Free Wedding Song by Farideh Goldin Page A

and slipped all the way to my legs. The orange trees had no leaves. My nails were blue.
    Maman wrapped a kerchief around my head. “Who’s going to take care of you when you get sick? Look at that wet hair! Can’t even dry yourself!”
    I ran to the house feeling dirtier than before I had the bath, my scalp itching as if I had lice. I wondered why we couldn’t go to the public baths like our neighbors. Mahvash, my second cousin who lived on the other side of the wall, always bragged about her visits to the
hamam
. She told me that the all-day affair was so much fun, and she couldn’t believe that I had never been there.
    In a few weeks I got my wish. I was five. A chill had set into our valley. Flocks of birds still covered the skies on their migration to the Persian Gulf, but the mountains surrounding Shiraz were dusted with an early snow. My mother needed to go to the
mikvah;
my grandmother had heard about a wedding party heading for the bathhouse; and my two single aunts needed to be presented to the public.
    We gathered around the samovar for tea and buttered bread one morning when my grandmother announced, “We’re going to the
hamam
tomorrow.” I wanted to run next door and tell Mahvash, but there was much work to be done. Going to the
hamam
was not a simple task. Like everything else in our lives, it had its own rituals.
    That day, the women made lunch and dinner ahead of time and put them on a slab of ice under a big colander. My mother made
koofteh
, giant meat balls with rice, meat, and herbs. My aunts washed and patted dry tarragon, basil, and spring onions. I squeezed fresh lime for a big jug of limeade. My grandmother prepared a waterpipe. She wrapped the
ghalyan
carefully among our clothes, along with the best pieces of charcoal and the tobacco she had prepared herself. I packed pumice stones,
konar, gelezard
, henna, and a few
kiseh
s. My grandmother hired the washer-woman to come to the baths around noon with our lunch, fresh bread, and the waterpipe and all its accompaniments. That night I was so excited about my first trip to the
hamam
that I barely slept.
    Very early the next day, we left our house in the
mahaleh
and crossed the main street that divided the ghetto. Few cars, but many horse-drawn carriages and donkeys carrying fruit and vegetables to the market crowded the dirt road. We passed bathhouses that served Moslems only during our half-hour walk to the Jewish
hamam
, where we entered through two large doors.
    The first thing I saw was the
mikvah
. “What is that?” I wanted to know.
    “Nothing,” my mother said.
    “How deep is it? Can you swim in it?”
    “No.”
    “Maman, are you going to drown in there?”
    “No.”
    “Is it not too cold? Why does it have leaves and stuff floating in it?”
    “That’s
enough
.”
    “Are there any lizards in there?”
    Silence.
    “Aren’t you afraid of getting in it?”
    My questions were endless and I was told that if I continued being such a
verag
, I would be sent home. I shut up then and decided not to jeopardize my good fortune. I would watch and listen, and that would be good enough for me.
    We stopped by a small room next to the entrance to pick up our utensils from the frowning bath keeper. His hair and even his thin mustache were greasy as if he didn’t know about the bathhouse himself. His left ear stayed glued to a radio whose sound was barely audible. A rolled mattress was set against the wall with bubbling plaster, crumbling in the humidity of the bathhouse. He and my grandmother haggled over the price.
    “Charging so much for what?” my grandmother said. “Last time you ran out of hot water and we froze.” She put a few rials in front of the
hamami
and wrapped her
chador
tighter around herself.
    “You use too much water. I can’t give you but one pail.” The man cracked his knuckles. His thick nails had rough edges. He picked up a small knife and dug underneath them to dislodge the dirt.
    My grandmother gave him another