The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (17 page)

Then why not, thought Lili to herself one day, put Sina to work on her behalf? After several desperate entreaties she managed to convince her cousin to take up the cause of her education. “Impossible,” Sohrab replied whenever Sina broached the topic, yet Mr. Doctor’s appeals—polite, logical, and undertaken with the greatest consideration of Sohrab’s vanities and prejudices—would continue for many weeks.

In the meantime, the world was splitting open. The whole city had poured into Avenue Pahlavi. The shah sent his soldiers marching through the streets of Tehran, pounding drums and blasting pistols into the air as they swept across the city. Gigantic posters of His Majesty Mohammad Reza Pahlavi were held aloft while hand-printed leaflets denouncing him littered the pavements. Men clambered onto the roofs of cars. “Down with the monarchy!” shouted one contingent. “Down with Mossadegh!” shot back the other. Armored tanks barreled down the streets; lampposts announced the names of those to be hanged there the following day. Children broke loose from their mothers’ hands and were instantly swallowed up by the crowds. Husbands and uncles and cousins disappeared just as suddenly; unlike the children, they rarely turned up again, and the few who did resurface after many months came back haggard, silent, and hollow eyed.

By summer’s end five thousand would be dead in the streets or behind prison walls.

For this latest crisis it was Sohrab’s house that served as a refuge for the entire clan. During the days, the men ventured out of the house—either to work where work was still possible or else to take part in the demonstrations—while the women stayed behind to mind the children and nurse their rattled nerves with prayer. What, Lili asked, was happening in the streets? And why couldn’t they go outside? Khanoom, Kobra, and Lili’s aunts, one as illiterate as the next, were no help at all explaining the turmoil that had overtaken the country, and every night the men of the family, wishing to stave off the women’s hysteria, retreated to their own quarters to listen to Sohrab’s Philips radio and kept the details of the coup to themselves.

Had they been inclined to share the news with the female population of the house, Lili might have learned that she was living atop an ocean of oil—not the type of oil she associated with cooking
and lanterns, but the kind that fueled her father’s American-built automobiles. She might have learned that while Iranians had lived on this ocean of oil for thousands of years, it was the British who first plunged a pipeline into it in the early 1900s. She might also have learned that for several decades Iranians had enjoyed scant revenue from their oil reserves but that two years earlier, in 1951, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, had finally nationalized the country’s oil. And, finally and most critically, she might have discovered that the chaos in the streets had been started as part of an effort to force the country’s oil revenues westward again.

But what not even the men of the clan knew was that while it was on account of oil that their world was splitting open, in the summer of 1953 it was being split by a different hand. “The British,” everyone sniffed, and shook their heads at the young shah who’d been reinstalled onto the Peacock Throne after Mossadegh’s ouster. In fact, though details of “Operation Ajax” would remain sealed away for nearly fifty more years, the coup had been financed with American dollars and carried out by the CIA.

In any case, Lili, newly divorced and still in exile from school, was simply told that the chaos tearing through the country was nothing that concerned her, and so for her the coup of 1953 meant nothing so much as a complete retreat back into the house and to hunger and her grandmother’s ingenious strategies for appeasing it with gigantic pots of
ab goosht
.

Khanoom began boiling the lamb for the soup at sunrise. After it had simmered for several hours, she checked to make sure the lamb had softened and slid from the bone and then she added an onion, a tomato, and a cup or two of beans. If anyone wandered into the kitchen before dinnertime, Khanoom handed them a slice of flatbread and a few slivers of pickled onion and warned them to steer clear of her pot.

When the curfew fell over the city and the men turned back into the house, Khanoom at last hauled her soup from the kitchen to the parlor. They commenced by drinking the broth—lemon tinged, with an inch of fat glistening at the top—and once they’d had their fill, they took long draughts of water from a communal bowl, sat back against the cushions, and began nursing their bloated stomachs. Khanoom returned to the kitchen to pound out the remaining lamb and beans into a thick paste. On her return, all hands flew straight back into the pot to scoop up the tasty concoction with sheets of stale bread. When everything had been cleared away and the men had retreated to their own quarters, Khanoom poured the tea and everyone stretched out on the floor and told stories and traded memories as a chorus of bullets, sirens, and screams pierced through all the windows of Sohrab’s house.

By the time the coup ended, Lili’s hair had grown long enough to braid into pigtails again. Mr. Doctor had finally succeeded in his appeals on her behalf, and these pigtails would be instrumental to the plan he and Sohrab formulated for her; they lent her the virginal look necessary for enrolling her in a new private school. The rest of the plan went like this: If he could not restore her to the status of a respectable woman, then Sohrab would make her into something else entirely, something hitherto unknown in their entire extended family, an educated woman, a professional woman. She might never again marry, but Sohrab was certain that a high school diploma, followed by some kind of occupational training, would shield her from the curses and insults that would trail a divorcée through the rest of her life.

But first he would have to bring her up to grade level. To this end, Sohrab enrolled Lili in not one but two schools, a regular day school—the School of Ambition—and also a remedial night school,
both situated clear across the city, where she was unlikely to meet anyone she knew. Lili’s free hours were immediately given over to being tutored and studying. No cousin, no matter how distant, was spared a role in the effort. Mohammad, Mohsein, Hamid, and even Sina—Mr. Doctor himself—were called to her side, frequently all appearing at Sohrab’s house on the same day. Over the next few years they would take turns tutoring her in everything from algebra and chemistry to French and English. As a reward, the cousins were given generous allowances to fritter away as they pleased, a gesture that would endear to them the uncle they might otherwise have remembered as the one who could set their knees quivering with a single sideways glance.

It did not end there. Sohrab sent his nephews to scour the city’s bookstores for every last European novel—all the French and English classics he himself had never read but that had always seemed to him an indispensable part of a truly educated person’s repertoire. He ordered her to read them all. In the beginning Lili understood two words out of every ten she read, but she was so determined not to disappoint her father that she traveled everywhere with one or more tomes tucked under one arm and a gigantic dictionary under the other. Very slowly the two words out of ten grew into three and then five and then seven out of ten, and reading, once a burden and a chore, turned into a favorite pastime. She even became devoted to certain authors—Balzac and Dickens were her particular favorites—and she wept at the heroes’ every tribulation and cheered at their every triumph.

Nader, though unclear on the reasons for Lili’s divorce and hospital stay, was nonetheless grateful to have her back home. He quickly devised his own plan for rehabilitating her. His first project was to teach Lili how to ride a bicycle. Since she was now forbidden from leaving the house, even to visit her aunts or grandmother, these lessons always took place in the garden. Lili spent many afternoons looping around and around the large tiled pool while
Nader trotted alongside the bike, holding the handlebars for her as she pedaled. When she made it all the way around the pool by herself the first time, Nader clapped and cheered for her. Lili looked up from the handlebars, smiled at her brother, and then sailed straight into the water. Nader dived in behind her, untangled her legs from the pedals, and brought her, gasping, then laughing, back up to the air.

The bicycling lessons were abandoned, but soon afterward Nader presented her with a notebook, a fountain pen, and three little glass vials of ink—red, blue, and black. At first the pen felt heavy and strange between her fingers—nearly two years had passed since she’d written a single line—but very quickly her hand eased back into her old penmanship. With one notebook and three vials of ink her brother had given her opportunity to let loose all the words inside her, and she filled page after page. Regular entries were recorded in either blue or black ink, and with the red ink she began writing poetry dedicated to Sara in the manner of H
fez.

“Do you want to hear one of my compositions?” she asked Sohrab one Thursday afternoon.

“Read,” he told her, and then he leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers over his chest, and closed his eyes.

“My days are dark, and deep, and full of you…,” she declaimed. The poem went on in this vein for some time, and when she came to the end Sohrab opened his eyes and frowned.

Generations of Iranian poets had emulated the rhyming couplets of H
fez’s
qazal
; the crafting of desire and desperation along these lines was, in fact, nothing short of a national pastime. Lili’s poem was a passable imitation of the master’s, though likely the first time an aspiring poet had installed her infant in place of the Immortal Beloved.

The innovation did not please Sohrab.

“Get dressed,” he told Lili, drawing himself up from his chair. “We’re going out.”

But when she pulled on her coat and presented herself to him, Sohrab frowned again.

“Have you nothing better?” he asked, pinching the worn collar of her cotton coat.

She shook her head. “No,
pedar-joon
.”

“Lalehzar,” he ordered his driver, indicating a high-end shopping district in the area.

That first Thursday Sohrab took her to a fancy dress shop where the ladies smiled sweetly at her and then flashed their pretty eyes at him, and there he bought her a sweeping mohair coat with a black velvet collar and matching velvet belt. The purchase occasioned many others—a wide-rimmed felt hat and strappy black shoes to go with the mohair coat, a dress to wear with the shoes, and seamed stockings to complete the outfit—so that by the end of the day she’d acquired a splendid ensemble she was allowed to wear only on her weekly outings in the city with her father.

From then on Thursdays meant strolls down Avenue of the Tulip Fields and Ferdowsi Square. Thursdays were the sunken garden at Café Naderi, where couples waltzed to a full band in the early-evening hours. Thursdays were
café glacé
at Yas with heaps of whipped cream and long, slender spoons. Thursdays were The Golden Rooster, where white-gloved waiters bowed and fluttered around their table proffering French champagne, fizzy lemonades that arrived in the bottle so as to show off their European provenance, and tender, bloody hunks of filet mignon for which she was shown the proper angle to hold her knife and fork. Thursdays were concerts in the Hall of Culture, where Sohrab taught her to sit with her ankles crossed under her seat and to clap her hands for elegant intervals. Thursdays were every fine habit, air, and affectation that
her father had acquired and cultivated in his many years away from his family and that she now learned happily at his side.

When Sohrab finally enrolled Lili at the School of Ambition, she was on strict orders to tell no one there about her marriage or her child. Any breach, Sohrab warned her, even a single girlish confidence, and he’d send her straight back to Kazem and have nothing else to do with her. Terrified, Lili pulled on her new seventh-grade uniform—a white blouse, a pleated navy blue skirt, and a narrow silk necktie—and made a silent vow not to talk to anyone about her marriage, her child, or anything at all.