In the Walled Gardens

by Anahita Firouz

Genres: War & Military; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

Set in the exotic, seductive world of pre-revolutionary Iran, In the Walled Garden tells the nostalgic and moving story of Mahastee and Reza, who loved each other as children but have not seen each other for 20 years. Mahastee, who has become trapped by the privileged society she has grown up in, is struggling to keep her identity in the face of the increasingly empty role she inhabits. Reza has grown up to become a Marxist revolutionary, leading underground meetings and living on the edge. When chance brings the two together again, their encounters are a portrait not only of an ill-fated love, but of two worlds at odds, moving ever closer to a doomed collision.

Release date: May 9, 2009

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 360

Sample

THE WHITE JASMINE WAS in bloom. Blossoms were gathered in silver bowls throughout the rooms, and the scent had taken possession of the house. That
night, Mother said, summer would be celebrated with a dinner party on the back veranda. They’d strung up the paper lanterns,
their orbs swaying in the evening breeze. From my bedroom window upstairs I watched the garden, the curve of flower beds,
the gardeners spraying the lawns, fans of water arcing out at sunset.


Dinner would be late. My brothers were having their friends, and I was having mine. At quarter to eight, Father, immaculately
dressed, came out in the upstairs hall and settled down to read yet another version of the rise and fall of our history. Mother
was fretting downstairs, orchestrating our life as usual. She called out to my brothers to bring the stereo system out into
the garden.


My three brothers, not married yet, went out often with a lot of girls and brought many of them home. That summer of my sixteenth
year, I watched them go out into the world and I watched them return. Always triumphant. I couldn’t decide if it was their
freedom that made them that way, or the privilege and certainties of home. I believed in never letting on how much I knew,
preserving power. And secretly I longed to see my life ravaged so I could see it rise up again from its own ashes — a riveting
thought.


I went out into the hall dressed in ivory muslin and pearls for dinner. A manservant ran halfway up the stairs to make a hurried
announcement.


“Sir, madame says it’s Hajji Alimardan! He’s here with his son! They’re waiting in the living room.”

Father, breaking into a smile, said, “What a splendid surprise.” My pulse raced. Reza was back for the first time. I hadn’t
seen him in two years.


We descended, Father telling me as usual how much he missed Hajj-Alimardan, how he’d never understand why Hajj-Ali had suddenly
left his services, the properties and gardens he once oversaw now in decline. How he had been not just an overseer but a confidant,
a friend.


They were in the living room with their backs to us when we entered.

“Hajj-Ali!” Father said, and they turned.

Our fathers shook hands with long-seated affection. Reza, even taller than when I’d last seen him, looked me over, then nodded.
His father still had that strange mixture of rectitude and kindness but looked pale and surprisingly aged. His eyes were misty,
like my father’s as he embraced Reza.


“How are you, my son? Look at you, a man now! How old are you?”

I knew. He was sixteen; he and I had also known each other a lifetime.

Hajj-Ali had come on a private matter. I suggested to Reza a walk in the gardens, and we left, passing through the back doors
to the veranda. We stepped out, the evening revealing itself in a hush. He saw the tables set with white tablecloths and turned,
pride darkening his wide-set eyes, the angles of his clean-shaven face shifting with the light. We went left up the gravel
path toward the arbors, my ivory dress whiter at dusk, like a bride’s. He didn’t say a word. When we got to the trees, he
turned.


“You haven’t changed much,” he said.

I smiled. “You thought I’d got bigheaded? That’s why you never visit?”

“Tonight Father insisted.”

I wanted to ask him why they’d left that summer so suddenly, but looking at him now, I knew he wouldn’t tell. I knew he was
stubborn, reticent, unwavering, that he kept secrets with tenacity and vision.


“You look nearly old enough to be married,” he said.

“This autumn I’m going away to study in England,” I said defiantly.

“Of course, England. Isn’t it good enough staying here?”

“It’s what we’ve all done.”

Suddenly he smiled. “Then what?”

“Then I’ll come back, of course.”

Behind the wall of cypress, we turned into the greenhouse. Passing through the potted orange and lemon trees, he stopped.

“I think Father is gravely ill,” he said.

I flinched. I thought of Hajj-Ali as blessed and immortal. He said his father was at the doctor’s constantly for his heart.
We wended our way out and to the far side of the rose garden. I asked about his school. He named a public school. It was a
rough place and had gangs. “We’re into politics,” he said, his jaw setting suddenly with this. Voices rose from the veranda,
laughter, then someone put on a record. A slow, dreamy summer love song.


He stared at the trees. “You have guests. You should go back.”

“Remember when I taught you to dance?”

“That was another life.”

He said it with a quiet anger, then stared at me, the anger plucked away, his eyes searching my face. The hum of cicadas rose
to a throbbing around us, the leaves above shivering with a breeze that ruffled my dress and hair. He hovered in the shadows
for a moment, then stepped in close. He bent down and, gripping me, pressed his lips to my mouth with a quiet urgency, then
a crushing force, and I felt shaken as if given desire and elation and life forever.


Emerging through the trees to the sweep of lawns, we saw in the distance the house rising, the veranda draped in flowering
wisteria, the spectacle of guests under lanterns. We hovered like phantoms at this distant border, and I thought, That’s what
we are, he and I, a separate world.


“Look! Safely back where you belong,” he said.

We came up along the side of the house. Mother, presiding over her guests, saw us and followed us with her gaze, watching
to see if I would give anything away. She pointed over to my friends. The boys eyed Reza with that who’s-he, he’s-not-one-of-us
look. The girls smiled and made eyes at him. He slipped past them and whispered to me that he had to leave, his father was
waiting.


We found him in the library alone.

“Hajj-Ali, you must stay for dinner!” I said.

“It’s getting late. I get tired quickly,” he said. “We must go.”

Father reappeared and gave Hajj-Ali a large and thick sealed envelope, and we accompanied them to the door. I rushed back
to the veranda.


Mother came up and whispered to me, “You look ashen. As if you’ve seen a ghost. The climate in England will do you good.”

The moon was up, and when the music rose and I was asked to dance, I turned, looking down the lawns at the immense shadow
of trees.


ISAW HER for the first time after twenty years, at an afternoon concert of classical Persian music in the gardens of Bagh Ferdaus.
It was an outdoor concert in early autumn. Summer still lingered, the leaves of the plane trees and walnuts brown and withering
at the edges. The sky was over-cast, threatening rain, the afternoon unusually muggy. She wore yellow, the color of a narcissus
from Shiraz. I knew it was her in a split second even after all those years.


The bus had taken forever all the way from downtown. As we crawled north, the mountains loomed closer and closer. The traffic
on Pahlavi Avenue was terrible, even worse when we reached Tajreesh. Two friends who work at the National Television were
waiting outside the gate with tickets. Abbas gave me one and we rushed in. He’s grown a beard recently to go with his political
leanings.


“Classy affair, isn’t it?” he said, pointing.

“It’s going to rain.”

“Lucky you didn’t have to park,” said Abbas.

We walked past the pavilion — a Qajar summer palace — and down the lawns to the concert, which had already started. There
was a crowd and all the chairs were taken, so we stood. Two television cameramen with headsets were recording the event, black
cables snaking by their feet. I watched the old trees at the periphery of the garden and listened to the music. The santour, kamancheh, nay, the tonbak. My friends wandered and talked. They hadn’t come for the music. When the concert was over, they introduced me to colleagues
who were making a film on old monuments. We strolled back up to the pavilion and stood under the porch, looking out to the
gardens. That’s when I saw her coming up the lawns, the yellow of her suit conspicuous in the crowd, her face unmistakable.
She was talking to friends, and a sudden gust of wind ruffled their clothes. When they left her, I saw an opportunity and
was happy that she’d come alone. Then two dapper men stopped her to talk, and the three of them drew together as if conferring.
From that distance it looked serious.


“Coming?” Abbas asked me.

“I’ll see you by the entrance.”

“Who’s the woman?”

I shrugged and they left to get the car. I whipped around and saw her standing by a sapling, and she seemed distracted, suddenly
distressed. A light rain began to fall and she looked up, squinting, her hair falling back, slithering, let loose, still a
deep brown like chestnuts. Nothing had really changed her in twenty years.


I wanted to go forward and say, Remember me? Reza Nirvani. Son of Hajji Alimardan, overseer of your father’s estates. I knew
she would.


The sky thundered, an eerie color; then suddenly there was hail. The garden turned gray and menacing, shrouded by hail-stones
the size of bullets. She came running in under the roofed porch, her hair and face wet, now just a few feet away from me.
Her eyes, hazel, familiar, were scanning a limited horizon, but she didn’t see me. The crowd pressed in, keeping us apart.
She dropped her program, shook her hair, leaned against the white wall, and took off her shoes, legs still slightly tanned
from the long summer, toenails vivid red. The television crew jostled past us with bulky equipment. People made a dash for
the gate, scrambling into cars. I waited, though I knew I’d lost the moment. Now just a handful of people remained under the
porch, the hail pounding into the lawns.


I stood by a column, at right angles to her. She looked out with an expression of alarm, even dread, as if gripped by something
terrible. Knowledge, premonition?


“What an afternoon!” the caretaker said next to her.

“Inauspicious,” she said, barely audible.

Then she picked up her shoes and headed for the gate. I followed her, her feet weaving past puddles until she put on her shoes
by the gate. She crossed by the grocery store, got into a car in the side street, lit a cigarette behind the wheel, and just
sat there smoking. Her windows fogged up. I’d heard she had a wealthy husband and two children. I stood waiting for my friends,
the last to leave.


Evening fell with the streets washed down, the pavement glistening like coal. Summer was finally over.

IGOT IN BEHIND the wheel and threw my heels in the back and lit a cigarette. I could have sworn a man was watching me from the other side
of the street. Now I was getting paranoid. Whoever it was got into the backseat of a navy blue Peykan that swerved down Pahlavi.
I rolled down the window, dragged on the cigarette, fretted with the gold lighter Houshang had given me. My husband always
gives me expensive presents when he gets back from abroad. He thinks I suspect nothing as long as I enact the role he’s deemed
suitable for me and let him conduct life as he pleases. I count his failings like darts on a board.


Bagh Ferdaus. What a name, Garden of Paradise. Grandeur and peace. Perfect for an afternoon concert. The green lawns freshly
cut, fragrant, with folding chairs in a semicircle. The event televised and well attended. Music rising to gray skies, the
afternoon warm, oppressive. It was too late in the summer really for wearing yellow; I should have worn something else. Yellow
looked jarring under gray skies and hail. Yellow was definitely out of place.


I shook hands with them after the concert. They were so matter-of-fact that anyone watching would have thought we were discussing
music instead of dismal information. I had mentioned the private matter to them at a luncheon two weeks before, telling neither
Houshang nor Father. Father hasn’t much influence left and Houshang only uses his for business. He doesn’t like to get involved
in matters of conscience. So there we were, the three of us on the lawns, cordial and diffident. What a place for a conversation
about the secret police, in the Garden of Paradise. But bad taste reigns these days. They’re always cordial at first because
of Father. “And how’s Mr. Mosharraf? Please give him my very best.” Why don’t they do it in person? Father isn’t fashionable
to call on any-more; he’s one of the has-beens they’ve shelved. How did they put it after that? Succinctly. “That’s all they’ll
say. Don’t ask more questions.” Why not? A country without questions is a land of indifference. They don’t even hear the questions.


I rolled down the window for more air. What could I tell Mr. Bashirian? Your son’s in Komiteh Prison. They reserve the right
to keep the boy, the right to detain him without a defense lawyer, a trial. The right to imprison him, burying him in a cell.
His mother died years ago when he was a child. His father wants to leap to the ends of the earth to get him. He wept when
he told me, put his face in his hands and wept. To my shame, I sat watching him woodenly. He’s just a student. What do they
think he’ll do? Blow up the army base at Doshan Tappeh, gun down a general? They’re paranoid, shrouded in secrecy and hunting
shadows. It’s their own shadow they should be afraid of.


Dusk at the foot of mountains. I felt them pressing in, looming. We were invited to an embassy dinner and I’d be late. I sat
in the car, watching people going in and out of the grocer’s. Pedestrians buying provisions for dinner, children dragged along
by flustered parents into backstreets. I thought of my two sons, sheltered. ...I stayed in the car, waiting. The streetlights
came on and I felt the ground being swept away from under me. Music, grandeur, assurance, composure, all gone. There was
nothing to hold on to.


The hailstorm, like an omen, beating down suddenly. Standing there under the pavilion, I felt the premonition. Looking up
at the sky, I saw it huddled, livid, and knew we’d all have to pay.


GUESTS CIRCULATED THROUGH enormous rooms. Hors d’oeuvres were being passed around, but by the looks of it there weren’t many left. Dinner would be
announced at any moment. Houshang loved to make an entrance, his pretty face suffused with a sudden flush for being invited,
for being permitted to keep such company. They love him, he’s charming and sociable, he’s good for business. But he was very
annoyed with me for being late.


They had rounded up the usual bunch, and the powerful were holding court. Mrs. Sahafchi, the wife of the wealthiest man in
the capital, and her pampered daughter reigned in Saint Laurent like most every other woman in the room. Tiny waistcoats and
ballooning sleeves and bright skirts in taffeta with cummerbunds. Tribal costumes at the embassy? The West sells back Eastern
ideas to us at one thousand times the price. It’s not our ideas we like so much as their labels. Wives exhaust their husbands’
bank accounts around their necks and ears and wrists and fingers. I felt the twinge, not of envy, but of regret. We’ve turned
into the handmaidens of opulence.


Embassy parties are dull. We’re on the B-plus list, though Houshang wants to make the A list the fastest way possible. He
knows how. I think these parties are held so foreigners can gather information. They’re really here for oil and gas and coal
and minerals and strategic points. To secure border stations to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union. To sell arms and fighter jets
and bring in the giant tentacles of their conglomerates. They need to boost their sagging economies, all the while gathering
statistics. That way they get to lecture us.


Thierry Dalembert, a French banker, threw his arms out before me. “Ma-has-tee!” he exclaimed with admiration, embracing me. He wanted gossip about Mrs. Sahafchi’s daughter, whispering about how long it
would take him to seduce her. I told him he didn’t stand a chance. They were keeping her on ice.


His blue eyes glistened. “Who’s the lucky man?”

“He’s being perfected by God!”

He laughed, exhilarated, quite certain he was nearly perfect himself.

“You look bored,” he said craftily.

He seized the last two glasses of champagne from a passing silver tray and offered me one. The embassy, known for stinginess,
was splurging. They were drumming up business. These were intoxicating times.


“What’s new?” Thierry said.

“I could ask you the same.”

“Houshang wants this port like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Thierry wanted gossip about the Bandar Kangan project on the Gulf. He hadn’t managed to talk to Houshang yet. There are major
projects worth billions of dollars coming up along the Persian Gulf. The commercial port on the island of Gheshm, the naval
port at Chah-Bahar, the expansion of Bandar Abbas. But recently we’ve had sudden government cutbacks in expenditures, with
grand projects like my husband’s new port teetering in the balance. Houshang’s company, in a joint venture with a British
firm, is the general contractor for Bandar Kangan, an expensive port by the old coastal town of Kangan, with its dusty palms
and fishing boats and distinctive architecture, three hundred miles from the port of Bushehr. But will it ever get finished?
Houshang dismisses such questions. Kangan is a dream project. “The navy wants it!” he keeps saying. Like Houshang, the military
always gets what it wants.


Thierry was courting us. We were his designated couple from the in crowd, always invited to his elegant dinner parties at
his home in Sa‘adabad. He wants us to meet his big boss from Paris, due to arrive in Tehran a little before the official state
visit of the president of France. I’ve heard Thierry and Houshang chuckling about Paris. Maybe he wants to wine and dine my
husband there, taking him to the best nightclubs so he can whisper about business in Iran, lucrative contracts, insider favors,
kickbacks to an account in Zurich. He could even foot the bill for the most exclusive call girls of Europe. Not that my husband
needs help there. Everyone watches a man for his weaknesses.


Thierry offered me a cigarette. He’d turned sullen. He dislikes women who don’t talk, who don’t shed words like clothing,
and leave him in the dark. I smiled when I realized how he could prove useful to me.


Houshang was deep in conversation with the ambassador and two ponderous men. Things were going swimmingly, I could tell. We’d
make the A list any day now; Houshang can’t think of anything better.


We were called in to dinner.

I took Thierry’s arm and whispered, “Be patient.”

He beamed, thinking his charisma had overcome yet another obstacle. He would boast to his compatriots about seducing the exotic
locals. Exotic was everything distant that they didn’t understand, nor ever really planned to. But he possessed worldly charms
and wit and a magnificent education. They’d sent us their very best. I like him.


The problem with most foreign men is that they’re too blond and too rapacious. They think they can rule the world. Dollars
and francs and pounds and marks bobbing in their eyes instead of pupils.


THE ROADS WERE DARK and quiet all the way to Darrous. Houshang drove fast, not completely sober.


We’d stopped off at the Key Club after the embassy with the group from London. “It’s important to impress them,” Houshang
whispered to me after dinner. “They’re already impressed!” I said. “Especially by all the money they stand to make.” But Houshang
wasn’t listening.


He cosseted them at the club, plying them with drinks and flamboyant attention. He danced and talked to their wives as if
they were promising starlets and he the great director. And the wives giggled, fugitives from the confines of their dull European
lives and the doldrums of marriage. Houshang introduced them to his good buddies, squished together at adjacent tables, who
more than obliged, laughing the night away with them, all hung up about foreign blond women. Their husbands — anchored to
their Greco-Latin pedestals — pulling loose their ties in dark corners, ogled Eastern women ten times more alluring than their
wives, dreaming of how to satisfy their whims in exotic places and run back to Europe.


It’s so nice to have a country everyone loves coming to. You’d think we’re adored! You’d think we’re the center of the world.

The house was dark, only a light on in the hall upstairs. I looked in on the children. Rumpled hair, fluttered breaths, pudgy
cheeks on pillows. My sons, sovereign in my heart. In our bedroom we went about undressing without conversation. These days
we feel more compelled to talk to others. We don’t even regret it. I wanted to read and Houshang wanted to sleep. After thirteen
years, if nothing else, we have our habits.


“We were late for the embassy,” he said irritably.

“How’s the port coming along?”

“I’m proud of my efforts. They’ve finally paid off.”

“Your port is going to destroy the town of Kangan.”

“It’s going to drag that sleepy old place into the twentieth century!”

“Thierry didn’t get a chance to talk to you tonight.”

“The leech wants introductions! Let him learn to suck up properly.”

I was tempted to tell Houshang about Mr. Bashirian’s son, stashed away in some dark cell at Komiteh Prison. I wanted him to
suck up to a rear admiral or one of his influential contacts and ask them to look into the matter. But he wasn’t going to
make waves, now or ever.


“Mahastee,” he said in bed, before turning over, “I want to tell you something.”

I thought he meant about intimacy, affection, our life together. How we’d grown apart that year. We hadn’t been close in months;
I wouldn’t let him touch me. I began to consider how much to forgive him.


His head hit the pillow. “Forget all that intellectual bullshit you go in for. This is no time for anything to go wrong for
me. Understand?”


Houshang can be uncannily prescient.

I walked down the hallway to the upstairs study, pulled up a book, but never turned on the light. I left the book on my lap
and lit a cigarette and smoked in the dark. The prospect of boredom together was lifting. Houshang and I were developing an
appetite for war. He’d turned out like the rest of them, taking the smallest unexpected idea as an absolute attack on all
conventions. The dictates of his ambition clouded his vision, requiring you to agree with him wholesale. Otherwise you were
intellectual, which meant you’d succumbed, subscribing to and awash in some suspicious ideology. A dissident, according to
such irrational rules, before you even knew it yourself.


IWOKE UP at five-thirty as usual. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the birds were singing under the roof. At that hour I’m especially thankful
I’m a bachelor and live alone and I have peace and quiet. I closed the window, the one facing the back alley, then washed
and shaved and set my bedroll against the wall.


I made tea, not on the samovar but on the kettle crowned by the teapot with pink roses Mother gave me. We bought it in Lalehzar,
with all my dishes and cups and saucers. I said, “Mother, why get me a teapot with roses?” She said, “That’s all they sell
and this is the country of the rose and nightingale.” Father adored her until the day he died. I think he still adores her
beyond the grave. She knows it — I see it in her eyes.


I had hot tea and rolled up pieces of bread with feta cheese for breakfast. I listened to the radio, reread between mouthfuls
the revised statement of purpose for our underground group at the end of the month. I edited and scrawled in the margins,
expounding on our main themes — the right of self-expression, the dignity of democratic freedoms, political pluralism. I inserted
sentences here and there to underscore our purpose — how we intellectuals of the Left want to liberate the present from the
past once and for all. We want to see the collapse of this dictatorship, a world of endless decrees, obsolete political patterns,
and paternalistic interventions. We want a constitutional democracy with independent0 political institutions. And a parliament
and political parties elected and willed by the people and representing them, instead of authoritarian royal directives and
rigged elections. We want to stir up the masses by giving them a political education and objective. We believe that imperialism
— the age-old adversary and economic exploiter of the Third World — is wheedling and coercing this regime, its willing servant,
to keep us beholden and dependent. And that capitalism, with its cunning distortions and ferocious bravado, is working its
ways to repress the inevitable — class warfare. We want to show how this regime’s power is primarily bluster. Its show of
strength, vast resources, machinery of state, pitted against our determination and our tenaciousness.


I poured another glass of tea. There were only three cubes of sugar left. Habib agha’s grocery store downstairs supplies me with most things. I will tell him that the cheese he got from Tabriz this month is
particularly good. He’s a decent man but barely makes ends meet with all those children.


At seven I hit the pavement. Mashdi Ahmad, the local sweeper, swept the sidewalk. He’s so thin his shabby cotton trousers
are several sizes too large for him, and he’s bowlegged, with a funny way of sidestepping when he sweeps. If it weren’t for
his olive skin and sunken eyes and bony cheeks, he’d be Charlie Chaplin. Mashd-Ahmad, the Charlie Chaplin of Iran! His mother
is very ill and I dared not ask this morning.


I greeted him and said, “It’s a fine day.”

“Whatever you say,” he said, and kept on sweeping.

I have under an hour to walk to work. I go through Lalehzar, past the fruit and fish markets of Estanbul Street, and on past
cinemas and cafés and barber shops and photography studios and dance studios and bookstores and stationery shops and tailors
and jewelers and curious tiny stores going sideways. I like to chat with the street vendors and shopkeepers. Afternoons they
call me in for a glass of tea, especially the money changers and rug dealers on Ferdausi. By day I work as a civil servant.
The Department of Educational Affairs for the Provinces is affiliated with the Ministry of Education. Our section was moved
up recently from Ekbatan Avenue to a new high-rise of concrete and glass in midtown with a guard at the door and steel desks
and several new divisions. I take home twenty-two hundred tomans a month. Evenings I teach night school in Moniriyeh, and
late nights I’m part of a Marxist underground organization.


Mother longs for me to find a wife, but I don’t want to be accountable to a woman. Mine is an uncertain life. Years of clandestine
activity have hardened me. Sooner or later my politics will land me in jail. All political parties have been banned for years
and now there’s only one party, decreed by the state.


Mother lives with my sister. Zari has three small children and a stingy and insufferable boor who calls himself her husband.
He’s loud and reeks of vodka on the rare occasion he comes to see me. He’s a lowly functionary in the Ministry of Post and
Telegraph, not that he’d ever admit it. Now that he’s got a car, he’s got a nasty habit of swerving down the road as he drives
and laughing like a lunatic. I know he sees whores. One day I will get him. We should never have given Zari away to such pretentious
people and instead should have sent them packing — the Behjat family — the day they came to ask for her hand in marriage.
She was only nineteen and thought he someho