Zarrinkolah was twenty-six years old and a prostitute. She was working in the New City at Golden Akram's house. Akram had seven gold teeth, and was also called Akram Seven. She had been there since she was a child. At first, she had three or four customers a day. By the time she was twenty-six, she had twenty to twenty-five or even thirty customers a day. She was tired of working. She had complained to Akram several times, and was yelled at and eventually beaten, until she shut up.
Zarrinkolah was a cheerful woman. She was always cheerful, whether she had three or four customers a day or thirty. She even turned her complaints into jokes. All the women liked her. When they ate lunch, Zarrinkolah would start joking and dance around the table, and the women would die laughing.
Several times she intended to leave the house, but the women had prevented her. They said that if she left the house, it would be dead. Perhaps all the women encouraged Akram Seven to beat her. Zarrinkolah never really intended to leave, for if she left this house, she would have to go straight to another house. Once, when she was nineteen, she received a marriage proposal and had a chance to leave. The suitor was an ambitious construction worker who dreamed of becoming a mason, and needed a hardworking wife. Unfortunately, before they could decide what to do, someone cracked open his skull with a shovel during a fight.
Although she complained sometimes, she had accepted her fate. But now, for six months, she had not been able to think clearly. The problem started one Sunday morning when she woke up.
Akram Seven shouted, "Zarri, there's a customer, and he's in a hurry."
There weren't many customers early in the morning. Usually just a few, who had stayed over from the night before, and had the urge in the morning. That Sunday morning, Zarrinkolah thought, so a customer has come. So what. She wanted to shout out, so what, but Akram Seven yelled, "Zarri, I'm talking to you. I said a customer has come."
She left her breakfast and angrily went back to the bedroom, lay down on the bed and opened her legs. The customer entered the room. It was a man without a head. Zarrinkolah didn't dare scream. The headless customer did his business and left.
From that day on, all of the customers were headless. Zarrinkolah didn't dare say a word about it. They might say that she was possessed by a demon. She had heard about a woman possessed by a demon, who would start shrieking at eight o'clock. For a while this scared away the customers until they kicked her out of the house.
Zarrinkolah decided to sing every night at eight o'clock so that she wouldn't shriek like that woman. She did this for six months. Unfortunately she couldn't carry a tune. A guitar player said, "You bitch, you don't even have a voice, you're giving everybody a headache." After hearing this, she went into the bathroom every night and sang there for half an hour. Akram Seven ignored it. After all, Zarrinkolah took care of thirty customers and was still cheerful. She was always cheerful.
Then they brought an innocent young girl to the house. One day Zarrinkolah took her into her room and said, "Kid, I have to tell you something. I have to tell somebody. I'm afraid I'm going crazy. I have a secret that's making me miserable."
The girl said, "Everyone has to tell their secrets to someone. My grandmother used to say that the poor Imam Ali, who couldn't talk to anybody, used to go out to the desert and put his head in a well and pour out his grievances."
"That's true. Now I'm going to tell you. I see everyone without a head. Not the women. The men. They're all headless."
The girl listened kindly. She asked, "You really see them all without heads?"
"Yes."
"OK, so maybe they really don't have heads."
"If they really didn't have heads, the other women would notice."
"Well, that's true. But maybe they all see them without heads, but like you, don't dare say anything about it."
So they agreed that whenever Zarrinkolah saw a headless man she would let the girl know, and if the girl saw a headless man she would let Zarrinkolah know.
Zarrinkolah saw all the men without heads and the girl saw them all with heads.
The next day, the girl said, "Zarrinkolah, you should maybe pray and make a vow. Maybe then you will see the men with heads."
Zarrinkolah took two days off work and went to the bathhouse. Instead of going to the public section like she usually did, she went to a private room so that she wouldn't have to talk and joke with the other women. She hired a woman to scrub her back. She washed herself from head to foot. She ordered the bath worker to scrub her three times. The bath worker scrubbed until Zarrinkolah's skin was raw. But she wasn't satisfied that she was clean enough to pray.
The bath worker finally broke down crying, and said, "You poor woman, you must be crazy."
Zarrinkolah paid the bath worker well so that she wouldn't tell anybody about her, and asked her how to perform ablutions after sexual pollution.
When the bath worker left, Zarrinkolah performed ablutions. She did it fifty times. Her entire body was burning from the chafing of the sponge.
She intended to get dressed and go to the shrine of Shah Abdelazim, but she had a sudden urge to pray. She decided to pray naked, but she didn't know how to pray. She decided that if Ali was so sad that he went out to the desert to pour out his grievances to a well, it would be all right for her to just repeat his name as a prayer. She prostrated herself in prayer, naked in the bath, saying, "Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali..."
As she was saying this she began to cry. She cried and called out to Ali.
Somebody knocked on the door, and then banged on it. She came out of her ecstasy and asked, sobbing, "Who is it?"
It was the bath attendant. She said they wanted to close up the bathhouse.
Zarrinkolah put on her clean clothes and gave her dirty clothes to the attendant. She went out and walked to the shrine of Abdelazim.
It was nighttime and the shrine was closed. She sat outside in the yard and cried quietly in the moonlight.
In the morning when they opened up the shrine, her eyes were swollen shut. She stopped crying, but did not enter. Her body felt as like a piece of straw.
She ate breakfast in a diner. She asked the owner, "If a person wants to drink cool water this time of the summer, where should she go?"
The owner looked at her puffy eyes with pity, and said, "Karaj isn't bad."
There was nothing in her face to show that she had once been a prostitute. She had become a small woman of twenty-six with a heart as big as the sea.
She went to Karaj.