In the Walled Gardens Read Free Page A

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.

THREE
    I WOKE 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