Thirty Shadow Birds, page 5
“Mati, Matiti Juni, you’re an unforgettable shining moon,” she says out loud. She closes her eyes to let hot tears fall over her face, smiling for her missing moon.
As her hand reaches the edge of the sheet, she hears the jinn sniffling. She wipes her nose and gets up to remove the sheet. Avoiding eye contact with the jinn, Yalda gives her the crumpled sheet and drags her feet towards the washroom.
When she’s back with a new sheet and an extra pillow, the jinn and Yalda catch each other’s eyes. The jinn has now lifted her chin from her locked knees, clasping the crumpled sheet in her hands.
“It’s not the right time for us to have Mati. Right?”
The jinn doesn’t reply. Yalda ignores her hamzad’s icy stare and sloppily spreads the clean sheet on the mattress. Instead of lying on her abdomen, she sleeps on her side with knees curled towards her stomach, a pillow between them. She covers her body up to the neck with the blanket. Just like her son, she thinks, in a fetal position, covered up to the neck.
“I thought my jinn appeared because of my son, not because of my sister,” she addresses the jinn.
The jinn jiggles her head and starts biting her nails.
“Mourning a lost sister is far better than cursing a degenerate son,” Yalda taunts.
All at once, it occurs to Yalda that the jinn’s reappearance might have to do with Mati after all. It makes the most sense. After all, it was Mati who’d made the jinn acceptable company for her. Although Yalda heard about the jinn from her mother, it was Mati who told Yalda that the jinn was not grotesque as Maman Ashi had described, with hooves, pointed ears, and a bald head. Instead, Mati told Yalda that the jinn was like an ordinary girl.
“So, the jinn is not a monster?”
“Not your jinn.” Mati’s smile was reassuring. “Yours is just like you. It’s your hamzad. She was born when you were born, but in the jinn world. You don’t believe what your wise half-sis says?”
“It’s hard to believe, Mati.”
But Yalda didn’t doubt Mati for long. The moment Yalda saw Mati’s sincere smile shining from her moon-shaped face, a shadow of a doubt fell on Maman Ashi’s authority and credibility.
Maman Ashi had claimed that the jinn—a male creature with hooves, pointed ears, and a bald head—would penetrate into her youngest daughter’s skin. Sick and tired of Yalda’s whining, she used to say, “Aye! There is a jinn under Yalda’s skin. That’s what makes her mewl and yowl all the time.” If anyone seemed doubtful, she would conclude that having such a difficult child was God’s punishment for her bad marriage.
Later on, after Agha Jun’s death, Yalda recalled that her mother’s remarks about their marriage drove her dad crazy. Whenever Maman Ashi brought it up, Agha Jun would shake his ivory-handled cane in the air. The magic of his dancing cane was that it made Yalda stop crying in an instant. It also allowed Maman Ashi to breathe a sigh of relief that the jinn had disappeared. And it meant that Agha Jun was on his way out the door, which made everybody happy. Despite this, all three of them—Mati, Dadashi, and Yalda—felt guilty as soon as he had left the room, each for their own reasons.
With little sympathy for Agha Jun, Mati agreed with Dadashi that it was Maman Ashi who ignited the quarrel. Mati couldn’t help being thankful to her generous stepfather who didn’t complain about the over-the-top demands and expenses of his unhealthy stepdaughter. The bond between Dadash Yunes and Agha Jun was a different story. In his words, Agha Jun was a marshmallow trapped inside a walnut shell. While inside he was soft and sweet, on the outside he was severe and hard, like the tooth-breaking shell. But who put the sweet soft stuff into the tough shell? First, the bird-headed rural nanny who was hired by Agha Jun to take care of his two-year-old son after the death of his wife, and second Maman Ashi, the new wife of Agha Jun, who made him cautious about showing attention and affection to his only son.
When Yunes returned from the country house to his father’s Tehran house to go to school, he had chronic hemorrhoids and some burn marks on his back. While he had been away, his father had remarried, so the motherless boy arrived in Tehran to find two new members of the household: a stepmother and a stepsister. From day one, there was a warm rapport between him and Mati, and a cold war between him and Maman Ashi. Agha Jun’s new wife was a “high-born lady.” Her full name, Ashrafolsaltaneh, was proof of her true or false affinity with the Qajars, the former royal family. All three children would hear, on and off, Maman Ashi complain about marrying an old man with no trace of nobility in his background and ever-shrinking wealth.
The jinn is shaking her compact body in a rhythm. She looks like an old woman in mourning. Yalda doesn’t remember if Maman Ashi ever mentioned anything about jinns aging, but her hamzad is getting old.
Now that it’s clear the jinn doesn’t intend to bug her with a new mess, Yalda feels like talking with her.
“I’m telling you, tonight’s dream was not the same as the one I already had,” Yalda says. “I mean, this one was a bit different. This time you didn’t show up—not you, and not anyone else.”
In the old dream, the jinn had appeared to her from behind the curtain between Mati’s room and Dadashi’s, right at the moment she took her eyes from Mati’s dead face. The jinn had loomed in front of her and disappeared in a second, as if she had no intention other than showing Yalda how to scream.
“There was another difference, though,” Yalda continued.
As the little sister of Mati and Dadashi, and as a child with a limited attention span and zero restrictions from her parents, she knew many things partially or completely unknown to her peer group. No, death was by no means a mystery in her world. Confusing? Sickening? Maybe. Yet not secretive. Death was seen by Maman Ashi as an obnoxious angel with a special mission to make her a widow, by Agha Jun as God’s executioner with no sense of punctuality, and by Dadashi as an eagle, always ready to swoop down on the newborn babies of his ignorant nanny, who never gave up the marathon of serial pregnancies. More than anyone else, however, it was Mati who had a connection with death—when she looked safe and sound; when she was in bed coughing and bleeding; when she was alive; when she was dead. She had talked about death as a part of life.
“Oh yeah, in the old dream I felt somebody come and sit beside me while I was on the edge of the window frame. I’d seen Mati lying dead in her bed, but the arm circling around my shoulder could only be Mati’s arm. I didn’t turn my head at all. Instead, I closed my eyes, yielded myself to the soothing caress, and stopped weeping and wailing.”
Yalda swallows the lump in her throat and grabs the hanky crumpled on the jinn’s knees. She wipes her nose with it and leaves it on the floor beside the bed, in between her and her hamzad.
“Old or new, it’s just a dream. Right?”
The jinn, still biting her nails, shakes her head a full one hundred and eighty degrees to indicate she doesn’t know the answer.
“So, let’s listen to Mati’s story, okay? I know it by heart.”
The jinn, twitching her head, reminds Yalda of a few rhymed words Dadashi and Yalda sang for Mati when they asked for her stories. “Mati, Mati, take off your veil! You’re not a male! Tell us the tale!”
And then Mati would open her delicate mouth. When she was not in a storytelling mood, she would tease them. “I do have a tale, with a fly as a head, with a fly as a tail. Shall I tell it, or shall I not tell it?”
“Tell it! Tell it!” Dadashi and Yalda would entreat.
“I don’t understand ‘tell it, tell it.’ I do have a tale, with a fly as a head, with a fly as a tail. Shall I tell it, or shall I not tell it?” Mati would continue.
“Not tell it! Not tell it!” Dadashi and Yalda would implore.
“I don’t understand ‘not tell it, not tell it.’ I do have a tale, with a fly as a head, with a fly as a tail. Shall I tell it, or shall I not tell it?”
But if she was in a good mood, she would tell them her tale, always starting with the same opening.
“Thus begins the tale of Mati, a baby girl born on a moonlit night. Her father named her Mah-e taban, which means the shining moon, since he saw the shining moon brightening her face. Mati did not live under a lucky star, and she soon lost her father. Her mother, Maman Ashi, thinking herself a high-born woman, knew only one way to make a living: by having a man do it for her. For a woman who had been married twice and widowed twice, a third husband seemed out of reach. So Mati’s mother moved in with her daughter and son-in-law. His house was like a stone castle for Mati. Such was the beginning of Mati’s tough time living under Sister Eti, her elder stepsister. But the earth turns and change comes. Maman Ashi found a third husband and Mati found the second series of step-people: stepfather, stepbrother, stepsister. Poor Mati was surrounded by steps—some short, some tall, some big, some small. Well, what could she do? Nothing. After all, she, herself, was a step-someone, trapped in a step-world with no trace of anything proper, anything pleasing, anything palsy-walsy….”
Mati ended the story differently each time.
“So let me tell you one of the stories of one of the steps around us. For instance, you, our stepbrother. You, our Dadash Yunes. You, our Dadashi. Let me tell little Yalda how you welcomed me by throwing a wiggle-eyed frog into my chest. Or how you frightened little kids in the alley with your Dracula mask. Or how you tied a small purse of valerian to the tail of the neighbour’s cat to make him dance around.
“And if you don’t like that story, I can tell you one about another step, say, this little sis, this little Yalda, this little sweetie…”
“And if you don’t like this story, my dear hamzad, I shall tell you the fucking story of a fucking woman with a fucking son and a fucking jinn under her skin….”
Yalda bursts into sobs, pulls the blanket over herself, and presses her face into the wet pillow.
11.
“SO, WHERE DO I GO FROM HERE?” she asks under her breath and hits the brake out of the blue. In the mirror, she can see the garage door closing behind her. As long as it doesn’t move up for another car coming out, she can stop right here to figure out what she’s going to do. She repeats the question, this time in her mind. She hears “dunno, dunno, dunno,” inside her head—not her own voice, but a choked voice, possibly the voice of her jinn. She misses her. Too bad her hamzad can’t bear the daylight. After everything, Yalda had a good feeling last night, having the jinn as company. It was a bizarre gathering of one who was dead, her hamzad, and a trapped animal that happened to be called Yalda.
Once, she had been Yalda Negunbakht (a surname that meant “bad luck”). So, she had changed her surname to Yeganeh (it meant “unique”), in the hope of avoiding any sinister omens. Thinking of this now makes her smile.
“Take me wherever you like, my silver horse!” Yalda murmurs, holding the middle part of the steering wheel.
She closes her eyes and imagines herself caressing the neck of a horse. She had never owned a horse, but had always longed for one. A tidal wave of longing for bygone days, when man could ride animals, rises up in her and forms a lump in her throat. She has hardly swallowed it when an image flickers through her mind: horseback riding on narrow paths that wind through a lush country garden. All three of them on a slim, trained horse—Dadash Yunes in the middle, Mati at the back, and Yalda in the front.
It was the last summer they had with Mati, a summer later named “Mati’s summer.” It was a time when all three of them were together, enjoying their vacation. There was no school during the day, and Agha Jun, who was in Tehran for business, was not there to torment them during the evenings. He had rented a garden house in Fasham for the entire summer, on the recommendation of Mati’s doctor who’d prescribed mountain weather. She could have been sent to a special sanitarium for those afflicted with tuberculosis—it would have been less expensive—but Mati had not wanted to go, and asked instead to go to the garden house.
Yalda opens her damp eyes and changes gears. Around noon, when she got up, she felt an urge to go for a drive with no destination, to flee from the confines of the apartment. She needed a break from pretending there was no messy room, no messy son, no messy mind. Without a doubt, her silver horse does its job whenever she comes up against a blank wall. It is used to taking its helpless rider to random places, where she can kill time, though she must eventually admit that it is time that kills us.
Turning onto Post Road, she slows down out of habit. She wonders if she does this because of the speed bumps or because she wants to take a look at the grand mansions that line the road. They are in a variety of styles, from Greek to Gothic to Futuristic. She has to admit that she has never aspired to own or even design one of these mansions. Once she was a Frank Lloyd Wright aficionado and dreamed of designing a Usonian house.
Nader, her boyfriend, had called this aspiration, “An oblique dream of a perverse architect.” When he made this remark, they had been celebrating their romantic reunion in a cozy restaurant in midtown Tehran. It was the fall of 1978. His seemingly sarcastic tone had annoyed her and she had stopped chatting and laughing. But her Nader, a political prisoner who had been recently freed from the Shah’s prison, had an argument to make.
“Don’t get me wrong, honey. After a year of dreaming about you, I like to see a big smile on your face. I’m not interested in a kiss that is not sincere.”
Yalda tried not to laugh, knowing that his kiss would be a modest peck, but hoping he would continue.
“It’s not that anything is wrong with your dream. But look around us and see what’s happening,” he clarified.
Yalda didn’t pay much mind to politics, and at first she didn’t get his point.
“Well, it looks like a revolution. I’m not a political person, though.” She paused. “All I know is that thanks to this revolution, you don’t have to spend years and years in jail for being an anti-Shah dissident.”
Her Nader stretched his arms towards her hands, which were still moving in the air, and said, “Tell me Yalda, do you believe that?”
“I’d rather talk about my dreams tonight.” She smiled, letting her hands be covered by his big ones, and kissed by his warm lips. “If you don’t want a dream house, let’s talk about another castle in the air.”
“We’re all wrong, our generation. It’s not just the wrong time, it’s also the wrong place, Yalda. If everything goes wrong…. I mean, what’s coming is scary,” her Nader said, ignoring the dirty look of a man at the next table who’d seen them kiss, and keeping her hands tightly in his.
“You don’t sound like that sunny young man I used to know, my Nader!”
She clenches the steering wheel and shakes her head to send the memories of her Nader’s back into the recesses of her mind. That all my darling dead ones are coming to me means that I’m indeed having another nasty problem, she thinks. To distract herself from disturbing thoughts, she has to replace her bag of dreams and nightmares with a bag of tricks. The most accessible trick is to immerse herself in the wonders of fall foliage on both sides of Leslie. The driver of a car behind her honks his horn. She is driving too slowly. She waves an apology while cursing him in her heart for interrupting her. She makes up her mind to go to Edwards Gardens for a stroll.
Despite the intermittent chilly breeze, she prefers to see the garden at this time of year, when it’s quiet. When she had first come to Toronto, her host had suggested she visit this garden. It was the first time she had gone sightseeing in the city. She did it for her son, then a ten-year-old, still sort of on a leash. Unable to compete with his favourite parks, the garden didn’t appeal to him. Soon afterwards, Nader discovered ravines and lost interest in the parks that he had once loved. She wonders if it was around that time that he lost interest in her as well.
After walking for an hour, she finds an empty bench with a view of the duck pond. As she is digging out her water bottle, she feels her cell phone vibrating in her coat pocket. “It’s definitely not Nader,” she says loudly, trying to quell her desire to hear his voice. She takes her phone out, turns it off, and sighs in frustration. On such a monstrous planet, she thinks, the only person who calls me is Jimmy, the ninny! She sometimes blames herself for expressing her anger by disgracing people with contemptuous titles. This time, though, she has no regrets. Once, in response to his insistence, she told him that men who undress all women in their minds cannot make women undress at all. Gazing at her in annoyance, he had grinned and said, “Who knows? You might change your mind.”
The scenery in front of her eyes, unlike the scene in her mind, is comforting: a pale sky with strolling clouds. The weeping willows around the pond are drooping towards their shadows, and mallards are paddling around, indifferent to the passersby who linger to watch them. She spots a small child, with a parent on each side, trying to feed timid ducklings. From a distance, she cannot tell if the child, in blue pants and a yellow coat, is a boy or a girl. Boy or girl, the child’s wavy hair reminds her of Nader’s when he was the same age. She came to the garden to try to focus on the outside world, but everything reminds her of her son.
In Tehran, the well-manicured Niavaran Park would never be busy on an October weekday afternoon. Weekends were different, for the park had to embrace not only local visitors, but also those coming from the poor neighbourhoods in downtown Tehran to take advantage of the privileges granted to them by the revolution, including enjoying public spaces that had once been covertly exclusive. The park was situated at the foot of a royal palace, and it was now in the hands of those who had overthrown the monarchy. Niavaran Park was different from other parks. Even with the post-revolution inclusiveness, it had kept its pre-revolution name. No new name, no disguise, no false identity. Long ago, sitting on a bench with her back to the palace, Yalda had stared at the yellow fall foliage. She had wondered how the changed names of streets and parks had been destructive to her memory, her mind, her soul. That this park was still called Niavaran meant something. It was 1991. It was just a couple of days before Dadash Yunes was murdered, but she’d had no idea that was coming, and she was thinking about the good old days of meandering through that park with her Nader, her first love. That park had kept part of her past alive for her. It still evoked the melody of a Beatles song, “That Means a Lot,” which then had been their favourite. It meant that after sixteen years, visiting the park with her son, a four-year-old Nader, she was able to recall how wonderful, how fresh, how young the newly built garden had been when she was fresh, when her Nader was young, and when their love was wonderful.
