The Temporary Bride Read online

  Copyright

  This memoir reflects the author’s life faithfully rendered to the best of her ability.

  Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Klinec

  Cover design/illustration by Kimberly Glyder

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Twelve

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  twelvebooks.com

  twitter.com/twelvebooks

  Originally published in the United Kingdom by Virago September 2014

  First U.S. Trade Paperback Edition: February 2017

  Twelve is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

  The Twelve name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944110

  ISBNs: 978-1-4555-3769-3 (trade paperback); 978-1-4555-3768-6 (ebook); 978-1-4789-6276-2 (audiobook downloadable)

  E3-20170116-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Eleven Memories I am Taking with Me

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with Jennifer Klinec

  Newsletters

  For my mother. For Vahid.

  Prologue

  We have begun what has grown into a daily ritual. It starts with me taking my morning’s thrill-seeking taxi ride through the crowded streets of Yazd, to her apartment complex on the edge of the city. Normally each morning, I ask the driver to stop on the way to buy flowers and he frets impatiently as I pick through the wilted irises and tulips that have somehow found their way to this place in the desert. But this morning’s driver makes me uncomfortable, so I don’t ask him to stop.

  Older than the other taxi drivers I’ve had, he isn’t sporting the latest gelled-up, parrot hairstyle. No sun-bleached, hand-lettered taxi sign is strapped onto the roof of his car. Despite the ninety-degree weather he is wearing a jacket over a thick, coarse-wool sweater. His car smells faintly of rosewater and tobacco.

  As he drives he clacks a string of wooden prayer beads loudly between his fingers. The dashboard is taped up with worn prints of bearded prophets in fading shades of green. He is the kind of devout, unsmiling man I can still feel intimidated by.

  He is silent during the twenty-minute journey from where he picked me up, honking and swerving his battered Paykan to where I’d stood at the curb. This is likely a second job, carried out for a few hours each morning, the consequence of rising inflation and three currency devaluations in the last year alone.

  I reach down to fidget with the length of rust-colored cotton resting in my lap from the scarf that loosely circles my head. A new habit picked up quickly. A green-handled screwdriver jammed into the gap next to my window rattles as we turn down the dusty, wide road lined with sand-colored brick buildings where Vahid lives with his parents. I hand over the equivalent of ten dollars, more than double what the trip should cost, and know enough not to wait for change.

  In the three days that I have been coming here the guards have quickly learned my face. They look up from their newspapers to wave me through the entrance and up the stairs.

  Vahid’s mother wears black every day. I want to greet her with a hug but it’s still too soon. She keeps her scarf on each time I come and lowers her head when I try to take photographs. Over cups of cinnamon tea we thumb through our combined collection of cookbooks to plan the day’s menu: chicken in pomegranate and walnut sauce or a fish stew fragrant with fenugreek and tamarind, the latter a specialty of her native Khuzestan.

  We sit on the floor with a silver tray between us, sorting through mountains of fresh mint, basil and parsley. I rip away roots knotted with sand and tiny pebbles, and slosh the leaves through a bucket of salt water. She tears the skins from a pile of onions and slices them in her hand. Her small knife strikes against her palm and neat, tidy crescents fall away into a plastic bowl. She measures rice, dipping a chipped cup rimmed with gold and patterned with roses that lives inside the bag for exactly this purpose. Four cups full instead of three, because I am still considered a guest and it would be a great shame if I were not given extra when the meal is served.

  I can sense by the way she smiles at me and her deep sighs of “akheish” that I am tipping the balance in this house. I imagine she’s been missing the presence of her only female child. Vahid’s sister lives near the Iraqi border, twenty-six hours away by bus. She hums while we work, a humming that sounds too powerful for her slight build, a humming that sounds neither calming nor cheery. Instead, it wafts around me in a way that keeps me aware of her presence, a center of gravity in the kitchen we share.

  Neither Vahid nor his father says much to her during our long mornings cooking together. Instead they attempt rudimentary repairs. The enormous cooler is removed from where it hangs suspended from the ceiling. They pry the filters loose with screwdrivers and take them to the balcony to bang them free of dust. Their tasks are social, involving long consultations with neighbors and the seeking of advice. Hers is solitary, the work of the sole woman of the house. They enter the kitchen only to reach around her to steal a peeled carrot from a bowl or a stray piece of cauliflower. Otherwise I see them only at mealtimes when they return from outdoors or rise from their places on the scarlet and navy carpet to throw open the door to the daily tide of relatives who wash in at lunchtime.

  Each day, as the house fills with the aroma of saffron, pomegranate syrup or onions fried in butter, our work is not unlike that of some ancient royal court. We decorate each dish with swirls of cream and stripes of chopped herbs. We snap the sofreh tablecloth sharply in the air. Without speaking, we glide our palms over it in a coordinated motion, smoothing any creases from its gold-threaded pattern after laying it on the floor. We cover it with platters of rice flecked with barberries, bowls of fragrant stews and little jars of the homemade pickles labeled in her hand. The men are quick to sit, eating everything almost without speaking, their eyes glued to the television. As their plates empty they are automatically refilled by their wives. Scraps of fire-singed bread are set before them; the handle of the doogh pitcher, the drinking yogurt Vahid’s mother leaves on the window ledge each night to ferment and turn fizzy, is turned toward them for their easy reach. In this house life quietly arranges itself around the men who watch CNN and the BBC.

  I half l
isten but I am not so interested. The reporter is talking about the upcoming elections. Ahmadinejad is making a speech. As the men struggle to understand the English voiceover they attempt loud interpretations—a commentary of pointing and shouting, with mouths half full of the food we have cooked. No one thinks to ask me.

  Vahid’s father is always the loudest. “Down, down America.”

  Tea follows lunch. The pots and dishes are gathered up and brought to the kitchen. Leftovers are scraped into empty yogurt containers to be reheated for dinner, and plates and cutlery are piled into the sink. I roll up my sleeves to wash the dishes but Vahid’s mother shoos me away. She gestures that I should sit instead with the men; a treat for me. I glance at Vahid’s father and uncles who remain sitting on the floor, dislodging particles from their teeth with wooden toothpicks. I shuffle across the room toward an aunt instead. She and I take turns cutting a pile of oval toftoon bread with scissors, stacking the pieces in quarters and wrapping them in cloth for the evening’s meal. When we finish I feel her press a ring into my hand. It is heavy and silver with a gaudy red stone. I smile as I try it on, pressing my fingers together to keep it from sliding off.

  “She is very proud to give you that ring which she bought in Mecca,” says Vahid. “You are the first foreigner she has ever met so she wants you to have it. But don’t worry,” he adds, “I know you think it’s ugly so you don’t have to wear it.”

  The latch on the hall closet makes a tinny clink when opened, signifying the start of the afternoon naps. We reach for the pillows stashed inside and the woolen blankets safety-pinned with thin, cotton coverings. The women retire to one room while the men sleep in another. As I tiptoe cautiously around the moms and aunties who have already settled themselves into tidy rows on the floor, there is a giddy atmosphere of freedom that comes from separation from men. It is only my third or fourth day of coming here but already I have a usual spot, in the corner underneath the thick yellow curtains that shield us from view.

  I hear coughs and faint snoring from the living room, and catch glimpses of Vahid’s father and uncles, wrapped loosely in sheets. They have stripped down to the gray cotton long underwear they wear under their trousers. Elasticated, cuffed ankles jut out in all directions. The whispered prayers of the women around me soften into quiet breathing. I am amazed once more by the ease with which they fall asleep with me, still a stranger, among them.

  Though the intimacy of the moment prevents me from sleeping, I feel pleased to have earned my place on their floor.

  Suddenly, by accident, I have found myself pulled—even accepted—into the inner circle of an Iranian household. As a warm feeling of affection washes over me, I close my eyes and fall asleep.

  Chapter One

  Growing up, my memories of the kitchen were of being chased out of it by my mother. Frazzled from a long day at work but committed to putting something homemade on our dinner table, she wanted no obstacles, no potential spillages, and certainly none of our eager curiosity in the way as she rushed to peel potatoes or slice raw onions into a cucumber salad. The consequence of her efficiency was that I didn’t learn to cook a thing from my mother. Not a thing.

  I was born in south-western Ontario to immigrant parents. The rural county road where we lived was little more than a gravel track and a kind of wild, pioneer lifestyle was in force. People burned their own garbage and showered in sulfur-smelling water pumped up from wells. They shot raccoons and occasionally each other’s barn cats with hunting rifles. A big yellow bus collected my sister and me at the end of our driveway each morning for the hour-long journey to school. It didn’t take long to figure out that we were a little weirder than the Anglo-Saxon kids in our neighborhood. Carcasses of lambs or pigs were roasted over a spit on our front lawn. Thermoses of stewed giblets and cabbage were put into our lunch boxes. My mom’s sour-cherry strudel stood out at bake sales against the towering Jell-O molds and Rice Krispies squares. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts weren’t part of our food vocabulary. In spite of my banishment, I was as voracious and eager a child as could be. My mother’s forbidden kitchen with its meaty, paprika-dense scent captured my imagination and I devoured every drop of her sour-cream-thickened stews, her fluffy semolina dumplings and the vinegary cabbage salads she crushed between her fingers.

  Our house was strict and mealtimes were sacred. Unlike my classmates who ate dinner at five-thirty from plates in their laps in their basement rec rooms or in front of the TV, we rarely ate before eight o’clock and always at the table. My mother, who frequently went back and forth to fetch cold beers for my father, sat nearest the kitchen. His place close to the window was marked by a dish of olives and an empty plate for bones. Bones of all shapes were a revered item in our house and we learned early to twist chicken wings in our mouths to snap them in two and scrape our teeth against pork ribs to seek out the satisfying tear of their tasty, paper-thin membranes.

  My parents were part of a generation of strivers for whom money and gain meant everything. My father had arrived in Toronto in the late 1960s with twenty-one dollars in his pocket and not a word of English. He considered his thick Hungarian accent to be his biggest curse and vowed that his own children would speak perfectly. He kept us away from the groups of other Eastern Europeans who met frequently in halls and church basements to socialize and pine for “the old country.” Instead he worked day and night shifts as an electrician, said yes to anything else that came up in between and built a New World cocoon around all of us. He never returned to the flatlands of northern Serbia where he was raised, not even when his father was dying of lung cancer.

  My mother came to Canada on a boat with my grandmother when she was five, sailing from the Yugoslavian port of Rijeka to Montreal. My grandmother had become pregnant with her just after getting married. My mother remembers little of the journey to Canada, only that she was sick most of the way. My grandfather, like many of his generation, was fiercely patriotic and couldn’t bear to see Croatia fall under the influence of communism. While my grandmother was pregnant, he went off to join one of Yugoslavia’s many wars, then emigrated via Austria to Canada, leaving them behind. My mother was born on a bed of straw in a barn that had been cleared of livestock. For five years they ate little but dried bread moistened with salted water or bean broth. Eventually my grandfather was pressured to apply for visas for them and to send money for their boat passage. My grandparents slept in separate bedrooms for as long as I can remember

  My grandmother, Baba Stanešič, learned her English mainly from watching television, which gave her an abrupt, stilted way of speaking. Combined with her humorless face and the violence of her gestures, she could scatter neighborhood children off her driveway in a matter of seconds. My grandmother was nothing like the mémés and nanas of my school friends who were all cuddles, home-baked shortbread and blind, unconditional love. Our baba preferred to fill our heads with talk of death, superstition and the curses of menopause. Her walls were hung with paintings of Jesus, and her drawers were filled with Kotex. Come winter or summer, she wore thick woolen tights.

  When we took her to lunch at one of the nondescript chain restaurants that filled our city, she dismissed our offers to visit the salad bar, demanding loudly that she wanted to eat meat. She wore saggy purple sweatpants under a long, navy trench coat every day except Sundays, when she wore every stick of jewelry she owned to church. Bursting with her crocheted doilies, Croatian flags, photographs of Tito and religious icons, her house had an ornate, museum-like quality, full of things I was to look at but never touch. The only times I felt close to her were on the occasions we went there for lunch, when she cooked the food of a peasant childhood. Her golden chicken broth glistened with pools of fat and swam with tiny homemade egg noodles and her salty cabbage rolls were stewed with leather-like hunks of smoked sausage. I watched in awe as she grated cabbages on a wooden mandoline, her broad shoulders and man-like arms packing them with salt into glass jars, storing them to ferment in her eerie, spiderless
cellar with walls so red my sister used to tell me they had been painted with pig’s blood. Her desserts were neither light nor colorful but dense, dark and unflashy, bundt sponges infused with coffee or chocolate, cakes made with cornmeal and pulverized walnuts, hazelnut crescents rolled thickly in powdered sugar.

  When my sister and I were ten and eleven, on the brink of becoming teenagers, our grandmother began a campaign of counsel and advice about men—how to catch them, how to keep them, and how she believed we should make them happy. She criticized our physical appearance—the cut-off jeans and plastic flip-flops we wore, and the combs we quickly dragged through our hair—insisting that “If you want to get married, you need to wear tight black dresses and lots of makeup!” Once we hit menstruating age, she chased us away from stone fireplace hearths and boulders in the garden, cold surfaces she believed would affect our ability to have children if sat upon, and she chastised me for my long, thrillingly fast bicycle rides, claiming they threatened my virginity. She told us that, once we were married, we had a duty to keep our houses clean and our fridges well stocked or our husbands were entitled to beat us until we were shades of blue and purple.

  When my parents met I imagine they were perfect for each other. My mother, who had remained an only child, was then fifteen. Her childhood was primarily a solitary one and although she’d become an attractive teenager, she was shy and inexperienced. My father was twenty-one and just beginning to feel the pangs of exile. He drank, smoked, had long sideburns and was confidently handsome. My mother tells me he thought of himself as a bit of a ladies’ man. Arriving in Canada to find that his electrician’s qualifications meant nothing was hard on him. For two years he resorted to driving a taxi at night while he studied English and prepared to qualify for a Canadian certification. His new life was unexpectedly lonely. No one could pronounce or spell his name correctly. No one appreciated his dry sense of humor. One day when he was working on a construction site, he told the foreman’s assistant that his name was “MacKlinec” after all the Scotsmen he’d encountered, and she punched the lettering into a piece of red adhesive tape that he wore on the front of his hard hat.