In the Walled Gardens

by Anahita Firouz

  “I like my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

  “Would you fight to keep it?”

  He laughed. “Fight? Fight for what?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  MAHASTEE HAD CALLED ME at the office earlier in the week and made an appointment for midday at a café on Naderi.

  She was already sitting at a far table when I got there. She looked unusually pale, abandoned with a guarded grandeur in the far corner, and was smoking, with a cup of coffee before her. The radiant eagerness of her adolescence had faded and instead she carried a convalescing patience.

  I knew why she wanted to see me. But I wasn’t sure how she could argue about the effrontery of her husband that night in their front hall without being disloyal to him or insulting my intelligence. I’d already decided not to set foot in that house again. But I kept the purpose of our meeting separate from her husband’s rudeness, which had brought us together, and waited for the moment to tell her.

  We ordered more coffee; I insisted she was my guest. She insisted back, finally calling me obstinate.

  “I could say the same about you,” I said.

  “I remember you were always more obstinate!”

  “How’s that?”

  “Under that fierce — even savage — reserve was a mulish temperament.”

  I had to laugh. “Fire away. What else?”

  “Well, that and your aloofness, defiance.”

  She meant the years I had stayed away. We fell into an awkward moment of silence, the clatter of plates and cups and other people’s conversation falling between us.

  “Did your father leave us because of some incident?” she asked.

  “Did I say ‘incident’? No, it was nothing.”

  “But everything changed suddenly —”

  “Life changed. Like it will for us.”

  “But he lost everything at the end.”

  I regretted how I’d slipped and told her. I felt that Father’s pride and memory would remain intact if I never talked about it. He would want it that way.

  She looked past me, aware I wouldn’t slip again.

  Then suddenly she said, “Reza, for the longest time I . . . held it against you — how you left suddenly that summer.”

  It shook me to hear her say that. To have her invoke our entire history together. I saw it all at once, shaken loose, revealing itself, as I saw her.

  “Please continue tutoring my sons. Just a bit longer.”

  She said “my sons” as though the husband didn’t exist. She knew we wouldn’t have any success mentioning him.

  “Even better,” she said, “come to my parents’ for lunch. You’d make Father very happy! Just like the day you came back.”

  I digressed. If I went to lunch, I would be a serpent returning to their nest. She returned to make her point, inviting my mother and sister and her children. The next day, Friday, was perfect. I lied and said I’d call them and let her know.

  “Call now,” she insisted.

  I went in the back to find a public phone, called, and came back, reciting.

  “Mother thanks you for the invitation, but she’s under the weather. She wanted to make a trip to Shah Abdul-Azeem tomorrow. But now she’ll be home — and Zari says the children have colds and coughs.”

  They didn’t want to come. How could I tell her? Why hadn’t any of them insisted they come before? Finally I too gave excuses by the door, but before leaving I said I’d continue with her sons a bit longer. “This afternoon, then?” she asked. And I conceded, to prevail in her world awhile longer, though I’d already found her a tutor who could start at the end of the month.

  TWO DAYS LATER, on my way to the dry cleaners past Sheesheh Mosque to pick up my jacket, I went by Jalal’s apartment on Jami. At the corner, teenage schoolgirls in dark uniforms flirted with a group of boys. I went past the dead end but went back and rang the bell. I could hear the shuffle of the landlady’s plastic slippers on her tiled floor, and her whiny voice inquiring who I was. Esmat khanom opened the door a crack. When she saw me, her eyes narrowed as if I held an ax.

  “Did you see them smoking at the corner?” she said. “Did you hear their brazen laughter? They should be ashamed. My dearly departed father would have killed me for that sort of behavior. He believed in virtue.”

  “What’s happened to the apartment?” I said.

  “I’ve got a new lodger! A graduate with impeccable manners.”

  “What about Jalal’s stuff?”

  “One morning I went in and the apartment was cleaned out!”

  “You know, he’s been released.”

  “Good riddance. He’s nothing but trouble.”

  “Did anyone come asking about him?”

  “God forbid.”

  I asked about the new lodger, and she said he was a Tehrani who liked the neighborhood. A believer who carried a rosary.

  “He brought me a bag of pomegranates the day he signed his lease. What good are they to me with my teeth?”

  She was still scowling at her door as I waved good-bye. For all I knew they’d planted someone else in the apartment — SAVAK.

  “Wait,” she said, shuffling out. “His sister came by once and wanted to go upstairs and asked questions and also about you. She’s a nurse. She told me if you came by to tell you to call her.”

  I called Najmieh Hospital the next morning and asked for Soghra Hojjati and left my office number. She called during lunchtime; from the background clatter it had to be from the hospital. She seemed to bear a grudge against me. We agreed to meet after her shift was over.

  That night I waited outside the pharmacy just below the inter-section of Naderi and Hafez. She was late. I stood leafing through the evening paper. We have two countries; the one they’ve designed for us, and the one we’ve got. They have movers and shakers and social engineers with policies and blueprints and facades, but without that flash of revelation at what we are from the inside out. They don’t see it, that great force of a man’s private history. The springboard of ideology is the intimate clockwork of blood and upbringing and personal rituals and daily existence ticking away. They leak out and subvert all the great forces of history. Nothing lasts from the outside, finally, unless it’s willed from the inside out.

  I went into the pharmacy and bought aspirin and came back out and saw her come up the street before she saw me. I prided myself in my perfect eyesight. She obviously prided herself in her short temper.

  “Some friend you are,” she said right off the bat.

  She liked being pushy. She had cheap pink lipstick smeared over thin lips, and eyes like pellets, ringed in black kohl, and dark hair snaking about her shoulders. We crossed the street. Right in front of the Park Hotel she stopped.

  “I’ve always wanted to eat dinner there,” she said.

  She didn’t like being denied. We stood by the open gate and she eyed the green lawns and luxury hotel beyond. I didn’t have much cash in my pocket and suggested we get meat piroshkis on Naderi. Round the corner, the street vendors hawked plastic wares spread out on the pavement, and she eyed them disdainfully, bumping into two men and bad-mouthing them as they stepped aside. She cussed like a hooker. Jalal — educated and self-reliant — had left them years ago. Soghra had his arrogance without the intelligence; his determination, without the ability to break free. It made her bitter.

  The café was overheated; the piroshkis were hot. She made no bones about being hungry and devoured two in no time flat and let me pay as though I owed her and would eternally. She downed Pepsi, asked if I had an apartment, what kind of job I had. I didn’t want to talk. She wore cheap gold dangling earrings like a maid.

  “Some friend you are,” she said. “You never look back.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Why didn’t you come back to see us?”

  “Your father dislikes visitors.”

  “So you’ve seen Jalal?”

  I shrugged.

  “Th
e bastard,” she said. “Keeping his own mother in hell.”

  She had tears in her eyes. She was upset for herself. She hated Jalal.

  “First I had to run around like a maniac looking for him, so we’re finally told he’s alive and in Komiteh, and they finally allow us a visit — he doesn’t give a damn he’s disgraced us by being in prison — and we go all that way, tense and nervous after I’d convinced Father, and Mother had prepared her pathetic little bundle of provisions for him, and he doesn’t show up! He refused to see us, the bastard. Mother whimpered and cried until I couldn’t stand it anymore. She only thinks of him. To hell with him. Father stood there like stone. When we got home, he said, ‘I forbid you under pain of death to see him again or ever mention his filthy name in front of me.’ Father scares me. Every man I know’s a son of a bitch.”

  “Didn’t he call you when he got out?”

  “Mother waited by the phone night and day and jumped every time it rang. One night I got so mad that when the phone rang I pretended it was Komiteh. You should’ve seen her face. A goddamn suffering saint! I don’t know what possessed me, but I said to her, ‘They’re going to shoot him tonight.’ Before she let out her death wail, I took it back. Her one and only son. The shadow hanging over me. If we’re never going to see him again, he might as well be dead. If you see him, tell him. Tell Jalal to put an announcement in the papers saying he’s dead so I can show her.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Tell him. That’s all I’ve got to say to him.”

  She shrugged, went on about the classy doctors at Najmieh, the smelly suitors she’d refused who were bazaar merchants her stupid father brought home. “That stupid peasant,” she called her father. She said she had liked me from the first instant she’d laid eyes on me. She could tell I liked her. I was her type. How much could I possibly make working for the government and teaching night school? she demanded. Her father had money.

  “Take me to your home,” she said.

  I delivered a sermon on how she was the sister of a friend and I respected her and could never abuse the sanctity of our relationship and how it was neither right nor ethical nor advisable, especially since she was so nice, and considering her parents, until her eyes glazed over.

  At the bus stop she said, “Call me when you change your mind.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MR. BASHIRIAN CALLED ME at home before breakfast.

  “They haven’t called,” he said. “I’m worried.” He was expecting Komiteh Prison to call for him to go collect his son.

  “I’ve already smoked half a pack. I’ve been up since five, sweeping and cleaning. You should see how much food there is in the refrigerator. I’m so restless I’ve been cooking and cleaning for two days. He’s so thin! He needs to eat. You must come and have dinner with us. You’ll get along wonderfully! I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. I can’t wait.”

  He said he’d call me back when he had news.

  That evening when I got home I dropped my coat by the bouquet of fragrant pink and yellow roses on the table in the front hall. I tore open several invitations, noting dates for an opening at the Seyhoun Gallery and a lecture at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. I called out to the children, who were upstairs. The house was clean and tidy and serene, a sanctuary away from the city, all because Tourandokht had come for her visit.

  She was in the kitchen with Goli, preparing dinner, winter stews bubbling on the gas range. I hugged her and she poured me a glass of tea from the teapot on the samovar. Goli seemed placated for the first time in weeks, but not exactly content. I wanted to keep Tourandokht forever. She dispensed serenity with a spiritual dimension and unremitting warmth.

  “Who sent the flowers?” I asked.

  The card was in the pantry. I ripped open the small white envelope. It read: “With exceptional affection, Thierry.” I tore it up. He was incorrigible.

  I went up to hug Ehsan and Kamran, who jumped up and down on my bed until they heard Tourandokht coming and then escaped before she could pile them with noisy kisses again. She huffed and puffed up the stairs, leaning on her cane. I drew a bath, and she sat in my bedroom as she had in the old days before I was married. She tried to explain about Goli.

  “It’s nothing,” said Tourandokht.

  The entire late-night incident could be blamed on a cassette tape left behind in the radio–tape deck in the kitchen. Goli and Ramazan hadn’t meant to bring it into the house. After cleaning up for the night, they’d forgotten to take it with them. Goli had come back to remove it out of consideration! She’d panicked when she’d heard me, leaving her key in the back door.

  “She panicked because she was eavesdropping on my phone conversation.”

  “No, she knocked over the receiver. She swears by the Twelve Imams —”

  “I hate how she swears, then lies. She was listening in.”

  Tourandokht shook her head. It annoyed me that her authority had waned.

  “So what’s on this tape?”

  “Some sort of sermon.”

  “What’s so scary about that?”

  “She was afraid you’d listen to it. Especially Mr. Behroudi.”

  “Why, what’s on it?”

  “Nothing much, she says.”

  I laughed. “Fire and brimstone and talk of doomsday?”

  “Sermons from Najaf by an old ayatollah in exile.”

  “What’s the big deal about that?”

  “Exactly what I said, my dear. She got it from the mosque in Gholhak.”

  “She’s changed, I tell you. Even Ramazan. He’s tense, he broods.”

  “It’ll all blow over.”

  I went in to take a bath and left the adjoining door open while Tourandokht inspected old framed photos in the bedroom, recollecting the days of the horse and carriage and summer migrations uptown to the big garden and back downtown to the old house in Ghavam Saltaneh for the winters. “What a production life was then!” she said. I could hear her dentures clicking and the interjecting rhythms of her uneven breath and the occasional tap of her cane. Then she came into the bathroom and, teetering, bent over, insisting on scrubbing me down with the mit as in the old days, just as in the public baths.

  In the bedroom she stared at a photograph of Houshang with our sons.

  “You’re satisfied with him?” she asked as I dressed.

  I didn’t want to say anything. Once, she had wished me a life-time with Houshang, a hundred years. A sentence.

  “Marriage is our house of refuge,” she said. “A woman builds it, and not just for herself.”

  “Maybe I built it so I could leave it,” I said.

  She murmured a prayer, blew it around the room the way she always did.

  Mother called to say the driver was on his way for Tourandokht.

  “She’s staying with me.”

  “She belongs here,” Mother said. “She’s the light and soul of my house. Once, she went to Tabriz for a month, and everything went wrong. We had bad luck nonstop! When she’s not here, I feel depressed. I think I’ll die in my sleep and the house will buckle and our trees will wither and the garden will perish. She’s the guardian spirit. Don’t tell her! She’ll get all uppity and take on airs. I have no patience for that.”

  “Really, Mother. Don’t you think it’s time you tell her?”

  “Why should I? She already knows.”

  The car came at the appointed hour. Tourandokht, in white chador and white socks, slipped on her shoes by the door. I packed her into the car carefully, and when I kissed her she chuckled, and I handed over her cane and waved. She waved back ever so slowly, as if she were a head of state being driven away in a motorcade.

  Houshang’s secretary called to say his meeting was running late and from there he would be going straight to his social gathering. Their circle of close friends, fifteen men, gathered once a month.

  He doesn’t like coming home. I prefer it when he doesn’t. In that way, we’re compatible.

  At
ten I called Mr. Bashirian. I let it ring, but he never picked up. I wondered if anything had gone wrong. Maybe he was on a walk. Unless they had called for him to go to Komiteh to get Peyman. They were already together, he would call to tell me the next morning, put Peyman on the phone to talk to me. Releasing a prisoner took time; there was red tape and last-minute glitches. They’d stopped to get something to eat. But he had so much food in the house.

  Midnight. Up in the bedroom I looked out to the mountains, then redrew the drapes.

  IT WAS THREE DAYS LATER that I learned Peyman Bashirian was dead.

  Mr. Bashirian had promised to call me, and I worried when I didn’t hear from him. I invented reasons. He was busy running errands, pampering his son, talking until all hours. He never showed up at work. The next two days I was locked into a seminar all day. The last evening, I tried calling him, then went to a family party without Houshang. I tried him the next morning without success. I wondered if he’d asked again for a few days off to be with his son, but no one in the office had heard from him. That didn’t sound like Bashirian. I called that night. I was nervous. A woman answered, much to my surprise.

  I asked hesitantly, “Is this Mr. Bashirian’s home?”

  She said yes, her voice oddly hollow. I quickly introduced myself. She acknowledged knowing me, gave her name. Shahrnoush, his sister. I wanted to tell her how much I’d heard about her.

  But she said, “Oh, Mrs. Behroudi. Something terrible has happened.”

  “Mr. Bashirian had an accident?” I said immediately.

  “No, Peyman — Peyman passed away.”

  Her voice broke, and she wept.

  I was home. It was evening. I fell back in the armchair, clutching at my head, at the convulsion brought on by what she had said. I repeated, “I’m so sorry, so sorry. How is that possible? He was supposed to be released. What happened? When?”

  “Three days ago. He had a heart attack. Before Kamal got to him. Yesterday afternoon we buried him at Behesht Zahra.”