The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (29 page)

Zahra was just as taken with her niece. “
Bah, bah, bah!
” she exclaimed as she appraised both Lili and Johann. “You’ve done well for yourself, Lili-
jan
!” Zahra brought armloads of oranges, nearly as big as honeydews, from her basement and as she peeled them the juice sprang from under her long, painted fingernails and scented the whole room. “Second marriages are certainly the best,” Zahra purred as she handed Lili slice after slice of her luscious oranges. “Don’t you agree, Lili-
jan
?”

To Lili there was little about Zahra’s skinny, balding second husband, Mahmoud, that suggested the amorous skills at which she more than
hinted to Lili around the
korsi
every night. In fact, during the course of Lili and Johann’s three-day stay in S
r
, Mahmoud loved nothing so much as to pass the evenings with Johann and his transistor radio, scanning the dial for European stations. He claimed to be especially interested in the news from Germany. “Your countrymen are the cleverest people in all the world!” Mahmoud exclaimed. Not for the last time, Johann struggled, and failed, to explain his family’s origins. “I love the sound of the German language!” Mahmoud beamed, his admiration for Johann, and the Germans, undimmed by Johann’s protests. “So very smart!” Mahmoud pressed his transistor radio and earplugs into Johann’s hands, begging him to translate, and so great was Mahmoud’s pleasure that more than once he rose to his feet and clapped his hands.

By the time Lili and Johann returned to the capital, the clan’s stupor had given way to suspicion, rumor, and outright censure. “May I die!” one of Lili’s aunts declared. “Sohrab Khan’s daughter has been traipsing about the country in every conceivable direction.”

“With a foreigner!” a cousin cried out.

“Unchaperoned and unveiled!” added another.

“And what proof is there,” said the aunt, “that this man will really marry her?”

Lili’s cousins, the ones who’d traveled abroad and adopted a modern outlook, did their best to appease Khanoom and the more pious family elders. A European man, they were quick to note, did not want for women, and therefore sex, in his own country. Surely, then, this one had traveled to Iran with noble intentions? And anyway, Lili’s cousins continued, what exactly was there left for Lili to lose and for them to protect? It wasn’t as if a young girl’s chastity were at stake. This last line of argument proved the most persuasive, though her cousins were always careful not to use it within earshot of Lili herself.

Lili’s and Johann’s attentions, meanwhile, had turned to appeasing the demands of the Iranian government. When a Muslim man married a foreigner in Iran, his bride was instantly converted to Islam through the ordinary Muslim marriage rites, a provision that would prove handy for the Iranian men who’d begun returning from their travels with European and American girlfriends and fiancées. But when a non-Muslim sought to marry a Muslim woman in Iran, he was thrown to the mercies of Iranian bureaucracy. Johann and Lili endured a three-hour-long interview at a government ministry only to be waved away with a sixteen-point list of requirements to be fulfilled before they could even apply for a marriage certificate.

Owing to Lili’s foresight, the first qualification, circumcision, had already been met. Declarations of support were made and notarized, male relatives deposed, immunizations administered, and so on until finally Lili pulled on Khanoom’s longest, thickest, blackest veil and took Johann by the hand to tackle the last of the sixteen requirements: Johann’s formal conversion to Islam.

The ceremony was officiated by Ayatollah Behbahani, a graceful, soft-spoken holy man with a black turban identifying him as a descendant of the Prophet. Johann sat cross-legged before the ayatollah, offered him a mangled, “
Salaam-aleykoom
[may peace be with you],” to which the ayatollah replied with a forgiving and heartfelt, “
Aleykoom-al-salaam
[and also with you].” Ayatollah Behbahani then commenced to whisper the requisite verses of the Koran into Johann’s ear. From her vantage point in the back corner of the mosque, Lili could make out little of the proceedings, but when the ayatollah intoned a final, “
Bismillah rahmaneh rahim
[in the name of God, the most gracious and compassionate],” and she saw Johann shape his mouth into the words, nod his final assent, and kiss Ayatollah Behbahani’s hands, Lili smiled broadly from behind her veil. Johann was now a Muslim. He even had a Muslim name, Amir. It meant “prince.”

After that nobody from the highest-level government minister to her most observant relatives could doubt Johann’s intentions, but no one would ever love him more than Lili’s grandmother Khanoom. “Tell him to come and sit by me,” she’d command her grandchildren and grandnieces whenever he appeared for a family dinner. She’d pull a chair in front of Johann, plant herself there, and tell them to translate for her in whatever European tongue they happened to have acquired in school. “Tell him we are proud he will soon be our son-in-law!” she ordered. “Tell him we are happy he is a Muslim now! Tell him how much we love him!” she exclaimed, and she always waited to make sure he understood every last word she had said to him.

In addition to such periodic declarations of love, Khanoom saved the best of everything she cooked for Johann and also kept a hawkish eye on his health. When he and Lili returned from a weekend of sunbathing in Ramsar, a town on the Caspian Sea, Khanoom took one look at Johann’s skin, now burnt neon pink to his very scalp, and went wild with rage. “What have you done to him?” she demanded of her granddaughter. Khanoom flew into the kitchen to whip up a soothing concoction of rose essence and rice powder. “You make sure he puts on a thick layer,” she told Lili, and then waved her away with a cutting look.

Lili and Johann’s wedding became the stuff of family lore, and it would be remembered, if for no other reason than because for the occasion she cast off yet another wedding dress and instead dressed herself in curtains.

“Why do you insist on wearing white?” her aunts and stepmothers had asked her with varying degrees of approbation. “It isn’t done for a second marriage; you will only call attention to yourself by wearing a white dress….”

As these were the very relatives who’d hastened her marriage to Kazem, Lili suppressed the urge to scream, curse, and strike. She did, however, go so far as to remind them that her first wedding dress, the one Kazem’s relatives had chosen for her, had not even been white but pale blue. Besides, Lili told them, the marriage was Johann’s first, and on his account she would consider nothing but white.

Determined as Lili was to wear a white wedding gown, with a budget of just three hundred
tomans
to cover all the wedding expenses, even the cheapest Western-style wedding dress in Tehran lay far outside her grasp. In any case, a perfectly lovely dress of beige-colored silk, sewn for her by Kobra, was already hanging in a closet when Lili settled onto her cousin’s sofa one day, looked out toward the garden, and found her view framed by some handsome ivory curtains. Then, just as she’d tucked a sugar cube inside her cheek and was taking her first sip of tea, she had a vision of a glorious wedding dress fashioned from the twin folds of duchesse satin that her cousin would later claim had hailed directly from France.

Such was Lili’s charm, or some later said cunning, that the curtains were taken down on the spot and the dress of mottled raw silk was left to molder and wilt in Kobra’s closet until it was finally pitched into the dustbin some years later. And by evening of the same day Kobra stood in bare feet to cut the cloth against Lili’s body. With her mouth full of pins, Kobra cautioned Lili against so flagrant a show of immodesty, but Lili only frowned and pulled the satin tighter and tighter across her breasts, her hips, her thighs.

“No, it must be like this,” Lili directed, “like this, you see.”

With the sixteen qualifications of marriage complete and the attendant documents in hand, Lili sent notice to her family of her impending wedding. The ceremony would take place just three days hence in Nader’s apartment. There was not a minute to waste. Together Lili and Kobra dragged the furniture to the peripheries of
the living room. They proceeded to throw open the windows, haul the carpets onto the balcony and beat them with brooms, and drop to their knees and scour every corner with ammonia and bleach.

Now Kobra began preparing the feast. For weeks anyone who’d come to visit, cousins and clients alike, had been given oranges to eat so that Kobra could collect and clip the peels for the wedding feast’s jeweled rice. At dawn on the morning of the wedding, Lili’s aunts, stepmothers, and cousins appeared at the apartment with their largest pots, pans, and platters tucked under their arms. They soaked the rice, mixed the tiny strips of orange peel with slivered almonds, sugared, spiced, and sautéed the mixture, and finally layered it into the rice. They fried spinach pancakes, rolled the
dohlmes
, stirred the puddings, and to steel themselves against the heady scents and the day’s gathering heat they split open a watermelon and tossed back cup after cup of
dooq
, a fizzy, minty yogurt drink. At noon Lili poked her nose into the kitchen to survey their progress, drank a cup of
dooq
someone passed into her hands, and then struck out for the city with the three hundred
tomans
she and Johann had budgeted for their wedding.

Her first stop of the day was Tehran’s best florist, a favorite among the wealthy foreign set. When asked the occasion, she replied coolly, “Nothing special, just a small family gathering.” Had she confessed the true nature of the event, she would have been charged twice or three times the going rate, but by omitting this detail she managed to walk out with an armful of tuberoses and a second armful of white gladiolus and 250
tomans
still left in her purse. The ruse was repeated at a pastry shop on Avenue Naderi, where she purchased three pink, beribboned boxes of pistachio-studded nougats and chickpea cookies. Finally, before turning back home, Lili stopped by a photography studio on Avenue Shah Reza and put down her remaining money—about two hundred
tomans
—on the counter along with a piece of paper on which she’d scribbled Nader’s address.

In the hour before the guests arrived, Lili bent her torso over the dining table and spread her hair against a white cotton tablecloth. Kobra, still weary from three steady days and nights of cleaning and cooking and sewing, ran a hot iron back and forth over Lili’s curls until they were transformed into straight, gleaming panels. Lili then sat before a mirror and watched as Kobra wound these panels around metal curlers and set each section with a slender clip. When Kobra finished arranging Lili’s hair, she raised her arms to place a rhinestone tiara (her wedding gift from Zaynab) onto her own head.

“Pretty as an
aroos farangi
!” Zaynab declared through moist eyes. Pretty as a foreign bride, by which she meant “much prettier than an Iranian bride.” From the kitchen Lili’s aunts and Sohrab’s stepmothers clucked their tongues and began whispering to one another with renewed vigor. “Yes, just as pretty as a foreign bride,” Zaynab continued in a louder voice, “and all the more lovely for the newly converted
damad farangi
[European groom] waiting for her in the next room!”

Just before sunset the
agha
, the holy man, arrived and the women retreated to Kobra’s bedroom as the men encircled Johann in the living room. Lili sat perched on the edge of the bed in her dress made of curtains while Zaynab and Kobra fussed with her veil and smoothed her train. The
agha
’s voice finally rang out, the men sent out their cheers, and Johann entered the room, red faced and eyes crinkling in a mixture of amusement and shyness. He took a seat beside Lili and gently lifted her veil. When the white satin canopy was at last unfurled, when two cones of sugar were rubbed above their heads and the canopy’s edge stitched with silver thread (to close the mother-in-law’s tongue, it was said), there would be no guests from Johann’s family and more than a hundred from Lili’s.