In the Walled Gardens (28 page)

In the car, neither of us spoke. Houshang slipped in a cassette of Italian music, like the summer evenings of the Hotel Darband.
In the backstreets of Zafaranieh, he condemned the divorce of two of our closest friends. She had asked for it, and for the
children.

“I believe in marriage,” he said. “For me, there’s no question of divorce. Ever. No question of taking children. It’s barbaric.”

I defended her.

“You defend her because she’s a woman. She should have the mettle to stick it out. She’s selfish.”

He smiled, his gold ring glinting in the dark on the wheel. “When a woman leaves her husband, it’s only because she’s being
unfaithful. Because there’s another man.” He looked over at me.

I looked out the window at the walled gardens we were passing. The moon was out, a sliver between huddled clouds. The street
a straight and dark incision. The trees phantoms. He wanted to pick an argument with me that I wouldn’t have. He wanted to
draw me out. I saw the inky sky, incomparably distant.

“I like my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

“Would you fight to keep it?”

He laughed. “Fight? Fight for what?”

M
AHASTEE HAD CALLED ME
at the office earlier in the week and made an appointment for midday at a café on Naderi.

She was already sitting at a far table when I got there. She looked unusually pale, abandoned with a guarded grandeur in the
far corner, and was smoking, with a cup of coffee before her. The radiant eagerness of her adolescence had faded and instead
she carried a convalescing patience.

I knew why she wanted to see me. But I wasn’t sure how she could argue about the effrontery of her husband that night in their
front hall without being disloyal to him or insulting my intelligence. I’d already decided not to set foot in that house again.
But I kept the purpose of our meeting separate from her husband’s rudeness, which had brought us together, and waited for
the moment to tell her.

We ordered more coffee; I insisted she was my guest. She insisted back, finally calling me obstinate.

“I could say the same about you,” I said.

“I remember you were always more obstinate!”

“How’s that?”

“Under that fierce — even savage — reserve was a mulish temperament.”

I had to laugh. “Fire away. What else?”

“Well, that and your aloofness, defiance.”

She meant the years I had stayed away. We fell into an awkward moment of silence, the clatter of plates and cups and other
people’s conversation falling between us.

“Did your father leave us because of some incident?” she asked.

“Did I say ‘incident’? No, it was nothing.”

“But everything changed suddenly —”

“Life changed. Like it will for us.”

“But he lost everything at the end.”

I regretted how I’d slipped and told her. I felt that Father’s pride and memory would remain intact if I never talked about
it. He would want it that way.

She looked past me, aware I wouldn’t slip again.

Then suddenly she said, “Reza, for the longest time I . . . held it against you — how you left suddenly that summer.”

It shook me to hear her say that. To have her invoke our entire history together. I saw it all at once, shaken loose, revealing
itself, as I saw her.

“Please continue tutoring my sons. Just a bit longer.”

She said “my sons” as though the husband didn’t exist. She knew we wouldn’t have any success mentioning him.

“Even better,” she said, “come to my parents’ for lunch. You’d make Father very happy! Just like the day you came back.”

I digressed. If I went to lunch, I would be a serpent returning to their nest. She returned to make her point, inviting my
mother and sister and her children. The next day, Friday, was perfect. I lied and said I’d call them and let her know.

“Call now,” she insisted.

I went in the back to find a public phone, called, and came back, reciting.

“Mother thanks you for the invitation, but she’s under the weather. She wanted to make a trip to Shah Abdul-Azeem tomorrow.
But now she’ll be home — and Zari says the children have colds and coughs.”

They didn’t want to come. How could I tell her? Why hadn’t any of them insisted they come before? Finally I too gave excuses
by the door, but before leaving I said I’d continue with her sons a bit longer. “This afternoon, then?” she asked. And I conceded,
to prevail in her world awhile longer, though I’d already found her a tutor who could start at the end of the month.

T
WO DAYS LATER
, on my way to the dry cleaners past Sheesheh Mosque to pick up my jacket, I went by Jalal’s apartment on Jami. At the corner,
teenage schoolgirls in dark uniforms flirted with a group of boys. I went past the dead end but went back and rang the bell.
I could hear the shuffle of the landlady’s plastic slippers on her tiled floor, and her whiny voice inquiring who I was. Esmat
khanom
opened the door a crack. When she saw me, her eyes narrowed as if I held an ax.

“Did you see them smoking at the corner?” she said. “Did you hear their brazen laughter? They should be ashamed. My dearly
departed father would have killed me for that sort of behavior. He believed in virtue.”

“What’s happened to the apartment?” I said.

“I’ve got a new lodger! A graduate with impeccable manners.”

“What about Jalal’s stuff?”

“One morning I went in and the apartment was cleaned out!”

“You know, he’s been released.”

“Good riddance. He’s nothing but trouble.”

“Did anyone come asking about him?”

“God forbid.”

I asked about the new lodger, and she said he was a Tehrani who liked the neighborhood. A believer who carried a rosary.

“He brought me a bag of pomegranates the day he signed his lease. What good are they to me with my teeth?”

She was still scowling at her door as I waved good-bye. For all I knew they’d planted someone else in the apartment — SAVAK.

“Wait,” she said, shuffling out. “His sister came by once and wanted to go upstairs and asked questions and also about you.
She’s a nurse. She told me if you came by to tell you to call her.”

I called Najmieh Hospital the next morning and asked for Soghra Hojjati and left my office number. She called during lunchtime;
from the background clatter it had to be from the hospital. She seemed to bear a grudge against me. We agreed to meet after
her shift was over.

That night I waited outside the pharmacy just below the inter-section of Naderi and Hafez. She was late. I stood leafing through
the evening paper. We have two countries; the one they’ve designed for us, and the one we’ve got. They have movers and shakers
and social engineers with policies and blueprints and facades, but without that flash of revelation at what we are from the
inside out. They don’t see it, that great force of a man’s private history. The springboard of ideology is the intimate clockwork
of blood and upbringing and personal rituals and daily existence ticking away. They leak out and subvert all the great forces
of history. Nothing lasts from the outside, finally, unless it’s willed from the inside out.

I went into the pharmacy and bought aspirin and came back out and saw her come up the street before she saw me. I prided myself
in my perfect eyesight. She obviously prided herself in her short temper.

“Some friend you are,” she said right off the bat.

She liked being pushy. She had cheap pink lipstick smeared over thin lips, and eyes like pellets, ringed in black kohl, and
dark hair snaking about her shoulders. We crossed the street. Right in front of the Park Hotel she stopped.

“I’ve always wanted to eat dinner there,” she said.

She didn’t like being denied. We stood by the open gate and she eyed the green lawns and luxury hotel beyond. I didn’t have
much cash in my pocket and suggested we get meat piroshkis on Naderi. Round the corner, the street vendors hawked plastic
wares spread out on the pavement, and she eyed them disdainfully, bumping into two men and bad-mouthing them as they stepped
aside. She cussed like a hooker. Jalal — educated and self-reliant — had left them years ago. Soghra had his arrogance without
the intelligence; his determination, without the ability to break free. It made her bitter.

The café was overheated; the piroshkis were hot. She made no bones about being hungry and devoured two in no time flat and
let me pay as though I owed her and would eternally. She downed Pepsi, asked if I had an apartment, what kind of job I had.
I didn’t want to talk. She wore cheap gold dangling earrings like a maid.

“Some friend you are,” she said. “You never look back.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Why didn’t you come back to see us?”

“Your father dislikes visitors.”

“So you’ve seen Jalal?”

I shrugged.

“The bastard,” she said. “Keeping his own mother in hell.”

She had tears in her eyes. She was upset for herself. She hated Jalal.

“First I had to run around like a maniac looking for him, so we’re finally told he’s alive and in Komiteh, and they finally
allow us a visit — he doesn’t give a damn he’s disgraced us by being in prison — and we go all that way, tense and nervous
after I’d convinced Father, and Mother had prepared her pathetic little bundle of provisions for him, and he doesn’t show
up! He refused to see us, the bastard. Mother whimpered and cried until I couldn’t stand it anymore. She only thinks of him.
To hell with him. Father stood there like stone. When we got home, he said, ‘I forbid you under pain of death to see him again
or ever mention his filthy name in front of me.’ Father scares me. Every man I know’s a son of a bitch.”

“Didn’t he call you when he got out?”

“Mother waited by the phone night and day and jumped every time it rang. One night I got so mad that when the phone rang I
pretended it was Komiteh. You should’ve seen her face. A goddamn suffering saint! I don’t know what possessed me, but I said
to her, ‘They’re going to shoot him tonight.’ Before she let out her death wail, I took it back. Her one and only son. The
shadow hanging over me. If we’re never going to see him again, he might as well be dead. If you see him, tell him. Tell Jalal
to put an announcement in the papers saying he’s dead so I can show her.”

“You’re joking.”

“Tell him. That’s all I’ve got to say to him.”

She shrugged, went on about the classy doctors at Najmieh, the smelly suitors she’d refused who were bazaar merchants her
stupid father brought home. “That stupid peasant,” she called her father. She said she had liked me from the first instant
she’d laid eyes on me. She could tell I liked her. I was her type. How much could I possibly make working for the government
and teaching night school? she demanded. Her father had money.

“Take me to your home,” she said.

I delivered a sermon on how she was the sister of a friend and I respected her and could never abuse the sanctity of our relationship
and how it was neither right nor ethical nor advisable, especially since she was so nice, and considering her parents, until
her eyes glazed over.

At the bus stop she said, “Call me when you change your mind.”

M
R. BASHIRIAN CALLED ME
at home before breakfast.

“They haven’t called,” he said. “I’m worried.” He was expecting Komiteh Prison to call for him to go collect his son.

“I’ve already smoked half a pack. I’ve been up since five, sweeping and cleaning. You should see how much food there is in
the refrigerator. I’m so restless I’ve been cooking and cleaning for two days. He’s so thin! He needs to eat. You must come
and have dinner with us. You’ll get along wonderfully! I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. I can’t wait.”

He said he’d call me back when he had news.

That evening when I got home I dropped my coat by the bouquet of fragrant pink and yellow roses on the table in the front
hall. I tore open several invitations, noting dates for an opening at the Seyhoun Gallery and a lecture at the Imperial Iranian
Academy of Philosophy. I called out to the children, who were upstairs. The house was clean and tidy and serene, a sanctuary
away from the city, all because Tourandokht had come for her visit.

She was in the kitchen with Goli, preparing dinner, winter stews bubbling on the gas range. I hugged her and she poured me
a glass of tea from the teapot on the samovar. Goli seemed placated for the first time in weeks, but not exactly content.
I wanted to keep Tourandokht forever. She dispensed serenity with a spiritual dimension and unremitting warmth.

“Who sent the flowers?” I asked.

The card was in the pantry. I ripped open the small white envelope. It read: “With exceptional affection, Thierry.” I tore
it up. He was incorrigible.

I went up to hug Ehsan and Kamran, who jumped up and down on my bed until they heard Tourandokht coming and then escaped before
she could pile them with noisy kisses again. She huffed and puffed up the stairs, leaning on her cane. I drew a bath, and
she sat in my bedroom as she had in the old days before I was married. She tried to explain about Goli.

“It’s nothing,” said Tourandokht.

The entire late-night incident could be blamed on a cassette tape left behind in the radio–tape deck in the kitchen. Goli
and Ramazan hadn’t meant to bring it into the house. After cleaning up for the night, they’d forgotten to take it with them.
Goli had come back to remove it out of consideration! She’d panicked when she’d heard me, leaving her key in the back door.

“She panicked because she was eavesdropping on my phone conversation.”

“No, she knocked over the receiver. She swears by the Twelve Imams —”

“I hate how she swears, then lies. She was listening in.”

Tourandokht shook her head. It annoyed me that her authority had waned.

“So what’s on this tape?”

“Some sort of sermon.”

“What’s so scary about that?”