In the Walled Gardens

by Anahita Firouz

  “This is a ridiculous and theoretical conversation!” said Houshang.

  “Will you help the poor father?” I asked the rear admiral point-blank.

  “It’s out of my hands —”

  Houshang took his arm, and they moved away into the foyer. His wife stared at me with haughty astonishment.

  “Thank you for dinner,” she said vacantly.

  Long past midnight, the last to leave, as usual, were Iraj and Pouran. I left the threesome drinking in the downstairs study and went up. Houshang was so angry he wouldn’t even look at me, and I was sure he was going to leave with them for a nightclub. But I was wrong. Thirty minutes later he came up and threw open the door to our bedroom. It was dark; I was in bed.

  “Tell me, what was tonight all about?”

  He slammed the door shut, turned on his bedside light.

  “I want an apology!” he said. “Now.”

  He threw his jacket on the chair.

  “I warned you, but no, you went against me, embarrassed me — embarrassed yourself! Your behavior was —”

  “Don’t yell, you lecher. I know who she is.”

  He stopped and stared, eyes bloodshot. He’d had too much to drink. I kept my composure. Slowly and rigidly I told him. I knew about Setareh, the diamond bracelet he’d given her, how Pouran did all his dirty work.

  “That’s ridiculous. Me and Setareh?”

  “I know, so stop lying.”

  “This was your revenge? Your calculation? How pathetic!”

  “Don’t you get it? That poor boy is dead. Dead! Go amuse your —”

  “You’re so blind. So — high and mighty with your truth. Do you know whose mistress she is?”

  He asked right up in my face, the veins popping out on his neck, the smell of alcohol on his breath.

  “The rear admiral’s. You hear? He adores her! They’re happy together! He doesn’t want a scandal. But he loves to spoil her, so he asks me. I sent Pouran and charged the bracelet to my account. You understand?”

  I flinched. To my eternal surprise I still wanted to believe him.

  Then he said, “You’re turning into some liberal leftist, whatever the hell you want to call it.”

  “Right, I’m a Marxist!”

  “You’re starting to behave like one.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I rant about reckless capitalist pigs?”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  An indicted rear admiral didn’t exactly qualify as a model patriot.

  “He lectured me,” I said, outraged, “about how to be patriotic.”

  “You shouldn’t have talked to a foreign journalist. He’s right.” “It’s none of his business.” “You shouldn’t have embarrassed him like that.”

  “What is he, God? Your only source of income? With whose money is he buying extravagant diamond bracelets? Look at him and his wife! We have to kowtow to them nonstop to get ahead? Oh, I hurt his feelings? God forbid. As if there’s no one else in this country with feelings worth considering!”

  “I’ve got a radical wife. You want to dishonor me and yourself?”

  He spoke of honor and let disgrace hang over our heads. His naval projects were being investigated behind closed doors.

  “I’m going to find out what happened to Peyman Bashirian,” I said.

  “You know what people will think. You want to ruin our reputation?”

  “I want to petition with his father.”

  “You will do no such thing. This is none of your business. You will stay away. I don’t want us mixed up with SAVAK. I’ve got contracts with the government. I’m not going to permit this. Your duties are to your family.”

  “Don’t you talk about duty. You’re a negligent father, a mostly absent and vacuous husband who whores around and drinks an —”

  “That’s right. That’s me! You should’ve married one of those highbrows your parents preferred. I bet they’re disappointed.”

  “No, I’m disappointed,” I said.

  He stared, offended, repelled, eyes calculating.

  “Well then, I better go out and find myself a whore and a drink and, if I get real lucky, a girl like Setareh!”

  He picked his jacket off the chair and walked out. I heard the garage door, his car speeding away.

  I SWEPT AROUND the bedroom, drawing back the drapes. Sat back in an empty room staring at far ridges in darkness. Perhaps I had precipitated a drama at my own dinner party to take my freedom, erase the false clockwork of an entire life.

  Perhaps Setareh had been my blunder — a blunder set in motion by a husband I now considered secondrate. Houshang had assured me I was making a fool of myself. There was in fact a time when it mattered to believe him. He had grabbed the high moral ground, feeding me small doses of humility like poison. A chastened wife makes a virtuous husband. But I am sick of goodness. Of being that paragon, a lady. The very reason for which Houshang married me.

  He’s always counted on my loyalty. Tonight he’d been forced to take its measure. Facing the rear admiral, I had become a disloyal woman.

  He had seethed about dishonor. But the only thing he really cared about was our reputation — that public and eye-catching display, infinitely malleable, a chameleon — for what did honor really matter to him when it was something solitary and modest and absolute, an inner life?

  At three in the morning I felt certain he was not only keeper of Setareh’s secret, but indulged as her protector. He was her refuge from the predatory tide of society’s ambitions. I’d seen the look they had exchanged after dinner, that devoted smile of acknowledgment. There was too much there to have given her away untouched. He’d had her himself before giving her to the rear admiral. There would always be others. Always another to come between us.

  I WAIT FOR THE DAY Reza teaches the children. I make sure I’m home. I listen for the front door, his eyes on me as I sweep down the staircase. Those vigilant eyes, seeing through me, seeing beyond. A man among men. And I think now, What was life before he walked in? I wonder what he’s hiding from me. What he’s done all these years he’s stayed away. I want him to tell me. I hear him in the other room and remember the boy in the garden of Morshedabad. Even then, what distinguished him was character. When we had guests, the house brimming with people, children running through the gardens, I was always looking for him. “Reza, Reza!” He would stand grinning by the trees and say, “Calling me again?” I would ask him to come play, come swim, come learn to dance instead of being so defiant, come ride through the fields with us. Then between one month and the next he was gone. That summer I had gone back to Morshedabad expecting to see him. Morshedabad and Reza were one and the same for me. One couldn’t be without the other. I had run to the bungalow, calling out to him, yanked open their front door, and faced an empty house. My first thought was they’d gone for another visit to Tabriz. But they wouldn’t have emptied the entire house for a trip. Gone were the rugs, the first sura of the Qur’an penned in black and gold ink by the door, his mother’s sewing machine and the large peacock she’d embroidered on magenta satin and hung up on the wall, the old brass samovar and huge bolsters and paisley shawls, the candle-holders with dripping crystals that Zari and I liked to run our fingers up against, the canary green pair of opaline hand vases — the hand of the beloved — sitting on the mantel, and above them all, crowning the room, the family photo taken by Sako on Naderi, which I’d compared to ours, where we’d been all airbrushed into perfection. The rooms were bare, white, stark. They had packed up and left. I’d run through the trees, shouting, “Father, Father, they’ve gone. How did this happen? Can’t you do something?”

  I’d never forgiven him for leaving, for disappearing one day, never to look back. I had considered it a personal insult and form of contempt, realizing that day that our lives were two things apart. Until then they had seemed as one to me.

  I PUT ON a black suit the next morning and drove to Niavaran to pick up Father and Mother and pay our condolenc
es to Mrs. Sobhi. Mother, stately in black, sat in the back of the car brooding, reciting an elegiac poem by Maulana. Father recollected forty years with Sobhi. The house was only a few streets away. It was grueling to sit with the grieving widow and listen to her and watch Father, who had lost one of his closest friends, look as devastated as she did. Mother and Father stayed on and other visitors streamed in, but I left for work.

  That evening I left the office late, knowing Houshang would stay out all night. He was waiting for me to show regret, waiting for me to reform myself. My home was no refuge. My children were at a sleepover. I had nothing to say to my friends that night. I couldn’t sit in a restaurant and eat out alone. I wasn’t about to wander into the lounge at the club — I wasn’t the type, even if I did know everyone there. And I didn’t want to see that crowd. I’d go home. I realized that what I meant — perhaps would always mean by that — was that I’d go home to my parents’ house. I would console Father about Abbas Sobhi’s death and play gin rummy with Mother and have dinner in the upstairs hallway, where the picture frames were crooked and the tiles several rows in from the top of the stairs had come unstuck ages ago and wobbled when you stepped on them but were covered by the large Esfahan rug, and where one of Mother’s large and chaotic bouquets from her garden always covered the dreadful and anemic portrait of Father, which had been painted by his well-meaning friend who had studied forever at the Fine Arts Academy and which Father insisted on keeping there as a matter of principle, and so, facing it — just to annoy Father — Mother had placed an oil painting he detested of an Edenic though lugubrious garden, which she had bought from an antique dealer on a lark and which we strongly suspected annoyed even her, day and night, but she kept it there because she would rather grow horns and a tail than back down, and there in the upstairs hallway they would sit, my parents, taking their meals when there were just the two of them, listening to the old radio, defending their life. I wanted that.

  I drove eastward. We were in the midst of a few days of Indian summer. I rolled down the window, slid out of my wool jacket at the red light.

  From the street I called Reza’s number on impulse. He was still at the office, working late on some report. I could barely hear him with all the traffic by Cinema Diana. It took half an hour to get across town and find parking near the place where he’d said to meet. He had an appointment around the corner and had suggested the first place that popped into his head. I waited at the corner table in the Hotel Semiramis. He was late and apologized when he appeared suddenly. There we were, the two of us, for a rendezvous in the evening in a hotel downtown. He removed his jacket, slung it on his chair. “So unusually warm,” he said. We ordered coffee with milk and I told him about Peyman. He listened, quiet, absorbed. The phone call, the heart attack, the photos he’d taken on his travels, his diary, the guidebook to Khorassan. I told Reza that day at the Intercontinental the French reporter had insisted that the son had to be involved in some clandestine activity. “You know, the father told me he was afraid to go to Komiteh,” I said. “I went with him. But I think he was afraid of Peyman. He couldn’t understand him. Maybe he couldn’t look into the eyes of this stranger who had lived with him. That’s why.” Reza asked about the petition. What kind of answer did we expect? Now that the boy was buried in Behesht Zahra. Now that his body was rotting and his files swept away. Would they exhume the body? Never. What could the authorities investigate? Hearsay, wardens, the prison doctor and coroner, their own interrogators. Tainted versions. Fiction. That was all that was left. I said, “Then the difference between the necessary and the sinister just depends on which side you’re on finally?” Reza asked point-blank, “How about this case?” I leaned in. “The dead can’t defend themselves,” I said. “Who decides the kind of evil considered necessary? Makes the rules, logical consistencies, the exceptions? Should we trust them?” There was a clock on the wall. Sometime later he offered me dinner. I wanted fresh air, so we walked. The hotel was opposite Saint Paul’s Church. Walking with him, I felt like an outsider in the city. We crossed streets here and there as if by mutual consent but apparently at random. The longer we walked, the better I felt. He asked what I wanted to eat. I didn’t mind, I didn’t want to stop walking.

  The evening was warm. Somewhere along the way there were colored lanterns strung between trees in a garden. There were plastic chairs and tables and the sounds of laughter and the smell of grilled chicken. We asked for a table on the last night you could eat outside that autumn. He ordered, and we realized we were hungry when the food came. He was no longer diffident and talked about the time when he had taught in far-off villages. “Four years,” he said. “Each year a different village. I was young, idealistic, impatient to change the world.” We talked of our fathers, and then, insisting, I said something about Hajj-Ali’s bankruptcy, how I felt, that we should have known, should have helped, my words turbulent. I said, “I know it’s too late. But your parents were like a second family for me.” I said it long after its passing, though it would always remain true. He stared at me, his eyes like a dark tide coming in, the strangest emotion breaking on his face. The moment scorched us, like a season of mourning. We looked to the night, now murky like brackish water, shutting us off from the world. At the periphery of our vision, people were moving about us. He asked about my university days abroad, my three brothers, and we talked of his sister’s children, Morshedabad, the daughter of the gardener whose family had suddenly disappeared. What was her name? I couldn’t remember. “Amineh,” he said. “Ah, Amineh,” I said, looking up into the trees, with their garlands of lanterns. “I liked that garden,” I said. “I liked the trees.”

  He said he liked riding his bicycle to the nearby village, Morshedabad. Liked the village children. Eighty years before a morshed had passed there and stayed for two years. A spiritual guide from Mashhad. A geomancer with white hair. He had healed their children, bidden beads to make good auguries, interpreted their dreams, and divined the future. Spoken of the Guarded Tablet written by God to transfigure fate. They had venerated him. There was a shrine in the village, a place of pilgrimage. Mud brick, with a dark interior. The large plane tree outside, where the village children played, had shreds of cloth tied to its branches for the vows they made. I remembered the glazed blue tile he’d once given me from the shrine. “But whose shrine is it?” I asked. “That’s what I mean,” said Reza. “There is no name on the tombstone. People in the village claim it’s his, the morshed’s. They say he left but came back later to die there. But there’s another story.” Reza said he believed this one. An old man had told him when he’d gone back years later to visit. The old man had remembered him. Son of Hajji Alimardan. He had offered him tea, talked of their dry wells, the heat. They had walked in together, stared at the bare slab sunk into dry earth. “Dust of time,” the old man had said, pointing. They’d come out and sat in a corner. And the old man had said, “I want to tell you something. All those years ago, when he tried to leave, the morshed, they stopped him, the villagers. They were incensed. They wanted him to stay. He refused. So they plotted to keep him. Late one night they fell on him. They killed the old man and buried him there.” “They wanted him that badly?” I said. “They wanted something sacred to remain among them,” said Reza. “Something to believe in.”

  Under the trees, time vanished. I wanted him. His patient voice, his steady hands, the intensity of his gaze. “That’s it,” he said. “History, superstition, in so many layers.” “It has power,” I said, “undertow. A fierce memory. It’s intimate. Don’t you have any?” He smiled. I liked his smile, so much about him. “No, really,” I said, “tell me.” He said, “I keep Father’s prayer stone at night by my bed.” “Always?” I said. “Always,” he said.

  The plane trees shed dry leaves. I felt impossibly alive at that moment. The colored lanterns swayed. Even the breeze was warm. “I have something to tell you,” he said. I smiled. “What, another superstition?”

  “Remember that afternoon co
ncert at Bagh Ferdaus? I was there.”

  “The one when it hailed?”

  He nodded. So he had been there. The day the sky had turned gray, then black, and hail had pounded the gardens. He hadn’t talked to me. He’d seen me come up the lawns with my friends, the two men. He had watched and waited. Had been several feet away under the porch when it hailed.

  Long past midnight, alone in bed, I imagined being in his arms. For even one night. Without the future.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  INEVER EXPECTED this night with Mahastee, from her phone call, to my ridiculous proposal to meet in a hotel like lovers, to our long dinner under colored lanterns. But I had also been dishonest ever since that day I’d walked back into her father’s house. I had taken his tea, and every night I plotted against their world. I hadn’t told her about my politics. The more I saw her, the more I was determined to tell her. This passion for the truth, served up for her, intruded at first during our dinner together, until it vanished.

  Of course, I was not obliged to explain anything. There under the paper lanterns we had mesmerized each other. She was oblivious to everything I did — oblivious to this city of smoke and mirrors, though she spoke of Peyman Bashirian, another dead boy who had played with sedition. There is no such thing as a cushy life being a partisan! There is no such thing as the absence of politics! To be apolitical is equivalent to assuming a political posture, but one that appeases nobody. When the haze lifts, she will know.

  We know. We count on it. Living dangerously has its own rewards.

  I had imagined her in that high society, anesthetized with the moral indifference of those with nothing at stake, surrounded by insolent men like her husband. They condescend if you’re from humbler birth, anticipating your slightest blunder so they can shake their heads. So they can say, Well, what can we expect from these types! They overlook class warfare, getting chauffeured around, perched high where they rest with their foreign education. Her father and mine were a different generation. They had had each other’s respect and affection, the same vision for the longest time. I don’t think it’s possible anymore.