The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (16 page)

“But Sara won’t be safe with him!” Lili whimpered. “He’ll hurt her, he’ll—” They quickly shushed her. Kazem’s mother, not Kazem himself, would raise Sara. Khorrami Khanoom was a good woman, kind and forbearing, and, unlike Kazem’s grandmother Ma Mère, had always seemed to genuinely love “that little girl.” Had Lili’s own grandmother Khanoom not been more of a mother to her than Kobra? Well, then who better to care for Sara than her grandmother? And, what’s more, Khorrami Khanoom ran a school of her own, and in just two years “the child” could join the children there.

It was then that a worrisome thing started to happen. Where Lili had once seen only her baby’s round face and lovely black eyes, now she saw only Kazem. When Sara cried, her brow furrowed just like his, and Lili was sure her eyes were his, too.

Really, though, there was no choice, and therefore nothing to consider. One week her aunt Zaynab stopped bringing Sara to her and soon afterward Khanoom wrapped Lili’s chest with long, thin strips of cotton to stop her milk, pulling them so taut that several times she caught her breath and cried out from pain. Gradually her milk dried up and the soreness in her chest began to ease, but for many weeks afterward her throat would feel so tight and raw that she could not speak for all her grief.

“Let her sit and wait until her hair turns as white as her teeth!”

When, after several weeks, Lili had still not returned to their apartment, Kazem refused to divorce her. Sohrab had consented to let him keep the bride money as well as all the items in her trousseau. He’d even hinted that Kazem could expect even more money on top of that. Still Kazem refused. “Let her sit and wait until her hair turns as white as her teeth!” was his reported reply to the divorce petition.

But Kazem’s willfulness was no match for her father’s, nor for Sohrab’s unique resources. Over the years Sohrab had collected a wide assortment of friends and acquaintances, and among the men with whom he regularly gambled and drank were a number of the city’s most prominent government figures. In the end it was no less than a top-level minister who was dispatched to procure Lili’s divorce. Though this gentleman began his appeal respectfully enough, he proceeded quickly to issue threats. “You’ll find yourself squatting in the middle of the Sahara,” Kazem was told, “with nothing but a hollow reed to air out your misery.” The exchange ended with curses on both sides, but not, finally, without Kazem’s concession.

Then one day the summons arrived.

It was the first time Lili had left the house since returning from the hospital. Her hair, so smartly bobbed just weeks before, had grown scraggly and uneven. On the day the summons arrived, Khanoom trimmed it for her and combed it until it crackled and shone. Lili pulled on one of Kobra’s skirt suits, slipped on a pair of her round-toed heels, and then she and one of her aunts walked to the courthouse arm in arm.

It was autumn by then, the season of pomegranates and quince. There was a hint of cold in the air as Lili made her way up Avenue
Pahlavi. The leaves of the plane trees had turned golden and had begun fluttering down to the sidewalks. In the distance she could make out the brown peaks of Mount Damavand rising above the city. Soon the whole of Tehran—from the mountains to the rooftops to the streets and the alleyways—would be brushed over with snow. There was a chance Sohrab would let Lili return to school after the winter holidays, and there she might once again be just a girl among many others.

The clerk, a portly, mustachioed fellow with heavy-lidded eyes, removed his glasses, peered into her face, and asked her—repeatedly—if she was certain she understood the meaning of the petition. “Divorce,” he intoned, “is a most serious matter. The most serious, in fact. Are you certain you wish to proceed, young lady?” Each time she nodded her head a firm yes, but he’d asked her again and again. Finally, though, the clerk returned his glasses to his face and, after a last deep sigh, he slid his pen to her side of the desk. With a slow and certain hand, Lili signed her name, and with that she was at last free.

Four

In Sohrab’s House

“I had nothing, I was no one. A divorcée was considered no better than a prostitute back then. But he made something of me, my father, and that would be the second miracle of my life.”

B
Y THE MIDDLE OF
the century rich
Tehroonis
had already begun their exodus to the north, toward Mount Damavand, where the air was more pure and more temperate and land was still plentiful, and from the day he first left his mother’s house on Avenue Moniriyeh, Sohrab had followed their lead. Edging farther and farther up Avenue Pahlavi, he’d sought out a series of increasingly smart living quarters for himself. The same exacting eye that had served him so well in his work appraising Persian carpets he also turned to the decoration of his own surroundings, with the result that every room he called his own boasted gold-footed banquettes, lacquered coffee tables, velvet drapes, and the very finest silk carpets piled three and four deep. Sohrab was also most particular about keeping up with the latest technical innovations to come to Iran. Each new apartment or house he rented boasted another set of wonders—running water, electricity, a phone line, and so on.

Yet Sohrab had divided the rooms of his grand house on Avenue Pahlavi in a manner that would have been familiar to his father, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. One wing, which older generations would have called the
andarooni
, or inside of the house,
he turned over to Kobra, Lili, and Nader; the other, the onetime
birooni
, or outside, he kept for himself. Like patriarchs of old, he was the only one free to move between the two quarters, and on Ali, his wiry, aged manservant, he now conferred one additional responsibility: to keep close watch over the comings and goings in the other half of the house.

Meanwhile, in his own quarters Sohrab continued to entertain his friends and associates in the manner to which they’d long been accustomed. The men passed the evenings drinking
araq
, smoking cigars, and playing cards and backgammon. If his woman (or any other women, for that matter) came to visit Sohrab in his rooms, the other members of the house certainly never bore witness to it. And as for Kobra, the only time Sohrab suffered her presence in his private quarters was when she went there to drop off a bowl of dill-and-cucumber yogurt or the garlicky eggplant dip so popular among his guests.

But that spring Kobra ruled every last corner of Sohrab’s house. In the final weeks of winter every window and door was thrown open at her command. She disassembled the
korsi
, washed all the quilts and cushions, hung them to dry in the courtyard, and then removed them to the basement. She hauled the furniture outside, gave every piece a thorough dusting, and commenced to rub them all with linseed oil. She rolled up the carpets and curtains and beat them with a broom until they yielded their last specks of dirt. She scrubbed the ceilings, then the walls, then the floors. She polished all the dishes and bowls and spoons in the house. She soaked lentils, set them in the sun, and sprinkled water over them until they sprouted green shoots. She laundered every last item of clothing the family owned, and when she strung the clothes outside to dry she knotted them together to bring everyone closer together in the coming year.

With one week to go before No Rooz, the Persian New Year, Kobra set up a huge vat in the courtyard for the
samanoo
, a dense,
sugary paste made from germinated wheat, and everyone, even Sohrab and all the male relatives who passed through the house, could be counted on to give it a stir, because they knew it would bring good luck in the new year. Then, on the day before the new year, she laid the
sofreh
with the seven
seens
—the seven totems of spring—a Koran, and a bowl of plump goldfish with a tangerine bobbing above their heads. She trekked to the bazaar for the choicest chickpea cookies and the most fragrant pomegranates and oranges. She sent Nader and Lili to the baths with horsehair mitts to scrub their bodies and bowls of vinegar to rinse their hair. She dunked strips of whitefish in a batter of egg yolks and saffron and fried them up along with two gigantic platters’ worth of spinach pancakes. She pinched her
dolmehs
tight and stacked them neat and even.

And only when every room of the house smelled of ammonia and hyacinth and a plate of thick, amber
samanoo
was placed on the
sofreh
alongside a lush swatch of greens did she settle down and wait for the earth to make its way round the sun so that the new year could begin.

It was then, in springtime, that the
kolis
—the Gypsy girls—came down from the mountains to the city with their arms full of branches from the mulberry trees. They had coal black eyes and hennaed hands. Silver flashed at their throats, their wrists, and their ankles. Their plaits swung out from under their bright, patterned kerchiefs and their long, flounced skirts skimmed the ground as they walked. Their feet were always bare. And though they came to sell their mulberries, there was always a sweet-tongued Gypsy among them to trade a story or a fortune-telling for a silver plate or a bolt of pretty cloth.

Every spring Lili’s grandmother Khanoom went down to the street to greet the
kolis
and then carefully pick out the branches with the greatest quantity of mulberries.
Shahtoot
, they were called—king’s berries. It had been Lili’s job as a girl to pluck them from the branches,
drop them into her grandmother’s pot, and carry them to the courtyard when she was finished. Crimson with halos of pink near their stems, the
shahtoot
berries always reached up to the top of Khanoom’s biggest cooking pot. She’d watch as her grandmother rinsed them under water from the fountain in the courtyard. Then together Lili and Khanoom would grab fistfuls of
shahtoot
and scatter them onto large aluminum sheets. After a day or two outside, the sun would call up all their sweetness and then, finally, they would be ready to eat.

Having missed the
kolis
the last time they came to the city, Lili was the first to greet them this year.

As he had been raised by a passel of illiterate women and bound to another by marriage, nothing aggravated Sohrab as much as an ignorant female. However carefully he’d guarded her as a girl, on the matter of Lili’s education he’d always been the most forward thinking of fathers; the continuation of her studies had, in fact, been the sole condition he’d extended for her marriage.

And yet, after her divorce, Sohrab refused to allow Lili to return to school. With her expulsion from the School of Virtue still fresh in his mind, he thought it unlikely that a private school would take her. The city’s public schools, where one teacher was often entrusted with as many as fifty students, he would not even consider. But beyond such practical considerations was another, far more pressing worry. A divorcée, it was said, surrendered to seduction as easily as a ripe peach slid down the throat. Sohrab predicted that any young man who discovered Lili’s status would make advances on her—or much worse—and since she was no longer a virgin there would be no recourse for such actions. The only way to protect Lili now would be to keep her at home.

“Why trouble yourself with school?” Lili’s aunts and grandmother asked her. “You’ll be wiping another bottom soon enough!”
This was the height of optimism, but even if they could manage to find her a suitor, nothing made Lili more miserable than the thought of marriage. One by one her female cousins were leaving school to marry or else help their families by working in the house. The young brides among them sidled up to her with wide grins and steadily rounding bellies. “You’ll marry again,” they, too, assured her, and proceeded to recommend that she take up some practical skill such as embroidery or else take a turn holding one of their newborns.

Sulking, Lili refused to take up so much as a single needle. To live in her father’s house, to go only where he allowed, she would never dare question. But she was her father’s daughter and she could not stand to become one of the ignorant females he scorned. It also did not help that at family gatherings her male cousins had taken to quizzing each other with obscure questions about calculus, physics, and chemistry—subjects she had never even studied. Before her marriage she had been just as clever as the boys, but now, having fallen nearly three grades behind in school, she could only listen mutely as they tried to outwit one another.

Most humbling of all, her favorite cousin, Sina, the most brilliant of all her male cousins, was now studying to become a doctor. He was only a first-year medical student, and yet everyone, even Sohrab himself, had already taken to calling him Mr. Doctor. Lavished with the respect usually reserved for family elders, Mr. Doctor was consulted on everything from the purchase of a new radio to the proper method for removing algae from the
hoz
.