The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (5 page)

At times there seemed to be no end of money in their house and Khanoom worried about where it had come from, but she was happy all the same, always busy buying things for the parlor—new vases, candlesticks, cushions, and carpets. One day Lili came home from school to find a suitcase in her bedroom stuffed with bills. “Do you like this money?” Sohrab had asked her. She glanced at the suitcase and said that surely she didn’t need it. At this he nodded and smiled warmly at her. “Some people will do a lot for this money. But you answered well. You are a good girl.” Then, before closing the suitcase and locking it, he pulled a single crisp bill from the pile and pressed it into her palm. She kept it in a box with her earrings and bracelets and never dared to spend it.

No family of means would ever allow a daughter to walk in the streets alone, even for just three paces, so when Lili started school at age six Sohrab ordered his young manservant, Mamm’ali, to walk her there and back every day. Knock-kneed, skinny, and pimply, Mamm’ali did not speak to her at all, not a word the entire way, but just stared into the distance with her books and notebooks tucked under his arm. She was not at all sorry when Mamm’ali disappeared and instead a driver came for her each morning at seven thirty with her father’s black Chrysler. His name was Saeed and he was a young man of twenty-three with wavy brown hair, dimples, and sometimes a sweet smile for her, too.

Then there were months when Sohrab gambled away all he had and the house on Avenue Moniriyeh became a different house altogether. Khanoom’s trinkets would disappear one by one from the parlor, and at night the family sat down together with only a bowl of unbuttered rice before each of them. If there was any meat, it all
went straight to Sohrab’s bowl, though he was known to drop some into Lili’s and Nader’s bowls as well. Saeed the driver disappeared and not even scrawny, pimple-faced Mamm’ali came round to fetch Lili from school. Instead it would be her own smartly dressed father standing by the gates of the School of Virtue with his silver-tipped cane and black fedora. When his debts grew truly substantial, Sohrab went out less often and was surlier than ever. Lili did not mind. It pleased her to have him walk her to and from school, even though his temper was far worse than even Mamm’ali’s. And at home she fluttered around him with tea and sweets, washed his hands each morning, and massaged his brow each night if he let her.

Such intervals of poverty always threw Kobra’s resourcefulness into high relief. With a handful of flour, a cup of water, and a sprinkle of sugar she conjured a stack of pancakes that, while plain, kept her children’s stomachs from rumbling through a whole day at school. An old housedress became a pleated skirt for Lili and three pairs of knickers for Nader. Clippings from their haircuts became the wig for a hand-sewn doll or the mane for a lion puppet. And at such times Sohrab’s guests rarely left the house without Kobra sending Nader after them to ask for a few
tomans
. Mostly the gentlemen obliged, though one of them was in the habit of tossing a handful of coins at Nader just for the fun of watching him fish them out of the dirty waterways along Avenue Moniriyeh. Whenever that particular gentleman called, Nader returned from his mission bawling, his leather shoes heavy and dark with
joob
water and his pants sodden to the knees with it.

But soon enough Sohrab’s fortunes would be replenished by a good night of gambling and he’d emerge from his room with a smile, sometimes even singing to himself and snapping his fingers as he skipped down the stairs, and once again he’d be gone from the house until late in the evening. It was then that Saeed the driver would reappear, his own smile a little bolder each time he returned.

Even when Sohrab managed to gamble away all of his savings (and much of his mother’s besides), he’d somehow borrow enough money so that each morning Lili could dress in her dark gray pinafore and take her place among the other girls at the School of Virtue. Modeled on the schools of the French lycée system, this was an institution as stern as both its name and the expressions worn by its two headmistresses, a pair of middle-aged sisters known to the girls as Mistress the Elder and Mistress the Second.

In the mornings two hundred pupils—all girls—assembled by the gates of the school on Avenue Pahlavi. The ones with the cashmere coats congregated near the front of the line, and the ones with shabby coats or no coats at all stood to the back. Lili’s coat was made of soft gray lambskin, and she always stood toward the middle and kept her eyes trained to the front. When the Mistresses Elder and Second called out good morning, the girls promptly formed a line and then, at the Mistresses’ signal, belted out Iran’s new anthem. “O Iran, jewel-studded land!” the girls cried, and only after this would they be let inside.

Most everything at the School of Virtue was learned by rote, and questions of any kind were met with sour looks or else a quick rap against the knuckles. Long before they’d mastered the rudiments of reading and writing, the girls began reciting classical poems by heart. Fountain pens in hand and pots of ink at the ready, they proceeded to take pages and pages of Persian dictation. The study of mathematics, geography, and history advanced through similar feats of memorization and willed incuriosity.

Lili enjoyed nearly all her classes, but one subject, Arabic, proved a perpetual torment. Before starting school she had known it as the language of her grandmother’s prayers and could never read the letters without hearing the sweet tenor and cadence of Khanoom’s
voice in her head, but at the School of Virtue Lili was judged not on her memory of these prayers but on her knowledge of their meaning. In this and also in her penmanship Lili was found lacking. Whenever the Arabic instructor reached Lili’s desk, two deep creases sprang up between the teacher’s eyes. She’d bend over Lili’s shoulder, close enough for their breaths to mingle, and proceed to guide Lili’s hand through the letters with her own crushing grip.

The girls wore gray pinafores with round-collared white blouses. Twice a week they stripped off their uniforms and pulled on knee-length black shorts and marched in formation in the school’s courtyard and performed the calisthenics that the Ministry of Education deemed necessary for their bodies. They were accompanied in their movements by military marches streaming from a gramophone—a marvel achieved by the energetic pumping of the machine’s hand crank by their gymnastics teacher. The girls with cashmere coats had special exercise shoes, but everyone else just wore regular shoes to exercise.

Even more than their cashmere coats, Lili coveted the patent-leather dress shoes of the rich girls at her school. Khanoom had always bought Lili’s shoes, and she usually chose a brown leather pair nearly identical to her own. They were presented to Lili once a year at No Rooz, the Persian New Year, along with a party frock and newly stitched underclothes. She’d never quite grasped the ugliness of her shoes until the day she first fixed her eyes on the shiny dress shoes at the School of Virtue. Lili begged and pleaded until at last Khanoom agreed to take her to the bazaar to search for her own pair of patent-leather shoes.

“A hen’s milk or man’s life”—it was said that anything could be bought at the bazaar. Lit only by gas lamps and candles, the marketplace was dim even in the middle of the day. Gripping her grandmother’s hand, Lili walked through the entrance, past the turquoise domes of Shah’s Mosque, and on toward the teeming belly of the
market. Together they threaded their way past stall after stall, past the goldsmiths and silversmiths, carpet-sellers, livestock, donkeys, beggars, castabouts, tricksters, and thieves who made their homes within the bazaar’s narrow passages.

Khanoom and Lili walked on until at last she spied the shoes she wanted. Graced with tiny bows at the front, they were shiny and did not have even a single scuff on the bottoms. Best of all they were red, a bright tomato red she’d never even seen any of the girls wearing at school. The shoes were too tight by at least a size, but she had wanted them anyway, and would wear them until blisters bloomed on all her toes and her heels grew thick with calluses.

On the day Khanoom bought the red shoes, they celebrated with a lunch at Shamshiri, the bazaar’s kabob restaurant. They retreated to the back corner, away from the passersby, so that Khanoom could enjoy her meal without troubling too much about her chador sliding off her head now and again. Stomachs rumbling in anticipation, they waited for the server, whom they privately called Mr. Kabobi. Over six feet tall, with a luxurious mustache that curled up at the ends, Mr. Kabobi could shove the meat from as many as three skewers onto their platter between two of his thick fingers. That day Mr. Kabobi appeared, as ever, with a smock smeared with grease and streaks of blood. Khanoom ordered four foot-long skewers, two for each of them, and even in the dark back room of the
kabobi
the meat still glistened with butter and the rice looked glorious with its orange and yellow swirls of saffron. It was the best kabob in all the city, and Lili, with her new red shoes already on her feet, ate with relish.

In the afternoons she was forbidden to play in the alleys close to the house, but the next day after school she lingered there to show off her pretty new red shoes. All at once a boy came running, shouting out that he’d just seen her father in the streets, just a block away from Avenue Moniriyeh. She ran into the house and hid herself
among the pile of mattresses in the basement. One of the children had squealed on her, and when Sohrab found her that day he beat her so severely that she went to bed with a fever that would not be cured by even ten cups of her grandmother’s sugared tea.

Fever or no fever, Kobra or no Kobra, Lili never missed the
hammam
. Once a week the women of Khanoom’s house bundled their towels, copper bowls, sweets, and fresh clothes into large embroidered cloths, then walked together to the low limestone building that housed the quarter’s communal baths. They splashed themselves with cold water from the fountain early each morning, before the first prayers of the day, but the
hammam
was their only full bath of the week and therefore also a holiday.

From her bundle Khanoom pulled pomegranates so ripe with juice, they were heavy as stones. “Don’t spill the seeds,” she’d whisper, and press one gently into Lili’s hands.

Then Khanoom and the others disappeared into the steam and the sweet, damp scents. Inside the bathhouse they eased themselves onto low benches, drew water from the fountain, and loosened their tongues with talk until the heat puckered and wrinkled their fingers and toes. Wet thighs slapping against tiles, pitchers and bowls clattering against stone, they scrubbed themselves with coarse rags until their skin raged pink and their heels were raw. They took turns dunking themselves in the warm, elevated pool. They combed and plaited one another’s hair. And then all but the oldest ones lay on tables to be smeared with the warm, sticky paste that ripped loose the hair on their legs and groins.

Lili sat on the steps by the
hammam
’s entry, her pomegranate balanced between her knees, watching the women come and go. The sky would begin to darken and finally one of her older cousins would come fetch Lili. Her own body would be hastily scrubbed in one far
corner of the
hammam
, and as her hair was washed and combed and wound into braids she’d steal glances at the older women.

“Tsss!” her aunts scolded. “Don’t open your eyes so wide,
dokhtar
[girl]!”

One year when Khanoom was braiding her hair in the
hammam
a lady called out to them, “What a pretty girl! Her skin’s as white as alabaster!”

Khanoom gave Lili a quick, furtive scratch on the buttocks to ward off the Evil Eye and then called back a cheerful, “
Merci, khanoom!
”

“Will you marry her off?”

“She’s only just turned nine….”

“Well, in that case she can grow up with her husband!” the lady replied. To this Khanoom gave no answer but to laugh and consider Lili with a strange, and then very tender, look.

By this time in the afternoon it would be late—Sohrab would be home, impatient for his dinner—and when the others rushed to gather their belongings and began hustling back toward Avenue Moniriyeh, Lili would follow along behind the train of women with her small bundle of juice-stained linens pressed against her chest.

In summertime, when the sky was bright and thick with stars, they all slept on the rooftop. At sunset, after Khanoom hosed down the tiles, piles of mattresses were hauled up from the basement and huge swaths of white netting were strung up to keep the flies and mosquitoes from tormenting them in the night. Divans, cushions, and carpets were assembled in the garden where Sohrab would hold court with his friends late into the night. Lili was forbidden from coming close to them, even just for a peek, but from where she lay on the roof she could see the smoke from the men’s cigarettes snaking its way into the night air and could hear their voices as they told stories and jokes.

Often Lili would fall asleep before dinner, which could be served as late as ten or eleven on a summer evening, and then Khanoom would shake her from sleep. “Wake up, child!” When she opened her eyes she would find her grandmother crouched beside her under the netting with a bowl nestled in her lap. “Eat this and then go back to sleep,” Khanoom would whisper, and heap rice and stew onto a spoon for Lili. Some nights as she chewed, sleepily, in the darkness, she could hear the men in the alleyways that ran along Avenue Moniriyeh, trilling poems as they stumbled back from the
meykhaneh,
the wine tavern.

Khanoom sewed Lili a prayer shawl festooned with pale pink rosebuds, and at Khanoom’s side she learned to whisper her prayers, press her forehead to the
mohr
, a holy stone, bend and straighten herself at the proper intervals. At Ramadan everyone except Sohrab woke before dawn to eat the rich foods—dates, porridges, stews—that would fortify their bodies through the day’s fasting, but there would always be a little something for the children to tide them over until sunset: a chunk of halvah wedged between bread, a handful of soaked walnuts, and a few yellow sultana raisins.