The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (22 page)

T
HERE WAS NO QUESTION
Nader would have to return to Europe to complete his degree, and also no question that Lili was now responsible for supporting him. Kobra and Lili bid him a tearful good-bye and then took measure of their circumstances. Nader’s car had been sold off to pay for his airfare back to Germany, leaving him a few hundred marks to pay for his university tuition and next month’s room and board. They calculated that they had three weeks, maybe four, until Nader’s money ran out. Not only would Kobra need to step up her sewing, but Lili would also have to find a job, and immediately.

Lili moved into Kobra’s three-room flat in Zahirodolleh Alley. The small, cracked
hoz
in their courtyard was clotted with leaves and cobwebs they felt little inclination to sweep away. They had no carpets and few furnishings and the partition that separated the parlor from the bedroom was so thin that in the mornings Lili could hear Kobra chewing the handful of walnuts that were her breakfast. For lunch every day they ate a bowl of watered-down yogurt into
which Kobra dumped soggy diced cucumbers, raisins, and scraps of stale bread. Dinner was a soup of marble-sized meatballs bobbing alongside a single potato, a pot of plain rice seasoned with a pinch of cumin seeds, or else
yatimcheh
, the aptly named “little orphans” or skinny eggplants that Kobra fried in water, turmeric, and a few slivers of onion.

There was no refrigerator in the flat, and on the nights Lili came home too worn down from her job search to eat anything, Kobra would set a plate for her on a giant platter in the basement so that she could eat the leftovers for breakfast. To keep away the centipedes, sow bugs, beetles, and cockroaches that lurked there, Kobra filled the platter with water and set Lili’s plate in the middle. This method proved effective until the day that Kobra acquired a stray cat, a long-haired ginger beauty with gray-green eyes. The shallow pool that drowned scads of insects every night proved no match for the kitten’s appetite and daring. Kobra would routinely wake to find the platter upturned, the plate licked clean, and Lili clutching her stomach in hunger. Unleashing her choicest curses, Kobra would chase the cat around the apartment, place her in a gunnysack, and deposit her as far south as the train station.

Without fail, that cat would be mewing at their door in the space of a week. Every time Kobra declared her reappearance nothing short of a miracle, scooped her up with kisses, and then scavenged about her cupboards for a tasty little treat to satisfy the cat’s hunger and assuage her own conscience. And so it would go until the next several plates of food were licked clean in the night and Kobra pulled out the gunnysack and the whole sequence began again.

Khanoom, infinitely generous despite her own poverty, lent Lili a hundred
tomans
, and with it she signed up for a typing course downtown. She took a bus in the mornings, and to save money she walked back in the afternoons. One day on her way to her typing class a man in a pin-striped suit and dark sunglasses approached her in Naderi
Square and asked her if she would like to be a movie star. They were shooting a new film about Kurdistan, he explained, and they needed a girl who could ride a horse. She seemed like just the type for the part, he went on, tall, slender, and dark haired, so would she take his card and telephone him at his office the next morning?

She could not believe her luck. She flew home that afternoon with the director’s card pressed in her palm and an image of herself galloping across the plains in Kurdish garb, her hair flowing behind her like a banner. But Khanoom had nearly fainted at the very idea. “Do you know what they do to girls who become actresses?” She gasped. “Do you know what this man is asking of you?” She could not even bring herself to say it, but Lili understood perfectly. The next day she resumed her typing course, but she decided to keep the movie director’s card as a souvenir of the adventure.

When, after weeks of inquiries and interviews, Lili learned that the best she could likely hope for was a job as a servant, she became the recipient of many entirely well-meaning and thoroughly aggravating attempts by her family to find her a husband. At nineteen she was fast approaching
torshidegi,
or the agedness of a pickle, and as she was a divorcée—a “touched” woman and one with a child, no less—her prospects for marriage could not have been worse. Yet Lili’s circumstances, and Kobra’s, were now so dire that Lili’s aunts and cousins would not be deterred lest they themselves became responsible for the pair.

Lili’s would-be suitors were often widowed men several decades her senior. Illiterate merchants, cripples, and even Christians were all put forth as potential mates for her—all to no avail.

“I wouldn’t even marry the
shah
himself if he came for me!” she routinely announced to her family.

“The cheek of that girl!” the matchmakers scoffed. “And the ingratitude!” they added. They clucked their tongues and shook their heads. The more charitable ones among them merely thought
her delusional. However evident to them the general hardships of married life, and the more particular disaster of Lili’s marriage to Kazem, it still seemed inconceivable to them that a woman would actually choose to remain unmarried. Indeed, the longer her aunts and cousins thought on it, the more they were inclined to think Lili was still inflicted with the madness that had once driven her to attempt suicide. But they would all have thought much worse if they’d known the real reason for her refusal, namely that she was already scheming to make her way back to Europe.

Kobra, meanwhile, set up a sewing machine, a fourth-hand Singer culled from the local
bazaarcheh
, in the middle of the dining table and declared herself open for business. She’d taken in sewing since moving into the apartment some months earlier, but the scale of her endeavors now would be unprecedented. The commissions were modest at first, but she labored with such precision and speed that within months word of her skills had traveled from her own ramshackle neighborhood to the leafy enclaves of upper Pahlavi. It was said there that with nothing more than a picture torn from a magazine a woman named Kobra could copy even the most elaborate French ball gown down to the very last stitch.

Every Thursday morning Kobra paid a visit to Mr. Kohan, the cloth merchant to whom she’d been faithful through all the years of her marriage. Among the last generation born in Tehran’s Jewish ghetto, Mr. Kohan had started working in the bazaar as his father’s apprentice at the age of ten and had taken over the stall sometime in his early twenties—about the time Kobra began to call on him. He and Kobra had long since established a mutually pleasurable routine that began when Kobra took a seat in the back room of his shop and Mr. Kohan poured her a cup of tea and then one for himself. After they finished exchanging the latest news concerning their respective
families, Mr. Kohan would rise and proceed to present Kobra with various bolts of fabric. While Mr. Kohan still made a show of haggling with Kobra, by this point in their decades-long acquaintance he knew enough of her trials to send her away with the most generous cuts of cloth, and their visits always ended with prayers for health and good fortune all around.

The corners and surfaces of Kobra and Lili’s tiny apartment grew crowded with stacks of fabric and buttons and spools of thread in shades as common as black and white and as rare as aubergine and mustard. In the weeks before the Persian New Year, the busiest sewing season, Kobra hired a helper, usually a young girl from the provinces, to run her errands and serve tea to clients when they came round to be fitted. The Singer groaned and sputtered, short-circuited and overheated, but by the time she could afford a replacement Kobra had come to attribute all her success to that venerable old machine. She would not dream of being separated from it. The Singer remained, the village girls came and went, and Kobra’s reputation grew. And though it would never make her wealthy, her work fed and housed both her daughter and herself, and for the time being that was miracle enough.

In part because they took her for a recent widow (a misapprehension she did not choose to complicate with the truth of her tempestuous marriage), but mostly because she saved them a fortune on their wardrobes, Kobra’s clients began to offer her many lovely gifts: baskets of tangerines and pomegranates, golden bangles and silver brooches, as well as genuine French lipsticks and pots of face powder from America. Both then and in all the years to come, Kobra would prefer gratitude in the form of cash, but she’d smile warmly at every offering, sell or barter what she could, and tuck away the rest to give away as presents to her friends and relatives throughout the year.

From time to time, Kobra’s clients showed their appreciation by inviting her to one of their private gatherings. Having attended
numerous wakes and weddings and gained many more commissions in this fashion, she was loath to turn down such invitations, but when one of her most loyal customers, Nasrine Khanoom, offered to take her along to a party in a
baq
, a landholding outside the city, Kobra took one look at her daughter, growing thinner, paler, and more listless by the day, and decided to send Lili instead.

For this occasion Kobra “borrowed” a dress already commissioned by one of her other clients, a midnight blue marvel inspired by a faded studio shot of Veronica Lake, and sent out a silent prayer that its owner would not be attending the same party that night. To complete the look, Lili wore her hair loose about her shoulders, with a single long, deep wave in the front. When Nasrine Khanoom and her husband came around to fetch Lili for the party, Kobra told her, somewhat sternly, that she should enjoy herself at the party and then pushed Lili out the door.

Paradise, for Iranians, has always been a garden. Interlacing vines and buds of every imaginable variation had always figured prominently on the country’s illustrious carpets, and though the paradisial garden had roots in the country’s pre-Islamic past, after the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century images of the garden continued to bloom across the walls of Iran’s shrines, mosques, and temples and along the margins and bindings of its assorted holy books—Muslim but also Christian, Jewish, Baha’i, and Zoroastrian.

By the mid-twentieth century, when much of the country seemed bent on stamping out every last vestige of tradition, the paradisial garden would once again survive in people’s minds. Old
Tehrooni
families still cultivated holdings called
baqs
outside the city and would journey there en masse to escape the crushing heat of Tehran’s summers. The
baq
to which Lili traveled that night lay in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, more than an hour’s drive from Tehran and farther north from the city than she had ever been in her life. She was greeted there by the exquisite fragrance of blossoms
from nearby pistachio and orange groves. That night the moon was yellow as an egg yolk and just as round. Nothing, she was surprised to discover, set the garden apart from the wilds that surrounded it. There wasn’t a wall or fence in sight.

The
baq
was indisputably lovely, and almost despite herself Lili felt her spirits rising. But even here she was dogged by the same questions that tormented her back in the city: “Have you come with your family?” “Are you married?” “How old are you?” The curiosity she encountered was anything but idle. It was enough for a young woman to appear unattached and from a decent family, but if she was also pretty she’d soon find herself in the unyielding clutch of matchmakers. That night in the
baq
, mothers approached Lili on behalf of their sons, elder sisters for their brothers, neighbors for their neighbors’ sons. How to deflect their questions without seeming rude? How to demur without arousing suspicion?

She escaped the crush, stealing away to a corner of the garden where she stood for some time listening to the small troupe of musicians. They were playing the old-style Iranian instrumental music, with the
tonbak, tar
, and
santour
, and the women were taking turns dancing one by one in an open field while the men clapped and watched from the peripheries of a wide circle.

Eventually, a woman approached her. Dancing, the woman beckoned with a smile and a playful tilt of her head. Lili begged off, but the lady would not be refused. Lili drew in a deep breath, cast her eyes down, and began to dance. Within seconds the voices of the partygoers dissolved and their faces receded and she heard nothing but the music, plaintive and wild, filling up the warm night air all around her. Here, finally, no one could ask her questions; no one could guess at her past. From one end of the garden to the other and back again she danced, and as she danced a word drifted through her mind:
ragass
. It meant “dancer” but also a “loose woman.” But she would not have stopped dancing then, not even if someone had
grabbed her by the arm and tried to pull her away. She closed her eyes, threw back her head, and danced through the garden without shame.

Before Lili could contrive a way to see her, Sara herself contrived a way to see Lili again. She woke at dawn when Kazem and her stepmother were still asleep on the rooftop with the new baby swinging in a hammock close by. Sara was just six years old, but she dressed herself and slipped out of the house and into the streets. In one hand she held a square of flatbread, in the other a few walnuts, and in her head she was singing “Farhang and Pahlavi, Zahirodolleh Alley, Farhang and Pahlavi, Zahirodolleh Alley,” words she’d overheard her father speak the previous night. She walked on and on toward the city center, tugging at ladies’ skirts and veils, reciting the address until they pointed the way for her.

Seven hours later a policeman found her sitting by a fountain, dragging a hand through the brackish water and crying. “Farhang and Pahlavi, Zahirodolleh Alley,” was all she would tell him. Not her own name, not her father’s name, nothing but the words she believed would lead her back to her mother.