Rapunzel must die a pers.., p.3
Rapunzel Must Die: A Persian Retelling, page 3
“There’s time enough to bribe them yet,” Mahmoud said with a grin.
Mahmoud succumbed happily to his fate and prepared for his journey.
His wife prepared for him roasted lamb, chunks of cheese, and filled bladders with milk. With great effort, she collected them off the ground. She rolled up his blankets and secured them onto the saddlebags of the donkey.
“Take care of him, Xerxes,” she said to the animal, giving his muzzle a fond stroke.
“Xerxes has never let me down yet,” Mahmoud said firmly, and in truth, the animal never had. He had been a constant and steady companion on many pilgrimages in Mahmoud’s life. With any luck, and kind nurturing, the animal could live well into his forties.
Xerxes wheezed affectionately in response and closed his eyes contentedly under the light touch of Farrah’s fingers.
“Are you sure the babies will wait for me to get back?” Mahmoud asked, suddenly unsure of his decision as his wife’s belly eclipsed the light of the fire.
Farrah waved a hand distractedly. “Of course! Does a woman not know her own body?”
Mahmoud was no expert in this matter, so he had to once again, concede to his wife.
“And where is my father?” Mahmoud asked. “I must, in return, charge someone with your well-being. Perhaps I should leave Xerxes here and go on foot? He is an expert at keeping the beasts away, after all.”
“Nonsense,” said Karim, appearing down the path. “I’ve got
things well in hand, and the widow is always here to help as well. Before you go, son, I want you to take this.” He handed his walking stick to Mahmoud.
It was both a shepherd’s crook and a walking stick, and it had been carved by his great grandfather. At the top of the shaft, it split into two. One side was a curved half-bowl, which was used to propel stones at any wild animals who got too close to camp. The other side, was the crook. Mahmoud often marveled over it—the heartiness of the willow wood and the little figures of cheetah and sheep and faeries etched into its surface. His father always said it was imbued with the energies, hopes and dreams of all the ancestors who had come before them.
“So, it has magic powers?” Mahmoud had asked as a boy, brown eyes wide with possibility.
His father smiled. “That depends on who is carrying it. It is good at keeping herds together.”
It was a family heirloom, beautiful, graceful, powerful—and now his father was handing it to him.
“You need a good stick for such journeys. Hurry back, son.”
As Mahmoud wrapped his hand around the treasure, golden sparks did not fly forth. No jinni appeared to grant him wishes. But Mahmoud felt a warm something trickle through him all the same. Whatever it was, it bolstered his spirits.
His was a noble quest—to keep his bride happy—and he was suddenly sure of his success.
He would be back in one week, and his babies would soon follow.
He was a blessed man indeed, and he set off to find Rapunzel.
Mina
Mina’s grandmother knew about food.
She always said, “To eat real Persian food, you must experience it in the home. From someone’s kitchen. You can’t get it at a restaurant! You need to be invited to a family dinner. You need it to be cooked by three generations of Persian women, who have spent the day preparing entirely too much food for one family to conceivably eat.”
And Mina agreed wholeheartedly. It was why she expected nothing less than a feast upon her return, simply because that is how her mother and grandmother cooked for anyone, family or stranger.
There came the embrace she had envisioned—her mother’s arms around her, smelling of all those jasmine petals she wore inside her shirt. There was her grandmother bossing Leila around in the kitchen, sneaking cigarettes from her father’s pack when she thought no one was looking, because the doctor had forbidden her from smoking a few years earlier. There was her father sitting at the piano, a gift from her mother when they moved to the city, as if anything could replace his lost sheep. But it had helped, at least a little, and Mina didn’t feel home without her father’s piano music filling in the background. And there on the wall, in a shadow box, was the shepherd staff her father had used, and her grandfather before that, watching over them all from a place of honor.
Nila was with them at dinner, as surely as if she was sitting at the table. She was there in the way Leila’s eyes were rimmed with red. In the way her father’s shoulders rolled forward more than they ever had. In the grief that cloaked the room like the special tablecloth her mother set out on occasions like this. They talked around it for as long as they could. They even shared some laughs when Mina recounted her own cooking journeys which mostly consisted of reheating delivery pizza and the occasional scrambled eggs. Her grandmother scoffed incredulously at this, as if reheated delivery pizza was a personal stain against her honor. Leila talked a little about veterinary school, and the courses she was most looking forward to. She liked the horses best, of course, a fact that surprised no one in her family after years of keeping at least a dozen stuffed horses on her bed.
Yes, Nila was there, but the family agreed silently to not talk about it—not yet. They wanted that one dinner together. They wanted that one night, before they acknowledged that everything was changed forever.
And after they had their fill of coffee and baklava and little date cakes, the girls sat on the floor in front of the couch and waited patiently for their turns at getting their hair combed by their grandmother.
They sat quietly just as they had when they were little. It didn’t matter that they could comb their hair themselves. It didn’t matter that they were adults. Some things were just done when the girls were at home, and Mina prayed it would always be that way.
Their grandmother massaged their scalps lovingly with olive oil, and sprayed their hair with rosewater, humming as she worked. Their mother sat on the recliner, working fastidiously at her sewing, and their father sat at the piano, thumbing through music books, smoking his cigarettes, and talking about the old fairytale he so desperately loved.
For one last night, a family sat in an ordinary apartment, pretending things were still okay.
Rapunzel’s Story: Mahmoud
Mahmoud sang.
His sweet voice trailed behind him as he went, and tangled with the end of his shawl that was blown about in the wind.
Mahmoud would miss Farrah, of course, but he was not one to mind solitude, or journeys. Mahmoud didn’t mind much of anything, really—his was a spirit at ease. He was just as happy drinking tea by the fireside as he was herding the sheep and goats or filling the water skins from the stream.
Xerxes walked on dutifully, accustomed to the loose shoal rock that coated the ground in those areas. The layer of rock grew thicker as they neared the mountain, and each step soon dislodged small avalanches, but Xerxes’ hooves were sure and sturdy, ‘;and he rarely slipped.
At night Mahmoud would make camp for them in the shelter of the rocky outcroppings, and the pair would spend the dark hours safe from the winds that made games out of howling up and down the mountain. He would collect loose tree limbs and sticks, and prop them against a boulder, and set about making the evening fire. As Xerxes pulled up bits of grass to munch on around him, Mahmoud would unpack his saddlebags and make himself dinner—tomatoes roasted over the fire with the bit of lamb Farrah had packed for him, a handful of wild pistachios, as many cups of fresh tea as he wanted, and bits of flatbread.
Always they could hear the sound of the river rushing—always rushing—from somewhere on the other side of the mountain. Streams and offshoots were everywhere, and Mahmoud would have to make it around many waterfalls before the end, but the constant drone of the moving water was a comfort to him.
It was at the end of his third day as he was drifting off to sleep, as he lay lazily looking up at the cold stars, that he saw a dark shape flutter across his line of vision.
A bat? Mahmoud propped himself up on his elbow. The thing came to rest on the nearby stone wall, its silhouette distorted by the flames of the dying fire. Xerxes looked up from his grazing.
Anything on such long quiet nights of solitude become things of interest, so Mahmoud got up to investigate. The creature was quite large and was the size of both of Mahmoud’s hands stretched open wide. He crept up carefully. Its wings were stretched flush across the surface of the rock, beautiful brown and gold patterns shining and winking at him.
It was a moth! Larger than Mahmoud had ever seen. He noticed how very like eyes the patterns on its wings looked. He snapped some tinder underfoot, and his guest shook its wings in a haze of color and flew off into the night.
“Well!” Mahmoud said, patting Xerxes on the neck, who also hadn’t been quite sure what to think of the guest, “what a wondrous creature! You never know what things you’ll find in these mountains. That, my friend, is a good omen for our journey.”
Xerxes simply chewed his grass, and if he had any opinions, he kept them to himself. Mahmoud returned to his bedroll, and flung himself out once more, feeling quite pleased at himself and how well the journey was going.
Mahmoud sang, and just out of sight in the shadows, the moth lingered, and the moth listened.
Mina
The sisters didn’t sleep.
But they didn’t sleep, side by side, so there was some comfort in that.
They lay together in the full-size bed that took up most of the guest room they had once shared as girls. Their parents had purged it of most of their childhood things, but little pockets of it remained, like Leila’s collection of horse toys on the corner table, and Mina’s stack of notebooks full of stories and sketches, of the faeries their father used to tell them about, who lived in the mountains he brought the flocks through.
Slowly, the pages in those notebooks were filled less and less with drawings of faeries, and more and more with sketches of sheep. Soon, facts about sheep accompanied these sketches. Then came diagrams of their anatomies, and instructions for their care. Then came numbers and lists, of those who needed to be sheared, or ewes who were expecting. Sometimes a fanciful drawing could still be found in the margins, but it was in Leila’s soft print. By the end of the notebooks, they were nothing but lists of facts Mina learned, or schools she one day wanted to go to. Mina could see her whole childhood in those pages, starting with magic, and ending with reality, the spaces in between marking the time they moved into the city, and away from her childhood.
The central heating kicked on with a rattle. Mina smiled in the
dark, remembering how much it had frightened them their first night in the apartment—the sounds of the city so foreign to them.
“It is nothing, children,” their father had said sitting on the edge of their bed. “It is just the friendly giant who lives in the walls! On cold nights, he gets as close to the walls as he can, so that he can breathe his hot air out into the room. That way, you’ll never get cold. Now, there’s no need to be afraid of such a friend as that, is there?”
Even as his heart must have been breaking from the loss of the life he loved, their father tried hard to bring any shred of magic from the mountains with them. The stories, the family’s shepherd crook passed down from generations, and the woolen blankets made from the fleece of their very own sheep.
“Are you thinking of Bumbles?” came Leila’s whisper in the dark.
Bumbles—the name of their friendly, wall-dwelling giant.
Mina turned over to face her sister.
She could see her eyes shining in the dark.
When was the last time they had such a sleepover? They were closer in age to thirty than twenty now, and their lives kept them separate more than naught. Mina was in America, and travelling, doing her contracting linguist work. Leila was mostly in Persia, although she had just been accepted to a first-rate school of veterinary medicine in London. She would start her new journey
the following year.
“Remember how old we were when we finally figured out Bumbles wasn’t real?” Mina whispered in reply. To be fair, Mina had figured it out much earlier than Leila, but she hadn’t deprived her sister of the notion.
“Wait, Bumbles isn’t real?” Leila joked. The sister’s shared a quite laugh.
Outside the bedroom door came the occasional shifting of the apartment, the familiar creaks and groans from their youth.
“What are we going to do, Mimi?” A sudden tremble appeared in Leila’s voice as she invoked her childhood nickname for her sister. The silence of the night hours had done its work, and thoughts had returned to Nila. Whatever unpleasantness that could be avoided with distractions of homecooked food and bedtime stories, had resurfaced.
Mina didn’t have to ask what she meant. “Listen to me, Leila. There is nothing to be done except stay out of the way. Dad has already helped pay for a good lawyer. They will petition the courts the right way. They will see Nila should not be in prison. They’ll release her after maybe a few nights in jail. It is that simple.”
It was easy for Mina to say, because it was really what she believed. Of course, everyone knew of girls getting arrested every now and then. The Morality Police were strict with the young generation. If they were out in a public park playing music, it meant arrest. If they were caught having a party in an apartment, it meant arrest. If a girl didn’t cover her hair just so in the presence of a conservative constable, arrest. Before Mina had moved to America, Mina herself had been brought in two times—once for having a dog out in public and once more for trying to film a short documentary for one of her high school courses.
Sometimes these offenses meant a few nights in jail. Sometimes it meant a few weeks. But they almost all were released—weren’t they? And it wasn’t as if Nila was speaking out against the government or shouting in the streets. She simply hadn’t covered her hair properly. They didn’t condemn people eternally for that. No, Mina was sure the matter would be over with before the month was out. Unless of course, people let their emotions get the best of them and they took to the streets in even greater numbers and made matters worse.
“But they haven’t even told the lawyers what she is being charged with,” Leila said more frantically. “Nothing about this is moving openly or orderly. And can’t you feel it, Mina? This arrest is different. The people she was with, the people out there,” she threw a glance out the window, “they can feel it too. Something is happening. It’s making my heart hurt. I’m frightened.”
Her sister shook in the dark, trying to keep her tears silent.
Mina wrapped her arms around her sister—the same age—yet Leila seemed so much younger. Leila’s words sat heavy on her chest. It’s making my heart hurt. That was one of the earliest ways she had ever been able to express herself as a child. For whatever reason, Leila was sensitive to things like that—shifts in moods, shifts in energies—she said she could feel things sometimes before they happened. Mina didn’t believe in the supernatural, but then again, how could she explain the time Leila announced her heart hurt at the age of six, hours before their father had his first heart attack? Or again at the age of thirteen, the day before Mina and the family dog were arrested and the dog confiscated, never to be seen again?
She wanted to blame coincidence. She wanted to write it off completely. But hearing Leila say the words now, feeling the warm teardrops from her sister fall onto her hand as she held her, made something inside of her shift uneasily—a seed of doubt settling into soil.
The heating kicked off. Apparently, Bumbles had finished his work for the night. Mina inhaled, taking some small comfort in the scent of the oil their grandmother had massaged into their braids. She pulled the quilt closer around them, glad that their mother had never swapped it out for some new, modern bedding. It had grown up with them, patchworked and full of memories, almost like a third sibling. Almost like Nila.
“It will be ok, Leila,” she whispered calmly. “Even if it is different this time, we have to stay out of it. Getting in the middle
of things will only make it worse for Nila.”
Silence.
A sniffle from Leila.
The silence became a trickle of fear at the back of Mina’s neck. “Leila? Promise you will stay out of it?”
Suddenly the trickle of fear became a pang in her stomach. Of course, her sister would want to take to the streets with the others. Of course, she would want to paint signs and paint her face and paint change across the entire country. But those were little girl dreams for those who never grew up. Things didn’t work like that. Mina couldn’t let her do it. She couldn’t lose her.
“Don’t worry, Mimi,” came the answer finally. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe everything will be ok.”
“It will be. You’ll see.”
They said no more after that. The quilt was pulled tighter. Bodies were shifted. But Mina thought about her sister’s response, and the way she had skirted around a promise.
No, the sisters didn’t sleep.
But they didn’t sleep, side by side, and that, at least, was something.
Rapunzel’s Story: Mahmoud
The shadow grew.
It stretched across the sky like Death’s hand, draping the rest of Mahmouds journey in grey light.
For once in his life, Mahmoud began to feel uneasy. He was sure it had something to do with the shadow cast by the Witch King’s tower. He couldn’t see the tower, but he could feel it, and after all, the shadow was very long. Xerxes was on edge. Usually stoic and unwavering, he spooked at little things, at the stirring of the leaves on the occasional cypress tree. At the way a mountain goat would bleat in the distance. And mostly, he spooked at the moths.
