In the Walled Gardens (35 page)

“Nothing.”

“Who’s this prisoner?”

“He’s dead.”

“What’s going on with your marriage? I hear you and Houshang aren’t talking. I hear he doesn’t come home at night.”

I felt a rush of indignation. How did she know?

“Who says, Mother?”

“Goli reports.”

“She spies for you now? Since when?”

“Since I caught her in your bedroom in one of your evening gowns with your high heels and jewelry. I told her I wouldn’t tell.”

“Under what condition?”

“No condition. She’s been very forthcoming since that day.”

“I should throw her out.”

“It wouldn’t solve a thing. Anyway, she looked ridiculous. So what’s going on? Your father wants to know, the worrywart!”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. I want to sleep.”

“Sleep — while we lie awake worrying ourselves sick! Just the sort of selfishness that runs in your father’s family.”

I heard Houshang come up after two in the morning. He slept in the guest room. Early in the morning he barged in for a change
of clothes, his face and eyes puffy. He’d been drinking, maybe smoking opium with Iraj. On my dressing table he saw the list
of people who had called.

“What a dinner party!” he said. “Everyone’s talking about it.”

“Thanks to that pompous upstart woman — who should be calling to thank us instead of gossiping all over town.”

“She’s waiting for you to call her and apologize.”

“What? Over my dead body.”

“I tell you,” he said. “You must apologize.”

He grabbed his clothes and walked out, slamming the door. War. Every step corrupting, distancing us from what it was we truly
fought for.

T
HAT WEEK
I got my passport. Jalal’s contact had been right: I wasn’t on the blacklist, not yet. So I had a passport for the first
time, and now that I had it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to give it to Jalal. He’d asked me for it, but it wasn’t a request, it
was barter. Ever since he’d informed me about the SAVAK raid against us, he wanted favors, each one more treacherous. I could
see how they’d never end unless he left.

Early one evening his sister called me at work and said her shift was ending at Najmieh Hospital. She wanted to paint the
town red. Dinner, the movies, one of those new cabarets. I got rid of her by saying I was leaving town. Mahastee called and
said she had tickets to a lecture. Would I attend with her? She wouldn’t say where nor what it was about.

I had been scouring the papers, half expecting to see Jalal’s name any day. Ten days before in the evening papers: “Two Women
Killed in Armed Struggle in Tehran — Simin Taj Hariri and Akram Sadeghpour.” Last week: “Bahram Aram Killed in Ambush on Shiva
Street.” This week: “Mohammad Hassan Ebrari, Political Prisoner, Executed.” Then the long article stating officially: We have
only thirty-three hundred political prisoners, and they’re all Marxists. In the next paragraph: Yes, we have torture. But
we don’t need physical torture anymore, when we have psychological torture at our disposal.

What an admission! Obviously they don’t feel the need to win anyone over.

I took the bus to visit Mother. I sat with her and we smoked and sipped tea and listened to the radio. Zari kept to herself
in the corner, sighing and brooding and blatantly ignoring me. When she left the room, Mother said, “Your sister’s turned
mute ever since that husband of hers got beaten up that night in the street. She doesn’t even scream at the children anymore.
If you ask me, it was better when she screamed. She’s told me it’s all your fault! Now he’s threatening to divorce her. You
want to ruin her life?”

“Now it’s my fault?”

“She thinks I always side with you because you’re my favorite, even though I live with her. You beat him up! Didn’t you? Now
go see what’s wrong with her.”

I was sick of the whole business, so I went out to talk to Zari. She was folding clothes in the other room and I asked if
something had happened.

“He hasn’t hit you or the kids again, has he?”

She turned, red-faced. “Leave us alone. You don’t respect us.”

I asked if Morteza had shaped up. I felt sorry for her. Did she need money?

“My husband provides for me! I don’t need your handouts. What happened to our two bits of land in Varamin? It’s all I’ve got
left in the world. Why can’t you do something? Why can’t you get that illiterate peasant Doost-Ali to cough up our money?”

“He’s always got excuses. The crop was diseased this year. He spent all the loan from the Agricultural Bank on a family pilgrimage
to Mashhad. He swears he’ll pay us next year.”

“It’s already been three years! I hope he drops dead. Aren’t you ever going to sell the other land? The six hectares? I want
my share! I want my money.”

“No one’s buying. I told you I’m going there this week.”

“Morteza claims you hide things from me and you’re going to sell the land and keep the money.”

“And you believe that?”

“He says you’re jealous of him. Because he’s bought a car and he does business and has a household with a wife and children!”

She wanted an upheaval again, to calm down. I turned to leave.

She turned shrill. “Don’t tell me he’s right?”

“How could I possibly be jealous of him?”

“Of course, Mr. Intellectual, who reads books and thinks big thoughts and prefers educated women. Morteza swears you’re a
leftist!”

I wanted to see the children and sit with Mother, but I was tired of Zari’s harangue. So I told Mother I had to go see a friend
in the hospital. “Which hospital?” she asked quickly. I said, “Alborz,” thinking of Mr. Bashirian. She asked why I’d bothered
to come if I only intended on staying a measly half hour. Zari kept the children in the other room, away from me. From the
doorway they stood and watched me leave, moping, their baby faces pressed against the door frame. Who knew whom they’d turn
against once they grew up.

On the bus, lurching past the shop fronts along Baharestan Square, I thought about Jalal and Peyman Bashirian. It’s brutal
how a man loses his innocence. One day he wakes up and looks around and it’s gone. Not only is it gone, but instead he has
self-loathing for having ever possessed such innocence.

I called Mahastee from the repair shop in Shahabad. I’d left my radio there and it was ready. I was curious about this lecture
she’d told me about the day before. She gave the name of an intersection that wasn’t near any concert or lecture hall. “That’s
where it is!” she said. “See you at six.”

I
CAME BY ORANGE TAXI
to avoid parking. It was already getting dark. Reza was at the traffic light. I paid the cab, showed Reza the address I’d
copied from the sheet at Mr. Bashirian’s house. “What is it?” he asked. I said it was the lecture the radical students had
talked about that night at the Bashirian house. I’d decided to take the risk. I wanted to find whatever it was that I kept
thinking I couldn’t find. I couldn’t have said to him on the phone that I felt compelled. I said if he didn’t want to attend
I’d understand. I was sorry to have dragged him all the way there for nothing.

“No, you’re not,” he said.

I stared into the street. I was annoyed at myself for talking in circles. I knew attending the lecture would be considered
a betrayal. I was incensed that it would. I’d called Reza because there was no one else to call.

I pointed to the address. He knew how to get there. He said it couldn’t be a school or institute but was probably a private
home. They’d let people trickle in without attracting attention. He warned me about showing my face in such places, about
informers in the audience. How such meetings and so-called lectures got raided. Sometimes they sent thugs. He was testing
me.

“We’re not far from Qasr Prison,” he added.

We were in the backstreets.

“See,” he said, “you haven’t noticed anything. Those students, strolling at corners, like that one there. They’re on watch.
They call ahead if there’s a raid. They see them coming.”

He told me that all those years ago after they left Morshedabad, it was in this neighborhood that his father had rented an
old house for them. His mother had loved the house — the porches, the interior courtyard, the persimmon tree — until she’d
had to give it up. I started counting the number of students we passed. One of them, holding a book, stared back when Reza
greeted him. Then he pointed down the street, walked back to the corner. The address turned out to be a large brick two-story
private house. At the front door a young man told us to go through the corridor, turn right, cross the courtyard, and turn
right again to the back. I felt that fluttering sense of panic. Inside, the house seemed vacant. We went down a half-lit and
empty corridor, across the tiled courtyard, where people stood talking — they stared, and I stared past them — then right
again into the next house in the back, going through two empty front rooms, following others.

We were ushered in from a small side door. The long room was already packed, and people were wandering down the aisles on
either side to find seats. Rows of folding chairs were set tightly squeezed together on the bare concrete floor. They’d done
a pretty crude job of knocking down a wall in the middle to make a larger room. A metal roll-up garage door took up part of
the far wall. Two impatient young men were directing people to get them seated as quickly as possible. A woman in a navy scarf
and overcoat and trousers handed out leaflets, murmuring, “Please photocopy this and help circulate it.” There were hardly
any seats left. Reza spotted two way in the back. We grabbed our leaflets and made our way. The audience was all under forty
and the majority looked like students. Reza joked about attending a lecture in a garage.

A young man in the front, in his early twenties, scrutinized the gathering, the commotion and the incessant reports coming
from the sentries outside, the unanticipated number of people who had turned up. People were now cramming in, sitting on the
floor along the aisles and in the front.

The speaker raised a hand to indicate they would start. He said if everything went as planned, there would be two lectures.
He would give the introduction. He said they had a surprise lecturer, looked around the room and at two men standing in the
doorway, then informed us that this guest hadn’t arrived yet. “He will!” he assured us. Then he turned to the young man beside
him, who was unshaven like himself and had been attracting a great deal of attention, and, referring to him as one of their
most inspiring speakers, introduced him as the first lecturer.

The young man looked back out to us stonily. He said that since the internal coup and split-up of their organization, the
rival Marxist group had betrayed comrades to SAVAK. They’d shed the blood of their own brothers! They now called Islam a petit-bourgeois
ideology! Tonight the two main speakers would directly address the rift, the ideological divide, the treachery.

The young man hadn’t introduced himself or given the names of the other speakers.

He began, a slight tremor in his voice. “The living expression of our nation isn’t found in the ostentatious decrees and edicts
of the regime, but in the enlightened commitment and action of our men and women. In us. But they don’t know us. They don’t
see us. We exist!” He raised his arms. “Look at us.”

Reza wasn’t listening. He was surveying the room.

“Shariati said we must create social awareness. The elevation and progress of our consciousness. Otherwise we hold the empty
title of citizen. He said this in his writings for years, in his lectures five years ago at Hosseiniyeh Ershad before they
closed it down. They were afraid of him. He inspired! He possessed that exceptional gift — fire! He set our generation’s mind
on fire! With his remarkable vision. They imprisoned him. This year they made him write those revisionist lies in
Kayhan.
We don’t believe them! Islam is as revolutionary an ideology as Marxism! The real battle in our hearts today is between Muhammad
and Marx. But first let’s look at our intellectuals! Miming what they’ve learned abroad. Card-board words learned in foreign
tongues in other continents. Our rich are no more trustworthy than vultures. Their fortunes are the fruit not of their labor
but of exploitation. They think they own this country — it’s their personal money press! Look how much they amass, how they
rush it out! Look at them — all educated abroad! Not even completely literate in their mother tongue! Let’s throw them out!
Our traditional clergy is another elite. Old puppets of colonial powers. Perpetuating centuries of a passive religion of mimicry,
submission, dogmatic ignorance. All blood and martyrdom of Hossein at Karbala and eternal tears. Time has come for change.
Radical action!”

He paused, looked out, his audience rapt. He could sense the audacity, the thrill of his words. Lecturing on about alienation
and economics and Islamic ideology and a return to our roots, growing increasingly fervent.

“Break it up!” someone suddenly shouted from the front. “Get out!”

The speaker was being hurtled out by his watchmen, along with the other prominent revolutionary lecturer. People shot up from
their seats and lunged forward, shoving chairs, pushing in the aisles, crushing people seated on the floor. There were bottlenecks
by the far doors. Reza shoved back chairs and went for the garage door. He bent down and, grabbing the handle, tried to yank
it up. It wouldn’t budge. I looked back to the room. Two students were shouting from the front, “Get out! Turn right, not
left. Not through the courtyard! Don’t jam the doors.” I imagined the side streets blocked off. The army trucks outside. Their
impassive faces as we came running out, the transgressors. How long did we have? I felt light-headed, as much from anticipation
as from fear. Reza said the garage door was locked from the outside. We were trapped. He pounded on the metal. I had walked
into a trap, and I had come willingly. “These idiots must open the garage door,” Reza said, angry. He shouted, his voice booming.
“Get the garage door open!” He pounded on the metal, the echo reverberating over the panicky audience. Several men joined
in and we tried the door again. Suddenly someone yelled from the other side, “Wait! Don’t pull.” The garage door rolled up.
Dark skies, cold air. Night had fallen. A young man holding the metal rod he’d removed ordered us, “Go this way! They’re coming
in the front.” People spilled out the back, running past us into the alley. Reza grabbed my arm. “I know the backstreets,”
he said. We rushed down the alley and into another, which was darker, and then another, turning in the warren of narrow backstreets
away from the direction we had come earlier. We heard police sirens in the dark, screeching brakes, people shouting in the
distance. Every time we rounded a corner, I thought I’d come face-to-face with them. Name, father, address, marital status,
occupation? Why is he with you? What were you doing at the meeting? Why? Who do you know? Tell us. Reza said, “We’re near
the shops — don’t rush.” In the main avenue the streetlights were bright, traffic moving briskly. Calmly we took in the street.
We went past the bicycle repair shop, a grocer, then a bakery where there was a line. He turned to get me a cab.