Scent of Butterflies (4 page)

My friend and I attended the same school. I was the tallest and blondest girl, she the most petite, her wild hair ink-black. She was fragile and vulnerable and navigated her world with cautious pessimism, as if her Aunt Tala might spring out from behind unknown corners, able and more than willing to inflict yet another undeserved injury upon her charge.

I, on the other hand, was stubborn and fearless and trusting of my world then, a world that comprised Baba, a loving disciplinarian; Mamabozorg Emerald, always lenient when it came to me; and Madar, who adored and idealized Baba and supported his every decision.

We were in second grade, Parvaneh and I, when she weaved her way to me in the classroom, holding her lunch box tight against her chest. It was afternoon recess time, the empty room dense with the smells of leftover food in brown bags and lunch boxes.

“Do something, Soraya, please. Do something bad to Ahmad.” She eyed a bully who had made her life miserable, calling her names and tearing the frilly
joupons
petticoats she wore under her skirts to fluff them up around her skinny thighs. There was something about Parvaneh in those days, a certain timidity and reluctance to fight back, that encouraged some boys into harassing her and others to follow her with puppy eyes.

“I know you can do it,” she pleaded, wiping her tears with the back of one hand.

“Do what?”

“I don't know. Just make him go away. I beg you, Soraya. Do it for me.”

Was it her seeming neediness or her admiring, hero-seeking expression that goaded me on? Perhaps it was the sense of vulnerability she exuded like a tempting invitation. At any rate, the need to step in and protect my friend from Ahmad, from her life, from the wiles of the world, was stronger than reason. So, I held her by the hand and led her into the school yard.

I would never again study a shrub, a flower, a tree, or an herb without recalling that time as the time I first became interested in the study of plants, their hidden healing powers, as well as their ability to hurt. Oh! I was a novice then—no, not even that. I was a curious child, hunched over in a patch of wild plants during recess, my friend leaning over me and watching me with stunned admiration as I picked and rubbed, smelled and tasted unknown plants in the laboratory of my mouth.

She encouraged me with her ceaseless mantra: “You can do it. You can do it, Soraya.” To this day, I don't know whether the concoction I invented from some prickly plants, DDT-tainted soil, and water from a mosquito-infected puddle was poisonous or not. What I know is that the endeavor was a success.

I broke a piece off a bar of chocolate I had brought to snack on, dropped it in the concoction to mask the taste, then poured the whole mess into a half-full bottle of Coca-Cola. Bottle in hand, with Butterfly in tow, I marched toward the end of the school yard, where boys played soccer during lunch hour. We sat on a ledge by a garden of geraniums and waited for the game to end, the hiss of Parvaneh's anxious fingernails against her flesh louder than the whirr of sprinklers behind.

It was one of those bright days when the air smelt of rotting fruit and sweating leaves. I remember that day well. How could I not? It was Wednesday, October 13, 1971. The day before, we had watched on television the opening ceremony that inaugurated the four-day festivities in honor of the anniversary of the 2,500-year-old Persian Empire. Iran was decked, groomed, and adorned beyond recognition.

Preparations had begun ten years before. New roads were built. Infrastructures strengthened. Airports renovated. A tent city was erected on 160 acres of desert land in the city of Persepolis. The desert was cleared of snakes, scorpions, and other poisonous creatures. Parisian architects, chefs, seamstresses, and all manner of artisans were flown in, as well as mature trees and flowers to turn the arid land into a green oasis. Mohammad Reza, the Shah of Iran, was holding what Orson Welles would call “the celebration of twenty-five centuries.” And what the Ayatollah Khomeini would label the “Devil's Festival.”

Proudly erect and decked in formal regalia, the Shah faced the tomb of Cyrus the Great and, with a strong voice filled with conviction, proclaimed: “Cyrus, we gather today around the tomb in which you eternally rest to tell you: rest in peace, for we are well awake and we will always be alert in order to preserve your proud legacy.”

In eight years, the Pahlavi dynasty would be no more.

That day, still innocent and unaware of the future, I sat next to Parvaneh in the school yard and waited for Ahmad's soccer game to end. Afterward, we followed him to the water fountain, where he washed his face and dried it with his sleeves. I held out the bottle of Coca-Cola. Full of himself, rooster chest puffed out, certain this was a peace offering and that he had managed to bring Parvaneh to her knees, he gulped down half the concoction. He doubled over spewing and retching from the foul taste, but more so from embarrassment.

Parvaneh, breathless and flushed, raised my hands and pressed her lips to the back of one, then the other, as if to crown me the empress of the Persian Empire. “You are amazing, Soraya! You're never scared.”

My heart darted around like a rabbit in my chest. From fear? From the pleasure of triumph? The reward of admiration? I'm not quite certain.

What I know is that all through elementary school, the responsibility of confronting bullies who crossed her path fell upon me, even if that meant having to lie to Baba to explain why I sometimes tossed all feminine restraint down the Rostam Gorge and behaved like a fatherless
dehati
village boy, or acted like a beggar from the boondocks of Samereh. It just felt good. Me, the benevolent keeper of my friend.

When we were twelve, Parvaneh became more serious and responsible. A bit more defiant. When her spinster aunt—who had moved into her home after Parvaneh's mother died—was present, Parvaneh no longer cast her eyes down, but looked her aunt straight in the eye and wrapped her arms across her chest as if to protect herself from Tala's lashing tongue.

Aunt Tala carried the stale smell of Turkish coffee on her breath and the biting odor of discontent on her ash-gray skin. She resembled a clacking skeleton rather than a woman with flesh on her bones. Her smoke-colored, ankle-length dresses with their winglike sleeves added to her funereal appearance. Contrary to her name, which meant “gold,” her heart was made of cold stone.

It was around then that Parvaneh began to ask a lot of questions. She wanted to know why a God, who was “Our Father in Heaven,” had allowed her mother to be invaded with a cancer that killed her in less than thirty-two days. And why, soon after, He struck again, storming her father's brain with petrifying images that rendered him a helpless idiot who whistled sad, outdated tunes, wandering aimlessly in his own home.

Having no one else to trust with her questions, she brought them to my Baba, who replied that God had his own mysterious ways and that we were too limited in our intelligence to understand. In answer to her dramatic declaration that she would die from grief, he chuckled under his breath and assured her that she would keep breathing and her pulse would continue to beat for a long, long time because it was far more stubborn than she could ever imagine.

And Madar, always there, always worrying in the periphery of Baba's world, ready to step in and validate, if he needed validating, would serve Parvaneh a cup of mint tea with rock sugar, pat her on the back of the hand, and offer her one of her restrained smiles. “Listen to Baba, Parvaneh. He is a wise man.”

Madar did not mention that Baba was also the generous benefactor who paid for Parvaneh's tuition, uniforms, books, and stationery. But Parvaneh must have guessed because soon she was drafting two different essays on the same subject, outlining the reading assignments, copying them, and taking notes in classes I missed. I had more pressing matters on my mind. I was thirteen; I had just met Aziz.

Parvaneh, too, celebrated her thirteenth birthday that year. It was around then that a strain of deception that must have lain dormant began to yawn and stretch and shake itself awake. She studied hard and excelled in her grades, so she could someday move out and free herself from that witch. Not only that, but she spread out her colorful wings and transformed herself into a caring butterfly, attending to loving, motherly details: spit-cleaned a stain on my father's shoe, scolded him for losing weight, remembered to buy my mother a birthday gift, and visited her at home when she was out of sorts to shampoo and blow dry her hair.

Having adopted my parents as her own, she played the role of the obedient daughter. I, on the other hand, possessed the required intelligence, courage, and temerity to keep alive our family name and multiply my inherited wealth. I admired our differences. We complemented each other.

As she became older, Butterfly's body refused to grow round and voluptuous. I pulled down her bathing suit once to see for myself what her breasts looked like—those tiny buttons with no sway to them. At that moment, as young as I was, I comprehended the lure of a pair of arrogant, well-rounded breasts like mine.

That year, her aunt went to the bazaar and bought an extra-large, white kerchief, marched straight to the synagogue of our chief rabbi, Eshagh the Henna Beard, and demanded that he sign all four corners of the cloth with a black marker, to make sure his signature would not wash off or the kerchief be replaced for another. That, to my great horror, was the nuptial cloth Butterfly was expected to use on her wedding night to display her blood to her in-laws as proof of her virginity.

I hurried home from school that day and snuggled in Madar's comforting scent of talcum and violets. My words tripped over each other in my haste to tell her what I heard from Parvaneh and ask whether it was true that brides had to show a bloody piece of cloth the morning after their wedding. That was before Madar's inexplicable tantrum and before she turned her back on Baba, leaving me confused and angry. But that day, her silvery pallor heightened in the pearly mist that crept in from the window, she touched my lips with one manicured finger. “Yes, it's true, Soraya. It's an appalling custom. But you don't have to do it if you don't want to. I'll never force you.”

“What if my future mother-in-law demands it? This bloody thing? Will you shut her up?”

“That's up to your father.” She moved closer to me and wrapped her silk shawl about our shoulders as if to buffer us from the shock of what was to come.

What came was Aunt Tala's increasingly abusive behavior.

She framed and hung the nuptial cloth from a hook on the wall that faced Parvaneh's bed. Her aunt not only forbade her to remove the frame until her wedding day, but also demanded that she stand in front of it every night and repeat aloud that her virginity was her honor and that she'd guard it with her very last breath.

The first night Parvaneh braved the framed nuptial cloth, her aunt stood guard, legs apart, arms resting against the doorjamb like a bat about to take flight.

Butterfly tried to repeat the words Aunt Tala ordered her to recite, but the rabbi's ominous, spidery signatures threatened from all four corners and, as if a bird was stuck in her throat, nothing but croaking sounds came out.

Butterfly sank into a well of grief. I should have left her alone there, allowed her to drown in her black moods. But I did not. I held her hand and tried to teach her what I knew well. How to ignore her aunt and find her own way of snuggling into her own skin. She misunderstood.

She grew her fingernails long and painted them deep violet, shaded her eyes with smoky kohl, tainting her lips cherry red and braiding her hair with turquoise beads as if she were queen of Sheba.

Her aunt warned her that if she didn't trim her nails, rinse off her Valentino eyes and vampire lips, no one would ask for her hand and she would shrivel into a spinster, become wrinkled and sour like pickled cucumbers, and end up in New City, a one-penny whore.

Her father, a few gray hairs spiking the top of his head, his once cleft chin puckered like a cock's wattle, pointed a thick, yellow fingernail at his daughter and smiled one last time before catapulting into eternal silence.

Once we turned fourteen, an age when defiance was no longer tolerated in our community, and Parvaneh still refused to mature and settle down, I decided she was incapable of rising above her teenage mutiny. Born in a sexually repressed world and brought up by an abusive aunt, she was doomed to forever flap her wings against her gated boundaries.

I took it upon myself to free her from her cocoon. Why? I should have abandoned her there in the shallow darkness of her shell. What arrogance could have made me believe that I possessed the power to overcome all hurdles and change her world? Now, looking back, I recognize that I was young and reckless and rode high and proud on the egoistic conceit of an only child, the favorite of a grandmother who was nearly impossible to please and an iron-willed father who had, more often than not, given in to my demands. Yes, that was part of it. But I also longed for the friend I'd lost. The friend who was there to listen, encourage, praise, defend, and lie for me when necessary.

So that day, fourteen and fearless, I promised Parvaneh that I would encourage Aziz to introduce her to his business partner, Hamid.

Her eyes sparkled against her skin and her dark pupils narrowed like a cat's. Her lashes, exaggerated with midnight-blue mascara, cast spiky shadows on her flushed cheeks. Her small teeth glistened against bloody lips. The scent of the Chanel No. 5 she had splashed on her armpits intensified.

“Will Aziz mind?” she whispered in cautious delight. “I'm sort of embarrassed.”

I imitated an old woman's warnings. “Get over your embarrassment, my dear girl, and find yourself a husband before your maidenhead shrivels and disappears between your legs.”

She laughed so hard that she almost fell off her chair. “You sound scarier than Aunt Tala. All right, Soraya, you win.”