When Nasrollah mirza’s mother died, Father gave a eulogy for her outside Tabriz on one of her estates, and the entire audience of peasants and family attendants and villagers from far and wide, standing before him and pouring out the doors and into the gardens, had wept. Father said he’d seen nothing like her, her skin pale like the Russian pearl necklace she always wore, her eyes hazel and arresting — I saw her in her old age, and her eyes were still arresting — perhaps an impossible woman, Father said, because of the high standards she kept, her insight unequaled. For her son, she had brought tutors to the house in the turbulent times of Mohammad Ali Shah, then sent him abroad to Vienna and the Sorbonne. To Father she had given one of her estates, named after him, Mardanabad, which years later provoked a nasty land dispute and was finally appropriated by one of her nephews.
Nasrollah mirza had returned from abroad, feisty and charismatic, and served his country — well but erratically, Father used to say — now and then allying himself with the wrong side, and at such times retreating to one of his gardens. Father, who had known him since childhood, thought he actually preferred these retreats to all else. He said Nasrollah mirza possessed, of course, a sense of general superiority — understandable and appropriate, considering his breeding — but suffered from a crankiness that often landed him in trouble and engendered bouts of solitude and gloom. In time the family’s large estates shriveled with the years and the proclamation of the Land Reform Law, which, striking like an earthquake, abruptly shattered a system entrenched for centuries. Father had overseen them all. He said the Mosharrafs talked about soil and orchards and homestead and heritage the way the devout talk about God.
He’d known them all so long, he said they had become his family. And when he finally married, he asked and was given a distant relative of theirs as his bride. Her father was a small-land owner who owned vineyards, and she brought with her a modest dowry. Mother, reserved and devout, spoke seldom of her affection for them, perhaps because she was a poor cousin and knew them little and felt far removed from them except through blood.
THE GARDENER GREETED ME at the gates of their garden. He didn’t recognize me, and I had to tell him who I was.
“Good to have you back!” said Mashdi Hossein.
We shook hands and he held on to mine, all the while asking after Mother and praising Father’s memory. He’d grown bonier and slightly stooped. He told me with pride, beaming, how his older sons now attended university.
The old house was exactly like before. I couldn’t even count the times I’d come and gone during my entire childhood and early adolescence. I felt a surge, a strange fulfillment. Even the position of the flower pots hadn’t changed on the stone steps going up both sides of the white-columned porch — pots of geraniums and fragrant white jasmine — the balconies on the upper floor overlooking the gardens trailing wisteria. A garden unaffected by the world outside its walls. Friezes of lapis blue and turquoise and yellow tile with foliations graced the pale brick along the entire front of the house. The stained glass glowed red and blue and green above the front doors, backlit by the Russian crystal chandelier in the hall-way. Father had brought me for years, his felt hat on his head, then in his hand as we passed through the doors.
I climbed the steps, hesitated on the stone porch. I had come back a changed man, not in the mold of my father. I was about to see Mahastee. When I’d seen her at the concert in Bagh Ferdaus, she’d triggered emotions I’d long forgotten. Any moment now we’d come face-to-face. This was her home, a house set long ago into my flesh and bones.
I STOOD IN THE DARK vestibule; the foyer just beyond was the axis of the house. Two magnificent oil paintings of the epic battles of the Shahnameh still faced each other on the walls. Corridors with numerous doors stretched to the sides and back, their tiled floors covered in fine old rugs. The central corridor had double doors at the end with stained glass, mirroring the entrance, giving on to a large garden of cypress and walnut and fig and mulberry.
Coming down the center hallway, the old nanny of the house-hold, Tourandokht, stalked a toddler with a bowl and spoonful of food. Swaying and clucking like a hen, she was in slow and painful pursuit of the child until she saw me. The child escaped.
“Reza!” she cried in surprise, heaping endearments on hugs and noisy kisses. “Let me get a good look at you.”
She said I resembled Father more and more. She insisted I take lunch. I told her Nasrollah mirza was expecting me, and she understood and waddled away to tell him. Children I didn’t recognize ran down one corridor and up behind Tourandokht, mimicking her waddle and giggling.
The elaborate chandelier with crystal prisms was dusty. The walls needed a fresh coat of paint. The old grandfather clock was still in the dark corner — the word Tehran set large and gleaming gold above six o’clock, the placid pendulums stately in the etched-glass case. I could hear it ticking. It was running eleven minutes late. I heard doors slamming and children laughing upstairs and the adults’ indistinguishable voices in the drawing room and, to my left, the clunk and clatter in the kitchen every time its doors swung open. Lunch was over.
Nasrollah mirza never keeps one waiting. Tourandokht emerged from the far room, waving impatiently.
“Come on!” she said, summoning me before the group.
I went, the moment strangely mesmerizing but distant, like nostalgia.
“My dear boy!” cried Nasrollah mirza Mosharraf at the thresh-old, embracing me. He called to his wife and all his sons, Kavoos and Ardeshir and Bahram, smiling all the while as if the years gone between us didn’t matter.
The drawing room was crowded, and the women assembled at one end looked me over with polite society smiles as the men, snug in tailored suits and old-world etiquette, scrutinized me. Behind them, the walls were adorned with friezes of plasterwork set above Qajar court paintings; potted palms stood in the corners; and the scent of tobacco and cigars mingled with sweetmeats and perfumes as a manservant took around a silver tray of tea, children threading their way past him, dodging mothers who were telling them they had to go upstairs to take a nap. I saw them all in one sweep, but I was looking for Mahastee.
SIX
MY HUSBAND WAS EMBELLISHING the gendarmerie attack in the dining room before my entire family.
“They’re gunning them down these days in the streets!” Houshang said.
He spoke well, judging by his audience. He has presence and impeccable timing, and his ambition is to enthrall, for which I admit an ambivalent admiration. But he’s omnivorous. Sometimes he gets on his high horse and stays there all during lunch. I get dagger looks from Mother, snide remarks from my brothers, who put him in his place from time to time, but not nearly enough. He’s ire-pressible.
He stood at the far end of the dining table, directing the children to turn down the two o’clock news on the radio. Father didn’t object. He preferred the news, hovering by the old radio with his bowl of asheh-reshteh. He savors his traditional Friday soup while listening to news. But he does like acknowledging his one and only son-in-law, and Houshang takes advantage. Mother, stately and scented with Shalimar, kept her guests around the dining table. Mr. Mostaufi, old-world politician and ex-ambassador, and his wife, a Qajar aristocrat and wistful poet. Mrs. Vahaab and the colonel. Mr. Malekshah, poet and scholar. Dr. Atabak, with impeccable bearing, Father’s old friend and family physician, called away to the phone as usual. Pushing back heavy strands of blond hair, Mother rearranged the greens and radishes, introducing her favorite stews as if they were members of the family. She encouraged more forays on the food, impeccably arranged on the rose-medallion china, interrupting Houshang as often as she could.
“More lamb? Try it with walnut pickle. Please take more fesenjoon.”
Houshang criticized the recent reshuffle of ministers in the cabinet, especially the four who had been dismissed. My youngest brother cut in about the mayor, reelected the week before. He adores criticizing the political oligarchy, though his burning ambition is t
o join it as soon as possible. Father complained the yogurt was too watery again. Wasn’t it from the bazaar in Tajreesh? Dr. Atabak came back from his phone call and protested Mother had heaped too much food on his plate. The colonel had heaped enough on his to feed an army, his mustache bobbing up and down as he ate. He looked even less intelligent when chewing. Mother said the cook was now taking an inordinate amount of time to pray. It was so inconvenient! The colonel said religion was our failure. A modern army and modern economy and modern factories were the only answer.
“Modern progress is marvelous!” he said.
Mother said the new maid, aiming to be modern, was making eyes at the oldest son of the gardener. A grumpy son, and surely a leftist. “All leftists are grumpy!” said Mrs. Vahaab, stuffing the perfect O of her mouth with a morsel of bread loaded with feta cheese and spring onions and baby radishes.
Of Father’s four sisters, the three there were having an argument about religion. The youngest was an armchair socialist and once-marching suffragette. The other two, pious aunts, spinsters who lived together, were devoted to French novels and religious vows and paid preachers who retold holy tragedies, and had taken the pilgrimage to Mecca and once taken me to Qom. Mr. Mostaufi tried arbitrating between these impossible women, mustering the skills of an old-world diplomat but to no avail. Mother’s youngest brother was complaining to Dr. Atabak about his brutal migraines. His wife, with theatrically penciled eyebrows, tittered all over the room, eyeing Mother — her formidable opponent — furtively. And eyeing the Qajar glass lusters dripping with cut-glass prisms — family heirlooms — their tall tulip-shaped globes bearing gold-leaf portraits of Nassereddin Shah. My oldest brother, Kavoos, sat watching quietly. The way his wife — Miss Universe, as we call her behind her back — fritters away his money would turn anyone mute. She sat across from him gossiping, blond and pale and groomed and combed and cosseted into vacant perfection. He looked like he’d just stepped out of bed, maddeningly disheveled. He was once thrown out of a cabinet minister’s outer office, he looked so slovenly. In a society where style means absolutely everything, they’d mistaken him for a loiterer. Mother says he does it on purpose. The more ostentation he sees in the capital — and his wife — the more rumpled he gets. Kavoos has Mother’s blue eyes, and such aptitude for business that he gets Houshang’s undivided attention. When dessert arrived, they were off talking tariffs.
The servants brought in fruits and halva and cakes and custards and sweetmeats and tea and the dented green dome of the marzipan cream cake.
“Look at the dent!” the colonel called to Houshang.
They exchanged dirty jokes, Houshang recasting the ambush as entertainment, yet another detail under control. Mr. Malekshah interrupted him. He was sullen because everyone had kept interrupting him at lunch and hadn’t given him the chance to exult in his high-minded scholarship. Mother was fond of putting him in his place, like a lion tamer standing over a squirrel. Mr. Malekshah picked up the old argument he had going with the colonel about the state of our poetry since the Samanids, one thousand years before.
“What’s it got to do with Marxists?” Houshang said.
“It’s more important, that’s what!” retorted Mr. Malekshah.
Houshang doesn’t really care about the Samanids, nor any of their poets, nor anyone since who hasn’t done really big business. He thinks of Father’s old friends as fuddy-duddies of a bygone age. Irrelevant but tenacious, doomed to extinction.
Father had been saying he expected a guest at three-thirty, repeating it four times, but nobody had taken notice. He finally told me.
“Who is it?”
“Hajj-Alimardan’s son.”
I could hardly believe my ears when Tourandokht came in to announce Reza.
HE STOOD IN the doorway. I flinched. He was a man now, strapping, solid. Face ordered around cheekbones, composed.
The last time I’d seen him, he was an adolescent with an Adam’s apple. He’d just started shaving, in that rite of passage to becoming a man. Though already then he’d had that perfect virtue, being manly. Watching him across the room now, it seemed as if he were returning only an hour later, so disconcerting was his presence and that face I knew well, its expressions and entire set of motions fixed permanently in my mind. Clean-shaven, steely, se-date. I’d watched him up close for years. As children we’d never hidden our feelings from others — that populated world of adults and relatives and strangers — climbing plum trees, bickering with my brothers and ganging up against them, riding in the open fields of Morshedabad. Reza rode better than the rest of us but never took notice of such things. We’d taught the village boys volleyball and organized teams, but Reza tutored them all year and helped them do homework. He’d taught them how to swim, lined them up like soldiers by the lower pool, overgrown with moss, and taught them to dive in. “What patience!” my brothers said. Then that last year he started to defy his father and look away from his mother, and everything shifted, the way he and I looked at each other, looked at others. From that weekend that last spring, when I brought records my parents had bought in Europe and threw a party for cousins and friends. Reza didn’t show up, and I left the chitchat and laughter to go find him and persuade him to join us. He came out under the grove behind the house and stood. Defiant, glowering. I went up and insisted he join us, then unexpectedly raised my hand, rubbed my palm across his face, and laughed and teased how he was going to be prickly forever. He grabbed my wrist and pulled, and suddenly we were two inches away from each other, staring, alone under the trees, our breaths close, our irises dark moons in the sea of our eyes. Then someone called out my name and we pulled away. After that night and for that last vacation there with him, everything was different, as if he and I had made a promise to each other and intended to keep it. We’d hidden it well from others, what we felt for each other. And then they had left suddenly. And when he’d come back that one summer night when we were sixteen and had kissed me in the garden, its fiery pleasure had stayed with me, that night and long after, its sheer force relenting, shifting, but remaining sheltered in my imagination through whatever came later — wisdom, experience — like a source remembered by the river.
It all came to me in a rush, disorienting, but intact and unequivocal like revelation. I kept back. I wanted to watch him before he could watch me. That inscrutable face, slightly scowling but even-tempered, eyes like his mother’s, quick and quiet. His father, we had adored. He’d always had a singular awareness, nearly eerie, able to read what I was feeling. No man could do that anymore.
He didn’t see me, what with Father calling to Mother and all my brothers gathering by the door to greet him. Funny how Father forgot to call me, introducing him all the while to others. I stood back, taking it in. I couldn’t run up and throw my arms around him like the others. We’d shake hands, smile, act cordial. Father turned and saw me.
“Mahastee, it’s Reza!” he said, beaming.
Father beams so seldom. I nodded, setting down my glass of tea.
Reza was staring, ever the straight shooter, and I went over and shook hands. We smiled, cordial, neither of us much good at small talk. My youngest brother took over, firing questions. “So where have you been?” “You’re married?” “Which ministry?” “How’s . . .”
I listened for a bit, then turned back to where I’d been sitting to pick up my glass of tea, catching my reflection on the way in the painted Qajar mirror. I was smiling. That’s when I saw Houshang’s reflection watching from behind me, the light catching his glossy black hair, which he so prizes and fingers. His high forehead, well-proportioned features, the spoiled-brat mouth unaffected by age. It was his eyes that betrayed a peculiar expression, as if he’d seen the next move on a chessboard he disdained.
My eyes swept back to my reflection. I looked older than my husband. Something steadfast, abstinent, about my features. What had my face betrayed to him? Lost pleasures. The past can’t be wrenched away from you. Only the future. It’s the futur
e we can’t possess. Walking through the door, Reza had brought the two colliding. I sat down, the crowded room falling away, a strange feeling resounding through me as if the past had come to subvert the future.
SEVEN
NASROLLAHmirzaSAT IN the armchair of his study, surrounded by his books, his white hair capping his head like snow on Mount Damavand, his puffy eyes behind glasses, capped by lush eyebrows. He still possessed that augustly discreet presence and the unassuming charm. His ancestors were up on the walls, with holster and gun and horse and homestead. They held poses under cypresses, erect on bentwood chairs, clenching walking sticks, in Qajar fezzes and karakul hats and Pahlavi caps. Never smiling — it wasn’t fashionable to smile in pictures in those days. Revealing anything to posterity was unbecoming, even revealing anything to oneself.
A manservant brought a tray of tea and sliced cake with a green frosting and left it on the desk. My eyes flitted over the vast collection of books — the entire far wall foreign books — registering works by Shadman, Isa Sadeq, Natel Khanlari, Foroughi’s classic three-volume History of Western Philosophy, a bound copy of Moayyer al-Mamalek’s The Notables of Nassereddin Shah’s Era, and Mohammad Massoud’s antiquated novels, Nocturnal Pleasures and Life’s Springtime. On the small side table by my elbow lay an old and slender rare book — Mohtasham al-Saltaneh Esfandiari’s Causes of Our Misery and Its Cure. I remembered Father telling me about it.
“How’s your mother, Shaukat khanom?” Nasrollah mirza asked.
We reminisced. I said Mother was as well as could be expected, her grandchildren the light of her eyes. He told me how much he missed Father. “My troubleshooter, my old friend . . . ,” he called him, his voice tapering off. He said Morshedabad was now a neglected estate, their lands in Azarbaijan gone, his peasants now strangers to him and beholden to the government, the regime holding families like his at arm’s length and with suspicion, even though their holdings had shrunk and an entirely new generation now prospered. “‘Those reactionary landlords,’ that’s what they called us!” he said. “They hated us strong, they patronize us weak.” He recalled his father and mother buried next to each other in the family mausoleum in Reyy. He remembered the houses of his parents, the legion of attendants attached to them, the nannies of his childhood squatting at the edge of the pool, scrubbing clothes and gossiping. He smiled, growing younger at this. He said once he had shared a life with them and the tenants and peasants on his lands in Azarbaijan. He stared into space. Then he came around by re-counting a hunting trip he and Father had taken together at the invitation of the chiefs of the Bakhtiari tribe; the year a hot wind had burned eight hundred pear trees and shriveled them; the house in the garden of Morshedabad he’d overseen being built brick by brick.
In the Walled Gardens Page 5