The men came back and went around the garden with the two women, who had slept in. I followed, careful not to be seen or discovered by Father. They touched one another a lot. The two women had to be funny, the men laughed so much.
After lunch, Amineh was in tears, her mother reproaching her in the kitchen for breaking two plates. “You’re all thumbs and irresponsible!” she shouted. “You clumsy idiot!” The mother was young herself and not very bright. I heard them from my usual spot under the trees, by the clearing behind the kitchen. I heard the two painted women come into the kitchen and scold and ridicule the gardener’s wife and Amineh.
Early in the afternoon the main house grew still. I was doing schoolwork. That year, Father and I kept arguing about everything, especially about school in Tehran, because he wanted to send me to relatives in Tabriz. Behind our bungalow he was talking to the gardener and the window was open. I heard Father mention Tehran and Tabriz and the Mosharrafs, and I got up to listen. “They’re staying longer,” Father said. “Those educated blockheads just returned from abroad!” The gardener said Nasrollah mirza’s cousin was angry. Father said it was because he hadn’t succeeded yet, though he’d bribed and plotted and created the situation, trying to appropriate the two estates in Azarbaijan for himself and swindle Nasrollah mirza’s family and muddle the accounts behind their backs and blame Father. “All last year he kept me going back and forth and blamed me for everything! Now he’s hounding me,” said Father. The gardener said, “Hajj-Ali, good thing you stood up to him.” Father said now the man was trying to take his land. Father’s. Mardanabad, which Mahbanou khanom had given him. “It’s hard to believe she and he are from the same family!” he said.
The afternoon was hazy and hot and the visitors took a nap. After tea the men went shooting in the fields, insisting that Father accompany them, along with laborers from the garden. I rode out on my bicycle to buy bread from the baker in Morshedabad. When I got back, Father was home doing the accounts, jaw tensed. I delivered the bread to the main house. The women were cooking in the kitchen. The gardener’s wife had her sleeves up, chopping herbs, frying meat, boiling rice. Amineh washed vegetables and peeled. She looked distraught and wouldn’t go in to set the table for dinner. The mother was about to scold her when I insisted and set the table myself. The guests were taking showers and had the phonograph on loud with foreign music, their rifles propped up by the door in the hallway. I saw packets of cigarettes and bottles of liquor piled on the living room table. In the alcove at the far end, arranged with bolsters and cushions, they had a tray set with a brazier. Provisions for opium. I leafed quickly through the foreign books on the cushions. They had no pictures, except in one book, which had drawings of stark-naked men and women in odd positions and even in groups, all tangled up, and with animals. I shut the book, left the house. Father would have killed me.
By dark I came back to my spot by the trees. They’d started drinking as they had the night before but were getting louder. “Girl, come here!” Nasrollah mirza’s cousin called out. He meant Amineh. They knew she had a name! But they had no use for it. They laughed. Maybe they were making fun of her one roving eye. I saw their shadows up on the white walls, framed by the window. They had put on music and were dancing, the women wriggling up to the men, rubbing themselves up against them. In the kitchen the gardener’s wife dished out the food, and they were served by Amineh. Soon enough the back screen door to the kitchen slammed open and Amineh ran out and stood in the clearing. I could hear her gasping in the dark, but her mother called and she went back in. “Don’t be useless and lazy!” the mother said. “They want tea.” They washed up in the kitchen, making a clatter. In between I heard Nasrollah mirza’s cousin. “Girl!” he thundered. He wanted her again. Then something crashed or fell over and the men howled with laughter. I hated how they laughed. They were laughing at the world. No, at us. Amineh ran out of the kitchen, and this time she was crying. The mother came out and stood talking to her in the clearing. “What’s wrong?” she said. Amineh said she didn’t like those men. “What’s it to you?” her mother said. “It’s how they look at me,” said her daughter. “Don’t look at them!” the mother said. “Even when they try to grab me?” said Amineh. “Or say those things?” “What things?” said the mother. “Tell me.” Amineh stood mute in the dark. “May God humble you, tell me or I’ll slap you!” the mother said. Amineh whispered, and the mother gasped, “God kill me!”
They were calling for them from the living room. Mother and daughter stood in the clearing, rooted to the spot. The mother whispered to Amineh, “We can’t go in — we have to tell your father.” They went off through the trees.
The guests called out again, and Nasrollah mirza’s cousin came into the kitchen, swearing at the women. “Where are those morons?” he shouted. The girlfriends were sent in to get tea and fruit. I waited by the trees and within minutes saw the gardener coming through the trees. He wasn’t a big man but had broad shoulders and big hands, and he was wielding a big stick and swearing. I jumped out into the clearing. “Where to?” I said. “I’m going to defend my family and reputation!” he said, pushing past me up the kitchen steps.
I ran to our house, shouting, “Father, Father, run, run!” Father came out onto our porch, still tucking in his white shirt. He disliked it when people shouted. I said, “Father — quick, run! The gardener’s going to beat up Nasrollah mirza’s cousin!” We ran through the thicket; we could hear them shouting. Father burst into the living room, proud and upstanding man that he was, and stopped dead. The two women were plastered against the wall in short, transparent nightgowns and high heels. Nasrollah mirza’s cousin and the gardener were in a shouting match. The gardener, holding on to his big stick, was yelling about their indecency before God and the chastity of his only daughter, until he choked on his words and lunged at Nasrollah mirza’s cousin. Father pounced to keep them apart, but the rakish friend picked up the bellows from the fireplace like lightning and hit the gardener. Blood oozed from the side of his head and he stumbled back, then lunged again and struck Nasrollah mirza’s cousin on the leg. The man let out a yelp. The painted women had disappeared.
The gardener was bucking to get at the two men, Father between them, admonishing the visitors about shame and scandal. “You should know better! What did you expect?” He ordered the gardener to leave. The man glowered, blood over his shirt, and didn’t budge. Father shouted, “I tell you, go, now!” He backed out, holding his stick, blood trickling from his head.
“You impertinent ass,” Nasrollah mirza’s cousin called Father. He turned, grabbed the riding crop on the table, raised it. “You deserve to be whipped for speaking to me that way.” He flailed the riding crop around once, glaring at Father. “Everything you have, you owe to us! I should’ve had you sacked the last time you interfered in my business. If you go whimpering to your master again, it’s my word against yours, you dog! I can buy and sell a hundred like you anytime I want.”
I lunged to attack him. Father pinned me back with both arms, ashen. Then the man told Father what I can hardly bear to remember. He said, “You must beg for my forgiveness.” He pointed with his riding crop. “Beg! Remember, you only exist by our grace and benefaction.”
Father turned, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “Get out.” I didn’t budge. Suddenly Nasrollah mirza’s cousin lashed out with the whip. The leather straps ripped at Father’s back, and just as they were about to fall on him again, he caught them flying through the air. He grabbed, jolting the man who wielded the whip with a sudden jerk. Then he let go, grabbed my hand, walked out of the house.
Past the clearing, he walked faster, nearly dragging me through the trees. I ached to go back and hit them; I wanted them to come after us. I didn’t know what kind of men they were. I overestimated them. On the front porch of our bungalow, the gardener’s wife and Amineh sat crouched against the wall. Father went into the house. When he turned his back, I saw the slender trickle of blood spreading on his sh
irt. I heard the visitors’ car rev up by the driveway of the main house, and then car wheels skidded on the gravel and the engine grew loud. Father came out on the porch, wearing his old black jacket. I could hear the car driving away as he went through the trees. They had fled.
He came back with the gardener, and the two of them went in. The women sat out by the flower bed, and I sat on the porch staring at the black grove. I heard the men arguing inside. Father was bandaging the gardener’s head. The gardener was angrily insisting on justice and going after the men to Tehran and complaining to the mullah and elder in the village. Father reasoned with him, and the gardener said then that he was obliged to leave. This was no place for his family! The door opened and they came out on the porch. The women got up by the flower bed, and they left, the gardener, bandaged, walking ahead of the women, still swearing under his breath. Father only told me this: “You will forget about tonight. You will tell no one. I won’t either, but not because they threatened me. You don’t understand the world yet. Understand?” He told me to sleep, but I didn’t sleep and didn’t understand, though I wanted to. In the other room the light stayed on. At dawn the cocks crowed, the moon a white sliver high over the fields.
The gardener, his wife and two sons, and Amineh left within the week. Those last days I would run through the gardens and watch Amineh. I knew her father had beaten her twice that week with a stick. He blamed her for being obliged to leave the garden. I saw her cry at dusk, sitting behind the dovecote all alone. I could hear the doves cooing. On the morning of their departure I went to find her before the open van from the village took them away. I ran down through the orchards, sunlight speckling the ground. For a moment I nearly called out, “Amineh! Amineh!” the way I did when we gathered the children to play in the gardens. She was sitting in her favorite place, staring out, neglected, forgotten, a nobody. I said good-bye to her under the mulberries. She looked down at the ground. “You’re leaving?” I said. She nodded, still hanging her head.
Years later I heard — from a laborer from Varamin whom I saw in town — that she had drowned a year after leaving us and that the mother had taken ill after her daughter’s death and died too. The husband hadn’t minded and remarried soon after.
We moved out of the garden of Morshedabad. Of course Nasrollah mirza was upset, and Najibeh khanom spoke to Father in her soothing way that week we were packing, but Father wouldn’t budge. Whenever he made a decision, it was final. Several times Nasrollah mirza asked after the gardener. “Why did he leave?” he said. “I thought he was happy here. And you, Hajj-Ali,” he said to Father in front of me, “you don’t want to work for me anymore? I can’t do without you.” Father said, “Sir, it’s not that. I’ve spent years in your service and now it’s time to go.”
Years later Nasrollah mirza’s cousin died in Europe in an auto-mobile accident. They found his body mangled behind the wheel, high above Monte Carlo. One day I recognized a photo of his friend in the papers. He still had the face of a rake and coward, but he was an important man. A pillar of society.
That year when I was still an adolescent, it was the one thing I saw and remembered. The man who had held the whip against Father, now needed him more, needed his obedience, needed his obedience to exist. In time I came to understand it as my first lesson in politics. I may have left the garden of Morshedabad like a boy leaving Eden, but instead in Tehran I found politics, rebellion.
The way I saw it, Father had retreated from the world, all because of someone who was half the man he was. I couldn’t stand to see him that way. I wanted him to fight, to go back and demand his right and place in the world. Why couldn’t he go back to being what he was?
He went back to Azarbaijan, to his lands and villages in Nirvan, jointly owned with other relatives and landowners. At first this revived him. They drew up plans for granaries and new pastures and improvements. He borrowed money so they could buy an electric pump and machinery and repair the underground water channels. But the second winter he had his first heart attack, and the doctor kept him in Tehran through the spring. He hated hospitals; he hated a prolonged convalescence. He said there was work to do and he owed money. He wasn’t going to live like an invalid! They had several good years, but then there were two years of drought, and Father ran into serious debt and mortgaged his land, and then the rumble started about land reform. The government was preparing to confiscate land, especially from the big landlords, and transfer it to cultivators and peasants. Father said, since when was it a crime to own private property? Hadn’t the Crown for years appropriated the best lands for itself and overtaken the Caspian region? They were making decisions without a proper rural census. Chopping up the country meant chopping up the livelihood of people who had worked the land for generations. No good would come of it. Big landlords? What about all the small-land owners all over the place?
This was my second lesson in politics. I was in university by then. I saw how the regime was ignorant. Ignorant in its haste, in how little it knew about landholdings and the complicated web of owners and tenants and peasants and water and crop divisions. Ignorant in its great distance and estrangement from the people it proclaimed to serve, in the shallowness of its posturing. The bill for land reform passed. Several ayatollahs issued fatwas against it. Some people said the Americans had interfered and pressured the regime. Father belonged to an agricultural group of landowners, and they protested and petitioned the government, but to no avail. They charged that for the purposes of transferring their lands the government had undervalued their properties, and the long-term bonds issued to them would be no restitution. They appealed to the provincial court, but their case was rejected. In the muddled execution of land reform and mounting rhetoric pitting all sides against one another, Father not only lost land — gaining nothing from the stipulations of the decree — but he lost his entire income from the land and so lost everything in one clean sweep when he couldn’t pay his heavy debts and his creditors took what remained. He was ruined.
We lost our house in Tehran and took rooms in the house of my mother’s brother. Father remained there like a caged bird, this man who had loved the open fields and open skies and lived to oversee the land. A man whose entire language was about working the land. He had always taken measure of its divisions and crops and seeds and water and roots. Daimi and saifi and abi and maalek and ra‘iyat and mosha and jareeb. A lifetime he had repeated the words into the night. A lifetime I had heard them, like the chanting of birds. When it stopped, the silence was terrible, as if someone had cut off his tongue and hands. He didn’t say much, not even to me, and never talked much after that. Once, he’d taken on the world, taken on peasants and tenants and government agents and land-lords, a lion in the desert of God. I felt my blood boil every time I saw him in a corner reading. I’d see him as I came and went from university, when I returned nights from arguing politics with friends, and there he sat under the light with his book and the ghost of his dignity, a broken man. Mother was heartbroken. Zari felt nothing but shame. Then Morteza’s family came to ask for her hand, and they were married under a dark cloud, though I think our family always kept up an admirable front. In time, through my fury and humiliation and guilt for the things I could not change, I learned to have the strangest tenderness for Father — and outright defiance for that edifice that had brought about his ruin.
One evening we found him lying in the street, where he’d collapsed from a massive heart attack on his way home from buying bread.
Then only death came to honor his old age, his life’s work commemorated by a simple slab, a grave.
Looking to take on the world, to change a destiny I would never again leave to others, I learned to rise up against a system that maintained that everything had to be the way it said, had to be obeyed and submitted to without question, unbroken for all eternity.
TWENTY
ICIRCLED FOREVER, looking for parking. Mr. Bashirian had said nine o’clock, the Central Department of Police adjoining Komiteh P
rison.
“You won’t forget?” he’d said self-deprecatingly the day before. As if I could. “I hope he’s all right,” he’d repeated all day. He was afraid they’d harmed him, afraid they’d bring out a different son. “I hope it’s no trouble to you,” he said finally. “No trouble,” I said. “Just something between friends.”
That night I worried — not just about going into Komiteh or what could happen, but about reaching out to somewhere unfamiliar, hostile, where I would be forced to reassess everything I stood for and took for granted.
The sun shone; the sky was enduringly blue.
My wool overcoat caught in the door of the car. I tripped as I crossed at the traffic light. I never thought of turning back. From that distance I could see Mr. Bashirian pacing with a small black duffel bag. He’d never seen the inside of a prison, never thought he’d deserve to.
Past the front gate and main office, where we checked in, we were directed to a waiting room. We waited, other visitors inhabiting steel chairs against the wall. Two families, one with two small children. I watched the children jump around. The duffel bag, which they had inspected, was on the floor next to Mr. Bashirian. He got up several times and went to the window, the only one, giving on to the courtyard, and the children jumped up and down in his way. You could still hear the noises of the city, buses, honking, the hum of traffic — reassuring sounds, from in there. It was reassuring to see children, though there was nothing reassuring for them there.
In the Walled Gardens Page 18