In the Walled Gardens (8 page)

As I watched her now, a woman self-possessed, it seemed impossible that nearly nothing had once stood between us. Then two
feet away I saw straight into her eyes. She was still utterly herself; I knew her well. The moment was hypnotic because I
knew the fullness of desire — desire and regret — can never be understood nor fully exist until you leave. As I had long ago.

F
ATHER SPENT HALF
an hour in the study with Reza, the door closed.

My sisters-in-law set up a table for bridge while exchanging gossip about dinner parties inaugurating the season. “When is
yours?” they asked me.

Dr. Atabak was praising the latest medical breakthroughs in France when Mr. Malekshah, always the pedant, interrupted him
to define the complete benefits of parsley and carrot juice. Then just as he was getting started on the marvels of Swedish
calisthenics, they were asked to play bridge. My two pious aunts retired up stairs to take their afternoon nap. The marching
suffragette went up to read Toynbee, but not before hearing the ladies hold forth on the fabulous new pearls of our favorite
jeweler, who always fawned on them and was always willing to make exchanges with tact and discretion.

Before Reza’s sudden arrival, Father and his lifelong friend Mr. Mostaufi, abandoning the damask-covered chairs of the dining
room for the corner armchairs under the imperious portrait of Grandfather garnished with medals, had been indulging in one
of their favorite pastimes: proceeding through the vast and interconnected family trees of the aristocracy, branch to branch.
This was always triggered by some news of an impending wedding or funeral or someone indisposed — as they called the sick
— and they were off, going from parents to grandparents to aunts and uncles and progeny and intermarriages, fanning out into
ever-rippling circles, all the while approving of each other’s memory and knowledge and dedication in this field by saying,
“Yes, yes, and of course you know . . .” Now Mr. Mostaufi was dozing peacefully, alone in the corner. We all knew his wife
would wake him up to lecture him any moment.

Houshang looked around and announced he wanted to go home immediately. He’d charmed everyone long enough and the show was
over. I wanted to talk to Father about Peyman Bashirian, so I told him to go ahead. He hung back and said we’d all leave together,
taking up backgammon with my brother Kavoos and the colonel. Houshang is so predictable, staying only to see what I was up
to.

We had more tea with dates and dried mulberries, choosing from a succession of sweets arranged in perfect pyramids on footed
silver dishes around the drawing room. The dice rolled while the men played, cards shuffled at the bridge table. The afternoon
sun was sinking behind the heavy drapes.

I waited. Suddenly I wasn’t waiting to talk to Father but to see Reza. With my husband watching from across the room, I thought
of him, what he and I possessed together. A childhood, coming of age, families entwined for generations. What we had escaped
was the fate — the compulsion — of being together.

I listened for footsteps in the hall, beyond the curtained French doors, eyeing my watch. Mother eyed me, talking about the
potted plants and Seville orange trees in her hothouse to her good friends Mrs. Mostaufi and Mrs. Vahaab. Mrs. Mostaufi slipped
away to awaken her dozing husband. Mrs. Vahaab took up much of the sofa, her ample body dipping into a green velvet dress
and resurfacing at very puffy ankles. The penciled mole by her penciled lips shuddered as she spoke, her inflection epic,
like her proportions. She’s known for her voice. Her husband, the retired colonel, lives at her feet. When she croons old
favorites, he dabs his eyes with a starched handkerchief, overcome. Today she was talking about her bunions. The colonel said
with military panache that it was time to leave. The Mostaufis returned arguing about the appropriateness of napping and,
overhearing the colonel, agreed it was time to leave.

Mother accompanied them outside.

I flipped through magazines, mostly cut-and-paste rehashes of foreign periodicals. True confessions, crimes of passion, the
art scene, cooking, pop singers like Aref and Googoosh, trendy movie stars, nostalgic tributes to dead artists like Mahvash.
Mother sub-scribed to them all, embracing the grand and trivial with the contemplative enthusiasm of a philosopher. A door
opened and closed, and I went out into the hall. Father and Reza were shaking hands by the grandfather clock between vistas
of epic battles. I walked toward them and they smiled at me guardedly. They couldn’t have only been reminiscing. Reza made
to leave and thanked Father, very official, and Father made him promise to visit more often.

Then he turned, and his eyes fixed on me for an instant with the measureless look of someone about to leave on an interminable
voyage. And the moment came back with full force — how he’d left through that door when I’d been sixteen. With agonizing recognition
I felt that old panic, taking fate with a blow, then turning away down the long tunnel of years.

I didn’t want him to leave again. I asked how it was that he worked in an office.

“Don’t you like teaching anymore?”

He smiled. “Of course I do.”

“My sons need a tutor,” I said.

He forgot to say anything. My first thought was I’d insulted him, now that he worked for a government department. Father interceded
by saying I couldn’t find a more gifted and dedicated teacher than Reza. Unless he was too busy? Reza said, “No, no.” We made
arrangements by the front door.

I wanted to walk him out, but when he opened the door we saw Mrs. Vahaab gesticulating to Mother by the driveway. She could
never stop talking.

At the wheel of his great big American car, the colonel raised his voice, entreating. “Get in, madame, for God’s sake, get
in.”

Reza left, and I remained in the entrance, an adult in possession of my life realizing we could never be in full possession
of our emotions, their great force like a wind.

I looked up. The Russian chandelier was dirty. I told Father, who said dusting in a city with desert winds was an exercise
in futility.

He made his way back into his study at my request, a little peeved, but mostly abstracted. I speculated on what Reza had told
him. Housing trouble, an illness in the family, an unsecured debt? Father sat, withdrawn. I told him Peyman Bashirian’s story
all in one go. Father took it, impassive, the pout in his face deepening.

“What do you think?” I said, sitting by the sepia picture of Grandfather with a handlebar mustache and stern eyes. He had
studied at the polytechnic under Prussian and Austrian instructors before going abroad.

“What’s the world coming to?” said Father wearily. “Reza was here about his friend who’s a political prisoner. But these things
don’t concern us.”

I felt dismayed at Father’s reticence, though I knew it was his exacting tact that made him so impassive. And also the insularity
of a supremely refined man who had been cut off from the daily life of his own country.

“What’s the point of rebellion?” Father said. “It’s unseemly — it’s vulgar. Why don’t these young people use the proper channels?”

Pitting the words
proper
and
unseemly
and
rebellion
against one another in one sweep, Father had given expression to the disposition of an entire culture.

I asked again how we could help Mr. Bashirian get his son out of prison.

“Surely he has someone to turn to,” Father said.

“Of course he doesn’t.”

“You’re certain this isn’t some mistake?”

“Father, his son’s in there. What can we do?”

“My dear,” Father said discreetly, “tell him to be patient.”

“That’s easy for us to say.”

Father sighed. “Let’s see what I can do, if anything.”

I find what I said to him after that inexcusable. I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Father, what’s wrong? Can’t
you see what’s going on around you? What have we got to lose? They’ve already turned their backs on you. You’re the one who
always lectured us on principles and integrity. As if they’re the cure-all and be-all! Now you say, ‘Let’s see’? ‘Let’s see’
is the worst kind of excuse. But to say ‘if anything’! That’s giving up hope.”

A
T NIGHT I STARED
at the photograph of Grandmother that I kept on my desk.

She sat under poplars shimmering silvery in quiet splendor. Father’s mother. Austere with the widow’s peak and square face,
the look in her eyes sweetened with old age, still wearing the pearl necklace. It gratified her to be feared. She said it
scared off bores and hypocrites. She adored the pageantry of small moments. She adored rituals — early morning inspections
of her rose garden, tea at five for the oddest assortment of people, whom she contradicted and provoked unfailingly, though
they always came back, the
iftar
evening meal during the month of fasting, exacting interrogations of her household over accounts and alms for the needy and
the doings of each and every member of her unwieldy retinue in Tehran and on her estates in Azarbaijan. Father had given me
her necklace on my sixteenth birthday. I’d worn it for the first time the summer night Reza had come back and I’d taken him
through the garden. Grandmother’s pearls, brought back in the winter of 1911 from Saint Petersburg, where Grandfather had
been told of political agitations by radicals and anarchists, and one night, returning in a carriage from a formal dinner
there in honor of two Romanov princes, he’d seen students thrashed, then arrested three blocks away, and his friends had reassured
him, “Think nothing of it.” Instead his host, the grand duke, had taken him the next morning to buy the pearl necklace and
an exquisite enamel frame by Fabergé, crowned with diamonds. Everyone said I looked like her, Grand-mother, and Reza’s father
had said the same watching me grow up year after year. “May God never take her from us!” he said. “She knows our heart. Because
she sees with the inner eye and her intuitions are spiritual.” After her death he had indulged me with stories about her and
that vanished world, stories that consoled us both and that he told better than anyone else, even her own children.

I
HAD BROUGHT
office work to finish at home. I pulled out the report we’d just completed for publication, plopped down on the couch, read
far into the night. Here was a whole country made up of statistics and graphs and charts. Apparitions on paper. But where
was meaning?

I’d confronted Father as if he were the progenitor of all deeds and words, accountable for the doings of a nation. I should
have brought him tea at his age and asked about the old days. We would have strolled out into the back garden between the
trees. And he could point to where he’d pruned and planted, where he cultivated seedlings, and he would say: My father planted
those and I planted . . . that mulberry, to bear fruit, like the quince and crab apple. The walnut to please your mother,
the mighty oak to celebrate a firstborn son, the almonds for a white spring. The weeping willow by the stream of mountain
water, and the pomegranate for its exquisite fruit. The Judas tree and lilac for their color and fragrance. He’d take my hand.
He likes to walk that way. Never depending on his cane nor on what Dr. Atabak prescribes for him. He likes his garden more
than people, more than governments, adornments, and even ambition finally.

He knows, he knows. He thinks it’s futile. And anything he says is dust in desert winds.

I
GOT BACK AFTER NINE
from teaching my classes at the Rahnema High School. I changed and wolfed down dinner while reviewing the new agenda for
our underground group — the compelling points of our new bulletins, the importance of our
Night Letter
and its distribution to students and workers and teachers, the long list of translations for Dr. Hadi.

Early summer brought us hysteria and paranoia after the SAVAK raid. For years we had been carefully evading the secret police.
That day, Jalal knocked at my door at six in the morning and said he’d been tipped off. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew. “They’re
going to hit before midnight!” he said. “How much do they know?” I asked. “Not much, not much,” he said impatiently, “just
your location.” I ran around all day to find the others, then got all tied up renting a van to move our mimeograph machine,
and then we got stuck in traffic and got there late. We left a watchman at the corner, then couldn’t find parking. We backed
the van into the narrow side street, double-parked, and went in. Panicky that they would hit any minute, we frantically swept
through our two-room basement to salvage our files, dragging out the mimeograph machine, rushing up and down the stairs, ignoring
one of the neighbors, who came out on his landing to ask questions. One of our guys finally threatened him, and they started
to quarrel and I had to pull them apart. “You’re crazy!” I hissed, dragging him away. “They’ll get here any minute!” We first
packed the van, which was obstructing the street, repeating our escape plan as we did, then we shoved everything else in the
car and took off, narrowly escaping.

One week later we met at a brand-new location in Pamenar. As soon as we got in, the clique of three stood up and went on a
diatribe about betrayal and blood and revenge. “They’re so full of shit it’s unbelievable!” I whispered to Dr. Hadi. They
were the graduate students from the cities of Tabriz and Mashhad, always shrill and dogmatic and belligerent. They continued
all night, keeping the upper hand as the hours progressed with veiled threats, pretending they had special information about
how we’d been betrayed. They started interrogating us one by one like a military tribunal, bragging all the while about their
greater commitment and purity of purpose. “We brought you new blood!” they cried. Then they turned to me. They had disliked
me most since that winter when I’d come up against one of them for the editorship of our paper and won out.