The handwriting was his without a doubt. He’d used the blue felt pen. His penmanship was awful and I always ridiculed him.
I looked for the book in my room and found the phone number scrawled on the very last page. His plan was already in place when he’d given me the book. I considered my options until nightfall. Jalal had disappeared. It was a lie that he was in prison if he was working for the secret police. So where was he, and what was he up to? The only way to get to him was to do what he’d asked and call the number and give his message. I had to find him to find out if he’d double-crossed me.
At eleven-fifteen I sprinted down to the corner, went into the public booth, and dialed. The phone rang four times, and a man picked up.
“Yes?” he said, decisive and abrupt.
“I bring news from Varamin,” I said.
He hesitated, for too many seconds. I didn’t like it. I could hear the murmur of a radio and paper rustling.
“I’ve got news from Varamin,” I repeated.
This wasn’t working, and I decided to hang up.
“Wednesday,” he said. “Let’s go to the movies. Radio City. How about the seven o’clock showing? You buy the tickets and wait by the door.”
“All right,” I said.
“Don’t forget to bring the book this time.”
The phone went dead. I had forty-eight hours.
SIXTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING I called Mr. Bashirian. I felt guilty about the interview and how everything had gone wrong. I valued his friendship, but I was also angry. He had roped me in, ever more dependent on me, and now he was sulking.
I told him I needed to discuss the new directive with him. He said he had other pressing matters and I’d be better off discussing it with Mr. Makhmalchi. Especially since I was seeing so much of him already. Someone had let him know that Mr. Makhmalchi, his rival, was constantly in my office, perhaps Makhmalchi himself. I humored Mr. Bashirian, but he was curt, brooding. I’d known him so long that I was familiar with the intricacies of his temperament. It mattered a great deal to me what he believed. In the end, he made polite excuses. I felt offended; still, I kept up a warm and tactful end to the conversation. I wouldn’t have done it for anyone else.
At the tail end of the day, there was a note on my desk. The director wanted to see me. Going past Mr. Bashirian’s closed door down the hall, I wanted to barge in and shake him and tell him I was on his side. I wasn’t sure how he saw things anymore.
The director was standing behind his desk talking on the phone when I went in. He waved me over to a chair, got off the phone, rubbed his temples.
“It’s been a bad week,” he said. “I know our economic realities have no bearing on the way things are run.”
I nodded politely.
“In other words” — he cleared his throat — “it’s not as simple as writing papers and sending memos. Our advice doesn’t really count. I mean, it should — but if we argue our side too forcefully, they accuse us of harboring leftists. The truth is, whenever there’s a big conference and everyone gathers, the only real players are way at the top. Everything — everything comes from the top.” He sat down. “Edicts, endless monologues, lectures. We’re ordered, like servants. And that’s that.”
He stared, solitary, dubious.
“There are too many political interventions from the top,” he said. “Too many things. One option is to resign in protest. Of course, it’s hard to let go of power. So if one knows what goes on and stays, that means one accepts.”
I thought he’d lost his mind to speak that way. If word got out, he’d lose his position and kill his entire career.
“I — I’ve spoken frankly, but, well, we go back many years and after all I know your father, though he and I are different generations. Please give him my best.”
Thierry called just as I was about to leave my office, his voice full of mischief. He’d already heard about the interview at the Intercontinental.
“This is the sort of thanks I get?” he said.
“You only want gratitude.”
“All that nonsense about the poor little wretched father. I hear he quotes Fanon and gets downright nasty.”
“Will it get printed?”
“Who knows,” he said. “Anyway, I’m in excellent humor, since I’ve made another conquest.”
“Tell me,” I insisted.
He dodged, but it was a game — he wanted me to know. He was having an affair and finally admitted it was Pouran.
“You call that a conquest?”
He laughed again, entertained and gratified I had ridiculed a mutual friend.
MY BROTHER KAVOOS DROPPED BY early in the evening. The children were doing homework upstairs. They came running down to greet their uncle, then went running back up again. Houshang had called to say he’d be late because of a meeting followed by a reception. I handed Kavoos a Scotch and soda in the living room, and he took off his tie and jacket.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Why?” Kavoos can be cagey.
“What happened to that boy who was arrested?”
“Nothing. His father saw the lawyer.”
“Then it’s out of our hands.”
“It’s in nobody else’s.”
“There’s something you should know,” he said.
I looked up.
“I heard something from a friend this morning. Someone high up.”
“Bad news?”
“It concerns Houshang. It’s very confidential.”
I reached for the pack of cigarettes.
“It doesn’t look good. They’re about to indict two rear admirals and several naval officers and, so far, two civilians. Several of the officers are on the Bandar Kangan project. The charges are embezzlement — payoffs in the millions. So far your husband is not on the list.”
“Thank God.”
“I don’t know how . . . involved Houshang is,” he said. “Let’s hope he’s clean as a whistle. Father will have a heart attack if he gets indicted.”
My palms turned clammy at the word indicted.
“I’m not sure when the story’s going to break. Right now they’re meeting behind closed doors. One of the naval officers has decided to come clean and name names. He’s been promised a more lenient sentence for betraying the others. I don’t know if Houshang knows, but this is very confidential information. Very sensitive.”
I nodded.
“I’m not one of your husband’s closest friends, and he’s never confided in me. I mean, I don’t know what he does. Right? But what if — anyway, even if he isn’t directly involved, it can get nasty. They could investigate his company. You know how it is — they blame others for their own corruption. They want scarecrows to leave twisting in the wind.”
He sipped his Scotch, the ice clinking. He’d just put distance between the corrupt system and Houshang and himself quite nicely.
I smoked, my gaze fixed on the miniatures nailed to the wall. The studied poses of the robed women, turbaned men, uniform gardens, the gold, astonishing colors. The figures shimmered. Their roles were cast for them, like their fate. Arrested. I saw myself up there with them. Stylized. Paralyzed. Ornate and immured.
I felt I was suffocating. I went to open a French window, stepped out onto the terrace for air. Kavoos came out and stood with me.
“What if he’s implicated?” he demanded. “Anything you suspect?”
“Nothing,” I said, lying so he would leave.
Kavoos was terrified for our good name and reputation, terrified for himself. Father had accumulated a lifetime of unimpeachable deeds large and small, already shelved and forgotten, his ambition muffled with decorum and self-effacement. Today they laugh at such modesty.
“What’s your gut feeling?” Kavoos asked me.
“Don’t worry,” I said.
“Don’t let on I’ve said anything. Wait until Houshang tells you.”
Kavoos stuck around, but I wanted him to go. He wanted mor
e reassurance than I could give, and I wanted to be alone. I let the help go home early and cooked and fed the children while they told me about their fistfight in school and detention at the principal’s office. Then they watched Morad Barghi on television. I tucked them in. I briefly called Mother, who talked about her bulbs and bedding her plants.
In the dark stillness of the house, I turned on a light down-stairs, sat opposite the Persian miniatures. I saw their beauty, minutely executed, constrained. The faces expressionless, one indistinguishable from the other. The tyranny of form. I’d never seen them that way before. I heard the wind, the creaking of the shutters. I stared, trancelike. Then I saw them — the robed men and women — rising out of their pages, propelling themselves. Casting off their mantles, their eternal strictures, millennial and crippling. Tearing off their configurations — the ceremonial robes, the eternal words, the props. Flinging themselves out of the impossible geometry of their pavilions and courts and gardens. Into an unpredictable future.
I MUST HAVE BEEN DOZING when a door slammed. Then I heard another door and flushing in the downstairs powder room. Two-thirty. Houshang had stopped off somewhere after the official reception. I heard him come up the steps, taking the treads slowly — he’d had too much to drink again. I imagined my sons taunted in school because their father’s name was denounced in the papers. Big headlines, a picture.
I lifted my head from the pillow and listened. Houshang knew better than to get caught. He knew better than to get himself implicated; he didn’t want anyone’s advice or opinion. He needed to come out on top, for himself, for the money, the sheer pleasure. Testing that fine line between big success and corruption — a populated line, judging by prevailing standards. I had no idea about the intricacies of his dealings.
He came down the hall, turned off the light, going into our bathroom through the hallway. He flicked the switch, light seeping from under the adjoining door into the bedroom, an incandescent strip adhering to the dark. I could hear him move in there. He picked off his shoes, let them fall with a thud. His belt buckle struck the tiled floor, then dragged. He turned on the faucet, brushed his teeth, rinsed, hitting the toothbrush against the sink four successive times. I heard the vanity mirror slide back and forth, then the faucet again, water rushing into a glass. He was drinking. He needed pills for a headache, pills for his stomach, pills to go to sleep. I turned toward the window, my back to the door through which he’d come.
When had I started disliking him? The first time I’d seen him. But I hadn’t noticed then.
Long ago suddenly. Fourteen years. I had just returned from London with a fine degree and the finest prospects, Mother said. I had wanted to choose my fate, whereas Mother believed one could not escape it. She thought deliberating endlessly about marriage vulgar and lacking in imagination; I thought it pride equivocating with emotion and logic. So I had started life by getting married. Houshang had stalked me. He wanted me all for himself. I had evaded him, knowing he would finally have me and I couldn’t escape him. He was nine years older, charming, persistent. Whispering, “You’re my paragon of goodness.” He brought his family to ask for my hand. His mother, hair-sprayed to perfection, fingered her jewels, adoring him. Mother mimicking her later. His father, a noted surgeon and sometime politician, was more discerning. His mother was a member of a royal charity and changed the color of her gems and expensive suits with the days of the month. Our families started seeing a great deal more of each other. His father soliciting Father’s advice in the corners of living rooms and on evening walks, which pleased Father no end. The mother cogitating about high society in her high trill, which amused and exasperated Mother. Mother’s ironic quips way above her head. We had a short engagement. Forty-five people at his parents’ in Mahmoudieh, then eighty-five people at the Hotel Darband for dinner and dancing. Well-attended luncheons, elegant afternoon teas, dinner at La Résidence, Friday lunches of chelo-kabob at their country house by the Karaj River, followed by interminable games of rummy and poker.
Father and Mother had considered others but agreed to Houshang. He looked promising, he had luster, zeal, drive. “That’s fine!” Mother said. Father had smiled, but that had had more to do with the vision of his one and only daughter in a white lace dress. Summer. A wedding in the garden of the old house. The fragrant rose bowers in full bloom and the night dark velvet. The massive trees lit like phantoms, the pool shimmering from the light of paper lanterns. The largest rugs cast over fine-graveled paths, with the music of the orchestra rising and children running across the lawns like fireflies. Mother’s friend the portly Mrs. Vahaab singing that night like a large-bosomed nightingale. Pots of white jasmine and red geranium set all around the front porch and down the steps. Old Tourandokht — old even then — in a brand-new blue satin dress and diaphanous voile chador, crying under the Russian crystal chandelier. Watching me turn in the downstairs hallway, lifting up my white veil with one hand. The bride. “Aroos khanom, aroos khanom!” she kept repeating, snapping her fingers in a lop-sided dance with her funny bowed legs. Murmuring prayers and blowing on me to ward off the evil eye. In the upstairs rooms, she had burned wild rue, carrying it in a small brazier on a silver tray, circling through the rooms to ward off evil spirits, and we had inhaled the mesmerizing scent in our frenzied state while applying French makeup and perfumes. And she had come close and whispered to me, “May you grow old with your husband. May you have capable sons and beautiful daughters. May you live together for a hundred years.” And I’d known then as the gates were closing that revenge would come. I’d seen myself pass before the bedroom mirror, shimmering in white, and knew even as I prepared to descend the stairs that I was relinquishing a certain instinct, that deeper rhythm of life, for certainty and logic. Doing what was expected. Drawn deep into a system, easing into it as though slipping on gloves for a formal and inevitable occasion. Already waiting for the end. Houshang and I virtual strangers, despite our all-consuming social calendar. Always with others, barely knowing each other. “What’s to know? What’s to know?” Mother kept repeating as we descended the jasmine-lined steps of the front terrace before all the wedding guests. “You’ll never know until you live with him three dozen years. Even then.”
I heard the bathroom door open and his footsteps on the carpet. He sat on the edge of the bed, then slumped back. I stiffened without moving, my back to him. I closed my eyes. The boys were still young; I had obligations. Houshang possessed. He liked being in that position. Anything else was losing.
THE NEXT MORNING Houshang was gone by the time I went in to shower. He was avoiding me. As usual his clothes from the night before were in a heap by the chair. As I lifted his blue shirt to put it in the hamper, I caught a whiff of perfume. The shirt I’d given him that summer. He liked blue, the finest shirts from Paris, but that wasn’t my perfume on his favorite shirt. He’d been out drinking and picking up women. He went, always accompanied.
I called Pouran and woke her up. She said it was just as well, since her masseuse would be there any minute to wrap her flesh in her eternal fight against cellulite. I told her I was dropping in on my way to work.
She lived four minutes away. The new Filipino maid opened the front door. She’d been over at our house with Pouran’s two brats and knew Houshang and the children. I asked if there had been a party the night before, and she mumbled about a group of friends and card games.
“Like other nights, madame,” she said.
Across the hallway, two Bangladeshi servants — new arrivals — were in the living room dusting and vacuuming. Pouran had sacked all the local house help, as she’d pledged, and imported. “Our masses stink!” she always says, grimacing.
“When my husband was here last night, did he leave his jacket?” I asked.
“No, no jacket, madame.”
That settled it. I went upstairs. Pouran was in the bedroom, seated at her gilt rococo dressing table, a half-dozen pairs of expensive shoes strewed by her feet. Her yellow hair was disheveled,
the black roots out. She looked wasted first thing in the morning, her vulgar sexuality in remission. She was in an apricot peignoir, applying greasy cream to her yellowish skin and yawning nonstop.
“I was going to call you,” she said.
“About last night’s party?”
She registered surprise but recovered admirably.
“Houshang was here,” I said.
“We missed you!”
“Of course you did. Did he take off with Iraj at any point?”
“Iraj had guests!”
“That’s nice. So you supply the liquor and women.”
“What?” said Pouran, indignant. “We played poker until late.”
“My husband never whores around alone. Neither does yours, of course. They go together. Don’t bother — I know.”
“I don’t know what you mean. Men must be men. You understand that! Houshang was tired and just had a couple of drinks an —”
“Did any of your guests need a ride?”
“What do you mean?”
“You” — I pointed — “know perfectly well what I mean. I know what’s going on behind my back. I’m warning you. Don’t you dare pimp for my husband. You understand?”
“How dare you insult me like that!” she said, all haggard and slovenly.
She went on about how she was shocked at my odd behavior, how I’d come barging in, how much I had changed. I had always been such a perfect lady! I left her as the masseuse came in, a stocky Maronite from Beirut with bulges and porcelain skin and bedroom eyes.
“Bonjour, mesdames!” she chirped, lugging her bag of potions.
It took forever to drive to work, traffic gnarled, downtown a hundred times worse.
Iraj and Pouran’s first and only allegiance is to Houshang. They will always lie for him. Iraj and Pouran keep a permanent state of open house. They live off others, seemingly living for them. Their friends congratulate them for this. It’s a perfect arrangement. Theirs, the grand central station, the clearinghouse, the private boudoir and drawing room for all seasons, where Iraj can play host and Pouran can fritter away her life publicly. My husband and Iraj and Pouran were three of a kind, tight like a fist. I had always been the odd one out. Every time we’d done anything, from the very beginning of our marriage, Iraj and Pouran had tagged along. To Cannes, Florence, the Greek isles. Houshang needed them, and whenever I objected he called me a snob. Iraj was the invaluable old friend and ally; they did business together. Pouran was scrupulous at leaving a very good impression on her husband and mine, her affair with Thierry another one of her backroom forays. She doesn’t know I know. She’ll never understand foreigners have big mouths and short attention spans. Iraj is so full of himself that he doesn’t notice her carnal incursions, or perhaps it helps business. He’s a developer on a grand scale, speculating in land and building high-rises and hotels and offices in Tehran and around the country. With homes in London and the south of France and New York. Pouran impersonates the role of dutiful wife, plopping herself forever center stage as hostess. Admittedly she’s perfected the role — the dulcet voice, the gushing warmth, the fortitude of an all-terrain tank for pushy hospitality. All the while catering to her husband’s hubris as though it were some hothouse flower guaranteed to stand her in good stead, which it does. She lives like a queen, but she’s restless. The last time she was in a frenzy was over the cultural attaché of a certain embassy — diplomats, not bankers, the ultimate conquest to her. I was acquainted with the attaché. Who wasn’t? He was slim and tall, and he had a bit of a stoop and silky hair collapsing into impish eyes, with a degree from Oxford and aristocratic bloodlines and all the markings of the European degenerate. An incurable collector — ancient glazed pottery and rugs and kilims and tribal silver and Eastern knickknacks — he shopped along Manuchehri Street every week like a fox. A friend said he was a spy. I was there the evening of that swank cocktail party in a garden in Niavaran — Iraj roving with his tycoon comportment and come-get-me look, Pouran all dolled up and on the lookout, stepping out of their chauffeured gold Mercedes-Benz with the starry-eyed look of some of our new mercantile imperialists. She’d caught the cultural attaché bored out of his mind, slumped in the armchair of the deserted living room. He’d attached himself to her on the spot. The local girls were too girlish for his tastes, too prudish for his pornographic requirements. He told me himself, taking great pride in his indiscretion. Pouran took pride in their lecherous afternoons knocking about the antique wares in his apartment off Ghavam Saltaneh, delighted with his great breeding, the cultural part completely wasted on her. He told me, with considerable condescension. “God, you’ve got such great breeding!” he’d say, mimicking her. “It’s such an honor!” Laughing his head off. Not that she ever knew. The last time I saw him, he said with amusement, “She likes giving juicy tidbits to the right customer. She’ll do anything! The husband gets foreign concessions. Both of them awful people.”
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