In those days no one spoke of “addiction,” much less of “treatment.” For Lili the Persian word for addiction, mohtad, conjured images of opium dens, those dark, ancient caverns where men wasted away in a thick, sweet haze. Or else it made her think of the cocaine and heroin that now circulated in the back rooms of the city’s discotheques and bars. She’d seen dozens of celebrities and socialites spirited away to the birthing clinic for a discreet, if tortuous, course of detoxification. Their screaming was terrible, far worse than the cries of women in labor. Sometimes they’d have to be tied down to their beds until their bodies were free of the drugs. That, Lili told herself, was addiction.
Meanwhile, Johann’s face turned haggard and he grew so thin that his pants sagged and flapped against his legs. He was never violent, he never spoke a harsh or unkind word against her, but many days his boss would call Lili at the hospital with complaints. “Please understand, khanoom,” he begged, sounding on the verge of tears. Johann had come late to work on Monday. He’d been drinking at his desk; he’d insulted a client; he hadn’t come to work at all for three days. “If it weren’t out of respect for you, Khanoom Doktor, I would fire him, please understand, Khanoom Doktor….”
Worse still were the days and weeks when he disappeared. She did not know where he went, whether as far as the provinces or just to some corner of the city. When he came back home, his clothes were always soiled and wrinkled, his pockets empty, his face and chest ruddy from the sun, and his eyes dull and bloodshot.
Mostly her family pretended not to notice Johann’s drinking, but these absences so terrified Zaynab and Kobra as to shake them from their reticence. Zaynab, fairly trembling with worry, would pull Lili aside at family gatherings and tell Lili the story of a foreigner, a poor bandeh Khoda, creature of God, who’d been found dead and half-naked at the edge of the Dasht-e Kavr, the vast salt desert that stretched across the Iranian plateau. “Keep him close,” Zaynab whispered. Kobra favored a more direct approach. “You are a good man, Mr. Engineer,” she’d tell Johann, taking him by the arm and speaking softly to him, “a true gentleman. I don’t tell you not to drink, just to drink here, in the house, where you will be safe….”
But whatever name Lili and her family gave his drinking, or would not, there would be many months now that she had no money to pay rent. Once she laundered and ironed all her clothes—her flowered sundresses and wool skirt suits and even her silk stockings—hung them along a string in her bedroom, and prepared to sell them to the neighborhood women.
“And just how much do you think you’ll get for all this?” Mariam had asked her.
“Three thousand tomans.”
“Three thousand! You’d let people steal your clothes from you for three thousand tomans?”
“Fine. Six thousand.”
“That’s better,” said Mariam. She reached for her purse. “I’ll buy it all, but I won’t pay you less than seven thousand.”
“You!” Lili exclaimed. “But none of it will fit you!”
“That, dokhtar-joon, is my business, not yours!”
With the money Mariam gave her for the clothes, Lili paid the back rent on the apartment on Avenue Pahlavi and bought a bottle of whiskey that would at least keep Johann home the next time he started to drink.
“I can’t make him stop….,” she once confided to Mariam.
“You stupid girl,” said Mariam with rough affection. “Of course you can’t.”
There was talk sometimes of trouble in the holy cities of Qom and Mashhad, of an exiled cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini smuggling cassette tapes into Iran from abroad. No one seemed to pay much attention. The shah’s soldiers were everywhere. Twenty billion dollars of oil revenue streamed into the coffers of the Peacock Throne each year. Nearly a million foreigners were living in Iran by then, and with the city’s hotels booked solid for much of the year, there were even rumors of tourists renting bathrooms and hospital beds. “The very gutters of Tehran are lined with gold!” it was said in London and Tokyo and New York. What, many Iranians reasoned, were an exiled cleric and his cassette tapes beside all that?
Still, there was talk; there were signs. Once, on Lili’s way back home after a delivery in the Bottom of the City, a woman in a long, black veil, a chadori, eyed her as she stood on the curb waiting for a cab. Every time Lili looked in her direction, she caught the woman staring at her. Lili turned her face away, pretended not to notice or care, but then the woman brushed past her and whispered, “You should cover yourself, sister.”
She had only meant it kindly, Lili told herself, and so she’d just nodded and gone on her way. But then, not long afterward, Johann told her that his clients had started reneging on their villas in Shemiran. “They’re sending their money out of the country,” one of the project’s Iranian engineers told Johann one day before confiding that he’d started doing the same. “Did you know that just a hundred thousand dollars buys a house, a business, and a green card in America?” Johann did not, but suddenly it seemed that everyone knew someone who’d left Iran for America or Europe and many others who were planning to leave the country soon.
For all this, in later years Lili would trace the end, or rather her end in Iran, to Mariam’s death.
One August evening Mariam went to visit her father, Shahryar Khan, at his ranch an hour outside Tehran. A country gentleman of vast estates, Shahryar Khan had long indulged a passion for hunting. At eighty, he still took weeklong treks through the countryside with his friends and their female consorts, returning, invariably, with carcasses slung over both shoulders—rabbits, antelope, and eagles. These he skinned, stuffed, and mounted on the walls of his house alongside his rifles, pistols, and antique swords.
For years Mariam had pleaded with him to show greater mercy. “Blood brings blood,” Mariam had warned her father, with much sincerity and far less success.
When Shahryar Khan woke one night to noises outside his house, he reached for the pistol he always kept by his bed, flung the door open, and shot into the dark. His eyesight was poor, his hands palsied, but with one bullet he met his mark. It was not until the next day that his second wife, the young country girl, found Mariam’s body bleeding and laid open to the sky.
For Lili, Mariam’s death belonged to a class of grief so deep it foreclosed the possibility of tears. One day Lili went to the clinic, pulled the sign from its place by the door, and drew the curtains closed. For many weeks the Bottom of the City women would arrive with their sisters, daughters, aunts, and cousins, their pots of stew and their knitting, only to find the clinic’s windows shuttered and its door locked. Inside, Lili would sit cross-legged on the floor, praying, and as she prayed she’d hear Mariam’s voice, as clear as it had been in life. “Blood brings blood,” Lili murmured as she rocked herself back and forth, though sometimes she screamed the words, too.
Now she began to dream.
Thousands had gathered in the streets of Tehran. Shoulder to shoulder, from one end of Avenue Pahlavi to the other, they stood with their faces turned up toward the sky. The shah’s plane circled the city. Then came the smoke. It began, always, as a thin black stripe, but this smoke, the smoke of Lili’s dreams, didn’t dissipate but instead grew thicker and blacker until finally it had swallowed the whole sky.
It was dreams, always dreams, by which Lili and Kobra took measure of both past and future. When Kobra dreamt, it was mostly of her dead, and her dreams invariably guided her toward acts of piety. When she dreamt of her mother, Pargol, she fasted. When she dreamt of Sohrab, she gave alms to the poor. As for Lili, long after she’d learned to spurn most all of Kobra’s superstitions, she still took close counsel from her dreams.
“We must leave Iran,” Lili finally told Johann one day.
Fifteen years had passed since he’d first come to Iran to marry her, and in that time he’d learned the futility, and often the peril, of dismissing such pronouncements. When Lili told him about her dream and announced that “we must leave Iran,” he claimed to have been
visited by a dream himself.
“I dreamt we were in America and that I died there in a tall building.”
“But there’s trouble. They say—”
“Let’s just wait another year,” he pleaded, but it was Lili’s dream that would guide us—that night and in all the years to come.
We left Iran on Shab-e Yalda, the first night of winter and the longest night of the year. For centuries Iranians had celebrated Yalda with a midnight feast of pomegranates, wine, and poetry, but on our final night in Iran, while Lili and Kobra packed the two maroon leather suitcases we would be taking with us to America, Zaynab and I celebrated the solstice by watching a Yalda special on television.
At midnight Googoosh, the diva of 1970s Tehran, appeared in a golden chariot. Zaynab pulled on her glasses and sat me on her lap, inches from the screen. Googoosh tossed back her blond hair and began to sing and dance. Every few minutes she floated away on her golden chariot, and when she came back she was always wearing a different dress, her hair had been restyled, and her heavy-lidded eyes had been painted with a different shade of pastel eye shadow.
“She’s changed her outfit again!” Zaynab would call out breathlessly. “Come see; come see!” she’d call, and from time to time Lili and Kobra would poke their heads into the room to admire Googoosh’s latest look.
A light snow had begun to fall earlier in the night. By the time we reached Mehrabad Airport, it was four in the morning and large, heavy snowflakes filled the still-dark sky. We trudged across the icy tarmac. The plane’s engines roared and hummed and the lights on its wings began pulsing.
“If you don’t hurry,” a woman called out to us, “it will be too late for you to board!”
At this, Lili, Kobra, and Zaynab fell into each other’s arms, crying. I caught a snowflake on my tongue and ate it, then caught another and another.
Zaynab broke free from Lili’s and Kobra’s embrace and brushed her tears away with the edge of her veil. “America,” she said suddenly. “It’s a wonderful place, they say. Everyone says it’s a wonderful place….”
This only made Lili cry harder. For weeks she’d been telling everyone—her cousins, aunts, colleagues, and neighbors—that we’d soon be back in our apartment on Avenue Pahlavi. “We’re only taking two suitcases!” she told them. “How long could we stay away with just two suitcases?”
But in these last minutes a terrible apprehension overtook her. She turned to her aunt and clasped Zaynab’s hands in her own. “What if we can’t come back?”
“But of course you’ll come back!” Zaynab and Kobra cried out together.
Lili nodded and drew in a deep breath. “But you’ll keep an eye out for her, won’t you? Just sometimes, so I know—”
“Yes, yes,” Kobra said quickly. “You just watch out for that one,” she said with a nod toward me. “And your husband, too.”
“But I’ll have no one to talk to over there!” Lili wailed.
“You’ll have her!” Zaynab exclaimed, giving my cheek a pinch.
“Her? What will she understand? She won’t even remember any of this. She won’t remember any of you!”
This would prove just as true as her dream. Until Lili told the story in the tapes twenty years later, I’d forget almost everything about that last night in Iran. The two suitcases, the pretty lady in the golden carriage on television, all the cries, prayers, and promises, Kobra as she held the Koran over our heads, and Zaynab burying her face in Lili’s chest and then wrestling herself free and walking away so that there was no choice for us but to go. One by one my memories of that last night in Iran fell away until finally I remembered nothing but the snow.
Later it would be called the Islamic Revolution, but for a long time the hopes and furies that gripped Iran in the late seventies would be known to Iranians only as the shoolooqi, “the busyness.” In the first months of the shoolooqi, when the streets of Tehran were overrun with mobs, tanks, soldiers, and snipers, Kobra would sit in the dark back room of the Lady Diola until the cries of “Allahu Akbar! [God is great!]” rose from the rooftops of the city.
My mother, father, and I landed in New York with two suitcases. Lili and Johann bought a silver Buick sedan and headed south and then westward across the United States. I sat cross-legged on my mother’s lap in the front seat, chattering to myself and playing dolls. Lili, lost in her thoughts, braided and unbraided and rebraided my hair. From time to time her eyes would seize on some detail of the landscape and she’d point out the window and tell me to “look at America.” I was five years old and “America” meant nothing more to me than the plush maroon seats and gleaming hood of that Buick. Persian was just the sound of my mother’s voice and German was my father’s.
We stayed at roadside motels, slept three to a bed, woke early, and drove all day. In New York, in Fort Lauderdale, in Houston and Las Vegas, Lili stayed up long past midnight, dialing Kobra’s number and then Zaynab’s. No answer. Lili would let the phone ring ten, twenty, thirty times before setting down the receiver. Sara had no telephone in the countryside. She might be safer there than with relatives in the city, but Lili couldn’t be sure. She paced the motel room, cursing or crying or both. Ten minutes later she’d dial Kobra’s and Zaynab’s numbers again. No answer. Every night Lili lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, desperate for sleep. It rarely came. By the time we reached Texas, her eyes were ringed with dark circles. When we stopped at gas stations she bought packages of pink doughnuts, and when she felt her waist start to thicken she found she did not care.
In Tehran, meanwhile, Kobra began to hoard flatbread, beans, and nuts. Twice a day she moistened a sheet of nooneh sangak with a sprinkle of water, pressed some feta cheese and walnuts on top of it, and ate it in one bite. Whenever she came by an orange or an apple at the marketplace, she’d wrap it in a sheet of newspaper and bury it deep in her refrigerator. Just before the fruit reached the point of rotting, she’d pull it out and eat it as a treat.
The shah left the country with a small box of Iranian soil tucked under his arm. Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to kneel on the ground and kiss the source of that same soil. “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” came the cries across the rooftops of Tehran night after night—God is great! God is great!—and all through the shoolooqi Kobra, too, put her faith in Him.
We crossed into California and spent an entire day circling Los Angeles, looking for Hollywood. Failing to find it, we settled for a tour of Universal Studios. The Santa Ana winds set the palm trees swaying, mixed the scent of the desert with the scent of the sea. My father took me to Disneyland and Lili, alone in a motel room in Anaheim, watched the news from Iran and wept.
From Los Angeles we continued north along the California shore, down Highway 1, until we reached San Francisco. When we crossed over the Golden Gate, my mother narrowed her eyes at a strip of coast just beyond the bridge. The light brushed the slate gray water silver and the hills that skirted the ocean were unlike any she’d ever seen, blond and rounded and endless.
“Here,” she told my father, because by then she understood that there’d be no going back to Iran, or no going back yet.
Like most immigrants, my parents found their degrees and work experience did not count for much when they came to America, and so they used their small savings to buy a run-down motel on a frontage road off Highway 101 ten miles north of San Francisco. The Casa Buena, the Good House. It had twenty rooms, doubles and singles, on two floors, and a small cottage, the “manager’s suite,” attached to the motel on one end. The parking lot was pitted with potholes, the beds all sagged and creaked, and the carpets and curtains stank of mold and cigarettes, but in those ruins they willed themselves to see their future. To begin again.
They worked in shifts, day and night, seven days of the week. My father took the night shift, snatching at sleep on a tattered powder blue couch in the office. His eyes, too, would soon be ringed with dark circles and his face would soon take on a look of permanent confusion but in the beginning he hel
d fast to his gentlemanly ways. At six in the morning he rinsed his face, splashed on some cologne, then combed his hair and set it with hairspray. He wore dress slacks, not jeans, dress shoes, not tennis shoes. He boiled himself a full pot of coffee—twelve cups’ worth to last him through the day—fried two sausages in a pan, and ate them with a knife and a fork, and then he returned to his desk behind the plastic window of the manager’s suite.
At noon—checkout time—Johann napped in the back room and Lili began her own shift at the Casa Buena. She piled the day’s clean sheets and towels onto an ancient, battered olive green trolley, checked her supply of bleach and Windex, and began making her way through the motel rooms. She emptied and polished the plastic ashtrays, then collected the beer bottles, soda cans, and pizza boxes from the floor. She stripped the beds, taking care to air out the mattresses before pulling on the new sheets, dusted the nightstand and the television, and vacuumed the carpet. Then, with one ear to the parking lot in case someone came looking for a room, she splashed the tub and the toilet with bleach, and to save time she threw rags on the bathroom floor and mopped with her feet as she wiped down the sink.
Mostly we rented to truckers on their way to Los Angeles. They’d stay the night and leave before dawn, and though they could be gruff or outright rude, it was the locals who always gave the most trouble. They’d stagger into the office when the bars closed, hollering and cussing and slamming their bills onto the counter. When they got to their rooms they’d send the lamps and tables crashing against the walls. Once a man dragged a half-naked woman into the parking lot and began whipping her with his belt, and by the time the police came the woman’s face and shoulders were covered in bloody welts and the man had made off into the dark.
The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life Page 27