Wedding Song (22 page)

This is how I became my sister’s guardian the summer before sixth grade. I taught her the curriculum for the first grade so she would not be a year behind. Even though the lessons were just writing and math, I resented
the task because it meant not having as much time to read for myself. Often, I told her to go to sleep, while I picked up a story to read. Nahid wouldn’t allow me: “Read it to me too.” I dragged a mattress next to her bed on the floor and lay next to her. I told her stories from
Shahnameh
in the imaginary mythical land of Touran; I told her the tales of Vikings on the cold seas, although I had never seen an ocean, or even a lake or a river. Sometimes I forgot the stories in the middle. Nahid would not accept that. “Just make them up,” she demanded. Sometimes Nahid told me about the orange groves she had seen in Israel, or even the ocean, or the airplanes she had flown in. I had never seen a plane. The two of us made travel stories and flew to exotic places like America in our imaginations. Sometimes, I made up stories about the rumors of little girls being kidnapped on the way to school. We stayed up all night in fear, although we were safe at home, locked in one room.

The situation didn’t get much better when Nahid was out of her cast. She had to relearn walking at age seven with braces tightly holding her right leg in place, her shoes heavy and cumbersome. My sister was brave. She never asked, “why me?” My grandmother bought a calf’s hoof every Friday, filled it with water and made my sister drink the stinking fluid. A wise-woman had told her it would strengthen the weak leg, already looking much thinner than the other. When family members came to visit, our aunts bent their heads close and whispered about Nahid’s problem. “She shouldn’t go out,” they said. “She would be mocked and laughed at. She could be treated as street entertainment.”

People did stare at my sister; women pulled their
chador
s tightly around themselves and gawked. Kind ones said, “
che heife
, what a pity!”

My grandmother asked her doctor if Nahid could ever carry a baby and give birth. Many in the family whispered that with such deformity, no one would ever marry her. My father worried what would happen to his daughter without a man in her life.

Nahid passed the exam for the first grade and was allowed to enter elementary school at the second-grade level. As the principal gave her the results, she looked proud and confident. School, however, was not what she had dreamt. Having never attended school, Nahid still had a hard time shaping the more difficult Persian letters. When she failed to produce a perfect letter “K” at the beginning of the word
kam-kam
(ironically meaning “little by little”), her teacher slapped her. I was pulled out of class to
calm her down. She stood outside her classroom sobbing. Her teacher, seething with anger, hit my sister hard on her head in front of me, aggravated by a seven-year-old’s lack of control over her emotions.

To make matters worse, Nahid couldn’t go to the bathroom by herself. She could not untie her braces or squat over the hole in the ground. I had left a hospital bed-pan at school for her. It was a novelty to all others who had never seen one. It was a clear sign of humiliation and lack of privacy for my sister, who had to use it in an open hallway, and an embarrassment and an inconvenience for me to be called constantly to take her to the bathroom. Wishing so much to escape my own sense of humiliation, I couldn’t wait to leave for high school.

That year, I was in the sixth grade, my last year in the small elementary school, Tavalali. As the senior class, we were making plans to disperse among various girls’ high schools, excited in anticipation of meeting a larger group of students. A new teacher at the school, Mrs. Mojtahedi, was in charge of the sixth grade. Short black hair in wild curls surrounded her round face, shiny from excessive makeup. She wore black eyeliner around her eyes that were lost in her raised cheeks and painted lips with the reddest lip color I had ever seen. Due to her unusual obesity, she struggled to make the smallest movements and created so much body heat that her makeup melted and smeared. Since the regular seats weren’t big enough for her, she brought her own chair. At recess, she assigned one of the girls to guard it, which forced the student to miss her own break. Very early on, she assigned students to help with teaching.

She designated me to teach history and geography because I managed to answer a few questions. Maps were not available for geography; historical events were not discussed. Instead, students took turns reading the assigned pages from the textbooks, then the teacher told us to memorize the long passages word for word by copying them a few times. Sometimes, there were no written tests. A student was called in front of the class to regurgitate the material and was corrected if a word was out of place. Points were deducted for misplaced words rather than distorted meaning.

I had difficulty memorizing verbatim, so I took advantage of the situation and gave tests that required thinking. “How do you interpret Nader Shah’s behavior? Was he a good king who brought unbelievable wealth to Iran? Or was he a madman who allowed his soldiers to kill, rape, and steal,
and who blinded his son with his own hands in fear of losing his power to him?”

Mrs. Mojtahedi eyes often closed behind her dark sunglasses, a smile fixed on her face to fool us into believing that she paid attention to every detail.

My classmates were incensed. They would rather have memorized the entire passage without thinking. Where did these questions come from? they wanted to know. They weren’t written in the textbook.

I didn’t mind the complaints. I ignored them and enjoyed being in control immensely, even if for a short time.

A few weeks into the school year, my father’s sisters and their children came for their regular Wednesday visits with my grandmother. The sun had already set; the weather was cool and pleasant. This was the usual time for catching up with gossip and everyone’s problems, since telephone services were unavailable. My grandmother chose a section of the walled yard under the tall sour orange trees and next to the flower beds for the gathering. I helped my mother carry a Persian carpet outside. We spread a plastic cloth over the middle of the carpet and brought the food. Everyone sat cross-legged around the
sofreh
in front of the spread of fruits, nuts, seeds, Iranian cucumbers, and watermelon slices. I tossed a few lit charcoals into a round wire bowl attached to a long string and whirled it in a circle to make the coal burn hotter. I put them on top of the Persian tobacco leaves in a metal crown on the peak of my grandmother’s hookah. An aunt took the first puff, ensuring the tobacco was burning right, and passed it to my grandmother. Everyone started the
taarof
ritual, proffering food and exchanging niceties.

My grandmother told an aunt, “Come on, peel a cucumber. Why aren’t you eating?”

My mother offered a plate of apples that she had peeled and sliced. “
Befarmaid
, please have a piece.”

A few aunts ate watermelon seeds. Each threw one after another into her mouth, positioned it between the top and bottom teeth in the side of her mouth and cracked it open, spitting the shells out. I served limeade in tall glasses on a silver platter with the patterns of Achaemenid soldiers with shields and arrows engraved on it.

The women started to
dard-e-del
, to speak of the ache in their hearts, of their new preoccupations and worries. One complained about her husband,
who spent too much time with his friends; the other worried about her only daughter who was suffering from a skin condition on her legs, getting worse despite all the doctors they visited and many ointments and pills; the third was troubled about her oldest daughter. A nice man’s family had gone to their uncle requesting him to be an ambassador of good will and to ask her parents for her hand in marriage. The uncle told him that they would not give their daughter to a Kohen. Being from the tribe of the keepers of the Temple, the Kohanim were to be given special respect. Fearing that a regular husband and wife dispute would set the wrath of God upon their daughters and themselves for disrespect to a descendent of the temple priests, many families didn’t give them their daughters. That hadn’t been the case with my aunt’s family. In fact, they had hoped that the man would ask for their daughter. They thought the uncle had done this out of malice and were bewildered what to do since the customs didn’t allow them to approach the family and correct the mistake.

Much to my surprise and horror, my mother for the very first time joined the conversation to
dard-e-del
. “I have a complaint with this family,” she started to say.

My grandmother stopped smoking her waterpipe and swatted the air with the back of her right hand in a gesture to stop her.

“No, no, no,” one aunt said. “Let her talk. Who else can she talk to? Her family isn’t here. We’re her family. She is a sister. Let her tell us of the pain in her heart.”

I had a very bad feeling about this. Why was my mother doing this to herself? Didn’t she know better than to complain to them about themselves? Maman looked at the aunts one by one and finally said, “I’m being treated like a maid. I have to cook for your mother, wash her clothes, iron her sons’ shirts, and she still complains about me to my husband. Your mother goes to him and tells him I didn’t take her watermelon juice right away, didn’t buy fresh milk everyday. What I am I to do? I have kids to take care of. I am always tired. I do everything for your mother, my husband’s mother, but I am always told that it is not enough, not been done the right way.”

I was surprised that they had allowed her to talk for such a long time without interrupting her. I thought maybe I was wrong. There was a silence for a second, then they all attacked her simultaneously—an emotional massacre. I didn’t have the heart to watch how my mother had set
up the trap for herself. So I went to the kitchen to get a fresh pot of tea for everyone, hoping that the food might soften them. I came back too late. My mother looked smaller than usual leaning onto her left side, her hand pushing against the ground for support. My aunts looked sweaty and red from the battle. My grandmother smoked serenely.

Morad’s wife had a smile on her face, since her sister-in-law’s defeat was her victory. She looked at me as I passed the small glass tea cups and exploded: “Who gave Farideh the authority to fail these kids?”

I was taken off guard, not realizing that the conversation had switched from mother to daughter. Unfortunately for me, one of my classmates was my aunt’s niece, who had complained to her after receiving a failed grade in history.

My uncle’s wife looked at me with fire in her eyes and pointed her index finger at me. “She has no conscience, making life so hard on them. I bet she can’t answer the questions herself.” Then she turned her head to me and her tongue slithered. “Do you know any of these things yourself? You’re the dumbest of them all, but you act like a queen.”

I looked at the aunts. They were still cracking the watermelon seeds and sipping the tea I had steeped for them. I bent over and picked up some of the dirty dishes to find an excuse to leave the assembly and got a glimpse of Geeta, Morad’s wife, sitting on her knees now.

“You get good grades for licking your teacher’s behind,” she screamed.

I felt as if I were the pit behind our house where the neighborhood kids practiced their stone throwing. I looked at her with fixed eyes. She was turning red now, angry for not getting any reaction from me, no tears, no shaking, just nothing.

“Instead of being good to the other kids by giving them simple questions, you are being hateful,” she added. Then she turned around and spat in the garden.

I turned to the faces around me for sympathy. That was absolutely un-called for. I didn’t know what the school had to do with the family. She was right. I was not qualified to teach. I did enjoy giving tough questions. Which teenager wouldn’t have? Her sister and niece should have taken their complaints to the school and the teacher. Plus, I was close family; my aunts barely knew the girl, but to my chagrin, everyone took Geeta’s side.

“What good can come out of this?” one aunt asked. That was a family motto; keep away from anything controversial.

“Why would you accept this kind of responsibility?” My grandmother admonished me. “Is it good that people will curse after your last name and by extension we’ll suffer from the bad eye that will be set upon us?”

I looked at my mother. She asked me to help her take the small dishes filled with the shells of watermelon seeds and get fresh ones. In the kitchen, she pinched my arm until it turned blue and screamed at me. “Am I not miserable enough without the troubles you make? Look what you have done! I will be hearing about this now for a week. Go to school tomorrow and tell your teacher you’re not doing it anymore.” She slammed the arm she was still holding against my body in a display of anger I had rarely seen.

The following day, Mrs. Mojtahedi made me tell her of the admonishment I received from the family when I resigned from teaching. She laughed and her long gold necklace jingled on her large bosoms.

I thought everything was going to be okay, but I was wrong. She had taught in the Jewish day school for many years and after this incident she enjoyed talking about it.

“How come you don’t go to the Jewish school?” she said. “I was surprised to see a Jew in Tavalali.”

“It’s too far away,” I said, knowing that the others were giggling.

“You don’t speak like them. How come you don’t speak your own language?”

She was referring to Judi, a Judeo-Persian language that was spoken only by the older generation or the Jews still living in the ghetto. We were all trying to disassociate ourselves from it in the hopes of integrating into the larger community.

“I don’t know. We don’t speak it at home.” I said in a small voice, hearing more giggles in the back of class.

“
Shalomalekhem, shalomalekhem!
” She laughed imitating the thick Judi accent she had heard the teachers at the Jewish school use as they had greeted each other. The words were from the Hebrew
shalom alekhem
, meaning “peace be with you.” “I’ve decided today that the Jewish students should not leave the classroom during the reading of the Koran and prayers. It would be good for you to learn.” Then she smiled widely, smearing more of the red lip-color on her teeth.