The Girl from the Garden (20 page)

Zolekhah feels Yousseff’s little hands holding on to the blankets, trying to use the cloth to pull himself up. Zolekhah looks at Khorsheed and another surge of grief overwhelms her.
Not so long ago,
she thinks,
this one was a child herself and here she sits, anxious over her growing belly, tired already, and so soon?

“Tired,” Zolekhah whispers. She closes her eyes. “Leave, daughter, so I can sleep.”

Khorsheed rises to leave. Zolekhah listens to the sound of Khorsheed strain with effort to lift Yousseff, then the slow shuffle of her feet. When Khorsheed leaves the room, Zolekhah allows herself to cry. “Rain down your mercy upon us, Lord,” she says. “Show the grace of Your mercy.”

I
brahim
hears the sound of the horse in the
courtyard.
Asher is home,
he thinks. The women will tell him the rabbi is here. He will not come out of his study until the old man leaves. Ibrahim turns his attention back to the old rabbi.

“I don’t know,” Ibrahim says. “I don’t know.”

“It is a mitzvah, son. An act the Lord will smile upon.”

“What about the child’s mother?” Ibrahim asks.

“You say she is due with another?”

“Yes.”

“Ibrahim, G-d rewards a righteous deed. Tenfold. You will have more children. Many, many more children, G-d willing. Think upon a rich man. What is a loaf of bread to him?”

“A child is not a loaf of bread.”

“A child is sustenance for the soul, as bread is nourishment for the body.”

“And my brother . . .” Ibrahim looks out of the window at Asher’s study. Each evening, his brother walks in through the street door and retreats to his study. He no longer places records on the gramophone and opens the window to the gardens. The dusks pass in silence. If Asher does come to dinner, he eats without a word. If he speaks, it is brief. Business. Formalities.

“Asher is starving,” Ibrahim says. He shakes his head and raps his knuckles absently against the wall. He stops and looks at the rabbi a moment. The rabbi meets his gaze, then nods his head.

“What will be the loss for you, son? And what will be his gain?” he asks.

“Yes . . .”

“The Lord still speaks to us, Ibrahim, still as loud as he did when he spoke to our forefathers. It is only the din and racket of this world, our entanglement in greed and selfishness, that distract us from hearing the melody of His voice.”

Ibrahim clasps his hands in his lap to keep them still. He draws in his breath and holds it, then exhales heavily.

“And there comes a time when He asks of us to be men. To act with courage, selflessly, to sacrifice for the good of others.”

Ibrahim rises from the ground and paces the room. He stops before the window and looks at the empty courtyard, at the shut window of Asher’s study, at the empty room that stands farthest down the breezeway. He leans his body against the window and presses his face against the cool of the glass. From somewhere in the courtyard, he thinks he hears his wife singing.

“Ibrahim?”

“Here I am,” Ibrahim answers. “Here I am.” He holds his face a moment, then looks at the old man.

“I will. It is clear that I must, there is no other way,” Ibrahim says.

The rabbi smiles and leans over to pat Ibrahim’s knee. Then, he searches for his walking stick and struggles to rise from the chair. Ibrahim takes hold of the rabbi’s elbow to help him. The rabbi stares for a moment at the light coming through the curtains. He nods his head.

“G-d will reward you, son, for this sacrifice. You will have many children, and they, too, will have many children. Your lineage will feel the tide of the Lord’s blessing for forty generations for such a noble deed.”

Ibrahim opens the door and helps the old man out into the sunlight of the late afternoon. The ground is littered with gold, brittle leaves.

“Forty generations, Ibrahim, forty generations will re
ceive tenfold blessings for this one act of giving,” the rabbi says as they walk slowly toward the street.

It must have
been
in autumn when Ibrahim made the decision. Mahboubeh sits in the grass, looking at the trees. The trees naked then, not like this. Not green, like now. She looks at the leaves shimmering in the sunlight. The garden must have been empty of roses. Mahboubeh inhales deeply. She can smell roses. She is here, now. In a garden bloom full of roses. She hears him talking. Insisting. At first, quietly. But then, his voice becomes louder and she sees Ibrahim standing in the room, and Khorsheed listening. Exhausted from a night of tending to Yousseff, Khorsheed fails to understand Ibrahim’s meaning at first. Then, when the words become solid and heavy, when they become a menacing presence, moving toward her and her baby like the shadow of a predatory animal, Khorsheed lifts the baby to her breast and Yousseff, sensing the danger through the cadence of her heartbeat, the quickness of her breath, the deft motion of her movements, startles and begins to wail. Khorsheed runs toward the door, recognizes that it leads nowhere, stops and turns, staring wildly about the room for a corner, a place where the words will not advance any further, where they will be forgotten and she can tend to the screaming baby.

“Do you feel a falter in your own heart, Father?” Mahboubeh asks out loud, sitting on the earth of her garden, beneath a cloudless blue sky.

He does not hear her. The room has become very clear for him, filled with the desperate motion of his young wife, clutching his son to her breast, pushing herself against a wall, bending over the child, burying it in the folds of her arm, beneath the black curtain of her hair, hushing, hushing him. Ibrahim stands silent, in awe of what he has done.

Ibrahim begins a series of logical sentences, constructed as though they are bricks in the hands of a blind man trying to piece together his recollection of a house.

“Yousseff will not be far from you,” he says.

“You will see him every minute of the day” and “You must take into consideration Asher’s sorrow and need. What does he have in this world if he does not have a child?” and “We will have more sons, we will be rich with children, this is an act G-d smiles upon.”

He speaks these words to Khorsheed, not daring to step closer to where she kneels in the corner, rocking back and forth, murmuring to her baby. She looks up at him, his hands in a plaintive gesture, in the middle of the room, standing like an uncertain child, waiting to hear the pronouncement of consequences in the aftermath of the shattering. Her look, however, is unfamiliar to him. He has known this woman, his wife, the intimacies of her being, and now, he can’t bring himself to use her name, nor place a hand on her shoulder. In the silence of this bafflement, he resolves to move forward with what he does know, that a decision has been made, that there was a promise to his brother and that he must prove himself a man and keep his word.

Khorsheed grasps her child firmer to her body and hisses the accusation, “You want to tear my son from my breast?”

Ibrahim, before becoming stone, trembles a moment, the fine hairs of his skin extending to feel the subtle motions of air that follow her utterance. But this is only a moment, when he listens to her and the depth of the wound he feels proves too much to bear, so, instead, he hardens his body and becomes ethereal, a torrent of words, no longer beseeching. Now, severe, he takes a step forward and she lifts herself off the floor and runs about the room frantically, the baby screaming, and Khorsheed, not finding anywhere to go, sinks to the floor, again, and weeps. She lifts her wild eyes, her face framed by her hair, and she screams for Ibrahim’s damnation. She pleads with heaven to turn the day black, to hide her from the mercilessness of her fate.

Zolekhah hears her from her room. She sits up with effort in her bed, her eyes moist, her legs lead, and mutters soft prayers. Fatimeh, too, hears the girl’s cries and raises her eyes to the soot-colored ceiling of the kitchen to plead for G-d’s mercy. Asher sits pensive in his study, behind his desk, staring at nothing, thinking of nothing.

Khorsheed stands outside
of Rakhel’s room, her feet bare. Her face unwashed. Her clothes soiled. Dark hollows encircle Khorsheed’s eyes. Her long hair knots at the ends. She shifts her weight from one foot to another. She waited that
morning until Asher and Ibrahim left for the caravansary before leaving her room. Then, she walked across the courtyard, up the marble stairs, beneath the painting of Moses in his wicker basket, past the sitting room to the door that led to Rakhel’s room. The curtains have been drawn tightly for days and the door is always closed. She waits a moment outside and listens. She hears Rakhel talk softly. Khorsheed strains and hears the baby, a low mewing sound. She knocks. Something rustles in the room, but no answer. She knocks a little louder, shifting her weight from one foot to another. She breaks into a cold sweat and pounds on the door. The latch lifts and Rakhel’s face appears in the doorway, blinking at the sunlight.

“It’s time for Yousseff to nurse,” Khorsheed says. She pushes past Rakhel into the dim room. Khorsheed looks around the room, her eyes adjusting to the light, until she sees Yousseff beside the bed.

“Why is he on the floor? There is a draft from beneath the door.”

“I placed him for a moment so he wouldn’t roll off the bed. I don’t think he’s hungry just yet,” Rakhel says. “He hasn’t started to cry.”

“You shouldn’t wait for him to start to cry before bringing him to me. Then he becomes too fussy and can’t suckle properly.”

Khorsheed picks Yousseff up and begins undressing him frantically. “You’ve bundled him too warm. He can’t breathe like this.”

She lifts him to her face and buries her nose in his hair. She closes her eyes and inhales deeply, then presses her lips against his chest, his shoulders, his arms.

“I was afraid he’d catch a cold.”

“You don’t know what you are doing.”

Khorsheed hastily touches the child’s clothes. She holds Yousseff up and looks at his legs. “He’s wet himself,” Khorsheed says.

“I just changed him an hour or so ago.”

“The urine has burned his skin.”

Khorsheed puts him on the rug and grabs the pitcher of water on the low table by the bed. She pours water from the pitcher onto a corner of her skirt and dabs Yousseff’s legs.

“Khorsheed, you don’t have to do that, I have clean rags.”

“He’s been in his own urine long enough for me to wait a while longer for you to find your clean rags.”

“They’re right here.”

Rakhel extends a rag and Khorsheed grabs it from her. Rakhel squats next to Khorsheed. “Let me do it.”

“No.”

Khorsheed lifts Yousseff to her breast. He turns his head away and Khorsheed turns his face back to her breast, pressing her nipple against his closed lips. Yousseff turns his head again.

“I don’t think he’s hungry,” Rakhel says.

“You only brought him to me once in the middle of the night. He hasn’t had milk for hours. He must be starving.”

“He hasn’t cried.”

“Perhaps he is too weak to cry.”

“Khorsheed, I won’t let him starve. I can sense when he needs milk.”

“Not the way I can sense it. My body feels the pull of his hunger.”

Khorsheed continues to struggle with the baby, inserting her index finger into his mouth to pry it open a bit, then pushing her nipple against his barely open lips. Yousseff begins to cry. Khorsheed tries to place her breast into his open mouth, but he struggles to turn his face.

“Khorsheed, you’re going to suffocate him, he’s turning red,” Rakhel says.

Khorsheed continues pressing her breast into the wailing child’s mouth.

“Khorsheed, stop, he isn’t hungry.” Rakhel reaches out her arms to take Yousseff from Khorsheed.

Khorsheed looks up with a hot anger in her eyes. “Don’t touch my baby, you’re upsetting him.”

“I’m upsetting him? You are about to kill him. He’s crying so hard he can’t breathe and you keep smothering him with your breast.”

“What do you know about how to care for a baby?”

“I know enough to know when someone is about to kill one. Give him to me, let me calm him.”

“What are you two doing, again, making such a racket?” Zolekhah stands in the doorway, then limps into the room and takes Yousseff from Khorsheed. She cradles
the baby in the crook of her arm and bounces him gently. “My sons’ brides are the talk of the town. Everyone hears this war the two of you make daily.”

“I came to feed my son.”

“Yousseff doesn’t want to feed,” Rakhel says.

“What do you know about what he wants and doesn’t want? You are not his mother.”

“Enough,” Zolekhah says. “Enough of the two of you. Khorsheed, we decided that when Yousseff is hungry, Rakhel will come fetch you.”

“I don’t want to leave my son alone with her.”

“Khorsheed,” Zolekhah said, “we’ll discuss things with Ibrahim and Asher when they get back home. For now, allow Rakhel to care for Yousseff and tend to yourself. Have you forgotten the one growing in your womb?”

“There is a reason G-d didn’t see her fit to have a child,” Khorsheed says.

Rakhel looks to the ground.

“It will be difficult to adjust to this, Khorsheed,” Zolekhah says, “but you must think about the unborn child you carry. This rage is not good for that innocent baby, or this one. When the other one arrives, you will be more than happy to have this one off your hands. The two of you will raise Yousseff together and you will have enough time for the new one. Now leave the room and go tend to yourself. You have neglected your body for too long. G-d forbid, you may harm the baby in your womb.”

Zolekhah hands Yousseff to Rakhel. Khorsheed
watches Rakhel holding Yousseff. Rakhel rocks him in the cradle of her arms, clicking her tongue to calm him. Khorsheed narrows her eyes and clenches her teeth. “You are the djinn!” Khorsheed says.

Rakhel looks up from Yousseff and takes a step back. Khorsheed steps closer, pointing her finger an inch away from Rakhel’s face.

“Like all those stories you yourself told me! You snatched my baby! You stole my boy!”

“His own father gave him to my husband. I did not snatch him from you at all,” Rakhel says.

“That’s enough, Khorsheed,” Zolekhah says.

“All this time, trying to persuade me of this and that, when you’ve been watching my child with your envious eyes, plotting and waiting!”

“Khorsheed, that’s enough I said,” Zolekhah says.

Khorsheed grabs Rakhel’s braided hair. “Tell the truth!” she says. “You made this happen! Because of you, they took my baby!”

Rakhel bends her body over Yousseff and tries to free herself from Khorsheed’s grasp. The baby starts to cry. Rakhel frees one hand and hits Khorsheed in the stomach. Khorsheed’s breath catches and she falls backward. For a moment, there is a frozen silence. Khorsheed remains sitting on the rug, gasping for air.