The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (4 page)

The following spring Sohrab and his cohorts journeyed across the border to Iraq, where he indulged his hosts by consenting to have a portrait taken of himself wearing an Arab headdress. Lili wished desperately that he’d take her with him. He would not consider it, but he promised to bring her back a gift, and so when he changed trains in Ahvaz he stopped at a flower stall and bought a bunch of narcissus flowers, their buds still tight and not yet fully fragrant, and he gave them to Lili when he returned to Tehran.

Kobra had spent the spring of Sohrab’s trip to Iraq burning and accommodating, burning and accommodating. One day she went down to the basement of Khanoom’s house where all the sacks of grain and flour were kept. As Kobra bent down and reached for a bag of rice, a large black scorpion raised its stinger and plunged it into the heel of her hand. She cried out at once, but before one of Sohrab’s sisters could reach her the poison was already coursing through her blood, hot as fire. Her arm tingled and went numb, and she was sure that she would die.

But Khanoom, a seventh-generation
Tehrooni
with an intimate knowledge of the city’s thousand perils, knew the cure. She hunted down the scorpion in the basement and killed it with one whack of her garden shovel. That night Kobra was put to bed with her hand facing up toward the ceiling and the dead scorpion bandaged to the site of its sting. The creature’s legs, still stiff, dangled from her wrist.

“The sting of a scorpion comes not from ill will, but from its nature,” Khanoom counseled, by way of soothing Kobra.

Kobra did not sleep that night, not a minute. She sat bolt upright hour after hour, drenched in her own sweat, crying for her mother and unable to look away from her hand, but by morning her fever began to break and slowly she understood that she would survive.

Although it was my grandmother Kobra who prayed five times a day, taking care each time to fold her prayer mat and veil into neat squares afterward, in the end it was Sohrab who found deliverance from his marital woes. In the ordinary course of his days, Sohrab had little use for the rituals of faith, but his religion extended him several important privileges then in place for men, one of which would prove especially useful: he could divorce his wife without documents or witnesses. To free himself of Kobra, he had only to speak his desire.

The argument started like any other of their arguments. He’d come home late from a party. In the circles in which he then moved, it had lately become fashionable to take a puff of opium with liquor, a combination that had brought him home even more bleary-eyed and unsteady on his feet than usual. The old curses and recriminations flashed between them, though this time he didn’t strike her with his open hand but instead made a fist. He struck her just once this way, but even in his state he managed to do it with such perfection that
the room went black and she fell to the floor. When Kobra opened her eyes it was to the sight of her own blood, streaming so profusely onto the tiled floors that it had formed a small pool beside her.

She left the house on Avenue Moniriyeh with nothing that night—not a single coin—and no clothes but the nightgown she was wearing and the veil she drew around her to hide her bloodied and swollen face. The next morning she would awake in her mother’s bedroom to find that the flesh of her nose had collapsed and spread across the middle of her face. The local bonesetter could do no more for Kobra than slice out the crushed bones from her face and bind her nose with gauze to quell the blood, and you might have said (as many did) that from then on her honey-colored eyes were wasted on her.

“Who can understand the ways of God?” Kobra’s aunt remarked coolly. “It is her
qesmat
, destiny.”

Her mother, Pargol, was enraged by this callousness. “Bite your tongue!” she hissed.

On the night of Kobra’s wedding six years earlier, Pargol had kissed her on both cheeks and whispered the warning with which Iranian mothers had always sent their daughters into marriage: “You are leaving in a white dress—come back home dressed in white.” By this it was meant she should not return home until she was covered by a white funeral shroud. To do otherwise signified the worst fate that could befall a woman: divorce, and all that it meant to live without the protection of a man. When Kobra appeared before her that night in not a funeral shroud but a bloodied veil, Pargol would not have thought to turn her away, but in truth not even she knew what would become of Kobra now.

One thing, at least, was clear: the children belonged to their father, as Iranian children always had. Neither of them would call Kobra
maman
, or Mother, again. When Sohrab sent her from the house, Lili and Nader stayed on to be raised by Khanoom and Sohrab’s sisters
and stepmothers. Kobra was forbidden from seeing her children, but she missed them terribly and so some afternoons she would draw her veil over her face and stand outside the gates of their school, waiting to catch a glimpse of them. She’d call out their names, slip a handkerchief filled with little candies through the bars of the gate, and warn them not to forget her.

Now that Kobra was gone, Khanoom would have to be mother to Sohrab’s children. She had much to do and was therefore always the first to rise in the house on Avenue Moniriyeh. She’d wake before dawn, when the streets were still empty and quiet. Downstairs in the courtyard she rinsed her face three times from her hairline to her chin, washed the length of her bony, white arms, scrubbed her feet from the tips of her toes to her ankles, and then she ran a trickle of water down the part of her hair. She was a fastidious woman—had never been known to miss a single
namaz
(prayer) and was so thorough in her ritual cleansings that her palms were perpetually mottled and chafed. By the time she was done performing her ablutions and had turned back into the house for her morning prayers, the first dark figures would be hustling down the alleys outside her house—husbands and wives on their way to the
hammam
(bath) to purify themselves of last night’s couplings before the muezzin’s voice pealed through the half-lit sky.

Her prayers complete, Khanoom began preparing the samovar. Urn-shaped, wider than a tree trunk, and wrought of pure brass, the samovar sat in the center of Khanoom’s parlor, and from dawn to dusk it would be kept at a boil so that anyone who came to the house could always be offered a freshly brewed cup of tea. Khanoom struck a match and tossed it over the coals, and while she waited for the water to boil she rolled a few leaves of lettuce between flatbread for her breakfast and pulled out one of the dozen hand-rolled cigarettes
she always kept in her pockets. She held the cigarette to the coals until it lit and then, cigarette dangling between her lips, she steeped the day’s first fistful of tea leaves in her small china teapot.

Then, once she’d finished drinking her first tea of the day—which she took black in thimble-sized draughts from a tiny crystal teacup—Khanoom pulled on her shawl and took her morning walk through the walled garden behind her house. Khanoom’s father had been a scribe who went by the name Mirza Benevees, or Mirza The Writer. Although she herself could neither read nor write, even in such private moments she always carried herself with the same proud and graceful bearing as that learned forebearer.

From Mirza she’d also inherited her great passion for flowers. She kept little vases in all the rooms, morning glory and honeysuckle and whatever else she found in bloom, but she loved jasmine flowers best of all. Each morning she placed a saucer full of the star-shaped blossoms beside her samovar and then she tucked a few sprigs under the folds of her breasts as well. As the day wore on and Khanoom smoked her cigarettes and poured teacup after teacup and performed her prayers and set about her work, the scent of jasmine rose with ever-deeper sweetness from her chest.

The first month, Lili asked after Kobra every time she sat at the samovar for her first tea of the day. “She’s gone to visit her mother,” Khanoom would tell Lili. “Don’t worry,
madar-joon
. She’ll come back.” And then Khanoom would pour Lili a small cup of weak tea and with a silver spoon stir in a lump of crystallized sugar until it had dissolved completely. If the tea was too hot, Khanoom would tip some of it into a saucer for Lili and let her drink it from there.

From the time she was four years old, Lili could drink as many as five little cups of sugared tea from Khanoom’s samovar in a single sitting. Lili loved everything that was sweet—candies and pastries,
cherry-rice and orange rind–rice—but best of all she loved
khageeneh
, the thin pancakes Khanoom drenched in honey, saffron, and rose essence and served each morning along with hunks of sheep’s milk cheese and fresh sheets of seeded bread from the bakery down the street.

While her appetite seemed only to have grown with Kobra’s absence, Lili’s brother, Nader, had become nervous and very thin and his eyes seemed always to be searching the rooms of Khanoom’s house for their mother. When he cried at night, Lili took him into her own bed and tucked her quilt around him. He had a face as white as the moon and black eyes fringed with eyelashes even longer and thicker than her own. Since Kobra had disappeared, Lili’s beatings had grown less frequent, but for Nader they seemed only to have gotten worse. Lili knew that if their father heard Nader crying in the night, he’d hit him for it, and so she’d acquired a mother’s ear for even his softest whimper.

One day she came home from school and found her brother dressed in a pair of white cotton pantaloons and a crimson sash knotted at his middle. A large party of women had gathered in the parlor. She saw presents stacked up high along one wall, and when she reached for one her aunt told her she should not touch because the gifts were all for Nader. When he descended the staircase in the strange pants, naked from the waist up and crying like a forlorn kitten, Lili puzzled over what they had done to make him so unhappy and why they’d bought him so many presents to make up for it.

Nader had been circumcised that day and the white flowing pantaloons had been sewn especially to ease his recovery. Kobra had been gone two months by then. Khanoom would regret her absence at such an auspicious event, but the celebration had been long in the planning and so there was nothing to be done for it. As he sat in the center of the room with a pile of new toys next to him that afternoon, her little brother’s eyes were full of all he’d learned, and lost.

But before the end of three and a half months Kobra appeared before the wooden doors of the house on Avenue Moniriyeh wearing her old black chador, a weathered suitcase by her side, looking not so much relieved as exhausted.

Sohrab had divorced her on a whim, without any formal procedure whatever, but just as surely as marriage under traditional Islam comes in several forms—ranging from the temporary and transient to the formal and final—so, too, does divorce. In the days of Sohrab and Kobra’s marriage, a woman living outside her husband’s house could be claimed back within three and a half months, thereby nullifying the divorce. Ostensibly this was to ensure that she’d not left bearing his child—an act tantamount to theft—but in Kobra’s case the rule would serve a different purpose.

Over the next years Sohrab would cast Kobra out many more times, though on occasion she’d grow so miserable that she would leave of her own accord. Each time she found refuge in her mother’s house. Kobra would weep for her children and she’d weep for herself and no one, not even Pargol, was capable of coaxing her from her misery.

However, Kobra’s exile always proved temporary. For the first few weeks following Kobra’s departure Khanoom would be glad to have an end to the midnight rows on Avenue Moniriyeh, but eventually she and Sohrab’s sisters would tire of caring for Kobra’s children, so they’d all head out together to Pargol’s house to claim Kobra back.

Sohrab said nothing whenever Kobra reappeared, but he hardly ever came to her room anymore, and his sisters were never as kind to her as they’d once been. After Sohrab first turned her from the house, Kobra’s stews were deemed too salty, the grains of her rice too short, and her puddings far too bland to eat. Weeks or months would pass, Sohrab would again send her away, and then, before three and a half months had gone by and the divorce could become
final, Khanoom would once again pull on her veil and bring Kobra back to the house on Avenue Moniriyeh.

At first these abrupt departures and reclamations set neighborhood tongues wagging, and this shamed Khanoom into hastily fetching her daughter-in-law from Pargol’s house. But over the years so many unmarried cousins and widowed sisters were eventually absorbed into the house that its rooms were always noisy with the voices of women—gossiping and bickering, confiding and accusing. Except for the two hours of the afternoon when everyone went down to the basement to nap, it was impossible to tell who would be coming and who would be going and what would be said about it all, and in time Kobra’s disappearances and reappearances were folded into all the other stories of that house.

Sohrab’s room had five wooden doors, each carved with intertwining vines and many-petaled blossoms. It was the largest room in Khanoom’s house, the only one with a water closet, and it took up nearly all of the second story.

As a gesture of respect, Lili began each day by purifying her father’s hands. She would creep into Sohrab’s room and fetch the jug beside his bed, then go down to the courtyard and pump water from the cistern beside the
hoz.
Back in the room she quieted her breathing and watched her father as he slept. His eyelashes were so long that they rested on his cheeks when his eyes were closed. She longed to brush her fingers along them, but she dared not touch him for fear of waking him.

She dipped a fresh cloth into the jug and then she began slowly to wash her father’s hands. Soft and exquisitely tapered, Sohrab’s hands were white and unblemished except for where cigarettes had stained two fingers of his right hand a deep yellow. Sometimes he stirred and sometimes he slept right through her ministrations. Because the
ritual was her only opportunity to observe her father closely, she always stretched out these moments at his side each morning, washing and rinsing his hands many times over before stealing finally from the room.