The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (31 page)

The campaign began by teaching Johann Persian. On the first page of a fresh notebook Lili wrote down the letters of the alphabet for him. “Copy them,” she told him. He took the task up with enthusiasm. Next she bought a first-grade reading primer. He tore through it in less than a week’s time. By the third week of his studies, Johann had advanced through the second-and third-grade books. “Easier than Greek!” he cheerfully announced. When he finished the fourth-grade primer, Lili began buying him a newspaper from the kiosk across the street. She’d wake up early every morning, walk to the kiosk for the paper, and then, over breakfast, he’d read every page, advertising included, aloud to her with steadily growing fluency.

Her next task was to find Johann a job. Through one of her cousins she learned that Etco, a large Iranian construction firm, was looking to increase the number of its foreign engineers. Presenting herself as Johann’s secretary, Lili called the firm and scheduled an interview for him with the company’s president. Johann was hired at a salary of eight thousand
tomans
, an astonishing sum and far more
money than even Lili had expected. With such a salary, she mused, a home of their own would not be far off.

The work suited him perfectly. It was, however, not the projects themselves that interested Johann—the bridges and tunnels were, after all, built in modern, Western style—but the fact that his job with Etco took him far outside the capital, often for several days and even weeks at a time. He’d set off in the mornings in a freshly pressed suit only to stagger home with his hair and shoes matted with dust, his jacket and slacks crumpled, and circles of sweat under each arm. The real Iran, he called the provinces, and always returned to Lili with stories of the ruins he’d seen, the nomads and the villagers he’d encountered.

But although Johann enjoyed his work and seemed destined to rise in Etco’s ranks, his guilelessness caused so many problems that for a time remedying them became Lili’s full-time job. Once, in these early months of marriage, he bought her a bouquet of pale pink tulips, and when he came home he kissed her cheek and then drew the flowers from behind his back like a magician.

Lili thanked him. “But how much did these flowers cost?” she asked as she pulled them from the sheet of cellophane in which they’d been wrapped.

His face fell. “Is it so important?”

Lili nodded. “Very.”

“Ninety
tomans
.”

“Ninety
tomans
!” She threw her hands into the air. “He asked you for ninety
tomans
and you didn’t even ask him for a better price?”

Johann shook his head. Lili let out a long sigh, bundled the flowers back into the sheet of cellophane, and headed straight to the florist.

“
Agha
,” she said, waving the tulips before him. “How much will you pay me for these flowers?”

“Begging your pardon,
khanoom
,” he replied, “but I sell flowers; I don’t buy them.”

“Then how much,” she pressed on, “would you sell these flowers to me for?”

“Twenty
tomans, khanoom-jan
.”

“Then why did you sell them to my husband for ninety?”

The florist frowned and began rubbing his chin. “Your husband?”

“Yes,” she returned. “He was here not an hour ago.” She held the florist’s gaze. “The foreigner,” she added. “Surely you remember?”

His frown deepened.

“I know,” said Lili, “that you are in the habit of tricking foreigners,
agha
, but you’re mistaken if you think you can trick this one.” She took a step closer to him and narrowed her eyes. “My husband spends his days traveling to the most godforsaken parts of this country,” she said, pausing to give an expansive wave of her arm. “He comes home too tired to stand or to eat and you,
agha
, are trying to steal not just his money but mine.” She plunked the flowers on the counter. “I won’t have it.”

“
Masha Allah, khanoom!
” the florist replied with genuine pleasure. “Lucky the husband who has you to watch over his money! So tell me, lady, how can we make you happy?”

“I’ll take back the difference between what these flowers are worth and what my husband paid for them, or else I will leave them here and take back the full ninety
tomans
.”

The florist slapped his knee and chuckled. “Here’s your ninety
tomans, khanoom
,” he said, reaching into his cash register and tossing a small pile of bills onto the counter. “Take these flowers as a gift from me and may God keep you for your husband and give you ten children to increase your happiness!”

“No more flowers,” Lili told Johann when she returned home that day, and from then on Johann placed all his wages in her hands, less twenty
tomans
for a week’s worth of the bitter, grainy Turkish coffee he’d come to love so.

With a ban on flowers and a slew of other economies, their savings steadily accumulated until they had enough to put down the money for their first home, a one-bedroom condominium in the same subdivision where Kobra and Nader lived. Setting herself a budget of just one thousand
tomans
to furnish the three rooms, Lili purchased a bed and a set of wrought-iron patio furniture she judged just as good as the expensive modernist furniture she glimpsed in the city’s chic new furniture boutiques. The chairs had the unfortunate habit of tipping over and sending their guests crashing to the ground. “If I were you,” Kobra told her, “I’d get rid of this junk.” She begged to know why Lili didn’t buy herself some proper French antiques and Persian carpets now that she had not only her own reputation,
aberoo
, to mind, but also Mr. Engineer’s.

“Leave her be; leave her be,” Khanoom urged Kobra. “She’s watching out for his money, as she very well should.”

Khanoom visited Lili and Johann often in their new home, and when she came she always brought along huge pots of Johann’s favorite stews and soups. To avoid the flimsy wrought-iron chairs, Khanoom took to sitting cross-legged on the floor. She would sit in the center of the carpet with her face propped up on her knees, staring adoringly at her
damad farangi
, her foreign son-in-law, and beseeching Lili and Kobra to leave off their squabbling.

One August morning in the first year of Lili and Johann’s marriage, Khanoom surrendered her soul to God. As on many summer nights, the heat had driven the family to the rooftop with their pillows and mattresses. Khanoom woke at dawn, long before the others, and slipped down to the courtyard to perform her ablutions and say her prayers. When she finished, she pulled on a fresh housedress, returned to the roof, and closed her eyes. Some hours later, Zaynab woke to find Khanoom with her prayer beads in one hand, arms folded over her chest, her body already turned toward God. No one in Lili’s family had loved Johann as much as Khanoom, and dear as
she was to everyone in the family, when she died few would miss her quite as much as Lili and her
damad farangi
.

Mutti, Elsa, and Maria had refused to acknowledge Johann and Lili’s engagement, much less attend their wedding, yet within months of Johann’s departure from Germany their love for their
Bübchen
would draw them all the way to Iran.

Mutti was the first of the three to appear, and she came armed with the strategy with which she would approach her daughter-in-law for the rest of her life: to simply pretend Lili did not exist. But a few days into her first two-month-long visit, Mutti broke her hip, and the injury would compromise the strategy considerably. Lili committed herself to tending to Mutti with a surfeit of daughterly attentions. In the mornings, Lili would alight with a tray laden with warm flatbread, feta cheese, butter, jam, and a carafe of freshly squeezed fruit juice. In the evenings, Lili undressed Mutti, guided her into the bathtub, and commenced to scrub her with a
leef,
a horsehair mitt. “Am I so dirty?” Mutti asked, her face stricken at the sight of the thick, grayish impurities that Lili drew from her skin. She began slapping at herself to flick away the
Schmutz
, the filth. “More, more,” she begged, and Lili obliged by scrubbing her positively raw.

With Johann away at work, Lili had no choice but to take Mutti to the hospital with her. On the first day, she borrowed a wheelchair, pushed Mutti down the corridors, and introduced her to the head of the gynecology department. “She is my eyes,” the doctor told Mutti in German. The phrase, meant to indicate Lili’s inestimable value to the hospital, did not seem to translate well, as Mutti did not smile or offer any reply. But then, as soon as Lili wheeled her into the delivery room and pulled a smock over her shoulders, Mutti began trembling with excitement. “Will she live?” Mutti asked again and again as she
took in the bloody spectacle unfolding before her. “Will she possibly survive it?”

Lili feared that the stimulation Mutti experienced in the delivery room was compromising her own recovery and therefore decided to move Kobra to the apartment to keep an eye on Mutti instead. Mutti did not hide her disappointment at this change in plans but seemed content enough to have Kobra flutter around her with even more devotion than Lili herself. Does Mutti-
joon
want an extra pillow? Kobra cooed. A second cream cake? Would Mutti-
joon
like her feet massaged? Her shoulders rubbed? Mutti very much did.

“But why does she call me Mutti-
joon
?” she asked Johann one evening.

“It means you are like her life, like her soul.”

“I am her life?” Mutti asked doubtfully. “Her soul?”

“Iranians say this whenever they love someone,” Johann explained.

“She loves me? But how can she love me?”

They’d never share more than ten words of each other’s languages, but in this time a certain affection did, in fact, grow between Kobra and Mutti. Alone together in the apartment, Mutti would begin wringing her hands and uttering curses in her native Kashubian. Kobra couldn’t make out one word, but between Mutti’s tone and the frequent references to Lili’s name she could discern the gist of Mutti’s remarks. Kobra listened quietly until the outbursts passed and then she patted Mutti’s hand and pointed to the sky, by which she meant to indicate heaven—the only place, surely, where consolation was to be found.

Elsa was the next of Johann’s family to visit Iran. Lili booked the flight herself (first class, nonstop from Frankfurt) and enlisted the most dashing of her brother’s friends, a swarthy, square-jawed professional boxer, to retrieve Elsa from Mehrabad Airport. On the evening of her arrival, a party far more lavish than Lili and Johann’s
wedding was thrown in her honor. Kobra and Zaynab cooked up no fewer than five different stews and three different kinds of rice, and Lili made sure that her most educated cousins were present to converse with her sister-in-law.

All night Elsa sat perched on the edge of a silk settee with her ankles neatly crossed, occasionally smoothing the skirt of her beige suit and observing everyone with her pale green eyes. That night the dashing boxer would ask her, repeatedly, to dance. Each time she declined with a slight shake of her head. But when the prettiest young girls were dispatched to lay before her the best of the evening’s feast—succulent kabobs, jeweled rice, saffron pudding—she ate it all with relish, with genuine pleasure.

Elsa’s appreciation for Iranian cuisine would, however, be insufficient to distract her from her mission. By the next morning her appeals had already begun.

“You should not have come here,” she told Johann. “Mutti is weak; her heart is weak. She will die if you do not come back home.”

Johann hung his head. “But I’m married now—”

“To an atheist!”

“But they believe in God here, too—”

“The devil they do!”

When Lili returned from work, a hush would fall between Johann and his sister. Elsa switched from German to Polish or Kashubian and resumed her appeals. Lili did not understand either language, but the meaning of the two words “atheist” and “barbarian” failed to elude her. She’d clear her throat to signal her comprehension, and Johann would throw her an apologetic look. This she was inclined to indulge, but she could not stand to see him drunk. When he next reached for a bottle of beer, she pulled it from his hands.

“Enough now,” she’d tell him in Persian.

“Yes,” he murmured. “You’re right. Enough.”

“And why are you taking that?” Elsa demanded to know. “Can’t you see that my brother is still thirsty?”

Lili brought a glass of water from the kitchen and set it down on the table. “He can drink this if he’s thirsty.”

“
Halt deine Schnautze!
Shut your muzzle!” came Elsa’s reply.

“A barbaric country,” Elsa would write of Iran when she returned home to Hessisch-Lichtenau. “The atheist will send you back to Germany in bare feet,” she predicted, and so certain was Elsa of this that from then on she would put aside a hefty chunk of her salary into a bank account she opened in Johann’s name.

Just as she’d predicted, Lili’s foreign diploma granted her entry into Tehran’s very best clinics. She soon found herself fielding several handsome offers, and from these she chose the newly built King’s Serenity. A project of the shah’s twin sister, King’s Serenity had been built to the exact specifications of the most advanced American hospitals. Everything from the metallic clipboards to the nurses’ uniforms and doctors’ smocks, the medical equipment to the intercom system, had been imported from the States. The physicians, nurses, and midwives were drawn mostly from the ranks of Iranians who’d studied abroad, and all written communication between the members of the staff was, as a matter of hospital policy, conducted exclusively in English.

Lili was promptly installed as the head of one of Serenity’s midwifery divisions, with her own smartly appointed examination room, a short white shirtdress, and a headdress whose compact dimensions she found both more manageable and becoming than the monstrosities of her student days. Her monthly salary of two thousand
tomans
, though generous by the standards of her profession, was less than adequate for her schemes, and so she began to supplement her income
by taking additional night shifts at a less prestigious downtown clinic and snatching meals and sleep between shifts.