In the Walled Gardens

by Anahita Firouz

  Early summer brought us hysteria and paranoia after the SAVAK raid. For years we had been carefully evading the secret police. That day, Jalal knocked at my door at six in the morning and said he’d been tipped off. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew. “They’re going to hit before midnight!” he said. “How much do they know?” I asked. “Not much, not much,” he said impatiently, “just your location.” I ran around all day to find the others, then got all tied up renting a van to move our mimeograph machine, and then we got stuck in traffic and got there late. We left a watchman at the corner, then couldn’t find parking. We backed the van into the narrow side street, double-parked, and went in. Panicky that they would hit any minute, we frantically swept through our two-room basement to salvage our files, dragging out the mimeograph machine, rushing up and down the stairs, ignoring one of the neighbors, who came out on his landing to ask questions. One of our guys finally threatened him, and they started to quarrel and I had to pull them apart. “You’re crazy!” I hissed, dragging him away. “They’ll get here any minute!” We first packed the van, which was obstructing the street, repeating our escape plan as we did, then we shoved everything else in the car and took off, narrowly escaping.

  One week later we met at a brand-new location in Pamenar. As soon as we got in, the clique of three stood up and went on a diatribe about betrayal and blood and revenge. “They’re so full of shit it’s unbelievable!” I whispered to Dr. Hadi. They were the graduate students from the cities of Tabriz and Mashhad, always shrill and dogmatic and belligerent. They continued all night, keeping the upper hand as the hours progressed with veiled threats, pretending they had special information about how we’d been betrayed. They started interrogating us one by one like a military tribunal, bragging all the while about their greater commitment and purity of purpose. “We brought you new blood!” they cried. Then they turned to me. They had disliked me most since that winter when I’d come up against one of them for the editorship of our paper and won out.

  That night they took their revenge and started grilling me like a criminal, disassembling my life, denouncing my background and family and loyalties. I was bourgeois, I wasn’t committed, I was impure, I was an equivocator. I didn’t follow the code of behavior and reasoning they upheld. “Where is your burning dedication to absolute revolution?” they yelled. I was always equivocating. I was an agitator, a revisionist, a renegade. I said, “The only absolute I feel is a revulsion for you. You reason exactly like the regime you condemn!” At this they got so outraged they resorted to hysterics. They threatened to search my home, confiscate my papers, denounce me to the Left as a traitor. “Wait and see what they’ll do to you then!” one of them shouted. “They’ll shoot you in the street!” “The hell with you,” I said. “You’ve turned into SAVAK yourself! Learned well from the very power we detest. It’s our own methods that have become detestable.” I went home, I didn’t care what they did. We had forsaken all democratic principles and turned ugly and demagogic and dictatorial. Years of painstaking work, and we were about to crash and burn! We were our own worst enemy.

  I stayed away. The others sent me private messages, which I ignored. I was already planning another group, making a list. After a month, one night several of them came knocking at my door. They said we’d had a crisis, bad blood, but it was over. The clique from the provinces had splintered off and the rift was complete. They made promises. We had a history together, shared a vision, we couldn’t throw it away. One week later we hammered things out. The upheaval had forced us to reassess everything and finally change the way we did business. We split into four sections of nine, redid our chain of command, the arrangement of our cells. Any key member could start another cell of nine, but only the few at the top knew the arrangement of our network and key contacts. I was asked to head our youth group, reorganize, and find a place for its headquarters.

  That night I could finally report at our ten o’clock meeting that I’d found a safe house downtown for our youth group. My new recruit, Hossein Farahani, had already proved himself unusually valuable. I had a perfectly located site, and well disguised — the back of the auto repair garage off Fauziyeh Square, where Hossein worked. I’d also been charged with finding a property outside Tehran, and I’d located a garden in Karaj to house the printing press for our organization — this through an old contact of mine, Majid M., a fellow student from my school days.

  Majid and I had come of age during the politically charged days of Mossadeq. We’d sold papers then for all political parties without really understanding their differences — Pan-Iranist, Third Force, Iran Party — in Lalehzar and Estanbul. We lived in the same neighborhood and attended the same school. Late nights we snuck out of our rooms and ran through the streets scribbling nationalist slogans on walls with bits of charcoal, distributing leaflets we pulled out of our socks in the dead of night, running ahead of patrols that were sweeping through Tehran to arrest us. Father caught me several times sneaking out late at night and threatened to confiscate my bicycle. Always repeating, “A boy shouldn’t be involved in politics.” But it never stopped me. Then he threatened seriously, the night I admitted I was there with Majid at the Saadi Theater for the opening of Lady Windermere’s Fan. That night the Left had sent a young recruit to take a famous journalist and anarchist to the theater to avert a plot by the regime’s thugs to assassinate him in the offices of his newspaper Shouresh. Majid and I were fascinated by the anarchist and knew the recruit — a high-school student who greatly impressed us — and we’d tagged along. Father was furious. He said I was playing with fire, I would be arrested, he didn’t approve of the leftist friends I kept. I would burn in their hell! He was going to send me back to the provinces. I didn’t see Majid again, but we kept in touch even after he left for university in England. He returned once from Manchester years later when our group was reunited and took part in large demonstrations that threatened the stability of the regime and once again failed. Two months ago he returned from abroad, sent in across the Kurdestan border to take charge at home. He’s teaching English at the Simin Institute. At night he teaches revolution, spewing political idioms in English, which intimidates the guys in the Left at home. He’s our connection to the antiregime Confederation of Iranian Students in Europe.

  I looked at my watch. Before leaving for the meeting, I had to scrounge around among my books and files and papers. I had an obligation to Jalal since his disappearance. First I had to find his parents, but I’d lost the address.

  Hojjati. There it was, the scrap of paper, in a tin can on the shelf by the tea and sugar. Backstreets near the train station with a telephone number. The father was a devout mason from the provinces. He’d thrived in the capital jerry-building in Eshratabad. Once, in faraway Semnan, he’d tended sheep around desolate villages, married a first cousin, then apprenticed in town with a local mason who beat him. But he’d learned to lay bricks like lightening. One year he’d taken his wife and hitched a ride on a truckload of pistachios to Tehran, first living in a hovel south of the city, a hole in the ground covered with sheets of plastic. Then he’d moved up, bought a house close to the train station. Khaniabad, off Masjed-e-Qanari, that was where I’d find them.

  Jalal never discussed family. They didn’t exist for him.

  His younger sister told me bits and pieces on a crosstown bus. I’d seen her once at Jalal’s shop when I’d come in and overheard them arguing in the back. I heard him say, “It’s none of your business.” “You’re a no-good son!” she countered. That’s all I heard, and she’d brushed past me, flushed with anger.

  A month later we were waiting at the same bus stop by Najmieh Hospital, where she worked as a nurse. We boarded the same bus, and she talked. Her name was Soghra. I felt her motive for opening up to me was to chastise Jalal. She had lighter skin and a frail but cunning disposition, and eventually she started to flirt. She smiled at me; she had a gold tooth and looked like a washerwoman. She gave me her address on a lark and said she lived with her p
arents. “When you call,” she whispered, “say it’s from the hospital. Say you’re a doctor.” She couldn’t have callers but had dreams of snagging a doctor. I took the paper, registering her nerve, considering her pious background. When she got off the bus, I saw her take out a light blue scarf and cover her head quickly.

  I GOT OFF THE BUS the next night near the train station. The man at the greengrocer’s told me to turn left at the intersection beyond the public bath. He knew the Hojjati family. But I didn’t stop to chat.

  Dinner hour, with throngs at the traffic lights in the noise and smog and hustle. A vendor in a threadbare jacket dished out steaming ruby-red beets from an old rickety cart. Laborers carried home freshly baked loaves wrapped in newspaper, the backstreets smelling of fried oil and kerosene and coal.

  We knew doctrines and dialectics, but not yet how to reach the masses. We had no roots here.

  I dipped into narrow back alleys right and left and rang a door-bell. I’d come late to catch them at home. His father opened the door. He had dark skin stretched over high cheekbones, a taut and ferocious face. Turkoman blood. I introduced myself as his son’s close friend before he let me into a half-lit passage. He called to his wife. A small woman came up and peered at me, chalky pale, bird-like and shriveled, her dark chador wrapped at her waist and slung over her head. I recognized her from the time in the street.

  The father grilled me. He’d retained the provincial accent.

  “He gave you our address?”

  I equivocated, said I’d come for news of Jalal. “Have you heard anything? Has anyone called about him?”

  He shook his head. “My daughter told us. She saw the shop shuttered and asked on the street. She checked hospitals and police stations. Even the morgue.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “He didn’t want us,” he said gruffly. “He’s an ungrateful son.”

  “Maybe he’s been arrested —”

  The mother started to weep. The father stepped in front of her; I could see he was frightened.

  “What d’you know?” he demanded.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m here to see if you do.”

  The mother flinched as if she’d been struck, letting out a small wail. “He’s disappeared. Just like that. Melted into the ground! O God, pity him and help us! He’s our one and only. The light of our eyes.”

  Grabbing her chador, she wept, beating her chest lightly with her fist. Her husband ordered her to calm down.

  I asked the father if he’d checked Jalal’s apartment. He didn’t even know where Jalal lived.

  “Can’t you help my son?” the mother implored me.

  “What’re you talking about, woman?” the father snapped.

  She started weeping again. They made a pitiful twosome. I asked if Jalal’s sister could get into his apartment.

  The father squinted, cheekbones rising to engulf wary eyes. “How d’you know her?”

  I said I didn’t. He said she was on night shift at the hospital. I suggested someone search the apartment to remove damaging evidence. Not that there was any, I added.

  “Just in case,” I said. Surely SAVAK had already taken what it needed.

  The father didn’t object. I was about to give him his son’s address.

  “You do it,” he said. “My daughter’s always at the hospital. She wouldn’t know what to look for. I don’t have much education. Do us this favor.”

  I said I knew Jalal’s landlady and could get into the flat with her latchkey.

  In the alley he took me aside to tell me he’d appealed to a hajji in the bazaar to find Jalal. “He’s devout and principled. I trust him. He says nothing is sacred for this government. They’re out to ruin the bazaar merchants. There’s a conspiracy to tear down the bazaar. What for, to build a four-lane highway? To build more casinos? They have no shame.” He shook his head angrily. “I’m at the Jazayeri Mosque there every chance I get. I hear what’s going on. The hajji belongs to an influential group. It’s through them I send my dues to our ayatollah in Najaf. Our beacon in darkness. God willing, may he come home one day. God willing.”

  On the main street a boy cried, “Kayhan . . . Ettela‘at. . . .” I bought an evening paper under the streetlight. The front page had an item at the bottom about an ambush against terrorists. They’d arrested four men in north Tehran, armed to the teeth and dangerous. They were routing them out. The article vituperated against the Red Reaction, the Black Reaction, lauding the glories of the White Revolution. There they went again, pontificating with colors. Eternal barren rhetoric.

  I SHUT THE DOOR on Jalal’s flat at a quarter past nine the next evening, turning off the lights before leaving. I returned the key to the elderly landlady, Esmat khanom, who detained me to groan about her bad heart and crippling arthritis. The light showed up her beaked nose and yellowish skin and hair. Jalal said she was a vicious gossip. Much as I tried, she kept me outside her front door with digressions that threatened to go on forever, her dentures clicking. I looked at my watch.

  “Nine-thirty!” I said.

  The building was on a dead end, an enclave for Assyrians, who were exemplary boarders according to Esmat khanom. “They are clean!” she said, in the fastidious way one discusses those of foreign origin.

  Then she got in her digs. “Though I would never touch tea from their glass nor food from their plate. And they drink so, dear Mr. Nirvani. And their young, well, they’ve got such an indecent life-style. They’re promiscuous, these Christians. Without a thought of burning in hell!”

  She said the city had become a vile and shameless place full of lechers and sinners and she was waiting for the Absent One — the Twelfth Imam — coming at the end of time to deliver us of all evil. Absentees are her favorite subject. I said good night before she could get on to her absentee husband of fifteen years, who had left home one night, never to return. She was still waiting, as if he’d stepped out for fresh air and was due home any moment. Jalal said the man had taken a mistress and lived blissfully in the provinces, in Behbahan. The building was all Esmat khanom had in the world, thanks to her departed father, an enterprising tailor and dry cleaner.

  For a woman so morbidly fond of absentees, she hadn’t started up about Jalal again. When I’d rung her doorbell and asked for the key, I’d lied by telling her I was running an errand for him. “He’s in Bandar Bushehr,” I explained. “And last week you came here all worried!” she said, reminding me to tell him she wanted her rent. This she now repeated before I took off.

  “Tell him,” she called after me, “or I’ll throw his stuff out!”

  I turned into Jami, a tree-lined residential street. Immediately at the corner I noticed a dark car with two men inside. They were watching me. I continued without missing a beat; they had no way of knowing who I was. When I’d gone far enough, I stopped and looked back. Neither of them had left the car. I leaned against a tree away from the streetlight and waited. Five minutes. The two men got out, dark suits carrying one box. I followed at a distance and saw them enter the building. I waited outside and watched for lights on the fourth floor. They came on at the count of fifty-seven. They hadn’t stopped to interrogate Esmat khanom, but they would on their way out. The only way she wouldn’t squeal about me would be in my presence, so I slipped back into the building. Checking up the stairwell, I rang the doorbell to her ground-floor apartment. She wasn’t overly surprised to see me.

  “May I come in?”

  I stepped in, closing the door behind me, which alarmed her. I said I’d forgotten something important and she thought I wanted the key again. As she shuffled away to fetch it, I remembered Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov comes in to kill the old woman.

  “Why the peculiar look?” she demanded, back with the key.

  The two men were upstairs going through Jalal’s life. Down-stairs I temporized with Dostoyevsky, waiting for them. I wasn’t about to let Esmat khanom betray me. Taking the key from her, I held forth with a fairly compreh
ensive summary of the novel. She listened, lighting up at the pathetic sufferings of the Marmeladov family, bewildered at Raskolnikov’s confession. When I heard foot-steps in the stairwell, I quickly asked to use her bathroom. Slightly dismayed, she pointed to the back. The doorbell rang and our eyes locked as I went past her into the next room. I kept behind the door there, listening, eyeing the window through which I could escape.

  The two men at the door said they wanted information on her fourth-floor tenant.

  “Hojjati, Jalal,” barked out one of them.

  They inquired about his comings and goings. Friends, habits, visitors. She obliged, effusive from terror, her inflection shallow, revealing Jalal to be a quiet tenant minding his own business. No one ever visited him.

  They asked how long he’d been a lodger. Two years. Who had a key? No one except the lodger, as far as she knew. Had anyone come by these past days? Anything peculiar? Be honest. She denied it.

  “We’ve been watching the building,” they said.

  “I wouldn’t notice.”

  “Anyone tonight?” they repeated.

  She said no, a shade too quickly. “Why, what’s he done?”

  They left her midsentence, the clatter of their regulation shoes hollow. She shut the door with a loud thud, eyeing me nervously as I came in from the back room. I handed back the key.

  “Where’s Jalal?” she demanded.

  “They have him.”

  “I want my rent.”

  “You’ll have to wait,” I said.

  “I don’t want trouble. I’m a lonely, miserable old woman. Look how everyone treats me, like dirt!”

  I checked at the window. The car was gone, so I could leave.

  “Why did he confess?”

  Jalal hadn’t. She meant Raskolnikov. “It’s a long story —”