The Stationery Shop(40)
But Ali does not want the powdered, pristine bride his mother chose for him at birth. His home is filled with books; his living room floor is covered with the best Persian rugs. A dahati peasant girl would be a joke in his family’s eyes. When he enters his father’s study and dares to tell him that he doesn’t want to marry Atieh, his father simply asks, “Why?” in a manner conveying that Ali’s statement is a nuisance. When Ali, with much throat-clearing and fidgeting and difficulty, mentions a girl who is sweet, who is beautiful, so gorgeous, her face like the moon’s—Ali’s father says impatiently, “Well, who is it?” Upon hearing that the girl is the melon seller’s daughter, his father’s face freezes for an instant, and then he doubles over in a throaty, loud, coughing laugh that Ali realizes with creeping disgust is the deepest laugh he’s ever heard from his father. Ali leaves the room as his father continues to clear phlegm with his laugh.
He and Atieh marry at the end of that summer. Ali thinks of the girl at the bazaar: her beauty, her scrappiness, nothing about her leaves him. He climbs on top of Atieh, the girl he has married, with the melon scent of Badri in his mind. The following year, their son is born. Celebrations are held in their community, in their part of town, in their rich inner circles. Atieh is enchanted with her child. Three more children follow in quick succession and none of them dies. Everyone marvels at how blessed he and Atieh are. All the children healthy. Atieh embraces motherhood and the domestic life. She embroiders on linen and knits perfectly patterned sweaters. She raises their children to be obedient and considerate. She ignores Ali’s aloofness and his burrowing in books and simply brings tea to his study every night. She does not complain when he pours his energy into opening a shop, does not express embarrassment and disappointment at his becoming a mere merchant, not the scholar he was meant to be. Atieh remains devoted to him. She ages beautifully. Her skin remains undamaged by the sun.
The melon girl is always scrappy and feisty in his dreams; she kisses him by the bins at the back of the bazaar, she smells sweet and heady. He wakes up craving her. Over the years, every now and then, Ali looks for the melon seller’s daughter when he is downtown. She must have married some dahati peasant boy; she must have twelve children by now. Sometimes he sees poor women walking down the street in the outskirts of the city, clasping their flowered chadors with their teeth, their baskets filled with wilting vegetables and the worst cuts of meat (if they’re lucky). He looks among them for that melon seller’s daughter, all grown up, but does not see her.
When he opens the Stationery Shop on the corner of Hafez Avenue, he is one of the first to import foreign books. The young students are crazy about reading these days. Obsessed with novels and stories from abroad as well as reading all the ancient and modern Persian literature.
One day, while Ali Fakhri is at his shop, taking newly printed Farsi translations of Dostoyevsky and Dickens out of a crate and arranging them with their spines aligned, the bell above the door rings and someone steps into the shop. A rich perfume fills the room.
She is tall and elegant, dressed like a Western movie star. She has clearly embraced Reza Shah’s reforms in dress. Some women resisted and found the removal of the veil traumatic. When Reza Shah’s police ripped the veils off women’s heads to force them to modernize, religious women resisted. But others welcomed their new Western ways of no covering. This woman is clearly not one who misses the veil. She even has rouge on her cheeks, and her face is like the moon. A resplendent, round, beautiful moon.
For a moment Ali is confused. He knows that he cannot be staring at the melon seller’s daughter. This woman standing in front of him cannot be that poor girl who emptied her father’s melon rinds into the garbage bin.
“Good morning, Ali Agha.” Her voice is confident and clear. “What a lovely shop you have.”
Behind the counter, Ali Fakhri remains frozen.
“You didn’t think I’d find you? It’s not that hard. Don’t look so scared. Did you think you’d find me on the side of the street getting by? I am an engineer’s wife now, didn’t you know? My husband taught me how to read and how to write. He took the time. And now, here I am. In this lovely shop of books!”
Before Ali can answer, the bell rings again, and in comes a boy, about fifteen, his cheeks red, his dark hair in a thick mop on his head, his eyes joyful and filled with hope.
“This is my son,” the woman says. “I thought you’d like to meet him. He loves to read. I brought him here because I have heard that you have the latest books, the best ones. They say you’re quite a bookseller.”
Ali clears his throat and tries to say something.
“Good morning.” The boy walks over, nods at Ali, and smiles. His confidence takes Ali Fakhri by surprise. “My mother has told me so much about you. She says you even have the Americans like Henry David Thoreau? I would love to read books like that.”
At this, his mother rolls her eyes. “Always with the politics and philosophy! I tell him the future of this country is with oil. Study hard. Learn how to manage economics. Learn finance. I tell him do something useful! But what can you do?” She ruffles the boy’s head with a mixture of frustration and pride. She pushes his head slightly, and the boy cringes. “Always with the politics! The youth of today! He wants the fancy books, Ali Agha.” Her manner of speaking is slightly false, the strained tone of a poor woman who is now rich. For a minute, her eyes lock with the bookseller’s, and Ali Fakhri’s body grows weak. He is the father of four healthy children. People say his wife, Atieh, is a wonderful woman, an angel. He has opened a shop selling books and stationery that is respected throughout the city as a haven for the intelligentsia. He has guided students to their intellectual matches on the shelf. He has imported works and products from all over the world; he is admired and successful, even if his father always remained disappointed that he didn’t become a religious scholar. A melon seller’s peasant girl does not deserve his attention, his mind, his energy. Years ago, she might have been forward and brash with him at the bazaar. Today he is a man above it all.