“Come sit with us, azizam!” Nasrine Khanoom called out to her, using the familiar endearment “dear one” and patting the empty seat beside her on the sofa.
Kobra poured Lili a cup of tea and passed her one of the special cookies. After they’d exhausted the customary greetings and pleasantries, Nasrine Khanoom turned to Lili, cleared her throat, and announced, “The more I see you, Lili-joon, the better I understand why Mr. Fereydoon has been so taken with you since we took you to the party that evening.”
Lili could not remember this Mr. Fereydoon, but she smiled politely, took another biscuit, and continued drinking her tea.
“Mr. Fereydoon is a very good man,” Nasrine Khanoom went on. She leaned toward Lili and lowered her voice slightly. “Quite capable in every last respect,” she said, and then held Lili’s gaze for a moment before continuing. “Between the two of us, I cannot imagine a better husband for you than Mr. Fereydoon.”
“Excuse me, khanoom,” Lili asked between sips of tea. “Is this Mr. Fereydoon your relative or an acquaintance of your family’s?”
“Actually, azizam, Mr. Fereydoon is my husband.”
At this Lili’s mouth fell open and her teacup came down on the table with a loud clatter. Polygamy, though slightly less common than in years past, might be thought a divorcee’s best hope—this she knew very well—but that a wife would go so far as to propose on her husband’s behalf was too much for Lili to believe. A dim memory of this stout middle-aged man with the beginnings of a stoop flashed through her mind. She’s courting me on his behalf and thinks she’s found a servant for herself in the bargain, Lili thought, but before she could say a word Nasrine Khanoom pressed on with her proposal.
“I understand that you have been married before—Kobra Khanoom has told me some of your unfortunate… history. To be perfectly frank, others would not look favorably on your circumstances, but we are very open-minded people. And of course I must mention, too, that since Kobra Khanoom”—here she threw Kobra a smile—“has become so dear to me in these last months I feel no hesitation whatsoever in accepting you into our family.”
“That’s very generous of you, khanoom, but—”
“There’s no need to answer just yet,” Nasrine Khanoom interrupted. “I’ll understand if you want a few days to talk the matter over with your dear mother, but please know that I fully expect you to make us happy by becoming our bride.”
What followed Nasrine Khanoom’s departure that afternoon was one of the longest, loudest, bitterest rows that would ever take place between Lili and Kobra. How many more weeks, Kobra begged to know, could Lili continue to drag herself around the city looking for work? “A lifetime longer than I will live as someone’s second wife!” Lili shot back, adding, “I’m nothing like you, suffering that blue-eyed jinn for two decades!”
At this Kobra buried her face in her hands and began to cry. “But how can I possibly tell Nasrine Khanoom no?” Kobra whimpered. “She and her husband have been so generous to both of us….”
Lili replied that Kobra needn’t trouble herself as she would give Nasrine Khanoom the news when that lady next called. This only made Kobra cry harder and beg Lili to hold her tongue until she herself found the most judicious words with which to refuse the proposal.
That night, after they’d finished swearing they would never again speak to each other, Lili pulled a sheet and a pillow out of the cupboard and went to sleep on the floor in the parlor. When she woke up the next morning, she saw that sometime in the night Kobra had pulled the quilt off their bed and thrown it over her. The gesture softened Lili’s anger slightly, but she still refused to speak to Kobra that day. When Kobra brought her a cup of tea and one of her special cookies the following morning, Lili stretched out her hand to take it and then muttered a terse and barely audible “thanks.” The following day, the day when she had no choice but to convey Lili’s refusal to Nasrine Khanoom, Kobra offered Lili no tea at breakfast. They nursed their respective grudges for a week or so, and then, without ceremony or further discussion, they eased back into a mostly peaceful cohabitation that depended on the indefinite deferral of the marriage question.
As galling as Nasrine Khanoom’s proposal had been to her, and as horrible as the prospect of marriage was overall, if it were not for her brother Nader’s sake Lili might never have found the courage to take a job.
She’d sometimes glimpse women on their way to work in the city. It was true that there were not many of them, but with their pocketbooks, shift dresses, and high heels they seemed a smart and beguiling set. But no woman in her own family had ever worked outside the house, and to judge from the reaction of her aunts she might as well have been setting out to sell herself on the streets. “They only work because they have no choice,” her aunts noted darkly. They redoubled their matchmaking efforts and begged her to stay at Kobra’s side until a husband could be found for her.
But the thought of marriage was still abhorrent to her. What’s more, she’d never had much of a talent or fondness for sewing, and she also felt sure that by working in the city she could earn a better wage with which to support her brother’s studies, an expense that Kobra’s earnings alone could never support. On a cousin’s advice, therefore, Lili finally took a job as a cashier in a sundry shop near Tehran’s central police station, a sprawling concrete compound that also housed various divisions of the shah’s army. So far as she could make out, she was the only woman within miles of the site. Perched for eight-and ten-hour shifts behind the wooden slats of her booth, she sat counting out change and scribbling receipts. In the dead hours she busied herself with calculating her modest earnings, most of which she sent away to Nader in tissue paper–thin airmail envelopes.
For weeks she secretly admired the young uniformed officers who dropped by the shop. At the end of the day there was no shortage of policemen, soldiers, and lieutenants eager to escort her home. Some of them were so earnest in the appeals, made such heartfelt mention of their own unmarried sisters back at home and their duties to her as honorable men, that she was quite often tempted to accept their offers. She’d always chosen to go home by bus, however and more than once she’d found herself wishing for a veil to deflect the more aggressive offers she attracted on her way to and from work each day.
Then one day she met the General.
“This isn’t a good place for a woman to stand by herself.”
His eyes were green. Lili blinked, straightened herself, and cleared her throat.
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“A young lady, especially one so lovely as you, shouldn’t stand by herself on a busy street like this.” He nodded toward a limousine parked across the street. “I will accompany you home in my car.”
She’d never before been propositioned by an officer of this rank, and when her eyes fell to the row of beribboned medals on his breast and he took her hand and told her to get into the car she knew there was no use protesting.
“And where do you live, young lady?” he asked once they’d settled in the back of the car.
“Lower Farhang, Zahirodolleh Alley, number forty-four.”
The driver pulled out into traffic and she turned to the General and offered him a slight smile. He nodded. She caught the scent of liquor on his breath. Was he drunk? She couldn’t be sure. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him run his hands along the length of a thickly muscled thigh. She turned her face quickly back to the street and cursed herself for accepting his offer of a ride.
“Excuse me, agha,” she said when she realized that the driver had turned in an opposite direction from her home. “But this is not the way. I live on lower Farhang, Zahirodolleh Alley—”
“Not to worry, not to worry,” the General assured her. “My driver knows this city better than anyone. He will take you home just as soon as I get your advice for a building project of mine.”
“But I know nothing of building projects!”
He would say nothing more, and so Lili gripped the armrest and
began scanning the streets for some landmark to guide her. Were they driving north? West? Her hands were shaking now. Where was he taking her? Just when she was sure they were headed toward the countryside, the car pulled into a private street, wound its way past a long row of cypress trees, and then came to an abrupt stop. The General leaned toward his driver and whispered something she could not make out.
When they’d stepped out from the car and the driver disappeared down the hill, the General took Lili’s arm and led her into the construction site. His “building project” looked to be the beginnings of a many-pillared villa with a view onto the whole city.
It was already late in the afternoon—from where she stood in the driveway Lili saw that the sun had tinted the rooftops pink—and all the workers had left the property. Inside, wooden beams lay stacked on top of each other and heaps of refuse and bags of concrete had been piled up in every corner. The marble for the foyer, the General informed her as they picked their way through the half-finished foundations, had been brought over from Italy and would surely be to her taste.
“My taste?” she stammered.
“But of course,” he replied briskly. “It will be to your taste or I will not proceed with the project at all.” He removed his pistol from its holster and set it on a banister, but then, as if on second thought, he picked it up, passed it from one hand to the other, and began to circle its mouth with his forefinger. “Yes. You see, dokhtar-joon, I’ve decided I want to marry you.”
She understood at once the sort of marriage the General had in mind—a siqeh, or temporary marriage, to sanctify sexual intercourse.
It was then that everything she had been holding back, had told no one, had kept a secret for so long, came out as one breathless whole. Her marriage to Kazem, their divorce and the baby they took from her, the foundling hospital in Tübingen, Sohrab’s death and the American attaché, her brother in Germany, her mother and her fourth-hand Singer, her job in the city. She could not look at him as she spoke, but she went on and on until still she had managed to tell him every last part of her story.
When she finished, the General laid his gun down and studied her. It had worked, she thought to herself. He would pity her; she would be safe now. She drew a deep breath and felt her pulse slacken. But all at once, he rose, slipped his belt free from his waist, and began working his fingers through the buttons of his shirt.
Lili looked quickly about her. There was no way out but past him.
When the General stepped toward her, she shoved him so hard with her two fists that she herself stumbled and nearly fell. “Who do you think you are that you won’t let me touch you?” he taunted, catching her by the shoulder with one hand and yanking the front of her dress with the other so that it gave a loud rip and then flapped open from collar to waist. She staggered, steadied herself, and shoved him again with her fists.
He began lashing the ground with his belt then. Each time it came down he took a step closer toward her, so that soon the belt was whipping at her feet. She backed away and they began to circle the room. Again and again the belt sliced at the unfinished floorboards—thwack, thwack, thwack!—and the General’s eyes never left her as it fell.
She spun around and broke into a run. Halfway down the driveway she bent down to kick off her shoes and heard a gunshot blast somewhere behind her. She hurled herself, barefoot, down to the end of the driveway to the main thoroughfare. There wasn’t a single car or person in the street, and so she kept running with the echo of the gunshot and her own blood beating against her ears.
After some minutes she finally managed to flag down a car. It was a married couple on their way back to the city after a holiday in the mountains. “Did your husband do this to you?” the wife kept asking, the color rising in her cheeks. “You know, there are laws against this sort of thing now. You mustn’t let him do this to you, you understand; you mustn’t!”
“You mustn’t let him”—that’s what the lady kept saying over and over, and Lili nodded her head. No, khanoom, she swore. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.
That afternoon Kobra was waiting for Lili in the alley, as had become her habit. She’d been standing at the corner, clenching the edge of her veil between her teeth, wringing her hands, and counting the buses as they went by. She counted seven buses, then eight, then nine. When the fifteenth bus rumbled past, Kobra felt a trickle of sweat roll down her spine. She began to pray. When at last she spied Lili slipping out of a stranger’s car with her chin buried in her chest, clutching at her torn dress with both hands, Kobra gripped her veil and rushed toward the car and then her screams ripped and echoed through the alley until, to Lili’s unending shame, she managed to draw every last pair of eyes to them.
“Do you see what they’ve done?” she wailed. “Do you see what they’ve done to my child?”
When, after some days, she had regained her wits and calmed her mother, Lili retrieved the movie director’s card, swiped on some red lipstick, and set off for his studio in Naderi Square. After the episode with the General, she could not return to her job as a cashier, and she did not have a single other prospect. Unfortunately, the director didn’t seem to recognize her. She pulled out the card he’d given her just a few weeks before. “You asked if I wanted to play a Kurdish girl, remember? A girl on a horse?”
“Ah, yes, of course,” he said with a quick lick of his lips, “but unfortunately that part’s already been given to someone else—”
“Actually, agha,” she interrupted, “I was thinking about a secretarial job. Surely you need secretaries here? I took a course, you see. I can type. I even have the certificate with me.”
She began fumbling with her purse, but the director straightened his tie, cleared his throat, and told her there would be no need of that. A vision of Khanoom’s face, contorted in pain, rose up in Lili’s mind’s eye but gradually faded as he put forth his proposition. Besides shooting films, he explained, the studio also employed girls for voice-over parts for foreign films. In fact, he said, it was her good fortune that they were holding auditions for voice-over jobs that very day.
The director took her by the arm and led her to a room where more than two dozen young women sat waiting their turns. She drew a breath of relief. He’d been telling the truth; he had decent work for her after all.
The audition consisted of reading a page torn from a recent, though far from current, edition of a London newspaper. She read sufficiently well to be called back the following day.
While the movies were all American, Westerns were particularly well represented. Her job was to speak for the women. Thanks to her once-fervent reading of Dickens she could still read English, but by this time her actual comprehension of the language had been winnowed down considerably. What’s more, the American accents and cowboy slang totally befuddled her. When she made this confession to a studio technician, Lili was told not to worry, that creativity was the greatest of assets to a girl in this line of work.
Alone in her tiny sound booth, Lili watched the heroines drape themselves in doorways, cling to the sleeves of their gun-slinging heroes, peel off their petticoats, and strip down to lacy silk negligees. She would sit in this booth for many months to come, grateful for the seclusion and anonymity she found there, eventually earning her passage back to Europe. Longing, humiliation, terror, love—the same themes flickered before her in seemingly endless cinematic variation. She pulled on her headphones, struck up her recording machine, and it was not long before she discovered that her job was not nearly as hard as she’d first imagined.
It took her a little less than a year to save up enough money. Now she applied herself to the truly difficult part of her scheme.
“I am going to Germany,” she told Sara.
It was a balmy afternoon in late August and they were sitting on a bench in Niavaran Park sipping cherry-flavored iced sherbets. They saw each other once or twice a month, mostly on outings in the city where Lili felt free of Kobra’s disapproving gaze and Sara could do as she
pleased. Earlier Lili had bought Sara a red kite from a street vendor. “Your big sister is very kind to buy you this kite,” the old man had said as he tied it to Sara’s wrist, and Sara had thought his mistake very funny and giggled.
But now, with Lili’s announcement, Sara gave the kite a hard, quick tug and it began to bob up and down awkwardly. She turned her face to Lili and fixed her with an angry look. “How long will you stay there?”
“Four years—maybe three.”
“Why?”
“So that I can study.”
“Why?”
“So that I can come back here and buy a little house for us.”
This seemed to please Sara and her expression softened. She took another taste of her sherbet and began swinging her legs under the bench. A breeze picked up and the red kite began to sway gently above their heads.
“But why don’t you study here?” Sara asked suddenly.
Lili hadn’t expected this question. “It’s very expensive to study in Iran,” she said. This was true enough. Medical school would be prohibitively expensive, and so she’d decided to study midwifery. Long practiced in informal networks, in recent years it had become a branch of study at a large, modern nursing institute in Tehran, but Lili knew it would be easier to pay her way through school in Germany and also that a foreign diploma would be worth much more in Iran than an Iranian one.
That she was fed up with her family’s attempts to marry her off, that she could not stand to live in Iran so long as she was just a poor, half-educated divorcée, that her father had been right to send her away the first time—these were all points Lili judged beyond the child’s comprehension.
The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life Page 17