In the Walled Gardens (3 page)

I poured another glass of tea. There were only three cubes of sugar left. Habib
agha
’s grocery store downstairs supplies me with most things. I will tell him that the cheese he got from Tabriz this month is
particularly good. He’s a decent man but barely makes ends meet with all those children.

At seven I hit the pavement. Mashdi Ahmad, the local sweeper, swept the sidewalk. He’s so thin his shabby cotton trousers
are several sizes too large for him, and he’s bowlegged, with a funny way of sidestepping when he sweeps. If it weren’t for
his olive skin and sunken eyes and bony cheeks, he’d be Charlie Chaplin. Mashd-Ahmad, the Charlie Chaplin of Iran! His mother
is very ill and I dared not ask this morning.

I greeted him and said, “It’s a fine day.”

“Whatever you say,” he said, and kept on sweeping.

I have under an hour to walk to work. I go through Lalehzar, past the fruit and fish markets of Estanbul Street, and on past
cinemas and cafés and barber shops and photography studios and dance studios and bookstores and stationery shops and tailors
and jewelers and curious tiny stores going sideways. I like to chat with the street vendors and shopkeepers. Afternoons they
call me in for a glass of tea, especially the money changers and rug dealers on Ferdausi. By day I work as a civil servant.
The Department of Educational Affairs for the Provinces is affiliated with the Ministry of Education. Our section was moved
up recently from Ekbatan Avenue to a new high-rise of concrete and glass in midtown with a guard at the door and steel desks
and several new divisions. I take home twenty-two hundred tomans a month. Evenings I teach night school in Moniriyeh, and
late nights I’m part of a Marxist underground organization.

Mother longs for me to find a wife, but I don’t want to be accountable to a woman. Mine is an uncertain life. Years of clandestine
activity have hardened me. Sooner or later my politics will land me in jail. All political parties have been banned for years
and now there’s only one party, decreed by the state.

Mother lives with my sister. Zari has three small children and a stingy and insufferable boor who calls himself her husband.
He’s loud and reeks of vodka on the rare occasion he comes to see me. He’s a lowly functionary in the Ministry of Post and
Telegraph, not that he’d ever admit it. Now that he’s got a car, he’s got a nasty habit of swerving down the road as he drives
and laughing like a lunatic. I know he sees whores. One day I will get him. We should never have given Zari away to such pretentious
people and instead should have sent them packing — the Behjat family — the day they came to ask for her hand in marriage.
She was only nineteen and thought he somehow fit into the love poetry she leafed through in her bedroom. His whole family
came for tea. Morteza, the apple of their eye, came hosed down with cologne, hair swept back, with a garish tie and a lecherous
smile. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on my sister. He left his polished shoes by the door, eyeing them as if he were afraid
we’d steal them. Zari was so nervous she noticed nothing. His mother and sisters sat to one side primly, nibbling on Mother’s
homemade almond rolls and baklava and walnut cookies and sweet fritters as if they were sprinkled with poison, surveying our
rooms and silver and rugs and samovar and dishes, taking inventory. As if Mother didn’t notice. Father was the very picture
of discretion as usual. He’d never believed in accumulating worldly goods and instead contemplated the interior life, prayed
on an old, faded rug, and read far into the night. Ferdausi, Attar, Maulana, the Constitutional Revolution, agricultural tracts,
the precepts of the first disciple — the Perfect Man — Ali. My father was a lion in the wilderness of a desert; Ali, the Lion
of God.

For years I taught mathematics in a public high school for boys. Every day was a battle, but I enjoyed their humor and directness.
I valued their disrespect gathering steam beneath that eternal veneer of obedience, their insolent tauntings and undiluted
politics. These were the minds that would dare think instead of doing as they were told. This was the force necessary to build
the future. I got them all before they could become sellouts. Before their inevitable concessions would soften them up, make
them jowly conservatives, neutered by government handouts and scholarships and promotions and international conferences. I
believed in them, understood them, before they got smothered by the state or the hallowed fears sown and harvested in their
souls by religion. Some we tracked, eventually recruited and trained, and then sent out to recruit others their own age. Only
the young make revolution.

Then I shifted to a private high school and for two years I watched the lambkins of the privileged and their parents. It will
take more than rich fathers to make men out of these boys. They’re given the hollow arrogance and false assurances of their
social class and believe in nothing but themselves, all soft and pampered. It only confirmed what we already suspected. If
they are the future of the Right, then we on the Left can defeat them. Paper tigers, they will go up in smoke one day.

When I applied for an opening in the Ministry of Education, I got this job. The department is in charge of all the educational
needs of the provinces: policy, budgets, curriculum and textbooks, recruiting teachers, leasing buildings. Now I can evaluate
civil servants. We have meetings with other divisions and we’re sent for official visits to the provinces. I talk to colleagues
and listen to their disaffection and unremitting cynicism about the higher-ups who run the country. Their most virulent ridicule
these days is directed at our new single party — Rastakhiz. One thing they know is how to undercut everything. They whisper
that the regime is losing its bearings. It has lost touch. They talk about their dreams of getting rich and moving to Los
Angeles. Of their friends who are doing so well in business. Meanwhile they keep their government salary and benefits and
pension and free milk and education for their children, then cut work and slink away to private jobs in the early afternoon,
making fast money in a pumped-up economy. The state is breeding vipers in its own bosom.

I walked up Ferdausi, past the circle, double-decker red buses breaking at the bus stop. Around the corner, airline offices
sell tickets to places around the world. But I haven’t gone abroad yet and may never go.

The first month of autumn is a mutable month, with chilly mornings graying at the temples and leaves gone dry and brittle
like Mashd-Ahmad. Branches shrivel and the wind smells of smoldering fires.

F
ROM THE OFFICE
I called my friend Abbas, who works for the National Television. The janitor passed through with the first tray of tea for
the morning. There would be more to come, linking up like compartments on a train steaming through the day. Abbas said he
had news and told me where to meet him next day.

It’s this business about Jalal. He’s disappeared without a trace. Long ago he broke with his family, and he’s been on his
own since high school. I met him one spring years ago when I was tutoring my two younger cousins — boys of eighteen — to help
them with finals and prepare them for the entrance examinations to university. They brought around Jalal, also in his last
year of high school, talented, angry, revolt in his blood. I was the first man to give him a political education. Then years
ago we parted ideologically, and he moved into the murky depths of the radical Left, but he always kept up with me. He’s a
rabid revolutionary.

Three months ago he warned our group of a SAVAK raid. If it hadn’t been for Jalal, that night eight of us would have landed
in jail. In a flash we cleared out of the basement we rented, taking typewriters and the mimeograph machine and political
literature and our lists and personal papers and archives. They hit within hours. We thought we had a SAVAK collaborator,
a snitch. The following week, in late-night sessions charged with hostile recriminations — exposing years of hidden rivalries
and old wounds and dirty laundry — we tore through our entire organization, insulting and accusing until the animosity and
ill will threatened to destroy us. That was how the group of three took control and held inquisitions and purges. They were
young hotheads — emotional and dogmatic and vain without knowing enough about anything — who had run leftist cells in the
provinces and now thought they’d take over in Tehran. They started on me. How had I known the secret police would hit that
night? What was I hiding? Maybe I’d set the whole thing up to pit us against one another? Maybe I was the snitch? Until the
last night, when I shot out of my seat and told them they could go to hell! We called ourselves progressive intellectuals?
Freedom fighters? We were a bunch of sick, suspicious bastards. No wonder the country never got anywhere. I walked out.

It was shortly after that Jalal and I got drunk one night, unduly cynical about the world, unduly cynical about the loyalties
of our respective comrades and the ever-present prospect of getting stabbed in the back by one of them. We made a pact that
had nothing to do with politics. It was a personal pledge. We would watch each other’s back.

I’m sure he was taken Wednesday night. He told me to meet him that night at nine-thirty at a café near Tehran University.
He had something important to tell me. I waited for an hour, but he never showed up. He never made it home that night, his
landlady told me. He never reappeared. I went by his coffee shop, but it was shuttered and padlocked. Jalal never closed shop,
and if he couldn’t be there himself — which happened frequently — he had young loafers looking for odd jobs to fill in. Familiar
faces, student types, manning the store while he was away.

I went by his apartment on Jami and rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. I checked again with his landlady, who said
he’d never come home that night. She was sure it was Wednesday night. She’d been unwell and had seen him go out at seven and
called out to him, trying to collect her overdue rent, but he’d rushed off. She had decided to nab him when he got back. She’d
left the radio on and barely touched her dinner and stayed up late waiting for him. She was fed up. Jalal had been avoiding
her for weeks. She’d even left the front door of her ground-floor apartment ajar in case he snuck by. “He’s a clever one!”
she said. But he never showed up. At the crack of dawn — she could hear the
azahn
from the mosque down the street, the call for prayer — she had knocked on his door again, but no answer. She’d tried again
all day, that night, the next morning. On the street the shopkeepers said rumor was Jalal had been arrested for being a profiteer.
That’s a cheap lie. A coffee seller is small-fry in the scheme of things. Still, the devastations of the antiprofiteering
campaign by the government blaze through the city, inciting rabid disaffection, punishing small merchants and retailers and
shopkeepers in the bazaar for high prices, but leaving the big fat ones at the top out of the fire.

Jalal wasn’t taken for profiteering. They would have made a spectacle of that. I’m sure he was taken in the dark by the secret
police to some dark cell in this city.

Shirin called around midafternoon about dinner at her house. Jalal introduced us last year, telling me how she was a convenient
woman. I take her type to late dinners at the College Inn, then back to their apartments, where they conveniently live alone.
I’ve tried going out with teachers and upwardly mobile secretaries and civil servants, but I always leave them — these women
forever looking for promises I will not keep. Shirin is divorced, without children, and an executive secretary to a big industrialist.
Hour-glass figure, spiked heels, dyed hair. She’s easy and never asks what I do and where I go and what I think or tells me
why I shouldn’t. She splurges in the expensive boutiques and primps herself in bourgeois clothes and likes to be seen at the
Copacabana cabaret, and at Cuchini and Chattanooga for dinner — the haunts of the bourgeoisie. Every year she treats herself
to a new country. This summer she took off for Rome and Naples and Capri on Jahan Tours and brought back gifts and pictures
of herself, the petit bourgeois tourist, in sunglasses and tight dresses, plastered against Italian monuments, dark boys salivating
around her like dogs.

At nine-thirty that night in her apartment, she was purring sweet nothings to me and feeding me dinner. She brought out creamy
desserts, droning on about leaving for New York together, where we could be free. “Free!” she repeated upstairs, releasing
her black garter. She murmured another heartrending love song by Haideh in her dusky bedroom, where she did everything to
please me. “I like you too much,” she whispered at midnight. “You’re like a drug.”

But I was thinking of Mahastee. The peculiar sensation of seeing her. An hour in a garden, and the past had erupted before
me like a geyser.

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
I got a haircut at the barbershop on Manuchehri, then met my friend who works at the National Television. He was waiting
at the corner drugstore on Takhte Jamshid across from the National Oil Company. He’d hitched a ride down from work. I’d told
him about Jalal after the concert because I knew he knew someone in the Department of Police. At first he resisted, but I
argued it was time to test his contact.

We walked past Shahreza and Rudaki Hall and the old mudbrick walls of the Soviet embassy compound, black crows rising from
the towering trees, cawing.

“Once we were the servant of the Russians and British,” Abbas said. “Now the Americans. In the ass-licking department — that’s
progress!”

I needed to buy shoes on Naderi, and he wanted to buy music.

“He’s in Komiteh Prison,” Abbas said.

So they had Jalal. An ominous feeling swept over me. “You’re sure?”

“He hasn’t been interrogated yet. Let this go, Reza. I don’t like what I hear.”

We stopped at the traffic light, backed-up cars honking furiously at each other in another afternoon of gridlock and exhaust
fumes and rotten tempers. Pedestrians jaywalked through the traffic, cab drivers swearing at the lot of them.