The Stationery Shop(37)

He was gone. He was gone, and but for the grace of God, it could have been her. Quite possibly should have been her. It was something she would always carry, like a scar, like a cold truth, like the sizzling embers of the shop’s remains embedded in her skin, like the body of Mr. Fakhri carried invisible above her extended arms forever.

Now that Mr. Fakhri was gone, she thought about him more than ever. What personal pain he had carried inside, she did not know.





Part Two





Chapter Fourteen


1916



* * *



The Melon Seller’s Daughter

A young man meanders through winding alleys of the bazaar downtown. Since his birth, his marriage has been arranged to his second cousin, Atieh. Atieh means “future,” but she is not the future he wants. He is in love with a young girl who works at the bazaar, who heaps melons onto crates every morning and stands haughtily next to her father as he haggles with the customers. Ali can’t stop thinking about this poor girl. He goes to the bazaar just to see her seed the melons, to catch any glimpse of her.

Amidst the cacophony and chaos of the stalls, he watches. She always wears a small headscarf. Her clothes are shabby, but her face is like the moon. She is young, too young perhaps, but stunning. With a knife that looks like a sword, the girl’s father magically whisks out the inner soft flesh of the fruit and sells slices and chunks to his thirsty customers. Some customers take a whole melon and drop it into their baskets; others want the immediate sweetness, the cool relief of melon cut and iced. The ice is just as special as the fruit, and the melon seller comes to the bazaar every morning carrying a coveted block of it. The girl guards the ice vigilantly, standing next to it with her hands on her hips.

Ali’s mother plans the items for his wedding sofreh. “Wasn’t I patient to wait till she’s older?” she says. “Your cousin is sixteen now and ripe and ready for you. You two were destined from birth. We all knew it.”

His mother chuckles, as though she is gaining something uniquely valuable. She tells the maids to make sure there is enough cinnamon to decorate the sholeh zard dessert on the wedding day. “At the end of summer, Ali Jan. Can you think of a better present for your eighteenth birthday?”

Ali thinks that Atieh looks like watery yogurt; he imagines her to be just as bland and tasteless. In his dreams, the shabbily dressed girl at the bazaar feeds him slivers of melon, the juice soaking his mouth.

One Friday, he walks downtown as usual to spy on her. He stands half-concealed behind a post at the spice stall as the girl arranges whole melons into pyramid-shaped heaps. He watches her slice the fruit into uneven pieces.

“Badri, bia, come!” Her father is toothless, skin leathered from too much time in the unforgiving sun.

Badri. Badri. Badri. Ali repeats the name under his breath as if he could possibly ever forget it. As if he won’t ache for years whenever he hears it.

Shoppers push and shove, women in chadors carry their baskets of greens and eggplants, babies cry, and peddlers moan about their wares. Badri, Badri, Badri. Ali, as the son of one of Tehran’s most esteemed scholars, will be sent off to Qom to study religion and the classics soon. This girl is not a thing that should enter his mind. She works with her father in the market. She is a dahati, a villager. A girl with nothing, from the same class as the servant who washes Ali’s clothes.

When the noontime call to prayer floats through the alleys of the bazaar, stalls are left and prayer mats picked up. The market methodically empties out; buyers and sellers disperse. One by one the men leave their stations and walk out. In the courtyard of the mosque at the end of the bazaar, they’ll make their midday ablutions. There they’ll wet their elbows and wrists with water from the concrete basins. For the prayer, they’ll kneel and touch their foreheads to the ground and lose themselves in meditation. They will rise and bend as one.

Is Badri going to pray? Ali feels a sting of disappointment as she leaves the stall. Of course he won’t be able to follow her into the female section of the mosque. The most he can do is see her take off her shoes at the entrance (they are slippers really, made of cloth, torn and ragged). She’ll then be swallowed up by the women’s entryway, inaccessible.

After she leaves, Ali lingers alone in the bazaar. He suddenly feels naked at his post near the spice stall. He’s conspicuous now that the crowd has left, vulnerable and uncomfortable without the shield of people covering his lookout point.

Footsteps. The slow scuff of slippers against the dirt. He looks up and can barely believe it. She’s back. He watches, hoping he’s unseen, as Badri moves a few things around her father’s melon stall. She lifts a large tin tub. For a moment she struggles with its weight, then hoists it on her hip. Soon it’s balanced there perfectly as though it’s a part of her anatomy, as though it was always perched there.

She walks out of the stall, and after he’s sure he can’t be seen, he follows her. There is something strangely alluring about her; she has such confidence and sway even though she’s young and poor. Instead of turning right toward the mosque, Badri turns left. Ali follows her down a small path to the back of the bazaar where a square yard shielded by trees serves as an unloading and garbage dock. It must be here that every morning donkeys carrying wares are unloaded and men unpack their crates of goods. The dock is lined with big bins where the garbage of the day is deposited in heaps. Flies swarm over the receptacles. The girl calmly navigates her way through the smelly, gorged bins until she reaches one that isn’t overflowing. The tub remains balanced on her hip as she walks. Ali marvels at how she carries the heavy tub as though she’s been doing this all her life. Then again, he thinks, she probably has been doing this kind of thing her whole life. For isn’t that how it is with this kind? They work. Manual labor all the time, Ali sniffs to himself, even the females out in the fields and in the markets from their earliest days. They are hardy, they are tough. Ali thinks of Atieh and her paper-white skin. He thinks of Atieh’s long fingers, her lips that seem transparent (when they are married, the excited relatives will profess joy at the thought of him grazing the perfection that is Atieh). He has seen Atieh without her veil; as children they were told to play together. Now Atieh’s face is always shielded from the sun to save her skin from going dark, to keep her pale and pure.