In the Walled Gardens

by Anahita Firouz

  Houshang bellowed from the bathroom, “What the hell’s going on tonight?”

  The telephone rang by my elbow and I picked up in the dark. Kamal Bashirian’s sister was calling to thank me for my flowers and visit. She was very worried for him. They’d taken him to Alborz Hospital late that afternoon and the doctors were keeping him overnight. It was his heart.

  “I hope this isn’t serious,” she said anxiously.

  I was saying good-bye when Houshang barged in with a flashlight.

  “We have no electricity and fifty-six for a sit-down dinner and you’re still on the phone gossiping?”

  “Fifty,” I said.

  He went out and shouted from the top of the landing, and the driver yelled back up from the foyer that the electrician was outside and not to worry — the lights would come back on in five minutes. “Are you all dead down there?” Houshang thundered from the top of the stairs. “Get some candles up here!” Then he came back in, pointing his flashlight. He saw the jumble of newspapers around me and asked how I could be reading instead of supervising the preparations for a dinner party that was so paramount to his career. Then he demanded to know who was not coming that night, for those who weren’t had snubbed him and would pay for it.

  “Iraj and Pouran,” I teased, smiling in the dark.

  “What? I just talked to them.”

  We heard a crash downstairs. They were breaking Grandmother’s rose-medallion china. Houshang left, slamming the door, leaving me in the dark. I sat alone, serene, for the first time all day, all week.

  The lights came back on finally, but only just before the guests arrived. Our sons cheered, running through the living room blowing out the candles and bumping into furniture. Houshang surveyed the rooms and tables and flowers, then threw me a critical look. He wanted to know why I wore no makeup and insisted on looking plain and severe and unadorned.

  We argued, just as the first guests walked in the door. The house help was jittery from the high-strung griping of Mashd-Ghanbar, anguished and angry without electricity just before his culinary masterpieces were to be presented.

  Our sons crouched at the top of the stairs and gawked. Under the chandelier in the front hall, the guests removed their furs and coats, and Goli, grouchy and curt, grabbed and carried as if dispensing with an arsenal. Drinks were served. People mingled, breeding prevailed. I went back to make my rounds in the kitchen. From the open door to the pantry, I kept hearing snippets of Goli’s conversation with the waiters, disparaging the guests and lecturing on alcohol and abstinence and the teachings of the Prophet. Then all of a sudden she said she’d heard the dead bodies of political prisoners were being dumped in a salt lake outside Tehran. I’d heard enough. I barged in and ordered her to go help the cook, warning the waiters they were there to tend to the guests. In the living room the guests effervesced and conversed. My brother Kavoos and his beauty-queen wife split up as soon as they arrived, moving in different circles. Pouran and Iraj worked the room like worker ants, Houshang laughing with delight whenever they spoke. Pouran had another low-cut dress on and crimson rubies that matched her sharp and glib tongue. She wasn’t making eye contact with me, though she had kissed me on both cheeks and raved about everything.

  “You have such taste!” she said. “Isn’t Thierry coming tonight?”

  Thierry arrived late, brushing his lips expertly over the hands of chosen women, speaking attentively in three languages to both genders and all ages in every circle. Pouran, he ignored. This she noticed too quickly, though she pretended not to, which forced her to become shrill and insincere and overwrought. She kissed Iraj, fiddled with the ties of several men, then patted their cheeks, dragged off Houshang and conferred with him theatrically. Thierry was asking about my Qajar pen boxes when I told him Peyman Bashirian was dead. “Who?” he asked, dashing and amiable. “The prisoner whose father met your reporter from Paris,” I whispered. “Where did he die?” Thierry asked. “In prison,” I said. He leaned in, whispered to me, “I told you it was wiser to leave this alone.” As I turned I caught Pouran giving us dagger looks. Five minutes later she cornered me.

  “Iraj hates Thierry,” she said. “Strange how your husband likes him.”

  “But I overheard Iraj and Thierry making plans to meet in Paris.”

  “Iraj is a dope. He can’t read people like I can. Where’s your ring?”

  “Houshang didn’t tell you? I sent it back. Just between us, it was hideous. Houshang can have gaudy taste.”

  She winced. She had chosen it, and had chosen always to side with Houshang.

  I wanted to interrogate her about the diamond bracelet. I wanted her out of my house.

  Our guests of honor, the rear admiral and his wife, arrived last of all. They swept in and around the room and settled on the French sofa, with Houshang and Iraj and Pouran in attendance, and asked for fruit juice. The rear admiral stared into the room, ill at ease. His wife kept poking her hairdo and puckering her lips and recrossing her stubby legs with tiny feet in spiked heels.

  For all I knew, this was the man they were about to indict any day now on charges of embezzlement. Maybe he’d already been told of the proceedings against him. He definitely looked tense.

  My back was killing me and I was about to sit down when I saw Goli out in the front hall motioning frantically to me. I went out and she grabbed my arm and said the boys were fighting upstairs and Kamran had a broken nose. We rushed up and barged into the study. The armchairs were upended, and there was blood on the sofa and broken glass on the floor. My youngest, Kamran, had blood trickling down his face and chin and over his shirt. His nose wasn’t broken, just bloodied. The boys sulked, glowering, then lunged at each other to have another go at it. I ordered them to cut it out and wash up. The glass on the floor was a Baccarat crystal vase, a wedding gift. Goli picked up the pieces, muttering about how my sons could terrorize the world. I thought of finally having that talk with Houshang about sending them off to boarding school in England.

  I went back down, and from the living room Houshang saw me in the front hall and came out to lecture about how I was ignoring our guests, especially the rear admiral and his wife.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Pouran has to play hostess now?”

  “If you mention her one more time —” I began.

  “Serve dinner,” he snapped.

  He went straight to the rear admiral and picked up where he’d left off, telling some joke, but not before throwing me an angry look.

  In the kitchen the nephews of Mashd-Ghanbar were scooping out steaming white rice from enormous pots. The gardener washed dishes. Ramazan had already arranged the stuffed fish with pomegranate sauce and was slicing roast beef and braised lamb, which his daughter decorated with bunches of parsley. Goli was spooning out the sour cherry rice while griping at the chauffeur, who was spooning out the almond-orange rice onto a silver tray while smoking and slurping tea. Mashd-Ghanbar, his back to everyone, was spooning out three different stews into serving bowls and arguing with Goli, his most recently sworn enemy.

  “Enough!” I said. “You’ve been cranky all the time here.”

  “Me?” Mashd-Ghanbar said, indignant. “That’s the sort of thanks I get, when I come to save you from them!”

  As I passed through the pantry, I startled a waiter guzzling down whiskey with his back to the door. I announced dinner. I wanted to go to bed.

  We were all seated and served. Under the candlelight, the room hummed with the pleasures of conversation and delectable food. I had the rear admiral seated to my right; Houshang had his wife at the next table. As we were being served and I turned to instruct one of the waiters, I caught sight of Setareh, the daughter of my mother-in-law’s best friend, seated at a table to my left. She was a seductive and eligible girl in her mid-twenties, and we were forever trying to fix her up, but she spurned the attention of admirers. I saw her smile and nod to someone at another table. So I followed her gaze, thinking rather smugly that she�
�d finally decided to approve of one of my bachelor guests. To my surprise, it turned out to be Pouran. I looked back to Setareh, saw her ever so slowly raise her hand, languorously stroke back her blond hair. That’s when I saw it. The gold-and-diamond bracelet on her arm. A bare and milky-white arm. I stared. She was mouthing something to Pouran, and then she winked. It was not my imagination. She had pointed ever so discreetly, with red lacquered nails, to the bracelet. Sharing a moment, a pleasurable secret. Of course she looked radiant. She’d been given a gift; she was wearing it to my dinner party, acknowledging this to Pouran. Houshang had splurged for her! She was having an affair with my husband. No wonder she was so finicky about other men. Why hadn’t I seen it before? Setareh was at most parties we attended. I always invited her myself. Sweet, educated, sociable. Apparently shameless.

  At our table, the rear admiral talked about his latest shopping list of hardware for the Persian Gulf. Then a technocrat with ebony hair and manicured nails and a well-stocked repertory bragged about the lofty Club of Rome, its dire projections for the future, and the RIO Project, Reshaping the International Order, meeting that month in Algiers. “But wait a minute,” said a guest across from him, “if a think tank is proved wrong, doesn’t it become a sink tank?” There was laughter, effulgence, chitchat about trips abroad. The weather in Rome, the cafés in Paris, the pleasures of Bond Street. I imagined Reza watching this. I stared at my husband charming his guests at the next table. I wanted to go over and slap him, then go upstairs, pack, and catch the first plane out. He was bedding a girl half his age, and certainly taking good care of her.

  I turned to the rear admiral. “How do you think we should deal with our record on human rights?”

  Nothing could have killed the conversation so fast. The question was unforgivable. Everyone stared. I was being a tactless hostess, a most tactless wife. In the split second that passed, I saw in their eyes how we were unprepared, disapproving, thin-skinned.

  Someone quickly covered for him. “That’s the sort of wicked question foreign journalists ask!”

  “That’s true,” I said. “One of them asked me a few weeks ago.”

  “And what did you say?” said the rear admiral.

  “I dodged the issue.”

  “Well you did, bravo. They have no business snooping around here.”

  “Then something happened,” I said.

  I saw Houshang staring at me. He had an uncanny ability to sense trouble.

  At our table, a high-ranking civil servant said, “Human rights? What bunk and distortion! A direct affront to the visionary leadership of our country. A naive and unrealistic point of view. Look what it proposes! To indulge a bunch of Marxists and religious fanatics who want nothing less than to destroy us. What are we supposed to do, accommodate them? They’re ready to slaughter us! Show me one country in the world that tolerates that. They get to hunt down their own terrorists. We can’t progress without law and order. The foreign press is crucifying us abroad! We have the right to decide who threatens our government and how to deal with it. Self-preservation is a basic right! Who are they to lecture us?”

  Houshang quickly rose with his glass of wine and toasted good friends and good food and fine wines and beautiful women. Setareh was watching him with a sweet and timid smile, her tapered fingers caressing the bracelet he’d given her. He had some nerve. We raised our glasses, drank a toast. The waiters brought dessert: crystal goblets of homemade ice cream with ribbons of caramelized sugar and fresh raspberries, and Mashd-Ghanbar’s specialty, an assortment of Viennese chocolate tortes and fresh fruit tarts that he’d perfected during his stints at the Austrian embassy whenever he’d got into his typical funks and abandoned Mother.

  My dinner partner asked me what I meant by “something happened.” I said the son of a friend had died in prison.

  “Anyone I should know?” he said.

  I hesitated and he turned away, amusing himself with someone’s joke.

  Dinner broke up. On our way back to the living room, while the rear admiral praised the splendor of our dinner, I asked, “Don’t you think that despite our naval bases and Sherman tanks and Phantom jets we’re vulnerable?”

  He smiled, patted my arm. “Don’t worry, my dear. A beautiful woman doesn’t worry!”

  “So when do you worry?”

  “When my wife goes shopping! When I see how much hair I’ve lost!”

  He’d patronized me, I’d played ingenue, and neither of us was the wiser. People came over to talk to him. He joked and laughed, quite recovered from his earlier unease, presiding with the aplomb of an emperor. Coffee and tea and after-dinner liqueurs were served. I tended to our guests, all the while watching Houshang and Setareh. She was whispering with Pouran across the room.

  The high-ranking civil servant who had spoken up at my table cornered me before slipping away. “Who can expose the opposition? We can’t; the foreign press doesn’t want to. Today they own the truth. This we can’t face. The question is — do we possess the words, the heart, the guts? Even to convince ourselves? I don’t know.”

  Half an hour later the rear admiral and his wife prepared to leave. Houshang beckoned me over, and we were exchanging niceties when out of the blue the rear admiral mentioned mistrusting foreign journalists. He said they were on a rampage to undermine the regime, dredging up every cause they could find. He said it was advisable not to speak with them. Houshang agreed wholeheartedly. I took this as a warning. Then he went too far.

  “In fact it’s downright unpatriotic,” said the rear admiral.

  “Unpatriotic?” I said. “I know a father whose son died in prison this week. That’s unpatriotic.”

  “Mahastee,” my husband said, “it’s late and the —”

  “Don’t you think that’s unpatriotic?” I asked the rear admiral. “Laws that don’t safeguard the life of a university student, of anyone?”

  “Not in this case.” Houshang smiled. “He must’ve deserved it.” He turned to the rear admiral. “You must excuse Mahastee. I can’t imagine why she’s bringing this up.”

  Houshang glared at me, disapproving, humiliated.

  So I said, “He was about to be released from Komiteh. But he was dead when his father went to collect him. He was twenty. He died in their custody. I should think they’d want to prove they didn’t kill him. He was interrogated four times. They say he died of a heart attack, but there was no autopsy.”

  “Who is this boy, a Marxist?” the rear admiral demanded.

  I told him.

  “Plotting against the government is sedition,” said the rear admiral. “You understand that.”

  “But he was innocent if they were going to release him,” I said.

  “Then what’s there to investigate?”

  The argument had erupted suddenly. We were speaking softly, huddled in a corner. The rear admiral’s wife kept a bored and frozen smile on her face. A pink and white and blond marionette. I sensed Houshang’s blood pressure rising and avoided eye contact with him. The rear admiral stared at me, dismayed.

  “So you see,” I said, “here’s the perfect case of how we’re at the mercy of our own sense of justice. Injustice, actually. Injustice is unpatriotic.”

  “What are you — a judge now?” Houshang said.

  I turned to the rear admiral. “I want to ask you to please help us find out what exactly happened. It’s for the father. He’s an old friend of mine.”

  “Who is this chap?” Houshang said. “I don’t know him!”

  “It’s not so simple,” the rear admiral said to me, suddenly very formal. “I’m sure you know very little, and the father was told certain things, but the boy must have done — well, let’s put it this way, we know he was arrested. But little else.”

  “We know he’s dead. What kind of terrible retribution is that?”

  “Now, let’s not be naive,” said the rear admiral.

  “But that’s exactly what I’m trying not to be.”

  “There are many c
ases like this,” he said irritably. “Don’t believe what you hear. I’m sure it was handled properly.”

  “You mean the sensible thing is to arrest and imprison without due legal process and in secret, then send home the corpse and claim —”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Houshang demanded.

  I looked into his eyes, saw how he wanted to throttle me. It gave me pleasure, that look, causing him anguish.

  “If someone you loved died in prison,” I told the admiral, “wouldn’t you want justice then?”