In the Walled Gardens Read Free Page B

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