The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life Read online

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  For my mother and grandmother

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many friends, family members, and colleagues have supported, guided, and (more than occasionally) prodded me along in the writing of this book.

  Linda Watanabe McFerrin gave me the courage to begin and for this I owe her my first thanks. In addition to leading me to Linda, Book Passage in Corte Madera, California provided me a wonderful community in which to read, learn, and write, and it’s impossible for me to imagine The Good Daughter without that community.

  Kelly Sonnack devoted early enthusiasm and unwavering attention to this memoir. I am grateful also to David Groff for his astute guidance. Sandy Dijkstra and the whole Dijkstra team—Elise Capron, Andrea Cavallaro, Natalie Fischer, Elisabeth James, and Taylor Martindale—have been enormously helpful to me at every turn.

  For her uncommon patience and keen insights, I thank my editor, Caryn Karmatz Rudy. Thanks also to my publisher, Grand Central, and to Amanda Englander, who helped me send this book into the world. I’ve been very lucky, too, in my editors at Random House UK, Vanessa Neuling and Drummond Moir, who read draft after draft.

  I’d like to acknowledge the wonderful organizations that supported this book: The Marin Arts Council, San Francisco Foundation, Intersection for the Arts, A Room of One’s Own Foundation, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Norman Mailer Writers Colony, and the Steinbeck Fellowship Program at the Martha Heasley Cox Center. In addition to the financial resources they extended for the project, they put me in contact with many of the mentors and fellow writers I’ve mentioned here.

  Endless thanks go out to Rebecca Foust, whose friendship makes me believe in fate. She and my friends Shahdeh Shooshdary, Amy Motlagh, Sue-Ellen Speight, Mahta Jahanshahi, Marie Ostby, and Eileen Kane were my first devoted readers. Jahanshah Javid, editor of iranian.com, gave me my first writing “gig.” Persis Karim and the members of the Association of Iranian American Writers continually inspired me with their camaraderie.

  I am also particularly grateful to my son, Kiyan Darznik-Banaee. His inimitable spirit gives me joy every day.

  And thanks, finally and profoundly, to my mother for the honesty, wisdom, and generosity with which she shared her story with me.

  Prologue

  Like all the photographs that came with us when we left Iran, this one was as supple and as thick as leather. Its edges were tattered and a long white crease coursed through the image. I might easily have mistaken it for just another old photograph, but this one was nothing like the others.

  The girl in it was my mother, Lili, and though she couldn’t be older than fourteen, someone had rimmed her eyes with kohl and darkened her mouth with a lipstick so deep it looked black in the picture. Her dress was satin, pulled taut across her torso and pinched at the waist, and her shoulders turned in awkwardly where a wedding veil skimmed her body. The man at her side was not my father. I’d never seen him before. He wore a gray fedora with his tuxedo and his right hand encircled my mother’s waist with surprisingly elegant fingers.

  A bride, I realized with a start, she’d once been this stranger’s bride.

  Nearly as astonishing as this revelation was my mother’s expression in the photograph. Eyes fixed on the distance and lower lip pouting, she looked as if the next shot would have shown her crying. I had never known my proud Iranian mother to look like that.

  I sat stunned, gripping the photograph between my thumb and forefinger, unable to look away. I was sitting in my mother’s house, a house to which I’d never imagined I’d return. It was late in the afternoon, five weeks after my father’s funeral; I was helping her go through his things and this photograph had fallen from a stack of letters whose Persian script my eyes could no longer follow. A photograph hidden, forgotten, and now found.

  Iranians would likely shrug at such a discovery, lift their eyes toward the heavens, and sum up its meaning as qesmat, or destiny. This was a word I’d hear often in the days following my father’s death. Qesmat, my mother told me, had brought me back to California. I hadn’t seen her in nearly a year when she called to tell me my father was in the hospital and that I had to come home… now. I left my apartment on the East Coast without even packing a suitcase. He died before my plane landed in San Francisco, but I returned to my parents’ house still unready for tears.

  My mother and I grieved at a distance, each of us in her own way. Lili’s friends encircled her, crying with her and soothing her and praying with her day after day. I kept to myself. I did not cry. Then, three days after the funeral, I drove my mother to the airport. Together we watched my father’s body, housed now in a black-ribboned coffin, being hoisted onto the plane that would carry him across the ocean to Germany, the home he’d given up when he moved to Iran in the sixties to marry my mother. The sky that morning was a rare December blue and nearly cloudless. “Qesmat,” she whispered as the plane arched out of sight, and at this, finally, I cried.

  We’d been a world of our own once, my mother Lili and I, a constant, intimate twosome beyond which I could imagine nothing, least of all myself. Then we came to America and I started turning into an American girl. That’s when she began telling me about The Good Daughter. The Good Daughter lived in Iran. She didn’t talk back—as I had learned to do in this kharab shodeh, this broken-down place. Actually, she didn’t talk much at all. The Good Daughter listened. She understood—always—about manners and modesty. She didn’t wander off to play in the streets by herself. The Good Daughter sat by her mother’s side and heeded her mother’s words. When a man looked at her, she lowered her eyes at once. And she was very, very pretty, with a sweet face and long, flowing hair just like the maidens in Persian miniatures.

  Over the years The Good Daughter became a taunt, a warning, an omen. When I spoke immodestly, when I wore my skirts too short or let boys flirt with me, I was not my mother’s real daughter, her Good Daughter. “If you become like the girls here,” she’d say, “I’ll go back to Iran to live with my Good Daughter.”

  The Good Daughter I knew back then was just a story she’d made up to scare me and make me into a good daughter, too. It was like my mother to tell such stories to keep me close and to keep me good. But I didn’t want anything to do with The Good Daughter of my mother’s Iranian world. The less I resembled her, the better it suited me. By the time I found the photograph of my mother as a young bride, I’d left home, as girls in this country always do and no true Iranian daughter ever would.

  And yet for forty days after my father’s death I stayed in my parents’ house, smiling and nodding like The Good Daughter of my mother’s stories while her friends dropped by in the afternoons in their lace-trimmed veils and carefully made-up eyes. “What will she do now?” they whispered to each other, and for forty days I served them tea and quietly watched them eyeing her for clues.

  The house was finally empty the day I found the photograph, the funeral rites complete and the visitors gone. The platters of dates and pastries and fruit had all been cleared away and cardboard boxes lay scattered on the floor of every room of the house. I worked long into the afternoon, packing up my mother’s clothes, bills, letters, and leather-bound photo albums. In one of the spare bedrooms I came across my father’s books of Rilke, Kant, and Khayyám and also my grandmother Kobra’s prayer shawl, rosary, and gilt-trimmed Koran. In my old bedroom closet I found the Gypsy dolls my grandmother sewed me years ago in Iran and a Persian picture book defaced by my own childish scribbles.

  My mother and I
were alone in the house where she could no longer afford to live, and when the photograph slipped loose from a bundle of letters she was upstairs sleeping with an open bottle of Valium on the table beside her bed.

  I carried the photograph to the living room and sat cross-legged on the floor for a long time, staring up at the large black-and-white portrait of my parents on their wedding day. Tehran, 1962. She, raven haired with Cleopatra eyes, plays Elizabeth Taylor to my father’s blond and slightly sheepish Richard Burton. I grew up with this portrait and all the stories my mother loved to tell about her wedding to my father. Every pair of eyes, she’d told me, had trailed her on the day she married her damad farangi, her European groom. As proof of who she’d been, of what our country had once been, she hung this picture in every home we ever owned in America: the tract house in Terra Linda, the five-bedroom house in the Tiburon hills, the villa on Richardson Bay. If, for many years, someone had asked me to tell them about Iran, I would have pointed to this photograph of my parents, as if every story began there, in that moment.

  Now I’d found a photograph that had survived revolution, war, exile, and something else besides: my mother’s will to forget the past. Although I couldn’t yet imagine the stories it would tell, I slipped it between the pages of a book and carried it three thousand miles away.

  Six months later I was back in California, sitting in the new in-law unit my mother had managed to carve out from her Spanish-style villa. The rest of the house was rented out by then, and she was living in two small rooms cluttered with everything she’d salvaged after my father’s death. She’d given up entertaining her friends, said the space was too cramped to serve a proper tea, so what was the point of inviting anyone over anymore?

  By then I’d looked at the photograph so many times I could have drawn its every detail from memory. Who, I’d wonder again and again, was the man at her side? What had happened to him? And why had my mother never told me about their marriage?

  For a long time her grief over my father’s death, and my own, had made it impossible to ask her these questions. Six months had passed and still I didn’t know how to begin. But the photograph lingered in my mind. I had to know the truth, no matter how painful it would be for me to ask about it or for her to answer my questions.

  I cleared my throat. “Maman,” I said at last, and held the photograph out to her.

  She glanced down at it and then scanned my face, trying to decipher what, if anything, I understood and what she could still stop me from knowing. She shook her head and continued drinking her tea. “No,” she murmured finally, averting her eyes. “This has nothing at all to do with you.” She set her cup down, snatched the photograph from my hand, and left the room.

  I didn’t mention the photograph again. The next days passed awkwardly, each of us holding herself apart from the other, and I was grateful to return to the East Coast. We didn’t speak again for some weeks, but a few days into the beginning of the new university term she called me and accused me of rifling through her things. I’d stolen the photograph from her, she said, and there was just nothing else to say.

  Then she started sending me the tapes. The first one arrived in springtime, a few weeks after No Rooz, the Iranian New Year. Eventually there would be ten of them. That year my mother Lili would sit alone in her house in California, speaking the story of her life into a tape recorder for me. The tapes always came marked up in Persian, and I couldn’t make out much more than my name when I opened the envelope and found the first one. As I traced my mother’s inscription with my fingertips, it occurred to me that I didn’t even own a cassette player. The next morning I headed into town to buy one, and with that her story began to pass like a secret life between us.

  One

  Avenue Moniriyeh

  “If you want to know my story,” my mother Lili began, “you have to know about Avenue Moniriyeh, about your grandmother Kobra and your grandfather Sohrab, and what Iran was then. Because we couldn’t just do what you do here—forget your name and who you belong to. Our lives were not like that. No.”

  WHEN SHE NAMED HER ninth child, Pargol Amini indulged her own fancies at last. “Kobra,” she announced to the midwife, and smiled from the bloodstained sheets. The “great one.”

  At this, the midwife looked up and considered her face.

  Pargol Amini had black eyes and cheeks so fair and flushed they were like snow blotted with blood, as was said back then. In a room that had grown warm and damp with her exertions, she met the midwife’s gaze with a heavy stare.

  “Kobra,” Pargol said again, her voice softer but still sure. Even the newborn—a tiny raging bundle with a shock of black hair—was silent at that moment. The scent of cinnamon and cardamom rose from the kitchen and threaded its way through the house. The midwife took in a single sharp breath, bit her lip, and then resumed her task of dusting my great-grandmother’s loins with ashes.

  When Pargol was a girl she and her family had left their village in the south, journeyed a hundred miles across Iran’s dusty, red-rimmed central plateau, and settled in the then-walled capital city of Tehran. Though she could not read and had never been to school, she could recite the Koran by heart from beginning to end in Arabic—God’s tongue—and she knew most of the hadith as well.

  The names of Pargol’s other eight children had been chosen under the watchful gaze of her father-in-law. Together they made up an unremarkable roster of Muslim names: Ali-Reza, Qasem, Fatemeh, Abolfazl, Mohammad, Ali-Ahmad, Khadijeh, Zahra. But by the time of this child’s birth, Pargol’s father-in-law was dead and she, barely thirty, was already called old, and so on that day in 1921 the list of her children’s names settled finally on one born of her own imagination. Kobra.

  Later it was commonly suspected that Pargol had lost her mind. Everyone feared for the child. But Kobra grew up to be the prettiest girl of the family, with the only pair of honey-colored eyes in the house. And with her beauty came a temperament so gentle that it dispelled every rumor about her mother’s willfulness and her own virtue.

  Around her neck Kobra wore a black string from which a single tiny blue eye hung and nestled itself in the hollow of her throat. The amulet was meant to protect her from the Evil Eye that since the day of Kobra’s birth had bedeviled Pargol—so fearful was she that jealous eyes would alight on her favorite child.

  In Iran they call such children the pearls of their mothers’ fortunes.

  The Aminis’ house sat in an alleyway barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side, and along the middle of it ran the joob. These were the open waterways that once traversed the entire length of Tehran, north to south. The joob water started out clear and cold at the foot of Damavand, the snowcapped volcano to the north of the capital, but by the time it reached Pargol’s house near the old southern gates of the city the stream had become thickly clogged with refuse and dirt. Every day there were stories of boys who’d wandered far from home, fallen into live waterways somewhere in the city, and returned in damp clothes—something for which they’d surely be beaten, since the joob was known to carry ringworm, typhoid, and diphtheria and they’d been warned many times not to play near it.

  When women ventured into the streets at all, they did so always with the fear that their veils would dip into the waters of the joob and render them najes, or impure. But peddlers wended their way daily through the alleyways, their wooden carts piled high with onions, herbs, vegetables, and fruits. When their wheels ran into the joob or ruts and bumps—of which there were many then throughout the capital—the clatter of pots and pans stopped briefly, then started up again once the peddlers hauled their carts onto a smoother patch of road. Long-haired, cloaked dervishes were also known to traverse the city, hawking poems, soothsayings, and tonics as they went. It could be said that the streets belonged to the peddlers and dervishes and also to the beggars who lined the stone walls of all such neighborhoods.

  The house itself was built of hand-hewn bricks, with honeysuckle and jasmine spilling ov
er the high walls that enclosed it. The large colony of sisters and aunts and mothers and grandmothers within never left except to attend a wedding or funeral close by or else to make a pilgrimage to a martyr’s shrine. And for that they always traveled with their men.

  Every seven days from behind the walls of her house, Pargol heard the plaintive cry of the namaki, the salt-seller. Humpbacked and toothless, he roamed the city with his salt borne on the back of an ancient donkey. Every few blocks he’d cup his fingers around his mouth, tip his head to the sky, and call out, “Namaki! Namaki!” When she heard his cry, Pargol would throw her chador about her and poke her head out the door for her weekly slab of salt.

  Pargol had married a rug merchant by the name of Qoli Amini, known better as Qoli Khan, or Sir Qoli. He stood a full head shorter than his wife, a predicament that, true to both his nature and his outlook on life, he regarded with a mixture of disbelief and amusement. Every day Qoli Khan set out for the great canopied bazaar in the center of the city. Once there, he’d take his place next to the fruit-seller’s pyramids of melons, pomegranates, oranges, bundles of mint and parsley, and crates of dried figs and mulberries. Perched on an enormous gunnysack of salted almonds, his complete inventory of rugs beside him, he waited in the bazaar from morning to night so that people could consider his wares and pay him the modest sums with which Pargol managed their lives.

  As Kobra grew, Pargol favored her in a thousand quiet ways, but the strength of her affections was never more evident than when the Bloodletter came calling. This happened twice a year, once at the end of summer and once at the end of winter. Bloodletting was thought to keep a body healthy and strong, proof of which could be found in the rosy tint it lent to even the most sallow complexion. But no matter how many times they were reminded of the treatment’s benefits, nothing kept the children from running at the sight of the Bloodletter’s blistering cups and the jar of slithering black leeches she harvested from provincial riverbanks.