In the Walled Gardens (40 page)

The graves of his ancestors in the Mosharraf family mausoleum in Reyy have been desecrated and built over. Who does that in
the world? This shame to our religion, our very own history. These things we do to ourselves, then invariably blame others.

One night last autumn I took out my reed pens and ink again, writing out the old verses. A verse for old dreams turned to
dust, another in Father’s memory. Mother turned her face to the wall and wept.

Mahastee and her husband left for Europe at the beginning of the revolution. They divorced within a year. I heard she lives
in London and her sons have graduated from the best universities. I’ll never see her again.

I forswore politics and went back to my roots. I finally did the traditional thing and married Mrs. Amanat’s daughter. We
have two sons. Mother is old and often stays in bed. She now lives with us in our ground-floor apartment in Kisha. My brother-in-law,
Morteza, flaunting a beard and rosary, got in immediately with the new crowd and finally got promoted in the Ministry of Post
and Telegraph. Zari is always beside herself with her family’s problems, complaining how her children have married the wrong
type, as she did long ago. I’ve gone back to teaching full-time.

This year my sons came back from university one evening and we sat down after dinner for a discussion long delayed. I began
my story with that eternal refrain, “Before the revolution. . . .” Far into the night we sat discussing my old days with the
Left, our national heritage, our passing hysterias. The anti–National Front hysteria. The hysterias of the Left itself. The
anti-Shah hysteria. And today. We are all responsible for the system they have inherited. They, the new generation, are courageous,
resolute, with conviction. They believe twenty years of silence have ended. They want sweeping reforms. They’re fighting for
their rights, their political freedom. We have always been told we are a people unprepared and unfit for democracy. As if
2,500 years isn’t enough time to get fit and ready.

Now I sit up nights, waiting for my sons. Waiting, for any day they could get arrested or disappear.

W
E ARE BETRAYED
by destinations. I read that somewhere; now I know it’s true.

I left my country for London with my two sons that winter, leaving all too quickly as Tehran fell into revolution. Temporarily,
I said. We’re still here.

Father passed away ten years ago in Paris. In his absence, they reviled his good name and reputation. The house, they confiscated
and looted; then they left it to rot. They ripped out the surrounding old gardens — like ripping out our heart — cutting down
the old trees and arbors. Jerry-building into oblivion.

Father took it, stoic to the end. Even when he fell in the street of an adopted land and broke his hip and no one stopped
to help him. He was wasting away from Parkinson’s. Late one afternoon toward the end he was in the wheelchair, the newspaper
on his lap. His head fell back, and thinking he’d dozed off, I went to rearrange his blanket. He had tears in his eyes and
I asked if he was in pain. He said he’d lived his life. His regrets were for his country.

I would have given anything to reassure him. I sat quietly holding his hand. And he murmured his favorite refrain, “Those
who haven’t lived in the years before the revolution, can’t understand what the sweetness of living is.” There we were, far
from home, our past ebbing like a receding horizon. We’d left everything behind. As we sat side by side in separate chairs,
he dozed, and I dreamed of reclaiming my heritage.

Living honorably is its own reward, to the bitter end. I come from a country that confirms that time and again.

Mother moved to London, but she’s still living with Father. Whenever the family gathers, she ends up cooking for at least
thirty. It perks her up, reminding her of the good old days. My brothers live in the States, working hard, visiting seldom.
Growing tough around the edges. Hard at heart? asks Mother often. Everyone gossiped behind her and Father’s back about the
millions they’d taken off with and their vast holdings abroad, while their sons supported them. People have no shame. Especially
in hard times.

Kavoos was the last to leave Tehran. His wife divorced him while he was in prison. She bad-mouthed him all over Europe while
shopping, calling him an inconsiderate husband. He was imprisoned in Evin. They accused him of everything under the sun, a
litany of treacheries they keep just for the likes of us. At one point we thought they’d just drop the small talk and shoot
him. Like so many others we knew in prison. Father aged just listening to the accusations. There was no mercy for our kind
anymore.

When Kavoos finally managed to get out, he seemed perpetually unsettled. One day in Regent’s Park, he said to me, “You know,
when I was in prison I thought about that friend of yours. Mr. Bashirian, and his son. I remembered how I’d been heartless
about them. And I said to myself, So that’s what the world feels about me now. Nothing.”

Houshang and I went our separate ways in Europe. There was nothing to hold our marriage together once we’d left. He lives
in the States and travels, still chewing cigars with leftover friends. I can only take him ten minutes at a time. His business
takes him around the world but never closer to anything.

My two sons both work in London, and my firstborn, Ehsan, is getting married this summer. My home is a third-floor apartment
overlooking a leafy square. I live with a Moroccan musician I met through the firm I work in. He strums the oud at night,
sonorous music, world-weary, noble. He also comes from places in the dust.

The verses Reza penned for me reside framed on the wall by the window.

For years I had no news of Mr. Bashirian. I had written him several times. I thought of him often. Then one day I received
an envelope in the mail, a letter with his impeccable handwriting. I tore it open in the front hall, carrying it through the
rooms. He wrote that he was retired, old and ailing, living with memories. In the same house with the grape arbor, a lonely
house. He hoped I was healthy and successful, my children prospering away from their homeland. He was enclosing photos, the
few remaining ones Peyman had once taken on his travels. He wanted me to have them. “You will be their keeper,” he wrote.
I cleared the coffee table, laid them out.

Windswept places. No people. Except in one, the one with a mountain on the horizon. A lone cypress leaning into the dust.
Half a human shadow there, elongated, as if the picture had been taken late in the afternoon. Just a shadow cut off at the
knees, stretching over empty spaces. Perhaps it was Peyman or a traveling companion. Any man’s shadow falling across his land.

And the father wrote: “I lost my son, and you lost your country. I still don’t understand why.”

I put my face in my hands and wept.

Exile is its own country. With obscure borders, unwritten conventions. It can bring unusual clarity. And exact strange sufferings,
discreet mutilations. At its outermost limits, there may even be an exceptional freedom. It is beyond heartbreak to reach
that far.

That other life — that world as I remember it, that grace of living — lives in me like a parallel universe. Always will until
the day I die. No one can find it anymore. Not even the names of the streets, now changed and erased to complete its vanishing.

Sometimes late at night, with the oud playing, I open the window facing the square. I recite from the poem, the verses breaking
in my throat: “My hometown has been lost....With feverish effort, I have built myself a house. On the far side of the night.
. . .”