It was shortly after that Jalal and I got drunk one night, unduly cynical about the world, unduly cynical about the loyalties of our respective comrades and the ever-present prospect of getting stabbed in the back by one of them. We made a pact that had nothing to do with politics. It was a personal pledge. We would watch each other’s back.
I’m sure he was taken Wednesday night. He told me to meet him that night at nine-thirty at a café near Tehran University. He had something important to tell me. I waited for an hour, but he never showed up. He never made it home that night, his landlady told me. He never reappeared. I went by his coffee shop, but it was shuttered and padlocked. Jalal never closed shop, and if he couldn’t be there himself — which happened frequently — he had young loafers looking for odd jobs to fill in. Familiar faces, student types, manning the store while he was away.
I went by his apartment on Jami and rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. I checked again with his landlady, who said he’d never come home that night. She was sure it was Wednesday night. She’d been unwell and had seen him go out at seven and called out to him, trying to collect her overdue rent, but he’d rushed off. She had decided to nab him when he got back. She’d left the radio on and barely touched her dinner and stayed up late waiting for him. She was fed up. Jalal had been avoiding her for weeks. She’d even left the front door of her ground-floor apartment ajar in case he snuck by. “He’s a clever one!” she said. But he never showed up. At the crack of dawn — she could hear the azahn from the mosque down the street, the call for prayer — she had knocked on his door again, but no answer. She’d tried again all day, that night, the next morning. On the street the shopkeepers said rumor was Jalal had been arrested for being a profiteer. That’s a cheap lie. A coffee seller is small-fry in the scheme of things. Still, the devastations of the antiprofiteering campaign by the government blaze through the city, inciting rabid disaffection, punishing small merchants and retailers and shopkeepers in the bazaar for high prices, but leaving the big fat ones at the top out of the fire.
Jalal wasn’t taken for profiteering. They would have made a spectacle of that. I’m sure he was taken in the dark by the secret police to some dark cell in this city.
Shirin called around midafternoon about dinner at her house. Jalal introduced us last year, telling me how she was a convenient woman. I take her type to late dinners at the College Inn, then back to their apartments, where they conveniently live alone. I’ve tried going out with teachers and upwardly mobile secretaries and civil servants, but I always leave them — these women forever looking for promises I will not keep. Shirin is divorced, without children, and an executive secretary to a big industrialist. Hour-glass figure, spiked heels, dyed hair. She’s easy and never asks what I do and where I go and what I think or tells me why I shouldn’t. She splurges in the expensive boutiques and primps herself in bourgeois clothes and likes to be seen at the Copacabana cabaret, and at Cuchini and Chattanooga for dinner — the haunts of the bourgeoisie. Every year she treats herself to a new country. This summer she took off for Rome and Naples and Capri on Jahan Tours and brought back gifts and pictures of herself, the petit bourgeois tourist, in sunglasses and tight dresses, plastered against Italian monuments, dark boys salivating around her like dogs.
At nine-thirty that night in her apartment, she was purring sweet nothings to me and feeding me dinner. She brought out creamy desserts, droning on about leaving for New York together, where we could be free. “Free!” she repeated upstairs, releasing her black garter. She murmured another heartrending love song by Haideh in her dusky bedroom, where she did everything to please me. “I like you too much,” she whispered at midnight. “You’re like a drug.”
But I was thinking of Mahastee. The peculiar sensation of seeing her. An hour in a garden, and the past had erupted before me like a geyser.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON I got a haircut at the barbershop on Manuchehri, then met my friend who works at the National Television. He was waiting at the corner drugstore on Takhte Jamshid across from the National Oil Company. He’d hitched a ride down from work. I’d told him about Jalal after the concert because I knew he knew someone in the Department of Police. At first he resisted, but I argued it was time to test his contact.
We walked past Shahreza and Rudaki Hall and the old mudbrick walls of the Soviet embassy compound, black crows rising from the towering trees, cawing.
“Once we were the servant of the Russians and British,” Abbas said. “Now the Americans. In the ass-licking department — that’s progress!”
I needed to buy shoes on Naderi, and he wanted to buy music.
“He’s in Komiteh Prison,” Abbas said.
So they had Jalal. An ominous feeling swept over me. “You’re sure?”
“He hasn’t been interrogated yet. Let this go, Reza. I don’t like what I hear.”
We stopped at the traffic light, backed-up cars honking furiously at each other in another afternoon of gridlock and exhaust fumes and rotten tempers. Pedestrians jaywalked through the traffic, cab drivers swearing at the lot of them.
We crossed past Starlight, the lingerie shop of the Armenian sisters, with garters and flimsy nightgowns and their own brand of stockings in the windows. We picked the Melli shoe store on Naderi, and I tried several styles and settled for a black leather pair; then three doors down Abbas selected cassettes. We parted at the bus stop.
I walked on, jostled by pedestrians at dusk. Komiteh was a prison where they tortured answers out of prisoners. Things they did were told in whispers. Jalal’s coffee beans and poetry and literary jargon were a thin veneer. They would break him into pieces, disassemble him, body and soul.
AT THE FRUIT MARKET on Estanbul Street, I stopped to buy two bags of bloodred pomegranates. A movie marquee loomed high above, advertising an Indian film with a doe-eyed girl, finger to the chin. In the Indian subcontinent they have to twirl around trees to declare their love. Hassan agha, the fruit seller, said he preferred any movie starring our very own sex bomb, Forouzan.
“Mr. Nirvani!” he said. “One day you’ll be minister of education! When you are, don’t forget me, your humble servant!”
His reverence for lofty posts and habit of self-abasement really annoys me. A ready recipe for breeding impetuous resentments.
“I don’t want to be minister of education,” I said.
He looked incredulous. “Why not? It’s a terrific thing to be!”
I caught the bus near Baharestan Square to see Mother.
Baharestan always reminds me of Father. He loved the square, the white-columned building of the parliament and its rose gardens and the mosque of Sepahsalar. This was the heart of the city for him.
The bus was crowded, and by the time I got off half an hour later it was dusk. When I rang my sister’s doorbell, she opened the front door as if she’d crouched behind it, her three children tugging at her skirt. They yelled, “Uncle!” and jumped into my arms like monkeys. I set my shoes by the door and gave my little nephew, Ali, a bag of pomegranates, and he grabbed it and ran off, his two little sisters chasing after him. Zari said she’d bring tea. She’s forever changing her hairstyle and hair color these days and wears too much jewelry and cheap perfume to console herself for her washout of a husband. Mother came in from chatting with the neighbors, and I rose to greet her.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said.
She always says that when she feels I’m trying to hide something from her. We sat on the rug and sipped tea while Zari’s children hopped about.
“You should get married,” Mother said.
“He’s waiting for the perfect woman!” said Zari.
“Let him wait,” said Mother. “In the meantime, there’s Mrs. Amanat’s daughter. I think you should consider her seriously.”
“Reza wants a modern woman,” Zari said.
They stared.
Zari went to get more tea, and Mother picked up her sewing.
“Jalal’s been arrested,” I said.
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She looked up, startled. “I think you’re mixed up in something yourself. I worry.”
She resumed sewing, her needle and thread looping deftly to complete a seam. She bent over, cut the thread with scissors.
“I’m going to see Nasrollah mirza,” I said. “To help Jalal.”
“After all these years?” she said. “Go, in your father’s memory.”
We sat quietly. Outside, a roving vendor’s singsong cry floated in the dusk. I remembered my father long ago buying a dark suit one day in the street.
“Won’t you stay for dinner?” Mother asked.
“I must be going.”
“Your brother-in-law never comes home,” she said.
Zari brought tea and date cakes and insisted I stay for dinner. She’s got wrinkles by her mouth and callused hands, and her eyes are vacant and her eyebrows so waxed there’s nothing left of them. The children wanted a ride on my back, so I took them around the room, and they laughed and screamed and kicked and fell over giggling.
It was pitch-dark when I left. I kissed Mother and Zari and the children. The streetlights were on; a dog barked in the distance. The new moon was out.
FOUR
THE SCHOOL BUS CAME in the morning to take the boys, who both had coughs and colds. I hugged them by the garden gate and they scrambled past me, the clinging mother, and rushed off, coats flailing.
Houshang barely ate breakfast, paging through the local English morning papers, griping about the perpetual shortage of skilled labor and cement. We had an argument as he tossed off the paper. I’d failed to perform, to look interested, the night before at the club. He thinks I do it on purpose.
“Why can’t you be more attentive?” he said. “Why can’t you be more — more wifely?”
The chauffeur drove him downtown. I like to drive myself, to come and go as I please, and I dislike the chauffeur, who’s snoopy and whose only loyalty is to himself. My husband treats him like a personal adjutant, but I think he can’t wait to hack off the hand that feeds him. He’d betray the lot of us in a moment.
I had decided Thierry could help Mr. Bashirian’s son and just needed to be persuaded. He’s a well-respected banker, a man who commands attention in Paris. One call to a noted journalist there, and they’d come after the story. Young innocent snatched off to prison versus oppressive regime with oil money louder than rights. That’s how they’d write it. The story would sell itself, turning up the pressure here. There’s no such thing as an objective journalist. They have their own axes to grind, blinded by their own civilizations. And I don’t trust the motives of newspapers. They run on abridged perceptions. They see us as a stinking oil-rich country lecturing them back, and they can’t wait to burst our bubble.
Thierry would of course resist at first. He’d resist any sort of meddling that could mean serious trouble. He does big business in this country and wants to keep it that way for as long as possible. The story would have to get out without being traced back to him.
I didn’t want to call him but suspected he’d show up at the French Club for lunch. I’d arrange to bump into him. It was short notice, but I first called my two best friends, then several others, until I found one who could make lunch at one-thirty.
As a manager in the division of the High Economic Council in charge of publications, I went from meeting to meeting all morning. We commission and publish research papers, analyze government statistics, produce a monthly bulletin and a quarterly journal. I was hoping to avoid Mr. Bashirian. I hadn’t a shred of consolation, only bad news. I would tell him soon enough.
The French Club serves the best lunch in town. At one-thirty, heads turned as Pouran and I were seated by the window. I was disappointed; I couldn’t see what I had come for. The garden was strangely nondescript, with towering and anemic fir trees, the light bright and hard.
Pouran had dyed her hair another nasty shade of blond. Her face was gray at midday, despite the makeup. She asked if I liked the new color.
“Wonderful.”
“I prefer yours. Iraj likes me blond,” she complained.
She likes to complain because it makes her feel important. We ordered. Friends of my parents’ stopped by our table on their way to bridge upstairs. When I turned to flag the waiter, I saw Thierry come in with three men. They passed by us to the main dining room, Thierry deep in conversation.
“He’s ravishing,” Pouran whispered.
Pouran has been fidgety for months. A cruise in the Greek islands in early September had only piled gold on her, but provided no solutions. We lit cigarettes with coffee. Pouran ran through her standard list: our beautiful women; who had a superb figure or skin and hair; whose husband was richer and threw bigger parties; and who was on which diet and lover and had plastic surgery and bought which clothes from which designer and stayed in which European hotel. I had to get to work but needed Thierry. Pouran needed him more than I did. He had all the right markings to leap to the top of her guest list.
“He looks good enough to eat!” she said, biting her lip.
Her coarse sexuality can be quite beguiling. She sauntered over and Thierry rose and they kissed, and he introduced her to his colleagues. He wears dark suits like no other man, ramrod-straight. Steel blue eyes like silvery mirrors. I stayed at our table calculating the tip. When I looked up, he waved and I walked over. He said Pouran was having a party Thursday.
“It would be the greatest honor of my life to have you there,” she said to Thierry.
Her exaggerations sweep the world, evacuating truth and meaning and finer distinctions in their wake.
“And bring your friends!” She smiled at the others.
My appeal for Peyman Bashirian had to wait for Thursday.
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON Mr. Bashirian sat before me. He’d closed the door to my office as if I held new hope.
“Your son’s in Komiteh Prison. There’s nothing you can do. They’ll be calling you.” I’d repeated the message a dozen times, repeated it in different ways, though the message wouldn’t change, no matter how I tried. He stared expectantly, as if I were holding back or better news was at the end of some sentence not yet uttered. I told him there was nothing more. He asked again, then stared blankly at the wall. He looked like he hadn’t slept for days. He said he was on Valium.
“Tea?” I asked.
He shook his head and just sat there, the silence awful, his appearance alarming, anemic. He sagged. I suggested he go home early. He said he couldn’t stand home without Peyman, so I offered to give him a ride. As we left, the secretary in the outer office stared after us.
He lived near Dampezeshki and gave directions and thanked me for driving him home more times than was decent for a man of his standing.
I asked if he was eating properly. Expounding on the benefits of nutrition, my tone clipped like a nurse’s, to steel him.
Dusk. The sun deserting. The tail end of the day shortened and dark. People in coats called out their destinations to orange taxis.
Mr. Bashirian pointed to a small house and invited me in. Who could refuse a grieving father? He had several rooms and a narrow kitchen and tiny backyard with a grape arbor. Dark rooms with speckled gray tile flooring and feeble overhead lights. They were the rooms of a father and son. There wasn’t the slightest vestige of a woman.
He made tea. I walked about the small living room. The heavy-handed oil paintings on the walls were his. He’d been taking lessons for years. I saw his small and modest signature, slanted like two birds flying south: Kamal. Nostalgic renderings. A virginal maiden with clasped hands and soulful eyes. Wispy willows bent over a stony river. Silvery moonlight over desolate hills. He came in, pointed to the steel bookcase holding his son’s collection of photographs, tucked away into albums, from his travels around the country.
“They haven’t gone through his stuff. They haven’t come yet.”
He was waiting for the secret police. He expected them, like a sort of death.
We sat at the table in
the hallway and laid out the last batch of pictures Peyman had taken. Mr. Bashirian handled the photographs the way I imagined he would have handled his son — discreetly. They were pictures from Peyman’s last journey to the eastern border of the Kavir in Khorassan Province, towns ringing the Salt Desert.
“From Kashmar to Gonabad, then Ferdaus, Boshruyeh, Tabas, and Robaat-Kur down to Robaat-Posht-Badaam,” said the father.
Places in the dust. He’d come to see them through the eyes of his son. He spread out the photographs with quiet hands, leaning over them, peering.
“He understands these places,” said Mr. Bashirian. “The way the sun breaks on their backs. Their strange and deserted silence, the light in the eyes of their inhabitants.”
Together we stared at the photographs.
“He loved the desert,” he said. “You can’t imagine how he spoke of it. It was a mystical thing. He told me it was there he could find God. Alone in that desolate place where man is stripped of his earthly masks and material wealth, where nothing can be faked.”
His voice broke. He wanted to ask for the hundredth time why they had taken Peyman. The question hung between us, unspoken. He went to bring tea.
He was so resigned. Why wasn’t he angry? Anger was a way out of grief.
When I left, he waved from the doorway, already sinking into the marshes of desolation. The light was to his back, his body silhouetted in the doorway. He smiled and I smiled back, walking away from him.
His grace had allowed me to leave with impunity. He blamed no one except himself.
FRIDAY I WOKE UP late with a headache. I called in my sons, Ehsan and Kamran, who were playing soccer in the garden. We had breakfast in the upstairs study, going through photos of our summer at the Caspian. They climbed over each other to see first or better, pointing to our friends, the villa, the local caretaker and his family, the mimosas, the old hotel, the lush green mountains of Ramsar sliding to the shore. They laughed, ended up on the floor slugging each other. Ehsan, a photocopy of his father, is already more handsome, nearly regal in bearing, calculating. Kamran looks like Mother, with light hair and a broad face and my hazel eyes and our penchant for sarcasm.
In the Walled Gardens Page 3