In the Walled Gardens (33 page)

Under the trees, time vanished. I wanted him. His patient voice, his steady hands, the intensity of his gaze. “That’s it,”
he said. “History, superstition, in so many layers.” “It has power,” I said, “undertow. A fierce memory. It’s intimate. Don’t
you have any?” He smiled. I liked his smile, so much about him. “No, really,” I said, “tell me.” He said, “I keep Father’s
prayer stone at night by my bed.” “Always?” I said. “Always,” he said.

The plane trees shed dry leaves. I felt impossibly alive at that moment. The colored lanterns swayed. Even the breeze was
warm. “I have something to tell you,” he said. I smiled. “What, another superstition?”

“Remember that afternoon concert at Bagh Ferdaus? I was there.”

“The one when it hailed?”

He nodded. So he had been there. The day the sky had turned gray, then black, and hail had pounded the gardens. He hadn’t
talked to me. He’d seen me come up the lawns with my friends, the two men. He had watched and waited. Had been several feet
away under the porch when it hailed.

Long past midnight, alone in bed, I imagined being in his arms. For even one night. Without the future.

I
NEVER EXPECTED
this night with Mahastee, from her phone call, to my ridiculous proposal to meet in a hotel like lovers, to our long dinner
under colored lanterns. But I had also been dishonest ever since that day I’d walked back into her father’s house. I had taken
his tea, and every night I plotted against their world. I hadn’t told her about my politics. The more I saw her, the more
I was determined to tell her. This passion for the truth, served up for her, intruded at first during our dinner together,
until it vanished.

Of course, I was not obliged to explain anything. There under the paper lanterns we had mesmerized each other. She was oblivious
to everything I did — oblivious to this city of smoke and mirrors, though she spoke of Peyman Bashirian, another dead boy
who had played with sedition. There is no such thing as a cushy life being a partisan! There is no such thing as the absence
of politics! To be apolitical is equivalent to assuming a political posture, but one that appeases nobody. When the haze lifts,
she will know.

We know. We count on it. Living dangerously has its own rewards.

I had imagined her in that high society, anesthetized with the moral indifference of those with nothing at stake, surrounded
by insolent men like her husband. They condescend if you’re from humbler birth, anticipating your slightest blunder so they
can shake their heads. So they can say, Well, what can we expect from these types! They overlook class warfare, getting chauffeured
around, perched high where they rest with their foreign education. Her father and mine were a different generation. They had
had each other’s respect and affection, the same vision for the longest time. I don’t think it’s possible anymore.

I ran down to meet her from Amjadieh on an unusually warm evening, darting down from the American embassy and across the intersection
to the Hotel Semiramis. I was really late and figured she’d already left, but she was there. There were several tables of
foreign men, mostly Americans, drinking. Businessmen, I thought, or embassy people churning over the latest tidbits from their
informants. Still plotting to overrun our country? I wanted to say, walking by. Who have you bought out recently? Then she
looked up with those hazel eyes, and the shadow lifted, and I removed my jacket and apologized for being late and ordered
coffee. She talked of Peyman Bashirian, who was dead. I could see the hairline cracks forming on that smooth surface of glass
that was her life. “Dead,” she whispered, shaken. In her world, people only died of old age and disease. Not torture and execution.
I didn’t like talking about the dead boy. Talking about him made me angry and preachy and dredged up politics. At some point
I suggested dinner, and we left and started walking through the streets. We found a restaurant with paper lanterns and ordered
dinner as though we ordered every night and would forever, so severed were we by then from the worlds from which we came.
She asked questions, listened, the expressions on her face shifting but familiar to me, inscribed on the template of my memory.
Then she talked about my father and his ruin with such emotion and resolution I felt a great wall crumble inside me. And I
thought, The past never lets you be. This is what it wants — to direct and consume you. All the time pretending it’s the present,
the future, the better to outwit you. Jalal, always evading it, always moving, has only the future in his sights. It’s a feral
instinct for him, like an animal’s. He told me once I would finally make the ideal revolutionary the day I left everything
behind. Everything.

The waiter brought dinner, and Mahastee laughed at how much food we’d ordered, then ate ravenously. I told her a story, and
Jalal withered with the pity I felt for him suddenly, living as he did only half a life. Then I told her something else, and
she leaned back in her seat and threw back her head and looked up at the colored lanterns with the warm breeze disheveling
her heavy hair, and I felt elated, so deep and moving and mysterious was the moment.

We sat under the trees, she and I, seduced, whiling the hour away. The dark was stealing in. She had passion, and if she’d
lost it in her world, she wanted it back now. I wondered about passion, hers and mine, how it lived or died, and what would
rise from the ashes. To possess it was to swear by its long life. And its price. I watched her against the night, gauging
the price of her resolve, her loyalty, to me, to anything. I wanted to reach over, draw her in, this woman I had loved as
a child and now wanted as a woman. Every man has the right to an imprudence. I sat there thinking, She is my transgression.

As the night wore on, I came close to saying, Let’s take a hotel room. Let’s go back to Semiramis. I nearly let the burn of
that desire liquefy my coldhearted life for once. To hold her. I held back. I was trained to renounce, discard, a perfected
instinct for a revolutionary. Renunciation as well honed as passion.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I went to the passport office. I had the black-and-white photographs I’d taken on Zarghami in the tiny photo shop whose owner
coached soccer with me in the same league. I went upstairs and turned left into the section marked for last names beginning
with
N
and stood in line. People were pushing. A young man with an obnoxious smile cut in, then had the gall to lie to our faces
with a typical story that went on forever and made no sense. Another donkey like my brother-in-law! Two men reached over and
tapped his chest and sent him packing to the end of the line. “Another sissy boy from the upper class!” they grunted. The
man behind me asked where I’d had my photos taken, just so he could strike up a conversation about his family back in Azarbaijan.
Finally it was my turn. A vacation, I said. No spouse. The officer looked fed up. “I can’t read this,” he said about Mother’s
name. “Shaukat ol-Zamon Eftekhar,” I said, “born in Tehran.” “And this, your father?” “Hajji Alimardan Nirvani,” I said. “Born
in Nirvan, in eastern Azarbaijan.” “You have lousy handwriting,” he said, just to stress his authority. The man behind me
started poking me and repeating, “I knew you were a Turk!” The officer ordered him to step back. “Wait your turn and stop
interfering,” he snapped.

In the evening the three of us went to the movies, me and my friend who works at Amjadieh Stadium and the owner of the photo
shop. Bright lights, shops chockablock with knickknacks, meandering mobs, young boys roaming like hyenas eyeing monster-size
posters of busty actresses with deep cleavage and brawny movie stars like Behrouz Vossouqi towering over the rest of us.

A little past eleven, I was undressing when something struck the window, the one looking onto the back alley. Then again,
thirty seconds later. I poked my head out, and there was a man standing in the alley. It was dark and I couldn’t see him properly.
He motioned, calling, “Come down, come down.” He said it irritably. I slipped back into my trousers, my shirt hanging out.
I picked up my keys and walked out wearing slippers — I was only going down to the back alley. I went around the building.
He was waiting a few feet into the alley.

Immediately he said, “Did you do it?”

“Do what?” I said.

“What you were told,” he snapped back. “Don’t play games with me.”

He was insolent. The worst thing I could do was admit to anything. I didn’t know him, and I never forget a face. He wasn’t
the guy who had shot off with Jalal on the Vespa, nor any of the ones in the car that day in front of Radio City. He wasn’t
more than twenty-two or twenty-three. For all I knew he’d been sent to entrap me. I said I didn’t know what he was talking
about.

“Don’t shit me! Did you do it for Jalal? Or did you chicken out?”

He had some nerve. “Who the hell are you?” I said. “I don’t know you.”

“And you never will. Now answer me!”

I was angry with Jalal for sending some jerk to harass me. So I told him.

“Watch your mouth, motherfucker,” he said. “You want to end up in a ditch?”

He was a nasty piece of work. I didn’t care who he worked for. I poked him straight in the chest.

I said, “Don’t think I’m afraid of you. You hear? That’s my answer.”

I turned and walked back into the building.

T
HE SERVICE FOR PEYMAN BASHIRIAN
was at their home the next evening. The house was overheated. Cold weather had come suddenly. People in overcoats were backed
up all the way to the sidewalk. Coming up to the house, I encountered Mr. Bashirian’s elderly next-door neighbor and we walked
in together. The house was lit up and filled with flowers. White carnations and roses and gladioli in baskets sat in the hallway.

The crowd was swelling inside and they had run out of chairs, and people were leaning against the walls talking, many of them
students. They glowered, huddled in corners, whispered. Some of the girls stood out because they were wearing the emerging
political uniform — head scarves and overcoats over matching trousers. The brother-in-law saw me from the kitchen and came
out and shook my hand. He said Kamal was in the living room. I saw him from the doorway. A crumpled man among men, slumped
in a chair at the end against the wall. He wore his suit loosely, his tie black and rigid under a face impossibly sallow and
drawn. His eyes were red, his cheeks flaccid as he leaned in, listening to an elderly man speaking next to him. I thought
Kamal could not possibly hear him, so bewildered and remote was Kamal’s gaze. Then his gaze lifted and he saw me. He rose,
lifted out his arms, and shook his head, as if to say, You see, you see what happened? Someone next to him tactfully vacated
his seat and I sat down. We tried to say something to each other but choked up. Finally he managed to say, “I know you were
here last night.” Together we wept quietly, heads bent, neither of us able to speak.

On the table beside him there was a large framed photograph of Peyman. A black-and-white portrait, a handsome boy.

“He’s gone,” he said, “forever.”

A manservant came around with a tray of tea. There was fruit on the side table, small dishes of sweetmeats, the traditional
bowl of halva. In the rooms people rose and sat in waves, gathering, coming forward, murmuring to Kamal, retracing their steps,
the house hot, stifling. He insisted I remain next to him.

The phone kept ringing. Colleagues and friends and neighbors came with words of sympathy. His sister came and whispered to
him. When he rose and left the room, I went into the kitchen and asked a maid who was washing up for a glass of water, then
found a chair in the hallway. By the front door, Mr. Bashirian and his male relatives greeted a mullah in flowing robes. The
mullah preceded them into the living room. Through the archway between the hall and the living room I saw him being shown
to his seat, Mr. Bashirian and his relatives taking seats to his right and left. The mullah, gathering his robes about him,
conducted the service with solemn decorum, uttering suras from the Qur’an and eulogizing the deceased. The rooms grew still,
resonating with the echo of the lilting prayers and eulogy for the dead young man accompanied by the intermittent sobbing
of the living.

After the mullah left, Mr. Bashirian came out into the front hall. The group of students quickly flocked to him. I couldn’t
hear what they were saying. They closed in on him, heads bobbing as they talked. Like autumn crows — dark, intense, pecking
at him, their shriveling and brittle morsel. I wanted to shoo them away. They lingered, heads drawn together, then suddenly
parted, Mr. Bashirian emerging from their fold. He looked contrite. Going by me to the kitchen, he whispered, “Please, God,
kill me and deliver me from this grief.” He carried a glass of water to a room and shut the door behind him.

One of the students, slim and tense, raised his hand, cleared his throat, asked curtly to make an announcement.

“There’s a lecture Wednesday. We’ve left the address by the door. Come in Peyman’s memory. They snatched him from us, kidnapped
him. He disappeared. It happens every week. What happened to him could’ve happened to any of us. Your sons and daughters!
They prey on us! We are their carrion.”

A girl in a black scarf and black overcoat let out a wail: “We must rip off their mask! Expose the evils they hide so cunningly.
What they —”

Like a clap of thunder, from the other room Mr. Bashirian’s brother-in-law called out, “This is no place for politics. Please,
you’re among the deceased’s family and friends.”

He came through from the other room, motioning with one hand to say it was enough. People turned and stared.

The girl, disturbingly high-strung, started protesting again in her shrill voice, but the boy interrupted her quickly, this
time more strident.

“They murdered Peyman. We mourn him. But we’re defenders of the innocent. Why remain silent? Because we’re afraid? See what
they’ve done to us!” He motioned quickly, including all those assembled in the rooms. “Peyman is our hero. He died a heroic
death! We want everyone to know. Is that a crime?”