In the Walled Gardens

by Anahita Firouz

  That night Jalal turned up like an unpaid debt. The story he told was meant not to unburden himself but to burden me. He hadn’t come for a confession or cautionary tale. It was a threat. Help me or else. I had been expecting it. They were hunting him, and if anything went wrong he’d make sure they’d be hunting me. With his back to the wall and all his colleagues dead, he was capable of anything. Once, when they’d been alive and provoked by him, I had been an insurance for him against their betrayals and conspiracies. Now they were dead and I was the only one left he could provoke and turn against. I wanted him to leave as desperately as he did. I wanted to be sure, so I’d be free of him once and for all. He’d barged into my apartment, robbing me of the hours with Mahastee, and left me sober and disillusioned at sunrise in the street. He’d come like ill fortune, like a hot and searing desert wind, and I had hated him that night. I sat facing him, contemplating how to throw him out. How to rid myself of him and get to her. All the while seeing my entire way of life — the legacy of my attachments — measured against his stony resolve and selfless politics. His colleagues had been slaughtered, and seeing their photos in the evening paper by flickering candlelight, I’d seen how we too would be destroyed one day ourselves. His words had been ruthless, ill-spoken, and I had seen how everything we did — no matter how much finer we were, and we were finer, no matter how literate and principled — our very purpose and reason for existence, could die too a miserable and ordinary death. And they would write whatever they wanted about us one day to bury us. This was the end, and when it came it felt like no glory had ever graced it. No honor could ever persist. It was in that state of mind that, walking back from South Tehran at day-break, I thought, Freedom begins now. I’ll free myself. I’ll leave everything behind. Give the cause everything I’ve got. Everything.

  It’s now, I told myself, now or never.

  Epilogue

  WE HAD A REVOLUTION within two years. Eight months before the revolution, three of us were arrested coming out of our head-quarters late at night and taken to Qasr, where we were interrogated and sentenced and imprisoned. I was given eight years. We were released at the outset of the revolution, in an amnesty for political prisoners, the first wave of concessions by the regime to a growing opposition.

  After that, nothing turned out as expected. What does?

  I saw Jalal again just after the revolution, in one of those weeks that winter. What weeks! Prisons and army barracks thrown open, newspapers that made you stand up and cheer, no bloodshed, no anarchy. What a feeling, what illusion! The exhilaration of unlimited possibilities. But the world isn’t made that way.

  The guerrillas were out on the streets. Guerrillas in the capital city, speeding around in open jeeps, waving their banners. It was midday, unusually warm for winter, with blue skies, the sun hot. I was at a traffic light at the intersection of Pahlavi and the parkway. That’s when I saw him. There he was, in an open jeep, sitting way up in the back, dressed like the rest of them in camouflage fatigues. Toting an Uzi finally in an armed insurrection. He had longer hair, a mustache, but it was definitely him. The jeep accelerated suddenly, their white banner fluttering in the wind, pro-claiming their name. Jalal was waving his gun like his comrades, hair flying, a red bandanna across his forehead. Just like Che. He had become Che Guevara, like all his comrades. I accelerated alongside the jeep, stuck my head out of the car, blew my horn. I shouted, “Aay, Jalal! Jalal! You’re alive! You’re back.”

  But he didn’t hear me. I followed the jeep, weaving through traffic, but lost sight of it at the next light. I never saw him again after that.

  While the mullahs swept into power, we in the revolutionary Left unraveled. A supposedly free Left, splintered, exhilarated, now flaunted itself and a free press. Then came our betrayals, one by one: Those who collaborated with the religious Right, and who didn’t decry the death of democratic freedoms, especially for women. Those who boycotted the alliance of the Left, then ratted on their friends. Those who, like the Khmer Rouge, planned in cold blood for internment camps and ultraradical massacres of the general population. In short order we were proved rapacious, shortsighted, ill-experienced, divided against ourselves. Like every other party kept underground for years. This was the ultimate legacy of the old regime. Then a peasant class with religious obscurantism took over.

  The new regime was ready to slaughter us and everyone else, making the old one they incriminated look like a bunch of dilettantes. They rounded up thousands of leftists and shot them. The group Jalal belonged to has come to be known in time as perhaps the most effective and competent in our revolutionary history. A legend. Jalal faced the firing squad in Evin.

  I survived. I always had a better understanding of timing than he did. A better sense of my roots.

  Majid fled across the border to Turkey and now lives in Paris in exile and has written his memoirs of the Left. And like all memoirs, they contain a good deal of bluster and revisionism. It’s the same story, on the Right and the Left. We’re all revisionists, so we can forget better.

  Hossein Farahani remained an invaluable recruit, and during that year they hunted the Left, he stashed away several of us in the warrens of South Tehran. Three years later he got killed in the war against Iraq with his two younger brothers. An entire generation slaughtered there. Shirin, the perfect bourgeois, moved to New York and later sent me a postcard of the Statue of Liberty with her address and phone number on the back and an offer to buy me a ticket, and two lines: “Darling, I’m withering here. See you in JFK Airport.” The director of our department watched from an upper-story window as an angry mob smashed the windows of his favorite red American car, then threw in a Molotov cocktail, which erupted into flames, during those early demonstrations that ignited the revolution. He took the next plane out to California. To America, where people go to forget. Mr. and Mrs. Mosharraf left that winter of the revolution and settled in Paris. He passed away there. They buried him in a foreign land, but I think he would have preferred being buried at home. None of his close family lives here anymore. If he were buried here, I’d visit his grave as I do Father’s. I always had respect for him, but there was a good deal more to it than that. Often I feel an astonishing sense of regret at his passing. An estimable gentility and benevolent enlightenment passed away with him. If I had contempt, it was for others and other things.

  The graves of his ancestors in the Mosharraf family mausoleum in Reyy have been desecrated and built over. Who does that in the world? This shame to our religion, our very own history. These things we do to ourselves, then invariably blame others.

  One night last autumn I took out my reed pens and ink again, writing out the old verses. A verse for old dreams turned to dust, another in Father’s memory. Mother turned her face to the wall and wept.

  Mahastee and her husband left for Europe at the beginning of the revolution. They divorced within a year. I heard she lives in London and her sons have graduated from the best universities. I’ll never see her again.

  I forswore politics and went back to my roots. I finally did the traditional thing and married Mrs. Amanat’s daughter. We have two sons. Mother is old and often stays in bed. She now lives with us in our ground-floor apartment in Kisha. My brother-in-law, Morteza, flaunting a beard and rosary, got in immediately with the new crowd and finally got promoted in the Ministry of Post and Telegraph. Zari is always beside herself with her family’s problems, complaining how her children have married the wrong type, as she did long ago. I’ve gone back to teaching full-time.

  This year my sons came back from university one evening and we sat down after dinner for a discussion long delayed. I began my story with that eternal refrain, “Before the revolution. . . .” Far into the night we sat discussing my old days with the Left, our national heritage, our passing hysterias. The anti–National Front hysteria. The hysterias of the Left itself. The anti-Shah hysteria. And today. We are all responsible for the system they have inherited. They, the new generation, are courageous, res
olute, with conviction. They believe twenty years of silence have ended. They want sweeping reforms. They’re fighting for their rights, their political freedom. We have always been told we are a people unprepared and unfit for democracy. As if 2,500 years isn’t enough time to get fit and ready.

  Now I sit up nights, waiting for my sons. Waiting, for any day they could get arrested or disappear.

  WE ARE BETRAYED by destinations. I read that somewhere; now I know it’s true.

  I left my country for London with my two sons that winter, leaving all too quickly as Tehran fell into revolution. Temporarily, I said. We’re still here.

  Father passed away ten years ago in Paris. In his absence, they reviled his good name and reputation. The house, they confiscated and looted; then they left it to rot. They ripped out the surrounding old gardens — like ripping out our heart — cutting down the old trees and arbors. Jerry-building into oblivion.

  Father took it, stoic to the end. Even when he fell in the street of an adopted land and broke his hip and no one stopped to help him. He was wasting away from Parkinson’s. Late one afternoon toward the end he was in the wheelchair, the newspaper on his lap. His head fell back, and thinking he’d dozed off, I went to rearrange his blanket. He had tears in his eyes and I asked if he was in pain. He said he’d lived his life. His regrets were for his country.

  I would have given anything to reassure him. I sat quietly holding his hand. And he murmured his favorite refrain, “Those who haven’t lived in the years before the revolution, can’t understand what the sweetness of living is.” There we were, far from home, our past ebbing like a receding horizon. We’d left everything behind. As we sat side by side in separate chairs, he dozed, and I dreamed of reclaiming my heritage.

  Living honorably is its own reward, to the bitter end. I come from a country that confirms that time and again.

  Mother moved to London, but she’s still living with Father. Whenever the family gathers, she ends up cooking for at least thirty. It perks her up, reminding her of the good old days. My brothers live in the States, working hard, visiting seldom. Growing tough around the edges. Hard at heart? asks Mother often. Everyone gossiped behind her and Father’s back about the millions they’d taken off with and their vast holdings abroad, while their sons supported them. People have no shame. Especially in hard times.

  Kavoos was the last to leave Tehran. His wife divorced him while he was in prison. She bad-mouthed him all over Europe while shopping, calling him an inconsiderate husband. He was imprisoned in Evin. They accused him of everything under the sun, a litany of treacheries they keep just for the likes of us. At one point we thought they’d just drop the small talk and shoot him. Like so many others we knew in prison. Father aged just listening to the accusations. There was no mercy for our kind anymore.

  When Kavoos finally managed to get out, he seemed perpetually unsettled. One day in Regent’s Park, he said to me, “You know, when I was in prison I thought about that friend of yours. Mr. Bashirian, and his son. I remembered how I’d been heartless about them. And I said to myself, So that’s what the world feels about me now. Nothing.”

  Houshang and I went our separate ways in Europe. There was nothing to hold our marriage together once we’d left. He lives in the States and travels, still chewing cigars with leftover friends. I can only take him ten minutes at a time. His business takes him around the world but never closer to anything.

  My two sons both work in London, and my firstborn, Ehsan, is getting married this summer. My home is a third-floor apartment overlooking a leafy square. I live with a Moroccan musician I met through the firm I work in. He strums the oud at night, sonorous music, world-weary, noble. He also comes from places in the dust.

  The verses Reza penned for me reside framed on the wall by the window.

  For years I had no news of Mr. Bashirian. I had written him several times. I thought of him often. Then one day I received an envelope in the mail, a letter with his impeccable handwriting. I tore it open in the front hall, carrying it through the rooms. He wrote that he was retired, old and ailing, living with memories. In the same house with the grape arbor, a lonely house. He hoped I was healthy and successful, my children prospering away from their homeland. He was enclosing photos, the few remaining ones Peyman had once taken on his travels. He wanted me to have them. “You will be their keeper,” he wrote. I cleared the coffee table, laid them out.

  Windswept places. No people. Except in one, the one with a mountain on the horizon. A lone cypress leaning into the dust. Half a human shadow there, elongated, as if the picture had been taken late in the afternoon. Just a shadow cut off at the knees, stretching over empty spaces. Perhaps it was Peyman or a traveling companion. Any man’s shadow falling across his land.

  And the father wrote: “I lost my son, and you lost your country. I still don’t understand why.”

  I put my face in my hands and wept.

  Exile is its own country. With obscure borders, unwritten conventions. It can bring unusual clarity. And exact strange sufferings, discreet mutilations. At its outermost limits, there may even be an exceptional freedom. It is beyond heartbreak to reach that far.

  That other life — that world as I remember it, that grace of living — lives in me like a parallel universe. Always will until the day I die. No one can find it anymore. Not even the names of the streets, now changed and erased to complete its vanishing.

  Sometimes late at night, with the oud playing, I open the window facing the square. I recite from the poem, the verses breaking in my throat: “My hometown has been lost....With feverish effort, I have built myself a house. On the far side of the night. . . .”