The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (33 page)

She left Johann and his friend to their beers and their talk, climbed up onto the rooftop with a cup of tea, drew a chair to the ledge, and peered over the roof and onto the city. At dusk there came the muezzin’s last call to prayer, distant but still exquisite, still stirring. Eventually the crowds thinned, the streets grew quiet, and one by one the windowpanes lit up. Lili closed her eyes and listened until the muezzin’s song trailed into silence, until the sky passed from blue to navy to black.

Lonesome as she felt on such nights, it was there, on the rooftop,
that Lili began to put together a plan for Sara. At thirteen Lili had had little sense of how to manage an infant. Now, at twenty-five, she had little sense of how to manage a teenager. But what she knew, beyond any doubt, was that she must get Sara out of her aunt’s house and back into school.

But how? It was unlikely that Kazem would release Sara into Lili’s custody, and legal recourse would be both costly and slow. Besides, her working hours were too long and too erratic for her to watch over Sara herself. Kobra would be no help to Lili, and Johann, however devoted and well-meaning, was clearly incapable of the task.

Yet she was determined to get Sara back into school. The problem absorbed her for many weeks, but then, through one of her patients at King’s Serenity, she learned that a girls’ boarding school had recently opened in the northern suburb of Shemiran, just steps away from Sa’ad Abad, the shah’s summer palace. The institution, she was told, was led by a Western-educated psychiatrist known as Mr. Dr. Headmaster.

Dressed in her best skirt suit, faux fur stole, and suede Viennese pumps, Lili spent an afternoon touring the school on Mr. Dr. Headmaster’s own arm. An erstwhile Qajar mansion, the school sat on a slope between a grove of aged cypresses and aspens and the lofty peaks of the Alborz Mountains. Apart from a few tasteful innovations, the mansion’s nineteenth-century fixtures—the mirror-work walls and engraved stucco tiles—had been exquisitely preserved. Daughters of princes and cabinet ministers and wealthy expatriates, the students seemed to her without exception a band of beautiful, healthy, confident, cheerful girls. By the time she’d reached the large interior courtyard, Lili longed to curl up at the base of the
beed
, the majestic old willow tree, and go to sleep.

In such a place, she felt sure, Sara would be safe and she would be happy.

“Call Kazem,” Lili told Kobra once again.

In the ensuing negotiations, Kazem proved only too eager to take up Lili’s offer to enroll Sara in boarding school—provided that Lili paid her tuition and covered all her other expenses. It would take many nights of scheming on the rooftop before Lili could work out how, exactly, she’d manage such an enormous expense, but with just a few more sacrifices, just a few more economies, she told herself she might find a way to enter Sara there by the beginning of the new term.

“Study,” Lili told Sara.

It was an exceptionally fine September morning when Lili dropped Sara off at the boarding school near Sa’ad Abad. Sara was wearing her new uniform—a pleated jumper, white tights, and brown loafers—and her long black hair was pulled into a braid. “Lovely,” Lili called her, but Sara had been surly in the taxi, turning her face away so that Lili could not meet her eyes.

But then, as they passed through the boarding school’s gates, Sara pressed her palms to the window, threw a look over her shoulder at Lili, and grinned.

“I’m going to live here?” she asked excitedly. “In this mansion?”

“Yes,” Lili answered, “but you must promise me you will study and that you will make something of yourself here.”

Sara nodded. “I will; I will; I will!” she sang out.

Lili smiled and kissed her on both cheeks. She’d done well by her daughter. Sara would be safe here and she would be happy.

But within the space of a week the strange fits and worrying episodes and telephone calls commenced.

Mr. Dr. Headmaster’s secretary would put through a call to King’s Serenity. As Lili stood with her hands poised between a woman’s
legs or else gripping an infant’s slippery flesh, an orderly or secretary would burst into the delivery room, begging her pardon but there was trouble with some person by the name of Sara up in Sa’ad Abad. Lili would pull off her mask, peel off her surgical gloves, and take the phone. It was Mr. Dr. Headmaster himself on the line, calling to tell her Sara had just thrown herself from the stairs, she was refusing to eat, she had not spoken for a week. And Lili must come straightaway.

Mr. Dr. Headmaster was a thoughtful man, educated at a famous French institute and conversant in all the latest psychoanalytic theories. Mr. Dr. Headmaster studied the mother, he studied the daughter, and then he wasted no time in delivering his diagnosis: All of Sara’s strange moods and disruptive behaviors could be traced back to a lack of motherly love.
Her
lack of motherly love. To this there was no possible reply, or any Lili would permit herself to make to so genteel, thoughtful, and educated a man as Mr. Dr. Headmaster. Every time Sara made a scene at school, Lili was called into his office. She could never do anything but bow her head, press her lips together, and nod. And then, as she sat stricken with the force of Mr. Dr. Headmaster’s assessment and the weight of her own unspoken words, there came Sara herself, her hair invariably disheveled and her eyes swollen from crying, making her way forward with all the confusion and rage of the child she still very much was in those years.

On Mr. Dr. Headmaster’s suggestion, Sara and Lili began to spend Saturday afternoons together. “It will calm her,” he assured Lili. “It will bring you closer to each other.”

Saturday after Saturday, Sara pouted and grimaced, shot her dark looks or refused to look at Lili at all, but when they went shopping together she suddenly became as breathless, cheery, and spirited as a little girl. She spent hours trying on clothes—dresses, slacks, ankle boots, and jackets—all nearly as smart and expensive as the clothes the Sa’ad Abad girls brought back from their European holidays.

“Tell me, do I look like you?” Sara would ask her in the dressing
room, eyes darting from her own reflection to Lili’s in the dressing room mirror. “Do you think I will be as beautiful as you someday? Are my eyes like yours?”

What Lili saw, in these moments, was a strange double exposure: Sara at two, at six, then at twelve, but also all those broken intervals, the separations and the absences between all the other Saras she’d known. “Of course,” Lili would say. “Very, very much.”

One Saturday in summertime they visited the new amusement park in North Tehran. Lili bought them ice creams, thick dollops of rose-infused, pistachio-studded cream pressed between two wafers, and together they made their way through the grounds. At dusk young girls appeared in kitten heels and shift dresses, linking arms as they walked with their beaus. Sara’s eyes always lingered on the prettiest ones. When they reached the large artificial lake at the center of the park, Lili rented a paddleboat—a red one; Sara had been most particular about its color—and then she and Lili took turns steering it around the lake with a pair of plastic oars and from there they watched the Ferris wheel, the women’s skirts billowing up as it rose and fell, rose and fell, and the smears of colored lights as the machine spun faster and faster against the sky.

Lili would be a mother yet. The more unruly Sara became and the more desperate she herself felt—about Sara but also about her in-laws and about Johann’s drinking—the more determined she was to have another child. This, however, was an ambition with which her body refused to cooperate, and so one by one she found her way to the examination room of every last fertility doctor in Tehran. She enrolled herself in treatments she and Johann could ill afford; endured injections and examinations and surgeries that left her dizzy, sore, bloated, and exhausted; submitted herself to Kobra’s unctions, tinctures, and compresses; trekked to mosques and
martyrs’ shrines; gave alms to the poor; and sought her fortune in tea leaves, coffee grains, and the verses of H
fez.

At all this, Johann looked on, dumbfounded. He was forty years old and fatherhood, when he considered it at all, seemed a vaguely appealing but hardly essential prospect.

“
Muss das sein?
” he asked her again and again. Must it be?

“Yes,” she answered, for every failure only increased her desire for a child.

Then one year she flew to Israel by herself, spent a week making the rounds of Tel Aviv’s top fertility specialists, and returned to Iran with her blood flush with hormones. She would not let herself hope for it, not quite, but she’d conceived the very first month. She began to walk with her hips thrust forward and one hand cradling her imperceptible bump. She sailed through shops, marketplaces, and department stores, bought herself a crib, bed linens, a stroller, and a rocking chair. By the second month, she had assembled a fully functioning nursery—bottles and diapers and all—and she passed all her spare hours daydreaming there in her new rocking chair. She scarcely noticed the bottles of Shams beer and the overflowing ashtrays. She smiled, brilliantly and often.

On a morning in the third month of her pregnancy, Lili threw back the sheets, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and found herself sitting in a large, wet circle of blood. She fainted as soon as her toes touched the floor.

When she came to, she found herself in a bed at King’s Serenity. She jerked up and ripped off her oxygen mask. The contractions that came then were so faint and quick that she scarcely recognized them as labor pains, and it was only when she lifted her head to check the sheets for blood that she saw him. Her baby, her son.

She caught him herself.

Very gently, she wiped his face clean with the edge of her gown and pressed him to her chest. He had no pulse, no color, and was so
small, no more than five inches long, that she could hold him in the palm of her hand.

For a quarter of an hour she held him to her, and she would have held him much longer but for the vein she imagined beating to life in his temple. When screams ripped loose from her throat, when her cries filled the corridors, nurses filed into the room and plunged a shot of morphine into her arm. One by one the nurses and orderlies took turns attempting to ease the stillborn from her hands. Her mouth fell slack, her lids grew heavy, but still she would not ease her grip. A doctor appeared, clipped the umbilical cord, ordered a second shot of morphine. The placenta would not come, the bleeding would not stop, her pulse grew slack, and through it all Lili kept her eyes peeled on her tiny baby, willing the vein to beat once more in his temple until suddenly there was nothing but darkness.

“Do you want the hospital to bury him?” came a far-off voice.

Lili opened her eyes. Mariam was sitting at the foot of the bed, and in her arms she held a small white bundle.

Lili shuddered. If they buried him at all, they’d pitch him into some horrid communal grave outside the city. “No!” she shouted. She reached out her arms for him, pressed him to her chest, and then together she and Mariam waited in silence until Kobra came.

Kobra did not bury the stillborn. That day she paced the street outside the morgue for nearly an hour, willing herself to enter and have done with it, but in the end she could not bring herself to bury Lili’s baby. Instead, Kobra put him in a large glass jar filled with rubbing alcohol and hid him deep in her closet.

She never spoke of it to Lili, but when neighbors or relatives came round to visit Kobra would pull the jar from its hiding place. “His eyes are blue!” she’d tell them. She traced the glass with her forefinger, outlining the curve of his spine, his head, his tiny fists. “Blue, blue, blue!”

“She thinks it’s Omid,” her cousins and sisters whispered to one another, recalling the madness that had gripped her when she’d found her own little boy dead at the foot of the pool. “She thinks she’s lost him again.” They were kind; they were indulgent. They nodded and they smiled, and when she grew quiet, they took her arm and led her gently away from the jar.

Five weeks later, when Lili herself had managed, mostly, to submerge her grief in work, the stillborn fetus was just as beautiful, just as perfect, and Kobra just as unwilling to part with him.

“His eyes are blue,” she murmured, touching a finger gently to the glass. “Blue, blue, blue…”

“But his soul!” her sisters reasoned. “You must bury him. God will not take his soul until you bury him.”

Kobra narrowed her eyes, puckered her lips, and began contemplating the fate of the stillborn’s soul.

She buried him in the sixth week. She went alone, told no one her plan. She pulled on her chador—reserved in those days for pilgrimages to Mashhad or the holy days of Ramadan—bundled the stillborn back into the white hospital sheet, and carried him to the cemetery. She performed the ablutions herself, swaddled him in a funeral shroud no bigger than a pillowcase, and buried him in the children’s section of the graveyard.

“The child’s name?” they asked her that day.

Kobra lifted her eyes. “His name?”