The Gardens of Consolation

by Parisa Reza

  So Bahram thinks about Firouzeh and Firouzeh thinks about Bahram. Bahram thinks about her, but he does not dream of her; since Talla, no girl has ever made him dream, except for the actresses he sees in films. Meanwhile Firouzeh dreams that Bahram will be her prince.

  Having bestowed enough of his searching looks and charming smiles on her, Bahram decides to approach Farouzeh, and waits for her outside one of her seminars. A surprised Firouzeh finds an excuse to break away from her friends and walk alone. Bahram follows at a discreet distance and then comes to join her a little further on with a “hello.”

  She does not look around.

  “May I talk to you?” he persists.

  She stops, eyes him up and down, then turns her back on him and sets off again more briskly, but confident that Bahram is still watching her, she is careful about how she moves.

  It is early winter, it snowed in Shemiran last night. Bahram walked to the bus stop through the snow this morning. As they drew closer to Tehran the blanket of snow grew thinner and broke up, leaving patches here and there, then it disappeared. From the spot where Firouzeh has just left him, Bahram can see the snowcapped peaks of the mountains. He takes a deep breath of the cold air blowing down from the mountains. Right now he needs consolation. He thinks of Elaheh for a moment and wonders where he might find her; it is six in the evening, most classes are over. He gives up on the idea for today.

  He is just heading off down the university’s main driveway when a woman’s voice calls out to him.

  “Hello!” the voice cries. God shows such clemency to men like this, and He alone knows why.

  It is already dark and Bahram recognizes Elaheh with the yellow light from the streetlamps giving her smiling face and big, happy eyes a fairy-tale brightness. Elaheh is pleased to see him. Bahram’s insistent eye contact in the library the other day reassured her that he likes her. So she walks beside him with the easy, affectionate stride of a woman who is loved. By all appearances she is right, Bahram returns her warm smile. They walk toward the gates of the faculty, and Bahram talks to her gently and very politely. He asks her what classes she had today and where she lives, and she asks him the same questions. Bahram points this out and they both laugh. They are heading in the same direction, Elaheh lives halfway between the faculty and Bahram’s house. They take a taxi together, one of the collective taxis that take five passengers. They sit side by side in the front of the car with so little room that their shoulders touch. Elaheh is relaxed, Bahram is friendly and even seems pleased and a little intimidated to be with her.

  When they reach Elaheh’s destination, instead of saying goodbye and continuing on his way, Bahram alights from the taxi with her. They walk on a little way together, then he says his goodbyes, telling her he will go no farther, it might be awkward for her if they met a relation or neighbor of hers. She accepts this with a smile, thanks him for accompanying her, it was very nice traveling some of the way with him, she is very happy to have done it. She has said too much. Because Bahram seemed shy in the taxi, Elaheh thinks he is not sure he has her consent in this game of love and feels she needs to reassure him. Bahram wonders why he got out of the taxi and is teasingly annoyed with himself for going too far. The last few things Elaheh just said bored him, otherwise this could have been rather nice, but now it’s just getting ordinary. He thinks of Firouzeh again. After spending this time with Elaheh, the image of Firouzeh shines all the brighter in his mind’s eye, her way of being a woman, so attractive, an enchantress—not that he forgives her for how she behaved this evening.

  “I’ll get her, I’m sure I will,” he thinks emphatically.

  On his way home in a taxi he closes his eyes and tries to remember Elaheh’s face. He can see its outline but cannot recall the details, the line of her nose or her mouth. Something emanates from her, something that overrides her physical presence. You follow her in your thoughts, with your feelings, and forget to look at her properly. Her appeal is on the inside, not visible to the eye. And this frightens Bahram. When he tries to picture Firouzeh’s face, he remembers everything, her lips, her eyes, her neck. With Firouzeh, her outer form is dominant. She herself puts emphasis on every detail of her body, she shows her lips, and wants you to look at her eyes, the shape of her eyes. She is attractive because she is an image, because she is concrete. She is not terrifying because she is not an unknown quantity. Her one and only tactic is to say: I am this body and I won’t let you have it, not until I allow you to touch it. Simple, straightforward.

  Just two days later Bahram is walking along the faculty’s main driveway on his way home when a woman calls out to say hello to him again. He turns around: This time it is Firouzeh. Bahram’s face momentarily registers his surprise, but he immediately brings his feelings under control and returns her greeting while treating her to his most appealing expression. Firouzeh instantly creates a diversion by pointing to the naked trees.

  “Don’t you think the trees look sad in winter?” she asks in a childish voice, then she stands up straight, sticking out her chest and looking him in the eye as she gives a soft sigh.

  Bahram is fascinated, he would like to take her in his arms.

  “You’re doing me the honor of talking to me this evening,” he says.

  “I was bored on my own. I usually go home with my girlfriends but I’ve ended up alone this time. I saw you and thought you’d like it if I went some of the way with you, wouldn’t you?”

  “Definitely!”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Gholhak.”

  “We’re heading in the same direction, then,” she says, “we’ll just have to walk together.”

  “Unfortunately, I’m not going straight home this evening, I have to go pick something up . . . ”

  He is lying of course. He wants to make her wait. He has plenty of time, there’s no rush, it’s all about the game, nothing but the game. For her, though, time is short, she could be married off at any moment, all it will take is for the right caliber suitor to show up and the game will be over. She is of marriageable age, while young men like Bahram have many years of bachelorhood ahead.

  Bahram is pleased, and wonders whether this meeting is a chance occurrence or something she planned. In fact Firouzeh saw him getting into the taxi with Elaheh like a pair of conspirators. It came as a shock. She had been under the impression that Bahram thought about, dreamed about, and lived for her alone. She concluded, quite rightly, that disappointment had driven him to this other girl. She realized she had gone too far and decided to correct her mistake. These players have clear, very logical thought processes. They follow the rules of the game. The game’s rules are fairly complex, with specific actions and reactions. And life never kills or destroys the players; at worst it disappoints them. So long as the protagonists are playing the same game, then the balance of power shifts one way or the other, much to their delight. But with people like Elaheh, who approach life viscerally, who are not playing but living life fully and without protection, who never follow a preordained pattern but make it up as they go along, guided by subjectivity, by emotional responses . . . life kills them, it destroys them. Because these people do not stop at another person’s façade, they want to get to the depths of them, and we are all reticent or even violent toward anyone who breaks us open to see us from the inside, even if it is done under cover of love. We know they are looking within us for something they have lost somewhere else, we know that in the long run they will simply bemoan the fact that they have found no trace of what they hoped to find, and will leave us emptied of our secrets.

  Bahram is happy. Firouzeh is his, he knows it. Let the dance begin.

  The next day Bahram goes to see The Great Sinner at the movies. Everyone tells him he looks like Gregory Peck, and Firouzeh could be as beautiful as Ava Gardner if she wore the dress from the casino scene.

  The country is in turmoil but the movie theaters are still full
, Iranian women are still as beautiful, and love can withstand anything.

  Bahram is in the library and notices Elaheh coming over to him, looking radiant; she says hello, sits down next to him, and gives him a booklet she promised him. Elaheh’s father came across something even better than Communism in France: Louis Aragon. And for some time now he has spent his nights in the torment peculiar to those who choose to translate poetry; his specific affliction is a collection of twenty-one poems called Elsa’s Eyes.

  Elaheh mentioned this to Bahram in the taxi and promised to copy out some of the translated poems for him. She has now done this, unbeknown to her father. Bahram has forgotten about the poems and takes a while to remember. He thanks her unenthusiastically and gets up to leave, inventing the excuse of a class about to start. The truth is he wants to find Firouzeh. He feels that four days without seeing each other should have been enough to whip things up a bit. Elaheh is rather disappointed, she was expecting more than this. A date perhaps, or for him to offer to see her home this evening. She would like to interpret this failure of initiative as shyness, as a lack of courage. She tells herself she should have done something, she should be the one to make the first move. He’ll never dare. Next time she’ll do it. She has a strong urge to delude herself on the subject of Bahram.

  God never spares these women any pain, and He alone knows why. On her way out of the library Elaheh sees Bahram and Firouzeh chatting. She sees them in profile and notices that Firouzeh has her head held high and is looking Bahram directly in the eye. Bahram is telling Firouzeh that in The Great Sinner Ava Gardner reminded him of her. He prepared all his lines the day before. Perhaps they could go and see it together?

  Firouzeh laughs out loud.

  “Is that all you want? Do you know who I am? My father’s a congressman, I really can’t parade myself through the streets with you!”

  “As you wish, but have you considered that your father might be proud for you to be seen with me? Do you know that I draw? I’d like to show you my drawings, perhaps one day you’ll let me draw your portrait?”

  Firouzeh smiles, she is flattered and she likes this young man more by the minute.

  “I’ll think about it,” she says but what she is actually thinking is, He’s so handsome, I wish I could marry him. I need to know which family he’s from and what his father does.

  If she only knew who my father is, Bahram thinks as he watches her walk away, but he quickly banishes the thought. He is in a hurry to find himself a job and some standing, to distance himself from his background, which is a nuisance for him here, at university. In Gholhak he is in his element, people know him, know everything about him, they are all proud of him. Back home he raised himself high enough to look down on people. Here he has to introduce himself, talk about his family and his father’s job to people who mostly come from high society. However much he persuades himself that he has a certain standing because of his grades, his talents, and his looks, he knows he will never marry one of these girls. To avoid this painful idea, he tells himself he would rather marry a girl from his own circles, a girl who would not go to university and would be proud of who he is. He’ll choose a very beautiful girl and he’ll give her dresses her father could never afford, and they’ll go to the movies together. She’ll take his arm as they climb the steps, everyone will look at them and mistake them for Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. It will happen, he has plenty of time. It’s like the one hundred meters, once he starts running he knows he’ll finish it and finish it well.

  So Elaheh sees Bahram talking to Firouzeh. Something about the scene indicates a shared interest, something tells her this didn’t just start today. Her heart starts beating and her hands shake. Ever since she was a child her hands have shaken when she experiences strong emotions, it irritates her father but other people find it touching. She does not stay to watch them, their complicity is unbearable. She walks away without a backward glance. Elaheh is an attractive young woman, not for her physical beauty but for her energy, her genuine commitment to things in life, and her emotional responses to them, but right now she feels ugly and colorless. Elaheh lacks Firouzeh’s narcissism, which would allow her not to need other people’s approval to appreciate her own qualities. Firouzeh’s ego can be bruised by another person’s indifference but she never reevaluates herself, it is always the others who are at fault. Elaheh has a deep-seated need for the mirror other people hold up to her. The reflection she sees of herself in their eyes is vital to her, and right now the mirror is telling her she is ugly. As she walks away from Bahram her footsteps change, they become heavier and her head droops between her shoulders. The same people who might have noticed her a few moments earlier will not see her now. She becomes transparent and disappears.

  When she arrives home, Elaheh has a terrible thought. What if Bahram wrote Firouzeh a love letter, and what if in that letter he copied out the poems she handed to him today . . . She was so stupid! She shuts herself in her bedroom and starts to write Bahram a letter. Is she really writing to him? What she says goes beyond this evening’s incident, she talks as if she knows Bahram’s very soul, as if she knows what will happen next, as if a year has gone by and a thousand things have happened. She writes about how this story will end, before it has even started. Obviously Bahram will not understand because as far as he is concerned there has been nothing between them. But Elaheh knows exactly what would happen, she has seen the performance a hundred times, with different actors, in different settings, and the result is always the same. At least that is what she believes.

  She cries as she writes, but she is not writing in a spirit of renunciation. She is actually telling Bahram: I know what you’re doing, I know what’s going to happen, I know you’re going to cause pain, to me and the other girl, I know you’ll cause yourself pain. too, I know that if you carry on like this you’ll never know the love and happiness of being with someone, I’m not talking about the moment of conquest but what comes afterward, all the years you can spend with another person.

  It is a magnificent letter, powerful and full of love. But what Elaheh does not realize is that men like Bahram have no need for the love she describes, quite the opposite—a mother’s overbearing love is enough for a whole lifetime. A woman in love is suffocating. Bahram needs distance and diversity. That is how he protects himself from a woman’s invasive presence. Even though paradoxically he constantly needs a woman’s presence. Alluring and repellent, that is how it is. It is this paradox that makes him difficult to understand, and not the other way around. It is life itself that makes men like him incoherent. But Elaheh does not grasp this. She cannot see that these are the irreversible consequences of a life that is no better or worse than any other, that turned out this way rather than any other way, and it would have taken so little for it to be different but that is not what happened. And she thinks she wants to change Bahram, but what she is really doing with this letter is asking life for compensation, it is her own story she wants to change. She wishes she could forgive her father and make her mother happy again. Even if a man gave her all the love she longs for, he could not satisfy this need. She would have to succeed in changing a man in the same mold as her father to show that it is possible. This might have been achievable if she did not carry so much resentment around with her. It stops her from taking things slowly; she is instantly stung and she overreacts. She has such striking premonitions of the future and all the events to come, and she reacts in anticipation of tomorrows that do not yet exist.

  The following Saturday the whole city is covered in a thick blanket of snow, and Elaheh is sitting on the bench at the university gates waiting for Bahram. He devoted the whole of Friday to politics, at home with his local friends. When he joined the newly formed Third Power Party at the beginning of the fall, the party had no office in his neighborhood, so he gave them the use of a room in his brand-new house. In the summer his parents bought him a small semi-detached house and integrated it into t
heir property. Sardar and Talla still live in their modest two-room house; Talla still wears the same dresses and the same worn shoes, Sardar still has the same patched jacket, and that will never change. But they are growing rich, even though no outward signs betray that fact. Sardar has bought land for a song in small plots all around Gholhak but also on other parts of the Shemiran plains, it was land no one wanted because no crop could be sown on it, but these plots are becoming very valuable. More and more beautiful villas are being built in Shemiran; agricultural land and even the land on the great sterile plains is now much in demand. Sardar did not buy his plots as a speculator, thinking they would one day be worth a fortune. He bought them precisely because they cost nothing, they were all he could afford. And they meant he could feel proud in front of Talla, because he now owned more than he had in Ghamsar. He took pleasure in owning them, but no more than a child who enjoys building a tower of paper, knowing it is only make-believe. In the end, though, and to his great surprise, the tower of paper turned into a castle of stone. Sardar now owns many plots worth a great deal of money. No one knows exactly how much, but a substantial amount.

  Talla knows Sardar has bought plots of land, but has no idea where or how large they are. She knows only the exact number of purchase certificates and where Sardar keeps them, just in case he suddenly leaves this world. And Bahram knows nothing about them for now. They do not tell him because he is too young and might be tempted by the devil. But the entire fortune is set aside for him.