The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (27 page)

Jakob never returned. “He’s lost,” Mutti took to murmuring as she stared out the window. “He’s lost somewhere out there and he can’t find us.” Elsa and Maria indulged the delusion for fear that without it their mother would truly lose her mind. By the time Papa and Johann turned up in Hessisch-Lichtenau, boys as young as
fourteen were being sent to the front. Mutti and the sisters swept up their
Bübchen
, their little boy. If not quite so handsome as his dead brother, Jakob, with his blue eyes and blond curls Johann was still the prettiest of them all. They installed him in the basement for the duration of World War II. To pass the time, Johann taught himself Greek.

When the war ended, he emerged from the basement, sat out two years of high school as the only boy in his class, and in that time learned to speak German as if he’d lived all his life in Hessisch-Lichtenau. Papa died shortly afterward of cancer. Having looked about the village and between them found not one eligible man under fifty, the two daughters of the family went to work. Johann finished high school, won a scholarship to study civil engineering, and then joined a team of engineers who traveled the country rebuilding its railways, tunnels, and bridges.

He had a gentleness that set him apart and a taste for beer that did not. Wherever he went for his work, he rented a room for four nights of the week, Monday through Thursday, and he spent the weekends and every holiday with his mother and sisters. Late at night when he stumbled home drunk from the beer halls, Maria and Elsa peeled the clothes from his body and took turns scrubbing his face and chest with warm washcloths so that their mother would not know the worst of his drinking habit. He was thirty-four years old the year he showed up at his family’s house with Lili, and though his blond curls had turned dark and wrinkles fanned out under his blue eyes, he was their
Bübchen
still, and they would not, as Lili observed after just ten minutes at their table, surrender him easily.

And yet within a week of that visit he had discarded the ring he’d bought for his German girlfriend. Lili’s affection for Johann fell short of his infatuation with her, but she had reason to hasten a formal
commitment: many of her relatives thought it inevitable that she would lose her morals in Europe, which only made her more determined to hold fast to them. One Sunday afternoon Lili asked Johann to drive her out to the countryside in his orange Audi. When they crossed a small trestle bridge, she told him to pull over and stop the engine. She pointed her finger in the direction of the river. Johann understood at once. He slipped out of his seat, took a few long strides away from the car, and then tossed the gold ring into the water.

Emboldened by the gesture, Johann next demanded a private interview with the head bishop of Frankfurt. In the course of explaining his intentions to marry a Muslim girl, he spoke of Lili’s marriage, her child, and her divorce. When he finished speaking, the bishop retreated into the recesses of the church. Whether this was to confer with his fellow priests or to consult some ancient religious tome Johann would never know, but when the bishop returned he assured Johann that given Lili’s age at the time of her first marriage an argument could be made that the union had lacked consent. It was not the definitive answer he had hoped for, but it eased Johann’s Catholic conscience somewhat, or at least enough for him to proceed with his proposal.

He declared himself with a string of pearls. As he reached over to close the clasp, a tear slid down his cheek, and with that tear Lili crossed instantly from indecision to certainty. She’d known him less than two months, but such depth of feeling, coupled as it so obviously was with adoration, seemed to her a very fine qualification in a husband. She would marry him, she said, but on the condition that he would put the proposal into writing for her family.

But to whom should he write? Since Khanoom and Kobra were totally illiterate, writing to them was out of the question, and, anyway, Lili felt certain that a male relative should be called forth to speak on her behalf. In the end Johann composed a formal letter to her brother in Stuttgart, to which Nader replied by stating: “My sister is free to choose her own husband. I wish you well in any case.”

Having settled this account, Johann set out for Hessisch-Lichtenau for what would prove a much more difficult task: announcing the engagement to his own family. Mutti, Maria, and Elsa looked at him and then at one another. The Iranian girl, they suddenly realized, had not been a guest but a thief. He was careful to make no mention of Lili’s first marriage, and certainly not of her child, as either of these would have been sufficient to kill Mutti outright, but even so it was not long before Mutti gave him to understand that in the absence of a Kashubian bride, any Catholic girl would do, but a Muslim was beyond consideration—his as well as theirs.

Johann left the house feeling bitter and dejected but not without his best suit draped carefully over his arm. He and Lili pooled their money and bought each other a pair of matching engagement rings (the thinnest slivers of ten-karat gold—their budgets allowed for no better). Then they decided they would need something else to commemorate the occasion. They spent the better part of a January afternoon ducking into the city’s finest boutiques, considering trinkets and tokens they could not possibly afford. When they tired of that game, they found an antique shop and settled on a silver candlestick and matching silver vase and three stems of nearly fresh orchids from an open-air market.

Johann booked two rooms in a hotel for their “engagement party,” and since hers was the better one of the two, it was there that they slipped their engagement rings onto each other’s fingers and made their promises. At midnight they kissed, said their good nights, and then Johann retired to his own hotel room. Between her past and his Catholic upbringing, there was no need for a chaperone that evening.

While his enthusiasm for the East was certainly attractive, there were certain practical conditions for Johann to meet before they could marry.

“What conditions?” he asked, confident that by defying his family
he’d already surmounted the most difficult challenge Lili could set for him.

“I don’t want you to drink. Well, not so much, anyway.”

“Then I won’t,” he answered quickly. “I won’t drink at all.”

Lili nodded. “Good,” she said. “But there’s something else.” She cleared her throat and, blushing slightly, put the matter forth in a single word: “Circumcision.”

Johann blushed back, bowed his head, and proceeded to ask her what, exactly, that entailed. Rousing all the professionalism she’d acquired over the foregoing three years, she explained the details of the procedure, employing all the proper medical terms and even drawing him a textbook-worthy sketch. “I see,” he noted when she finished, his voice even despite the fact that his face had been drained of all color.

When he left that night she was not at all certain he would return, but another hour found him knocking at her door. He had more questions for her—not about circumcision this time, but about Islam proper. The next few hours progressed with him asking her questions of increasing theological subtlety. Her German was, by then, quite passable, but she found her vocabulary limited in matters of faith. She answered as best she could. Johann spent an hour in his car only to return with more questions. There was an interlude before dawn when they slept, she in her room and he down in the street in his car.

“Call the hospital and make an appointment,” he told her when light cracked over the horizon at six o’clock the next morning.

Circumcisions were far from routine even among infants at the clinic, but the procedure had certainly never before been attempted on a man in his thirties. No precautions were spared. Johann was counseled as if for brain surgery, advised to proceed only under general anesthesia, and required to spend two nights in the hospital. After he’d been wheeled out of sight, Lili sat by herself in the waiting
room, studying the black-and-white tiles at her feet and biting her nails down to bloody nubs. As the hours stretched on, she began to consider what she could possibly say to his family if he wound up dying on the operating table.

Johann finally emerged after three hours, heavily drugged and smiling goofily, his cheeks the brightest shade of red she had seen in her life. Infection had set in and his condition was critical. A massive dose of antibiotics was administered, and Lili’s worry now turned into hysteria. She paced the halls and appealed to God with every last prayer she remembered, and many more that she made up that day.

When Johann’s fever reached 104 degrees, he turned his eyes slowly to her. “Telegraph Mutti,” he whispered between labored breaths. “Tell her to come, but don’t tell her anything….” Within hours, Mutti and Maria descended on the hospital in their trench coats, trailing their peppermint and cigarette perfume through the corridors. They brushed past Lili without a hello and made their way straight to Johann’s sickbed. But why had he been brought to the hospital in the first place? Had he been ill? What kind of surgery had he undergone? Mutti and Maria pleaded and begged and even, in their desperation, began to suggest bribes—only to be frustrated at every turn. Elsa, arriving some time later from Frankfurt, noted the lack of visible bandages and guessed straightaway what had transpired. But was it really possible he had let this
thing
be done to him, Mutti cried, and when Johann, whose fever had finally begun to ebb, nodded weakly from the hospital bed the women’s cries rose up and echoed through the halls. The Iranian girl had come straight from hell, they wailed, and she’d bury them all in time.

Against all such predictions, Johann, at least, recovered. Within a week of his operation, he returned to work and resumed his weekly dates with Lili. He visited both the beer halls and his family with
less and less frequency, and in his spare hours he took to perusing volumes on Iranian literature, history, and architecture. Then, as soon as Lili sat for her final exam and extracted her diploma from the University of Göttingen, Johann handed in his resignation. He sold off his Audi and all but his most cherished books. With the money from these, his savings, and Lili’s small contribution, he bought a black Mercedes sedan that he and Lili would drive to Iran.

It was 1962. For three weeks they would subsist on a diet of bread, coffee, and the occasional fruit plucked from a roadside tree. Their only luxuries were a tour of the gambling casino in Monaco and the purchase of a pair of suede pumps Lili spied in a Viennese boutique. At the Austro-Yugoslav border they were searched and questioned in a windowless room that smelled heavily of garlic and sweat. When they were well into Turkey, Lili discovered one of her suede pumps was missing. Johann turned the car back toward Yugoslavia, freed the missing shoe from the clutch of a surly and poorly shaven customs officer, and with that the couple headed back toward Iran to be married.

Eight

Peacock Throne

“I can still remember her dress,” Lili said as she began to speak of the last years in Iran. “Blue velvet, cut open at the shoulders. She wore it to serve me tea. Can you imagine such a thing? To give a girl a dress like that and then call her mother
kharab,
broken? And that’s what she called me, too.
Kharab.
A prostitute.”

I
RANIANS HAD WELCOMED A
succession of three queens over the preceding decades: the Egyptian princess Fawzia, the green-eyed Soraya, the formidable Farah Diba. This parade of royal brides posed a riddle as complex as any of the changes to occur during the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In generations past, infertile and otherwise undesirable wives would most likely have been kept alongside new ones, but as heir to his father’s modernization campaign as well as Reza Shah’s strategic, often uneasy alliances with the West, the second Pahlavi monarch had embraced the custom of taking a single wife. Whatever cost this extracted privately, in practice it meant that again and again the country would be treated to a new queen and a wedding celebration made ever more majestic by the country’s oil and the shah’s ambitions for Iran.

When Lili returned from Europe to become a bride in the early sixties, she did so by force of her own considerable ambitions, brandishing a foreign diploma that compelled everyone to call her Madame Doctor—the first of the family and the first for many years
yet. To the even greater astonishment of her cousins, aunts, and stepmothers, she also brought with her a handsome, well-mannered, blue-eyed
farangi
eager to live in the country and also to convert to Islam in order to marry her.

“She’s got herself Richard Burton!” her cousins marveled, hiding their smiles behind their hands.

“Yes, her bread’s been drenched in oil, that one,” her aunts and stepmothers concurred, “but just how did she pull it off?”

Day after day members of the clan appeared at Nader’s apartment in a newly built concrete housing development in West Tehran. Kobra had been living in the apartment since Nader’s return from Germany earlier that year, and until they managed to find work it would be Lili and Johann’s home as well. As the clan filed into the apartment to greet the new couple, Lili, linking her arm in Johann’s, watched mouth after mouth fall agape, flashed a brilliant smile, and proceeded to savor the clan’s collective stupor.