Wedding Song Read online

  My father forgot his thirst. He rushed back up the slippery slope, hanging onto the thorny bushes to pull himself up. Now he was even thirstier, exhausted, and bruised. His pants were torn at the knees. He sat in the shade of a bus, leaning against it for support, feeling defeated and homesick. When the truck reached Shiraz late on a Friday afternoon, my father was delirious from the long, dry journey.

  A neighborhood boy saw him and ran ahead to the house, “Mola’s wife, Rabbi’s wife, Esgheli is here!”

  My grandmother rushed to him at the door and grabbed him to break his fall. “Esgheli, what have they done to you?” she cried. My grandmother helped Baba through the orange groves in the backyard to the cool basement. She washed the dirt and the grime of the long journey from his face and hands and knees. She held his head up and helped him drink, brought him clean clothes and changed him like a child. She had made beef stew with zucchini and tomatoes and served it over fluffy rice.

  Baba ate as if he had not seen food for months and always remembered the food as the most wonderful meal of his life.

  My grandmother helped Baba lie down and tucked him in with a light blanket smelling of jasmine. Baba drifted to a deep sleep for the first time in months. As he slept, he could still taste the delicate flavors of fresh tomatoes, coriander, basil, and mint. He could smell the scent of his mother next to him gently caressing his head. Unlike the nights in the village, he slept without beasts or bandits in his dream. He was home.

  That day, after having been lost among strangers, my father’s childhood story comforted me and made me laugh. As his sandpaper hand held mine, I felt at home. I had found my way back to him the way he had returned to his mother.

  The consequent retelling of the adventure when I was much older, however, lost its magic. I couldn’t reconcile the two opposing feelings— my growing wanderlust and his homesickness. Although the taste of my grandmother’s food, her touch, her love, was enticing, I didn’t want my father to go back. With later retellings, I could not follow him all the way, and I let him return to his mother alone. I thought that if that was my story, I would have gone further away, never to return.

  My mother’s words, much stronger than my father’s, echoed in the back of my head. “You have to find a way to leave this hellhole,” she always told me. “Find someone to take you away. Don’t allow yourself to get trapped here like me.”

  I never stopped to think why my mother wanted me to go away. Did Maman realize that she was pushing me to leave my family, even my mother?

  As a young girl, my parents’ stories of their teenage trials in faraway places and among strangers jarred me. As a teenager, I didn’t understand how Baba couldn’t identify with my mother’s shock of being physically and emotionally violated. Remembering his own cries for his mother at the same age, he must have known that a thirteen-year-old girl would wither away from her family. Having so much love from his own mother, he should have not dismissed the impact on my mother of this rejection by her family. I knew that it was the custom of the times. Had it not been my father, someone else would have married my mother at a young age. Then I wouldn’t exist.

  I also wondered if the Persian word for bride, aroosak, a little doll, meant just that, a doll for men, a body without emotions.

  A New Life in Shiraz

  On their all-day bus ride to Shiraz after the wedding, Maman sat quietly, trying to concentrate on the rugged scenery, the bare mountains streaked with blue and purple mineral deposits, the desert covered with thorny bushes, and Bedouins on camels. This was her first trip outside the chilly climate of Hamedan, her first glance of a desolate landscape.

  My father’s thirteen-year-old brother Jahangeer, who had accompanied him to the wedding, was elated and chatty at the prospect of reaching home. Homesick, he had cried for his mother every night, begging my father to take him home.

  This is the scene that pains me the most. Being the same age, my mother and uncle should have been playing marbles on the floor of that bus, chatting about their schools and friends. Instead, the wedding party dismissed Maman’s anxiety and sympathized with her brother-in-law’s tears for being away for just a short time.

  My father’s family waited at the bus stop in Shiraz to greet them. They threw green cloth and sugar candy over them, and sprayed them with rose water for good luck, a sweet life.

  Aunt Maheen giggled when she saw the bride. She whispered loudly in my father’s ear, “You’re so tall—why such a short wife?”

  Such simple words of gentle criticism Baba never ignored. My mother told me that my father’s behavior changed immediately. He became quiet, sad, and kept his distance from her. After the departure of my maternal grandmother, when my mother needed her husband’s emotional support the most, he had none to give. Distraught, Baba himself had no one to support or to reassure him.

  Maman, two years before her marriage, with grandmother Touran and three of her brothers in Hamedan. My maternal grandfather was often absent from home, trying to sell merchandise in faraway villages until Touran demanded that he should return home. His assets confiscated during Reza Shah’s reign to help with the war expenses, twice he opened bookstores. Twice they were burned down. He gave up and plunged the family into terrible poverty, forcing grandmother Touran to work as a cook and sometimes a maid in local hotels. Picture courtesy of Nahid Gerstein.

  On my mother’s first week in Shiraz, guests came to bring gifts and to see the new bride. Bent over with a low broom, my mother was sweeping the yard on her honeymoon. “Is that your new maid?” a neighbor asked my grandmother.

  That embarrassed Khanom-bozorg, my mother told me. She was mad at Maman for allowing the company to see her at work in tattered clothes. She worried that they might become the subject of gossip and criticism.

  Worse yet, a distant relative came unannounced to see this new addition to the family. She and my grandmother had never liked each other. The visitor covered her mouth with the corner of her chador and laughed, “Look! They’ve brought a peasant for a bride!”

  Part of my mother’s dowry: gold necklace, earrings, and a Ghajar coin. Photography by Jon and Jennifer Crockford.

  My grandmother stewed over the insult and later complained to my father that the snake’s tongue had revealed itself.

  My mother didn’t lift her teary eyes to see who was making the cruel comments. She felt like a bird that had flown in by mistake, banging herself against every clear window pane to reach the wide skies outside, only to get bloodied.

  Insecure, conscious of community standards, devoted to his mother and siblings, and thirsty for approval, my father too felt caged by his own mistake. There was no way out. For decades, he sided with the rest, and looked at my mother as a stranger in order not to become one himself. Instead of defending and protecting his wife, my father became a mirror to the family, magnifying their image of my mother, and reflecting it back on her, and sometimes on us as well.

  My father and I traveled to Tehran when I was in high school. I enjoyed staying at a hotel, riding on the top floor of double-decker buses, and eating in the cafeterias for the first time. We went for long walks along fashionable streets, lined with foreign-named boutiques, and looked into the cafés whose windows framed young men and women laughing like actors on a movie screen, without worrying about their modesty, without fear of the community gossips. I had my arm in his, loving every minute of having him to myself, knowing that he too enjoyed the intimacy.

  A sample of my father’s artistry in designing and crafting jewelry, often made for new brides. Picture courtesy of Dr. and Mrs. Dayanim.

  My father and I didn’t visit my mother’s family in Tehran. I didn’t question the decision, but he explained nevertheless. We stood in front of the glass window of a shop where women’s robes wrapped around mannequins gracefully as if they were parading to an evening ball. Maybe he too imagined beautiful women walking luxuriously around clean homes in silk and velvet robes.

  He had made the wrong decision, he
told me for the first time about his marriage. “I was young,” he said. “Someone should have told me your mother wasn’t right for me.” He was entrusted to an elder with little wisdom. It was no surprise that he was blindfolded with false words and had married a woman of no fortune or class.

  I didn’t tell him that a wealthy family would not have sent such a young girl away. He knew that.

  “I cringe when I’m around her family,” he added. “I don’t want you to be exposed to them.”

  I adored our time alone and away from life in our chaotic, multi-family house in Shiraz, so I didn’t ask him to define class. The robe he bought me obligated me to listen to his grievances. We ate white rice and yogurt in a non-kosher restaurant, since my father didn’t fear the watchful eyes of the community. As I drank my tea, he chewed his mustache and recalled event after event at which my mother’s family had acted with callousness and disregard for social graces.

  “This is the family I fell into,” he sighed. “My fate!” Like my mother, Baba blamed his destiny for his unhappiness.

  I tried to think of ways to fight this unpredictable, often adversarial “fate,” but I couldn’t. I was happy. I was enjoying a sweet cup of tea; I couldn’t wait to show my robe to my friends. I never reminded my father that he was denigrating my mother.

  In our house, my grandmother Khanom-bozorg was the head of the household and received the daily spending money from my father early each morning. Baba worked long hours, sometimes not returning home until midnight, and if he had a light day, he went to the movies secretly and alone. My grandmother was dismayed that her daughter-in-law didn’t have the skills to cook; my mother grumbled that she had been washing, cleaning, and ironing all day for my father’s siblings. Not being able to juggle the needs of the two wailing women, Baba abided by the cultural rules of respecting and obeying elders.

  At the same time, Morad wanted to separate from my father and open his own business. My father refused. They were to work together to support the rest of the family, my father insisted. Frustrated and resentful, Morad targeted my mother, encouraging my grandmother to be more strict with her. When winter came, my grandmother gave Maman Morad’s tattered coat to wear at home and told my mother to save the one she had brought with her from Hamedan to wear in public to save face.

  Desperate and lonely, Maman stole a pencil and a sheet of paper from her sister-in-law and wrote a letter to her great uncle Dr. Sayed, telling him that since he was responsible for her marriage, he needed to help her out of it.

  To her mother she wrote, “Please come and take me away or I will die in this foreign land.”

  But no response came to these letters or the ones after. Then, one day, many months later, a letter arrived telling her that her husband’s house was her home and that she had no other home. She leaned against the door and cried. She put the letter to her nose to see if any scent of her mother remained on it, but it smelled like the ink of a scriber in the bazaar. She folded the paper and put it in the pocket of her dress. She read it again when cooking, and her tears, added to the turmeric and the sesame oil, flavored the chicken. My grandmother noticed the letter and asked Maman to read it aloud. Maybe Khanom-bozorg thought the letter contained some gossip from the Jewish community of Hamedan; maybe she hoped it would have regards for her. When my mother refused, she warned my father. He read the letter, threw it in the fire, and demanded the right to check Maman’s mail.

  “I submitted to my fate,” my mother told me. “What else could have I done?”

  My grandmother was alarmed by my mother’s open unhappiness and watched her movements, so that the community wouldn’t discover the problems in the family. They had to save face. The walls thickened. The doors closed.

  Aziza

  My mother’s isolation impacted my life in many ways. I grew up not knowing most of my mother’s relatives, including my maternal grandparents. I had lived in the United States for over twenty years, when I was introduced to some of the relatives on my mother’s side. Once I heard my mother’s brother Avi, who is three years younger than me, talk about his sister being “so nice.”

  “Which sister? You mean Maman?” I said, confused.

  “No, my other sister, Aziza.”

  My mother had a half-sister and no one had ever bothered to tell me. My uncle said that Aziza lived in Los Angeles with her daughter Mohtaram. “Don’t you know Mohtaram, Parveez, Eshagh, Jamsheed, Maheen, and Farzaneh, her children, your cousins?” he asked.

  I felt empty. During my childhood and teen years, I had felt sorry for myself that I did not have a khaleh, a maternal aunt. My friends felt sorry for me as well, a sorrow laced with a touch of grandiosity. “You don’t have a khaleh, what a pity!” A good friend told me as she slapped her cheeks with both hands. Khalehs, she told me, were much better than amehs, the paternal aunts, because they loved their sisters’ children and spoiled them.

  I wanted to be spoiled too, to have someone to run away to from time to time. I was angry that my mother had six brothers but no sisters. Now, after so many years, Avi informed me that I had a large family that no one had bothered to tell me about. I had been to Los Angeles the month before and, as I found out later, just ten minutes away, not knowing about their existence.

  My mother’s sister.

  When I made arrangements for my next trip to Los Angeles, visiting my khaleh was my top priority. I called her from Norfolk to introduce myself and to tell her that I would like to visit. Her daughter Mohtaram picked up the phone. Their phones, I learned later, were connected so she could monitor her mother’s calls. She was delighted and gave me directions to her apartment and the promise to take me over to my aunt’s.

  I couldn’t find the steps to her second-floor apartment and instead rode the dilapidated elevator, trying not to panic in the enclosed cubicle. The walls closed in on me, and I felt my breakfast of soft cheese and walnuts coming up in my throat as I smelled foreign spices aged to a noxious odor that clung to the walls and the tattered carpeting. I leaned against the metal structure and tried to control my breathing. I have never liked confined spaces; they rot the living.

  The elevator stopped with a jolt. The doors opened, and the smell of Iranian, Indian, Afghani, and Israeli foods floated freely in the breeze down the corridors, aromatic, pungent, mouth-watering.

  Wearing a long dress and carefully applied makeup, I hesitated for a minute outside Mohtaram’s apartment before I knocked. The door opened a crack, and a woman in her sixties with short, teased hair dyed a reddish-yellow took a peek through the opening. She looked at me with surprised and questioning eyes. I wondered if I was in the wrong place.

  “Farideh,” I introduced myself. “Mohtaram khanom?”

  Her eyes lit up; her body relaxed. “O, my God! I can’t believe Rouhi’s daughter is here. I can’t believe it.” She kissed me on both cheeks. “May I be sacrificed for you. Your steps should be on my eyes. You don’t know how happy I am to see you.”

  She asked me to sit in an ornate, imitation French-antique armchair with a matching sofa and dining room chairs covered with heavy plastic. The oversized furniture overwhelmed the tiny apartment. She asked me what I would prefer to drink, sour cherry or quince drink.

  “Just water, please.” My tongue felt woolly.

  She brought me all of them and trays of fruit too. I chewed a piece of watermelon and let it sit on my tongue for a few seconds before swallowing it as I scanned the walls covered with family pictures like so many other Iranian homes I had visited. In Iran, her family would have lived with Mohtaram or nearby. Now in Los Angeles she could keep her children and grandchildren with her as photographs hung on every centimeter of the walls. Mohtaram explained that the separation was because of all the traffic, because of the long distances across the highways, and because of their busy schedules that kept them away.

  The clocks run faster in America, I knew.

  I pulled out pictures of my children and husband for Mohtaram to see.

 
“Mashalah, what wonders God has fashioned. What beautiful girls!” Her eyes opened wide as she covered her mouth with delight.

  I showed her pictures of my brothers’ weddings in Philadelphia, my sister’s family in Washington, my youngest sister in Israel. I was trying to make up for lost time. I handed her a picture of my mother, taken two years earlier in Israel.

  “Is this Rouhi khanom?” She stared at my mother’s picture.

  Maman was in her house dress, her hair matted, a big smile on her face.

  “Her beauty is gone,” she said, “such a pity.”

  I resented that she noticed the aging, the burden of life on my mother.

  “Your mother was the most stunningly gorgeous girl. She was taken to the hairdresser before her wedding to curl her hair, which framed her face and hung around her shoulders and back in long tubes. She was so beautiful!” Mohtaram said enviously.

  My mother had natural curls. Imagining her with a Shirley Temple hairdo, I wondered why they gave her a perm. I remembered the burn on the right side of my mother’s head, next to her ear, where the hair stylist had left the hot iron for too long.

  “She was a child,” I mumbled, not knowing why. Mohtaram knew how young my mother was married off. I didn’t need to remind her.