The Blood of Flowers

She closed her eyes. “Daughter of mine, remember that we have nowhere else to go.”

  I sighed. Safa had been right; we were not our own mistresses now. “I thought Gordiyeh would have invited us to share the meal with them again,” I said.

  My mother looked at me with pity. “Oh daughter, whom I love above all others,” she said, “a family like this one keeps to itself.”

  “But we are their family.”

  “Yes, and if we had arrived with your father, bearing gifts and good fortune, it would have been different,” she said. “But as the poor relatives of your grandfather’s second wife, we are not good news.”

  Feeling more tired than I could remember, I closed my eyes and slept as if dead. It seemed only moments before Cook knocked on our door and asked for help. The family would be up and about soon, she said, and they’d be anxious for their coffee, fresh fruit, and sweetmeats.

  “What a honeyed existence!” I muttered under my breath, but my mother did not reply. She was asleep, her eyebrows knitted together in a furrow of worry. I couldn’t bear to wake her, so I told Cook I’d work for two.

  TWICE A YEAR, Isfahan’s Great Bazaar was closed to men so that the ladies of the royal harem could shop in freedom. All the shopkeepers’ wives and daughters were sent in to run the stores for three days, and all the women, whether buyers or sellers, were allowed to walk around the bazaar without their heavy chadors.

  Gostaham kept an alcove in the bazaar with a few rugs on display, not so much for sale but to remind people such as the royal courtesans that he was available for commissions. Since these could be the most lucrative of jobs, and since they improved his contacts within the harem, he always put his most fashionable wares on display for the women.

  Gostaham normally sent his daughter Mehrbanoo to run his shop during the harem’s visit, but she became ill the night before. Gordiyeh was sent to sell the carpets instead, and I begged Gostaham to let me accompany her. I had heard stories about the Shah’s women, who were gathered like flowers from every region of our land to adorn him. I wanted to see how beautiful they were and admire their silken clothes. I had to promise I would be as quiet as a mouse if Gordiyeh was making a sale.

  On the first day of the harem’s visit, we walked to the Image of the World just before dawn. The vast square, normally so busy with nut sellers, hawkers, musicians, and acrobats, was now the province of girls and pigeons. All men had been ordered away under penalty of death, lest they catch a glimpse of the unveiled women. The empty square looked even larger than before. I wondered how the Shah made his way between the palace and his private mosque on the other side of the square. It seemed a long way for royalty to walk in public.

  “How does the Shah go to pray?” I asked Gordiyeh.

  “Can you guess?” she asked, pointing to the ground beneath us. It looked like ordinary dirt to me, and I had to think for a moment.

  “An underground passageway?” I asked, incredulous, and she dipped her chin in assent. Such was the ingenuity of the Shah’s engineers that they had thought of his every convenience.

  When the sun rose, the burly bazaar guards opened its gates and permitted us to enter. We waited near the doors until the women of the harem began to stream in, mounted on a procession of richly decorated horses. They held their chadors closed with one hand and the reins in the other. Not until all the horses and horsemen had disappeared did they shed their wraps and pichehs, throwing them off with merriment and frivolity. They lived in palaces only a few minutes’ walk away, but such ladies were not allowed to travel on foot.

  There were thousands of shops in the bazaar to answer every desire, whether for carpets, gold jewelry, silk and cotton cloth, embroidery, shoes, perfume, trappings for horses, leather goods, books, or paper, and on normal days, all kinds of foodstuffs. The two hundred slipper makers alone would occupy the women for some time. Although we could hear their chattering and their laughter, it wasn’t until the end of the day that we spoke to any of them.

  I had imagined that all the women of the harem would be beauties, but I was wrong. The Shah’s four wives were in the fifth or sixth decade of life. Many of the courtesans had been in his harem for years and were no longer beautiful. And most of them weren’t even ample. One pretty girl caught my eye because I had never seen hair like hers, the color of a flaming sunset. She looked lost among her sisters, though, and I realized that she didn’t speak our language. I felt sorry for her, for she had probably been captured in battle.

  “Look!” said Gordiyeh in a tone of awe. “There’s Jamileh!”

  She was the Shah’s favorite. She had black curls surrounding her tiny white face and lips like a rosebud. She wore a lacy undershirt slit from the throat to the navel, which showed the curve of her breasts. Over it, she had chosen a long-sleeved silk sheath dyed a brilliant saffron. Flowing loosely on top was a red silk robe, which opened at her throat to reveal a golden paisley pattern on the reverse side. She had tied a thick saffron sash around her hips, which swayed as she walked. On her forehead pearls and rubies hung from a circlet of gold, which shimmied when she turned her head.

  “She’s the very image of a girl the Shah loved when he was a young man,” Gordiyeh said. “They say she spends her days in the harem quizzing the older women about her dead predecessor.”

  “Why?”

  “To curry favor with the Shah. She pinches her own cheeks all the time now, because the other girl’s always bloomed with pink roses.”

  By the time Jamileh and her entourage reached our alcove, Gordiyeh was as nervous as a cat. She bowed practically to the ground, inviting the ladies to have something to drink. I fetched hot coffee, hurrying so that I wouldn’t miss anything. When I returned, the white-cheeked Jamileh was flipping up a corner of each rug with her index finger and examining the knots.

  After I served her coffee, she sat down, explaining that she was refurnishing the Great Room in her part of the harem. She would need twelve new cushions for reclining against the wall, each of which was to be about as long as my arm and knotted with wool and silk.

  “To make him comfortable, you know,” she said significantly.

  Hiring Gostaham to design cushion covers was like paying a master architect to design a mud hovel, but Jamileh would have only the best. A fluent stream of flattery poured from her lips about his carpets, “the light of the Shah’s workshop, by any measure.”

  Gordiyeh, who should have been immune to such flattery, melted as quickly as a block of ice in the summer sun. When the two began bargaining, I knew she was doomed. Even her first price for the work was too low. I calculated that it would take one person three months of knotting to make the cushion covers, not including the work on the design. But whenever Jamileh arched her pretty eyebrows or pinched her small white cheeks, Gordiyeh slashed a few more toman off the price or made another concession.

  Yes, she would make some of the knots out of silver-wrapped thread. No, the cushions would look nothing like her predecessor’s. Yes, they would be ready in three months. By the time the bargaining was over, a sly expression had stolen into Jamileh’s eyes, and she looked for a moment like the village girl she had once been. No doubt she would make the ladies of the harem laugh out loud over the tale of what a good deal she had made on this day.

  One of the Shah’s eunuchs wrote up two copies of the agreement and stamped them with the Shah’s elaborate wax seal. The deal was done.

  When dusk fell, we returned home and Gordiyeh went straight to bed, complaining of a headache. The house was unusually quiet as though awaiting a catastrophe. Indeed, when Gostaham came home and read the receipt, he went straight to Gordiyeh’s room and yelled at her for breaking his back.

  The next day, Gordiyeh retaliated by staying in bed, leaving him to manage the household and all the visitors on his own. In desperation, Gostaham sent my mother to run his shop, and I went with her. He couldn’t have made a better choice: My mother knew the value of every knot. This was a surprise to the junior harem women wit
h limited shopping allowances who had heard of Jamileh’s triumph. All day, my mother drove hard bargains with these women, who whined over her stiff prices but nonetheless agreed to pay them because they, too, wanted carpets from the same maker used by the Shah’s favorite courtesan.

  That evening, when Gostaham looked at the receipts, he praised my mother for her skill with money.

  “You have earned us a fine profit, despite Jamileh’s wiles,” he said. “Now what can I offer you as a fitting reward?”

  My mother said she’d like a new pair of shoes, for hers were frayed and dirty from our journey through the desert.

  “Two pairs of new shoes, then, one for each of you,” Gostaham said.

  I had been waiting for a chance to ask Gostaham for what I really wanted, and this seemed the most auspicious moment.

  “Shoes are very nice,” I blurted out, “but instead, will you take me to see the royal rug workshop?”

  Gostaham looked surprised. “I didn’t think any young girl could resist a pair of shoes, but no matter. I’ll take you after the bazaar returns to normal.”

  My mother and I went to bed that night filled with glee. As we spread out our bedrolls, we began whispering together about the peculiarities of the household we were fated to live in.

  “Now I understand why Gordiyeh reuses the tea leaves,” my mother said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “She’s a bad manager,” she replied. “She loses her head in one situation, then tries to make it up in another.”

  “She’ll have to reuse a lot of tea to make up for the loss she took on Jamileh’s cushions,” I said. “What a funny woman.”

  “Funny is not the word for it,” my mother replied. “We’ll need to show Gordiyeh that we’re working hard instead of draining her household. After all, Gostaham hasn’t said how long we can stay.”

  “But they have so much!”

  “They do,” said my mother, “but what does it matter if you have seven chickens in a shed when you believe you have only one?”

  My parents had always taken the opposite approach. “Trust God to provide,” my father used to say. It may have been equally uncertain, but it was a much sweeter way to live.

  A FEW WEEKS later, after I had covered myself in my picheh and chador, Gostaham and I left the house and walked to his workshop near the Image of the World. It was a mild day, and signs of spring were alighting on the Four Gardens district. The trees had their first shimmer of green, and purple and white hyacinths were blooming in the gardens. The first day of the New Year was only a week away. We would celebrate it on the vernal equinox at twenty-two minutes past five in the morning, the precise moment when the sun crossed the celestial equator.

  Gostaham was looking forward to the New Year because he and his workers would take a two-week holiday. He began telling me about the latest projects. “We’re working on a rug right now that has seventy knots per radj,” he said proudly.

  I stopped so suddenly that a mule driver with a cargo of brass pots yelled at me to move out of the way. A radj was about the length of my middle finger. My own rugs might have had as many as thirty knots per radj, but no more. I could hardly imagine wool fine enough to produce so many knots, or fingers nimble enough to do so.

  Gostaham laughed at my astonishment. “And some are even finer than that,” he added.

  The royal rug workshop was located in its own airy building near the Great Bazaar and the Shah’s palace. The main workroom was large, with a high ceiling and plenty of light. Two, four, or even eight knotters were busy at each loom, and many of the carpets in process were so long they had to be rolled up at the foot of the loom to allow the workers to keep knotting.

  The men looked surprised to see a woman in the shop, but when they saw I was with Gostaham, they averted their eyes. Most were small in stature—everyone knows that the best knotters are small—but they all had larger hands than I did, and still they formed knots that could hardly be seen. I wondered if I could learn to make even smaller ones.

  The first carpet we looked at reminded me of Four Gardens, the parklike district near Gostaham’s home. The carpet showed four square gardens divided by canals of water, with roses, tulips, lilies, and violets as beautiful as real ones. Floating above them, a single peach tree with white blossoms gave life to seedlings in each garden. It was like watching nature at work, feeding and renewing her own beauty.

  At the next loom we stopped to admire, the carpet was so dense with patterns that my eyes couldn’t follow them at first. The most visible design was a red sunburst, which gave birth to tiny turquoise and indigo blossoms edged with white. Somehow, unbelievably, the knotters had made a separate layer of curved vines and another simultaneous layer of arabesques, as delicate as breath. Despite the intricacy of these patterns, none interfered with another, and the carpet seemed to pulse with life.

  “How do they make it so fine?” I asked.

  Gostaham laughed at me, but it was a kind laugh. “Touch one of the skeins,” he said.

  I stood on my toes to reach a pale blue ball hanging from the top of the loom. Each thread was thinner and softer than the wool I used at home.

  “Is it silk?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  “Long ago, a couple of Christian monks who wanted to curry favor with our Mongol conquerors smuggled some cocoons into Iran. Now it’s our biggest export, and we sell more of it than the Chinese,” he finished with a chuckle.

  Iraj, the man in charge of the sunburst rug, called his workers to their labors. After they settled on their cushions, he assumed a crouching position behind the loom and began reciting the sequence of colors needed for a blue-and-white flower. Because the carpet was symmetrical, the knotters could work on a similar flower at opposite ends of the loom. Every time Iraj called out a color change, two pairs of hands reached simultaneously for the silk and made the knot. The men held a knife loosely in their right hands, which they used to separate the knot from its connection to the skein.

  “Abdullah,” said Iraj abruptly, “go back. You missed the change to white.”

  Abdullah uttered an oath and slashed at a few knots with his blade. The other man stretched while he corrected his mistake. Then the chant started up again, and they were off.

  From time to time, I saw Iraj look at a sheet of paper to refresh his memory of what came next.

  “Why do they use a design on paper instead of in their heads?” I asked.

  “Because it is an exact guide to where every knot and every color should appear,” Gostaham replied. “The results are as close to flawless as any human can attain.”

  In my village, I always knotted my patterns from memory, inventing little details as I went along. I had been used to thinking of myself as an accomplished knotter, even though my rugs weren’t perfectly symmetrical, and curved shapes like birds, animals, or flowers often looked more square than round. But now I had seen what master craftsmen could do, I wanted to learn everything they knew.

  Before returning home, Gostaham decided to check on sales at his alcove in the bazaar. As we twisted and turned through the bazaar’s alleys, we passed hammams, mosques, caravanserais, schools, endowed wells, and markets for everything, it seemed, that man had ever made or used. The smells told me which section we were passing, from the nose-tingling spice market redolent of cinnamon, to the richness of leather used by the slipper makers, to the blood of freshly slaughtered lamb in the meat market, to the crispness of flowers that would soon be distilled into essences. “I’ve worked here for twenty years,” a rug merchant told me, “and there are still many parts of the bazaar I’ve never set foot in.” I didn’t doubt his word.

  After Gostaham picked up his receipts, we looked at rugs on display in other merchants’ shops. Suddenly, I noticed a carpet that made me cry out.

  “Look!” I said. “There’s the rug I sold to the merchant my mother was telling you about!”

  It was hanging at t
he entrance of a shop. Gostaham approached and checked it with expert fingers. “The knots are nice and tight,” he said. “It’s a fine piece, though it shows its village roots.”

  “The design is a little crooked,” I admitted. Its flaws were obvious to me now that I had seen better things.

  Gostaham stood looking at the design for some time. “What were you thinking when you chose the colors?” he asked.

  “I wanted it to be unusual,” I said. “Most of the carpets from my village use only camel, red, or white.”

  “I see,” he said. The look on his face made me afraid that I hadn’t chosen wisely.

  Gostaham asked the merchant to name his price. Upon hearing his answer, I was speechless for a moment.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s so expensive, it’s as if they’re asking for my father’s blood,” I said angrily. “Perhaps we could have survived in my village if we had been paid such a large amount.”

  He shook his head sadly. “You deserved much more.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “but now that I’ve seen your workshop, I know how much more there is to learn.”

  “You are still very young,” he replied.

  My blood rushed to my head, for I knew exactly what I wanted and hoped that Gostaham would understand. “Will you teach me?” I asked.

  He looked surprised. “What more do you want to know?”

  “Everything,” I said. “How you make such beautiful designs and color them as if they were images from heaven.”

  Gostaham considered for a moment. “I never had a son that I could train to carry on my work,” he said. “Neither of my daughters ever needed to learn. What a pity you’re not a boy! You’re the right age to apprentice in the workshop.”

  I knew there was no possibility of working among all those men. “Perhaps I could help you on your projects at home—if you found I was good enough,” I said.

  “We’ll see,” he replied.

  His answer wasn’t as encouraging as I had hoped. He himself had once begged his master to let him learn, but he seemed to have forgotten what that was like.