Free The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life by Jasmin Darznik Page B

were pleasant enough, his head, she now saw, was nearly bald, but in the front two thin, long tufts of hair had been brought together in the middle—joined, she would only later discover, by the sticky paste of quince seed he kept in a ceramic bowl next to his bed every night.
    From then on Kazem came to Khanoom’s house once a week. Lili learned to predict his arrivals by what meats and herbs the servants brought back with them from the bazaar each day. Lamb almost always meant Kazem would be visiting, as he had a particularly large appetite for it.
    “Kazem Khan is here!” a servant would call out, and all the women of the house would reach at once for their head scarves. Only then would Kazem enter in his suit and tie. Without fail, he would be wearing his gray felt fedora.
    Lili would sit across the table from him, her eye trained on his plate, ready to offer him more rice and stew as he progressed through several generous portions. At the end of the meal she rose from the table, cleared his plate, and then served him tea and sweets.
    Afterward, her grandmother led them into a sitting room upstairs where they were allowed to spend half an hour alone together. “This is the time for you to get to know each other,” Khanoom had explained the first time, urging Lili into the room with a reassuring smile.
    In preparation for this part of Kazem’s visits, her cousin Soudabeh was routinely dispatched to recite a long list of rules: “Sit with your knees pressed together.” “Don’t let him take off your underwear.” “He cannot reach inside your blouse to touch your breasts.” These rules were coupled with another set of directions, whose sum was, “Be sweet and tender, for he is nearly your husband now.”
    Kazem seemed always to enter the room with an understanding of these same rules, and so he satisfied himself by straddling her and rubbing himself vigorously against her thighs while she sat with her knees pressed together in the way she had been instructed. Often at these moments she thought of a picture she’d once seen of a snake eating a rabbit, its belly engorged with its kill. Kazem, though, seemed content with the arrangement and did not, strictly speaking, challenge the limits indicated by her stiff posture. In any case, his visits occurred regularly up to the wedding day.
    On one occasion, Lili visited Kazem at the compound where his grandmother, mother, and aunts lived with their families. When Lili arrived there Ma Mère greeted her with kisses, and this time it was she who was waited upon and hers the first plate to be heaped with rice, stew, tahdig (thick crisped rice), yogurt, and a generous handful of fresh herbs.
    At the end of the meal Ma Mère turned to Kazem with a gentle smile. “Would you like to take your pretty little aroos to your own house?” she asked.
    Kazem led Lili out into the street and back into his own quarters. Unlike the main building of the Khorrami compound, which housed all manner of ornate French furnishings and Persian carpets, the two rooms that made up Kazem’s suite were practically empty. His bedroom held only a bed and a gilt-framed mirror that ran from the floor to the ceiling.
    Lili found herself drawn to this mirror as if by a magnet. Up until that day she had seen herself only in Kobra’s old handheld mirror, an instrument with which Lili had been able to study only a few inches of herself at a time. But here for the first time she could see herself from head to foot, and she stood, entranced, before a body she scarcely recognized as her own.
    “Do you like to look at yourself?” Kazem asked her. His voice was soft and tender, and she could see him smiling at her in the mirror.She watched as he advanced toward her with slow, even steps, and then she looked back at her own reflection and she nodded.
    Kazem rested his hands on her shoulders. Their eyes met in the mirror and he smiled at her again.
    Suddenly, with one swift yank, he pulled her dress over her