The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (37 page)

The girl never returned to the Lady Diola after that. I missed her for a while and asked my grandmother why she’d disappeared. But no one spoke of her again and then, for more than twenty years, I would forget that the girl had ever been there at all.

At the gates of the boarding school by Sa’ad Abad, Lili would reach into her purse, count out Sara’s pocket money for the week, fold it once, twice, four times, and then finally press it into Sara’s palm. “Promise me you will study,” she’d say. “Promise me you will be a good girl, that you will be my very own good daughter.”

Usually Sara would bundle her packages together, offer Lili a cheek to kiss, and slip quickly out of the taxi, but one night she crossed her arms over her chest and refused to leave.

“I don’t want to go back there,” she pleaded. “I want to stay with you. I want to live with you and the baby! Why don’t you take me to your house? Why can’t I live with you?”

“Just another year,” Lili promised. “Just one more year.”

The words were meant honestly—she had not quite given up hope yet—but before the year was out Lili would be pregnant again and Sara would be a married woman.

It was Zaynab who brought news of Sara’s wedding. “She has a suitor!” Zaynab announced. Kobra had put me down for a nap in the back room of the Lady Diola and they were sitting cross-legged on the carpet, taking their afternoon tea. “Her father’s already consented to the match,” Zaynab continued. “They’ll be married in the spring, after the New Year, and they’ll live near the groom’s family in the countryside.”

“Thanks be to God!” Kobra exclaimed, raising her hands to the sky. “Marriage will settle that girl at last!”

Lili, confined once again to her bed, pulled herself onto her elbows and considered the news. That Sara should have a suitor did not surprise her. No pretty girl would want for suitors, and Sara was certainly prettier than most. Still, no one, not Sara and certainly not Kazem, had given Lili reason to think a proper courtship was actually under way.

She frowned. “And just who is this suitor?” she asked.

Zaynab brightened. “Such a nice young man!” she exclaimed. “Handsome, too! Looks just like Elvis Presley—”

Kobra threw her hands up into the air again. “All-merciful God! A suitor and he even looks like Elvis Presley!”

“But it’s true!” Zaynab insisted. She turned to Lili and lowered her voice. “She wants to know if you’ll come to her wedding.”

Kobra stiffened. “Don’t you dare!” she hissed. She nodded toward Lili’s belly. “You’ll lose that baby if you so much as stand on your two feet!”

“May your tongue grow mute, Kobra Khanoom!” Zaynab cried out at this terrible thought.

Once, not long before this day, Sara had called Lili on the telephone from the boarding school. The conversation had been brief. “It’s true what they told me about you,” Sara said. “You are
kharab.
” The word meant “broken” but also “bad.” A prostitute.

With this one word,
kharab
, Lili had finally understood many
things: That no matter what she promised or sacrificed, she would always be “broken” to her daughter. That my birth had undone what little affection she’d earned from Sara in the last few years and had returned Sara’s rage to her. That the pain of this would always be equal to her will to not feel anything. And, too, that there is a mercy in forgetting and also in letting one’s self be forgotten.

For some minutes there’d been silence as Sara waited for Lili to answer. Slowly, almost tenderly, Lili had set the phone down, lifted her hands to her face, and cried.

On the eve of Sara’s wedding, Lili sent her a set of embroidered bed linens, a white sharkskin suit for Sara’s groom, and a gift of seven thousand
tomans
, all her savings. But Lili could not go to the wedding, she could not steel herself to face Kazem and his family, nor could she bear to meet Sara’s eyes on the day she became a bride. And when Lili miscarried again that summer, she pitched her grief onto the many others, the previous miscarriages, Johann’s drinking, and her in-laws’ cruelties, went back to work, and surrendered all of her love and hope to me.

In those days no one spoke of “addiction,” much less of “treatment.” For Lili the Persian word for addiction,
mohtad
, conjured images of opium dens, those dark, ancient caverns where men wasted away in a thick, sweet haze. Or else it made her think of the cocaine and heroin that now circulated in the back rooms of the city’s discotheques and bars. She’d seen dozens of celebrities and socialites spirited away to the birthing clinic for a discreet, if tortuous, course of detoxification. Their screaming was terrible, far worse than the cries of women in labor. Sometimes they’d have to be tied down to their beds until their bodies were free of the drugs. That, Lili told herself, was addiction.

Meanwhile, Johann’s face turned haggard and he grew so thin
that his pants sagged and flapped against his legs. He was never violent, he never spoke a harsh or unkind word against her, but many days his boss would call Lili at the hospital with complaints. “Please understand,
khanoom
,” he begged, sounding on the verge of tears. Johann had come late to work on Monday. He’d been drinking at his desk; he’d insulted a client; he hadn’t come to work at all for three days. “If it weren’t out of respect for you, Khanoom Doktor, I would fire him, please understand, Khanoom Doktor….”

Worse still were the days and weeks when he disappeared. She did not know where he went, whether as far as the provinces or just to some corner of the city. When he came back home, his clothes were always soiled and wrinkled, his pockets empty, his face and chest ruddy from the sun, and his eyes dull and bloodshot.

Mostly her family pretended not to notice Johann’s drinking, but these absences so terrified Zaynab and Kobra as to shake them from their reticence. Zaynab, fairly trembling with worry, would pull Lili aside at family gatherings and tell Lili the story of a foreigner, a poor
bandeh Khoda
, creature of God, who’d been found dead and half-naked at the edge of the Dasht-e Kav
r, the vast salt desert that stretched across the Iranian plateau. “Keep him close,” Zaynab whispered. Kobra favored a more direct approach. “You are a good man, Mr. Engineer,” she’d tell Johann, taking him by the arm and speaking softly to him, “a true gentleman. I don’t tell you not to drink, just to drink here, in the house, where you will be safe….”

But whatever name Lili and her family gave his drinking, or would not, there would be many months now that she had no money to pay rent. Once she laundered and ironed all her clothes—her flowered sundresses and wool skirt suits and even her silk stockings—hung them along a string in her bedroom, and prepared to sell them to the neighborhood women.

“And just how much do you think you’ll get for all this?” Mariam had asked her.

“Three thousand
tomans
.”

“Three thousand! You’d let people steal your clothes from you for three thousand
tomans
?”

“Fine. Six thousand.”

“That’s better,” said Mariam. She reached for her purse. “I’ll buy it all, but I won’t pay you less than seven thousand.”

“You!” Lili exclaimed. “But none of it will fit you!”

“That,
dokhtar-joon
, is my business, not yours!”

With the money Mariam gave her for the clothes, Lili paid the back rent on the apartment on Avenue Pahlavi and bought a bottle of whiskey that would at least keep Johann home the next time he started to drink.

“I can’t make him stop….,” she once confided to Mariam.

“You stupid girl,” said Mariam with rough affection. “Of course you can’t.”

There was talk sometimes of trouble in the holy cities of Qom and Mashhad, of an exiled cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini smuggling cassette tapes into Iran from abroad. No one seemed to pay much attention. The shah’s soldiers were everywhere. Twenty billion dollars of oil revenue streamed into the coffers of the Peacock Throne each year. Nearly a million foreigners were living in Iran by then, and with the city’s hotels booked solid for much of the year, there were even rumors of tourists renting bathrooms and hospital beds. “The very gutters of Tehran are lined with gold!” it was said in London and Tokyo and New York. What, many Iranians reasoned, were an exiled cleric and his cassette tapes beside all that?

Still, there was talk; there were signs. Once, on Lili’s way back home after a delivery in the Bottom of the City, a woman in a long, black veil, a
chadori
, eyed her as she stood on the curb waiting for a cab. Every time Lili looked in her direction, she caught the woman
staring at her. Lili turned her face away, pretended not to notice or care, but then the woman brushed past her and whispered, “You should cover yourself, sister.”

She had only meant it kindly, Lili told herself, and so she’d just nodded and gone on her way. But then, not long afterward, Johann told her that his clients had started reneging on their villas in Shemiran. “They’re sending their money out of the country,” one of the project’s Iranian engineers told Johann one day before confiding that he’d started doing the same. “Did you know that just a hundred thousand dollars buys a house, a business, and a green card in America?” Johann did not, but suddenly it seemed that everyone knew someone who’d left Iran for America or Europe and many others who were planning to leave the country soon.

For all this, in later years Lili would trace the end, or rather her end in Iran, to Mariam’s death.

One August evening Mariam went to visit her father, Shahryar Khan, at his ranch an hour outside Tehran. A country gentleman of vast estates, Shahryar Khan had long indulged a passion for hunting. At eighty, he still took weeklong treks through the countryside with his friends and their female consorts, returning, invariably, with carcasses slung over both shoulders—rabbits, antelope, and eagles. These he skinned, stuffed, and mounted on the walls of his house alongside his rifles, pistols, and antique swords.

For years Mariam had pleaded with him to show greater mercy. “Blood brings blood,” Mariam had warned her father, with much sincerity and far less success.

When Shahryar Khan woke one night to noises outside his house, he reached for the pistol he always kept by his bed, flung the door open, and shot into the dark. His eyesight was poor, his hands palsied, but with one bullet he met his mark. It was not until the next
day that his second wife, the young country girl, found Mariam’s body bleeding and laid open to the sky.

For Lili, Mariam’s death belonged to a class of grief so deep it foreclosed the possibility of tears. One day Lili went to the clinic, pulled the sign from its place by the door, and drew the curtains closed. For many weeks the Bottom of the City women would arrive with their sisters, daughters, aunts, and cousins, their pots of stew and their knitting, only to find the clinic’s windows shuttered and its door locked. Inside, Lili would sit cross-legged on the floor, praying, and as she prayed she’d hear Mariam’s voice, as clear as it had been in life. “Blood brings blood,” Lili murmured as she rocked herself back and forth, though sometimes she screamed the words, too.

Now she began to dream.

Thousands had gathered in the streets of Tehran. Shoulder to shoulder, from one end of Avenue Pahlavi to the other, they stood with their faces turned up toward the sky. The shah’s plane circled the city. Then came the smoke. It began, always, as a thin black stripe, but this smoke, the smoke of Lili’s dreams, didn’t dissipate but instead grew thicker and blacker until finally it had swallowed the whole sky.

It was dreams, always dreams, by which Lili and Kobra took measure of both past and future. When Kobra dreamt, it was mostly of her dead, and her dreams invariably guided her toward acts of piety. When she dreamt of her mother, Pargol, she fasted. When she dreamt of Sohrab, she gave alms to the poor. As for Lili, long after she’d learned to spurn most all of Kobra’s superstitions, she still took close counsel from her dreams.

“We must leave Iran,” Lili finally told Johann one day.

Fifteen years had passed since he’d first come to Iran to marry her, and in that time he’d learned the futility, and often the peril,
of dismissing such pronouncements. When Lili told him about her dream and announced that “we must leave Iran,” he claimed to have been visited by a dream himself.

“I dreamt we were in America and that I died there in a tall building.”

“But there’s trouble. They say—”

“Let’s just wait another year,” he pleaded, but it was Lili’s dream that would guide us—that night and in all the years to come.

We left Iran on Shab-e Yalda, the first night of winter and the longest night of the year. For centuries Iranians had celebrated Yalda with a midnight feast of pomegranates, wine, and poetry, but on our final night in Iran, while Lili and Kobra packed the two maroon leather suitcases we would be taking with us to America, Zaynab and I celebrated the solstice by watching a Yalda special on television.

At midnight Googoosh, the diva of 1970s Tehran, appeared in a golden chariot. Zaynab pulled on her glasses and sat me on her lap, inches from the screen. Googoosh tossed back her blond hair and began to sing and dance. Every few minutes she floated away on her golden chariot, and when she came back she was always wearing a different dress, her hair had been restyled, and her heavy-lidded eyes had been painted with a different shade of pastel eye shadow.