After several more songs and dances everybody applauded enthusiastically, primarily for Faty, and congratulated Esmat for having such a precious talented daughter and suggested she should encourage Faty, perhaps even send her for dancing lessons. At the end of all their compliments and advice, all five ladies dug into their purses and handed little Faty money, colorful paper money.
Once they left the house, Esmat snatched the money from Faty’s little hands. As she counted the bills, she was stunned to find out that it was more than ten times the amount she received for washing clothes.
The notion of using her own untapped talent along with Faty's to earn their living, instead of being a rakht shoor, struck her like a pleasant shock. The idea, as farfetched as it seemed, lodged itself in the back of her mind and took on greater weight with every passing minute. It didn't leave her alone all the way home or even over half a bottle of aragh sagy, nor later under the weight of the ugly and stinky body of Mash Abbas, the butcher, who was so tight with his money that always bargained over two rounds of going at it for the price of one because he would always have his orgasm in less then five minutes, regardless how much roasted dombalan, lamb’s testicles, he ate.
Early the next morning, when Esmat woke up, she found sleepy Faty next to her. She stretched her tired body and gazed over at the innocent face that looked like an angel’s. She whispered, “Oh, my God! I can't believe it. I got me a gold mine.”
The following week, Esmat began her new career with the same vigorous determination with which she had once sought a husband, and no obstacle could stop her from realizing her dream.
Life was sweet and easy for Faty. It flowed on smoothly and routinely, in spite of an occasional flare of temper by Esmat. Their entertaining ability and quality spread quickly – all by word of mouth. Esmat would take her to parties, weddings, birthdays and circumcision parties; first, around where they lived, but later, when her reputation mushroomed citywide, invitations came from all over the city. Wearing nice, soft, shiny colorful dresses, Faty would dance her heart out, sometimes until early dawn.
In the past, Esmat’s touches were only slaps to punish little Faty but as their entertainment career got under way and money began to pour in, she stopped beating her baby and began touching her tenderly.
Esmat began to take better care of her own appearance as the money started to roll in. She purchased numerous new dresses, washed her hair more often with perfumed shampoo, reshaped her eyebrows, separating them by plucking the hairs in between, wore makeup and even went on a crash diet. She lost a great amount of weight but soon stopped the dieting when her breasts began to noticeably sag. She remained pleasantly plump. Her hands never touched another piece of dirty laundry regardless how much more her clients were ready to pay for her service – not hers, not her daughter’s and certainly no one else’s. However, she continued to accept customers at night but at a higher price. When more flow of cash kept coming her way, she took her baby to have her teeth straightened after taking care of her own first. Faty's body and face shone with health and cleanliness, fair and delicate, and white as porcelain, all in less than a year.
An important event happened the night Faty turned six. Her mother surprised her by telling her that they would sing and dance in a nightclub in an underground saloon on Lalehzar Nou Street. This was a sort of night club where all the truckers and cabdrivers, butchers, grave-diggers, blacksmiths and every good-for-nothing, two-bit city hoodlum competed for a few over-the-hill-dancers, with tree-trunk-thick thighs and huge sagging breasts, who would prostitute on the side to supplement their incomes.
The place was jam-packed with men of all ages; smoke and noise had already filled the place when Esmat and Faty arrived late. Their hearts were full of hope and their stomachs swarmed with butterflies. To calm her nerves, to do away with her stage freight, Esmat downed a few shots of aragh-e keshmesh-e dow atesheh, a two-flames vodka extracted from raisins (one notch better in quality and in strength than aragh sagy), before she sang and played three tunes while Faty performed her dances. Little Faty became so deliriously excited that she even joined in singing with her high-pitched squeaky voice. The second they finished their routine, the audience showed their overwhelming enthusiasm by showering them with bills and coins, and they didn't stop as Faty and Esmat bowed once and left the stage.
The talented mother and daughter cheerfully counted the money backstage while the loud applause and whistling continued generously. With all the excitement and appreciation expressed by the intoxicated customers, the nightclub owner asked Esmat to return the next night to perform. It more than pleased her when she heard the unsolicited request, for unbelievably, it represented an enormous opportunity, a vision of a new life for her. A golden dream was unexpectedly turning into an unbelievable reality.
By now Faty had learned two dozen songs by listening to radio and was accomplished in several dances: the simple waist and buttocks twisting, with the meaningless curling of hands above the head, called the Tehrani dance, which looked like someone trying to screw a light bulb into its socket; the fast artistic footwork of Lezgy, Caucas, Georgian and Kurdish dances; and the favorite of all men, the sexually arousing belly dance. She had memorized the lyrics of several rhythmic love songs with a few slightly profane words thrown in as spice. To her the dancing and singing was not work; it was shameless pleasure and fun – the best way to please her mother at first, and then others and, unknowingly, she had coined an identity for herself.
As Faty grew older, her mole-sized breasts swelled with the sweet juice of youth and became round and big enough to fill up the palms of any adult male, even with enormous hands. The more nightclubs she and her mother performed in, the more fame and fortune poured down on the garden of their fantasies, nurturing the bloom of every bud of their dreams. Their names sounded unfitting and inappropriate for their profession, so Esmat metamorphosed to Helen and Faty, Zee-Zee, to have a more European ring. The new names made them feel as if they had become entirely different people, who had never existed before. With new names they felt their rearview mirrors shattered, they were well protected from their acrimonious past. With no past and no sad memories to chase them, or to hinder their advancement on the road to a bright and glorious future, life began to be more exciting than Esmat had ever dreamed.
They even sang a few rhythmic songs with cheap street language lyrics on the radio one Friday morning when every ear was glued to the sound box. That helped them land a job at the prestigious Shekofeh-Nou Nightclub, where the pay was beyond their imaginations.
Since the press did not have the freedom to publish social and political events of true importance during the Shah's regime, and people who dared to write the truth were jailed and their pens were broken, no valuable material worth reading appeared in the daily or weekly publications. Instead, not one week would pass without Helen and Zee-Zee's pictures appearing on the cover of some weekly magazine – Zan-e Emrooz (Today’s Woman), Weekly Etelauat (Weekly Information), and a host of other publications.
Zee-Zee was only fifteen, but was on her way to becoming a symbol of womanhood in a society that was always preoccupied with its tumultuous past, a past that was wrongly perceived as “glorious,” intoxicated in its aimless present and paranoid and frightened of its unknown future.
Helen bought a three-bedroom house on the city’s north side, where the cool breezes from the Alburz Range soothed the skin in summertime, and where most of the rich and famous lived. She moved to the new house with no intention of ever going back to her old neighborhood. She stayed away from all her previous neighbors as if they had all contracted the plague or some other incurable disease.
When she was known as Fat Esmat, she was fat, poor, and if not ugly to the eyes of the general public, surely unattractive to a certain class. But she was always in demand by a different class of men who were mainly attracted to, among other things, her big body, the texture and the color of her skin, her profanities and perverted way of lovemaking that they couldn’t expect from their wives. If in the past she was destitute and didn’t know what to do to make herself eye-catching to men of distinction, now that the money was pouring in every which way, she knew exactly what to do to make herself increasingly in demand to rich men and even to men of some stature.