Wedding Song Read Online Free PDF Page B

about his trip to Bab-e Anar, the village of pomegranates.

    Baba at eighteen, still wearing a beard as a sign of mourning for his father’s death
.
    When he was thirteen years old, Sha’ul the peddler hired him to helpwith his accounting in the faraway village. My father had never left home before.
    Listening to my father’s rendition of his childhood story, the melodic intonation of words mixed with poetry and
zarbol-masal
, Persian proverbs, I forgot my own misadventure. I felt as if I were with him on the back of an open truck on the only paved road heading south into the mountains; I imagined the old tires kicking off dust. Together, we savored the memories of the clear blue sky, the mountains richly painted with mineral deposits, the Bedouin campgrounds beside a small spring, the large expanse of brush against the shadow of the mountains.
    The bus reached the village at dusk and my father could barely see the outline of the pomegranate gardens. Sha’ul unloaded the merchandise by the side of the dirt road and asked my father to wait for him there and not move. He was going to make sure that the gates were open and that he could secure a few donkeys to help carry the goods inside. Surprised, my father asked, “Why don’t we just drive to the gate,
agha
Sha’ul?”
    The merchant was exhausted and impatient, his wrinkles deeper now that the sun had darkened his skin further, leaving white lines around his eyes, crinkled from the bright sun. His graying hair was matted with sand and fine dust. “First of all,” the peddler snapped, “a truck is too big to go down this road. Most passengers are on their way to Jahrom and it is getting late in this
biaboon
, in this forsaken place. Plus, do you want me to get killed for a few pieces of merchandise if the gates are closed? What if we have to stay outside the walls with all the bandits knowing about the goods? Stay here behind this hill. No one will see you from the road or the village. I will be back soon.” He started walking down the narrow dirt road that led to the village and slowly disappeared in the dark that gradually blanketed the landscape.
    Baba waited by the road for an hour in the dark before he started to panic. Now he expected to be robbed and murdered by outlaws roaming through the desert. Totally alert, he stared into the dark, looking for a sign of life. Then his mind wandered, imagining ferocious beasts slowly closing on him, and he shivered. He heard wolves crying in the distance and his hair rose on his body; he felt something rubbing against his leg and screamed, thinking that he had been bitten by a deadly snake. Fortunately, it was just the fringes of a carpet touching his skin. After a few hours, he finally gave up on his boss; he must have been murdered by the peasants or the bandits. He shivered as the desert temperature fell rapidly.
    Baba was tired and sleepy but afraid to close his eyes. After all, the same murderer could knife him in his sleep. He wrapped a large blanket around himself and paced around the pile in the dark to keep awake. He was suddenly falling. Baba screamed in terror and called for his mother in Judi, “Ahhhhhh! Mava, Mava …” He landed at the bottom of a ditch he had not seen in the dark and recited his
shema
, expecting death to take him. Scratched but unharmed, he decided that the fall could be a good omen. No one would look for him in the hole, and, if the robbers came by, they could steal the merchandise and disappear. He wrapped the blanket tighter around himself and surrendered to an uneasy sleep, in which wild beasts roamed the
biaboon;
black scorpions crawled on his blanket with their venomous tails on their backs; and bandits with black headpieces covering their faces galloped on fast horses toward him with shining eyes and drawn curved swords.
    In the early hours of dawn, my father awoke sweaty with a jolt, screaming, thinking that an animal was pulling on him. But it was only his boss shaking