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

by Jasmin Darznik

  Mr. Dr. Headmaster was a thoughtful man, educated at a famous French institute and conversant in all the latest psychoanalytic theories. Mr. Dr. Headmaster studied the mother, he studied the daughter, and then he wasted no time in delivering his diagnosis: All of Sara’s strange moods and disruptive behaviors could be traced back to a lack of motherly love. Her lack of motherly love. To this there was no possible reply, or any Lili would permit herself to make to so genteel, thoughtful, and educated a man as Mr. Dr. Headmaster. Every time Sara made a scene at school, Lili was called into his office. She could never do anything but bow her head, press her lips together, and nod. And then, as she sat stricken with the force of Mr. Dr. Headmaster’s assessment and the weight of her own unspoken words, there came Sara herself, her hair invariably disheveled and her eyes swollen from crying, making her way forward with all the confusion and rage of the child she still very much was in those years.

  On Mr. Dr. Headmaster’s suggestion, Sara and Lili began to spend Saturday afternoons together. “It will calm her,” he assured Lili. “It will bring you closer to each other.”

  Saturday after Saturday, Sara pouted and grimaced, shot her dark looks or refused to look at Lili at all, but when they went shopping together she suddenly became as breathless, cheery, and spirited as a little girl. She spent hours trying on clothes—dresses, slacks, ankle boots, and jackets—all nearly as smart and expensive as the clothes the Sa’ad Abad girls brought back from their European holidays.

  “Tell me, do I look like you?” Sara would ask her in the dressing room, eyes darting from her own reflection to Lili’s in the dressing room mirror. “Do you think I will be as beautiful as you someday? Are my eyes like yours?”

  What Lili saw, in these moments, was a strange double exposure: Sara at two, at six, then at twelve, but also all those broken intervals, the separations and the absences between all the other Saras she’d known. “Of course,” Lili would say. “Very, very much.”

  One Saturday in summertime they visited the new amusement park in North Tehran. Lili bought them ice creams, thick dollops of rose-infused, pistachio-studded cream pressed between two wafers, and together they made their way through the grounds. At dusk young girls appeared in kitten heels and shift dresses, linking arms as they walked with their beaus. Sara’s eyes always lingered on the prettiest ones. When they reached the large artificial lake at the center of the park, Lili rented a paddleboat—a red one; Sara had been most particular about its color—and then she and Lili took turns steering it around the lake with a pair of plastic oars and from there they watched the Ferris wheel, the women’s skirts billowing up as it rose and fell, rose and fell, and the smears of colored lights as the machine spun faster and faster against the sky.

  Lili would be a mother yet. The more unruly Sara became and the more desperate she herself felt—about Sara but also about her in-laws and about Johann’s drinking—the more determined she was to have another child. This, however, was an ambition with which her body refused to cooperate, and so one by one she found her way to the examination room of every last fertility doctor in Tehran. She enrolled herself in treatments she and Johann could ill afford; endured injections and examinations and surgeries that left her dizzy, sore, bloated, and exhausted; submitted herself to Kobra’s unctions, tinctures, and compresses; trekked to mosques and martyrs’ shrines; gave alms to the poor; and sought her fortune in tea leaves, coffee grains, and the verses of Hfez.

  At all this, Johann looked on, dumbfounded. He was forty years old and fatherhood, when he considered it at all, seemed a vaguely appealing but hardly essential prospect.

  “Muss das sein?” he asked her again and again. Must it be?

  “Yes,” she answered, for every failure only increased her desire for a child.

  Then one year she flew to Israel by herself, spent a week making the rounds of Tel Aviv’s top fertility specialists, and returned to Iran with her blood flush with hormones. She would not let herself hope for it, not quite, but she’d conceived the very first month. She began to walk with her hips thrust forward and one hand cradling her imperceptible bump. She sailed through shops, marketplaces, and department stores, bought herself a crib, bed linens, a stroller, and a rocking chair. By the second month, she had assembled a fully functioning nursery—bottles and diapers and all—and she passed all her spare hours daydreaming there in her new rocking chair. She scarcely noticed the bottles of Shams beer and the overflowing ashtrays. She smiled, brilliantly and often.

  On a morning in the third month of her pregnancy, Lili threw back the sheets, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and found herself sitting in a large, wet circle of blood. She fainted as soon as her toes touched the floor.

  When she came to, she found herself in a bed at King’s Serenity. She jerked up and ripped off her oxygen mask. The contractions that came then were so faint and quick that she scarcely recognized them as labor pains, and it was only when she lifted her head to check the sheets for blood that she saw him. Her baby, her son.

  She caught him herself.

  Very gently, she wiped his face clean with the edge of her gown and pressed him to her chest. He had no pulse, no color, and was so small, no more than five inches long, that she could hold him in the palm of her hand.

  For a quarter of an hour she held him to her, and she would have held him much longer but for the vein she imagined beating to life in his temple. When screams ripped loose from her throat, when her cries filled the corridors, nurses filed into the room and plunged a shot of morphine into her arm. One by one the nurses and orderlies took turns attempting to ease the stillborn from her hands. Her mouth fell slack, her lids grew heavy, but still she would not ease her grip. A doctor appeared, clipped the umbilical cord, ordered a second shot of morphine. The placenta would not come, the bleeding would not stop, her pulse grew slack, and through it all Lili kept her eyes peeled on her tiny baby, willing the vein to beat once more in his temple until suddenly there was nothing but darkness.

  “Do you want the hospital to bury him?” came a far-off voice.

  Lili opened her eyes. Mariam was sitting at the foot of the bed, and in her arms she held a small white bundle.

  Lili shuddered. If they buried him at all, they’d pitch him into some horrid communal grave outside the city. “No!” she shouted. She reached out her arms for him, pressed him to her chest, and then together she and Mariam waited in silence until Kobra came.

  Kobra did not bury the stillborn. That day she paced the street outside the morgue for nearly an hour, willing herself to enter and have done with it, but in the end she could not bring herself to bury Lili’s baby. Instead, Kobra put him in a large glass jar filled with rubbing alcohol and hid him deep in her closet.

  She never spoke of it to Lili, but when neighbors or relatives came round to visit Kobra would pull the jar from its hiding place. “His eyes are blue!” she’d tell them. She traced the glass with her forefinger, outlining the curve of his spine, his head, his tiny fists. “Blue, blue, blue!”

  “She thinks it’s Omid,” her cousins and sisters whispered to one another, recalling the madness that had gripped her when she’d found her own little boy dead at the foot of the pool. “She thinks she’s lost him again.” They were kind; they were indulgent. They nodded and they smiled, and when she grew quiet, they took her arm and led her gently away from the jar.

  Five weeks later, when Lili herself had managed, mostly, to submerge her grief in work, the stillborn fetus was just as beautiful, just as perfect, and Kobra just as unwilling to part with him.

  “His eyes are blue,” she murmured, touching a finger gently to the glass. “Blue, blue, blue…”

  “But his soul!” her sisters reasoned. “You must bury him. God will not take his soul until you bury him.”

  Kobra narrowed her eyes, puckered her lips, and began contemplating the fate of the stillborn’s soul.

  She buried him in the sixth week. She went alone, told no one her plan. She pulled on
her chador—reserved in those days for pilgrimages to Mashhad or the holy days of Ramadan—bundled the stillborn back into the white hospital sheet, and carried him to the cemetery. She performed the ablutions herself, swaddled him in a funeral shroud no bigger than a pillowcase, and buried him in the children’s section of the graveyard.

  “The child’s name?” they asked her that day.

  Kobra lifted her eyes. “His name?”

  Later it would seem that only the blank expanse on the gravestone could contain her grief, but for hours Kobra would sit by herself, desperate to think of a name to give Lili’s baby. Long after the other mourners had filed out of the cemetery, Kobra sat cross-legged beside his grave, rocking herself back and forth, weeping and praying until at last she felt her madness lift and she imagined salvation descending to take its place.

  As Kobra recovered from her grief over the stillborn’s death and Lili diverted hers by seeking out yet another series of fertility treatments, Johann dedicated himself to his own cause: Iran’s infrastructure. “I know what this country needs!” Johann declared to Lili one day, handing her a thick pile of sketches. “Ready-mix concrete!”

  For all the feverish construction of those years, concrete was still mixed by hand in Iran. It was a costly and time-consuming, not to say backbreaking, process, and one for which Johann, bent over the dining table with his drafting tools and maps, sketching and calculating through packs of cigarettes and a bottle of English whiskey, had finally managed to find a solution. That the project might distract Lili from the agonies of infertility had made him doubly sure of its necessity.

  “But how much will it cost us?” she asked him.

  “Just thirty thousand tomans to start, and we’re sure to get a loan for the rest.”

  Lili cast her eyes up to the heavens. At that moment they had less than a thousand tomans between them, but the project’s merits were immediately obvious to her. She lowered her gaze and looked about her. “We’ll sell the condominium,” she sighed.

  With that they moved into a smaller apartment farther south on Avenue Pahlavi. Johann procured a loan from a German bank the following month, quit his job at Etco, and struck out some sixty miles northwest of Tehran, to a place so forlorn that not even a dog could recognize its master, as the saying went, and there he bought a thirty-acre parcel of land. A quick survey of the closest village put him in contact with a copper-skinned, broad-faced Azari Turk named Fato’allah. A long-unemployed father of three, Fato’allah took one look at this lanky, blue-eyed foreigner and cheerfully attached his fate to the venture.

  Johann bought a clanking, sputtering, weather-beaten pickup truck and then he and Fato’allah began filling its bed with bricks. They spent several weeks working side by side, building a low brick wall to demarcate the property line from the neighboring wasteland. In the middle of the day, with the sun at the height of its mercilessness, Johann and Fato’allah spread out a carpet under the parcel’s lone date palm, shared a tobacco pipe, poured two cups of tea from a canister, and proceeded to eat the flatbread and walnuts Lili packed for their lunch each day. At the start of the project, Johann could not make out much more of Fato’allah’s Azari accent than “salaam” and “merci,” but in their many months together under the date palm Johann would learn to speak a more or less fluent Persian tinged with the same sweet Turkish accent as Fato’allah’s.

  Next Johann built Fato’allah a house on the property, a simple two-room structure with an adjoining privy. Fato’allah, speechless with gratitude, rounded up his family from the village and brought them to live in the cottage. Every night Fato’allah’s wife, Samira, unrolled a mattress onto the center of the floor, and every morning she rolled it back up against the wall. Whenever Lili came along with Johann to survey the factory’s progress, she’d find Samira by the door to the cottage, smiling shyly from behind her flowered kerchief while her children played nearby. Samira was perpetually pregnant. Dear God, how can another body possibly fit in there? Lili thought each time, but still the family grew. Lili improvised checkups for Fato’allah, Samira, and their children, and even if they had but three cookies and one melon in the cupboard, they would always offer everything they had to Madame Doctor alongside a freshly brewed cup of cardamom-spiced tea.

  When the brick wall ran all the way round the property, Johann and Fato’allah began to build the factory itself. The mixing machines began to rattle, churn, and hum. Together Johann and Fato’allah kept the machines working through the crushing heat of summer until, finally, the two ready-mix concrete trucks arrived, at enormous expense, from Germany, and with that the pair at last made their maiden voyage to the capital, Johann manning the wheel and Fato’allah exultant at his side.

  On Lili there now fell the dual functions of the corporation’s president and its secretary. She propped a poster in the parlor window, acquired a desk, and began negotiating the company’s contracts. Mostly her work was conducted over the phone and in the hours between her hospital shifts, but whenever signatures were required Lili pulled on a suit and drew a chair opposite her desk.

  This arrangement worked well enough until the day the landlord’s wife, Khanoom Nabavi, caught Lili’s arm in the hallway. “You have many gentleman callers, khanoom,” she murmured, averting her eyes. “Many, many men…”

  It took a moment for Lili to grasp her meaning. Khanoom Nabavi had mistaken her for one of those women whose profession could not even be named. Lili led her to the window. “You see, khanoom,” she said, pointing to the sign, “we have a company. Ready-mix concrete. My husband’s company and mine.”

  Khanoom Nabavi stared at the sign and shook her head. “Too many men…,” she murmured.

  All-merciful God, Lili thought to herself, the woman is completely illiterate! How could she get Khanoom Nabavi to understand that her and Johann’s venture was a legitimate one?

  When she next spied Khanoom Nabavi’s grandson mounting the back stairs, Lili quickly poked her head out the window and called him into the apartment. “Please,” she said, handing him some contracts and a stray pile of receipts and pointing out the poster in the window, “can you explain to your grandmother?” She specified the profession for which Khanoom Nabavi had mistaken hers.

  The young man blanched, dropped his eyes, and mumbled an apology.

  “Surely an honest mistake, agha, but should you or any of your friends or associates need any concrete,” Lili added when showing him the door, “you now know who you’re obliged to buy it from!”

  One day a woman approached Lili as she was making her way out of King’s Serenity. She wore a chador, a full, black veil. “I beg your pardon, khanoom,” she said with a nervous glance at Lili’s uniform, “but are you a nurse?”

  “A midwife.”

  “Thanks be to God!” the woman cried, and clutched Lili’s hand. “My sister, she is pregnant.” She turned her palms up and tilted her head. “But they wanted two thousand tomans there,” she said with a nod toward the hospital, “and it’s too much for us….”

  “And the public hospital?”

  “No room. They told me to bring her here, but—” She lowered her eyes.

  “But what can I do for you, khanoom-jan?”

  “Will you come to our house?”

  The woman’s hand, as she held Lili’s, trembled.

  “And where is your house?” Lili asked her.

  The woman lowered her eyes. “Tayeh Shar,” she mumbled. The Bottom of the City, the poorest district in Tehran.

  Seeing the woman’s shame only hastened Lili’s reply. “Yes,” she answered, “I will come with you, khanoom-jan.”

  They drove south by taxi, past the train station, past the vestiges of Tehran’s caravanserai, the old way station for travelers, until at last they reached a cluster of tin-roofed buildings set against a muddy slope. She’d lived not far from here once, many years ago when she’d been Kazem’s wife. Her sadness, exhaustion, and terror had prevented her from grasping the poverty of her life back t
hen. It struck her now like a blow, but she would not let her face betray her for fear of offending the woman at her side.

  Together they climbed out of the taxi. Lili let herself be led up a mud-packed path until her companion stopped before one of the shanties. In place of a door, a sheet of sun-bleached burlap had been nailed to the wall. She lifted it gingerly, entered, and then watched a dozen pairs of eyes turn to her with fear and then relief.

  “Thanks be to God!” the women cried, and pulled her inside.

  Lili squinted against the dark. The room, she gradually saw, was just ten feet wide and ten feet across. It had no window and no carpets. In the center of the room a girl of no more than seventeen lay tucked under the korsi, moaning. Her face shone with perspiration. Her patient.

  “Salaam, dokhtar-jan,” Lili said. Hello, dear girl.

  Lili set down her work bag and then turned to the oldest woman in attendance, a heavyset matron with gray braids that fell to her hips. “Her water sac?” she inquired.

  “Broken.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “Last night!”

  Lili sucked in her breath and began unpacking her tools. “Boil water!” she ordered. “Boil water at once!”

  She reached for the girl’s hand. Her pulse was regular, her temperature normal, but when Lili pressed her fingertips to the girl’s belly, just above the girl’s pelvis, she felt an unmistakable sign of trouble: she could not feel the baby’s heartbeat. The birth could be risky, fatal even, but with the girl’s contractions at less than a minute apart, there was no chance they’d reach the hospital in time.