Wedding Song (16 page)

Evil Eye Pendant: the large stone symbolizes blind eyes; the white shells represent closed eyes. The square gold piece used to encase a salt cube to deter evil. My mother pinned this to all her children’s clothes when we were babies
. Pendant courtesy of Nahid Gerstein. Photography by Jon and Jennifer Crockford.

These scary stories made my excursions with my grandmother even more valuable. I especially loved going shopping with her. Even in those days, I knew the power belonged in the folds of the little knitted purse wrapped around her waist. In our outings, she often bought me a chewy taffy bar that took forever to eat, and, when I was finished with it, I had
taffy drool all over my shirt. Or she treated me to a long piece of paper rolled tightly, glued and filled with sugar. Sometimes, when she stopped by the bakery to buy a few
noon-e chaee
for breakfast, she bought me a raisin cookie dripping deliciously with oil.

That day I thought only of a treat as we walked down the busy street. Unusually quiet, my grandmother cocooned herself tighter in her
chador
. I left her in her own world and enjoyed the sounds of shopkeepers inviting the customers in: fruit stands, selling long yellow Persian melons piled up in a neat row, the bakery, tempting me with chickpea cookies,
zulbia
, and
koolooche masghati
arranged in skillful pyramids.

Khanom-bozorg allowed me to linger by the kiosks and to explore displays: head coverings in Indian motifs, bright tribal colors, or simple black ones for praying. We passed by a salesman, his merchandise displayed on the sidewalk: plastic shopping bags and colanders, naked dolls, and striped balls.

“Look, look at those dolls,” I said excitedly. “Can we look, pleeese.” We stopped. I touched one. “Aren’t they wonderful? Aren’t they beautiful?” I looked at their little naked bodies and dreamt of sewing little dresses for them; maybe Maman could help. There was always a little extra fabric left over from a dress made a long time ago. Maybe she could even knit a little jacket with the leftover yarn, I thought.

I looked at my grandmother. I hadn’t ever noticed so many wrinkles around her eyes, which were set in deeper than usual—sad eyes. I was surprised to see that she didn’t have her teeth in; she never appeared in public without them. I ignored that and knowing that it was inappropriate for a child to be greedy and demanding, I still slowly lifted my head and, in a small, very small voice asked her, “Could I, Khanom-bozorg, could I have one? They are very cheap,” I reasoned.

She looked at me and absentmindedly asked, “You don’t have any dolls, do you?”

My heart pounded like an iron pestle smashing turmeric sticks in our stone mortar. “No, Grandma, you know I don’t.” She asked the shopkeeper how much it was.

“Five
rial
s, only.” He pushed the toy into my hand.

I prayed. I would be a good girl. I would do anything for that doll with yellow hair and blue eyes.

“Let’s go,” Khanom-bozorg said, turning her back.

I was used to the methods of bargaining. I assumed that was the game being played. So did the shopkeeper.

“Okay, come back, four
rial
s.” But my grandmother kept going.

“Khanom-bozorg, it’s cheap,” I cajoled her.

“Yes, and you don’t need it.”

“Cheap Jews!” The shopkeeper screamed at us. People turned around and stared. A few laughed.

I wanted to go home. I thought she took pleasure in my shock, and I didn’t want her to see my tears. I held my head up, swallowed hard, and didn’t say a word, fearing that I would lose control and cry, not realizing that tears might have convinced her to buy me the toy.

I followed the little floating flowers of her
chador
moving fast past the kiosks and the hotels that housed Arabs during hot Arabian summers. From their billboards I had learned my first Arabic word, the word for hotel. A few Arabs with their long, white summer caftans sat on platform beds on the roof, watching the street. We passed by my father’s little jewelry workshop and didn’t stop. Now we were very close to the gates of the
mahaleh
, and had only the teahouse to pass. The men there especially scared me. I hid myself in the folds of my grandmother’s
chador
and I wished for her to speed up. We were almost home.

A few men with mischievous looks on their faces sat outside the tea-house drinking chai and smoking
ghalyan
under the shade of an old tree, next to a meandering stream. The city allowed the water to run through the open gutters of the main streets to help shopkeepers wash and cool down the sidewalks. To my horror, my grandmother slowed down, trying to release me from the tight grip of her
chador
, as though I was a fly on the flowery fabric, and started to talk to them.

“Come on, come on, what’s your problem? Got to talk to these people. They’re in our neighborhood. It isn’t good for them to think the Jews are disrespectful. Just a little small talk.” She held her
chador
tight around her face and prostrated herself to the laughing faces. “
Salam
, what a nice day!” She greeted them in her heavy Judi accent.

“Yes it’s a nice day, but it’s even nicer outside the city in the mountains, cooler. Say, a few of us are going to Babakoohi, wannacome?” He talked in poor Farsi without taking a breath in between words, then grinned, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “What do you say?”

“I hope that your kindness will always be great,” my grandmother
taarof
ed. “I have to go home, but thank you.” I wondered if they would
dare ask a woman of their own faith to go to the mountains with them. I didn’t know why my grandmother, who demanded much respect for herself in the synagogue, would invite such disrespect. I wanted to go home.

“What about the little girl?” They laughed. Now the situation was truly grave. I just wanted to leave. The gates of the
mahaleh
were visible and promised security. I tugged at her
chador
, trying to give her a reason to leave.

“She is not worthy of you,” she
taarof
ed again. I had always thought that there was a bit of truth to the custom of niceties, and I was horrified. I pulled on her
chador
again, trying to turn myself invisible in its folds.

“Do you want to go?” she asked, laughing at my fear, trying to peel me from her body covering. My heart ached. My legs took off. I covered my ears not to hear the laughing voices, trying not to see anything but the gates. When I finally stepped down from the smooth, hot pavement down to the dirt road under the arch, I realized that my face was cold and wet. I hated myself for crying. I had lost the battle.

After our day out, my grandmother was sick again, too exhausted to get out of bed. She couldn’t catch her breath. My father took her to a well-known, American-trained doctor.

When the doctor asked my grandmother what was bothering her, she responded, “Everything!”

The doctor prescribed many bottles of pills, and Khanom-bozorg took them religiously for a few days, but she still hurt. My mother squeezed watermelon juice for her, but it was too
cold
and made her weak. I had learned by then that there was a second kind of temperature for all food.
Cold
sapped the energy;
hot
gave it back. There had to be a balance or one became ill. My father went to the bazaar and purchased a collection of herbal teas: white tea and green tea, tea made of tree barks, and tea made of flowers. I stood on a stepstool and watched my grandmother make her potions. She felt cold in her bones and that meant that she needed
hot
tea to give her energy, to revive her spirit, to put heat under her chilled skin. She chose the bark of some magical tree, combined it with cracked fruit of wild bushes, and boiled it with crystallized sugar. I strained it for her in a cloth; even with all the sugar, it tasted bitter and repulsive. To balance the
humors
in her body, she drank the foul tea with dates and dried mulberries, with soft
halwa
made of rice flour and the hard one made with sweet date syrup. Nothing helped. Her body was out of balance. Her stomach hurt;
she was cold in her bones, dizzy in her head. And now I had a stomachache too from feasting on the dried fruit and the sweets without the tea.

Her women friends stopped by every day to bring new remedies. What about tattooing? Khanom-bozorg already had large green dots tattooed on her forehead and wrists to alleviate her unknown pains and aches, but the magic had worn out. What about letting out the dirty blood?

No, no. My father wouldn’t allow that. Absolutely not. He was going to take Khanom-bozorg back to the American-trained doctor.

The word “bloodletting” horrified me. I imagined relatives gathering around my grandmother cutting her skin with razor blades, opening her veins with my father’s sharp knife when he wasn’t around.

My father warned his mother before leaving the house every day: “
Mava
, my life should be sacrificed for you. Don’t do it. On my life, on my kids’ lives, promise you won’t do it. You’ll expose yourself to disease, risk your life.” The ritual constituted voodoo, forbidden by Jewish laws, he emphasized, appealing to my grandmother’s strong religious beliefs.

I took a sigh of relief; my grandmother would live.

My grandmother’s sister Khatoon-jaan came for her daily visit one day, but didn’t enter the house right away. Esghel-
khan
home?” she asked.

No, my father had left early that day for work.

She bent back, holding her blue
chador
tightly around her with one hand, and with the other motioned to someone. Khanom-bozorg’s best friend Joon-joone-bandi appeared at the door, her usual jolly self, and, before I could defend myself, she put two juicy, drippy kisses on both sides of my face, her white mustache tickling and repulsing me at the same time.

A short woman with a fat stomach followed the two women into the house, her middle clanking and swishing. “No men at home?” she asked.

“No, no men,” I said.

She took her
chador
off and there was a bucket where I had imagined a fat belly. Had I known the contents, I would probably have run to my father’s shop, screaming and warning him of the mischief, but instead, I followed them to the main building and went upstairs to tell my grandmother her guests wanted her to come to the yard. I thought Khanombozorg looked pale; that my grandmother could be scared of anything that day didn’t cross my mind. Khatoon-jaan piled up a few pillows by the wall and helped Khanom-bozorg sit on one and fluffed another to support her back.

The brass knocker hit against the front door again in urgency. My mother, who was working in the kitchen at the end of the yard, must have opened the door. My two married aunts arrived flushed from their quick walk. Relieved to discover that nothing had happened yet, they threw their
chador
s on the limb of the rose tree and sent me to the kitchen to see if my mother had prepared the large omelet with the hard-to-find eggs that they had brought with them. They fed Khanom-bozorg every single morsel that I hadn’t picked on the way from the kitchen.

“Eat, eat,” Khatoon-jaan said as she rolled up my grandmother’s sleeves and bared her thick, hairy legs.

The leech-lady gathered her skirt around her. She knelt on the floor, and ladled the thick brown silt from her bucket onto my grandmother’s right arm and then the left. I watched black slug-like creatures attach themselves to her as if they burrowed into her flesh. In just a few minutes, they bloated and grew fat. The women inched their way to my grandmother, asking if enough blood was sucked out. The leech-lady scraped the creatures off and let them fall into the bucket, where they vomited my grandmother’s pomegranate-colored juices.

Khanom-bozorg’s eyes rolled back and she slumped over the pillows. The three women rushed to her side, massaging her body, her toes, her legs, her shoulders, her hands, and her arms. She closed her eyes and called for my father. I ran to the kitchen and made mint tea, sweetened with honey. Khanom-bozorg opened her eyes, her color still white, her hands trembling. The women covered her with blankets, but Khanom-bozorg’s fingertips were blue, her body cold and heavy. I wanted to go to her and hold her but I was afraid to touch her. What if she died?

When my father came home for lunch and saw the women gathered around the pile that was my grandmother, he was terrified. “
Mava, Mava
,” he called his mother. “What have you done?” he asked in Judi.

Later we learned that he had gone to all the butchers, begging to purchase a cow’s liver, which he threw directly on hot charcoals. Then he slowly fed my grandmother as if she were the child and he the parent.

The following day, Khatoon-jaan and my grandmother’s best friend visited to inquire of her health.

“Not good!” Khanom-bozorg moaned, still under the covers. Someone must have cursed her, she said. That was it—pure, unadulterated evil eye.

The other two nodded. Khatoon-jaan said that the women had to take
matters into their own hands. From her bundle, she retrieved the bark of a tree, the size of a half coconut, put a few drops in its curve and, with a back of a teaspoon, rubbed it for a few minutes. A white paste oozed out, which she tenderly rubbed on Khanom-bozorg’s forehead.