The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (2 page)

Six months later I was back in California, sitting in the new in-law unit my mother had managed to carve out from her Spanish-style
villa. The rest of the house was rented out by then, and she was living in two small rooms cluttered with everything she’d salvaged after my father’s death. She’d given up entertaining her friends, said the space was too cramped to serve a proper tea, so what was the point of inviting anyone over anymore?

By then I’d looked at the photograph so many times I could have drawn its every detail from memory. Who, I’d wonder again and again, was the man at her side? What had happened to him? And why had my mother never told me about their marriage?

For a long time her grief over my father’s death, and my own, had made it impossible to ask her these questions. Six months had passed and still I didn’t know how to begin. But the photograph lingered in my mind. I had to know the truth, no matter how painful it would be for me to ask about it or for her to answer my questions.

I cleared my throat. “
Maman
,” I said at last, and held the photograph out to her.

She glanced down at it and then scanned my face, trying to decipher what, if anything, I understood and what she could still stop me from knowing. She shook her head and continued drinking her tea. “No,” she murmured finally, averting her eyes. “This has nothing at all to do with you.” She set her cup down, snatched the photograph from my hand, and left the room.

I didn’t mention the photograph again. The next days passed awkwardly, each of us holding herself apart from the other, and I was grateful to return to the East Coast. We didn’t speak again for some weeks, but a few days into the beginning of the new university term she called me and accused me of rifling through her things. I’d stolen the photograph from her, she said, and there was just nothing else to say.

Then she started sending me the tapes. The first one arrived in springtime, a few weeks after No Rooz, the Iranian New Year. Eventually there would be ten of them. That year my mother Lili
would sit alone in her house in California, speaking the story of her life into a tape recorder for me. The tapes always came marked up in Persian, and I couldn’t make out much more than my name when I opened the envelope and found the first one. As I traced my mother’s inscription with my fingertips, it occurred to me that I didn’t even own a cassette player. The next morning I headed into town to buy one, and with that her story began to pass like a secret life between us.

One

Avenue Moniriyeh

“If you want to know my story,” my mother Lili began, “you have to know about Avenue Moniriyeh, about your grandmother Kobra and your grandfather Sohrab, and what Iran was then. Because we couldn’t just do what you do here—forget your name and who you belong to. Our lives were not like that. No.”

W
HEN SHE NAMED HER
ninth child, Pargol Amini indulged her own fancies at last. “Kobra,” she announced to the midwife, and smiled from the bloodstained sheets. The “great one.”

At this, the midwife looked up and considered her face.

Pargol Amini had black eyes and cheeks so fair and flushed they were like snow blotted with blood, as was said back then. In a room that had grown warm and damp with her exertions, she met the midwife’s gaze with a heavy stare.

“Kobra,” Pargol said again, her voice softer but still sure. Even the newborn—a tiny raging bundle with a shock of black hair—was silent at that moment. The scent of cinnamon and cardamom rose from the kitchen and threaded its way through the house. The midwife took in a single sharp breath, bit her lip, and then resumed her task of dusting my great-grandmother’s loins with ashes.

When Pargol was a girl she and her family had left their village in the south, journeyed a hundred miles across Iran’s dusty, red-rimmed
central plateau, and settled in the then-walled capital city of Tehran. Though she could not read and had never been to school, she could recite the Koran by heart from beginning to end in Arabic—God’s tongue—and she knew most of the hadith as well.

The names of Pargol’s other eight children had been chosen under the watchful gaze of her father-in-law. Together they made up an unremarkable roster of Muslim names: Ali-Reza, Qasem, Fatemeh, Abolfazl, Mohammad, Ali-Ahmad, Khadijeh, Zahra. But by the time of this child’s birth, Pargol’s father-in-law was dead and she, barely thirty, was already called old, and so on that day in 1921 the list of her children’s names settled finally on one born of her own imagination. Kobra.

Later it was commonly suspected that Pargol had lost her mind. Everyone feared for the child. But Kobra grew up to be the prettiest girl of the family, with the only pair of honey-colored eyes in the house. And with her beauty came a temperament so gentle that it dispelled every rumor about her mother’s willfulness and her own virtue.

Around her neck Kobra wore a black string from which a single tiny blue eye hung and nestled itself in the hollow of her throat. The amulet was meant to protect her from the Evil Eye that since the day of Kobra’s birth had bedeviled Pargol—so fearful was she that jealous eyes would alight on her favorite child.

In Iran they call such children the pearls of their mothers’ fortunes.

The Aminis’ house sat in an alleyway barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side, and along the middle of it ran the
joob
. These were the open waterways that once traversed the entire length of Tehran, north to south. The
joob
water started out clear and cold at the foot of Damavand, the snowcapped volcano to the north of the capital, but by the time it reached Pargol’s house near the old
southern gates of the city the stream had become thickly clogged with refuse and dirt. Every day there were stories of boys who’d wandered far from home, fallen into live waterways somewhere in the city, and returned in damp clothes—something for which they’d surely be beaten, since the
joob
was known to carry ringworm, typhoid, and diphtheria and they’d been warned many times not to play near it.

When women ventured into the streets at all, they did so always with the fear that their veils would dip into the waters of the
joob
and render them
najes
, or impure. But peddlers wended their way daily through the alleyways, their wooden carts piled high with onions, herbs, vegetables, and fruits. When their wheels ran into the
joob
or ruts and bumps—of which there were many then throughout the capital—the clatter of pots and pans stopped briefly, then started up again once the peddlers hauled their carts onto a smoother patch of road. Long-haired, cloaked dervishes were also known to traverse the city, hawking poems, soothsayings, and tonics as they went. It could be said that the streets belonged to the peddlers and dervishes and also to the beggars who lined the stone walls of all such neighborhoods.

The house itself was built of hand-hewn bricks, with honeysuckle and jasmine spilling over the high walls that enclosed it. The large colony of sisters and aunts and mothers and grandmothers within never left except to attend a wedding or funeral close by or else to make a pilgrimage to a martyr’s shrine. And for that they always traveled with their men.

Every seven days from behind the walls of her house, Pargol heard the plaintive cry of the
namaki
, the salt-seller. Humpbacked and toothless, he roamed the city with his salt borne on the back of an ancient donkey. Every few blocks he’d cup his fingers around his mouth, tip his head to the sky, and call out, “
Namaki! Namaki!
” When she heard his cry, Pargol would throw her chador about her and poke her head out the door for her weekly slab of salt.

Pargol had married a rug merchant by the name of Qoli Amini, known better as Qoli Khan, or Sir Qoli. He stood a full head shorter than his wife, a predicament that, true to both his nature and his outlook on life, he regarded with a mixture of disbelief and amusement. Every day Qoli Khan set out for the great canopied bazaar in the center of the city. Once there, he’d take his place next to the fruit-seller’s pyramids of melons, pomegranates, oranges, bundles of mint and parsley, and crates of dried figs and mulberries. Perched on an enormous gunnysack of salted almonds, his complete inventory of rugs beside him, he waited in the bazaar from morning to night so that people could consider his wares and pay him the modest sums with which Pargol managed their lives.

As Kobra grew, Pargol favored her in a thousand quiet ways, but the strength of her affections was never more evident than when the Bloodletter came calling. This happened twice a year, once at the end of summer and once at the end of winter. Bloodletting was thought to keep a body healthy and strong, proof of which could be found in the rosy tint it lent to even the most sallow complexion. But no matter how many times they were reminded of the treatment’s benefits, nothing kept the children from running at the sight of the Bloodletter’s blistering cups and the jar of slithering black leeches she harvested from provincial riverbanks.

Pargol brooked no resistance. Hands on hips, jaw set, she routed her children out of their hiding places throughout the house. She sent her sons in first, and then one by one she pinned the girls’ plaits to the tops of their heads. When the Bloodletter finished with the boys, she sliced the girls’ backs with a razor and pressed her cups to the cuts or else planted her leeches onto their bare backs. Kobra’s siblings hollered or whimpered, each according to his or her disposition and the vigor of their respective treatments. Pargol always suffered their torments
without blinking, but she could not bear to hear her youngest daughter so much as whimper, and so year after year Kobra was left unmolested in her hiding place behind the water cistern in the basement.

Still, when Pargol decided to send eleven-year-old Kobra from the house to learn a trade, not even a long history of such indulgences could stop mouth after mouth from falling open. A girl stayed in her father’s house until her marriage, and even the less pious would have agreed that formal education was wasted on females. But soon after Kobra turned eleven, Pargol predicted that as the last of so many children it was unlikely Kobra would ever marry. For this reason, Pargol explained, it would be necessary to send Kobra to a school that prepared young girls to become professional seamstresses.

Many secretly believed that Pargol wished to keep this one child for herself, and that it was for this reason that of all her daughters it was Kobra whom she sent forth to study and work. But whatever the reason, from then on Kobra could be seen each morning stepping into the streets of Tehran, kerchief knotted at her chin, with a basket of fabric and needles in one hand and a small iron pot filled with rice and stew in the other.

There were twelve other students in her class, all of them from families poorer than her own, but she made her first friends sitting side by side on the floor with those girls. Their teacher, Malekeh Khanoom or “Mrs. Queen,” was a round-faced widow with long hennaed hair and two thick rows of gold bracelets dancing at her wrists, and she laughed easily with the girls. In the mornings she taught them to sew and in the afternoons she taught them to embroider. From the fabrics—silk, velvet, georgette, voile, crepe de chine—Kobra guessed that the garments she would be sewing were meant for the fine ladies of the city, and it thrilled her to run her fingers along the glorious bolts of fabric stacked along one wall of Malekeh Khanoom’s basement and to imagine the materials skimming a woman’s body here, clinging to it there.

Malekeh Khanoom showed the girls how to measure with their hands, spreading her fingers wide like a fan and counting off from the tip of her thumb to the tip of her pinkie. One, two, three. Ample figures would still be in fashion for another few years, and a waist the width of three outstretched hands was considered ideal in the days that Kobra sat in Malekeh Khanoom’s basement learning her trade. The girls watched their teacher and then, shyly at first, spread their own fingers against the fabrics she set at their feet. One, two, three. They looked up to make sure they had measured well, and when Malekeh Khanoom had nodded and smiled at every one of them they took turns cutting the fabric with Malekeh Khanoom’s only pair of brass scissors.

The girls themselves wore cotton pantaloons with
sheleeteh
, the short, flounced skirts of a curious provenance. The story went that once, during the nineteenth century, a Qajar king had been shown a photograph of some ballerinas on a Paris stage and was so taken by the sight that he set out for France posthaste. During the trip he became an avid patron of the ballet, coincidentally running up stupendous bills at the Paris brothels. These he settled by selling the French government rights to carry out archaeological expeditions in Iran and to retain whatever artifacts they unearthed. On his return, the Qajar king decreed that all the ladies of his court should henceforth appear dressed in tutus. Out of modesty the Iranian princesses wore their silken skirts with long tunics and flowing trousers or white tights underneath. The skirts were given a Persian name,
sheleeteh
, which suggested the rustling sounds they made when the ladies of the Qajari palaces danced in them.