A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (38 page)

he months pass in a frenzy, lost in the urgent hours and days that fill them. Getting a passport. Knocking on embassy doors and paying off bureaucrats. Buying a seat on six different flights spread out over four months, just in case. She doesn’t tell anyone that she plans to leave. Not yet. Why should she? Better to be cautious, to once again make a habit of guarding her secrets and schemes. Goodbye to the sweet abandon of those first days of marriage, when no secret seemed too big to whisper to each other.

Enough of this. Though she looked for one, she has no excuse for staying in Iran, for never having tried to get out despite marrying Abbas based purely on that hope. She isn’t trapped. She hates herself for thinking that she was, for always walking a step behind, for accepting lesser roles and playing them gratefully. Enough of the salty and the sweet of this seaside life. No more Khanom Basir, but also no more Reza. No more time spent as a village wife, but also no more time with her father.

No more Islamic Republic of Iran. But also no more Iran. No more foggy Caspian afternoons. No more thick soups eaten directly out of a cauldron on top of a roof in Masouleh. No more drives through tree-covered mountains toward the beach. No more fragrant rice fields or garlic strung up in batches around wooden doorposts.

No more of many things, but most important: no more fuzzy sketches of Mahtab through stories. Time to move on to something tangible, to discover the fuller story. To live out all the moments she gave to her sister for fear of living them herself.

She is very careful now to hide all signs of her impending departure until the last moment. She visits Rasht and Tehran on days when Reza is in class and Khanom Basir is playing backgammon, shopping, or cooking with Khanom Alborz and Khanom Omidi. She pays a friendly office worker to expedite the processing of her passport and to avoid questions about her husband and her planned travels. (“I’ve always wanted to visit Istanbul and Dubai,” she tells him, and he smiles and says that Istanbul is very nice.) When the passport arrives, she hides it with her music tapes and her six plane tickets. Slowly she begins to empty out her bank accounts. She thinks of Reza, and the amount he will need to finish his studies, to buy a small plot, maybe even to take care of Ponneh.

With fearful disbelief she scans the list of steps required to apply for an American visa.
Really so many?
She remembers an article in an old copy of
The New York Times
, in which a wealthy Iranian man asks an American the desperate question that so many others have asked: “Why won’t your government let me go to the U.S.A.?” Maybe it’s hopeless. She is reading one of these visa applications, slowly becoming disheartened, when the phone rings. She ignores it and returns to her work, discreetly putting the items she will take in one corner of the closet, stacking all her scattered notes and stories into her journal. Fifteen minutes later the phone rings again. She picks up the receiver and waits.

“Allo? Allo?”
the man on the other end shouts into the phone.
“Khanom Abbas?”
This was never Saba’s name. Even strangers haven’t called her that for more than a year.
In the background she can hear a woman panting instructions.
Tell her now,
she says, and when the man hesitates,
It should be a simple thing, very simple.
Another man hushes the woman as the caller tries to speak. He introduces himself, an Arab name that Saba immediately forgets, and tells her that he is a lawyer. His accent is distinctly rural and she imagines him as a frail, balding man. This image calms her. The man tells her that he is representing some members of her family, and as such, he is at her service, but he cannot fail to inform her of his research, findings, and proposed changes on their behalf. Saba waits for him to continue, though with each word spoken and implied she comes nearer to understanding. “My client is a close family relation. And so he will take care of you, his brother’s widow.”
“That is too kind,” she says, “but not necessary, really.”
“No, no. It is only right now that it has been proven that he and Abbas shared not only a mother but also a father.” She recalls the uterine brother who took a small portion of her inheritance. The mullah told her that he would try to prove himself a full brother. A primary heir. The last remark hangs between them and Saba wonders if she can ignore it. But of course he repeats himself.
How has it been proven? Saba asks. What evidence does he have? Has he contacted anyone? What does he want from her at this time?
The panic that hits Saba just then—the knowledge that everything she chooses to say and do now will affect her entire future—is overwhelming. She presses the cold telephone receiver so hard to her ear that it leaves a reddish mark. When it is time for her to reply—a moment so fraught with expectation that the silence on the other side almost buzzes with energy—she gives the usual pleasantries, conveys her desire to work things out, and suggests a date several weeks away for them to meet in Rasht. The lawyer is reluctant but agrees, repeating twice that Abbas’s brother prefers to move faster.
Afterward, despite the urgent feeling that engulfs Saba as she hangs up the phone, despite the fact that she allows survival and selfinterest to rule her actions, she can’t ignore the painful conviction that this man really does deserve the money because did she not let his brother die?

“Baba, I need your help,” Saba whispers into the phone not ten minutes after she has hung up with the
dehati
lawyer. “Who will buy my land for cash? Dollars.”

“Oh God, Saba jan. What now? Are you in trouble?” Her father sounds like he was sleeping. More likely, he has been spending time with the pipe.

Saba explains about the uterine brother and the new claims. She hears her father cursing on the other end, and she can almost see him shaking his head, getting up, sitting down again. “You can’t sell the land.”

“Why not?” says Saba.
“Because no one is that stupid. If you try to sell it, even if you offer a price at half the value, the buyer will know that your ownership is suspect.”
“But I have the papers.”
“Wouldn’t you wonder,” her father says, “if someone wanted to sell you all that land for cheap and then demanded fast cash? Wouldn’t you worry that the government would take it tomorrow and you would be out all that money?”
“What can I do?” she asks, wondering if she will have to leave it all behind.
Her father switches to a sort of telephone code, like the one he uses when trying to arrange alcohol for a party. “Leave it, Saba jan. The courts will decide fairly. You know, I just found your Victorian doll. Remember the one with the big skirt and lots of pockets? Maybe it’s time to clean it out.” He is telling her to empty her bank accounts.
“What if I send the doll to America?” she says.
There is a moment when he must be thinking, or pretending not to hear.
Then she says, not caring who is listening, “I want to go to America.”
Her father breathes heavily. “Don’t say foolish things. I have the name of a man who can turn milk to butter without question. Butter is good anywhere and doesn’t spoil like milk.” He means that she should change her tomans to dollars.
Over the next few weeks Saba makes so many mistakes. She goes to empty her accounts completely before realizing that the consular officers who grant visas will need to see that she has wealth in Iran and plans to return. She has settled on trying for a tourist visa at first, then finding a way to stay—perhaps by enrolling at a university. At the bank her hands shake as she tears up the withdrawal forms knowing that she almost wrecked it all. She wonders how much money in a bank will convince the officers. Can she withdraw more after they grant her a visa? Should she put back the sums she has already withdrawn? No, she decides. She will call that her travel money. She asks the banker for a statement of her accounts instead. What will the consulate people want to hear? They are so vague and mysterious about their criteria, presumably so people won’t lie. It seems callous, but she is thankful she never gave Reza access to her larger finances. He doesn’t care enough to ask and Khanom Basir is at least too ashamed to insist.
She asks her father to do all he can to delay the proceedings with Abbas’s family—to keep her money safe during this time when she can’t withdraw it.
On a quiet night she scrolls through Hafezi after Hafezi in an old family address book—a gray handwritten one she took from under her father’s bed. She has relatives in Scotland, Holland, and America. Is her mother one of them? She finds only one
B. Hafezi
, but when she calls just to see, an unfamiliar woman answers and claims not to know a Bahareh.
Sometimes Saba daydreams about hearing her mother’s voice on the other end of a phone line. Her voice will be older and she will answer in an informal American way. Saba will speak in English, and her heart will leap at the thought that her mother is hearing her perfect Western greeting. She will ask a series of stupid questions, because this is, after all, her one-and-only mother, who, until their separation, heard all her most mundane thoughts.
What do you look like now? Are you happy to hear from me? Do I sound very old? Do you want me to say something else in English?
They will spend hours mixing two languages, laughing at the few favorite topics they still share, stories from television and Saba’s English books. Before they hang up, her mother will promise to send an official invitation letter. “I miss you, my Saba,” she will say. “
Zoolbia
.” And they will laugh that she still remembers that old joke.
Barely an hour has passed when the doorbell rings. Khanom Basir and Reza are both away for the day, and Saba pulls on her headscarf before entering the high-walled front garden. Lost in worries about invitation letters and visa interviews, she unlatches the big white gate, almost cutting her finger on the metal, and sees her father trembling in his house shoes and a ragged winter coat.
He doesn’t have to say why he’s come. He looks at her as though she were a foreign thing, ungrateful and cruel and selfish, like a
shalizar
worker caught stealing rice or the shepherd who informed the moral police about the men listening to Gospel Radio Iran on the hillside. “What are you doing?” he asks. “Why did you call Behrooz in California?”
“What?” Saba had expected nothing more than his typical angry response to her earlier comment about America. “Who’s Behrooz?”
“My cousin in California. You called his house an hour ago, asking for your mother . . . which, by the way, really scared his superstitious wife. He guessed it might have been someone in Cheshmeh and he called me.”
“I’m sorry.” She takes his arm and ushers him in. “I tried to tell you.”
“Look, this Abbas thing can be fixed,” he says. “You’re being rash.”
“No,” she says. “It’s just time for me to leave. I want to find out what happened.”
“Your mother is not in America,” he says. He sounds tired, frustrated. He follows her inside and closes the door. “I wish I could tell you exactly what happened, Saba jan.”
They sit down in the kitchen. “I know,” she says. “But that’s not the reason I want to go. The phone call was just a whim . . . because I saw the name in the book. I want to have my own life. I’m not happy here.” She hopes that will be enough.
It isn’t. Fathers too have selfish needs. “It’s because you don’t have babies.”
She decides to tell the truth. “I can’t have babies.” Briefly she feels the cool, quenching freedom of it. Then the rest comes out. The entire story of Abbas and their wedding night. Of the black-clad women in her bedroom and the inheritance she thought she deserved. Of the first days with Reza, that look in his eyes that she mistook for love but now recognizes as his attempt at love, a sort of theater mixed with boyish heroism and pity for all damaged women, for her ruined body—her reward for it all.
The way her father puts his head in his hands, the way he rubs his thinning hair in a circle on both sides of his head and looks up to her with big, piteous eyes, reminds her of Reza’s reaction that day in the shack. That ashen look. Those fidgety hands. That immediate response to reach for her hands or her hair. Why do men show so much grief when a woman is harmed by someone other than
them
? Why so much pity now? Does he think she is less of a person? Is he angry that she has let herself be tarnished?
Her father recovers his voice. “You always loved Reza. Everyone knew it.”
“And he never really loved me back,” she responds. “Everyone knew that too.”
“Have you told him? He won’t let you leave.”
“It’s not up to him. Baba jan, don’t you want me to get one thing that I want?”
“Don’t be ungrateful.” She can hear him trying not to snap.
She stares dumbly at her father. Talking to him is like trying to control a car on ice. Sometimes the way it goes has nothing to do with the way you turn the wheel. Maybe she should stop trying and just say something true. “Aren’t you proud of me for not giving up?” she asks, her voice childlike. She clears her throat because she wants to be taken seriously. “I sometimes think she’s out there with Mahtab, maybe not in the States, but somewhere. Yes, I’m an adult and my brain says one thing, but I . . .” She wants to mention the day at the airport but doesn’t. “I just want to go and see.”
Her father’s sad, faraway gaze reminds her of Agha Mansoori when his wife died. Finally it settles on her face. Just as it does, Saba gives a too-big smile as she did when she was the child he didn’t have time to know, and his eyes cloud over in a pool of gray. Is he going to chastise her? She fixes her face in what she thinks is a neutral glare.
“Saba jan, I wish you could look her up in a phone book or find her in America somewhere. You have a good heart to keep hoping when your father has stopped believing in everything.” He trembles as if trying to shake out a painful memory. He speaks in spurts between thoughtful pauses. “What would Bahareh say, do you think, about what I’ve done? If a man talks like a Muslim, and eats and drinks with Muslims, and allows his own daughter to marry them, can he call himself a Christian? Does it matter what’s in his heart if it’s all covered up by cowardice?” Saba doesn’t want to move; he has never told her so much. She wishes she knew what to say to preserve the moment, but each time they tiptoe toward each other like this, she manages to do something that causes the small light into her father’s world to flicker off again. He sighs. “But never mind that. We must accept the truth no matter how much it hurts.”
She sighs. Again he is failing her, refusing to understand. “Why is it so awful to keep hope? Maybe that’s just what we both need.” She gets up to refill their tea, but her father takes her hand. She stops but doesn’t sit back down, just stands over him, letting him take her small hand in both of his like a firefly that might flutter away.
He pauses for a long time and she can see he is looking for the right words—that he is struggling to say them. “That particular hope is good, yes. But there are better ones. Remember what your mother and I used to tell you girls?” he asks. “That you were destined to be great. That it’s in your blood to be powerful and strong and do big things?”
Saba nods. They were going to be twin titans, taking all their English words and piles of books and weaving a new history for the world, or a city, or a family. She hasn’t done any of that.
Her father continues, all the while refusing to let go of her hand, as if he thinks she will run away, or that his meaning will soak through his sweaty palms into her veins. “Saba jan, accepting the truth doesn’t dishonor your maman and Mahtab. But it’s keeping you from becoming that woman. You’re holding your hope so tight, using up all your power to hang on to it, that it’s become like a big stone weighing you down. You see? Now you have no power left. And even if you try, you can’t fly off and do all the things you were destined to do.” When she doesn’t respond, her father says, “I’m sorry if that comes across all wrong. I am not a twin. That part I probably can’t understand.”
She sits beside him, slips her other hand into the clamshell of her father’s heavy palms, and says, “I think you understand.” She rests her head on his shoulder. It’s been a long time since she felt the twists and knobs of a fatherly shoulder against her cheek. “As for America, give me time. I’ll figure it out.”
“If you go,” he says, a little sadly, “I will miss you.”
“Only for a while.” She smiles, then, when her father begins to disagree, she adds, “Because I’m not Mahtab, and it won’t be forever.”