With a few years of sporadic attendance at elementary school, Zee-Zee had learned how to read and write by the time she was eight, and now in the lonely hours of her teenage years, she showed a great interest in reading all sorts of books, especially classical poetry. Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat became her favorite, and she memorized many of the great poet’s quatrains and often sang them in her solitude.
Helen was very grateful for Zee-Zee’s lack of interest in men. With no competition from her daughter, she freely developed her lucrative profession on the side, which was intended to secure an independent future for her and her future progeny. After each performance, she would take Zee-Zee, “her tired baby,” home. She would make sure Zee-Zee ate the right quality and quantity of healthy food and went to bed on time. She would then accept men. Although men’s appearances were different from the sort she used to serve when she was poor, in essence they were the same; with a fistful of petrodollars, thanks to OPEC, they were at times even more rude and crude.
She never sipped another drop of Iranian brewed aragh sagy, or aragh-e keshmesh-e dow atesheh. Instead, Johnnie Walker Black Label on the rocks, straight shots of imported Russian aragh, a few glasses of aged French red wine or bubbly French champagne became her favorites.
The decade of the 70s appeared to pass with supersonic speed, while Esmat and Faty had the world in the palms of their hands, permanently secure beyond all standards, living among the clouds. With her increased wealth, Helen purchased a brand new Mercedes Benz 600, hired a chauffeur, a maid, and a private secretary. The flow of fortune and fame was unstoppable. She bought another, bigger, more luxurious house, new furniture, jewelry and more European dresses. Acquiring wealth was no problem; money seemed to grow on trees. Like autumn leaves it fell on the stage in the evenings and between her thighs at night. Her only problem was that she couldn’t spend it fast enough. She had come a long way from her past life of deprivation and poverty.
Wealth overhauled Helen’s exterior completely. In the past if she consciously had to defend herself with her profanity and fake external roughness; now she softened and sweetened her words, filtering them first in her mind before passing them through her lips. Of course, now and then, when sexually arouse a few profane words, in compromising positions, sounded exciting, like spice to make her more deliciously palatable.
Wealth had done its magic. No one could imagine this new Helen as Fat Esmat of only a few years ago. Everything about her looks, manner, voice and movements signified a woman of high class – a symbol to be envied by the rest – a woman to be emulated by others.
One night a wealthy unattractive Arab from Kuwait with a lot of unrepaired pockmarks on his dark brown face approached Helen in a nightclub. He confessed his love and desire for Zee-Zee and offered a blank check to Helen if Zee-Zee would marry him, give up show business and live in his palace like a queen. Helen took a good look at the man and refused instantly, lying, telling him that her baby was engaged to a rich young man from good stock, soon to be married. Knowing that Arabs love Persian women, especially the “chubby” ones, she showed him a sample of her own body by pulling up her skirt to a few inches above her knees. She let him peek and touch all that soft and smooth skin that the man had never seen on any woman on the other side of the Persian Gulf.
The man went on fondling Helen’s thighs, inching his hand toward her vagina, while kept bargaining, hoping he could strike a deal with her and lure her to bed. She refused his offers, but allowed him to come close, sample her by touching her shapely thighs and kissing her cheek and touching her breast, hoping to raise her ultimate price. The man, immature in the art of picking up a woman, didn’t have a clue about the game he was getting himself into. He was about to lose his mind with the hors d'oeuvres Helen was “generously”offering, and, being overloaded with hormones and petrodollars, he wanted to indulge himself with the main dish. He extended an offer of one hundred thousand dollars if Helen would join him for a one-week trip to the south shores of the Persian Gulf in his private custom-made 727 Jet. She accepted the offer coquettishly, received the money in advance, and told him she would join him in Kuwait in two days then went to his hotel. Once they arrived in his room in the Continental Hotel, Esmat refused to get naked, only pulled her skirts half up, lay on her back – and let the man receive enough pleasure for his money. Helen never set foot in Kuwait and never saw the Arab’s palace or any other parts of Kuwait.
She would brag about her high value to her other customers often, but kept it a secret from her “tired baby.”
Chapter Four
If the angel of happiness knocks on anyone’s door only once in a lifetime, for Zee-Zee it took place early on a hot August afternoon. While Helen was taking her long beauty nap in her room on the first floor, young and fragile Zee-Zee was restlessly and innocently entertaining herself by trying on some of her old dresses and practicing dance moves in front of a mirror in a secluded room on the third floor. A large window was left open, inviting the cool breeze from the mountain to come in. She was unaware that a young boy in his late teens was in ecstasy, watching and enjoying every curve of her tender body from a window in a house across the street.
She tried on a dress, twirled around, looked at her body in the mirror and bowed to an imaginary audience, and then tried on another one. She would then appear completely nude delighted by watching the movements of her own proportionate body in the mirror, busy playing a sweet guiltless game of youth.
Each of her coquettish glances at the mirror seemed to be a desperate need for a simple response, for the mirror to tell her that she was indeed beautiful. She, whispering, would ask an imaginary tall handsome young man, chocolate-suntanned, dressed in a white silky suit and turquoise-blue shirt, in the mirror, “Do you think I’m pretty, you devil young handsome crazy man?” She would then laughingly reply as if she were the man in the mirror, “Of course, you are, aziz-e man!”
Completely naked, as she twirled around, thinking she was dancing only for the eyes of the imaginary handsome young man in the mirror, her eyes accidentally caught a glimpse of the young man across the street gazing at her. Frozen, she stood in the middle of the room for a few seconds, gazing back at the man. To avoid his sharp hungry eyes, she dove to the floor and remained there motionless for a few long minutes. She felt a rush of anger at first as she listened to the pounding of her heart throbbing in her chest. But it soon gave way to a sense of shame, then eventually to an ambiguous joy and excitement very foreign to her. She crawled to a corner, grabbed a piece of clothing, put it on and bravely went to the window, only to discover that the young man had vanished, evaporated into thin air. She had never seen him before; then again, they had moved to the neighborhood only recently. As she bent to pick up a dress from the floor and before she could complete her loud expressions of disgust, “A coward, thief ...”, she heard a crackling noise. A piece of paper wrapped around a small rock sailed through the window, hit the opposite wall and fell to the floor. She picked it up, opened the paper and read: “Forgive me for looking at you. You must believe me. I couldn't help it. I was just admiring your beauty. How can one stop looking at a beautiful flower? If anybody should be blamed for this intrusion into your privacy it must be you, because you’re so beautiful. How I wish to see you, to speak