In the Walled Gardens (12 page)

The journalist was taking the minutes. Dr. Hadi unlatched the window to air the room — four of us were smoking. Someone asked,
as always, if Mo’meni had actually written the article and if it wasn’t another SAVAK conspiracy.

“He wrote it, that Stalinist despot!” said our host.

“Of course students are entranced with guerrillas!” said the playwright. “They’re armed. They’re epic. They’re in the vanguard.”

We discussed how the Left was splintered and all over the place, deathly afraid to criticize and rectify itself. Meanwhile
the tide had turned antisecular, with Shariati the rage and students finding religion, calling Islam our legitimate roots
and heritage. Even society philosophy professors and men of letters — those coddled by the regime — were siding with Islam
to retaliate against the Left by saying nothing worthwhile came from the West, and not just trash like Marx. They lectured
on how Western civilization itself was a sewer of corruption, whereas the East had Islam, Sufism, and didn’t have the need
to rebel. They were even bringing back writers like Al-Ahmad, a censored author until recently banned and maligned himself,
to counter Marxism —these jet-set thinkers educated abroad.

“The girls want a separate cafeteria!” the lecturer said. “They don’t want to eat with the boys. They don’t want to take exams
with the boys.”

“The Black Reaction!” said the journalist.

“What’s rational about fanning religious babble?” said our host.

“A hundred Fedayee with dead leaders versus tens of thousands of clerics. Who wins?”

“The regime,” I said.

P
AST MIDNIGHT
in my room I took out paper and the inkwell and the pen box of reed pens. Father had left me his set. His father too had
been a skilled calligrapher, and a mystic, a cleric who had left his village and old garden — a place of mystical legend,
a garden of unusual light and spiritual inspiration — for Tabriz, to teach jurisprudence and theosophy. They had said about
him that he possessed Sufic chivalry, healing gifts, exceptional powers.

I pulled over the low table before me, laying out my implements, trying my hand after years. I sat cross-legged, dipping the
pen in black ink, drawing the tip against paper. An old
ghazal,
a throwback to timeless verses for her. For that time some twenty years ago when I had loved only her.

Autumn. Father long dead and this another season. His picture before me on the wall as I slid his reed pen against paper for
this woman he’d known as a child. Had he known then how I loved her? Known and disapproved and in his wisdom kept quiet, while
I measured his faith in me and the insurmountable obstacles he saw in the world. He knew their world well, had known it living
in the household of her grandmother, Mahbanou
khanom,
year after year. He had received their benevolence — especially hers, as long as she lived — their infinite loyalty and grace
and sense of extended family, but also witnessed their imperious treatment of others, their intrigues and family feuds, their
secret political machinations. He lived between several worlds, his entire life made up of negotiating the infinite demands
between them: the Mosharrafs, the many cultivators of their lands who held inheritable tenant rights, the peasants with their
wily logic but also ignorance and superstition, the village elders and gendarmes and government tax collectors, the turbaned
clerics surrounding his father in Tabriz. I thought Father infinitely judicious and resourceful in his ways.

Except as Mahastee grew older, when she arrived in Morshedabad and I went out to see her, he’d turn steely with apprehension.
He loved her. But she was the daughter of the man he served, and that distinction would remain for him forever. To Father
distinctions were there to be upheld. I thought his manner especially austere when she was there, perhaps to steel me against
her and the world. To say, Things are never how you think. Prepare, prepare for what will come. He’d known then he wouldn’t
succeed with me — known perhaps what could come — and had bided time for the intervention of fate.

Now, long after, I wrote the words of an old master. The room was quiet except for the rasping of a blunt instrument; the
letters, long and drawn like cypresses. Black, night arcs. Tipped. Hooked. Latched. Round and capacious like empty basins.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I called Jalal’s parents from the office. I left a message with the mother, who kept referring to her husband as
hajj-agha.
He called at midday. I recognized him from that first “Allo!” spoken crudely like a peasant and barked into the phone, his
sentences all pitched higher at the end as if everything stated were an impertinent question. He wanted to see me immediately.
Had I done the job? He coughed, a loud hacking noise.

“Tonight,” he said. “Something happened.”

I was at his doorstep at nine, this time addressing him as
hajj-agha.
He took me along the half-lit passageway, at the end of which there was an interior courtyard with a blue-tiled pond of stagnant
water. We took off our shoes and he opened a door, and we stepped up into a small white room with a brand-new Kashan carpet
touching the walls. There were bolstered cushions opposite the door. We sat cross-legged under framed portraits of the Prophet
— faceless and robed, with a golden halo and angels above him — and of the first disciple, Ali, bearing the sword of Zulfaqar.
He took out a rosary from his pocket, fingering the pale green beads. They clicked in the room like the ticking of a clock.
His feet smelled terribly.

The door opened and his wife entered in a white chador, bearing a brass tray of tea. I raised myself in greeting. She left
the tray on the carpet and sat away from us on her knees, looking like an aged twelve-year-old.

“That
hajji
from the bazaar came late last night,” the father said. “The rug merchant. The one who said he’d help. I was groggy with
sleep. He brought bad news. He said, ‘They’ve got your son in Komiteh Prison. They say he’s a Marxist guerrilla.’”

He stared at the floor, shaking his head, ran the palm of one hand over the stubble of his beard.

“He was raised a good Muslim,” he protested. “The only battle worth fighting is in the path to God! Like Imam Hossein, who
was martyred in Karbala.”

His wife wiped tears from her face. “I know my son. He’s a good boy! His heart is pure. He wouldn’t harm a soul.”

The father scowled. “What d’you know about a son you never saw? This city corrupted him. Like it does everyone else.”

She hung her head, and he looked away in silence. The mother rocked to and fro, whispering lamentations, the father’s gaze
fixed on the carpet, running fingers over his rosary. In this city, even after so many years, he was still in exile.

“About the apartment —” I began. Vaguely I mentioned the pamphlets — without saying they were on armed insurrection — that
I’d ripped up and flushed away. I didn’t want to frighten the mother. I said it appeared nothing had been touched there before
me. I didn’t mention the two SAVAK agents in the street but said Jalal owed the landlady rent.

“How much rent?” the father demanded suspiciously.

“Your tea’s gone cold,” the mother said, staring at the tray. She seemed nervous. “Let me get you a fresh one.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” I insisted.

I grabbed a glass and saucer, the dark and tepid brew bitter even through the sugar cube melting on my tongue. The father
started on me, demanding to know if I’d found anything really important. Incriminating evidence? Drugs, a stash of money,
arms? I shook my head.

“What money?” I said. “He owed rent.”

“The
hajji
told me they found evidence,” the father said. “In my son’s apartment.” He stared at me. “You promised to destroy evidence.”

“I told you I did.”

“You’re educated. You know a lot. You said you were there first!”

I stared at him.

“They said they found evidence. Why did you go, for the money? To take something? Plant something?”

I saw how the mother looked embarrassed. He believed I’d lied to them, suspecting I’d had other motives all along. He didn’t
trust anyone.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “Someone like Jalal? Or tell me, are you an informer?”

I said I was his son’s friend.

He couldn’t be sure of anything except the bitter certainty of all the betrayals he’d already seen and anticipated. He’d migrated
to the city with so many others and seen gray for so many years that the more he saw the more he was disgusted.

“The only truth today is spoken in the mosque,” he declared.

His wife was beseeching God and the Twelve Imams under her breath. The father said the way he saw it his sole duty in life
was donating funds to the clergy for his religious obligations. Now he would be doubling the funds, even tripling them. He
said he had no other allegiance.

“They’re the only source of moral authority,” he said.

I said I was sorry about his son.

“We must all fight the battle of Karbala!” he said, rising.

I thanked the old woman for the tea.

“I should’ve stayed in my village,” the father said. “Why did I leave?”

I left, relieved to get away. Twisting in the darkened alleys past the mud-brick walls, I thought how so many of the people
who lived here harbored regrets and how many of their children had deserted them to move up and away from them in this city.

M
R. BASHIRIAN CAME IN
with a wad of folders. His trousers were too long, like the sleeves on his shabby tweed jacket. He was shrinking.

“Really!” I said. “You’re disappearing.”

He left the folders on the table, sank into a chair. He visited me daily. I walked around the desk and stood leaning against
it.

“You must eat!”

“I can’t,” he said.

At first, years ago, he’d annoyed me. The ceremonious demeanor, the persnickety work habits, that austere guise like that
of a maiden aunt, finicky, brooding. Then one day I saw him in Bam-daad eating ice cream and cream cakes with his son, and
as I watched them it changed my opinion of him forever. He was such a tender father. They ate custard tartlets covered with
fruit, they ate éclairs, they ate creamy roulette. They ate and ate, laughing together. Peyman was nine at the time, with
big cheeks and a crew cut and eyes the size of saucers. They were so engrossed with each other that they didn’t see me. Later
when we were better acquainted Mr. Bashirian told me about his wife — how she’d died in a car accident in the mountain passes
of Gachsar. After her there could be no other woman, he said. He had his son, his work. At night he listened to Shajarian
and Banon on the radio, and to old records of Badi‘zadeh and Ghamar, and weekends he painted. He had taken classes from the
famous Katouzian. One time he brought in a small oil painting wrapped in brown paper, a gift for me. A tranquil sea with bloodstained
sunset and red clouds and floating gulls. Maudlin, pretty awful actually, but touching. When I took it home, Houshang laughed.

“Are you painting?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “I pray.”

He’d always been rational and solid, a man devoted to secular liberalism, measuring the progress of this nation inch by painful
inch. I couldn’t imagine him fatalistic, submissive.

“I’ve made a vow,” he said, “to Imam Reza.”

Kavoos had told me to put him in touch with a certain lawyer. I put this to Mr. Bashirian. Here was something solid. I felt
in this way I would wash my hands of the whole affair.

He wrote the name and phone number in a small blue calendar he took from the inside pocket of his jacket.

“You need time off,” I said. “Take a week. Why don’t you arrange —”

He refused immediately. “Never! I need to work. More work. Anything to keep from agonizing.”

I argued for a bit. He could be insufferably stubborn. I asked if he had any relatives in Tehran, but he said his sister lived
up north, in Sari.

“Any nieces and nephews?”

“They live up north. Why?”

For his own sake I said, “Say you have an ailing niece. She’s deathly ill. People are asking questions. They think something’s
wrong. Don’t you see? Please, let’s give them some sort of answer. For now.”

He agreed, reluctant, pushing his folders like a proud man fiddling with defeat.

T
HE DIRECTOR QUESTIONED
my judgment the next day. He’s hugely distracted and under enormous pressure, rushing to meetings and official events all
week, arranging for conferences and endless foreign visitors. Recently the buoyant effect of all that has receded, leaving
him looking oddly vacuous. He seemed deflated when he called me into his office. First we went over new papers for our journal
and publications. “Statism and the Dangers of Economically Interventionist States Engaging in Monological Speech.” He said
nobody read this stuff anyway, especially way at the top! He flipped through the article “The Rentier Economy and Rentier
Mentality in Iran,” then skimmed through the first two pages of “Our One-Product Economy — Oil — and Patron-Client Relationship
with Foreign Powers,” poking at it with his pen.

He said, “As always it comes down to the obvious need for scientific study versus the obvious need for censorship.”

Then he complained how he wasn’t pleased at all with Mr. Bashirian.

“What’s going on? I hear he’s a poor manager. He’s hostile and curt with colleagues and impossible in meetings. I hear he’s
sneaking home papers and photocopying documents.”

“He would do no such thing.”

“Then what’s the problem? His colleagues are complaining.”

“He’s an invaluable employee.”

“That’s not what I hear anymore. Ask Mr. Makhmalchi.”

Mr. Makhmalchi was a snoop, a clever and overbearing toady promoted instead of Mr. Bashirian, whose competence and very principles
were now in question.

“Mr. Bashirian’s a hard worker and an honorable man. He hasn’t changed.”

“Of course, you wanted him promoted. You’re biased. I’ll give him two weeks.”