Sohrab frowned and reached his hand out to take it from her. “You go back home now,” he told her.
She’d never seen her father holding anything half as common as that rusty old canister, and she now wished desperately to snatch it back from him. “But we haven’t got any kerosene,” she protested, “and the rooms get so cold at night.”
“I said it’s time to go home.”
Back in the apartment, she flung off her chador and watched as his eyes took in the peeling paint on the walls, the exposed pipes above the kitchen sink, the uncurtained windows. Had her aunts spoken to him about Kazem? Her cheeks burned with shame at the thought. She hurried to the kitchen to brew him a pot of tea. She found no sweets in the cupboard and so, hands trembling, she piled chunks of sugar into a small bowl for him.
He didn’t stay long enough to finish even one cup of tea, but before he left Sohrab pressed several hundred tomans into her hands and told her she could always come to him for more money. Then, the following morning, her aunt Zaynab came around to tell Kazem that Sohrab would soon send someone to help her with the housework and errands. He’d already arranged a room for a servant with the landlord and would pay all of the servant’s wages himself.
“Does Sohrab Khan think these are his own princely quarters in Shemiran?” Kazem chided when Zaynab approached him with the offer. “She’ll do her own work, like any decent woman.” No servant was sent to help her, but from then on every Friday at noon a basket full of provisions—a fresh chicken and some rice in a pot, cantaloupes and apples, two jugs of milk—showed up alongside a full canister of kerosene on her doorstep, and she never had to guess who’d sent it for her.
The weeks wore on in this way until, just a few days shy of her delivery date, Lili at last moved back to Khanoom’s house for her lying-in period.
They were all sleeping around the korsi (a low table with a heater underneath it), their arms and limbs intertwined under piles of quilts, when she felt a surge of warm liquid pass between her legs. She kicked off the covers and cried out for Khanoom. “Shhh, shhh,” her grandmother soothed. “This means it’s time, bacheh-joon. It’s time….”
Hearing this, the others untangled themselves from the blankets, threw on their veils, and together lifted Lili from the korsi and hauled her into a taxi.
“How young you are!” the midwife exclaimed when Lili appeared in the clinic sobbing and clutching her grandmother’s hand. Very young mothers were becoming less common, at least in the capital, and the midwife seemed utterly charmed when she learned Lili was still just thirteen years old. And when, after just three-quarters of an hour, the baby emerged, to be laid on Lili’s chest still slick and warm with blood, the midwife declared it another blessing of youth as well as an auspicious start to her life as a new mother.
Lili lifted her head and peered at the newborn. Here she was at last, Lili thought, her own baby! Kazem’s family had chosen a name for her—Sara. Lili looked for the first time at Sara and for a moment a feeling of tenderness overtook her pain. Finding Sara whole, with all of her fingers and toes in place, Lili fell back against the pillows. A cloth soaked with chloroform was passed under her nose, and with that she sank almost immediately into a deep sleep.
“Wake up and see who has come for you!”
Lili rubbed her eyes and raised herself onto her elbows. Every part of her body, from her head to her feet, felt impossibly sore. She looked out the window and saw that the sky had turned dark. How long had she been here? Somewhere in the room a woman was moaning. From another corner there came the high-pitched squalling of a newborn.
The midwife was holding a crying baby—her baby, Lili realized with a start. Sara had been swaddled in a white woolen blanket. Her little face was pinched and red. She looked exhausted.
Lili reached out for her.
“She’ll want her milk now,” the midwife said, smiling kindly as she handed Sara over to Lili.
First the midwife showed Lili how to cradle one hand behind the infant’s head and cup her breast with the other. She lowered Sara to her chest and nudged the little mouth toward her nipple, but the baby showed no interest whatever in latching on. “Khanoom,” Lili said, looking up at the midwife, “why won’t she drink?” The midwife shushed her, patted her hand, and then told Lili to lie down on her side and positioned the baby facing toward her that way. But no matter what the midwife or Lili did that day, the tiny pair of pink lips stayed locked in a tight line.
Why, Lili puzzled, wouldn’t Sara take her milk? Was it true what everyone said, that a fetus fed on its mother’s emotions? Had her baby come into this world already full with her own grief? Tears spilled from Lili’s cheeks as she considered this, but the midwife hushed her and told her not to worry, that there was no child yet born who would not drink from its mother’s breast once it grew hungry enough.
Four days later, when Lili finally left the hospital for Khanoom’s house, Sara had still not taken so much as a drop of Lili’s milk. On the fifth day sweat began beading Lili’s forehead at dawn and by noon it had thoroughly soaked her bed linens. Her hair clung to her scalp in wet tendrils; her breasts grew heavy and then turned hard as rocks. Her temperature rose and fell, climbed past a hundred, and settled at 102 degrees, where it would hover for the next three days.
Khanoom put her faith in timeworn methods. At regular intervals throughout the day, she pressed boiled cabbage leaves against Lili’s breasts and then kneaded them with her calloused fingers. To bring down Lili’s fever, Khanoom held a cold compress to Lili’s temple and spoon-fed her ice water tinged with limoo shirin, sweet lemon. When, finally, Lili’s milk let down, it was Khanoom who cried out to God in thanks and vowed she’d sacrifice two lambs for His infinite mercy. For the next few days Khanoom, her eyes full of sleep, appeared at Lili’s bedside at dawn, and held out a saucer while she expelled her milk. As promised, Khanoom had two lambs slaughtered, cooked, and served up as alms to the poor.
It was not enough to stop the fever, though. Lili’s whole body shook and shivered, slackened like a doll’s until finally she became so delirious that she would not even answer to her own name. Engorgement had led to infection. Late one night she was rushed back to the hospital to have her milk ducts sliced open with a knife, and for days afterward bad milk seeped from her breasts.
She woke one morning feeling completely hollowed out, but her forehead had cooled considerably. She sat up and ate a full breakfast, her first meal since having left the hospital over one week earlier, and Khanoom, in her fine deep voice, sang out prayers as Lili ate.
At noon Khanoom came to Lili’s room with a basket full of caramel-colored puppies, and she woke to find three identical pairs of brown eyes squinting at her.
“A gift?” she asked.
“Yes.” Khanoom nodded. “A gift.”
Lili sat up and clapped her hands. The three puppies scampered out of the basket and began crawling across the bed. One of them, the littlest one, began to lick her fingers, and Lili giggled.
“You can keep that one if you like,” Khanoom told her, giving the puppy a pat. “But to make you feel better, bacheh-joon, you must first let it suckle.”
“Suckle?”
“Suckle.”
Lili gasped. “I won’t!”
“You must!”
But after that Lili turned her face to the wall and crossed her arms over her chest and would not so much as look at the puppies. Khanoom frowned and squared her shoulders. She lifted the puppies up one by one, placed them back into the basket, and turned from the room.
She would appear again the next day with another basket. This one held a pair of six-month-old twins belonging to a distant cousin. The twins latched on expertly and, in so doing, brought immediate relief. Their mother, no doubt grateful for the respite from her own duties, sent them once in the morning and once in the evening for a week. The second week the twins came three days, the third week just twice. In this time Lili’s own baby was given goat’s milk served from a g
lass bottle affixed with a plastic yellow nipple, but after the twins cured Lili’s engorgement, Sara learned to latch on with ease.
Lili’s pain slowly diminished and Sara began to settle into a routine, but for days afterward Lili would still think about the three puppies Khanoom had brought to her bedside. Lili would close her eyes and imagine their velvety coats and their moist brown eyes. She thought about the littlest one, the one that had licked her fingers with its rough tongue and lifted its head to let her scratch under its chin. She wondered where Khanoom found the puppies and where they’d been taken after Lili had refused to let them nurse.
Kobra, meanwhile, could think of nothing but her own baby lying dead in the garden. She barely spoke anymore and had grown painfully thin. She spent the days huddled in her bed and the nights pacing the house with a curious vigor. She hadn’t visited Lili in the hospital, not even for an hour, and when Lili returned to Avenue Moniriyeh with Sara she could not even look at the new baby without wishing desperately that she herself would die.
To temper Kobra’s anguish, Khanoom and the others sequestered her in a corner of the house, far away from Lili and Sara. So successful were they in shielding Lili from Kobra’s grief that Lili would always remember the weeks after the delivery as one of the happiest times of her life. She’d been gone for over a year, but she fell easily into the old rhythms and rituals of Khanoom’s house. Lili listened eagerly to all the gossip and grew intimate with everyone’s ailments, but most of all she let herself be tended. Everything was done for her—expertly and devotedly. There was always a pair of extra hands to hold and rock Sara, and in all that time Lili did not have to change a single diaper or even her own nightgown.
She spent entire days by the korsi, with heavy quilts and cushions heaped all around her. Khanoom sent her manservant to the bakery every morning and he’d return with two sheets of long, heavy flatbread, one slung over each shoulder. The bread was still warm when Khanoom dipped it into the cream for Lili and poured her glass after glass of cardamom-and-saffron-spiced milk. For lunch and dinner everyone gathered under the korsi and ate ash (soup) with noodles, ground beef, fresh chives, and thick creamy dollops of kashk (fermented whey), or else the enormous herb-and-chickpea meatballs that were Khanoom’s other cold-weather specialty. “You must eat. You must grow strong again,” Khanoom told Lili at every meal, and so she did.
“She has come! Sohrab’s woman has come!”
Sometime before Sara’s birth, Khanoom, fearing for Sohrab’s soul, had demanded that he either formally marry Simin, his twice-divorced, blue-eyed mistress, or else put an end to the relationship. Sohrab responded by cutting off all contact from his family. The ensuing separation had lasted one year, in which time Khanoom seemed to age ten.
It was understood by all that Khanoom would not survive another such episode, but it was Simin herself who’d initiated the rapprochement with Sohrab’s family. Every few weeks she invited Khanoom and Sohrab’s sisters to her own house for a lavish lunch. They always returned full of praise for Simin’s fava bean pilafs and her pomegranate-and-walnut stews, her well-appointed rooms and her artful entertaining, and when Simin mentioned that they should not hesitate to come to her for loans the clan grew fonder of her still.
And yet the speculations raged on. Had Sohrab officially married his woman? Performed a siqeh—a temporary marriage? Dispensed with all rites and formalities? When Simin appeared at Lili and Kazem’s apartment to greet Lili and her new baby, the visit would add a new question to this long-running debate. Had Sohrab sent Simin as a gesture of respect or was her visit meant, rather, to establish his woman as beyond his family’s reproach?
She was not pretty and she was not beautiful. Sohrab’s woman, as they would always call her among themselves, was ravishing. Her glossy black hair fell long past her shoulders to the small of her back, her skin seemed completely poreless, and her eyes were an unearthly pale blue. The dress she wore—pale lavender with a row of tiny pearlescent buttons running from her throat to just above her waist—was a garment otherwise so plain that Khanoom herself might have worn it, except that it was exquisitely cut to reveal Simin’s tiny waist and sumptuously rounded rear.
When Simin joined the gathering, Lili had for some time been seated on an expanse of cushions at the farthermost end of the room. She had taken more care than usual when dressing that morning, slipping on her prettiest peach-colored silk blouse, loosening her hair from its braid, and even running a bit of kohl along her eyes, but when her aunt announced Simin’s arrival Lili was at once painfully self-conscious.
Lili tucked her bare feet quickly under the blanket and raised a hand to smooth the frizzy strands at her crown. When she looked up again, there, suddenly, was the blue-eyed woman who’d linked arms with Lili’s father in a garden outside the city and bathed with her in the river lined with beech trees many summers ago. Lili had not seen her since that time, not even once, but now the lady had come just to visit her.
The moment seemed to call for her to rise, but she could not. Four weeks after the delivery of the baby, her stomach was still bound in the homemade girdle Khanoom had fashioned for her from long strips of muslin. Lili could scarcely breathe in this garment, and with Sara lying on her legs with her little head propped at her knees, she found it impossible to move.
“Salaam, khanoom,” she offered from the floor.
Simin bent down to brush her cheeks with two kisses. “Salaam, dokhtar-joon.”
Certainly it was fear of Sohrab that inspired the clan’s ministrations toward Simin that day, but their attentiveness was just as much a surrender to the irrefutable proof of the woman’s beauty, grace, and—though it was not a word they would so much as whisper or even let themselves think in connection with anyone but foreigners and prostitutes—lavandee. Sexiness. Simin was sexy. They felt it, they could not deny it, and it inspired them to do the one thing they knew best: to serve her.
Thick honey-soaked squares of baqlava were the first delicacy to be set before Sohrab’s woman that afternoon. Next came the almond-stuffed dates, then the puff pastries clotted with fresh cream. They waited and watched. Simin’s eyes did not so much as linger on any of it. “But khanoom!” they wailed, genuinely aggrieved. “You must at least try a small piece of the baqlava!” Simin made no answer but to smile faintly and take another sip of tea. Glasses of cherry sherbet, plates of fig compote, and bowls of saffron pudding came flying out of the kitchen in quick succession. But no matter what they set before her, Simin’s lips would go nowhere but to the rim of her crystal teacup.
Having at last exhausted their offerings, the clan left Lili and Simin alone in the apartment and congregated in the courtyard to discuss their next move. What could Sohrab’s woman possibly mean by her refusal to eat? Various explanations were put forth, but when someone suggested that it was only right that Simin would wish to preserve her splendid figure, all of them nodded in assent, and then even the ones who thought themselves beyond such vanities vowed to practice more restraint with respect to their own appetites—if not on this day, well, certainly the next.
“I congratulate you,” Simin said to Lili as the clan’s deliberations reached a close and the women began straggling back to the apartment. “You are a mother now.”
Lili flinched. A mother—it was precisely this distinction of motherhood that had always governed her grandmother’s and aunts’ treatment of Kobra and Simin. However much Sohrab favored Simin, however they themselves had come to think her superior, the fact of her infertility could simply not be overcome. It was Kobra who was the mother of Sohrab’s children and Simin who was not.
When, just a few short months later, Lili replayed the scene of their meeting again and again in her head, she would remember that there’d been an unmistakably cool tone to Simin’s congratulations. But that Simin should resent not only Kobra’s presence in Sohrab’s life, however broken, but also hers and Nader’s was something Lili had not considered before and would not consider that day. Indeed
, at the time she had felt nothing so much as an overwhelming sense of gratitude for Simin’s visit.
“Merci,” Lili stammered. “Thank you, khanoom-joon.”
Lili cried miserably on the day she returned with Sara to her own flat in the Bottom of the City, but her anguish would soon be overshadowed by news of Ma Mère’s death and the attendant obligations of mourning. When Ma Mère died that year she was mourned for forty days and forty nights. An enormous framed photograph of her was mounted in the main parlor of the Khorrami compound and flanked by a pair of candelabra the height of trees. The photograph showed Ma Mère with a lovely smile that rendered her unrecognizable to Lili. It was an impression she chose to keep to herself throughout the mourning rites.
She’d only recently left Khanoom’s house and returned to her own dingy apartment. When Lili was alone for the first time with Sara, the routines of motherhood baffled and thoroughly exhausted her. Now she was also expected daily at the Khorramis’ compound to greet and attend the mourners, and there was nothing for it but to bundle her baby up and take her along for the task.
To Lili’s surprise, Kazem’s relatives, who’d so recently mocked her own family’s fidelity to traditional wedding customs, now mourned with the sexes separated and the women veiled and grieving with all the ritualized abandon Lili had long associated with such occasions. The Khorrami women held silk fans to keep themselves from overheating, fainting, or both. Some threw themselves onto the floor, while many approached the point of collapse, only to be revived by handkerchiefs doused in valerian and rose water.
The arrival of every new visitor would inspire the others to recount in intimate detail how Ma Mère had passed into the next life. Though the lady had died suddenly of a heart attack and with little apparent suffering, the story of her death inspired the mourners to lash their chests and pull at their hair. One woman clawed her face deeply enough to leave tracks of blood along her cheeks. Through all of this, one lament was continually repeated, sometimes singly and sometimes by the whole party at once: “Why have you gone, why have you gone, why have you gone…”
The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life Page 9
