Wedding Song (15 page)

Cleaning
ghooreh.
My mother and two brothers clean sour grapes
. Picture courtesy of Nahid Gerstein.

As I quietly mourned a rejection from the first grade in the summer of 1959, Aunt Fereshteh eagerly awaited her acceptance to the medical school. The Shah, trying to emulate the standards of the country that had returned the kingdom to him, ordered the establishment of Pahlavi University in Shiraz, an American-style institution with a reputable medical school. To keep up with the West, Pahlavi University imported American and British textbooks to be taught by Western-trained teachers.

One night that summer, my grandmother, my aunt, and I were walking home with plastic baskets filled with romaine lettuce, green onions, fresh dill, and cilantro, when we heard the names of the accepted students announced from a transistor radio. Arab tourists in white caftans fanned themselves on the rooftops of a motel, and a teenage boy sold spicy potatoes cooked with fried onions and tomatoes from a pushcart.

At my aunt’s begging, we waited by a kiosk and listened to the radio. She was accepted to the medical school. I clapped. My grandmother didn’t look overjoyed. Fereshteh’s laughter attracted the other pedestrians. Two young men with fuzzy hair on their upper lips gawked and moved their hands over their crotches; older men with stubble and loose-fitting pants
gathered around us as if for entertainment. We picked up the baskets and made our way home. My aunt and I were flying high. Such an unbelievable achievement for a woman, what a wonderful escape from an oppressed history! Excited, we both ignored my grandmother’s grumbling.

I didn’t hear any discussions about my aunt’s college plans until a few days later. My mother, grandmother, my aunts, and three or four of my cousins helped with the yearly ritual of cleaning sour grapes. We spread a plastic cloth on the cement floor of our basement and put pillows all around the walls. My grandmother opened the Passover closet and took out baskets and containers.

My father and uncle had left very early to find the best bundles of sour grapes, and soon two donkeys limped their way through our yard. Sour grapes covered the entire room in a large pile, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands dirty. It was work, yes, but it was also a ton of fun, although one couldn’t tell by looking at the adults. My grandmother asked my cousin Farnoosh to be the first to walk in the room. Her steps were light; the work would finish early.

The yearly ritual involved separating the grapes from the vine and discarding the spoiled ones, then washing and air drying them. Every year, my father hired the same heavy-set man to squeeze the juice. In a huge barrel, he stepped on the grapes with his bare feet, his loose-fitting pants rolled up over his knees, and his “stuff ” jiggling around inside with every heavy step he brought down.

We forced the pulp through cheesecloth and bottled the juice in huge, flat-bottomed glass amphorae. The first batch was for Passover. Then we put the Passover dishes away and used regular containers to store the sour juice for year-round use.

Ecstatic and playful, that day I made the biggest trouble for myself. During the lunch break, my aunt spoke excitedly about continuing her education at the medical school the following year. Morad was the first to object. “Stop dreaming about such nonsense. A woman’s job is to get married. Plus, who is going to pay the expenses?”

Other than the two uncles in medical school, no one in the family had finished high school. My aunts and grandmother joined in to remind Fereshteh of the role of marriage and children in a woman’s life. My father moderated, trying to keep everyone calm.

During a moment of silence, a rest from shouting, I couldn’t stand my
aunt’s crying and took the opportunity to add my own opinion. “Of course she is going to college,” I said. “It’s free for women. I heard it with my own ears.”

Uncle Morad looked at me as if realizing for the first time that I existed. He jumped off the ledge he was sitting on, and made his way to me in two huge steps. His big hand went up and landed on my face. Too surprised to cover my face in defense, too stubborn to cry or touch my burning skin, I didn’t look at my mother or father. Instead, I looked straight into his eyes.

Looking directly into a person’s eyes implied lack of social graces for adults, but for a child, especially a girl, it connoted defiance. He looked at my dry eyes with his own, bloodshot with anger. He tossed me over his shoulder and carried me through the yard, through the little alley, through the second set of doors, and put me down on the ledge next to the open doors of Mori-Jaan’s house. Then he smirked, went back into the house, and closed the door.

I sat there, numb, shaken, and empty. I was scared, too scared to look at the open doors to my left, too scared to think what my neighbor’s ferocious dog would do to me if he found me there all by myself sitting in the dark, damp hallway. I don’t know how long it took for my father to win my release. When he finally came, all the blood had drained from my face and limbs. I was cold and limp. He carried me into the house, and I went quietly back to cleaning the grapes and stayed silent amid the noisy conversations around me. I don’t remember any reactions from my mother. I sought neither her help nor her comfort. Even then, I knew that she was more helpless than I was.

My aunt was one of the very first Iranian women to enter medical school that year. I was very proud of her, a stubborn woman capable of overcoming many obstacles to reach seemingly impossible goals. She went on to continue her education in the United States, but she never did get married. Most men were intimidated by her intelligence, her education, and her title.

I became closer to my grandmother during the year I awaited an opening in the first grade. Where my mother was meek, Khanom-bozorg was strong and resourceful. She was my teacher in life before I had any formal
education. My grandmother often enticed me to clean the rice with a promise of a story. As she and I inspected piles of rice on a round brass tray, she entertained me with my favorite tale, that of her first marriage. “I was only nine years old,” she said. “Your great-grandmother, Bibi, would hold my hand and take me to my fiancé’s house.”

Khanom-bozorg
.

There, my grandmother’s future mother-in-law asked her to sit by a pile of vegetables and herbs and clean them for dinner to see if little Tavous was a good worker and if she was not
zaban-deraz
, a girl with a long tongue who answered back. My grandmother remembered her fiancé, a man in his twenties, playing childish games with her as she sat on his lap. The young bride, however, was restless in her new home, homesick for her mother. “As soon as they were busy, I ran away.” My grandmother covered her toothless mouth with her hand and laughed with delight. Through the maze of alleyways, my little grandmother ran home like the strong wind that blew between her many braids.

Every time she escaped, Bibi screamed, beat her chest in exasperation and cried, “You’re ruining your reputation! Who is going to marry you now?” Finally, the family returned her one day saying she was not suitable for their son.

Khanom-bozorg and one of her sisters, Khanom, were briefly reunited in Jerusalem after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Khanom died shortly after. My grandmother died the following year. I am very sad that despite my father’s efforts, I couldn’t obtain the picture of my grandmother’s best friend Joon-joon
.

I quietly cheered my grandmother’s defiance and strong sense of self that freed her from an unwanted marriage at a young age. I desperately wished that her spirit of independence and stubbornness would also run through my veins. But sometimes, I also resented her for torturing me unknowingly.

A late summer afternoon, when the temperature had already fallen, my grandmother sat on a low stool in the yard, curing tobacco leaves in salted water. I squatted next to her, watching her rinse and hang them outside on the laundry lines. She said, “Don’t touch,” before turning her back, which made me more curious. I tasted a piece floating on the brown water. It was salty, grainy, nasty, and burned my tongue. I screamed, jumped to my feet, and spat on the ground.

“Didn’t I tell you to keep away?” my grandmother said.

“Is it poisonous? Is it poisonous?” I asked in a panic, not able to get rid of the taste in my mouth no matter how many times I spat. There was no reply.

“Is it poisonous? Am I going to die?”

Khanom-bozorg with her older sister Khatoon-jaan (left). My father searched for this picture for over a year, knowing how much it meant to me. A most courageous woman, my great aunt sold her own dowry to provide for my grandmother and her destitute children after my grandfather died
.

“Go wash your mouth with clean water.”

“Am I going to die, Khanom-bozorg? Am I going to die?” I said, panic-stricken.

“I don’t know,” she answered, her eyes gleaming. “We’ll see.” She winked.

Put in the same situation, my mischievous friend Mahvash would have laughed. Not me. For the rest of the day, I watched for signs of death. Nothing happened. At the end of the day, when I could not keep my eyes open any longer to keep death away, I decided I was going to bed and if I awoke in the morning, then I knew it was not poisonous, and if I didn’t, then I wouldn’t.

The next day, I woke up still breathing, and my grandmother asked if I wanted to go shopping. She was anxious, she told me. She needed to get fresh air, to see people. I loved the chance to leave the ghetto in the safety of her flowered
chador
, to explore the unknown. The world outside our immediate neighborhood frightened me. My parents, family members, and children my own age told me repeatedly that evil lurked outside the gates of the
mahaleh
. Genteel-looking grandfathers enticed young children
with drug-covered candy and kidnapped them to slavery. Nice old ladies, covered modestly in
chador
s, asked for directions, and made the children disappear. Kidnappers from other cities, Arabs from other countries, and those they hired from the local community, cornered children in quiet alleyways and took them by force for prostitution.