I looked at my design again, and it was as if I were seeing it through Gostaham’s eyes. It was a design that tried to cover its ignorance through bold patterns, one that would sell only to an unwashed farangi who didn’t know better. “Will you help me make it right?” I asked in a meek voice.
“I will,” said Gostaham, reaching for his pen. His corrections were so severe that there was almost nothing left of my design. Using a fresh sheet of paper, he chose to draw just one of the motifs that I had selected: a teardrop-shaped boteh called a mother and daughter because it had its own progeny within it. He drew it neatly and cleanly, intending for there to be three across the carpet and seven down. That was all; and yet it was far more beautiful than the design I had made.
It was a sobering lesson. I felt as if I had more to learn than I had time on earth. I leaned back in the cushions, feeling tired.
Gostaham leaned back, too. “I’ve never known someone as eager to learn as you,” he said.
I thought perhaps he had—himself. Yet I felt ashamed; it was not a womanly quality to be so eager, I knew. “Everything changed after my father . . .”
“Indeed, it was the worst luck for you and Maheen,” Gostaham said gravely. “Perhaps it’s not such a bad thing for you to distract yourself by learning.”
I had more than distraction on my mind. “I was hoping that with your permission, I might make the carpet you just designed for use as my dowry . . . in case I ever need one.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” said Gostaham. “But how will you afford the wool?”
“I would have to borrow the money,” I replied.
Gostaham considered for a moment. “Though it would be simple compared with the carpets we make at the royal workshop, it would certainly be worth many times more than the cost of the wool.”
“I would work very hard,” I said. “I promise I won’t disappoint you.”
Gostaham was looking at me in a fixed fashion, and for a moment he didn’t say anything. All of a sudden, he jumped off his cushion as if he had been startled by a jinn.
“What is it?” I asked, alarmed.
Gostaham uttered a big sigh and settled back into the cushions. “For a moment,” he said, “I had the strangest feeling that I was sitting next to my younger self.”
I smiled, remembering his story. “The young man who gave his finest possession to a shah?”
“The very one.”
“I would have done the same thing.”
“I know,” said Gostaham. “And therefore, as a tribute to all the good fortune that has come to my door, I will give you my permission to make the rug. When you finish it, you can keep what you earn after paying me back for the wool. But remember: You are still responsible to Gordiyeh for your household duties.”
I bent and kissed Gostaham’s feet before going to tell my mother the good news.
NAHEED DIDN’T HAVE to trouble herself with making her own dowry, but she had other problems. When she knocked at Gostaham’s door and invited me to visit her, I knew what she wanted to do. Sometimes we went to her house and I continued my writing lessons under her supervision. Other times, instead of going where we said we would, we took a shortcut to the Image of the World and went to the perch near the bazaar where Naheed had first shown Iskandar a glimpse of her face. I watched in fascination the people milling around during the game—sunburned soldiers with long swords, dervishes with ragged hair and begging bowls, strolling minstrels, Indians with trained monkeys, Christians who lived across the Julfa Bridge, traveling merchants come to trade their wares, veiled women with their husbands. We tried to lose ourselves in the crowd, as if we were attached to the families around us. When the game started, Naheed sought out her beloved and followed his form the way other spectators followed the ball, her body straining toward his.
Iskandar was handsome like Yusuf, who in tales was so renowned for his beauty that he made women lose their reason. I remembered a line that my mother always used: “Blinded by his beauty, the Egyptian ladies merrily sliced their own fingers, their shiny red blood dripping onto the purple plums.” They would have done the same for Iskandar, I thought. I was especially drawn to the beauty of his mouth. His white, even teeth sparkled like stars when he smiled. I wondered how it would feel to be a girl like Naheed, who could set her heart on such a man and conquer him. I had no such hopes of my own.
One afternoon, we arrived at the square just before the game started. I noticed that people kept looking toward the Shah’s palace with an air of excitement. Suddenly, the royal trumpets blasted and the Shah emerged onto his balcony high above the square. He wore a long dark blue velvet robe embroidered with small golden flowers, a green tunic, and a sash that married layers of green, blue, and gold. His turban was white, with an emerald aigrette; his mustache was long and gray; and even at a distance I could see that most of his teeth were missing.
“Vohhh!” I said in surprise and awe at my first glimpse of royalty. Naheed laughed at me, for she was a child of the city.
The Shah sat upon a low throne placed in the middle of a blue-and-gold carpet. Once he was comfortable, the men in his retinue knelt around him in a semicircle and sat back on their heels. The Shah made a sign with his hand and the game began.
When I had had my fill of staring at him through my picheh, I left Naheed to examine the carpets for sale in the bazaar. I didn’t enjoy polo that much, with all the dust and dirt kicked up by the horses, and the people weaving back and forth for a better view and yelling out for their favorites. I checked on the carpet that I had made and discovered that it was no longer hanging in the shop. The merchant told me it had sold the day before to a foreigner. When I returned to Naheed’s side to tell her the news, her response was short and full of reproach. She wore her picheh and chador so she couldn’t be recognized, but still, she oughtn’t to be there at all, and to be seen alone was even worse. She needed me.
Naheed turned back to the game. She was hoping for a sign from Iskandar, even though the square was thronged with spectators. How could he distinguish her tiny, white-shrouded form among hundreds of other women? She was standing in the same corner where she had shown him her face. That afternoon, we watched him score three goals in a row and drive the spectators into a frenzy of delight. After the game, he was called back to ride to each of the four corners and salute the crowd. When he arrived at ours, he reached into his belt and drew out a leather polo ball, which he threw in the air. It rose high before dropping straight into Naheed’s outstretched hand. It was as if a pari—a fire-born fairy—had brought it right to her.
We lingered as the players were being congratulated and the crowd thinned. Naheed was still holding the ball in the palm of her hand. After a while, a little boy with crooked teeth appeared in front of us and revealed a slip of paper hidden in his sleeve. Naheed took his hand discreetly and slipped the letter into her own sleeve before paying him with a small coin. After concealing the ball under her clothes, she linked her arm through mine and we began walking home. She unfurled the letter when we were away from the crowd, and I peered over her shoulder, wishing I could read.
“What does it say?” I asked eagerly.
“There’s just one line, written in haste,” she said. “‘In a crowd of thousands, no one else shines like you, the brightest star of my heart.’ It is signed, ‘Your loving servant, Iskandar.’?”
I couldn’t see Naheed’s face, since she was completely covered in her picheh and chador, but I could hear the excitement in her voice.
“Perhaps your fates are intertwined,” I said with amazement.
“I must know if that’s possible,” said Naheed. “Let’s have Kobra tell our fortunes!”
Kobra was an old servant of Naheed’s family who was known throughout the neighborhood for the accuracy of her readings. She reminded me of some of the women of my village who could look at the sky or a handful of peas and tell you whether the moment was auspicious for your desires. Her skin was the color of dates, and the fine
wrinkles in her forehead and cheeks made her look wise.
Naheed summoned Kobra to her rooms a few moments after we arrived, and she came bearing two vessels of coffee and told us to drink it without disturbing the grounds. We consumed it in one or two gulps so that she could read our future in the remaining froth. First, she peered into Naheed’s cup and smiled, showing us her nearly toothless gums. She began describing Naheed’s marriage to a handsome young man with lots of money and a body as strong as the hero Rostam’s, an event that was to be followed by the birth of more children than she could count. “You’ll be spending a lot of time with your feet in the air!” she said.
The prediction was exactly what her mistress wished to hear, which made me wonder about its truth.
When it was my turn, Kobra peered into my cup for a long while. Several times it seemed as if she wished to say something, but then she stared into the cup again as if its message were troubling.
“What does it say?” Naheed prompted.
Looking at the grounds, Kobra mumbled that my future would be exactly like Naheed’s. Then she gathered the cups and fled the room, declaring that she had work to do.
“That was strange,” I said. “Why didn’t she say what she saw?”
“She did!”
“How could my future be the same as yours?”
“Why not?” said Naheed. “You, too, can marry a handsome young man and have plenty of sons.”
“But if it was that simple, why did she seem so afraid?”
“Oh, pay no attention to her,” said Naheed. “She’s old. She probably just needed to visit the latrines.”
“I’m afraid the evil comet must still be following me,” I said in despair. “It seems as if Kobra thinks my future is fated to be dark!”
“Certainly not,” said Naheed. She summoned Kobra again and asked her to tell us more about what she had seen. Kobra clapped both her hands to her chest, one on top of the other.
“There’s nothing more I can wring from the grounds,” she protested, “but I can tell you the old tale that came to my mind while I was looking at them, although I don’t know what it means.”
Naheed and I settled back into the cushions and listened to Kobra’s story.
First there wasn’t and then there was. Before God, no one was.
Once there was a prince whose sleep was troubled almost every night. In his dreams, he saw the image of a woman who was moonlike beyond compare. Her curly hair framed a milk-white face. Beneath her rose silk tunic, the womanly parts of her body swelled like melons. As the prince dreamed more deeply, he could see that she was crying, opening her arms to the sky to show her desperation and helplessness. The prince awoke in a sweat, for he could not bear to see her suffer. He longed to help her, but first he had to find her.
One day, the prince set out to do battle with a fierce warlord who robbed travelers when they tried to cross a bridge through his territory. The prince and his men stamped across the bridge to invite an ambush, then fought the warlord and his tribe for hours in the midday sun. At one point, the warlord ran his sword through one of the prince’s best soldiers before heaving his body off the bridge. With a great roar of rage, the prince jumped on the warlord, vowing to avenge his friend’s death. The two clashed swords but the prince was stronger, and he forced the weapon out of his opponent’s hands, threw him onto the ground, and sat on his armored chest. Then he drew his dagger, planning to savor the end of the man who had tossed his best man over the bridge like a leaf.
“Stop!” cried the warlord. “You know not what you kill.”
“All men beg for mercy in their final moments,” said the prince, “but you shall soon be begging before God.” He raised his dagger.
“At least let me remove my armor so you can see who I am.”
The warlord lifted off his helmet, revealing a face as smooth as a woman’s and long, dark curly hair.
The prince was astonished. “What a pity that such a fair youth shall soon be dust! You fought so fiercely, I thought you must be a grown man.”
“Not even,” said the warlord. He removed his chest armor and raised his tunic to reveal a muscled abdomen and tiny breasts, like red rosebuds in the sun.
The prince’s dagger wavered, then dropped. The lust to kill had been replaced by a different kind of lust. He bent forward and kissed the young woman’s tender lips.
“What caused you to don armor?” he asked.
The woman’s face toughened so that she looked like a warrior again. “My father was a warlord who raised me to kill. After he died, I continued to care for his men and protect his property.”
During the next few days, the prince came to know and admire the fierce young woman. She could ride as well as he could, goad him into a sweat when they jousted with swords, and best him in a race up a hill. Her muscles were tight and lean, and she was as agile as a deer. She was nothing like the woman he had dreamed about so often, but before long he was smitten, and he married her.
After a year of happiness, the prince started being troubled again by his dreams. The moonlike woman began appearing to him every night on her knees, her head bent, as if her plight were more severe than ever. One morning, after another disturbed night, he kissed his warrior woman good-bye.
“Where are you going?” she protested.
“I have to find someone,” he said. “Insh’Allah, we’ll see each other again one day.”
He mounted his horse and rode away without looking behind him to see the expression on her face.
The prince traveled for months, describing what he had seen in his dreams to anyone who would listen, only to hear the reply, “There’s no one like that in this town.” Finally, he came to a city where people wouldn’t answer his question, and the prince knew he was in the right place. At night, under a full moon, he walked silently to the town’s palace and hid himself outside its walls. Before long, he heard a piteous wail. He scaled the palace walls, landing on the other side as softly as a cat, and observed the woman his heart had longed for. She was kneeling on a roof, her arms stretched toward the heavens, her body shuddering with sobs. Her curly black hair gleamed in the moonlight, and the sight of her rounded form filled him with longing. He called to her from the palace grounds.
“Dear distressed woman, don’t make the clouds weep. I have come to help you.”
The lovely princess raised her head and looked around, astonished.
“Tell me the source of your suffering, and I will destroy it,” said the prince, his muscles flexing with pleasure at the thought.
“Who are you?” she asked suspiciously.
The prince revealed himself in the moonlight, recited his lineage and the great deeds of his family, and repeated his desire to help the princess vanquish her sorrow.
She wiped away her tears. “My maidservant has my father’s ear,” she said. “By day she serves me; by night she wraps herself around his body. She has threatened to tell my father I have been conspiring against him with his top advisor. I have already given her all my jewelry and money. What if my father should believe her lies? I’ll be banished or killed.”
The prince hauled himself onto the roof and offered to take the lady away. Revealing his love, which had persisted in his dreams for so many years, he promised to treat her honorably by marrying her. Together they fled the town on horseback, and as soon as they reached a sizable settlement, the prince married his lady under the authority of a mullah. The two spent their first night as man and wife in a caravanserai fit for shahs. The princess was just as the prince had imagined, round and ripe like a summer peach. At last, his dream of many years had been fulfilled.
The prince took his new bride to the house of his first wife, the warrior woman, who bared her teeth at his new acquisition. Nonetheless, all three returned together to his father’s house. Much had changed since he had left. He was a married man now and a proven warrior, not the dreamer who had set off on a seemingly impossible quest years before.
His fath
er invited the prince to a special dinner in honor of his return. The warrior woman advised him to be careful about any food that he was served. He took her advice and fed his portion to a cat, who immediately had convulsions and died. His father, who had decided he wanted to take the warrior woman as his own wife, ordered his favorites to tear out his son’s eyes and set him loose in the desert.
Left alone, the prince wandered for hours with his eyes in his hands, unable even to cry. When he heard the sound of a spring, he patted the earth until he felt wetness. He drank to satiation and sat down to rest. Leaves fell on him from above, and he crushed them in his palms and rubbed his eye sockets, seeking relief. They immediately stopped burning. The prince took each eye and popped it back in its socket. He could see again!
The prince returned toward the city. At its outskirts, he came upon a full-fledged battle. Even from far away, among the armor-clad soldiers he recognized the lithe figure of his warrior woman, whose sword flew mercilessly through the air. With a great war cry, he joined her in battle, and together they vanquished his father’s men.
When the battle was over, the prince and the warrior woman returned to the city. He became shah and installed each of his women in her own lodgings, making sure he visited them equally and gave them the same number of gifts. With his first wife he hunted, jousted, and discussed battle plans; with his second, he explored the art of passion and lived contentedly until the end of his days.
When Kobra finished her story, Naheed and I were both silent. Kobra stood up and returned to her work.
“That was a strange tale,” I said. “I’ve never heard that one before.”
“Nor I,” said Naheed. “What a lucky talisman that prince must have had, to get everything he wanted!”