Women Without Men (11 page)

“Why didn't you bring your wife?” Fa'iza asked pointedly.

“She is too busy,” he said. “Besides, she is not into socializing. She is a homemaker, born to keep house.”

“I can't say I approve of full-time homemakers,” Fa'iza returned. “A woman must have a social dimension, to help her man advance socially. One can't get stuck in the kitchen corner. For example, you don't plan to remain a low-grade employee forever. You want to advance yourself to higher positions in your organization. The way to do it is to network with important people. I have lost count of the number of important people I've gotten to know so far. I just have to drop a hint and any problems I may have will be taken care of.”

“Do you happen to know Mr. Atrchian?” asked Amir Khan, brimming with anticipation, “the one who was here last week? You know, bald, short, his face always flushed?”

“Of course,” she answered emphatically, insinuating a need for confidentiality. “He and Mr. Manaqebi smoke opium together.”

Amir Khan seemed delighted with the answer. He had brought up the man's name with Fa'iza before. But pointedly she never asked why he was interested; she did not want to serve as a go-between.

Farrokhlaqa had agreed to model for the painter. In
addition to Fridays he also came on Tuesdays to work on the portrait. The plan was to have an exhibition, richly financed by Farrokhlaqa, consisting of various sketches the painter had made of her in preparation for the portrait.

Munis continued to spend most of the day at the end of the garden helping the gardener collect dewdrops for the tree. Mosayeb and Ahmad took full charge of the kitchen, obviating the need for the women in catering chores. With the approach of the winter season Farrokhlaqa was thinking of getting rid of the women. Now she knew how to manage her affairs. The exhibition was to open in late January, and she was thinking of leasing a house in Tehran. The garden in Karadj would be her summer residence. She saw no place for women in this scheme.

One night in mid-January the garden was flooded with a mysterious luminescence. Munis, who was sleeping close to the window in the villa, was awakened by it. “She is giving birth,” she muttered to herself. Hurriedly, she put on some clothes and headed for the lodge. A heavy snow had fallen through the night and had covered the garden, diffusing the light in all directions, as though the whole universe was aglow.

Zarrinkolah was now a figure of clear crystal, refracting the light in many colors. The gardener, seemingly unconcerned, was sitting on the floor mending his slippers.

“We must help her,” Munis yelled at him.

“She does not need help,” said the gardener. “A true woman gives birth by herself.”

Just before dawn a morning glory came into the world.

The gardener gathered it in his cupped hands and headed toward the riverbank, where he had already dug a small pit in the sand. It was full of frozen snow. Gently, he placed the seedling on the ice.

“It's going to freeze,” groaned Munis.

“It will not die. It will grow roots and prosper.”

They returned to the room. Zarrinkolah was sitting silently in the middle of her bed. She was no longer crystalline. She had turned into her former self, her breasts swollen with milk. The gardener embraced her tenderly. He kissed her forehead and her hands, gently stroking her hair. He then bent down and massaged her feet.

“We must now feed the tree,” said the gardener solemnly, handing a cup to his wife. She expressed her milk in the cup, filling it to the brim.

“Now, go to sleep,” he said to his wife, “a restful sleep.”

He picked up the cup and with Munis walked to the tree. Turning to Munis, he said, “It is frozen into a sleep. It is good that it is hibernating. By the spring it will be a tree like you've never seen before.”

Drop by drop, he spread the milk around the trunk of the tree. By the time he finished, the sun had risen and they returned to the lodge. Munis picked her way slowly through the wintry garden toward the house. She had a sense that she had died again, since nothing seemed strange to her anymore. Somewhere along the way she stopped by a tree and leaned her head against its rough trunk. “I need help,” she told herself.

In a way, she envied the prostitute. The prostitute had won too easily, having achieved the sanctity of light, as
spontaneously and effortlessly as laughing. Munis could not penetrate this mystery.

“How can I turn into light?” she moaned.

There was no answer.

She lacked the potential to become a tree; it wasn't in her nature. She was not fertile either. She knew that she was rotting from within. She knew that what led to the clarity of light was love, something she had never experienced in her life. She had progressed to the edge of wonderment, but love was oceans away. She knew that love would come if she could sincerely feel the essence of a tree past the roughness of its bark. But always, the physical sensation of the roughness interrupted her. She always knew the malice of humankind, without herself being in its possession. She had not learned to be malicious. She only knew malice.

In a deserted stretch of the Karadj highway Munis had come face-to-face with unbridled lust, although she knew what lust was before being touched by it. The problem was that she had an unbounded awareness of things, an awareness that instilled undue caution in her, making her fearful that action would lead to ignominy, humiliation. This created in her a desire to be ordinary, average. Yet she did not truly know what it meant to be ordinary. She did not know that it meant not loving an earthworm, not genuflecting at the altar of withered leaves, not standing in prayer at the call of a lark, not climbing a mountain to see the sunrise, not staying awake all night to gaze at the Ursa Major. She did not differentiate between earth and gravel, but she distinguished the earth from the sky. She
had not seen the skies of the earth, but she knew there were earths of the sky. She saw herself in an inevitable process of stagnation. She was already partially rotten within.

“What can I do with this mass of trivial knowledge?” she wondered aloud. “How can I cut through it?”

Farrokhlaqa was awake and standing at the entrance to the house in her woolen housecoat.

“The house is freezing cold,” she said, sounding upset. “Obviously, you left the door open.”

“I'm sorry,” said Munis, already aware that Farrokhlaqa wanted the women out of the house.

“In your opinion,” Munis asked, “what can I do with all this trivial knowledge?”

“What trivial knowledge?” Farrokhlaqa asked, puzzled.

“I mean all this trivial knowledge, for example, you wanting us out of the house. Why should I know this?”

Farrokhlaqa shrugged her shoulders dismissively. By now she had learned how to deal with Munis and was no longer intimidated by her mind-reading ability. She had decided that Munis was too simple-minded to be able to exploit the knowledge she gained from mind reading for some practical purpose. She was only tormented by it.

“I'm going to Tehran today,” she announced. “I have rented a house there. You people can stay here for as long as you want. I'm going to be back in the summer. Give the key to the gardener when you leave.”

 

MAHDOKHT HAD PLANTED HERSELF on the riverbank in the fall. She suffered as the clay around her ankles hardened. The freezing rainstorms of the season tore her clothes to shreds. She was left dressed in tatters. She shivered incessantly until the winter frost froze her all over. But her eyes were left open, looking at the river as it flowed by.

With the first spring showers, a thaw set in and splintered the ice and she felt the tingling of sprouting buds on her limbs. Her toes resumed their growth as roots, and they penetrated deeper and deeper into the earth. She could hear them grow. They extracted nutrients from the earth and spread them through her organs. She listened
to the sound of the roots and watched the water in the river turn green.

The fall arrived again, and with it came the cold. But she no longer suffered. The roots stopped their growth and so did every part of her body.

That winter she was fed with dewdrops. Although she felt the frost covering her, she still saw the river as green, with a slight tinge of blue.

In the spring she was once more covered with sprouting buds. She welcomed the spring and her heart filled with joy, a joy that she passed on to the buds as they grew into green leaves.

When the summer arrived, she saw the water turn blue and schools of fish in it.

Freezing weather returned in early autumn and the sky darkened. But her heart was still joyful, having now found unison with the spirit of the tree, storing all the goodness of the earth.

By midwinter she was being fed with human breast milk. This gave her an explosive burst of energy thawing the ice even before the advent of spring. But it also made her ache all over as she had to confine the force within her body. Now, as she stared at the river, she no longer saw a continual stream, but a flux of liquid drops rushing in the riverbed helter-skelter in their numberless multitude. This exacerbated her pain. Her senses infiltrated the droplets of the river current and made her palpitate in unison with the heartbeat of each drop.

She was fed human milk for three months. Toward the end of April the pressure within her had reached explosive
force. It burst out suddenly and violently. Although it was an explosion, it was not an instantaneous blowout; it was nuanced and in stages. It was as if her tissues were coming apart slowly and jarringly. In a perpetual transmutation Mahdokht was separating from herself, suffering excruciating, unbearable pain like birth contractions, almost causing her eyes to burst out of their sockets. The water was no longer a mass of droplets but fractured into infinite tiny bits of atoms of ether.

It all came to a sudden end. The tree was now a mountain of seeds. A strong wind scattered them into the river. The seeds traveled with the water to all corners of the world.

 

DURING AUTUMN THE CITY AIR was fresh. By late morning it was pleasant to take a walk in the streets. Almost every morning around eleven Fa'iza met Amir Khan for a stroll. She would arrive in Victory Square on the bus from Karadj and he would be there to meet her. He often grumbled about his wife and she listened patiently. The wife was slovenly, he complained, and didn't know how to cook. She couldn't even take proper care of their baby. Fa'iza sympathized with him and tried to give him helpful advice.

A month into their assignations, the company where Amir Khan worked penalized him for excessive absences. This was a blow to him, and he had to change the time
of their meetings to five in the afternoon. Now she would arrive from Karadj in late afternoon to meet Amir Khan. They would meander the streets near Victory Square and talk. Sometimes they would take in a movie or have dinner in a restaurant. After a while, it was apparent that the routine was becoming monotonous. Besides, they were running out of things to talk about.

“I don't know how to put this,” Amir Khan said one day, “but it is not a good thing for you to commute from Karadj every day. I'm afraid something might happen to you. A woman shouldn't be traveling by herself late at night.”

“What should we do?” she asked.

“Why don't you come back and live in Tehran?”

“Where? In whose house?”

“Go back to your grandmother.”

“What makes you think she'll take me back? She doesn't understand our lifestyle. She'd think something bad has happened to me and be even more strict than before.”

Amir Khan thought for a moment. “Perhaps it is better if I rent you a room,” he said.

“Shame on you,” Fa'iza objected diffidently. “What makes you think I'm that kind of girl?”

“What if we enter into a concubinage?”
⁵
Amir Khan proposed. “That will at least formalize our relationship.”

Fa'iza disliked the term “concubine” applying to her, but said nothing.

They went to see a notary public one afternoon. “We do not handle concubinage,” said the registrar, “only permanent marriages.”

They went through the formalities and registered their marriage with the understanding that there would be no announcements until Amir Khan had prepared his wife for a separation. They spent the night in a hotel room.

The morning after, Amir Khan woke up in a depressed mood. He kept moving around the room looking for things. Fa'iza, for her part, ignored him as he stood in front of the window gazing at the street below. He felt his life was in a shambles and he had no one to complain to.

“We must look for a small house,” Fa'iza broke the silence.

“Wait a minute,” barked Amir Khan. “I'm taking you to my own house.”

“Over my dead body!” she retorted. “What makes you think I'm going to live under one roof with another wife of yours? No way!”

Fa'iza started looking for a place to live and soon found a place on Salsabil Avenue. Amir Khan looked for and found a new job at a trading company to support two households, still hoping that Fa'iza would put him in contact with Mr. Atrchian.

Life goes on for the two of them—not ideally, but not too badly either.

 

MUNIS STAYED BEHIND to help the gardener for three months. Together they nurtured the tree with the milk from Zarrinkolah's breasts. In the middle month of the spring the tree was adorned with magnificent flowers in bloom. One morning they found that the tree had turned into a huge mound of seeds. A wind came and scattered the seeds on the river.