In the Walled Gardens (5 page)

“The music was loud.”

“Then why not dance?” he said, laughing like a hyena.

He does that to keep cool in a rage; I’m allergic to the sound it makes. He thinks he’s guileful and indirect. But I know
he whores around with foreign and expensive imports, a tradition he maintains accompanied by loyal friends. Their tribal ritual.
They trade stories about procuring pleasure behind closed doors. They snigger, invent. They should learn to make love instead
of buying it — to give of themselves, if that were even possible.

Houshang believes it my duty to turn a blind eye. He bears gifts. I’m the kind who looks a gift horse in the mouth. Three
years ago I realized he had a mistress. Unlike the generation of my parents, who had arranged marriages, I couldn’t shrug
it off. I hadn’t been educated for this. My generation flatters itself that we determine our fate; we are liberated, individualistic,
self-reliant. Our marriages require absolute compatibility and possession, a form of predestination and myth we can’t escape.
I confronted Houshang, but he denied everything, remarkably well rehearsed for the occasion. I was the one ill prepared, stunned
at the limits of emancipation like a fish out of water. I warned him then and there. Later, I realized it was a rut I would
be in forever. To preserve my dignity, I feigned nonchalance but kept an eye on him, looking for signposts and slipups. A
steely warden in an institution, that’s what I’ve become. Distant, hard-hearted — for which I blame him and dislike him even
more.

He went up to bed with pills and a bottle of water and bloodshot eyes. I stayed downstairs, shuffling through pages of a report
at two in the morning.

Thierry had come to the party flanked by his banker friends. They met haughty courtiers and enthralled diplomats and feverish
MBAs and businessmen and jaded loafers and professional free-loaders and part-time intellectuals and full-time charlatans
and brats. His friends looked impressed. “Especially by the women!” they kept repeating. Not too original, still, they spoke
from habit. Who knows what the truth is abroad.

Iraj and Pouran Mazaher are the perfect embodiment of the new elite of the capital. They’re social arbiters, beholden to no
one and nothing, their home a consummation of the boom mentality, slightly chilling with its grip on grandeur.

There was throbbing disco music, important bouquets from Rose Noir in all the rooms. The grand salon was set with the requisite
faux gold knockoff Louis XIV furniture, set under knockoff tableaux of bucolic scenes with maidens in bonnets among cows and
sheep. A friend had told me Iraj liked his call girls dressed up that way — as shepherdesses. The other rooms were set with
gargantuan modern Italian furniture and bogus modern art. There was opium and grass in the private den, where the door remained
shut. A mound of pearl gray caviar in a silver bowl on crushed ice surrounded by toast and fresh limes was carried around
by a sullen manservant in white jacket and white gloves. Guests were already planning to go on to La Cheminée, or La Bohème
for the Dark Eyes Band, though La Bohème wasn’t as fashionable anymore. Dinner was served too late as usual, the succulent
foods piled and steaming around the dining table, overlit by a fearsome chandelier. Fish and partridge and roast lambs and
stews and silver trays heaped with rice. The host was on the prowl, roaming rooms gratifyingly decorated to his tastes. Shirt
tight, hands wandering. My husband and Iraj are two peas in a pod, chewing the end of their Cuban cigars in well-orchestrated
candlelight. Pouran kept pinching her breasts together, busy laughing in all the rooms, whispering to choice guests it was
the greatest honor of her life to have them there.

Halfway through the night, Thierry heard my case about Peyman Bashirian in a corner. False arrest, the rights of prisoners,
an appeal to human rights organizations. “I know the boy’s father,” I said. At first he looked amused. That nearly did me
in I felt so insulted. Then he began to flirt, by reflex, like a dog salivating. I countered, going on about torture, electric
prods, mutilated genitals. He cooled off astonishingly well, nodding with the aplomb be-fitting a very distant heir to the
Enlightenment, more pantomime than compassion. I pressed on and he listened in earnest, suddenly turning chilly — this wasn’t
his idea of fun at Iraj and Pouran’s. He said he’d commit to nothing except thinking about it and calling me later. “When?”
I insisted. “Later,” he repeated. Pulling in closer, he asked me to dance, his eyes glassy, the song blaring from the towering
speakers. He was about to take advantage, and I refused too quickly. Bad move, I thought, walking away. If you ask the favor,
you dance. But I’d seen Houshang watching from across the room and had no need for a showdown, which came anyway once we got
home.

Around midmorning I called Mother to ask if she needed anything for Friday lunch.

“The marzipan cream cake from Danish Pastry.”

“The green dome?”

“The green one,” she said, and hung up.

We both hate small talk.

Pouran called five minutes later. Thierry had made a pass at her, she gushed, tripping over her words. “See,” she said, “he’s
in love with me! Of course, I adore my husband!” Cocky from the merest whiff of success, she gossiped about her guests. She
collects people so she can watch them up close, then trash them, drawing satisfaction from denigrating them for a host of
imperfections. She complained that her servants were turning sullen.

“The ingrates!” she said, yawning. “I’ve applied for Bangladeshis to rid me of these local asses sulking and glaring at us
so disapprovingly.”

Pouran and Iraj would rather import a whole country to avoid contact with our masses. They throw a bash a week, and every
night they’re either out or have guests. He’s my husband’s best friend; she’s neurotic. An unlikely mixture of savvy, naïveté,
hard glamour, and shaky self-respect. Her impetuous generosities and revelry are offset by flashes of vulgarity and malice.

She hung up, saying I looked on edge.

A
T A QUARTER TO ONE
we were speeding up Saltanatabad, the green marzipan cream cake on my lap. The children had been picked up earlier by their
uncle. We were behind a brown car with a dented fender. Within seconds Houshang was trying to overtake it. The driver weaved
left, then right. Four men were in the car. Houshang honked and the car accelerated. He shifted gears, swearing under his
breath.

“The cake,” I said.

Houshang floored the gas pedal, but the brown car cut in left again. Houshang swung back abruptly. As I swayed toward the
window, I caught sight of one, then two gendarmerie jeeps in my side-view mirror. The jeeps honked. We were within a mile
of the army barracks. Houshang, provoked and indignant, wouldn’t let them overtake us.

The jeeps turned on their sirens, and Houshang slowed down. The jeeps pulled out, speeding past us, two army vehicles now
visible behind them. Then something peculiar happened in front. The jeeps jackknifed into the brown car suddenly, forcing
it off the road. Houshang slammed his foot on the brakes. I lurched forward with the cake. The two armored vehicles tailing
the jeeps overtook us, barricading the brown car within seconds. Uniformed men poured out, shouting and pointing guns at the
four men in the car. Suddenly there were gendarmes and soldiers and guns and men barking orders everywhere.

An agitated gendarme ran out and jumped in front of our car. He screamed at us, motioning frantically for Houshang to drive
on. The armored vehicles were blocking our way. We had to back up.

I turned for a quick look at the men. Two were being dragged out by force, their arms covering their heads. Two were already
up against the car, legs spread, arms high. I saw them in profile; they looked so young — black hair, jeans and sweaters and
sneakers. Student types, but impassive, unafraid.

The gendarme slammed his fist on our hood. “Go!” he shouted, pointing.

Houshang backed up quickly, then shot up the road. Every month they ambush armed guerrillas in the streets in shoot-outs.
We get lists and mug shots in the papers, but these boys hadn’t been armed. Houshang said SAVAK was infiltrating underground
organizations, uncovering nasty plots of insurrection against the monarchy like clockwork. Someone had to do the dirty work.

“Better count your blessings,” he said.

“Which blessing?” I said. “Killing boys like them? Living in a bubble?”

“What, you want pandemonium? Don’t be irrational! We’re kept from raving maniacs and ruthless Marxists and bloodthirsty ideologues.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

“You’re
such
an idealist!”

I looked into the side-view mirror until the men were distant specks.

By the foothills past the palace, we turned left into Niavaran and to the narrow side streets beyond. Friday is quiet, especially
deep in the side streets, quiet if you only hear what you want. There have been more than twelve political assassinations
carried out by the Left this year. Last month armed Marxist rebels gunned down three American military advisers to the Shah
at midday downtown. This month in three separate incidents armed guerrillas have been gunned down by the security forces in
the streets. Their names were in the evening papers: Aladpoush, Ahangar, Davari, Olfat. I read them out for my brother on
the back veranda facing the garden, but he shrugged it off. I read them out for Father after lunch, but he dozed off. Repeated
the names in the bathroom mirror all week. Who were they? These young men, prepared to die for a cause. Prepared to die like
heroes in an epic. SAVAK — ruthless itself — decries the ruthlessness of guerrilla groups who purge their own, kill each other
off, then burn the bodies and dump them in the city and blame SAVAK. Houshang — supposed realist — dismisses all such incidents
as minor blips on an unclouded horizon.

We turned in at the gates of the old garden on the foothills of Shemiran. Once there were open fields here.

Mashdi Hossein, the gardener, waved from the small porch of his quarters by the old grape arbor. On the other side of the
drive-way, his youngest son crossed the lawn ploddingly with a rake. The children congregated by the pool were pointing and
shouting. They parted as Mashd-Hossein’s son stepped up to the perimeter. He lowered the rake, nudging the soccer ball floating
in the middle of the pool among the leaves.

I counted cars all the way up the driveway. My parents had all their children with their spouses and grandchildren, which
came to fifteen, and several aunts and uncles, who brought nieces and nephews. Thirty for Friday lunch was usual, not counting
friends who dropped in. Houshang was sulking because they were all my relatives instead of his, but he was charming the lot
of them within minutes. He worked the living room and I headed for the kitchen.

Mother was tucking lamb into hot, fluffy rice. Mashdi Ghanbar, our cook for more than thirty years — reciter of epic poems,
and repository of Napoleonic longings — was quibbling ostentatiously about the whereabouts of four canisters of cooking oil.
The new maid, a girl of eighteen from the village, came in the back door carrying fresh, long loaves of
sangak
bread. Mashd-Ghanbar gave her his most menacing look. She’d come to learn that meant she might as well take poison.

I opened the cake box.

“It’s dented.” Mother pointed to the green dome.

“We were in an ambush!”

She nodded, heaping more baby lima bean rice onto her china platter as if the outside world didn’t really count.

I
CALLED MR. MOSHARRAF
, who was delighted to hear from me. “It’s been so long!” he said. The last time I’d seen him, Father had forced me to go
when he was suffering from a failing heart and I was a student discovering politics.

The gardens of Shemiran sprawl for miles. In the summer, past the forbidding walls and iron gates flung open, you can see
their winding driveways covered with the finest pebbles, the freshly cut lawns bordered with ribbons of snapdragons and petunias
and marigolds. Vast gardens, with tennis courts and swimming pools. Well past the shrubbery and rose arbors and cypress, the
houses are covered with honeysuckle, morning glory, and wisteria. It’s serene here, the world at its best, not congested and
crude and hectic like downtown. If you stand up here long enough, you think nothing will ever go wrong.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The history of families residing in these gardens has been as fickle as fate. Their
fortunes have cringed and surged at the whim of politics.

Nasrollah
mirza
Mosharraf is from an old aristocratic landowning family, with one branch in Azarbaijan. His wife is from a clan of landowners
in Tabriz; blue-eyed, blond, obdurate, from a family with a flair for commerce. A formidable woman, Nasrollah
mirza
liked to tell Father. He congratulated himself often for winning her hand, disobeying his imperious mother to marry her.
Just like his own willful father a century before — a member of that large tribe that had ruled then as the Qajar dynasty
— who had disobeyed his pious yet calculating mother and refused to marry a relative, a Qajar princess. Instead Fathollah
mirza
— named after the spiritual and eminent sheikh and writer buried in Najaf — had headed north for Rasht and taken the boat
from Enzeli across the Caspian to Baku and boarded a train from czarist Russia across Europe. He had sown his wild oats all
over Saint Petersburg, then Vienna and France, and graduated from the Sorbonne. Then he’d come home to marry the haughty and
impossible daughter of the eccentric and ferocious Ebrahim
khan
Sardar Bahador, who commanded his own army and whose ancestors had come from the steppes of central Asia near the river Amu
Darya. He’d brought her Russian crystal chandeliers, Viennese vases, silk brocades, and a magnificent dinner set for eighty-four,
hand-painted in Saint Petersburg. She had been raised as few women in her time, fluent in French and Russian and Turkish,
riding bareback and hunting and presiding over her villages and crops and lands herself, settling disputes and meting out
justice like a man.