In the Walled Gardens (19 page)

Cars honked at me as I skipped through speeding traffic, walking fast, then slowing down suddenly right before Radio City.
I went straight for the ticket window, eyes fixed on the woman inside, who looked bored. I asked for two tickets, whipped
out bills from my trouser pocket, grabbed the tickets, and turned away.

“Your change,” the woman called after me.

I grabbed the change, dumped it in my pocket, then pulled out the book of poetry from the outside pocket of my jacket, making
sure the cover with the title was facing out:
The Selected Poems of Forough Farrokhzad.
In my other hand I held up the two tickets like Popsicles. I backed into a rowdy group of boys standing together, and one
of them threw back his head with an idiotic smile.

“Wow,” he said, “an intellectual just bumped into me!”

They laughed. He was pointing at me.
“Porfessor,”
he said mockingly. “
Porfessor,
is this a good movie for morons like us?”

They doubled over laughing. People turned to watch — we were attracting attention. I was between the rowdy bunch and the entrance
to the cinema. I looked past the succession of glass doors, my eyes sweeping past pedestrians and the magazine stand by the
curb. I saw a man at the far end turn around and look straight at me. He wore glasses, was young, unshaven, nondescript, with
a medium build and wavy black hair, and was wearing a pea green jacket. I saw him look at the two tickets and the book against
my chest. His eyes widened but he didn’t budge.

Just then the tickets fell from my grip. I swore and bent down to sweep them up, seeing trouser legs and car tires on my way
up facing traffic. Then I froze. I’d seen a maroon car parked across the street past the group of boys, who were partially
blocking it. I straightened up behind the group. There were three men in the car, a driver in front with a dark jacket, and
two men in the back, whose faces I couldn’t see. SAVAK? I turned quickly, locating the young man with glasses. He was walking
toward me. I looked across the street. Had they come for him, for us? The two men in the back of the maroon car were now talking;
the closer one had his face turned away from the window. Then suddenly he turned his head. I first saw the other one pointing
to the cinema. What I couldn’t believe was the one who’d just turned his head. It was Jalal. Whose side was he on? Why had
he told me to call a stranger and bring a message, then come to Radio City himself? In a flash I understood what was about
to happen. I whipped around to warn the young man with glasses, now just a few feet away from me. This was a trap. They’d
used me and drawn him out to arrest him. Jalal was about to give him away, the snitch. The young man was nearly within my
reach. He couldn’t see the car because he had his back to it. I went to grab the sleeve of his jacket to tell him, all the
while calculating how to make a run for it myself. Then I saw Jalal lean forward and look straight at me. He saw us, my eyes
locking with his, not a single emotion on his face, not even acknowledgment. He stared as if looking through me. He could
have betrayed his own mother, the son of a bitch. Then something strange happened. Jalal shook his head slowly, and the man
next to him said something insistent, and Jalal shook his head again twice. Then he leaned back into the seat. The man beside
him tapped the driver, and the car pulled out, merging with traffic.

If Omeed was his code name and he was with the secret police, why watch from across the street, then leave? I turned suddenly.
The young man with glasses was behind me. We came face-to-face.

“What are you waiting for?” he said under his breath.

“I’ve got a message for you.”

“Give it right here.”

I whispered, “The message is, the group has been infiltrated. Two Savakis got in after the assassination of Colonel Fotouhi.”

“Which two?” he demanded.

“Omeed —”

“Omeed?” he said, confounded. “Who’s the other?”

“Shaheen.”

He looked like he’d bitten into a capsule of poison.

I lunged to grab his arm. This was my only chance to wheedle information out of him, but he pivoted quickly and turned on
his heels. I saw the back of the pea green jacket disappearing quickly in the crowd, and I started running.

“Wait —” I called out. “Hold on —”

He rounded the corner into Takhte Jamshid, nimble and quick, zigzagging between pedestrians. I saw him turn left again and
look back over his shoulder, eyes nasty and dead-set. I ran into the side street after him, but he ran faster, the flaps of
his jacket billowing. Nightfall, the streetlamps on, the side streets shadowy. I’d lost him.

T
HE TAXI DRIVER TALKED
nonstop all the way up Pahlavi. I sat in the front. If the secret police had brought Jalal to Radio City to point the finger,
he hadn’t. He’d come with another set of plans. I couldn’t decide what had just happened.

The taxi driver had the radio on and was shouting over it. Another self-proclaimed philosopher. The inside of the cab, from
the front windshield all the way to the back, was adorned with green velvet trim dripping with little green pompons. A picture
of the disciple Ali in the front with halo and sword under winged angels, and verses from Hafez and the Qur’an plastered all
around, with post-cards of mermaids and seamen and strange islands at sunset and virginal girls with doleful eyes, big tears
plunging down their cheeks. Hanging from the rearview mirror, a cluster of amulets to ward off the evil eye, an enormous set
of dice in red velour, and two pale blue fluorescent plastic swans. “They’re unrequited lovers!” he said, fingering them lecherously.
The last leg of the trip, he took no other ride and flipped open the dashboard to reveal nude pictures of big blonds with
big tits and high heels and black lace stockings and big behinds. He chuckled, going through the register of low-class brothels
in the red-light district, District Ten. He kept telling dirty jokes and elbowing me in the ribs like a jackass and swearing
at every politician he could cut down, berating the lot of them.

“They’re all servants!” he said.

He screeched to a halt by the curb. “Your car’s in the repair shop?”

I nodded and paid.

“Women only like flashy cars! What’s yours?”

“Me? A red Camaro,” I said, smiling.

I could see the group from where I was standing, up by the short end of the restaurant facing the side street. The director
from our department was there with my other colleagues, eyeing the competition at other tables, drinking.

I watched them as I crossed. The director held forth with some story while they all listened and laughed, slapping the table
when he finished. One hell of a story, judging by their reaction.

I crossed the side street and came up alongside Casbah. Traffic whizzed by along Pahlavi. I walked on along the panes of smoked
glass, stopping to light a cigarette under a tree. I didn’t feel like making small talk with the director, another vain, rootless,
just-returned-from-abroad braggart. The new breed.

I pushed through the glass doors. I gave the maître d’ a brief message, pointing at the far table, and left; then I got into
the phone booth on the street to dial Abbas. I watched with anticipation, already laughing. Within seconds the director came
running out of the restaurant, very agitated, flailing arms about, his buddies on his heels. He looked up and down the street
frantically; then they all ran to the corner. The message was, “The owner of a brand-new red Camaro that is on fire and burning
in the street is that man.”

Abbas was working late as usual at the National Television, just up and across the street on the hill. He said he’d be able
to leave shortly and told me where to go.

I walked up Pahlavi, past the Hilton, turning right on Fereshteh, past new mansions faced in white travertine and marble for
the new rich. At the end where the street turned left at the bottom, I turned by the summer compound of the Soviet embassy,
its old walls running along the road, the immense plane trees towering behind them. Father had told me stories on cold winter
nights about Colonel Liakhoff plotting around old Tehran, and Colonel Starosselsky, White Russian commander of our own Cossack
Brigade. In Father’s days the big scare was the Red Terror and Pishehvari and the Communist movement. He disdained all foreign
interferences and schemes and handouts.

Down past the embassy the road was dark, the rocky riverbed under the bridge bearing a trickle of water from a summer with
no rain. I went over and up, turning down into the residential back-streets behind the Old Shemiran Road. I found the small
restaurant at the bottom of a dead end, stuck between trees, with a string of bare lightbulbs on the porch and Formica chairs
and tables in white vinyl. I took a corner table overlooking the phantom river. The owner was a quick and efficient man, sweating
from the char-coal grills going in the back. I said I was Abbas’s friend, and he brought out a bottle of Ettehadieh vodka
and a glass with ice.

I poured the chilled vodka. The sky was a dome of black rock with stars; the moon, at its prime.

The owner came back out with a saucer of dill pickles and bread and cheese, calling out to his sons, who were serving other
tables.

I heard laughter inside through the open window, shrill and flirtatious, more suited to jammed cabarets. From the porch I
looked back over my shoulder. I could see them through the window, the table of four, two men, and two women tossing yellow
hair, with tight and revealing tops. One of the men had blond hair, and I could see his patrician profile. Some foreigner.
The other, with ebony hair, had his back to me, his expensive blazer slung over the chair, a gold ring with a seal on his
right finger. When he put out his other arm with the sleeve rolled back, I saw the expensive gold watch and wedding band.
They were the only such customers, slumming, far from the haunts of the upper class. The other tables were dowdy family types;
and on the porch, tables of only men, workers, and students.

Several patrons left, going for their cars in a dirt lot by the restaurant. A Peykan came down the road and swerved sharply
into the lot. Abbas, ever the careless driver, emerged, his shrewd eyes even more pronounced above his beard. The owner came
to greet him, taking our order with affability and rushing off.

“The boys were at the British embassy in Gholhak,” said Abbas. “This English group was scheduled to go on camera to explain
some dig. Our director says: ‘I’m not going in!’ Now, they’re already inside the gates, clustered by the door, the archeologist
and special guests waiting inside. The director says to the boys, ‘Fuck the English! The sons of bitches screwed us for years.’
The film crew agreed, so they turned around and left.”

I poured him vodka, and we touched glasses.

He leaned in. “We’ve become all theater! All make-believe. Like that ridiculous paean to the royal family in the Marble Palace.
A monumentally garish sound-and-light show by that charlatan Czech. Like this festival with English brass bands in our parks,
their ambassador arriving in his Rolls-Royce to cut ribbons.” He shook his head. “Who’re they kidding? Scratch the surface
and there’s rage.”

One of the owner’s sons brought the chicken kebab. We tore into the pieces, stuffing ourselves with raw onion and pickles
and spoonfuls of buttery rice.

Abbas wanted to know if I had anything more on Jalal.

He said, “You can’t be too careful. There’s proof SAVAK was running a Communist cell a few years back. Imagine! Like shooting
fish in a barrel. Even Radmanesh in Moscow had endorsed the cell. What do those guys know in exile? They’re out of touch.”

We downed vodka, the restaurant emptying around us. We ordered tea, picked our teeth with toothpicks from a glass. An emaciated
dog came out of the dark, sniffing around the tables on the porch, and I threw it bread. One of the workers two tables over
kicked the dog, and the animal went off howling and the workers burst out laughing. They got up to leave, still laughing.
The boy brought our tea and was clearing our table when the blond foreigner appeared in the doorway, the one from the table
of four inside. Tall, with dazzling blue eyes, nearly silvery. The worker who had kicked the dog turned around and blocked
his path, saying something obscene to his face, which the foreigner didn’t get. But I saw the flicker of tension in the blond
man’s eyes. Not on his face. He was still smiling, like some surefire movie star on screen. Way too good for the worker, way
too good to acknowledge an obscenity in any foreign language. He made a small sweeping motion with his hand. A conceited gesture
— a “Get out of my way, boy” — saying something in what I thought was French as he moved forward. The girl behind him had
her arm snug around his waist, her face against his back as though he were her protector. The worker stepped back, ogling
them. The girl gave him a triumphant look, then called back to her friend inside to grab the pack of cigarettes from their
table. I saw the girl inside, framed by the window, snap up the pack. She had heavy makeup and dyed strawberry-blond hair
and the tightest jeans riding up her buttocks. She was running her fingers through the ebony hair of the man paying the bill.
He stood with his back to the window, peeling off bills and tossing them on the table. She smiled, sliding her arm into his,
kissing him on the neck. He laid a hand on her buttock and squeezed, leaving a large enough tip for the owner to be bowing
and scraping while he turned to whisk his blazer off the chair. I saw his face as he turned, recognizing him, to my surprise.
Mahastee’s husband. I looked away. I didn’t want him to see me.

“Thierry,” he called to the Frenchman, as he came out on the porch. Then something quick in English about a house. “See you
at your house.” I’ve been teaching myself English.

Abbas slurped tea, and I watched the foursome. The workers had disappeared. Mahastee’s husband had his arm around the girl,
whispering in her ear until she broke out into a titter.