A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (26 page)

don’t blame Saba’s father for asking me to stay away when she was growing up. The dangers to the family were real enough. And I suppose now she has no need of me, though I would love to give her a fuller understanding of her mother to balance out the undoubtedly hostile picture that the village women will have painted.

But I will not push too hard. That would be a mistake, I think. Next time, if I find an opportunity, perhaps I will tell her that she is very much like her mother. The other day I called Saba and a housekeeper, a woman named Omidi, told me about her current “storytelling.” Naturally I was worried. I’ve read the case studies of children who, in order to live with a tragedy or loss, use misinterpreted memories to create permanent other realities for themselves. Interestingly, the tragedy is often one in which they had a hand—like the subjects of the Milgram experiment who, when told what they had done, convinced themselves that they had argued or fought back when, in fact, they had been compliant. But why would Saba exhibit such symptoms? I wish I could speak to her, or that I had done so as she was growing up.
After the phone call, I recalled that Bahareh used to do something similar. When we were in college, I became involved with a young man who later broke our engagement to study in London— a feeble excuse since I had also won a place in an English university for a term. Bahareh came to my room and sat with me all night inventing stories about his foolish antics there. She made a list. Number one: he will use the wrong fork. Number two: he will try to kiss a man on the cheek. Number three: he will make rubbishy speeches to the queen. She was so amusing. The next day she brought me a wedding cake to throw in the river as a symbol of . . . well, I forget of what.

n the last two weeks Dr. Zohreh has called twice. She has assured Saba each time, in her husky, chain-smoker’s voice, that she is available if Saba should need her. Saba hasn’t returned her calls, afraid of what the doctor might have to say about her mother. Her letters to Evin Prison have so far been met with a long silence, and she has been unable to find any new clues. The doctor’s message might be a last hope, and she isn’t ready for closure. What if the information brings back the old, buried anger against her mother for leaving? What if it confirms that her mother is dead or wasting away in Evin? Still, in an effort to recruit Saba, Dr. Zohreh has sent, via Ponneh, books to read, pictures to examine, stories to consider. Though exhilarated by the attention of her mother’s friend, Saba can’t imagine throwing herself into such danger and uncertainty. She flips through newspapers from all over the world, the ones that contain pictures taken by the members of Dr. Zohreh’s group. These women come from all backgrounds, from cities all around Tehran and Shomal. They are Christian, Baha’i, Zoroastrian. Some are even Muslim. Dr. Zohreh is Zoroastrian—a worshipper of fire.
My mother is made of fire
, Saba thinks, engrossed by the image of her mother the activist burning through chadors with nothing more than her rage. She wishes she had seen this part of her, the part that wasn’t so sensible. Does Saba too have a little of that in her blood?
Abbas knocks on her door to say he’s leaving for the day. “Saba?

Saba jan? I’m leaving now. Do you want to come out and say goodbye?” She has ignored his every pleading look, all his miserable mumbling and shuffling about the house day and night for months. She says nothing and hopes her silence is painful to his dying ears. When the house is empty, she will do some research about America, maybe about taking a trip there . . .
for later
. She needs to create a tangible next step for herself because that is what a sensible girl would do. Maybe it’s time to visit Dr. Zohreh just once, only to retrieve whatever information might exist—to stop being afraid and listen to her mother’s distant voice. What could the doctor possibly say that would hurt her now? Maybe she will find an answer, something to cling to while she decides how to live out her life here.

When she has summoned the courage and made a plan, Saba holds a pencil-drawn map in one hand and the steering wheel of her father’s car in another, weaving through snowy streets. Soon the road joins the mountainous highway that so many Iranians take to escape to lush, green woods and dewy seaside villas in summer and to reach the ski slopes in winter. She eyes the map, which instructs her to abandon the Qazvin–Rasht road, itself curvy and dangerous, for a road even more prone to avalanche deaths. She pushes back the chador she wears out of town, rolls down the window, now foggy from her breath, and accelerates over a patch of old snow. Driving to the mountain shack on her own has been easier than she thought. Her father is spending the day walking through his spotty white fields and doing paperwork in the offices of his friend and bookkeeper, and he won’t miss the car. So far, the roads have been empty and unmenacing. Saba relaxes, watching the changing landscape—tan and orange dunes and rocks, slightly snow-covered—rolling across the horizon followed by frosty white trees leading up the mountain. When she was a child, Saba used to think that all distances could be measured with a teaspoon. Today she measured the distance using the gas in her father’s tank. Maybe after this she can travel even greater distances alone—distances measured by seas and oceans instead of teaspoons and gas tanks. In a few months spring will reach the top of the mountain and Saba is glad she has made this trip to witness the winter season.

She stops the car in a flat area on the side of a hill, just beneath the plateau where Dr. Zohreh promised the shack would be. Getting out of the car, she spots it right away, a small, cubelike wooden house hidden by the colors of the mountain. Unpainted brown logs in a blanket of white and evergreen. This part of the mountain is close to the sea. She can smell it, though the trees block the view. A woman is making tea on the other side of a window. She looks up and waves at Saba before disappearing to open the door.

“Saba jan,” she says in her tobacco rasp as she holds the door open and waves her inside. “Welcome. You look so grown up.” Dr. Zohreh is tall and slender with a dark face and a black, uncovered bob. She is wearing stylish tan slacks, and her ivory sweater looks like it came from America.

“Thanks,” says Saba. “I’m twenty.” Then she feels foolish, worries she’s made an inane first impression. The air inside is warmed by battery-powered space heaters and kerosene lamps. The house consists of one main room, a tiny kitchen, and an outdoor toilet beyond the back wall. Saba takes a seat at a large table covered with white lace and gives Dr. Zohreh her chador, which the doctor stuffs unceremoniously behind a box—strange, Saba thinks, and grows curious about the contents of the box. Pamphlets? Letters? When the teakettle whistles, the doctor rushes to the kitchen. Saba runs her cold hand through her hair, working her fingers through a tangled strand.

Dr. Zohreh’s voice wafts in along with the smell of warm honey pastries. “I’m so happy you came.” Already Saba is enthralled by the shack.

“Me too,” she says. She stares out the window, relishing the quiet all around. When Dr. Zohreh brings the tea, it almost feels like a luxury, like meeting a new friend in an unfamiliar café for a frivolous hour. No loud mothers gossiping and giving advice. No Ponneh and Reza with their unspoken dialogue seeping through thick clouds of hashish smoke. No history at all, which is the very essence of peace.

“Tell me about your husband,” Dr. Zohreh asks in a detached, psychoanalytical tone. She takes a bite of
ghotab
bread and pushes the plate toward Saba. This very un-Iranian gesture—serving herself first—somehow makes Saba trust her more. There is no
tarof
here, and Saba hates pretend generosity, which is a lie, after all. She takes a piece and realizes that it’s the same bread that Ponneh has been bringing to the pantry lately.

Dr. Zohreh stops chewing and narrows her eyes. “Does he hurt you?” she asks, skipping any kind of polite hesitation. “If so, I think you should tell me.”

“Why?” Saba tries to fix her face into an ironic smile. But it seems that she succeeds only in looking sad, because Dr. Zohreh reaches over and touches her hand. Right away Saba fears that she has said too much, because it is vital to her future that no one probe into the workings of her marriage. So she says, “He’s a coward. He stays out of my way when I want him to.” And since the Dallak Day, this has been true.

“Do you know what your mother said to me once . . . after the accident?” Dr. Zohreh offers. “She told me, if anything ever happened to her, to make sure you don’t grow up to be too safe and sensible.” She shakes her head and sips her tea. “What a funny thing to tell a daughter in this day and age.”

Yes, what a funny thing,
Saba muses. Certainly her mother would be disappointed to hear of her choices. Marrying an old man for money. Putting aside college to tend to a man who can barely read a word of English. There is a frightening possibility that Saba has made a lifetime of foolish choices. But is Bahareh Hafezi in any position to judge? Whether she left or was arrested for her activities, didn’t she abandon Saba one way or another? Didn’t she leave her daughter to fend for herself? And this is how Saba has chosen to protect herself—it’s the way her surrogate mothers have taught her, and Khanom Hafezi has no right to interject her opinion through this stranger. The mothers who raised her instructed her to follow the old ways, and that is what Saba has done. There was no one around to push her to do otherwise. “That’s all she said?” Saba asks. “Tell me more about her. When did you talk to her?”

Now Dr. Zohreh looks surprised. “Talk to her?” she says. “Well, same as anyone else, of course . . . years ago, before she was . . . taken.” She examines Saba with her inquisitive doctorly gaze and adds, “I think she means you should have some purpose. Something that’s worth being reckless for. She cared so much about your potential.”

Saba nods, sips her tea.
“You know,” the doctor says as she straightens the tea tray, “our work is your mother’s legacy in a way. You should visit one day when we have a meeting—”
Saba cuts her off. “Can you tell me anything about what happened to her?”
When Dr. Zohreh gets up and starts lighting a lamp and two candles, Saba thinks she is just creating work for her hands. Soon the frosty windows shine yellow and Dr. Zohreh sighs, pleased. “Isn’t that lovely?” She warms the bread over a hand stove, but Saba is well aware of this trick. Her mother used it to avoid her father’s questions in the weeks—or was it months or a different year entirely?—before her disappearance. Saba sits back and refuses to say a word, determined to wait out the game.
Finally Dr. Zohreh breathes out again and says, “If you don’t hear from someone after they’re taken to Evin Prison . . . Well, you know.”
“I don’t,” says Saba, as she considers the reasons for the arrest. Maybe her mother passed out Dr. Zohreh’s leaflets or played too much Gospel Radio Iran for the fieldworkers.
“Here’s how I see it,” the doctor says. “Somebody told your father they saw her at the prison, correct? That’s why he began to look for her there.” Saba nods. “But did you know that there was never any paperwork?”
Saba’s fingers are working through a piece of
ghotab
bread, breaking it into crumbs on the table. She wishes the doctor would just get to it. “I don’t understand.”
Dr. Zohreh nods. “The prison claims that she was never there, and of course, I have to be very honest with you, this is what they often say when something unexpected has happened to the prisoner. . . .” She trails off and cleans up some of Saba’s crumbs. “I think it’s easier for your father to believe that she died there. She was so brave, you know. . . . And it really
is
the most logical explanation, Saba jan.”
Saba conjures the vision of her mother at the airport. She refuses to believe Dr. Zohreh. Who is she to say definitively that her mother is dead? She takes a deep breath and tries not to touch her throat, because surely the doctor will judge her weakness.
“But,” Dr. Zohreh continues, “who is to decide that the person claiming to have seen your mother is any more reliable than the prison guards? I say that the lack of paperwork gives us two possibilities.” Saba can see a glimmer of excitement in the doctor’s face, and her mind wanders through the jumbled memories of the day at the airport. Did she see the
pasdar
s take her mother away? In that last moment—before her mother disappeared into the crowd headed for America—did they see each other in the terminal lounge, at the gate, in the security line? Was Mahtab wearing a coat in summer?
She tries to focus on the possibility that her mother’s best friend is now offering. “She might have died,” Saba begins, “or . . .” She stops there, considering what this other, more hopeful option means.
“She might never have been arrested at all,” says Dr. Zohreh.
“Yes,” Saba mumbles.
She might have abandoned Cheshmeh and her family
.
Since seeing the letter to Evin, Saba has tried so many times to piece together the sequence of events from that day. How could Mahtab have gotten on a plane with a mother who had just been arrested? But now, with this new possibility, her airport memories could very well be true.
Baba might have been wrong about Evin.
Now her elegant mother returns, wearing a blue manteau, holding Mahtab’s hand, boarding a plane—a picture that’s suddenly lifelike again, as if someone had turned the knobs on a TV and cleared up all the static and white lines.
Saba exhales, letting a pleasant calm wash over her.
It makes sense. After all, how could her father have been distracted enough to lose his wife to the
pasdar
s? Is he too ashamed to admit that she
did
abandon him? That she did run away without a word? Why isn’t he angrier? Why does he never curse the wife who brought such plagues into his life? Maybe that is a part of his private suffering. Maybe he helped her run away and refuses to tell Saba, because she too might leave him.
In the early evening, when the candles and lamps have grown dim and the sun is lost behind acres of frosted mountains, when the bread is dry and the windows have lost their warm yellow glow and returned to their gray coat of wet glaze, Saba excuses herself. She doesn’t like to be near the sea at night. “I have to be home before Abbas.”
“What do you think about coming to our next meeting?” Dr. Zohreh asks again as she looks for Saba’s chador behind the boxes. Glancing out into the black, Saba imagines her younger self, playing with Mahtab that day in the water.
“Today was nice,” Saba says. “I’m glad I came. But I’m sorry, this isn’t for me.”
Dr. Zohreh seems surprised. “Are you sure? Your mother—”
“I’m sure,” says Saba. There is far too much at stake. Her entire future for what? The thrill of broadcasting the country’s collective misery to the world? Shaming hordes of oblivious Iranian men who may never even know that they have been punished? She has no need for that. There is a real man, a flesh-and-blood sinner to punish all she wants, waiting in her own house. “Besides, this is Ponneh’s project. I think I’ll let her have it.”
Dr. Zohreh smiles, as if she knows this is just an excuse. “Take this then,” she says, and reaches for something in her pocket. She gives Saba an old key on a thick string. “Come to this house anytime you need a place to think.”
The two part ways—each with a few nostalgic words about Saba’s mother—donning their black-and-gray coverings and disappearing in their cars into the night. All the way back home, Saba pictures the sea just beyond the tree cover. The frightful rocks. The creaking, unsteady pier. The boats tossed by waves. Such misty winter days have a strange effect on the Caspian, giving it the murky, gloomy quality of an unhappy dream. Saba longs for summer. She rubs the key to the shack between her fingers and thinks of the knife-wielding
pasdar
from her nightmares, the one who says, “On your life, where is Mahtab?”
Across the sea,
she whispers to him in her mind, certain again after so long.