In the Walled Gardens (7 page)

The servants brought in fruits and halva and cakes and custards and sweetmeats and tea and the dented green dome of the marzipan
cream cake.

“Look at the dent!” the colonel called to Houshang.

They exchanged dirty jokes, Houshang recasting the ambush as entertainment, yet another detail under control. Mr. Malekshah
interrupted him. He was sullen because everyone had kept interrupting him at lunch and hadn’t given him the chance to exult
in his high-minded scholarship. Mother was fond of putting him in his place, like a lion tamer standing over a squirrel. Mr.
Malekshah picked up the old argument he had going with the colonel about the state of our poetry since the Samanids, one thousand
years before.

“What’s it got to do with Marxists?” Houshang said.

“It’s more important, that’s what!” retorted Mr. Malekshah.

Houshang doesn’t really care about the Samanids, nor any of their poets, nor anyone since who hasn’t done really big business.
He thinks of Father’s old friends as fuddy-duddies of a bygone age. Irrelevant but tenacious, doomed to extinction.

Father had been saying he expected a guest at three-thirty, repeating it four times, but nobody had taken notice. He finally
told me.

“Who is it?”

“Hajj-Alimardan’s son.”

I could hardly believe my ears when Tourandokht came in to announce Reza.

H
E STOOD IN
the doorway. I flinched. He was a man now, strapping, solid. Face ordered around cheekbones, composed.

The last time I’d seen him, he was an adolescent with an Adam’s apple. He’d just started shaving, in that rite of passage
to becoming a man. Though already then he’d had that perfect virtue, being manly. Watching him across the room now, it seemed
as if he were returning only an hour later, so disconcerting was his presence and that face I knew well, its expressions and
entire set of motions fixed permanently in my mind. Clean-shaven, steely, se-date. I’d watched him up close for years. As
children we’d never hidden our feelings from others — that populated world of adults and relatives and strangers — climbing
plum trees, bickering with my brothers and ganging up against them, riding in the open fields of Morshedabad. Reza rode better
than the rest of us but never took notice of such things. We’d taught the village boys volleyball and organized teams, but
Reza tutored them all year and helped them do homework. He’d taught them how to swim, lined them up like soldiers by the lower
pool, overgrown with moss, and taught them to dive in. “What patience!” my brothers said. Then that last year he started to
defy his father and look away from his mother, and everything shifted, the way he and I looked at each other, looked at others.
From that weekend that last spring, when I brought records my parents had bought in Europe and threw a party for cousins and
friends. Reza didn’t show up, and I left the chitchat and laughter to go find him and persuade him to join us. He came out
under the grove behind the house and stood. Defiant, glowering. I went up and insisted he join us, then unexpectedly raised
my hand, rubbed my palm across his face, and laughed and teased how he was going to be prickly forever. He grabbed my wrist
and pulled, and suddenly we were two inches away from each other, staring, alone under the trees, our breaths close, our irises
dark moons in the sea of our eyes. Then someone called out my name and we pulled away. After that night and for that last
vacation there with him, everything was different, as if he and I had made a promise to each other and intended to keep it.
We’d hidden it well from others, what we felt for each other. And then they had left suddenly. And when he’d come back that
one summer night when we were sixteen and had kissed me in the garden, its fiery pleasure had stayed with me, that night and
long after, its sheer force relenting, shifting, but remaining sheltered in my imagination through whatever came later — wisdom,
experience — like a source remembered by the river.

It all came to me in a rush, disorienting, but intact and unequivocal like revelation. I kept back. I wanted to watch him
before he could watch me. That inscrutable face, slightly scowling but even-tempered, eyes like his mother’s, quick and quiet.
His father, we had adored. He’d always had a singular awareness, nearly eerie, able to read what I was feeling. No man could
do that anymore.

He didn’t see me, what with Father calling to Mother and all my brothers gathering by the door to greet him. Funny how Father
forgot to call me, introducing him all the while to others. I stood back, taking it in. I couldn’t run up and throw my arms
around him like the others. We’d shake hands, smile, act cordial. Father turned and saw me.

“Mahastee, it’s Reza!” he said, beaming.

Father beams so seldom. I nodded, setting down my glass of tea.

Reza was staring, ever the straight shooter, and I went over and shook hands. We smiled, cordial, neither of us much good
at small talk. My youngest brother took over, firing questions. “So where have you been?” “You’re married?” “Which ministry?”
“How’s . . .”

I listened for a bit, then turned back to where I’d been sitting to pick up my glass of tea, catching my reflection on the
way in the painted Qajar mirror. I was smiling. That’s when I saw Houshang’s reflection watching from behind me, the light
catching his glossy black hair, which he so prizes and fingers. His high forehead, well-proportioned features, the spoiled-brat
mouth unaffected by age. It was his eyes that betrayed a peculiar expression, as if he’d seen the next move on a chessboard
he disdained.

My eyes swept back to my reflection. I looked older than my husband. Something steadfast, abstinent, about my features. What
had my face betrayed to him? Lost pleasures. The past can’t be wrenched away from you. Only the future. It’s the future we
can’t possess. Walking through the door, Reza had brought the two colliding. I sat down, the crowded room falling away, a
strange feeling resounding through me as if the past had come to subvert the future.

N
ASROLLAH
mirza
SAT IN
the armchair of his study, surrounded by his books, his white hair capping his head like snow on Mount Damavand, his puffy
eyes behind glasses, capped by lush eyebrows. He still possessed that augustly discreet presence and the unassuming charm.
His ancestors were up on the walls, with holster and gun and horse and homestead. They held poses under cypresses, erect on
bentwood chairs, clenching walking sticks, in Qajar fezzes and karakul hats and Pahlavi caps. Never smiling — it wasn’t fashionable
to smile in pictures in those days. Revealing anything to posterity was unbecoming, even revealing anything to oneself.

A manservant brought a tray of tea and sliced cake with a green frosting and left it on the desk. My eyes flitted over the
vast collection of books — the entire far wall foreign books — registering works by Shadman, Isa Sadeq, Natel Khanlari, Foroughi’s
classic three-volume
History of Western Philosophy,
a bound copy of Moayyer al-Mamalek’s
The Notables of Nassereddin Shah’s Era,
and Mohammad Massoud’s antiquated novels,
Nocturnal Pleasures
and
Life’s Springtime.
On the small side table by my elbow lay an old and slender rare book — Mohtasham al-Saltaneh Esfandiari’s
Causes of Our Misery and Its Cure.
I remembered Father telling me about it.

“How’s your mother, Shaukat
khanom?
” Nasrollah
mirza
asked.

We reminisced. I said Mother was as well as could be expected, her grandchildren the light of her eyes. He told me how much
he missed Father. “My troubleshooter, my old friend . . . ,” he called him, his voice tapering off. He said Morshedabad was
now a neglected estate, their lands in Azarbaijan gone, his peasants now strangers to him and beholden to the government,
the regime holding families like his at arm’s length and with suspicion, even though their holdings had shrunk and an entirely
new generation now prospered. “‘Those reactionary landlords,’ that’s what they called us!” he said. “They hated us strong,
they patronize us weak.” He recalled his father and mother buried next to each other in the family mausoleum in Reyy. He remembered
the houses of his parents, the legion of attendants attached to them, the nannies of his childhood squatting at the edge of
the pool, scrubbing clothes and gossiping. He smiled, growing younger at this. He said once he had shared a life with them
and the tenants and peasants on his lands in Azarbaijan. He stared into space. Then he came around by re-counting a hunting
trip he and Father had taken together at the invitation of the chiefs of the Bakhtiari tribe; the year a hot wind had burned
eight hundred pear trees and shriveled them; the house in the garden of Morshedabad he’d overseen being built brick by brick.

The old days. Nasrollah
mirza
said they had been good.

“At my age, saying anything less would be admitting defeat. Futility,” he said. “I’m left to mull over the past. Whatever
the mistakes, it’s too late now.”

He leaned forward, offering me a glass of tea.

“I don’t understand what’s going on anymore,” he said. “It’s become a — such a circus. We’re under the illusion we’ve leaped
forward body and soul. It’s no good leaping by decree. If anything, our underpinnings should be secure, permanent. I’m not
so sure if — well, we’ll see —”

He paused. We drank tea and he insisted I try the cake.

“We’ll see,” he repeated absently.

I started telling him about my friend Jalaleddin Hojjati. He listened, veined hands covered with liver spots and fingers inter-locked.
A flicker constricted his eyes when he heard the words
SAVAK, Komiteh.
Disappointment. It was inevitable; no one liked stories about the secret police. I’d ruined his Friday, perhaps even stirring
the languid profundity of his obscure disillusionments. Then ever so quickly he resumed an air of gracious concern.

As long as I’d known Nasrollah
mirza
he’d possessed tact and poise, he had emanated goodness, but that goodness was now muted and irrelevant.

He didn’t say a word until I had said more than was necessary. He understood about trouble, abuses of power, dead ends, but
spared me the exposition.

“I saw his mother and sister in the street,” I said finally. “The mother looked haunted.”

“Yes,” Nasrollah
mirza
said vaguely. He reached for a gold Parker pen, asked for Jalal’s full name, and wrote carefully, promising to make calls
and consult Kavoos. “My son’s the one with contacts in high places. I wonder about this country when I hear about his contacts.
They’re such — such pretentious people.”

He accompanied me to the hall with his customary tact, murmuring it was time for him to slip away upstairs for his nap.

I wanted to make my exit then and there, since I had no business back in the living room. The Mosharraf brothers I’d once
been friends with when we were children and had been thrown together ignorant of the world and friendship had been easy, but
that seemed long ago. Their father had evidently retreated discreetly into a shell, into ever-constricting circles in order
to safeguard and cultivate his integrity, typical of his class. Mahastee I’d seen all of three minutes. Perhaps another time,
I told myself just as she came out into the hall. As she walked toward us, I felt a surge of indignation at how much I wanted
to see her, this sudden weakness I felt. In my anger I decided to leave quickly, before she had the chance to talk to me,
but still I waited as she covered the distance.

She was ten feet away when I remembered suddenly how one summer they had arrived for the holidays in Morshedabad and she had
jumped out of the car and run over to me and thrown her arms around me and cried, “Reza! It’s summer! I’m so happy to see
you!” I had felt my cheeks flush while she had danced around the trees. I was impatient for every vacation, always asking
Father when they’d arrive and how long they’d stay. With each year my exasperation increased every time she left. She emitted
radiance, changed the garden and meaning of life when she was there. She brought me books from Tehran and odd things like
colored globes and flashlights and card decks and pens, and then once a Meccano set from abroad, which I later discovered
she’d bribed one of her brothers to give to me. She was uncanny in her deceptions. “But I prefer your house to mine!” she’d
say. All because she knew it was easier for her to visit mine and stay until all hours since Mother didn’t like it when I
stayed over too long at theirs. The only gift I ever gave her was a blue-glazed octagonal tile with a chip in the corner.
“It’s from the shrine in the village,” I said. “I found it in the rubble. It’s for good luck.” “I didn’t think you were superstitious,”
she said. “I’m not, but you are,” I said.

That day she threw her arms around me, I had that sudden intake of breath, a strange quivering ripped through me. When I turned,
I saw Father staring at me as if he’d become stone; then he turned and walked away. My heart sank, knowing that he understood
more than I wanted him to, more than anyone else, and I had to resort to concealment. I disliked the change — the heaviness
of his gaze, the obscure signs of his displeasure, the implication that she and I were not equal, for she thought I was her
equal and behaved that way and that was enough, though I couldn’t see her father or mine doing the same. From that moment
until they left, Father started giving me chores constantly to keep me away. She’d run through the trees calling to me — “Reza,
I’m bored! What’s keeping you away?” — and I’d wait and watch until Father was off somewhere to go join them. The next summer
when they arrived, he must have thought I was cured he was so indifferent. He went off to Azarbaijan to oversee their estates,
and we spent entire weeks in the garden together, and running through the trees after dinner, I knew we were free and loved
this freedom fiercely, all the more because I sensed it wasn’t ours and could be taken. I knew, long before she did. That
last spring, in my fourteenth year, my sense of freedom suddenly evaporated as I went lurching between feeling angry and frustrated
and solitary. I kept arguing with Father that I wanted to leave for Tehran and attend school in the capital. Gripped often
by maddening flashes of rage at the limits of freedom and Mahastee’s appearances and disappearances, which were determined
by her world and always beyond my control, I knew nothing could assuage my feelings. I turned to books more and more. Then
I read in a novel how those who love fiercely so young see that love destroyed as adults. I knew it was a lie. I thought then
nothing could destroy what I felt.