I ran down to meet her from Amjadieh on an unusually warm evening, darting down from the American embassy and across the intersection to the Hotel Semiramis. I was really late and figured she’d already left, but she was there. There were several tables of foreign men, mostly Americans, drinking. Businessmen, I thought, or embassy people churning over the latest tidbits from their informants. Still plotting to overrun our country? I wanted to say, walking by. Who have you bought out recently? Then she looked up with those hazel eyes, and the shadow lifted, and I removed my jacket and apologized for being late and ordered coffee. She talked of Peyman Bashirian, who was dead. I could see the hairline cracks forming on that smooth surface of glass that was her life. “Dead,” she whispered, shaken. In her world, people only died of old age and disease. Not torture and execution. I didn’t like talking about the dead boy. Talking about him made me angry and preachy and dredged up politics. At some point I suggested dinner, and we left and started walking through the streets. We found a restaurant with paper lanterns and ordered dinner as though we ordered every night and would forever, so severed were we by then from the worlds from which we came. She asked questions, listened, the expressions on her face shifting but familiar to me, inscribed on the template of my memory. Then she talked about my father and his ruin with such emotion and resolution I felt a great wall crumble inside me. And I thought, The past never lets you be. This is what it wants — to direct and consume you. All the time pretending it’s the present, the future, the better to outwit you. Jalal, always evading it, always moving, has only the future in his sights. It’s a feral instinct for him, like an animal’s. He told me once I would finally make the ideal revolutionary the day I left everything behind. Everything.
The waiter brought dinner, and Mahastee laughed at how much food we’d ordered, then ate ravenously. I told her a story, and Jalal withered with the pity I felt for him suddenly, living as he did only half a life. Then I told her something else, and she leaned back in her seat and threw back her head and looked up at the colored lanterns with the warm breeze disheveling her heavy hair, and I felt elated, so deep and moving and mysterious was the moment.
We sat under the trees, she and I, seduced, whiling the hour away. The dark was stealing in. She had passion, and if she’d lost it in her world, she wanted it back now. I wondered about passion, hers and mine, how it lived or died, and what would rise from the ashes. To possess it was to swear by its long life. And its price. I watched her against the night, gauging the price of her resolve, her loyalty, to me, to anything. I wanted to reach over, draw her in, this woman I had loved as a child and now wanted as a woman. Every man has the right to an imprudence. I sat there thinking, She is my transgression.
As the night wore on, I came close to saying, Let’s take a hotel room. Let’s go back to Semiramis. I nearly let the burn of that desire liquefy my coldhearted life for once. To hold her. I held back. I was trained to renounce, discard, a perfected instinct for a revolutionary. Renunciation as well honed as passion.
THE NEXT MORNING I went to the passport office. I had the black-and-white photographs I’d taken on Zarghami in the tiny photo shop whose owner coached soccer with me in the same league. I went upstairs and turned left into the section marked for last names beginning with N and stood in line. People were pushing. A young man with an obnoxious smile cut in, then had the gall to lie to our faces with a typical story that went on forever and made no sense. Another donkey like my brother-in-law! Two men reached over and tapped his chest and sent him packing to the end of the line. “Another sissy boy from the upper class!” they grunted. The man behind me asked where I’d had my photos taken, just so he could strike up a conversation about his family back in Azarbaijan. Finally it was my turn. A vacation, I said. No spouse. The officer looked fed up. “I can’t read this,” he said about Mother’s name. “Shaukat ol-Zamon Eftekhar,” I said, “born in Tehran.” “And this, your father?” “Hajji Alimardan Nirvani,” I said. “Born in Nirvan, in eastern Azarbaijan.” “You have lousy handwriting,” he said, just to stress his authority. The man behind me started poking me and repeating, “I knew you were a Turk!” The officer ordered him to step back. “Wait your turn and stop interfering,” he snapped.
In the evening the three of us went to the movies, me and my friend who works at Amjadieh Stadium and the owner of the photo shop. Bright lights, shops chockablock with knickknacks, meandering mobs, young boys roaming like hyenas eyeing monster-size posters of busty actresses with deep cleavage and brawny movie stars like Behrouz Vossouqi towering over the rest of us.
A little past eleven, I was undressing when something struck the window, the one looking onto the back alley. Then again, thirty seconds later. I poked my head out, and there was a man standing in the alley. It was dark and I couldn’t see him properly. He motioned, calling, “Come down, come down.” He said it irritably. I slipped back into my trousers, my shirt hanging out. I picked up my keys and walked out wearing slippers — I was only going down to the back alley. I went around the building. He was waiting a few feet into the alley.
Immediately he said, “Did you do it?”
“Do what?” I said.
“What you were told,” he snapped back. “Don’t play games with me.”
He was insolent. The worst thing I could do was admit to anything. I didn’t know him, and I never forget a face. He wasn’t the guy who had shot off with Jalal on the Vespa, nor any of the ones in the car that day in front of Radio City. He wasn’t more than twenty-two or twenty-three. For all I knew he’d been sent to entrap me. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Don’t shit me! Did you do it for Jalal? Or did you chicken out?”
He had some nerve. “Who the hell are you?” I said. “I don’t know you.”
“And you never will. Now answer me!”
I was angry with Jalal for sending some jerk to harass me. So I told him.
“Watch your mouth, motherfucker,” he said. “You want to end up in a ditch?”
He was a nasty piece of work. I didn’t care who he worked for. I poked him straight in the chest.
I said, “Don’t think I’m afraid of you. You hear? That’s my answer.”
I turned and walked back into the building.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE SERVICE FOR PEYMAN BASHIRIAN was at their home the next evening. The house was overheated. Cold weather had come suddenly. People in overcoats were backed up all the way to the sidewalk. Coming up to the house, I encountered Mr. Bashirian’s elderly next-door neighbor and we walked in together. The house was lit up and filled with flowers. White carnations and roses and gladioli in baskets sat in the hallway.
The crowd was swelling inside and they had run out of chairs, and people were leaning against the walls talking, many of them students. They glowered, huddled in corners, whispered. Some of the girls stood out because they were wearing the emerging political uniform — head scarves and overcoats over matching trousers. The brother-in-law saw me from the kitchen and came out and shook my hand. He said Kamal was in the living room. I saw him from the doorway. A crumpled man among men, slumped in a chair at the end against the wall. He wore his suit loosely, his tie black and rigid under a face impossibly sallow and drawn. His eyes were red, his cheeks flaccid as he leaned in, listening to an elderly man speaking next to him. I thought Kamal could not possibly hear him, so bewildered and remote was Kamal’s gaze. Then his gaze lifted and he saw me. He rose, lifted out his arms, and shook his head, as if to say, You see, you see what happened? Someone next to him tactfully vacated his seat and I sat down. We tried to say something to each other but choked up. Finally he managed to say, “I know you were here last night.” Together we wept quietly, heads bent, neither of us able to speak.
On the table beside him there was a large framed photograph of Peyman. A black-and-white portrait, a handsome boy.
“He’s gone,” he said, “forever.”
A manservant came around with a tray
of tea. There was fruit on the side table, small dishes of sweetmeats, the traditional bowl of halva. In the rooms people rose and sat in waves, gathering, coming forward, murmuring to Kamal, retracing their steps, the house hot, stifling. He insisted I remain next to him.
The phone kept ringing. Colleagues and friends and neighbors came with words of sympathy. His sister came and whispered to him. When he rose and left the room, I went into the kitchen and asked a maid who was washing up for a glass of water, then found a chair in the hallway. By the front door, Mr. Bashirian and his male relatives greeted a mullah in flowing robes. The mullah preceded them into the living room. Through the archway between the hall and the living room I saw him being shown to his seat, Mr. Bashirian and his relatives taking seats to his right and left. The mullah, gathering his robes about him, conducted the service with solemn decorum, uttering suras from the Qur’an and eulogizing the deceased. The rooms grew still, resonating with the echo of the lilting prayers and eulogy for the dead young man accompanied by the intermittent sobbing of the living.
After the mullah left, Mr. Bashirian came out into the front hall. The group of students quickly flocked to him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. They closed in on him, heads bobbing as they talked. Like autumn crows — dark, intense, pecking at him, their shriveling and brittle morsel. I wanted to shoo them away. They lingered, heads drawn together, then suddenly parted, Mr. Bashirian emerging from their fold. He looked contrite. Going by me to the kitchen, he whispered, “Please, God, kill me and deliver me from this grief.” He carried a glass of water to a room and shut the door behind him.
One of the students, slim and tense, raised his hand, cleared his throat, asked curtly to make an announcement.
“There’s a lecture Wednesday. We’ve left the address by the door. Come in Peyman’s memory. They snatched him from us, kidnapped him. He disappeared. It happens every week. What happened to him could’ve happened to any of us. Your sons and daughters! They prey on us! We are their carrion.”
A girl in a black scarf and black overcoat let out a wail: “We must rip off their mask! Expose the evils they hide so cunningly. What they —”
Like a clap of thunder, from the other room Mr. Bashirian’s brother-in-law called out, “This is no place for politics. Please, you’re among the deceased’s family and friends.”
He came through from the other room, motioning with one hand to say it was enough. People turned and stared.
The girl, disturbingly high-strung, started protesting again in her shrill voice, but the boy interrupted her quickly, this time more strident.
“They murdered Peyman. We mourn him. But we’re defenders of the innocent. Why remain silent? Because we’re afraid? See what they’ve done to us!” He motioned quickly, including all those assembled in the rooms. “Peyman is our hero. He died a heroic death! We want everyone to know. Is that a crime?”
“What do you want here?” the brother-in-law said, up against him.
“Justice, reckoning! Don’t you? You want to let them get away with it?”
Next to me in the kitchen doorway, Shahrnoush, red-faced, chewed her lip, flicked tears off her face. Her husband was ashen.
“This is state-run terrorism,” the boy said. “They’re killing our generation! A heart attack? You expect us to believe that? There’s a list. Every name a story of brutality and terror and abduction. You want to see the list? Beware of their propaganda. They buy our hearts and souls with scholarships and casinos and factories and F-14s. They’re selling us out to foreigners. The bloodsuckers! Ask their prisoners. It’s inside their prisons you see their real faces.”
The brother-in-law grabbed the boy’s shirt, shoved him into the kitchen. “I don’t know who you are or what you do. And I don’t want to know! You’re causing us shame and grief. You want to make more trouble so they come back for us? Take your friends and get out. You hear? Don’t make me repeat it, or I’ll throw out every one of you personally.”
“You’re not angry with me,” the boy taunted him. “You’re angry at your own impotence.”
Dark with indignation, he went over to the students, consulted them momentarily, then turned to the brother-in-law, enraged. Those of us close enough heard what he said next.
“You’re cowards. We’re ready to give blood! Fight in the streets. We believe in an armed revolution. And we’ll never give up!”
They exited in a flurry. When they left, I noticed the two young men sitting by the far wall, hanging their heads.
THE ROOMS WERE QUIET. The manservant collected the empty glasses and plates, and the maid finished washing up in the kitchen. Shahrnoush came in from the kitchen and insisted I take dinner with them. “Please,” she said, “this is your home.”
Then she whispered, “I’m staying for a while. I don’t want Kamal alone. He’s in a terrible state of mind. I’m afraid he’ll take an overdose and slip away.”
The front door was open. A van pulled up and parked, and two men came in and took away the chairs along the walls. The brother-in-law paid them, peeling off bills. He was solid, efficient, but it was impossible to read his thoughts. Mr. Bashirian was still locked up in the bedroom. The two neighbors were there — the elderly man and the engineer — and the relatives from Mazandaran, and the two friends I’d seen seated against the far wall. Kazem and Ali. They stood in the hallway talking, the women preparing dinner in the kitchen.
There was a palpable sense of relief once the crowd left. The evening had been a strain, especially the disruption by radical students. The brother-in-law, still in a rage, smashed two plates in the kitchen. Then he came out, pointing at Kazem and Ali, and said, “What stupidity! I should never have called them. Their visit was a shrewd calculation. If they loved Peyman they wouldn’t behave like that. The nerve to say he died for them! Those bastards talk like they own him!”
No sooner had the students left than people started talking behind them. To the family, they said they were stunned. How brazen! How reckless! How downright dangerous for those kids to have barged in and mouthed off like that! But to one another they murmured other things, judging by the looks on their faces — tactful, circumspect — those who had previously been in the dark about Peyman’s arrest. They’d heard the words: prison, disappearance, murder by the state. Their unease became even more conspicuous as they gathered to leave. I overheard one of them say by the door, “So it turns out he was arrested! God knows what he did.”
A bedroom door opened, and Mr. Bashirian came out and said he wanted to talk to me alone in the living room. He drifted in, moved about the furniture, a ghost in his own house, then lowered himself into an armchair.
“You know,” he murmured, “he took pictures.”
I nodded. Outside, a siren wailed.
“That was his crime. The accusation.”
“What crime?” I said, startled.
“You remember that morning we saw him in there?” He choked up but kept going. “He told me something. You couldn’t hear, he was whispering. He said they had asked about the photos. Interrogated him four times, he said. They wanted to know which group he belonged to. They said he’d followed orders and taken pictures of military installations.”
“What? Which installations?”
“It was in the photos, they claimed. They wanted him to confess. They said he was a traitor. He said it was all lies.”
“Traitor?” I was shocked Peyman would have any crime to confess. That he could ever be a traitor. “I remember you said to him, ‘How can it be?’ You meant the photos. The accusation.”
“Maybe he didn’t have a heart attack,” he whispered. “Maybe they tried to — to punish him. It’s a terrible thought. What if they knew — knew all along they were never going to release him?”
It was an awful thought.
“When they gave back his belongings, the photo albums weren’t there. They gave back his clothes, his sneakers. I asked for the photos. They told me they couldn’t find them.”
His hands shook. He wanted a cigarette. I got my pack and lighter and we lit up under the dark oil paintings I’d examined the first day I’d visited him there, which he’d painted over the years with such somber effect.
“What do you think?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What if they lied about how things happened?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want him to believe it.
“I agonize about it,” he whispered. “Please. Don’t tell my family.”
I stared at the stony river he’d painted, the silvery moonlight over spectral hills. They had accused Peyman of taking pictures of military installations. That was what he’d told his father that morning, at the other end of the table under feeble neon lights. His father had leaned in, shocked, but he hadn’t told me. Until tonight.
“Last night I imagined terrible things. I imagined him screaming out for me. Father, Father! he was screaming, strapped to a table. Helpless while they tortured him —”
“You mustn’t torture yourself,” I said.
“That night when they took me in, I — I saw him laid out on the table,” he said numbly. “I remember looking. Before I passed out. To see if they had harmed him. He looked so peaceful.”
He slumped back.
“I wanted to keep on looking. To divine his last thoughts. I wanted to throw myself on him. To embrace him for the last time. I’m weak, so weak. He was my rock, my reason for existing. Why didn’t I die instead?”
He sat, nearly lifeless himself.
We were called in to dinner. A dozen people were around the table. Kamal refused food, leaned over, and said to his sister, “Tell me it’s a bad dream.” She laid a hand on his, told him to try eating some white rice at least. She had such milky-white skin and dark hair. She gave him a glass of water and watched him down pills. Then she fetched him a glass of tea from the samovar. More than gentle, she was mothering. I was introduced to Peyman’s two friends, Kazem and Ali. Kazem kept to himself. He was the boy from Kerman on scholarship, with the face of a stoic, maybe angelic if you didn’t notice the discreet tenacity in his eyes, the austerity of the jawline. After dinner, Ali, who had traveled with Peyman all over, spread his photos on the table before us. He had the chiseled looks of an athlete, sinewy and distraught, and his right leg never stopped pumping. He talked, lectured us, considering the tone of his voice. Once in a while he’d repeat: “So what military installations are they talking about? You see any signposts, barbed wire? You see anything here?”
In the Walled Gardens Page 26