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

by Jasmin Darznik

  Johann left the house feeling bitter and dejected but not without his best suit draped carefully over his arm. He and Lili pooled their money and bought each other a pair of matching engagement rings (the thinnest slivers of ten-karat gold—their budgets allowed for no better). Then they decided they would need something else to commemorate the occasion. They spent the better part of a January afternoon ducking into the city’s finest boutiques, considering trinkets and tokens they could not possibly afford. When they tired of that game, they found an antique shop and settled on a silver candlestick and matching silver vase and three stems of nearly fresh orchids from an open-air market.

  Johann booked two rooms in a hotel for their “engagement party,” and since hers was the better one of the two, it was there that they slipped their engagement rings onto each other’s fingers and made their promises. At midnight they kissed, said their good nights, and then Johann retired to his own hotel room. Between her past and his Catholic upbringing, there was no need for a chaperone that evening.

  While his enthusiasm for the East was certainly attractive, there were certain practical conditions for Johann to meet before they could marry.

  “What conditions?” he asked, confident that by defying his family he’d already surmounted the most difficult challenge Lili could set for him.

  “I don’t want you to drink. Well, not so much, anyway.”

  “Then I won’t,” he answered quickly. “I won’t drink at all.”

  Lili nodded. “Good,” she said. “But there’s something else.” She cleared her throat and, blushing slightly, put the matter forth in a single word: “Circumcision.”

  Johann blushed back, bowed his head, and proceeded to ask her what, exactly, that entailed. Rousing all the professionalism she’d acquired over the foregoing three years, she explained the details of the procedure, employing all the proper medical terms and even drawing him a textbook-worthy sketch. “I see,” he noted when she finished, his voice even despite the fact that his face had been drained of all color.

  When he left that night she was not at all certain he would return, but another hour found him knocking at her door. He had more questions for her—not about circumcision this time, but about Islam proper. The next few hours progressed with him asking her questions of increasing theological subtlety. Her German was, by then, quite passable, but she found her vocabulary limited in matters of faith. She answered as best she could. Johann spent an hour in his car only to return with more questions. There was an interlude before dawn when they slept, she in her room and he down in the street in his car.

  “Call the hospital and make an appointment,” he told her when light cracked over the horizon at six o’clock the next morning.

  Circumcisions were far from routine even among infants at the clinic, but the procedure had certainly never before been attempted on a man in his thirties. No precautions were spared. Johann was counseled as if for brain surgery, advised to proceed only under general anesthesia, and required to spend two nights in the hospital. After he’d been wheeled out of sight, Lili sat by herself in the waiting room, studying the black-and-white tiles at her feet and biting her nails down to bloody nubs. As the hours stretched on, she began to consider what she could possibly say to his family if he wound up dying on the operating table.

  Johann finally emerged after three hours, heavily drugged and smiling goofily, his cheeks the brightest shade of red she had seen in her life. Infection had set in and his condition was critical. A massive dose of antibiotics was administered, and Lili’s worry now turned into hysteria. She paced the halls and appealed to God with every last prayer she remembered, and many more that she made up that day.

  When Johann’s fever reached 104 degrees, he turned his eyes slowly to her. “Telegraph Mutti,” he whispered between labored breaths. “Tell her to come, but don’t tell her anything….” Within hours, Mutti and Maria descended on the hospital in their trench coats, trailing their peppermint and cigarette perfume through the corridors. They brushed past Lili without a hello and made their way straight to Johann’s sickbed. But why had he been brought to the hospital in the first place? Had he been ill? What kind of surgery had he undergone? Mutti and Maria pleaded and begged and even, in their desperation, began to suggest bribes—only to be frustrated at every turn. Elsa, arriving some time later from Frankfurt, noted the lack of visible bandages and guessed straightaway what had transpired. But was it really possible he had let this thing be done to him, Mutti cried, and when Johann, whose fever had finally begun to ebb, nodded weakly from the hospital bed the women’s cries rose up and echoed through the halls. The Iranian girl had come straight from hell, they wailed, and she’d bury them all in time.

  Against all such predictions, Johann, at least, recovered. Within a week of his operation, he returned to work and resumed his weekly dates with Lili. He visited both the beer halls and his family with less and less frequency, and in his spare hours he took to perusing volumes on Iranian literature, history, and architecture. Then, as soon as Lili sat for her final exam and extracted her diploma from the University of Göttingen, Johann handed in his resignation. He sold off his Audi and all but his most cherished books. With the money from these, his savings, and Lili’s small contribution, he bought a black Mercedes sedan that he and Lili would drive to Iran.

  It was 1962. For three weeks they would subsist on a diet of bread, coffee, and the occasional fruit plucked from a roadside tree. Their only luxuries were a tour of the gambling casino in Monaco and the purchase of a pair of suede pumps Lili spied in a Viennese boutique. At the Austro-Yugoslav border they were searched and questioned in a windowless room that smelled heavily of garlic and sweat. When they were well into Turkey, Lili discovered one of her suede pumps was missing. Johann turned the car back toward Yugoslavia, freed the missing shoe from the clutch of a surly and poorly shaven customs officer, and with that the couple headed back toward Iran to be married.

  Eight

  Peacock Throne

  “I can still remember her dress,” Lili said as she began to speak of the last years in Iran. “Blue velvet, cut open at the shoulders. She wore it to serve me tea. Can you imagine such a thing? To give a girl a dress like that and then call her mother kharab, broken? And that’s what she called me, too. Kharab. A prostitute.”

  IRANIANS HAD WELCOMED A succession of three queens over the preceding decades: the Egyptian princess Fawzia, the green-eyed Soraya, the formidable Farah Diba. This parade of royal brides posed a riddle as complex as any of the changes to occur during the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In generations past, infertile and otherwise undesirable wives would most likely have been kept alongside new ones, but as heir to his father’s modernization campaign as well as Reza Shah’s strategic, often uneasy alliances with the West, the second Pahlavi monarch had embraced the custom of taking a single wife. Whatever cost this extracted privately, in practice it meant that again and again the country would be treated to a new queen and a wedding celebration made ever more majestic by the country’s oil and the shah’s ambitions for Iran.

  When Lili returned from Europe to become a bride in the early sixties, she did so by force of her own considerable ambitions, brandishing a foreign diploma that compelled everyone to call her Madame Doctor—the first of the family and the first for many years yet. To the even greater astonishment of her cousins, aunts, and stepmothers, she also brought with her a handsome, well-mannered, blue-eyed farangi eager to live in the country and also to convert to Islam in order to marry her.

  “She’s got herself Richard Burton!” her cousins marveled, hiding their smiles behind their hands.

  “Yes, her bread’s been drenched in oil, that one,” her aunts and stepmothers concurred, “but just how did she pull it off?”

  Day after day members of the clan appeared at Nader’s apartment in a newly built concrete housing development in West Tehran. Kobra had been living in the apartment since Nader’s return from Germany earlier that year, and
until they managed to find work it would be Lili and Johann’s home as well. As the clan filed into the apartment to greet the new couple, Lili, linking her arm in Johann’s, watched mouth after mouth fall agape, flashed a brilliant smile, and proceeded to savor the clan’s collective stupor.

  But when, finally, the last of the introductions had been made and she was free to venture out into the streets, Lili would find cause for astonishment even greater than her relatives’. In her absence Tehran had seemingly shrugged off the last of its eighteenth-century foundations and transformed itself into a twentieth-century metropolis. Cranes and high-rise buildings had shot up in every direction. The streets were now clotted with traffic, the city skyline wreathed in perpetual smog. Scores of young Iranians had left for Europe and, increasingly, for America, but here in the streets of Tehran Lili was suddenly witness to a reverse exodus. Thousands of foreigners had come to live and work in the country (by the seventies there would be nearly a million), and to accommodate them the once-modest Mehrabad Airport, the portal through which they all passed, was swallowing whole farms as it fanned out into the countryside.

  Nowhere, though, did the changes seem more striking to her than among the female population of Tehran. With their short shift dresses, pocketbooks, and bouffants, most Tehrooni women were now as indistinguishable from the foreign women in the streets as they were indifferent to the veiled women who walked beside them. Most shocking of all, wherever she looked in the capital everyone, from the pious old chadoris to the soigné young ladies, now had cigarettes pressed between their lips.

  But where, Johann mused, were the rose gardens of which the poet Sa’adi had so rapturously written? What had become of the bejeweled thrones? The fabled monuments? Lili began to worry that Johann’s penchant for Persian antiquity had played too great a part in his decision to marry her. She resolved, therefore, to leave this bewildering new Tehran behind for the moment and devote her fiancé’s first weeks in Iran to searching for the most blighted regions of her native land.

  It was to be their Tour of Destitution. She borrowed a few hundred tomans from Khanoom and then, beginning with some of the poorest districts of the capital and ending with the most forlorn of its neighboring villages, Lili and Johann bumped and jerked along in rusted buses for three weeks, resting at what she made sure were the most humble lodgings along the way. Johann observed everything with great care and took notes in a small leather-bound notebook purchased for that very purpose. When Lili saw that the dereliction of Tehran’s southerly neighborhoods—largely unchanged despite the transformations that had taken place elsewhere in the capital—failed to rattle him, she became curious about how intimately he’d known poverty himself. Back in Germany he’d once talked of the war, of the work camps and trekking from Russia to Germany with his father, but the story had been related with scant detail.

  In any event, when she saw that the Tour of Destitution did not diminish Johann’s enthusiasm for Iran, or for her, she rewarded him with another tour, the Tour of Many Splendors. As part of this journey, they peeked through the gates of the shah’s palace in Niavaran, surveyed the lush valleys and snowy peaks of Mount Damavand, and then headed south for an extended ramble through the architectural jewels of Isfahan, Shiraz, and Persepolis, most of which Lili would be seeing for the first time in her life.

  Here there was plenty to delight Johann. His notebook was soon full of sketches and scribbles and he resorted to documenting the Tour of Many Splendors in the margins of pages chronicling the earlier Tour of Destitution. He walked the length of Isfahan’s central square in a daze, traced a reverential finger along the calligraphy adorning Hfez’s tomb in Shiraz. In Persepolis, Johann fell speechless at the colossal tombs hewn of ochre rock.

  But the greatest surprise came on the road back from Persepolis when a wiry, dark-skinned villager greeted Johann in English, bowed his head, and proceeded to kiss his hands. Thorough as it had been, Johann’s study of Iranian history had not prepared him for such a welcome.

  Lili did her best to explain. A long succession of invasions (Greek, Arab, Mongol, Turkish, English) had been wedded to the Iranian gift for hospitality and a more elemental instinct for survival. Over the centuries, the union had managed to produce a widespread strain of obsequiousness toward foreigners. That such deference came laced, at least occasionally, with suspicion and resentment was something Lili kept to herself for the time being. Johann, shaking himself free of the would-be supplicant, pronounced the episode the most incredible of their journey so far.

  On the way back to Tehran, Lili chanced to read a sign for the village of Sr and decided to dedicate the last leg of the Tour of Many Splendors to a search for her long-lost aunt Zahra.

  As a young girl Zahra, with her full lips and lovely almond-shaped eyes, had been considered among the prettiest of her sisters. At fourteen, just a few years before Kobra’s marriage to Sohrab, Zahra had been married off to a wealthy but ill-tempered widower. The union had not suited her at all, and so she’d badgered and tormented her husband until he at last consented to divorce her. Had she taken up widow’s weeds, Zahra might have eventually been forgiven this disgrace. Instead, Zahra eloped with a second husband to the town of Sr, and thereafter her family acted as though she had died, or else had never been born. Zahra had not been seen in Tehran for many years, though her mother, Pargol, and later Kobra had been known to send her letters in Sr through a scribe.

  Lili and Johann found Zahra sitting on the front steps of a honey-colored cottage, peeling an orange and looking resplendent in her exile. Though she was well into her forties by then, Zahra’s plump lips, sweeping eyebrows, full breasts, and deep-throated laugh made her a woman of striking beauty. She clearly cared nothing for Western fashions and wore her veils in the old style, rather like an Indian sari, cut of beautiful crepe de chine and tailored to perfection. Yet Zahra’s allure rested, really, on a less definable quality: saltiness. “Zahra namak dareh,” it was said of her. “Zahra has salt,” meaning that her charms were exquisitely seasoned. In the town of Sr it was a well-known fact that with just one glance from her kohl-lined eyes and a quick toss of her veil Zahra could make old men and teenage boys alike blush. Lili found her salty, indeed, and adored her for it.

  Zahra was just as taken with her niece. “Bah, bah, bah!” she exclaimed as she appraised both Lili and Johann. “You’ve done well for yourself, Lili-jan!” Zahra brought armloads of oranges, nearly as big as honeydews, from her basement and as she peeled them the juice sprang from under her long, painted fingernails and scented the whole room. “Second marriages are certainly the best,” Zahra purred as she handed Lili slice after slice of her luscious oranges. “Don’t you agree, Lili-jan?”

  To Lili there was little about Zahra’s skinny, balding second husband, Mahmoud, that suggested the amorous skills at which she more than hinted to Lili around the korsi every night. In fact, during the course of Lili and Johann’s three-day stay in Sr, Mahmoud loved nothing so much as to pass the evenings with Johann and his transistor radio, scanning the dial for European stations. He claimed to be especially interested in the news from Germany. “Your countrymen are the cleverest people in all the world!” Mahmoud exclaimed. Not for the last time, Johann struggled, and failed, to explain his family’s origins. “I love the sound of the German language!” Mahmoud beamed, his admiration for Johann, and the Germans, undimmed by Johann’s protests. “So very smart!” Mahmoud pressed his transistor radio and earplugs into Johann’s hands, begging him to translate, and so great was Mahmoud’s pleasure that more than once he rose to his feet and clapped his hands.

  By the time Lili and Johann returned to the capital, the clan’s stupor had given way to suspicion, rumor, and outright censure. “May I die!” one of Lili’s aunts declared. “Sohrab Khan’s daughter has been traipsing about the country in every conceivable direction.”

  “With a foreigner!” a cousin cried out.

  “Unchaperoned and unveiled!” added another.

  �
��And what proof is there,” said the aunt, “that this man will really marry her?”

  Lili’s cousins, the ones who’d traveled abroad and adopted a modern outlook, did their best to appease Khanoom and the more pious family elders. A European man, they were quick to note, did not want for women, and therefore sex, in his own country. Surely, then, this one had traveled to Iran with noble intentions? And anyway, Lili’s cousins continued, what exactly was there left for Lili to lose and for them to protect? It wasn’t as if a young girl’s chastity were at stake. This last line of argument proved the most persuasive, though her cousins were always careful not to use it within earshot of Lili herself.

  Lili’s and Johann’s attentions, meanwhile, had turned to appeasing the demands of the Iranian government. When a Muslim man married a foreigner in Iran, his bride was instantly converted to Islam through the ordinary Muslim marriage rites, a provision that would prove handy for the Iranian men who’d begun returning from their travels with European and American girlfriends and fiancées. But when a non-Muslim sought to marry a Muslim woman in Iran, he was thrown to the mercies of Iranian bureaucracy. Johann and Lili endured a three-hour-long interview at a government ministry only to be waved away with a sixteen-point list of requirements to be fulfilled before they could even apply for a marriage certificate.

  Owing to Lili’s foresight, the first qualification, circumcision, had already been met. Declarations of support were made and notarized, male relatives deposed, immunizations administered, and so on until finally Lili pulled on Khanoom’s longest, thickest, blackest veil and took Johann by the hand to tackle the last of the sixteen requirements: Johann’s formal conversion to Islam.