The Girl from the Garden (13 page)

Kokab brings her face close to his, so that her lips are a breath apart from his. “You want to feel through me?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She raises her hand and he looks down at her forefinger as it draws close to the candle. She holds her finger in the flame a moment, then extinguishes the light. Asher flinches and quickly takes her hand, putting her fingers to his lips. In the darkness of the room, he holds her fingers to his mouth and kisses them once, then inhales the musk of her wrist. Gently, Kokab pulls her hand back. The taste of her skin, a trace of the salt of her remains in Asher’s mouth.

“What can I give you?” he asks. “Ask for anything, anything in the world, and you shall have it.”

“I want my solitude.”

Asher pulls back as though she has slapped him. He hesitates. She is so close. He should take his arms, the leaden weight of them, and grab her shoulders. He should draw her with force toward his body and kiss her open mouth, run his tongue on the flesh of her neck. He raises his hands to clutch her shoulders, then hesitates and stands up abruptly, instead.

“As you wish, Kokab. Tell Zolekhah if there is anything you need,” he says. “I will return tomorrow night.” And with that, he walks briskly out of the room and into the cool night. He waits a moment, with the door into her room ajar behind him, then he closes it gently.

Asher stands in the breezeway, beneath the painting of Mount Zion and the feverish dance of the tribe. He sees the darkness first, then the still courtyard. Slowly, he recognizes the scent of night jasmine, the crispness of the air. He hears the low moaning of a cat in the street. His soul opens its eyes and he sees the splendor of the night. He feels
the need of his own body. He walks back toward the room he shares with Rakhel, reveling in the power of his legs.
Rakhel will be happy to see me
,
he thinks.

Khorsheed hears someone
singing in the courtyard. She rises from her bed and looks out of the window. In the yard below, Rakhel hoists a bucket of sour plums into the fountain. Khorsheed opens the window and leans out, resting her forearms on the sill. “That’s how I like to see you, Dada, working and singing like a peasant.”

“Not all of us are born to eat and sleep the day through,” Rakhel says.

“Certainly no. Only those of us of certain refinement,” Khorsheed says. “So you are done with the mourning?” Rakhel walks to the window, wiping her wet hands on her skirt. “Good thing, too, Dada. I’ve been meaning to tell you. Your nose gets all swollen when you cry too much.”

“I was only a bit anxious,” Rakhel says. She stands beneath Khorsheed’s window, rises to the tips of her toes, and reaches for Khorsheed. “Though it seems there was no need. Asher didn’t even spend a minute in her room last night, came straightaway back to me. Come closer so I can pull you down by the rope of your hair.”

“And when I break my neck, who will mother my boy?”

“Myself, of course. And a better job I’d do of it.”

“You’ll be too busy wiping the bottoms of Kokab’s brood to care for my little prince.”

“Yousseff would be the apple of my eye. That woman can tend to her own litter.”

“Have you spoken with her yet?”

“To say what?”

“I don’t know, to befriend her somehow.”

“I’d befriend her soon as I befriend the mare Asher buys to mate with his steed.”

“Please, Dada, she may hear you. I’m not interested in living with an enemy.”

“I hope you are not planning on becoming her friend?”

“I just don’t want trouble with her.”

“You know, Khorsheed, it’s best to keep away from her. You heard about why Eliyahoo divorced her.”

“Rumors, Dada.”

“I don’t know, Khorsheed. She seems to have it in her.”

“You haven’t even met her yet.”

“For a reason. It’s best to keep from looking into her eyes, directly. I didn’t want to tell you, to scare you, but they say she’s possessed, you know, by the djinn Al.” Khorsheed stands up and looks down on Rakhel. Rakhel looks back at her.

“What are you talking about, Dada?”

“Well, you know Al doesn’t just snatch babies from their mothers. Sometimes she takes the form of a beautiful woman, who lures men away from their wives. And from the stories I’ve heard about her . . .”

“Enough, Dada. She’s a mother, herself.”

“I’ve heard stories about her daughter, too.”

“Stop creating trouble, Rakhel.”

“That’s the real reason Eliyahoo divorced her. To keep the girl from learning the mother’s lewd nature.”

“Enough, Rakhel.”

“I’m just warning you, Khorsheed. I don’t think she’ll seduce Ibrahim, she seems to have her eyes on my husband alone, but I’d be careful with your baby. It makes sense, no? All that sorrow for losing her own child might make her eyes full of envy for yours, right?”

Khorsheed takes a step away from the window. She turns to look at Yousseff sleeping on the bed. She turns back to Rakhel.

“Don’t worry, though. Just be cautious,” Rakhel says. “Put a little soot on his face each time she’s about. Better yet, keep him away from her sight. Just to be safe.”

Khorsheed frowns. “I have to go nurse him,” she says, then begins closing the window.

“I’m just telling you to keep him safe, Khorsheed. I love him as much as you do.”

Khorsheed looks at Rakhel from behind the closed window. Rakhel smiles and shrugs her shoulders, then turns back to the fountain and the buckets of sour plums. Khorsheed walks over to her sleeping baby. She kneels beside him and watches the gentle rise and fall of his chest. She clenches her eyes shut. “Please, G-d,” she says. “Let no harm come to my baby.”

K
okab steps
into the dim light of the
study. She stands for a moment beside the threshold, looking into the courtyard. Then, she closes the door gently behind her. She turns to look at the room. All four walls are lined with towering bookcases. Some shelves hold books, others statues and strange masks. On the topmost shelves are tremendous, heavy vases made of silver with intricate etchings, images of men on horseback hunting gazelles and bare-breasted women holding flasks of wine in the wilderness. Kokab walks from bookcase to bookcase, running her finger down the fabric spines of books, stop
ping to study strange objects made of precious metal, carved of wood, chiseled in rock. She picks up a stone sculpture of a nude woman, the size of her hand. The head and half the legs are missing, the breasts prodigious over an orb of a belly. She turns it in her hand. It feels cold and heavy. She places it back and turns to the desk facing the window overlooking the courtyard. Fierce dragons are carved into the woodwork of the desk, the whole of it painted a deep emerald green. On the desk is a leather-bound book, which she opens. Inside, beneath meticulous writing, she sees rows and rows of numbers, page after page after page. She closes the book and walks around the desk to a table that holds a gramophone. She puts her palms on the large trumpet and peers into the hollow.

“Do you want to hear it?” Asher asks. He enters the study and closes the door behind him. She does not greet him but turns to the window, instead, and places her hand on the glass. He walks to her. She feels him, close enough to reach out his hand and touch the fabric of her skirt. “After a day of haggling and buying, sometimes on my walk home through the streets of the mahalleh, I feel as though my limbs are slowly turning to lead.” She faces him and looks into his eyes. Without taking his eyes off her, Asher turns the crank, places the needle of the gramophone down and there comes a
kheshkhesh
as the record turns, before sound pours out into the silence of the room. “I panic in those moments that if I don’t move fast enough, that cold will touch my heart and I will never arrive at my home.” He steps be
side her and looks out of the window at the courtyard. “It is a race to beat this slow suffocation. I come to my study first, always, and put a record on this contraption. And when that first note sounds, I open this window into the courtyard so the rest of them, too, can hear the music. It fills the gardens. And death is not so solid, then.” He places his hand on the glass beside hers. “This that you are hearing now is by a man named Beethoven.
Moonlight Sonata
. I received it the week I married Rakhel, from a dealer I correspond with in Austria. The music reminds me of you. The sweet longing in it.” Kokab moves away from Asher and leans against the desk with her back to him. Asher follows her.

“Did boredom lead you here?” he asks.

“The desire to know who you are.”

“Do you know, now?”

She turns to face him and says, “You want desperately to believe that life can be measured in what it yields.”

Asher laughs. He steps closer to her and fingers the collar of her blouse. Kokab pulls back abruptly. Asher’s hand falls to his side. She watches a red creep up his neck and into his face. He steadies his breath and asks, “Have you met Rakhel yet?”

“No. I saw her working in the courtyard from the window of my room.”

“And you didn’t go to say hello?”

“How do you imagine that conversation?”

“Well, the two of you will have to meet eventually.”

“In due time, when she is ready.”

“Are you ready?”

“To meet her? Yes. But I am the enemy.”

“I won’t allow that. You needn’t worry about her.”

“She is hurt.”

“That is not your concern.”

“I have to live with the guilt of her suffering.”

“It is her own fault. She will have to learn to adapt.”

“And me? Will I learn to adapt?” Kokab asks. Asher takes hold of Kokab’s shoulders with both hands.

“I pray that you will find this to be your home,” he says.

Kokab becomes rigid at his touch. “But you know that despite your efforts to beat death, there is something that escapes you,” she says. “Something that cannot be measured, something beyond your grasp.”

“Pardon?”

Asher turns and lifts the needle off the record, silencing the music. Kokab strums her fingers on the leather-bound book. “I imagine that you are waiting for the yield of your investment,” she says.

“I won’t demand anything of you that you will not give willingly.”

“What is the weight of one’s will in a prison?”

“I should hope that is not how you deem this home.”

Kokab laughs. She places her palm on Asher’s cheek. Asher closes his eyes and tilts his head down slightly toward her. “Asher, tell the old servant to bring my dinner to my room. I am not ready to join the family yet. And I am tired. I hope to go to bed promptly after eating.” Asher’s jaw tightens.

“How long do you plan on pulling me in such a fashion?”

“Forever.”

“I am a patient man.”

Asher begins walking out of the room. “In the future, this is my private study. The women do not come in here unless I invite them and that is a rare occasion.” He stops and, without turning, says, “You remember the direction of your room?” Kokab walks past him silently. She continues to walk down the breezeway. She knows that he watches her bare heel against the marble, her hips sway beneath the folds of her skirt. Without looking back at him, she disappears into the darkness of her room.

A package arrives
for Mahboubeh in the mail. Too big to fit in the mailbox, the mailman leaves it behind her door, rings the doorbell, and leaves before she has time to answer. She opens the door to find a box, wrapped in white paper, lying on her doormat. It is from a man in London, a certain rabbi, the husband of a distant relative. She closes the door to the empty streets, walks to her dining table, and opens the package to find photographs, handfuls of pages, the writing in diligent blue ink, carefully formed words, questions, dates, and a mass of pages taped together, when unfolded, revealing a family tree. There is an envelope, too, with a letter inside, addressed to her from the rabbi. She reads it once, then again. He asks several questions about the family history in his letter. Mahboubeh puts the let
ter down and looks at the family tree spread out upon her table. Beside Asher’s name, joined to him by the branch that indicates marriage, there are two boxes. In one, the rabbi writes
Rakhel,
in the other, a question mark. Beneath both boxes is the word
childless
. In the careful blue script of his letter, the rabbi asks if Mahboubeh might know the name of Asher Malacouti’s second wife.

“Kokab,” Mahboubeh says. “But who remembers her anymore?”

Beside her father Ibrahim’s name there are three branches, one for each of the wives he wedded, then buried. Those women lived in that home beneath Rakhel’s reign, neither their will nor their children belonging to them alone. Mahboubeh places her finger on Khorsheed’s name and closes her eyes. The other women’s faces she can recall, but of Khorsheed all she has is a name, and the question of how she died. Mahboubeh looks beneath her father’s name at a multitude of branches, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. She looks past that, up to see Zolekhah’s name, and finds beside it a small image. Quickly, she shuffles through the bundle of photographs the rabbi has sent, and there it is, a photograph of her grandmother.
Zolekhah,
the rabbi writes beneath the image,
lived to be one hundred years old.

Mahboubeh remembers Zolekhah as a bent old woman. Quiet. Unobtrusive. Perhaps even apologetic for the space she inhabited, the corner of the room where she sat all day, watching the family come and go in her silence. But this
portrait is of a younger Zolekhah, in her late forties, perhaps. In the image, her face is like the bark of an oak tree, the frown sealed by the creases of the forehead, the chin pulling down on the corners of lips, which appear to have been supple in her earlier youth, now pursed, in controlled sternness. Her eyes are soft, though, or softened. There is a subtle kindness in the depth of those eyes, an understanding. Zolekhah wears a white head scarf, and through it, where it parts at the chest, a sequined blouse catches the light. She wears a coat of velvet, or mink. The costume and the face are incongruous. It is the face of a great chief, a sexless face, time worn into the skin. And the blouse, the coat? Certainly her grandmother would have dressed in such finery, her sons the richest merchants of the caravansary. And yet, Mahboubeh cannot imagine Zolekhah in any other dress than the one she wore in her old age, made of simple cotton, modest blue flowers, darker hues, her sparse white hair wrapped in a head scarf. On the day of this portrait, Zolekhah must have dressed herself in wealth to indicate her power within the household, to insist on it through the ages. Mahboubeh imagines Zolekhah as she sits for the photographer in the courtyard of the old family estate, and holds still for the time it takes for him to steal his head beneath the black cloth, and set her image to gelatinous silver. Zolekhah prepares for this occasion Asher has arranged for her with her thoughts elsewhere, and in the two-minute meditation as the camera captures the sepia leather of her skin, the firm pride of her cheekbones, she thinks of her son’s ache for a child. She
thinks about Kokab, alone in the farthest room, and for a moment, she allows herself to hope that the solution might be in that woman. When the photographer indicates that he is done, she rises from the chair and wanders to the kitchen to ask one of the girls to bring the photographer some tea.

From the kitchen, Zolekhah hears hurried footsteps in the courtyard and looks out to see Asher leaving Rakhel’s room. She goes back into the kitchen to save him the shame of having to explain to her why, a week after Kokab’s arrival, he has not yet consummated the marriage. When she hears the
clickclock
of the horse’s hooves pass the kitchen and the dull thud of the heavy wooden street door close, she steps out. The courtyard is empty. The photographer must have left with her son. Zolekhah walks to Ibrahim’s quarters, and quietly opens the door to find Khorsheed sitting on the floor beside the bed where Ibrahim sleeps, the child at her breast. “Did you sleep last night?” Zolekhah whispers.

“He kept me up.”

“Let me take him from you when he is done nursing. You go to Rakhel and tell her I need to see her, to come to the kitchen as soon as she is dressed, it is a matter of urgency.” Khorsheed rises heavily from the floor and lifts the baby. She hands Yousseff to Zolekhah and leaves for Rakhel’s room.

Zolekhah, with the baby in the nook of her arm, climbs the marble steps to Asher’s home, and walks down the breezeway to the farthest room. She raps gently on the door, then opens it slightly. “Kokab?”

“Zolekhah Khanum?”

“May I come in?” Zolekhah enters without waiting for a response. Kokab sits beside the window, looking out to the gardens.

“Did you see Asher leave?”

“This morning?”

“Yes, from the window. Did you see him leave?”

“Yes.”

“He did not stop to bid you a good morning?”

“No.”

“He has not, yet, slept in your bed?”

Kokab turns her face back to look out onto the garden. Zolekhah walks to her. “Take this child from me.” Kokab takes the baby and Zolekhah lowers herself to sit on a cushion on the floor. “Age is getting the best of me,” she says. They sit for a while in silence, Zolekhah looking out the window at the skies and Kokab rocking the baby in her arms until he falls asleep.

“He smells of milk,” Kokab says. She kisses the top of the baby’s head. She studies him in the soft blue of the light that filters through the window, then kisses the baby’s head again. “He smells of milk.”

“There is only so much time we can afford our sorrow, daughter,” Zolekhah says. She watches Kokab place her finger in the baby’s open palm. Yousseff clenches her finger in his sleep. Kokab brings the baby’s hand softly to her own lips and holds them there, her eyes closed.

“I lost my husband several years ago,” Zolekhah says. “I
don’t remember my parents, very well. I was a child when I married. He was a child, too, in the way men are children even when their beards suggest otherwise. In the beginning, he thought it his duty to beat me. By the time I handed him Asher, he had learned. He became a good man, and tender toward me. He died before my sons reached manhood. I was alone, with two boys. There was no time for weeping. The boys had to become men and I was both mother and father for them. Now, they are who you see before you. Good men. Hardworking, honest men.” Zolekhah stops talking and watches Kokab cradling the baby. Kokab keeps her head bent toward the child, clicking her tongue softly.

“Asher suffers terribly for want of a child. The longing for one has changed him. He withdraws from the family more and more. He increases his wealth, his lands, and the success makes him even unhappier,” Zolekhah says. Kokab does not look up from the baby.

“I know you’ve suffered much and your heart aches for the child you have lost,” Zolekhah says. “But Eliyahoo will not let you have her back. You must accept this loss. G-d does not take without giving. You are fortunate to be married again. You will have more children. The pain of your loss will never abate, but soon you will bear and love other children. It is a blessing, this chance to start new.”

Kokab shakes her head no, biting her lips. The child startles in his sleep and Kokab pulls him closer to her breasts and begins humming again. Zolekhah watches her. The child settles back into sleep. They sit for a while in silence,
looking at Yousseff. Then Zolekhah rises and Kokab hands her the sleeping baby.

“Go to the hammam. Tonight, join us for dinner. Allow him to be a husband to you. It is the time for living.”

Rakhel sits beside
Khorsheed in the courtyard and waits for Zolekhah. She watches Zolekhah emerge from Kokab’s room with Yousseff in her arms. She nudges Khorsheed. Zolekhah walks toward them, slowly as to not wake the sleeping baby. Khorsheed, her eyes round, her face drained of color, stands up and takes Yousseff hurriedly from Zolekhah.