In the Walled Gardens (39 page)

“Your ace in the hole just got indicted,” I said.

“I have others.”

“He’s such a — patriot. Isn’t he?”

“You’re always sarcastic.”

“I’m like Mother.”

He stared at me seated across from him, jiggling his glass with ice. I set the paper on the coffee table. He was still staring
at me.

“Can I take you to dinner? Just you and me for a change?”

“So after all these years we can discuss kickbacks and rigged bids and payoffs?”

“You’re exciting when you’re outraged,” he said.

“That’s not what you thought the other night. Level with me.”

“You have nothing to worry about.”

“Did you pay off the rear admiral?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You mean he got paid off for Kangan, but some other way.”

He shrugged. I sat back. There was no climax, no lesson, no punishment here. Just business.

“They’re investigating your company?”

“They’re investigating our joint venture for the port. And they will find nothing. My British partners aren’t worried. I’ve
been on the phone all day with London.”

“So you’re in the clear?”

“I don’t make the rules around here, I play by them. I’ve earned my way.” He smiled. “The port at Kangan will get built. I
have no doubt. If not this year, then maybe next year. And we’ll be here — here forever — willing and able!”

He smiled again, still working his way back.

“Let’s forget the other night,” he said. “The dead boy and rear admiral and his wife. The whole damn thing.”

“You mean I don’t need to apologize to those two anymore?”

He laughed, his spirits nearly restored, and then drained his glass of Scotch.

“Tell me something,” he said. “You knew, you knew he was going to be indicted, didn’t you?”

“No. No, I didn’t,” I said.

“I like the way you lie. Even when you lie, you’re virtuous.”

He looked at me with emotion. Leaned over, grabbed the paper, turned it around so he could read it.

“See!” He slapped the paper. “Nothing in the whole damn article. No, they’re never going to say exactly. Now, if they did,
that would be news!”

The phone rang at his elbow. He picked up but was short. When he put it down, he said it was Iraj. I said it was time for
him to run over.

“The hell with Iraj — forget everyone.”

“The rear admiral is going to prison?”

“With his clout I don’t know about going to prison for kickbacks. But he’ll get tried by a military tribunal.”

“Imagine! His wife going to visit him in jail.”

“You’re getting vindictive,” Houshang said.

I thought of Peyman Bashirian, how nothing would bring him back. In the end it was impossible to determine what exactly had
happened, the circumstances surrounding his death, whether in fact he had even taken photographs of military installations.
No one — no matter on which side — could actually prove anything anymore.

That evening Houshang and I didn’t go out. We ended up at home all night for once, quiet, withdrawn, edging toward each other.
Washed up as if after a thunderstorm. It had been months, longer, a year. Late that night we took a drive; he wanted to get
out and just drive. It was a wintery night. We drove through the streets, both of us shaken. The indictments were a big jolt
for him, a turning point, now that he’d seen how they could betray and forsake him. Now even he couldn’t be indifferent anymore.
He’d gone to the edge, but not over; I had too. My meeting with SAVAK had been a time-honored ritual. In that anonymous building
and half-lit room, I’d seen precariousness awarded and withdrawn. That’s how it was, living on borrowed time. I knew the edge
was blurred now. Where you stepped, what you did and said, whom you met. How everything got perverted. The undefinable betrayals
— and without exception we are all betrayers — connected and accruing like capillaries.

We drove around, then up toward the mountains. The lights of the city shimmered below us. There, the seat of our desires.
The place where we’d been born and grown up and loved. That night Houshang made love to me. I had been refusing him for months.
I’d floated out. He was seducing me, and I let him. We were biding our time, but it was already too late. On the bed he slipped
off my clothes and whispered, whispering into the ear of night and fate. The moon a luminous dome behind the windows, drifting
in a huge sky. Braced by minarets of stars. Rising toward winter. I thought of Reza, reached out as if to touch him. Imagined
him, flesh and soul, pressing against me in the garden. Houshang was kissing my lips and flesh, murmuring about the sanctity
of marriage and the honor of things. All at once afraid of his downfall. Afraid of losing me, of other things, at least for
a while.

“Let’s forget,” he whispered in my hair. “Forget everything.”

But I’m not the type who can forget.

F
REEDOM BEGINS WITH
remorse. For a man like me at least, not a man like Jalal. Though Jalal was right about one thing: first you must leave everything
behind.

Freedom begins when the truth you pick — knowing a singular one doesn’t exist anyway — is the one you can live with. And every
other choice you make is wrong. It begins when the charms of the past are revealed and known to you, and the charms of the
future don’t exist anymore. For me it was that night Jalal came to me for help and I left him at dawn, though if things had
gone differently I should have been leaving Mahastee at that hour after spending the night with her.

A man’s will — the very essence of his life — makes him conscious of being free. But the choice I made that night wasn’t about
a night with Mahastee or the possibility of other nights. It was drawing everything I had through the eye of a needle. Father
and Mother and family and my entire career and reason for existence. And Mahastee, for she was a separate world and would
forever remain so. You know nothing in life until you have to make a choice, and even then it’s each choice and each time
that remakes you. You know nothing until the metal blade of your own undoing slides and cuts between your teeth.

When Father had lived, I’d measured my life against his. His, the measure of history and heritage; the past was alive as long
as he was alive. With Mother I have a gentle proximity, the guilt of her life and mine in our eyes. The remorse. She prays
and I’m forced to remain as she sees me because I want her prayers answered for her. Father said Ferdausi’s epic was like
a Qur’an in his heart. The men who judge me from the outside — who judge my life, my convictions, my politics — have no right
to the measure of my heart. I know, already know I’ll remember this one day facing my interrogators. Whatever I do and they
do one day against me, there is this interior life, and no one can take it away. I will know this looking into their eyes.

I had prepared to go to her in Morshedabad, rushing through yet another turbulent meeting arguing about politics in a down-town
basement, then running through the streets to get to her. How long I had prepared. Since the first time I’d gone back to see
her at sixteen. Since the first day I’d seen her in the hailstorm. I’d come to test my strength against her will, her world.
I’d left her waiting in the garden of Morshedabad, where we’d grown up together like two limbs on a tree. She waited there,
where I had first loved her and first learned the endless lessons of leaving. I imagined her then — how often I had imagined
that moment — imagined her sitting there on the veranda at dusk by the towering trees with the dovecote to her east, the water
channels and orchards to the west. I imagined her sitting facing the darkening outline of garden and beyond it the long road
to the village twisting through the open fields, her face up against the fading light growing dimmer to the traveler coming
down the driveway, and then the generator kicking in, the faint cooing of doves, a distant truck leaving the distant village,
and then dark, the hush of night coming, the pinpoints of lights in the house like stars in a distant firmament. I would never
leave in time to get there.

That night Jalal turned up like an unpaid debt. The story he told was meant not to unburden himself but to burden me. He hadn’t
come for a confession or cautionary tale. It was a threat. Help me or else. I had been expecting it. They were hunting him,
and if anything went wrong he’d make sure they’d be hunting me. With his back to the wall and all his colleagues dead, he
was capable of anything. Once, when they’d been alive and provoked by him, I had been an insurance for him against their betrayals
and conspiracies. Now they were dead and I was the only one left he could provoke and turn against. I wanted him to leave
as desperately as he did. I wanted to be sure, so I’d be free of him once and for all. He’d barged into my apartment, robbing
me of the hours with Mahastee, and left me sober and disillusioned at sunrise in the street. He’d come like ill fortune, like
a hot and searing desert wind, and I had hated him that night. I sat facing him, contemplating how to throw him out. How to
rid myself of him and get to her. All the while seeing my entire way of life — the legacy of my attachments — measured against
his stony resolve and selfless politics. His colleagues had been slaughtered, and seeing their photos in the evening paper
by flickering candlelight, I’d seen how we too would be destroyed one day ourselves. His words had been ruthless, ill-spoken,
and I had seen how everything we did — no matter how much finer we were, and we were finer, no matter how literate and principled
— our very purpose and reason for existence, could die too a miserable and ordinary death. And they would write whatever they
wanted about us one day to bury us. This was the end, and when it came it felt like no glory had ever graced it. No honor
could ever persist. It was in that state of mind that, walking back from South Tehran at day-break, I thought, Freedom begins
now. I’ll free myself. I’ll leave everything behind. Give the cause everything I’ve got. Everything.

It’s now, I told myself, now or never.

W
E HAD A REVOLUTION
within two years. Eight months before the revolution, three of us were arrested coming out of our head-quarters late at night
and taken to Qasr, where we were interrogated and sentenced and imprisoned. I was given eight years. We were released at the
outset of the revolution, in an amnesty for political prisoners, the first wave of concessions by the regime to a growing
opposition.

After that, nothing turned out as expected. What does?

I saw Jalal again just after the revolution, in one of those weeks that winter. What weeks! Prisons and army barracks thrown
open, newspapers that made you stand up and cheer, no bloodshed, no anarchy. What a feeling, what illusion! The exhilaration
of unlimited possibilities. But the world isn’t made that way.

The guerrillas were out on the streets. Guerrillas in the capital city, speeding around in open jeeps, waving their banners.
It was midday, unusually warm for winter, with blue skies, the sun hot. I was at a traffic light at the intersection of Pahlavi
and the parkway. That’s when I saw him. There he was, in an open jeep, sitting way up in the back, dressed like the rest of
them in camouflage fatigues. Toting an Uzi finally in an armed insurrection. He had longer hair, a mustache, but it was definitely
him. The jeep accelerated suddenly, their white banner fluttering in the wind, pro-claiming their name. Jalal was waving his
gun like his comrades, hair flying, a red bandanna across his forehead. Just like Che. He had become Che Guevara, like all
his comrades. I accelerated alongside the jeep, stuck my head out of the car, blew my horn. I shouted, “Aay, Jalal! Jalal!
You’re alive! You’re back.”

But he didn’t hear me. I followed the jeep, weaving through traffic, but lost sight of it at the next light. I never saw him
again after that.

While the mullahs swept into power, we in the revolutionary Left unraveled. A supposedly free Left, splintered, exhilarated,
now flaunted itself and a free press. Then came our betrayals, one by one: Those who collaborated with the religious Right,
and who didn’t decry the death of democratic freedoms, especially for women. Those who boycotted the alliance of the Left,
then ratted on their friends. Those who, like the Khmer Rouge, planned in cold blood for internment camps and ultraradical
massacres of the general population. In short order we were proved rapacious, shortsighted, ill-experienced, divided against
ourselves. Like every other party kept underground for years. This was the ultimate legacy of the old regime. Then a peasant
class with religious obscurantism took over.

The new regime was ready to slaughter us and everyone else, making the old one they incriminated look like a bunch of dilettantes.
They rounded up thousands of leftists and shot them. The group Jalal belonged to has come to be known in time as perhaps the
most effective and competent in our revolutionary history. A legend. Jalal faced the firing squad in Evin.

I survived. I always had a better understanding of timing than he did. A better sense of my roots.

Majid fled across the border to Turkey and now lives in Paris in exile and has written his memoirs of the Left. And like all
memoirs, they contain a good deal of bluster and revisionism. It’s the same story, on the Right and the Left. We’re all revisionists,
so we can forget better.

Hossein Farahani remained an invaluable recruit, and during that year they hunted the Left, he stashed away several of us
in the warrens of South Tehran. Three years later he got killed in the war against Iraq with his two younger brothers. An
entire generation slaughtered there. Shirin, the perfect bourgeois, moved to New York and later sent me a postcard of the
Statue of Liberty with her address and phone number on the back and an offer to buy me a ticket, and two lines: “Darling,
I’m withering here. See you in JFK Airport.” The director of our department watched from an upper-story window as an angry
mob smashed the windows of his favorite red American car, then threw in a Molotov cocktail, which erupted into flames, during
those early demonstrations that ignited the revolution. He took the next plane out to California. To America, where people
go to forget. Mr. and Mrs. Mosharraf left that winter of the revolution and settled in Paris. He passed away there. They buried
him in a foreign land, but I think he would have preferred being buried at home. None of his close family lives here anymore.
If he were buried here, I’d visit his grave as I do Father’s. I always had respect for him, but there was a good deal more
to it than that. Often I feel an astonishing sense of regret at his passing. An estimable gentility and benevolent enlightenment
passed away with him. If I had contempt, it was for others and other things.