The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (3 page)

Now that the Qajars had been overthrown in favor of the Pahlavi dynasty and Western clothes had become a matter of not just fashion but also royal mandate, only poor women still dressed in
sheleeteh
and their skirts were made of plain cotton, not silk, and issued no pleasing rustles when they walked. My grandmother’s only
sheleeteh
was apricot colored, and it had belonged first to Pargol, who had worn it to cross the desert so many years ago.

Sometimes Malekeh Khanoom let her students keep remnants from the dresses they sewed. In her first month at the school, Kobra chose two squares of voile and with them she sewed two scarves. One was blue like a robin’s egg and the other crimson as a pomegranate seed. She had no pearls or golden coins, and so she embroidered them with a handful of tiny turquoise beads. She took the two scarves home to Pargol, who wore them constantly—one day the blue one, the next day the red one—with great pleasure, and more than a little pride.

The first year Kobra went to Malekeh Khanoom’s school as a student, but she was so clever and hardworking that the second year she went as an assistant and the third year as a teacher herself.

Then one night Kobra’s brother Ali-Ahmad, the gambler, put forth a proposition that altered my grandmother’s fortunes forever. One evening, after losing a great sum of money—his greatest loss yet in what would be a long and infamous career—Ali-Ahmad turned to his gambling opponent and said, “You can take my sister in marriage.” He did not name her at all but added simply, “The youngest one.”

Ali-Ahmad knew his friend Sohrab had reason enough to accept the offer, but most likely neither of them spoke of it that night or any other. Whether Ali-Ahmad regretted this later no one in the family could ever say. They’d only remember that when he returned home that night with news that he’d found Kobra a suitor the news was met with unbridled glee.

Kobra’s sisters, themselves all recently married, tittered and giggled; her aunts clucked their tongues and smiled. Sohrab was so handsome and cut such a fine figure in the neighborhood that even
Pargol took Ali-Ahmad’s news as a stroke of incredibly good luck. By the next morning Kobra’s aunts and sisters had already begun to sew and embroider a crimson tunic and flounced wedding skirt, and by week’s end they’d pooled their monies to buy Kobra a pair of wooden platform shoes at the bazaar. Malekeh Khanoom, Kobra’s sewing instructor, lent out her string of tiny blinking lights (a treasure from
farang
, or Europe, it was rumored), which Pargol, in a fit of creative inspiration, nestled into Kobra’s wedding veil. And with Kobra so outfitted and Ali-Ahmad’s debts neatly covered by what would have been Kobra’s bride price, my fourteen-year-old grandmother became, for a time, an
aroos
.

In those years a young bride had no name. Known simply as the
aroos,
or “the bride,” she truly took her husband’s name only when her mother-in-law died. When Kobra was called
aroos
, her hair fell in two black braids, thick as coiled ropes, down to the middle of her back. She was shy, neat, and modest, which Sohrab knew would endear her to his mother, a woman known to all as Khanoom, “Missus.” But however beautiful Kobra’s eyes and plaits of black hair, she was simple, provincial, and as unlikely a match for my grandfather, with his elegance and airs, as, it would seem, she was for her own fantastical name.

Sohrab was the first son born to Khanoom after two daughters, and as such he was also her
cheshmeh cheraq
, the very light of her eyes. By the time Sohrab was two years old, his father had already quit their house on Avenue Moniriyeh and taken three other wives. He’d also long since stopped sending his first wife any money. Khanoom lived by her hands, sewing and knitting, and raising Sohrab and her other children on her own. When, one by one, her husband’s other three wives showed up at her door, passed over just as she herself had been, she took them in, too, and they lived in her house like sisters and worked alongside her.

Since his earliest days Sohrab had been spoiled with the attentions
of the many women of his mother’s house. As a boy he was known as the little dandy in their midst, and they sewed all his clothes themselves and ironed them for him, too, even when he was no more than three or four years old and they would not have thought to do the same for their own best garments. Between their endless rounds of sewing and knitting and cooking and cleaning, they plucked the seeds of pomegranates and fed them to him from a bowl. They saved him the soft-bellied figs from their garden and popped them into his mouth whenever he came to sit with the women in the kitchen. And Sohrab took in their attentions just as easily as he had once taken his mother’s milk.

He would not stay at their side for long, though. By the age of seven Sohrab was already the acknowledged leader of the pack of neighborhood boys who wiled away the afternoons in the alleys riding bicycles and shooting homemade slings. By eleven he had the run of the whole city and would often linger in the streets or the
qaveh khaneh
, coffeehouse, where men recited the
Shahnameh
, Ferdowsi’s eleventh-century verse epic, for one another. Sohrab would linger in the city long after school ended, leaving his mother to curse her fate and pray, hour after hour, for his safe return.

As a young man of twenty Sohrab had somehow secured a high post in Iran’s national textile bureau. No one quite knew how this had happened. He had neither money nor connections, and it was a job for which he had no qualifications besides his charm and his taste for finery, but these had proved sufficient. On their way to Europe and America, many of the country’s most opulent carpets passed under his hands and exacting eye and could be shipped off only with his consent. His salary was generous by standards of the day, but to satisfy his luxurious tastes he supplemented his income with gambling, a favorite diversion since his teenage years. Within a few years of his marriage to Kobra, Sohrab had done well enough to dress in perfectly tailored Western suits, then still rare in Iran, and
also to drive a black Chrysler of which he was no less vain than of his own brilliantined hair.

It was no secret that even after he married Kobra my grandfather’s eyes still lingered on the smartly dressed ladies who had recently begun to appear on the streets of Tehran. It was also a fact known to many that for several years before his marriage Sohrab had courted a lady so chic and lovely it was said she could pass for an
aroos farangi
, a European’s wife. But this woman, Simin, was twice divorced and unable to bear children; Sohrab knew that until he produced heirs to his family name, he could never marry her. So when his friend Ali-Ahmad had offered Sohrab his sister, whom he’d once seen at Ali-Ahmad’s house and still remembered as a plump and pretty girl, Sohrab had not thought long before saying yes and bringing her to live in Khanoom’s house on Avenue Moniriyeh.

Sohrab’s sisters and three stepmothers took Kobra in with smiles and compliments. “Look at her pretty hands!” gushed one. “And her lovely eyes!” added another. She was given her own small room in Khanoom’s house, and in her first months there Kobra sewed herself a quilt and embroidered a cloth on which she set her prayer shawl and rosary and also her hand mirror and hairbrush. All day she worked in Khanoom’s kitchen, cleaning and chopping herbs for the
sabzi
, picking pebbles from the rice, and tending the grains over a charcoal brazier. At night she went to her room to wait for Sohrab. In the first years of their marriage, he came to her a few times a week, and it wasn’t long before a baby appeared in a basket by her feet in the kitchen, and her breasts and belly were still swollen when two months later a second child began to grow in her.

They were her pride. As a boy Nader was especially prized by the family, but Lili was a beautiful child, plump and rosy cheeked, with sparkling black eyes, dimples, and an exquisitely tiny nose. The
neighborhood women cooed and fussed over her whenever they dropped by the house on Avenue Moniriyeh. Even Sohrab, little given to children as he usually was, seemed charmed by her.

Kobra loved the courtyard of Khanoom’s house and the deep blue tiles of the
hoz
, the shallow pool that stood there in the shade of a large persimmon tree. Khanoom’s persimmon tree was also a favorite of the neighborhood birds, who would gather to feast on the fallen fruit under its branches. While her children napped in the afternoons, Kobra would steal away from her work to sit on the edge of the
hoz
and watch the birds as they pecked greedily at the seeds embedded in the fruit’s rotting flesh.

In the years leading to the 1941 Allied invasion of Iran, when Soviet soldiers commandeered the northern provinces and British soldiers roamed the capital and controlled the oil fields to the south, the bread at Khanoom’s house was often dotted with pebbles and splinters and the stews they ate were only rarely prepared with meat. Sitting under the persimmon tree one afternoon in late fall, Kobra was cracking the shells of sunflower seeds between her teeth when she suddenly had an idea. She dusted the seeds from her skirt and went back into the house. She returned with a large wicker basket, which she set at the base of the persimmon tree. She scattered a fistful of sunflower seeds under the tree and then she held her breath and she waited.

She trapped five small brown birds the first day, and Khanoom clapped her hands in surprise, smiled with genuine pleasure, and praised Kobra’s cleverness.

As a child of three, her daughter (and my own mother), Lili, would sometimes come across Kobra hunting birds in the courtyard. A sly smile would spread across Kobra’s face as the creature’s wings fluttered between her fingers. Later when Lili took her place on the floor of Khanoom’s parlor for supper, she’d find a stew set out with bones so tiny and thin they were eaten along with the meat and she
would cry and refuse to take a single bite, even though she knew there would be nothing else.

Most nights Sohrab went out with his friends to parties where the ladies were very slender and wore Western dresses and were much more beautiful than Kobra. When she asked to go with him, he told her she looked old and slovenly in her chador and that he would be embarrassed to take her along. She offered to go without her veil or even a simple head scarf, even though this would have made her barely less uncomfortable than roaming the streets naked. Still he went out alone.

Every night after putting her children to bed, she sat cross-legged in her room, propped her mirror against the wall, and set a candle on the floor beside it. She lined her eyes with a stick of
sormeh
, eyeliner, first outside and then inside along their rims, and then she darkened her mole with its tip. She swiveled up her only tube of lipstick, dragged its crimson grease along her lips, and next blotted her fingers with lipstick and set about rouging her cheeks. She dabbed rose water behind her ears and between the cleft of her breasts, and then she sat peering at herself in her mirror until at last she heard the brass knocker crash against the door.

He always returned well after midnight, his impeccable suits and silk cravats scented by liquor, cigarettes, and the perfumes of other women. Kobra would ask him why he’d come home so late, saying his dinner had grown cold and she had been so worried, and if he answered at all, it would be to tell her that it was none of her business and why did she stay awake at all if it was only to annoy him? But if she ever fell asleep before his late-night arrivals and therefore failed to open the door for him after a second or third banging of the knocker, he would storm into the house and strike her, demanding to know where she had been and why she had not come at once, as
any decent wife ought. Lili and her brother, Nader, often woke to the sounds of shouting and crying, and if they left their rooms and came forward Sohrab would beat them, too, though sometimes he would only raise a hand to strike them and stop just before it came crashing onto their heads.

“
Besooz-o-besaz
,” Kobra would have been enjoined if she’d sought out anyone’s advice. Burn inwardly and accommodate; burn inwardly and accommodate. But Kobra sought no one’s advice. Too ashamed to confide her suffering to her family and too proud to unburden herself to her in-laws, Kobra lifted her eyes and her palms to the sky and confided only in God.

In spring and in summer Sohrab left for months at a time for the cooler provinces. In Karaj or Hamadan he and his friends would recline on carpets thrown across a riverbank, passing around a gold-trimmed
qalyoon
(water pipe) and drinking
araq
, a Persian vodka, late into the night. One year he rented a cottage in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, and toward the end of the summer he sent for Lili to spend a week with him there. She had never spent such a long stretch of time with her father, and it was difficult for her to reconcile the smiling, easygoing gentleman in the countryside with the fierce, formal patriarch she knew at home. Even his clothes were different. Here he wore cream-colored linen slacks and during the hottest parts of the day he rolled up his sleeves and undid the top buttons of his shirt as well, habits unheard of in the city. There were many pretty women about the cottage, but to Lili none seemed prettier than the fair, blue-eyed lady who linked her arm in Sohrab’s and whispered in his ear as they walked together in the garden.

Since she was the only child among the party, Lili idled away the hours outside. What she liked especially was to pluck fruits from the trees—mulberries, sour cherries, and plums—and to hoard them in her pockets so that whenever Sohrab took her in his lap and stroked her hair she could present them to him like treasures. And in the
mornings, when her father and his guests were still asleep, she helped the servants set honeydews and watermelons in the crook of the stream that ran behind the cottage.

The fruits would be left to cool in the water all day, and when Lili returned to retrieve them at dusk she’d find the women bathing together there in the stream. Beech trees lined the banks and their leaves shone like silver when the wind tousled them and they caught the last of the sunlight. Because the stream was shallow and the stones of its bed were flat and smooth, she could wade out to the center all by herself, but sometimes the current twisted her skirt around her legs and sent her tumbling. The woman with the blue eyes bathed in the river, too, but there was always a female servant to dip a pitcher into the water for her and pour it over her lovely shoulders and her long black hair, and when she caught Lili watching her she seemed neither surprised nor disturbed by such wide-eyed attentions.