The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (9 page)

Sohrab, meanwhile, had approved the marriage, but he’d informed Khanoom that he would not be attending the nuptial ceremony. It was generally thought this was on account of “that blue-eyed jinn,” Simin. She had not been invited to Lili’s wedding and had no doubt insisted that Sohrab not attend any event from which she’d been excluded. “Please tell him to come!” Lili had begged Khanoom and her aunts, and though they nodded and smiled, none of them dared press the point with Sohrab.

On the night of the
aqd konoon
, Lili scanned the room for her father, sure he would come after all. Then toward the end of the evening she was led to a room with a silk banquette and seated there alone before the
sofreh
(wedding spread). The mirror shone brilliantly at her feet and the scent of burning wild rue began to fill the air. She could barely make out the words of the
agha
in the next room where the men had gathered, but when at last Kazem emerged and took a seat beside her she knew the ceremony was over and that her father had not, finally, come to see it.

Though their formal marriage was still months away, after the
aqd konoon
the pair became
mahram
to each other, which meant that Lili could now appear before Kazem without a head scarf. When Kazem came to sit beside her on the banquette that evening, her gaze fell toward the mirror that had been set down in the center of the wedding spread. It was there in the mirror that she saw Kazem removing her veil, and there also that she saw him without his fedora for the very first time.

Suddenly she knew that she had been right to worry, and she fought back her tears. Though Kazem’s features were pleasant enough, his head, she now saw, was nearly bald, but in the front two thin, long tufts of hair had been brought together in the middle—joined, she would only later discover, by the sticky paste of quince seed he kept in a ceramic bowl next to his bed every night.

From then on Kazem came to Khanoom’s house once a week. Lili learned to predict his arrivals by what meats and herbs the servants brought back with them from the bazaar each day. Lamb almost always meant Kazem would be visiting, as he had a particularly large appetite for it.

“Kazem Khan is here!” a servant would call out, and all the women of the house would reach at once for their head scarves. Only then would Kazem enter in his suit and tie. Without fail, he would be wearing his gray felt fedora.

Lili would sit across the table from him, her eye trained on his plate, ready to offer him more rice and stew as he progressed through several generous portions. At the end of the meal she rose from the table, cleared his plate, and then served him tea and sweets.

Afterward, her grandmother led them into a sitting room upstairs where they were allowed to spend half an hour alone together. “This is the time for you to get to know each other,” Khanoom had explained the first time, urging Lili into the room with a reassuring smile.

In preparation for this part of Kazem’s visits, her cousin Soudabeh was routinely dispatched to recite a long list of rules: “Sit with your knees pressed together.” “Don’t let him take off your underwear.” “He cannot reach inside your blouse to touch your breasts.” These rules were coupled with another set of directions, whose sum was, “Be sweet and tender, for he is nearly your husband now.”

Kazem seemed always to enter the room with an understanding of these same rules, and so he satisfied himself by straddling her and rubbing himself vigorously against her thighs while she sat with her knees pressed together in the way she had been instructed. Often at these moments she thought of a picture she’d once seen of a snake eating a rabbit, its belly engorged with its kill. Kazem, though, seemed content with the arrangement and did not, strictly speaking, challenge the limits indicated by her stiff posture. In any case, his visits occurred regularly up to the wedding day.

On one occasion, Lili visited Kazem at the compound where his grandmother, mother, and aunts lived with their families. When Lili arrived there Ma Mère greeted her with kisses, and this time it was she who was waited upon and hers the first plate to be heaped with rice, stew,
tahdig
(thick crisped rice), yogurt, and a generous handful of fresh herbs.

At the end of the meal Ma Mère turned to Kazem with a gentle smile. “Would you like to take your pretty little
aroos
to your own house?” she asked.

Kazem led Lili out into the street and back into his own quarters. Unlike the main building of the Khorrami compound, which housed all manner of ornate French furnishings and Persian carpets, the two rooms that made up Kazem’s suite were practically empty. His bedroom held only a bed and a gilt-framed mirror that ran from the floor to the ceiling.

Lili found herself drawn to this mirror as if by a magnet. Up until that day she had seen herself only in Kobra’s old handheld mirror, an instrument with which Lili had been able to study only a few inches of herself at a time. But here for the first time she could see herself from head to foot, and she stood, entranced, before a body she scarcely recognized as her own.

“Do you like to look at yourself?” Kazem asked her. His voice was soft and tender, and she could see him smiling at her in the mirror.
She watched as he advanced toward her with slow, even steps, and then she looked back at her own reflection and she nodded.

Kazem rested his hands on her shoulders. Their eyes met in the mirror and he smiled at her again.

Suddenly, with one swift yank, he pulled her dress over her head. For a moment she stood staring at herself in nothing more than a pair of underpants, and then she bowed her head and began to cry.

“Shhhh, be quiet!” Kazem hissed, and tossed her dress back at her before leaving the apartment.

They came for her one day with a droshky, a horse-drawn cab, to buy fabric for her wedding dress. It was late afternoon on a Thursday, the busiest shopping day of the week. All up and down Avenue Moniriyeh chador-clad housewives were bustling home from the bazaar, gripping their veils between their teeth so as to leave their arms free for their baskets, packages, and infants. Across the street from Khanoom’s house a peddler had set up two handcarts, one stacked with baked beets and the other with iced cherry sherbets.

Lili settled into the seat beside Ma Mère and peered out of the curtained window. The carriage turned down one alley after another until soon Lili was looking out at parts of the city she had never seen. When they reached the newly christened Electricity Avenue, she caught her breath at the faint orange glow of the streetlights at dusk. The carriage turned another corner and proceeded farther north. On the Avenue of the Tulip Fields, where the streets were much broader and also smoothly paved, an enormous building rose before her, seeming all of light. The letters above the crimson awning read: “Cinema Lalehzar.” Cinema of the Tulip Fields. Saeed, her father’s driver, had once told her about a movie house he’d snuck into uptown. “Pictures that come alive!” he’d exclaimed. “People bigger than trees!” She had not believed him, but here it was after
all. She would have liked to hop out just then except for the promise of what was to come.

When at last they reached the row of shops and cafés near Execution Square, Lili stepped out of the droshky and was astonished to find that there was not a single veiled woman on the street. It was only after the prohibition against the veil had been lifted that her own grandmother and aunts went out into the city at all, and on Avenue Moniriyeh even a quick trip to the bakery three doors away always called for at least a kerchief. But in this part of Tehran there were dozens of unveiled women, and like Ma Mère and Kazem’s other relatives, all their heads were not only bare but also elegantly coiffed.

What’s more, from time to time a pair or a small cluster of fair-haired women would pass by, the click of their heels sharp and smart against the pavement.
Foreigners.
The only foreigners Lili had ever seen were soldiers, and even grown men cowered from them. But these women were beautiful, and she could not tear her eyes from their red lips and bare calves.

Ma Mère caught her staring and smiled. “Has our little bride come out to the world?” She laughed.

In the shop they picked a fabric for Lili and let her touch it. It was not white but the palest blue, with a hint of shimmer to it. She stroked it gently and the shimmers danced under her fingers. Did she like it? “Yes,” she stammered, she liked it very, very much. They took her to a back room and told her to undress. But as soon as the fabric was pulled around her torso, her hands went to her shoulders and she began shivering with fear. The dress would be sleeveless! What would Khanoom say? She had never been allowed to wear even a short-sleeved dress, or even one that left her forearms exposed, and now she was to wear a sleeveless dress to her wedding? Then all at once it seemed like ten pairs of hands were on her, pulling the fabric tighter, lifting the hem, smoothing the bodice. With
the way the women were looking at her, smiling and cooing and fussing, her hands fell from her shoulders to her sides, and her worries slipped at once from her mind.

The Khorramis were well-to-do and would certainly provide for her in the years to come, but it would have shamed Khanoom to send her granddaughter into marriage without a decent
jahaz,
or trousseau. In the months leading up to the final nuptial ceremony, she gathered the best she had managed to put aside for Lili over the years and also bought a few things to round out the offerings. Khanoom filled a large leather trunk to the very top with embroidered linens, a fine silken carpet from K
sh
n, a pretty china teapot, and a brand-new samovar. This trunk and a hand-carved dining set, several mattresses, and a full assortment of kitchenware purchased by Lili’s father were then sent to the Khorrami compound a week in advance of the wedding.

Then, a few days before the Night of Consummation, Lili was led to the room farthest from the streets and encircled by the women of her family. First they dusted her from head to foot with precious face powder from America. Its perfume tickled her nose and she began to laugh, but they told her to lie very still. Out of the corner of the eye Lili saw one of her aunts unraveling some string and twisting it between her fingers. Lili had had her eyebrows plucked once before, before the first nuptial ceremony. The ritual would be repeated once more on this occasion, but only later. Only after.

Suddenly she understood why so many of her aunts and cousins had come to the house that day: they were needed to hold her down as every last hair on her body was plucked out with the string her aunt was now twisting and tightening between her fingers. Lili had been taken to the room farthest from the street so that the neighbors would not hear her cry out, and on the unlikely chance that she’d
break free and bolt out of the room, one of her cousins stood blocking the door.

“
Bah, bah, bah!
” the women cried, as one of them began thumping on a
tonbak
. “How lucky her husband is! What a happy bride she will be!”

It was at this point that Lili started to scream.

Lili flinched and whimpered with each tweak, but afterward they all kissed her and rubbed a cool paste over her smarting flesh and Khanoom had soothed her with sugared milk and even slept beside her that last night.

Then, on the day before the final wedding ceremony, the Khorramis rented the whole bathhouse, and it was there that her aunts and cousins commenced to groom her from head to foot. First they washed her body with a mixture of milk and honey, lathered her hair with yogurt, and rinsed it clear with rose water. Then they sat back and consumed several dozen potato and spinach pancakes, followed by quince-lemon sherbet and tea from the samovar that had been brought especially to the
hammam
that day.

With a few deep puffs of the
qalyoon
they were ready to resume their work. They scrubbed Lili vigorously with
kiseh
, the rough woolen mitts that drew out every impurity from the skin. They worked quickly, two of them tending to each part of her body, and when they finished rinsing and toweling her off they rubbed her all over with a mixture of Vaseline and rose essence.