In the Walled Gardens (29 page)

“She was afraid you’d listen to it. Especially Mr. Behroudi.”

“Why, what’s on it?”

“Nothing much, she says.”

I laughed. “Fire and brimstone and talk of doomsday?”

“Sermons from Najaf by an old ayatollah in exile.”

“What’s the big deal about that?”

“Exactly what I said, my dear. She got it from the mosque in Gholhak.”

“She’s changed, I tell you. Even Ramazan. He’s tense, he broods.”

“It’ll all blow over.”

I went in to take a bath and left the adjoining door open while Tourandokht inspected old framed photos in the bedroom, recollecting
the days of the horse and carriage and summer migrations uptown to the big garden and back downtown to the old house in Ghavam
Saltaneh for the winters. “What a production life was then!” she said. I could hear her dentures clicking and the interjecting
rhythms of her uneven breath and the occasional tap of her cane. Then she came into the bathroom and, teetering, bent over,
insisting on scrubbing me down with the mit as in the old days, just as in the public baths.

In the bedroom she stared at a photograph of Houshang with our sons.

“You’re satisfied with him?” she asked as I dressed.

I didn’t want to say anything. Once, she had wished me a life-time with Houshang, a hundred years. A sentence.

“Marriage is our house of refuge,” she said. “A woman builds it, and not just for herself.”

“Maybe I built it so I could leave it,” I said.

She murmured a prayer, blew it around the room the way she always did.

Mother called to say the driver was on his way for Tourandokht.

“She’s staying with me.”

“She belongs here,” Mother said. “She’s the light and soul of my house. Once, she went to Tabriz for a month, and everything
went wrong. We had bad luck nonstop! When she’s not here, I feel depressed. I think I’ll die in my sleep and the house will
buckle and our trees will wither and the garden will perish. She’s the guardian spirit. Don’t tell her! She’ll get all uppity
and take on airs. I have no patience for that.”

“Really, Mother. Don’t you think it’s time you tell her?”

“Why should I? She already knows.”

The car came at the appointed hour. Tourandokht, in white chador and white socks, slipped on her shoes by the door. I packed
her into the car carefully, and when I kissed her she chuckled, and I handed over her cane and waved. She waved back ever
so slowly, as if she were a head of state being driven away in a motorcade.

Houshang’s secretary called to say his meeting was running late and from there he would be going straight to his social gathering.
Their circle of close friends, fifteen men, gathered once a month.

He doesn’t like coming home. I prefer it when he doesn’t. In that way, we’re compatible.

At ten I called Mr. Bashirian. I let it ring, but he never picked up. I wondered if anything had gone wrong. Maybe he was
on a walk. Unless they had called for him to go to Komiteh to get Peyman. They were already together, he would call to tell
me the next morning, put Peyman on the phone to talk to me. Releasing a prisoner took time; there was red tape and last-minute
glitches. They’d stopped to get something to eat. But he had so much food in the house.

Midnight. Up in the bedroom I looked out to the mountains, then redrew the drapes.

I
T WAS THREE DAYS LATER
that I learned Peyman Bashirian was dead.

Mr. Bashirian had promised to call me, and I worried when I didn’t hear from him. I invented reasons. He was busy running
errands, pampering his son, talking until all hours. He never showed up at work. The next two days I was locked into a seminar
all day. The last evening, I tried calling him, then went to a family party without Houshang. I tried him the next morning
without success. I wondered if he’d asked again for a few days off to be with his son, but no one in the office had heard
from him. That didn’t sound like Bashirian. I called that night. I was nervous. A woman answered, much to my surprise.

I asked hesitantly, “Is this Mr. Bashirian’s home?”

She said yes, her voice oddly hollow. I quickly introduced myself. She acknowledged knowing me, gave her name. Shahrnoush,
his sister. I wanted to tell her how much I’d heard about her.

But she said, “Oh, Mrs. Behroudi. Something terrible has happened.”

“Mr. Bashirian had an accident?” I said immediately.

“No, Peyman — Peyman passed away.”

Her voice broke, and she wept.

I was home. It was evening. I fell back in the armchair, clutching at my head, at the convulsion brought on by what she had
said. I repeated, “I’m so sorry, so sorry. How is that possible? He was supposed to be released. What happened? When?”

“Three days ago. He had a heart attack. Before Kamal got to him. Yesterday afternoon we buried him at Behesht Zahra.”

She exhaled, breath quavering, words broken off and jagged. I asked for Mr. Bashirian. She said he had retired to his bedroom
for a bit. But I could come anytime I wanted.

I tore through my closet and changed into black and rushed down. I left a message with Goli for Houshang not to wait for me
for dinner, kissing my sons at the foot of the stairs as I slipped on my coat. They veered off, arms out, imitating jet fighters.
Goli, sulking by the door, said Ramazan wanted the final number of guests for our upcoming dinner party.

The last thing I wanted, could imagine in that state, was to entertain the rear admiral and more than fifty guests for Houshang.
I drove fast and furiously. The hills and mountains were blue-black at that hour. That poor father, waiting by the phone,
never to see his son again.

I turned into their street and parked by the trees. Mr. Bashirian’s front door was open. A woman in black stood in the doorway,
arms crossed, the light from the hall behind her. She was short, heavy in the hips. As I locked the car and drew close, heavyhearted
with dread and remorse, she raised her hand as if she’d left the door open for me. She was the sister. We shook hands, then
our eyes met and we embraced as if we’d known each other a lifetime.

“He will not survive this,” she whispered.

We walked in and she shut the door. I turned to several people standing in the hallway and she introduced us. Relatives from
Mazandaran, two neighbors; one of the men took my coat. Her husband brought in chairs from the dark living room beyond. He
spaced them slightly apart at the end of the hall, close to the kitchen, and offered me a seat I did not take. Instead I watched
his wife in the kitchen. She moved about, opening cabinets, murmuring about teaspoons, sugar. I’d only seen her black-and-white
picture, the one we had used to gain entry for me into Komiteh Prison. For one hour I had been her, his relative, the dead
boy’s. I could see how we resembled each other, though airbrushed photos were deceptive. She had a fuller face, wide-set eyes,
and an aptitude to radiate happiness, from what I could tell in her picture. Now stricken, she emerged from the kitchen with
a tray of tea and set it on the small, rickety table by the chairs in the hall. We all sat, except her husband.

“Mrs. Behroudi,” she began softly, “Kamal is unwell. I called the doctor, who gave him a strong sedative, and I put him to
bed.” She kept smoothing down folds of her black skirt. “Three — three days ago he called early in the morning. ‘Peyman is
gone,’ he said. ‘Come quickly.’” Tears streamed down her face; she gulped for words. “We hid it from our children. We couldn’t
bring ourselves to tell them, they adored him so much. We left them in the care of my sister-in-law who’s our next-door neighbor.
God knows how fast we drove to Tehran. When we got here, Kamal was already a — a broken man. He could barely talk. At night
Komiteh called with instructions. My husband talked to them. We went to get — get him, and yesterday afternoon we buried him
in Behesht Zahra —”

Gathered under the half-light of the hallway, she wept. Her husband brought a box of tissues from the kitchen and left it
on the table. He looked angry.

“My poor brother. On the day they were going to — to release —” She stopped, overcome, covered her face in her hands. We waited
silently, obedient in our mourning, unwilling to speak. She dabbed her face with a tissue, kneading it. “They didn’t call
him that day until seven in the evening. Imagine going to the phone. They said there was a problem. Peyman was unwell — unwell.”
She exhaled to subdue herself. “They didn’t tell him. They said they’d rushed Peyman to the infirmary, so Kamal got there
as fast as he could. They told him there. How Peyman had had a heart attack. A heart attack at twenty? My brother went mad.
‘Tell me he’s alive!’ he begged them. They wanted to know if Peyman had been ill. On medication. Did he have a birth defect?
What defect?” she said softly. “They took our perfect boy and gave us back a corpse instead.” She moaned. Her husband came
and stood behind her. “They took him to see the body. He collapsed, and they had to revive him. The doctor there confirmed
they’d called an ambulance, but there hadn’t been enough time to get Peyman to a military hospital. They said Peyman had been
losing weight, but that was normal. Prisoners refused to eat, especially young students. The heart attack was an unexpected
problem, they said. As if it was his fault for dying there. My poor brother says he’s ashamed how he cried and begged in front
of them. He couldn’t leave. In the end they got exasperated and they dismissed him. He said he wandered the streets and waited
until dawn to call us. I wish I’d been here. That boy was his — his everything —”

She stood up and withdrew through the kitchen to the back patio. I saw her standing under the arbor, her back to us, sobbing.
Her husband removed a coat from the coatrack, murmured he would take her for a walk.

The rest of us remained seated in the hall. A cousin of Mr. Bashirian’s, fidgety and thin, with his wife beside him, took
out a pack of cigarettes and offered it around. The elderly man beside me was a next-door neighbor; the other, an engineer
who lived a few doors down.

Mr. Bashirian’s cousin lit my cigarette, then his, lowered his voice.

“You think I believe Komiteh? They’re lying. They killed that boy. His blood is on their hands. The blood of a twenty-year-old!
With everything going on in there, when have they ever told the truth that they should this time? They’re accountable to no
one! They killed him.”

When I left, he accompanied me to the door. Down the side-walk I heard the door shut behind me. I breathed out, breathing
in the night air, the luxury of a different fate, the privilege of walking away into the street. The sky was suddenly clear,
the night magnificent. Under the streetlamp I considered this terrifying and sub-lime exchange: death’s pilfering of life.
This side of death, the strangest elation; it was everything to be alive, everything.

“W
HERE WERE YOU
?” Houshang demanded in our bedroom. I went straight into the bathroom, shut the door. I felt worn out, despondent, and I
wasn’t prepared for him to be home. In the bathroom mirror I looked ashen. I prepared for sleep. When I emerged, he was in
bed reading.

He looked up. “What is it? You won’t talk to me?”

“I’m tired. I need sleep.”

“So sleep. Don’t I get an answer?”

“That boy died in prison. That should make you happy, no?”

He stared, speechless. I turned off the light, slipped under the covers, turned my back to him. We lay in the dark, still
for a moment, listening for each other’s breath. Then he stretched out his hand, laid it on my upper arm, pressing bare flesh,
his fingertips barely touching my breasts, moved it down, grazing my silk night-gown, and slid his palm down to the curve
of my waist. I stiffened. He hesitated, his hand still on me. Then quickly he withdrew it.

“You’re made of stone,” he said.

“And what are you made of?”

He turned away, both of us alert, ready to strike.

That night we didn’t. He sensed the magnitude of what I hadn’t said. There, the promise of complication, upheaval, undoing,
frightening him away. We were like rival armies; Peyman, a battlefield. There was something narrow, selfish, in the way Houshang
and I lived together, in the way we did not meet each other’s requirements. But he had spoken with regret, caution. His voice
had moved me for a moment — though I would no more admit to him — and I remembered how it had felt at the beginning, when
the freshness of life had been ours and we had embarked, with the utter confidence of our place in the world — secure, whole,
exuberant — prevailing, shielding us. That had changed, shifted — maybe forever — though we could not see it. And so, in that
tenuous interlude before sleep, still lingering in Mr. Bashirian’s tiled and half-lit hallway with his grieving sister, I
groped along the contiguous and frayed borders of those attachments we chose, and those we were given. Kamal alone in his
room, sedated, wanting nothing more than to live with this son now taken from him. I, in the dark, beside my husband. I shut
my eyes. And in the weightless freedom before sleep, in those moments before drifting off, I felt something altogether past
— irretrievable, distant, floating — for Houshang, some memory carried in me with which I sensed I could still forgive him,
from which we could emerge, begin, erase, as if we could still be tender. I floated in this presentiment, this garden laid
open, between night and day, sleep and waking — a promised land — mutating, strangely conscious it was not to be. And I saw
there, between the pale flower beds and green box hedges and towering trees, Kamal Bashirian walking toward me, and though
I wanted to cringe, as he approached down the path I saw his face, beatific, strangely radiant, and he put his hand out, and
there through the trees — the green shadow of cypresses — his son emerged, his Peyman, tall, thin, self-assured, and they
walked together toward me, Peyman speaking; he was speaking to me, his mouth moving but without voice or sound, and though
I struggled I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and then he pointed to the book in his hand — a white book — and let the pages
fall open, and I looked but they were blank — white sheets — but he didn’t know it, and I turned, distressed, to tell others,
but they passed and I stood stricken, turned to the father and son and knew that he was dead, Peyman, dead, and the father,
bent over on a stone bench, was weeping, and when I got close enough I heard him whisper; softly he was saying, “The world
is made of stone, stone.”