Mourning in this fashion demanded constant refreshment. Dates, almonds, and halvah were thought particularly revitalizing, and in place of tea they drank the thickest, most bitter concoction of Turkish coffee. By afternoon, dozens of neighbors began drifting into the compound, accompanied by their own family members, friends, associates, and acquaintances. Night after night the servants were ordered to cook twelve pots of rice and twelve pots of stew. If this threatened to fall short of satisfying the crowd’s appetite, they cooked a thirteenth pot of rice, spooned in another cup of tomato paste, and with that they fed every last person who came to mourn the matriarch.
When Lili had first returned to the apartment after Sara’s birth, Kazem would begin shouting at her over some detail of housekeeping—a poorly prepared pot of rice or a dusty mantel—and when Sara began crying he’d shout at her, too. Lili didn’t know how to make Sara stop crying and often she found herself crying along, too. But now, with Ma Mère’s death, Kazem had fallen into a depression so deep and constant that he did not even seem to notice Lili or the baby. He spent whole days slumped in a chair in the corner of their apartment, his face in his hands, completely silent. It was to be the calmest interlude of their marriage, though it would end much differently.
That end came in summertime, on one of the many days of which it was commonly said that the sun could force open a flower bud by midday and fry its petals crisp by sunset. Lili had packed a bag with a change of clothes and towels and set off with Sara for the bathhouse. Bruises—faint now but still visible—ran along Lili’s torso, arms, and legs. She knew she could try to bathe discreetly in the communal pools, winding a towel or two around herself to hide her bruises from the other bathers. Because the effort of this was great and ruined what was one of her few pleasures, she’d begun squirreling away a couple of tomans to hire a private stall once or twice a month. That was her plan on this particular day.
She took a number from the attendant and waited in the courtyard for her turn. Once inside the stall, she held her baby to her chest, closed her eyes, and let the warm water envelop them. She washed Sara first, all over her rounded belly and behind her ears and inside the folds of her thighs. When Sara was still a newborn, Lili had set her on a towel by her feet so that she could wash herself, but when at five months Sara began crawling she’d had to develop a new tactic for bathing. Tucking Sara under one arm, Lili lathered and scrubbed the opposite side of her body with her free hand, then switched the baby over to wash the other side. Between washing and rinsing herself like this she often caught her daughter’s black eyes smiling up at her through the steam.
She’d timed her return home to coincide with sunset, the hour when the heat finally ceased to ripple off the streets and rooftops and the city came alive with the clap of thousands of shutters and grilles being thrown open. The streets, she’d always been told, were the source and stimulus for every last misery in this world, but on these walks after her weekly bath she had the simultaneous feeling of being lost and utterly at home there, and it was a feeling she’d come to love.
A few paces from the bathhouse she stopped to buy an ear of freshly grilled corn, pried the kernels loose, and fed them kernel by kernel to Sara from her hand. They pressed on, the crowds growing thicker all the time. After just a few blocks, Sara fell asleep. Lili decided to stop for a sherbet, cherry or melon flavor or both if she had the money for it. She ducked into a shady stairwell and as she sipped her treat Lili took in the crowds, the scents, and the rhythms of her city. A gramophone was playing an old folk song somewhere down the alley. She tapped her foot idly to the music, working out the tune in her head. She finished her sherbet, bought another, and then started for home.
At the entry to the house she stopped to straighten her veil. The stairs were uneven and cracked, and every few steps she held her hand to the wall to steady herself. When she reached the landing she felt around in her pocket for her key, but then she saw that the door to the apartment was wide open. She hesitated, straightened her veil again, and stepped inside.
Blood was streaming down Kazem’s forehead, dripping onto his shirt and down onto the floor. He made no effort to wipe it away. A burglar has attacked him, was her first thought, but then she saw that he was holding a knife. He had done this to himself, she realized, had slashed his own forehead and cheeks with a kitchen knife. In her confusion and fear, her bag fell from her hands, spilling its contents at her feet. Trembling from head to foot, she bent down and scrambled to pick up the mess.
“Where have you been?” he shouted. At the sound of his voice Sara’s eyes flew open and she began to cry.
“The baths,” Lili stammered. “You know I go there every Friday afternoon—”
“But why have you come home so late? Where did you go afterward? Did you meet someone in the streets?”
She started to tell him that the hammam had been crowded, it was Friday after all, and she’d had to take a number, and then on the way back Sara had been hungry and she’d bought an ear of corn and stopped to feed it to her and then she’d been thirsty herself. With every word she spoke he only grew more agitated. His eyes flashed and he lunged toward her, but she ducked and flew down the stairs with Sara pressed against her chest.
Sara was howling now. Lili began rocking her, which only made her cry harder. A woman passed by, throwing Lili a look as if to say she should take better care of her child. Lili shifted Sara onto the other arm and realized she’d been holding her so hard that her own knuckles had turned white. She loosened her grip and gently ran two fingers along Sara’s cheek to soothe her. Lili’s heart was knocking against her chest. Where would she go? She’d left her pocketbook upstairs in the apartment. She’d have to walk all the way to Khanoom’s house, and her legs, already weak from her long walk through the city, were now shaking with such force that she could barely stand.
She bit her lip and cursed herself for spending her money on snacks on the way back from the hammam, for staying out so long, for leaving her pocketbook in the apartment. He began calling her then, and his voice was so sweet, so very full of regret and longing, that for all the world he sounded like a lovelorn hero out of a fairy tale. “I’m all right now,” he called from the window. “Come back,” he called. “It’s all right now.”
That night as she ran a wet washcloth over his face and wrapped rags around the cuts, he pressed his head against her chest and for the first time in many months he had cried again. It was then, at that moment, that she understood if he was capable of hurting himself like this, neither she herself nor her own daughter would ever be safe, and more than anything that had happened so far in their marriage, it was this realization that frightened her.
Walking down Avenue Pahlavi on her way to the dentist that morning, she was worrying her loose tooth with a finger when a slight breeze on her newly naked neck had brought on another of her spells.
She’d had her hair bobbed to look just like an actress she’d seen in a magazine at her in-laws’ house. It suited her—even Khanoom had told Lili so—but then sometimes, when Kazem was away at work and she was alone in the apartment with Sara, she would get so lost in her thoughts that she’d forget she’d had it cut. She’d raise a hand to twirl her braids and, finding them gone, she’d panic. Sometimes it was enough even to make her scream.
But this was more and more the way with her. Some of her senses and faculties seemed to fall off completely, while others would never be as keen. She was constantly forgetting things—silly things like having had her hair cut, but also whether she’d fed Sara or visited to the marketplace yet that week. She hardly heard Sara when she cried anymore and could sit in one place for hours at a time, staring at the wall or the floor, absent from everything around her, but then, all at once, the faintest noise from the apartment above hers could set her heart racing, her hands shaking.
And she had not wanted to visit the dentist. For several weeks after Kazem had pushed her down the stairwell—landing her jaw-first at the bottom of the
stairs—she’d tried desperately to pry the loose back tooth out with her fingers. It had not worked. The pain had gradually become excruciating and she’d finally had no choice but to borrow money from her aunt Zaynab to have the tooth pulled out for her.
“We’ll fix this for you straightaway, young lady,” the dentist assured her, smiling warmly from behind round-rimmed glasses. His fresh white smock had put her immediately at ease, and she drew in a long, deep breath and closed her eyes.
He was halfway through the procedure when, suddenly, Lili remembered. Sadisme. She hadn’t thought of it in many months, but here, finally, was her opportunity to find out what it meant.
She tugged at the hem of the dentist’s smock. “Does it hurt so much?” he asked, pulling the tongs from her mouth.
Lili sat up in the chair and shook her head. “Sadisme, Mr. Doctor,” she said, taking care to pronounce the word just as she’d heard it. “Is it a sickness?”
“Well, I suppose so, yes.” He tapped a finger to his temple. “A kind of sickness here.”
She considered this. “But does it go away?”
“I should say not,” he answered. He narrowed his eyes at her. “But tell me, where would you have heard about something like that?”
“My husband…,” she said absently. She had not meant to tell the dentist anything at all, but from the look in his eyes just then she realized he understood everything—about how her tooth had come loose and many more terrible things besides.
“Have you told your parents?” he asked quietly.
She shook her head. “No!” she cried, and sat up straight in the chair. It suddenly occurred to her that he might take it upon himself to contact Kazem—or, worse, her family. The prospect was so awful that she threw off her bib, grabbed her purse and her jacket, and scrambled out of the room.
“Your tooth!” the dentist called out after her. “Young lady, what about your tooth!”
By the time she’d made it back home, the tooth was loose enough to yank out on her own, but the pain had only increased tenfold.
“You go to a doctor and you come back like this?” Kazem chided her, pointing to her disheveled hair and her tear-swollen eyes. That time he shoved her against the wall, thrust his knee hard between her legs, and caught her throat in one hand and her wrist in the other. He began to tighten, then loosen, his grip, and she felt her legs sway and melt, her vision dissolve into a thick white haze, but suddenly and without another word, he let her go and she crumpled to the floor.
Then, in the middle of the night, he grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her awake. “I know you don’t love me,” he began. “Tell me you don’t love me.”
“Please, Kazem, just let me sleep—”
“You’ll leave me,” he continued. His voice was calm and nearly cheerful in the dark. “You’ll marry a rich man. A handsome, very rich man.” For some time Kazem was silent, but then he told her she should close her eyes and dream of her new husband because he’d kill her before she could even lay eyes on him.
In the hours that followed, Lili lay awake, thinking and crying by turn, and when dawn at last broke these were the things she knew:
She knew that Kazem was sick and that he would never be cured of his sickness. She knew that he could, and likely might, kill her—if not soon, then eventually. She did not know, but was relatively sure, that she did not want to die. She knew—with complete certainty—that she could do nothing on her own. She knew that Kobra had no means whatsoever of helping her, and that if she went to her grandmother or her aunts they would only tell her that this was a woman’s life, worse than some, yes, but not unlike many others. And, finally, Lili knew that the only person to whom she could now go for help was also the only person she feared more than her husband.
Sohrab would not help her.
“A fourteen-year-old girl with a baby wants to sit by my side?” He frowned and shook his head. “This is not possible.”
Sohrab and Simin were sitting together in the garden when Lili arrived at her father’s house. Earlier in the afternoon she’d managed to leave Sara with Kazem’s sister and taken a taxi to Sohrab’s house on upper Pahlavi. Twice Lili lost her nerve, setting off toward home only to circle back and pace the sidewalk in front of his building again. By the time she’d worked up the courage to pull off her veil and bang the knocker, it was evening and the table set before Sohrab and his woman on the terrace had been spread with gold-rimmed English porcelain and goblets of red wine.
“But pedar-joon,” Lili said, struggling to keep her voice even. “Kazem, he…”
“He what?”
“He threw me down from the stairs. And this…” She opened her mouth to show Sohrab the missing tooth.
Sohrab’s frown deepened. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
There was then a long silence in which she struggled to find her voice and she cast her eyes down at the ground and tried, with a desperate determination, not to cry. When she looked up again her eyes skipped from Simin’s red lips to the garnet brooch on her lapel and then to her red fingernails. Simin raised a spoon to her mouth and Lili’s stomach gave a twist. She realized she hadn’t eaten a single thing all day.
“I can do nothing for you,” Sohrab told her. His voice was not unkind, but the words rang with unmistakable finality.
“But if you can do nothing, then…” And here she blurted out the most terrible thing she could imagine. “Then I want to die!” She began crying in earnest then—a messy, heaving, hiccuping cry—and for a long time after her father left the garden and she lay crying on the flagstones she still felt Simin’s eyes on her.
Much later, when the scent of honeysuckle had grown so sweet that the air seemed heavy with it, Lili turned her face to the house and saw that all the windows were dark. She pulled herself up from the ground, clipped a sprig of flowers from the garden wall, and as she brushed her fingers along the still-warm stones she felt herself grow calm. She knew what she must do now. She would wait for her father to return, she would speak to him again, but this time she’d maintain her composure, she’d tell him everything, and she would convince him to help her.
She walked into the house and placed her veil in the small alcove by the door. Upstairs, she lay down on the bed in the spare room next to Sohrab’s suite. She’d meant to close her eyes for only a few minutes, but she was so exhausted from all the hours pacing round Sohrab’s house and then all her crying that she soon fell asleep.
Sometime after midnight the door to the room swung open and jolted her from sleep.
“I’m leaving now!” Simin called out. Lili rubbed her eyes and lifted herself onto her elbows. Simin was standing in the doorway. She’d draped her coat over her shoulders and was holding a thin leather pocketbook in front of her with both hands. Her lips, Lili saw, were freshly painted. “I’m worried about your father,” Simin told her. “He hasn’t come back to the house and I’m going out to find him.”
Lili quickly smoothed her hair with her fingers, straightened her skirt, and followed Simin downstairs. The rooms were completely quiet and still. The servants had long since retired to their own quarters, and she and Simin were alone in Lili’s father’s house now.
“It’s chilly at this time of night,” Simin said when they’d reached the landing. It was true—the tiles felt ice-cold against Lili’s bare feet. As Simin turned to leave, she nodded in the direction of Lili’s veil. “You should cover yourself, you know.”
Lili slid the latch and bolted the door. On her way back up the stairwell, she picked up her veil from the alcove, shook it loose, and then watched as a cigar box fell from its folds and landed with a soft thud by her feet. She bent down and examined it. It was crimson with black lettering. English, she thought, or maybe French. As a child she’d fetched boxes just like it for her father at parties, but this one felt strange in her hands.
She rubbed her eyes and felt inside for the contents. It was two large chunks of taryak, opium. This she recognized fro
m her grandmother’s house. Her aunts sometimes shaved a sliver from such rolls and placed it onto an aching tooth or swirled a bit into their tea to cure a headache. But these two pieces of opium were as thick as Lili’s thumb, and, when she pressed them together, they were also nearly as long. How had the box found its way into her veil? Had one of the servants misplaced it before leaving the house? Puzzled, she folded her chador and returned it, and the box, to the alcove.
Half an hour later the doorbell woke her.
“I’ve come to check on you,” Simin said brightly. “Are you feeling better now?” As she said this Simin’s gaze fell toward Lili’s veil. “But you haven’t put on your chador to warm yourself!”
Lili shook her head. She returned to the alcove and pulled the opium from the cigar box. “Khanoom, I found this in my veil.”
Simin’s eyes widened. “But have you eaten any of it?”
“Eaten?” She shook her head. “But this isn’t to eat.”
“So you’ve had none of it?”
Again Lili shook her head.
“Look, I want to tell you something.” Simin’s voice was soft and gentle, and as she spoke she took both of Lili’s hands in her own. “I want to tell you what to do so that you won’t cry anymore. You see, it’s just as well you found this,” she said, touching a finger to the opium in Lili’s palm. “It will help you sleep. When you wake, your father will be here, and he will help you. I promise.”
“You’ll speak to him for me?”
“Yes, of course, but you must go to sleep now. You must rest.”
She brought a glass of water from the kitchen. For a moment Lili hesitated, but when she saw Simin smile and nod she placed the opium on her tongue.
“But it’s so bitter!”
“Of course it’s bitter. It’s medicine, you silly girl!”
The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life Page 10