In the Walled Gardens

by Anahita Firouz

“He’s my husband,” I said defensively. “What did you expect?”

  He smiled, spreading his arms. “Will you forgive me, ma chère?”

  He repulsed me at that instant. His gallantry was frivolous and willful, like his endearments, well timed but chilling.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s embrace and make up, and how about —”

  “Did you also tell Houshang about your affair with Pouran?”

  “No! And I wouldn’t.”

  “How honorable.”

  He shrugged sheepishly. I asked when he’d seen my husband.

  “We talked on the phone yesterday.”

  “You discussed Peyman Bashirian on the phone?”

  “Actually, he dropped in to discuss some business matter. Yes, last night.” Thierry smiled. “I see you still haven’t forgiven me.”

  I looked at my watch. “He’ll be home any minute and we’ve got a dinner —”

  “The Spanish embassy? Their ambassador’s a poet, you know.”

  I accompanied him to the door, anxious to be rid of him, my utmost civility and inscrutability the rudest affront.

  Just then the dining room doors flew open and my sons rushed out, Reza behind them. The boys circled, charging with plastic rulers and shouting all the way up the stairs. I noticed Reza staring at this foreigner at home with me. A frank scrutiny. Thierry, reproducing niceties to me on his way out, didn’t even acknowledge his presence or greet him, ignoring him completely.

  I shut the door and turned to Reza. “He’s a banker friend of ours.”

  He nodded politely. But I sensed disapproval.

  “You disapprove of foreigners?” I said casually.

  “Considering our history, they hold a dismal record of involvement.”

  “We were the ones giving away concessions and monopolies.”

  “We?” he said. “No, not the people.” He smiled. “Discussing foreigners is a treacherous business.”

  “You know, the last time I saw your father — when we were sixteen and you came back for a visit? What was in that large sealed envelope my father gave him that night?”

  “After all these years!” Reza said, surprised. “They were old letters a servant had found in a trunk in your grandmother’s house. Copies of the letters she’d written my grandfather over the years, and he’d written her from Tabriz. They corresponded after she took Father away and he was growing up in her household. And long after.”

  “You read the letters?”

  “Yes. Much later. Father left them to me when he died.”

  “Had my father read them?”

  “No. That night he was returning them to their rightful owner, he said.”

  I wanted to read them but felt it was better to ask for them some other time.

  “They’re not just about a boy far from home,” said Reza. “But the personal correspondence of an outspoken woman and a learned cleric — who shared not only an affection for the same boy but an insightful and deep concern for their country. Father was overcome when he read them. He was old and ill by then. He said they were the most unusual and affecting documents he’d ever read.”

  “Did something happen that made your father leave us suddenly?”

  “No. He just retired.”

  He would never tell me. “And after that?”

  “He went back to being a farmer. He was a landowner in Nirvan. He had villages and fields. But then he fell into debt. With land reform he lost everything. In the end he was ...defeated. He died a disillusioned man.”

  I was shocked at Hajj-Ali’s defeat, at hearing about it so many years later. For the man I remembered, defeat would have seemed as far away as the ends of the earth. He had had that kind of vitality.

  “He could make you see things about yourself better than anyone else,” I said. “I remember the way he admonished my brothers, which often left them dumbfounded. I remember the stories he told me. Once, he told me about the Constitutional Revolution on the porch in Morshedabad. His voice still trembled over what had happened so many years before — and what hadn’t since then. I think he carried such emotion — such a tremendous burden with him. That’s what I loved about him most.”

  Reza stood rooted to the spot. A hush fell into the hallway like the inside of a well, except for the ticking of the antique clock on the console. Overcome by the memory of Hajj-Alimardan, I felt immense distress at his passing. More than when he had died that winter and I had attended the services with Mother. The past was rising, resurgent, bringing back that deepest rhythm and relinquished instinct, and emotion for Reza. He looked stricken.

  The creaking of the front door startled us. From the doorway, Houshang stared at us as if at two conspirators.

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded impudently. “Someone’s died?”

  Reza walked out, even while I was carrying on with a hasty introduction. Houshang stared after him without so much as a word.

  The door was still open when Houshang said, loud enough to be overheard, “I don’t like that fellow.”

  “You’re rude,” I said.

  “I am what I am. Are we out tonight?”

  NINETEEN

  NIGHT FELL, the specter of the mountains to the north looming like a bad omen.

  She had an imperious and deceitful husband, imperious and deceitful foreign friends. Didn’t she know better?

  I walked all the way from Darrous to Gholhak, winding down the ever-changing neighborhoods, rich and tranquil to crammed and run-down. In the backstreets by a small mosque with a white minaret and a string of bare lightbulbs, a handful of boys played soccer. I stood watching, then showed them how to kick and pass. In the meagerly tiled doorway, under the light, a mullah in turban and robes listened to a man cry, consoling him. The man, in billowy trousers and overshirt and a buttoned-up, threadbare brown jacket, kept pointing to the sky, then hitting his chest. A woman stood a little bit away from him in a black chador, clutching the hand of a little girl with a flowered scarf and runny nose, dark trousers poking out from under her short flowered skirt. The little girl turned and smiled at the boys. She had dimples, a rosy chin and cheeks. Her mother slapped her head, telling her to look down. She did as she was told, then turned her head just enough to stare at us side-ways, fixing us with an inquisitive look. The peasant kissed the hand of the mullah with gratitude, then bowed, motioning salutations to God.

  I greeted them, crossing the street, thinking how for a thousand years and more that scene had repeated itself. One man with one woman behind him with child, beseeching. We would never break the mold.

  If Mahastee knew about her husband and foreign friend, she wouldn’t be so quick to defend them. But she would always be loyal to her own class. She’d given me the photograph of the house in Morshedabad, trees in shadow and light, and asked me about Father, why he retired. Her father doesn’t know. If he did, he wouldn’t be so quick to defend his own kind. And they don’t know what happened to him at the end, the last few years of his life, when he was ruined.

  After that last spring in Morshedabad, we packed up and left. Father sent Mother and Zari and me ahead to Tehran to rent a house and find schools. He told Nasrollah mirza that he was unwell. He went to him and made excuses, and Mahastee’s father believed him. “I’m getting old, sir, I want to retire and go home. Find someone young and able.” They were excuses with which to save face for everyone — not only for himself and his family, but for Nasrollah mirza Mosharraf and his. We packed up and left like hired help. Mother and Zari never knew why. Father just told Mother, “It’s time,” and she believed him.

  After Father left the Mosharrafs, they held on to most of their estates in Azarbaijan until they were confiscated and divided up with land reform. In the complicated subdivisions of pastures and villages and entanglements with the government, everyone lost cash crops and harvests and orchards, and though the sharecroppers and peasants were given the land in time, they couldn’t maintain and farm it as they had before, and many finally gave up an
d migrated away to the cities.

  In Morshedabad, the gardens grew neglected and the house fell into disrepair.

  THAT YEAR I turned fourteen, spring came early. Mahastee’s father came to Morshedabad in late March for the holidays with his entire family and stayed ten days. I didn’t know it would be the last time I’d see her in the garden. “Our garden!” she said, as children only do. “You live here too.”

  It had been a bad year for Father. His long-ailing and aged father, a respected and enlightened mullah, had passed away in Tabriz while still embroiled in a controversial and bitter dispute on obscure religious texts. The year before, Mahastee’s grandmother had had a stroke and died in her sleep. Father stood ashen in the room when they came to tell him. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him weep. He left immediately for Tehran and then for Tabriz, where he delivered a moving eulogy for her on her estate and the crowds had wept. It was as if he’d lost his own mother. Three months later, two of her nephews started on him, questioning him on the handling of two of her large estates, which he had only advised her on. Bypassing Mahastee’s father, they demanded to see all Father’s accounts — questioning him on the division of property, and how and why certain estates had been sold, and their share of earnings for wheat and barley and fruit from the orchards tallied against the generous share given to cultivators of those lands, besides what they called other immoderate expenses. They tormented him — especially one of them — and for several months kept him running back and forth to Tehran and the estates in Azarbaijan, and Father came home to Morshedabad at the end of winter, white with fury, and cried, “Now they say I’m a swindler! Now that she’s gone. They’re dumping everything on me to cover up. But I know what they’re up to! If Mahbanou khanom were alive this would never have happened.”

  So it was that, after her death and then his father’s, he said one day that with their passing an entire world had passed away for him.

  It was a bad year until early spring. Mahastee came and left, the car receding down the road; she turned around in the back as usual, waving to me, crammed between her brothers until she lurched toward the window suddenly and popped her head out, shouting, “Reza, Reza! See you in two months.”

  The first week of that spring vacation, she’d thrown a big party and I had refused to go, and she’d come looking for me. I knew her family and cousins and some of her friends — as she did mine — but still I didn’t go. That year she’d filled out, all flesh and curves. I had to readjust to her all over again every time I saw her. I watched her walk and swagger, the light in her eyes, the rise of her breasts above the dip of her waist and commotion of flounced skirts. I could see the other boys staring at her. I didn’t ask Father about attending her party, knowing full well he would have disapproved, nor Mother, forbidding as she was, who never said a word, though with her it was her silence that was especially effective. I had stayed outside to avoid them both that evening when I heard Mahastee calling under the trees. In the garden, with the music and their party, and thinking about her and my parents and hers, I’d come to realize for the first time that year the distance between us, she and I — all of us — and how it was greater than I had ever imagined and understood. Her grandmother and my father had been close, and her father and mine in their own way, each with a different arrangement, but it was ours — that progressive world — that closed us off to each other, she and I, and even for the others I felt that with the passing of years the distance had increased between them too. Then I heard her call through the trees and I stepped out so she could see me, and she came up and said something, but I was angry already and grabbed her arm and pulled. Our faces rushed up so close I saw her lashes up before my nose, and her astonished look, the sudden flutter of her warm breath on my mouth. One tug of possession and for the entire vacation I felt as though we belonged to each other.

  Two nights later, while they played cards at her house, she brought the phonograph out to the clearing by the pool and plugged it into the socket by the left tree and put on a record. There, with the two of us alone, she said, “I’m going to teach you to dance tonight.” I laughed first, then refused, although I wanted to. I said I didn’t need to learn. She insisted and I stood rock-still and obstinate.

  “Reza! Stop it,” she said. “You’re being stubborn like a mule. Everybody learns to dance!”

  “No, they don’t,” I said. “My parents didn’t.”

  “It’s no crime to dance! My parents dance. My uncles, cousins, everyone I know.”

  “Mine don’t. Even if they do at weddings, it’s different from yours.”

  “I mean two together, like they dance abroad.”

  “It’s unthinkable for them.”

  “Then you’re going to be the first.”

  She stepped right up and put my hand to her waist, slipped my other hand gently into hers, and turned. I thought it was the most wonderful thing to hold her in my arms and call it a dance and have music. I liked this, what they did abroad. I liked the dance, the night, the music. Then I stepped on her toes and she laughed, and I tried looking off into the trees instead of at her hair and radiant face and skin emitting the sweet scent of perfume there in my arms. And she laughed and said this was only the first lesson and I needed to practice more. And I said, “Who with? Who is there except you?” And she gave me the strangest look and I knew we were young and thought nothing else existed nor mattered. When I arrived two years later in her garden and heard the music rise between the trees, she evoked the night we’d danced together.

  That spring she taught me to dance in the clearing by the pool, and the next thing I knew, she was waving to me, speeding away to Tehran, shouting, “See you in two months.”

  Her father came back again soon after, this time for a weekend alone. The orchards were in full bloom. He told Father they’d all be back in early summer. “See you in Khordad or early Tir, Hajj-Ali,” Nasrollah mirza said. He patted my head. “You have a good son,” he said. Father and I waved by the poplars as the car disappeared down the road, the fender glinting crimson in the last rays of the setting sun. The fields were washed down from the rains earlier in the day. A perfect evening, the stars out before the night was on.

  “By the way,” Nasrollah mirza had said to Father before getting into the car, “my cousin will be coming to visit.” I saw a frown cloud Father’s eyes. As the car drove away, Father muttered under his breath, “God keep us from trouble, as if we haven’t already had enough this year.”

  Ten days later, late in the afternoon, a car appeared, raising dust on the horizon. I saw it in the distance, then approaching down the road. I ran in between the trees, following it all the way to the main house. An elegant car from Tehran. I read the license plate as I stood in the grove by the driveway. Instead of a driver, a gentleman emerged from behind the wheel. He had pressed trousers and an ivory shirt and a vest and jacket, and elegant shoes like Nasrollah mirza’s and a cane that he didn’t really need but with which he pointed things out to his rakish friend, who got out of the car after him. Pointing — to the house, stables, other lodgings, the orchards and fields. I could hear them, high-handed. Out of the back door two women emerged the likes of whom I’d never seen. A redhead and a fake blond, they had low-cut blouses and tight pants over curvaceous hips and high heels and puffy hairdos and painted faces. They wiggled out, pecked the men on the cheek, laughing. The gentleman-driver smacked the redhead on her bottom.

  “Boy!” he called out to me. “Get Hajj-Alimardan!” He spoke, landlord of the world.

  I ran to get Father and watched as they exchanged greetings. The women had a mesmerizing way of moving their bodies. Father turned and caught me gaping, and I backed into the bushes. He conducted them to the main house and called for the gardener’s wife and fourteen-year-old daughter. The gardener — a gruff and grumpy man who had been there forever, a Turk from one of the Mosharraf villages in Azarbaijan — brought in the suitcases and several cartons and two rifles. He brought yogurt and b
utter and heavy cream and sour cherry jam made by his wife. From outside the screen door of the kitchen, I saw the daughter unpacking bottles of liquor from a carton. She was pretty but had one roving eye, and the parents worried about finding her a suitor. The two guests from Tehran, accompanied by Father, went off to inspect orchards and fields.

  At night by the trees I watched the house, all lit up. The visitors were drinking; I heard their laughter, the shrill giggle of the women. I decided they had a different idea of fun than we did. Our bungalow was behind the thicket of trees behind the main house. Mother and Zari were in Reyy visiting relatives. Zari had been sick with a fever, and Mother had taken her to stay closer to Tehran, worried about her health. Mother always worried, ever since losing her first child to a mysterious fever. Father said Mother had wept for a year. It had taken her years after that to get pregnant.

  Father and I went to bed, and I heard him muttering under his breath. I asked who the visitors were. He said they were the cousin of Nasrollah mirza and his friend from Tehran. I decided he didn’t like them. I asked if those were their wives. “Mind your own business,” he said. Whenever he was angry or scolded me, he always spoke in Turkish. Then he read to me under the hissing gas lamp, admonishing me to listen, his gray mustache turned down, his hands large and still. His voice rose with the names of mountains and feats, descending low into the valleys of betrayal and destruction.

  Lying back listening, I thought how old he was getting. That year he’d complained about chest pains to Dr. Atabak, family friend and physician to Mahastee’s father and her grandmother, whom he’d attended to her dying day. Dr. Atabak had given Father an appointment to be examined in Tehran. Each time there was a sickness or burial in the family, I watched Father. But he was larger than life, inimitable, though I could never explain exactly how.

  The next morning Nasrollah mirza’s cousin ordered the horses saddled and rode out with his friend and the stable boy. After breakfast I saw the gardener’s daughter leave through the kitchen door. She stood in the clearing, chewing the end of her sleeve, a clump of her light brown hair catching the sunlight. She kept tugging at her head scarf, jittery. I came up and asked if they needed anything at the house, but she rushed off. Her name was Amineh. We’d grown up in the same garden. She was fair-skinned and moony and sweet. When we’d all played hide-and-seek, the rest of us had been impatient and excitable and braggarts, but she was always the most difficult to find, she hid so well, patient and quiet and still.