The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (18 page)

For several weeks she sat by herself in a far corner of the schoolyard during recess, watching the older girls play volleyball. They wore shorts, high-top sneakers, and lace-trimmed bobby socks. Many of the girls used their neckties to pull their hair back into ponytails, and a few even rolled up their sleeves to show off their muscles. From her first day at the School of Ambition, Lili was captivated by these older girls. Their playfulness and confidence awed her. They longed, surely, for marriage, or at least for the liberties they associated with marriage—to pluck their eyebrows, wear lipstick, dress in women’s clothes, and go wherever they pleased—just as she had once longed to do. But the girls at the School of Ambition would offer Lili her first glimpse of another kind of life. She knew that if her classmates did not, in fact, marry first, the very clever ones among them would become nurses, secretaries, and teachers, though every year one or two exceptional girls might even enter medical school. Would they be called Madame Doctor? Lili was not sure, but it thrilled her to think so.

Meanwhile, in the afternoons, after a hasty lunch at home, she found herself among dozens of girls who’d been held back by tradition, financial hardship, laziness, or some other incapacity. In Lili’s
remedial classes it was not uncommon to see a girl of eighteen holding up a fourth-grade reading primer, her face either screwed up in concentration or completely slack with incomprehension, but even here, as at the School of Ambition, Lili kept up her vow of silence. There were no volleyball games to distract her, and so to relieve the torture of silence she began singing to herself. She favored the soulful Delkash songs that streamed from every radio in the country in those days—tunes she could reproduce with uncanny vocal likeness and perfectly genuine tears.

Her talents did not go unnoticed. Not so long ago, her emerald engagement ring had drawn classmates at the School of Virtue to her side, but now the girls at her remedial school slid beside her, one at a time and then in pairs and eventually as a small crowd, in order to hear her sing. They cupped their hands under their chins, closed their eyes, and, completely absorbed in their own tribulations and passions, listened to her sing until the bell rang. Finally, after many days, one of them, a skinny olive-skinned girl called Mina, asked Lili if she was sad on account of having fallen in love with a boy, and this had seemed so preposterous to her that Lili broke into a violent fit of giggles, shocking and silencing them all.

With Lili back in school, Kobra once again dedicated herself to the care of Sohrab’s appetites and vanities and, somewhat more discreetly, to the enlargement of her own estate.

At dawn each morning a plump, sprightly young hen was pulled out of the chicken coop, butchered, plucked, and boiled to make a fresh cup of broth for his breakfast. Sohrab tossed it back in one gulp, wiped his mouth with the napkin Kobra held out for him, and then passed the empty glass back to her. As soon as he set out from the house, she headed straightaway for the kitchen to cook him a fragrant stew and saffron-soaked crisped rice. Though Kobra no
longer sought out the city’s back-alley spiritualists and had ceased to sprinkle love potions about the windows and doors, she still kept her pots warm late into the night, and, increasingly, she also held her tongue on the nights when Sohrab did not return to the house until morning.

And slowly, in the course of her housekeeping, Kobra became a landowner.

Sohrab had long been in the habit of kicking off his slacks and tossing his jacket onto the floor before falling into his bed. As Kobra made her rounds through his quarters in the mornings, she would come across his suits lying about in heaps. She’d pick them up, shake them gingerly to loosen the wrinkles, and then she would dig into the pockets of his trousers and jackets for change. With the clothes draped over her arm, she hustled back to the other end of the house, tucked the coins and bills into a chest of drawers, locked the chest, wrapped the key in a kerchief, then locked that key in a second chest of drawers, and proceeded, finally, to launder and iron Sohrab’s suits by hand.

As soon as the bills and coins threatened to outgrow their hiding place, Kobra threw on her veil, boarded a bus, and struck out for the countryside. While real estate was once the province of the very few, the future, most wealthy Iranians now thought, pointed toward the capital. As a result, in the last few decades ancestral lands the length and breadth of the nation had been parceled out into cheap plots. These plots were where Kobra now set her sights for her own future. With the first thousand
tomans
Kobra collected from Sohrab’s pockets she bought herself a scrubby single acre in Youssefabad. With the next two thousand
tomans
she bought three acres of wild yellow grass on the road to Karaj. She would eventually turn over both these parcels, followed by several others. The deeds to her lands, and the profits from her sales, she would continue to deposit into one of several hiding places within hiding places in Sohrab’s house.

Kobra’s real estate transactions were undertaken without counsel or intermediary of any kind. Unlettered, she simply pressed her inky thumbprint on the line allotted for her signature. She told no one of her schemes, and certainly nothing of her modest though growing fortunes, but never before had she tackled the laundry with such devotion.

Sohrab, wholly ignorant of Kobra’s rapaciousness, continued to prefer her labors to any French-style dry cleaner in the city, but he was busy drawing up schemes of his own. In these years any Iranian family who could afford it, and plenty more who could not, were sending their sons away to be educated in the West. The practice had its origins in the nineteenth century, when the Qajars began sending their princes to Europe. With that dynasty long since dismantled and the current one waffling between foreign dictates, in the 1950s a young man’s surest path to advancement in Iran was to acquire Western credentials. At the time, the “West” was defined almost exclusively as England, France, and Germany and the only worthy credentials were thought to be in the fields of medicine and engineering.

Having settled on his son’s future profession, engineering, Sohrab considered to which of these three countries to send fourteen-year-old Nader. The English, though elegant, were dismissed as ruthless imperialists; the French, even more elegant than the English, Sohrab imagined as heirs to temptations unfitting for a teenage boy. Of the Germans Sohrab knew little apart from the two points his gambling cohorts had impressed upon him: first, that the Germans had done remarkable work toward rebuilding their country after two wars and, second, that their university fees were considerably lower than those charged by the English and the French.

Germany it would therefore be.

For several weeks Nader himself wandered through the house looking alternately stupefied and euphoric. Khanoom, Kobra, and the other female members of the clan wailed and clutched their chests
and tore at their clothes, but their agony failed to dissuade Sohrab from his decision. As the date of Nader’s departure approached, Sohrab brought Nader three silk carpets to sell abroad. On Nader’s last day in Iran, Sohrab slid off his most prized possession, a diamond of a thousand facets that he’d had mounted for himself onto a thick gold band, and gave it to his son as a keepsake.

No one in their family had yet gone to the
farang
, that place beyond the seven rivers, the seven mountains, and the seven oceans. For her part, until this moment Lili had conceived of Europe only in terms of the cinema and certain highly prized objects, brassieres and chocolate truffles being the chief of these, and the images proffered by the
Shahreh Farang
Man, the European City Man. Every year at the Persian New Year, Lili and her cousins lined up at the bazaar to peer through the European City Man’s copper nickelodeon. Big Ben, the Palace of Versailles, and the Luxembourg Gardens—there they were in their glory, and all at just a few coins a peek! The images had long since inspired a deep and nameless longing in her, yet now, as she ironed her little brother’s best suit in preparation for his departure for this wondrous place, Lili found herself choked with grief. To ease her own misery, she fed Nader as if he were a man going to war. By the time he set off for Germany, his cheeks had filled out and he’d even acquired a small paunch.

As soon as he left, she and Kobra locked the door to Nader’s room, lay down side by side on his bed, and cried with the fervor of two young widows.

It was all very well, Kobra thought, that Sohrab had sent Lili back to school, but she now had a program of her own, and it was guided by a single principle: everything that Sohrab now refused Lili, Kobra was determined to give her. What Kobra lacked in material resources, she made up for with a combination of innate cleverness and hard-won
guile. When Lili admired a short plaid jumper in a foreign fashion magazine, Kobra hunted down what was surely the only bolt of Scottish tartan in the whole of Tehran, traded one of her golden bangles for it, ordered Lili to sketch the garment for her, and then sewed an exact replica. When Lili asked for lace-trimmed anklets just like the older girls at the School of Ambition all wore, Kobra sacrificed her best nightdress and used its lace to decorate seven pairs of plain white socks. And when Lili’s new girlfriend Mina invited her to a party, Kobra packed herself and Lili each a bag, announced that they were off to visit her own mother, Pargol, and then secretly sent Lili along to Mina’s house with a ten-year-old male cousin as a chaperone.

That night a dozen Iranian girls would rumba and tango together in wide skirts and curled bangs. There was a tray of little round cakes slathered with a dense, sugary paste. “Cupcakes,” Mina explained, licking the pink icing and offering her one. Lili took a bite and thought she’d swoon from the pleasure. She ate three cupcakes, one after the other, and she had just reached for her fourth when Mina took her hand to give her a private tour of her bedroom.

Together they admired Mina’s bed with its rose-print coverlet and matching cushions, her closetful of party dresses and pleated skirts, and her collection of three pale pink lipsticks. “My auntie’s been to Paris,” Mina explained of this last, and most impressive, of her treasures. On their way back to the parlor, Mina paused at a half-open door at the end of the hallway. Lili caught sight of a tall, fair-haired young man fumbling with a screwdriver and a shortwave radio. He looked from his sister to her and then gave Lili a slow, crooked smile. “My brother Farhad,” Mina noted, adding, “He’s going to America.”

America! That, Lili thought, was
yengeh donya
, the other side of the earth—and much, much farther than even her own brother’s travels.

“But are you
really
going there?” she asked.

He nodded. “I’m leaving in the fall,” he said, his smile breaking wide open. “And when I get there I’m going to shave my head just like Yul Brynner.”

Before he left Iran, Mina’s older brother Farhad sent her a dozen letters, which Kobra made Lili read to her aloud first but had the courtesy of letting her keep afterward. In the most beautiful handwriting she’d ever seen, Farhad promised they could marry just as soon as he returned from America. Such declarations of love were not altogether uncommon in those years, but Farhad’s had been especially quick. On the pretense of chaperoning his sister home, he also began to appear by the gates of Lili’s school to chat with her some afternoons. Once he’d even brought her a red-black rose, a genuine rarity that revealed itself as purple only when Kobra plucked one of its petals and held it to the light, and from then on Kobra had to bribe Sohrab’s driver to keep news of the romance to himself.

For Lili, the hastiness of Farhad’s proposal was completely overshadowed by the impossibility of his plan. His parents would never accept her, a divorcée. It was not just beyond hoping; it was beyond imagining. Lili could not bear to tell him so herself, and so she’d been forced to confess to Mina that she’d been married and had a child. “Please tell him he mustn’t write me any more letters,” she begged Mina. “And please, please tell no one else what I’ve told you!”

After that Mina had not asked Lili to her house again, and she could not even meet Lili’s eye in the hallways at school. But the letters still came for many months after Farhad left Iran—beautiful, strange letters about how the air in Los Angeles smelled of oranges and dust and the ocean there was so blue that it melted into the sky. For her birthday that year—her sixteenth—he sent her a Parker pen, the top half of it gold and the bottom half turquoise, along
with a Polaroid of himself. He was standing outside his college dormitory in a striped sweater and he’d shaved his head just like Yul Brynner.

“He’s asked for a picture of you,” Kobra noted when Lili finished reading the letter to her.

“I know,” she answered sadly.

It was, they both knew, a hopeless request.

Somewhere in Sohrab’s private quarters there were a dozen framed pictures of him in profile and full face, standing and sitting, black hair slick and shiny and his suits always impeccably pressed. But however much it pleased him to commission portraits of himself, when it came to his women Sohrab thought the practice too costly. It would only encourage their vanities, and, most damningly, it would subject them to a photographer’s groping hands and lascivious gaze.

“We’ll go to Avenue Shah Reza,” Kobra whispered.

She grabbed twenty
tomans
from her cache, and then she and Lili draped themselves in veils and set out for a photography studio.

The picture, which came out beautiful, was slipped between the pages of Lili’s next letter to Farhad.

It was not love, exactly, that she felt toward him, but over the next several months this boy with his strange and beautiful letters became her only friend. Despite her better judgment, and her fear of Sohrab, Lili found she could not stop herself from answering Farhad. But eventually his letters thinned out and then stopped completely. When she had not heard from him in many weeks, she summoned all her courage and hauled Kobra along to pay a visit to Mina. They arrived at a house of mourning. Mina, dressed in black and her face ashen, opened the door. Farhad, she whispered through tears, had shot himself with a pistol. He was buried in America now, she sobbed, somewhere close to Hollywood.