The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (13 page)

“A gift?” she asked.

“Yes.” Khanoom nodded. “A gift.”

Lili sat up and clapped her hands. The three puppies scampered out of the basket and began crawling across the bed. One of them, the littlest one, began to lick her fingers, and Lili giggled.

“You can keep that one if you like,” Khanoom told her, giving the puppy a pat. “But to make you feel better,
bacheh-joon
, you must first let it suckle.”

“Suckle?”

“Suckle.”

Lili gasped. “I won’t!”

“You must!”

But after that Lili turned her face to the wall and crossed her arms over her chest and would not so much as look at the puppies. Khanoom frowned and squared her shoulders. She lifted the puppies up one by one, placed them back into the basket, and turned from the room.

She would appear again the next day with another basket. This one held a pair of six-month-old twins belonging to a distant cousin. The twins latched on expertly and, in so doing, brought immediate relief. Their mother, no doubt grateful for the respite from her own duties, sent them once in the morning and once in the evening for a week. The second week the twins came three days, the third week
just twice. In this time Lili’s own baby was given goat’s milk served from a glass bottle affixed with a plastic yellow nipple, but after the twins cured Lili’s engorgement, Sara learned to latch on with ease.

Lili’s pain slowly diminished and Sara began to settle into a routine, but for days afterward Lili would still think about the three puppies Khanoom had brought to her bedside. Lili would close her eyes and imagine their velvety coats and their moist brown eyes. She thought about the littlest one, the one that had licked her fingers with its rough tongue and lifted its head to let her scratch under its chin. She wondered where Khanoom found the puppies and where they’d been taken after Lili had refused to let them nurse.

Kobra, meanwhile, could think of nothing but her own baby lying dead in the garden. She barely spoke anymore and had grown painfully thin. She spent the days huddled in her bed and the nights pacing the house with a curious vigor. She hadn’t visited Lili in the hospital, not even for an hour, and when Lili returned to Avenue Moniriyeh with Sara she could not even look at the new baby without wishing desperately that she herself would die.

To temper Kobra’s anguish, Khanoom and the others sequestered her in a corner of the house, far away from Lili and Sara. So successful were they in shielding Lili from Kobra’s grief that Lili would always remember the weeks after the delivery as one of the happiest times of her life. She’d been gone for over a year, but she fell easily into the old rhythms and rituals of Khanoom’s house. Lili listened eagerly to all the gossip and grew intimate with everyone’s ailments, but most of all she let herself be tended. Everything was done for her—expertly and devotedly. There was always a pair of extra hands to hold and rock Sara, and in all that time Lili did not have to change a single diaper or even her own nightgown.

She spent entire days by the
korsi,
with heavy quilts and cushions heaped all around her. Khanoom sent her manservant to the bakery every morning and he’d return with two sheets of long, heavy
flatbread, one slung over each shoulder. The bread was still warm when Khanoom dipped it into the cream for Lili and poured her glass after glass of cardamom-and-saffron-spiced milk. For lunch and dinner everyone gathered under the
korsi
and ate
ash
(soup) with noodles, ground beef, fresh chives, and thick creamy dollops of
kashk
(fermented whey), or else the enormous herb-and-chickpea meatballs that were Khanoom’s other cold-weather specialty. “You must eat. You must grow strong again,” Khanoom told Lili at every meal, and so she did.

“She has come! Sohrab’s woman has come!”

Sometime before Sara’s birth, Khanoom, fearing for Sohrab’s soul, had demanded that he either formally marry Simin, his twice-divorced, blue-eyed mistress, or else put an end to the relationship. Sohrab responded by cutting off all contact from his family. The ensuing separation had lasted one year, in which time Khanoom seemed to age ten.

It was understood by all that Khanoom would not survive another such episode, but it was Simin herself who’d initiated the rapprochement with Sohrab’s family. Every few weeks she invited Khanoom and Sohrab’s sisters to her own house for a lavish lunch. They always returned full of praise for Simin’s fava bean pilafs and her pomegranate-and-walnut stews, her well-appointed rooms and her artful entertaining, and when Simin mentioned that they should not hesitate to come to her for loans the clan grew fonder of her still.

And yet the speculations raged on. Had Sohrab officially married his woman? Performed a
siqeh
—a temporary marriage? Dispensed with all rites and formalities? When Simin appeared at Lili and Kazem’s apartment to greet Lili and her new baby, the visit would add a new question to this long-running debate. Had Sohrab sent Simin as a gesture of respect or was her visit meant, rather, to establish his woman as beyond his family’s reproach?

She was not pretty and she was not beautiful. Sohrab’s woman, as they would always call her among themselves, was ravishing. Her glossy black hair fell long past her shoulders to the small of her back, her skin seemed completely poreless, and her eyes were an unearthly pale blue. The dress she wore—pale lavender with a row of tiny pearlescent buttons running from her throat to just above her waist—was a garment otherwise so plain that Khanoom herself might have worn it, except that it was exquisitely cut to reveal Simin’s tiny waist and sumptuously rounded rear.

When Simin joined the gathering, Lili had for some time been seated on an expanse of cushions at the farthermost end of the room. She had taken more care than usual when dressing that morning, slipping on her prettiest peach-colored silk blouse, loosening her hair from its braid, and even running a bit of kohl along her eyes, but when her aunt announced Simin’s arrival Lili was at once painfully self-conscious.

Lili tucked her bare feet quickly under the blanket and raised a hand to smooth the frizzy strands at her crown. When she looked up again, there, suddenly, was the blue-eyed woman who’d linked arms with Lili’s father in a garden outside the city and bathed with her in the river lined with beech trees many summers ago. Lili had not seen her since that time, not even once, but now the lady had come just to visit her.

The moment seemed to call for her to rise, but she could not. Four weeks after the delivery of the baby, her stomach was still bound in the homemade girdle Khanoom had fashioned for her from long strips of muslin. Lili could scarcely breathe in this garment, and with Sara lying on her legs with her little head propped at her knees, she found it impossible to move.

“
Salaam, khanoom
,” she offered from the floor.

Simin bent down to brush her cheeks with two kisses. “
Salaam, dokhtar-joon
.”

Certainly it was fear of Sohrab that inspired the clan’s ministrations toward Simin that day, but their attentiveness was just as much a surrender to the irrefutable proof of the woman’s beauty, grace, and—though it was not a word they would so much as whisper or even let themselves think in connection with anyone but foreigners and prostitutes—
lavandee.
Sexiness. Simin was sexy. They felt it, they could not deny it, and it inspired them to do the one thing they knew best: to serve her.

Thick honey-soaked squares of
baqlava
were the first delicacy to be set before Sohrab’s woman that afternoon. Next came the almond-stuffed dates, then the puff pastries clotted with fresh cream. They waited and watched. Simin’s eyes did not so much as linger on any of it. “But
khanoom
!” they wailed, genuinely aggrieved. “You must at least try a small piece of the
baqlava
!” Simin made no answer but to smile faintly and take another sip of tea. Glasses of cherry sherbet, plates of fig compote, and bowls of saffron pudding came flying out of the kitchen in quick succession. But no matter what they set before her, Simin’s lips would go nowhere but to the rim of her crystal teacup.

Having at last exhausted their offerings, the clan left Lili and Simin alone in the apartment and congregated in the courtyard to discuss their next move. What could Sohrab’s woman possibly mean by her refusal to eat? Various explanations were put forth, but when someone suggested that it was only right that Simin would wish to preserve her splendid figure, all of them nodded in assent, and then even the ones who thought themselves beyond such vanities vowed to practice more restraint with respect to their own appetites—if not on this day, well, certainly the next.

“I congratulate you,” Simin said to Lili as the clan’s deliberations reached a close and the women began straggling back to the apartment. “You are a mother now.”

Lili flinched.
A mother
—it was precisely this distinction of motherhood that had always governed her grandmother’s and aunts’
treatment of Kobra and Simin. However much Sohrab favored Simin, however they themselves had come to think her superior, the fact of her infertility could simply not be overcome. It was Kobra who was the mother of Sohrab’s children and Simin who was not.

When, just a few short months later, Lili replayed the scene of their meeting again and again in her head, she would remember that there’d been an unmistakably cool tone to Simin’s congratulations. But that Simin should resent not only Kobra’s presence in Sohrab’s life, however broken, but also hers and Nader’s was something Lili had not considered before and would not consider that day. Indeed, at the time she had felt nothing so much as an overwhelming sense of gratitude for Simin’s visit.

“
Merci
,” Lili stammered. “Thank you,
khanoom-joon
.”

Lili cried miserably on the day she returned with Sara to her own flat in the Bottom of the City, but her anguish would soon be overshadowed by news of Ma Mère’s death and the attendant obligations of mourning. When Ma Mère died that year she was mourned for forty days and forty nights. An enormous framed photograph of her was mounted in the main parlor of the Khorrami compound and flanked by a pair of candelabra the height of trees. The photograph showed Ma Mère with a lovely smile that rendered her unrecognizable to Lili. It was an impression she chose to keep to herself throughout the mourning rites.

She’d only recently left Khanoom’s house and returned to her own dingy apartment. When Lili was alone for the first time with Sara, the routines of motherhood baffled and thoroughly exhausted her. Now she was also expected daily at the Khorramis’ compound to greet and attend the mourners, and there was nothing for it but to bundle her baby up and take her along for the task.

To Lili’s surprise, Kazem’s relatives, who’d so recently mocked her
own family’s fidelity to traditional wedding customs, now mourned with the sexes separated and the women veiled and grieving with all the ritualized abandon Lili had long associated with such occasions. The Khorrami women held silk fans to keep themselves from overheating, fainting, or both. Some threw themselves onto the floor, while many approached the point of collapse, only to be revived by handkerchiefs doused in valerian and rose water.

The arrival of every new visitor would inspire the others to recount in intimate detail how Ma Mère had passed into the next life. Though the lady had died suddenly of a heart attack and with little apparent suffering, the story of her death inspired the mourners to lash their chests and pull at their hair. One woman clawed her face deeply enough to leave tracks of blood along her cheeks. Through all of this, one lament was continually repeated, sometimes singly and sometimes by the whole party at once: “Why have you gone, why have you gone, why have you gone…”

Mourning in this fashion demanded constant refreshment. Dates, almonds, and halvah were thought particularly revitalizing, and in place of tea they drank the thickest, most bitter concoction of Turkish coffee. By afternoon, dozens of neighbors began drifting into the compound, accompanied by their own family members, friends, associates, and acquaintances. Night after night the servants were ordered to cook twelve pots of rice and twelve pots of stew. If this threatened to fall short of satisfying the crowd’s appetite, they cooked a thirteenth pot of rice, spooned in another cup of tomato paste, and with that they fed every last person who came to mourn the matriarch.

When Lili had first returned to the apartment after Sara’s birth, Kazem would begin shouting at her over some detail of housekeeping—a poorly prepared pot of rice or a dusty mantel—and when Sara began crying he’d shout at her, too. Lili didn’t know how to make Sara stop crying and often she found herself crying along, too. But now, with Ma Mère’s death, Kazem had fallen into a depression so
deep and constant that he did not even seem to notice Lili or the baby. He spent whole days slumped in a chair in the corner of their apartment, his face in his hands, completely silent. It was to be the calmest interlude of their marriage, though it would end much differently.

That end came in summertime, on one of the many days of which it was commonly said that the sun could force open a flower bud by midday and fry its petals crisp by sunset. Lili had packed a bag with a change of clothes and towels and set off with Sara for the bathhouse. Bruises—faint now but still visible—ran along Lili’s torso, arms, and legs. She knew she could try to bathe discreetly in the communal pools, winding a towel or two around herself to hide her bruises from the other bathers. Because the effort of this was great and ruined what was one of her few pleasures, she’d begun squirreling away a couple of
tomans
to hire a private stall once or twice a month. That was her plan on this particular day.

She took a number from the attendant and waited in the courtyard for her turn. Once inside the stall, she held her baby to her chest, closed her eyes, and let the warm water envelop them. She washed Sara first, all over her rounded belly and behind her ears and inside the folds of her thighs. When Sara was still a newborn, Lili had set her on a towel by her feet so that she could wash herself, but when at five months Sara began crawling she’d had to develop a new tactic for bathing. Tucking Sara under one arm, Lili lathered and scrubbed the opposite side of her body with her free hand, then switched the baby over to wash the other side. Between washing and rinsing herself like this she often caught her daughter’s black eyes smiling up at her through the steam.