The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (35 page)

By the late sixties Kobra had been working as a seamstress for well over two decades, and though she was still young, still in her forties, she swore that another year spent hunched over her sewing machine would find her both completely blind and crippled with arthritis.

Business had been falling off since the introduction of department stores to Iranian life, and her income, while more or less sufficient, could no longer justify the sheer physical sacrifice exacted by her profession. Kobra’s sisters urged her to stop working at once and move in with Lili and Johann, but after so many years she was accustomed to earning her own money and living in her own house. She was also totally incapable of idleness.

But what else could Kobra do besides sew?

The answer came to Lili when, on her way to King’s Serenity one day, she noticed a newly erected Western-style beauty institute. A glorious spectacle of mirrors and marble and brass, the institute proved an instant hit among office workers and salesclerks, who now
made up the majority of Iran’s female workforce. Lili looked it over, inside and out, and formulated a plan, which she wasted no time in presenting to Kobra. The modern Iranian woman, Lili explained, required manicures, pedicures, shampoos, tints, cuts, highlights, perms, and blow-outs, all of which demanded a corresponding army of professionally trained beauticians.

These, Lili went on, were just the needs of ordinary working women—the real money lay with the brides. While once they had been tended in the bathhouses by their own relatives, it had became fashionable among all but the most destitute
Tehrooni
families to send brides to the beauty parlor before their weddings. It hardly needed mentioning that a bride was the most lucrative of clients, for she always brought along her mother, sisters, aunts, and cousins—some two or three dozen females all requiring a complete overhaul before the wedding.

Kobra’s eyes brightened when Lili put forth the proposition, especially when she reached this last part about the brides. Lili congratulated herself on the plan and put down the money for a complete course of study, but Kobra was to be sent home the next day. A teacher had ordered her to read the directions on a bottle of dye and discovered that Kobra could not make out a single word. She was totally illiterate.

Lili intervened on Kobra’s behalf, offering to enroll her in night school if she was allowed to stay on and watch the instructors. Kobra now found a single page from her first-grade reading primer could pitch her into a fit of tears. Lili hired a private tutor for her, Kobra made slow gains toward literacy, and some months later she matriculated in beauty school.

A European certificate, Lili contemplated, would be just the thing to launch Kobra into this new career as a hairdresser. Lili conferred with Johann, and Kobra was sent to Hessisch-Lichtenau, where for one year she would occupy Johann’s old room. Presenting a translation of her Iranian beauty school certificate, Kobra offered herself
as an apprentice at the village salon. She was, from the first, a brilliant success. The likes of her depilatory methods had never before been seen in that German village. “
Wunderbar!
Wonderful!” They beamed as she worked a length of string over their eyebrows, upper lips, and chins.

On Saturday mornings Mutti and Kobra made trips to the nearby town of Kassel. Whenever a man eyed Kobra on the bus or flashed her a warm or faintly suggestive smile as they passed her on the street, Mutti pulled her close and whispered, “
Nein, nein, nicht gehen!
[No, no, don’t go!]” Kobra averted her eyes and stayed put at Mutti’s side, and as a reward for her obedience Mutti spoiled her with a gift from one of the village shops.

A little over a year after its inception, the ready-mix concrete company began running aground. They did not lack for contracts, but to pay off the German creditors Johann and his assistant, Fato’allah, would have to work twice as fast.

“What can we do?” Johann asked Lili.

In less than a minute she found him the solution: “Night shifts.”

As this would require a permit, she set off for the city’s central business registry one morning wearing a crepe navy dress, matching navy heels, and a lace-trimmed hat. Her best. At the registry a uniformed officer glanced up, shot her an appraising, then appreciative glance, and led her up a curving marble staircase and deposited her in a private office.

Lili stole a look about the room. It was handsomely appointed, with a large inlaid desk and leather chairs. The floors were covered from one end to the other with silk carpets. Lili made a quick study of the patterns, noted their provenance (Shiraz and Tabriz, Iran’s finest), and then she smoothed her skirt, tidied the sheaf of papers in her lap, and waited.

Ten years had passed since the day she’d last seen him. His hair had turned white at the temples, he’d grown a mustache and a paunch and had traded his much-decorated military uniform for a suit and silk cravat, but as soon as he turned his green eyes to her she knew him. The General.

He was the first to speak. “They told us this company belongs to a foreigner.”

“It’s true,” she stammered. “The foreigner is my husband.”

“Ah,” he said, raising an eyebrow and considering her more carefully. He walked behind his desk and opened a drawer. Her heart lurched.
He’s reaching for his pistol, he’s recognized me, I’ll die right here, in this office, and no one will ever know.

It was, however, a box of Swiss chocolates that he held out to her.

She shook her head.

The General shrugged, took a chocolate for himself, and then set the box back into the drawer. “And what is it you need from us?”

“A permit,” she stuttered.

“I see,” he answered. “But this is no trouble whatever,
khanoom-jan
, provided you’d be willing to resume our conversation at a private meeting.”

“And my husband?”

“But surely he does not understand Persian, this foreign husband of yours?”

“Not a word.”

“Leave your telephone number with my assistant,
khanoom,
” he said as he rose from his desk. “We’re sure to find an answer to your problem.”

He drew his hand from his pocket and smiled. She extended her own hand and let him squeeze it. Still she kept her eyes cast down. There was a moment, then, when she felt sure he would remember her, but his smile was warm to the last.

“A pleasure,
khanoom
,” he said as he showed her to the door.

As Lili walked out of the General’s office that day, she kept her eyes down and her steps slow and steady. All the way down the hallway, past the uniformed officers and suited businessmen, down the enormous circular marble staircase and through the main doors, she kept her pace slow and even. It was only in the streets, in the open air, and surrounded by crowds of people that she doubled over as if struck by a blow, threw a look over her shoulder, and broke into a run.

“They won’t authorize a permit,” she told Johann that night.

It was the first outright lie of her marriage, and despite the ruin it would cause them, it was neither a lie she hesitated to tell nor one she would ever regret having told.

All through that autumn and winter the two ready-mix trucks rumbled back and forth between the factory and Tehran. Johann and Fato’allah began working sixteen-and eighteen-hour shifts and finally twenty-hour shifts, but still they could not work fast enough.

The bills came daily now. Official letters from the bank, invoices from shipping companies and cement suppliers and subcontractors. The German creditors rang each morning (5:00
A.M.
Tehran time), pressing for satisfaction, first with warnings and then, increasingly, with threats.

In the end, there was no choice but to sell the factory, the two trucks, and every last sack of cement, until they owned nothing but the parcel of land on which it all sat.

It was then that Johann’s drinking really began.

At night he’d come home with a case of Shams beer under one arm and a bottle of English whiskey under the other. He spent days holed up in the apartment on Avenue Pahlavi, drinking and playing the same record on the turntable until he passed out and finally the needle ran off the edge and scratched at nothing.

She’d return from work and find him dead asleep in the middle of the day or slumped in a chair with his face buried in his chest or in his hands. When she called out to him, he’d turn his face to her and wrinkle his brow, as if struggling to place her—or himself. She’d slip his shoes from his feet, pull a blanket over him, and draw the curtains. There were bottles in every room, in every corner, and even at the foot of the tub. In the summer the heat sharpened the scent of the beer and whiskey, and in her desperation she’d throw open the windows and sleep curled up in a chair on the balcony.

She cajoled; she pleaded; she reasoned. She used every endearment, German and Persian, that she knew and more than a few curses, too. Often she refused to speak to him at all.

“I won’t drink anymore; I won’t,” he’d swear, clasping her hands in his own. “I promise you. No more.”

However heartfelt, however earnest his promises, within an hour his hands would start shaking, and then instead of the bottles of whiskey and Shams beer it would be dinner plates brimming with cigarette butts, ash smeared on the carpets and the couch, smoke in her hair and on her skin until once again bottles lined the mantel, cluttered the dining room table, and lay by the sink and at the foot of the tub.

She tore through the Armenian deli so many times and with such fury that the owner began throwing his arms in the air as soon as he saw her coming. “Why did you sell him so much?” she’d demand.

“But what can I do,
khanoom
?” he begged to know. “What can I do?”

In the evenings, at the end of her shift, she would stand waiting for Johann in the street outside King’s Serenity. Half an hour, then an hour would pass, and still he did not come. She’d turn back to the hospital to call him on the phone, and if he answered at all, it was always in a voice thick with liquor and sleep. She’d return to the street and pace the sidewalk until finally she’d glimpse him weaving
down Avenue Pahlavi, the front wheel of the car careening over the edge of the sidewalk until he jerked the clutch and greeted her with a look that was the perfect confluence of helplessness, exhaustion, and mischief.

When, finally, the German creditors were paid off and a small sum of money came in from the sale of their company, Lili marched to the bank, put half the money into an account in her own name, and then cut Johann a check for the other half. “You’re free to go back to Germany,” she told him. “In a plane or car or in your bare feet—however you prefer.”

Johann sobered up, put aside ten thousand
tomans
for Fato’allah and his family, deposited the rest of his share into Lili’s bank account, and took a job building villas for the rich in Shemiran. It was neither his first, nor his last, wholehearted and wholly unsuccessful attempt at reform.

Established soon after her return from Germany, the Lady Diola was Kobra’s brainchild, and it was born the moment she chose its name. “Lady Diola” was both fantasy and fiction—invented by Kobra to sound both French and modern. For two decades
Tehrooni
women would pass through her doors, calling out, “
Salaam
, Diola Khanoom! [Hello, Mrs. Diola!]” Year after year Kobra indulged them, smiling silently over her pots of dye and tucking away the bills that would prove her salvation many times over.

To finance the venture, she hauled Lili’s best carpets to the bank and signed them over as security for a loan. Kobra then acquired the deed to a new apartment on Avenue Geisha. The living room was outfitted with three gleaming pink sinks, a row of matching pink hair dryers, and pale green floor-to-ceiling carpeting. The larger of the apartment’s two bedrooms she’d turned into a waiting room complete with a pair of gold-footed Louis XIV chaises and a steady
supply of French and American fashion magazines. The third room in the apartment was Kobra’s bedroom, with its single bed and white coverlet and latticed window frames, and this room she always kept locked.

Since opening the Lady Diola, Kobra had undergone a striking transformation. Though she favored styles far more conservative than those in fashion—long, flowing skirts and flowery blouses—they were now invariably cut of the very finest silks. To bolster her diminutive frame, she also began wearing cork-heeled wedges. Kobra and her assistant Hovick, a slender, mustachioed Armenian gentleman with a genius for highlights, could be found every night together at the Diola, experimenting on her hair with the latest tints and hairstyles. And on the eve of her fiftieth birthday she submitted her face and nose to the hands of one of the most famed plastic surgeons in Tehran—to wonderful effect.

As Kobra’s fortunes, and beauty, increased, so, too, did the number and quality of her suitors. For a time they had been confined to a thin assortment of aging, often senile, widowers, and Kobra had not hesitated in refusing their advances and dismissing them as a band of gold diggers. Then, in her third year as Lady Diola, she was introduced by one of her neighbors on Avenue Geisha to a very good-looking young man with no visible defect apart from his inability to hold down a job. To everyone’s astonishment, Kobra entertained him with a coquetry she’d never, to anyone’s knowledge, even vaguely exhibited in her youth.

“Have I mentioned,” Kobra confided to Lili one day, hiding her smile behind her hand like a girl, “that my suitor is just thirty years old?”

“But you cannot really mean to marry this gigolo?” Lili inquired.

Kobra blushed; she giggled; she refused all counsel.

The affair continued until at last Lili and Johann were invited to
the Lady Diola to formally meet Kobra’s suitor. For this occasion Kobra had draped the sinks and hair dryers with white tablecloths and hauled the Louis XIV furnishings from the waiting room to the parlor. Upon arrival, Kobra’s suitor was directed to one of the chaise lounges, while Lili and Johann were ordered to sit side by side on the second one. Kobra, dressed in a pink chiffon dress and pink pumps, had never looked as radiant. In this period, she wore her hair in a blond bob that she liked to pull back on one side with a tortoiseshell clip, but that day she’d pinned it into place with a rhinestone barrette. When all parties had assembled, she retreated to the kitchen to prepare tea, which she then proceeded to serve between sweet sidelong glances to her suitor. The pastries were sublime.