The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (6 page)

Every few months a
rowzeh-khan
(reader of homilies) came to Avenue Monireyeh to recite passages from the Koran. Lili marveled at how the women’s faces, just moments before alive with chatter and gossip, fell slack and mournful at the
rowzeh-khan
’s first words. They rocked their bodies back and forth, slowly at first and then faster and faster, and then they’d raise their hands up to the sky and begin to moan and cry and beat their chests with their fists. Listening to these parables of human suffering, they released their own emotions with a fervor that drowned out the
rowzeh-khan
’s own impassioned readings, but at the end they invariably emerged calm and happy, their worries washed suddenly clean for the day.

Once or twice a year the women of the house boarded the
masheen doodi
, the “smoke machine” or train that connected Tehran to the
ancient town of Rey, to make a pilgrimage at the shrine of Shah Abdol-Azim. Because there was no place for them, as women, to stay once they reached their destination, they always spent the night inside the mausoleum. It was for this reason they always set out from home with their bedrolls and blankets tucked under their arms.

Inside the train’s cabin they napped and gossiped and snacked on huge quantities of watermelon seeds and dried mulberries and pistachio nuts. Slowly the city, with its tangle of buildings and smoke-smudged sky, gave way to views of arid plains, orchards, villages, and great cloudless sweeps of blue. In the spring wildflowers blanketed the desert, and occasionally a cavalcade could be seen inching its way across the buff-hued slopes, the colorful kerchiefs, tunics, and long skirts of its women visible even across a distance of many miles.

In Rey they got off and walked the rest of the way—another half an hour along a crowded dirt road—until they glimpsed the golden domes of Shah Abdol-Azim. Not far from the gates of the cemetery stood a
bazaarcheh
, a small, tented marketplace that catered to pilgrims and funeral parties. There Khanoom would reach into the folds of her chador and pull out enough coins to buy several skewers of kabob, bread, and fresh herbs, which would be bundled into a cloth and taken into the mausoleum along with their bedclothes and other provisions.

The mausoleum consisted of a single large room with marble floors and tiled walls, and even on the hottest summer days the air inside was cool enough to draw shivers. As the others filed in behind her, Khanoom would strike a match against the wall and proceed to light all the candles. The fire flickered and then blossomed to orange, and as light began to fill the chamber Lili would squint up at the portraits hung all around the mausoleum walls. These were oil paintings of the family’s male ancestors—old men with heavy eyebrows, Qajar-style cloaks, caps, and lances, and a few handsome young men in similar garb. No pictures ever adorned the women’s
plaques, and so Lili set her blanket under a portrait of one of the comelier youths, unaware that under the bed she was making for the night lay a corpse that had once matched the portrait she’d claimed as her own.

Then, just like at the
rowzehs
(preachments), Khanoom and the others would begin to cry, softly at first but with a gathering intensity that echoed through all the chambers of the mausoleum. As a young girl she did not yet understand the reason for their crying and would look at her grandmother and aunts in disbelief and wonder at how all the bickering and gossiping of the journey could so suddenly be forgotten once they entered this strange, dark place. But then, just as suddenly, their mourning would be done, and they’d unfurl their blankets and set out the kabobs for lunch.

Khanoom minded Lili without complaint, including her in all the rituals of the house on Avenue Moniriyeh, but long periods of caretaking exhausted her. To ease her burdens when Kobra’s absences coincided with the children’s school holidays, Khanoom frequently sent Lili to stay with Zaynab, her eldest and only married daughter. Zaynab’s husband, Ismail Khan, had been chosen to serve in Reza Shah’s cabinet soon after the fall of the Qajar dynasty, and his house was situated close to Parliament, in Sar Cheshmeh, Spring’s Source. To Lili it seemed a palace. Visitors first passed through a handsomely appointed foyer. Cushions lay scattered alongside a marble fountain, and perched along its rim were several
qalyoon
. When Ismail Khan’s diplomatic friends and military comrades appeared at his iron-studded wooden door, a servant would lead them to the foyer, where a second servant would soon alight with a plate of fresh tobacco, and then the visitors would sit by the fountain and take a few puffs from the
qalyoon
before proceeding through the rose garden and then into the main house.

All her life Lili’s aunt Zaynab loved to tell the story of how she’d once presented herself to the shah. By the time of this fateful meeting, Reza Shah had already torn down the city walls, razing old palaces and mud huts alike to make way for broad boulevards, modern houses, schools, hospitals, government buildings, hotels, and numerous palaces of his own. As a finishing touch, he surveyed his army of 150,000 and sent troops of uniformed officers into the streets with seedlings and watering cans. “If the trees die, you die,” he’d told them, and few doubted the threat.

On the day the shah officially outlawed the veil in 1936 and ordered all the wives and daughters of his government ministers to appear before him unveiled, Zaynab accompanied Ismail Khan to the ceremony wearing a brand-new two-piece skirt suit and a large feathered hat. Women were known to faint from terror in His Majesty’s presence and on the day that would become known as Women’s Emancipation Day many of the ladies in attendance sobbed in each other’s arms and cowered behind walls. Zaynab, however, had drawn herself up to her full height, looked directly into Reza Shah’s eyes, and shaken his white-gloved hand with her own.

Zaynab was Ismail Khan’s second wife. His first wife was said to be old and sickly and had long since retired to a separate residence on the outskirts of the city. And yet, as soon as Ismail Khan left in the mornings, Zaynab would fall into a chair and begin her fretting. Would he return that night or would he choose to stay at his other wife’s house? Did he love his first wife better, or was she his favorite? And, most worrisome of all her worries, would Ismail Khan take another wife now that several years of marriage had proved her infertile?

At her most feverish, Zaynab would send a servant to bring her neighbor Touran Khanoom to the house. A Shirazi woman with pillowy lips and a curvaceous figure, Touran Khanoom had a smile that revealed a fetching gap between her teeth. She’d come to Tehran
at seventeen to marry a wealthy and sweet-tempered man who was a distant relative of her father’s.

Zaynab adored Touran Khanoom, not least of all because she was also one of the few women in the neighborhood who knew how to read and could therefore tell the Fortune of H
fez. Among the many volumes of Ismail Khan’s library was an exquisite leather-bound
Divan-eh H
fez
, the collected poems of the fourteenth-century lyric poet H
fez. The book was thought to contain fortunes for all who perused it, and its gilt-lined pages and lavish illustrations enchanted Lili. She’d settle close to Zaynab and watch as her aunt began fingering its pages. The calligraphy was so stylized that Lili could make out only the occasional word. Zaynab would stop several times, furrow her brows, thumb through the book again, draw a deep breath, and finally rest on a poem. At this point Touran Khanoom would lift the book to her lap and read to herself from the page Zaynab had chosen.

“Will he come tonight?” Zaynab would ask breathlessly, leaning toward Touran Khanoom. “Tell me, will he come back to the house tonight?”

“Patience, sister, patience!”

Interpreting the Fortune of H
fez was known to be an exacting art, one that called upon both a reader’s creative and critical faculties. Ever mindful of the poem’s portent, Touran Khanoom always took her time before delivering her divinations.

One afternoon when she was ten years old and Zaynab had called Touran Khanoom to her house, Lili asked to have her own Fortune of H
fez read.

“Why not?” allowed Zaynab. Her own fortune had been promising and her spirits were high that day.

Touran placed her glasses back onto her face and let Lili choose a page from the book.

“One day,” Touran began after several minutes of silent study,
“you will be sitting in a garden on a day just as beautiful as this one, and a bird will come sit on your lap. It will lift you up into the sky and carry you to another garden across the sea, and there, in that other garden, a prince will come and marry you.”

Touran Khanoom settled back in her chair and regarded Lili with a smile. “That will be your destiny, my child,” she said finally, and flashed Zaynab a conspiratorial wink. By then Lili was so busy imagining the beautiful bird and the prince that it did not occur to her that Touran Khanoom might not have been reading her a fortune from the book but telling a story entirely of her own invention. In the coming years, however, Lili would turn this fortune over in her mind many, many times, measuring its beauty and promise against the truth of her life.