A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (8 page)

“Saba jan, come and help. Mullah Ali brought some people . . .” His gray mustache bounces, sweeping his slack cheeks as he chews. Saba smells honey. “I saw the tapes,” he adds. “A collection that size will bring trouble. What if your cousin Kasem sees it?”

“Is he coming? He’s not going in my room!” She shudders. “I hate him . . . always looking at me that way. Worshipping Mullah Ali.” She sticks out her tongue in disgust.

Her father warns her with a glance. “He’s my sister’s son. Be kind. And show some respect to Mullah Ali. He’s a decent man, a helpful man. I don’t want trouble.”

Saba begins to storm off, mumbling, “All mullahs are pigs, even decent ones.”
“Watch your tongue,” he whispers. Then he softens. “Yes, I know . . . but please, Saba, you used to be sensible. Drop this May Ziade act.” His attempt to placate her falls apart at the mention of the obscure Arab feminist whose last name happens to mean “too much” in Persian. Her father loves to use this otherwise random woman in his lectures. “The name says it all!” he exclaims. “Whatever your views, learn restraint.” Often he adds, as if to entice her to behave, “You know, keeping silent, not expressing opinions, is a talent of the finest people in the Western world. It shows a mastery of self.”
May is a good name,
Saba thinks, and crosses her arms, maybe to invite his anger.
“What?” Her father sighs. “Tell me. What is it that you’re so desperate to say?”
She snaps, “It’s not fair that you talk to me like I’m some delinquent. When have I ever caused problems?” This is a kind of truth— she has become an expert at fulfilling her illegal desires without attracting trouble.
Her father glances back toward the living area. He is still whispering, but his tone is as loud as ever. “
When?
I’ll tell you
when
. Every other day I have to cover for you to someone. Oh no, Khanom Alborz, that wasn’t my daughter barefoot with red toenails in the street. No, no, she didn’t mean anything by that remark, Mullah Khan. No, Khanom Basir, that wasn’t my daughter making inappropriate advances toward your son. What are you thinking, Saba? This isn’t Tehran. Everyone knows everyone!”
The last remark stings. She has tried hard to keep her feelings for Reza a secret. She has pulled away each time he has touched her hand, looked away, face burning, from his knowing smiles. Even in the pantry, when his bare foot creeps too close to hers, she has tried not to give in, to exercise restraint. “I didn’t do anything . . .”
But her father is only getting started. He paces, picking at the paint on the wall as if he can’t control his hands. “What’s the matter? Help me understand! Are you unhappy? You have the best tutors and more foreign books than anyone, and all these women to take care of you. Why do you want to jeopardize your future?” He pulls a lock of red hair from the front of her headscarf and flips it aside. Saba wishes he would just see how careful she is, how sensible, maybe even shrewd. And doesn’t
he
take risks for
his
many dangerous habits? “You won’t even get rid of that music! I don’t know . . . I wish—” A bewildered look passes over her father’s withered face.
“You wish what?” Saba whispers.
That I was Mahtab? That she was the one left behind?
When the twins were born, they were often told, Saba had a cord wrapped around her neck. Mahtab waited patiently, pink and beautiful, never shedding a tear while her twin was blue and near death from impatience. Once at a party Saba heard a distant aunt wonder if this impatience as a baby had caused damage to her brain. After all, wasn’t Mahtab the smarter one? The twin better suited for America. When her sister was around, Saba used to giggle at this sort of talk, because Mahtab was the other half of her and it didn’t matter which half was considered good and which wicked.
Her father shakes his head. “It’s time to find you a husband.”
“That’s not what you were about to say,” she goods. Her father is a progressive man. This isn’t about marriage. “You wish I were Mahtab.” It would be grotesque to cry in front of her father, so she tries to seem more adult, hard-hearted and above girlish blubber.
Her father’s eyes widen. “What . . . ?” He seems agitated and confused. “Yes, I do wish for her sometimes,” he says. “Can you blame me? If I had done things differently—”
He looks away. What is he thinking? Is that guilt making his jowls shiver? Regret? Though she has never asked, Saba imagines that her father has nightmares, that he doesn’t tell her where her mother went because he was there and couldn’t change any of it. How daunting to be the one in charge of a caravan when so many pieces are breaking apart one after another. At what point do you simply let go of the reins and give yourself up to falling? Who do you call to rescue you?
She touches her lips with two wandering fingers. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean—” Saba shrugs. Agha Hafezi sighs loudly. “I meant that life would be simpler if I could have been a better father, so you could both be here . . . but everyone knows that twins are the same. You and Mahtab, God keep her, are just the same to me.”

Everyone knows that twins are the same.
This is her parents’ philosophy. All fate is determined by the laws of blood and DNA, and two genetically identical girls will always live the same life, they will always provide the same comfort to their parents—whether they are at home or in a faraway place.

“Baba,” she says, and clears her throat, “please tell me where Maman went.”
Her father rubs the corners of his eyes, a ploy to avoid her gaze. Finally he looks at her with a weak smile. “When you were small, Khanom Basir told me everything about you.” He laughs, and Saba wonders what this has to do with her mother. “She told me you made up a letter from Mahtab to entertain your friends. She called it stress.”
What is he trying to accomplish? She wonders if her father has been at the hookah. He touches her shoulder with a massive hand. “I like your way of dealing with impossible things,” he says, “the way you make a perfect world for yourself and say to everyone
that’s that. . . .
Makes life simple . . . So, for the sake of killing the bad memories, let’s just say your mother’s in America . . . just until I’m sure of a few things myself.”
A part of her wants to press on, to insist again that she
saw
her mother and sister get on that plane, and that he can stop running away from the murkier, more enigmatic possibilities. She wants to force her father to finally tell her.
What happened? Why can’t I speak to her on the phone?
But her father looks like a lost child, and he too is without a mother, or wife, or sister. She remembers the days after the separation when he spent sixteen hours a day on the phone in his office. No meals, no visitors, just call after call to agencies and bureaucrats and mullahs—even some whispered conversations with her mother’s friends and members of the underground Christian community, people whom Saba recognized as her father’s real friends, though they never came over for dinners like the mullahs so often do. They whispered to her father that all would be well, that he should keep faith and pray to Jesus to banish his doubts. Did he keep faith? Maybe . . . but he also kept a suitcase under his desk—a toothbrush, a flask of water, pajamas—in case his God failed him and he was arrested without warning. Saba prays to Jesus sometimes. Though she is unsure, it is enough that her mother believed—that it would make her proud. She decides that her father has been through enough for now. He is trying so hard to keep a smile. Better to be kind, to conspire with him. Though he is only humoring her, she will be generous and play along. “Okay,” she offers, “that’s what we’ll tell them.”
“No,” he says, his expression suddenly cautious. “These are all private things.” With that the moment is lost, as is Saba’s chance to be good to her father—
a stupid thing to try,
she thinks
.

Saba moves quietly to the back of the sitting room, the one decorated in Persian style with old rugs, rush mats, and pillows around a floor cloth, a
sofreh,
in place of a table and chairs. This is the only room, in which her father entertains villagers. The Western dining room with the Nain rugs and carved chairs, remains mostly unused, except when Saba’s tutors visit from Rasht. She likes to study there because it has a big window and photos of her mother and Mahtab. In summers when they were small and the carpets were being aired and checked for mold, she and Mahtab used to lie facedown on the tile floor of the Western room in their underwear to cool their bellies. Now in the casual sitting room, she places herself just behind the Three Khanom Witches and Ponneh’s mother, Khanom Alborz, who is often a reluctant addition to the party. Saba remembers her father’s words. Do they all know about Reza? Are they mocking her? Her head spins.

Vertigo,
she thinks it’s called in English
.
For the sake of the clerics, the women are draped halfheartedly in house chadors—white ones with big purple blossoms, or polka-dot ones with rows of pink roses and curlicues—from the cloth bundle kept stocked for guests near the door, next to the pile of everyone’s shoes. For Saba’s father, this practice shows off his piety to the mullahs; but around Tehran where black coverings are the norm, it is a welcoming gesture to offer a guest a bright house chador.
Please change your chador,
they say,
get comfortable, stay awhile
. It is an invitation to slough off crowish exteriors, to display one’s natural colors, to engage in the chirping talk of Persian mothers, which is the same in every region.

Why? How? What?
Chera? Chetor? Chee?
Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.
Saba knows that it is a popular joke now to call Iranian women crows because of the black chadors worn in cities or solemn places, but in his early hashish moments, when he is most reflective, her father scolds her for it. He says Persian women are more like the terns of the Caspian that hover and glide over the foggy sea, not like crows at all. Don’t be fooled, he says. They are terns in crows’ clothing. You see, the Caspian tern started out here, but exists now all over the world, in every continent. It is a fierce water bird, with a deep red bill, a sharp, blood-red mouth. And while the body of the tern is white, its head is covered in black. It watches with coal-black eyes and attacks without pause, bloodying anyone who disturbs its nest. “Just like your mother,” he says, breathing out the comforting smoke. “The tern has a wild and angry spirit living inside.”

What a wonderful way to describe someone—even her rage made into poetry.
Around the
sofreh
, three men are lounging on a thickly stacked row of large, colorful pillows. They wear the clerical robes of mullahs, and turbans wrapped around their heads like crowns of white rope. Saba hates Mullah Ali, the oldest one with the white beard, whom her father credits with keeping the family safe despite her mother’s too-loud Christianity and flagrant activism. She hates his robes and his mealtime speeches, his reverent attitude toward old women, and the way he has taken her witless cousin Kasem under his wing. Most of all she hates him for being a mullah, a symbol of a bleak new Iran. The constant intrusion of a mullah in one’s home is a strange thing in the quiet, unassuming North. So his presence, however friendly, is a sort of blackmail, alms for all the secrets he keeps for her parents. She wonders how her father first broached such topics with the mullah, how he knew the subtle language of it. It is her habit to reject or ignore every kindness offered by this man.
Now he is telling a story about his recent dental surgery. “I’m serious as the grave!” he says, through bites of watermelon. “He pulled out a tooth so long, my left arm shrank. See? You see how it doesn’t match?” He holds both arms to the side of his body and the men roar with laughter. One of the women tries to top him. “I once had a tooth that went as deep as my jaw. There’s still a hole where I hide jewelry from thieves.”
Her father sits quietly in a corner, not eating, only reflecting, taking no part in the conversation. Is he thinking of his wife and other daughter? Does he know the truth about them? He must. Wherever she is, Maman would need his help. They say that children have an intuitive sense for what is true, and Saba has always felt a certain truth in the shadowy mother and daughter at the airport, rushing for a plane to America. Once, though, she dreamed that a faceless
pasdar
held a knife to her throat and ordered her to stake her life on Mahtab’s whereabouts. She woke with a tight aching in her stomach and the words
bottom of the sea
new and salty on her lips. Or was it
across the sea
?
Her father leans back, showing little need to entertain. These guests come every few days unannounced, cook for themselves and for him, expect none of the politeness and cheery hospitality they would feel entitled to if he had a wife, only raw materials and a place to practice their conversational arts. Most of them have never been invited into another home like the Hafezis’. Saba imagines that privately they feel sorry for her father and like to assure themselves they are helping—that these parties are good for
his
spirit.
“Agha Hafezi.” Mullah Ali addresses her father, but looks over at Saba the way a cunning parent looks at a small child about to be tricked into being good. “How would the lady of the house like to bring us some fresh bread and yogurt?” He asks this with a flourish, as if he expects her to be honored by her role. A better, smarter girl would have gotten up right then. But she ignores him and goes back to eavesdropping on her adopted mothers. Her father sighs loudly and glares. She can almost hear him thinking,
May Ziade.
The mullah clears his throat, embarrassed. “Oh, were you talking to
me
, Agha?” she says dryly, and her father turns white. Mullah Ali chuckles and shakes his finger at her. Luckily he has been at Agha Hafezi’s pipe. He takes a sip of his tea—which the other mullahs will swear was the only pleasure of the evening. No alcohol, no crude stories, no women present, young or old. Mullah Ali leans on his side and takes a puff of the water pipe, breathing in opium from Khanom Omidi’s stash. Saba knows where to find the rest, tiny brown balls buried deep in a jar of turmeric-cumin mix. Why does she bother to hide her indulgences? Opium is cheap and she’s a harmless old woman.
“This is just a light tobacco, yes?” the mullah asks Agha Hafezi, who nods twice.
Convenient, Saba thinks, how opium and hashish—which sedate the masses—are so easy to find in this new pious Iran, and alcohol— mutinous and unpredictable—has to be consumed in shame and secret, hunted and bargained for from trustworthy sources, or brewed in tubs in the bathroom where a mistake in its strength could kill (and has). For a few after-dinner drops, Agha Hafezi must travel to back alleys and transport cheap sludge in unmarked containers to his storage room. Meanwhile, his hookah is always uncovered in a corner. Though, if he isn’t discreet, either habit could get him jailed or killed. Saba recalls the early days after the revolution, before his trust in Mullah Ali was fully cemented, when her father would invite friends and business partners to the house. He was a jovial man then, hopeful of maintaining his prerevolutionary lifestyle. He used code over the telephone to indicate what he had procured. Each drink had its own name: whiskey was Agha Vafa. Gin was Agha Jamsheed, and so on. He would say, “Come over, my friend. Agha Vafa and Agha Jamsheed have both arrived. Come and talk with us.”
In the family’s vast but dim kitchen, Saba takes some
lavash
bread out of the oven, along with newly picked parsley, mint, and a bowl of yogurt, and returns to the sitting room. She places the food on the
sofreh
and gives her father a cold, wet cloth. He smiles his thanks as he places it on his forehead and leans into the soft crimson pillows. When Mullah Ali praises her for the
sofreh
, she picks a dead bee from the bowl of honeycomb and dumps it on a used plate between him and the food. Her father glares at her, but the mullah doesn’t notice. He leans over the bee and takes a spoonful of fresh cream.
In moments like this, she daydreams about America, promising herself that she will go one day. She has outlearned most of her tutors, yet her father never mentions college. She knows he is afraid to let her go, that he thinks she is too fragile, though all her Tehran friends are preparing for it now. Saba has never pressed the subject because if she goes to university in Iran, she will have chosen
this
life. She knows what happens to Iranian doctors and engineers in America. They drive taxis. No, she won’t go to college here. She will read novels and speak flawless English, and she will save herself. One day she will wear jeans and hairclips to class. Brazenly polish her nails in the middle of a lecture like she saw once in a movie. She will be a journalist and she will find her mother.
Soon Reza arrives. Saba sits up and thinks of all the ways to escape with him. If Ponneh were here, the three of them could sneak off together and Reza wouldn’t suspect Saba of loving him. At eighteen, Reza is unusually tall for an Iranian man, and a target of jealous jokes. He has dark hair, longer than the devout men wear theirs. It’s silky and straight and falls neatly around his face. It reminds her of the French tourists, college boys who came to visit once when she was eight. Saba likes his Western clothes, his refusal to grow more than a millimeter of facial hair, his accent, and his love of music. She likes that he thanks her when she brings out the tea, unlike his older brother, who doesn’t even look at his wife when she brings him something. She even likes the worshipful way he listens to his mother and defends old Gilaki traditions without a thought.
Flushed from playing football, he pushes back his sweaty black hair. His shoulders are relaxed, his smile full of recent victory. From her bedroom window, Saba has seen him score hundreds of effortless goals in sandaled feet. He must know that she watches him, because he plays in the same spot every day, then knocks on her window to see if she has any new music. He still has that same ball from when they were children.
“Agha Hafezi, when are you giving your daughter for marriage?” one of the black-bearded mullahs asks in a grandfatherly tone, despite the fact that he is much younger than her father. She flinches and glances at Reza, who shows no reaction at first and then gives the pitying half-smile he uses when the adults discuss her marriage prospects. She looks at Khanom Omidi for help, but she is busy digging into the spaces between her yellowing teeth with a long fi n g e r n a i l .
“She’s only eighteen,” her father says.
“Too old, I’d say,” says the mullah, whose oafish lounging is making Saba livid—one leg spread out, another tucked in so that his knee is to his belly, and a hand clutching bread hangs off the edge of his knee.