In the Walled Gardens (11 page)

“What does he like?”

“Mountain ranges and desert, out-of-the-way places. He likes children.”

“He has a girl?”

“He only studies.”

They’d taken what they thought of as evidence. So they were building a case, a verdict, we reassured ourselves. They’d contact
him any day now, permitting him to see Peyman finally after all this time.

“I can’t thank you enough,” he said again in the street. “You’re the light in a dark room.”

I cringed at such gratitude, even before I came to know the fate that was to befall his son.

T
HIERRY CALLED
the office several days later and said we should talk. Where better than his house up in Sa‘adabad, say around six-thirty?
I equivocated when he said “house,” suggesting a public place. But he said he was having drinks at home for some French businessmen
staying at the Hilton before taking them to dinner. If I didn’t mind. ...I decided to make the best of it.

The maid opened the door.

“Mrs. Behroudi,” she said, her tight-lipped smile implying disapproval.

I was a married woman who’d come alone to the home of a foreign bachelor.

To my surprise I found I’d arrived before the other guests. Thierry had said they were coming at six-thirty. He breezed into
the living room with goodwill and vitality, wearing an open shirt, chinos, and loafers — no attire for business guests and
dinner. He kissed me on the cheeks, took my hand, brushing his lips over it, lingering. I pretended not to notice.

“And your guests?” I demanded.

“We’re meeting at Chez Maurice later. My secretary got things muddled. Hope you don’t mind. What will you have?”

I asked for tea by the sliding glass doors facing his pool and garden, trying to overlook the compelling possibility he’d
never planned on having anyone else there but me. He spoke about his house, the luxury of living abroad, pouring himself a
Scotch over ice. Wandering, I admired his collection of carved Buddhas and jade figurines from the Far East, though I’d seen
them before when Houshang and I had been invited to his dinners. Thierry flopped on the large sofa, arms splayed, features
poised with effrontery and luster. An introduction to trouble, if I’d ever seen one.

“Seen Pouran lately?” I asked.

“Only when you’re around!”

I stayed by the window, pulled out a cigarette, lit it before he could get over.

“You’re fast,” he marveled.

I smiled. “Efficient.”

The maid brought tea, then turned to him.

“Moosio Dalembert, r-reean doploo?”
she asked in a funny accent, smiling at Thierry coquettishly despite her apparent prudery and advanced age.

He’d inherited her from his predecessor. In broken Persian he said, in the most elaborate way, that he was dining out and
dismissed her. They’d crossed languages, displaying skills for my sake. It was a bit of theater. We heard the front door slam
as she left.

I could see why she had greeted me that way. He’d never told her to expect nor prepare for any other guests.

I took the armchair by the window, as far away from Thierry as possible.

“Tehran’s an ugly city,” he said. “But — it has timeless charms.”

“Spoken like a colonialist!”

He laughed, excited at the possibility of being outwitted. It prolonged the seduction.

“Thierry, look —”

“Efficient again?”

He sauntered over to my armchair, stood over me. He was being impossible. Looking straight in my eyes, he said just above
a whisper, “Come on, you know how I feel. Stop fighting it.”

I dragged on my cigarette, asked if he’d made a decision about Peyman Bashirian. He walked away.

“Your record on human rights is atrocious,” he declared.

“It isn’t mine!”

“See! There’s no upper class less committed to the very regime it depends on. It’s — disgraceful.”

Now that there was to be no seduction, he was making his points, one by one.

“At the slightest rumble they’ll all desert ship,” he said, eyes glinting. “Like rats.”

He wanted to get even. But I’d come for a favor, not to argue fine and arguable points. The regime didn’t rule with or through
us, nor any particular social class.

He poured himself another drink, saying his boss was coming in from Paris. He said he had an offer: he’d help me if I’d help
get Houshang to use his influence in favor of Thierry’s bank. I paused, then accepted, pausing for his sake, not mine. The
French admire reflection.

He told me to write up what I knew about Peyman Bashirian’s case there and then. He’d contact a newspaper and a human rights
organization in Paris as I’d requested. He went into the next room and took a white sheet and pen from the desk by the window.
I said I preferred dictating; he could take notes.

“Really!” he said. “Who’d recognize your handwriting? I won’t tell.”

I shrugged. I had obligations. Still, I’d just avoided even committing the account of my friend’s son to paper. My inbred
discretion was craven. A telling milestone, I thought with resentment and contempt. I grabbed the pen and paper and wrote.

“Either way, you’re playing with fire!” he assured me.

His culture, like mine, thrives on heightened emotion and theatrics.

By the door he tried to kiss me on the lips, but I turned my cheek.

“I want you,” he whispered.

In the street I laughed at his ambitions.

I
TOLD HOUSHANG ABOUT
the banker’s reception in the car. The invitation had been hand-delivered that day. He shrugged it off, exasperated at something
else. We were on our way home from a reception for yet another visiting trade delegation, this one from the Far East. I longed
to be home with the children. I never man-aged to spend enough time with them. With bumper-to-bumper traffic, the drive uptown
was taking forever.

Houshang kept honking at cars cutting in left and right, griping about letting off the chauffeur earlier than usual, and about
how a deputy minister had snubbed him at the reception. “The idiot has an inferiority complex!” he said. He was exasperated
with the new snags each and every day at the Ports and Shipping Organization.

“The project’s going to be canceled?” I asked.

“Not with our kind of clout!”

My husband thrives on clout.

He shrugged. “I’m not worried.”

I was surprised Bandar Kangan was going full-force ahead, unlike other major projects recently aborted. Houshang didn’t want
to speculate, so I told him Reza Nirvani would be coming to the house to tutor. His reaction was irrational.

“I don’t see why we need him in the house!”

We argued on until I finally lied and said Father had arranged it. Houshang dared not dispute nor ridicule Father’s judgments
so readily.

“You mean there isn’t another tutor in the world?” he demanded. “I need to be consulted when it concerns my sons.”

“What do you have against Reza?”

Houshang lit a cigarette, dragging on the filter with derision. “Don’t tell me he’s a friend of your brothers’. That’s ridiculous!
What does he want?”

“He doesn’t want anything. He’s a friend of the family’s.”

“He’s a peasant.”

“No he isn’t!”

“So he’s the son of a sharecropper.”

“It so happens his father was a distinguished man, and his mother is a distant relative of Father’s.”

“We’re all also distantly related to apes! I didn’t ask for his genealogy. Why are we arguing about this chap anyway?”

And so it was I came to inform my husband that the matter was already settled.

T
HE MAID OPENED THE DOOR
and introduced herself as Goli, Tourandokht’s great-granddaughter. She said her mistress had already told her I was the new
tutor. She kept house for Mrs. Behroudi, her husband cooked, and they had three children. I said I’d seen her great-grandmother
the week before, a woman who had brought up several generations in the Mosharraf household and who didn’t have a birth certificate
but claimed she was born during the Tobacco Boycott against the British. Goli giggled and said she had forgotten the story.
Frivolous and insubstantial compared to Tourandokht.

We heard Mahastee upstairs reproaching her children.

Goli directed me to the living room and left. I stood at one end before the old glazed pottery propped up on glass shelves.
Farther along the same wall were two groupings of old miniatures with gold leaf. Leyli and Majnoun in robes of purple, recumbent
in a pavilion; Sufi dervishes by an indigo river; Rostam the hero battling Afrasiyab; Yusuf and Zuleikha under stylized clouds,
attended by stylized courtiers in turquoise and saffron. On a side table was a collection of Qajar pen boxes, painted and
lacquered, with hunting scenes, nightingales among roses, bearded noblemen, and oval medallions with portraits of Europeans.
I picked up a
qalamdan,
pulled out one end.

“Looking for a pen?”

I turned to face Mahastee, expecting her to be robed in gold and flowing magenta. I’d seen her in yellow in a garden under
hail.

She smiled and we shook hands. I told her I was there to help out for a few weeks. Besides the department I was also teaching
night school. I had asked around to find her a suitable and permanent tutor.

She smiled. “You’re doing me a big favor.”

She wore dark slacks and a white shirt, stylish and sedate. And still true to herself, instinctively unpretentious. I complimented
her pen boxes.

“You still do calligraphy?” she asked.

“My father was adept. He had deep faith guiding his ink and pen.”

“You don’t?”

“I had his until he passed away.”

So many years gone by, and we could feel them buckle under us, our smiles slightly strained at the realization, and at being
alone together. She explained that her sons would appear shortly. Aged ten and twelve, they were lazy, unfocused students
and needed discipline, the rewards of hard work.

She went through milky curtains, unlocking a French window, the curtains billowing as she flung open the casements. She turned,
her face opaque behind the drapes, her eyes restive; then she stepped outside and I followed. She pointed to her bed of roses
and we started walking. Gusts blew the dried leaves of plane trees, scattering them over the lawns. In the midst of cooler
days, we’d hit upon a mild afternoon. As she spoke, her eyes flitted back and forth, the light hazel of their irises darkly
outlined, her elongated eyebrows ornamental, her skin pale, flawless. She told me about the years since she had left for England
and returned, a succession of events proceeding like clockwork, her tone meandering, then efficient, as if their passage had
been mechanical. I talked about university and teaching and my job at the department, outlining without essence. “And you’re
not married?” She smiled. “No, not yet,” I said. Explaining had distanced us from each other with time and place, making sudden
strangers of us instead of bringing us closer to the emotions we felt at seeing each other again. The lawns sloped down to
a pool, and she descended, limber, and we circled down, drifting to the side of a gardening shed by the farthest wall. For
a moment she stood, uncertain, as if about to disclose something, then changed her mind.

Standing there at the far end of the garden, I found her exactly as I’d known her twenty years before. All she had related
about what she’d done and who she’d been with were irrelevant. I found that astonishing, this phantom truth crossing twenty
years — this elemental connection between us, though everything else in our lives had changed.

We climbed back up the slope, and her sons came running out the open French window of the living room, and her expression
changed, slackened, though her body grew taut. She waved, drifting toward them like a ship berthing. They ran round us in
circles, chasing each other and shouting, the large white house towering as we gathered to go back inside.

I
TOLD THE TAXI
to drop me off in Dokhaniyat, and although I’d got off only three blocks away, still I was running late.

There was a nip in the air. I was hungry, but there was no time for dinner. I had been given the code and a succession of
knocks to get into the house for our meeting. Seven of us were there. Our host — a chemical engineer and the son of a cleric
in Mashhad — had first read Hegel in Arabic and joined an Islamic student association there until discovering the secular
Left at the polytechnic in Tehran. The others were a lecturer at Tehran University on modern history; a young filmmaker, still
editing his documentary on village life; Dr. Hadi, a radiologist who had studied in Paris and was also a translator; a newspaper
columnist who resented his state-sanctioned prose and dug out scandals on corruption; and our playwright and literary critic,
a chain-smoker and pedant who emulated the prominent dramatist Sa‘edi. We sat in the small room around an Arj steel table
and chairs, flimsy curtains drawn. Our host brought in a jug of water and tea after turning down the radio a tad in the other
room.

We had a watchman in the street, a boy sitting under a street-lamp. Poor bastards, all they ever got to do was watch and wait.

We passed out the study questions given to all four of our sections: What kind of revolution today? Who will make it — the
people, the party, the revolutionaries? Can there be revolution without a political party? In what form can the historic vanguard
appear? What kind of party do we make? What kind of rapport with the masses? Then we moved on to the main topic for the night
— the continuing problems for the Left at Tehran University. It had started with a poisonous article by Mo’meni, a leftist
hero to students — a Fedayee guerrilla — now dead, arrested and executed along with other leaders. But when he was alive,
his diatribe against the faculty had thundered on campus, accusing, naming names — professors of economics and sociology,
especially those who taught anything about Marxism. “Far from dedicated intellectuals, they’re corrupters, informers, collaborators
of the regime!” he’d warned students. “Trust no one!” In class they’d pointed at teachers and said, “You must be in with SAVAK.”
We were incensed. Just when we’d gained momentum and the students were more involved than ever — resisting, participating,
committed — this blow had been delivered to the Left by the Left. The Left was still paranoid, and it continued to demand
mind control and enforce censorship.