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Blood
Azin Arefi
My sister and her husband had left Iran for Eshgh Abaad as a newly married couple, he filled with the hopes and promise of becoming a successful merchant, and she filled with the satisfaction of having a husband capable of such a task. Now, after two years, they were coming back home, she as the heavy-hearted wife and mother of a two year old daughter, and he as a dying man. My sister had sent word that her husband had contracted tuberculosis and the doctors had advised him to go back to his birthplace, so he would not die on foreign soil. It was her wish that they come home to us so that she could take care of her dying husband with the help of her own family; she too had decided against the foreign soil of in-laws.
Their homecoming was bittersweet for my parents. On one hand their daughter was coming home, but under what circumstances? My mother was as steadfast as always and went about preparing for their arrival as dutifully as she approached any task. She cut and sewed new bedding; she sewed a flowered praying chador for my sister; and despite the approaching summer months she knitted a sweater for her first grandchild. But there was no joy in her work, as if she was welcoming in-laws and not her own flesh. My father was the more vocal one, muttering curses under his breath, and inveighing the young man for going to “cold, infested Russia.” Hadn’t he heard that tuberculosis was rampant in Eshgh Abaad? “Money may be strewn about on the streets there,” he’d say, “but is it worth your life?”
I, on the other hand, had to hide my true feelings. I knew that my appropriate feeling should have been one of somber reflection and pity for my sister and her dying husband. But inside I felt a twinge of excitement about my older sister coming home—life without Sooreh had not been difficult, but simply dull and uninteresting. We’d talk about everything and that was enough to make the dullest day seem eventful. I could not help but be happy that I would reclaim my sister when I thought I had lost her to that unfamiliar land forever. Moreover she was bringing home a child. My very own niece! And she was at that perfect age: past her burdensome infancy and into engaging toddlerhood.
As far as my brother-in-law, I tried to feel sorry for him, but frankly he was a stranger to me. He and my sister had moved to Eshgh Abaad shortly after their marriage. My sister hardly knew him then. What hope was there for an attachment on my part? If anything, he was that man who had taken my sister away. I felt sorry for him, but sympathy? That was not there. I had to fake it. At night when we sat around the sofreh to have dinner, my father would mention the young man and my mother would shake her head as she handed out bread to us and I—I would lower my head and focus on the crumbly yellow of a hardboiled egg and seem solemn just to be appropriate.
(continued in the print edition)
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