The Girl from the Garden by Parnaz Foroutan Page B

him a third time, and he imagined the glance of black animal eyes. A fourth time, and he searched his mind for the recollection of his bride’s eyes, for the eyes of this girl who walked around him. A fifth time and he could not remember the face of the veiled girl at all, not anything of her face. A sixth and he felt overwhelmed with fear. If he could stop the moments from advancing, silence the guests, the rabbi, his own breath, and steal quietly into the night. If he could reach his horse, and lead it softly to the street, into the open fields, over the mountains. If he could just hold this moment, perhaps cast everything into a deep slumber so that he might escape this inescapable dream. He opened his eyes to see Rakhel circle him for the seventh time. Then she stood beside him and someone placed her hands in his own lifeless hands and he felt no heat from either his own flesh, or hers. Nothing burned between them and his body became suddenly drenched with cold sweat and he thought, this, this is my death and he heard words and sipped wine and heard his own voice promise Haray aht m’kudeshet li b’taba’at zo k’dat Moshe v’ Yisrael in response and saw his own hand, trembling, place a gold ringon her extended finger and nothing seemed more impossible than what his body had already done, the betrayal of his hands, the betrayal of his voice. Asher heard the rabbi read the ketuba, and then instruct him to drink again and Asher raised a glass of dark wine to his lips and he understood, then, with great awe and terror, that he had deceived himself, and that this treason lurked within his own heart, a thief in the dark night of his own making, the one that will, soon, very soon, raise the sharp blade of his dagger and rend his very soul. That wine burned his throat, and he felt it spread to his heart and to his arms and to his hands, to his fingers and suddenly he felt Rakhel’s hand in his own. He breathed in her scent, this bride who was not the other, and his body betrayed him a third time. He brought down his foot with fury upon the glass, and with the clear sound of its shattering, he felt an intense desire for the veiled girl before him, felt it in his flesh and knew that, this time, there would be a quenching of thirst. Beneath the canopy of the chuppah, made of his father’s tallith, the prayer shawl that held the weight of his father’s hopes and fears and dreams, Asher remembered that the color of the eyes of his new bride was the shade of honey.

Five
    T he dayis a uniform gray. The sky still. Mahboubeh sits at the dining table and looks at the naked branches of the trees through the living room window. August is an immeasurable distance from now, she thinks. She rises heavily from the table and walks to the cold fireplace. She takes a book from the mantel and blows the dust from its cover. She returns to the table, sits and closes her eyes, the book resting in her lap. Then she opens the book to a random page and begins reading out loud. “Like Yakov, I am crying, for the beautiful face of Yousseff is mydesire. Without you, the city is my prison. Wandering, the mountain and desert are my desire.”
    Mahboubeh closes the book and remembers her father, Ibrahim, reciting these poems, his eyes closed, tears streaming down his face. As a child, she’d steal into his room, hide in a corner and listen to him, the book open in his lap, his head thrust back, reciting, almost singing poetry. When she became older, she learned the poems, too, by heart and wondered if it was the loss of her mother that inebriated her father with such sorrow that he sang from dawn to dusk, lost to the world before him.
    Before her mother’s death, her father was a religious man. Each day, on his way to the caravansary, Ibrahim walked first to the synagogue to bind his arms and place The Word upon his flesh in hope that the light that filtered in through the windows, in that instant, in the next, might illuminate a path. And in the