In the Walled Gardens (32 page)

“The rear admiral’s. You hear? He adores her! They’re happy together! He doesn’t want a scandal. But he loves to spoil her,
so he asks me. I sent Pouran and charged the bracelet to my account. You understand?”

I flinched. To my eternal surprise I still wanted to believe him.

Then he said, “You’re turning into some liberal leftist, whatever the hell you want to call it.”

“Right, I’m a Marxist!”

“You’re starting to behave like one.”

“Then you won’t mind if I rant about reckless capitalist pigs?”

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”

An indicted rear admiral didn’t exactly qualify as a model patriot.

“He lectured me,” I said, outraged, “about how to be patriotic.”

“You shouldn’t have talked to a foreign journalist. He’s right.” “It’s none of his business.” “You shouldn’t have embarrassed
him like that.”

“What is he, God? Your only source of income? With whose money is he buying extravagant diamond bracelets? Look at him and
his wife! We have to kowtow to them nonstop to get ahead? Oh, I hurt his feelings? God forbid. As if there’s no one else in
this country with feelings worth considering!”

“I’ve got a radical wife. You want to dishonor me and yourself?”

He spoke of honor and let disgrace hang over our heads. His naval projects were being investigated behind closed doors.

“I’m going to find out what happened to Peyman Bashirian,” I said.

“You know what people will think. You want to ruin our reputation?”

“I want to petition with his father.”

“You will do no such thing. This is none of your business. You will stay away. I don’t want us mixed up with SAVAK. I’ve got
contracts with the government. I’m not going to permit this. Your duties are to your family.”

“Don’t you talk about duty. You’re a negligent father, a mostly absent and vacuous husband who whores around and drinks an
—”

“That’s right. That’s me! You should’ve married one of those highbrows your parents preferred. I bet they’re disappointed.”

“No, I’m disappointed,” I said.

He stared, offended, repelled, eyes calculating.

“Well then, I better go out and find myself a whore and a drink and, if I get real lucky, a girl like Setareh!”

He picked his jacket off the chair and walked out. I heard the garage door, his car speeding away.

I
SWEPT AROUND
the bedroom, drawing back the drapes. Sat back in an empty room staring at far ridges in darkness. Perhaps I had precipitated
a drama at my own dinner party to take my freedom, erase the false clockwork of an entire life.

Perhaps Setareh had been my blunder — a blunder set in motion by a husband I now considered secondrate. Houshang had assured
me I was making a fool of myself. There was in fact a time when it mattered to believe him. He had grabbed the high moral
ground, feeding me small doses of humility like poison. A chastened wife makes a virtuous husband. But I am sick of goodness.
Of being that paragon, a lady. The very reason for which Houshang married me.

He’s always counted on my loyalty. Tonight he’d been forced to take its measure. Facing the rear admiral, I had become a disloyal
woman.

He had seethed about dishonor. But the only thing he really cared about was our reputation — that public and eye-catching
display, infinitely malleable, a chameleon — for what did honor really matter to him when it was something solitary and modest
and absolute, an inner life?

At three in the morning I felt certain he was not only keeper of Setareh’s secret, but indulged as her protector. He was her
refuge from the predatory tide of society’s ambitions. I’d seen the look they had exchanged after dinner, that devoted smile
of acknowledgment. There was too much there to have given her away untouched. He’d had her himself before giving her to the
rear admiral. There would always be others. Always another to come between us.

I
WAIT FOR THE DAY
Reza teaches the children. I make sure I’m home. I listen for the front door, his eyes on me as I sweep down the staircase.
Those vigilant eyes, seeing through me, seeing beyond. A man among men. And I think now, What was life before he walked in?
I wonder what he’s hiding from me. What he’s done all these years he’s stayed away. I want him to tell me. I hear him in the
other room and remember the boy in the garden of Morshedabad. Even then, what distinguished him was character. When we had
guests, the house brimming with people, children running through the gardens, I was always looking for him. “Reza, Reza!”
He would stand grinning by the trees and say, “Calling me again?” I would ask him to come play, come swim, come learn to dance
instead of being so defiant, come ride through the fields with us. Then between one month and the next he was gone. That summer
I had gone back to Morshedabad expecting to see him. Morshedabad and Reza were one and the same for me. One couldn’t be without
the other. I had run to the bungalow, calling out to him, yanked open their front door, and faced an empty house. My first
thought was they’d gone for another visit to Tabriz. But they wouldn’t have emptied the entire house for a trip. Gone were
the rugs, the first sura of the Qur’an penned in black and gold ink by the door, his mother’s sewing machine and the large
peacock she’d embroidered on magenta satin and hung up on the wall, the old brass samovar and huge bolsters and paisley shawls,
the candle-holders with dripping crystals that Zari and I liked to run our fingers up against, the canary green pair of opaline
hand vases — the hand of the beloved — sitting on the mantel, and above them all, crowning the room, the family photo taken
by Sako on Naderi, which I’d compared to ours, where we’d been all airbrushed into perfection. The rooms were bare, white,
stark. They had packed up and left. I’d run through the trees, shouting, “Father, Father, they’ve gone. How did this happen?
Can’t you do something?”

I’d never forgiven him for leaving, for disappearing one day, never to look back. I had considered it a personal insult and
form of contempt, realizing that day that our lives were two things apart. Until then they had seemed as one to me.

I
PUT ON
a black suit the next morning and drove to Niavaran to pick up Father and Mother and pay our condolences to Mrs. Sobhi. Mother,
stately in black, sat in the back of the car brooding, reciting an elegiac poem by Maulana. Father recollected forty years
with Sobhi. The house was only a few streets away. It was grueling to sit with the grieving widow and listen to her and watch
Father, who had lost one of his closest friends, look as devastated as she did. Mother and Father stayed on and other visitors
streamed in, but I left for work.

That evening I left the office late, knowing Houshang would stay out all night. He was waiting for me to show regret, waiting
for me to reform myself. My home was no refuge. My children were at a sleepover. I had nothing to say to my friends that night.
I couldn’t sit in a restaurant and eat out alone. I wasn’t about to wander into the lounge at the club — I wasn’t the type,
even if I did know everyone there. And I didn’t want to see that crowd. I’d go home. I realized that what I meant — perhaps
would always mean by that — was that I’d go home to my parents’ house. I would console Father about Abbas Sobhi’s death and
play gin rummy with Mother and have dinner in the upstairs hallway, where the picture frames were crooked and the tiles several
rows in from the top of the stairs had come unstuck ages ago and wobbled when you stepped on them but were covered by the
large Esfahan rug, and where one of Mother’s large and chaotic bouquets from her garden always covered the dreadful and anemic
portrait of Father, which had been painted by his well-meaning friend who had studied forever at the Fine Arts Academy and
which Father insisted on keeping there as a matter of principle, and so, facing it — just to annoy Father — Mother had placed
an oil painting he detested of an Edenic though lugubrious garden, which she had bought from an antique dealer on a lark and
which we strongly suspected annoyed even her, day and night, but she kept it there because she would rather grow horns and
a tail than back down, and there in the upstairs hallway they would sit, my parents, taking their meals when there were just
the two of them, listening to the old radio, defending their life. I wanted that.

I drove eastward. We were in the midst of a few days of Indian summer. I rolled down the window, slid out of my wool jacket
at the red light.

From the street I called Reza’s number on impulse. He was still at the office, working late on some report. I could barely
hear him with all the traffic by Cinema Diana. It took half an hour to get across town and find parking near the place where
he’d said to meet. He had an appointment around the corner and had suggested the first place that popped into his head. I
waited at the corner table in the Hotel Semiramis. He was late and apologized when he appeared suddenly. There we were, the
two of us, for a rendezvous in the evening in a hotel downtown. He removed his jacket, slung it on his chair. “So unusually
warm,” he said. We ordered coffee with milk and I told him about Peyman. He listened, quiet, absorbed. The phone call, the
heart attack, the photos he’d taken on his travels, his diary, the guidebook to Khorassan. I told Reza that day at the Intercontinental
the French reporter had insisted that the son had to be involved in some clandestine activity. “You know, the father told
me he was afraid to go to Komiteh,” I said. “I went with him. But I think he was afraid of Peyman. He couldn’t understand
him. Maybe he couldn’t look into the eyes of this stranger who had lived with him. That’s why.” Reza asked about the petition.
What kind of answer did we expect? Now that the boy was buried in Behesht Zahra. Now that his body was rotting and his files
swept away. Would they exhume the body? Never. What could the authorities investigate? Hearsay, wardens, the prison doctor
and coroner, their own interrogators. Tainted versions. Fiction. That was all that was left. I said, “Then the difference
between the necessary and the sinister just depends on which side you’re on finally?” Reza asked point-blank, “How about this
case?” I leaned in. “The dead can’t defend themselves,” I said. “Who decides the kind of evil considered necessary? Makes
the rules, logical consistencies, the exceptions? Should we trust them?” There was a clock on the wall. Sometime later he
offered me dinner. I wanted fresh air, so we walked. The hotel was opposite Saint Paul’s Church. Walking with him, I felt
like an outsider in the city. We crossed streets here and there as if by mutual consent but apparently at random. The longer
we walked, the better I felt. He asked what I wanted to eat. I didn’t mind, I didn’t want to stop walking.

The evening was warm. Somewhere along the way there were colored lanterns strung between trees in a garden. There were plastic
chairs and tables and the sounds of laughter and the smell of grilled chicken. We asked for a table on the last night you
could eat outside that autumn. He ordered, and we realized we were hungry when the food came. He was no longer diffident and
talked about the time when he had taught in far-off villages. “Four years,” he said. “Each year a different village. I was
young, idealistic, impatient to change the world.” We talked of our fathers, and then, insisting, I said something about Hajj-Ali’s
bankruptcy, how I felt, that we should have known, should have helped, my words turbulent. I said, “I know it’s too late.
But your parents were like a second family for me.” I said it long after its passing, though it would always remain true.
He stared at me, his eyes like a dark tide coming in, the strangest emotion breaking on his face. The moment scorched us,
like a season of mourning. We looked to the night, now murky like brackish water, shutting us off from the world. At the periphery
of our vision, people were moving about us. He asked about my university days abroad, my three brothers, and we talked of
his sister’s children, Morshedabad, the daughter of the gardener whose family had suddenly disappeared. What was her name?
I couldn’t remember. “Amineh,” he said. “Ah, Amineh,” I said, looking up into the trees, with their garlands of lanterns.
“I liked that garden,” I said. “I liked the trees.”

He said he liked riding his bicycle to the nearby village, Morshedabad. Liked the village children. Eighty years before a
morshed
had passed there and stayed for two years. A spiritual guide from Mashhad. A geomancer with white hair. He had healed their
children, bidden beads to make good auguries, interpreted their dreams, and divined the future. Spoken of the Guarded Tablet
written by God to transfigure fate. They had venerated him. There was a shrine in the village, a place of pilgrimage. Mud
brick, with a dark interior. The large plane tree outside, where the village children played, had shreds of cloth tied to
its branches for the vows they made. I remembered the glazed blue tile he’d once given me from the shrine. “But whose shrine
is it?” I asked. “That’s what I mean,” said Reza. “There is no name on the tombstone. People in the village claim it’s his,
the
morshed
’s. They say he left but came back later to die there. But there’s another story.” Reza said he believed this one. An old
man had told him when he’d gone back years later to visit. The old man had remembered him. Son of Hajji Alimardan. He had
offered him tea, talked of their dry wells, the heat. They had walked in together, stared at the bare slab sunk into dry earth.
“Dust of time,” the old man had said, pointing. They’d come out and sat in a corner. And the old man had said, “I want to
tell you something. All those years ago, when he tried to leave, the
morshed,
they stopped him, the villagers. They were incensed. They wanted him to stay. He refused. So they plotted to keep him. Late
one night they fell on him. They killed the old man and buried him there.” “They wanted him that badly?” I said. “They wanted
something sacred to remain among them,” said Reza. “Something to believe in.”