In the Walled Gardens

by Anahita Firouz

  Just then the tickets fell from my grip. I swore and bent down to sweep them up, seeing trouser legs and car tires on my way up facing traffic. Then I froze. I’d seen a maroon car parked across the street past the group of boys, who were partially blocking it. I straightened up behind the group. There were three men in the car, a driver in front with a dark jacket, and two men in the back, whose faces I couldn’t see. SAVAK? I turned quickly, locating the young man with glasses. He was walking toward me. I looked across the street. Had they come for him, for us? The two men in the back of the maroon car were now talking; the closer one had his face turned away from the window. Then suddenly he turned his head. I first saw the other one pointing to the cinema. What I couldn’t believe was the one who’d just turned his head. It was Jalal. Whose side was he on? Why had he told me to call a stranger and bring a message, then come to Radio City himself? In a flash I understood what was about to happen. I whipped around to warn the young man with glasses, now just a few feet away from me. This was a trap. They’d used me and drawn him out to arrest him. Jalal was about to give him away, the snitch. The young man was nearly within my reach. He couldn’t see the car because he had his back to it. I went to grab the sleeve of his jacket to tell him, all the while calculating how to make a run for it myself. Then I saw Jalal lean forward and look straight at me. He saw us, my eyes locking with his, not a single emotion on his face, not even acknowledgment. He stared as if looking through me. He could have betrayed his own mother, the son of a bitch. Then something strange happened. Jalal shook his head slowly, and the man next to him said something insistent, and Jalal shook his head again twice. Then he leaned back into the seat. The man beside him tapped the driver, and the car pulled out, merging with traffic.

  If Omeed was his code name and he was with the secret police, why watch from across the street, then leave? I turned suddenly. The young man with glasses was behind me. We came face-to-face.

  “What are you waiting for?” he said under his breath.

  “I’ve got a message for you.”

  “Give it right here.”

  I whispered, “The message is, the group has been infiltrated. Two Savakis got in after the assassination of Colonel Fotouhi.”

  “Which two?” he demanded.

  “Omeed —”

  “Omeed?” he said, confounded. “Who’s the other?”

  “Shaheen.”

  He looked like he’d bitten into a capsule of poison.

  I lunged to grab his arm. This was my only chance to wheedle information out of him, but he pivoted quickly and turned on his heels. I saw the back of the pea green jacket disappearing quickly in the crowd, and I started running.

  “Wait —” I called out. “Hold on —”

  He rounded the corner into Takhte Jamshid, nimble and quick, zigzagging between pedestrians. I saw him turn left again and look back over his shoulder, eyes nasty and dead-set. I ran into the side street after him, but he ran faster, the flaps of his jacket billowing. Nightfall, the streetlamps on, the side streets shadowy. I’d lost him.

  THE TAXI DRIVER TALKED nonstop all the way up Pahlavi. I sat in the front. If the secret police had brought Jalal to Radio City to point the finger, he hadn’t. He’d come with another set of plans. I couldn’t decide what had just happened.

  The taxi driver had the radio on and was shouting over it. Another self-proclaimed philosopher. The inside of the cab, from the front windshield all the way to the back, was adorned with green velvet trim dripping with little green pompons. A picture of the disciple Ali in the front with halo and sword under winged angels, and verses from Hafez and the Qur’an plastered all around, with post-cards of mermaids and seamen and strange islands at sunset and virginal girls with doleful eyes, big tears plunging down their cheeks. Hanging from the rearview mirror, a cluster of amulets to ward off the evil eye, an enormous set of dice in red velour, and two pale blue fluorescent plastic swans. “They’re unrequited lovers!” he said, fingering them lecherously. The last leg of the trip, he took no other ride and flipped open the dashboard to reveal nude pictures of big blonds with big tits and high heels and black lace stockings and big behinds. He chuckled, going through the register of low-class brothels in the red-light district, District Ten. He kept telling dirty jokes and elbowing me in the ribs like a jackass and swearing at every politician he could cut down, berating the lot of them.

  “They’re all servants!” he said.

  He screeched to a halt by the curb. “Your car’s in the repair shop?”

  I nodded and paid.

  “Women only like flashy cars! What’s yours?”

  “Me? A red Camaro,” I said, smiling.

  I could see the group from where I was standing, up by the short end of the restaurant facing the side street. The director from our department was there with my other colleagues, eyeing the competition at other tables, drinking.

  I watched them as I crossed. The director held forth with some story while they all listened and laughed, slapping the table when he finished. One hell of a story, judging by their reaction.

  I crossed the side street and came up alongside Casbah. Traffic whizzed by along Pahlavi. I walked on along the panes of smoked glass, stopping to light a cigarette under a tree. I didn’t feel like making small talk with the director, another vain, rootless, just-returned-from-abroad braggart. The new breed.

  I pushed through the glass doors. I gave the maître d’ a brief message, pointing at the far table, and left; then I got into the phone booth on the street to dial Abbas. I watched with anticipation, already laughing. Within seconds the director came running out of the restaurant, very agitated, flailing arms about, his buddies on his heels. He looked up and down the street frantically; then they all ran to the corner. The message was, “The owner of a brand-new red Camaro that is on fire and burning in the street is that man.”

  Abbas was working late as usual at the National Television, just up and across the street on the hill. He said he’d be able to leave shortly and told me where to go.

  I walked up Pahlavi, past the Hilton, turning right on Fereshteh, past new mansions faced in white travertine and marble for the new rich. At the end where the street turned left at the bottom, I turned by the summer compound of the Soviet embassy, its old walls running along the road, the immense plane trees towering behind them. Father had told me stories on cold winter nights about Colonel Liakhoff plotting around old Tehran, and Colonel Starosselsky, White Russian commander of our own Cossack Brigade. In Father’s days the big scare was the Red Terror and Pishehvari and the Communist movement. He disdained all foreign interferences and schemes and handouts.

  Down past the embassy the road was dark, the rocky riverbed under the bridge bearing a trickle of water from a summer with no rain. I went over and up, turning down into the residential back-streets behind the Old Shemiran Road. I found the small restaurant at the bottom of a dead end, stuck between trees, with a string of bare lightbulbs on the porch and Formica chairs and tables in white vinyl. I took a corner table overlooking the phantom river. The owner was a quick and efficient man, sweating from the char-coal grills going in the back. I said I was Abbas’s friend, and he brought out a bottle of Ettehadieh vodka and a glass with ice.

  I poured the chilled vodka. The sky was a dome of black rock with stars; the moon, at its prime.

  The owner came back out with a saucer of dill pickles and bread and cheese, calling out to his sons, who were serving other tables.

  I heard laughter inside through the open window, shrill and flirtatious, more suited to jammed cabarets. From the porch I looked back over my shoulder. I could see them through the window, the table of four, two men, and two women tossing yellow hair, with tight and revealing tops. One of the men had blond hair, and I could see his patrician profile. Some foreigner. The other, with ebony hair, had his back to me, his expensive blazer slung over the chair, a gold ring with a seal on his right finger. When he put out his other arm with the sleeve rolled back,
I saw the expensive gold watch and wedding band. They were the only such customers, slumming, far from the haunts of the upper class. The other tables were dowdy family types; and on the porch, tables of only men, workers, and students.

  Several patrons left, going for their cars in a dirt lot by the restaurant. A Peykan came down the road and swerved sharply into the lot. Abbas, ever the careless driver, emerged, his shrewd eyes even more pronounced above his beard. The owner came to greet him, taking our order with affability and rushing off.

  “The boys were at the British embassy in Gholhak,” said Abbas. “This English group was scheduled to go on camera to explain some dig. Our director says: ‘I’m not going in!’ Now, they’re already inside the gates, clustered by the door, the archeologist and special guests waiting inside. The director says to the boys, ‘Fuck the English! The sons of bitches screwed us for years.’ The film crew agreed, so they turned around and left.”

  I poured him vodka, and we touched glasses.

  He leaned in. “We’ve become all theater! All make-believe. Like that ridiculous paean to the royal family in the Marble Palace. A monumentally garish sound-and-light show by that charlatan Czech. Like this festival with English brass bands in our parks, their ambassador arriving in his Rolls-Royce to cut ribbons.” He shook his head. “Who’re they kidding? Scratch the surface and there’s rage.”

  One of the owner’s sons brought the chicken kebab. We tore into the pieces, stuffing ourselves with raw onion and pickles and spoonfuls of buttery rice.

  Abbas wanted to know if I had anything more on Jalal.

  He said, “You can’t be too careful. There’s proof SAVAK was running a Communist cell a few years back. Imagine! Like shooting fish in a barrel. Even Radmanesh in Moscow had endorsed the cell. What do those guys know in exile? They’re out of touch.”

  We downed vodka, the restaurant emptying around us. We ordered tea, picked our teeth with toothpicks from a glass. An emaciated dog came out of the dark, sniffing around the tables on the porch, and I threw it bread. One of the workers two tables over kicked the dog, and the animal went off howling and the workers burst out laughing. They got up to leave, still laughing. The boy brought our tea and was clearing our table when the blond foreigner appeared in the doorway, the one from the table of four inside. Tall, with dazzling blue eyes, nearly silvery. The worker who had kicked the dog turned around and blocked his path, saying something obscene to his face, which the foreigner didn’t get. But I saw the flicker of tension in the blond man’s eyes. Not on his face. He was still smiling, like some surefire movie star on screen. Way too good for the worker, way too good to acknowledge an obscenity in any foreign language. He made a small sweeping motion with his hand. A conceited gesture — a “Get out of my way, boy” — saying something in what I thought was French as he moved forward. The girl behind him had her arm snug around his waist, her face against his back as though he were her protector. The worker stepped back, ogling them. The girl gave him a triumphant look, then called back to her friend inside to grab the pack of cigarettes from their table. I saw the girl inside, framed by the window, snap up the pack. She had heavy makeup and dyed strawberry-blond hair and the tightest jeans riding up her buttocks. She was running her fingers through the ebony hair of the man paying the bill. He stood with his back to the window, peeling off bills and tossing them on the table. She smiled, sliding her arm into his, kissing him on the neck. He laid a hand on her buttock and squeezed, leaving a large enough tip for the owner to be bowing and scraping while he turned to whisk his blazer off the chair. I saw his face as he turned, recognizing him, to my surprise. Mahastee’s husband. I looked away. I didn’t want him to see me.

  “Thierry,” he called to the Frenchman, as he came out on the porch. Then something quick in English about a house. “See you at your house.” I’ve been teaching myself English.

  Abbas slurped tea, and I watched the foursome. The workers had disappeared. Mahastee’s husband had his arm around the girl, whispering in her ear until she broke out into a titter.

  They stepped out toward the parking lot, paired off. A few seconds later we heard cries and the sound of running. Abbas rose, but the owner came out and stood on the porch, facing the lot. I heard Houshang Behroudi shouting about two bricks hurtling out of the dark straight at them. The workers had aimed and missed. The owner called to his sons to chase after them. “Go! Quickly!” he said. They quickly obeyed, running up the street, their father cursing the workers loudly for effect. Behroudi was cursing in the parking lot with authority. He wasn’t about to go after them himself, demeaning his social standing by chasing laborers, jeopardizing his pretty face. I didn’t think he had the balls. The two sons came back within minutes. The owner apologized profusely to Mahastee’s husband and the foreigner on behalf of the runaway workers and everyone. Such a wimp! Waving dutifully as the two Range Rovers pulled out of the lot.

  “They’re all pimps now with foreign advisers!” he said, coming back on the porch.

  Too bad the brick had missed Houshang Behroudi; now he’d be at the foreigner’s drinking and fornicating. Did Mahastee know? How could she stand him?

  Before midnight, Abbas dropped me off.

  “We’re an American puppet regime,” he said. “Only puppet regimes buy so many arms and keep drawing-room generals and a rubber-stamp prime minister and parliament. And fortunes stashed abroad. How long can this last?”

  EIGHTEEN

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER HEARING about the charges accumulating behind closed doors against naval officers, I sat doing house accounts, worrying. A photograph of the port town of Kangan was on my desk: palm fronds up against an old house with traditional wind towers and reticular windows, in the distance the deep dazzling blue of the Gulf. The naval project outside the town had broken ground. Houshang was building their new port, hobnobbing with the top brass. To get that far, he had given kickbacks. I knew; it was no use pretending.

  The summer of the year before, Houshang and I had been arguing on our way back from a dinner party. That very evening, after dinner, he’d been taken aside and promised a lucrative contract by the man we referred to as his contact. A man very high up. I knew this man. The big contract was Bandar Kangan. In return, Houshang’s company was going to build this man’s vast summer home in Ramsar on the Caspian as a gift. Houshang told me in the car, perhaps imprudently, for he never told me much anymore. But he wanted to break open a bottle of champagne — he was jubilant. I accused him of unscrupulous dealings. He became incensed. He parked the car at one o’clock in the morning on a side street in Dar-band to lecture me. What did I think? he demanded. Most of the really big jobs were awarded way at the top. You bid, but the bids were rigged. Nothing happened without a powerful contact and payoffs. It was political, very sensitive. When you got the job, you inflated all your prices up 200 percent. You overcharged, they expected it, it was part of the deal. Suddenly you needed five times more concrete. The kickbacks were given up front — right into a drawer or the Swiss bank account. There was no real accounting; there was so much cash floating around, nobody checked. He asked why I was playing the naïf and goody-goody. “But I thought you liked me good,” I said. “This is business!” he cried. His company had taken on projects where they had let themselves lose good money, just to get into the big league. Exactly six months before, on a housing bid for the navy on the Gulf, they were finally told their prices were too low and dismissed. The man in charge claimed Kaviyan General Contractors could not get the job finished at such prices and would end up not only unprofitable but in the red. “Write a letter saying you can’t do it!” the man said. Houshang had subsequently discovered that the prices on a similar housing bid for the navy up by the Caspian had come in so high the man in charge was afraid to be seen taking anything lower. He said he’d learned his lesson. He was a capitalist, he wanted to make money, the economy was booming, they were building the country. What was he supposed to do, sit on his hands? He wasn’t blind. He saw o
pportunity, he saw how to make it. If he didn’t, someone else would! He had turned to me in the dark. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Our company’s on the A list. You begrudge my success? You begrudge my finally getting a project like the port in Kangan?”

  I called Kavoos. My voice must have been clipped, because he pulled the older brother routine and I changed my tone. I felt a headache coming.

  “Anything new?” I asked.

  He told me to call Father and go there for dinner with the children.

  “What’s wrong there?” I asked.

  “Stop asking what’s wrong all the time. Just go. It’ll do you good.”

  I called and told Mother I was coming for dinner.

  “Anything wrong?” she asked.

  Indictment was not a word for our family, nor embezzlement. Our good name and reputation meant everything. So it should, Father always said. He liked to think the old adage had been honored. Old family, old bones, old values, old gardens. Instructing all my brothers like a drill sergeant. Kavoos, his eldest, never contradicted him openly but thought Father naive, old-fashioned. Bahram, the youngest, didn’t really care. Ardeshir argued everything. Mother had taken to instructing me about being a lady, in between her bridge games and orchids and interminable parties and high teas and ceremonial lunches and charitable works. Being a lady was an imperative, as though it were a profession, like being a doctor or an engineer. As if you could draw a salary from it, with pension. One time I told her. She said, “That’s what I get for sending my children abroad.”

  I checked my face in the mirror. I looked haggard and tense. I despised this collusion Houshang had going behind my back with Iraj and Pouran, his needing only those who submit to him, and finding there his kind of freedom, like his well-chosen infidelities. But I’ve come to think he wants me to know, to teach me a lesson — put me in place now that he’s acquired me, arrived completely. When we were first married, I’d admired his aggressive drive for success. He’d admired and misunderstood the very qualities in our family for which he wanted me most: that sluggish procession of obligation and depth of thought and gravity of purpose, minutely considered and hard-won and timeworn. In time, he had found them time-consuming and tiresome. He had envisioned something and found us altogether different. And he had taken my system of existence as a nuisance to his. An oppression. As he is to me.