Women Without Men (7 page)

“So you were a lover throughout the war years,” Adeleh observed. “Good for you, girl.”

Now, on the balcony, Farrokhlaqa clasped her hands behind her head and stretched as she yawned. “Eight years of war,” she said loudly.

Golchehreh felt increasingly irritable without knowing why. He suddenly asked, “In menopause, do women undergo an emotional shift as well?”

“I don't know.”

“It must be so,” he speculated. “That is why polygamy is allowed for a man so he won't have to put up with a menopausal woman in his bed for the rest of his life.”

“Perhaps,” said Farrokhlaqa.

Golchehreh was reminded of that Polish émigré woman he had met in a tavern during the war. The woman knew little Persian and Golchehreh had taken to calling
her Farrokhlaqa. She had a hard time pronouncing it and thought it sounded funny.

“Faroklaka return Europa,” she had mumbled, laughing heartily, on the day that the news of the end of the war had reached Tehran. She was gone the following week.

“Will you be very upset if I marry another woman?” Golchehreh asked musingly. There was no reaction from Farrokhlaqa, who was gazing at the garden, deep in thought. She was thinking of the last time she had looked into Fakhroddin's face.

They were in his house, the door locked and curtains drawn. In the darkness of the room his eyes gleamed strangely.

“I need to go,” he had said. “I need to go and take care of my children.”

Farrokhlaqa was weeping soundlessly. “But I will return,” he said resolutely. “I promise I will.”

When the war ended, the American wife returned with Teddy and Jimmy. She acted erratically and seemed emotionally perturbed. At a party one night she had stood up and yelled, “You are all crazy.” It could have been the alcohol, or that the stress had been too much for her. Ten days later she took her children and left for America.

For some reason, Farrokhlaqa knew deep down in her heart that Fakhroddin would never come back to her. Five months later came the news that he had died in a car crash. She felt she was now alone in the world with only Golchehreh for company. Of course there were the children, but they had their own lives. They had grown so fast it was as if they had never been born.

Golchehreh had finished with the paper. He folded it and held it ready in anticipation of his wife wanting it back. This would open a line of conversation for him to talk about menopause, further annoying his wife. He had seen the word and learned about it in a reference book only three days earlier. He could foresee that a discussion of it would irritate her.

Farrokhlaqa persisted in her awkward silence. Her husband grew impatient and asked, “Don't you want the paper?” She reached out wordlessly and took it out of his hand. She then lit a cigarette.

“You mustn't smoke,” her husband warned. “At your age and with menopause coming you'll seriously hurt yourself.”

“Why don't you go for a walk?” she said, more as a suggestion than a question. “You go every day.”

“Perhaps I don't feel like it today,” he answered sharply.

She regretted asking the question. She was certain he would never leave the house if he suspected that his absence was a relief to her in any way.

“That's fine,” she said, sounding nonchalant. “It is better if you stay home today.”

“On second thought,” he said, rising to his feet, “I think I'll go for stroll after all.”

He felt hesitant to leave, as if something was likely to happen in his absence. He stood in front of her, thinking for a moment that it was no longer necessary to wear that sarcastic grin when looking at her. He realized that the grin was his defensive barrier against her overwhelming
desirability. Suddenly he did not feel the need for this barrier. He had an urge to look at her the way he looked at the Polish woman in the bar, the one he gave the name Farrokhlaqa. It was true his wife was now on the verge of menopause. She did not dream anymore, and went to bed early. She even snored sometimes. Perhaps he could now look at her in a natural, spontaneous way.

He followed her as she left the room, intercepting her at the landing. He interposed himself between her and the staircase with his back to the stairs.

“Farrokhlaqa darling,” he said.

There was a tremor of surprise in the woman. He had never addressed her in those terms. He always called her by a nickname. And that loathsome grin was not there. Instead there was in the tone of his voice a trace of what sounded like genuine affection. She shuddered with fear. She was certain there was an evil intention behind all this. “What if he wants to kill me?” she thought to herself. Instinctively, she sank her fist in his midriff as hard as she could. Under the blow his belly felt soft and resistless. It threw him off-balance. He tried uselessly to keep his foothold on the stairs but he could not. He took a headlong fall down the staircase. Farroklaqa steadied herself by leaning on a chair nearby. She averted her eyes from the bottom of the staircase where the man was sprawled on the floor, motionless.

Three months later, shriveled and dressed in black, Farrokhlaqa was sitting on a chair. Mosayeb was delivering a message from Mr. Ostovary, the real-estate agent. In
case the lady thought of selling the house, she should let him know. At one point she had casually told Mosayeb that she might want to sell the house if Ostovary could find her a suitable garden villa in Karadj. Ostovary had found one near the river.

Mrs. Farrokhlaqa Sadroddin Golchehreh bought the villa, sold the house, and moved to Karadj.

ZARRINKOLAH WAS TWENTY-SIX and a prostitute. She lived at Golden Akram's brothel in the city's notorious red-light district. Akram, the madam, had seven gold teeth. That was why some people called her “Akram the Seven.”

Zarrinkolah had lived there since puberty. In the early years she had three or four customers a day, but now at twenty-six, she serviced twenty, twenty-five, even thirty customers a day. Several times she had complained to Akram about the pressure of work, but all she got was a tongue lashing, and once even a beating. She had learned her lesson.

Zarrinkolah was a jolly person by nature. She had always been cheerful—from the time when she received three or four guests a day until now when she handled twenty or thirty. She even expressed her complaints as jokes. The women liked her tremendously. During lunch breaks she would crack jokes or carry out comedy routines, and the women responded with peals of laughter.

On some occasions she toyed with the idea of leaving the house, but the women had pleaded with her to stay. Without her, they said, the house would be cheerless. It was possible that some of them had egged Akram on to beat her. In reality, she was never serious about leaving; she had no place else to go but to another establishment like this one. At nineteen she had had a real chance of leaving when she had a suitor. He was an ambitious bricklayer who dreamed of becoming a contractor. Unfortunately, before he could carry through with his proposal, he had his skull split by a shovel in a fight. By now Zarrinkolah was resigned to her fate, although she complained from time to time.

But for the past six months Zarrinkolah had been experiencing a serious problem with the way her mind worked. It all started one Saturday morning. She got up, drank a glass of water, and was getting ready for breakfast. “Zarry,” she heard Akram shout from downstairs. “You have a customer and he is in a hurry.”

Usually, there were no customers in the morning, except those who had stayed overnight and fancied extra treatment before they left. So what? Zarrinkolah had thought to herself that morning, to hell with customers
so early in the morning.

Before she could give voice to her thoughts, she heard Akram's voice again, louder and sharper this time, “I'm talking to you, Zarry. The customer is on his way.”

Zarrinkolah gave up on breakfast. Angrily she went back to her room, threw herself on the bed and parted her thighs.

The customer came into the room. It was a man with no head. She was so frightened she couldn't scream. She submitted to him frozen with fear. He finished his business and left. That day all her customers were headless. She kept it to herself afraid that she might be accused of being possessed by evil spirits. She had heard of another woman afflicted with evil possession who would let out blood-curdling screams around eight o'clock at night scaring away customers at the peak of business hours. The woman had been turned out of the house and had disappeared without a trace. Zarrinkolah had assumed that the time the spirits visited was eight at night. She thought of singing at that hour to ward them off. For the past six months she had been breaking into song at eight o'clock. Unfortunately she had a poor voice and could not carry a tune. “You slut,” a traveling musician, frustrated by her singing off key, had barked at her. “You have no voice and you've given me a headache.” After that Zarrinkolah had taken to going down to the basement washroom to practice out of earshot. Akram the Seven was watching her bizarre routine, but didn't mind it as long as she served her daily quota of customers and did so cheerfully.

After a while, a fifteen-year-old girl was recruited to join the house. She was painfully shy. One day Zarrinkolah beckoned her upstairs to her room.

“Listen to me, kid,” she addressed her, “I have to tell you something. I have to tell someone, or I'll go mad. It is a secret that's eating me up.”

“Of course one has to confide in someone,” said the girl, sounding precocious. “My grandma told me that when His Holiness Ali
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couldn't find anyone to trust with his thoughts, he would go into the desert, lean into an abandoned well, and tell his secrets.”

“That's right,” said Zarrinkolah, “now I'm telling you that I see all people without heads, I mean men, not women.

“Do you really?” said the girl sympathetically, without any trace of skepticism.

“Yes!”

“Perhaps they really don't have any heads.”

“But other women would notice something like that, too.”

“That is true,” the girl said contemplatively. “It is possible they also see the men headless but like you are afraid to talk about it.”

So they agreed to exchange signals if either one of them saw a headless man. The experiment indicated that only Zarrinkolah saw headless men.

“Zarrinkolah,” the girl addressed her with an air of authority, “You must say your prayers. You should give alms. Perhaps you will be able to see men with heads again.”

Zarrinkolah asked Akram the Seven for a two-day furlough. She headed to the local bathhouse, and reserved a private stall for herself. She also asked for a masseuse and told the woman to scrub every inch of her body with utmost care. She ordered the masseuse to repeat the process three times. By now Zarrinkolah's skin was raw with excessive scrubbing as if blood was about to seep out of her pores. The masseuse was exhausted and almost on the verge of tears. “You poor woman,” she said, “You're insane.”

Zarrinkolah gave her a hefty tip and asked for her discretion. She then asked the masseuse to teach her the process of devotional ablution. After the masseuse left, she performed the ablution ritual meticulously, and kept repeating it over and over, nearly fifty times, still feeling her skin on fire from the severity of the scrubbing the masseuse had given her.

Finally she decided to get dressed and prepare for a visit to the shrine of Shah Abdolazim. But she felt an urge to prostrate herself, naked as she was, in prayer and plead for God's grace. It occurred to her that she did not remember the required formalities and incantations for such an appeal. She then remembered Imam Ali and his agony in telling his secrets to a well. She thought of invoking his name and asking for his intercession with God on her behalf.

“Ali, Ali, Ali,” she moaned repeatedly as she dropped to her knees naked and pressed her forehead on the floor. She then burst into a fit of sobbing, still repeating “Ali, Ali, Ali.”

Someone was beating on the door of the stall.

“Who is it?” she asked, still crying.

“We're closing the bathhouse for the night,” came the answer.

Zarrinkolah put on fresh clothes, leaving the old ones behind, and started walking toward the shrine. By the time she got there the shrine was closed for the night. She sat on the grass near the gate. The sky was cloudless, and the courtyard was lit up by moonlight. Zarrinkolah wept soundlessly.

When the gate to the shrine was opened in the morning, Zarrinkolah's eyes were no more than narrow slits in her face, her eyes having receded behind swollen eyelids. She did not enter the shrine. She was not crying anymore. She felt as light as air, like a piece of straw being carried along by the wind. From a street vendor she bought a bowl of porridge.

“Where can one find a breath of cool air in this beastly summer heat?” she asked the vendor.

“Karadj isn't bad,” he replied, looking at her swollen eyes compassionately.

She headed for Karadj.

AT SUNSET TWO WOMEN, one twenty-eight and the other thirty-eight years old, both wearing chadors, were walking along the highway to Karadj. They were both virgins.

At mile marker eighteen, a truck came to a halt thirty feet away from them. There were three men in the cab. The driver and his assistant were drunk; the passenger was not. Several times along the trip, the passenger had had to grab the steering wheel to avoid a collision, or to stop the truck from running off the road. Finally, he had given up on interfering and decided to let fate take its course.

When the truck stopped, the driver beckoned to his assistant to get out. The two walked toward the women.
The passenger took the opportunity to stretch and light a cigarette.