The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (28 page)

But when, finally, the last of the introductions had been made and she was free to venture out into the streets, Lili would find cause for astonishment even greater than her relatives’. In her absence Tehran had seemingly shrugged off the last of its eighteenth-century foundations and transformed itself into a twentieth-century metropolis. Cranes and high-rise buildings had shot up in every direction. The streets were now clotted with traffic, the city skyline wreathed in perpetual smog. Scores of young Iranians had left for Europe and, increasingly, for America, but here in the streets of Tehran Lili was suddenly witness to a reverse exodus. Thousands of foreigners had come to live and work in the country (by the seventies there would be nearly a million), and to accommodate them the once-modest Mehrabad Airport, the portal through which they all passed, was swallowing whole farms as it fanned out into the countryside.

Nowhere, though, did the changes seem more striking to her than among the female population of Tehran. With their short shift
dresses, pocketbooks, and bouffants, most
Tehrooni
women were now as indistinguishable from the foreign women in the streets as they were indifferent to the veiled women who walked beside them. Most shocking of all, wherever she looked in the capital everyone, from the pious old
chadoris
to the soigné young ladies, now had cigarettes pressed between their lips.

But where, Johann mused, were the rose gardens of which the poet Sa’adi had so rapturously written? What had become of the bejeweled thrones? The fabled monuments? Lili began to worry that Johann’s penchant for Persian antiquity had played too great a part in his decision to marry her. She resolved, therefore, to leave this bewildering new Tehran behind for the moment and devote her fiancé’s first weeks in Iran to searching for the most blighted regions of her native land.

It was to be their Tour of Destitution. She borrowed a few hundred
tomans
from Khanoom and then, beginning with some of the poorest districts of the capital and ending with the most forlorn of its neighboring villages, Lili and Johann bumped and jerked along in rusted buses for three weeks, resting at what she made sure were the most humble lodgings along the way. Johann observed everything with great care and took notes in a small leather-bound notebook purchased for that very purpose. When Lili saw that the dereliction of Tehran’s southerly neighborhoods—largely unchanged despite the transformations that had taken place elsewhere in the capital—failed to rattle him, she became curious about how intimately he’d known poverty himself. Back in Germany he’d once talked of the war, of the work camps and trekking from Russia to Germany with his father, but the story had been related with scant detail.

In any event, when she saw that the Tour of Destitution did not diminish Johann’s enthusiasm for Iran, or for her, she rewarded him with another tour, the Tour of Many Splendors. As part of this journey, they peeked through the gates of the shah’s palace in Niavaran, surveyed the lush valleys and snowy peaks of Mount Damavand, and
then headed south for an extended ramble through the architectural jewels of Isfahan, Shiraz, and Persepolis, most of which Lili would be seeing for the first time in her life.

Here there was plenty to delight Johann. His notebook was soon full of sketches and scribbles and he resorted to documenting the Tour of Many Splendors in the margins of pages chronicling the earlier Tour of Destitution. He walked the length of Isfahan’s central square in a daze, traced a reverential finger along the calligraphy adorning H
fez’s tomb in Shiraz. In Persepolis, Johann fell speechless at the colossal tombs hewn of ochre rock.

But the greatest surprise came on the road back from Persepolis when a wiry, dark-skinned villager greeted Johann in English, bowed his head, and proceeded to kiss his hands. Thorough as it had been, Johann’s study of Iranian history had not prepared him for such a welcome.

Lili did her best to explain. A long succession of invasions (Greek, Arab, Mongol, Turkish, English) had been wedded to the Iranian gift for hospitality and a more elemental instinct for survival. Over the centuries, the union had managed to produce a widespread strain of obsequiousness toward foreigners. That such deference came laced, at least occasionally, with suspicion and resentment was something Lili kept to herself for the time being. Johann, shaking himself free of the would-be supplicant, pronounced the episode the most incredible of their journey so far.

On the way back to Tehran, Lili chanced to read a sign for the village of S
r
and decided to dedicate the last leg of the Tour of Many Splendors to a search for her long-lost aunt Zahra.

As a young girl Zahra, with her full lips and lovely almond-shaped eyes, had been considered among the prettiest of her sisters. At fourteen, just a few years before Kobra’s marriage to Sohrab, Zahra had
been married off to a wealthy but ill-tempered widower. The union had not suited her at all, and so she’d badgered and tormented her husband until he at last consented to divorce her. Had she taken up widow’s weeds, Zahra might have eventually been forgiven this disgrace. Instead, Zahra eloped with a second husband to the town of S
r
, and thereafter her family acted as though she had died, or else had never been born. Zahra had not been seen in Tehran for many years, though her mother, Pargol, and later Kobra had been known to send her letters in S
r
through a scribe.

Lili and Johann found Zahra sitting on the front steps of a honey-colored cottage, peeling an orange and looking resplendent in her exile. Though she was well into her forties by then, Zahra’s plump lips, sweeping eyebrows, full breasts, and deep-throated laugh made her a woman of striking beauty. She clearly cared nothing for Western fashions and wore her veils in the old style, rather like an Indian sari, cut of beautiful crepe de chine and tailored to perfection. Yet Zahra’s allure rested, really, on a less definable quality: saltiness. “
Zahra namak dareh
,” it was said of her. “Zahra has salt,” meaning that her charms were exquisitely seasoned. In the town of S
r
it was a well-known fact that with just one glance from her kohl-lined eyes and a quick toss of her veil Zahra could make old men and teenage boys alike blush. Lili found her salty, indeed, and adored her for it.