The Girl from the Garden (21 page)

“See what the two of you have done?” Zolekhah says. “See what the two of you have become? Both of you, like the unnatural mother who stands before King Solomon.”

Khorsheed heaves to catch her breath and weeps. “She . . . She is Al. She has taken my Yousseff and she tries to kill the one I carry, too. She will be the death of me!”

Zolekhah struggles to lift Khorsheed off the floor and guides her out. “Come,” she says. “Come and pray that the one in your womb still is.”

Khorsheed cries in Zolekhah’s arms and holds her stomach with both hands. At the door, Zolekhah turns to reprimand Rakhel, but the words catch in her throat. She looks at Rakhel, who cradles Yousseff and coos softly, her face wet with tears.

Mahboubeh does not
want
to imagine Khorsheed’s death, but it is night, and dark, and nothing crowds her mind so that the thought of death creeps in. She rises from her bed and walks to the window of her room, to gaze at the moon. She tries to picture her mother sitting at an open window, gazing at the moon, before they took her Yousseff, before sorrow killed her, when Khorsheed could still dream.

It is a stolen moment in the silence of the night. Khorsheed rests in her bed and turns her attention to the movement of her own body. She feels the shift of her bones and the stretch of her sinews. She looks at the expansion of the flesh of her taut belly and waits for the slight flutter that surprises her each time so that she has to put her hand to her stomach. Only in this darkness does Khorsheed feel that her body, and the fruit of this body, belongs to her
alone. She waits each night for her husband to fall asleep, for the lanterns in the household to dim, for the voices in the yard to become whispers, the concerns of the day finally settled by the chirping of crickets. Then, she rises from the bedding beside Ibrahim, removes her undergarments, walks to the window, pushes it open, and sits down to bathe in the cool night air that floods the room and carries in its ebb and flow the scent of orange blossoms in full bloom. Khorsheed sits long enough to watch for the moon to rise, for her to disrobe from behind the cloak of dark clouds, to bare her spectacular fullness in the still black pool of the sky.

It isn’t the familiarity of the moon that draws Khorsheed, though. It is the urgency of the orange tree, the desire to fruit so heavy that all living things become drunk with it. She knows this desire, and knows that it is a good thing, and so she breathes deeply and imagines the scent reaching into the small universe of her womb and carrying with it the promise that the loneliness of that existence will end in a paradise where the air itself is of honey.

Mahboubeh wants to reach out the tips of her fingers and touch Khorsheed’s cheek. “
Paradise
is a Farsi word, Mother,” Mahboubeh whispers. “It means an enclosed space, a garden set aside from the surrounding wilderness.”

Mahboubeh sees the seasons pass that orange tree in rapid succession and then, in one simultaneous instant, she sees Rakhel praying, two girls in the rain, Asher lost in the thought of Kokab singing, Khorsheed birthing, Ibrahim
bleeding, locusts. A tall mountain. A man waiting beneath the mute heavens, beside a pile of wood, a firestone and the knife in his hand. And then, another birth.

And snow.

“Paradise,” Mahboubeh repeats, and tries to picture the courtyard in moonlight, again, the orange tree laden with blossoms. But

Bare feet. Blue. Cracked.

“Paradise,” Mahboubeh repeats. She clenches her eyes shut, to shut out the darkness, to keep out the sound of

A door left ajar. Creaking in the wind.

The wailing. Wind.

Khorsheed stands barefoot in the snow. She does not feel the cold, nor does she hear the wailing of the infant in her room. Her eyes are black, swollen. Her eyes. Her eyes are vacant. Hollow.

How did my mother die, Father?

Your mother died from the complications of womanhood.

How did my mother die, Dada?

Khorsheed degh marg shod.
From sorrow.
Your father killed her, with sorrow.

Milk drips from her breasts. Her thin blouse frozen against her skin. Her nose is running. Her mouth slightly parted. Her breath escapes in small clouds. She stares across the courtyard at the marble steps she is forbidden to ascend, at the door she is forbidden to open.

I just want to smell him.
Once more.
Just once.
Please.
Just allow me to hold him to my chest and bury my face in his hair, to
put my lips to the crown of his head.
Just his scent. Please. Then just a dirty shirt of his, a shirt he wore?
Allow me that?
Allow me to hold that to my face?

No.

There is nothing left.

What about your newborn child?
Your daughter, Mahboubeh?

There is nothing left.

The trees above her cross their naked limbs. Jagged black lines bar and break a white sky. Her dark hair tangled. Bramble where vines were. Stems and thorns. Broken lips. The howl of the wind. Hers, too. Khorsheed howls, too.
S
he calls him and her voice fills the skies with blackbirds. In the silence that follows, the snow falls.

Yousseff,
she cries again.

Zolekhah rushes from her room, throws a blanket over Khorsheed’s shoulders. Khorsheed’s knees give. She falls onto the snow-covered ground. She wails and plunges her hands into the snow, clutches handfuls of it and smashes it against her face. The old woman tries to lift her from the ground. She tries to pull her in the direction of the room where the hungry infant cries for milk, for the heat of her mother’s arms. Fatimeh appears beside Zolekhah. They weep and struggle to raise the girl from the frozen earth. The two women finally lift Khorsheed to her feet and drag her back to the room. Across the courtyard, behind the curtains, Rakhel sobs silently, too, and holds Yousseff to her chest.

I
n
her garden, the rosebushes have grown
thick stemmed, their thorns large, their perfume bewildering. The fig tree leans heavily against the wooden crutch Mahboubeh placed against its trunk for support. The nasturtiums teem in shades of orange. Mint invades any open space. And that vine that grows unruly has bloomed. Blue flowers. It creeps up her trees, crawls along their branches. It strangles rosebushes, tangles itself among the grapes, weaves through the honeysuckle. It allows a uniformity to Mahboubeh’s days, the shocking blue of its delicate flowers at dawn. The fuchsia of their wilted deaths
by late noon. And time, itself, has become lawless, too, shifting in a moment from afternoon shadows and birdsong to the song of crickets, frogs, the coyotes in the hills yelping, cars on the dark, distant highway without much passing in between.

“There once was a garden, in another home, in Kermanshah,” Mahboubeh says out loud. The sun, round and big and red, sets behind the hills. The skies turn orange and pink. Crows become black markings. The house grows unfamiliar. Mahboubeh turns and walks toward it. “That home, in that other place, belonged to two brothers, who would sacrifice anything for one another.”

Mahboubeh turns to look, once more, at her garden in the failing light of day. Gladiolus pierce out of the naked earth any which way. The pomegranates, never harvested, hang from the branches, half eaten by crows, empty combs, dry shells. Mahboubeh stops before a rosebush. She brings her face close and inhales deeply, searching in the scent for something she has lost. She closes her eyes and says, “The eldest brother married a woman named Rakhel . . .”

Mahboubeh opens her eyes and notices that the vine, with its beautiful, delicate blooms, holds captive this rosebush, too. She raises her finger to begin untangling the vine from the stalk, but then stops. She looks at her garden, teeming with life. Time passes.

“And when Rakhel failed to conceive, the eldest brother took a second wife, and when she too failed to conceive, the younger brother gave his own son, as a gift, to his
brother. And that child’s mother . . .” Mahboubeh stops to watch the garden recede into the long shadows of evening. She turns toward the house, its windows dark. “That child’s mother . . . she died from too much sorrow. She died from the complications of womanhood.”

Mahboubeh stands in the middle of the grass, and wonders if the house before her might be her home. A gentle breeze passes, and the leaves on the trees rustle with their own music, and the flowers shake pollen onto their petals, and the grass ripples beneath her feet. Mahboubeh closes her eyes, and allows that unseen hand to touch her skin, to brush the hair away from her face.

I am indebted to Megan Lynch, Leigh Feldman, Elizabeth George, Robert Eversz, Hedgebrook and Amy Wheeler, PEN, Ron Rosenbaum, Dr. Loretta Kane, Shirin Galili, Dr. Haleh Massey, Christopher Massey, the elders of my family, my aunt, my husband, and above all, my mother, who teaches me courage by the way she lives.

PARNAZ FOROUTAN
was born in
Iran and spent her early childhood there. She received PEN Center USA’s Emerging Voices Fellowship for this novel, which was inspired by her own family history. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters.

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Cover design by Sara Wood

Cover photograph © by Dirk Wüstenhagen Imagery/Getty Images

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE GIRL FROM THE GARDEN.
Copyright © 2015 by Parnaz Foroutan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-238838-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-244286-4 (international edition)

EPub Edition AUGUST 2015 ISBN 9780062388407

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