The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (34 page)

Later it would seem that only the blank expanse on the gravestone could contain her grief, but for hours Kobra would sit by herself, desperate to think of a name to give Lili’s baby. Long after the other mourners had filed out of the cemetery, Kobra sat cross-legged beside his grave, rocking herself back and forth, weeping and praying until at last she felt her madness lift and she imagined salvation descending to take its place.

As Kobra recovered from her grief over the stillborn’s death and Lili diverted hers by seeking out yet another series of fertility treatments, Johann dedicated himself to his own cause: Iran’s infrastructure. “I know what this country needs!” Johann declared to Lili one day, handing her a thick pile of sketches. “Ready-mix concrete!”

For all the feverish construction of those years, concrete was still mixed by hand in Iran. It was a costly and time-consuming, not to say backbreaking, process, and one for which Johann, bent over the dining table with his drafting tools and maps, sketching and calculating through packs of cigarettes and a bottle of English whiskey, had finally managed to find a solution. That the project might distract Lili from the agonies of infertility had made him doubly sure of its necessity.

“But how much will it cost us?” she asked him.

“Just thirty thousand
tomans
to start, and we’re sure to get a loan for the rest.”

Lili cast her eyes up to the heavens. At that moment they had less than a thousand
tomans
between them, but the project’s merits were immediately obvious to her. She lowered her gaze and looked about her. “We’ll sell the condominium,” she sighed.

With that they moved into a smaller apartment farther south on Avenue Pahlavi. Johann procured a loan from a German bank the following month, quit his job at Etco, and struck out some sixty miles northwest of Tehran, to a place so forlorn that not even a dog could recognize its master, as the saying went, and there he bought a thirty-acre parcel of land. A quick survey of the closest village put him in contact with a copper-skinned, broad-faced Azari Turk named Fato’allah. A long-unemployed father of three, Fato’allah took one look at this lanky, blue-eyed foreigner and cheerfully attached his fate to the venture.

Johann bought a clanking, sputtering, weather-beaten pickup truck and then he and Fato’allah began filling its bed with bricks. They spent several weeks working side by side, building a low brick wall to demarcate the property line from the neighboring wasteland. In the middle of the day, with the sun at the height of its mercilessness, Johann and Fato’allah spread out a carpet under the parcel’s lone date palm, shared a tobacco pipe, poured two cups of tea from a canister, and proceeded to eat the flatbread and walnuts Lili packed for their lunch each day. At the start of the project, Johann could not make out much more of Fato’allah’s Azari accent than “
salaam
” and “
merci
,” but in their many months together under the date palm Johann would learn to speak a more or less fluent Persian tinged with the same sweet Turkish accent as Fato’allah’s.

Next Johann built Fato’allah a house on the property, a simple two-room structure with an adjoining privy. Fato’allah, speechless with gratitude, rounded up his family from the village and brought them to live in the cottage. Every night Fato’allah’s wife, Samira, unrolled a mattress onto the center of the floor, and every morning she rolled it back up against the wall. Whenever Lili came along with Johann to survey the factory’s progress, she’d find Samira by the door to the cottage, smiling shyly from behind her flowered kerchief while her children played nearby. Samira was perpetually pregnant.
Dear God, how can another body possibly fit in there?
Lili thought each time, but still the family grew. Lili improvised checkups for Fato’allah, Samira, and their children, and even if they had but three cookies and one melon in the cupboard, they would always offer everything they had to Madame Doctor alongside a freshly brewed cup of cardamom-spiced tea.

When the brick wall ran all the way round the property, Johann and Fato’allah began to build the factory itself. The mixing machines began to rattle, churn, and hum. Together Johann and Fato’allah kept the machines working through the crushing heat of summer until, finally, the two ready-mix concrete trucks arrived, at
enormous expense, from Germany, and with that the pair at last made their maiden voyage to the capital, Johann manning the wheel and Fato’allah exultant at his side.

On Lili there now fell the dual functions of the corporation’s president and its secretary. She propped a poster in the parlor window, acquired a desk, and began negotiating the company’s contracts. Mostly her work was conducted over the phone and in the hours between her hospital shifts, but whenever signatures were required Lili pulled on a suit and drew a chair opposite her desk.

This arrangement worked well enough until the day the landlord’s wife, Khanoom Nabavi, caught Lili’s arm in the hallway. “You have many gentleman callers,
khanoom,
” she murmured, averting her eyes. “Many, many men…”

It took a moment for Lili to grasp her meaning. Khanoom Nabavi had mistaken her for one of those women whose profession could not even be named. Lili led her to the window. “You see,
khanoom
,” she said, pointing to the sign, “we have a company. Ready-mix concrete. My husband’s company and mine.”

Khanoom Nabavi stared at the sign and shook her head. “Too many men…,” she murmured.

All-merciful God
, Lili thought to herself,
the woman is completely illiterate!
How could she get Khanoom Nabavi to understand that her and Johann’s venture was a legitimate one?

When she next spied Khanoom Nabavi’s grandson mounting the back stairs, Lili quickly poked her head out the window and called him into the apartment. “Please,” she said, handing him some contracts and a stray pile of receipts and pointing out the poster in the window, “can you explain to your grandmother?” She specified the profession for which Khanoom Nabavi had mistaken hers.

The young man blanched, dropped his eyes, and mumbled an apology.

“Surely an honest mistake,
agha
, but should you or any of your friends
or associates need any concrete,” Lili added when showing him the door, “you now know who you’re obliged to buy it from!”

One day a woman approached Lili as she was making her way out of King’s Serenity. She wore a chador, a full, black veil. “I beg your pardon,
khanoom
,” she said with a nervous glance at Lili’s uniform, “but are you a nurse?”

“A midwife.”

“Thanks be to God!” the woman cried, and clutched Lili’s hand. “My sister, she is pregnant.” She turned her palms up and tilted her head. “But they wanted two thousand
tomans
there,” she said with a nod toward the hospital, “and it’s too much for us….”

“And the public hospital?”

“No room. They told me to bring her here, but—” She lowered her eyes.

“But what can I do for you,
khanoom-jan
?”

“Will you come to our house?”

The woman’s hand, as she held Lili’s, trembled.

“And where is your house?” Lili asked her.

The woman lowered her eyes. “Tayeh Shar,” she mumbled. The Bottom of the City, the poorest district in Tehran.

Seeing the woman’s shame only hastened Lili’s reply. “Yes,” she answered, “I will come with you,
khanoom-jan
.”

They drove south by taxi, past the train station, past the vestiges of Tehran’s caravanserai, the old way station for travelers, until at last they reached a cluster of tin-roofed buildings set against a muddy slope. She’d lived not far from here once, many years ago when she’d been Kazem’s wife. Her sadness, exhaustion, and terror had prevented her from grasping the poverty of her life back then. It struck her now like a blow, but she would not let her face betray her for fear of offending the woman at her side.

Together they climbed out of the taxi. Lili let herself be led up a mud-packed path until her companion stopped before one of the shanties. In place of a door, a sheet of sun-bleached burlap had been nailed to the wall. She lifted it gingerly, entered, and then watched a dozen pairs of eyes turn to her with fear and then relief.

“Thanks be to God!” the women cried, and pulled her inside.

Lili squinted against the dark. The room, she gradually saw, was just ten feet wide and ten feet across. It had no window and no carpets. In the center of the room a girl of no more than seventeen lay tucked under the
korsi
, moaning. Her face shone with perspiration. Her patient.

“
Salaam, dokhtar-jan
,” Lili said. Hello, dear girl.

Lili set down her work bag and then turned to the oldest woman in attendance, a heavyset matron with gray braids that fell to her hips. “Her water sac?” she inquired.

“Broken.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“Last night!”

Lili sucked in her breath and began unpacking her tools. “Boil water!” she ordered. “Boil water at once!”

She reached for the girl’s hand. Her pulse was regular, her temperature normal, but when Lili pressed her fingertips to the girl’s belly, just above the girl’s pelvis, she felt an unmistakable sign of trouble: she could not feel the baby’s heartbeat. The birth could be risky, fatal even, but with the girl’s contractions at less than a minute apart, there was no chance they’d reach the hospital in time.

For the first time in many years, Lili felt her hands begin to shake as she prepared to deliver a child.

For a quarter of an hour the girl leaned against her grandmother’s shoulder, groaning and crying and screaming by turn. Lili meanwhile scrubbed her hands and forearms in a pot of hot water, calculating the contractions as they came. When she checked the girl’s
pelvis again, Lili still felt no heartbeat. She drew a breath, pushed up her sleeves, and told the girl to lie back down by the
korsi.

The baby came fast. Lili pulled him clear, checked his color, pressed her mouth to his tiny lips, and then gave him a slap against the buttocks. He let out a ripping scream. “
Pesareh!
” one of the women shouted. “It’s a boy! A boy!”

With that the event was at once transformed into a celebration. Tears spilled from the girl’s cheeks, someone began to sing, and even the neighbors crowded into the room and let out whoops of joy.

When she’d stitched the girl’s wounds and quelled her bleeding with ice, when the basins and bloody sheets had been hauled away to where she did not know, Lili packed her implements, reached into her purse, and counted out two hundred
tomans
.

“For your baby,” she said as she placed the money on the mantel.

Her hand was already on the burlap when the women swept her back inside. “But we can’t accept this!” they pleaded. They tried to press the bills back into her hands. Lili shook her head and made ready to leave. “Then you must stay now as our guest! You absolutely must!” A candle was lit on the mantel, an embroidered cloth unfurled on the floor, and it was many hours later that they sent her off with kisses, blessings, and a small but very full basket of quince fruits.

“But we must do something!” she told Mariam the next day.

Mariam only laughed bitterly. “Those districts are teeming with such stories,” she told Lili.

With the advent of modern hospitals and licensing regulations, the old informal networks of midwives had grown thin. A number of large public facilities struggled to fill in the gap, but many traditional families were not keen that male doctors should examine their daughters and attend them in childbirth.

“That girl,” Mariam said, “was lucky her family brought her anyone at all.”

“But we must do something!” Lili cried again.

Mariam made no answer, but then she narrowed her eyes in a manner Lili had come to recognize well. Mariam was scheming.

Within a week of that exchange, Lili and Mariam had rented a space in the Bottom of the City. Their “clinic” consisted of a single examination room, with a sink, a cot, a chair, and a small wooden side table. Though they charged a nominal fee of one hundred
tomans
, the enterprise was subsidized in large part by their own salaries and staffed by just the two of them. Lili and Mariam’s patients ranged from factory girls of fourteen or younger to fifty-year-old housewives with eleven children. As they labored in the clinic’s one room, their sisters and cousins and mothers sat cross-legged in the corridor. They brought their knitting and embroidery, passed around their pots of stew and jars of pickled onions and beets, and, invariably, fell into each other’s arms with joy at news of a boy’s birth and wept and consoled each other at news of a girl’s.

As word of the clinic spread, the Bottom of the City families also brought their nine-and twelve-and fourteen-year-old daughters, skinny and pudgy, flawless and blemished, rich and poor, mostly Muslim but also Jewish and Christian—dozens and dozens of young girls alike only in their fear. The girls appeared at the clinic to have their virginity confirmed, most often on the eve of their weddings but also when their parents suspected them of having boyfriends or, less frequently, of having been raped.

The ten years that stood between Lili and most of these girls could not close in on the memory of the day she’d had her virginity examined and everything that had followed. She knew, from the first, that whatever it cost her, in money and in grief, she could never turn these girls away. But over time she developed her own methods for
these examinations. She always started by meeting the girls’ eyes. “Tell me,” she’d begin. They confided as much of their stories as they could. “My father will kill me,” they whispered, or, “My brothers will kill him.” Most, though, said nothing at all.

Whatever they told her or could not tell her, Lili always nodded, patted their hands, and smoothed their brows. She checked the girls for bruises and scars, and if she found none, she released them to their families with reassurances that all was in order. The result of all this was that Lili sent out far more “virgins” than came through her doors in those years. She counted on people’s pride to keep them silent, and, so far as she knew, it always did. The declaration of chastity was made and its documentation delivered, and if subsequent events indicated a girl’s virginity lacking, they sought their revenge elsewhere, far away from Lili.