“Listen,” began Ma Mère. “It is true that we have servants, thanks be to God. But you must know that no matter how delicious their cooking, your husband will always want to eat the food you prepare for him.”
Ma Mère pointed to the corner of the basement, where a charcoal brazier sat low to the ground. “That is your own stove,” she explained. “You may use it for cooking all your meals.” She shuffled over to a cabinet and hauled out a large sack of rice and a jug of oil. “These are also for you, but keep them upstairs in your own quarters, so they do not get mixed up with our things down here.”
Lili took the items from Ma Mère’s hands and nodded. “Yes, khanoom!” she chirped, but the truth was that she had never made even a single pot of rice and could not begin to think how she would manage to prepare entire meals by herself. But no sooner had Ma Mère mounted the stairs than the servants took pity on Lili and began coaching her in the rudiments of cooking. Over the next several weeks they took turns showing her how to rinse and soak rice, dice and fry strips of onions to the point of translucence, and brown the lamb for Kazem’s stews. Khanoom kuchak, they called her—“little missus”—and minded her progress with growing affection.
When she was not cooking, most of Lili’s time in those early days of marriage was spent learning how to wash clothes, a solitary task that took up almost two full days each week. There were no washing machines in the country yet, and all the washing took place outside in the hoz, the rectangular pool that sat in the middle of the courtyard. It was a job most families with means delegated to their servants, but as with the cooking, Ma Mère assured Lili that it would be far more pleasing to Kazem if she herself tended to this chore.
In wintertime thick sheets of ice covered the hoz. To wash the week’s clothes, towels, and bed linens she had to first boil a kettle of water in the basement, carry it up to the courtyard, and then pour the water into the pool to melt the ice. This procedure was repeated two, three, sometimes even four times. From one of the servants she learned to carry a knife among her bundles of laundry in order to pierce through the ice on the coldest days. Turning back toward the kitchen to fetch another kettle of hot water, she would often catch a glimpse of Ma Mère’s face in the upstairs window, watching her as she worked.
She’d stand at the edge of the pool, the wind whipping the hem of her housedress as she poured water from a brass kettle into the hoz. Steam rose from its surface and the ice began to crackle. She’d hurry back down the steps to the basement, and even if stews had been simmering there since dawn, it was always the scent of the mud, loamy and sweet, that first greeted her down there. As she stood waiting for the water to come to a boil again, she learned every slope and sinew of those mud walls, and in time her eyes began to linger on the places where jagged lines arched from floor to ceiling in one continuous crack.
By the time she returned to the courtyard, the linens had already turned stiff at the cuffs and hems, as if in her absence the cold had bled into the fabric. For a while it startled her, this greed of the winter chill, but she learned to expect it with the same certainty with which she knew that if she turned her head toward the house, she’d always be met by those black eyes and that unmoving mouth.
One day after the washing was done, she climbed up to the attic and fell into her bed for a nap. She had just drifted to sleep when the door swung open and hit the wall with a sharp clap. Before she could open her eyes, she felt Kazem bearing down on her and felt his breath coming out hot and moist against her cheek.
“You’ve disgraced me in front of my grandmother!” he shouted in her ear. He began pummeling her with his fists. “Gendeh! Whore!”
“But why?” she finally managed to sob from underneath the sheets. “Why?”
He stopped, ran the back of his hand across his forehead, and told her what his grandmother had witnessed that morning.
Every day when he returned to the house, Kazem first went to Ma Mère’s quarters, where he would kneel and kiss her hands and then have his own head kissed by her in turn. On this particular day, he’d gone to greet Ma Mère and she’d refused his kiss. Ma Mère had been watching Lili and had seen that she’d neglected to rinse the soap from her hands before beginning to rinse the clothes and so had soiled the laundry. The stupidity and ineptitude of his bride were, Ma Mère assured him, unrivaled.
Kazem cleared his throat and pulled up his sleeves. Seeing this, Lili shrank farther into the sheets and pulled her arms over her head. The beating went on until at last a voice rose from the stairwell.
“Baseh! Enough!” Ma Mère called out from below. “You’ve disciplined her enough for now!”
At these words Kazem rose from the bed and left the room, only to return much later in the night, smelling of alcohol and something else, an odor she would later come to recognize as the sweet, sharp scent of vomit.
It was not yet spring when she first felt the sickness. Just two months had passed since the Night of Consummation when it began. It always came first thing in the morning, just as soon as she opened her eyes. It started like a tickle or a cough playing at the back of her throat, but then all of a sudden she would feel it snaking its way up from her stomach, hot and fast, and she’d race to the bathroom and thrust her head into the washbasin to relieve herself of it.
For a while she’d thought the sickness was on account of the beatings, but then one night Ma Mère caught Lili’s eye over the dinner table, tipped her chin up with her thumb, and delivered a diagnosis: Lili was pregnant and there would be no going back to school that year.
“But how could you let this happen?” Kobra asked Lili when, later that week, the neighborhood midwife confirmed the pregnancy. “Did your cousins tell you nothing?”
Such intimacies were, in these years, not routinely conveyed by mothers but rather by the bride-to-be’s recently married relatives, usually her closest female cousins. Lili’s cousin Soudabeh, however, had conveyed little more than giggling assurances of pleasures of the conjugal bed; contraception thus eluded Lili as wholly as that promised pleasure. Indeed, such were the limits of Lili’s knowledge that Kobra’s question completely baffled her, and it was through tears that she begged to know what she could have done to stop a baby from coming. At this Kobra slapped her own cheeks and shook her head sadly, by which she meant that the situation was too far gone for such discussions now.
“You need to take her away,” Lili next overheard Ma Mère telling Kazem. “I can’t stand her swelling up like a cow, and then all the noise of a child! It will be the death of me!”
Within a week Kazem moved Lili to an alley close to the train station in South Tehran, or Tayeh Shar, the Bottom of the City. The two-room flat was part of a squat family compound long since cordoned off into half a dozen individual apartments. The larger of the rooms had no windows and no electricity and consequently became a storage space for her trousseau and most of their furniture. They took their meals and slept in the room with the sink and a makeshift stove, shared a toilet with the landlord, his family, and the other tenants, and for baths they walked seven blocks to the closest hammam.
On the first day of every month Kazem placed three hundred tomans—his entire month’s wages—onto the dining table and told her it was her responsibility to manage their household expenses. Two hundred tomans went straightaway for the rent, and with the rest she was supposed to feed and clothe and otherwise care for the two of them. How such a meager sum could be made to accommodate not just herself and Kazem but also a child was yet another worry Lili added to her steadily mounting heap. She also found it impossible to sleep in the new apartment, and soon the misery of these early months of pregnancy was exacerbated by an unrelenting bout of insomnia and an understanding that she’d likely never return to school now that she was expecting a child.
Lili might have gone to her own mother to unburden her heart, but by that time Kobra was nursing what would be the deepest grief of her days: the death of her youngest child, Omid.
That ho
rrible day, Kobra had been in the kitchen cooking rice pudding, which Omid always ate by the bowlful. It was a delicacy that, when left too long without stirring, quickly congealed into black clumps, and Kobra had already been stirring the pudding for some time when Omid wandered out of the kitchen to play by himself.
Lili would never know for sure what happened to him. Once she’d hear a cousin speak of the child mistaking a chunk of opium for chocolate, but it could just as well have been a spider bite. And of course autumn had brought droves of baby tarantulas to the garden. No one paid them much mind even though they were known to be poisonous, but to two-year-old Omid the tarantulas would have been new, and maybe also beautiful, and perhaps he’d caught one and let it plunge its stinger into his small fist. In any case, when Kobra finished dusting her bowls of rice pudding with cinnamon she stepped out into the garden and found him lying at the foot of the hoz, curled up as if in sleep, his lips and eyelids tinted blue.
Since then, Kobra’s eyes had taken on a glassy cast, with black half-moons underneath that told of her own sleeplessness. When Omid died, Lili was already several months into her pregnancy, and no one would tell her much about the circumstances of her little brother’s death for fear that grief would enter her blood and disturb her unborn child. But Lili could see that Kobra’s grief had only deepened in the last months, and now it was Lili who could not bear to burden her mother with her own troubles, and so whenever Kobra asked about Kazem or her pregnancy, she would force herself to smile and to speak of happiness.
The first few times he cried for hours afterward. He’d drop to his knees and beg her to forgive him. Swear she was more precious to him than his own life. That he would never again raise a hand to hurt her. So desperate, so completely genuine, did Kazem seem with his pleas and promises those first few times, so apparently bewildered by his own behavior, that she smoothed his brow and hushed him as she would a child.
But soon hardly a week passed without his beating her, and every time he cried less afterward until eventually he didn’t cry at all and the excuses and apologies stopped altogether.
At night she fell asleep wondering whether he would wake up angry or happy the next day. As soon as he left for work in the mornings, she would try to guess whether he would come home for lunch or stay away until dinnertime. What could she do to please him when he returned? Should she greet him with a smile, or should she avoid his eyes until he spoke to her? Should she comb her hair and put on a fresh dress for him? Would he be glad to see her looking pretty or would he accuse her of having made herself up and gone out by herself?
The worst, by far, always came at night.
When he did not return for dinner one evening, she laid a blanket on the floor, intending to rest there just until he returned. Sometime after midnight she’d worn herself out from thinking and finally fallen asleep. Near dawn he stumbled into the apartment and kicked her sides. Her hands went at once to the bump in her belly. She shut her eyes and he lowered himself onto her. She opened her eyes for an instant and saw two strands of hair hanging loose from either side of his otherwise bald head. In the first weeks of their marriage he’d been scrupulous about grooming himself before coming to her, but over time such niceties had fallen by the wayside. She shut her eyes until, gradually, inevitably, he finished.
From Thursday afternoon until late Sunday evening she was marched from relative’s house to relative’s house to be appraised and advised and feted until her cheeks burned with the effort of smiling through it all. It was at these gatherings that she first realized how much had been hidden from her about Kazem throughout their courtship. He flew into a rage at the smallest pretense, mocked and belittled everyone who crossed his path. Lili observed how guarded his family seemed in his presence and the care they took when addressing him. Many of them, she discovered, would not so much as meet his eyes from across the room. Of all of them, Ma Mère was the only one capable of coaxing a smile or kind word from him.
And then there was the conversation that revealed to Lili how little she herself had managed to hide about her life with Kazem.
It happened during one of her visits to the Khorramis’ extended family. After lunch, she rose to fetch Ma Mère a fresh cup of tea when she heard one of the women asking Kazem’s aunt, “Is that your aroos?”
“Yes, the poor thing.”
The poor thing? Lili stole a sideways look at the two women and realized that they were talking about her. She hustled away, but then, from behind a banister, she strained to make out the rest of their talk.
“Sadisme,” she heard Kazem’s aunt saying. “You remember how he was as a child?” She paused, shook her head sadly, and continued. “His parents used to send him to the countryside for it. We’d all hoped it would help him to marry, but…” Here her voice trailed off.
Sadisme. Lili mouthed the foreign word to herself. What did it mean? From the way Kazem’s aunt had said it, Lili guessed it must be something terrible, some sort of disease. She repeated the word silently to herself several more times. If she could somehow find the meaning of this word, surely she could also find its cure?
In the meantime, she made a lesser but still useful discovery: a well-seasoned herb stew with rice could sometimes soften the edges of her husband’s temper. With this realization she quickly devoted herself to perfecting her cooking. Every Thursday morning she walked to the bazaarcheh down the street and brought back cilantro, chives, mint, and parsley by the bucketful. The freshest, most fragrant herbs always came with the stems and roots encrusted with dirt. Back at home she rinsed the herbs many times over, pulled out her biggest copper pot, and bathed them for an hour in salted water before starting on the rice.
It was when she was cleaning and rinsing the herbs one day that year that she discovered a way to make herself disappear. By focusing all her attention on a chore, she could summon a distinct sensation of cutting loose from her worries, from the room, from her own body. She practiced the trick over and over until she could sustain this peaceful state for intervals of an hour—or even longer.
Five months pregnant, her fingers and feet swollen beyond remedy, she was making herself disappear one June afternoon when she suddenly heard loud voices in the stairwell. Kazem was arguing with the landlord and his wife again. Lili shut her eyes and kept her knife moving over the pile of herbs. The voices grew louder and then stopped. Kazem flung the door open, but before he could slam it shut the landlord and his wife shouldered their way inside the apartment. Lili felt a sudden sharp pain in her temple, but it was only when she opened her eyes again and met Kazem’s that she looked down and saw the blood.
Slowly and with something strangely resembling indifference, she traced the fine red rivulets now soaking through the herbs until she found the source of the bleeding. The tip of her index finger, she saw, was dangling from her hand. She blinked—once, twice, again. The knife dropped, just barely missing her foot.
“You clumsy idiot!” Kazem shouted. He lurched toward her and she screamed.
“I’ve told you,” the landlord called out, “no more of this, no more hitting her—”
“It’s nothing to do with you!” Kazem snapped, but the landlord and his wife had seen Lili’s ravaged finger and her knees as they buckled under her. “That girl’s got to see a doctor!” he shouted, and pulled her off the floor and into the open air.
The landlord’s wife had been so kind to Lili that night, had told her to come at once if ever she had troubles again. “Troubles”—that’s exactly how she’d put it, and she’d been so tactful, too, bending toward Lili and whispering so that no one in the crowded hospital ward would overhear her. Lili had nodded and promised that she would, but from that night on Kazem was always careful to hit her only in the places where no one could see the bruises, and she was both too ashamed and too frightened to tell anyone when next the “troubles” began.
Even to those closest to her, the fact that the abuse she suffered was not, strictly speaking, uncommon made it no les
s difficult to name. Khanoom and her aunts all guessed at her situation from the start, and yet they never spoke of it. They reasoned that any intervention on their part would only anger Kazem and therefore add to her difficulties. They said nothing at all and, in some unspoken way of her own, Lili understood that their silence was meant as kindness.
As consolation, perhaps, for their reticence, Khanoom often urged her to visit the family, but as her pregnancy advanced, Lili had less and less inclination to leave her own apartment. In part this had to do with the astonishing changes in her body. Her belly seemed to grow by the day and then by the hour. While her feet and legs swelled to gigantic proportions, her cheeks hollowed out and her face took on a yellowish pallor. She could barely make out the symptoms of pregnancy from the effects of Kazem’s beatings; the two would always be irrevocably linked in her mind. Indeed, any pleasant reveries she indulged about the baby were overshadowed by her fearfulness. And the uglier and more awkward she seemed to herself, the less she troubled with her hair or her clothes and the more frequently she resorted to throwing her chador over her housedress when she went out to the market or the bathhouse.
It was in this state that Sohrab made what would be his first and only visit to her as a married woman. She’d pulled on her veil, grabbed a large tin canister, and set out to buy some kerosene from the neighborhood market. A few steps from the apartment, she spied a well-dressed gentleman approaching her from the opposite end of the alley. She strengthened her grip on the canister. With her free hand she held her veil under her chin and prepared to lower her eyes.
She looked up and realized that the gentleman approaching her was her own father.
“Babjoon!” she sputtered. “You’ve come to visit me?”
“Yes, yes,” Sohrab answered impatiently. “But what is that you’re holding?”
“Holding?” It took her a moment to realize he meant the canister. “Oh, this! It’s for the kerosene.”
The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life Page 8