In the Walled Gardens

by Anahita Firouz

  He poured more vodka.

  “Reza,” he said. “You’re the only one left.”

  It was a chilling verdict. We lit up, and I made tea in the white teapot with roses that Mother had given me.

  He pointed to the pile of handwritten papers. “What are you writing?”

  “An article on why we oppose an armed struggle.”

  “What for? Who’ll believe you? SAVAK, your interrogators? Never. The students won’t — they’ll think you’ve all turned into apologists and revisionists and distrust you even more. The Left will accuse you of being liberal. The establishment wants your heads no matter what you say. They’re digging your graves. There’s no honor here. It’s each man for himself. You’re shouting in the wind.”

  He stared at me; I stared at the wall. At the future.

  He said, “The only truth in the world is chaos and change. There’s nothing out there for our beliefs to correspond to! I believe in drive, instinct, power. There is nothing else. Except the will to power.”

  “What about ideology?”

  “Ideology bolsters the weak. The mediocre — the people. It empowers them enough to submit to the few who will inevitably dominate them.”

  “I thought you pitied the masses.”

  “Pity who — like that religious brute, my father?” he said, eyes fiery. “That detestable peasant who raves about the denigration of the flesh and this world? He’s a fucking nihilist himself! If that’s the will of his God — it’s the will to nothing. A religion that disguises nihilism so it can preach it.”

  “Don’t you want to liberate the masses?”

  “The weak, oppressed? Those shameless hypocrites! They want it for themselves — the power. You might as well shoot them.”

  I picked up the dirty dishes. He sat against the wall, took out a piece of paper from his jacket, and studied it. Then he asked if I could spare a map, a sweater, a book — “You pick,” he said — a pen and notebook. And a small duffel bag to pack. I was ready to give anything to get rid of him. I gave him the black plastic zippered bag that I kept in the back of the cupboard, from my soccer league. I rinsed the dishes, turned up the radio a notch for Golha. The veil of music, the soulful voice of Golpayegani, tremulous incantations — the drug that was the world.

  Jalal rolled up his pea green jacket under his head and stretched out, all dressed, with his boots on.

  “You can have the bedroll.”

  “I don’t need it,” he said.

  I poured tea, went over to the bookcase, grabbed a book. He snatched it and turned it over without looking at the cover.

  “Early tomorrow morning I’ll hitch a ride south. Call my parents. Tell them I’m dead. Tell them I got killed in the raid.”

  I SLEPT BADLY, in fits, waking up repeatedly to watch the night behind the window. I dreamed, though it seemed to me I was between sleep and consciousness, between being and nothing, between the world as it was and as I imagined it dreaming. I saw my entire life all at once. Felt the razor’s edge of my own death and undoing. I woke up before Jalal, but when I sat up, he asked the time.

  “Five-twenty,” I said.

  “Time to leave.”

  The wail of an ambulance went down Sepah. I left water on to boil and washed my face. He made rolls of bread with feta cheese, wrapped them in newspaper, tucked them in the duffel bag. I told him to take the rest of the halvardeh, but he left it on the table.

  “You must come with me,” he said. “You carry the passport and money. It’s safer.”

  I didn’t know where he was going. He said he hadn’t decided yet which square to leave from. I got dressed. We stood and each downed a glass of tea without a word. In the half-light he looked more impatient than ever.

  He flung on his pea green jacket, grabbed the duffel bag.

  “We go down Nasser Khosrau. I walk ahead of you. If something happens, don’t wait. Reza, no matter who gets me — and they won’t — I don’t know you.”

  A man will say anything and even mean it when he’s escaping. I locked the door. I had the passport and money in my jacket. We trudged down the stairwell. It was one thing to be hidden up in my room, but now we were out on the street. The sidewalk was practically deserted. He walked fast, arms loose, torso slightly swiveled so he could look back and flag down a taxi. Several cars whizzed by at full speed. There were mostly open vans and buses on the road, the storefronts shuttered. The dark was changing. Contused skies, bruised purples and charcoal instead of light.

  He threw out his arm again. A cab screeched to a stop and he darted over and threw the door open.

  “Maidan Shoush,” he told the driver.

  They sped away, and I watched and continued down the street. It was my turn to flag a cab. I had an appointment with Jalal in the traffic circle. Fifteen minutes later I was in a taxi watching the streets change through South Tehran.

  At the corner of Shahin I paid the driver. I hadn’t needed Jalal to warn me about disaster striking anytime up to the last second. Crowds of laborers and factory workers and vans and buses and diesel trucks were coming and going. The start of a new day. I was rubbernecking, but I couldn’t see him. I felt nearly heroic. Felt nothing could happen now. I saw him in the distance at the intersection with my black duffel bag. From that distance he was another face in a million. I took the longer way around in his direction. Traffic came between us. I knew he would stop at the point where the traffic was heading south to Reyy. He crossed, now over at the corner across from me. I walked faster and beyond the oncoming traffic caught glimpses of him with his arm out. I picked up my pace and waded through traffic, looking left, then right. A bus stopped in front of us and I couldn’t see him anymore. I rushed across the road. Down from the corner, a truck had stopped where Jalal stood by the curb. He looked up, and from the way he looked at me I turned quickly to see what was behind me. I groped for the passport in my pocket, felt the sharp rim of plastic, the wad of money. As I passed slowly behind him I whipped them out, and he turned and grabbed the passport and envelope and they disappeared inside his pocket. The truck was waiting. He had the duffel bag in his left hand. He jumped out into the street, and as I moved on, I looked back and saw him leap up on the running board and get into the truck. Honking at traffic, the truck pulled out. It was a beat-up old thing for lugging soil and gravel, the exhaust spouting black smoke above the fender, which was set with the verse “If you don’t have the heart of a lion, don’t undertake the voyage of love,” bracketed by the eternal invocation: “Ya Ali.”

  The truck rumbled down, merging with traffic.

  I crossed at the intersection and headed back up. I saw the first sweep of light. Tehran was lumbering awake.

  THIRTY-TWO

  ABBAS SOBHI’S FUNERAL HAD BEEN the week before. That evening we were at their home again for a memorial service. Mother and Father looked ill by evening. At such times they aged within hours. We stayed on with Mrs. Sobhi, who was ever gracious and gentle even in grief, and after dinner I took them home.

  In the car Mother said to me, “Goodness is a state of grace. Like art. Like faith. When we die, you must remember.”

  In their upstairs hallway she fidgeted with her possessions, and Father fiddled with the evening papers and stared at the wall. I knew he wanted to have his talk, but neither of us could dredge up what it took. We dropped into the dark velvet armchairs. Above Father’s left shoulder was the photograph of Mlle. Hulot, decorous and looming with a high collar and parasol. She was the French governess summoned more than half a century ago by Grandfather for his only son and many daughters. She had arrived thin and choleric from Paris, and the household and gardeners had called her Houlou — the only way they could pronounce her name — and so in Persia she had finally been transformed into something sweet and delicious. Mlle. Peach. Father kept rustling the papers and coughing and clearing his throat until Mother threatened him.

  “What is it now?” she demanded. “Bronchitis, pneumonia? You never listen to the doctor
, you never listen to common sense, you never listen to anyone!”

  “Look who’s talking,” he said.

  “All my life I’ve spent listening — to all of you — and now I’m tired.”

  “You’re not tired, I’m tired,” he said.

  “Tired of what?” Mother countered.

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “No, I think you better tell me!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Sobhi is dead, I — I don’t know. Forget what I said.”

  Mother glowered and rolled her eyes, and just as she was about to launch one of her invasions, I said, “Uncle Khodayar is having an operation tomorrow.”

  “What?” she said. “How come you know and I don’t?”

  By the time I got through telling her that his wife had called and when and that it was a brain tumor, she was pacing, raking fingers through her hair. Mother was a world-class orator. She gave a fiery speech denouncing her sister-in-law. How she was nothing but trouble. That social-climbing cow from the provinces! That poor, irrational, perpetually resentful midget! That piglet with the eternally stunned expression! Father started flipping through the papers again. She wanted to call her brother immediately, but I said they were already at Pars Hospital, and she jumped up to call, poking her lit cigarette menacingly at the receiver.

  “Najibeh, dear,” Father said gently, now that the storm had passed over his head, “any of that delicious pound cake left?”

  “He’s got a brain tumor and you want pound cake?” she wailed.

  I volunteered to get cake. Father said he’d forgotten his book in the library. I said I’d get it, but he insisted. We went down together, leaving Mother arguing on the phone with the nurse’s station at the hospital.

  “Put him on,” Mother commanded. “We may lose him any moment!”

  Father said she should have been a general. She would have had four stars by now and left everyone alone.

  “So tell me,” he said, “what happened that night with the rear admiral?”

  We were in the front hallway under the Russian chandelier. I told him and he sat on the banquette against the wall, listening. Oddly rigid. The grandfather clock chimed a quarter to the hour. I told him my marriage was going through bad straits. I told him Peyman Bashirian was dead, and the suspicion was infecting everyone. I said maybe I’d been wrong to take on the rear admiral. But I was angry. My voice shook. I said I felt I resented just about everything these days. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me. I said I’d heard young students with more heart and conviction — and worse, putting far more at stake — than anyone I knew anywhere. They staked all! Of course I was angry. I told Father, if we had been raised to respect the status quo, well, then, where was it? How did we support it? It didn’t seem to have any shape or roots or definition anymore. We had grown up in a political vacuum — maybe not just political, but some sort of vacuum nonetheless. We hadn’t questioned the status quo. Instead we had taken our dreams and ambitions, and our equivocations, in fact our entire way of life, our inheritance and therefore our children’s, and settled into what only appeared to be the established order — because it was and wasn’t established — and the awful truth was we were ill prepared to fight, or even face the consequences.

  “What are you two doing down there?” Mother called out.

  Father rose. “You get the cake, I’ll get my book,” he said.

  When I got back upstairs with the tray of tea glasses and pound cake and pot of mint tea, Mother was sifting through a shoe box of old photographs. The box — marked “Magenta satin evening shoes” — was from her favorite shoemaker, old Mr. Mehran, who created custom shoes for a select clientele. Mother said she’d worn the shoes only twice with the magenta evening gown Ninon and Pierre had made her. Father said she’d looked regal with her blond hair swept up and her ample bosom and slim waist and magnificent hips. “Ah! The slim waist,” Mother said, her perspective on the world mending as she pulled out photos she particularly cherished. “Look!” she said. “My angelic baby brother, the cutest toddler! Before the witch.” Somewhere in those black-and-white and sepia photos, time had vanished. Mother announced she was going to bed. She hugged me, warning Father about staying up late and not to forget his pills.

  Father hadn’t had a bite of cake. He told me he hated the paintings Mother collected. He hated owning endless things. He couldn’t sleep. More than anything he wanted to retire to the Caspian and enjoy the garden.

  Then he said, “At one time we had a sort of loyal opposition, with many lessons for both sides to learn from the encounter. These days they only get to look in the mirror. This is a city paved with technocrats. They’ve brought in the young and educated-abroad and swept out the old. And why not? Except the old-timers were experienced and well schooled and well prepared and understood their people and their country. I think today people feel their problems, their privations and concerns, aren’t understood anymore. They think of this crowd as usurpers. The last time they contacted me, a few years ago, they wanted me to be senator. Of course, they’d forgotten how they tried to sabotage my reelection when I was a member of parliament long ago. I was against land reform. At least the way it was executed. I said it would ruin agriculture in this country. It gives me no pleasure to say I was right. I was a landowner. My ancestors had cultivated and fought for and defended their land and this country. We used to be the backbone of this country . . . This time round, they asked me to be senator. But I felt I wouldn’t be representing anyone. I don’t understand the people running this show. I’ve lost touch. Most of our land is gone except for bits and pieces. I don’t know the peasants and farmers anymore, especially since Hajj-Alimardan’s death. Anyway, he always knew them better. I tell you, the more I think about it, the more I think he should have been a member of parliament. I think about him often. Now the farmers are disillusioned. They’re unhappy with the agricultural cooperatives the government’s set up for them. One of them came by again with a crate of fruit from his orchard, his family waiting outside in a van, and he told the gardener they long for the old days and want me back. Of course, that’s impossible. And I don’t really believe it. Anyhow, it wouldn’t work without Hajj-Ali anyway. My dear, I don’t want cake — I’m not hungry. Sobhi died, and I think about death. Old age is tiring after a while. But I don’t want to be young again. Don’t worry, nothing lasts forever. And that young boy’s death — that too shall pass. Why don’t you take a few days at the Caspian?”

  THE NEXT DAY I was at Kamal Bashirian’s again late in the afternoon. He was in the hallway on the phone. I’d come to sign the petition. They were going to deliver it personally the next morning to the Ministry of Justice. His sister and brother-in-law weren’t home yet. Ali and Kazem were talking to me in the living room. I was waiting for Ali to answer my question.

  “When I asked Mr. Bashirian what he saw that night?” Ali repeated. “You heard — I didn’t insist. I couldn’t ask him. But when he was in the infirmary, Peyman was on the table. I wanted to ask if — if the body was still warm. If he could tell how long it had been. Since he’d died. I know, that’s brutal. But how else can we get to the truth?”

  Mr. Bashirian had been telling me how he was getting calls from students he didn’t know and who didn’t even know Peyman but wanted to come by and see him. He refused them all. They argued on the phone with him; they said they had theories. One of them had come by the house anyway and told the brother-in-law he knew for a fact that Peyman had been tortured. “They’re trying to torture me!” Mr. Bashirian protested. “They want me to listen, to come speak at meetings, they want his picture, they want me to discuss Peyman’s convictions. He has become their torch! It makes me ill,” he said. “Their obsession. Their cause. Their need. Don’t they have anything else to think about?”

  Kazem said the students had given their verdict: Peyman had been kept in solitary confinement, interrogated repeatedly, beaten, tortured, and then killed.

  “Is there proo
f?” I said.

  “Come on, how naive can you get?” Ali said.

  Out in the hall, we heard Mr. Bashirian greeting Shahrnoush and her husband. Mr. Bashirian walked in and said they had news from Komiteh. The brother-in-law came in, greeted us, perched on the chair by the doorway, and smoked and complained about traffic. He said he’d talked to his children in Sari that morning, and he missed them terribly. He rubbed his temples; he looked ill. Shahrnoush came and sat by her brother. She was pale and rigid and edgy.

  “What happened?” Ali asked them.

  The brother-in-law said they’d gone to Komiteh that morning and repeated their story at least four different times. At first the officers had listened with a grudging ear, until they’d heard enough; then he and Shahrnoush had been passed over and patronized instead and lectured point-blank and finally ordered to go home. One of the officers had been angry and threatening. “Didn’t you see the medical report? Didn’t you see it was a heart attack? What do you want? How many times must we explain things to you people?” Suddenly Shahrnoush had pounced, shaking from a bad case of nerves and stress, and she’d attacked them like nothing he’d ever seen before.

  “Like a wounded lioness,” her husband said.

  He couldn’t have stopped her even if he’d tried, he said, and she had shrieked and sobbed, denouncing the officials and everyone and everything, beating herself on the head and chest, and screaming, “Go ahead, do what you want! I don’t care anymore.” She’d ended up sitting on the floor, wailing, “I won’t leave, never! Not until you tell us what you did with that poor young boy, not until you give us an answer and stop treating us like goddamn dirt.”