The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (24 page)

It was then that everything she had been holding back, had told no one, had kept a secret for so long, came out as one breathless whole. Her marriage to Kazem, their divorce and the baby they took from her, the foundling hospital in Tübingen, Sohrab’s death and the American attaché, her brother in Germany, her mother and her fourth-hand Singer, her job in the city. She could not look at him as she spoke, but she went on and on until still she had managed to tell him every last part of her story.

When she finished, the General laid his gun down and studied her. It had worked, she thought to herself. He would pity her; she would be safe now. She drew a deep breath and felt her pulse slacken. But all at once, he rose, slipped his belt free from his waist, and began working his fingers through the buttons of his shirt.

Lili looked quickly about her. There was no way out but past him.

When the General stepped toward her, she shoved him so hard with her two fists that she herself stumbled and nearly fell. “Who do you think you are that you won’t let me touch you?” he taunted, catching her by the shoulder with one hand and yanking the front of her dress with the other so that it gave a loud rip and then flapped open from collar to waist. She staggered, steadied herself, and shoved him again with her fists.

He began lashing the ground with his belt then. Each time it came down he took a step closer toward her, so that soon the belt was whipping at her feet. She backed away and they began to circle the room. Again and again the belt sliced at the unfinished floorboards—
thwack, thwack, thwack!
—and the General’s eyes never left her as it fell.

She spun around and broke into a run. Halfway down the driveway she bent down to kick off her shoes and heard a gunshot blast somewhere behind her. She hurled herself, barefoot, down to the end of the driveway to the main thoroughfare. There wasn’t a single car or person in the street, and so she kept running with the echo of the gunshot and her own blood beating against her ears.

After some minutes she finally managed to flag down a car. It was a married couple on their way back to the city after a holiday in the mountains. “Did your husband do this to you?” the wife kept asking, the color rising in her cheeks. “You know, there are laws against this sort of thing now. You mustn’t let him do this to you, you understand; you mustn’t!”

“You mustn’t let him”—that’s what the lady kept saying over and over, and Lili nodded her head.
No
, khanoom, she swore.
I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.

That afternoon Kobra was waiting for Lili in the alley, as had become her habit. She’d been standing at the corner, clenching the edge of her veil between her teeth, wringing her hands, and counting the buses as they went by. She counted seven buses, then eight, then nine. When the fifteenth bus rumbled past, Kobra felt a trickle of sweat roll down her spine. She began to pray. When at last she spied Lili slipping out of a stranger’s car with her chin buried in her chest, clutching at her torn dress with both hands, Kobra gripped her veil and rushed toward the car and then her screams ripped and echoed through the alley until, to Lili’s unending shame, she managed to draw every last pair of eyes to them.

“Do you see what they’ve done?” she wailed. “Do you see what they’ve done to my child?”

When, after some days, she had regained her wits and calmed her mother, Lili retrieved the movie director’s card, swiped on some red
lipstick, and set off for his studio in Naderi Square. After the episode with the General, she could not return to her job as a cashier, and she did not have a single other prospect. Unfortunately, the director didn’t seem to recognize her. She pulled out the card he’d given her just a few weeks before. “You asked if I wanted to play a Kurdish girl, remember? A girl on a horse?”

“Ah, yes, of course,” he said with a quick lick of his lips, “but unfortunately that part’s already been given to someone else—”

“Actually,
agha
,” she interrupted, “I was thinking about a secretarial job. Surely you need secretaries here? I took a course, you see. I can type. I even have the certificate with me.”

She began fumbling with her purse, but the director straightened his tie, cleared his throat, and told her there would be no need of that. A vision of Khanoom’s face, contorted in pain, rose up in Lili’s mind’s eye but gradually faded as he put forth his proposition. Besides shooting films, he explained, the studio also employed girls for voice-over parts for foreign films. In fact, he said, it was her good fortune that they were holding auditions for voice-over jobs that very day.

The director took her by the arm and led her to a room where more than two dozen young women sat waiting their turns. She drew a breath of relief. He’d been telling the truth; he had decent work for her after all.

The audition consisted of reading a page torn from a recent, though far from current, edition of a London newspaper. She read sufficiently well to be called back the following day.

While the movies were all American, Westerns were particularly well represented. Her job was to speak for the women. Thanks to her once-fervent reading of Dickens she could still read English, but by this time her actual comprehension of the language had been winnowed down considerably. What’s more, the American accents and cowboy slang totally befuddled her. When she made this confession
to a studio technician, Lili was told not to worry, that creativity was the greatest of assets to a girl in this line of work.

Alone in her tiny sound booth, Lili watched the heroines drape themselves in doorways, cling to the sleeves of their gun-slinging heroes, peel off their petticoats, and strip down to lacy silk negligees. She would sit in this booth for many months to come, grateful for the seclusion and anonymity she found there, eventually earning her passage back to Europe. Longing, humiliation, terror, love—the same themes flickered before her in seemingly endless cinematic variation. She pulled on her headphones, struck up her recording machine, and it was not long before she discovered that her job was not nearly as hard as she’d first imagined.

It took her a little less than a year to save up enough money. Now she applied herself to the truly difficult part of her scheme.

“I am going to Germany,” she told Sara.

It was a balmy afternoon in late August and they were sitting on a bench in Niavaran Park sipping cherry-flavored iced sherbets. They saw each other once or twice a month, mostly on outings in the city where Lili felt free of Kobra’s disapproving gaze and Sara could do as she pleased. Earlier Lili had bought Sara a red kite from a street vendor. “Your big sister is very kind to buy you this kite,” the old man had said as he tied it to Sara’s wrist, and Sara had thought his mistake very funny and giggled.

But now, with Lili’s announcement, Sara gave the kite a hard, quick tug and it began to bob up and down awkwardly. She turned her face to Lili and fixed her with an angry look. “How long will you stay there?”

“Four years—maybe three.”

“Why?”

“So that I can study.”

“Why?”

“So that I can come back here and buy a little house for us.”

This seemed to please Sara and her expression softened. She took another taste of her sherbet and began swinging her legs under the bench. A breeze picked up and the red kite began to sway gently above their heads.

“But why don’t you study here?” Sara asked suddenly.

Lili hadn’t expected this question. “It’s very expensive to study in Iran,” she said. This was true enough. Medical school would be prohibitively expensive, and so she’d decided to study midwifery. Long practiced in informal networks, in recent years it had become a branch of study at a large, modern nursing institute in Tehran, but Lili knew it would be easier to pay her way through school in Germany and also that a foreign diploma would be worth much more in Iran than an Iranian one.

That she was fed up with her family’s attempts to marry her off, that she could not stand to live in Iran so long as she was just a poor, half-educated divorcée, that her father had been right to send her away the first time—these were all points Lili judged beyond the child’s comprehension.

“It’s too expensive here,” Lili repeated.

Sara started crying and her sherbet tipped over into her lap and spilled all over her skirt. Lili fell to her knees and began to dab at the sticky mess with the sleeves of her own dress. It was hopeless. The stain would not come out, and dabbing at it did nothing to quiet Sara’s crying, nor could it stop Lili from starting to cry herself.

Seven

Damad Farangi
(Foreign Groom)

“A
damad farangi?
A European groom?” My mother laughed. “No one in my family had ever heard of such a thing! But that is exactly what I found when I went away for the second time. And they still can’t believe it. Even after all these years, they wonder how it happened!”

O
N HER RETURN TRIP
to Germany, Lili found an empty cabin and stretched out on the seats. In her purse she had one hundred deutsche marks and a letter of acceptance to a
Frauenklinik
, a school for midwives in Hamburg. She pulled the letter out, read it, and tucked it carefully back into the bottom of her purse. She smiled to herself. She’d done it; she’d finally left Iran. She’d supported her brother to the end of his studies and was free now to resume her own. But if she had any hope of carrying out the rest of her plans, she’d need to keep her wits about her. She’d also have to be very careful with her money.

To avoid the cost of a night’s lodgings, she’d taken a midnight train directly from Frankfurt to Hamburg. Drawing her coat over her for a blanket and laying her purse on the armrest for a pillow, she closed her eyes and fell into an uneasy sleep. Sometime before dawn she woke to the sound of a woman’s laughter. Not a foot from where Lili was lying, a woman had thrown a leg around a man’s waist. The man whispered something against her throat and the woman giggled. The train bumped
along the tracks and wound its way through a tunnel, illuminating for some moments the metal clasp of the woman’s garters, the man’s hands on her neck, his exposed buttocks, and the trousers bunched at his feet.

Lili held her breath and then, after what seemed like an eternity, the man at last let out a long, deep-throated moan and the pair disentangled.

The next morning on her way to the lavatory, Lili came across the selfsame gentleman sitting in the dining car with one leg crossed smartly over the other, completely absorbed in the morning paper. A gold wedding band flashed from his finger and his companion of the previous evening was nowhere in sight. Terrified that he’d recognize her, Lili bowed her head and hustled off.

At one station a family of five had entered her cabin, considered her briefly, and then wedged themselves side by side on the three seats facing her. With a great crinkling flourish of butcher paper they assembled, and proceeded to consume, an elaborate breakfast of paper-thin slices of ham and cheese, buttered rolls, a tin of what looked to be cherry jam, a large metallic flask of coffee, and a second, smaller flask filled with cream. The family did not offer her so much as a single roll.

In Iran, she reflected, a person would have to be on the brink of starvation before such rudeness could be excused. She turned her face to look at the countryside, a wash of gray and black now in wintertime. Her stomach grumbled and she considered leaving the cabin and buying herself a pastry from the dining car, but on second thought she decided she was better off saving her money. She pulled her coat tighter about her, pressed her forehead to the cold windowpane, and consoled herself with the thought that at least she could count on maintaining her figure in this country.

Some hours later, when she reached her dormitory room, Lili discovered a girl sitting cross-legged on one of the cots with her head bent
over a book. Her hair was long and dark and she had a pretty, heart-shaped face. Lili greeted her new roommate, only to be rewarded with an unintelligible mumble. She dropped her suitcase, looked quickly about the cell-like quarters, and, lacking any other diversion, sat down on the edge of one of two empty cots and began to study her roommate more closely. When she saw the Persian script stamped along the spine of the girl’s book, Lili thought she’d die of happiness. She fell onto the girl’s bed, clasped the girl to her breast, and kissed her on both cheeks. “Do you miss your family? Is that why you don’t talk? You can talk to me now, you know. You can talk to me all you like!”

After several days of prattling on in this manner she succeeded in learning the girl’s name (it was Shireen, which meant “sweet”) and drawing out one-and two-word answers from her. After a few days Lili met a second Iranian student, a pudgy, giggly girl named Farideh who claimed the third and last of the room’s three cots. Lili liked her less than she liked Shireen, but still it cheered her considerably to befriend another Iranian so far from home.

More than loneliness, it was hunger that sealed the girls’ friendship. Every evening the instructors of the
Frauenklinik
and their German students filed into the clinic’s main dining hall. Lili, Shireen, Farideh, and the half-dozen other foreign girls waited outside on a long wooden bench. The only German student among them was a heavyset girl with a stutter and a limp. When the first group finished its dinner, the second group was called in to forage a meal from the leftovers: undercooked bits of herring, a few charred baked potatoes, strips of beef floating in fat-flecked gravy, pasty dumplings, and seemingly endless variations of pork. Suffice it to say, Lili, Shireen, and Farideh often returned from the dining hall as hungry as when they entered it.