Free In the Walled Gardens by Anahita Firouz Page A

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 Father sat, withdrawn.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