In the Walled Gardens (34 page)

“What do you want here?” the brother-in-law said, up against him.

“Justice, reckoning! Don’t you? You want to let them get away with it?”

Next to me in the kitchen doorway, Shahrnoush, red-faced, chewed her lip, flicked tears off her face. Her husband was ashen.

“This is state-run terrorism,” the boy said. “They’re killing our generation! A heart attack? You expect us to believe that?
There’s a list. Every name a story of brutality and terror and abduction. You want to see the list? Beware of their propaganda.
They buy our hearts and souls with scholarships and casinos and factories and F-14s. They’re selling us out to foreigners.
The bloodsuckers! Ask their prisoners. It’s inside their prisons you see their real faces.”

The brother-in-law grabbed the boy’s shirt, shoved him into the kitchen. “I don’t know who you are or what you do. And I don’t
want to know! You’re causing us shame and grief. You want to make more trouble so they come back for us? Take your friends
and get out. You hear? Don’t make me repeat it, or I’ll throw out every one of you personally.”

“You’re not angry with me,” the boy taunted him. “You’re angry at your own impotence.”

Dark with indignation, he went over to the students, consulted them momentarily, then turned to the brother-in-law, enraged.
Those of us close enough heard what he said next.

“You’re cowards. We’re ready to give blood! Fight in the streets. We believe in an armed revolution. And we’ll never give
up!”

They exited in a flurry. When they left, I noticed the two young men sitting by the far wall, hanging their heads.

T
HE ROOMS WERE QUIET.
The manservant collected the empty glasses and plates, and the maid finished washing up in the kitchen. Shahrnoush came in
from the kitchen and insisted I take dinner with them. “Please,” she said, “this is your home.”

Then she whispered, “I’m staying for a while. I don’t want Kamal alone. He’s in a terrible state of mind. I’m afraid he’ll
take an overdose and slip away.”

The front door was open. A van pulled up and parked, and two men came in and took away the chairs along the walls. The brother-in-law
paid them, peeling off bills. He was solid, efficient, but it was impossible to read his thoughts. Mr. Bashirian was still
locked up in the bedroom. The two neighbors were there — the elderly man and the engineer — and the relatives from Mazandaran,
and the two friends I’d seen seated against the far wall. Kazem and Ali. They stood in the hallway talking, the women preparing
dinner in the kitchen.

There was a palpable sense of relief once the crowd left. The evening had been a strain, especially the disruption by radical
students. The brother-in-law, still in a rage, smashed two plates in the kitchen. Then he came out, pointing at Kazem and
Ali, and said, “What stupidity! I should never have called them. Their visit was a shrewd calculation. If they loved Peyman
they wouldn’t behave like that. The nerve to say he died for them! Those bastards talk like they own him!”

No sooner had the students left than people started talking behind them. To the family, they said they were stunned. How brazen!
How reckless! How downright dangerous for those kids to have barged in and mouthed off like that! But to one another they
murmured other things, judging by the looks on their faces — tactful, circumspect — those who had previously been in the dark
about Peyman’s arrest. They’d heard the words:
prison, disappearance, murder by the state.
Their unease became even more conspicuous as they gathered to leave. I overheard one of them say by the door, “So it turns
out he was arrested! God knows what he did.”

A bedroom door opened, and Mr. Bashirian came out and said he wanted to talk to me alone in the living room. He drifted in,
moved about the furniture, a ghost in his own house, then lowered himself into an armchair.

“You know,” he murmured, “he took pictures.”

I nodded. Outside, a siren wailed.

“That was his crime. The accusation.”

“What crime?” I said, startled.

“You remember that morning we saw him in there?” He choked up but kept going. “He told me something. You couldn’t hear, he
was whispering. He said they had asked about the photos. Interrogated him four times, he said. They wanted to know which group
he belonged to. They said he’d followed orders and taken pictures of military installations.”

“What? Which installations?”

“It was in the photos, they claimed. They wanted him to confess. They said he was a traitor. He said it was all lies.”

“Traitor?” I was shocked Peyman would have any crime to confess. That he could ever be a traitor. “I remember you said to
him, ‘How can it be?’ You meant the photos. The accusation.”

“Maybe he didn’t have a heart attack,” he whispered. “Maybe they tried to — to punish him. It’s a terrible thought. What if
they knew — knew all along they were never going to release him?”

It was an awful thought.

“When they gave back his belongings, the photo albums weren’t there. They gave back his clothes, his sneakers. I asked for
the photos. They told me they couldn’t find them.”

His hands shook. He wanted a cigarette. I got my pack and lighter and we lit up under the dark oil paintings I’d examined
the first day I’d visited him there, which he’d painted over the years with such somber effect.

“What do you think?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What if they lied about how things happened?”

I shook my head. I didn’t want him to believe it.

“I agonize about it,” he whispered. “Please. Don’t tell my family.”

I stared at the stony river he’d painted, the silvery moonlight over spectral hills. They had accused Peyman of taking pictures
of military installations. That was what he’d told his father that morning, at the other end of the table under feeble neon
lights. His father had leaned in, shocked, but he hadn’t told me. Until tonight.

“Last night I imagined terrible things. I imagined him screaming out for me. Father, Father! he was screaming, strapped to
a table. Helpless while they tortured him —”

“You mustn’t torture yourself,” I said.

“That night when they took me in, I — I saw him laid out on the table,” he said numbly. “I remember looking. Before I passed
out. To see if they had harmed him. He looked so peaceful.”

He slumped back.

“I wanted to keep on looking. To divine his last thoughts. I wanted to throw myself on him. To embrace him for the last time.
I’m weak, so weak. He was my rock, my reason for existing. Why didn’t I die instead?”

He sat, nearly lifeless himself.

We were called in to dinner. A dozen people were around the table. Kamal refused food, leaned over, and said to his sister,
“Tell me it’s a bad dream.” She laid a hand on his, told him to try eating some white rice at least. She had such milky-white
skin and dark hair. She gave him a glass of water and watched him down pills. Then she fetched him a glass of tea from the
samovar. More than gentle, she was mothering. I was introduced to Peyman’s two friends, Kazem and Ali. Kazem kept to himself.
He was the boy from Kerman on scholarship, with the face of a stoic, maybe angelic if you didn’t notice the discreet tenacity
in his eyes, the austerity of the jawline. After dinner, Ali, who had traveled with Peyman all over, spread his photos on
the table before us. He had the chiseled looks of an athlete, sinewy and distraught, and his right leg never stopped pumping.
He talked, lectured us, considering the tone of his voice. Once in a while he’d repeat: “So what military installations are
they talking about? You see any signposts, barbed wire? You see anything here?”

We had looked. We didn’t.

He showed us the groupings: towns, portraits, vistas. Under this last heading we peered at everything he passed around, which
didn’t look like much and wasn’t of anything in particular. Dusty spaces, lone trees, scrub brush, amber and purple horizons
dawn to dusk.

“The charge was an obscene lie,” Ali concluded.

“They don’t worry about such details,” Kazem said modestly.

Ali leaned in. “Think about it. They already had a trumped-up charge against him. It carried a sentence. They claimed they
had evidence, not that they’re obliged to prove anything! Then suddenly — they want him out. I keep asking myself why.”

“Maybe because they realized he was innocent,” I said.

He eyed me suspiciously, went on. “They call his father to prepare to come get him. But they ask about medication. What for?
The next day they call in the evening and say Peyman is ill, and Mr. Bashirian panics. He was right to panic. I think Peyman
was already dead then. Perhaps he’d died the night before under torture. His heart had stopped suddenly. It was a sentence
carried out following a secret verdict. Even if it was an accident, what’s the difference? They’d managed to get rid of him
quietly. So until when was he still alive? When they made the first call, or the second call, thirty-six hours later? Was
he actually alive when they said, Something’s wrong, come right away? If he was, that’s good — at least they weren’t lying.
Which means he had to die within the hour. By the time Mr. Bashirian got there. But what if he was already dead — and they
called? That would prove there was a scheme. Pretty sinister. They had a corpse lying around and they call the father and
pretend, saying, Come get your child! The coldhearted, shameless, lawless sons of bitches!”

“What’s your point?” Kazem said calmly.

“We must find out if Peyman was still alive the first and second time they called.”

“What are you talking about?” said Mr. Bashirian’s brother-in-law. “How can we? You kids are all the same. So idealistic.”

“Idealistic?” Ali said, incensed. “You’re his family. The only thing he left behind in this world. Go back to Komiteh. Pretend
you believe the heart attack. Cry, plead! Whatever it takes. Ask to speak to the doctor. Ask for his photo albums, the diary.
Say they’re precious mementos — all you have left of him. Can’t you do that?”

“For God’s sake,” Shahrnoush said, “you’re all so pushy!”

Ali looked to Kazem, then looked down.

“Who saw him alive?” Ali repeated. “Did they see him right up to the last day? Maybe another prisoner saw him. A guard. Forgive
me for asking again, Mr. Bashirian, but what did you see?”

“I told you,” Kamal said flatly.

“I know.”

“When I got there, they kept talking about Military Hospital Number Two. I thought they’d already transferred him. They rushed
me down a corridor. My legs felt wobbly. A man in a white coat came out of a room. He was a doctor and talked about a heart
attack. How they’d called for an ambulance but it was too late — too late. We went in. He pointed to the steel table; the
body was there on the table. He pulled back the sheet. Peyman was dead.”

There was silence. We shifted, uneasy in our seats. Ali nodded, tender and grave, disguising his considerable edginess. He
wasn’t satisfied with the answer but let it go. Shahrnoush asked Kamal, “You’re ready to go back to Komiteh? Ready to face
them again?”

“You go,” he said. “I can’t.”

She looked to her husband. “I don’t know how to talk to them. I mean —”

“Do what I said,” said Ali. “I told you.”

“It’s not so simple,” snapped the brother-in-law.

“You must begin somewhere.”

The brother-in-law looked away in stony anger.

The only way left was to see the lawyer the next morning. There was to be no more procrastination. They would have him write
up the petition demanding an official inquiry into Peyman’s death. The sooner the better. None of us really held much hope.

“But you need prominent names,” Ali said. “Lawyers, judges, writers, anyone with balls left these days.”

Quickly he apologized, regretting the slip. Mr. Bashirian told him to gather up his photos and take them with him. “This house
is no refuge from anything,” he said.

I
WAS SPENDING
more time at Mr. Bashirian’s house than at my own.

When I got back, the house was dark. On the console in the front hall by the antique French clock there was a list of phone
messages scribbled in Goli’s crablike handwriting. Friends had called to thank us for our dinner party. As though I didn’t
know all they wanted was to drag information out of me. We were the subject of the latest gossip in town. My in-laws had already
called to tell me at work. My two best friends. And of course Pouran, from her grand central office — the hairdresser — early
in the afternoon. I heard hair dryers whirring in the background, and the noisy chitchat of other women, bejeweled and fashionable
arbiters of the city. Pouran repeated to me how the wife of the rear admiral was bad-mouthing me all over town, commiserating
with Houshang for putting up with me. Who did I think I was? I’d insulted her husband, I was uncontrollable. Whose side was
I on — the leftists’ and radicals’? Think of it, considering my family. What was I — playing pushy intellectual? Pouran quoted,
suddenly prissy, sanctimonious. Taking advantage of the occasion. The very woman charged with maintaining the rear admiral’s
mistress, now outdoing herself for the wife. From my mother-in-law and sister-in-law I got lectures on propriety and wagging
tongues and the sheer stupidity of any political opinion. They were worried. Terrified of being out of favor, cut off from
their only source of heavy income and oxygen — the right people.

Mother called with the uncanny prescience of a fortune-teller just as I stepped into my bedroom.

“What’s going on?” she demanded. “You’re never home.”

I sank into a chair, kicked off my shoes. Houshang wasn’t home again.

“Is your husband home?” she asked.

“He’s sleeping,” I whispered. “It’s late.”

“Why are you whispering suddenly? You’re hiding things from me.”

“Who could do that, Mother?”

“The phone hasn’t stopped ringing here. Your father is extremely upset! He doesn’t need this right after Sobhi’s death. What
happened the other night at your party?”