The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (36 page)

Lili narrowed her eyes and appraised her mother’s suitor. He was a completely amiable fellow, well mannered and much more handsome than Lili had expected. Most disarmingly, his affection for Kobra seemed completely genuine. Why shouldn’t Kobra entertain his attentions? What harm was there in this “second spring,” as Johann had dubbed Kobra’s midlife affair?

But not long after this meeting Kobra herself began to waver. Her suitor’s trousers, she claimed, were always too short, while his fingernails were always too long. When she had finished chronicling his thousand other defects, Kobra sighed and told Lili, “He’s nothing next to your father.” Lili took it upon herself to remind Kobra that her years with Sohrab had hardly amounted to a happy marriage. Kobra shrugged off the comment. “Your father was a gentleman,” she continued. “A perfect gentleman.”

The years had worn away at the truth of things, and to Kobra, Sohrab was now not only the husband she’d always longed for and loved but also the husband who’d always longed for and loved her.

Perhaps, Lili reflected, it was not so much this fantasy that Kobra coveted but her independence. In any case, Kobra’s courtship with
the young suitor came to a decisive end when Kobra, for the very first time in her life, signed her name as Sohrab’s wife to an unwitting government clerk and thereby claimed the grave beside his in a cemetery outside Tehran. The previous year Simin, Sohrab’s blue-eyed jinn, had died of cancer—a quick though by all accounts tortuous death. With Simin dead, there’d be no one to challenge Kobra’s claim to Sohrab’s grave. Kobra would, for the rest of her life, be exceedingly proud of this plot of earth, and would be known for many years afterward to hire a taxi to drive her to the graveyard and visit it from time to time.

In the early seventies, Lili alighted on a certain Parisian arrondissement and swept into the offices of a certain celebrated French fertility doctor. She had no appointment and only broken English with which to plead her case, but in one hand she held a gigantic, beribboned metal tub of caviar, and just as she’d predicted, this would serve her better than any letter of introduction.

“Tubes,” the celebrated French doctor told Lili with a deep and decisive frown.

The diagnosis did not square with any of the hundreds of others she’d received over the years, but by the time she’d opened her mouth to protest the doctor had already plunged a needle, thin and pliant, into her navel until it disappeared.

“Nothing the matter but your tubes, Madame,” he told her as he pulled the needle clear.

No sooner had she acquired the laboratory slip confirming her pregnancy than Lili resigned from King’s Serenity and took to her bed. Kobra came to her once a day bearing clay pots of stew and silver platters of potato cutlets, her purse stuffed with herb sachets and wild rue. She attacked the rooms with buckets of ammonia, dusted and swept and polished, and before she left she always circled
smoking pots of herbs over Lili, first over her head and then over her belly.

Wild rue, wild rue, kernels of wild rue,

Hundred and thirty seeds of rue,

All-knowing rue,

Blind all jealous eyes.

In the fall and winter Lili buried herself by the
korsi.
She ate persimmons by threes and fours. Twelve weeks into the pregnancy, she had the mouth of her uterus stitched tight to keep the baby from slipping loose. She would not leave the apartment or even stand for fear it would slip loose anyhow. When the weather grew warmer, she abandoned the
korsi
and instead reclined on a carpet on the balcony with a wide-brimmed straw hat pulled over her eyes, eating whole watermelons and reading her way through the classics of nineteenth-century Russian and French literature—Dumas (père and fils), Balzac, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy.

One day Mariam planted pots of geraniums along the balcony for her. “For good luck,” Mariam explained as she worked the seeds briskly into the soil. The leaves of the geraniums, when they grew, were fleshy, fan shaped, and when the wind blew the petals and scattered them across the balcony they looked just like pomegranate seeds. By No Rooz, Lili felt strong enough to stand, to walk the length of the balcony and dip the nose of her watering can into the flowering pots. Her belly was pleasingly enormous. Slowly, secretly, she let herself imagine her baby’s face.

That June, in a first-class hospital suite with a view onto Mount Damavand, Lili lay waiting. She wore a pretty new nightgown with lace at the wrists, collar, and hem. To better remember the day, she refused even a whiff of chloroform. For twenty hours, while Johann paced the corridors, smoking cigarette after cigarette to calm his
nerves, her colleagues joked and soothed and cajoled her through labor, and when I appeared at dawn with an umbilical cord wrapped tightly round my neck and the doctor unfurled it and I took my first gulp of air, there were even champagne flutes to greet me.

Aroosak farangi
, Lili called me, the foreign doll, her eyes filling with tears even as she laughed and took me into her arms. She pressed her nose to my skin and brushed her lips against my forehead. On the occasion of our first photograph together that day, she piled her hair high on her head, teased up the front, and pinned a gardenia behind her ear.

Every morning Kobra arrived at the apartment on Avenue Pahlavi, touched a forefinger to my eyelids, and gently forced my eyes open. Frowning, lips pursed, she surveyed their progress from gray to blue to black. Then one day she found a near-perfect match for her own honey-colored eyes. “Beautiful,” she crooned, sweeping me from my canopied crib with one hand and reaching for her wild rue sachet with the other.

As for Johann, fatherhood would draw forth all his native kindness. He rolled up his sleeves and changed my diapers and bathed me. He stood over my crib and sang me Iranian lullabies in his Azari-tinged Persian. Lili’s relatives looked on, dumbfounded. Of course every father loved his child, but no father they’d known had ever proved of such practical use. “Yes, Lili’s bread’s been drenched in oil,” they noted to one another, and once again shook their heads in wonder.

When I passed my fifth month, Lili, Johann, and Kobra took me north to Mashhad, to the shrine of Imam Reza. It was Ashura, the holiest day of the Shiite Muslim calender, the day commemorating Imam Hossein’s martyrdom. Thousands of pilgrims had descended on Mashhad to beat their chests and cry out to God as they circled the shrine.

“Take her inside!” Lili called out to Johann over their cries. “Take her to the shrine!”

The turquoise dome of the mosque shimmered in the late-summer sun. Johann, dressed in a denim shirt and jeans, his blond hair to his shoulders, nodded, lifted me high over his head, and fell in with the pilgrims. In addition to drawing forth his native kindness, fatherhood had brought on a protracted period of sobriety. This would not last, but on that day in Mashhad it would still be something for which both Lili and Kobra could give their thanks.

“Give her here, Mr. American!” a man called out in English to Johann when he reached the shrine.

“But I’m not—,” he started to call back in Persian. It was useless. The din drowned out his voice. He shook his head, lifted me up in the air, and passed me into the stranger’s hands. One by one the pilgrims passed me over their heads, touched my forehead to the doors of Imam Reza’s tomb, and then, very gently, they passed me back into my father’s hands.

And in this way, I was blessed.

Nine

Revolution

“First the shoolooqi and then the war,” Lili said into the tapes. “Who knew how long it would last? Nobody could be sure of anything in those years. As for me, I knew only this: I had to keep you close and I had to keep you safe.”

I
N MY
I
RAN EVERY
story always began the same way. “
Yeki bood; yeki nabood
. [One was all; all was one.]” It was a riddle, an incantation, a summons. It was my grandmother’s honey-colored eyes narrowing in the dim back room of the Lady Diola whenever she began to remember or to imagine a story.

Yeki bood; yeki nabood.

One was all; all was one.

We lived then in a high-rise apartment building, one of the many that were rising up almost daily to permanently alter the shape and contours of Tehran. Except for its mirrored walls, our apartment on Avenue Pahlavi was decorated completely in white—white leather couches, white Formica dining table and dining chairs, white plush carpets. When I think of Iran I can still hear Elvis’ voice echoing through the all-white rooms of that apartment and can still see Charlie’s Angels sashaying across our TV screen in their bikinis and their evening gowns.

I was
doh-rageh
, a two-veined child. Not “half” or “mixed,” as they say in America and many other countries besides, but double.
Two. For Iranians, such legacies are carried in the body, intimate as blood and unopposable as destiny.

Every day my mother Lili dressed in a white shirtdress and stacked heels, twisted her hair into a bun, and pulled on her fancy white headdress. She was the only woman in her family with a foreign diploma and the only one who worked outside the home. She called me her
aroosak farangi,
her foreign doll, and she liked to dress me in white to match her own white uniform.

In the mornings she’d drop me off at my grandmother Kobra’s salon on Avenue Geisha and from there she’d call for a taxi to drive her to the hospital. In memories it is, somehow, always a summer afternoon at the Lady Diola, the kind of summer afternoon when heat rippled off the rooftops and forced a stillness over the streets of Tehran. I’d toddle through the salon, clawing at the women’s hosiery, seeking out my grandmother’s long skirts, and begging to be picked up. “Dear God, what will become of this one?” she’d sigh, scooping me up and balancing me on her hip as she washed and tinted and blow-dried her clients’ hair.

There was a girl who used to visit the Lady Diola sometimes. She had long black hair that fell like a veil all around her. Months could pass between her visits, and I didn’t know whom she belonged to or why she came at all. She’d sit with me in a room behind the salon while my grandmother Kobra worked. Sometimes the girl played dolls with me. Sometimes she drew me pictures. A sweep of blue for the sky. Roses and irises and peonies, all growing alongside one another. I can still see the flowers and the exact shade of blue of her sky, but hard as I try I can’t remember the girl’s eyes, and it’s only like this—faceless—that I know her now.

When the last of the women left the salon, Kobra and I retreated to the kitchen and there she would trade her smock for an apron. She whipped up pancakes spiced with a pinch of saffron and drenched them in sugar and rose essence. She plucked pomegranate seeds
from their honeycombs and fed them to me from a bowl. She pried the skins off kumquats so that I could pop them into my mouth like grapes. Her fruits always tasted, faintly, of the mint and parsley she trimmed for her stews.

Then Kobra would take me to her bedroom, and there she sewed me dolls with velvet tunics, satin slippers, and real golden hoops pierced through their tiny cotton ears. She lined both my wrists with rows of thin gold bangles and strung a blue-eyed amulet around my neck just as, she told me, her mother had once done for her. We’d lie down side by side on her narrow bed and she would tell me tales about a rapacious
deev
and the princess who bewitched him with a dance.

While I napped on those afternoons in Tehran, she would sometimes steal away to the bathroom and with eyeliner and lipstick draw on her stomach a set of enormous eyes, a pair of thick, vermillion lips, and a black beauty mark as round and as fat as a coin. She’d sit on the edge of the bed, waiting for me to open my eyes, and then she would begin her dance.

Kobra strained and stretched her belly, let it loose and drew it in, arranged and rearranged the painted features so that her stomach turned into a live, wriggling kaleidoscope of expressions. I’d sit up, wide-eyed, clapping my hands and following her with my eyes as she danced.

I didn’t know this yet, but it was a dance that Iranian women had performed for each other in the
andaroon
, or women’s quarters, for hundreds of years, a vestige of the all-but-vanished country to which my grandmother had been born and the place she conjured for me in the stories and songs that would always make up my own best memories of Iran. What fascinated me most, though, was neither the dance itself nor the face of the woman Kobra drew but the canvas of my grandmother’s skin. Dimpled and slack in the middle, the peripheries of her stomach were streaked with what looked to me then like claw marks.

But of all that I can still remember about this “land of jewels”—the final years of the Pahlavi dynasty and also our final years in Iran—it’s the girl, the one with hair like a veil falling all around her, whom I think about most often now. One day when I was three years old, my grandmother stepped out of the Lady Diola to meet the postman. The girl lifted me up and smiled into my eyes. At this my memory dissolves and recedes, and I know only that it was my screams that brought my grandmother running in from the street. Kobra pulled me to her. I’d cut my lip and my blood splattered onto her white smock. Turning to the girl, my grandmother shouted words I’d never heard before and drove her away with her shrieks and her cries.