Brides of Blood by Joseph Koenig Page A

Spotting Hormoz in his capelike abayah at the head of a group of students, he followed into a side room where Hormoz recited a prayer with the copious tears that were the mark of a famous marja. Measured against Farib’s sobs the old man was found wanting in his fervor. Darius knew Hormoz as an intellectual who tested his faith daily against the reason of a world he never had turned his back on. Farib, better educated, and Westernized, had blinded herself to the contradictions of dogma frozen in obscure, seventh-century political rancor. But her weeping was not for the sister of the eighth imam exclusively, but to be shared with the martyr from the District of Columbia, who, caught up in events she couldn’t control, had taken sanctuary in the veil.
    Hormoz clacked his stone beads while he chanted “Forgiveness” three hundred times. Snatches of prayer recalled from religious grade school came together on the back of Darius’s tongue. They dissolved there like a crumbling pill as he left the shrine, rubbing the sore spot in his chest.
    Hormoz’s house was an open hearth under the rays of the morning sun. Darius played the brackish water of the new shower against his depleted muscles. He needed a shave, but Farib hadn’t packed his razor. Using cuticle scissors, he trimmed a week’s growth to several days’ stubble, and then he cut away the dressing from his head. The wound was too sensitive to go near with his fingers. He rubbed color into the wan stripe high on his forehead, and combed wet hair over the bald patch surrounding his stitches.
    A draft of hot air blistered the skin across his shoulders. He squinted at Hormoz stenciled in the doorway against the low sun.
    “I saw you at Fatemeh’s shrine,” Hormoz said. He came down the corridor diffidently. When his wife was still alive, this part of the house had been the anderoun, the inside, or women’s area, which he seldom visited. His room was the biroun, the outside, or master’s apartment. “In your bandages you looked like a holy man.”
    “The National Police are masters of disguise.”
    Hormoz patted Darius’s rough cheek. “What disguise is this?”
    “A well man.” Darius splashed cold water against his face, and then he toweled off. “I’m returning to Teheran.”
    “Farib, too?”
    “That’s up to her. But I’ve been away from work too long.”
    “She’ll be disappointed. Ayatollah Ardebili, the former chief justice, will be at Faiziyeh this afternoon to talk about proposed changes in the laws of Houdoud and Qesas. She asked that you be allowed to sit in.”
    “What else has she planned for the period of my recovery?”
    “There are seminars every day during the month of Muharram,” Hormoz said. “And she thought you might visit Mobarakabad and other famous mosques.”
    “It’s futile to attempt to make me devout—even in my weakened condition.”
    “She knows. But it’s become clear to her that the marriage has no future so long as your lives continue in opposing directions. As it is, you’ve grown apart. The need for you to remain my nephew is not a sufficient foundation for an enduring relationship.”
    “Since one of us must change, let it be her. I’ve tried—”
    “Farib already has changed.”
    “She can change back.”
    “Do you believe that is still possible?”
    Darius borrowed more hair from his temple to conceal the white patch. “No,” he said, “not really.”
    “Grant her the divorce she wants, and the freedom to find her way.” Hormoz’s stone beads came out, and silently he began counting Allahu Akhbars. “If you feel in jeopardy not being under the protection of my name, then you must flee as so many others have. You’ve lived outside the country before. Farib agrees that was the happiest part of your life. You speak excellent English, you have an American university degree. You came back from Washington more American than Iranian in attitude.”
    Darius wanted to interrupt, but deferred to the