The Girl from the Garden (9 page)

Another night passed and another day. The crowd of people filled his sitting room, spilled into the courtyard, wandered to the outer gardens. Family and relatives sur
rounded him with much commotion until the dusk of that Thursday. Asher stole away from the guests and retreated to his study. He sat behind his desk, his books and abacus before him, the gramophone caught repeating the same three notes of Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata
. His eldest uncle entered his study, stood before his desk and asked, “You are hiding?”

Asher could not find the words to speak. His uncle patted him on the back and said, “Come, son, there is nothing to fear. Tonight is a night for joy, and tomorrow night, for an even greater joy.” Asher stood absently and allowed the old man to lead him by the hand. They came to a room where Rakhel stood, a window behind her and the setting sun so bright that Asher could see only the eclipse of light behind her darkened body. They led him to her and he stood before her. Without looking at her face, he drew the veil over her eyes, and behind it, in the mesh embroidered with gold thread, she might have been Kokab.

Soon there will be the prayer
, Asher thought.
There will be the wine, the ring, the breaking of glass, there will be witnesses and the signing of contracts and the consummation, and tomorrow night, Rakhel’s naked body in my arms and she will be mine and it is not the other, not the one who held my soul in her gaze, who left me trembling.
He turned and left the room, walked past the old bread maker, past his uncles, past the singing and clapping guests to the old rabbi who waited beneath the bridal chuppah.

From beneath the canopy of the chuppah, Asher watched
Rakhel’s approach. The women’s ululations pierced the air. The reverberations of their sound weakened his knees. They clapped and sang as Rakhel walked toward him, faceless beneath the veil, one hand held by her widowed aunt, one held by Zolekhah. The two women released their hold. Asher noticed his own rapid breathing. He closed his eyes. Rakhel circled him once and he felt her nearness. Twice, and he smelled the scent of her flesh and of rosewater. She circled him a third time, and he imagined the glance of black animal eyes. A fourth time, and he searched his mind for the recollection of his bride’s eyes, for the eyes of this girl who walked around him. A fifth time and he could not remember the face of the veiled girl at all, not anything of her face. A sixth and he felt overwhelmed with fear. If he could stop the moments from advancing, silence the guests, the rabbi, his own breath, and steal quietly into the night. If he could reach his horse, and lead it softly to the street, into the open fields, over the mountains. If he could just hold this moment, perhaps cast everything into a deep slumber so that he might escape this inescapable dream. He opened his eyes to see Rakhel circle him for the seventh time. Then she stood beside him and someone placed her hands in his own lifeless hands and he felt no heat from either his own flesh, or hers. Nothing burned between them and his body became suddenly drenched with cold sweat and he thought,
this, this is my death
and he heard words and sipped wine and heard his own voice promise
Haray aht m’kudeshet li b’taba’at zo k’dat Moshe v’
Yisrael
in response and saw his own hand, trembling, place a gold ring
on her extended finger and nothing seemed more impossible than what his body had already done, the betrayal of his hands, the betrayal of his voice. Asher heard the rabbi read the ketuba, and then instruct him to drink again and Asher raised a glass of dark wine to his lips and he understood, then, with great awe and terror, that he had deceived himself, and that this treason lurked within his own heart, a thief in the dark night of his own making, the one that will, soon, very soon, raise the sharp blade of his dagger and rend his very soul. That wine burned his throat, and he felt it spread to his heart and to his arms and to his hands, to his fingers and suddenly he felt Rakhel’s hand in his own. He breathed in her scent, this bride who was not the other, and his body betrayed him a third time. He brought down his foot with fury upon the glass, and with the clear sound of its shattering, he felt an intense desire for the veiled girl before him, felt it in his flesh and knew that, this time, there would be a quenching of thirst. Beneath the canopy of the chuppah, made of his father’s tallith, the prayer shawl that held the weight of his father’s hopes and fears and dreams, Asher remembered that the color of the eyes of his new bride was the shade of honey.

T
he day
is a uniform gray. The sky
still. Mahboubeh sits at the dining table and looks at the naked branches of the trees through the living room window.
August is an immeasurable distance from now,
she thinks. She rises heavily from the table and walks to the cold fireplace. She takes a book from the mantel and blows the dust from its cover. She returns to the table, sits and closes her eyes, the book resting in her lap. Then she opens the book to a random page and begins reading out loud. “Like Yakov, I am crying, for the beautiful face of Yousseff is my
desire. Without you, the city is my prison. Wandering, the mountain and desert are my desire.”

Mahboubeh closes the book and remembers her father, Ibrahim, reciting these poems, his eyes closed, tears streaming down his face. As a child, she’d steal into his room, hide in a corner and listen to him, the book open in his lap, his head thrust back, reciting, almost singing poetry. When she became older, she learned the poems, too, by heart and wondered if it was the loss of her mother that inebriated her father with such sorrow that he sang from dawn to dusk, lost to the world before him.

Before her mother’s death, her father was a religious man. Each day, on his way to the caravansary, Ibrahim walked first to the synagogue to bind his arms and place The Word upon his flesh in hope that the light that filtered in through the windows, in that instant, in the next, might illuminate a path. And in the afternoons, after the azan sounded from the minarets, when the other men took their rest either at home, or in the caravansary, their bellies full, tired from the work of the morning, Ibrahim hurried back to the synagogue to find the old rabbi and study with him, argue with him, demand answers for all the questions that harried him night and day.

And each of those afternoons, on his way back to the caravansary from the synagogue, Ibrahim passed the same dervish, bare chested, hair unkept, who sat shoeless in the shade of a mulberry tree and laughed, spoke to birds, to the tree, to anyone passing, and sang beneath the skies, sang
from dawn to dusk and into the night. Ibrahim asked the dervish one day, “What inspires you to sing all day?” The dervish stopped singing and smiled. He held open his empty hands and said, “Wouldn’t you sing, too, if you held all the wealth of this world in the palms of your hands?”

Ibrahim envied the dervish. Often, he stopped to watch him from behind a wall for a moment and imagined himself as that man, wanting nothing, needing nothing, free of the cumbersome possessions of this world, and free, too, of the yoke of custom, propriety, expectations. But that moment couldn’t have been long, as his older brother waited, frowning because Ibrahim tarried too long with holy men who got fat from the hard work of real men and did nothing all day but fill the heads of the feeble-minded with fantasies.

Coins and the counting and the goods and the lands and the trades kept Ibrahim busy. Merchants came in from the deserts with their camels, tired and dust covered, and these men led the exhausted animals to water, then drank themselves and came to speak to Ibrahim about their journeys before buying bundles of tobacco and wheat before heading back out, again, into the nothing.
Even they,
Ibrahim thought to himself,
even they are on a path, a meditation in the repetition of the road they travel, learning mirages from reality, disciplined by their thirst and the tiredness in their bones.

At the end of each day, Ibrahim walked back to his home, its high walls, its large gardens, the rooms of valuable antiques, his beautiful young wife who spoke like a little bird. Then dinner and weekly Sabbaths, weddings,
celebrations for the births of sons, or the wild mourning for the dead, or holy days and their circumscribed procedures, which he followed for a while, until that one day when he buried his young wife, and renounced everything.

Ibrahim did not leave behind much. A crowd of motherless children. A handful of photographs. And this book he gave to Mahboubeh before he died. She holds it in her hands, the binding undone, the pages browned, brittled. She touches the green leather cover, traces the engraving on the leather with her finger, the gold of the title long gone. It is a collection of the poems of Jalāl ad-Dīn Mu
ammad Rūmī. Mahboubeh closes her eyes and sees Ibrahim sitting, in his old age, in the corner of his room. He sways gently to the rhythm of his recitation.

“What did you gain for your sacrifice?” she asks him, but he does not answer her. He keeps his eyes closed, and weeps and sings until he falls into sleep, slumped on a cushion Mahboubeh places for him against the wall.

Ibrahim awakens
in
the fraction of the moment before Khorsheed screams. He turns to find his wife’s moonlit face contorted in pain, her body drenched with sweat. He stumbles in the dark to find the matches. She moans. Ibrahim’s fingers shake so violently that the matches fall unlit, one by one, to the dark floor.

“Hold on, hold on,” he says. Again and again, his hands are like hands in a dream, incapable of steady move
ment, until, suddenly, the gold spark, the blue hiss and light. He places the candle beside the bed and pulls the blankets off his wife.

Khorsheed clutches her abdomen with both hands, and rocks side to side on the soaked bedclothes. Ibrahim feels the room pulsate. The walls move perceptibly in toward him, then out again. The ground softens, giving. He kneels beside her bed. “What should I do?” he asks. Khorsheed screams again and grabs the bedclothes with her hands, the muscles of her body tightening. Ibrahim’s whole being halts in this moment, in the stretch of his wife’s open mouth, in the quivering of her thighs, in the arch of her back, the bulging veins of her fists. In this instant, he no longer inhabits his own body but feels the great urgency of her body.

“Khorsheed?”

He hears a pounding at the door. It might have been his own chest, or the natural sound of the room, itself, the heartbeat of the sun-baked bricks beneath the skin of white plaster and the wooden-beam bones. He hears his mother and Fatimeh behind him, then feels his mother’s hand on his back.

“Ibrahim, stand up, son,” Zolekhah says. “Stand up, let me see the girl.” He stands, his head spinning. He holds on to his mother’s shoulders with both hands.

“Mother?”

“Come, come, agha Ibrahim,” Fatimeh says as she ushers him out. “We need a man to fetch Naneh Adeh at this hour.”
She gives him a gentle push and closes the door abruptly behind him.

The night air feels cold against Ibrahim’s face. In the darkness, he notices the black of the fountain and swaying shadows that might be trees. From behind the door, he hears Khorsheed scream again, and his knees give out beneath him.

“Brother, what are you doing sitting on the cold earth at this hour?”

Ibrahim looks up to see Asher standing over him. “I need to go get the midwife,” Ibrahim says. “The child is coming.”

“You need to stand up, first. Come to the pool and splash some water on your face so that you return to your senses.”

Ibrahim stands with effort and follows Asher to the fountain. The fish are still. He sees the reflection of the round, white moon, black clouds, the thousand stars on the surface of the water. He cups the cool water in his hands and splashes his face, over and over. He blinks his eyes several times and looks about the courtyard. The trees stretch their naked limbs in supplication to the night sky.

“Sit down and wait here, in case the women need you,” Asher says. “Though I don’t know of what use you can be in your state. I’ll go fetch the midwife. Nothing to fear, brother, fortune smiles upon you tonight.” Asher then turns to walk to the stables.

Ibrahim watches him leave. He listens to the click of
the heavy metal lock of the stable door, the latch, the creak of the hinges, the scrape of the door against the ground, the
clackclack
of the horse’s hooves across the courtyard, into the cobblestoned streets, and he imagines Asher alone, riding atop that horse, full of longing for a son. Ibrahim’s heart floods with a tremendous sorrow and he turns his face to the night sky and says, “How do You choose whom to bless and whom to keep bereft of Your blessings?”

Fatimeh emerges from the room wringing her hands and runs to the kitchen. “Ya Abolfazl, ya Allah,” she says. Ibrahim listens to her remove the iron grille of the stove. He hears the crackle of twigs broken by the old woman’s hands. After a few moments, the faint glow of the fire in the stove illuminates the doorway of the kitchen. Fatimeh bustles out of the kitchen with a heavy copper pot. “Agha Asher, is that you sitting in the shadows?” She asks.

“Asher left to fetch the midwife.”

“Agha Ibrahim, you don’t mind filling this pot with water from the well and bringing it back to the kitchen for old Fatimeh? I’m afraid age will slow the process.” Ibrahim takes the pot from her wordlessly and walks toward the well. The ground, though not covered in snow any longer, still feels frozen against his bare heels. He stops at the low stone wall of the well beneath the hanging branches of the willow tree. The branches sway in the gentle night breeze. They move in a unity of motion, each branch curving in the same supple angle, dancing to the left, bending to the right. He lowers the bucket into the well, listens to the squeak of the
pulley, the handle a burning cold to his touch. The bucket hits the surface of the water and there is the lag in the rope. He pulls the lever, the weight of the water awakening the muscles of his arms. He inhales the crisp night air, the scent of smoke in it, and perhaps a faint promise of blossoms. He pulls the rope until the bucket is within his reach. He tips the bucket and fills the copper pot. He bends to pick it up and walks back to the kitchen where Fatimeh waits nervously in the doorway.

Fatimeh takes the pot hurriedly from him and puts it on the stove. She rushes past him back toward the room where Khorsheed lays. Ibrahim stands in the kitchen and stares at the round belly of the stove, the fire blazing inside, the orange of it visible through the grille. He hears Khorsheed scream again and steadies himself against the wall. To take his mind off of her, he imagines Asher in the tangle of the passageways, making this journey to the midwife’s home in the cold of the night.

The sun rises
to find Ibrahim still sitting beside the pool. Khorsheed’s screams fill the courtyard, drown the tiny passages of the mahalleh
,
echo through the halls of the synagogue to unsettle the rabbis, carry to the merchants in the bazaars, reach barbers in their shops and schoolboys hurrying along. Ibrahim tries to remember if he heard the roosters crow at all. He is certain that Khorsheed’s hollering reaches the caravansary on the outskirts of the town, that camels, in
their stride across landscape, turn their heads in the direction of her cries, that men, amidst their business, shudder to feel the ripple of the air that carries the waves of her pain. In between, in the periods of her heavy breathing, the horses in the stalls keep still, the birds keep still, the chickens in the yard cock their heads, blink, their claws motionless in the dirt, and when the ripping begins in her body again, she wails so loud, the skies seem to rend open.

In the room, Rakhel sits pensively on the edge of the bed and watches Fatimeh and Naneh Adeh hold Khorsheed’s arms as she squats in the middle of a blanket spread out on the floor. Zolekhah presses wet rags against Khorsheed’s back, her neck, the back of her knees. Sadiqeh and Zahra wait by the wall.

“You have to push, daughter, with all your strength,” Naneh Adeh says.

“Khorsheed Khanum, listen to Adeh Khanum. A woman in the village I grew up in took so long to push out her baby, the girl was born with a head shaped like a honeydew melon, and not much smarter than one, either,” Sadiqeh says.

“G-d forbid, girl. What a time to talk like this,” Fatimeh says.

“The All-Merciful as my witness, I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. That was her nickname. We called her Honeydew.” Zahra nudges Sadiqeh, and the girl stops talking.

Khorsheed moans. She is drenched in sweat. Her long hair sticks to her skin, her stomach descends between her
thighs, the skin of it tight like a drum. She clenches her fists. The veins in her forearms and calves rise blue and bulge. Her face reddens. She shuts her eyes tightly and screams.

“I can’t . . . I can’t anymore . . .”

“Do you want to keep this one, child?” Naneh Adeh says.

“Khorsheed joon, child, you’re not the first woman to do this,” Zolekhah says.

“I’ve seen the poor soul’s head twenty times already and all he needs is one good
zoor
to slide out,” Naneh Adeh says. “Lord knows, the Bakhtiari women just stop behind their tribe, squat, and not a sound they make. Alone in the middle of some wilderness. Clean the babe up and run to catch up with the group.” Naneh Adeh turns to Zahra and Sadiqeh. “One of you girls go fetch more boiling water from the kitchen hearth. She’s taken so long, the last pot’s cooled again.”

“I’ll go,” Rakhel says. The women turn to look at her.

“I almost forgot you were here, child,” Naneh Adeh says. “So quiet you’ve been.”