The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (30 page)

The elders pronounced the jeweled rice the best in collective memory and the saffron pudding fit for the shah and his queen, while Lili’s cousins declared her tiny waist a marvel to rival a Hollywood starlet’s. At midnight the dinner spread was finally cleared away and
Lili’s teenage cousin Nima pulled out his
tar
, an old-fashioned Iranian string instrument. When the neighbors came to complain about the noise, they were simply invited to join the festivities. The photographer captured image after image and Nima played song after song, and since there was scarcely any room to stand, Lili was the only one of the wedding party to dance.

She rose to her feet. Nothing remained of the thirteen-year-old bride she’d been, nothing of the confusion and terror she had felt when Kazem gripped her wrists and pulled him to her on their wedding night. This was an Iranian dance, an Iranian tune, and when she began to dance her groom was smiling shyly at her from across the room. She lifted her arms, tilted her head, and swayed her hips. She kicked off her shoes and let her hem down. Her hair slipped loose from its pins and she did not raise her hand to tidy it but let it fall about her bare shoulders. One song rose and slipped into the next, and on this night Lili danced only for her groom and lifted her eyes only for him.

The next day at noon Kobra knocked gently on the door. In a much-abbreviated nod to tradition, she, Zaynab, and Khanoom and some others had passed the night on the floor of the living room, and Kobra woke in the early morning to cook Lili and Johann their first meal as a married couple. Pancakes with thick clots of fresh cream, strawberries the size of plums, almond-stuffed dates, and a little vase of nasturtium trailing its vines along the delicacies—Kobra passed the offerings into Mr. Engineer’s hands and then, before taking her leave, she lowered her eyes and flashed him the shy smile with which she’d greet him in all the years to come.

By the time of Lili and Johann’s wedding, Kobra’s mother, Pargol, had lost her mind. It started several years earlier, when she lost her house. For over twenty years Kobra’s brother Ali-Ahmad had approached
their mother, Pargol, with every sweet connivance gleaned from half a lifetime of loafing and swindling. “I’ll serve you for the rest of your days,” he’d sworn, clutching his heart and kneeling at her feet for extra effect. He would, he continued, make enough money to buy her a new house on the smartest boulevard in the city, where he’d hire no fewer than ten servants to tend to her. He’d go around dressed in tweeds fit for an Englishman. He’d buy her a French fur so long she’d sweep the streets of Tehran with its hem, and when she grew tired of it he would buy her three more to take its place.

Year after year Pargol merely laughed her deep-throated laugh, tousled Ali-Ahmad’s steadily thinning hair, and assured him that only death could part her from those rooms. But then, sometime after her seventieth year, Pargol began conversing with doorknobs and lightbulbs and staring at her hands for hours at a time—behaviors that, some decades hence, would posthumously be diagnosed as symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

Ali-Ahmad followed her demise with care. When he at last managed to extract the deed to her beloved house, Pargol’s condition, and his own circumstances, would deteriorate with astonishing speed. In short order Ali-Ahmad invested and lost every last
toman
from the sale of Pargol’s house, installed Pargol in a tiny room in his elder brother’s home, and began drinking himself to a premature death. In even shorter order, Pargol acquired the troubling habit of wandering into the street by herself and disappearing for days on end. They’d find her perched on a park bench or on the pavement of some far-flung alley, combing her long white hair with her fingers and mumbling to herself in a language completely of her own invention.

The only choice then was to keep Pargol locked in a room until death released her from her agony. In the meantime, Kobra did her best to shield her mother from its worst effect: loneliness. Kobra paid near-daily visits to wash and braid Pargol’s hair, spoon porridge and yogurt into her toothless mouth, and listen to her warbling until
Kobra felt she herself might go mad. It was also Kobra who arranged for Pargol’s care on those occasions that demanded her exclusion from the family. Lili’s wedding had been one of these occasions. Pargol had spent that night eating snap peas in a basement with a servant, and though Pargol herself had seemed perfectly content with the arrangement, Kobra urged Lili and her new husband to visit Pargol just as soon as they returned from their honeymoon.

“Look here; look here!” Kobra called out brightly, straightening Pargol’s flower-print kerchief and taking her by the arm to greet the newlyweds. “Here is Lili and your new
damad farangi
!” If Pargol recognized her granddaughter, there was no outward sign of it whatsoever, but after several weeks of visits from the first and last foreigner she was to see in her life, Pargol at last took Johann’s hands in her own, looked deep into his eyes, and declared that she missed the purple summertime skies of the village she had left more than seventy years before.

Her marriage formalized and feted, Lili now attended to the unfinished business. “Telephone Kazem’s mother for me,” Lili told Kobra one morning soon after the wedding festivities had ended. Lili was sitting before the mirror, combing out her curls. “Tell her I want to see Sara.”

Kobra cast her eyes down to the floor and cleared her throat. “I can’t.”

“And why can’t you?”

“Because,” Kobra answered quietly, “Kazem’s mother is dead.”

Lili turned from the mirror. “But where is Sara then?”

“They say she’s gone to her aunt’s house—”

“They say? Who says? And how long—”

But Kobra had already retreated to the next room. Lili followed her. Kobra took up her prayer shawl, turned her palms upward, and began her midmorning
namaz
. With no choice but to wait for Kobra
to finish her prayers, Lili pressed her forehead to the wall and began teasing out the implications of Kobra’s revelation.

Kobra’s
namaz
went on much longer than usual that morning, but some thirty minutes later she found Lili outside the bedroom door, tapping her foot and holding out the phone.

“Call them and tell them I want to see Sara,” Lili told her. “Tell them we are coming to see her and that my husband will accompany us. Call them
now
.”

Kobra prepared herself to defend her new son-in-law against insults by her former son-in-law and his family, but two days later, when Lili rang the Khorramis’ bell and the door to the villa swung open, it was immediately clear that Lili had correctly gauged the effect of Johann’s presence on Kazem and his family. Although Johann spoke no Persian at all and would not have understood any insult yielded at him, he was a tall, blond, blue-eyed European, and his presence at Lili’s side assured that the meeting with the Khorramis would proceed with an abundance of Persian pleasantries.

“
Salaam, salaam!
” Kazem called out to them as Lili, Kobra, and Johann crossed from the house into the terrace. Kazem wore a light gray double-breasted suit and silk tie, all much finer than the clothes he’d worn in the past, and an updated version of his old gray felt fedora. His arms were extended in warm welcome.

Silk carpets had been spread over the terrace of the Khorrami compound. Lili’s eye fell at once to the lovely array of sweets, melons, and iced sherbets assembled for the visit. Kazem’s aunt, Sogra Khanoom, a heavyset woman in a sleeveless shift, rose and offered her hand, and the five or six assorted relatives followed suit. Addressing Johann in halting English and with the title “Mr. Engineer,” one after another the Khorramis bid Johann welcome to Iran, and then, by extension, they also bid Lili and Kobra welcome to their home. Even Kazem, when he spoke to Lili and Kobra, used the formal address
shoma
rather than the more familiar
toh.

Lili took in the show with satisfaction, but where, she wondered, was Sara? Just as Lili began to doubt that Sara was in the house at all, there came the sound of high heels clattering against the flagstones.

“Such a good girl!” Sogra Khanoom suddenly exclaimed.

“So good with the children,” added a cousin.

“And a first-rate cook,” noted yet another cousin.

The heels clattered louder and louder until a girl paused just short of the terrace. She had straight black hair and olive skin and she wore a blue dress, a little too long in the arms, tight around the hips, and cut wide and deep in the front. A cocktail dress, in short. In her hands she was holding a tray, and she kept her eyes lowered as she approached the party.

“Come now,” Sogra Khanoom called out. Sara began passing the tea among the guests. When she came to Lili, she flicked her eyes up, just briefly. She did not smile.

“
Salaam, dokhtaram,
” Lili said, rising from her seat to kiss her on each cheek. Hello, my daughter.

Sara looked up toward her aunt and then back down at the tray. “
Salaam
,” she said.

Lili winced. Not
salaam, madaram
(hello, Mother), as was the customary sign of respect and affection, but only “hello.”

Lili struggled to maintain her composure and the pleasantries resumed around her. Sara finished serving the tea, took a cup for her herself, and then sat beside her aunt. When Sara raised the cup to her mouth, the collar of her dress slipped, exposing one of her shoulders. Sara tugged it back into place, but very casually, very carelessly.

They have not taught her shame
, Lili thought to herself.
They have not taught her modesty
. It suddenly seemed very important not to look, really, at Sara in her cast-off dress, not to see this absence of shame and modesty, not to understand it as neglect.

“You’re in seventh grade now, yes?” Lili asked her.

“I don’t go to school anymore,” Sara answered.

Lili turned to Kazem. “But why,” she asked, her voice suddenly shrill, “did you stop sending her to school?”

At this, smiles faded and eyes were averted. “I have three other children,” Kazem said. He turned to Johann, addressing the rest of his words to him in English. “Mr. Engineer, it is difficult to provide for all of them, and she and my wife do not get on so well—”

Before Johann could attempt an answer, Sogra Khanoom cleared her throat and began to speak. “Actually, Lili-
jan
, Sara completed her sixth-grade year, but the truth of the matter is that she didn’t care much for school, and so we brought her to live with us here. The children—my daughter’s children—are very fond of her, you know, and she’s been a great help to me since my daughter and her husband left for America.”

“I see,” Lili said at length. “And when will your daughter and her husband return to Iran?”

“Ah…,” said Sogra Khanoom with a sigh and a glance up to the heavens. “It’s so very difficult to know. Maybe this year, maybe the next….” She sighed again and took a long draught of tea. “Surely you can understand these things after having left us yourself for so long.”

“Surely,” Lili answered, “you understand I had no choice.”

“But Lili-
jan
!” said Sogra Khanoom with an air of pure exasperation. “What choice have we, any of us, in this life?”

No sooner had they reached the car than Lili planted herself in the backseat, next to Kobra, and let loose a string of recriminations. “Why didn’t you tell me her grandmother died? Why didn’t you tell me they sent her to her aunt’s house?”

“What use was there?” Kobra shot back. “What could you have done for her? What could I have done for her?”

“But you let them make a servant out of her! They couldn’t make me their servant, so they’ve made a servant out of her!”

“I knew we shouldn’t have come here,” Kobra whimpered. “Your father’s soul is uneasy. I know; I can feel it here….” She made a fist and began pounding her heart with it. “He always said no good would come from seeing that child.”

“A servant, a servant…,” Lili railed.

“What are you saying to each other?” Johann asked from the front seat. He’d pulled to the side of the road and turned off the engine. “What has happened?”

“
Idioten, idioten, idioten!”
Lili shouted in German by way of answer. Idiots, idiots, idiots! Strangely, the outburst had a calming effect on her. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “We must bring her to our house,” she told Kobra in Persian.

“Our house!” Kobra cried. “We don’t have a house! Have you forgotten that we don’t have a house? You don’t have a house and I don’t have a house. And he,” she said with a nod toward Johann, “certainly has no house.”

“What is she saying now?” Johann asked again. He’d turned around to face them and was looking anxiously from Kobra to Lili. “Why won’t you tell me what has happened?”

Lili began to answer him in German, but Kobra caught her arm and gave it a squeeze. “Don’t you upset him!” she hissed. “He’s only just set foot in this country and already you want to burden him with that child!” She shook her head. “She is Kazem’s daughter,” Kobra said with emphasis. “They have all of them made sure of that, so let them care for her.”

“But she can’t stay there with them! They’ve turned her against me; they’ve made a servant out of her!”

“And do you really believe,” Kobra answered evenly, “that you can do anything about it now?”

Lili made no answer to her mother that day, but she would, as Kobra had put it, do something for Sara.

The reunion had unsettled her, but it had also disabused Lili of certain foolish hopes. Sara was no longer the little girl who’d sought her out on Zahirodolleh Alley. Lili knew better than to think she could claim back Sara’s affections; she had promised too much and come too late for that. Yet she was now only more determined to make something of herself. She would submit her résumé to the best clinics and hospitals in Tehran and find work for Johann as well. She’d find them a house of their own and then she’d set about making something of Sara, too. If nothing else, she would send her daughter back to school.