Wedding Song (14 page)

The year I had to wait for my acceptance to the first grade was the longest year of my life. There was nothing fun to do. Paper and pencils
were items of luxury, books nonexistent. I helped sweep the floors, clean the rice, wash the clothes, and all the other boring chores, which I hated and tried to escape as much as I could. That year, my lessons were of life, my teachers the people around me.

My mother was busy with my baby sister, whose severe infection kept her in the hospital more often than at home. Maman often sent me to my father’s shop to get me out of her hair. I loved going there to watch my father and uncle Morad thread little pearls on gold strings and sew them on wide bracelets in the shape of roses. I didn’t know then that their art would show up in museums during my adult life. I didn’t know that there would come a time when I longed for a small piece of the jewelry I watched my father create.

In the back workshop, I watched three young men, my father’s apprentices, polish silver platters and goblets for the customers. They enjoyed having me there, took turns putting me on their laps, spreading my skirt so it would not get mussed, holding me tight so I would not fall. Their hips moved up and down rhythmically.

My father disapproved of my wandering around the workshop, alone with young men. Many times, he took off his face shield, turned off his jeweler’s torch, shook the gold dust from his leather apron onto a metal container, and steaming, came to the back. Not being able to tell me of his fears (no one ever discussed such matters with children), he dragged me back to the main shop and ordered me to sit up straight, with my hands folded on my lap. Every time, after fifteen minutes, I became restless and jumped up and down, putting at risk large glass containers of acids used to purify the gold and the silver. Finally, my father forbade my mother to send me to his shop.

Soon I was looking for other means of entertainment. My father’s first cousin lived next door, and his daughter was my age. Mahvash was mischievous. Her carefree running around the streets of
mahaleh
with her skirt flying in the air appalled the neighbors. “Look at her running like a boy. The girl has no shame,” they would say, spitting on the ground with disgust.

My father forbade me to spend time with her after hearing the comments from our neighbors.

Years later, Mahvash would surprise all her classmates by participating in the competitions for Miss Iran. The self-confidence to think herself beautiful, deserving, to be adventurous and allow her pictures to appear in
Zan-e Rouz
, the premier women’s magazine, was beyond our imaginations. Many looked down at the way she exhibited herself, and wondered if she would ever find a husband. A Tehrani man saw Mahvash on television and fell in love with her. He found her address in Shiraz and asked for her hand from her parents.

Mahvash married at age fourteen. She looked like a dressed-up queen on her wedding night. She had a big smile, and when she saw me, she winked and pointed to her hair that was piled up on top. She pulled me to the side later. “Do you see the glitter on my hair?” she asked, a twinkle in her green eyes. “A special hairspray!”

Mahvash moved to Tehran and had three children by the time I graduated from high school. She was widowed by age thirty-five when her husband died of a heart attack. According to the Islamic laws reinstated by Khomeini, her father-in-law was in charge of the inheritance and the children’s welfare. Mahvash was lucky. Her father-in-law was a compassionate man who turned over the money to her and helped her and the children leave the country for the United States.

Mahvash and I found each other in Los Angeles when we were in our mid-forties. We had not seen each other for over twenty-five years. She was still beautiful—porcelain doll skin, green eyes, curvaceous body, the same mischievous half smile and twinkle in her eyes. In an outdoor café, I asked her how she remembered me as a child.

She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke away from me. “You went by the rules—too serious,” she said.

Her full lips parted in a seductive smile. She took another puff from her cigarette and laughed. She told me how she had tricked a bus driver, when she was eight years old, to take her and her cousins to downtown Tehran to visit her aunt.

“Please, sir, we lost our money and our aunt is waiting for us for lunch. She is probably worried to death!” They rode on top of the double-decker, singing from the top of their lungs.

I imagined her letting the wind blow through her blond hair, laughing with delight. I would never have dared. “Did you really do that? Weren’t you afraid?” I asked her.

“See! You are still too serious. Who was going to get us?”

That was the difference between us as children. She looked at the world as if it were a playground. I envisioned a bogeyman around every bend.

“We were kids,” Mahvash added, smiling in her familiar playful way.
“And guess what? After having lunch with my aunt, she gave us money for the bus home.” She took another puff from her cigarette and laughed. “I convinced everyone to buy ice cream, and once again we waited for the bus with no money. The same bus driver stopped and bought the story again, taking us home on his lunch break.”

Mahvash was right. I grew up to be suspicious of people. Like my father, I feared their judgment.

Originally, Mahvash jeered at me. My mother had my fine hair shaved when I was five years old. According to common beliefs, shaving made the hair grow thicker and more abundant. All winter, I went around wearing a kerchief so I would not catch a cold from my bald head. All winter, Mahvash made fun of my ugly scarf and hairless scalp. Later, when she began courting my friendship, I was both intimidated and intrigued.

She used to tell wild stories about how her brother ate a razor blade wrapped in a piece of bread to show how brave he was, and that her mother approved, saying it was nothing but pure iron that his body needed anyway. She told me that it was good to eat raw pistachios. I believed her despite hearing the opposite from my mother, who thought they would give me worms. She convinced me to go with her to the synagogue, put my head on its closed door, and ask God to take away the life of a neighborhood girl, who had angered her.

“Did you do it?” she asked.

I nodded.

“No, you say it aloud. I wanna hear it.”

I audibly cursed the girl, but silently asked God not to accept my words.

Mahvash and I roamed the narrow alleyways looking for something to do. She told me about a wonderful confectionery outside the
mahaleh
and about the unusual candies we could buy if we had money.

One day, Mahvash spotted the beggar. His name was Sakalak, but we called him Kachalak, the bald one. His baldness differed from that of other men I knew. A few had receding hairlines in front that gave them a high forehead. Others had a more advanced form that stretched the baldness beyond the forehead to the back of their heads. There was usually a small dip from the natural boundary of their foreheads to the newly created extension all shiny and smooth, surrounded with thick brown hair. Others had no hair at all and did not have to worry about growing a row of hair long enough to be glued on top of their hair with grease.

Kachalak’s scalp was patchy. Long dusty strands of hair sprouted around
his head. Though lifeless, the hairs did not droop over the bald spots around them but instead stuck out according to how he had slept on them the night before. The dirt in the air of the ghetto and his own natural body oil that was never washed away helped give his hair body and form. Parts of the visible scalp showed white patches as though a mysterious invisible organism was eating the brown pigments of his skin, and no doubt the brown borders around them would soon succumb to the sickly whiteness of the disease.

He did not seem to have a reason for shaving. The crawling whiteness had found its way around Kachalak’s left ear to spread itself beneath the protruding cheek bone and his lower jaw before proceeding to the right side, weakening the roots of the hair follicles in its path. Kachalak was also becoming bald on his face.

I thought he was lucky to be blind and not witness his own miserable condition. In place of the dark eyeballs that everyone else had, there were blue lifeless orbs floating in the mushy whiteness of his eye sockets. One eye was often shut with sticky yellowish slime, which oozed from his tear ducts slowly, drying around the sunken eye and eyelashes and creating a feast for flies.

I had seen him many times before, when he visited my grandmother at our home to ask for leftover food and old clothes, especially close to the holidays when everyone was more generous. I could smell his sour body before he entered the yard.

My grandmother sent me scouring the house for leftover food and my dad’s old clothes. I resented my grandmother’s generosity; her gifts would bring Kachalak’s wasted body to our doors again and again, spoiling the thoughts of the holidays for me. I laid the food and clothing a few steps away from him and hastily locked the door behind him. At the time, I didn’t know that he pushed his way into the house and that my grandmother was trying to get rid of him by giving him something quickly.

On the day that Mahvash and I encountered the beggar, he was sunning himself on a torn piece of carpet in a busy crossroad close to the public water spouts. He had a tin can in front of him with a few
rial
s in and around it. I was revolted by the sight of
the thief
, as I used to call him, for who would want a perfectly beautiful day to smell of rotting live flesh?

Mahvash was merely intrigued. She wanted us to circle him. “Watch him,” she said, “He will know someone is close to him.”

I watched him tap his wooden stick on the ground trying to find us.

With his slight stutter, Kachalak said, “Give, give to the poor!”

As if being blind and bald was not enough, he had a speech impediment, too. I remembered someone saying the beggar had slight mental retardation. I tried not to act scared in front of Mahvash.

“Let’s steal a couple of these
rial
s. We can buy some candy with them. He is blind. He won’t know what we’re doing,” she whispered in my ears. Before I could react, she bent down and picked up a few.

I imitated her. A volcanic sound of rage exploded from within the mound on the carpet. I was disoriented, and my heart pumped rapidly. I threw the coins down. I don’t know how my shaking legs found the strength to carry me away. I could hear the blind man’s voice for months after that screaming, “Get her, get her,
dofte mola Esghel
, the daughter of Mola Esghel.” He screamed half in Farsi, half in Judi, the language of the ghetto.

I knew what he was saying—that he recognized me as my father’s daughter. Not only had I humiliated myself, I had also shamed my father, a religious advisor and community leader.

I could not understand Mahvash’s giddiness. She was as happy as ever, juggling the copper coins, giggling, and skipping all the way home. Her unbraided hair danced around her. I was horrified; Kachalak was my living nightmare from then on. Whenever he came to our house for his usual share of leftovers and old clothes, he eyed me with those drippy dead eyes. I hid in a hot closet, pale and shaking well after he was gone, fearing that he would one day murder me. Sometimes I hated my grandmother for being so kind to him.

A year later, tired of this nuisance among us, the community collected money and sent Kachalak to Palestine. In those days everyone believed that Israel was the solution to all problems, and that they would train the beggar to become a productive citizen.

We moved out of the
mahaleh
soon after, and I forgot about him until I began to tell my daughters bedtime stories of my childhood. As I recounted the event to them, I realized that the horror and the guilt that had brewed inside me for so many years had blinded me to the reason that a sightless man could have seen me so well. My laughing children knew that Kachalak was not blind.

After all that mischief, we still didn’t have enough money for the candy. Mahvash suggested a scheme, “Let’s go to your Dad’s store and tell him that your mother needs money for groceries.”

I did it. It worked. I think my father was too embarrassed in front of his cousin’s child to say no. I had ten
toman
s of my father’s hard-earned money burning a hole in my fist, feeling a certain thrill and shame at the same time. The call for adventure was stronger.

We went to the candy shop. Mahvash was right. I had never seen such pretty candy, shaped as apples, cherries, and pears. The friendly shopkeeper invited us behind the counter for a free sampling. Mahvash had warned me ahead of time, “He likes to stick his hands in little girls’ panties.” I had never heard of such nonsense, but I followed her advice and kept my distance. She took the money from me and chose the candies. We greedily bit into their velvety skins. Every piece tasted like sawdust mixed with sugar, but neither one of us wanted to admit the defeat. I spit mine out in a street corner when I thought Mahvash wasn’t looking. In the pretext of having sticky hands, she knelt by the watercourse running by the side walk, and pulled the nasty mush out with two fingers.

Shortly after, the shame came back. I wanted to go home and give the rest of the money to my mother. Mahvash and I argued in the hallway between the two houses. She thought the rest of the money was hers, but I didn’t remember such promises. I couldn’t go home without any money. My mother would want to know where I had been. I was ashamed for wasting my father’s money that had kept him working through late hours of the night.

I managed to secure most of the money from Mahvash. It was only half of what I had started with, but maybe nobody would know. My father did find out the truth that night. But when I told him Mahvash had some of it, he shook his head and with tired and sad eyes told me not to socialize with Mahvash again.

Then he screamed at my mother for not having enough control over me.

I venerated Aunt Fereshteh like a big sister, a role model. Unlike other adults, she instilled self-confidence in me: “How beautiful you look in red,” she would say—my favorite color even now. When my mother admonished me for slurping tea like a peasant, Fereshteh arranged a tea party for the two of us. We sat cross-legged in front of a samovar and practiced sipping like Persian princesses.