She was sitting next to me, her newborn daughter in her arms. When the baby started to cry, she loosened her tunic and put the child to her breast. Goli’s cheeks glowed pink like the baby’s; the two of them looked healthy and contented. I wished with all my heart that my life were like hers.
When the baby had finished nursing, Goli placed her in my arms. I breathed in her newborn smell, as fresh as sprouting wheat, and whispered, “Don’t forget me.” I stroked her tiny cheek, thinking about how I would miss her first words and her first halting steps.
Goli wrapped her arms around me. “Think of how big Isfahan is!” she said. “You’ll promenade through the biggest city square ever built, and your mother will be able to choose your husband from thousands upon thousands!”
I brightened for a moment, as if my old hopes were still possible, before remembering my problem.
“But now I have no dowry,” I reminded her. “What man will take me with nothing?”
The whole room became quiet again. My mother fanned the rue, the lines in her forehead deepening. The other women began speaking all at once. “Don’t worry, Maheen-joon! Your new family will help you!”
“They won’t let such a fine young girl get pickled!”
“There’s a healthy stud for every mare, and a lusty soldier for every moon!”
“Shah Abbas will probably desire your daughter for his harem,” said Kolsoom to my mother. “He’ll fatten her up with cheese and sugar, and then she’ll have bigger breasts and a rounder belly than all of us!”
At a recent visit to the hammam, I had caught my reflection in a metal mirror. I had none of the ripeness of nursing mothers like Goli, who were so admired at the hammam. The muscles in my forearms stood out, and my face looked pinched. I was sure I could not be moonlike to anyone, but I smiled to think of my thin, bony body in such a womanly form. When Zaynab noticed my expression, her face twisted with mirth. She laughed so hard she began pitching forward over her stomach, and her lips wrapped back over her teeth until she looked like a horse fighting its bit. I flushed to the roots of my hair when I understood that Kolsoom had only been trying to be kind.
IT DIDN’T TAKE us long to pack our things, since we had so very few. I put one change of black mourning clothes into a hand-knotted saddlebag along with some heavy blankets to sleep in, and filled as many jugs as I could find with water. The morning of our departure, neighbors brought us gifts of bread, cheese, and dried fruit for the long journey. Kolsoom threw a handful of peas to divine whether it was an auspicious day for travel. After determining that it was excellent, she raised a precious copy of the Qur’an and circled our heads with it three times. Praying for a safe journey, we touched our lips to it. Just as we were setting off, Goli took a piece of dried fruit out of my bag and slipped it into her sleeve. She was “stealing” something of mine to make sure that one day, I would return.
“I hope so,” I whispered to her as we said good-bye. It pained me to leave her most of all.
My mother and I were traveling with a musk merchant named Abdul-Rahman and his wife, who escorted travelers from one city to another for a fee. They often journeyed all the way to the northeastern borders of our land, looking for musk bladders from Tibet to sell in big cities. Their saddlebags, blankets, and tents smelled of the fragrance, which commanded princely prices.
The camel that my mother and I shared had soft black eyes that had been lined with protective kohl, and thick, bushy hair the color of sand. Abdul-Rahman had decorated his pretty nose with a strip of woven red cloth with blue tassels, a kind of bridle. We sat on his back atop a mountain of folded rugs and sacks of food, and held on to his hump. The camel lifted his feet delicately when he walked but was ill-tempered and smelled as rotten as one of the village latrines.
I had never seen the countryside north of my village. As soon as we stepped away from the mountains’ life-giving streams, the land became barren. Pale green shrubs struggled to maintain a hold on life, just as we did. Our water jugs became more precious than the musk bladders. Along the way, we spotted broken water vessels and sometimes even the bones of those who had misjudged the length of their trip.
Abdul-Rahman pushed us onward in the early-morning hours, singing to the camels so they would pace themselves to the cadence of his voice. The sun glinted off the land, and the bright white light hurt my eyes. The ground was frozen; the few plants we saw were outlined with frost. By the end of the day, my feet were so cold I could no longer feel them. My mother went to sleep in our tent as soon as it was dark. She couldn’t bear to look at the stars, she said.
After ten days of travel, we saw the Zagros Mountains, which signaled our approach to Isfahan. Abdul-Rahman told us that from somewhere high in the mountains flowed the very source of Isfahan’s being, the Zayendeh Rood, or Eternal River. At first, it was just a pale blue shimmer, with a cooling breath that reached us from many farsakhs away. As we got closer, the river seemed impossibly long to me, since the most water I had ever seen before had been in mountain streams.
After arriving at its banks, we dismounted from our camels, for they were not permitted in the city, and gathered to admire the water. “May God be praised for His abundance!” cried my mother as the river surged past us, a branch flowing by too quickly to catch.
“Praise is due,” replied Abdul-Rahman, “for this river gives life to Isfahan’s sweet melons, cools her streets, and fills her wells. Without it, Isfahan would cease to be.”
We left our camels in the care of one of Abdul-Rahman’s friends and continued our journey on foot on the Thirty-three Arches Bridge. About halfway across, we entered one of its archways to enjoy the view. I grabbed my mother’s hand and said, “Look! Look!” The river rushed by as if excited, and in the distance we could see another bridge, and another gleaming beyond that one. One was covered in blue tiles, another had teahouses, and still another had arches that seemed like infinite doorways into the city, inviting travelers to unlock its secrets. Ahead of us, Isfahan stretched out in all directions, and the sight of its thousands of houses, gardens, mosques, bazaars, schools, caravanserais, kebabis, and teahouses filled us with awe. At the end of the bridge lay a long tree-lined avenue that traversed the whole city, ending in the square that Shah Abbas had built, which was so renowned that every child knew it as the Image of the World. My eye was caught by the square’s Friday mosque, whose vast blue dome glowed peacefully in the morning light. Looking around, I saw another azure dome, and yet another, and then dozens more brightening the saffron-colored terrain, and it seemed to me that Isfahan beckoned like a field of turquoise set in gold.
“How many people live here?” my mother asked, raising her voice so it could be heard above the din of passersby.
“Hundreds of thousands,” replied Abdul-Rahman. “More than in London or Paris; only Constantinople is bigger.”
My mother and I said “Voy!” at the same time; we could not imagine so many souls in one place.
After crossing the bridge, we entered a covered bazaar and passed through a spice market. Burlap bags overflowed with mint, dill, coriander, dried lemon, turmeric, saffron, and many spices I didn’t recognize. I distinguished the flowery yet bitter odor of fenugreek, which set my mouth watering for a lamb stew, for we had not tasted meat in many months.
Before long, we reached a caravanserai run by Abdul-Rahman’s brother. It had a courtyard where donkeys, mules, and horses could rest, surrounded by a rectangular arcade of private rooms. We thanked Abdul-Rahman and his wife for escorting us, wished them well, and paid for our lodgings.
Our room was small, with thick windowless walls and a strong lock. There was clean straw on the floor, but nothing else for bedding.
“I’m hungry,” I said to my mother, remembering the lamb kebab I had seen grilling near the bridge.
She untied the corners of a dirty piece of cloth and looked sadly at the few coins remaining there. “We must bathe before seeking out our family,” she replied. “Let’s eat the last of our bre
ad.”
It was dry and brittle, so we endured the emptiness in our bellies and lay down to sleep. The ground was hard compared with the sand of the desert, and I felt unbalanced, for I had become used to the gentle tipping motion of my camel. Still, I was weary enough from our long journey to fall asleep not long after putting my head down on the straw. In the middle of the night, I began dreaming that my Baba was tugging on my foot to wake me for one of our Friday walks. I jumped to my feet to follow him, but he had already passed through the door. I tried to catch up; all I could see was his back as he advanced up a mountain path. The faster I ran, the faster he climbed. When I screamed his name, he didn’t stop or turn around. I awoke in a sweat, confused, the straw prickling my back.
“Bibi?”
“I’m here, daughter of mine,” my mother replied in the darkness. “You were calling out for your Baba.”
“He left without me,” I mumbled, still caught in the web of my dreams.
My mother pulled me to her and began stroking my forehead. I lay next to her with my eyes closed, but I couldn’t sleep. Sighing, I turned first this way, then the other. A donkey began braying in the courtyard, and it sounded as if he were weeping over his fate. Then my mother began speaking, and her voice seemed to brighten the gloom:
First there wasn’t and then there was. Before God, no one was.
My mother had comforted me with tales ever since I was small. Sometimes they helped me peel a problem like an onion, or gave me ideas about what to do; other times, they calmed me so much that I would fall into a soothing sleep. My father used to say that her tales were better than the best medicine. Sighing, I burrowed into my mother’s body like a child, knowing that the sound of her voice would be a balm on my heart.
Once there was a peddler’s daughter named Golnar who spent her days toiling in her family’s garden. Her cucumbers were praised for being crisp and sweet; her squashes for growing into large, pleasing shapes dense with flesh; and her radishes for their fragrant burn. Because the girl had a passionate love of flowers, she begged her father to allow her to plant a single rosebush in a corner of the garden. Even though her family was poor and needed every morsel of food she grew, her father rewarded her by granting her wish.
Golnar traded some vegetables for a cutting from a rich neighbor’s bush and planted it, uprooting a few cucumber plants to make room. In time, the bush pushed forth extravagantly large blossoms. They were bigger than a man’s fist and as white as the moon. When a warm wind blew, the rosebush swayed, dancing as if in response to the nightingales’ song, her white buds opening like a twirling skirt.
Golnar’s father was a liver-kebab seller. One afternoon, he returned home and announced that he had sold the last of his kebabs to a saddle maker and his son. He had bragged about what a good worker his daughter was—not a girl who would fall ill at the rancid fumes of tanning leather. It wasn’t long before the boy and his family paid a visit to the liver seller and his daughter. Golnar was not pleased: The boy’s shoulders and arms were thin, and his small, beady eyes made him look like a goat.
After some tea and an exchange of compliments, the girl’s parents urged her to show the boy her garden. Reluctantly, she led him outside. The boy praised her healthy vegetables, fruits, and herbs and admired the rosebush’s beauty. Softening, she begged him to accept a few blossoms for his family and cut several long stems with her shears. As the two reentered the house, their arms filled with white blossoms, their parents smiled and imagined them on their wedding day.
That night, after the boy and his family had left, Golnar was so tired that she fell into a deep sleep rather than visiting her roses. The next morning, she arose with a feeling of alarm and rushed outside. The rosebush drooped in the early-morning sun, its flowers a dirty shade of white. The garden was silent, for all the nightingales had flown away. Golnar pruned the heaviest flowers tenderly, but when she removed her hands from the thorny bush, they were streaked with blood.
Penitently, the girl vowed to take better care of the bush. She poured a bloody bucket of water she had used to clean her father’s kebab knives onto the soil around the bush, topping it with a special fertilizer made of tiny pearls of liver.
That afternoon, a messenger arrived with a marriage proposal from the boy’s family. Her father told her that a better boy could not be found, and her mother whispered to her coyly about the children they would make together. But Golnar wept and rebuffed the offer. Her parents were angry and puzzled, and although they promised to send a letter of refusal, they secretly sent a message to the boy’s family asking for time for reflection.
Early the next morning, Golnar arose to the sweet music of nightingales and discovered that once again her roses stood large and proud. A wealth of blossoms had opened, nourished by the organ meat; they shone in the still-dark sky like stars. She clipped a few flowers from the bush, tentatively at first, and the plant caressed the tips of her fingers with its silky petals, exuding a musky perfume as if it desired her touch.
On the morning of the family’s annual picnic to celebrate the New Year, the girl had so much to do that she failed to water her rosebush. She helped her mother prepare and pack a large picnic, and then the family walked to a favorite spot near a river. While they were eating, they happened to see the boy and his parents, who were picnicking, too. The father invited them to drink tea and share a meal of sweetmeats. The boy passed the finest pastries to Golnar, a kindness that surprised her now that she had rebuffed him (or so she believed). At their parents’ urging, the two took a walk together near the river. When they were out of sight, the boy kissed the tip of her index finger, but Golnar turned and ran away.
When she and her family returned home, it was already dark. Golnar ventured into the garden to give the thirsty rosebush a drink. As she bent forward with a bucket of well water, a sudden wind whipped up and tangled her hair in the bush’s stems; the bush embraced her and held her tight in its long, thin arms. The more she struggled, the tighter its thorns gripped her, slashing her face. Screaming, she tore herself out, blinded by blood, and crawled back to the house.
At the sight of her in the doorway, her parents howled as if she were an evil jinn. At first the girl refused to let them touch her. Her father grabbed her flailing arms and held them down so her mother could treat her wounds. To their horror, they discovered a fat black thorn lodged in her index finger as firmly as a nail. When her mother pulled it out, it left a hole that bled like a fountain.
With a great roar of rage, her father rushed out of the house. Within moments came the sound of an ax as it struck the bush, cracking it at its core. With each blow, Golnar shuddered and tore at her own hair in the fury of her grief. Her mother put her to bed, where she stayed for several days, burning with fever and crying out in delirium.
At her parents’ insistence, she was married two weeks later to the boy who looked like a goat. The two lived together in a room in his parents’ house, and the boy came home every afternoon stinking of the blood and rot of the tannery. When he reached for Golnar, she turned her face away from him, shuddering at his touch. Before long, she became pregnant and bore him a son, followed by two daughters. Every day, she arose in darkness, dressed herself in old garments, and clothed her children in hand-me-downs even more ragged than her own. She never had time to grow her own flowers again. But sometimes, when she passed the walled garden where she used to tend her rosebush, she would close her eyes and remember the smell of its blossoms, sweeter than hope.
When my mother stopped speaking, I rolled this way and that to free my legs and back from the prickling straw, but I couldn’t get comfortable. I felt as distressed as if a buzzing bee had gotten stuck in my ear.
My mother took my face in her hands. “What is it, daughter of mine?” she asked. “Are you ill? Are you suffering?”
An unhappy sound escaped my lips, and I pretended I was trying to sleep.
My mother said, as though thinking aloud, “I’m not sure why I told you that
story. It poured out of me before I remembered what it was about.”
I knew the tale, for my mother had told it once or twice in our village. Back then, it hadn’t troubled me. I had been anticipating a life with a husband who paved my path with rose petals, not with a boy who smelled of rotting cowhides. I had never thought that my fate might be like Golnar’s, but now, in the darkness of a strange room in a strange city, the story sounded like a prophecy. My father could no longer protect us, and no one else was duty-bound to do so. My mother was too old for anyone to want her, and now that we had no money for a dowry, no one would want me. With the first pass of the comet, all my prospects had been ruined.
My eyes flew open; in the wan streaks of light creeping into our chamber, I saw my mother studying me. She looked frightened, which made me feel sadder for her than for myself. I took a sharp breath and forced calm into my face.
“I felt ill for a moment, but now I’m better,” I said.
The relief in my mother’s eyes was so great that I thanked God for giving me the strength to say what I did.
CHAPTER TWO
We arose the next morning to the sound of travelers loading up their mules for the day’s journey. My black trousers and tunic were stiff with dust and sweat, as I had been wearing them for more than a week. With the last of our money, my mother paid for us to enter a nearby hammam, where we scrubbed the grime off our bodies and washed our hair until it squeaked. When we were clean, we performed the Grand Ablution, submerging our bodies in a tank large enough for twenty women. The bath attendant rubbed my back and legs until I felt all the tightness from our long journey dissolve. As she worked, I cast my eyes over my bony ribs, my concave stomach, my callused fingers, and my stringy arms and legs. In my daydreams, I had imagined myself as a pampered woman, my hips and breasts round like melons. But it was no use: Nothing had changed except for the color of my face and hands, which to my dismay had darkened after all the days of travel.