“The project’s going to be canceled?” I asked.
“Not with our kind of clout!”
My husband thrives on clout.
He shrugged. “I’m not worried.”
I was surprised Bandar Kangan was going full-force ahead, unlike other major projects recently aborted. Houshang didn’t want to speculate, so I told him Reza Nirvani would be coming to the house to tutor. His reaction was irrational.
“I don’t see why we need him in the house!”
We argued on until I finally lied and said Father had arranged it. Houshang dared not dispute nor ridicule Father’s judgments so readily.
“You mean there isn’t another tutor in the world?” he demanded. “I need to be consulted when it concerns my sons.”
“What do you have against Reza?”
Houshang lit a cigarette, dragging on the filter with derision. “Don’t tell me he’s a friend of your brothers’. That’s ridiculous! What does he want?”
“He doesn’t want anything. He’s a friend of the family’s.”
“He’s a peasant.”
“No he isn’t!”
“So he’s the son of a sharecropper.”
“It so happens his father was a distinguished man, and his mother is a distant relative of Father’s.”
“We’re all also distantly related to apes! I didn’t ask for his genealogy. Why are we arguing about this chap anyway?”
And so it was I came to inform my husband that the matter was already settled.
ELEVEN
THE MAID OPENED THE DOOR and introduced herself as Goli, Tourandokht’s great-granddaughter. She said her mistress had already told her I was the new tutor. She kept house for Mrs. Behroudi, her husband cooked, and they had three children. I said I’d seen her great-grandmother the week before, a woman who had brought up several generations in the Mosharraf household and who didn’t have a birth certificate but claimed she was born during the Tobacco Boycott against the British. Goli giggled and said she had forgotten the story. Frivolous and insubstantial compared to Tourandokht.
We heard Mahastee upstairs reproaching her children.
Goli directed me to the living room and left. I stood at one end before the old glazed pottery propped up on glass shelves. Farther along the same wall were two groupings of old miniatures with gold leaf. Leyli and Majnoun in robes of purple, recumbent in a pavilion; Sufi dervishes by an indigo river; Rostam the hero battling Afrasiyab; Yusuf and Zuleikha under stylized clouds, attended by stylized courtiers in turquoise and saffron. On a side table was a collection of Qajar pen boxes, painted and lacquered, with hunting scenes, nightingales among roses, bearded noblemen, and oval medallions with portraits of Europeans. I picked up a qalamdan, pulled out one end.
“Looking for a pen?”
I turned to face Mahastee, expecting her to be robed in gold and flowing magenta. I’d seen her in yellow in a garden under hail.
She smiled and we shook hands. I told her I was there to help out for a few weeks. Besides the department I was also teaching night school. I had asked around to find her a suitable and permanent tutor.
She smiled. “You’re doing me a big favor.”
She wore dark slacks and a white shirt, stylish and sedate. And still true to herself, instinctively unpretentious. I complimented her pen boxes.
“You still do calligraphy?” she asked.
“My father was adept. He had deep faith guiding his ink and pen.”
“You don’t?”
“I had his until he passed away.”
So many years gone by, and we could feel them buckle under us, our smiles slightly strained at the realization, and at being alone together. She explained that her sons would appear shortly. Aged ten and twelve, they were lazy, unfocused students and needed discipline, the rewards of hard work.
She went through milky curtains, unlocking a French window, the curtains billowing as she flung open the casements. She turned, her face opaque behind the drapes, her eyes restive; then she stepped outside and I followed. She pointed to her bed of roses and we started walking. Gusts blew the dried leaves of plane trees, scattering them over the lawns. In the midst of cooler days, we’d hit upon a mild afternoon. As she spoke, her eyes flitted back and forth, the light hazel of their irises darkly outlined, her elongated eyebrows ornamental, her skin pale, flawless. She told me about the years since she had left for England and returned, a succession of events proceeding like clockwork, her tone meandering, then efficient, as if their passage had been mechanical. I talked about university and teaching and my job at the department, outlining without essence. “And you’re not married?” She smiled. “No, not yet,” I said. Explaining had distanced us from each other with time and place, making sudden strangers of us instead of bringing us closer to the emotions we felt at seeing each other again. The lawns sloped down to a pool, and she descended, limber, and we circled down, drifting to the side of a gardening shed by the farthest wall. For a moment she stood, uncertain, as if about to disclose something, then changed her mind.
Standing there at the far end of the garden, I found her exactly as I’d known her twenty years before. All she had related about what she’d done and who she’d been with were irrelevant. I found that astonishing, this phantom truth crossing twenty years — this elemental connection between us, though everything else in our lives had changed.
We climbed back up the slope, and her sons came running out the open French window of the living room, and her expression changed, slackened, though her body grew taut. She waved, drifting toward them like a ship berthing. They ran round us in circles, chasing each other and shouting, the large white house towering as we gathered to go back inside.
I TOLD THE TAXI to drop me off in Dokhaniyat, and although I’d got off only three blocks away, still I was running late.
There was a nip in the air. I was hungry, but there was no time for dinner. I had been given the code and a succession of knocks to get into the house for our meeting. Seven of us were there. Our host — a chemical engineer and the son of a cleric in Mashhad — had first read Hegel in Arabic and joined an Islamic student association there until discovering the secular Left at the polytechnic in Tehran. The others were a lecturer at Tehran University on modern history; a young filmmaker, still editing his documentary on village life; Dr. Hadi, a radiologist who had studied in Paris and was also a translator; a newspaper columnist who resented his state-sanctioned prose and dug out scandals on corruption; and our playwright and literary critic, a chain-smoker and pedant who emulated the prominent dramatist Sa‘edi. We sat in the small room around an Arj steel table and chairs, flimsy curtains drawn. Our host brought in a jug of water and tea after turning down the radio a tad in the other room.
We had a watchman in the street, a boy sitting under a street-lamp. Poor bastards, all they ever got to do was watch and wait.
We passed out the study questions given to all four of our sections: What kind of revolution today? Who will make it — the people, the party, the revolutionaries? Can there be revolution without a political party? In what form can the historic vanguard appear? What kind of party do we make? What kind of rapport with the masses? Then we moved on to the main topic for the night — the continuing problems for the Left at Tehran University. It had started with a poisonous article by Mo’meni, a leftist hero to students — a Fedayee guerrilla — now dead, arrested and executed along with other leaders. But when he was alive, his diatribe against the faculty had thundered on campus, accusing, naming names — professors of economics and sociology, especially those who taught anything about Marxism. “Far from dedicated intellectuals, they’re corrupters, informers, collaborators of the regime!” he’d warned students. “Trust no one!” In class they’d pointed at teachers and said, “You must be in with SAVAK.” We were incensed. Just when we’d gained momentum and the students were more involved than ever — resisting, participating, committed — this blow had been delivered to the Left by the Left. The Left
was still paranoid, and it continued to demand mind control and enforce censorship.
The journalist was taking the minutes. Dr. Hadi unlatched the window to air the room — four of us were smoking. Someone asked, as always, if Mo’meni had actually written the article and if it wasn’t another SAVAK conspiracy.
“He wrote it, that Stalinist despot!” said our host.
“Of course students are entranced with guerrillas!” said the playwright. “They’re armed. They’re epic. They’re in the vanguard.”
We discussed how the Left was splintered and all over the place, deathly afraid to criticize and rectify itself. Meanwhile the tide had turned antisecular, with Shariati the rage and students finding religion, calling Islam our legitimate roots and heritage. Even society philosophy professors and men of letters — those coddled by the regime — were siding with Islam to retaliate against the Left by saying nothing worthwhile came from the West, and not just trash like Marx. They lectured on how Western civilization itself was a sewer of corruption, whereas the East had Islam, Sufism, and didn’t have the need to rebel. They were even bringing back writers like Al-Ahmad, a censored author until recently banned and maligned himself, to counter Marxism —these jet-set thinkers educated abroad.
“The girls want a separate cafeteria!” the lecturer said. “They don’t want to eat with the boys. They don’t want to take exams with the boys.”
“The Black Reaction!” said the journalist.
“What’s rational about fanning religious babble?” said our host.
“A hundred Fedayee with dead leaders versus tens of thousands of clerics. Who wins?”
“The regime,” I said.
PAST MIDNIGHT in my room I took out paper and the inkwell and the pen box of reed pens. Father had left me his set. His father too had been a skilled calligrapher, and a mystic, a cleric who had left his village and old garden — a place of mystical legend, a garden of unusual light and spiritual inspiration — for Tabriz, to teach jurisprudence and theosophy. They had said about him that he possessed Sufic chivalry, healing gifts, exceptional powers.
I pulled over the low table before me, laying out my implements, trying my hand after years. I sat cross-legged, dipping the pen in black ink, drawing the tip against paper. An old ghazal, a throwback to timeless verses for her. For that time some twenty years ago when I had loved only her.
Autumn. Father long dead and this another season. His picture before me on the wall as I slid his reed pen against paper for this woman he’d known as a child. Had he known then how I loved her? Known and disapproved and in his wisdom kept quiet, while I measured his faith in me and the insurmountable obstacles he saw in the world. He knew their world well, had known it living in the household of her grandmother, Mahbanou khanom, year after year. He had received their benevolence — especially hers, as long as she lived — their infinite loyalty and grace and sense of extended family, but also witnessed their imperious treatment of others, their intrigues and family feuds, their secret political machinations. He lived between several worlds, his entire life made up of negotiating the infinite demands between them: the Mosharrafs, the many cultivators of their lands who held inheritable tenant rights, the peasants with their wily logic but also ignorance and superstition, the village elders and gendarmes and government tax collectors, the turbaned clerics surrounding his father in Tabriz. I thought Father infinitely judicious and resourceful in his ways.
Except as Mahastee grew older, when she arrived in Morshedabad and I went out to see her, he’d turn steely with apprehension. He loved her. But she was the daughter of the man he served, and that distinction would remain for him forever. To Father distinctions were there to be upheld. I thought his manner especially austere when she was there, perhaps to steel me against her and the world. To say, Things are never how you think. Prepare, prepare for what will come. He’d known then he wouldn’t succeed with me — known perhaps what could come — and had bided time for the intervention of fate.
Now, long after, I wrote the words of an old master. The room was quiet except for the rasping of a blunt instrument; the letters, long and drawn like cypresses. Black, night arcs. Tipped. Hooked. Latched. Round and capacious like empty basins.
THE NEXT MORNING I called Jalal’s parents from the office. I left a message with the mother, who kept referring to her husband as hajj-agha. He called at midday. I recognized him from that first “Allo!” spoken crudely like a peasant and barked into the phone, his sentences all pitched higher at the end as if everything stated were an impertinent question. He wanted to see me immediately. Had I done the job? He coughed, a loud hacking noise.
“Tonight,” he said. “Something happened.”
I was at his doorstep at nine, this time addressing him as hajj-agha. He took me along the half-lit passageway, at the end of which there was an interior courtyard with a blue-tiled pond of stagnant water. We took off our shoes and he opened a door, and we stepped up into a small white room with a brand-new Kashan carpet touching the walls. There were bolstered cushions opposite the door. We sat cross-legged under framed portraits of the Prophet — faceless and robed, with a golden halo and angels above him — and of the first disciple, Ali, bearing the sword of Zulfaqar. He took out a rosary from his pocket, fingering the pale green beads. They clicked in the room like the ticking of a clock. His feet smelled terribly.
The door opened and his wife entered in a white chador, bearing a brass tray of tea. I raised myself in greeting. She left the tray on the carpet and sat away from us on her knees, looking like an aged twelve-year-old.
“That hajji from the bazaar came late last night,” the father said. “The rug merchant. The one who said he’d help. I was groggy with sleep. He brought bad news. He said, ‘They’ve got your son in Komiteh Prison. They say he’s a Marxist guerrilla.’”
He stared at the floor, shaking his head, ran the palm of one hand over the stubble of his beard.
“He was raised a good Muslim,” he protested. “The only battle worth fighting is in the path to God! Like Imam Hossein, who was martyred in Karbala.”
His wife wiped tears from her face. “I know my son. He’s a good boy! His heart is pure. He wouldn’t harm a soul.”
The father scowled. “What d’you know about a son you never saw? This city corrupted him. Like it does everyone else.”
She hung her head, and he looked away in silence. The mother rocked to and fro, whispering lamentations, the father’s gaze fixed on the carpet, running fingers over his rosary. In this city, even after so many years, he was still in exile.
“About the apartment —” I began. Vaguely I mentioned the pamphlets — without saying they were on armed insurrection — that I’d ripped up and flushed away. I didn’t want to frighten the mother. I said it appeared nothing had been touched there before me. I didn’t mention the two SAVAK agents in the street but said Jalal owed the landlady rent.
“How much rent?” the father demanded suspiciously.
“Your tea’s gone cold,” the mother said, staring at the tray. She seemed nervous. “Let me get you a fresh one.”
“Don’t trouble yourself,” I insisted.
I grabbed a glass and saucer, the dark and tepid brew bitter even through the sugar cube melting on my tongue. The father started on me, demanding to know if I’d found anything really important. Incriminating evidence? Drugs, a stash of money, arms? I shook my head.
“What money?” I said. “He owed rent.”
“The hajji told me they found evidence,” the father said. “In my son’s apartment.” He stared at me. “You promised to destroy evidence.”
“I told you I did.”
“You’re educated. You know a lot. You said you were there first!”
I stared at him.
“They said they found evidence. Why did you go, for the money? To take something? Plant something?”
I saw how the mother looked embarrassed. He believed I’d lied to them, suspecting I’d had other motiv
es all along. He didn’t trust anyone.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “Someone like Jalal? Or tell me, are you an informer?”
I said I was his son’s friend.
He couldn’t be sure of anything except the bitter certainty of all the betrayals he’d already seen and anticipated. He’d migrated to the city with so many others and seen gray for so many years that the more he saw the more he was disgusted.
“The only truth today is spoken in the mosque,” he declared.
His wife was beseeching God and the Twelve Imams under her breath. The father said the way he saw it his sole duty in life was donating funds to the clergy for his religious obligations. Now he would be doubling the funds, even tripling them. He said he had no other allegiance.
“They’re the only source of moral authority,” he said.
I said I was sorry about his son.
“We must all fight the battle of Karbala!” he said, rising.
I thanked the old woman for the tea.
“I should’ve stayed in my village,” the father said. “Why did I leave?”
I left, relieved to get away. Twisting in the darkened alleys past the mud-brick walls, I thought how so many of the people who lived here harbored regrets and how many of their children had deserted them to move up and away from them in this city.
TWELVE
MR. BASHIRIAN CAME IN with a wad of folders. His trousers were too long, like the sleeves on his shabby tweed jacket. He was shrinking.
“Really!” I said. “You’re disappearing.”
He left the folders on the table, sank into a chair. He visited me daily. I walked around the desk and stood leaning against it.
“You must eat!”
“I can’t,” he said.
At first, years ago, he’d annoyed me. The ceremonious demeanor, the persnickety work habits, that austere guise like that of a maiden aunt, finicky, brooding. Then one day I saw him in Bam-daad eating ice cream and cream cakes with his son, and as I watched them it changed my opinion of him forever. He was such a tender father. They ate custard tartlets covered with fruit, they ate éclairs, they ate creamy roulette. They ate and ate, laughing together. Peyman was nine at the time, with big cheeks and a crew cut and eyes the size of saucers. They were so engrossed with each other that they didn’t see me. Later when we were better acquainted Mr. Bashirian told me about his wife — how she’d died in a car accident in the mountain passes of Gachsar. After her there could be no other woman, he said. He had his son, his work. At night he listened to Shajarian and Banon on the radio, and to old records of Badi‘zadeh and Ghamar, and weekends he painted. He had taken classes from the famous Katouzian. One time he brought in a small oil painting wrapped in brown paper, a gift for me. A tranquil sea with bloodstained sunset and red clouds and floating gulls. Maudlin, pretty awful actually, but touching. When I took it home, Houshang laughed.
In the Walled Gardens Page 9