In the Walled Gardens Read Online Free PDF Page B

parties; and who was on which diet and lover and had plastic surgery
     and bought which clothes from which designer and stayed in which European hotel. I had to get to work but needed Thierry.
     Pouran needed him more than I did. He had all the right markings to leap to the top of her guest list.
    “He looks good enough to eat!” she said, biting her lip.
    Her coarse sexuality can be quite beguiling. She sauntered over and Thierry rose and they kissed, and he introduced her to
     his colleagues. He wears dark suits like no other man, ramrod-straight. Steel blue eyes like silvery mirrors. I stayed at
     our table calculating the tip. When I looked up, he waved and I walked over. He said Pouran was having a party Thursday.
    “It would be the greatest honor of my life to have you there,” she said to Thierry.
    Her exaggerations sweep the world, evacuating truth and meaning and finer distinctions in their wake.
    “And bring your friends!” She smiled at the others.
    My appeal for Peyman Bashirian had to wait for Thursday.
    L ATE IN THE AFTERNOON Mr. Bashirian sat before me. He’d closed the door to my office as if I held new hope.
    “Your son’s in Komiteh Prison. There’s nothing you can do. They’ll be calling you.” I’d repeated the message a dozen times,
     repeated it in different ways, though the message wouldn’t change, no matter how I tried. He stared expectantly, as if I were
     holding back or better news was at the end of some sentence not yet uttered. I told him there was nothing more. He asked again,
     then stared blankly at the wall. He looked like he hadn’t slept for days. He said he was on Valium.
    “Tea?” I asked.
    He shook his head and just sat there, the silence awful, his appearance alarming, anemic. He sagged. I suggested he go home
     early. He said he couldn’t stand home without Peyman, so I offered to give him a ride. As we left, the secretary in the outer
     office stared after us.
    He lived near Dampezeshki and gave directions and thanked me for driving him home more times than was decent for a man of
     his standing.
    I asked if he was eating properly. Expounding on the benefits of nutrition, my tone clipped like a nurse’s, to steel him.
    Dusk. The sun deserting. The tail end of the day shortened and dark. People in coats called out their destinations to orange
     taxis.
    Mr. Bashirian pointed to a small house and invited me in. Who could refuse a grieving father? He had several rooms and a narrow
     kitchen and tiny backyard with a grape arbor. Dark rooms with speckled gray tile flooring and feeble overhead lights. They
     were the rooms of a father and son. There wasn’t the slightest vestige of a woman.
    He made tea. I walked about the small living room. The heavy-handed oil paintings on the walls were his. He’d been taking
     lessons for years. I saw his small and modest signature, slanted like two birds flying south:
Kamal.
Nostalgic renderings. A virginal maiden with clasped hands and soulful eyes. Wispy willows bent over a stony river. Silvery
     moonlight over desolate hills. He came in, pointed to the steel bookcase holding his son’s collection of photographs, tucked
     away into albums, from his travels around the country.
    “They haven’t gone through his stuff. They haven’t come yet.”
    He was waiting for the secret police. He expected them, like a sort of death.
    We sat at the table in the hallway and laid out the last batch of pictures Peyman had taken. Mr. Bashirian handled the photographs
     the way I imagined he would have handled his son — discreetly. They were pictures from Peyman’s last journey to the eastern
     border of the Kavir in Khorassan Province, towns ringing the Salt Desert.
    “From Kashmar to Gonabad, then Ferdaus, Boshruyeh, Tabas, and Robaat-Kur down to Robaat-Posht-Badaam,” said the father.
    Places in the dust. He’d come to see them through the eyes of his son. He spread out the photographs with quiet hands, leaning
     over them,