The Girl from the Garden (8 page)

She looks about her darkened kitchen. A coyote yelps outside in the distant hills. Its brothers begin laughing in response. She imagines the rabbit they must be chasing, the pursuit, the frantic flight, the joy of the chase. Her house is cold. She picks up her cup of tea, but that has cooled, too. She closes her eyes and remembers when the women gathered, even to celebrate little things, in hope of dispelling the monotony of their days. They came together for the plucking of a bride’s eyebrows, the sixth night of a daughter’s birth, the first meal of a baby, the spilt blood after the first night of being a wife. And they gathered to celebrate holy days, too, and for the preparation of feasts for those sanctified days, and for Sabbath dinners. And sometimes, they entered each other’s homes just to bring news, to share the joy or spread the shame, to help with an ailing mother, to
mourn, to console, to counsel, to tell stories, to eavesdrop, to bring a talisman against miscarriage, a remedy to win back a straying husband, to bring news about the misconduct of potential grooms, to gossip about the shamelessness of potential brides, to return borrowed china, to apologize, to pray, to forgive.

They knocked on the heavy wooden door, the knocker to the right, a different pitch of iron against iron, to let the women of the household know that it was another woman at the door, a sister, a friend, a seamstress. If a man knocked, the knocker to the left sounded a deeper tone. Then, the woman answering put a finger in her mouth, in the corner of her cheek, to mask her voice before asking who called and for what business, so that the sweetness of her voice might not lead the man behind the door to sinful thought, rouse him to break open that very door and drag her down in shame. Rarely did a woman open the door for an unknown man, unless it was a peddler, selling needle and thread, or one of these men who did small tasks for coins, scouring pots, fetching pails from the bottom of wells, sharpening knives. But if it was a woman who knocked, then the women let in the cloaked figure, and if no men were home, then the woman entering through the threshold removed her ruband, her chador, her head scarf, let loose her hair, took off her shoes, rolled up her sleeve, entered the andaruni, laughing out loud, hitched up her skirt to wash her feet in the pool, splashed water on her face if it was a hot day, accepted the mint sherbet or the chai, and sat down to a feast of words.

Mahboubeh remembers when, a year after Asher’s death, news spread throughout the Jewish mahalleh that Rakhel was searching for a bride for Yousseff, the sole heir to the Malacouti estate. All day the knocker announced the arrival of another potential girl, her aunts and mother in attendance, stopping by to pay their respects to Rakhel, on their way from here to there. Mahboubeh sat in her room studying for an exam when one of the servants came running to fetch her. Rakhel insisted that Mahboubeh keep the girl company while she entertained the women.

Mahboubeh reluctantly earmarked the page in her book, closed it, and rose with a sigh. For an hour or so, Mahboubeh sat in the guest hall, sipping her chai and trying to speak with the girl so that she could report back to Rakhel whether the candidate was suitable or not. Sometimes, however, the girl was reluctant to speak. Often, though, the girl knew the opportunity this meeting afforded her, and so she went out of her way to chat with Mahboubeh. Usually, those girls did not attend school, or if they did, they were not too serious about their studies, so that the conversations between Mahboubeh and the potential bride hit walls of silence. Mahboubeh would look to Rakhel, who glared back at her until she attempted another avenue of dialogue. When the visitors left, Rakhel began the questioning.
Does she read too much?
Rakhel asked.
Is she very interested in gold and trinkets?
Does she seem docile?
Vain?
Lazy?
Did you sense in her a harlot?
A girl who’d demand this and that from her husband?

Then, one day, a young girl arrived with her mother and aunts. Beautiful. Shy. She held a doll to her chest and sat quietly, listening to the women talk. When Mahboubeh sat beside her, she looked up at Mahboubeh and asked, “Would you like to hold my baby?”

Speechless, Mahboubeh took the doll from the girl and held it cradled in her arms. “What’s her name?” Mahboubeh finally asked.

“Hannah,” the girl said.

Mahboubeh handed the doll back. “She is very well behaved,” she said. “You must be a wonderful mother.” The girl smiled, and for the rest of the visit, she tended to her baby.

When the girl and the women who accompanied her left, Rakhel looked at Mahboubeh and said, “That one reminds me of Khorsheed.” They sat in silence for several moments. Mahboubeh wondered
does she have her face,
or
her mannerisms, is it the way she loved her baby,
but Rakhel rose to leave before Mahboubeh could find the voice to ask.

“Tell the servants a decision has been made,” Rakhel said without looking back. “Tell them to send the rest away.”

Mahboubeh sits in her kitchen, in silence. She cannot hear the coyotes in the hills any longer. She considers turning on the lights, but outside her window, she can see her garden silver in the moonlight.
Loneliness is a palpable sensation,
she thinks to herself,
the presence of an absence
. She closes her eyes to shut out the darkness of her kitchen and the quiet of the night, when she hears the sound of women chattering.
She sees Zolekhah, a week before Asher’s wedding, standing amidst them like a captain at the helm of a ship. Everyone around her engages in some industry, cooking or baking or washing. They come early in the morning and work well into the afternoon, until they leave for their own homes, where they make dinners for their husbands and brothers before those men return from the work of their day. The merrier the women are, the better the outlook for the match. And so the women laugh easily, and sing often.

On one of those frenzied days before the wedding celebration, Asher decided to send Ibrahim ahead to run the business of the caravansary, while he remained behind to work out the mathematics of yields and taxes. All day he tried to drown out the incessant noise of the women’s talk and laughter by closing his study’s windows and turning on the gramophone, but by noon he realized that his chances of thinking straight were better in the hubbub of the marketplace than in his own home.

Asher peeked his head out of the door and looked down the breezeway in both directions to see if a wayward aunt might trap him with an offer of advice, or a cousin might entangle him in an hour’s worth of synagogue gossip about so-and-so’s daughter, but it was after lunch and all the women had retired to the five-doored sitting room to rest during the afternoon heat. He stepped gingerly out of his study and quietly closed the door.

Asher walked across the courtyard to the stables, lost in his own thoughts, when he heard a voice singing and
looked up to see the colors of the afternoon a brighter orange. He felt the depth of the August heat, and the scent of the dying roses permeated the air. His cousin’s new bride, Kokab, stood in the pool of the fountain, the water around her a more magnificent blue than he remembered. Her skirt was tied up in a knot above her knees, her calves glistening wet in the shallow water. Red apples floated in that pool, bobbed in the small ripples of her motion, collected around her, floated away from her grasp. She stood up to rewrap her chador around her waist and when she bent over again to wash the apples, the tips of her thick, black hair touched the water.

She sang and his eyes followed the sound to the smooth, white skin of her throat, to the rise and fall into the white valley between her breasts. He saw her, and her beauty burned into his flesh a yearning deeper than anything he had ever felt before. In this pause in eternity, Asher felt at once the promise of his own death and the beckoning of his desire. Within that moment, Kokab looked up to meet his gaze. Asher could not move. He stared at her in that fountain, trapped in the simple notes of her solitude, and knew that he would give it all, the wealth, the future of his progeny, the honor of his name, to hold this woman he could not touch. He stood thus, frozen in the wake of that afternoon when his eyes were opened and he perceived with terror his vulnerability to desire. She looked at him with her black animal eyes, tilted her head slightly, then went back to her task, as though it had only been a sparrow she had
witnessed, a dust-covered sparrow hopping in the dirt of the yard. He turned and walked quickly to the stables, his body hot, now with shame.

Though later he forgot how he managed the horse or led it past Kokab and into the streets, Asher soon found himself riding at the foothills of the mountain. A cloud of dust rose behind him. His body rose and fell, the sun beat down on him, his muscles taut. His ears heard nothing but the sound of her voice singing, his eyes saw nothing but the indifference in her eyes, and no matter how hard he rode that horse, his thoughts stayed trapped in that moment in the courtyard, where he imagined how he should have walked toward the fountain, pushed her down into the water, grabbed her bared shoulder, pulled her hair, forced her to turn those black animal eyes away from him with something more than just indifference. He buried his heels into the side of the horse and thought of the soft of her flesh bruised, the white of her skin revealing the evidence of his hurt pride, the spreading deep purple of his shame across her cheeks, and when in the cool of the evening he was spent in his rage, he trotted home slowly and dreamed of the apologies of his lips against the lobe of her ear as they sat, hidden deep in the recesses of that garden.

He did not see her again until the week of the wedding celebrations. That Monday, all the members of his family, his distant cousins, his childhood friends, arrived with musicians who plucked the strings of the
kamancheh
and
tar,
wailed of love through the
ney
, beat deep rhythms with
dafs
raised over their heads. He sang and danced with the guests. He drank glasses of wine and spoke to his cousins and uncles about the future.

Standing to accept the blessings of an old aunt, Asher saw Kokab across the courtyard, leaning against the trunk of a poplar tree, distant from the crowd, gazing at the last brilliant streak of red against the dusk blue skies. Suddenly, the blood in Asher’s veins turned to fire and crept into his hands, up toward his face, and he feared that the old woman clutching his hand and talking about his future joy and the merits of his young bride might feel the change in his body and know his shame. He wrestled his hand from hers, smiled and thanked her profusely for her kindness, then stole away. He stood hidden amidst the crowd, among a hundred faces that talked and laughed.

The entirety of a courtyard stretched between himself and Kokab, but Asher felt as though he were close enough to feel her breath faintly on his skin. He turned away, for fear of being caught in such shameful circumstances, at his own engagement party, staring at a woman belonging to another man. His cousin Eliyahoo lurked somewhere in that garden lit by lanterns, his disembodied head floating through Asher’s mind, a large, round face with fleshy lips, an insolent nose red with wine, teeth already yellowed by tobacco. Asher remembered seeing him undressed at the hammam.
How a man with arms like a woman thinks himself worthy of holding such a wife,
Asher wondered.

Asher looked up again and in that moment, Kokab
turned in his direction. She met his eyes and held him there, terrified and exhilarated, in her gaze. A circle of dancing women came between them and she continued to look at him. Asher looked at her, too, and the whole world spun madly about them, the garden, the voices, the music, the dusk-darkened treetops overhead, the first few stars appearing in the night skies. From above the heads of the dancing women, Asher watched Kokab’s stillness, this woman who stood alone in contemplation first of the setting sun, and now him, this woman who remained untouched by the joy and frenzy of all the other guests.

Then, Kokab was gone. She disappeared into the crowd and he looked for her until darkness descended completely and the lanterns betrayed too many shadows. He could no longer discern one face from another. He mumbled formalities in response to blessings, then found himself carried by the crowd toward the door leading into the tight streets, pushed along by words of encouragement and hands slapping his back. He walked behind his mother, who held a tray of jewels, gifts for the bride, over her head as the procession poured through the door of their home, loud with song, and turned in the direction of the bread maker’s home. A few times, he glanced over his shoulder as if to turn back, but the hands were quick to hold his elbows and a chorus of promises to respond that this marked the beginning of a joyous life. Before he knew it, he stepped through the narrow doorway of the bread maker’s home and there sat Rakhel in a chair placed in the center of the room, surrounded
by women who burst into loud ululations and men who whistled and musicians who took up their tune.

Asher stood frozen before Rakhel, staring at her as though she were a stranger. She looked up to see his expression, her own gaze full of panic, before she looked down to her hands clasped in her lap. With her head tilted down, she glanced up again and he nodded his head, but before he could smile to reassure her that he recognized her, a group of women surrounded her and began adorning her with the gifts from his family, a gold-threaded shawl on her shoulders, gold bangles from her wrists to her elbows, emerald rings for her fingers, heavy gold trinkets for her hair, and gold coins, one after another,
clink, clink, clinking
in time to the music, dropped into a bowl placed in her lap.

Morning came. The men came for him, Ibrahim, his bachelor cousins and boyhood friends. They slapped his face until he opened his eyes and they made him drink hot chai. They laughed and boasted as he groaned with the weight of the previous night still heavy in the pit of his stomach. They rose from the sofre, pulled him up from the floor, and carried him, like a man wounded in battle, to the hammam. In the hammam the men sang loudly and told bawdy jokes and laughed heartily. Asher, too, sang and laughed, but only a part of him sat there in the steam of that afternoon among those young men.