The memory of Setareh’s crying followed Lili into the week, and she would think, miserably, of Sara. How much longer could she count on Sara to remember her? Or had she already forgotten her? Lili, absorbed in thoughts of her own daughter, patted the little girl’s head and wrestled herself free and made her way back into the streets of Hamburg. Eventually, though, she would welcome the longing she felt between these visits to the Pakravans. If motherly feelings still stirred in her, Lili reasoned, when she returned to Iran she might be a mother yet.
Her other charge in this period was a young Iranian man named Payam. He’d contracted polio as a child and could move about only by crawling and dragging himself along the floor. By the time his family had sold off their lands and properties in Iran and sent him to Germany for a series of experimental operations, there was not enough money left for any of them to accompany him on his journey. Lili was one of a number of student nurses his family hired to keep him company a few hours each week between his surgeries. The job did not pay very well, but she found herself incapable of turning it down.
Twenty-five years old with a high forehead and beautiful limpid eyes, Payam played classical violin and could talk for hours about Rumi and Iran’s mystical poetic tradition. Payam had a small library by his bedside and begged Lili to ask anyone going to Iran to bring him back volumes of poetry. He told her about the metal bands that he’d soon have on his legs, how he’d be able to walk as well as anyone after his operation. He always spoke of returning to Iran, of marrying a girl he loved there.
At night the German girls, lipsticked, perfumed, and high heeled, disappeared into the hospital basement to listen to jazz records with the male doctors. No invitations were extended to the Iranian girls, but even if they had been, none would have been accepted. Convinced that word of the slightest indiscretion would somehow make it back to their families in Tehran, Lili and her Iranian friends spent their first dozen nights off duty eating their saffron-spiced fried potatoes and trading news of home.
One evening, however, she and Farideh would hazard a visit to the Reeperbahn, the mile-long red-light district near the harbor. “You haven’t seen Hamburg until you’ve seen the Reeperbahn!” one of the German students had insisted. “People come from all over the world to see it!” That the world’s oldest profession had outposts in their own homeland was something Lili and Farideh vaguely understood, but this did nothing to quell their curiosity about how, exactly, prostitution was practiced in the West. Lili made discreet inquiries and discovered that the city’s prostitutes were easily accessible by foot.
It was a warm evening in early autumn, but the mission somehow roused in Lili and Farideh a native instinct for modesty. When they set out, they pulled on their heaviest winter coats and covered their heads in silk scarves. Meanwhile, on Hamburg’s famed Reeperbahn, the prostitutes were displaying their wares from behind faintly illuminated windowpanes. Holding hands and sweating profusely under their coats, Lili and Farideh discovered that European prostitutes came in an astonishing range of ages and shapes. The states of undress were strikingly diverse as well. Most of the women wore lacy slips with garters, but at the sight of the first naked prostitute, a thoroughly bored-looking redhead with enormous breasts, Farideh shut her eyes and refused, simply refused, to open them. Lili laughed and joked that a future midwife had better get over such squeamishness, but when one of the prostitutes winked and gestured to her from behind a window she almost fainted herself.
“Schmutzige Ausländer!” a man suddenly shouted from across the street. Dirty foreigners! He was waving his arms wildly at them, and the other men on the street all turned to look at her and Farideh. Their shame in that moment would have been more than enough to convert all the prostitutes they’d seen into nuns. They locked eyes for an instant and then broke into a run. Within minutes the pair arrived, panting and trembling, back in the safety of their dormitory room.
There were certain temptations, to be sure. Not in the city, where the males in the cafés seemed not much older than fourteen years and failed to rouse the faintest longing in Lili, but in the hospital corridors where she spent ten or twelve hours of every day. For Lili the doctors in their impeccable white smocks were easily the most appealing men in Germany, not least of all because they made her feel she was a character plucked from the pages of The Thousand and One Nights. Several of them were wont to pull her aside in the hallways to discuss the love poems of Hfez and the architectural wonders of Persepolis. They were in many cases more learned about her country’s history and literary traditions than she herself, and she listened eagerly to their speeches and secretly spun fantasies of her own.
When one of them, a handsome, towering surgeon, returned from a weekend in San Moritz to tell her that he’d seen the young shah and his new bride on the slopes, trailed by two dozen skiing paparazzi, Lili gasped. “Did you see how beautiful our Queen Soraya is?” she asked him. “Did you see her green eyes?” The surgeon answered that the young queen was indeed beautiful but assured Lili that black eyes and dark hair like hers were far more fetching—“more Orientalisch,” he added, throwing her a wink.
She delivered her thousandth baby (a howling, bright pink twelve-and-a-half-pound boy) and prepared herself for the last part of her training: the theoretical examinations. She had by this time acquired a stack of notebooks filled with several hundred German words she’d meant to look up but never had. Between her days at the Frauenklinik attending the deliveries of the Germans and her weekends tending to her fellow Iranian exiles in the city proper, she had not had as much time to study as she would have liked, but as the examination date neared she reminded herself that there were dozens of lazy students with far less hope of gaining their certificates. Surely she would pass.
According to Frauenklinik tradition, on the day of the students’ final exams one of the instructors always handed out bright silver pfennigs for good luck. That year it was Schwester Annelise who handed out the coins. When Lili’s turn came she smiled very slightly, and then let the pfennig fall. “Pity to have come so far only to lose your luck,” Schwester Annelise said, shaking her head. “Such a pity you’ll have to go back now!”
Lili did not flinch. She stepped neatly over the pfennig, sat down at her desk, and smoothed her examination book. But the pages were crawling with words she couldn’t make out, and her mind would not quite settle down. Three hours later, when she and the other students filed out of the room to await their results, her hands were still shaking and her throat had gone dry. One by one the girls were called back in until Lili was the only one left sitting outside. She would not get her certificate and would not be able to return to Iran that year.
She spent five hours tramping through Hamburg, in which time she rounded the Binnenalster no fewer than fourteen times. Only when she’d lost all sensation in her fingers and toes did she turn back to the clinic. Shireen found her facedown on her cot several hours later, alternating between fits of crying and uncontrollable laughter. She hauled Lili out of the dormitory and dragged her into the psychiatry ward. There she was given a dose of morphine so massive that it put her out for two days. Hysteria, it was believed, was not uncommon with these foreign types, and in their case drugs were administered more freely and in more than the usual quantity.
Having passed her exams, Farideh returned to Iran; Shireen left for England for a round of advanced training, bequeathing Lili her little cache of saffron and enjoining her to write often; and Lili was left behind in Germany with her failure and her rage.
The episode would, however, only strengthen Lili’s determination to succeed. She found a new school, this one in the town of Göttingen, and set herself to the task of repeating the academic portion of her degree requirements. One night, Francesca, the frizzy-haired German girl occupying the cot opposite hers, offered to take Lili along to a dance in a nearby village. Lili accepted the rare treat of a night out. Over blaring polka music, she spent the evening demanding of a succession of young men, “Per
sian, I am Persian. Do you not know the poet Hfez? Do you not know the master, Rumi?” Wealthy Iranian families had been sending their sons abroad for several decades, but in those years Iranian women rarely left the country except as the wives of very rich men. To most Germans back then “Iran” meant either a land steeped in the splendors of Persian antiquity or else a country suspended in medieval squalor. For her part, by this time Lili had learned to read in people’s expressions which of these two visions they had of her country. She herself did not discriminate between the people she met but simply confronted everyone with the imperiousness that had become native to her.
A young railway engineer in a herringbone jacket and crooked bow tie, Johann had come alone to the village dance by himself that night, but he’d been courting a German girl for some months. All his life he would be a man who was shy even of children, but because he had read mystical Persian poetry and had lived for three months on a Greek island, in Lili he would have glimpsed the almond-eyed beauties of the Persian miniatures and he would have held her gaze longer than most of the German men there that night.
How, he began, did people live in Iran? What were their customs, hardships, and ambitions? Lili smiled and answered him as well as she could. With each draught of beer his attentions grew keener. He ordered a round for their table and another for the entire polka band. Before leaving the dance he asked if he could call on her the following day. She needed, she felt, the permission of a putative father, and so she turned to the only viable candidate at the table, Francesca’s inebriated father. The gentleman slurred his assent.
Lili was still sleeping when Johann appeared at noon wearing the previous night’s bow tie paired with a freshly pressed suit and vest. Francesca shook her awake, and she piled her hair on top of her head and then descended the stairs in a flowered robe. She and Johann took coffee in the parlor and he left an hour later, having promised to visit her soon in Göttingen. Grinning, he skipped out of the house and waved to her from the window of his little orange Audi.
From then on the phone rang for her daily in the dormitory, and every Friday evening he would drive out to visit her. That they did not share a common native language or culture, that she knew little of his past and that he knew even less of hers—all these gaps and fissures only put Lili at ease with her gentleman caller. They’d go to dinner at one of the city’s finest restaurants and afterward they always took a turn around the town’s main thoroughfare together. Sometimes he exhausted her with his questions, but he was, she thought, exceedingly well mannered and, though he was more than ten years older than her, still sweetly boyish. And when, after dinner one evening, she at last told him about her marriage and her child back in Iran, he’d listened with a tenderness that she would not soon forget.
On Christmas Eve they paid a visit to his family in Hessisch-Lichtenau, a small village outside Frankfurt. It was snowing hard when they set out from Göttingen and did not stop the entire way there. Arriving hours later than they’d planned, they found the rooms dark and quiet. Johann showed Lili to the guest room and slipped away to some other corner of the cottage. She awoke the next morning to discover she’d spent the night under the figure of Christ—or, rather, a gigantic wooden statue of Jesus impaled on a cross above the bed. It was no longer snowing, and from the window she could make out a one-lane road and a few black roofs in the far distance. More sobering than all of this, however, were the starched white bed linens and the ironed doilies of that room. Though she was by now no stranger to the German passion for order, these linens and doilies intimidated her sufficiently to pull on the cream two-piece suit she’d intended to wear to dinner that night and also to twist her curls into an officious bun.
They were all waiting for her in the breakfast nook downstairs. Mutti, Johann’s mother, was a portly woman with bright blue eyes and flushed cheeks and she wore a cornflower blue housedress, a white apron, orangey-beige stockings, and a pair of thick-heeled black leather shoes. Lili shook her hand and was next introduced to Johann’s two sisters. The tall one with the glasses was called Maria, and she lived with Mutti in Hessisch-Lichtenau and worked as an accountant in town. Elsa was the shorter, prettier sister with the sharp eyes. She’d moved to Frankfurt to work for a large company that traded gold, silver, and other hard currencies. Taking her place at the table, Lili could not help but notice that though it was still very early in the morning, the threesome already smelled strongly of cigarettes and peppermints.
While to Lili they seemed the picture of a German family, Johann and his family had, in fact, come to the country from a village near Danzig and were actually Kashubians, ethnic Slavs who had lived for hundreds of years in a colony of thatched cottages near the Baltic Sea. When the Nazis descended on Poland in the 1930s, the Kashubians were hauled out of their villages and appraised alongside cripples, degenerates, and Gypsies. The result was that the six members of the family were split three ways. The eldest sibling, Jakob, a strapping sixteen-year-old, was sent to the front to fight for the Reich; Johann, the youngest, and his father were sent to the work camps in Russia; Johann’s two sisters and their Mutti were shipped to a village outside Frankfurt to wait out the fate of their men.
Jakob never returned. “He’s lost,” Mutti took to murmuring as she stared out the window. “He’s lost somewhere out there and he can’t find us.” Elsa and Maria indulged the delusion for fear that without it their mother would truly lose her mind. By the time Papa and Johann turned up in Hessisch-Lichtenau, boys as young as fourteen were being sent to the front. Mutti and the sisters swept up their Bübchen, their little boy. If not quite so handsome as his dead brother, Jakob, with his blue eyes and blond curls Johann was still the prettiest of them all. They installed him in the basement for the duration of World War II. To pass the time, Johann taught himself Greek.
When the war ended, he emerged from the basement, sat out two years of high school as the only boy in his class, and in that time learned to speak German as if he’d lived all his life in Hessisch-Lichtenau. Papa died shortly afterward of cancer. Having looked about the village and between them found not one eligible man under fifty, the two daughters of the family went to work. Johann finished high school, won a scholarship to study civil engineering, and then joined a team of engineers who traveled the country rebuilding its railways, tunnels, and bridges.
He had a gentleness that set him apart and a taste for beer that did not. Wherever he went for his work, he rented a room for four nights of the week, Monday through Thursday, and he spent the weekends and every holiday with his mother and sisters. Late at night when he stumbled home drunk from the beer halls, Maria and Elsa peeled the clothes from his body and took turns scrubbing his face and chest with warm washcloths so that their mother would not know the worst of his drinking habit. He was thirty-four years old the year he showed up at his family’s house with Lili, and though his blond curls had turned dark and wrinkles fanned out under his blue eyes, he was their Bübchen still, and they would not, as Lili observed after just ten minutes at their table, surrender him easily.
And yet within a week of that visit he had discarded the ring he’d bought for his German girlfriend. Lili’s affection for Johann fell short of his infatuation with her, but she had reason to hasten a formal commitment: many of her relatives thought it inevitable that she would lose her morals in Europe, which only made her more determined to hold fast to them. One Sunday afternoon Lili asked Johann to drive her out to the countryside in his orange Audi. When they crossed a small trestle bridge, she told him to pull over and stop the engine. She pointed her finger in the direction of the river. Johann understood at once. He slipped out of his seat, took a few long strides away from the car, and then tossed the gold ring into the water.
Emboldened by the gesture, Johann next demanded a private interview with the head bishop of Frankfurt. In the course of explaining his intentions to marry a Muslim girl, he spoke of Lili’s marriage, her child, and her divorce. When he finished speaking, the bishop
retreated into the recesses of the church. Whether this was to confer with his fellow priests or to consult some ancient religious tome Johann would never know, but when the bishop returned he assured Johann that given Lili’s age at the time of her first marriage an argument could be made that the union had lacked consent. It was not the definitive answer he had hoped for, but it eased Johann’s Catholic conscience somewhat, or at least enough for him to proceed with his proposal.
He declared himself with a string of pearls. As he reached over to close the clasp, a tear slid down his cheek, and with that tear Lili crossed instantly from indecision to certainty. She’d known him less than two months, but such depth of feeling, coupled as it so obviously was with adoration, seemed to her a very fine qualification in a husband. She would marry him, she said, but on the condition that he would put the proposal into writing for her family.
But to whom should he write? Since Khanoom and Kobra were totally illiterate, writing to them was out of the question, and, anyway, Lili felt certain that a male relative should be called forth to speak on her behalf. In the end Johann composed a formal letter to her brother in Stuttgart, to which Nader replied by stating: “My sister is free to choose her own husband. I wish you well in any case.”
Having settled this account, Johann set out for Hessisch-Lichtenau for what would prove a much more difficult task: announcing the engagement to his own family. Mutti, Maria, and Elsa looked at him and then at one another. The Iranian girl, they suddenly realized, had not been a guest but a thief. He was careful to make no mention of Lili’s first marriage, and certainly not of her child, as either of these would have been sufficient to kill Mutti outright, but even so it was not long before Mutti gave him to understand that in the absence of a Kashubian bride, any Catholic girl would do, but a Muslim was beyond consideration—his as well as theirs.
The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life Page 19