In the Walled Gardens (14 page)

T
HURSDAY AFTERNOON
I was there tutoring the two boys in the dining room when I heard Mahastee come in. I’d given the boys a quiz, and while
they figured out the math problems, I heard her around the house and the phone kept ringing. The boys chewed the end of their
pencils, eyes flitting about.

“Concentrate!” I thundered.

They pumped their legs, squirmed in their seats, shot out the room after the lesson. I was in the hall when Mahastee came
out onto the upstairs landing, wearing a navy blue suit and high heels. She said she wanted to discuss my fee, her slender
body exerting a strange hold over me as she swept down the stairs.

“What fee?” I protested.

We argued. I couldn’t possibly accept payment from her. There was no question of charging her by the hour; besides, I was
an interim tutor. We got all tied up standing on ceremony, and she insisted so much that I made to leave.

“I’d like your advice,” she said.

She directed me into a smaller room with a television and large sofa and low table; she was steady, only her eyes troubled.
I dropped my satchel, which held our group’s commentaries on Latin American revolutionaries, by the sofa, staring at the painting
on the wall above it. A large canvas in sepia colors by Hajizadeh of a father and son, inspired by an old turn-of-the-century
photograph, it was a portrait at once decorous, tense, intimate, enigmatic, unyielding. To my astonishment, Mahastee said
what I was thinking.

“It reminds me of you and your father.”

There she sat, below it, and told me about a colleague whose son, a student at Aryamehr University, had been taken. I said
I’d asked her father to intervene on behalf of Jalal Hojjati. So it seemed we both knew some young man who was a political
prisoner.

“I’m just surprised you do,” I said.

“Why, is that your specialty?”

I smiled. “Let’s say my political views are different from yours.”

“But I don’t have any!”

“Exactly.”

She waited for an explanation I would not give. I could never divulge anything about my underground politics. I told her some-thing
vague instead, which only confirmed there was a lot more I couldn’t say.

She gave me a knowing stare, changed the subject. “When I told Father about the boy in prison, he was appalled. In fact he
was disappointed — I mean with me. He may be a wise and weathered old hand, but he’s — out of touch. He used to be forceful
and obdurate. But they set him aside years ago. They like burning their bridges behind them. Of course, they hate old-timers,
and Father despises playing the sort of toady they need. He’s aged.”

“I found him barely changed,” I said.

She held my gaze. I couldn’t lie to her.

“My friend doesn’t eat,” she said. “He’s on Valium. He’s about to have a nervous breakdown. If something happens to his son,
he’ll never forgive himself. I — I haven’t consulted Houshang about this.”

She leaned forward, close, bringing traces of her perfume.

“As I watch him fall apart,” she murmured, “my own sense of equanimity is falling apart too.”

I stared at the table.

“In a way,” she said, “I’ve made a decision for him. It could go wrong. It’s treacherous deciding for someone else, isn’t
it?”

“He must be grateful to have you.”

“He’s grateful to have his son.”

She got up, went to a cabinet, pulled out an album, and, flipping through the pages, pointed. There we were, scrawny adolescents
with younger parents. Her brothers, my sister, boys from the village and gardeners’ children in Morshedabad. A photograph
of the house there fell from her lap — the slanted roof, the front steps, the sunlit grove up against the house. The shadows
underneath, where life had once passed. We had left it all suddenly, and with it the Mosharrafs. After the incident in Morshedabad
that summer, we left — I’m the only one still alive who knows the story, an insidious secret that ate away at us. Father,
humiliated and embittered, packed us all off to Tehran, and then, once there, he fell into quiet days hollowed out by gloom
until he went back to farm his own villages in Azarbaijan. And despite a heart attack, for years he worked his land. But then
he lost it with land reform and went bankrupt and finally lost all he had. He died a broken man. They don’t know that either,
the Mosharrafs, how Father ended up.

“Most of the garden’s gone,” she said. “Now Father wants to sell the house.”

She wanted me to have the photograph, but I said it was for her to keep. She didn’t know what I meant, and I wasn’t about
to tell her about that miserable incident and why we had left Morshe-dabad. I say let that too stay buried. Erupting suddenly
that summer, it had poisoned our life, then receded, dying off with each passing year bit by bit. After that, in Tehran, Father
paid the formal and customary visit once a year only to Mahastee’s father. But I refused to go and so had given up seeing
Mahastee. Except once, when Father, insisting, had taken me with him, and she had led me through the summer garden that evening,
her dress fluttering against the green underbrush and her eyes incandescent, and I’d been seized with a wild and brutal remorse
and kissed her there and then. Then, steely and remote as if to punish her — though it was nothing she had done but my emotion
at seeing her again and my remorse — I’d left, never to return, and she’d left for school abroad.

She pointed to a picture of Father — erect, calm, long before he withered, long before his ultimate defeat — with high forehead,
austere eyes, dark mustache, the Adam’s apple. A sensible man standing in a field with Nasrollah
mirza
and village elders.

“Your father was the most wonderful man. Grandmother adored him.”

“Father always said you look like her.”

“Did you get my letter of condolence?”

She’d written a moving testament, simple, heartfelt, when Father died.

The phone rang again for her, and I wrote down my number at work before leaving. Winding down the garden path, I wondered
about her equilibrium, and mine with her, by the immaculately pruned rose bushes and inert fountain.

H
ER FATHER CALLED ME
at the office in the morning. He said he’d just returned from a short visit to the Caspian.

“We had splendid weather!”

He got talking about orange trees and mimosas and rice paddies just long enough to make polite conversation. Otherwise what
he was calling about could have been summed up in an indelicately short amount of time.

He cleared his throat. “About that friend of yours. Before leaving, I spoke to Kavoos, who has his ways. Dear boy, I’m afraid
the news is — is that for the time being, nothing can be done. But I was assured there would be the utmost . . . care and
deliberation in handling the case. If you see what I mean.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, wondering if he believed this himself.

“Needless to say, your friend should’ve known better. Now, I’m passing no judgments here —”

“Of course —”

“But you know these things can be quite difficult. The atmosphere is . . . charged. Perhaps with a bit of forbearance everyone
will see the light.”

He’d lost me now. Did he mean SAVAK would see the light, or the regime, or nasty leftists like Jalal? I imagined us all dazzled
by clarity.

“I’ll let you know — that is, if anything new crops up. There isn’t much that can be done for the time being. But —”

I interrupted to spare him the inconvenience of offering other excuses. He meant well and had called himself instead of passing
on the message. A gentleman from the old school. I thanked him, saying I hoped it hadn’t been a terrible inconvenience.

“Come by and see us,” he said. “Don’t stay away now.”

I
HAD FORTY-TWO STUDENTS
in my class of trigonometry at the Rahnema High School on Moniriyeh. The first month of the academic year, and already several
were behind, and this time I was angry. “You expect to pass the final exams like this?” I called out. Most of them were between
twenty and twenty-six. All of them had day jobs and took night courses to prepare to sit for the national examinations to
get their twelfth-grade diploma.

Hossein Farahani had lost his father at fifteen and ever since had been obliged to support a family. He was the one I had
recruited who worked in the auto repair shop. For two years I had watched and listened to his arguments. He was hard on everyone
but hardest on himself. His most interesting instinct was to disagree. I never recruited the ones who didn’t contradict me.
He sat insolent and unrepentant in the back.

After class I kept Hossein and Massoud. They sat, my youngest students, hunched in their seats, and I asked what they had
to say for themselves, and Hossein said he had family trouble. I asked if it was his mother again, little sisters, two brothers.
He wouldn’t say. Massoud, who was a typesetter for a small publishing firm, said he had no family but had problems. Hossein
wasn’t really listening, for usually he argued. After my last course I saw him in the hall downstairs and we walked out together.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing.” He shrugged.

“Where were you last night?”

“I dined out at Shekoufeh-Nau with my mistress, and after the show I whistled for my chauffeur, who took us back to my white
villa.”

His jaw was clenched he was so angry. We walked on. At the corner of Simetri, he turned to me.

“I drag along this family my father left me. Mouths to feed, clothes to buy, doctors’ bills. What do I own in this world?
We’re miserable, and uptown they’re fattening up. If I get hit by a car tomorrow, my sisters and brothers will beg or sell
themselves, and mother will die and make them orphans.”

“The auto repair shop you work for,” I said, “— I want to see it.”

“Zaffar’s Garage.”

“You said they’ve got empty rooms in the back.”

“Filthy rooms,” he said.

“Tell them you know someone who needs a workshop behind a garage.”

He had a purity and intensity that reminded me of myself way back. He believed the things he said honestly and with feeling
and with the kind of simplicity and forthrightness that the rest of us had lost.

He followed me to our appointment. Our
Night Letter,
ready for distribution, was on the week-old hunger strike of eight political prisoners in Qasr Prison and the execution of
a member of the Tudeh. Some on the Left were insisting this Tudehi was no political prisoner but a spy for socialist imperialism
and the Soviet Union. The dispute was whether those of us against the Tudeh but for human rights should protest this execution.
Six hundred copies to distribute that night on political commitment.

I left Hossein at the street corner and went up to the third-floor apartment to collect the copies from Dr. Hadi. In the dim
light of his back room, among his books and papers, he pointed to the stack. “Only students care about such things,” he said,
shrugging. Essayist and translator, he said he’d heard from his publisher that they and others were banding together — big
publishers like Amir Kabir — to formally protest censorship and demand a meeting with the prime minister and SAVAK censors.
The only ones immune from censorship were the Islamic publishers. “More than thirty new ones in the last decade!” he said.
“Their journals sell forty thousand copies a month, and the finest literary journal sells two thousand. Qom is a factory!
Islam, an ideology like Marx. Yet the clergy get slush funds from the state, and all the rest of us are forced underground.”
“They’re more afraid of us!” I said. “They fund them to keep them irrelevant. We must work harder, write faster!” “But it’s
spreading uptown,” said Dr. Hadi. “Vacuous society ladies are frequenting the houses of dervishes and celebrating religious
feasts, all decked in the latest fashions and lace and high heels. Even pop singers are crooning about the call for prayer
and the second coming. Disco-Islam!”

We divided the stack into bunches, and I ran them down to the street to give to Hossein and three other students he’d recruited,
who were waiting by the curb on motorcycles.

Then I slipped off into the side streets to give a lecture at ten in a basement. My favorite topic — the young Marx and extreme
voluntarism.

Late that night in my room, while correcting papers, I stared at the framed incantations Father had penned years before. That
steady hand, drawing letters like rivers. The words swooping down, then soaring, waves, gathering like a mighty ocean. Arrangements
of faith in ordered syllables, stroke by stroke, root by root. The very web that sustained him, splendid, impermeable.

Our time is tormented by a hunger for convictions.

W
E’D ARRANGED TO MEET
the French journalist at the Intercontinental early in the evening. He was waiting in the grand lobby to take us up to his
room. We shook hands, and he pointed us to the bank of elevators.

Mr. Bashirian was visibly nervous. I knew he understood French, but he refused to acknowledge this before the journalist.
He kept looking to me or down at his shoes. Leaving the elevator on the seventh floor, he hesitated long enough for me to
think he’d decided against going through with it. He looked riddled with guilt. Out in the corridor he took a white handkerchief
from his pocket and patted his forehead.

The room was crammed with two beds covered with stacks of books and papers, a typewriter on the desk. Several chairs were
around a table at the far end by the window, which had a view to the back, overlooking the flat tarred roofs of midtown, spawning
television aerials.

“Ugly roofs!” the journalist said.

Then, as if to make up for this slight and immediately ingratiate himself, he offered us tea or drinks. We declined. Mr. Bashirian
stood, wooden. When I’d made arrangements for the meeting, he’d indicated to me he wanted no one else present and no tape
recorder. He feared reprisals, reports to SAVAK. He feared the interview would have grave repercussions despite all assurances
of anonymity. He didn’t trust anyone. Still, he’d come with a sort of morbid fascination, like a man testing his wings by
running off a cliff.