In the Walled Gardens (38 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY
I was at Kamal Bashirian’s again late in the afternoon. He was in the hallway on the phone. I’d come to sign the petition.
They were going to deliver it personally the next morning to the Ministry of Justice. His sister and brother-in-law weren’t
home yet. Ali and Kazem were talking to me in the living room. I was waiting for Ali to answer my question.

“When I asked Mr. Bashirian what he saw that night?” Ali repeated. “You heard — I didn’t insist. I couldn’t ask him. But when
he was in the infirmary, Peyman was on the table. I wanted to ask if — if the body was still warm. If he could tell how long
it had been. Since he’d died. I know, that’s brutal. But how else can we get to the truth?”

Mr. Bashirian had been telling me how he was getting calls from students he didn’t know and who didn’t even know Peyman but
wanted to come by and see him. He refused them all. They argued on the phone with him; they said they had theories. One of
them had come by the house anyway and told the brother-in-law he knew for a fact that Peyman had been tortured. “They’re trying
to torture me!” Mr. Bashirian protested. “They want me to listen, to come speak at meetings, they want his picture, they want
me to discuss Peyman’s convictions. He has become their torch! It makes me ill,” he said. “Their obsession. Their cause. Their
need. Don’t they have anything else to think about?”

Kazem said the students had given their verdict: Peyman had been kept in solitary confinement, interrogated repeatedly, beaten,
tortured, and then killed.

“Is there proof?” I said.

“Come on, how naive can you get?” Ali said.

Out in the hall, we heard Mr. Bashirian greeting Shahrnoush and her husband. Mr. Bashirian walked in and said they had news
from Komiteh. The brother-in-law came in, greeted us, perched on the chair by the doorway, and smoked and complained about
traffic. He said he’d talked to his children in Sari that morning, and he missed them terribly. He rubbed his temples; he
looked ill. Shahrnoush came and sat by her brother. She was pale and rigid and edgy.

“What happened?” Ali asked them.

The brother-in-law said they’d gone to Komiteh that morning and repeated their story at least four different times. At first
the officers had listened with a grudging ear, until they’d heard enough; then he and Shahrnoush had been passed over and
patronized instead and lectured point-blank and finally ordered to go home. One of the officers had been angry and threatening.
“Didn’t you see the medical report? Didn’t you see it was a heart attack? What do you want? How many times must we explain
things to you people?” Suddenly Shahrnoush had pounced, shaking from a bad case of nerves and stress, and she’d attacked them
like nothing he’d ever seen before.

“Like a wounded lioness,” her husband said.

He couldn’t have stopped her even if he’d tried, he said, and she had shrieked and sobbed, denouncing the officials and everyone
and everything, beating herself on the head and chest, and screaming, “Go ahead, do what you want! I don’t care anymore.”
She’d ended up sitting on the floor, wailing, “I won’t leave, never! Not until you tell us what you did with that poor young
boy, not until you give us an answer and stop treating us like goddamn dirt.”

Suddenly overcome, he stopped, covered his face in his hands, and wept.

“What sort of life is this?” he said.

It was shocking to see him break down.

He excused himself and walked out, Shahrnoush following him into the bedroom across the hallway and shutting the door. Peyman’s
room.

“What?” said Ali. “They got nothing?”

Mr. Bashirian stared at the wall. “What’s left?” he said.

“Nothing, we have nothing!” Ali said, raising his voice, pumping his leg, eyes jittery. “There’s got to be something to help
us!”

“I think we better leave,” Kazem said to him.

They said they would call the next day or maybe the day after that. Mr. Bashirian nodded. When I left, the typewritten petition
from the lawyer was lying on the table. With all our signatures.

I
HAD BEEN CALLED
a few days earlier at the office. It was a polite and brief conversation asking me to come in on a routine official and bureaucratic
matter. An address on Iranshahr, with no mention of the name of the organization, which was peculiar. Just a street number.
After I put the phone down, I sat staring out the window. What administrative matter was it? What did they want from me? The
official had asked — very courteously — for me to come in. At my convenience, ten-thirty.

I didn’t mention the call to anyone.

The night before, Thierry had sent over his chauffeur with a large sealed envelope before dinner. I tore it open in the upstairs
study. There it was — the article by the French reporter and our interview at the Intercontinental. I skimmed through and
recognized Peyman Bashirian’s story, his father’s statements. The names had been changed, but the facts were all there, with
a footnote about how the young student was now dead. There they were, father and son, in one of the most famous newspapers
in the world. I sat back, slowly reading the long article, which described other cases of political arrest. Though it was
perhaps accurate in detail, its overall effect was somehow warped. I felt overwhelmed by a sense of disorientation, even dread.
Mr. Bashirian and I had in time regretted the interview. Here all our vitality and progress and national purpose appeared
somehow distorted. In the article I could not recognize my own country.

At midmorning I drove up Iranshahr past the building and parked on a side street two blocks away. The building was nondescript
yellow brick with small black metal windows. More like an apartment building, with no name above the entrance, which didn’t
make sense for a government office. Stranger yet, the door was locked. I rang the doorbell. A man in plain clothes opened
the door and asked my name and conducted me along a narrow and dimly lit corridor. The place looked deserted as I trudged
behind him to room 106, at the end. I was in a SAVAK building for an interview. What did they know? That I’d attended the
lecture? I’d gotten on a list. Maybe they knew I’d lied about being the relative that day in Komiteh, when I’d gone with Mr.
Bashirian to visit Peyman. I would be told any moment.

He left me at the entrance to 106. I knocked, although the door was slightly open. There were two men in the room, in dark
suits and white shirts and dark ties. One sat behind a steel desk with nothing on it except a blue folder and a black telephone;
the other was in an armchair in the corner. They rose when I entered. The one in the corner shut the door. The one behind
the desk extended his hand to me, very cordial. The walls were gray-white, blinds drawn across the one window behind the man
at the desk. The room was poorly lit on purpose. I sat in an upright chair with metal arms, facing the man behind the desk.
He coughed ceremoniously, then got done with his cursory and bureaucratic introduction efficiently.

“We just have a few questions,” he said.

I nodded, the pounding in my heart quickening. He went through some general personal information about me. I verified what
he already knew. He confirmed that my husband was Houshang Behroudi, co-owner and managing director of Kaviyan General Contractors.

“Contractors for the Bandar Kangan Gulf project?” he asked.

I nodded.

“The port for the navy,” he confirmed.

“Yes,” I said, my heart sinking.

He cleared his throat politely, paused. Long enough to leave me uneasy once he’d made his point, and to impress upon me where
this could lead, which made me even uneasier.

Then very tactfully he said, “Do you have a special interest in university students?”

“No,” I said, taken by surprise. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Students from Aryamehr. You know them?”

“No. I mean, well, I know a few.”

“So you know them well?”

“No. I’ve met them briefly.”

“Their names?”

I wasn’t about to name names. “Who exactly do you mean?”

The specter of a smile hovered on his lips, as if to tell me he didn’t blame me. “Be careful,” he said. “You never know who
you’re dealing with.”

I nodded. The man in the corner had been only listening. Suddenly he said, “Do any of these names mean anything to you? Peyman
Bashirian, Hamid Haratabadi, Kazem Abbasi, Soheila Badri, Akhtar Nemati?”

“I only know — knew Peyman Bashirian. I don’t know the others.”

“But you were at the Bashirian house when some of the others were there. Try to remember.”

“Maybe. A lot of people were there for the memorial service.”

The man behind the desk again took over the questioning. “You have a special interest in the Bashirian family?”

“He’s a colleague and friend of mine. I know the family.”

“Of course you do. You’ve signed a petition for an investigation into their son’s death.”

I nodded, startled at the extent of his information. Perhaps we’d finally got around to the reason I’d been called in. He
set his hands neatly across the blue folder.

“You’ve asked several people to intervene in this case,” he said respectfully, “before and now on behalf of the petition.”

“Well, of course I wanted to — to help the family.”

“Didn’t you know they were told their son died of a heart attack?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Then did someone suggest to you that something else had happened?”

“No, no one did.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“So why would anyone want an investigation?”

It was impossible to give him an answer to his question. His colleague in the corner stared past me, very formal, serious.

I cleared my throat. “Komiteh was about to release Peyman Bashirian, so it was shocking how he died so suddenly. His family
wants to know if he was ill while . . . in prison, before his heart attack.”

He nodded. Then he waited for me to say more, and when I didn’t, again he repeated, “I would advise you to be careful.”

The man in the corner said, “These students have subversive political agendas. We know all about them. You don’t want to be
associated with such things.”

The man behind the desk straightened the blue folder before him. “Did any of the students — anyone — ever tell you anything?”

“No. What do you mean?”

“Just what I said.”

I shook my head.

“Who suggested this investigation into the boy’s death?”

“Well, actually I — I did.”

He nodded. “No one encouraged you?”

“No.”

“What did the other students think?”

“We never discussed it.”

“You’ve criticized the way this case has been handled. We know this. Don’t you believe what the authorities said happened?”

“I never said I didn’t.”

“There are those who’re prepared to use you for their own benefit. You realize this?”

He nudged the folder, brought his hands together.

He leaned forward. “Your, uh, interest in this case is of course understandable. You’re close to the family. But please, refrain
from any involvement in the politics surrounding it. We thank you for taking the time to come in. We hope it wasn’t inconvenient.”

Out in the street I pulled on my sunglasses, looked up at the building, sunlight glinting off the small windows. I walked
up Iranshahr, faced for the first time with another miserable fact. There was an informer among the students.

T
WO DAYS LATER
in the evening paper the headline blazed: “Embezzlement Racket — Two Rear Admirals, Four Officers, Three Civilians, Indicted
in Naval Scandal.” There in print — the investigation, the millions taken, one of the rear admirals from the Bandar Kangan
project.

Houshang had called me all day the day before. Four times, and two messages. Quite a record, considering he hadn’t wanted
to talk to me — and hadn’t — for days. Even before that, we hadn’t had any success talking to each other for weeks, if not
months.

He wanted to see me immediately. Ten o’clock that morning I met him at his office in midtown, where he shut the door and sat
me down and told me about an extensive investigation and the imminent arrest of several officers in the navy. “The rear admiral!”
he said. “Don’t worry, they’re not going to touch us. It won’t affect us.” He talked as though his real business was suddenly
protecting me. He said he hadn’t wanted to tell me, though he’d known for days. He didn’t want me to worry.

He ushered me out, whispering, “I trust you,” as if I were the only one in the world. He was dashing off to a meeting at the
Ports and Shipping Organization. He called again two hours later, curt, nervous. “What was the meeting?” I asked, anxious
something unforeseen was again coming down the pipeline. “I told you not to worry!” he snapped. But this time he hung up with
a small endearment. My stock was going up in the world. Early that afternoon he called and apologized for having been so terse
and rushed. He said everything was completely under control. He was locked up with the accountant in his office. This went
on throughout the next day. He called; he was in and out of meetings. He was waiting for two important calls. They came late
in the afternoon. He called me right after. He sounded exhausted, defeated.

“It’s been a strain,” he said. “I’m tired. I’ll be home early.”

He called again just before heading home.

I had the newspaper on my lap in the downstairs study when Houshang came home, early for the first time that year. He left
his briefcase in the front hall. I’d left the door wide open, and he saw me and walked in. He saw the paper. He rang for Ramazan,
asked for a Scotch with ice. I waited. He dropped into the armchair, loosened his tie. He looked drained, but also sincere.
Nearly fresh faced without the overindulged markings of success and high stakes and oodles of gratification. Nearly like the
days when we’d first met and he’d first got started. I didn’t say a word.

Ramazan brought the Scotch and left. Houshang took a gulp.

“For a while there, I thought they’d make me their whipping boy. Take me down to exonerate themselves. I saw it in their eyes.
How they’d abandon me. Me! One of their most loyal attendants. I’d done everything they’ve asked for twenty years. You know,
it shook my faith.”