Wedding Song (21 page)

Walking at one, she had a barely noticeable discrepancy in the length of her legs. By age three, she was walking on the tip of her right foot to gain
a few inches for balance. This image of my sister became etched on my mind: a ballerina with big dark brown eyes, pointing with one leg only, looking at the world for answers to her plight.

The tombs of Esther (left) and Mordekhai (right) in Hamedan
. Pictures courtesy of Hadi Rabbani.

When she was six, Nahid’s body dipped to the right exaggeratedly. My father came home one day after a meeting with her surgeons. “I am taking Nahid to Israel,” he said, his eyebrows drawn together. “The doctors here are suggesting to immobilize her leg. That would be a terrible fate for a young girl,” he added with tears in his eyes. For the first time, I saw my father cry. He and Nahid left for Tel Ha-shomer Hospital in Israel and spent much of that year away from home.

By this time, my mother had given birth to my brother Freydoun, who was now four; she was also pregnant again. But she insisted on accompanying Nahid and my father to Tehran to bid them farewell on their journey to Israel, and also to visit her family, who had moved to the capital to escape the insufferable anti-Semitism. When Baba and my sister left, my mother’s brother Eliahou insisted that we should stay longer, visit my mother’s hometown, Hamedan, and make a pilgrimage to the tombs of Esther and Mordechai to pray for my sister.

I remember most of Hamedan like an old black and white movie, fuzzy,
out of focus, an amateur production that had yellowed with age. More than anything else, my mother wanted to visit the Jewish ghetto to check on her old friends. My uncle kept reminding her that many years had passed and that most of the community had emigrated either to Israel or to Tehran as her family had. Yet, she had to see the place she had longed for since her wedding, so that was our first stop.

A sukah decorated with hand-painted tapestry, built by the small Jewish community still living in Hamedan
. Pictures courtesy of Hadi Rabbani.

My mother’s demeanor changed quickly as she recognized her childhood arena. She put her hand on her mouth and giggled, her voice cracking in joy. Once in a while, she skipped, forgetting her stomach, the size of a round watermelon. “Remember,” she asked Eliahou, “the day we made a big pile of snow? Remember?”

Eliahou winked at me when he noticed my astonishment. His long black eyelashes couldn’t hide the tears. His big bony frame wrapped around my mother. “Yes, wasn’t that fun?”

“Remember we made such a big cave inside the pile of snow and asked our little brother to stand on it …” She couldn’t continue for a minute, giggling so hard, her eyes teared. “Poor thing fell inside and all the snow …” She bent in laughter. “All the snow fell on him and we had to dig him out… . Oh, so much fun!”

This was a side of my mother I had never seen! I was embarrassed by her behavior, wanting her to act with dignity. She tittered as she bounced and skipped on the dirt-covered alleyways, forgetting the baby in her big stomach. “Let’s knock at this door and ask if Moneer is still living here,” she said. “She was my classmate, you know. There it is!” She covered her mouth to squash a cry of joy.

There was a tiny dilapidated door in the ruins of what had been once a large community. A brass knob was calling my mother. She hit the door with it, chewing her fingernails as we waited. Eliahou put his arm around her.

“Yes!” The door opened a crack to show a wrinkled face framed with an old flowery kerchief above stooped shoulders. “What do you want?”

“Is Moneer here?” When she saw the astonished look on the woman’s face, my mother pointed to herself. “Don’t you know who I am? Rouhi. Don’t you remember? I used to come to play with Moneer.”

The old woman crinkled her eyes; she pursed her mouth like the tied knot of a cheesecloth around mushy cheese, hung to drain.

“Moneer finished high school, went to Tehran to become a nurse, married, and left for Eretz Israel. Everyone’s gone. There are only a few Yehudim left.”

My mother’s eyes darkened. She had finally come back home to find that it was not home after all. “So is life,” she sighed, “we will never find each other.” She stood there even after the door closed.

Eliahou took her hand and in a quiet voice said, “Let’s go for ice cream.”

At the garden café, we sat down under the shade of cypress trees on a brick patio. I had tasted ice cream a few times before but never served in such a fancy manner—shaped into white and brown balls and presented in footed glass bowls. I wondered how someone had formed such perfect balls and didn’t want to ruin their shapes with my spoon.

“It’s melting,” my uncle warned, “you better eat it now.” I wanted to know why one of the balls was brown. “Chocolate!” Eliahou said as he watched me. I gobbled the treat in rapid gulps and then sat there with a sticky mouth looking longingly at my uncle’s dish, which my mother forbade him to share with me.

I remotely remember spending the afternoon in the luscious hills of Abbas Abad on the outskirts of Hamedan where families picnicked under the trees. The gurgling of the waterpipe, the smell of the kebab, the laughter of faceless people were everywhere as I kept bending over, trying to capture the gold in the glittering sand. I felt humiliated when my mother
finally told me that the gold dust was nothing but a mirage. I wanted to go home then, but Eliahou promised the delight of visiting the tombs of Esther and Mordekhai the day after.

The following day, I was shocked at the sight of the building. “This is it?” We had come such a long way to see the drab, square brick monument. Maybe if my uncle had not built up the trip to be such a fantastic adventure I would have not been so disappointed. I hadn’t expected a palace for a burial ground, but a Persian monument decorated with blue tiles, like the mosques colorfully scattered throughout Iran—in Esfahan, Shiraz, Tehran. The Moslems had conquered Persia much later; nevertheless, the Achaemenids had Romanesque columns; images of beasts, flowers, and soldiers carved in stones decorated their palaces and their tombs. I expected to see a glittering gold or silver dome marking the burial place of our courageous queen. Instead, there was only a plain building with a dome. Rather than the hands of Persian artisans and stone masons, strong winds, rainfall, and ice had shaped the sand-colored bricks through the last two millennia.

“Is this truly the burial site of Esther and Mordekhai?” I asked Eliahou in disbelief. The poor sat cross-legged on the grounds, their lunches of yogurt and flat bread spread over kerchiefs. A few vagrants squatted on the worn-out steps, their greasy fingers extended through the sleeves of their patchy overcoats, gesturing for alms.

The
ziarat
was meant to be the highlight of our trip. Every year, Esther’s story was retold in all its awesome details: love, treachery, and heroism. The most beautiful women of each region had been brought to the king’s palace so he could choose a new queen. The beautiful Esther had groomed herself for King Akhashverosh, her black eyes red from crying, her spirit gloomy for having to leave home. But her uncle Mordekhai, her only family alive, had encouraged her to be brave. Maybe God was placing her in this fate for a greater purpose. Among all the virgins, the most beautiful woman of each province was ordered to the court by the royal decree; but a Jewish woman was chosen to be the queen of the most powerful man, the King of the Persian Empire.

Then, after she held a position of respect and power, Esther had endangered her life to stop the murder of the entire Jewish community by the evil vizier Haman. How could she then be buried in this simple place? If not as a Jewish heroine, then as a queen she deserved better. I thought
of the room in the ruins of the palace, Takhte Jamshid, outside Shiraz that I was told was hers. The large room was made of the finest stones, polished to such degree that they reflected the queen’s image as mirrors do. The king wanted his queen to be surrounded by her own beauty. Where were such fineries then for her tomb?

A strong sense of longing overtook me. “I want to go home,” I whimpered. “I want Baba.”

“He is in Israel with Nahid. You know that,” my uncle said.

I was at an awkward age, with a scrawny body and chicken legs. I had never been away from my father for such a long time, never spent so much time with my mother. Baba had been away for only a few days, but I already felt that I had forgotten his features. Now that the excitement of the trip had died in disappointment, I especially needed the comfort of a familiar place, where my father’s clothing hung in the closets, where the scent of his cigarettes was a part of the house.

I refused to enter the mausoleum, crossed my arms and puckered my lips, expecting the filth to be also in the inside. Holiness couldn’t exist in squalor, I thought. My mother covered my hair with a kerchief and pushed me up the broken steps. We entered through the threshold of the heavy wooden doors. The room was dimly lit from the natural light of a skylight. The sweet fragrance of rose water surrounded us, mixed with the smoky smell of candles burning in remembrance. A large dome in the middle of the room was covered with silk fabrics in bright colors, some with gold threads. Women crowded around the sepulcher crying, some beating their chests, a few spread even more cloth on top; all lips moved in silent requests, quiet prayers. A younger, worn-out woman held tightly to the bars crying and had to be forcefully peeled off to make room for the crowd behind her.

In a carved opening in the wall in front of us, a Torah scroll stood upright in its round silver casing, decorated with velvet fabric and gems, crowned with silver. My mother and I bent to kiss it. I prayed for my sister’s healing and for her and my father’s safe return. I don’t know what my mother prayed for but our faces were covered with tears as we stood up.

I had not seen the tombs yet. They were hidden underneath the offerings. I knelt by the bars, removed the layers of fabric and stared down into the deep room underneath. Two simple gravesides were lit artificially. The rest was darkness. My uncle bent over and told me that those who wished
very hard could be transported to Jerusalem through a secret passage underneath.

I closed my eyes and willed to be in Jerusalem with my father and Nahid. I imagined being transferred down to the gravesides, musty and dark. I reached to find the walls to the tunnel, slowly making my way through its dark, narrow, muddy sides. I could not see anything. I cried for my father, “Baba, Baba.” I called for my sister, “Nahid, where are you? Do you see me?” An echo came back, and I was trying hard to hear the words, but a hand grabbed me by the shoulders and removed me. My time was up.

I wrote to Nahid every day when I returned to Shiraz, telling her of my experience in Hamedan and of the little events of our lives. The two of us became very poetic, dwelling on the sorrows of the unimaginable distance that separated us, in the florid tradition of Iranian poetry bemoaning heart-wrenching separations.

Nahid had not attended school yet and could not read or write. My father read my letters to her and wrote her responses. I looked for beautiful postcards of two birds for her—to give her something to look at when she did not understand written words. We called ourselves two
bolbol
s, nightingales, the symbol of pure love in Persian poetry. I sent Nahid long letters and postcards with the picture of colorful birds: tropical parakeets, whimsical ones, fanciful like the birds in the Iranian epic,
Shahnameh
. My favorite ones had a sprinkle of glitter on them. Always, I put those in envelops so their sparkle would not diminish during their journey to Nahid.

When my little sister came back from her surgery, she still had those big dark eyes, but she was not dragging one leg along either. She could not walk. Nahid was in a body cast. She could move only her arms and her head. They put her on a single bed in my parents’ room, with the headboard by the window. My baby brother’s circumcision ceremony had been delayed by a week so my father could be back. During the party, when Nahid stretched to look at the guests in the backyard, she fell off the bed and broke the leg in the cast. That day, my father told me that I was in charge of her, that I should not leave her sight unless someone else was there.