The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (25 page)

In her desperation Shireen began collecting potatoes in her bag and frying them up in the dormitory after hours. When her mother, a widowed schoolteacher, sent Shireen a pouch of saffron stamens by post from Tehran along with a mortar and pestle, she ground the
stamens round and round until she’d reduced them to a deep orange dust. After midnight, when all the other girls in the dormitory had gone to sleep, Shireen plugged in her hot plate, greased it with a pat of butter also poached from the canteen, sprinkled a bit of her treasured saffron on top, and stirred the potatoes until they crisped at the edges. Then she, Lili, and Farideh sat cross-legged on their cots and ate until they felt their stomachs would burst.

Lili’s days now began in the middle of the night. At three o’clock her alarm clock jolted her from sleep and she’d jerk herself out of bed. She pulled on all her stockings, all four pairs of them, grabbed her coat, and stumbled out of the dormitory. The cold was astonishing. The streets were slick with ice and snow, and though the clinic was no more than a few hundred yards from her dormitory, she’d falter, trip, and haul herself back up several times before reaching the
Frauenklinik
. Within weeks the frozen cobblestones would grind down the kitten heels that were her only pair of shoes.

When she finally arrived at the clinic, she stripped off two of her pairs of stockings (the hospital corridors were so cold that she kept on the other two pairs), pulled on her uniform, smock, and, finally, her headdress. It made her smile to remember the dozens of headdresses she’d ruined on her first stay in Germany, back when she’d been an orderly at the foundling hospital. There’d be no fumbling about this time round. A minute, to judge from the attitude of the nurses at the
Frauenklinik
, was worth one hundred years in Germany, and tardiness was among the most severely punished of offenses. Lili pinned her headgear tight, smoothed the pleats of her smock, and set off at a clip down the dark corridors.

She’d have at least three dozen babies to clean and diaper and hand over to their mothers for the six o’clock morning feedings. After that she stripped the sheets, often still damp with blood from
the previous night’s deliveries, loaded them onto wheeled baskets, and delivered them to the laundry to be bleached and steamed and ironed before the day was out. At eleven o’clock she sat in the lecture hall with her clipboard propped between her legs, dividing the page into one column for the parts of the lecture she understood and another for the words she would have to look up later, first from German to English, then from English to Persian.

She earned her lunch by scouring and polishing the enormous brass pots in the kitchen. Unfortunately, most days this meant some manifestation of pork, which she simply could not bring herself to eat. To supplement her late-night potato binges, she took to scraping the burnt porridge from the pots and spooning it quickly into her mouth when no one was looking. Fortunately, the porridge tasted somewhat like rice pudding, especially when she managed to sneak a sprinkle of sugar onto it before eating it.

Like other unpleasant aspects of her new life, the details of her hunger were not disclosed in the letters Lili now scribbled to her family between shifts at the
Frauenklinik
.

The difficulty with which these letters were received made her all the less willing to write them in the first place. Khanoom and Kobra could not read or write and therefore depended on male relatives, or one of the younger girls of the family, to read Lili’s letters aloud to them and to then dictate their replies.

It was a slow and laborious process, but reaching one another by telephone proved far more troublesome. With no phone of their own, her mother and grandmother would have to make a trip to Tehran’s main post office and wait, sometimes hours, for their turn in a booth—all for the unlikely chance that Lili would be in her room and could be called up to the dormitory phone. The result was that they rarely called her, and for the most part Lili did not regret
this, as her voice always managed to betray her misery when she spoke to them by telephone.

“We have nothing to complain of but your absence” was once again the claim put down in her family’s letters to her. The same line was written in her own letters to them. On both sides, the remark only managed to underscore the hardship of their respective circumstances, but just how much these words obscured from her Lili would not discover for a long time yet.

What Lili did not know, and would not know for several more years, was that shortly after she’d left Iran, Kazem’s mother had died, leaving Sara fully in Kazem and her stepmother’s care. Kobra found out through Zaynab, the only member of the family who’d continued to visit Sara after Lili left Iran. Neither Zaynab nor Kobra could bear to tell Lili the news for fear it would distract her from her studies and prolong her stay in Germany or—even worse—bring her prematurely back to Iran a second time.

For some months Kobra had neither word nor sight of Kazem, and for this she had no end of thanking both God and the mercies that came only with time’s passing. Her peace, however, was to be short-lived. After Lili left for Germany, Sara continued to show up on Kobra’s doorstep on Zahirodolleh Alley. As in the past, Sara always came alone, but now she appeared without her little brown suitcase. Many of the same curses Kobra had suffered from Kazem fell now from Sara’s lips. “May your spine rot!” was accompanied by words made doubly indecent to Kobra by the fact that they were spoken by a young girl and triply so by the fact that they were spoken by a young girl about her mother.

“She’s a prostitute! They told me she’s a prostitute!”

At this Kobra would cup both hands over her ears and begin chanting to herself. It was always the same words, the same prayer: “May God kill me; may God kill me….”

“She’s a prostitute and you want to hide it! That’s why you won’t tell me where she is!”

Pacing the room, clawing her cheeks, Kobra continued her chanting. “May God kill me; may God kill me….”

It was in the spirit of such exchanges that Kobra grew familiar with the stories Sara had been told about Lili by Kazem and his family.

The Khorramis, according to this version of events, had had their doubts about Lili from the very beginning of the marriage. Apart from the obvious differences of class and education, there’d been the defects in Lili’s character. However Kazem had tried to rein in her vanities and temper her restlessness, Lili had taken no heed. When she’d left Sara behind one afternoon and come home in a shameless state, with wild hair and disheveled clothes, it was immediately obvious what had happened. Lili had fallen in love with a man and “given” herself to him. After that she’d wanted nothing more of either her husband or her child. What’s more, Lili’s studies were nothing but a ruse devised to cover her shame. She’d likely never even left Tehran and was hiding out somewhere in the city.

“May God kill me; may God kill me; may God kill me….”

Kobra would chant these same words so loudly, for so long, and with such concentration that eventually Sara would grow tired and leave her alone. A month, two months would pass. One blessed year six months went by without a visit from Sara. But Sara always came back. And while Kobra continued to pray and burn her little pots of wild rue, for such curses as she would hear from her granddaughter over the next years she judged there would be neither cure nor any need to tell Lili.

Before graduating, Lili would have to attend exactly one thousand deliveries, the first several hundred of which she would observe until she was judged capable of proceeding on her own.

The students were each assigned a midwife and traveled in packs through the hospital and ordered to study the instructor’s
every move. The midwife routinely began by placing her hands on the woman’s belly to determine the direction of the baby’s head. Once she’d ascertained the width of the patient’s pelvis, the midwife touched two fingers to the woman’s wrist to check her pulse and then proceeded to measure her dilation and time her contractions. Lili and her cohorts were shown how to cut open and sew up a woman’s wounds. They even learned how to sever an umbilical cord without scissors, though, they were pointedly assured, it was unlikely that most of them would resort to such primitive measures in their future careers. They grew familiar with the various tools of the trade—metal trays, surgical needles, iodine, alcohol, and chloroform—and eventually Lili and the others were trusted to prop up the patients’ legs into stirrups and to wash, shave, and prep them for the deliveries. “
Drücken, drücken, drücken!
” they learned to shout when the babies’ heads crowned. Push, push, push!

She was shocked to discover that most of the patients were women well into their forties, an age at which she thought most women had long since been retired from their conjugal duties. Gray-haired, with shrunken breasts and bellies distorted through five and six pregnancies, they lay hollering and heaving, cussing and praying, and easily outnumbering the young mothers in the wards. They were not told, nor did they ask, the names of the foreign girls who held their hands and stroked their foreheads and reached out to catch the children they pushed into the world.

Schwester Annelise, the midwife to whom Lili had been assigned for her training, was a jowly, big-bosomed woman from the southern part of the country. “
So ist das Leben mit Fremde Leute
,” she muttered in a thick Swabian accent whenever Lili failed to understand orders. So this is life among strangers—as though the meaning of this, too, would escape Lili’s comprehension.

Schwester Annelise was well-known among the midwives and students for her method of quieting women in the throes of labor. When
their cries turned too whiny or too rowdy, she yanked a bed pillow from under their heads and smothered their faces with it. Month after month Lili stood by Schwester Annelise’s side, herself breathless with fear that the poor women would suffocate before they managed to deliver their babies, but Schwester Annelise always knew just how long to hold the pillow over a woman’s face before lifting it again.

To all this Lili submitted herself.

Work was making a new person out of her, efficient, assured, and even a little removed from the agonies and cruelties surrounding her. Better still, it had no equal in its power to chase thoughts from her head. To fill her few spare hours, she decided to take a job outside the hospital. Apart from her growing appreciation for the oblivion induced by hard labor, there were two immediate reasons for this. First, if she hoped to make it through the winter without breaking all her arms and limbs in steady succession, she would need a pair of proper boots. Second, she could not afford to pay for her textbooks and she suspected she would soon wear out Shireen’s patience by borrowing hers.

One afternoon Lili took a streetcar to the center of the city to visit the Iranian embassy, and there she sat waiting with her knees tightly pressed together, her small brown handbag on her lap, fighting the urge to flee. When the consular officer appeared, she braced herself for a tawdry proposition. None was forthcoming. She relaxed her grip on her purse handles, cleared her throat, and related her need for books and shoes. The consular officer’s expression went from one of polite inquiry to one of genuine concern. In a matter of minutes, he produced a list of a half-dozen names and urged her to return if none of these contacts proved useful.

From then on she spent her Sundays with an elderly Iranian couple, the Pakravans, in their well-appointed flat near the Hotel Vier
Jahreszeiten. Her job was to watch over their granddaughter, Setareh, a curly-haired, pink-cheeked girl of five. Lili could not help but wonder how the Pakravans had landed in this corner of Germany and where the girl’s parents could possibly be, but she refrained from asking such questions for fear it should inspire the Pakravans to ask more about her own circumstances. She took Setareh on long treks through the city’s botanical gardens, and as they walked Lili searched her memory for all the best stories that Khanoom used to tell her when she was a child. “
Yeki bood; yeki nabood
,” she always began, the traditional Iranian invocation of a story. “One was all; all was one.” She spun stories of princes, princesses, and beasts, of quests and perils and prizes. As the little girl’s eyes went wide and her lips fell open in wonder, Lili found she was as happy to tell these stories as Setareh was to hear them.

When they returned from their outings, Lili shared a supper of rice and stew with the family, easily tucking away as many as three helpings. Setareh always claimed the seat beside hers at the table and begged for more stories. At the end of the night, when Lili pulled on her coat and turned to leave, Setareh would throw her arms around Lili’s legs, bury her head in Lili’s stomach, and refuse to let her go. Clinic rules forbade her from staying overnight at the Pakravans’ apartment—or any other place—during the week. She patted the girl’s head and then pulled herself free. “I’ll be back next week!” she’d say with as much cheer as she could muster.

The memory of Setareh’s crying followed Lili into the week, and she would think, miserably, of Sara. How much longer could she count on Sara to remember her? Or had she already forgotten her? Lili, absorbed in thoughts of her own daughter, patted the little girl’s head and wrestled herself free and made her way back into the streets of Hamburg. Eventually, though, she would welcome the longing she felt between these visits to the Pakravans. If motherly feelings still stirred in her, Lili reasoned, when she returned to Iran she might be a mother yet.

Her other charge in this period was a young Iranian man named
Payam. He’d contracted polio as a child and could move about only by crawling and dragging himself along the floor. By the time his family had sold off their lands and properties in Iran and sent him to Germany for a series of experimental operations, there was not enough money left for any of them to accompany him on his journey. Lili was one of a number of student nurses his family hired to keep him company a few hours each week between his surgeries. The job did not pay very well, but she found herself incapable of turning it down.