Embassy parties are dull. We’re on the B-plus list, though Houshang wants to make the A list the fastest way possible. He knows how. I think these parties are held so foreigners can gather information. They’re really here for oil and gas and coal and minerals and strategic points. To secure border stations to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union. To sell arms and fighter jets and bring in the giant tentacles of their conglomerates. They need to boost their sagging economies, all the while gathering statistics. That way they get to lecture us.
Thierry Dalembert, a French banker, threw his arms out before me. “Ma-has-tee!” he exclaimed with admiration, embracing me. He wanted gossip about Mrs. Sahafchi’s daughter, whispering about how long it would take him to seduce her. I told him he didn’t stand a chance. They were keeping her on ice.
His blue eyes glistened. “Who’s the lucky man?”
“He’s being perfected by God!”
He laughed, exhilarated, quite certain he was nearly perfect himself.
“You look bored,” he said craftily.
He seized the last two glasses of champagne from a passing silver tray and offered me one. The embassy, known for stinginess, was splurging. They were drumming up business. These were intoxicating times.
“What’s new?” Thierry said.
“I could ask you the same.”
“Houshang wants this port like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Thierry wanted gossip about the Bandar Kangan project on the Gulf. He hadn’t managed to talk to Houshang yet. There are major projects worth billions of dollars coming up along the Persian Gulf. The commercial port on the island of Gheshm, the naval port at Chah-Bahar, the expansion of Bandar Abbas. But recently we’ve had sudden government cutbacks in expenditures, with grand projects like my husband’s new port teetering in the balance. Houshang’s company, in a joint venture with a British firm, is the general contractor for Bandar Kangan, an expensive port by the old coastal town of Kangan, with its dusty palms and fishing boats and distinctive architecture, three hundred miles from the port of Bushehr. But will it ever get finished? Houshang dismisses such questions. Kangan is a dream project. “The navy wants it!” he keeps saying. Like Houshang, the military always gets what it wants.
Thierry was courting us. We were his designated couple from the in crowd, always invited to his elegant dinner parties at his home in Sa‘adabad. He wants us to meet his big boss from Paris, due to arrive in Tehran a little before the official state visit of the president of France. I’ve heard Thierry and Houshang chuckling about Paris. Maybe he wants to wine and dine my husband there, taking him to the best nightclubs so he can whisper about business in Iran, lucrative contracts, insider favors, kickbacks to an account in Zurich. He could even foot the bill for the most exclusive call girls of Europe. Not that my husband needs help there. Everyone watches a man for his weaknesses.
Thierry offered me a cigarette. He’d turned sullen. He dislikes women who don’t talk, who don’t shed words like clothing, and leave him in the dark. I smiled when I realized how he could prove useful to me.
Houshang was deep in conversation with the ambassador and two ponderous men. Things were going swimmingly, I could tell. We’d make the A list any day now; Houshang can’t think of anything better.
We were called in to dinner.
I took Thierry’s arm and whispered, “Be patient.”
He beamed, thinking his charisma had overcome yet another obstacle. He would boast to his compatriots about seducing the exotic locals. Exotic was everything distant that they didn’t understand, nor ever really planned to. But he possessed worldly charms and wit and a magnificent education. They’d sent us their very best. I like him.
The problem with most foreign men is that they’re too blond and too rapacious. They think they can rule the world. Dollars and francs and pounds and marks bobbing in their eyes instead of pupils.
THE ROADS WERE DARK and quiet all the way to Darrous. Houshang drove fast, not completely sober.
We’d stopped off at the Key Club after the embassy with the group from London. “It’s important to impress them,” Houshang whispered to me after dinner. “They’re already impressed!” I said. “Especially by all the money they stand to make.” But Houshang wasn’t listening.
He cosseted them at the club, plying them with drinks and flamboyant attention. He danced and talked to their wives as if they were promising starlets and he the great director. And the wives giggled, fugitives from the confines of their dull European lives and the doldrums of marriage. Houshang introduced them to his good buddies, squished together at adjacent tables, who more than obliged, laughing the night away with them, all hung up about foreign blond women. Their husbands — anchored to their Greco-Latin pedestals — pulling loose their ties in dark corners, ogled Eastern women ten times more alluring than their wives, dreaming of how to satisfy their whims in exotic places and run back to Europe.
It’s so nice to have a country everyone loves coming to. You’d think we’re adored! You’d think we’re the center of the world.
The house was dark, only a light on in the hall upstairs. I looked in on the children. Rumpled hair, fluttered breaths, pudgy cheeks on pillows. My sons, sovereign in my heart. In our bedroom we went about undressing without conversation. These days we feel more compelled to talk to others. We don’t even regret it. I wanted to read and Houshang wanted to sleep. After thirteen years, if nothing else, we have our habits.
“We were late for the embassy,” he said irritably.
“How’s the port coming along?”
“I’m proud of my efforts. They’ve finally paid off.”
“Your port is going to destroy the town of Kangan.”
“It’s going to drag that sleepy old place into the twentieth century!”
“Thierry didn’t get a chance to talk to you tonight.”
“The leech wants introductions! Let him learn to suck up properly.”
I was tempted to tell Houshang about Mr. Bashirian’s son, stashed away in some dark cell at Komiteh Prison. I wanted him to suck up to a rear admiral or one of his influential contacts and ask them to look into the matter. But he wasn’t going to make waves, now or ever.
“Mahastee,” he said in bed, before turning over, “I want to tell you something.”
I thought he meant about intimacy, affection, our life together. How we’d grown apart that year. We hadn’t been close in months; I wouldn’t let him touch me. I began to consider how much to forgive him.
His head hit the pillow. “Forget all that intellectual bullshit you go in for. This is no time for anything to go wrong for me. Understand?”
Houshang can be uncannily prescient.
I walked down the hallway to the upstairs study, pulled up a book, but never turned on the light. I left the book on my lap and lit a cigarette and smoked in the dark. The prospect of boredom together was lifting. Houshang and I were developing an appetite for war. He’d turned out like the rest of them, taking the smallest unexpected idea as an absolute attack on all conventions. The dictates of his ambition clouded his vision, requiring you to agree with him wholesale. Otherwise you were intellectual, which meant you’d succumbed, subscribing to and awash in some suspicious ideology. A dissident, according to such irrational rules, before you even knew it yourself.
THREE
IWOKE UP at five-thirty as usual. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the birds were singing under the roof. At that hour I’m especially thankful I’m a bachelor and live alone and I have peace and quiet. I closed the window, the one facing the back alley, then washed and shaved and set my bedroll against the wall.
I made tea, not on the samovar but on the kettle crowned by the teapot with pink roses Mother gave me. We bought it in Lalehzar, with all my dishes and cups and saucers. I said, “Mother, why get me a teapot with roses?” She said, “That’s all they sell and this is the country of the rose and nightingale.” Father adored her until the day he died. I think he still adores her beyo
nd the grave. She knows it — I see it in her eyes.
I had hot tea and rolled up pieces of bread with feta cheese for breakfast. I listened to the radio, reread between mouthfuls the revised statement of purpose for our underground group at the end of the month. I edited and scrawled in the margins, expounding on our main themes — the right of self-expression, the dignity of democratic freedoms, political pluralism. I inserted sentences here and there to underscore our purpose — how we intellectuals of the Left want to liberate the present from the past once and for all. We want to see the collapse of this dictatorship, a world of endless decrees, obsolete political patterns, and paternalistic interventions. We want a constitutional democracy with independent0 political institutions. And a parliament and political parties elected and willed by the people and representing them, instead of authoritarian royal directives and rigged elections. We want to stir up the masses by giving them a political education and objective. We believe that imperialism — the age-old adversary and economic exploiter of the Third World — is wheedling and coercing this regime, its willing servant, to keep us beholden and dependent. And that capitalism, with its cunning distortions and ferocious bravado, is working its ways to repress the inevitable — class warfare. We want to show how this regime’s power is primarily bluster. Its show of strength, vast resources, machinery of state, pitted against our determination and our tenaciousness.
I poured another glass of tea. There were only three cubes of sugar left. Habib agha’s grocery store downstairs supplies me with most things. I will tell him that the cheese he got from Tabriz this month is particularly good. He’s a decent man but barely makes ends meet with all those children.
At seven I hit the pavement. Mashdi Ahmad, the local sweeper, swept the sidewalk. He’s so thin his shabby cotton trousers are several sizes too large for him, and he’s bowlegged, with a funny way of sidestepping when he sweeps. If it weren’t for his olive skin and sunken eyes and bony cheeks, he’d be Charlie Chaplin. Mashd-Ahmad, the Charlie Chaplin of Iran! His mother is very ill and I dared not ask this morning.
I greeted him and said, “It’s a fine day.”
“Whatever you say,” he said, and kept on sweeping.
I have under an hour to walk to work. I go through Lalehzar, past the fruit and fish markets of Estanbul Street, and on past cinemas and cafés and barber shops and photography studios and dance studios and bookstores and stationery shops and tailors and jewelers and curious tiny stores going sideways. I like to chat with the street vendors and shopkeepers. Afternoons they call me in for a glass of tea, especially the money changers and rug dealers on Ferdausi. By day I work as a civil servant. The Department of Educational Affairs for the Provinces is affiliated with the Ministry of Education. Our section was moved up recently from Ekbatan Avenue to a new high-rise of concrete and glass in midtown with a guard at the door and steel desks and several new divisions. I take home twenty-two hundred tomans a month. Evenings I teach night school in Moniriyeh, and late nights I’m part of a Marxist underground organization.
Mother longs for me to find a wife, but I don’t want to be accountable to a woman. Mine is an uncertain life. Years of clandestine activity have hardened me. Sooner or later my politics will land me in jail. All political parties have been banned for years and now there’s only one party, decreed by the state.
Mother lives with my sister. Zari has three small children and a stingy and insufferable boor who calls himself her husband. He’s loud and reeks of vodka on the rare occasion he comes to see me. He’s a lowly functionary in the Ministry of Post and Telegraph, not that he’d ever admit it. Now that he’s got a car, he’s got a nasty habit of swerving down the road as he drives and laughing like a lunatic. I know he sees whores. One day I will get him. We should never have given Zari away to such pretentious people and instead should have sent them packing — the Behjat family — the day they came to ask for her hand in marriage. She was only nineteen and thought he somehow fit into the love poetry she leafed through in her bedroom. His whole family came for tea. Morteza, the apple of their eye, came hosed down with cologne, hair swept back, with a garish tie and a lecherous smile. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on my sister. He left his polished shoes by the door, eyeing them as if he were afraid we’d steal them. Zari was so nervous she noticed nothing. His mother and sisters sat to one side primly, nibbling on Mother’s homemade almond rolls and baklava and walnut cookies and sweet fritters as if they were sprinkled with poison, surveying our rooms and silver and rugs and samovar and dishes, taking inventory. As if Mother didn’t notice. Father was the very picture of discretion as usual. He’d never believed in accumulating worldly goods and instead contemplated the interior life, prayed on an old, faded rug, and read far into the night. Ferdausi, Attar, Maulana, the Constitutional Revolution, agricultural tracts, the precepts of the first disciple — the Perfect Man — Ali. My father was a lion in the wilderness of a desert; Ali, the Lion of God.
For years I taught mathematics in a public high school for boys. Every day was a battle, but I enjoyed their humor and directness. I valued their disrespect gathering steam beneath that eternal veneer of obedience, their insolent tauntings and undiluted politics. These were the minds that would dare think instead of doing as they were told. This was the force necessary to build the future. I got them all before they could become sellouts. Before their inevitable concessions would soften them up, make them jowly conservatives, neutered by government handouts and scholarships and promotions and international conferences. I believed in them, understood them, before they got smothered by the state or the hallowed fears sown and harvested in their souls by religion. Some we tracked, eventually recruited and trained, and then sent out to recruit others their own age. Only the young make revolution.
Then I shifted to a private high school and for two years I watched the lambkins of the privileged and their parents. It will take more than rich fathers to make men out of these boys. They’re given the hollow arrogance and false assurances of their social class and believe in nothing but themselves, all soft and pampered. It only confirmed what we already suspected. If they are the future of the Right, then we on the Left can defeat them. Paper tigers, they will go up in smoke one day.
When I applied for an opening in the Ministry of Education, I got this job. The department is in charge of all the educational needs of the provinces: policy, budgets, curriculum and textbooks, recruiting teachers, leasing buildings. Now I can evaluate civil servants. We have meetings with other divisions and we’re sent for official visits to the provinces. I talk to colleagues and listen to their disaffection and unremitting cynicism about the higher-ups who run the country. Their most virulent ridicule these days is directed at our new single party — Rastakhiz. One thing they know is how to undercut everything. They whisper that the regime is losing its bearings. It has lost touch. They talk about their dreams of getting rich and moving to Los Angeles. Of their friends who are doing so well in business. Meanwhile they keep their government salary and benefits and pension and free milk and education for their children, then cut work and slink away to private jobs in the early afternoon, making fast money in a pumped-up economy. The state is breeding vipers in its own bosom.
I walked up Ferdausi, past the circle, double-decker red buses breaking at the bus stop. Around the corner, airline offices sell tickets to places around the world. But I haven’t gone abroad yet and may never go.
The first month of autumn is a mutable month, with chilly mornings graying at the temples and leaves gone dry and brittle like Mashd-Ahmad. Branches shrivel and the wind smells of smoldering fires.
FROM THE OFFICE I called my friend Abbas, who works for the National Television. The janitor passed through with the first tray of tea for the morning. There would be more to come, linking up like compartments on a train steaming through the day. Abbas said he had news and told me where to meet him next day.
It’s this business about Jalal. He’s disappeared without a trace
. Long ago he broke with his family, and he’s been on his own since high school. I met him one spring years ago when I was tutoring my two younger cousins — boys of eighteen — to help them with finals and prepare them for the entrance examinations to university. They brought around Jalal, also in his last year of high school, talented, angry, revolt in his blood. I was the first man to give him a political education. Then years ago we parted ideologically, and he moved into the murky depths of the radical Left, but he always kept up with me. He’s a rabid revolutionary.
Three months ago he warned our group of a SAVAK raid. If it hadn’t been for Jalal, that night eight of us would have landed in jail. In a flash we cleared out of the basement we rented, taking typewriters and the mimeograph machine and political literature and our lists and personal papers and archives. They hit within hours. We thought we had a SAVAK collaborator, a snitch. The following week, in late-night sessions charged with hostile recriminations — exposing years of hidden rivalries and old wounds and dirty laundry — we tore through our entire organization, insulting and accusing until the animosity and ill will threatened to destroy us. That was how the group of three took control and held inquisitions and purges. They were young hotheads — emotional and dogmatic and vain without knowing enough about anything — who had run leftist cells in the provinces and now thought they’d take over in Tehran. They started on me. How had I known the secret police would hit that night? What was I hiding? Maybe I’d set the whole thing up to pit us against one another? Maybe I was the snitch? Until the last night, when I shot out of my seat and told them they could go to hell! We called ourselves progressive intellectuals? Freedom fighters? We were a bunch of sick, suspicious bastards. No wonder the country never got anywhere. I walked out.
In the Walled Gardens Page 2