In the mornings two hundred pupils—all girls—assembled by the gates of the school on Avenue Pahlavi. The ones with the cashmere coats congregated near the front of the line, and the ones with shabby coats or no coats at all stood to the back. Lili’s coat was made of soft gray lambskin, and she always stood toward the middle and kept her eyes trained to the front. When the Mistresses Elder and Second called out good morning, the girls promptly formed a line and then, at the Mistresses’ signal, belted out Iran’s new anthem. “O Iran, jewel-studded land!” the girls cried, and only after this would they be let inside.
Most everything at the School of Virtue was learned by rote, and questions of any kind were met with sour looks or else a quick rap against the knuckles. Long before they’d mastered the rudiments of reading and writing, the girls began reciting classical poems by heart. Fountain pens in hand and pots of ink at the ready, they proceeded to take pages and pages of Persian dictation. The study of mathematics, geography, and history advanced through similar feats of memorization and willed incuriosity.
Lili enjoyed nearly all her classes, but one subject, Arabic, proved a perpetual torment. Before starting school she had known it as the language of her grandmother’s prayers and could never read the letters without hearing the sweet tenor and cadence of Khanoom’s voice in her head, but at the School of Virtue Lili was judged not on her memory of these prayers but on her knowledge of their meaning. In this and also in her penmanship Lili was found lacking. Whenever the Arabic instructor reached Lili’s desk, two deep creases sprang up between the teacher’s eyes. She’d bend over Lili’s shoulder, close enough for their breaths to mingle, and proceed to guide Lili’s hand through the letters with her own crushing grip.
The girls wore gray pinafores with round-collared white blouses. Twice a week they stripped off their uniforms and pulled on knee-length black shorts and marched in formation in the school’s courtyard and performed the calisthenics that the Ministry of Education deemed necessary for their bodies. They were accompanied in their movements by military marches streaming from a gramophone—a marvel achieved by the energetic pumping of the machine’s hand crank by their gymnastics teacher. The girls with cashmere coats had special exercise shoes, but everyone else just wore regular shoes to exercise.
Even more than their cashmere coats, Lili coveted the patent-leather dress shoes of the rich girls at her school. Khanoom had always bought Lili’s shoes, and she usually chose a brown leather pair nearly identical to her own. They were presented to Lili once a year at No Rooz, the Persian New Year, along with a party frock and newly stitched underclothes. She’d never quite grasped the ugliness of her shoes until the day she first fixed her eyes on the shiny dress shoes at the School of Virtue. Lili begged and pleaded until at last Khanoom agreed to take her to the bazaar to search for her own pair of patent-leather shoes.
“A hen’s milk or man’s life”—it was said that anything could be bought at the bazaar. Lit only by gas lamps and candles, the marketplace was dim even in the middle of the day. Gripping her grandmother’s hand, Lili walked through the entrance, past the turquoise domes of Shah’s Mosque, and on toward the teeming belly of the market. Together they threaded their way past stall after stall, past the goldsmiths and silversmiths, carpet-sellers, livestock, donkeys, beggars, castabouts, tricksters, and thieves who made their homes within the bazaar’s narrow passages.
Khanoom and Lili walked on until at last she spied the shoes she wanted. Graced with tiny bows at the front, they were shiny and did not have even a single scuff on the bottoms. Best of all they were red, a bright tomato red she’d never even seen any of the girls wearing at school. The shoes were too tight by at least a size, but she had wanted them anyway, and would wear them until blisters bloomed on all her toes and her heels grew thick with calluses.
On the day Khanoom bought the red shoes, they celebrated with a lunch at Shamshiri, the bazaar’s kabob restaurant. They retreated to the back corner, away from the passersby, so that Khanoom could enjoy her meal without troubling too much about her chador sliding off her head now and again. Stomachs rumbling in anticipation, they waited for the server, whom they privately called Mr. Kabobi. Over six feet tall, with a luxurious mustache that curled up at the ends, Mr. Kabobi could shove the meat from as many as three skewers onto their platter between two of his thick fingers. That day Mr. Kabobi appeared, as ever, with a smock smeared with grease and streaks of blood. Khanoom ordered four foot-long skewers, two for each of them, and even in the dark back room of the kabobi the meat still glistened with butter and the rice looked glorious with its orange and yellow swirls of saffron. It was the best kabob in all the city, and Lili, with her new red shoes already on her feet, ate with relish.
In the afternoons she was forbidden to play in the alleys close to the house, but the next day after school she lingered there to show off her pretty new red shoes. All at once a boy came running, shouting out that he’d just seen her father in the streets, just a block away from Avenue Moniriyeh. She ran into the house and hid herself among the pile of mattresses in the basement. One of the children had squealed on her, and when Sohrab found her that day he beat her so severely that she went to bed with a fever that would not be cured by even ten cups of her grandmother’s sugared tea.
Fever or no fever, Kobra or no Kobra, Lili never missed the hammam. Once a week the women of Khanoom’s house bundled their towels, copper bowls, sweets, and fresh clothes into large embroidered cloths, then walked together to the low limestone building that housed the quarter’s communal baths. They splashed themselves with cold water from the fountain early each morning, before the first prayers of the day, but the hammam was their only full bath of the week and therefore also a holiday.
From her bundle Khanoom pulled pomegranates so ripe with juice, they were heavy as stones. “Don’t spill the seeds,” she’d whisper, and press one gently into Lili’s hands.
Then Khanoom and the others disappeared into the steam and the sweet, damp scents. Inside the bathhouse they eased themselves onto low benches, drew water from the fountain, and loosened their tongues with talk until the heat puckered and wrinkled their fingers and toes. Wet thighs slapping against tiles, pitchers and bowls clattering against stone, they scrubbed themselves with coarse rags until their skin raged pink and their heels were raw. They took turns dunking themselves in the warm, elevated pool. They combed and plaited one another’s hair. And then all but the oldest ones lay on tables to be smeared with the warm, sticky paste that ripped loose the hair on their legs and groins.
Lili sat on the steps by the hammam’s entry, her pomegranate balanced between her knees, watching the women come and go. The sky would begin to darken and finally one of her older cousins would come fetch Lili. Her own body would be hastily scrubbed in one far corner of the hammam, and as her hair was washed and combed and wound into braids she’d steal glances at the older women.
“Tsss!” her aunts scolded. “Don’t open your eyes so wide, dokhtar [girl]!”
One year when Khanoom was braiding her hair in the hammam a lady called out to them, “What a pretty girl! Her skin’s as white as alabaster!”
Khanoom gave Lili a quick, furtive scratch on the buttocks to ward off the Evil Eye and then called back a cheerful, “Merci, khanoom!”
“Will you marry her off?”
“She’s only just turned nine….”
“Well, in that case she can grow up with her husband!” the lady replied. To this Khanoom gave no answer but to laugh and consider Lili with a strange, and then very tender, look.
By this time in the afternoon it would be late—Sohrab would be home, impatient for his dinner—and when the others rushed to gather their belongings and began hustling back toward Avenue Moniriyeh, Lili would follow along behind the train of women with her small bundle of juice-stained linens pressed against her chest.
In summertime, when the sky was bright and thick with stars, they all slept on the rooftop. At sunset, after Khanoom hose
d down the tiles, piles of mattresses were hauled up from the basement and huge swaths of white netting were strung up to keep the flies and mosquitoes from tormenting them in the night. Divans, cushions, and carpets were assembled in the garden where Sohrab would hold court with his friends late into the night. Lili was forbidden from coming close to them, even just for a peek, but from where she lay on the roof she could see the smoke from the men’s cigarettes snaking its way into the night air and could hear their voices as they told stories and jokes.
Often Lili would fall asleep before dinner, which could be served as late as ten or eleven on a summer evening, and then Khanoom would shake her from sleep. “Wake up, child!” When she opened her eyes she would find her grandmother crouched beside her under the netting with a bowl nestled in her lap. “Eat this and then go back to sleep,” Khanoom would whisper, and heap rice and stew onto a spoon for Lili. Some nights as she chewed, sleepily, in the darkness, she could hear the men in the alleyways that ran along Avenue Moniriyeh, trilling poems as they stumbled back from the meykhaneh, the wine tavern.
Khanoom sewed Lili a prayer shawl festooned with pale pink rosebuds, and at Khanoom’s side she learned to whisper her prayers, press her forehead to the mohr, a holy stone, bend and straighten herself at the proper intervals. At Ramadan everyone except Sohrab woke before dawn to eat the rich foods—dates, porridges, stews—that would fortify their bodies through the day’s fasting, but there would always be a little something for the children to tide them over until sunset: a chunk of halvah wedged between bread, a handful of soaked walnuts, and a few yellow sultana raisins.
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�
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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 Hfez. Among the many volumes of Ismail Khan’s library was an exquisite leather-bound Divan-eh Hfez, the collected poems of the fourteenth-century lyric poet Hfez. 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 Hfez 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 Hfez 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.”
The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life Page 4
