In the Walled Gardens

by Anahita Firouz

  The young man hadn’t introduced himself or given the names of the other speakers.

  He began, a slight tremor in his voice. “The living expression of our nation isn’t found in the ostentatious decrees and edicts of the regime, but in the enlightened commitment and action of our men and women. In us. But they don’t know us. They don’t see us. We exist!” He raised his arms. “Look at us.”

  Reza wasn’t listening. He was surveying the room.

  “Shariati said we must create social awareness. The elevation and progress of our consciousness. Otherwise we hold the empty title of citizen. He said this in his writings for years, in his lectures five years ago at Hosseiniyeh Ershad before they closed it down. They were afraid of him. He inspired! He possessed that exceptional gift — fire! He set our generation’s mind on fire! With his remarkable vision. They imprisoned him. This year they made him write those revisionist lies in Kayhan. We don’t believe them! Islam is as revolutionary an ideology as Marxism! The real battle in our hearts today is between Muhammad and Marx. But first let’s look at our intellectuals! Miming what they’ve learned abroad. Card-board words learned in foreign tongues in other continents. Our rich are no more trustworthy than vultures. Their fortunes are the fruit not of their labor but of exploitation. They think they own this country — it’s their personal money press! Look how much they amass, how they rush it out! Look at them — all educated abroad! Not even completely literate in their mother tongue! Let’s throw them out! Our traditional clergy is another elite. Old puppets of colonial powers. Perpetuating centuries of a passive religion of mimicry, submission, dogmatic ignorance. All blood and martyrdom of Hossein at Karbala and eternal tears. Time has come for change. Radical action!”

  He paused, looked out, his audience rapt. He could sense the audacity, the thrill of his words. Lecturing on about alienation and economics and Islamic ideology and a return to our roots, growing increasingly fervent.

  “Break it up!” someone suddenly shouted from the front. “Get out!”

  The speaker was being hurtled out by his watchmen, along with the other prominent revolutionary lecturer. People shot up from their seats and lunged forward, shoving chairs, pushing in the aisles, crushing people seated on the floor. There were bottlenecks by the far doors. Reza shoved back chairs and went for the garage door. He bent down and, grabbing the handle, tried to yank it up. It wouldn’t budge. I looked back to the room. Two students were shouting from the front, “Get out! Turn right, not left. Not through the courtyard! Don’t jam the doors.” I imagined the side streets blocked off. The army trucks outside. Their impassive faces as we came running out, the transgressors. How long did we have? I felt light-headed, as much from anticipation as from fear. Reza said the garage door was locked from the outside. We were trapped. He pounded on the metal. I had walked into a trap, and I had come willingly. “These idiots must open the garage door,” Reza said, angry. He shouted, his voice booming. “Get the garage door open!” He pounded on the metal, the echo reverberating over the panicky audience. Several men joined in and we tried the door again. Suddenly someone yelled from the other side, “Wait! Don’t pull.” The garage door rolled up. Dark skies, cold air. Night had fallen. A young man holding the metal rod he’d removed ordered us, “Go this way! They’re coming in the front.” People spilled out the back, running past us into the alley. Reza grabbed my arm. “I know the backstreets,” he said. We rushed down the alley and into another, which was darker, and then another, turning in the warren of narrow backstreets away from the direction we had come earlier. We heard police sirens in the dark, screeching brakes, people shouting in the distance. Every time we rounded a corner, I thought I’d come face-to-face with them. Name, father, address, marital status, occupation? Why is he with you? What were you doing at the meeting? Why? Who do you know? Tell us. Reza said, “We’re near the shops — don’t rush.” In the main avenue the streetlights were bright, traffic moving briskly. Calmly we took in the street. We went past the bicycle repair shop, a grocer, then a bakery where there was a line. He turned to get me a cab.

  “Wait,” I said suddenly. Then I told him. I was closing the house in Morshedabad that weekend. Did he want to go back one last time to the garden?

  He looked straight into my eyes, leaned in. Whispered, “If you stay the night with me.”

  He looked back at the approaching traffic. Hailed an orange taxi for me, pushed me in.

  It was a dare. He had dared ask; it was that or nothing. Spend the night. This was no ordinary transgression and betrayal for me, but the desire for another life. I’d already shifted into its quick-sand, its consuming ambitions looming with consequence. The question left was what to tell Houshang. My husband doesn’t understand that I’ve always known the art of finer deceptions but have waited for the day I would truly need such fineries to conceal a deep-seated and devastating emotion. And perhaps find a way out.

  THURSDAY I DROVE TO Varamin early in the afternoon. I outdid buses and trucks and vans, going eighty-five miles an hour dead south.

  From the distance I saw the trees of the village of Morshedabad. A clump on the horizon in the tranquil undulations of the plain. The sun was high, beating everything white. There was neither a sign nor an arrow to caution the accidental traveler. I turned off the main road to an unpaved one, raising dust behind me, approaching the village. Past the old trees with gnarled limbs like cripples, their strong branches flexed like the arms of peasants. Dusty leaves on a dusty street. Alongside the road, the water channel was without even a trickle. The old mud-brick walls running along the road were crumbling here and there to reveal gardens behind them. I went over the humped bridge of packed earth and wood, right by the clearing, where children playing soccer turned and came running up along the car. Beyond — the square, the baker’s, the grocer’s, the shrine of the morshed, the school building and clinic our family had built for the village.

  I parked and the children gathered around the car. I got out and greeted them and they surrounded me. I saw the black mulberry tree against which we had once parked our bicycles long ago.

  I walked around the village, the children in tow. The sun was sliding down, hovering orange. I stopped by the shrine of the morshed. A monument to dust and fate and superstition. I walked around greeting old men and young boys and mothers clutching babies, and the village elder, and the grocer, who gave me an orange Fanta, and the baker, who introduced his son and grandchildren and offered me fresh loaves. They murmured salutations to Father. They asked after Mother and my brothers. They’d heard we were about to sell off the garden and house. The garden of Morshedabad. Who was going to buy it, then?

  Early in the evening the birds came out for an hour and chattered. The air cooled down. The plain glistened gold with the setting sun. I drove along the fields and the irrigation channels and embankments until the gates and walls of the garden rose up before me, a vision after years.

  The gardener helped bring the bags into the main house. We went out to survey the garden. He said, “This place isn’t what it used to be! What orchards? The cherry trees are diseased, but the grapevines are still solid. What stables? Only a donkey there.” We walked. The pool was cracked and overridden with green moss. The flower beds overgrown with weeds, no new flowers were planted anymore. Only the rose vines bloomed regardless of who came and went. He said his wife had died and he lived alone. His children were gone. “What shall I bring you to eat and drink?” I thanked him, saying I had brought food with me. He said he’d called Zobeydeh from the village to clean the house. “How’s Tehran?” he said. “I didn’t think I’d see you back here anymore.”

  He walked me back to the main house. Through the trees I saw their bungalow back in the far end of the clearing. The house of Hajj-Alimardan and Reza. The wooden door, the front porch. I told him someone was coming from the Nirvani family to look over their land in the village. Maybe they’d drop in to see me. “The daughter or the son?” he asked. “What a man he was, that fath
er!”

  He left for the night. I went back into our house to get ready. Rummaging through old records abandoned there, I put one on and music from a long-lost song filled the rooms. I’m still young, I thought, I can choose, transform the future. I shed my clothes and stepped into a hot shower, emerging to stare at my reflection appearing slowly in the bathroom mirror as the steam vanished. “Twenty years!” I whispered. I felt young again, freed, as if I had come back to the garden that night to cut loose from everything, so certain was I of this, so resolute in embracing its dangers, so serene and invulnerable, knowing it had always been destined to be. Wading in this haze of strange calm, I dressed and dabbed on a scent redolent with jasmine. I made tea. I dragged out a chair and sat out on the porch. Waiting for Reza. Looking out at the garden, I knew I had been waiting for years.

  He had said he could be delayed. I waited. At dusk the generator kicked in. Then quiet. The moon came up above the grove, silvery. The gardener, watchman by the gate. But he did not come.

  I went back in to put out the food I’d brought from town for the two of us. I tore into one of the fresh loaves from the village I’d carefully laid out for him. I flitted through the rooms, slammed shut a door. Worried, pacing to and fro. Something bad had happened to him, no, something terrible. My equanimity was caving in to apprehension, then anger, anguish. Where was he?

  I felt ice running through my veins. He wasn’t late. He hadn’t been delayed. He was never going to come.

  I was there to claim my freedom, to say I wanted him. Didn’t he know? It was astonishing how the two went together in my imagination. My freedom and Reza. I imagined him changing his mind, imagined him going home and grabbing a duffel bag and running down the stairs. I’d never seen his home. No, two rooms, he’d said, a functional place, not a home. I imagined him finding the last diesel Benz out of Tehran and speeding in the dark down the road, even while knowing he wouldn’t. I felt a brutal remorse. He was gone. I had waited twenty years for this. Twenty years, only to come back and bury us here, in this garden. He and I. This was the place. There would be no shrine to cover it, no slab of stone to say, Here lies not one man or woman but a whole way of life, buried here — in this garden — for here too was buried the memory of his father and the life he had lived with us, Hajj-Alimardan, taken from his parents in Tabriz as a child by my grandmother because she had loved him, as had my father, though finally my father had never understood him enough to know why he had left and how to breach the distance, nor how Hajj-Ali had ended his life ruined, and even if Reza and I understood or tried to, it was still the end — for us, for them — too late, and we would sell the garden, and someone would buy it and make and unmake another life here for a time, and children would play under its shade and wade in its waters and run through the orchards blithe and blind as we had been, carrying our fate for each other until tonight, when I had come to bury it here, and here it would be forgotten.

  I felt we had been broken. I could feel the breaking, like a great tree falling dead in the forest. I threw on my coat and went out, down through the trees where life had already passed. The garden was silhouetted, moon-washed. The wind picked up and I looked up to the night sky opening vast and fired with stars beyond the trees.

  Wasn’t he certain of my will? Had he held back because he did not believe in it? But he didn’t need my will anymore. He had out-grown it, like a man crossing a river who sees the bridge over which he’s running crumbling behind him. I knew. It was too late and he could never come back now.

  I had watched him at the lecture by the radicals. He had watched them like a professional. With a cool head and heart. They weren’t slashing away at his world; they were slashing away at mine. Attacking everything I lived with, turning it on its head. Warping, redirecting, this world I thought I knew well. Reza had watched them as if he were assessing the competition. How and what they said, their polemics. Then he’d looked away like a man with an ulterior motive. A superior intellect disdaining them, competitive. He’d leaned in, whispered about them, disparaging. There only to protect me.

  He was forced to carry his politics like a thief carrying loot. He lived with this and hid it well because it was so much a part of him. I could see why now. He was not concealing anything — he wore it all over. Like a badge of honor. It kept him passionate, alive, rooted. It kept him from me.

  Our fate could not be rewritten; it was not ours anymore. We were on either side of a divide, he and I. I represented the status quo, what he fought against, what accorded him dishonor and betrayal for thinking and doing as he did. Each of our lives negating the other’s existence, the divide between us an eternal form of contempt. So many things between us. I considered them, my life and his. It was painful, this inevitable tallying up. It comes one day, as if everything we’ve ever done is working against us, so trapped are we in what we make of ourselves.

  Dark night. The lone bird trilled. There in that garden, I thought, if anywhere, all ideology, all else, would have ended, breathing life into the present so it could live.

  When sleep came, I dreamed he was writing me a poem. Ancient verses, about an eternal garden. I writhed in sleep, wept, as if told a harrowing secret.

  THIRTY-ONE

  IHAD TOLD MAHASTEE I’d get to Morshedabad around six-thirty. But I was already running late. The afternoon meeting had taken forever, the guys on edge over polemics. I had to pack a bag and rent a diesel Benz taxi to get to her. The streets were crowded, the bus crawling eastward through rush-hour traffic. I got off before my stop and starting running, zigzagging past pedestrians.

  I rushed up the stairs, unlocked my front door, and pushed it open. I heard rustling and stopped. Someone was in the room. I didn’t switch on the light.

  “Shut the door,” he murmured.

  I closed the door, locked it, turned back in the dark. There was light coming in from the street. Jalal was by the window.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “You have food in the house?”

  “What happened?”

  “They ambushed and killed our guys yesterday. There’s an informer way at the top. He’s going to take down every last one of us.”

  He was looking out at the back alley.

  “I’d just left Shahr-Ara. They were waiting for instructions clear across town. For two weeks I was the messenger. I was told to stop at the pharmacy to buy medicine. I was running late. Three blocks before Vossuq, I told the cab driver to let me off. I saw the commotion. I ran up Bastami. looking for a phone to warn the others. The line was busy. I redialed. I wanted to save them! I ran to Behfar Hospital to grab a taxi back to Shahr-Ara. But they’d hit both places at the same time. I think I know who it is. Don’t touch the light.”

  I set down my keys, but I didn’t take off my jacket. I felt a rush of adrenaline. They were looking for him, and I was giving him refuge. I had no way out.

  “Go get dinner, and candles. And the papers. I need cigarettes. I’ll sleep here tonight.”

  I left my cigarettes on the table. I rushed down, thinking of a way out. Mahastee was waiting for me. I kicked out the door in an incredible rush of anger. For an instant I saw my famished dreams carved out of rock, suddenly garish ambitions. I felt no contrition, just loathing. Everywhere we plotted lay our own ruin. I saw her in the garden waiting.

  I had chosen this fate. Mine was another world. I would never reach her now. My obligations came first, my revolutionary politics. I had to protect myself and our underground group from any outsider like Jalal. His eyes had been cold and hard, staring at me in the dark. He expected my help, and I was either with him or against him. If I didn’t help him disappear, he’d hunt me down and hunt down our group. He wasn’t useful to me anymore, but a grenade now with its pin pulled, waiting to explode. I had to get him out that night.

  I rushed down the street and got kabob rolled in fresh bread, and from Habib agha’s, three packs of Zarrin cigarettes and candles and matches and feta cheese and sweet halvardeh, an
d down at the corner I grabbed the evening papers. I dropped the tenrial coin I gave the boy. He bent down and I scanned the front page. “Pakistani Prime Minister Bhutto Due in Tehran.” “Eight People Killed, Eleven Arrested, in Armed Clashes with Security Forces in Shahr-Ara and Vossuq.” From my window, Jalal was watching the city close in on him.

  I slipped in and locked the door. He was still by the window.

  “I couldn’t find matches,” he said.

  “It’s all over the papers,” I said.

  I laid out the food, lit two candles, and stuck them on saucers. He lit a cigarette, dragged on it, grabbed the papers, reading by candlelight the list of the dead, cursing under his breath, pointing to their pictures. He said only one name was missing. The wife of one of their leaders, a doctor who had studied in Rome. He’d been shot in the throat; maybe she’d escaped.

  “You have the passport, the money?”

  I said they were under my shirts in the cupboard.

  “Last night I walked all over Vahidieh. I slept in the park. I need to wash up. I need a change of clothing.”

  He washed up and I gave him clothes and turned on the radio. “Keep it down,” he said, buttoning the shirt. The clothes were slightly baggy on him. I found my passport and the envelope of cash he’d given me where I’d left them. He flipped through the passport and counted the money. He said he needed the name of a contact on the Gulf coast to help him cross the border. I wrote down a name and number in the port of Bandar Abbas.

  “You’ve got vodka?”

  I got the bottle and glasses from above the sink. We sat on the floor to eat. He wolfed down his food, chugged the vodka, tore into more bread with halvardeh as he sat under the photo of Father.

  “For years our leadership quibbled. Castroist versus Maoist tactics, socioeconomic doctrines based on their seven-year research in villages, the necessity for a mass uprising versus guerrilla warfare. They’re all dead now! This summer I was taken to meet one of them. He picked me to go abroad for training. Yesterday they killed him. They wiped out our entire revolutionary wing. We were betrayed by one of our own. Someone high up who knew everything.”