Rosewater and Soda Bread Read online

  ALSO BY MARSHA MEHRAN

  o Jennifer Heslin, an angel

  when I least expected it, and for Sammy,

  my huckleberry friend

  My whole being is a dark chant

  which will carry you

  perpetuating you

  to the dawn of eternal growths and blossoming

  in this chant I sighed you sighed

  in this chant

  I grafted you to the tree to the water to the fire …

  Ah

  this is my lot

  this is my lot

  my lot is

  a sky that is taken away at the drop of a curtain

  my lot is going down a flight of unused stairs

  a regain something amid decay and nostalgia

  my lot is a sad promenade in the garden of memories

  and dying in the grief of a voice that tells me

  I love

  your hands.

  I will plant my hands in the garden

  I will grow I know I know I know

  and swallows will lay eggs

  in the hollow of my ink-stained hands.

  And it is in this way

  that someone dies

  and someone lives on …

  I know a sad little fairy

  who lives in an ocean

  and ever so softly

  plays her heart into a magic flute

  a sad little fairy

  who dies with one kiss each night

  and is reborn with one kiss each dawn.

  “ANOTHER BIRTH”

  CHAPTER I

  MRS. DERVLA QUIGLEY, perpetual widow of James Ignatius Quigley, was the self-proclaimed arbiter of all that was decent and holy in the coastal village of Ballinacroagh.

  By no sheer accident was her place of inhabitance situated over the Reek Relics shop, a musty amalgamation of crucifixes, laminated prayer cards, bottled holy water, and any paraphernalia pertaining to Saint Patrick. The dark apartment she shared with her spinster sister afforded Dervla a steady view of Main Mall, a crooked, cobbled main street that, despite all her efforts, had been greatly altered in the last year and a half.

  There was a time, Dervla bitterly recalled, when a respectable citizen could sit by her bedroom window and not be battered by the smells of strange lands; a day when the only problem confronting decent folk was whether they should take an umbrella on the way out or brave unprotected the cold, pricking rain that plagued the western plains of Ireland eleven out of twelve months.

  But then, that was before those three in that café came along.

  Casting her rheumy eyes out onto Main Mall, Dervla settled her gaze on the squat stone building across the street. Its bright red door and purple shutters were closed, but it was nearly half past six in the morning, and as Dervla knew quite well by now, they would soon be opened for another day of business.

  Another day of enduring the licentious smells of strange spices, the heady vapor of dishes that drew regular crowds of gluttons to the café's windows and had prompted The Connaught Telegraph to declare it “County Mayo's Best Kept Secret,” a title that still eluded Dervla's caustic sensibilities.

  “Divine” and “delicious” were how some had praised the food served behind that crimson door, but she was rather more inclined toward the sobering adjectives “debased” and “detrimental” to describe the goings-on of the Babylon Café.

  During weekly meetings of Ballinacroagh's Bible study group, held conveniently downstairs in the religious relics shop, Dervla Quigley was quick to remind her fellow members of the dangers of the Eastern-flavored eatery: “Let's not forget who was behind Thomas McGuire's tragic accident,” she would hiss, turning a portentous eye on the assembly of cobwebbed spinsters and whiskery matrons. “Drove the poor man to near ruin,” Dervla would say, referring to the colossal heart attack that had struck Thomas dead for a whole minute in the café.

  As the proud proprietor of Ballinacroagh's three smoky pubs, a title that also qualified him as its most successful businessman, Thomas McGuire had kept a tight rein on the village's thin, and often precarious, economy. A workhorse of boundless stamina, he was rarely seen indulging in the drunken frivolities that passed as craic, or entertainment, in the small country town.

  But for the heated caresses of his rotund wife, Cecilia, who enjoyed a nymphomania of epic proportions, Thomas had been a man devoted to the humorless world of stocktaking, profit margins, and the legalized peddling of Ireland's favorite imbibed brew—thick, luscious stout. There were few who could have guessed, then, the fanciful desires that lurked in the bar owner's congested heart.

  Not even Dervla Quigley Ballinacroagh's most scrupulous ru-mormonger, had gathered that Thomas would have given up ownership of his three pubs, two spirit shops, and the Wilton Inn on Main Mall, for the chance to open his very own neon-faceted, disco-themed nightclub.

  Thomas McGuire's discotheque dream came to light one stormy afternoon, the weekend of the 1986 Patrician Day Dance.

  The July festival, commemorating Saint Patrick's spirited Lenten fast, also marked the fourth month since the Babylon Café had opened its bright red door for business. Stealing the awakened appetites of the Wilton Inn's regular lunch crowd was reason enough for Thomas to unleash his mounting fury, but the fact that the café stood on the grounds where he had planned to open his long-awaited mirror-balled nightclub, Polyester Paddy's, sparked what could only be regarded as a moment of certified insanity: he broke into the Babylon Café. There, inside its warm and quiet kitchen, he met his fate.

  Bubbling away on the kitchen range, a vast green Aga stove that had lived through four wars (civil or otherwise) and a revolutionary uprising of patriots alike, was a pot of shimmering pomegranate soup. From its open lid escaped a perfume so erotic and tantalizing that, like the bewitching Salome, it revealed false prophets with every veiled motion. The sweet, languid smell of cooking pomegranates clasped itself around Thomas McGuire's hardened heart and did not let go until it had smothered not only his stale breath but the decades of tyranny the drinks baron had imposed on Ballinacroagh's unwitting inhabitants.

  Though Thomas survived the heart attack, saved at the last minute by the café's owners, he never returned to the run of his alcohol empire. The greater part of the publican's days was now spent sitting in a lumpy chair; he resurfaced in public during Christmas and Easter Masses, a pale and withered doppelgänger of his former self.

  Yes, thought Dervla, things had definitely changed since those three foreign women moved into town.

  Just then the red door across the street swung open. Dervla quickly disappeared behind her pastel chintz curtains, only to reemerge peeping a moment later. The oldest of the three, the one who made all the food, had just stepped out onto the damp sidewalk.

  Dervla watched, following the dark-haired woman as she knelt to stop the café door open. The heavy door would shut easily were it not for the help of a stopper, which the woman was now securing at its corner. The doorstopper was none other than a crenellated iron, the same sort Dervla's mother had used to wrinkle out her father's Sunday poplin, heating it up on the turf stove that dominated their front parlor.

  Those were the days, recalled the old gossip, when a woman knew her place in the world. No time idling in front of a pot of mash for her mother, no fiddling about with recipes and fancy trimmings, that's for sure. She had more sensible chores to bother about. Sewing on buttons and picking fieldstones, now that was a woman's true lot in life.

  The woman, Marjan Something-or-Other, stood for a moment observing the iron stopper, then turned to face the Mall. Yawning, she took her time shrugging back her shoulders, shaking them loose with a smile. Her apron, a half-skirt bursting with pink and red
roses, was tied loosely around her waist. She undid the bow at the back and retied it tighter, reaching in its deep front pocket for an elastic band. This she used to harness the mass of brown curls that would otherwise have fallen around her face.

  Had it not been the modern year of 1987, thought Dervla, she would have sworn she had traveled back forty years in time, to when Estelle Delmonico had stood outside that very shop. Es-telle would flash her thick hair and curvy bits on the street six mornings of the week, without a thought to decency or Jim Quigley's roving eye.

  That Italian witch had certainly caused a hullabaloo the year she moved into town, she and that mustachioed husband of hers. Opening up a bakery smack in the middle of Main Mall, peddling coffees and puffy pastries like it was some tinker's wedding they were catering at. Not a loaf of brown bread or a potato farl to be seen in the entire shop. Imagine such a thing, now!

  Dervla shook her head slowly, her tight gray perm anchoring any sudden toss. Her beady eyes followed the Marjan woman as she made her way to the café's window shutters. Standing on the tips of her toes, she unlatched the bolts at either side of the wooden panels. Recently painted a deep plum color, the shutters folded back across the glass like a gentle accordion. As they did, a large bay window, framed by hanging baskets of wispy honeysuckle and Persian jasmine, revealed itself to the morning sun. The flowers in the baskets matched the dewy blossoms planted in two deep barrels directly below the ledge.

  With a sideways tilt of her stooped back, a sloping spine that began in a pouchy, mole-infested neck, and her pointed chin angled just right, Dervla was able to look straight through, all the way to the back of the café's dining room. There, on an elegant mahogany display counter, surrounded by teapots of various shapes and sizes, sat the showpiece of the Babylon Café, the machine she'd heard touted as “the greatest invention since the lightbulb.”

  Bloody blasphemous, if you asked her, especially considering it had been Father Fergal Mahoney who had made that insidious claim, right in the middle of Saint Barnabas's noontime Mass. That blasted contraption was the reason so many once-devoted parishioners rushed through their Sunday psalms nowadays, flying down Main Mall to that crimson door of hell with communion wafers still dissolving in their parched mouths. Shameful to the point of senseless, muttered Dervla. There ought to be a law against such behavior.

  Suddenly, a soft light flickered inside the restaurant. Dervla watched as the Marjan woman switched on the last of the café's five muted lamps, tapped the large belly of the gleaming machine with a silver spoon (a heathen ritual, no doubt), and positioned the diamond needle of an aging Victrola over an LP record. Cradling a short glass of tea in her palms, she walked back outside just as the sun broke through the cloudy sky.

  MARJAN AMINPOUR SLOWLY sipped at her hot tea and studied the changing horizon. Mornings in Ireland were so different from those of her Persian childhood, she thought, not for the first time. Were she still in the land of her birth, Marjan mused, daybreak would be marked by the crisp sounds of a sofreh, the embroidered cloth upon which all meals were enjoyed, flapping over a richly carpeted floor. Once spread, the sofreh would be covered by jars of homemade preserves—rose petal, quincelime,and sour cherry—as well as pots of orange blossom honey and creamy butter. The jams and honey would sit alongside freshly baked rounds of sangak bread, golden and redolent with crunchy sesame seeds. Piled and teetering like a tower, the sangak was a perfect accompaniment to the platters of garden mint, sweet basil, and feta cheese placed on the sofreh, bought fresh from the local bazaar.

  And of course, Marjan thought with a smile, no breakfast sofreh was complete without the presence of a steaming samovar, the golden water boiler without which fragrant cups of bergamot tea could not be enjoyed. No meal could survive without a stop of that draft.

  Marjan sighed as she took another sip of her bergamot tea. She might not be in Iran now, but she could happily boast a pantry full of jam jars. Jam jars aplenty, to be precise, as well as a domed oven whose heated bricks turned dough into piping morsels of bread—not to mention a verdant back garden, where stalks of cilantro, mint, and feathery dill bloomed season after season. And while she didn't have the time for an elaborate Persian breakfast, she did own a trusty electrical samovar, not to mention a view that had, throughout the centuries, mesmerized saints and sinners alike.

  Marjan gazed up the steep and cobbled Main Mall, past the bright yellow frontage of Corcoran's Bake Shop and the fat sausage displays of the Butcher's Block, toward the obelisk monument at the opening of the town square. There, perched on his stone pedestal, with crooked staff in one hand and dead snakes splayed at his sandaled feet, was Patrick, patron saint of Eire. The old bishop looked rather triumphant in his regal robes, thought Marjan, free of the demons that had once haunted him. It had taken him a long time to get rid of them, but get rid of them he had.

  From where she stood, Marjan could even see the rising summit of Croagh Patrick, County Mayo's most illustrious mountain. Conical in shape and steeped in its usual misty blanket of green, “the Reek” was a popular destination for devout climbers, contrite pilgrims who hiked its shrouded peak in hopes of spiritual release.

  In quiet moments, before her sisters had woken and when the only sound on the street was that of Conor Jennings's Guinness truck, Marjan liked to take her morning tea with a view of the mountain. That old mound of penitence never ceased to amaze her, the modesty of its simple triangular shape filling her with peace and security.

  Even the ancient Celts had felt the magic. Long before Saint Patrick had set foot on the mountain, druidic souls had ventured to its summit for worship. On days like today, thought Marjan, when the equinox was rounding its autumnal corner and the berries of surrounding hedgerows were turning from scarlet to deepest amethyst, their pagan exaltations must have been doubly poignant. Crops had been gathered, the old year was coming to an end, and winter was looming, dark and dangerous. Courage and faith had carried those early warriors through the bitterest of seasons. It was a great reminder of what could be done with a bit of luck, Marjan told herself.

  Courage and faith—and a bit of Irish luck—had brought them to this little western town. It was still hard to believe that a year and a half had passed since she and her sisters had packed their bags and moved over from London. A year and a half! Marjan shook her head in awe. It seemed like only yesterday when she'd hung the wooden sign above the café door and begun serving platters of fried elephant ears and baklava to hungry villagers. She could still recall the anxiety with which she had prepared her first batch of dolmeh, the nerves that had threatened to get the better of her as she pushed the fragrant parcels into the hot oven. How she had prayed for strength on that spring day! Having planted her hopes deep inside for so long, she had willed them to burst forth, feeding her vision of a café filled with warmth, laughter, and light. And somehow things had worked out. Somehow they had found a home, here in this quiet corner of the world, this Ballinacroagh.

  Amazing, thought Marjan with a smile, how some things turned out. There was much to be thankful for, that was for sure.

  Nodding, she lifted the tea glass to her lips, drinking in the last of its orangey goodness. Taking one final look at the ancient mountain, she turned to go back into the café.

  At the door she paused, lifting her fist to the small wooden shamrock nailed above the handle. The clover's heart-shaped leaves were powerful shields against the evil eye, protecting all who paid it homage. It was a potent good luck charm that couldn't hurt from some superstitious knocking, thought Marjan.

  If nothing else, she told herself with a smile, her “heathen ways” would give Dervla Quigley something to nibble on for hours to come.

  “WHERE WERE YOU?” Bahar said as Marjan walked into the kitchen with her empty glass. “I had to put the dried limes in myself,” she added, halfheartedly stirring a pot of herb stew with a wooden spoon.

  Marjan gasped. “Did you just put them in?” She hurried to the Aga and grabbed the
spoon from her sister. Four limoumani were bobbing happily amongst the stewing fenugreek. She deftly fished the limes out, placing them on a small terra-cotta saucer.

  Bahar held up her hands. “Take it easy. It's only a few limes,”she said, backing away from the green stove. Through the kitchen door she could see Fiona Athey and Evie Watson settling at their usual window-side seats. “Besides, aren't you supposed to add the limoumani with the meat?”

  “The meat has to soften with the herbs before you can introduce the sour. Otherwise, it's too overpowering,” explained Mar-jan, waving her pinched thumb and forefinger in the air as though she were conducting a symphony. “You have to let the fenugreek take hold of the broth, you see,” she added.

  Bahar sighed. “I don't know how you remember all those details. Just hand me a knife and lead me to the chopping block. Anything else is too hard,” she said, tying an apron, one with maroon pheasants marching across the hem and pockets, around her neck and tiny waist. The apron was one of nearly a dozen their landlady and friend, Estelle Delmonico, had sewn for them that year.

  “Looks like Fiona's ready for her jasmine tea. I think we should just give her a permit to use the samovar whenever she wants. She's in love with that thing!”

  Marjan let out a laugh. “I know. I'm half-thinking of getting her one this Christmas. Mustafa's sells them now.”

  “Don't you dare!” said Bahar, stuffing a frayed order pad into her apron pocket. “She'll keep it in the salon, for sure. Then we'll never see her.” She threw Marjan a creaky smile and swung past the kitchen doors.

  Marjan returned to the pot and gave the thick herb stew another stir. The long, thin leaves of the fenugreek swam gracefully against the sides of her spoon, entwining themselves with the lighter cilantro, parsley, and chives.

  According to the Persian seer Avicenna, whose Canon of Medicine Marjan often consulted, fenugreek is the first stop to curing winter chills. Combined with the hearty kidney beans and succulent meat of the herb stew, it made for an excellent garm, or hot, meal. Whenever she could, Marjan liked to adhere to the ancient Zoroastrian tradition of cooking, matching the needs and bounties of the season (as well as the individual eater) to ingredients.