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

by Jasmin Darznik

  They would assemble at the clinic doors each day at dawn and wait there until Schwester Maria appeared with her white robes billowing behind her and her headgear rising a full two feet up and three feet across. Each girl was given a headpiece identical to the nuns’. This item was to be Lili’s first true source of agony abroad. The headgear seemed to wrinkle and smudge the moment she placed it onto her head. She could not get the knack of holding her head still enough to balance it and therefore resorted to shuttling down the corridors clutching her headdress with one hand and her loads of diapers and bottles with the other. Worst of all, twice a week her headgear was disassembled, bleached, starched, pressed, and at last returned to her in individual components to be reassembled by her own hand. She ruined half a dozen fresh bundles before Schwester Maria stated flatly she would be sent away if she could not manage to pin her headgear neatly. The terror induced by this warning sharpened her mind sufficiently for her to master the skill.

  The clinic was devoted to the care of abandoned infants, ranging from newborns to toddlers, who were too sickly to be housed in a regular orphanage. The infants arrived with measles and mumps, whooping cough, shingles, broken limbs, and an assortment of unclassified fevers and random gastrointestinal ailments. Some recovered within days or weeks, while others would linger in the clinic indefinitely, or, in the very worst cases, permanently.

  Attachment to any particular child was discouraged by the nuns, but Lili quickly found a favorite among the three dozen or so orphans, a blond, blue-eyed boy called Franz. He’d been born with a congenital lung disease and lay tethered to a hunkering respirator. Her heart fell each time she passed his cot. When no one was looking, she cooed over him and whispered Iranian folk songs in his ears, with the result that soon enough he refused to take his bottle from any of the other orderlies and Lili took increasing pride in the motherly skills she’d someday lavish again on her own child.

  Their bond would go unnoticed, as the rest of the clinic was involved in its own love affair with a seven-month-old black baby rumored to be the abandoned offspring of a local German girl and an American soldier. The baby had appeared one day at the clinic with a face and torso covered in plum-colored splotches. They called him Kenya and treated him like a visiting royal. At any hour of the day a crowd of nuns, nurses, doctors, administrators, orderlies, and janitors could be found clustered around his crib, vying with one another for a chance to hold him. Kenya spent several weeks being coddled and fussed over until finally the splotches disappeared and one of the doctors took him to live in his own house.

  Lili was shown the precise methods for bathing and diapering and swaddling the infants, and she practiced until her hands seemed to fly through the various steps. Twice a day she wheeled the babies onto the balcony so that they could take their naps in the open air. The humid summer days gave way to autumn and then slowly to winter, but in all but the heaviest snowstorms she was ordered to wheel the babies onto the balcony for their naps. As she stood watch over the rows of cots, she shivered and pulled her cardigan tighter and tighter about herself. Within minutes the little faces turned bright pink and even in some cases purplish, but when she expressed her worry the nuns assured her that the change in the infants’ complexions was but the thoroughly wholesome effect of the pure Black Forest air.

  One afternoon in late October the housemistress slipped a letter under the door to Lili’s room. She was busy dressing and did not immediately rise to fetch it. On her way out some time later, Lili bent down and picked up the envelope and discovered that it was the most recent letter she had written to her father. She turned it over and noticed a faint stamp, in Persian, on the back of the envelope. She struggled to make out the words. “No such person at this address.” Strange, she thought idly. She checked the address again and, finding it identical to the one in her little brown notebook, she placed the letter back on her desk.

  Nader appeared at the clinic for her the following morning. It was a rare occurrence, made stranger by his pale, stricken face. In place of one of his brightly colored neckties he was wearing a thin black tie.

  “What’s this?” she asked, lifting the tail of Nader’s tie and waving it slightly.

  He yanked the tie from her hand. “It’s the new style, you donkey,” he replied. It was his old endearment for her, but he did not smile as he said it. “Listen,” he told her, clearing his voice. “I’ve got to go back to Iran for a while.”

  “Iran?”

  He nodded.

  “For how long?”

  “Two or three months.”

  “Two or three months! But what about your studies?”

  Nader would tell her nothing more that afternoon, but when she reached her room at the end of the day she would find a note from him under her door.

  Father has died in a car accident. I must leave for Iran on Sunday.

  Lili read the note three, seven, ten times. Impossible, impossible, impossible, she thought. He cannot be dead. But then her hands began to shake and a terrible cry heaved up from her chest. She gripped the metal bars of her canopied bed and began shaking it with such force that the housemistress rounded the stairs in nothing more than a robe and house slippers to see what could be the matter with the Iranian girl. Within minutes a half-dozen other lodgers had crowded around her. “Was ist? Was ist den, Madele? [What is it?, What is it, miss?] Sind Sie krank? [Are you sick?]” One of them held her shoulders, another one stroked her hair, and a third brought her a glass of water. Though their voices sounded kind, she begged them with whatever words she had to leave her alone.

  She stayed in the room for three days, neither eating nor sleeping, eyes wide and unseeing, and then early the next Sunday morning she went to her brother. She had made up her mind. She would go back to Iran with him.

  They would travel by car from Germany to Iran, a distance of nearly three thousand miles. The route wended along cliffs and across huge swaths of desolate countryside, and with winter fast approaching, the roads might soon be impassable. More frighteningly, they’d heard countless stories of thieves and murderers waylaying tourists along the way, but with Sohrab dead and their funds dwindling, they had no money for airfare. Besides, Nader’s car would fetch a better price in Tehran.

  They set off with such haste that Lili had neither the time nor presence of mind to acquire a simple black sheath dress from the shops along the river. The day of their departure she pulled on a lavender two-piece skirt suit, though the matching hat and gloves were left behind in the boardinghouse along with all her other clothes and belongings.

  They traveled out of Germany to Austria, farther south to Yugoslavia, then east toward Bulgaria and southeast into Greece. For the length of the journey images of her father crowded in her head: the cut of his gray pin-striped suit, the elegance of his hands when he smoked, the squares of American chocolate he always kept in his pockets for her when she was a child.

  “But why? How?” she’d ask her brother.

  “I don’t know,” Nader would answer, shaking his head sadly. “They told me nothing.” Eventually, though, he made no answer at all, just stared hard at the road before them.

  They slept in the car, Nader at the wheel and Lili curled up in the backseat. Night after night winds whipped at the windows, setting the little car swaying on the roadside. They slept with all their jackets and sweaters piled on, with boots on their feet and mittens on their hands, but still the cold seeped in through the windows and kept them shivering until dawn. Soon they took to napping for a few hours during the day and driving straight through the night. When Nader’s eyelids grew heavy, she’d yank his sleeve. “Wake up!” she’d shout. When he lost the way, she’d slip from the car to read the road signs. Often she found nothing more to guide them than the name of a village, written in chalk on a piece of wood in what looked to be a child’s hand, the letters smudged away by the wind.

  Two hundred miles outside Istanbul, Nader spotted a coffeehouse perched on the hillside. He left the car idli
ng at the bottom of the hill with Lili inside and rushed in to take a quick swig of black coffee and buy some flatbread and cheese. When Lili shifted her position, her hip threw the gear into reverse. The wheels began to roll. Never having operated a car, Lili, in her terror, could think of nothing to do but stick her head out the window and scream. The car rolled farther down the hill, veering closer and closer to the wrong side of the road, but all at once Nader came running out of the coffeehouse and managed, just barely, to yank the brake before the car swerved off the road and plunged into a ravine.

  “Khareh! You donkey!” he shouted, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her. “You could have died! You could have died just like…” He choked on the words.

  “But I didn’t know what to do,” she whimpered. “I couldn’t think….”

  At last they reached the border between Turkey and Iran.

  For centuries Iranians were known to linger here, at this juncture. It was said that the sky above Iran was a brighter blue, the earth a richer brown, the grasses and trees a brighter shade of green. In reverence, in joy, in greeting, Iranian travelers would kneel beside the road and press their lips to their native soil. Home. But Lili and Nader did not stop or even slow the car but instead pushed on toward the capital. Past Tabriz, past Zanjan, past Ghazvin. When, eleven days into the journey, Tehran, brushed over by a snow made brilliant by the winter sun, at last came into sight, Lili turned to Nader.

  “To the grave first or to Avenue Moniriyeh?” she asked quietly.

  “Khanoom’s house,” her brother answered—the first words he’d spoken in many days.

  “May God kill me!” Khanoom wailed at the sight of Lili.

  Not quite three months had passed since Lili had last seen her grandmother, but in that time Khanoom had turned into an old woman. The day Sohrab died, Khanoom had clutched at her heart and doubled over in grief. The posture stuck. Khanoom’s spine would stay bent until the day she herself was put into the ground.

  But to Khanoom, Lili, too, seemed much changed.

  “May God kill me!” Khanoom wailed.

  It took Lili a moment to understand. The skirt she was wearing just barely cleared her knees, and at this time of mourning the color of her suit was a kind of violence to Khanoom’s eyes.

  Lili hung up her lavender suit and changed into one of her aunts’ simple black frocks. It would fall, loose as a sack, all the way down to her ankles for many weeks to come. She scrubbed her face, knotted her hair tightly at the nape of her neck, and covered her head with a black muslin veil, but still the women stared and whispered to each other whenever she passed, and the men studied her with something that was neither solicitude nor, even, curiosity.

  Lili saw it plainly now, how carefully Sohrab had shielded her from just such looks, just such whispers. She was, to their way of thinking, damaged, and would always be so. She saw, too, that there’d be no one to protect her from now on, and so, despite the general disorientation of those days and the terrible depth of her grief, Lili lifted her chin and shrugged off the stares, and gradually, over the course of many days, she pieced together the story of her father’s death.

  “Let me off here,” Sohrab had told his driver when they reached the main thoroughfare leading to Khanoom’s house. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  He’d gone no farther than three paces from the car—his latest, a cherry red Cadillac with cream-colored leather seats—when a Town Car swerved into Avenue Moniriyeh and pitched him up into the air. He landed on his side, his head knocking against the pavement. Peeling backward out of the street, the tires of the Town Car had made such a fantastic screech that Khanoom had cried out to the manservant, “Madaresh bemeereh! May his mother die and be spared her grief! Who’s been killed?” The servant rushed from the house and ran back, breathless, with the answer: “Sohrab Khan! It’s Sohrab Khan who’s been killed!”

  He hadn’t died then, though. Sohrab, refusing even to take the manservant’s arm, had pulled himself up from the street, brushed off his slacks, and straightened his tie. He’d nearly reached his mother’s house when two policemen appeared for him.

  He would spend the next hours at Tehran’s police headquarters. The driver who’d struck Sohrab was a foreigner, a farangi. The news rippled through the police station, rousing every last officer on duty that night. “We have procedures, protocols, routines for such cases,” they told Sohrab. After a three-hour-long interrogation, he was finally taken, cursing, to the city’s large public hospital and it was there, on one of the dozens of cots crowding the hallways, that he would die in the night of a brain hemorrhage. He was forty-two years old and when he died there was not even a bruise to tell of his injury.

  In the morning the Washer of the Dead closed Sohrab’s lids and performed the ablutions. Beginning first with the right side of his body, he was purified limb by limb, from head to foot, three times. Next he was laid down on the kafan, the white shroud perfumed with myrrh. The kafan was wrapped around him once, then again, and then a third time. The procedure was repeated with a second kafan and finally, because it was winter and a hard snow had begun to fall, he was cloaked once more, this time with a fine silken carpet.

  At noon his friends came, hoisted him onto their shoulders, and carried him through the streets of Tehran to a cemetery encircled by cypress and plane trees. His body was laid alongside the open grave and the janazeh began. The men of the family—the cousins and uncles—marveled at the sight of these several dozen gentlemen, dressed in their cashmere coats and silk cravats and wailing like women. “La elah ella Allah! [Allah is the only God!]” they cried out as they lowered Sohrab into the ground. They guided his body to the right side, toward Mecca, toward the one who is the only One, and when the prayers were finished they set a stone above Sohrab’s head and, weeping harder still, they began to throw fistfuls of soil into the grave.

  Long past sunset the women of the family sat on the floor in a darkened room together, rocking their bodies back and forth, beating their chests, and raising open hands up to the sky. Their chanting would start low and even, like a moan or a hum, but it would rise steadily until all their despair, yearning, and rage was at last released into their dirge.

  When it was over Sohrab’s friends paid for every last funeral expense, from the plot in which they’d laid him to rest to the garlands of lilies and tuberoses they’d draped above his grave.

  Few members of Sohrab’s family had known him to be as beloved as on the day his friends buried him; indeed, to many it would seem that his friends were grieving a different man altogether. Nearly as astonishing as the funeral itself was the sight of Sohrab’s two widows thrown suddenly together in the seven days of mourning that followed. Having circled each other, very carefully, for nearly twenty years, Kobra and Simin would spend every one of those seven days, from sunrise to sunset, together in his house. Many braced themselves for a vicious row, but without sharing a single word or glance Kobra and Simin managed to divide their grief in equal parts. When one entered a room, the other left it. When one stopped crying, the other began.

  But even when the seven-day mourning period came to an end, the clan still did not manage to learn whether there had been a marriage, even a temporary one, between Sohrab and Simin. No one dared ask Simin outright, and Simin herself would stay as silent on the matter as Sohrab himself had been.

  For all this, it was Simin whom Sohrab’s family treated as his true widow, and for proof of this Kobra looked no further than a cup of chicken broth.

  It was understood that those whose grief was the most profound would be unable to eat a proper meal during the mourning rites. To prevent this select contingent from passing out from hunger, a pot of saffron-spiced chicken broth was always kept simmering on the stove. Day after day, as crowds of mourners assembled at Sohrab’s house, it was into Simin’s hands, and not Kobra’s, that a cup of this precious broth was passed, and Simin who was begged to keep up her strength by drinking it.

  In any case, i
n the end it was not as his wife but as his creditor that Simin claimed Sohrab’s estate. On the eighth day following his death, Simin appeared at Avenue Moniriyeh to present Khanoom with a thick stack of receipts. Some of the loans ranged as far back as twenty years, and their receipts were so faded that the sums were scarcely legible. All told, the debts ran into the hundreds of thousands.

  Since there was nothing else to satisfy his obligations to Simin, Sohrab’s house was picked clean. Silk carpets piled three and four deep in every room, fistfuls of gold coins, antique Chinese vases, marble-topped armoires—Simin sent no fewer than eight men for it in the night—and when the men left there was nothing left in Sohrab’s house but a single, broken chair and a half-empty gunnysack of rice in a kitchen cupboard.

  “Unpaid debts foreclose a restful death,” Khanoom murmured, citing a well-worn saying, and to this no one had anything at all to say in reply.

  But the story would not achieve a proper ending until Lili and Nader returned to Iran.

  No sooner had they dug a handful of soil from above Sohrab’s grave and passed it like kohl along their eyelids than they were called to appear at the American embassy. The man who’d struck Sohrab had been an attaché of the American government, one of dozens then living in Iran, and had likely been spirited out of the country within days of Sohrab’s death. Iranian law already granted foreigners immunity from government prosecution, but Lili and Nader had been summoned to Iran to sign a document waiving their individual rights to bring charges against the American attaché.

  They were made to understand it was in their best interests to sign.

  The following week an envelope bearing an embossed golden seal of the U.S. government appeared at Khanoom’s house. Inside they discovered a letter, composed in English and addressed to Lili and Nader. Nader strained to translate it aloud for the family. The letter stated that out of respect for local custom seven thousand tomans—about a thousand American dollars—had been put aside for the accidental death of their relative. They could have used every toman of the paltry sum, but they would not claim it. More copies of the letter were sent from the American embassy to Avenue Moniriyeh, all of them bearing the same embossed golden stamp, and eventually Persian translations were even inserted along with their English original. Letter after letter arrived at Khanoom’s house and the check went unclaimed for many weeks until finally Sohrab’s blood money became Simin’s, too.