The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

by Jasmin Darznik

  She swallowed the opium whole then, and to chase away the foul taste in her mouth she drained the water from the glass Simin held for her.

  “Better?”

  Lili nodded. “Yes, khanoom-joon.”

  She was, in the next few moments, intensely aware of Simin’s closeness to her—the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed, her lilac perfume, and under that a different, muskier smell. The pale blue of her eyes was barely visible in the darkness. A pleasant warmth swept through Lili’s head and down to her chest. She smiled at Simin and moved to embrace her, but Simin drew herself up and turned to the door.

  “But won’t you stay, khanoom?”

  “No, I need to find your father. You remember I’ve promised to talk with him for you?”

  When Simin left the house for the second time that night, Lili thought this woman was nothing like the woman Kobra had cursed all these years. She was a good person, so kind and generous. The warmth in Lili’s chest was already spreading down to her limbs when all at once a familiar ache shot through her breasts. She’d promised Kazem’s sister she would come back for Sara. She’d be so hungry for her milk now, Lili thought as she stumbled across the hall to the telephone.

  “Auntie Zaynab, I left the baby with Kazem’s sister….” Her words were coming out slurred and thick and she had to hold her hand to the wall to steady herself as she spoke.

  “But why do you sound like this, bacheh?”

  “I ate opium; the lady, she said—”

  “Opium?”

  Before Lili could answer, the line went dead, and that was the last thing she would remember about that night.

  Afterward it will seem as if she’s traveled across the sea to a distant shore and then back again. She will hear Kobra shrieking and see her pulling at her hair and beating her chest with her fists. She will watch Nader staring down at her with his large, pensive eyes and Khanoom’s fingers spread open and her palms raised up to the sky. Suddenly the women—two women? three?—begin slapping her face, but she doesn’t understand why. They’re wearing white uniforms and screaming, “Don’t sleep! Don’t sleep!” They slap her until her cheeks burn and flush and begin to bruise. They force milk into her mouth until she vomits. They pass a bottle of ether under her nose, hold down her arms and legs, and then they plunge a black rubber hose down her throat.

  When she wakes it’s so bright that she’s screaming from the pain of opening her eyes to the light. “Don’t sleep!” the women in the white uniforms shout, and begin slapping her again. Sometimes Sohrab is there, too, rubbing his chin, looking away from her, and she wants to tell him something, but he’s slipping away again and she can’t keep her eyes open.

  Sleep. She wants, desperately, to sleep.

  Suddenly they’re slicing her skin with a thin blade whose edge catches the light like a wink. Two long plastic tubes are thrust into the veins of her left arm. Through heavy lids she sees them—two streams of red-black blood, one poisoned, one fresh. For the rest of her life, in Europe, in America, whenever she goes to the doctor for a shot or to have her blood pressure checked, the nurse’s eyes will linger on the scars—two long white seams running along Lili’s forearm. They will know that she once overdosed and she will turn her face away, refusing their looks and their questions.

  When next she opens her eyes it is to the talk of money. A public hospital, a man is saying, very limited resources for such cases, already two thousand tomans for one transfusion, at least five thousand more for a second one, and still they cannot promise… And it’s her mother who finally silences the doctor. “I’ll get it, every last toman of it!” Kobra shouts as Lili descends once more into that strange sea.

  They hadn’t exchanged so much as a glance from across Lili’s hospital bed, but Sohrab knew Kobra would come to his house for the money. That night he unlocked all the cabinets and drawers of his carved mahogany desk. When Kobra arrived at his house she found the bills and gold coins stacked in meticulous heaps for her. She stuffed the money into her pockets, her prayer shawl, even her stockings, and since it was dawn and there were no buses or taxis to drive her, she ran all the way back to the hospital with Sohrab’s coins jingling in her pockets and his bills chafing against her skin.

  More transfusions would be needed, Lili was weak and feverish, and progress was slow. Several weeks later, when the danger had finally passed, a nurse wheeled Lili away from the screaming and wailing of the drug ward and left her to rest outside in the shade of a flowering ash tree. It was nearly the end of summer, the last week of August. Kobra had gone back to Khanoom’s house to cook Lili a proper meal, and though no one had expected it, sometime in the afternoon it began to rain.

  At first it felt soothing and gentle against Lili’s face and bare arms, and when a scent rose, sweet and fresh, from the grass, she drew deep breaths, filling herself as if with a blessing, as if with grace. Across town, Kobra looked out the window of her kitchen and saw the first drops of rain dotting the pavement outside. By the time she made it back to the hospital the sky was dark with clouds and the rain was falling hard and cold. After a frantic search, Kobra finally found Lili lying on a cot in the hospital’s inner courtyard, soaked through to her hospital gown and shaking uncontrollably.

  An orderly ran toward them, waving her hands and calling out apologies. Kobra flapped her arms like a crazy woman, screamed and cursed and wailed. Hearing this, Lili opened her eyes and smiled. Kobra unfurled her veil and spread it over the two of them like a tent and then, with her arms pressed like wings across Lili’s body, they held each other under the rain and they cried.

  For many days she would wake to the scent of wild rue and the sound of her father’s rage.

  “What am I to do with this child now?” Sohrab bellowed from the parlor of his house on upper Pahlavi.

  Heavy shades were drawn against the light. Weeks of lying prostrate had weakened her limbs. Her voice, when she tried to speak, came out as a rasp. Her head ached terribly. Whenever she opened her eyes, Lili would see Kobra sitting cross-legged on the floor by her bed, rocking back and forth and working her prayer beads between her thumb and forefinger in endless rounds. Kobra would smile, just faintly, and then rise from the floor, hold a glass of water to Lili’s lips, and press a cold compress to her forehead.

  In the parlor, three doors down from the darkened room in which she and Kobra now spent their days, Lili’s aunts and cousins and Sohrab’s stepmothers were called forth one by one to account for their role in what was assumed to have been Lili’s suicide attempt.

  “How could you have allowed her to marry this man?”

  “She wanted to marry…,” one of Lili’s cousins offered.

  “She was so happy about the wedding…,” Lili’s aunt noted feebly.

  “We knew nothing…,” said another.

  Sohrab cursed their ignorance, their piety, their cowardice, and one after another they bowed their heads, clasped his hands in their own, and begged for his forgiveness. He shook them off and cursed them anew. Between interrogations and indictments, Sohrab paced the halls, stormed through the rooms, and slammed every door in his path. “What am I to do with this child now?” he roared, and no one, not even Khanoom, dared answer him.

  It’s as if I’ve died after all, thought Lili from her bed.

  Suicide, as she well knew, was the greatest conceivable sin against God. A hundred hells awaited those who took their own lives, and it was not at all uncommon for a family to disown relatives who’d attempted suicide. But Sohrab thought if he sent Lili back to Kazem she very likely would try to take her life again, and this time she might succeed.

  Keeping Lili in the house posed its own quandary. As long as they were still married, Kazem could claim her back at any moment. Without any legal rights of her own, the only way Lili could divorce Kazem would be for Sohrab to petition for a divorce on her behalf. Yet if he chose this path, he would be releasing her from marriage only to condemn her to the life of a divorcée. In the minds of many,
nothing distinguished a divorced woman from a prostitute. A wealthy woman in her circumstances—a woman like his own woman Simin had been—might hope to overcome such prejudices and eventually remarry, but Sohrab’s finances, though much less precarious than in years past, still fell far short of what would be necessary to wash away the double taint of an attempted suicide and divorce.

  While he considered what he could possibly do with Lili, Sohrab summarily realigned living arrangements. As the only member of the family who’d opposed Lili’s marriage to Kazem, Kobra now became the only one to whom Sohrab entrusted her care. The result left the clan speechless. Kobra, who’d shuttled between her mother’s house and her mother-in-law’s for well over a decade, now moved into the home where Sohrab had until recently entertained Simin.

  If not, exactly, the lady of the house, Kobra was now indisputably the mother of the house. It was a vindication of sorts, and it roused her at once from the grief that had claimed her in the year since Omid’s death. She now whipped, steely-eyed, past her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law to single-handedly command Lili’s sickbed. “It’s the Evil Eye,” Kobra intoned. “She’s been struck by the Evil Eye.” Kobra proceeded to burn wild rue by the hour. Nearly every time Lili opened her eyes in those weeks, she would find Kobra passing a little iron pot of cracking, smoking kernels above her head and singing,

  Wild rue, wild rue, wild rue seeds,

  Hundred and thirty kernels of rue,

  All-knowing rue,

  Blind all jealous eyes.

  One day Kobra set down her pot of burning rue, sat at the edge of Lili’s bed, and pulled off the amulet her own mother, Pargol, had tied around her neck when she was a baby. The black string had grown soft and frayed at the ends and there was a tiny crack the size of a pinprick on one side of the eye. It was the only piece of jewelry Kobra always wore, and certainly the most precious piece she owned, but she now slipped it over Lili’s head. The little blue bead was still warm when it fell against her neck and Kobra leaned toward her and pressed her lips to Lili’s cheek.

  Sohrab’s rages continued, but even when the scent of wild rue had suffused the sheets, the walls, and her very skin Lili would still tell no one who’d given her the opium.

  When she returned from the hospital, no one, not even Sohrab, had wanted to upset her by asking her questions. Everyone assumed she’d meant to kill herself, and from then on her family treated her with that particular strain of deference reserved for the insane.

  Much as she did not wish to be thought crazy, there was a usefulness in maintaining the fiction. During her convalescence Lili would find many reasons for withholding the truth from her family, the most compelling of which was that Sohrab would not have believed her. Had she named Simin, he would almost certainly have refused to help Lili at all, and if Kobra learned the truth, she would have dragged Simin through the streets by a hank of the woman’s hair.

  It was, therefore, to Sohrab’s woman and to her own silence and secrecy that Lili owed her new life.

  She was still very young, Sohrab counseled her when he’d finally found his bearings, just a little over fourteen years old. He would help her; he would petition for a divorce on her behalf. There might be talk, but she shouldn’t worry about that for now, and in time those who knew might forget. She had to promise just one thing, and that was to leave her baby with the Khorramis.

  For a while after Lili returned from the hospital, her aunt Zaynab had called on Kazem’s mother and brought Sara to visit Lili every day or two. When she took Sara into her arms, Lili’s milk would let down, forming two large, wet circles on her blouse. It seemed amazing, and strange, that her body should spring to life in this way. She was not to nurse Sara, however, as her blood was not yet free of the opium, and so Lili held a bottle to her lips instead and was relieved when Sara took it with no trouble.

  Sometime during Lili’s weeks in the hospital, Sara had learned to curl and squeeze her tiny fingers. Her hands were plump, with a deep indentation that ran like a bracelet all around her wrists. They’d sit together on the floor, Sara gripping Lili’s finger as she played and then took her bottle and fell asleep. It was enough to make Lili sleepy, too, and she’d curl herself around Sara, drawing her close and dozing off to the scent of her hair and her skin.

  But here the campaign began. Kobra, Khanoom, and every last member of the clan banded together to wage it. For Lili’s own sake as well as the child’s, she must leave Sara with Kazem’s family. A child belongs to its father, they told Lili, and no woman who left her husband could contrive a different fate. “Do not even speak her name,” they advised. “Not even to yourself.” They themselves spoke of Sara now as “that child,” “the girl,” or some variant of these. They reminded Lili, none too gently, that she herself now had nothing apart from what her father allowed her.

  “But Sara won’t be safe with him!” Lili whimpered. “He’ll hurt her, he’ll—” They quickly shushed her. Kazem’s mother, not Kazem himself, would raise Sara. Khorrami Khanoom was a good woman, kind and forbearing, and, unlike Kazem’s grandmother Ma Mère, had always seemed to genuinely love “that little girl.” Had Lili’s own grandmother Khanoom not been more of a mother to her than Kobra? Well, then who better to care for Sara than her grandmother? And, what’s more, Khorrami Khanoom ran a school of her own, and in just two years “the child” could join the children there.

  It was then that a worrisome thing started to happen. Where Lili had once seen only her baby’s round face and lovely black eyes, now she saw only Kazem. When Sara cried, her brow furrowed just like his, and Lili was sure her eyes were his, too.

  Really, though, there was no choice, and therefore nothing to consider. One week her aunt Zaynab stopped bringing Sara to her and soon afterward Khanoom wrapped Lili’s chest with long, thin strips of cotton to stop her milk, pulling them so taut that several times she caught her breath and cried out from pain. Gradually her milk dried up and the soreness in her chest began to ease, but for many weeks afterward her throat would feel so tight and raw that she could not speak for all her grief.

  “Let her sit and wait until her hair turns as white as her teeth!”

  When, after several weeks, Lili had still not returned to their apartment, Kazem refused to divorce her. Sohrab had consented to let him keep the bride money as well as all the items in her trousseau. He’d even hinted that Kazem could expect even more money on top of that. Still Kazem refused. “Let her sit and wait until her hair turns as white as her teeth!” was his reported reply to the divorce petition.

  But Kazem’s willfulness was no match for her father’s, nor for Sohrab’s unique resources. Over the years Sohrab had collected a wide assortment of friends and acquaintances, and among the men with whom he regularly gambled and drank were a number of the city’s most prominent government figures. In the end it was no less than a top-level minister who was dispatched to procure Lili’s divorce. Though this gentleman began his appeal respectfully enough, he proceeded quickly to issue threats. “You’ll find yourself squatting in the middle of the Sahara,” Kazem was told, “with nothing but a hollow reed to air out your misery.” The exchange ended with curses on both sides, but not, finally, without Kazem’s concession.

  Then one day the summons arrived.

  It was the first time Lili had left the house since returning from the hospital. Her hair, so smartly bobbed just weeks before, had grown scraggly and uneven. On the day the summons arrived, Khanoom trimmed it for her and combed it until it crackled and shone. Lili pulled on one of Kobra’s skirt suits, slipped on a pair of her round-toed heels, and then she and one of her aunts walked to the courthouse arm in arm.

  It was autumn by then, the season of pomegranates and quince. There was a hint of cold in the air as Lili made her way up Avenue Pahlavi. The leaves of the plane trees had turned golden and had begun fluttering down to the sidewalks. In the distance she could make out the brown peaks of Mount Damavand rising above the city. Soon the whole of Tehran—from t
he mountains to the rooftops to the streets and the alleyways—would be brushed over with snow. There was a chance Sohrab would let Lili return to school after the winter holidays, and there she might once again be just a girl among many others.

  The clerk, a portly, mustachioed fellow with heavy-lidded eyes, removed his glasses, peered into her face, and asked her—repeatedly—if she was certain she understood the meaning of the petition. “Divorce,” he intoned, “is a most serious matter. The most serious, in fact. Are you certain you wish to proceed, young lady?” Each time she nodded her head a firm yes, but he’d asked her again and again. Finally, though, the clerk returned his glasses to his face and, after a last deep sigh, he slid his pen to her side of the desk. With a slow and certain hand, Lili signed her name, and with that she was at last free.

  Four

  In Sohrab’s House

  “I had nothing, I was no one. A divorcée was considered no better than a prostitute back then. But he made something of me, my father, and that would be the second miracle of my life.”

  BY THE MIDDLE OF the century rich Tehroonis had already begun their exodus to the north, toward Mount Damavand, where the air was more pure and more temperate and land was still plentiful, and from the day he first left his mother’s house on Avenue Moniriyeh, Sohrab had followed their lead. Edging farther and farther up Avenue Pahlavi, he’d sought out a series of increasingly smart living quarters for himself. The same exacting eye that had served him so well in his work appraising Persian carpets he also turned to the decoration of his own surroundings, with the result that every room he called his own boasted gold-footed banquettes, lacquered coffee tables, velvet drapes, and the very finest silk carpets piled three and four deep. Sohrab was also most particular about keeping up with the latest technical innovations to come to Iran. Each new apartment or house he rented boasted another set of wonders—running water, electricity, a phone line, and so on.