In the Walled Gardens (20 page)

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?”

T
WENTY-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 opportunity, 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.

I told Goli to leave dinner for Houshang. She hesitated by the door as if she wanted something, yet another raise. She wasn’t
going to get one. She’d been gossiping up and down the street, idling at front doors with cooks and gardeners and chauffeurs,
comparing notes. Disapproving of the inflowing house help from Bangladesh and the Philippines.

The children fought in the car all the way. I interrupted to ask if they liked their tutor, Mr. Nirvani.

“He’s strict. But he plays great soccer! He’s in a league!”

They played soccer sometimes for a break. I hadn’t even paid Reza — he refused to take money. I would call and insist, now
that he’d given me his office number. Something he had not said still bothered me about why his father had retired abruptly
that year, leaving suddenly that summer when we were fourteen. They had vanished between one month and the next. Father had
never given me a proper explanation, considering how Reza’s family had been a part of our lives and how Hajj-Alimardan had
had Father’s complete trust and run his estates to his complete satisfaction. In time, though it seemed impossible, I was
certain Father didn’t even have a proper explanation for himself.

Evening. The properties by the mountains enveloped in darkness, fenced in by walls. The air bracing, cool. I felt the strangest
tranquillity, driving through the gates of the old garden. Father was standing on the front porch waiting, hands clasped behind
his back. He waved as we came out of the car.

When I went up to kiss him, I lingered and he said, “You’re sad tonight.”

He sent the children in and took me for a walk. Past Mother’s pond of water lilies with goldfish, past the vanishing petunias
and snapdragons of summer. He pointed here and there, linking his arm into mine. Beyond the cypresses, the pine trunks were
draped with ivy.

“You know, those days,” he said, “they’re forgotten. This is a city with no memory. Everyone and everything is forgotten here.”

Father liked to tell stories while walking. The warring factions during the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and Mohammad Ali
Shah’s rebellion. The bombing of the new parliament. The old aristocracy, appointed, dismissed, exiled, bribed by the Russian
and British legations. The terror of invasion from the Bolsheviks, with Khiabani in Azarbaijan and Kuchek Khan in Gilan. Famine
and typhoid and cholera in Tehran. The government bankrupt and humiliated. The British imposing the disgraceful 1919 Agreement,
contemplating how to break Persia into pieces to safeguard their empire. The old regime. A new one. And always, an uncertain
future.

By the fruit trees at the end of the garden, there was no light. We turned back, the black facade of the house looming.

“Change comes as surely as the seasons,” he said. “We must fight for a place in this world. It’s no use losing heart. We must
hold our heads high.”

On the porch we stood facing the garden, the dark slab of sky over us. The night breeze bore the faint scent of perishing
roses. A lone bird trilled high in a tree. Father’s wizened face was intent on some purpose long abandoned.

When we went in, Mother glared at him disapprovingly.

“You’ll catch cold without a cardigan,” she said to him, kissing me.

Father ignored her.

Mrs. Vahaab and the colonel arrived for dinner. She had her domed coiffure and penciled mole and another frilly dress on.
The colonel was ramrod and solicitous. Mrs. Vahaab was telling us about the rabbits and chickens and hens they kept in their
garden. And her parrot, Ghamar.

“Such a ridiculous name!” said Mother.

“Please, madame, try keeping some of your opinions to yourself,” said Mrs. Vahaab, puckering her lips.

A manservant brought around a tray of freshly squeezed pomegranate juice in old bohemian glasses. Mrs. Vahaab clutched a glass
with her pudgy pinkie in the air and drank from it as if from the fountain of youth.

For dinner we had borscht and cabbage rice and fat Tabrizi meatballs. The children amused themselves by peeking at each other
from across the table between the fruit epergnes and giggling. For dessert we had ripe persimmons and apples and pears from
the garden. Mother loves persimmons and she loves autumn. We took tea in the living room, bolstered by a succession of her
antique Russian chintz cushions presenting the first motorcars, czarist steam engines, and steamships, all backed in claret
velvet. Mrs. Vahaab said she had a cough, patting her plump bosom. The colonel, fingering his walrus mustache, issued a directive
that she take mint tea with rock candy to assuage it. Mother was about to call for the house help, but I went into the kitchen.
The colonel gets pushy only when it comes to his wife, his military career docile and dull and cut short. She was his only
compensation. He was discussing the war when I got back with mint tea.

“Which war is it this time?” Mother said.

“Why, the Second World War, of course, madame. When the Allies overran our country. We were called, and I bade my sweet young
bride farewell early that morning and went off to fight.”

Mother smiled angelically. “But Colonel, you got back home for lunch!”

The colonel, blushing to his ears, coughed politely into his starched and monogrammed white handkerchief.

Mrs. Vahaab, sipping mint tea blithely, turned to me. “Remember when I sang at your wedding?”

“How could I forget?”

“I was inspired that night, you know. I was communing with the universe. I felt a mystical light within me, a majestic surge.”

Mother rolled her eyes, as indiscreetly as possible. We all ignored her.

So she spoke. “Mystical surges must be like electrical ones. You’re a veritable generator, dear madame. The colonel should
plug you in to iron his shirts!”

Father suppressed his laugh, and the colonel immediately quoted a verse from Hafez to dispel this affront. A fitting but ineffectual
cure for Mother’s unremitting sarcasm at the universe.

Father took me into his library after they left. First he shelved a bound volume of Montaigne’s essays that was lying open
on his desk. Then he looked through his books, pulled one out, and gave it to me. It was a new and scandalous tome written
by a journalist against the so-called thousand families, the landowning oligarchy.

“They’re trashing us again,” he said. He settled into his arm-chair. “You know, I feel bad. We haven’t seen Reza’s family
since Hajj-Alimardan’s death. May he rest in peace, he’d be proud of this son. I think for years Reza wanted to stay away.
That day he came, he came back to us. I can’t tell you what it meant to me. How happy I was! But later, I thought about it
and realized he was already lost to us. Perhaps forever.”

“Lost to us?” I said, startled.

“He was aloof, judgmental. You know, like a stranger.”

“He’s no stranger.”

I asked him about Hajj-Alimardan’s retirement. Had there been some incident? Father wanted to know why I thought that.

“Reza’s got that stubborn streak of his father,” Father said, shaking his head. “I didn’t help. When I called him about the
problem he came to see me for, I suppose I sounded oblivious. I meant well.”

He sank into the armchair by the faded sepia photographs.

“If I’d left it to Kavoos to call him, or any of the boys, it would’ve been worse. They don’t care.”

He hadn’t thought of asking me.

“Talk to him,” Father said. “If he respects us, it’s by choice, not instinct. You know, he may be in trouble. These things
happen.”