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Chapter One

She was born in 1938, the daughter of Shusha the Beautiful and her tailor husband, Rahman the Ruler. Her family lived in two rooms they rented from Shusha's mother--the terrible and terrifying BeeBee, who owned three houses in the Jewish ghetto of Tehran and who rented them room by room to anyone desperate enough to put up with her unreasonable demands and Draconian rules. BeeBee made no exception for her own daughter, and many were those in the ghetto who quietly whispered that she had never forgiven Shusha even a week's rent.

The rooms were unpaved and windowless, constructed of mud and clay and connected to the courtyard by a narrow wooden door made of loose planks nailed together into a lopsided, squeaky shape. The first room was where Shusha slept with her husband, and where he worked as a tailor during the day. The second room served as the family's dining and living room, and as the children's bedroom.

The children slept next to each other on the floor--five small bodies stretched out under a single comforter, limbs intertwined and skin so accustomed to the warmth of others, not one of them could have fallen asleep in a bed by themselves.

Once, when she was three years old, Roxanna awoke to a strange scent. She sat up on the sheet spread over the thin canvas rug that covered the dirt floor and that served as the only barrier between her and the insects that crawled in the dust. She was a tiny child, so thin and light her movement never disturbed anyone else. She reached over and awakened Miriam.

"I dreamt I was a bird," she said.

Miriam sighed and turned over. She was nine years old and had been caring for her younger siblings all her life.

"Does something hurt?" she asked without opening her eyes.

"No. But I can't feel my legs."

Miriam felt Roxanna's forehead.

"You're not warm," she concluded. "Go back to sleep."

An hour later, Miriam woke up scared. She saw that Roxanna was in her own place. The other children were also sleeping. But the room, she realized, smelled strange: instead of the usual scent of skin and hair, of leftover food and old clothes and dry, unforgiving earth, Miriam the Moon smelled the sea.

She lit a candle and looked around. Nothing appeared out of place. Then she saw Roxanna: her hair was wet, her arms stretched to her sides, and she was afloat in a bed of white feathers.

Roxanna looked so calm and beautiful then, so immersed in her dreams of faraway mountains and emerald seas, that Miriam thought she would die if anyone awakened her. So she lay next to her, on that bed of feathers so white they looked almost blue in the moonlight, and hoped to dream her dreams.

Miriam saw the feathers many more times, smelled the Caspian so often in their city thousands of miles away from the sea, she thought some nights Roxanna was going to drown. Afraid of what would happen if anyone discovered the feathers, Miriam hid them inside the comforter. She split the seam open with her fingers and stuffed the feathers on top of the existing fill of cotton that was yellowed with age and thinned from use. But after a while the weight of Roxanna's secret became too heavy for Miriam to bear alone. Once, when the air in their room had become so humid it had turned into beads of moisture and was dripping off the roof onto the children's faces and hair, Miriam went to call her mother.

Shusha came barefoot and sleepy, her chador wrapped loosely around her waist, and for a moment stood above Roxanna without noticing the feathers.

"Look!" Miriam grabbed a fistful and held them close to Shusha's face. "Many nights I wake up and find these in her bed."

Shusha gasped as if she had been struck by lightning. Her body shook, only once, but with enough force that Miriam had to pull away from the impact. She saw the color run out of Shusha till her skin was transparent.

"Who else knows about this?" Shusha asked.

"No one." Miriam wished she had not called her. "I've been hiding them. I'm sure no one has a clue."

Just then Tala'at, Shusha's second daughter, stirred in her sleep. She ran her hand over her neck and chest, rubbing the sweat off her skin as she whispered hoarsely to an imaginary lover. She was only eight years old and had never had any contact with men outside her immediate family. But even then she was driven by lust, by the raw, uncompromised passion that would rule her adult life.

Shusha looked away from Tala'at and went outside. She sat on the steps that led from the bedroom down into the courtyard, then signaled for Miriam to sit next to her. She was a stunning woman--dark skinned and dark eyed and so hauntingly beautiful she created a sense of confusion and sadness in anyone who saw her unveiled. But she had always seemed unaware, or perhaps ashamed, of her own beauty.

"Do you understand you can't tell anyone about the feathers?" she asked Miriam.

Miriam nodded.

"Do you know where they come from?"

Miriam began to answer, then stopped. They lived under a veil of silence then, a web of secrets spread over a thousand years, nurtured by a reverence for the power of the spoken word and a fear of its consequences. So Miriam did not speak, and Shusha did not tell Miriam what she knew so well: that the feathers in Roxanna's bed came from her dreams, that in them Roxanna was flying like a bird, or an angel, over a sea that was vast and limitless and that led her away from the tight borders of their ghetto, that the wings and the sea air spilled over the edge of the night sometimes, skipping the line between desire and truth, and poured into Roxanna's bed to speak of her longings.

It had begun, as tragedies often do, with a woman--the Russian wife of a Lubovicher rabbi who had come to Tehran at the end of the eighteenth century with the express purpose of educating the Jews in the ways of virtue and righteousness. To this end the rabbi had brought his wife, his four daughters, and a mule's load of books and scrolls, which he promised would serve as testimonial to his speeches and sermons. He set up a temple and pursued his mission with zeal. Before long he had managed to convince the Jews that he was the world's foremost authority on the nature of Wrong and on the manner of preventing it. Since women were most often the source of evil and the root cause of what he called "acts of moral turpitude," the rabbi had written his own bible on the proper codes of female conduct--forbidding them such luxuries as laughter, which made them light-headed, and requiring that they speak with one hand covering their mouths, so as not to tempt any man with the display of the pink and fleshy insides of their mouths.

To set an example that others would follow, the rabbi kept his own wife and daughters under the strictest watch. He wrapped them in suffocating layers of black cloth, never allowing them to talk, even in the presence of other females, never telling anyone their names. He even made the ghetto's bath-keeper open the bath two hours early every other week so that his wife and daughters were alone when they unveiled to wash themselves. The rest of the time they stayed at home, quiet and aloof and eerie in their isolation, communicating with one another through gestures for fear that someone other than the rabbi might hear their voices. To the people who came to the door or stood on the roof watching them, they looked like a tribe of deaf-mutes moving in a slow and interminable fog. Speculation ran rampant about their physical attributes, which the rabbi took such care to hide: the wife must be ugly, the Jews assumed, harelipped and pockmarked and probably even toothless. The daughters must have inherited her bad looks. That was why the rabbi would not give them names--because he knew that an ugly woman would never get married and therefore had no business being alive. Behind the rabbi's back, the Jews called his family "the Crow and her daughters."

That is how the Crow lived for many years, and that is where her story would have ended, except that on Yom Kippur of the year 1800, she suddenly went mad. As always on that day, God had made the weather unseasonably hot--to make life more difficult for the Jews, who could not drink for close to thirty hours--and the legions of rats and scorpions that normally populated the surface of the earth had disappeared deep within its cracks in search of cold. It was almost noon, and the Lubovicher's temple was packed with worshipers repenting their sins. The men sat in the sanctuary, prayer books melting in their hands. The women stood in the courtyard outside, sweating under their veils and whispering to one another about the latest scandal in the ghetto. Then they all heard a sound and looked up.

Someone was singing. She had a soft, fluid voice, the kind of voice that drips off the lips and leaves a cool trail, that pours onto a man's body and makes his thighs burn. It was a harlot's voice, free and uninhibited, singing an old love song that only men of the lowest caste--entertainers--were allowed to sing. The women in the courtyard heard it first, then the men, and at last the rabbi. Then they all looked up, through the waves of yellow heat rising from the arid ground, and saw the Crow naked.

She was white as the river's foamy waters, blond from her head down to her feet, slender and curved and scented like every young man's dream of copulation. She walked into the temple with her eyes closed and her hands on the sides of her mouth, so that her voice would carry farther as she sang. She was followed by her four daughters, who were still veiled and who seemed entranced by her singing. The very sight of her made the rabbi turn black with rage.

Stop the Sinner! he wanted to scream, but his throat had shut down. In desperation, he watched as his wife went through the temple, circled the pulpit, then left. The women who saw her foamed at the mouth with envy, and the men memorized her every inch and passed the memory on to their offspring, and it was no wonder they all began to follow her when she walked out.

She went into the street, her daughters in tow, the congregation behind them. She went through the main square that until a moment ago had been empty but for a pack of yellow stray dogs, through the silent alleys and the stifled archways of the ghetto, past the sorry homes and the pitiful shops where her husband had forbidden laughter, until she finally reached the gates that connected the ghetto to the city of Tehran. At last she stopped singing and turned to her daughters. Her eyes were hollow, like a madwoman's, and when she smiled, her breath smelled like water.

Then she vanished into the unforgiving sun of the Day of Atonement.

Her departure, of course, would have been devastating enough to her family had it been an isolated incident that no one dared repeat. But it was especially harmful because it augured a series of escapes among the female members of every subsequent generation of the rabbi's offspring: The Crow's youngest daughter, for example, left home one morning at the age of fourteen and was never seen or heard of again. Her granddaughter ran away at the age of nine to join a band of Turkish gypsies who had camped out in the mountains outside Tehran. Other girls ran off with bandits, were abducted by nomads, sold themselves to traders of whores. One woman, Shusha's grandmother, threw herself in the Karaj River hoping it would carry her to sea. She ended up purple and bloated and rotting on the river's southern banks. Another one, Shusha's aunt, was caught by her father in midflight and brought home, where he kept her tied by the ankles to a brick column for the rest of her life.

Shusha the Beautiful was raised on stories of her wayward ancestors, many wandering naked and sorry through the deserts of central Iran, where even scorpions perished, wanting to return home and beg forgiveness but not being allowed to. As a child, she felt the humiliation of being singled out and despised, the fear of "remaining"--of becoming an old maid--and the suspicion that she, too, might someday run away because it was "in her blood." Her father died when she was two. Her mother, BeeBee, raised her in the back of the family's fruit and vegetable shop, amid rotting produce too old and rancid for the Muslims--the law stating that Jews should not have access to fresh produce. Harsh with her customers and cruel with Shusha, BeeBee thought nothing of denying a worm-ridden apple to the beggarwoman with the crippled child hanging at her breast, and taught Shusha obedience by beating her with the branch of a pomegranate tree till blood beaded on her cracked skin. To keep her from fulfilling her destiny and running away from home, BeeBee followed her own father's example and tied Shusha's ankles together when she slept.

Shusha grew up quiet and sad, so full of fear, she could hardly swallow the food her mother gave her, so convinced she would die alone and unmarried, she began to save shreds of fabric for her own shroud. It is true she did not have many suitors, her name having been soiled by the Crow's legacy, but her mother had told her early on that even if a suitor did emerge, she was not going to allow Shusha to marry.

"I am going to stop the shame," BeeBee had said. "If you marry, you will have a daughter, like I did, and she will run away, or her daughter will run away. I am going to keep you childless and, in this way, change our destiny."

At fourteen, Shusha was so beautiful BeeBee forbade her to look in a mirror, for fear she would become vain and disobedient. At sixteen, she had offers of marriage from brokers who worked for rich Muslims, searching far and wide for the most beautiful girls they could add to their harems. At eighteen, having finished her shroud and certain she would never become a mother, she cried bitter tears into a tear jar she had inherited from her runaway aunt, then drank the tears in a single gulp to mark her grief. It was the eve of the holiday of Shavuot, and BeeBee was away in Tehran looking for produce. The next day Shusha opened the shop at the usual hour--five A.M., before the man who sold drinking water had started, his rounds--and spent the morning haggling with customers over the price of every vegetable. Around noon Rahman the Ruler walked in, just as Shusha was picking the bad leaves off a bunch of lettuce, and fell in love.

Copyright (C) 1999 Gina Barkhordar Nahai All rights reserved.

Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith

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Gina B. Nahai, born in Iran and educated in Switzerland and the United States, is the author of the award-winning novel Cry of the Peacock. A frequent lecturer on Iranian Jewish history and the topic of exile, she has studied the politics of Iran for the U.S. Department of Defense. Currently teaching fiction writing at the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing program, Ms. Nahai lives with her family in Los Angeles.

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