The Temporary Bride Read online

  Vahid is waiting for me as he promised, nodding approvingly that his instructions have been followed to the letter. He calls out, “Hi, Jenny,” but says little more to me, speaking instead to the driver, telling him where to take us next. He sits up front, looking pleased to be in charge of everything. We stop again at a busy roundabout where minibuses and taxis are jostling for passengers. The sound of them calling out is energizing, the noise of the day’s commerce coming to life. I climb out of the car and follow Vahid down a concrete stairway that leads to an underground passage.

  “It’s this way,” he says. “I can smell the soup from here.”

  As we pass under the fluorescent strip lighting, I breathe in the musty scent and the dank air that flows up around us, taking it all as a good sign. Though it serves little purpose other than to sell cigarettes to pedestrians traversing the busy roundabout overhead, to me this underground passageway instinctively seems perfect. The ground is littered with banana chewing-gum wrappers. The rusty pipes overhead leak fluid. Vahid quickens his step as if he knows what I am thinking. I can see he feels not the slightest embarrassment in bringing me here.

  “So the way it works is this,” he explains. “We order our soup, and then we choose which parts of the animal we want and he’ll put them on a separate plate for us. We have a choice of brains, tongue, foot, or eyeballs.”

  “Eyeballs!” I gasp aloud.

  He pauses in front of a large window that drips with slow trails of condensation, looking as if he has forgotten something.

  “Are you sure you want to go here?” He hesitates. “My mom has sometimes come here to buy soup for home but she would never sit down and eat inside.”

  I understand he is seeking reassurance as much for himself as for me, thinking I might feel singled out and exposed. In response I pull my scarf forward and tuck away any loose strands of hair in a show of modesty, knowing if my presence causes any offense it is Vahid who will be made to explain.

  The tabaakhi has no more than four tables. One is occupied by a group of men in starched shirts with stiff, leather satchels resting in a tidy row at their feet. Their collars are stuffed with overlapping sheets of Kleenex and they hunch forward over their steaming metal bowls to avoid splashing themselves. In between slurps they mop the perspiration from their foreheads with bunched-up handkerchiefs held tightly in their fists.

  At first I am almost disappointed, having expected coarser, rougher company. The floor is swept clean instead of littered with spat-out bones and discarded bits of cartilage. Used paper napkins have been crumpled and placed in the bin. A turbaned mullah chants the morning prayers from a TV hung on a bracket on the wall, all long vowels and exaggerated rhythm. One of the men gets up from his chair and switches the channel, settling on a football match between Argentina and Brazil. Behind cupped hands the men discreetly scrape at their teeth with wooden toothpicks, impeccable manners I find disconcerting. Perhaps it is these same manners that allow me to be here at all, I remind myself. My presence is marked only by fleeting glances of recognition and shuffling of chairs.

  A white-bearded man enters and breaks the silence, grumbling praises to Allah as a greeting to no one in particular. His long, baggy shirt and trousers could easily pass for pajamas and the undone metal clasps on his sandals flap as he moves. He places a battered pot and lid brought from home on the counter, explaining his wife is pregnant with their fifth child and unable to prepare the morning meal without vomiting. “Ya ali,” he mutters through thick, dry lips, asking God to grant him strength. As soup is poured into his pot with scraps of the cheaper meat from the foot, he takes notice of us and turns, speaking solely to Vahid. He assumes by my presence Vahid has plans to go abroad, tells him what a shame it is for Iran to lose her young people. “The West isn’t the same as here,” he says, “they don’t care for each other as we do in this country. You could die in the street there and no one will notice you,” he warns, shaking his head in a mournful fashion. Vahid nods respectfully as one might with a grandparent, as though humoring him but thinking him hopelessly old-fashioned. Vahid then turns, bringing the conversation swiftly to an end, ordering bowls of soup and a plate of tongue and brains for us to share.

  The teenage boy behind the counter begins talking as he fetches two tin bowls from a shelf behind, as if nothing were unusual about our arrival. He notices my interest, my leaning to peer over the counter, and invites me to step into the rear to see where he works, looking bemused. He shows me the gas flame he uses to burn the hairs off the sheep’s heads, the enormous pot he places them in to boil. He points to a cleaver he splits the feet in two with—a trick the previous owner taught him—to encourage the bone marrow and gelatine to spill out and thicken the broth. In spite of the streaks of grease on his white smock and the blistered skin on his fingers from pulling scalding meat from bones, I am shocked to learn the young boy is also the owner. With his chin, he gestures at a small platform bed tucked under the counter, where he sleeps from midnight until 4 a.m. while the heads and feet simmer with onions and turmeric. He once overslept while making the soup for a wedding, he says, waking to find it had reduced to little more than a dark, wobbling jelly. He smacks his lips, describing how he couldn’t resist spreading a few spoonfuls on bread, before thinning it again with several teapots full of water.

  Beside the counter a large bucket of discarded skulls and feet steam faintly, having been stripped clean of all meat and gristle. Vahid tugs on my sleeve impatiently, urging me to rejoin him. “The leftover bones are always kept separate,” he says. “Some men will come later to take them. They grind them to powder and use it for fertilizer.”

  “Tell her it is because of the sanctions,” the boy tells Vahid, “that before the revolution we could import everything.”

  We are all too young to know anything of life before 1979 but I know it already as commonplace, to reminisce about the “Shah times” when access to foreign commodities was easy. I’ve seen photos of the years when Tehran could have easily been mistaken for London or New York, with women dressing in miniskirts and Western goods lining the shelves. Days when it was not yet illegal for men to wear a tie and young graduates worked in the glassy office complexes of European firms in the expanding district of Abbas Abad. Tourists drank martinis in the lobbies of the Intercontinental and the Hilton, and went to nightclubs to hear Ebi and Googoosh, who have since gone into exile. Wealthy Iranians apparently used to think nothing of flying to Paris to go shopping or to New York to visit their children studying for PhDs. Now they must pay hundreds of dollars for visas that take months and a mountain of documents to obtain.

  In a flurry of gestures and excess, the boy passes a chipped oval plate of wobbly meat to Vahid, who taps his heart in a gesture of thanks. I can guess that the portion has been doubled as a show of kindness.

  We take our seats in the corner and another boy drops a newspaper-wrapped parcel on our table. Vahid opens it to reveal a warm stack of bread and passes the boy a handful of notes. Our soup is fluorescent yellow from turmeric, and the tongue and brains are sprinkled with cinnamon and lemon juice. Our spoons slice through the meat easily and I am pleased to see that, like me, Vahid possesses a generous appetite in the morning. He passes me a parchment-like slab of flatbread, eager that I eat in the same fashion as he does. He instructs me to tileet, to tear the bread into bite-sized pieces and let them drop slowly into the broth. “Wait,” he says, reaching across to push my bread fragments under the little pools of fat that glisten on the surface of my bowl. “Now,” he nods when they have become engorged and fluffy, “it’s ready.” As we sip the soup from our spoons and pass each other more bread to scoop up what little broth remains in our bowls, Vahid begins to explain our plans for the day.

  “I have asked about where the camel butcher is. We have to go to a place about thirty kilometers outside of the city. I will find a taxi and bargain the price to take us there.”

  “A butcher thirty kilometers outside of the city?” I ask. �
�Don’t they have these kinds of places in Yazd?”

  “No,” Vahid says, looking startled. “It is very messy to kill a camel. We have to go to a special place for that and its location is outside of the town.”

  I am confused at first and start to laugh. But soon I realize there has been a terrible misunderstanding. This wasn’t what I’d meant at all. He is talking about taking me to a slaughterhouse.

  “Are you serious?” I ask, stunned. “Will they let us go there?”

  “Yes, of course they will let us go there. Don’t you want to go there?”

  I turn the plastic shakers of sumac and lemon juice in my hands, unsure whether to feel pleased or hurt, whether he really thinks I am so morbid with such a taste for gore.

  “Don’t worry,” Vahid says, leaning forward, “for us it is normal. When I was fourteen I helped my father kill a sheep in our back garden for the end of Ramazan.” I look at him. He hasn’t shaved this morning and the thick stubble on his face and the deep creases in his forehead make him look older than twenty-five.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I say, finally, wiping the soup from my chin and rising to wash my hands at the small sink in the corner. We leave a few crumpled ten-thousand-rial notes on the counter and I readjust my scarf before stepping outside into the cool morning air.

  Vahid hails a taxi and from the gruffness of his voice I can tell he is bargaining with the driver. “I have agreed a good price for us,” he says and turns to open the back door for me. He makes to get in the passenger’s seat next to the driver, but then pauses and shuffles across the backseat beside me. “I will sit next to you,” he says, smiling, but looking shy.

  The driver eyes us carefully in his rearview mirror, hesitates, and then with a shrug of his shoulders raises the volume on his radio and pulls away from the curb. The traffic is just starting to build as we drive first east, then south through the city and toward the desert. I take my first photograph of us, sitting together in the back of the taxi with the sun behind us just beginning to rise.

  Even from a distance the slaughterhouse is ugly and shabby, its construction little more than rough-painted breeze-blocks oozing a crumbling, cement paste. As we get closer I can see the surrounding acre of gray asphalt, parked with battered old Peugeots and dusty pickup trucks. A group of men in bloodstained smocks lean against one wall, smoking cigarettes, speaking quietly into their mobile phones. Their bearded faces glow in shades of amber, lit by a single yellow lightbulb hanging from a wire over the doorway.

  One of the slaughtermen sees me and calls out loudly to Vahid, “Isn’t she scared to be here? Women don’t come to this place.” I hear the word “Canada” and feel a number of heads turn in my direction, causing my face to burn with embarrassment. I lower my gaze and concentrate instead on Vahid, the slightly uninterested tone of voice I am accustomed to, explaining me away in Persian.

  We walk to the entrance and I peer through the doorway. The dozen men inside have the dark complexions of Kurds or Afghans, black eyes and sunken cheeks that seem suited to this place. Wearing high rubber boots and thick woolen caps, they lean against the cracked, tiled walls in sluggish expectation. Long knives with chipped plastic handles swing from the loops of their belts as they joke and gesture lazily.

  A small pickup truck reverses to a concrete loading ramp opposite. With a bang it drops its rear metal panel to unload a densely packed cargo of goats and sheep. Some of the animals sense danger and urinate without control onto the cracked, stained floor. Others bolt for the entrance and try to escape. I stifle an inane giggle as the men grab the animals by a leg, dragging them back limping on the other three. It is the kind of confused laughter that comes at a funeral or on hearing something shocking, usually accompanied by a feeling of helplessness and despair. I fear someone will demand an explanation for my presence or point a finger in my direction, assuming people normally come here to choose a carcass for a birthday feast or wedding. I can do little but stand and lean against a wall stupidly, fiddling with the ends of my scarf in a way I know must look furtive and self-conscious. I avoid their languid, showing-off smiles and the way they regard me, over their shoulders or out of the corners of their eyes. It’s too late now to huddle into a corner and lower my gaze, to try to make a point of not being seen.

  The killing is swift and methodical. As each animal’s throat is cut it is laid on its side to bleed over a metal grate. Despite myself I am unable to take my eyes off the twitching carcasses, or the men who surround them in gangs of four. I step back as they roll their thick sweaters up to their elbows and take long final drags on their cigarettes, hoisting the bodies onto large metal hooks. In a matter of moments the animals are skinned and their organs removed, tangles of warm intestines and livers and hearts heaped into buckets without ceremony. It is only when the half-digested, grassy contents of their stomachs are emptied into a wheelbarrow that Vahid gags and rushes outside. I feel a flicker of irritation at him for suggesting we come here and then not being stoic enough to tolerate it.

  Within moments the animals have been transformed into clean rows of pink bodies and the procedure calms to something routine and mechanical. It feels impossible not to soak it all up, the marked contrast to the prettiness and constrained order of how I live. In London I can be made to feel guilty taking even a pair of scissors to a bunch of parsley instead of plucking it leaf by leaf onto a sheet of paper towel, working in a state of such fierce concentration I have on occasion sliced straight through my finger or scorched a pattern of lines across my arm. I recall the hours I’ve deliberated over recipes for my classes, things I dream up and am dying to teach. The tiny quails I want to spear onto skewers and roast, the messy bowls of octopus braised in olive oil with whole hunks of potatoes, ideas that never see the light of day. Everything must be tempered and tamed for the people who come, wanting to know how packages of sauce could be doctored with this or that, who laugh, giddy at the heaviness of my knives in their hands. People who weekly cause me to wake in the middle of the night startled, grasping for imaginary ingredients around me: a bunch of carrots, a wet fish, anything I can improvise for a class at a moment’s notice.

  Vahid stumbles back inside, pressing a tissue clumsily to his mouth. He looks at me surrounded by all this blood and mess as though I am a delicate bird or newborn chick, fearful I am in danger of breaking down into tears. He inspects my face for signs of sadness or melancholy, but the truth is I am perfectly calm. I see the twitch of a smile and he shakes his head as if bemused by something. He paces a little as if to make it clear he has overcome his queasiness, his feet leaving a circuit of wet prints across the floor. He seems disconcerted by the lull in activity, by the sounds that have now died out, as if asking himself “What now?” With visible excitement he shouts and points over my shoulder to the brick wall outside, where the heads of two camels are just skimming the top of the perimeter. He nudges me to go toward them but I’ve seen all I need to, obtained whatever self-validation I’ve supposedly come for. He insists, pushes closer at my elbow, urging me toward the doorway, and because we are here and because I’ve been so straight-faced it feels impossible to back out now. Annoyed at being caught up in this absurd game of chicken, I take a deep breath and allow myself to be pushed into the eerie silence looming outside. As I walk I feel unavoidably tender toward every part of my body, my hands crossing in front of my abdomen, the sound of my breathing loud in my ears.

  A teenage boy leads the camels through the entrance, tugging heavily on their ropes, causing their fleshy muzzles to pull away sharply exposing their teeth. I wince at his smirk, which feels all for my benefit as he tethers the animals to the rusted bumper of an old Renault 5. The camels kneel down on the pavement, blinking their wet, brown eyes, their mouths pulled up in what could almost be a grin. They flare their nostrils and snort away the moths that flutter around them, and from where we stand I can smell their damp, malty breath. I have the urge to reach out and stroke their long, fuzzy necks. As I move forward Vahid lean
s in close beside me. “Camels are very emotional creatures. They must be killed one at a time, separately, and it takes two men. If they see the knife, or the killing of the others, they become violent and it can be dangerous. They could sit on us or kick us and break all our bones. I have heard many stories of that.”

  An older man comes out and unties the smaller camel, leading it brusquely into a small room at the back. Instinctively the camel follows with its head bowed and its hind legs clip-clopping on the asphalt. Onto its hide someone has painted the Persian numerals for fifteen—the five in Farsi being shaped like a heart upside down.

  “Come, Jenny,” says Vahid, turning on his heel to go back inside. Seeing my reluctance, he grabs my hand and breaks into a run. I am startled less by the schoolboy gesture than by his willingness to put us both in danger. We both know for a man to hold an unmarried woman’s hand is both reckless and illegal. Instead of dropping it when we reach the entrance, he tightens his grip, forcing me to turn slightly toward him. I squeeze his hand in response, not sure whether I am encouraging him, but unable to bring myself to push him away. The metallic, protein smell of the room drains me of any need for interpretation. I simply feel grateful for being touched. Stepping over a drain and the coils of a long, rubber hose, we retreat until our backs press against a damp, bare wall. Vahid moves in to close the remaining space between us, his neck inches away from my nose. I find it comforting to detect the scent of the cologne, a generic male scent of musk and limes that he must have rubbed into his skin before coming to meet me that morning.

  The camel is crouched in a small heap on the floor beside a pair of massive metal scales. In a far corner a dead cow lies slumped on a metal dolly, water trickling from a hose inserted into its mouth. The room is airless, the single entry door has been closed, and the whirring metal fan overhead creates little wind. Underneath my manteau, my jeans and cotton shirt cling heavily against my body. Two men approach the camel from opposite sides and it sniffs the air as if expecting the deposit of a cucumber or carrot into its leathery mouth. The older of the two yanks its yoke to turn its head violently in one direction while the other makes a deep, forever slash across its throat. Vahid pulls me back as a pool of crimson seeps across the floor toward us and I feel the rough tips of his fingers twitch in my hand.