Wedding Song (2 page)

When I told my mother of my first period, she folded her fingers into a fist and hit herself on the chest, “
Vay behalet!
” She used the Farsi words as if I had angered her. “You’ll suffer,” she said.

The sun painted the walls of the bedroom I shared with her, etching shadows of the cast iron grillwork on the windows. Two cats fought outside. The water in the shallow, keyhole-shaped pool was green with pollen. I leaned against the wall by the closet, my hair still wild from storybook dreams against a soft pillow, my panties wet, my thighs sticky. My mother stood in front of me but wouldn’t look into my eyes. She looked at my left shoulder or maybe the wall.

“Misery will be your share in life, for you have become a woman with all its inheritance of pain,” she said. “This is the beginning of your sufferings. Be prepared!”

My mother’s eyes were the shade of young dates on a palm tree, hazel with striations of gold. Her curls were unruly, her palms the surface of the desert.

I bit the inner flesh of my lips. There was blood in my mouth. I wondered about this mysterious prophecy of catastrophe. Could I find an antidote to the poison my mother believed would ruin me? A sparrow skidded on the murky water in the pond. Did it think the surface was solid? It flapped its wings in a panic and landed on a water fountain in the middle.

A bundle of rags lay on the closet floor like a sleeping cat. My mother crouched, grabbed an old sheet, put it between her teeth, and tore it with her claws. “There!” With her shoulders stooped, she turned her back and closed the door behind her.

When I entered the passage to womanhood in spring of 1966, I was
thirteen years old. In our Jewish home in Shiraz, the monthly occurrence was both intensely private and offensively public. Men never mentioned it. Women spoke about it in hushed voices while shelling fava beans, when rolling mung beans on a round brass platter to separate them from pebbles.

Someone’s daughter had started her first period; she was ripe to get married. Disregarding the Jewish laws of family purity, a neighbor’s lustful husband wouldn’t leave her alone, so she took her rag to the community leader to prove that she was still bleeding, to seek his protection. Speaking of blood, the women covered their mouths with the palms of their hands as if trying to shove the words back, as if the language itself could pollute the air.

During my childhood, I often answered the dreadful call from various women in the family, “Farideh, come. Come to the bathroom and pour water over my hands.” Pouring water was the euphemism for helping them wash their rags and bloody underwear. With an
aftabeh
, a copper water jug used for washing our bottoms, I bent over my mother. She wrapped her skirt tightly around herself and squatted by the hole in the ground that was our toilet. In a slow constant flow, I poured water over her hands as she rubbed the leftover soap into the unclean clothes. She didn’t use the sink or the wash tub or else they would be contaminated with her
gha’edeh
, her monthly “mandate.” She wrapped the clean
tamei
clothes in newspapers, took them outside, and hung them on shrubs in the backyard. When she came back, I helped her wash her hands again over the toilet before she dared to wash them once more in the sink.

Passover was the most difficult time for menstruating women. My mother always mumbled curses underneath her breath, made faces drinking the bitter spinach juice to delay her period. Otherwise, she could not hold the Seder plate as adults did, reciting “
Ha-lakhma
… This is the bread of affliction … Now we are slaves; next year may we be free.” Otherwise, she could not dip her bitter herb in the same bowl of salt water, the tears of our ancestors, like everyone else.

“Damned be the day I was born a woman!” My mother hit her chest whenever she had her period during Passover. “There is nothing for a woman but sorrow and pain!”

As the customs dictated, when menstruating my mother had to drag the
tamei
mattress, pillow, and quilt out of the special closet and spread
them in a corner of the bedroom, away from the traffic. I wondered whether she minded that part of the custom. Her impure corner gave her a little space of her own that no one approached for fear of becoming unclean. My grandmother didn’t ask her to rise from her warm bed to make her tea. My father didn’t tell her to prepare his breakfast at five in the morning before he went to work.

Left alone, sometimes she wrote a letter to her parents. Sometimes she read. Sometimes she sang a song to herself.

My father took the bed at these times. My siblings and I huddled under the blankets in another corner of the bedroom floor. There was a taboo space around our mother where no one dared to intrude. Somehow even the air touching her body contracted the same invisible filth. She ate from plates that had to be washed separately and stored in a hidden space, where no one could touch them by mistake.

I knew all the rules of the monthly curse, the separation, the untouchability, the fatigue, and the blood. They should all have been frightening. Yet when my turn came, something was different. That early morning, when I withdrew my hands from the wetness between my legs, I was not terrified of the blood. I was euphoric. I felt grown up. Now my grandmother wouldn’t allow me to bend over with the low broom sweeping the carpets. I counted on her repeating to
me
what she used to tell my single aunt Fereshteh, “Go lie down. Your back must be hurting from the flow. Go rest.”

Now someone had to bend over the toilet pouring water over
my
hands to wash
my
soiled underwear. Now I would not be sent out of the room when women gathered to gossip. I was going to be a part of the sisterhood of women. Even with all my mother’s warnings, I could not help the ebullience that surged in me.

I knew the secret was out when I went into the kitchen that morning. The men, my father and two uncles, were at work. The women sat on low wooden stools, their skirts tightly wrapped around their legs. My mother mixed grated cooked potatoes, ground beef, and eggs. She took small portions out of the mixture, flattened them between the palms of her hands, and put them in the frying pan on top of a kerosene stove with sesame oil and turmeric to make
shamee
. I loved to hang around for the broken pieces. My mouth watered. Geeta, Uncle Morad’s wife, and the bane of my
mother’s life, chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, parsley, and onions to make a Shirazi salad. That was my job. She had a meaningful smile on her face. She knew.

Picking through the vegetables for a stew, my grandmother looked like a flower amidst a garden of herbs. “Don’t touch, don’t touch,” she said.

I hadn’t tried to handle anything. Her calico kerchief slipped off her hair at the sudden gesture, revealing two henna-covered braids. She didn’t have her teeth in her mouth. Her words slurred and came at me in slow-moving waves.

It was Friday, my only day off from school, the busiest day in the kitchen before the start of Shabbat. Any other week, my help would have been welcomed, orders given rapidly to wash and clean, to chop and mix. Now I was a nuisance.

Knowing of this reaction, I wondered if my mother had betrayed me by not warning me to hide the secret of my blood; if she had abandoned me by exposing my secret herself. How I had convinced myself that I would be different! I couldn’t look at her.

Khanom-bozorg, my grandmother, tried to find a job away from the food area for me. “You can sweep the backyard.”

I grabbed a low broom, but lingered by the door. The pots clanked, the water gurgled down the sink, the oil sizzled, the charcoal popped in the mud stove, and sparks flew around a large pot of water. My mother poured the rice in, counting aloud five cups. In comparison, the backyard felt like such a lonely place. Khanom-bozorg must have noticed the sadness and hurt on my face. “Go stand in front of an orange tree and tell it, ‘Your greenness shall be mine, my yellowness yours,’” she said. “That should bring you luck, a good husband.”

Geeta covered her mouth with her parsley-stained hand and snickered. She spurned me as an extension of her dislike for her sister-in-law. I wished I could free myself from the blood that linked me to my mother, for she was the carrier of my oppression.

In our large garden, I looked at the long rows of orange, tangerine, sweet lemon, pomelo, and sour orange trees lined up against the two walls. Sweet lemons were precious for their medicinal magic. They had to be wrapped each winter to save their delicate limbs from frostbite. Pomelos were reserved for special guests only since they were so rare,
large and beautiful. Sour oranges were used for flavoring the food. Their fruits were too tart to eat but every Iranian dish tasted better, more complete with them.

I recalled watching my father cut a sour-orange tree halfway down the trunk, gently make an incision to place a cutting from a tangerine tree. All our trees originated from their species that were hardy and immune to drought and disease. A delicate wind swirled around the tree-lined courtyard, mixing the fragrances of orange blossoms and roses. I chose the tallest sour orange tree, stood in front of it, and wished to be as strong as it was, to stand erect as it did, not bending to the whim of others. I wished to be like its fruit, adding flavor to life, yet tasting so pungent that no one would dare to bite into me.

I went back to the house to face the other women. I took the kettle and made myself tea with the orange blossoms I had snipped from my tree. As I reached for a regular cup, the women stopped their work and stared at me. My grandmother rose half way, but sat down again. She looked at my mother and shook her head. “Rouhi, you didn’t show your child where the
tamei
dishes are!”

I had failed my first lesson in womanhood.

My mother grabbed my arm. “Why are you making trouble for me?” she asked. “Don’t I already have enough to put up with?”

I didn’t care. Since they had made me an outsider, I detached myself from their rules. After the initial hurt, I was content, determined to be different, to look inside myself rather than to their world for answers. I would use another dish the next time and another the time after that. I would wash my underwear in the bathroom sink with good soap and sleep on my own mattress. Let them all be
tamei
, impure, every day and forever.

That night I unrolled my own mattress on the carpet in my usual spot. I fell asleep in the cool breeze from the open window. My parents’ whispering woke me up. In the pitch-darkness, phosphate dots shone on a round alarm clock by their bed. “Your daughter’s misery has started,” my mother said. “Pity on her who will soon know the cruelty of life.”

I listened for my father’s response, but it never came. I buried my face in the pillow and cried silently. It was all too much—the humiliation of something so private being discussed with my father, the loneliness of being separated from the women whose company I desired. My younger
sister, Nahid, rolled to her side and faced me. Her big eyes looked darker than the night. She moved closer to cuddle. I caressed her sweaty hair. We were on a long voyage against the strong tides of superstition and female inferiority, lonely, without our mother.

My mother was born two years old. My grandparents’ first child was a daughter, named Rouhi. When she died a toddler, they kept her birth certificate and gave it to their next child. Therefore, when my father and his brother-in-law, Masood, knocked at their door thirteen years later to ask for Rouhi’s hand in marriage, she was legally of marriageable age.

If my mother didn’t have her deceased sister’s birth certificate, I am sure my maternal grandmother would have found a way to circumvent the law. Girls were married young. Most officials helped families get around the law that forbade child-marriages. My great uncle, Agha-jaan, crossed his hands over his chest and laughed when he recollected his own story of changing his bride’s birth certificate. He approached an official to whom he sold fabric at discounted prices. This man told my great uncle to dress his twelve-year-old fiancée in a mature outfit: long skirt, jacket, hat, and high heels. They appeared at the official’s door with the young girl made up, kohl around her eyes, and red lipstick smeared on her mouth, slipping and losing control while walking in the unfamiliar spiked shoes two sizes larger than her feet. She refused to hold hands with Agha-jaan, but when asked if she was willing to marry this man, she said yes obediently. She was then pronounced to be legally fifteen and her birth certificate was changed.

Although my great uncle’s bride was a child, she had her family close by to check on her. Her parents’ home was a refuge even if for short periods of time. My mother was alone. She was given away as a young bride to a man from a far-away city. My parents’ official date and place of marriage is 17 October 1951 in Shiraz, but that was a formality they went through when in my father’s hometown. The religious ceremony was performed earlier in Hamedan. She was thirteen, he twenty-three.

All my life, I have struggled to understand and accept this implausible union. Many times I have imagined standing outside my parents’ bedroom
on the night of their wedding in Hamedan, never daring to turn the knob. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to see beyond the doors where a young man lay with a child-woman for the first time. I never asked my father or mother about their first night together. My mother would have shared the events, but I didn’t want to know.