In the Walled Gardens (25 page)

“My beloved son. May God keep you, my son,” he murmured.

Peyman removed himself from his father’s arms.

The official was watching from the corridor. As was expected of an aunt, I went over to Peyman and embraced him. I whispered
to him, “He loves you more than life itself. You’ll be out soon . . .”

A few steps away, Mr. Bashirian was shaking, wiping tears off his face.

“Father —” Peyman said, and Mr. Bashirian looked up. “Don’t grieve. Don’t think about me. Stop thinking about me.”

They were gone. Only the quiet sobbing of Mr. Bashirian. The convoy of receding footsteps. The distant thunder of a metal
door, echoing. Final.

N
IGHT CAME, OBSIDIAN, PREMATURELY
. Autumn was deepening.

The children had eaten and I tucked them in early. I sat with them reading for half an hour, proclaiming legends and pointing
at pictures. They stuck their faces under mine. They squirmed, they yawned, they stretched. I hugged and kissed them, immeasurably
thankful at that moment.

Goli brought our dinner trays into the upstairs study.

Houshang and I ate together so seldom that we were out of practice. We liked to be invited out as often as possible, to know,
be assured, that we were mainstays of the society we upheld.

I had the television on. Houshang came in with a Scotch on ice and occupied the sofa, jiggling his glass, his gold ring with
the seal tapping cut crystal. It annoyed me when he tapped. He turned up the volume on the news, a deliberate snub, since
he never watched local television.

We ate without a word, knives and forks clinking against our plates, water glasses going up and down like elevators. Both
of us entrenched, intractable, in the same house with the same life.

Goli came back with tea and a bowl of dates and took away the trays. Houshang said he had something for me. I thought he had
bad news. From the top drawer of the cabinet, he took out a small black velvet box and left it on the table. I pried it open;
it was a sapphire ring encircled by hideous prongs set with diamonds from a jeweler I neither trusted nor liked.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“I give you a present, and you ask why! Put it on.”

A pudgy hillock of stones, several sizes too large. True to himself, Houshang always gave the expendable.

“Don’t you like it?” he said, for a moment distressed, nearly attentive.

“No, I — Thierry was here yesterday afternoon,” I said suddenly.

To my surprise, he grinned equably. “The fox! Did he grovel?”

I balked. Thierry had been forced to come. Houshang had required it to force his hand, as penance, a measure of his control
and manipulation. It was his sort of revenge, transmuted into an apology. He had Thierry exactly where he wanted him.

“You have to pull all the strings all the time?” I said.

He blew up. “Don’t you like the ring? You want to throw it back in my face? You and your family are all the same. I’m sick
and tired of your remoteness. Who the hell understands you anymore?”

He stood up, about to storm out, but changed his mind. “You know —” he said, pointing his finger, “let me tell you. It’s sad.
Really sad.”

“I know,” I said.

“No, you don’t! The truth is you’re cold with me. You have no devotion left for me anymore. There’s no sweetness or gentleness
in you. You’re not the woman I fell in love with. The one I married.”

H
E LEFT RIGHT AFTER
dinner. The phone rang. Eleven-twenty: I knew it wasn’t him.

Mother called late, often on a whim, to chat before going to bed. “In case I die in my sleep,” she’d say. Late at night she
was at her most creative. And awake. She would wander through the large house, baking cakes, making quince and sour cherry
and carrot jam, checking her pickles, reading Hafez, playing solitaire and listening to old records, painting, complaining
how all her friends were getting old and tiresome.

I’d been rummaging through photo albums in the downstairs study. I went into the kitchen to make tea, carried the glass back
to the study. The ringing telephone startled me. I picked up on the second ring, immediately recognizing Mr. Bashirian’s voice.
I’d given him my home number, advising him not to hesitate to call. This was the first time.

“It’s me . . .” he said tentatively.

I asked how he was. Desperate, he insisted, and unwell.

“What kind of unwell?” I said.

“I have chest pains.”

“A cough? You must have a cold.”

“No, it’s a sharp pain — all over.”

I asked what kind of pain, where, what he’d eaten, which pills. His voice tremulous, he apologized for disturbing me, for
calling so late.

“You should see a doctor.”

“What doctor? It was terrible to see him today. Terrible.”

I heard a click on the phone. Someone was listening in. The door of the study was ajar; beyond, the dark hallway, the curving
silhouette of the staircase. On the table next to me in the study, a single light, a wheel of light in a darkened room.

“Hold on,” I said.

I went through dark rooms to the kitchen. The lights were out, but there was a nip in the air — the back door to the kitchen
had been open. Goli and her husband each had a key and locked up when they left at night. Whoever had been eavesdropping on
my phone call had left in a hurry and hadn’t had time to lock the door. The key was still in the outside lock. Down the garden
path I thought I heard footsteps. I locked the door and returned to the study.

“Are you still there?” I said when I picked up the receiver.

Mr. Bashirian was coughing. When he recovered, he said, “I must give you the extra key to my house.”

“You’re going on a trip?”

“If — if I die, I want you to give him this letter. I’m leaving it on —”

“Why talk about death? When we can talk about living.”

“I’ll die alone in this house, and I will never see him again.”

This filled me with a terrible foreboding. “You mustn’t say that!”

“I’ve been pacing for hours, thinking awful thoughts. I — I can’t breathe. I’m being swallowed up by darkness. I’m drowning,
you know. Drowning with every hour, the darker it gets. I’m thrashing for air.”

I cradled the receiver by my neck, whispering. “Think of him. How you finally saw him. How you love him. Nothing else matters.
Didn’t you hear what they said? Any day now —”

“I don’t believe anything anymore.”

“Please, listen. So far things are improving. Right?”

heard the labored breathing broken off by his agitation for keeping me up so late.

“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “Sleep. Take a sedative and go to sleep.”

“When I sleep I have nightmares. I lie down waiting for them.”

“I know, I know. But they will not come tonight. If you take the sedative now, you’ll sleep, and by morning you’ll feel better.
Believe me.”

He disavowed equilibrium, endurance, and I repeated, whispering into the phone until he acceded to notions of trust and sleep.

In the bedroom I drew the curtains, their skirts rustling, like the wind outside hunting fallen leaves. “Believe,” I had told
him. We lie to others with the same words we use to lie to ourselves.

F
RIDAY AFTER MY MORNING HIKE
, I decided to stop by to see Mother.

The hike up in Tochal — a meeting of one of the university cells under my supervision — had been disrupted by a third-year
physics student. Once a hothead in high school in Qom, he still argued like the mule-headed son of a minor cleric. “Kill or
get killed!” he threatened, lecturing us on the immediate need for an armed struggle. He bickered with the others about the
ideal revolutionary condition, quoting Jazani and Puyan and the independent Marxist, Sho‘ayian. Then suddenly they lunged
at one another, thrashing around on the mountain ledge, threatening to bash one another’s brains out. I wanted to bash their
brains out myself. Despite the training, they still had no discipline. For a political front to have breadth and depth it
had to exist separately from an armed struggle.

Early in the afternoon, still angry, I arrived with a big box of sweetmeats for Zari’s children.

“There’s a message for you,” Zari said at the door. “Why can’t you get your own phone? I’m not your secretary!”

She could be so touchy and tiresome. I made for Mother’s room.

“Why’s her door shut?” I said. “She’s sleeping?”

“Morteza blew up again. He wants to know why you can’t take her.”

Mother had elected to live with Zari, for which Zari received something from me every month. I also gave something to Mother.
Morteza wanted it all.

“He wants money,” said Zari, tears welling up in her eyes, her hand still covering her cheek. “He still thinks we’re hiding
it from him.”

“What does that mean? Why’s your hand stuck to your face?”

“He thinks we were loaded, since Father worked for Nasrollah
mirza
all those years. He screams all the time, ‘You think I’m gullible and stupid? You think I don’t know you’re hiding things
from me?’ He says we’re sneaky liars and misers. Or else, Father really was an incompetent, bankrupt idiot.”

“He said that about Father?”

“Mother came out of her room and I saw her turn white, and she went back in and shut the door.”

“He said that in front of her?”

“You think that’s all? He says our family went broke and pawned me off on him. He says he was tricked! He wouldn’t have married
me and only did not to dishonor the family. And after Father died . . .”

She stared at me, grief and shame in her eyes.

“When he shouts, even the neighbors can hear him! He screamed so much today he scared the children and they started wailing.
So he hit them. Mother locked herself in her room. The children went to get her, but she wouldn’t come out. They begged and
cried and stamped their feet and pounded on her door until I started crying. Morteza said he’d hit me so my teeth would jump
out. Then he slapped me around.”

Zari wept. I yanked her hand off her face and saw the bloodred welt on her cheek. The son of a bitch was slapping my sister.
Now I would find him and kill him so that she’d cry only as his widow.

“Where is he?”

“How should I know? He’s gone to hell!”

“When did he leave?”

“Right after he beat me and my children and kicked the doors and broke plates and threw around our belongings! He’s an animal!”

“He must be taught a lesson once and for all,” I said.

“What’s the use?” Zari burst out sobbing. “He’s got some god-damn slut. He goes on and on about her — about some whore to
my face. That’s what he wants the money for. For her! Imagine adoring a slut! What am I — his goddamn maid? You should see
how he torments me. He says I’m dirt-poor, I’m a shrew, I’m getting old, I’m useless and cranky. He calls me a nobody!” Zari
said, wailing. “He does what he wants since Father died.”

I didn’t want to hear another word. “Stop crying, I said!”

“But he’s the father of my children!” she said, sobbing.

That was his worst defect. I went out in the courtyard and lit a cigarette and smoked. Zari hid away inside the house. She
had insisted on marrying Morteza, abandoning her studies, making three children with him. I came back in and knocked on Mother’s
bed-room door. I heard her murmur something and barged in. She lay on the bedding, invested with dignity and helplessness.
I was so angry I wanted to beat the walls.

“So, you’ve come?” Mother said to me.

“Haven’t you had lunch?” I said.

Zari leaned against the door, red-faced, with red eyes, arms folded.

“Shall I bring you lunch?” she asked Mother.

“Bring me poison.”

A copy of
Tehran Mossavar
lay by her hand. She motioned for me to sit.

“See what sort of brute he is? If only your father were alive . . .”

Tears rolled down her cheeks. She hid her face in her hand, momentarily overcome, then wiped the tears off efficiently.

“Did she give you the message?” Mother asked.

“What message?”

“Jalal called.”

“Jalal? That’s impossible.”

“It was him,” said Zari. “I talked to him.”

He’d called at one-thirty, asked after Mother, the children, and me as if he’d been away on vacation. He’d left a number for
me to call immediately.

“What’s going on?” said Zari.

“How should I know?” I snapped back.

We got into a bitter argument overflowing with recriminations until Mother had to intercede. The children came in from the
neighbor’s all quiet, then all happy to see us together, and I fetched the box of
zoulbiah
and
bamieh
that I’d bought at the confectioner’s, and we sat by Mother, eating golden treacly sweets with sticky fingers and glasses
of tea, and made Mother retell stories about the days in the old house in Darvazeh Daulat until she took out the black-and-white
and old sepia photographs from the small, battered suitcase behind the curtain, and we spread them on the bed — Father like
a general with pensive eyes standing behind Mother, seated demurely and airbrushed; Grandfather in clerical robes and turban
at the entrance of a mosque in Tabriz; Zari at five with a bow in her hair like a bumblebee; Zari radiant at sixteen before
marrying the jackass; me with a crew cut, buttressed by Father and my bicycle; graduation from the Teacher’s College; a family
picnic with the samovar under trees. Mother pointed here and there, looking astonishingly young all at once, then surprisingly
tired, and trying, always trying, to tell us something else.

“Things were different then” is what she always said.

T
HE PHONE NUMBER WAS
for a crowded café. The man who answered had an Armenian accent. His name was Khachik and he told me to call back. I did,
three times in two hours, until he put me through.

“Jalal!” I said.

“Reza?” He gave directions, said to get there immediately, and hung up.

When I got there, the neon sign was blinking blue and green. They had tongue sandwiches and bologna with fat pickles and tripe
on Thursdays. Inside they’d laid out the vodka at a corner table for a bunch of men. Khachik was the blond Armenian at the
corner table telling jokes, his arm around a whore, his customers hollering with laughter. He shoved back his chair, took
me through a door to the small kitchen in the back. He had dimples and blue eyes and two gold teeth.