The Girl from the Garden Read online

  “Rabbi is here,” Rakhel says.

  “I’m going to take my rest,” Zolekhah says. She pushes on her knees to stand. Then, she picks up a few pillows from the floor and places them against the wall at the head of the bed, and helps Ibrahim sit up and lean against the pillows. By the time she turns to walk out, the old rabbi shuffles into the room. He mutters Shabbat shalom as he walks past Zolekhah toward the bed. Rakhel hurries to place a chair beside the bed for the old man. Zolekhah stands waiting by the open door, the morning light behind her radiant.

  “Asher knows what he is doing, Mother. Please, just trust him. He calculates the costs and risks of everything before making a decision,” Ibrahim says. Zolekhah listens without turning. She waits a moment, then says Shabbat shalom to the rabbi and leaves. Rakhel follows her quietly into the courtyard.

  “Naneh Zolekhah?”

  “The girls already left for the day. Can you see to the chai, Rakhel?”

  “Fatimeh made it. I will serve it. Naneh Zolekhah?”

  “Yes, daughter?”

  “The rabbi said something about guests. Are we expecting company for Sabbath?”

  Zolekhah shakes her head, then turns to face Rakhel. “Yes, a guest. A guest is coming, though not for Sabbath.”

  “Who is coming?”

  Zolekhah places her hand on Rakhel’s shoulder, then looks up at the trees behind Rakhel. “Asher took Kokab as a wife on Wednesday. She will arrive here the day after tomorrow.” The old woman does not look at Rakhel when she speaks but keeps her gaze at the tops of the trees as though she were announcing the news to them. She finally looks at Rakhel for a moment, then turns and walks away. She continues talking as she makes her way across the courtyard.

  “I know it will be hard for you, child. But nothing can be done. Asher needs a son, or else all he has built will be lost to the wind. You must be strong, dear. And welcome his new wife, for the sake of whatever peace remains in this household.”

  Rakhel waits for Zolekhah to leave. She stands alone in the empty courtyard. Clouds rush overhead. Outside, a man whistles. She listens to his song until she can no longer hear him, then she turns and walks to the kitchen. She stops in the doorway for a moment and watches the orange fire through the grille in the belly of the black stove. Rakhel walks closer to the stove. She takes one more step forward and then places her open palm on the hot surface of the grille. She grits her teeth and holds her hand on the burning metal. Rakhel removes her hand and bits of her skin peel off, sticking to the surface of the stove. She turns and walks back to the courtyard to sit beside the pool. Zolekhah peers out from the open window of her bedroom.

  “Rakhel, have you served the tea?”

  “I was about to, but I burned my hand.”

  “Why G-d has chosen you for such black misfortune?” Zolekhah looks up to the sky and shakes her head. She comes out of her room and walks toward the kitchen. “Is it very bad?”

  Rakhel looks at her palm. She studies it for several moments. Her flesh is red, the white of it revealed in some places. “It will scar,” she says.

  Zolekhah walks past her without looking at her. “I’ll peel some cucumbers for the guest and leave the skins on a plate for you in the kitchen. Put it on the burn,” Zolekhah says. “Go get some rest with Khorsheed. She is asleep with the baby in the sitting room. I’m sure this news has you worn. I’ll tend to the rabbi and Ibrahim myself.”

  Rakhel walks toward the sitting room. The air stings her raw flesh. She shakes her burned hand and opens the door quietly with the other. The curtains of the room are drawn and the room is dark, save for a sliver of light that falls across Khorsheed’s face. Khorsheed lies on the rug, her black hair loose over a pillow, her body curled around the baby asleep at her breast. Yousseff clutches with his small hand the collar of his mother’s shirt so that Rakhel sees the rise and fall of the girl’s chest as she sleeps. A streak of light wavers across Khorsheed’s full lips, and she sighs deeply in her sleep, shifts her shoulders and wraps an arm around the sleeping baby. The baby nestles his head farther into the flesh of his mother’s breast.

  Rakhel enters the sitting room quietly and sits beside Khorsheed. The baby stirs and wakes, then looks up at her face, blinking. Khorsheed opens her eyes, yawns, and smiles at Rakhel. Rakhel gives her finger to Yousseff, who clutches it in his small hand. She wiggles her finger and says, “It was my place to bear the first son of this family.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Rakhel.”

  “He should have been mine.”

  “Spit three times, Dada, so some awful thing doesn’t happen,” Khorsheed says. She sits and takes the baby in her lap. She holds Yousseff up in the air and gazes at him, before pulling him toward her face, then kissing his eyes, his nose. “You know as good as I what happens if you look at someone wanting what they have, regardless of who you are or how much you love the other person.”

  Rakhel jumps to her feet and glares at Khorsheed and her baby. “Worried I have the evil eye for your baby?” She watches Khorsheed’s innocent surprise, the way she presses Yousseff to her chest protectively, and a strange pleasure takes hold of Rakhel. She closes her eyes for a moment and breathes in deeply, then looks at Khorsheed again, cowering before her, and says, “You’re right, Khorsheed. I am full of envy, overflowing with it. So much, it’s going to flood the whole damned world. See what comes of it.”

  Mahboubeh watches the warblers dart in and out of the bare rosebushes, eyeing her with suspicion, eyeing the plate of bread crumbs she’s left for them, then looking at her again. She remembers how Rakhel used to walk to that well to talk to her djinns and curse her enemies. She and the other children hid and listened, holding their breaths for fear that she’d name one of them. And whomever she did name came to some misfortune, one way or another. So no one ever crossed her. Everyone always did what she asked. Mahboubeh walks back into the kitchen and closes the door. She presses her forehead against the cool of the glass. She watches the little birds outside gather around the plate. A small war ensues among them.

  Mahboubeh remembers the night Rakhel suggested the neighbor’s son as a potential suitor for her. Mahboubeh was home on holiday from the college she attended in Tehran. She announced to the whole family, at the Sabbath dinner, the news that she had just been selected for a scholarship to further her studies in mathematics in France. Rakhel looked at her. Then she turned to Ibrahim and mentioned Elchonon’s eldest son. He owned a shoe store with his brothers. He had even studied up to the eighth grade, knew how to read and keep numbers. His mother had come calling.

  “No,” Mahboubeh said.

  Six months later, Rakhel led Mahboubeh, weeping, to the altar.

  Mahboubeh sits down at her kitchen table and looks at a portrait of her husband on the wall. A tall man. Sad eyes. Smooth skin. A faint smile. He wears a fine tailored suit. The photograph is in sepia and soft white, but his cheeks have a slight rosy tint and his eyes a hint of green, the stroke of the photographer’s paintbrush. She closes her eyes and sees him as he was the first few mornings after their wedding. He sits before her, at the table she set for him, the steam of the chai rising in swirls between them, the bread still warm. He clears his throat, but she does not look up. It is she that speaks, first.

  “I want to work as a teacher,” Mahboubeh says. “I will make my own money. So that my will is my own.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  She has not asked him for permission. She simply stated a condition for the life they will lead together. He looks up to meet her eyes and nods his head. She looks back at him with fierce resolve. He chuckles. He brings the glass of chai to his mouth to hold back the laughter, but it escapes him. He laughs for a while, then looks at the bewilderment in her eyes and laughs again.

  “Yes, Mahboubeh. Clearly, your will is your own,” he says. She smiles. He stops laughing and looks down, his cheeks red. Then he stands abruptly and says, “Thank you for breakfast.”

  “You will be home for lunch?”


  Her kitchen is silent. The click of the refrigerator. Mahboubeh looks about her, lost for a moment. She sees the portrait. “So much respect you had for me,” Mahboubeh says. “You came to me for advice, when men in your time thought of their wives as something they owned.” He died young, her husband. In her arms, of a stroke. She closes her eyes, releases her breath sharply between her teeth.

  He appears before her, tall, awkward, silent. She sees him thus, in that captive moment before the rest of life washes over her. Mahboubeh opens her eyes and shakes her head. The birds outside bicker among themselves. She walks over and stands before his portrait. Then, she closes her eyes and places her hand on the glass of the frame, over his chest. She can feel it, almost, the warmth of his hand over hers, the course of his life beneath her palm. She holds her hand there.

  “Mahboubeh,” he says, and nothing more.

  An urgent knock sounds against the heavy wooden door, the resonance of a man’s knocking. From behind the drawn curtains, through the crack that allows in a sliver of daylight, Rakhel watches Fatimeh rush across the courtyard, one hand pushing the wisps of white hair that fall out from beneath her chador back into place, the other gathering the black fabric over her head and throat. Rakhel clenches her fist, then winces at the pain from her burned hand. She watches Fatimeh all morning. Asher told the servant to keep her tasks close to the door, so that when Kokab’s brothers bring her, the old servant could let her in immediately.

  When the knock finally sounds through the silent estate, Fatimeh jumps in alarm, overturning the pot of rice she’s been sifting for pebbles and pests. Sadiqeh and Zahra peek their heads out of the kitchen and laugh into their hands. Fatimeh hears them and shoos them back out of sight. They wave at her and gesture lewdly, pushing out their chests, shaking their hips. The old woman waves them away with both her hands until they retreat into the kitchen. Fatimeh then leaves the andaruni for the outer gardens leading to the street. When Fatimeh returns to the empty andaruni, a cloaked woman walks beside her. Fatimeh holds the knotted bundle of the woman’s possessions firmly with both hands and motions for Kokab to follow her.

  From behind the drawn curtains of her room, Rakhel watches the movement of Kokab’s black chador, the fabric folds shifting as she enters the courtyard. Fatimeh places the bundle down and Kokab sits on the edge of the fountain. The servant walks away in a hurry to find Zolekhah and announce Kokab’s arrival. Rakhel watches Kokab withdraw a slender white hand from beneath her chador and touch the surface of the water with her fingertips. When Zolekhah arrives, Kokab rises. The two women exchange a few sentences and Zolekhah leads her in the direction of Asher’s house.

  Zolekhah and Kokab ascend the stairs, walk past the purple blossoms of the wisteria, glide down the breezeway toward the farthest room. Hidden behind the curtains, Rakhel watches them walk by her window. Rakhel tries to catch a glimpse of Kokab’s face behind the ruband, to see a lock of her hair. She looks at the drape of the fabric and tries to discern the shape of the body veiled beneath it. Zolekhah opens the door to the room at the farthest end of the building and waits for Kokab to enter, before she walks in herself and closes the door.

  By late afternoon, the courtyard is still empty. Fatimeh finishes preparing dinner and retires to her own room to say her evening prayers. Sadiqeh and Zahra take their leave for the day. Rakhel watches them go from the slit in the drawn curtains. They walk with their arms about each other’s waist as they whisper. They laugh out loud and turn to look over their shoulders in the direction of Asher’s home. Rakhel darts away from the window. She touches the flesh of her burned palm with a forefinger. Her lips are cracked, her throat is dry and her stomach empty.

  Rakhel did not intend such a vigilant fast to mark the arrival of Asher’s second wife, but after Asher left that morning, she stayed in the tangled sheets of the bed, her knees pulled into her chest. Her husband had risen from bed, finished his ablutions, and dressed as he always did. But when he took his leave, he paused for a moment, his back to where she sat, his hand on the door latch. She waited for him to turn, to take her in his arms, but he only stood there. He sighed, shook his head and left without looking back.

  She wept then. Wept most of the morning. She buried her face in his pillow and inhaled the scent of his sleep. She crawled out of bed to where his nightshirt lay crumpled on the floor and held it against her cheek, repeating his name until her voice cracked and she felt a sharp pain in her throat. Then she took up her station at the window and waited and watched the comings and the goings of the household. Everyone had forgotten her, even Khorsheed. No one knocked to ask if she was thirsty, if they could bring her some water, if she needed witness to her suffering. The day proceeded like any other day, except for her absence and the anticipation of Kokab’s arrival.

  By dusk, Rakhel sits motionless on the floor, spent of crying. She thinks about Kokab sitting in her room, dressed in fine clothes, adorned with jewels, waiting for Asher. Rakhel tries to imagine Kokab’s body, the feel of her skin. She pictures Kokab’s arms embracing Asher, and the thought shakes her so violently that she falls into another fit of hysterical curses, damning Kokab, her own barren womb, and the G-d that created her for this life of suffering. Exhausted from her fury, she lies back down and takes up her weeping once more.

  Rakhel hears muezzins all across the city begin the evening azan. She sits up to pray, mimicking Fatimeh’s gestures, prostrating over and over, chanting Arabic words she doesn’t understand, but hopes that G-d will hear and either take mercy upon her or strike her down in His wrath. In the silence that follows the muezzins’ song, Rakhel finally hears the sound of Asher’s voice in the courtyard. She reaches under her shirt to where she keeps the iron key tied about her waist. She clasps it and shuts her eyes. “Please, please, please,” she whispers.

  She runs to the window to see Asher through the crack in the curtains. He lights a lantern and walks across the courtyard in the direction of her room. She hurries to the mirror, wipes her nose with the end of her skirt, then pulls her fingers through her hair. By the time he reaches the door, Rakhel is standing behind it, straining to hear his footsteps. He knocks once and she catches her breath. “Rakhel?” She can hear his breathing behind the closed door. “Rakhel?”

  “Yes?”

  “I came to say that I am home. Did you help Kokab when she arrived?”

  Rakhel clutches the key at her waist with her burned hand and winces.

  “Rakhel?”

  She breathes in gulps, tries to pull enough air into her lungs so that she can say something. She touches the smooth ungiving surface of the wood. She imagines Asher’s hand on the other side of the door. She presses her lips against the wood, strains to feel, through the surface, the stroke of his fingertips.

  “Rakhel,” Asher begins, a tremor in his voice, but the sentence ends there. “Listen to me,” he says, this time with a firmer tone, “I won’t be seeing you tonight. Go to sleep.”

  Rakhel bends forward and wraps her arms around her body. Tears drip from her nose and chin, her sobs audible now. She hears the cold steel of the latch lift and she holds her breath. She waits, but he does not push the door open. She listens to him whisper to himself. Then, the cold steel of the latch settles softly back, and Rakhel hears the rustle of Asher’s qaba and the sound of his feet recede down the breezeway in the direction of the farthest room.

  Mahboubeh holds the tip of the pomegranate branch close to her face. She touches the small, hard red buds gently with her forefinger. “So much longing,” she says, “all here, enclosed in this sheath, waiting to blossom.” She smiles and releases the branch. Her garden is on the brink of blooming. A few more weeks. A bit more sunshine. And then, one morning, she will wake to tender green leaves. And blossoms. She sees the green vine that has been climbing her rosebushes all winter, insistent in its path. She holds it, the fine hairs irritating the skin of her hand. “You, too, will blossom soon,” she says. She does not tug on the vine to uproot it but lays it back g
ently in its path. “We’ll wait, then, to see.”

  Mahboubeh sits in a chair and looks at her garden. Kokab’s arrival must have been something like this. On the end of winter, with so much life held fast within her. They said something awoke in Asher Malacouti when she arrived. Something opened in him and he changed. Mahboubeh imagines her uncle waiting hesitantly before the door of that farthest room, the moment before Asher opens it that first night when Kokab enters his home. He holds the lantern and breathes in once. He straightens his shoulders. Then, he cracks the door ajar and peers into the dim room.

  Kokab sits before a lit candle, her hair veiled. The candle provides the only light in the room and its dimness comforts Asher. He places his own lantern outside and enters quietly. Kokab remains seated, staring at the flame. He stands before her, hesitating. Perhaps he should sleep this first night in his bedroom with Rakhel, give the woman some time to settle, ease Rakhel’s anxieties. He needs to be more diplomatic, he thinks. Then he notices that Kokab sways slightly back and forth. The folds of her skirt gather beneath her, allowing for a faint outline of her legs. The skin of her throat is bare, gold in the warm light. Though not the skin of fresh youth, Asher reminds himself. This act is a mitzvah, he thinks. Certainly no other man would have her, if not for the scandal, then for her age. He continues to study her sitting before him, quiet, motionless, as though willing herself invisible. Her lips are still moist, though, and the thick of hair beneath that veil. . . . When he realizes his trance, he clears his throat and calculates that she has perhaps fifteen years of childbearing left. Enough time, no doubt, to bear a son.

  The silence becomes too ponderous. He steps forward and speaks. “Would you rather be alone tonight?” he asks, though he isn’t certain if he has spoken at all. “Are you comfortable?” He tries his voice again, still uncertain if the words he forms in his mind leave his lips. “Have you had dinner?”