Free In the Walled Gardens by Anahita Firouz Page B

square face,
     the look in her eyes sweetened with old age, still wearing the pearl necklace. It gratified her to be feared. She said it
     scared off bores and hypocrites. She adored the pageantry of small moments. She adored rituals — early morning inspections
     of her rose garden, tea at five for the oddest assortment of people, whom she contradicted and provoked unfailingly, though
     they always came back, the
iftar
evening meal during the month of fasting, exacting interrogations of her household over accounts and alms for the needy and
     the doings of each and every member of her unwieldy retinue in Tehran and on her estates in Azarbaijan. Father had given me
     her necklace on my sixteenth birthday. I’d worn it for the first time the summer night Reza had come back and I’d taken him
     through the garden. Grandmother’s pearls, brought back in the winter of 1911 from Saint Petersburg, where Grandfather had
     been told of political agitations by radicals and anarchists, and one night, returning in a carriage from a formal dinner
     there in honor of two Romanov princes, he’d seen students thrashed, then arrested three blocks away, and his friends had reassured
     him, “Think nothing of it.” Instead his host, the grand duke, had taken him the next morning to buy the pearl necklace and
     an exquisite enamel frame by Fabergé, crowned with diamonds. Everyone said I looked like her, Grand-mother, and Reza’s father
     had said the same watching me grow up year after year. “May God never take her from us!” he said. “She knows our heart. Because
     she sees with the inner eye and her intuitions are spiritual.” After her death he had indulged me with stories about her and
     that vanished world, stories that consoled us both and that he told better than anyone else, even her own children.
    I HAD BROUGHT office work to finish at home. I pulled out the report we’d just completed for publication, plopped down on the couch, read
     far into the night. Here was a whole country made up of statistics and graphs and charts. Apparitions on paper. But where
     was meaning?
    I’d confronted Father as if he were the progenitor of all deeds and words, accountable for the doings of a nation. I should
     have brought him tea at his age and asked about the old days. We would have strolled out into the back garden between the
     trees. And he could point to where he’d pruned and planted, where he cultivated seedlings, and he would say: My father planted
     those and I planted . . . that mulberry, to bear fruit, like the quince and crab apple. The walnut to please your mother,
     the mighty oak to celebrate a firstborn son, the almonds for a white spring. The weeping willow by the stream of mountain
     water, and the pomegranate for its exquisite fruit. The Judas tree and lilac for their color and fragrance. He’d take my hand.
     He likes to walk that way. Never depending on his cane nor on what Dr. Atabak prescribes for him. He likes his garden more
     than people, more than governments, adornments, and even ambition finally.
    He knows, he knows. He thinks it’s futile. And anything he says is dust in desert winds.

NINE
    I GOT BACK AFTER NINE from teaching my classes at the Rahnema High School. I changed and wolfed down dinner while reviewing the new agenda for
     our underground group — the compelling points of our new bulletins, the importance of our
Night Letter
and its distribution to students and workers and teachers, the long list of translations for Dr. Hadi.
    Early summer brought us hysteria and paranoia after the SAVAK raid. For years we had been carefully evading the secret police.
     That day, Jalal knocked at my door at six in the morning and said he’d been tipped off. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew. “They’re
     going to hit before midnight!” he said. “How much do they know?” I asked. “Not much, not much,” he said impatiently, “just
     your location.” I ran around all day to find the others, then