Читать книгу Escape From Paradise - Majid MD Amini - Страница 4

Little Fatemeh, Faty, as everyone called her in those innocent days, was a five-year-old happy, little shabbily-dressed girl, the only child of Esmat, from her second marriage that had ended in an unexpected tragedy. Her young husband of only two years, Ali-Akbar, a dark-featured medium height southern man, a skilled stonecutter by profession, had been crushed to death under tons of huge boulders falling from an old crane that collapsed when Faty was only six months old. Protecting himself against any liability, the greedy owner of the business falsely blamed the tragedy on Ali-Akbar's negligence and unyieldingly refused to pay any money when Esmat repeatedly asked for the customary compensation for her husband’s tragic death. She became enraged when her repeated threats didn’t dent the owner’s decision about the matter. She felt the weight of vengeance in her heart so intensely that the thought of throwing a bottle of sulphuric acid in the owner's face didn’t escape Esmat's mind for a long time. She was truculently tough enough and mean enough to carry out that appallingly evil thought. It was obvious that the intensity of the hatred that lingered in her heart for her Ali-Akbar’s boss clearly signified the depth of a totally opposite emotion, love, she felt for her deceased husband. Only the passage of time poured layers of ashes on her hot and burning hatred, cooling it somewhat, but she was unable to completely erase its residue for the rest of her life.

Esmat was born in the small farm town of Taft, a village west of the ancient desert town of Yazd, to a farm worker's family, a Middle Eastern version of sharecroppers as old as the land itself. She had a round face, diminutive eyes that could hardly be seen, covered with heavy eyelids. She had a small round nose and rosy red cheeks. She had thick and naturally red lips, and black eyebrows with no space in between that made them look more like a man's mustache than a woman’s eyebrows. With all the strenuous work she had performed over her life, her arms were sizably thick, muscular and powerful. She possessed large swaying breasts and thighs – she was as thick and strong as the trunk of a hundred-year-old oak.

As nature has never been one hundred percent generous by giving all the beauty to one woman, conversely it never compacts all the ugly features in one either. In Esmat’s case, if she had a lot of unattractiveness in her entire features and body, she had one outstanding trait going for her and that was her skin. It was soft, smooth as porcelain, and an indescribable shade of white that once seen naked and touched gently by a man, any man, would compel him to come back for more, much more, repeatedly more.

Fat Esmat, as she was called behind her back, had carried the excess weight of muscle, bone and pure fat; as far back as she could remember. Her massive head was covered with wild black curly hair that hardly looked natural. But ironically, there was something attractive in her fat body. It was proportionate and symmetrical, attractive enough that men with strong sexual drives and/or loose morals were drawn to her like bees to flowers.

She had an unmatched, stormy and violent temper that was a backup for her gustiness – another quality about her. But with her large and strong body, whenever she was provoked, she would wrap her chador around her waist, wave her arms in the air, and scream and roar like a wounded tigress. She could scare men and women alike to death with her thunderous voice and her violent temper.

She worked alongside her father, with her sister and two brothers, almost as soon as she could walk. They worked from sunup to sundown, day in and day out, seven days a week – backbreaking labor, for an absentee landlord, always on the same farm. The entire family received some wheat and nominal cash in advance each year to tide them over until the next autumn when the owner calculated the results of the harvest, always lopsidedly, and offered them one-fifth. Almost every year, after all the expenditures were deducted, they still owed the landlord, forcing them to remain on the land like the deep-rooted stumps of old dead trees. This was a feudalistic system, the ill-proportioned scheme practiced for centuries across the entire country. An inventive system in which the farm owners throughout the country could insure the workers’ indebtedness thus fastened them to the farm for generations to come.

After her father's death, when she was sixteen, a few suitors came along and asked for her hand in marriage, and even though her mother insisted that she accept, each time she found some excuse and refused. To pursue a better life, she moved to Yazd in search of something shining like a rainbow from afar. Later, when the city of Yazd failed to realize her dreams, not offering her an opportunity for a better future, she took a risk and moved to catch the rainbow in Tehran; a city overcrowded by overconfident men, and, women, who would invent all sort of reasons to marry them. She rented a small room in a twelve-room adobe house located in the southeastern section of Tehran, a ghetto near the old Messgar-abad cemetery, poor people’s burial place. A different family, almost all destitute, from lower echelon of the society, each migrating from various parts of the country, occupied each room, with multitudes of bare-footed, barely-dressed, and loud children, running around from sunup to sundown.

It was while living there that she met and married Gholam, her first husband, and gave birth to Faty. Although it was only a dingy little place with a large folded mattress against the wall and practically no other furniture, she still called it home, a cozy warm place that was solely hers. She always considered that her simple home, the four walls and a roof, with no fancy decorative pieces of furniture, offered her more comfort and happiness than the Shah’s palace, Niavaran.

When excited, she would sing loudly in her husky voice, “I'm hot like an oven in the winter, a cool breeze in the summer.” She was utterly profane, but her vulgarity seemed to be a part of her defense, more a protective mechanism than an inherent part of her psychological makeup. Her vulgarity along with her sexual attitude offered a sort of titillating perversion that attracted men, ironically married men, who found her vulgarities sexually quite provocative – something they couldn’t get at home. They didn’t expect their wives to talk like whores and even if they did, it would have turned them off more than on.

Most married women didn't hesitate to despise and often hate her indiscriminately, but aware of how far she would go to hurt them, they were always petrified to confront her. This hatred developed over a long period of time. After her second husband Ali-Akbar died, when her search to find another good man hit a brick wall, she allowed men into her room, always very discreetly, late at night, for a quick sexual encounter at a fixed price. This was a sort of second job – moonlighting. She never considered herself a prostitute, differentiating herself from that oldest profession by claiming, “Whores go after men, but for me, men come after me. They're crazy for my plump curvy body, my soft skin and these big boobs. Poor bastards can't help it. I give them sweetness. ... What do you think their goddamn wives give them? Nothing, honey ... nothing but snake venom.”

Esmat’s first husband Gholam, a good hard-working carpenter, left her after they had been married only eight short months, but eight sweet and memorable months. To make more money, he headed south to drive trucks for the Americans during World War II. He hauled military supplies from the southern port cities of Bandar-e Abbas and Bandar-e Boushehr in the Persian Gulf to the border city of Astara, in the north near the Russian border.

The treacherous, very often impassable mountain passes of Kotal-e Mullah Felfely, Kotal-e Malu, and Kotal-e Peerezan, between the port cities and the city of Shiraz, had become the graveyard of many of those ill-fated drivers. Most of those poor drivers didn't even know how to shift the gears on those big trucks let alone negotiate the sharp turns of the narrow road through the rugged and unforgiving boulders in the high altitude. No driver’s license was required. Any able-bodied man was hired, and after a day’s training they were sent to the port cities to pick up a loaded truck with weapons and ammunition and drive it north to the Iran-Russian border. Because of the existing black market for American dollars (in which drivers were paid) the pay was considered exorbitant by any standard, but due to the job’s tremendous risk, it was truly a driver’s ghaymat-e khoon, the price of his blood.

Gholam never sent her any money and that was painful for Esmat, nor did he ever send her a short letter of a few warm words and that embarrassed and hurt her deeply. He never returned and that was humiliating for Esmat, especially when her neighbors stared at her and she would read sarcasm and taunting in their eyes. And now and then, the neighbors’ jeering or mocking remarks about the whereabouts of Gholam brought her sleepless nights.

And so it happened that in the early spring of 1945, she consciously assumed Gholam dead after not hearing from him for two long and lonely years. An old hideous-looking, evil-eyed gypsy woman read her palm a few years later. She told her that the man she was waiting for had a chubby black-skinned lover in the remote southern port of Bandar-e Langeh in the Persian Gulf. Esmat disregarded it, called all her fortune-telling “bullshit” and found more comfort in considering him dead than alive. “If my man isn’t next to me in bed every night, if his skin isn’t rubbing against mine, honey, I don’t give a shit if he’s dead or alive. If not aziz-e man [my darling], he’d be better dead than alive,” she would often reason, whispering to herself, in her lonely hours, more to ease the pain of missing him than the belief in such an ice-cold truth.

With no source of income and no special skill to support herself and her child, she began to work as a maid or as a cook for upper middle class and rich families. But, besides having no grace and never at ease, she had a serious and irresolvable problem, almost an incurable disease that made it difficult for her to hang onto that sort of job for any length of time. That was, in addition to being naturally big, with huge muscles and bones, covered with the enormous amount of glut of fat she carried around she had an uncontrollable urge to eat anything that she could get her hands on. In addition to that incurable shortcoming, she was also extremely and unbearably sloppy. Not being able to hang onto any job, there were many nights when she and her deprived child laid their heads down on their pillows with empty growling stomachs. But those nights didn’t last long once Ali-Akbar entered her life, first as a lover, then as a faithful husband and a generous provider.

Ali-Akbar was a remarkably strong young man, who could lift the front of a car or could bring down a brick wall with one tackle – after pouring down a few shots of aragh, of course. In that remarkably powerful body, one could hardly find even one single mean bone. He had a soft spot in his heart for plump women with light skin soft and watermelon-sized breasts, thick thighs, and enormous round buttocks. He compensated for his lack of good looks and charm with the goodness of his heart and his ceaseless passion for sex.

Always smiling, he was mild-mannered, well liked by everyone, even though he always dressed in shabby clothes that never indicated success. He put up with Esmat's flares of temper. He loved her huge body and treated her tenderly. It was as if he could see some precious gem buried deep beneath all that flab, a piece of jewelry no one else could see.

Being younger than her and tremendously strong, he could stand the violent jerking and clenching of her body when she became sexually excited, working herself toward a climax. He would crawl between her thighs, missionary style, whenever the opportunity presented itself, which was way above the average. Afterward, to heighten his sexual ecstasy, he would beg Esmat to tighten her tree-trunk thighs and legs around his body and squeeze as hard as she could. “The best damn way to get rid of the pain in my bones,” he would philosophically articulate with a deep sigh of relief, followed by thunderous laughter.

With the experience of a few men under her belt, Esmat had known how to hook this one, reel him in slowly, land him in her bed, and possess him for good. She had gone to buy a sausage sandwich in a shop that also served aragh and beer in the neighborhood. She noticed that she was the target of an intense stare from a young man, who was trying to undress and devour her with his look. She had responded to his lustful stare with a smile and soon accepted his invitation for a walk, which gave her an opportunity to gather detailed information about him. At first, she pursued him persistently like a shadow. She then lured him to bed, giving him generously as much sweetness as she could muster from her plump sensuous body, until he could no longer live a night without lying next to her. When she thought he was hooked, she pulled back, staying out of his sight for a while. He came running to her like a saturated-with-hormones teenage boy who couldn’t stay away from his first love, begging, as if he had gone utterly mad.

Determined not to lose this lover under any circumstances, she planned everything thoughtfully and nothing was left to chance or luck.

She sent Faty to stay with one of her neighbors for the night. Having the room all to herself, she used her imagination and creativeness to the fullest, arranged an outlandish romantic feast for him that she had never done for anybody before. She spread a sofreh, a rectangular white clean tablecloth, on the floor, placed two candles in the brass candlesticks that she borrowed from her neighbor, two red roses in a tall glass, and a steaming browned roasted chicken on a large plate in the middle. For drink, she chilled two bottles of bootlegged, hundred proof aragh sagy, cheap vodka, extracted from raisins, a sort of aragh that no one except underprivileged men could stand because of its sharp taste. To ease the taste of the aragh in his mouth, or as a chaser, she provided a bowl of cool yogurt mixed with chopped cucumber and mint.

Ali-Akbar gently knocked on Esmat’s door around eight o’clock that night and waited anxiously. When he heard the soft sexy voice of Esmat, saying, “It’s open. Come on in, aziz,” he most probably thought a nightingale in the Garden of Eden was speaking to him. He found Esmat sitting near a sofreh like a pinup girl on calendars – a sofreh decorated with colorful food and drink that was exclusively set for a special visitor. He took off his jacket and placed a passionate kiss on her lips. As he tried to explore her body with his hand, she gently refused his advance and forced him to sit next to her.

Wearing pink see-through chiffon, Ail-Akbar’s favorite color, revealing as much of her soft white skin as she could, she hand-fed him piece after piece of tender-cooked chicken, and acted with naz and kereshmeh, coquettishness and flirtatiousness, and as hard-to-get as she knew how. She then handed him shot after shot of ice-cold aragh sagy to wash his food down, and spoonfuls of yogurt and chopped cucumber to erase the bitter aftertaste of the aragh sagy.

When his stomach was full up to his throat with roasted chicken and his veins were overflowing with aragh sagy, she rose and began to perform an extraordinary dance, stripping down to the little pieces of underwear she had on. She gracefully took a few small steps and twisted her waist lustfully with all the eshveh, teasing, she could muster. The collective movements of her legs, arms, hands, chest, shoulders, head, and even the subtle motions of her fingers, were beckoning, performed to disarm and attract Ali-Akbar.

Loaded with lust that was brewing in him fermented by watching every sensuous move of that great plump goddess of beauty, he was about to lose his mind. The last piece of fabric on Esmat’s voluptuous body was a cherry-red thin string panty. She peeled that tiny piece of garment off in slow motion and rotated it in the air around her finger. The dim candles’ light illuminated a black beauty mark the size of a quarter between her naval and pubic hair. Besieged Ali-Akbar couldn’t take it any longer. He stood up, swaying and shaking, ripped off his clothes like a madman and tried to wrap his arms around her, but she eluded his grasp with all the naz she had in her bag of tricks, driving him to the edge of sanity. Burning in a fever of passion, powerless, standing in the middle of the room, panting and trembling like a thirsty dog, his brain non-functional, he could no longer take Esmat’s titillating eshveh. He knelt down as if he were consenting to his defeat in this game of love and was willingly prepared to surrender his body and soul for a piece of Esmat. He opened his arms and begged, “Come to me ... I can’t stand it anymore, aziz-e man. ... I can’t live without you anymore, maman-e man [my beauty].” He paused for a gulp of air before saying, “Come to me, bolbol-e man [my nightingale].”

Holding her breasts in her palms, pushing them upward, targeting his heart with both barrels of her nipples, she walked toward him in slow crossed steps like a peacock hen in heat until she reached his mouth and watched him kiss her erect nipples so gently; and then, grinning, she watched him going absolutely wild, struggling to take her entire large breast in his mouth, sucking, going from one to the other.

She allowed him to lay his coarse hands on every curve of her soft body, caressing. When she could no longer stand it, she buried herself in the half-circle of his muscular arms. Gently, he sucked on her swelled lips, lowered her to the floor and nervously hurried to make love to her. She disappointed him by firmly refusing to submit herself to him.

Both naked as newborn babies, he was now about to go out of is mind; full crazy with passion. She was aroused but controlled, calculative and shrewdly manipulative. She was thinking: I have him where I want him. My fish is hooked. All I have to do now is reel him in gently.

He was as hot as an oven and steaming like a locomotive, and the precious seconds were ticking away. Before losing all that good steam completely, she begged him to close his eyes. He obliged helplessly, expecting that she was about to do something erotic or surprise him by a new exotic sexual way of getting on with the urgent business. She offered nothing of the sort. Instead, she rose and fetched a copy of the holy book of Quran from the mantel and put it in front of him on the floor.

When he opened his eyes, as he was told, she demanded, “Put your hand on the book and swear to its holiness that you will never leave me for another woman.”

With sparkles in his eyes, willingly and timidly, he obeyed her like a child. Doing exactly as he was instructed, he placed his right hand on the holy book.

“I swear I will never leave you ziba-e man [my beauty],” he managed to whisper.

Little did she know that in the condition the poor fellow was in with all the testosterones racing up and down his body, he would have surely cut off his right arm if asked; swearing on a single copy of the holy book of Quran or even a stack of them did not pose a problem.

Only then did she give herself wholly to him without any reservation; she enjoyed his touch, his warm skin, his body odor, and cherished his long and short powerful strokes. Afterward, with her head resting on his wide hairy chest, listening to the pounding of his heart, she felt that he was the first man who had ever touched her heart and soul and satisfied her body completely.

Unknown to her then, the love she felt for him at that moment was never to be replaced by any other for the rest of her life. That was when he became her inseparable lover. From then on, a night didn’t turn to dawn without having her warm and soft naked body next to his.

When their relationship reached a stage were every curve of her body was etched in his mind, and he could smell and taste her breasts even when he was alone at work, when he craved for nothing except her company, he knew that that kind of closeness and intimacy was prelude to something more; it required a definite matrimonial commitment.

He was exhilarated and proud to kneel down next to a dolled-up smiling Esmat on the floor in front of a mullah, in a very private ceremony, and convincingly say, “Baleh [I do].”

He had for sure become her husband, her lover, her soul mate, and a wonderful generous provider – a dream man for any girl in Esmat’s social class.

Besides breaking her heart and hurting her deeply, Ali-Akbar's tragic death changed everything in Esmat’s life. She camouflaged her pain and sadness with often-uncontrollable anger and vulgarity. When pouring down considerable amounts of aragh sagy and getting drunk didn't ease the pain of her loss, she tirelessly searched for another husband. When all her tricks failed to lure the man she was involved with into the sanctity and security of matrimony, she went to a fortune-teller but not the same one she had gone to previously. She paid a good sum of hard-earned cash to an old Iraqi Arab “witch” to cast a love spell for her into the tightly closed heart of a strong but boyish-looking man, a butcher, who very much resembled her deceased husband. But it was useless. His heart remained shut. He adamantly refused to prove his permanent commitment to her as a lover by swearing on the holy book, let alone commit himself to the institution of marriage. Sipping the last drops of sweetness that oozed from her fat body, he gradually found her bed each night colder than the night before; he stopped seeing her altogether, and memories of him faded from her mind not long after he was gone.

Having Faty as her unceasing responsibility, her attempts to become a maid again were farfetched – an impossibility, or at least wishful thinking. Life left her with no other option or prospect. She became a rakhat shoor, a clothes washer, for affluent families.

Although rakhat shoori wasn't known to secure anybody's future, it at least provided her a steady income that could put food on her sofreh. It also gave her an opportunity to be around people in the upper echelons of society – the rich people who, at times, would comfort their conscience or hide from their guilt and elevate their sense of well-being by being generous and giving their leftover food to the poor.

She cherished her one-room irreplaceable home. The rent was cheap. The room was comfortable, secure and homey, for she had many sweet memories shadow-dancing over the walls of that little room.

Esmat, like millions of others, no more or no less, was trying her best to keep her head slightly above troubled waters, to stay alive, to have three square meals, a bed, a roof over her head, hope in her heart, a little laughter now and then, a chance to raise her little girl, and hope for a better tomorrow.

Faty had dirty, curly, black hair that often looked like a dried-up mop. With all that unmanageable hair covering her skull, her head appeared much larger, size of an overgrown melon. Her thick black eyebrows met in the middle, like her mother’s, making her look older than her age. She had a narrow and upward-tilted nose over a pair of thin lips. Her teeth were all crooked. In spite of her physical deficiencies and lack of proper hygiene, there was still a bounty of sweetness about her that gleamed from her eyes, especially when she smiled, and that was quite regularly. She definitely had inherited her mother’s soft, smooth attractive white skin.

She was a naturally joyous child, especially around other children. She would openly and passionately hate it when her mother would take her to other people's houses to wash clothes. Without exception, she was not allowed to touch anything or play with the children of the house. Gradually, she began to believe she was different from the other children who lived in the northern part of the city – an inferior sort. Ironically, this understanding of her own inferiority at that tender age defied all the psychological hypotheses, for she grew up without carrying any excess baggage as a damaged child.

She could only sit near where her mother Esmat worked putting a large tray full of soapy water on the ground, squatting down, rubbing, twisting and squeezing the clothes with her hands, as if trying to drain the life out of them, rinsing, twisting and then hanging them on the lines to dry.

The only advantage in going with her mother was that she could eat plenty of mouth-watering leftovers, these being the only times her stomach was full.

Once back in her own little room in the evening, when Esmat happened to be in a pleasant relaxed mood, if she had had a “good day” and a few shots of aragh sagy afterward, she would get out an old daf, a large tambourine, and beat some rhythms so Faty could dance. The other poor families would gather around for free entertainment, clap their hands to the rhythms of Esmat's daf and chant a few folkloric songs. That also allowed Esmat to advertise her moonlighting, luring married men to bed late at night to offer them the sweetness of her body, and soon afterward retrieve the money from their tightly held pockets.