Wedding Song (27 page)

My paternal great-grandmother Bibi
.

At the same time, she was ingratiating. Knowing that my father wasn’t giving me even a
rial
(intending to curb my movements), from time to time she passed me enough money to catch a taxi or buy stamps. In return, she expected me to drive her to doctors’ appointments and to her daughters’ homes for socializing. She expected me to keep her company, to take long walks with her, or help her with sewing the covers on the quilts. But
I didn’t feel like the old days. I was restless and teary. My thoughts drifted constantly to possible plans for getting back to Virginia.

The year before I left for the United States, I had copied a few lines from
Walden
and pasted the sheet on the wall by my bed. Every night before I slept, they reminded me of the essence of Thoreau’s essays, that as an individual—a new and delicious concept in my vocabulary—I had the right to my own life. Every morning when I woke up, I touched the slowly yellowing paper, and the words reinforced the idea that even if I were wrong, my mistakes were more right than those the family could make for me. Many times my father asked me to translate it for him, thinking that it was a love poem. I refused. It was mine and only mine—and yes, in many ways, it was a love poem, an ode to myself, celebrating self-reliance and independence.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life
.

Thoreau’s lines sustained me and fed a stubbornness that powered my will to leave.

Now, in the summer of 1976, I had left the quotation in America along with my books. I began to doubt its message as I observed the suffering I was causing my parents and my siblings. I desperately needed someone, something to hold me, to assure me that I wasn’t making the biggest mistake of my life by severing all ties to my past, by seeking that independence that I had thought was my right.

I sat beside my grandmother one day that long summer, threading the needles for her as we attached the covers on the blue quilt. She sighed through her toothless mouth. Her kerchief slid to her neck and exposed her braids, white and faded orange. I resisted the urge to hold and rub them for comfort as I had done in my childhood before going to sleep. She hadn’t colored her hair with henna on the days leading to Tisha’B’Av, a time of mourning for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. She sighed again and asked me if I remembered her mother Bibi. Every time we were alone, Khanom-bozorg would tell me stories of our past lives—maybe
to keep my mind off my problems, maybe to keep me connected in the hope that I would become another branch on the family tree.

How could I not remember Bibi?

My great-grandmother had lived with her son, my great-uncle Daeebozorg, in a small house shared by his extended family. The house was slowly renovated but Bibi’s second-floor room remained the same, a dark, windowless cave. After we moved out of the ghetto, I walked the long distance between our new house in a Moslem neighborhood and Bibi’s in the
mahaleh
once a week, taking food and clothing for her. Khanom-bozorg was a devoted daughter, checking on Bibi every day. She would visit or send one of the children or grandchildren to run her mother’s errands. Whenever I complained of the chore, my grandmother reminded me that I had been Bibi’s favorite child of my generation. She had held me in her arms as a baby and walked me through the streets whenever my mother had been busy. Although she was fastidious about cleanliness to the point of obsession, she didn’t mind taking care of me as a baby, even when I wet her lap.

Nevertheless, I always balked doing errands from our new house to her place in the ghetto. I dreaded the long, forty-minute walk through stillunfamiliar neighborhoods, the sexual remarks made by young men in the dark winding alleyways, and the obscenities exchanged by the prostitutes at the gate of the
mahaleh
. To avoid entering Bibi’s room, I asked Daeebozorg’s wife if my great-grandmother was in, hoping not, so that I could leave the package. Bibi was always in. I stood on top of the stone stairs in the open hallway, staring into the pitch blackness until Bibi saw me.

“Come on in. My life should be sacrificed for you,” Bibi called me in with her shaking voice coming through the darkness.

“Bibi-joon,” I addressed her using the word “dear” at the end of her name. “I am putting the package here at the door. I’ve got to go.”

“Come in! What are you afraid of? No one is going to eat you. I’ve missed you. Come in. Your eyes will get used to the darkness. Come in. I’ve not seen you for a long time. My heart has shriveled in your absence.”

I would walk into the dark, taking tiny steps, trying to balance the food, holding onto it tightly in anticipation of a fall. When my feet touched the bedding on the cobblestone floor, Bibi reached with her bony hands and
took the package from me, and holding my hand, helped me sit on the mattress. She caressed my hair and blessed me. “May God reward you for your act of charity. May you find a good husband and have healthy children,
ensha-allah
, God willing.”

At age nine or ten, I didn’t want a husband; I couldn’t think of children. I drew back from being petted by her rough hands. I didn’t like her juicy kisses. I wanted to get out, to breath the fresh air, and see the light outside. Bibi often picked up a stone from the floor and threw it at an invisible mouse. Terrified, I would draw my feet up on the bed and hug my knees, wondering if the mice were brave enough to jump on the mattress.

Looking down at my stitches, I told Khanom-bozorg, “Yes, I do remember Bibi.” After a long silence, I stopped sewing and lifted my head to see tears at the corner of my grandmother’s eyes. Not knowing how to react, I asked what Bibi’s name, Zaghee, meant.

“The blue-eyed one,” my grandmother said, surprised that I didn’t know the meaning of the old Farsi word.

Bibi’s piercing blue eyes were an anomaly among Iranians, who were either mesmerized by the color or considered it unlucky. Her full lower and narrow upper lips opened to a complete set of teeth that amazed people who had never seen anyone keeping a full set of teeth into old age. She had a large nose for her petite face; her frame had shrunk and her spine was slightly curved. I remembered her well. An aunt brought Bibi over once a week. My mother washed Bibi’s clothes as my grandmother and aunt bathed Bibi in the
hamam
. Serving the three women a pitcher of sour cherry drink in the bathroom, I almost dropped the tray when for the first time I saw my great-grandmother naked, her chest flat like a child’s with skin stretched over defined ribs and little flesh.

My mother told me that Bibi’s breasts were “cut off, diseased.”

I wasn’t frightened by her figure, just fascinated. After all, nothing about Bibi was common. She was the oldest person I had ever known. After her bath, my grandmother groomed Bibi’s long white hair with a wooden comb, but let Bibi braid it herself in numerous strands. Then Bibi put a scarf on her head and wrapped a long black piece of fabric around it like a turban, covered herself in her
chador
, and sat in the sun with her eyes closed to take in its warmth. She ate little, didn’t talk much—only to bless
everyone in gratitude—never wanted to stay long. As soon as she entered the house, she longed to go back to her own room, but Khanom-bozorg kept her the entire day.

Khanom-bozorg said that her mother lived to be a hundred and ten years old, ten years short of the magic number every Iranian Jew wished for their loved ones, because she was righteous, because she had suffered. I wondered how one’s suffering made her closer to God. My own suffering was distancing me from all I had believed.

My grandmother sighed again and continued to list Bibi’s virtues. “She was fastidious about staying clean. She wore separate sandals to enter the outhouse, and wrapped her clothes tightly around her, so that they wouldn’t touch the walls. Afterward, she washed her arms to the elbows, her legs to the knees, just the way Moslems purify themselves before praying.” My grandmother wiped her tears. “Poor Bibi ate very little. She said she didn’t want to grow food for maggots.”

Although I recalled Bibi vividly, I didn’t know much about her life. Her body had shriveled down to a child’s size by the time she died in 1963, when I was ten years old. Unaware of her death, I went to school that morning. When I returned home for lunch, I saw my grandmother, father, and aunts washing their hands and feet at the door with the water from a jug my mother had left outside, the custom for Jews returning from the cemetery. No one told me anything. As always, I had to decipher information by listening. By then I had learned not to ask, not to try to take part in the adults’ conversations. I heard an aunt tell the family how she was taking Bibi for a medical check up, when my great-grandmother collapsed in the courtyard and was gone, “an easy death. She was blessed.” I felt cheated for not being able to express my grief, to speak of her as everyone else did.

My mother once said that Bibi’s longevity was a direct result of her drinking a shot of
aragh
sprinkled with pepper every morning.

Incensed, Khanom-bozorg disagreed, “No, that was to keep her nerves steady. She had a hard life.”

I had always wondered but feared to ask what could have tortured my quiet Bibi for so many years. On this summer day, watching Khanombozorg so tender and vulnerable, I asked. The answer was as long as all her other stories, as indirect as all conversation in Farsi.

Bibi Zaghee married a wealthy man, Esghel Ghalgeer, who made a living
by retrieving silver and gold from the dust at the jewelers’ shops. My father was named after him. Being relatively wealthy, Bibi’s husband had bought his stunning wife a pearl necklace that was the envy of every woman in the ghetto. Petite, fair-skinned, and bright-eyed, Bibi had enchanted her husband, who would do anything for her, except live long enough to raise their son and four daughters. Although a girl, the youngest, Bagom-jaan, “I say you are my life,” became Bibi’s dearest child.

Like my mother, women in those days married before puberty and were continuously pregnant. When my Aunt Shams started her period before her wedding night, my grandmother beat her head with both hands: “It isn’t time yet, not yet. What am I going to tell the groom’s family?”

The Iranian custom of that time dictated that a woman’s first blood was to flow in her husband’s home. Therefore, when she was still a little girl, Bagom-jaan’s extraordinary beauty sent the families of numerous men to ask my paternal great-grandmother for her daughter’s hand in marriage. After the groom was chosen, Bibi spent days preparing for a special wedding for her favorite daughter and spent money that she didn’t have to prepare a feast. Bagom-jaan was breathtaking in her beautiful wedding gown, her long black hair shone from underneath the sheer veil, and her youth and innocence were the crowns that adorned her head. She was a rosebud ready to be opened.

After the wedding, men escorted the bride and the groom, who rode donkeys through the narrow alleyways of the
mahaleh;
women walked behind them, clapping and singing
vasoonak:

The alleyways are narrow, yes; the bride is beautiful, yes! Don’t touch her mane; it is decorated with pearls, yes!

Don’t take the bride through the alleyways; they are muddy, Just as the bride’s lips are clearly rosy.

The entire neighborhood gathered on the flat roofs of their homes, ululating as the bridal party went by, showering them with sugar candy flavored with rose water. With the beat of their
tonbak
s, the Jewish musicians met the entourage at the groom’s house and ushered the couple to their
hejleh
, decorated with silk fabrics and greens. The family sang until their voices gave up. Then they left Bagom-jaan and her husband to enjoy each other’s company and waited outside, still clapping and singing along with the musicians, waiting for the bloody cloth.

The groom came out in a short while. The family sang even louder:

Our bride is a child; early at night she is sleepy From the
hejleh
, the groom appears, satisfied and happy.

The groom didn’t look happy, and my great-grandmother panicked. What was wrong? The bride was surely a virgin; she was but a child. Bagom-jaan was suffering from severe cramps, the groom informed the family. Bibi rushed to her daughter’s side trying to comfort her, but no one realized the seriousness of the problem, and Bagom-jaan died on her wedding night. Bibi tore her necklace and the pearls flew in the air and scattered over the dead child. Her true pearl was going to sleep in the cold of earth rather than in the warmth of a wedding bed.

Bibi never recovered from the shock. She had to be peeled off the pile of dirt in the Jewish cemetery. After pulling out fistfuls of her hair and throwing them on the grave, she beat herself on the head and chest until she fainted. Her grief was too deep to be consoled. Week after week, she fasted and prayed for Bagom-jaan, but her grief wouldn’t dull. She spent her days at the gravesite, crying, grieving, and eating little, trying to fast as many days as possible. After the thirty days of formal mourning, when her pain was still as harsh as the first weeks, Bibi still visited the grave every day, beating her breasts with a large stone, asking for atonement from God, for forgiveness from her beloved daughter, believing that her sins had brought death to Bagom-jaan.