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!”
LILI 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.
In Tehran she’d grown accustomed to walking with her eyes cast down and if anyone spoke to her in the streets she immediately quickened her step. Now she ambled around town for hours all by herself, smiling and chirping greetings as she went, and the fact that no one said much more to her than “Guten Tag” only increased her feeling of liberty.
At first Lili walked without any particular purpose in mind, but she found one soon enough. With her first month’s allowance from Sohrab she bought herself a tube of red lipstick, a pair of white gloves with a pearl set at each wrist, a bag of peaches, a pot of geraniums for her balcony, and a pillbox hat she liked to wear cocked to one side. What was left—about half of her allowance—that month and in all the months to come she sent back to Kobra in Tehran.
The funds would be much needed, as Kobra’s circumstances had turned dire since Lili had left Iran.
After twenty years of a marriage punctuated by countless separations, two divorces, and many more near divorces, Kobra had left Sohrab’s house for good. This momentous break was not attended by any formal petition or document of any kind, but Kobra did not doubt the finality of the move. With both Nader and Lili in Europe, Khanoom and Sohrab’s sisters would not be hauling Kobra back to his house or to their own house on Avenue Moniriyeh, and with Sohrab still in thrall to his blue-eyed jinn, even her most heartfelt labors were inadequate to secure a corner of his house.
She spent the first few weeks at her mother’s house. Long since inured to Kobra’s comings and goings, Pargol still kept a spare room free for her, but this time Kobra felt herself less than welcome there. In recent years Pargol had been content to delegate most of the day-to-day affairs of her household to one of her daughters-in-law. Kobra’s first few days back passed amiably enough, but when it was discovered that this time Kobra’s stay was to be permanent, there was suddenly less meat in Kobra’s portions at dinner—with a corresponding coolness in Kobra’s own manner toward her sister-in-law. The quarrel threatened to turn violent when Kobra discovered that someone had taken a pair of scissors to one of her best dresses in the night, reducing it to shreds. Her sister-in-law swore her innocence on the graves of seven generations of her ancestors, but this did nothing to dissuade Kobra of the culprit’s identity.
Kobra left the house in a huff and and found herself a flat in a derelict quarter of the city, on Zahirodolleh Alley. The landlord had not been keen to rent to her, a single woman. “Trouble,” he said, shaking his head, “always trouble,” but in the end he’d found himself unable to refuse the bills she pressed into his hands. To support herself, Kobra began taking in sewing here and there, mostly for women in the neighborhood but only as much as was strictly necessary. She ate just milk and flatbread, and quite often she forgot to eat at all. And so great did her losses now seem that not even the great passion of the last several years, her passion for real estate, could spur her toward greater enterprise.
Kobra would entertain just one visitor in her new home, her former son-in-law, Kazem. When news of Lili’s departure from Iran reached him, Kazem wasted no time seeking Kobra out on Zahirodolleh Alley. By then there was nothing at all left of the courtesies with which he’d once approached her at Sohrab’s house. The one time she refused to open the door for Kazem, he made such a scene that the landlord threatened to put her out and keep the month’s rent as penalty for the disturbance. It was impossible to turn Kazem away after that.
As soon as she heard him knocking at her door—three hard, quick raps—Kobra would spring at once to her feet. Kazem would shoulder his way past her and make a quick search of the apartment’s three small rooms. When he finished rifling through the drawers and cupboards and tossing the contents about the floor, he’d grab her by the wrist or the neck, grind the heel of his shoe over her bare foot, and demand that she tell him where Lili had gone, and with whom.
“I know nothing,” Kobra would tell him, careful always to keep her voice low, her face impassive. “I know nothing at all.”
“May her spine rot—and yours, too, you hag!”
These episodes invariably left her trembling and rushing to the stove to burn wild rue to cancel out the curse, but however unsettling, however terrifying, Kazem’s visits were not mentioned in any of Kobra’s missives to Lili. “I have nothing to complain of but your absence,” Kobra’s nieces wrote to Lili on her behalf. Of Sara, Kobra consistently reported: “She is thriving in her grandmother’s care,” and Lili, newly arrived in Germany, had no reason at all to doubt the honesty of Kobra’s claims.
One day, after Kazem had come round for her and she felt herself growing truly desperate, Kobra raised her eyes and then her palms heavenward. She stated her case in the simplest terms. On account of the blue-eyed jinn she now had no husband and no home. One child—her littlest, her baby—was dead and now her other two had been spirited away. Of Kazem’s torments she felt no need to say anything at all. “I leave the judgment to You,” she said finally. Kobra lowered her gaze, folded her hands back into her lap, and then she began waiting for her answer.
Since his own arrival in Germany several months earlier, Nader had taken a room in a house of five women, a widow and her four young daughters. They were all exquisitely beautiful—with long, flaxen curls and bright blue eyes—but none more so than Margarethe, the sister with the shriveled arm. “A birth defect,” Nader had whispered in Lili’s ear before taking her to visit the family for the first time. “Something to do with a drug her mother took during the war.”
He proceeded to explain that the three other daughters of the house left each morning at dawn for jobs in town, leaving Margarethe and her mother, Isolde, to labor in their tiny cottage kitchen. Isolde baked fruit pies she sold to restaurants and boardinghouses while Margarethe sewed tablecloths, dish towels, and aprons. When Lili first laid eyes on her, Margarethe was holding a large square of yellow-and-white-checkered fabric between her toes and working her needle and thread through it with her good arm. She was to Lili a vision of industriousness and good cheer, and through the ensuing months of their friendship Lili would rarely encounter the girl otherwise.
Margarethe was also exceedingly bright. No sooner had Lili offered her one of her cheery but poorly pronounced “Guten Tags” than Margarethe proposed, for a small weekly fee, to tutor her in German. From then on, three afternoons a week Lili walked from her room in town, through an enormous wheat field buzzing wi
th insects, and into the crumbling four-room cottage for her German lessons. Margarethe’s pedagogical method consisted of ordering Lili to memorize twenty words from the dictionary every night and then teasing her as she struggled to pronounce them. As the tutorial progressed, the cottage filled with the aroma of vanilla, cinnamon, plums, and apples, distracting Lili no end from her studies. On some lucky days, she and Margarethe ate the slightly burnt pies Isolde could not hope to sell in town.
Lili spent her evenings in the boardinghouse poring over her newly acquired German grammar books until all the ders and dies and dases threatened to make her head burst, and then she’d go sit on her balcony and watch the people in the street below. On Saturday and Sunday evenings she joined her brother in town, looked on as he held court with his many new friends, and thought about all the wonderful things to come.
There were few jobs for a foreign girl like her, but at Sohrab’s word Nader had made inquiries and secured a spot for her as an orderly at a foundling hospital run by Catholic nuns. If she did well there, Nader promised her, she could eventually earn a place in medical school. She’d be a doctor! The prospect thrilled her, and so Lili wasted no time in joining the ranks of skinny, dark-skinned immigrant girls—Turks, Greeks, Yugoslavians—who’d come to Germany after World War II to be thrown together with no common language, and jobs that left them little time to wonder about one another’s circumstances or even to give much thought to their own.
The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life Page 14
