from his gaze. He looks at the resolution of her lips, the strength of her chin. He swallows. Then frowns. He looks down at his useless hands, then up at her eyes, again, her deep, unforgiving eyes.

“My father died when I was just a boy. He left me some land. It wasn’t much. But something to build upon. Some earth to create upon. The land brought me fortune and I made with that fortune a greater fortune. And through this, you see, through this . . . Something of him continues. But I have no child, no son, to give the work of my days any meaning.” He brings his face closer to her face, leans in because he feels that these words should not be spoken with distance between the person who utters them and the one who hears. “I . . . I want you . . .” He pauses, weighs the consequence of those words. He starts again, in almost a whisper. “I want you to give me children, to give me hope.”

“Children you may be able to wrest from my womb, but hope is not something I can give.”

Asher flinches. Kokab looks at him another moment, then looks down at the candle between them.

“This is not what I meant to say,” he says. “There is more than this. More reasons than this for why you are here, why I have taken you as my wife.” Sitting there before him, she is lost again in her solitude.
Perhaps she is not here at all,
Asher thinks.
Perhaps she is a phantom of my mind born from these many years of longing.
He considers reaching across the vast space between them to take hold of her slender hand and pull her into himself, pull her into being, for him. A moment passes, then another, and with each passing second, that space between them becomes greater and greater. Asher panics that he may never reach her. He leans forward again and says, “Every day, I wake and I walk to the caravansary. Every day, the sound of the same merchants, the haggling, the clicking of the abacas, coins and coins and coins. In my hands, they feel so weightless. Inconsequential. And I buy things. Beautiful things, valuable things from around the world. This house is filled with beautiful, valuable things.” He looks around himself desperately, as if searching for the shape of his cumbersome possessions in the dark. “And each night I come home, I walk to my study and stand in the darkness, among the shadows of my gilded horde, and all I can think of is the dust that it is gathering. Dust.” His voice cracks on the last
word. He can feel his eyes burn with tears. He waits until it passes, then says, “I want to know that there will be something left other than dust, something living after this tedium of night and day. Something to show that I was. Alive. Once.”

She looks at him as he speaks. He is there, again, small in the black pupil of her eyes. He turns his face from her. Then turns back to look into her eyes once more. “And there is more, still. More that you must know. Kokab, for years, you have been standing in the cool water of that pool for me, beneath a hot sun, bent over and washing apples. I can still hear you singing. For years, your song has haunted me. I’ve dreamed of being the water against your calves. I’ve imagined being the drop of water that traveled down your spine when you put your wet hair back. I have been living in the wake of that August morning, an eternity in that moment when you first looked at me.” He looks down, his hands clenched in his lap. He shakes his head at his own weakness, at the words he has just spoken. It is too late, now, to stop. Enthralled, he thinks, by the light caught in the gleam of her black hair. He leans into her and says, “You burn with life, Kokab. I want to feel the world through you.”