The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (19 page)

Months after the divorce became final, Kazem continued to seek Lili out. He’d turned gaunt, with an unbecoming stubble and perpetually wrinkled suit. “I only want to speak with her for a moment, Kobra Khanoom,” he begged, and much as this offended her sense of Muslim charity, Kobra dared not invite him into the house for fear of crossing Sohrab.

Finding no success with this approach, Kazem next began bribing Sohrab’s manservant into disclosing Lili’s school schedule. Kazem would pull the rim of the fedora over his eyes and linger in the alley until Sohrab’s driver brought her back home in the afternoons for lunch. Sometimes Kazem brought her a bouquet of tuberoses or a box of prettily wrapped nougats. The gesture did nothing to assuage her fear. The sight of Kazem terrified Lili, but now, after the divorce, she was less frightened that he’d hurt her or make a scene than that her father would find them together and throw her back at him, this time forever.

When again and again Lili refused his presents, Kazem began to press photographs into her hands instead. Not photographs of himself, or the two of them together, but photographs of the baby. Of Sara. They were recent pictures, all of them lovely studio shots with scalloped white edges and the photographer’s embossed signature running along one corner. “She talks now,” Kazem would tell Lili. “She asks for you all the time.” Sara’s hair had grown out straight—there was no trace of the curls she’d had just a few months earlier—and her eyes seemed larger, more knowing.

Lili studied these pictures until her throat went dry and her temples throbbed, and then, invariably, she handed them back to Kazem. He would never take them from her, though. He stood with his hands buried deep in his pockets, and so the pictures fell, one after the other, onto the ground.

But after learning of Farhad’s suicide, Lili was suddenly seized by a longing to see Sara again. At first it was an idle wish, entertained only late at night in her bed, but it soon forced all other thoughts from her mind. But how could she manage it? Even if she could somehow overcome her fear of meeting Kazem, her hours were now so closely guarded that it would be impossible to sneak away to the Khorramis’ house for even an hour.

The only way to see Sara would be to somehow bring her into Sohrab’s house. In this mission, she realized, she would have only one ally, her aunt Zaynab. It was Zaynab, childless and besotted with children, who had coddled Sara since the day of her birth, and Zaynab who’d continued to bring her to Lili in the period between her release from the hospital and her divorce from Kazem. Zaynab had even been keen to raise Sara herself, but Sohrab had not allowed it on the logic that a complete break from the family would be best for all.

“Nothing good will come of this,” Zaynab whispered, but she was grinning all the same as she smuggled Sara in through the back door one afternoon. In an apparent effort to disguise Sara as a bundle of laundry, Zaynab had swaddled her in several sheets and quilts. When Zaynab peeled back the layers they found Sara’s cheeks flushed pink and the hair at her temples damp with perspiration. Sara blinked and let out a small cry, but when she saw Lili her face lit at once into a smile. Sara still knew her! Lili, hands trembling with joy and relief, smiled back, smoothed Sara’s brow, and pressed her nose against her hot, wet cheeks.

They snuck her quickly into Lili’s room and then Lili and Zaynab took turns pinching Sara’s cheeks and tickling her sides. She toddled along, dragging herself along furniture to support herself as she made her way around the room.

“She ought to be walking on her own by now…,” Zaynab muttered.

“Why doesn’t she,
ammeh
?” Lili asked anxiously. “Is there something wrong?” she asked, but Zaynab only muttered something else that Lili could not make out and slipped from the room.

Zaynab returned with a plate of raisin cookies. She squatted against the wall, several feet from where Sara was sitting in Lili’s lap, and then she held out a cookie in her palm. Sara’s eyes brightened. She hauled herself up and set off at once for the treat.

“Such a clever girl!” Zaynab beamed. “We’ll have you walking in an hour!” Zaynab said, and then she and Lili clapped each time Sara made it across the carpet without stumbling or crawling.

They kept her in Lili’s bed that night, wedged between Kobra and Lili. In sleep Sara proved a nervous, restless child. Every hour or so she’d wake up crying. They did not know if she still took a bottle, and had none in the house in any case, and so Kobra brought a chunk of rock candy wrapped in a handkerchief and pressed it to Sara’s lips whenever she stirred.

In the morning Zaynab returned to the house with a wrought-iron birdcage swinging in one hand. She set it on the floor in Lili’s room, unfastened the little door, and out hopped a bright yellow canary with a perfect red circle on each of her cheeks. “She’s blushing!” Zaynab announced, her own cheeks rosy with pleasure. She tossed a few seeds on the carpet and they watched as the canary snapped them up in her beak. Sara squealed, and then Lili pressed some seeds into her fist and showed her how to toss them for the bird.

Lili, Sara, and Zaynab passed the morning playing with the blushing canary while Kobra stood sentry outside the entrance to the women’s quarters. Toward noon Sara began to rub her eyes with her fists and yawn. Lili put her down for a nap, and then she and Zaynab slipped, still chuckling, to the kitchen for lunch. When they returned they found Sara gone. Lili, Kobra, and Zaynab tore through the house, each in one direction. Lili flew first to the courtyard. Finding
the pool empty and still, she ran back into the house, poked under all the cabinets in the parlor, then scrambled down to the basement. When she reached the kitchen she found Zaynab rocking Sara in her lap and Kobra wringing her hands. Zaynab’s voice trembled as she told Lili what had happened. Sara had woken up and crawled all the way down the corridor to Sohrab’s quarters. Seeing her, Sohrab had called for his manservant to remove her to the kitchen.

Zaynab swaddled Sara in the blankets once more and Lili retreated to her room to await her punishment. For a long time it did not come. The blushing canary continued to chirp sweetly and rock back and forth on her little swing, but eventually the sight of the bird made Lili so miserable that she took the cage into the courtyard and left it there to find her way out. Still no word came from Sohrab. She began to wonder if it had not been her father but one of the servants who’d found Sara that day. An eerie silence reigned over the house for several weeks, to be broken at last by the announcement that Lili would soon be sent abroad.

Five

Exile

“My brother had turned himself into a pasha—a prince—in Europe!” Lili said into the tape recorder with a laugh. “My baby brother with his bowed legs and skinny arms, the one who’d shaken and cried when our father so much as looked at him. Well, if he could turn himself into a pasha, imagine what I could become in such a place!”

L
ILI WOULD LEAVE THE
country dressed as if for an English garden party. White with pale green vines creeping up its three tiers and many flounces, her dress was easily the most beautiful one she had ever owned, and for the entire five hours of her flight from Tehran to Frankfurt she would not even cross her legs for fear it might wrinkle.

As sudden as her exile was in the execution, it had, in fact, been long in the planning. As the date of her graduation from high school approached, Sohrab had begun to take measure of her. She was no longer a pretty girl but a beautiful young woman. She’d grown tall, her breasts had come in, and her waist had narrowed. Her pigtails looked awkward and would soon have to be loosened. Suitors would come, only to leave once they learned she’d been married and had a child. She would contrive to see Sara again, and the habit, Sohrab felt certain, would both distract Lili from her studies and further compromise her chances of marrying again.

For some time Simin had been taking her measure of Lili as
well—and of her own circumstances. For nearly three years Lili and Kobra had lived in Sohrab’s house. For nearly three years Sohrab had entertained Simin only in his own quarters and only occasionally. So long as Lili stayed in Iran and remained unmarried, she would continue to live under Sohrab’s roof, and so, too, would Kobra. And while Lili had seemingly told no one about the opium, that, too, might change now that she was no longer a child.

“Send her to her brother,” Simin told Sohrab. “She will be better off with him in Europe.”

The same message was relayed to Sohrab’s friends and associates until he finally adopted the plan as his own.

In the weeks following Sara’s furtive visit, Sohrab had sequestered Lili in the house, forbidding her to visit even her cousins or her grandmother without a chaperone. The boredom of those weeks had been awful—much worse, even, than the isolation she’d endured before her divorce. But now, Sohrab promised her, she’d begin a new life in a place where nobody knew about her past. She’d continue her studies and become an educated woman.

Lili thrilled at the thought. And while she would never dare mention it to anyone—could scarcely let herself think it to herself—perhaps someday she’d even return to Iran and make a life for herself and her daughter.

Weeping and wailing all the while, Kobra commenced to sew Lili a European wardrobe. In addition to the white dress with the creeping vines, Kobra sewed her some half-dozen others in shades of red, pink, and persimmon. Since Kobra had heard it was very cold in Germany, she also knit Lili a wool scarf and matching hat. The others devised their own means of preparing Lili for her departure. On the day before Lili was to leave Iran, Sohrab handed her an envelope full of deutsche marks and a second suitcase that held two small carpets Nader was to sell for her in Germany. “Study,” Sohrab told her sternly. As for her grandmother, cousins, and aunts, on the day of
her departure they wept, passed the Koran over her head, and then imparted three bits of advice: “Don’t let anyone trick you,” “Listen to your brother,” and “Be grateful to your father.”

As Lili readied herself to leave Iran for Germany, Kobra readied to leave Sohrab’s house for the last time and Simin readied herself to return to it once again.

“Hello, you donkey!” Lili’s brother, Nader, called out from across the airport terminal. He was holding a bouquet of deep blue irises, and when he saw her he raised his arm and began waving the flowers. Lili hustled past the other passengers, but before she could embrace him her mouth fell open at the young man standing before her. In less than a year, her shy, skinny younger brother had been transformed into a dandy in a three-piece suit and rakish smile.

And this was not all. Here the boy who’d once cowered at the sound of Sohrab’s footsteps had taken on his lavish habits, throwing frequent parties and outings financed by the gold and carpets Sohrab regularly sent him to sell abroad. On her first night in Germany, Nader threw her a welcome party in a pub in Tübingen, the small university town that was now to be home to them both. Her eyes went wide at the sight of him perched at the bar, surrounded by several blond girls. Pretty as movie stars, she thought them. The girls were laughing into their beer bottles, free and easy as she had never before seen any woman. She caught Nader’s eye and he grinned at her from across the smoky room.

During her first days in Germany Lili and Nader walked arm in arm through the streets of Tübingen, he in his colorful silk ties and tweed sport jackets and she in the half-dozen dresses Kobra had sewn her back in Tehran. She adored the church spires and the canals, the crooked cobblestone lanes that reached up to the hills, the red and pink geraniums cascading from the window boxes of
the half-timbered houses along the river. Most wonderful of all was the chorus of greetings she heard in the streets. Old men doffed their hats to young mothers. “
Guten Tag!
” they called to one another. Stout matrons greeted the fishmonger; the baker greeted a young boy passing by on a bicycle; the streetcar conductor greeted a pretty passenger. “
Guten Tag, Guten Tag, Guten Tag!
”

Lili could feel eyes following her and Nader everywhere as they toured the city. They joked that the locals must take them for a pair of wealthy exotics passing through on their honeymoon, and this only made them laugh harder and link arms more tightly as they strolled down the streets and alleys together. It was, Lili thought to herself, the
Shahreh Farang
she’d glimpsed through the old nickelodeons outside the bazaar on New Year’s Day, except that now she herself was in the picture.

Nader arranged a room for her in a boardinghouse in the center of Tübingen. It was a very small room, with a low ceiling and creaking floorboards, but she had her own little wrought-iron balcony and from there she could trace the Neckar River to where it thinned to the width of a ribbon and then disappeared into the green hills. Every night she sank, smiling, into a sea of eiderdown. Every morning she woke, smiling, to the chiming of church bells. And during the week, when Nader was away at school, she pulled on one of her pretty dresses, grabbed a handful of cookies from the kitchen downstairs, and then set off to explore the city on her own.