In the Walled Gardens (10 page)

“Why the peculiar look?” she demanded, back with the key.

The two men were upstairs going through Jalal’s life. Down-stairs I temporized with Dostoyevsky, waiting for them. I wasn’t
about to let Esmat
khanom
betray me. Taking the key from her, I held forth with a fairly comprehensive summary of the novel. She listened, lighting
up at the pathetic sufferings of the Marmeladov family, bewildered at Raskolnikov’s confession. When I heard foot-steps in
the stairwell, I quickly asked to use her bathroom. Slightly dismayed, she pointed to the back. The doorbell rang and our
eyes locked as I went past her into the next room. I kept behind the door there, listening, eyeing the window through which
I could escape.

The two men at the door said they wanted information on her fourth-floor tenant.

“Hojjati, Jalal,” barked out one of them.

They inquired about his comings and goings. Friends, habits, visitors. She obliged, effusive from terror, her inflection shallow,
revealing Jalal to be a quiet tenant minding his own business. No one ever visited him.

They asked how long he’d been a lodger. Two years. Who had a key? No one except the lodger, as far as she knew. Had anyone
come by these past days? Anything peculiar? Be honest. She denied it.

“We’ve been watching the building,” they said.

“I wouldn’t notice.”

“Anyone tonight?” they repeated.

She said no, a shade too quickly. “Why, what’s he done?”

They left her midsentence, the clatter of their regulation shoes hollow. She shut the door with a loud thud, eyeing me nervously
as I came in from the back room. I handed back the key.

“Where’s Jalal?” she demanded.

“They have him.”

“I want my rent.”

“You’ll have to wait,” I said.

“I don’t want trouble. I’m a lonely, miserable old woman. Look how everyone treats me, like dirt!”

I checked at the window. The car was gone, so I could leave.

“Why did he confess?”

Jalal hadn’t. She meant Raskolnikov. “It’s a long story —”

T
HEY HAD LIED
about watching the building, or at least about how long they had been there that night. I’d spent about forty minutes in
Jalal’s flat, and if they were already parked at the corner, they would have seen the lights going on and off. They hadn’t.
They’d arrived after nine, making it sound like they were there night and day, watching.

Jalal’s two rooms were modest. The place didn’t look like it had been touched in weeks, a fine layer of dust on everything.
An un-made bed, several melamine dishes in the cupboard, the table in the kitchenette with a half-empty bottle of Ettehadieh
vodka and two rickety chairs, dirty dishes in the sink, and on one of the two electric burners, a small pot of desiccated
Turkish coffee. There was one picture, of Forough, plastered inside the door of his closet. A dead woman, killed long ago
in an accident. “Our first sensual rebel since Eve!” Jalal said. He admired how her famous poems had gone against everything,
her intimate torments, daring confessions, her dramatic death. Dark hair, penciled eyes, hair piled up. You’d think she was
actually his lover.

Jalal was in his prime, proud of his razor-sharp insight, his analytical powers. He had a keen and fiery intelligence and
an unfailing knowledge of people, nearly eerie. In the early days when we’d first met, after watching him for a while I had
finally invited him to join our restricted circle. We had started as politically active students in the electrifying days
of Mossadeq and the National Front and nationalization of oil, terminated by the CIA-engineered coup against Mossadeq. We
were indelibly marked by those events.

We were Jalal’s first stop along the Left. I was his mentor then, and he was an eager and restless novice. In those days I
wrote about liberation movements like the Algerian War of Independence and submitted to certain magazines until I got censored.
Jalal would bring his writings, ask for advice, then get all worked up when I edited them. He detested being criticized. A
feverish writer, he was attending Tehran University for a degree in sociology, always arguing with his professors. And forever
casting around, shopping for doctrines and ideologies that could measure up to his appetite. Then he disappeared.

Later when he called Mother and Zari and left a message for me, he’d already completed his military service and owned the
coffee shop. He kept a picture of Che in the cash register under all the bills with the imperial picture. Che this, Che that,
he kept saying. Che! The Perfect Man. He needed money and started borrowing from me but always paid me back. All the while
he kept up the front, talking about being enrolled in a graduate program — he was out of the shop so often — though he was
vague about this to everyone. I knew it was a lie. Militant, atheist, he was sophisticated for the son of a shepherd and bricklayer.
Very disdainful of his lower-class family and peasant heritage, which went against what he preached.

We had arguments. Jalal hated how I accused the new generation — his — of being rootless. Of not knowing anything about its
political history. Of being shut out, cut off. He much preferred arguing that great big engine of history — class struggle.
Or lecturing about the struggling masses, though his concern seemed aloof and perfunctory. He knew our group had connections
with Marxists in Europe from the Confederation of Iranian Students there and in the progressive National Front. But we had
avoided the old mold of a Leninist party structure. We kept small — a political association, recruiting and training. We maintained
a shrewd and disciplined group, secular intellectuals intent on proving our ideological independence. Unlike the pro-Moscow
Stalinist Tudeh Communists, whom we distrusted. They always use the same old bankrupt tactics — forever clobbering the regime
but also clobbering every other ideological and liberation movement in sight. Jalal tried them and every notch along the Left.
Then he started touting Safai Farahani’s book on the necessity of an armed uprising instead of studying Hegel and Marx, growing
ever more militant, insisting on the relevance of Maoist radicalism in the Middle East. He preached armed insurrection. I
said he would crash and burn. He said revolution was blood! No bureaucracy, but straight from the gut. He was typical of the
Radical Left, reckless and half-baked, furiously outdoing himself to be more revolutionary than anyone else.

I surveyed his room. If they had wanted his stuff so badly, they would have come and taken it as evidence. I poked under the
mattress and threadbare rug, in the closet, where he had a few items of clothing, and in the space behind the adjoining metal
bookcases. I found a black plastic comb there. I went over the place inch by inch, but there were no personal scraps, no family
pictures, just an antiseptic life. I sat in the kitchenette and stared.

That’s when I saw the newspapers, a stack of old papers in the corner. Jalal never read
Kayhan
or
Ettela‘at.
“I’ll never pay to boost the circulation of mouthpieces for the regime!” he said. Both of us ran and circulated underground
papers. I bent down and moved the stack, peering at the tiles. The caulking around several of the tiles had worn away. I took
a knife from a drawer, tapped the tiles, then pried one up. The floor had been slightly hollowed out underneath, but there
was nothing there. I sat down again, thought back. He liked looking out his kitchen window to the back alley — a man standing
above the world surveying it from his perch. One thing was clear — he burned to change the world. One time I got up to the
fourth floor and found his door slightly ajar — it mustn’t have been closed properly and had blown open — so I walked in.
He was standing by the open window and whipped around suddenly. I’d caught him off guard. He detested being caught off guard.

I got up from the kitchen table and went over to the window and looked out as I had so many times before. There wasn’t much
to see except rows of small windows set into the dark brick wall of the building facing his and the one at the end. All the
windows had drawn curtains, electrical lights filtering through here and there. The occupants didn’t like facing a drab and
narrow back alley. I opened the window, stuck my head out, saw sky and walls of brick. I looked down at the back alley. What
had Jalal been doing at his window that day? I pushed down on the ledge and leaned out farther to try to see what he’d seen.
Then just as I was pulling back in from the window, I noticed the corner of what looked like a metal box right under the ledge.
I leaned over to see it better. It was the size of a satchel, with a protruding lid, like a mailbox. Easy to miss, the way
it was placed just under the ledge with only a corner sticking out, nailed into brick. Some sort of utility box, maybe for
electrical wires, except it had a lid and no wires leading into it and was in an impractical and inaccessible place. It couldn’t
have much of a purpose, all the way up on the fourth floor where you couldn’t even reach it with a ladder from the alley.
I felt around, lifted the lid, and stuck my hand in, half expecting to touch electrical wires. I felt plastic and tugged a
little. A plastic bag. I squeezed what seemed like a wad of papers, then pulled and grabbed the bag with both hands to make
sure it wouldn’t slip down into the alley. A taped plastic pouch full of papers. I ripped off the tapes, dumped the contents
on the kitchen table, and a mishmash of typed and handwritten pages fell out. An ingenious way to hide documents, suspending
them outside in an innocuous metal container resembling a utility box that no one could reach.

I closed the window, went through the stack. Handwritten papers, typewritten pamphlets. Revolutionary titles — treatises on
how to topple the regime. Manuals, instructions, insurrectionist theses. I leafed through. Here, the inner workings of an
ultraradical organization.
Procedures for an Armed Struggle. Epic of Resistance. What Must Be Done Now? A Revolutionary’s Execution. Today All Heroes
Are on the Left.
The texts were underlined in red here and there, annotated with Jalal’s very own handwriting in the margins. He had edited
and inserted, using some of my very arguments to attack other groups like ours on the Left. The stapled sheets of lined loose-leaf
were covered with longer commentaries by him. Still a lousy writer, overblown, intellectually sloppy, but animated. Here was
evidence SAVAK killed to find. Marxist-Leninist edicts capping directions on how to make explosives, a report on assembling
eight hundred grenades in a garden outside Tehran in Karaj and how they were distributed by motorcycle, the rigors and advantages
of Cuba’s guerrilla tactics versus Maoist China’s theoretical courses, how to attack and disarm policemen in the street, how
to blow up banks and government offices and military installations. Invaluable underground documents. They would use them
against Jalal, both the Right and Left. Jalal had said the Tudeh Communists, another underground party, rather than the state,
were the ones spreading the most vicious lies and rumors against his group. I shredded everything to pieces, burned them on
the bathroom floor, and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

I
WAS RUSHING
to make the lecture at the Institute for Social Studies and Research and then get home in time to catch the children before
their bedtime. To my surprise Mr. Bashirian was waiting by my car in the parking lot. Brown raincoat, tweed beret, hovering.
His face was suspended with sorrow, aging.

Smiling feebly, I endured guilt and remorse. He had started clinging to me. Of course I couldn’t blame him. He couldn’t let
go. I was beginning to dread our unexpected meetings. Nothing positive came of them for his son except the bond Mr. Bashirian
and I were forming.

He apologized in that most considerate manner of his for de-laying me after work, but he had news. They’d come to the house
the night before. They’d turned it upside down. Of all Peyman’s books they had taken his copy of
A Guide to Khorassan
by Shariati. But it was just a guidebook! Then they’d taken away Peyman’s collection of photos.

“The travel albums?”

He nodded, wringing his hands, wondering what they wanted with endless pictures of tiled domes and villagers and caravansaries
in deserts.

“They’re looking for something specific,” he said. “I’m sure, I’m sure.”

People from work were going by. We were attracting attention, so we decided to walk. Up by the light, we headed north, the
street thick with traffic. I didn’t tell him I’d talked to Father. What was there to report except promises? So I repeated
what I’d said before.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “He’ll be home in no time.”

“First I consoled myself by saying it was a mistake. But he’s still not home. That can only mean bad news.”

He tormented himself like this each day. From what he’d gathered, they’d taken Peyman in a day of rioting at Aryamehr. A crowd
of students had gone on a rampage, breaking windows and furniture on the pretext the cafeteria food was contaminated and inedible.
Everyone knew it was an excuse. They wanted the right to form associations for debate and politics and sports, prohibited
by law. A special unit of the army had been called around midday. They’d driven up Eisenhower Avenue, turning in at the gates.
Soldiers had poured out, rounding up students and forcing them into trucks in the front courtyard. The professors had retreated
to their offices as usual and locked their doors.

“Last night, did they say anything?”

“They kept me in my bedroom,” he said.

For a moment I felt his pain catch my throat, as if he’d passed it to me, beyond words, beyond the smallest gesture. His eyes
fastened to hope like a man drowning. His son had become a phantom, burning brightly at the extremity of his vision.

“I don’t understand,” he murmured, shaking his head.

He thought back, told me about the time Peyman had traveled into the mountains of Kurdestan with a friend from the Literacy
Corps. About his trip to northern Azarbaijan, then Gilan, and through the rice plantations of the Caspian. A week in Yazd
one winter. Khorassan was the last journey — I’d seen those pictures at his house. And the summer he’d traveled south to the
Gulf to visit a friend in Ahvaz. In that searing heat, they’d traveled the coast from Bandar Bushehr to Bandar Abbas — they
were young, after all.