Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran

Mahdokht (Reprise)

— 103 — Mahdokht had planted herself on the riverbank in the fall. She suffered as the clay around her ankles hardened. The freezing rainstorms of the season tore her clothes to shreds. She was left dressed in tatters. She shivered incessantly until the winter frost froze her all over. But her eyes were left open, looking at the river as it flowed by. With the first spring showers, a thaw set in and splintered the ice and she felt the tingling of sprouting buds on her limbs. Her toes resumed their growth as roots, and they penetrated deeper and deeper into the earth. She could hear them grow. They extracted nutrients from the earth and spread them through her organs. She listened Mahdokht (Reprise) WWoM_v4.5.indd 103 11/3/11 1:51 PM — 104 — to the sound of the roots and watched the water in the river turn green. The fall arrived again, and with it came the cold. But she no longer suffered. The roots stopped their growth and so did every part of her body. That winter she was fed with dewdrops. Although she felt the frost covering her, she still saw the river as green, with a slight tinge of blue. In the spring she was once more covered with sprouting buds. She welcomed the spring and her heart filled with joy, a joy that she passed on to the buds as they grew into green leaves. When the summer arrived, she saw the water turn blue and schools of fish in it. Freezing weather returned in early autumn and the sky darkened. But her heart was still joyful, having now found unison with the spirit of the tree, storing all the goodness of the earth. By midwinter she was being fed with human breast milk. This gave her an explosive burst of energy thawing the ice even before the advent of spring. But it also made her ache all over as she had to confine the force within her body. Now, as she stared at the river, she no longer saw a continual stream, but a flux of liquid drops rushing in the riverbed helter-skelter in their numberless multitude . This exacerbated her pain. Her senses infiltrated the droplets of the river current and made her palpitate in unison with the heartbeat of each drop. She was fed human milk for three months. Toward the end of April the pressure within her had reached exploWWoM_v4 .5.indd 104 11/3/11 1:51 PM — 105 — sive force. It burst out suddenly and violently. Although it was an explosion, it was not an instantaneous blowout; it was nuanced and in stages. It was as if her tissues were coming apart slowly and jarringly. In a perpetual transmutation Mahdokht was separating from herself, suffering excruciating, unbearable pain like birth contractions, almost causing her eyes to burst out of their sockets. The water was no longer a mass of droplets but fractured into infinite tiny bits of atoms of ether. It all came to a sudden end. The tree was now a mountain of seeds. A strong wind scattered them into the river. The seeds traveled with the water to all corners of the world. WWoM_v4.5.indd 105 11/3/11 1:51 PM ...