The ceremony was officiated by Ayatollah Behbahani, a graceful, soft-spoken holy man with a black turban identifying him as a descendant of the Prophet. Johann sat cross-legged before the ayatollah, offered him a mangled, “Salaam-aleykoom [may peace be with you],” to which the ayatollah replied with a forgiving and heartfelt, “Aleykoom-al-salaam [and also with you].” Ayatollah Behbahani then commenced to whisper the requisite verses of the Koran into Johann’s ear. From her vantage point in the back corner of the mosque, Lili could make out little of the proceedings, but when the ayatollah intoned a final, “Bismillah rahmaneh rahim [in the name of God, the most gracious and compassionate],” and she saw Johann shape his mouth into the words, nod his final assent, and kiss Ayatollah Behbahani’s hands, Lili smiled broadly from behind her veil. Johann was now a Muslim. He even had a Muslim name, Amir. It meant “prince.”
After that nobody from the highest-level government minister to her most observant relatives could doubt Johann’s intentions, but no one would ever love him more than Lili’s grandmother Khanoom. “Tell him to come and sit by me,” she’d command her grandchildren and grandnieces whenever he appeared for a family dinner. She’d pull a chair in front of Johann, plant herself there, and tell them to translate for her in whatever European tongue they happened to have acquired in school. “Tell him we are proud he will soon be our son-in-law!” she ordered. “Tell him we are happy he is a Muslim now! Tell him how much we love him!” she exclaimed, and she always waited to make sure he understood every last word she had said to him.
In addition to such periodic declarations of love, Khanoom saved the best of everything she cooked for Johann and also kept a hawkish eye on his health. When he and Lili returned from a weekend of sunbathing in Ramsar, a town on the Caspian Sea, Khanoom took one look at Johann’s skin, now burnt neon pink to his very scalp, and went wild with rage. “What have you done to him?” she demanded of her granddaughter. Khanoom flew into the kitchen to whip up a soothing concoction of rose essence and rice powder. “You make sure he puts on a thick layer,” she told Lili, and then waved her away with a cutting look.
Lili and Johann’s wedding became the stuff of family lore, and it would be remembered, if for no other reason than because for the occasion she cast off yet another wedding dress and instead dressed herself in curtains.
“Why do you insist on wearing white?” her aunts and stepmothers had asked her with varying degrees of approbation. “It isn’t done for a second marriage; you will only call attention to yourself by wearing a white dress….”
As these were the very relatives who’d hastened her marriage to Kazem, Lili suppressed the urge to scream, curse, and strike. She did, however, go so far as to remind them that her first wedding dress, the one Kazem’s relatives had chosen for her, had not even been white but pale blue. Besides, Lili told them, the marriage was Johann’s first, and on his account she would consider nothing but white.
Determined as Lili was to wear a white wedding gown, with a budget of just three hundred tomans to cover all the wedding expenses, even the cheapest Western-style wedding dress in Tehran lay far outside her grasp. In any case, a perfectly lovely dress of beige-colored silk, sewn for her by Kobra, was already hanging in a closet when Lili settled onto her cousin’s sofa one day, looked out toward the garden, and found her view framed by some handsome ivory curtains. Then, just as she’d tucked a sugar cube inside her cheek and was taking her first sip of tea, she had a vision of a glorious wedding dress fashioned from the twin folds of duchesse satin that her cousin would later claim had hailed directly from France.
Such was Lili’s charm, or some later said cunning, that the curtains were taken down on the spot and the dress of mottled raw silk was left to molder and wilt in Kobra’s closet until it was finally pitched into the dustbin some years later. And by evening of the same day Kobra stood in bare feet to cut the cloth against Lili’s body. With her mouth full of pins, Kobra cautioned Lili against so flagrant a show of immodesty, but Lili only frowned and pulled the satin tighter and tighter across her breasts, her hips, her thighs.
“No, it must be like this,” Lili directed, “like this, you see.”
With the sixteen qualifications of marriage complete and the attendant documents in hand, Lili sent notice to her family of her impending wedding. The ceremony would take place just three days hence in Nader’s apartment. There was not a minute to waste. Together Lili and Kobra dragged the furniture to the peripheries of the living room. They proceeded to throw open the windows, haul the carpets onto the balcony and beat them with brooms, and drop to their knees and scour every corner with ammonia and bleach.
Now Kobra began preparing the feast. For weeks anyone who’d come to visit, cousins and clients alike, had been given oranges to eat so that Kobra could collect and clip the peels for the wedding feast’s jeweled rice. At dawn on the morning of the wedding, Lili’s aunts, stepmothers, and cousins appeared at the apartment with their largest pots, pans, and platters tucked under their arms. They soaked the rice, mixed the tiny strips of orange peel with slivered almonds, sugared, spiced, and sautéed the mixture, and finally layered it into the rice. They fried spinach pancakes, rolled the dohlmes, stirred the puddings, and to steel themselves against the heady scents and the day’s gathering heat they split open a watermelon and tossed back cup after cup of dooq, a fizzy, minty yogurt drink. At noon Lili poked her nose into the kitchen to survey their progress, drank a cup of dooq someone passed into her hands, and then struck out for the city with the three hundred tomans she and Johann had budgeted for their wedding.
Her first stop of the day was Tehran’s best florist, a favorite among the wealthy foreign set. When asked the occasion, she replied coolly, “Nothing special, just a small family gathering.” Had she confessed the true nature of the event, she would have been charged twice or three times the going rate, but by omitting this detail she managed to walk out with an armful of tuberoses and a second armful of white gladiolus and 250 tomans still left in her purse. The ruse was repeated at a pastry shop on Avenue Naderi, where she purchased three pink, beribboned boxes of pistachio-studded nougats and chickpea cookies. Finally, before turning back home, Lili stopped by a photography studio on Avenue Shah Reza and put down her remaining money—about two hundred tomans—on the counter along with a piece of paper on which she’d scribbled Nader’s address.
In the hour before the guests arrived, Lili bent her torso over the dining table and spread her hair against a white cotton tablecloth. Kobra, still weary from three steady days and nights of cleaning and cooking and sewing, ran a hot iron back and forth over Lili’s curls until they were transformed into straight, gleaming panels. Lili then sat before a mirror and watched as Kobra wound these panels around metal curlers and set each section with a slender clip. When Kobra finished arranging Lili’s hair, she raised her arms to place a rhinestone tiara (her wedding gift from Zaynab) onto her own head.
“Pretty as an aroos farangi!” Zaynab declared through moist eyes. Pretty as a foreign bride, by which she meant “much prettier than an Iranian bride.” From the kitchen Lili’s aunts and Sohrab’s stepmothers clucked their tongues and began whispering to one another with renewed vigor. “Yes, just as pretty as a foreign bride,” Zaynab continued in a louder voice, “and all the more lovely for the newly converted damad farangi [European groom] waiting for her in the next room!”
Just before sunset the agha, the holy man, arrived and the women retreated to Kobra’s bedroom as the men encircled Johann in the living room. Lili sat perched on the edge of the bed in her dress made of curtains while Zaynab and Kobra fussed with her veil and smoothed her train. The agha’s voice finally rang out, the men sent out their cheers, and Johann entered the room, red faced and eyes crinkling in a mixture of amusement and shyness. He took a seat beside Lili and gently lifted her veil. When the white satin canopy was at last unfurled, when two cones of sugar were rubbed above their heads and the canopy’s edge stitched with silver thread (to
close the mother-in-law’s tongue, it was said), there would be no guests from Johann’s family and more than a hundred from Lili’s.
The elders pronounced the jeweled rice the best in collective memory and the saffron pudding fit for the shah and his queen, while Lili’s cousins declared her tiny waist a marvel to rival a Hollywood starlet’s. At midnight the dinner spread was finally cleared away and Lili’s teenage cousin Nima pulled out his tar, an old-fashioned Iranian string instrument. When the neighbors came to complain about the noise, they were simply invited to join the festivities. The photographer captured image after image and Nima played song after song, and since there was scarcely any room to stand, Lili was the only one of the wedding party to dance.
She rose to her feet. Nothing remained of the thirteen-year-old bride she’d been, nothing of the confusion and terror she had felt when Kazem gripped her wrists and pulled him to her on their wedding night. This was an Iranian dance, an Iranian tune, and when she began to dance her groom was smiling shyly at her from across the room. She lifted her arms, tilted her head, and swayed her hips. She kicked off her shoes and let her hem down. Her hair slipped loose from its pins and she did not raise her hand to tidy it but let it fall about her bare shoulders. One song rose and slipped into the next, and on this night Lili danced only for her groom and lifted her eyes only for him.
The next day at noon Kobra knocked gently on the door. In a much-abbreviated nod to tradition, she, Zaynab, and Khanoom and some others had passed the night on the floor of the living room, and Kobra woke in the early morning to cook Lili and Johann their first meal as a married couple. Pancakes with thick clots of fresh cream, strawberries the size of plums, almond-stuffed dates, and a little vase of nasturtium trailing its vines along the delicacies—Kobra passed the offerings into Mr. Engineer’s hands and then, before taking her leave, she lowered her eyes and flashed him the shy smile with which she’d greet him in all the years to come.
By the time of Lili and Johann’s wedding, Kobra’s mother, Pargol, had lost her mind. It started several years earlier, when she lost her house. For over twenty years Kobra’s brother Ali-Ahmad had approached their mother, Pargol, with every sweet connivance gleaned from half a lifetime of loafing and swindling. “I’ll serve you for the rest of your days,” he’d sworn, clutching his heart and kneeling at her feet for extra effect. He would, he continued, make enough money to buy her a new house on the smartest boulevard in the city, where he’d hire no fewer than ten servants to tend to her. He’d go around dressed in tweeds fit for an Englishman. He’d buy her a French fur so long she’d sweep the streets of Tehran with its hem, and when she grew tired of it he would buy her three more to take its place.
Year after year Pargol merely laughed her deep-throated laugh, tousled Ali-Ahmad’s steadily thinning hair, and assured him that only death could part her from those rooms. But then, sometime after her seventieth year, Pargol began conversing with doorknobs and lightbulbs and staring at her hands for hours at a time—behaviors that, some decades hence, would posthumously be diagnosed as symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
Ali-Ahmad followed her demise with care. When he at last managed to extract the deed to her beloved house, Pargol’s condition, and his own circumstances, would deteriorate with astonishing speed. In short order Ali-Ahmad invested and lost every last toman from the sale of Pargol’s house, installed Pargol in a tiny room in his elder brother’s home, and began drinking himself to a premature death. In even shorter order, Pargol acquired the troubling habit of wandering into the street by herself and disappearing for days on end. They’d find her perched on a park bench or on the pavement of some far-flung alley, combing her long white hair with her fingers and mumbling to herself in a language completely of her own invention.
The only choice then was to keep Pargol locked in a room until death released her from her agony. In the meantime, Kobra did her best to shield her mother from its worst effect: loneliness. Kobra paid near-daily visits to wash and braid Pargol’s hair, spoon porridge and yogurt into her toothless mouth, and listen to her warbling until Kobra felt she herself might go mad. It was also Kobra who arranged for Pargol’s care on those occasions that demanded her exclusion from the family. Lili’s wedding had been one of these occasions. Pargol had spent that night eating snap peas in a basement with a servant, and though Pargol herself had seemed perfectly content with the arrangement, Kobra urged Lili and her new husband to visit Pargol just as soon as they returned from their honeymoon.
“Look here; look here!” Kobra called out brightly, straightening Pargol’s flower-print kerchief and taking her by the arm to greet the newlyweds. “Here is Lili and your new damad farangi!” If Pargol recognized her granddaughter, there was no outward sign of it whatsoever, but after several weeks of visits from the first and last foreigner she was to see in her life, Pargol at last took Johann’s hands in her own, looked deep into his eyes, and declared that she missed the purple summertime skies of the village she had left more than seventy years before.
Her marriage formalized and feted, Lili now attended to the unfinished business. “Telephone Kazem’s mother for me,” Lili told Kobra one morning soon after the wedding festivities had ended. Lili was sitting before the mirror, combing out her curls. “Tell her I want to see Sara.”
Kobra cast her eyes down to the floor and cleared her throat. “I can’t.”
“And why can’t you?”
“Because,” Kobra answered quietly, “Kazem’s mother is dead.”
Lili turned from the mirror. “But where is Sara then?”
“They say she’s gone to her aunt’s house—”
“They say? Who says? And how long—”
But Kobra had already retreated to the next room. Lili followed her. Kobra took up her prayer shawl, turned her palms upward, and began her midmorning namaz. With no choice but to wait for Kobra to finish her prayers, Lili pressed her forehead to the wall and began teasing out the implications of Kobra’s revelation.
Kobra’s namaz went on much longer than usual that morning, but some thirty minutes later she found Lili outside the bedroom door, tapping her foot and holding out the phone.
“Call them and tell them I want to see Sara,” Lili told her. “Tell them we are coming to see her and that my husband will accompany us. Call them now.”
Kobra prepared herself to defend her new son-in-law against insults by her former son-in-law and his family, but two days later, when Lili rang the Khorramis’ bell and the door to the villa swung open, it was immediately clear that Lili had correctly gauged the effect of Johann’s presence on Kazem and his family. Although Johann spoke no Persian at all and would not have understood any insult yielded at him, he was a tall, blond, blue-eyed European, and his presence at Lili’s side assured that the meeting with the Khorramis would proceed with an abundance of Persian pleasantries.
“Salaam, salaam!” Kazem called out to them as Lili, Kobra, and Johann crossed from the house into the terrace. Kazem wore a light gray double-breasted suit and silk tie, all much finer than the clothes he’d worn in the past, and an updated version of his old gray felt fedora. His arms were extended in warm welcome.
Silk carpets had been spread over the terrace of the Khorrami compound. Lili’s eye fell at once to the lovely array of sweets, melons, and iced sherbets assembled for the visit. Kazem’s aunt, Sogra Khanoom, a heavyset woman in a sleeveless shift, rose and offered her hand, and the five or six assorted relatives followed suit. Addressing Johann in halting English and with the title “Mr. Engineer,” one after another the Khorramis bid Johann welcome to Iran, and then, by extension, they also bid Lili and Kobra welcome to their home. Even Kazem, when he spoke to Lili and Kobra, used the formal address shoma rather than the more familiar toh.
Lili took in the show with satisfaction, but where, she wondered, was Sara? Just as Lili began to doubt that Sara was in the house at all, there came the sound of high heels clattering against the flagstones.
“Such a g
ood girl!” Sogra Khanoom suddenly exclaimed.
“So good with the children,” added a cousin.
“And a first-rate cook,” noted yet another cousin.
The heels clattered louder and louder until a girl paused just short of the terrace. She had straight black hair and olive skin and she wore a blue dress, a little too long in the arms, tight around the hips, and cut wide and deep in the front. A cocktail dress, in short. In her hands she was holding a tray, and she kept her eyes lowered as she approached the party.
“Come now,” Sogra Khanoom called out. Sara began passing the tea among the guests. When she came to Lili, she flicked her eyes up, just briefly. She did not smile.
“Salaam, dokhtaram,” Lili said, rising from her seat to kiss her on each cheek. Hello, my daughter.
Sara looked up toward her aunt and then back down at the tray. “Salaam,” she said.
Lili winced. Not salaam, madaram (hello, Mother), as was the customary sign of respect and affection, but only “hello.”
Lili struggled to maintain her composure and the pleasantries resumed around her. Sara finished serving the tea, took a cup for her herself, and then sat beside her aunt. When Sara raised the cup to her mouth, the collar of her dress slipped, exposing one of her shoulders. Sara tugged it back into place, but very casually, very carelessly.
They have not taught her shame, Lili thought to herself. They have not taught her modesty. It suddenly seemed very important not to look, really, at Sara in her cast-off dress, not to see this absence of shame and modesty, not to understand it as neglect.
“You’re in seventh grade now, yes?” Lili asked her.
“I don’t go to school anymore,” Sara answered.
The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life Page 21
