In the Walled Gardens

by Anahita Firouz

  Early last summer, by the pool at our house, Pouran came right out with an astonishing admission. A rare moment of disillusionment. We were on the deck chairs on the sunny side. She said, “Iraj is hairy and stocky and dull. He’s got no real class. You want to know something? He’s got a dinky instrument and is one lousy lover. And he thinks he’s a stud!”

  Her laughter hammered, all caustic and tinny.

  I took one good look at her that day and suddenly saw her as an old tart with nothing left to peddle, sunning herself by some swank pool in the south of France. Decomposing in her favorite Eden.

  SEVENTEEN

  AFTER TEACHING my last trigonometry class at night school, I gathered up the quizzes and rushed off to see Mother. There was a chill in the air.

  The bus came late and we all squeezed in like cattle. The ticket boy was rude and pushy, the driver amusing himself by braking and accelerating erratically. Two irritable mothers with overstuffed plastic baskets pulled at the whining and sniffling children tugging about their skirts. We stood rocking to and fro, the bus lurching and pushing through evening traffic, the city streets a jumble of bright neon lights over the heads of pedestrians. Two bullies in the front picked an argument with the driver and the ticket boy, pushing and shoving the rest of us. I was about to lose my temper when they muscled their way out at a stop, firing back four-letter words like bullets.

  Zari opened the door, wiping wet hands on her skirt, brushing off a strand of hair from her pale face with her wrist.

  “You’ve been neglecting Mother!” she said, in a temper.

  She holds me responsible for everything. Not that she, the apple of Father’s eye, Zarrindokht, would ever admit it. I’m the one she blames for letting her get married to Morteza. She told me after Father’s death, since which Morteza’s outbursts and cruelties have grown. Now he dares get into fights with Mother, who lies in bed the next day, disconsolate. Zari blames me for letting Morteza drink and carouse and avoid coming home until all hours of the morning. She figures I should keep threatening him. I could beat him up, but he’ll get even by beating Zari. She nags at me that he’s still a lowly underling at the Ministry of Post and Telegraph, as if I were withholding the magic word to get him promoted. She nags at me that her life is being washed down the toilet and holds me responsible for not lecturing Morteza every chance I get. He doesn’t need a lecture. He needs a lobotomy.

  Zari’s children came running. I took out little brown paper bags of dried mulberries and sour cherries from my pockets. They hopped higher, stretching up their hands.

  “Me, me, me!” they shouted.

  “Don’t shout!” Zari screamed at them.

  She struck her firstborn, Ali, on the head. He backed into the wall, staring up at her from behind his dark lashes as she loomed over him.

  I followed her into the kitchen. She had lentil rice with dates and raisins steaming in the pot with chicken. The children went by, each on a plastic stick with the head of a horse, whinnying and bucking through the small rooms as they clutched their bags.

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “You’re selfish!” said Zari.

  Mother looked tired. She’d just finished saying her prayers. I carried in the Aladdin portable stove and fetched her a glass of tea.

  “Zari doesn’t belong in this marriage,” I said.

  “She’s got three kids. I’m the one who doesn’t belong,” Mother said.

  We ate and I helped clear the plates and went back to sit with Mother, who was knitting, her eyes enlarged like saucers behind thick glasses. She had a big operation last year and she’s still weak. She has arthritis and bad circulation, and when she exerts herself she gets heart palpitations and shortness of breath. She may live in her daughter’s house, but she still lives with Father.

  “You’re quiet,” she said to me.

  Her hands are comforting. When they hover, a lifetime appears a sheltering place, an illusion worth every moment.

  “What’re you waiting for?” she demanded. “Get married. Before your teeth fall out and you lose all your hair and I die like your father.”

  “It’s not so simple.”

  “You’re involved in something political. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “It isn’t that.”

  “Yes, it is. Politics means misfortune and prison. You want me to wear black? What sort of life is this? You’ll grow old, you’ll be lonely, you’ll be miserable,” she said on that first chilly night of autumn.

  The children were crying and making a racket in the next room. They ran in and jumped into Mother’s lap and threw their arms around her.

  “We don’t want to go to bed!” they pleaded, sobbing.

  She told them a fable and they squealed in delight, repeating the refrains to the end with her. They wanted one from me and I told them about Rostam and Zal. Zari leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, scowling.

  “I’m tired of the same old heroes,” she said.

  She yanked the kids by their arms off to bed, pulling them and cussing. They were her burden. They went, throwing desolate glances back in our direction.

  “Zari’s high-strung this year,” Mother said.

  I lit a cigarette and she put down her knitting.

  “I have a vow. I’m going to Shah Abdul-Azeem to light candles. Will you go with me?” I said I would. She asked about Jalal, and I said I’d been to see Nasrollah mirza and was temporarily tutoring Mahastee’s children.

  “When you were just a boy you . . . admired her.”

  In those days Mother would whisper, “Never be beholden to anyone. Never accept a handout, no matter what they promise you. Never overstep your place in the world.” In Morshedabad there was only a grove between our house and the Mosharrafs’. They always kept the customary distance with impeccable courtesy on both sides in the same garden. But Mother and Father had first lived in Tehran, where their first child, a daughter, was born. In her second year the child fell ill with a mysterious fever that came suddenly and took her within ten days. Mother fell into a wild and inconsolable grief, until finally Father took her away from the city and brought her to Morshedabad to rest and convalesce. She had liked the village, the shrine, the open fields and country life, and in time, when Mahastee’s father started a school there and then a clinic, she helped and then managed the clinic, and she and Father had stayed on. The village had grown, and two of her relatives had also bought property there and started families, and then Mother started sewing and knitting classes for the village women and finally one year became pregnant again and went back to Tehran to give birth to me. After several months she took me back to Morshedabad, going back to Tehran another time to stay with her relatives to have Zari, and then back always several times a year to the capital for us to visit family there.

  Morshedabad was home. When the Mosharrafs arrived, she paid them a formal visit each time Mahastee’s mother was there, during which they would say how much they esteemed each other, how much each husband respected the other, and going on from there about how to make jam and pickles and about Sobhi’s radio program and the marvelous voice of Banu Delkash and the latest fashions in Tehran and news of the school and clinic in the village and Mother’s classes for the women, but more than anything, about how to bring up their children. Mother never said anything about how Mahastee was at our house all the time, but Mother’s eyes would light up when Mahastee came and plopped down against our bolsters, and they’d talk about the village, and Mother would take her to the classes, and Mahastee would chatter with the children and come home late with Mother and often curl up against the bolsters and fall asleep until she was called home for dinner and she would yawn and stretch and run back through the trees. She watched Mother sew and cook and make sweetmeats, especially quince-blossom paste in spring, which was her favorite, listening to the quiet stream of Mother’s unassuming comments, listening even when she withdrew to say her prayers in the next room. Father, she listened to in a different way, demanding sto
ries from him, questioning him, and it unfailingly surprised me how much he liked it. Mother took her mother fruit preserves and pickles and votive bowls of sholehzard for the proper occasions, and then gifts of satin pillowcases she’d embroidered herself, and bed-spreads by the village women, and Najibeh khanom brought her cotton fabrics from Tehran for the sewing classes and fine imported ones for the New Year, which Mother sewed up on her Singer sewing machine for Zari and herself for visits to the capital, and whenever the Mosharrafs came back from Europe, Mother got perfumes and creams from Paris and London, which she left sitting unopened on the shelf but Zari would tear open with delight and use extravagantly, though the sight of them sent her day-dreaming and lurching between envy and regret until Mother had to give her a lecture about the world. And that was how they had lived the years out, Mother and the Mosharrafs, circumscribing the limits of their relationship.

  Mother glared. “Admire all you want. But not the illusions.”

  She knew — she was related to them.

  In the street I pulled on my jacket.

  SUNRISE CAME with the birds chirping in clusters in the plane trees. The trees were losing leaves, browning steadily. Masht-Ahmad was out, sweeping them away. Coming up from behind, I saw his stoop and his bowed legs and aimless broom and apathetic effort. A picture of futility. I decided I’d tell him he looked like Charlie Chaplin to cheer him up.

  “How’re you doing?” I said.

  “My mother passed away.”

  I stopped in my tracks and offered my condolences. He looked down at his shoes, worn shoes, and dark, faded trousers billowing against bony legs. When he looked up, tears were streaming down his face.

  “I was born stupid and will leave this world stupid,” he said. “Poor Mother. What did she know?”

  He turned away, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. I left him to his work, and at the corner I looked back. He hadn’t made much progress, though he’d been out since the crack of dawn.

  I got to work so early that only the janitor was there. He brought tea and office gossip. At three-thirty I saw our director in the hall, smiling with superfluous charisma. He’s back with a master’s degree from America, which has inflated his ego. He came over and pumped my hand.

  “I’ve heard nothing but praise about you,” he said.

  He needed a dependable workhorse to complete the big report for the department on schedule, so he could take all credit and glory.

  “Why don’t you join us at Casbah tonight?” he said.

  They were a select group. The guys in the office longed to be asked even once. I hesitated and he insisted one more time, and I agreed to join them later after my appointment. He took off all pleased, smoothing back his hair and tie, admiring his reflection, newly perfected abroad, in the mirror by the elevators.

  The copy of Forough’s poetry was on my desk, the one Jalal had sent me. I’d already told Rahnema High School to find a substitute for the evening.

  I went out to deliver a message to a stranger at seven in the street.

  RADIO CITY CINEMA — like Niagara, Diana, Moulin Rouge, Odeon, Paramount. In their halls, packs of voracious boys dream of becoming men. Spitting out sunflower seeds and leering at the girls and letting out wolf whistles and keeping up a running commentary in the dark. Dreaming of Technicolor liberation, the bourgeois Dream Machine. The kind with easy girls and easy sex and fast cars. Envisioning themselves towering and swank and free-wheeling.

  I turned down from Valiahd Square. If there had been a betrayal against our group, and the betrayer was Jalal, then I was the offender. I’d given us away because I was the link. They could point the finger at me, and I was as good as dead.

  I had half an hour. I knew the drill — I trained others for this sort of thing. Approaching Radio City Cinema from the north, one block up I crossed the street, checking behind me as if about to flag a taxi or catch the bus, making sure I wasn’t being followed. I walked on purposefully, right past the cinema but on the opposite side of the street, on the lookout for any telltale signs — slow-moving cars, loiterers, extra policemen, parked cars with idle passengers. Nothing was out of place. Across the street under the big movie marquee a crowd gathered for the seven o’clock showing. I stepped out to the very edge of traffic as if to cross over. Instead I looked out, taking in the crowd, then continued on the same side briskly, turning west at the traffic light. I went right one block and, across the street from Golden City Cinema, turned up Sabba. Then up one block, and turning right on Dameshq and back into Pahlavi, full circle, I crossed over, heading down, this time on the same side as the cinema, eyes peeled but sauntering. Up against the towering facade of Radio City, I felt the rush of adrenaline. I cut through the loosely gathered crowd under the marquee — mostly young men — a passerby in the flow of evening pedestrians. I didn’t go for the small window of the ticket office. Instead I took a quick look around and immediately crossed at the intersection. No one had been waiting alone at the entrance. The contact wasn’t there yet. I looked back over my shoulder, into the crowd and the street. That’s when I saw the two men in dark suits, higher up, crossing with me. I stiffened, walked faster, right through the intersection on Takhte Jamshid. They followed. I cut into a side street, a dead end with a hotel marquee, and walked straight into the lobby of the Commodore Hotel, all glass and brass and lit up, two bellboys in silly blue uniforms with gold braid, smiling in a corner.

  They stared and I walked back out. The two men in dark suits were not there. I went up to the corner of Takhte Jamshid, checked up and down Pahlavi. Eight minutes to seven. There was no time left. I had to get there right away.

  Cars honked at me as I skipped through speeding traffic, walking fast, then slowing down suddenly right before Radio City. I went straight for the ticket window, eyes fixed on the woman inside, who looked bored. I asked for two tickets, whipped out bills from my trouser pocket, grabbed the tickets, and turned away.

  “Your change,” the woman called after me.

  I grabbed the change, dumped it in my pocket, then pulled out the book of poetry from the outside pocket of my jacket, making sure the cover with the title was facing out: The Selected Poems of Forough Farrokhzad. In my other hand I held up the two tickets like Popsicles. I backed into a rowdy group of boys standing together, and one of them threw back his head with an idiotic smile.

  “Wow,” he said, “an intellectual just bumped into me!”

  They laughed. He was pointing at me. “Porfessor,” he said mockingly. “Porfessor, is this a good movie for morons like us?”

  They doubled over laughing. People turned to watch — we were attracting attention. I was between the rowdy bunch and the entrance to the cinema. I looked past the succession of glass doors, my eyes sweeping past pedestrians and the magazine stand by the curb. I saw a man at the far end turn around and look straight at me. He wore glasses, was young, unshaven, nondescript, with a medium build and wavy black hair, and was wearing a pea green jacket. I saw him look at the two tickets and the book against my chest. His eyes widened but he didn’t budge.