Scent of Butterflies (11 page)

I still wear Aziz's plain gold wedding band. A piece of his heart forever mine. Never removed his wedding band, not even on the day my suspicion turned to certainty and time extended into years, even decades, before scorching itself in my memory. In minutes, perhaps seconds, one by one, the protective fortresses of denial split open to the tune of “The Blue Danube,” and I was forced to acknowledge the stench of betrayal.

I didn't have a camera. I didn't need one. I've replayed these moments over and over again, drawn with meticulous care the geography of their affair, its every devious outline and silhouette, until the blueprint is embedded in every layer of my consciousness.

Candlelight. Music. “The Blue Danube.” Sighs. Twisting flesh and frenzied legs. Damp heat and fogged mirrors. Glasses of wine. One empty. The other, half full, lipstick stained. Witnesses on the surrounding walls: my photographs gazing down at them. Freeze frame.

Click!

Our bed in Iran faces west toward Jerusalem, a religious custom Baba insisted we honor. Unaware that I did not intend to become pregnant, my father was adamant we follow a tradition that would guarantee us a firstborn son. As far as I was concerned, as long as we loved each other on that bed, it did not matter if our bed faced Sodom and Gomorrah.

That afternoon, twenty-four days and four hours ago, the bed's placement made it impossible for them to see me standing at the door. But even if that was not the case, I doubt they would have noticed anything or anyone but themselves, being entangled in and consumed by each other as they were. Butterfly's long hair imprisoned Aziz like a morbid net. His thighs held her in their grip. Sweat glistened on her skin as she clawed at the hair on my husband's chest.

The web of her curls parted. Their profiles came into view and I saw what I should not have seen.

I turned on my heel and fled. Ran out of my own home, shoe soles scuffing the carpet, breath tangled in my throat.

I sat erect in the backseat of the car as the chauffeur drove around Vanak Circle and up Jordan Avenue, renamed Africa Avenue after the revolution. I was dry-eyed, indifferent to the cherry blossoms, velvet sky, spring sun. Like the protective fences of denial I had once erected around myself, a thick layer of paint on walls around the city now concealed anti-American slogans and a series of tragic images that, nonetheless, endured underneath. Posters and murals of mothers crying bloody tears for their martyred sons; men crumpled lifeless against walls, shot in the head, broken-necked and hanging from makeshift gallows. Hoveyda, prime minister during Mohammad Reza Shah's reign, shot at close range, dark welts disfiguring his face, bottomless sockets for eyes.

Perhaps posters were removed and murals painted over in hope that we would forget the horrible atrocities of the revolution and the tragic consequences of the Iran-Iraq war. Forget the senseless death of our youth. Forget the tortured bodies that dangled from cranes in streets. Forget how we struggled with the aftereffects of poison gas, how our widowed women and mothers were forced into prostitution. Forget the acrid stench of spilt blood and gunpowder that continued to lace our lives. Perhaps the authorities assumed that having witnessed endless horrors for so long, we had become desensitized, so the images were painted over to give us temporary respite before even more offensive ones emerged to haunt us anew.

The watchman flung open the wrought-iron gates of the mansion my father had built before the revolution, the beloved home he refused to abandon, lest the authorities confiscate everything, partition the rooms into cubicles, and move “needy, impoverished” families in.

I ran into our high-ceilinged hall, the Esfahan carpets muffling the anger of my tinder-smelling heels, but not the chaos in my head. I did not care that I had only tossed a coat over my shoulders without taking time to wear stockings, nor that I cut my arm against the gilded console as I ran across my parents' hallway. I wiped my bloody arm and licked my fingers, thinking of the Fountain of Martyrs that gushes red-colored water in the center of the Heaven of Zahra Cemetery. There was a time when the staining of water to resemble blood seemed a senseless act of a desperate people. But that day, I was bleeding from every pore, so why shouldn't a fountain?

Madar held me as I cried out Aziz's name. He was with a woman. In my bedroom. I pressed my palms against my ears to stop “The Blue Danube” playing in my head, the notes that evoked our shared secrets, smells, and memories. He fucked her in our house, on our bed. Such recklessness! How could he toss all precaution to hell? The answer was obvious. He was in love.

“Cry,” Madar advised, with a wary little gesture of rubbing her eyelids. She forced half a bottle of Passiflorine, a calming tonic of French passion flowers, down my throat. “I know how hard it is.”

“No! You don't!” Baba would never fuck my mother's best friend. Never! And on their bed, no less, and to a tune the two of them had danced to on their wedding night.

Now, the notes reverberate in my head, hurting my eardrums with a different breed of secrets. The truth is that neither the music and the wine, nor the candles and the indignity of my photographs looking down on them, had the power to destroy me. What devastated me beyond repair was what I saw when her hair parted, revealing their profiles.

Their lips were glued in a kiss. My husband's tongue was buried in Butterfly's mouth. The horror of their melded bodies paled at the sight of that gesture of deep intimacy.

“They were naked,” I whispered to Madar that day.

“Who is she?” Madar asked.

I turned to her with all the force of my pain and told her it didn't matter who she was. The kernel of a resolution was beginning to harden even then. It was important to pull myself together, to take care of this betrayal in my own time and in my own way.

Madar's tears left dark stains on her silk blouse. “Whoever she is, she's a passing whim, I'm certain. These types don't last. Anyway, Soraya, nothing you can do.”

“Don't say that, Madar. Please don't!”

“I am being realistic, Soraya. Remember when I left? Remember what happened?”

Of course I did. Five years had gone by, yet that incident remained seared into my consciousness.

Madar and Baba fought furiously while I, who had come to spend the weekend with them because Aziz was away on business, sat in the next room, pretending to read and trying hard not to intrude. Baba insisted that no one but he had the right to decide how to dispose of his assets after his death. Madar snapped her fingers like castanets, reminding him that she had been his wife for more than thirty years and that he had no right to change his will without consulting her.

“I'm leaving more than enough for you and Soraya. It doesn't matter what I do with the rest.”

“Oh! Yes! Yes! It matters. It certainly does.” Like a chirping bird, Madar stressed every syllable as if to preface a profound statement. “You better change your will back or…I'll…yes, I assure you…I'll get a divorce.”

“
Barayeh
chi
?” Baba asked. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I can!”

“Of course,” Baba replied calmly. “You can do anything you want.”

I respected Baba for not losing his composure and for refusing to intimidate or be intimidated. Any other man would have mentioned the Jewish
ketubah
—an ancient religious agreement that entitles a divorcee to no more than her weight in gold.

“
Etemad
behet
nemikonam
,” Madar declared, and the small hairs on my arms rebelled at that rare flash of anger, a glimpse of seldom revealed fang.

At his wife's proclamation that she did not trust him anymore, I heard Baba jump out of his chair, which crashed behind him with startling finality. “This is it, then! There's nothing left to say.” Having delivered his verdict, Baba marched out of the house and slammed the door nearly off its hinges.

The swish of sprinklers came to life outside. The gardener whistled a melancholy tune. The snap of sheers grated on my nerves.

Madar shuffled into the living room, sat on the sofa, and patted a space next to her. She stared at the clasped hands she cradled in her lap, then unlocked her fingers and ran them through her carefully tinted hair that did not show a hint of gray at the roots. “Baba and I have had our differences, but not this serious.”

I put aside my book and pressed my damp handkerchief against my eyes. “Why did Baba change his will?”

“It doesn't make a difference, Soraya. I want you to know that whatever happens, I love you very much.”

I felt helpless and miserable as I observed Madar toss a few pieces of her silks, chiffons, and mink into a suitcase, letting loose the scent of her talc and violets. She removed her wedding band. Her bright eyes gazed at it as if the answer to her problems lay there. She pressed it to her lips before leaving it on the dressing table.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I'm not sure, Soraya.”

“Come stay with us, then. Until you both calm down.”

“No, Soraya, I won't calm down. And I'll never stay at my son-in-law's.”

“But it's my home, too, Madar.”

“Not really,” she replied. “A home belongs to the man.”

From the window of my parents' home, my devastated gaze trailed her as she passed our neighbor's house, a consulate that sported a flag from a faraway land, and then past a café with dark-tinted windows, past the green grocer who was in the process of haggling with a pregnant customer, before disappearing at the end of the avenue, leaving behind her scent of
Je
Reviens
, her pearl earrings, her Peykan car parked at the door, and the high-heeled pumps she wore out of the house, and without having teased her hair into the curls that normally framed her translucent face.

My father, despite his total loss of self in her absence, despite the melancholy liquidity in his eyes, continued to slick back his hair with the pomade that smelled of leather, continued to wear his formal three-piece suits and colorful bow ties.

In less than two weeks, at the same open window from which my gaze had raked the street when I came to visit, I watched my mother unexpectedly reappear on foot around the bend. I was surprised and saddened by the change in her. In such a short time, she had hardened into middle age. She wore the same slippers she had left in, her hair tucked behind her ears, gray visible at the temples, frailer than I remembered her.

What later continued to devastate and humiliate her was that she had no choice but to return because our culture ostracized a divorced woman and would not allow her to continue to live the life she was accustomed to among her circle of friends. She had returned to the place she would from then on call “my husband's home,” with the added awareness that my father had the legal right to draw his will as he pleased and that, in the end, there was nothing she could do.

In a short time, she turned old and bitter, with a rough edge to her fragility.

To punish Baba, Madar stitched together the remnants of her pride with the ancient thread of martyrdom. She transformed herself into a living saint. Her skirts became longer, her fingernails shorter, her lips paler, and the style of her hair matronly. She separated her bed from my father's and moved into a sparsely furnished room on the second floor. She padlocked all emotions in a chest as impenetrable as steel.

That day, five years later in my parents' home, my blood beginning to thicken with the recent discovery of my husband's betrayal, I did not understand Madar. I stood up, smoothed my dress, and asked her to keep my husband's betrayal to herself. If Baba ever found out, he would certainly punish Aziz. And that was my business. I did not intend to follow in Madar's footsteps. I did not intend to allow Aziz to transform me into a martyr.

I am from a different generation.

I will shape my own fate.

The lamenting howls of the bird reverberate around the courtyard from somewhere up high among the darkest branches of the monkey tree, where its cries echo its lonely existence. I can't help but think of my grandmother's barking owl, can't help but believe that there must be a reason for this bird's appearance in my courtyard in another country at this time of my life. I whistle once, twice, and then murmur soothingly in hope of seducing the bird out into the open. Failing to do so, I summon Mansour to the courtyard and tell him that I need his help. I will tame the owl.

Mansour, his eyes rounded in shock, lowers his head and mumbles under his breath that I should keep my distance because owls are bad-luck creatures of the night. “Please,
Khanom
, they are messengers of the Devil! Evil spirits you shouldn't see in daylight! They are funereal birds!”

“Are you done, Mansour? Now go buy a kilo of raw meat, find some beetles if possible, maybe a dead rat or two, and come back.”

He stuffs his hands in his pants pockets and huffs under his breath. “With your permission,
Khanom
, there's no need for rats. I keep a few kilos of meat in the refrigerator for Oni and myself. Maybe that will do.”

“Flavor a piece with seasoning, some salt, and turmeric. They like that. And bring it to me with a tall ladder. I'll be waiting here. And bring a bowl. Do we have an extra-long hook and handle?”

“Yes, in the garage. For trimming treetops.”

“Bring that, too.”

I rest against the trunk of the monkey tree and glance up every now and then to check for the slightest movement among the still branches.

The air is sweet with the scent of lemons. Leaves are the pale green of spring. Our wedding anniversary is fast approaching. A ray of sun falls across the carpet of grass like a trail of splashed gold. Nature is in a festive mood, braided and rouged and powdered. What is there to delight in? A Red Admiral lands on the back of my hand. I blow off a powdery layer of its bright red shade and marvel at how fast its luster is lost. I trap it under my cupped hand and imprison it in darkness. Butterflies are cold-blooded. They need the sun to fly.

I remove my hand and off it flaps. Gone!

Mansour appears with a bowl of seasoned meat. With the help of the ladder and the hook and handle, he slides the bowl onto the top of the atrium skylight and quickly scrambles down.

“Leave the hook and handle here in case I need it.”

The scar across his mouth is a tortured zipper. “With your permission,
Khanom
, I will stay with you. Owls are jealous creatures. They attack and blind women.”

“No, this owl is a blessing. Thank you, Mansour. I want to be alone now.”

He slaps his forehead in disapproval and, with a stiff nod and heavy steps, crosses the courtyard, climbs the stairs to the terrace, and disappears into the house.

I will stay out here as long as it takes, even sleep here if I need to, until I earn the bird's trust. I do so in silence, motionless as a corpse, transporting myself to my grandmother's garden in Iran, where with great patience and wisdom, she managed to tame an owl into a pet, feed it from her heavily gloved hand, and later tempt the bird out of hiding by simply dangling a dead rat, frogmouth, or opossum in front of its bespectacled face.

The owl made its home in a walnut tree next to her bedroom window, in a dilapidated nest abandoned by other large birds that had migrated long before to other places. During the first months, the owl raised a racket with its despondent barks as it strove to establish ownership of its territory and while hunting at dusk and dawn. In time, this strong and unfriendly bird would gently bite into its daily meal out of Mamabozorg's hand, careful not to hurt her.

With persistence and a healthy dose of compassion, you can domesticate anything or anyone, she would advise me.

But my patience is running low and the sun is beginning to wreak havoc on my face, yet my illusive bird is proving to be far more stubborn than my grandmother's owl. I throw my hands up.

In a neighbor's garden, musicians are tuning their instruments in preparation for a party. It is Sunday. A luncheon. Cars are arriving. The band begins to play “Bridge,” an old song of the Iranian pop singer Googoosh: “Help me weave a bed of flowers for our innocent sleep of love…Help me weave a tent of songs to shadow us…I am not scared of night because you handed me the sun…” Tales of fragile loves and broken hearts, virgin brides and eager grooms, nuptial moons shimmering through diaphanous skies.

Struck by an overwhelming urge to cry, I fold down on the damp grass, lean against the tree bark, and swallow my nostalgia. We loved to dance to Googoosh's songs, Aziz and I, admired the way she managed to reinvent herself year after year. Now, like many of my expatriates, she must have fled Iran, where creating music is a crime worthy of flogging, imprisonment, or other punishments.

I gaze up at the tree above me and call with a pleading voice that is louder than I intended, “
Khaheshmikonam
please, Mamabozorg, I'm alone and lonely here and desperate for your guidance.”

Mamabozorg's image flits behind my eyelids, veiled in her silks and scents of jasmine and powder. Her embroidered sleeves rest like fans on her ample breasts. She strokes the amber beads slung about her neck, raising their scent of possibilities. My eyes squeeze shut to keep her from fleeing.

Like an answer to my prayer, a flurry of movement occurs among the branches. I jump to my feet and step back to survey the tree from a distance. A shadow flutters about. The silence is broken by the creak of twigs and rustle of leaves. The bird quietly emerges to settle on one of the prickly branches. I freeze in place, afraid to breathe or even wink, lest I scare it away. And then, as if playing a game of teasing Soraya, it hops down to a lower branch, then another, and before I have time to take a good look, swoops to circle and spiral overhead once, twice. Then it lands on a branch almost level with my field of vision, spreads its mottled wings, and preens itself, showing off for me.

I try hard not to cry and laugh with joy and wonder, not to scare it away because it is a barking owl. Right here in my courtyard. The elusive “screaming woman.” I am certain because its similarity to Mamabozorg's owl is unquestionable. The same mottled plumage in shades of brown, cream, and auburn, some the color of burnt chocolate. Its large head rests on a short neck. Framing its shining, yellow eyes is a circular pattern of white, as perfectly round and seamless as a platinum wedding band.

With a flurry of flirtatious hopping and flapping, the owl takes flight, wheels around the atrium, and with great purpose lands on the dome of the atrium, where the sun reflects on the glass panels like so many fireballs. The owl observes with interest the bowl with its offering. Please, I beg, my heart will break if you reject my meal.

An imperceptible growl emanates from its throat. The compact head rotates one complete circle, then turns back to the bowl. Head flailing, it tears with its beak and devours morsels of raw meat held between strong talons. Having finished its meal, it lets out low barks and pecks on one glass panel, then another, as if conducting a conversation with the Corpse Plant in the atrium below.

I take a deep breath, slowly approach the ladder, climb a few rungs, and await the bird's reaction. Encouraged, I climb higher for a closer look. I draw shallow breaths as its inquisitive eyes inspect me like double camera lenses. Then, as if in acknowledgment, it lets out a low, groaning hoot of a bark, sharp and short and far reaching.

The size of its stocky body and broad, white-dotted wings leave no doubt that the owl is female.

My grandmother is making her presence known to me.