The Seyyid from the Arab Quarter was also sitting silently in a corner. Usually when he saw Zari he would reach under his belly and start scratching himself, saying, “Burning, burning, I am burning!” And then he would add, “It’s me Eilan-ud-Dowleh, it’s me Veilan-ud-Dowleh.” In exchange for Zari’s gifts, he would give her bits of imaginary paper with prayers of love and affection on them, or magical and occult charms or talismans.
“Our account is clear,” he would say, “but do wash your shirt with water from the morgue. Spread it out on a deadman’s grave then have him wear it the next morning. Tiger’s whiskers and the brain of a black mule …”
Then there was another patient who tied his imaginary leg wounds with whatever bits of material he could get hold of, and would stretch out the leg and fan it. But today the fan had fallen away from his hand.
As Zari and Gholam, accompanied by the warden, were passing through the dried-up yard of the asylum, they saw a young woman stretched out on an old mattress under a pine tree. Hearing footsteps, the woman flicked open her eyes. Zari recognized her, even though her face had been drained of colour until it blended with the dust on the ground. It was the same woman who sometimes claimed to be the wife of God, and at other times God himself. Occasionally she would smear her cheeks and lips with some red petals from the Marvel of Peru flowers in the garden and say she was waiting for God. Apparently she would stare at the sky and repeat some mumbo-jumbo in a language resembling Arabic, saying God was waiting for her on the roof. But she herself wouldn’t go to him; she was a woman, and a woman could never take the first step.
‘God’s wife’ was now stretched out under the pine tree, her face twitching and her lips blistered. “She seems ready to join Him at any time,” Zari thought. “If only she would intercede with Him for the rest of her fellow sufferers …”
A sound escaped the woman’s lips. “Water!” she moaned, as her blankly staring eyes slowly closed. Gholam ran for some water.
“Why is she lying here?” Zari asked the warden.
“She’s got typhus,” he replied.
“Well, all of them catch that at one time or another …”
“All the better! It will be a relief for them. Their relatives pray that they’ll be released from their suffering. What’s the use of keeping them like this?”
Gholam came back in a rush, holding a glazed bowl full of water. He lowered the edge of the bowl to the woman’s lips. “Drink, sister,” he coaxed, but she couldn’t swallow. Zari took her handkerchief from her handbag, soaked it and rubbed it on the woman’s face and lips. Then she wet it again and placed it on her forehead.
They walked on. The warden followed alongside, offering explanations, “Three of our nurses caught typhus,” he said, “and are now sitting comfortably under the Tuba Tree in paradise. ‘God’s wife’ will be on her way there too tonight.” Then, seeing Zari looking at him disapprovingly, he continued in a different tone, “It’s amazing. When their fever goes up, their madness seems to disappear. If only we could save them from this second disease, maybe they’d be cured of their madness too! But what’s the use? If they ever came to their senses, it would only be the beginning of their troubles. Their families have become used to their absence, and they would have no room or patience for them.”
In the women’s ward, Zari noticed the crippled woman who always managed to frighten her. “You fucking whore,” she would say, “are you back again? What do you want from my life?” This woman blamed Zari for her paralysis and Zari felt guilty at heart about it too. When the woman had had healthy legs, she had asked Zari for a pair of old slippers, or a sturdy pair of second-hand givehs.
“I’m a respectable woman,” she had said, “and I can’t go to the toilet barefoot.” Then, “May God strike Khanom Essmat dead! If she had spent my marriage portion and inheritance on me instead of on that goddam cuckold who sleeps with her, I’d never be grovelling for your droppings, you whore from Mordestan!”
But the following week Zari had been due to go to the prison, and the week after that she had forgotten all about it. By the time she remembered to buy the woman her new shoes, it was too late—she was already paralysed. Of course everyone knew her paralysis had nothing to do with the givehs. But every time after that when she saw Zari she threw unspeakable insults in her direction. Still, the nurses said she hugged the new shoes tightly each night as she went to sleep.
Zari glanced around for the young teacher with the glass eye. This one wasn’t particularly fond of her, either, and wouldn’t let her come close. Zari always left her share of bread and dates on the sill. Sometimes when the teacher was in a good mood she would say things like, “Look how much perfume this harlot’s used! Ugh! How lucky you are, my little servant, to have got this far. You remember you were the daughter of our dressmaker? I knew you’d finally give in. With that cab driver who had a wife in every town …” And she would put a finger under Zari’s chin and say, “You little coquette!” Then suddenly she would get angry and shout, “You’ve put rat poison inside these dates! You’ve taken out the pip and put ratsbane instead. What an offering!”
Apparently she used to teach first graders. One day, sometime after the veil was banned, the school was inspected by the Governor, the army commander and the minister of education. The minister had found out that this teacher would punish children by squeezing a pencil between their little fingers and laugh when they hopped with pain. He had made quite a fuss, but only about the issue of corporal punishment, yet the young teacher had fainted from humiliation at the sight of all those important people. She was immediately hauled off to the principal’s office where they revived her, but the shock had been too much. She had stared blankly at everyone, then calmly taken out her glass eye, holding it out in the palm of her hand for her bewildered audience to behold.
One day in the asylum she played the same trick on Zari. Until then, Zari hadn’t known that the woman had a glass eye, although she had noticed that the right eye didn’t move in its socket. The young teacher was agitated that day. When Zari came into the room she went over to her, reached out her hand, and said, “Take it!” Then she opened her fist into Zari’s hand, and there was Zari holding a large, shiny glass eye.
Now, on inquiring, Zari was told that the first fatality from typhus had been this very girl.
“At first we didn’t know she had typhus,” the warden explained. “Of course her fever was very high and she was delirious. She imagined she was putting on her shroud. She tied anything she could find around herself saying it was her shroud, and began reciting the Quran by heart. She was superb. But instead of cursing the Devil, she cursed the Cardboard Man. I believe the Cardboard Man was that same minister of education who fired her from her job. Finally, she said her last prayers and threw herself into the pool. She died that night.”
At the end of her rounds, Zari went to Khanom Fotouhi whose bed lay next to a window where she could constantly watch the yard, in the hope that her relatives would come and take her to the ‘hundred and twenty-four thousand metre garden’. Zari knew the Fotouhi family. They were well off. At the beginning of Khanom Fotouhi’s illness, they kept her at home. But when she finally drove them to desperation, they gave up hoping for her recovery, and passed her on to the asylum. Before the war, she had had a private room where she was visited regularly by her mother who would even take her home for a week or two sometimes. When she had had enough, she would drag her daughter back to the asylum, leave her in the reception office and disappear. But the mother had died years ago.
Khanom Fotouhi’s brother was the well-known history teacher in town and something of an idol for its youth. The most he could manage was to visit his sister once in a blue moon. Now it looked as if they had all really abandoned her at the asylum. But Khanom Fotouhi never despaired. She was still waiting for them to come and take her to the ‘hundred and twenty-four thousand metre’ garden.
She was a sallow-looking girl with thick eyebrows that joined in the m
iddle, protruding teeth, and grey hair. She never accepted food from Zari, as if it were too demeaning to show interest in something which others would grab at with such greed. When the fruit in her garden ripened, Zari usually took woven baskets piled high with apricots, sour apples, cherries, peaches and pears to the prison and asylum. But Khanom Fotouhi wouldn’t even look at these.
On several occasions Zari had prepared a special fruit basket for her and left it on the windowsill. But the nurses later said that the minute she had stepped outside, the other patients raided the basket. When they got to the sour apples they would split them in half, ask for some salt and sprinkle them until they were well ‘seasoned’ in the Shirazi way. It was enough to make anyone else’s mouth water. But Khanom Fotouhi would merely stare out of the window at the yard, waiting for her relatives to take her away to the ‘hundred and twenty-four thousand metre garden’. The other patients didn’t even spare the apricot pips which they would either split open with their teeth or bang with stones on the floor to get at the little kernels. After all, as the warden said, how could any of the patients get real sustenance on their pitiful daily allowance? Most of them had gone mad from poor nutrition in the first place.
When she had finished dividing the food, Zari would sit next to Khanom Fotouhi’s bed and listen to her complaints. Khanom Fotouhi hated all the other patients and never spoke to any of them. They, in turn, had nicknamed her ‘Princess’. The kinds of things Khanom Fotouhi used to ask for included the large-format Iran newspaper which was mailed to Yusef twice a week from Tehran, lined notebooks and pencils which she would accept from Zari, saying, “I have allowed you to contribute to the world of science and literature.” She loved all the serial articles in the Iran, and the notebooks she would use for writing her autobiography—or so she claimed.
Each time she finished a notebook, she would hand it ceremoniously to Zari. “Rent a safe deposit box in the National Bank,” she would say. “Take the money for it from my brother and store my works there. We could have a fire here someday, and I don’t want to have my works destroyed.”
The first time Zari had believed her, and tried to read one of the notebooks only to discover that it was filled with some incoherent ideas written out in a language of the occult sciences. Wherever the handwriting became legible, it described a ‘hundred and twenty-four thousand metre garden’ with man-made waterfalls and lakes, blooming water-lilies, acacias and ash-trees. In one part she wrote about a well-built man with a wide forehead and white hair around the temples who hid behind an ash-tree while she herself, wearing a loose white chiffon dress which fluttered in the wind, stepped gracefully into the open air. Her shapely breasts and erect nipples showed through her dress, and the well-built man rushed out from behind the tree, capturing her in his arms and hugging and embracing her. At the end of her notebook she had written, “Thus endeth the sorrowful tale of the Fotouhi maiden in the Nai prison,” and underneath this sentence she had added, “Some verses by the Fotouhi maiden:
I was a fledgeling my mother died
The wet nurse took me, but she too died
They raised me on cow’s milk
I was so ill-starred, the cow then died.”
Zari was quite certain these lines were not composed by the ‘Fotouhi maiden’ because Ameh Khanom had hummed them herself from time to time. Actually, in the days when the ‘Fotouhi maiden’ was in her right mind, she had been a good writer, producing articles in local papers about women’s rights, and the injustices of male domination. She also brought out a magazine which aimed to raise women’s consciousness.
In the days before her mental breakdown, Khanom Fotouhi was a woman to be reckoned with. She had been the first to abandon the black veil—or black shroud, as she called it—in favour of a roomier, more attractive blue veil. The lifting of the veil had not yet been announced officially before she even gave up the blue one also. On a good day, she would complain to Zari that it was too bad she had not been appreciated. “A pity,” she would say, “that our men were not ready to accept a woman like me. At first they thought I could be taken advantage of, like a pot of honey you could dip your finger into. But when I smacked them on the fingers and sent them off packing, they humiliated me or ignored me.” Then she would suddenly shout with tears in her eyes, “They drove me mad! They drove me mad! I told them I wouldn’t give in! I won’t give you what you’re after! And that’s that! When will other women—those silly little dolls—ever understand who I was and what I stood up for!”
Zari sat down by Khanom Fotouhi’s bed and greeted her. Khanom Fotouhi turned her gaze from the yard to Zari and said hello. Zari reached into her bag and brought out four issues of Iran for her, at the same time catching sight of a pillow next to which all the previous newspapers had been neatly stacked. Khanom Fotouhi opened the new issues one by one. She frowned at the changes in detail and the recently introduced small format.
“Didn’t you give the newspapers to the other patients to read this time?” Zari asked.
“No, most of them have been freed from prison,” she replied nervously. “Ali took two of your newspapers and ate them.” Then she looked Zari up and down. She didn’t seem to like the long, wide sleeves of Zari’s shirt. “You’ve wasted a hundred metres of good material just on those sleeves, haven’t you?” she asked. Then she crumpled up the new newspapers and threw them down beside the bed. She turned her attention to the old newspapers and started counting them. Then she rolled one up and suddenly hit Zari very hard on the head with it. “They say Afsar Khanom, the daughter of the commander, is dead!” she shouted. “And she didn’t even have a shroud!”
11
A Shirazi woman, trained as a midwife in Tehran, had recently opened an office in town. She had more patients than she could handle, but Zari had managed to get an appointment for seven o’clock Thursday evening after her rounds at the asylum. As soon as she was finished, she sent Gholam away and headed for the doctor’s office, thinking all the while of the futility of her charities. She remembered Yusef’s words, “What’s the use of your charity and goodwill? This society is rotten at the core.” But no matter how hard she thought, Zari did not seem to come up with any ideas on how to improve a society at its core. The solutions which Yusef suggested always seemed so dangerous that they sent shivers down her spine.
At six o’clock, she arrived at the midwife’s office. She was feeling queasy. There were two donkeys standing at the door with their bridles tied to the door knockers. In the small courtyard next to the office, two women were huddled on a bare wooden bed, with another stretched out behind them. One couldn’t tell their age because the expression on their faces was so strained. A sick man was tossing about on yet another bed. Right next to the door of the waiting-room a woman was stretched out stiff as a rod. Her bare, henna-dyed feet protruded grotesquely from underneath the blue polka-dot veil with which she was covered. Her black trouser-legs had been pulled up to her knees. Zari was taken aback. Surely the woman was dead. Zari had seen enough in life to recognize death when she saw it. But it would seem the woman had no-one, since she was obviously abandoned even in death.
Inside the waiting-room all the seats had been taken. Only five of the patients were pregnant women—recognizable by their round bellies and blotchy skin—the others were either male or elderly. A young girl with blistered lips leaning her head on the shoulder of an older woman entered the waiting room just then. “Oh, my heart! My heart!” she moaned. A pregnant woman stood up and gave her place to the young girl, opening the window above her. But only a blast of hot air came in. The door of the doctor’s office opened, letting out a pregnant woman, who slowly crossed the waiting-room as if the weight of her nine-month burden made it impossible to move any faster. A nurse with dishevelled hair followed her and announced:
“Forty-eight!”
Zari managed to reach the nurse as she scanned the patients for number forty-eight.
“Forty-nine!” the nurse said loudly.
&nb
sp; “I have an appointment for seven,” interrupted Zari.
“It’s no use getting an appointment these days, dear. All sorts of patients are crowding in on us. Even the courtyard is packed. Didn’t you see for yourself?”
“Yes, I did. One of them was dead.”
“I know,” said the nurse coolly. “By the time they’re brought here on donkey from the villages, they’ve taken their last breath.” Then turning to the other patients she shouted, “Forty-nine isn’t here? Fifty!”
An old hunch-backed woman got up. Clutching her veil tightly across her face, she walked over with an odd shuffle. The nurse opened the office door for her. Zari reached into her handbag, and the nurse followed her movements with her eyes as she groped for a handkerchief. Finally she grew impatient.
“If there’s nothing wrong with you and you’re here only for pregnancy, I suggest you leave it for another time.” And with that she disappeared into the inner room.
“She’s right,” Zari thought to herself. “After all, I’m in no hurry. In any case, I’ll probably end up at Khanom Hakim’s yet again.” She decided to go home and wash thoroughly, even boil her clothes. She wasn’t going to let those delicate children touch her before she had disinfected herself. On the way home she stopped at the pharmacy and bought anti-flea powder, alcohol, soap and sulphur.
By the time Zari reached the garden-gate of her home, the sun had already set. A dark little boy with curly hair opened the gate. As soon as he saw Zari, he grinned widely at her. Zari recognized him.
“What are you doing here, Kolu?” she asked.
“I’ve come back with the master.”
“Is he back then?” she exclaimed, rushing past him towards the house. Yusef, still dressed in his dusty travelling clothes, was sitting on the cane chair by the pool, smoking a hookah. His face lit up at the sight of his wife.
“Where have you been till now?” he asked. “I was waiting for you. I came all the way to … why are you standing so far away?”