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

yet, and all the washing took place outside in the hoz, the rectangular pool that sat in the middle of the courtyard. It was a job most families with means delegated to their servants, but as with the cooking, Ma Mère assured Lili that it would be far more pleasing to Kazem if she herself tended to this chore.
    In wintertime thick sheets of ice covered the hoz . To wash the week’s clothes, towels, and bed linens she had to first boil a kettle of water in the basement, carry it up to the courtyard, and then pour the water into the pool to melt the ice. This procedure was repeated two, three, sometimes even four times. From one of the servants she learned to carry a knife among her bundles of laundry in order to pierce through the ice on the coldest days. Turning back toward the kitchen to fetch another kettle of hot water, she would often catch a glimpse of Ma Mère’s face in the upstairs window, watching her as she worked.
    She’d stand at the edge of the pool, the wind whipping the hem of her housedress as she poured water from a brass kettle into the hoz. Steam rose from its surface and the ice began to crackle. She’d hurry back down the steps to the basement, and even if stews had beensimmering there since dawn, it was always the scent of the mud, loamy and sweet, that first greeted her down there. As she stood waiting for the water to come to a boil again, she learned every slope and sinew of those mud walls, and in time her eyes began to linger on the places where jagged lines arched from floor to ceiling in one continuous crack.
    By the time she returned to the courtyard, the linens had already turned stiff at the cuffs and hems, as if in her absence the cold had bled into the fabric. For a while it startled her, this greed of the winter chill, but she learned to expect it with the same certainty with which she knew that if she turned her head toward the house, she’d always be met by those black eyes and that unmoving mouth.
    One day after the washing was done, she climbed up to the attic and fell into her bed for a nap. She had just drifted to sleep when the door swung open and hit the wall with a sharp clap. Before she could open her eyes, she felt Kazem bearing down on her and felt his breath coming out hot and moist against her cheek.
    “You’ve disgraced me in front of my grandmother!” he shouted in her ear. He began pummeling her with his fists. “ Gendeh! Whore!”
    “But why?” she finally managed to sob from underneath the sheets. “Why?”
    He stopped, ran the back of his hand across his forehead, and told her what his grandmother had witnessed that morning.
    Every day when he returned to the house, Kazem first went to Ma Mère’s quarters, where he would kneel and kiss her hands and then have his own head kissed by her in turn. On this particular day, he’d gone to greet Ma Mère and she’d refused his kiss. Ma Mère had been watching Lili and had seen that she’d neglected to rinse the soap from her hands before beginning to rinse the clothes and so had soiled the laundry. The stupidity and ineptitude of his bride were, Ma Mère assured him, unrivaled.
    Kazem cleared his throat and pulled up his sleeves. Seeing this,Lili shrank farther into the sheets and pulled her arms over her head. The beating went on until at last a voice rose from the stairwell.
    “ Baseh! Enough!” Ma Mère called out from below. “You’ve disciplined her enough for now!”
    At these words Kazem rose from the bed and left the room, only to return much later in the night, smelling of alcohol and something else, an odor she would later come to recognize as the sweet, sharp scent of vomit.
    It was not yet spring when she first felt the sickness. Just two months had passed since the Night of Consummation when it began. It always came first thing in the morning, just as soon as she opened her eyes. It started like a tickle or a cough playing at the back of her throat, but then all of a sudden she would feel it