She exhaled, breath quavering, words broken off and jagged. I asked for Mr. Bashirian. She said he had retired to his bedroom for a bit. But I could come anytime I wanted.
I tore through my closet and changed into black and rushed down. I left a message with Goli for Houshang not to wait for me for dinner, kissing my sons at the foot of the stairs as I slipped on my coat. They veered off, arms out, imitating jet fighters. Goli, sulking by the door, said Ramazan wanted the final number of guests for our upcoming dinner party.
The last thing I wanted, could imagine in that state, was to entertain the rear admiral and more than fifty guests for Houshang. I drove fast and furiously. The hills and mountains were blue-black at that hour. That poor father, waiting by the phone, never to see his son again.
I turned into their street and parked by the trees. Mr. Bashirian’s front door was open. A woman in black stood in the doorway, arms crossed, the light from the hall behind her. She was short, heavy in the hips. As I locked the car and drew close, heavyhearted with dread and remorse, she raised her hand as if she’d left the door open for me. She was the sister. We shook hands, then our eyes met and we embraced as if we’d known each other a lifetime.
“He will not survive this,” she whispered.
We walked in and she shut the door. I turned to several people standing in the hallway and she introduced us. Relatives from Mazandaran, two neighbors; one of the men took my coat. Her husband brought in chairs from the dark living room beyond. He spaced them slightly apart at the end of the hall, close to the kitchen, and offered me a seat I did not take. Instead I watched his wife in the kitchen. She moved about, opening cabinets, murmuring about teaspoons, sugar. I’d only seen her black-and-white picture, the one we had used to gain entry for me into Komiteh Prison. For one hour I had been her, his relative, the dead boy’s. I could see how we resembled each other, though airbrushed photos were deceptive. She had a fuller face, wide-set eyes, and an aptitude to radiate happiness, from what I could tell in her picture. Now stricken, she emerged from the kitchen with a tray of tea and set it on the small, rickety table by the chairs in the hall. We all sat, except her husband.
“Mrs. Behroudi,” she began softly, “Kamal is unwell. I called the doctor, who gave him a strong sedative, and I put him to bed.” She kept smoothing down folds of her black skirt. “Three — three days ago he called early in the morning. ‘Peyman is gone,’ he said. ‘Come quickly.’” Tears streamed down her face; she gulped for words. “We hid it from our children. We couldn’t bring ourselves to tell them, they adored him so much. We left them in the care of my sister-in-law who’s our next-door neighbor. God knows how fast we drove to Tehran. When we got here, Kamal was already a — a broken man. He could barely talk. At night Komiteh called with instructions. My husband talked to them. We went to get — get him, and yesterday afternoon we buried him in Behesht Zahra —”
Gathered under the half-light of the hallway, she wept. Her husband brought a box of tissues from the kitchen and left it on the table. He looked angry.
“My poor brother. On the day they were going to — to release —” She stopped, overcome, covered her face in her hands. We waited silently, obedient in our mourning, unwilling to speak. She dabbed her face with a tissue, kneading it. “They didn’t call him that day until seven in the evening. Imagine going to the phone. They said there was a problem. Peyman was unwell — unwell.” She exhaled to subdue herself. “They didn’t tell him. They said they’d rushed Peyman to the infirmary, so Kamal got there as fast as he could. They told him there. How Peyman had had a heart attack. A heart attack at twenty? My brother went mad. ‘Tell me he’s alive!’ he begged them. They wanted to know if Peyman had been ill. On medication. Did he have a birth defect? What defect?” she said softly. “They took our perfect boy and gave us back a corpse instead.” She moaned. Her husband came and stood behind her. “They took him to see the body. He collapsed, and they had to revive him. The doctor there confirmed they’d called an ambulance, but there hadn’t been enough time to get Peyman to a military hospital. They said Peyman had been losing weight, but that was normal. Prisoners refused to eat, especially young students. The heart attack was an unexpected problem, they said. As if it was his fault for dying there. My poor brother says he’s ashamed how he cried and begged in front of them. He couldn’t leave. In the end they got exasperated and they dismissed him. He said he wandered the streets and waited until dawn to call us. I wish I’d been here. That boy was his — his everything —”
She stood up and withdrew through the kitchen to the back patio. I saw her standing under the arbor, her back to us, sobbing. Her husband removed a coat from the coatrack, murmured he would take her for a walk.
The rest of us remained seated in the hall. A cousin of Mr. Bashirian’s, fidgety and thin, with his wife beside him, took out a pack of cigarettes and offered it around. The elderly man beside me was a next-door neighbor; the other, an engineer who lived a few doors down.
Mr. Bashirian’s cousin lit my cigarette, then his, lowered his voice.
“You think I believe Komiteh? They’re lying. They killed that boy. His blood is on their hands. The blood of a twenty-year-old! With everything going on in there, when have they ever told the truth that they should this time? They’re accountable to no one! They killed him.”
When I left, he accompanied me to the door. Down the side-walk I heard the door shut behind me. I breathed out, breathing in the night air, the luxury of a different fate, the privilege of walking away into the street. The sky was suddenly clear, the night magnificent. Under the streetlamp I considered this terrifying and sub-lime exchange: death’s pilfering of life. This side of death, the strangest elation; it was everything to be alive, everything.
“WHERE WERE YOU?” Houshang demanded in our bedroom. I went straight into the bathroom, shut the door. I felt worn out, despondent, and I wasn’t prepared for him to be home. In the bathroom mirror I looked ashen. I prepared for sleep. When I emerged, he was in bed reading.
He looked up. “What is it? You won’t talk to me?”
“I’m tired. I need sleep.”
“So sleep. Don’t I get an answer?”
“That boy died in prison. That should make you happy, no?”
He stared, speechless. I turned off the light, slipped under the covers, turned my back to him. We lay in the dark, still for a moment, listening for each other’s breath. Then he stretched out his hand, laid it on my upper arm, pressing bare flesh, his fingertips barely touching my breasts, moved it down, grazing my silk night-gown, and slid his palm down to the curve of my waist. I stiffened. He hesitated, his hand still on me. Then quickly he withdrew it.
“You’re made of stone,” he said.
“And what are you made of?”
He turned away, both of us alert, ready to strike.
That night we didn’t. He sensed the magnitude of what I hadn’t said. There, the promise of complication, upheaval, undoing, frightening him away. We were like rival armies; Peyman, a battlefield. There was something narrow, selfish, in the way Houshang and I lived together, in the way we did not meet each other’s requirements. But he had spoken with regret, caution. His voice had moved me for a moment — though I would no more admit to him — and I remembered how it had felt at the beginning, when the freshness of life had been ours and we had embarked, with the utter confidence of our place in the world — secure, whole, exuberant — prevailing, shielding us. That had changed, shifted — maybe forever — though we could not see it. And so, in that tenuous interlude before sleep, still lingering in Mr. Bashirian’s tiled and half-lit hallway with his grieving sister, I groped along the contiguous and frayed borders of those attachments we chose, and those we were given. Kamal alone in his room, sedated, wanting nothing more than to live with this son now taken from him. I, in the dark, beside my husband. I shut my eyes. And in the weightless freedom before sleep, in those moments before drifting off, I felt something altogether past — irretrie
vable, distant, floating — for Houshang, some memory carried in me with which I sensed I could still forgive him, from which we could emerge, begin, erase, as if we could still be tender. I floated in this presentiment, this garden laid open, between night and day, sleep and waking — a promised land — mutating, strangely conscious it was not to be. And I saw there, between the pale flower beds and green box hedges and towering trees, Kamal Bashirian walking toward me, and though I wanted to cringe, as he approached down the path I saw his face, beatific, strangely radiant, and he put his hand out, and there through the trees — the green shadow of cypresses — his son emerged, his Peyman, tall, thin, self-assured, and they walked together toward me, Peyman speaking; he was speaking to me, his mouth moving but without voice or sound, and though I struggled I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and then he pointed to the book in his hand — a white book — and let the pages fall open, and I looked but they were blank — white sheets — but he didn’t know it, and I turned, distressed, to tell others, but they passed and I stood stricken, turned to the father and son and knew that he was dead, Peyman, dead, and the father, bent over on a stone bench, was weeping, and when I got close enough I heard him whisper; softly he was saying, “The world is made of stone, stone.”
TWENTY-FIVE
EARLY IN THE MORNING the phone rang on my desk. I picked up on the third ring.
“Listen,” Jalal said. “See you at the corner after work.”
At the end of the day I assorted my papers and pulled on my jacket. The doorman cracked a smile from behind his steel desk. In the street I looked right and left beyond heavy traffic; then I turned right and kept going, twice looking over my shoulder. Pedestrians and more traffic. I got to the corner and scanned the street. No sign of Jalal. I kept on walking down Karim Khan Zand.
From behind, someone swept up beside me. I turned and our eyes met. He had a newspaper rolled under one arm, longer hair, a bomber jacket, scruffy jeans. He’d lost a bit of weight, all fit and wiry, always exuding vigor. This was his most distinctive trait. His shiny black eyes flitted, surveying the street.
“We’ve got ten minutes. Let’s go.”
We went down Kheradmand. He walked fast, alert and impatient.
“I need a big favor,” he said.
“Another one?”
“If you don’t want to hear me out, tell me now,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Reza, you’re my good friend. You’re an honorable man. I trust you like a brother. More than I trust my comrades. Listen, I have to leave the country. I don’t have a passport. I can’t apply for one. I don’t want to alert them. They’ve told me to lie low. You think I believe that? How much time do you think I’ve got? Any day they’ll put it all together and arrest me. Maybe they’ve known all along. They’ve been waiting to see where I lead them. It’s a brutal business. They shoot people like me in the street! Don’t think I’m afraid. I want to stay alive. I want to leave.”
“I told you to leave.”
“Here’s what I want,” he said. “I know you don’t own a passport. I want you to go to the passport office and apply for a brand-new imperial passport.”
“For you?”
“I’ll pay for it. An officer I know checked the list. You’re not on the blacklist. You can leave the country. It’s your passport I need to use.”
“Let me think about it.”
He shook his head. “Tell me now. There’s no time. I’m asking you this once. If you can’t, I won’t hold it against you. Honest.”
He was lying. We both judged a man only by the risks he took.
“What will you do?” I said.
“Change the picture. An old classmate in Esfahan specializes in that. I need two weeks. When I arrive where I’m going, your passport will be useless. Two weeks only, that’s all I need.”
“Where will you go?”
“I won’t tell you.”
“I saw your sister,” I said. “She told me they came to Komiteh but you refused to see them.”
“I’m glad that stupid peasant thinks his son is a godless Marxist! It’ll poison his existence forever.”
“Soghra said your father has forbidden them to mention your name ever again or see you. Think of your mother! She’s heartbroken. Soghra thinks she can put your mother out of her misery once and for all. She must really hate you. She told me to give you this message: ‘Tell Jalal to put an announcement in the papers saying he’s dead.’”
He resented giving them a moment’s thought. But he paused, his eyes flashing.
“If I’m dead, no one will ever bother me again. I take your passport, run a classy announcement about how I’ve passed on, then cross the border.”
The only way left for him was to leave. If he did, he couldn’t ask me another favor. I said I would do it.
He embraced me by the curb, slipping a white envelope from the inside of his jacket into my pocket. “Keep this money for me. Wait for my call.”
He jumped into the street, one arm raised as if hailing a taxi, and a Vespa moped sped toward us, skidding to a stop. The driver, a young man with a helmet and orange goggles and longish hair, dragged his feet over the asphalt, revving up the engine. Jalal hopped on behind him and lurched as they veered off, shooting through the traffic.
TWENTY-SIX
THAT MORNING THE FLOWERS WERE arranged like peacocks in all the rooms, the round tables rolled into the dining room and set with heirloom starched hand-embroidered tablecloths and napkins and china and bohemian glassware and crystal and polished silver. The house smelled of tuberoses until the kitchen door opened and you could smell fried oil. The pantry was jammed with serving platters and bowls and slim-necked decanters and silver trays and boxes of sweetmeats. Goli had chosen, purposely of course, to be in her worst temper. She glowered. The day before, Ramazan, looking ashen enough to require a blood transfusion, had botched up several dishes and come in with his head hanging, muttering that he refused to cook anymore and was leaving my service. I’d showered him with compliments and consolations and given him enough Valium to drug a horse, so he’d withdrawn dutifully to take a nap and had remained comatose until the next morning. Then I’d called Mother and asked for Mashd-Ghanbar, her cook, who arrived in a taxi, charging in like Napoleon and setting about the kitchen making such a fuss and mess that he only tripled everyone’s work. To make matters worse, he criticized Ramazan and Goli all day, withdrawing periodically for his prayers, then coming back to criticize them again, slamming down pots and pans and tossing utensils and behaving abominably.
The next morning he was still being a pain in the neck. So I called Mother.
“Can’t you talk to him?” I said.
“I haven’t spoken to him for two weeks,” she declared. “Tell him to drop dead.”
“I have a seated dinner party for fifty-six, Mother.”
“He’s vindictive and sulky and a general nuisance. The spoiled brat.”
“He’s your cook.”
“As if yours is any better! Anemic and impotent, with a turd for a wife.”
I went back into the kitchen. Mashd-Ghanbar was in the eye of a storm, barking orders to his flunkies — my house help and their small children, the gardener, who had been called in, and two young adolescents, who turned out to be Mashd-Ghanbar’s nephews from Reyy. The telephone rang, and from somewhere in the house, one of my sons called out in the loudest possible shriek, “Mother, it’s for you!” I went out into the hall and there were two pairs of muddied tracks all the way in and up the carpeted steps. Goli would throw a fit.
The electrician was calling to say he was running late, but he’d be there before the party to fix the outside lights. At six my sons clogged up the upstairs toilet and it overflowed and flooded the entire bathroom, and the pantry ceiling below started leaking, and Mashd-Ghanbar’s nephews ran up with mops and pails and a plunger and tried their best, mustering all their technical knowledge until they felt heroic. Houshang arrived, so the jaunty chau
ffeur could join the already crowded kitchen, but instead of letting him lounge around drinking tea, Mashd-Ghanbar sent him off to buy ice and soft drinks, and freshly baked bread on his way back. The two waiters I had hired to serve arrived with sassy expressions and bathed in cheap cologne, and I heard Goli grumbling about how they were useless because all the important work had already been done by her, but obviously her mistress preferred outside help. She ordered them to watch the china and crystal because if anything, God forbid, got chipped or broken, she of course would be blamed as usual.
Upstairs, Houshang declared the house a zoo.
“Why can’t you organize better? Don’t you care?”
He locked himself in the bathroom for half an hour with the Economist and Playboy and soaked in the tub and shaved until the masseur arrived with his oils and folding table to tend to Houshang’s body, that holiest of sanctuaries. The telephone rang and it was Mother. She said Father was depressed and unwell. There had been another death. She paused for effect. “Who?” I said, worried. Abbas Sobhi had finally died of cancer in the hospital. He was one of Father’s oldest and dearest friends, and our families had known each other for several generations. I said I’d call on the Sobhis the next day. Mother started crying on the phone. I consoled her and said I’d come to see Father the next morning. “If we’re still alive,” she said, hanging up. Five minutes later my uncle Khodayar’s wife called to see if I’d received the bad news about Abbas Sobhi. She said she had more bad news. Uncle Khodayar had a tumor. He was going in for surgery at Pars Hospital in two days. But she wasn’t going to tell Mother. “Why not?” I said. “He’s her brother.” She started down her list of grievances, interjecting here and there melodramatically that Mother didn’t care about anyone anyway. We got into an argument. Mother had never liked her and thought her a tedious and uneducated hypocrite given to hysterics, and she’d always found Mother meddlesome and overbearing and made sure she got back at her as often as she could. “I’m going to tell Mother,” I said. She protested about onerous expectations in families like ours — “Of course, God forbid that you should ever lower your standards!” she said, all acerbic and overwrought — nagging on about a host of old and unrelated and miscellaneous affronts, and since nothing in the world could stop her, I kept an eye on my watch, until I finally had to cut her short and say we would all be at the hospital for the surgery. “You’re just like your mother!” she retorted, and hung up on me. Mother called back two minutes later to tell me about the services for Mr. Sobhi and the phone calls she’d received about him since we’d last talked. “Why was your phone busy for the last twenty minutes?” she asked. “Mother,” I said, “I have a party and I have to get ready, and I’ll call you tomorrow morning.” “You’re very short with me tonight!” she said, all miffed, and hung up. The telephone continued ringing nonstop — with messages for Mashd-Ghanbar from his overattentive and hypochondriacal wife, and several calls for his nephews, who were buzzing around like horseflies, and four consecutive calls from friends of mine who wanted to discuss which jewel to wear with which shoes and which dress. I chose a navy blue silk chiffon dress, no jewelry. Dusted loose powder lightly over my face, sheer lipstick on my lips. Then I shut myself in the upstairs study to quickly check all the local papers, then the French papers I’d bought from Larousse downtown. Nothing from the French reporter in Tehran about Peyman Bashirian’s case; nothing about a naval scandal involving charges of corruption. Suddenly the electricity went out.
In the Walled Gardens Page 23