I lie back upon one elbow on the carpet, but I can no longer see my wife in the kitchen area due to the bar counter and its stools. This is something quite western, the design of a drinking saloon in one’s own home, and if I were not planning to sell the property to Americans, I would have it removed. The sound of televised laughter comes from Esmail’s new bedroom. Yesterday he was excited to discover this hill brought as many programs to his screen as the pooldar apartments, and for two hours today, after he had organized his room, my son rode his skateboard down the long hill of Bisgrove Street again and again, those minature wheels sounding on the road like a quite distant F-16 in the clouds.

Nadi rests the tea and sugar at my bare feet, then quickly removes the empty pizza container and returns to the kitchen, which she has been putting into order all the afternoon. Upon the sofa are unpacked boxes, lamps, folded drapes and blankets. She is reserving this room for last, which is good, for I know she has enough work to keep her busy for at least the first week. Fardoh, tomorrow, I will for her purchase a new cassette player and even a new tape or two, Googoosh perhaps, that zeebah Persian woman who is a less sentimental singer than Daryoosh.

I rise and carry my tea out the front door and walk barefoot upon the grass. The blades are long, at least two centimeters, and as I walk around to the side of the house I make a note to purchase a grass cutter as well, something used, nothing extravagant. The sky has lost most of its light and my new neighbors have turned on the lamps in their homes. I was disappointed there was no sun all the weekend long, only that strange cool fog, but I am grateful for the tall hedge bushes around our little bungalow, and I like the heavy smell of pine they release into the air. Through the kitchen window I can barely see my Nadi working for she has turned on no light. Tomorrow begins my new work, that of buyer and seller. I will give it the best hours of the day, like any office position, and that is what I must do with my room, arrange it with a proper desk and chair and a telephone and perhaps a typewriter as well. But first I must become a seller; I must double my investment with a buyer very soon. And of course this must be handled more delicately than anything else. I cannot push Nadi too far too quickly, asking her to pack and move again so immediately. Perhaps I should wait a month or two for her to settle herself here, away from all the lying and play-acting of our life at the high-rise of our ruling pooldar. But will it not be more difficult, after I sell the home on the open market for a fair price, to ask her to move once again? But then I will of course be able to show her eighty or ninety thousand dollars in our hands, the opportunity to purchase another auction property to sell for profit or even begin a business of some kind right away.

I regard the slope of the roof above me, the sky growing quite dark, and I decide to telephone a najar as well, a carpenter, to give a price for the building of a widow’s walk. I can then refer to this bungalow as Waterview Property, and in the meanwhile, my wife and I may sit together in the early evenings so high on the house and hill, to look out at the sea, and the sky.

THE NAJAR IS a polite young man, not quite thirty years, and he has given to me a price of eleven hundred dollars for the construction of a widow’s walk. We will not be able to enter this from inside the home but must walk outdoors to new stairs in front of the kitchen window in order to reach the roof. There is no other affordable way to construct it, the najar assures me, so I accept this compromise, but I will not inform Nadereh of her window.

This morning, Monday, while my son rides his skateboard down the hill of Bisgrove Street to explore the town of Corona in the sunshine, I spend time here in my new room organizing it as an office, and I have no time to waste. As soon as I rid my desk of all unnecessary papers and boxes I begin immediately to write an advertisement for the sale of this house. I study the language used in other realty advertisements of the town’s newspaper, and I use the same for my own, yet I do not feel I am qualified to name a price. So many of the homes advertised sound no larger or more well-maintained than this bungalow, and they are in “quiet residential areas” as well, but the prices for these homes are well over one hundred seventy thousand dollars. My fingers begin to shake; I am once again in amazement at the low price I paid for the home and I imagine if I could sell for even one-fifty I would more than triple my investment. Outside my door and down the hallway, Nadi works in the living-room area. From time to time I am able to hear her voice as she speaks to herself. It is a habit she has always possessed and I am pleased to hear it for it only comes when she is deeply involved with a project or task of some kind.

Early this morning she rose from her bed with the rest of us, her son and I. She for us prepared toast and tea, and when she poured for me I thanked her and she said: “Haheshmeekonam, Behrani,” which is the proper response, though I have never cared for her using my family name when addressing me. When we were younger she called me Massoud-joon or, often, Mass. But for many years now—since the revolution I am quite certain—my Nadi has called me Behrani. One evening in our large apartment in Paris, on the Right Bank of that dirty but beautiful river the Seine, Nadi had a long telephone conversation with one of her sisters in Tehran. After hanging up she began immediately crying. I gave her a few moments of solitude, then I went to comfort my wife but she pushed me away and yelled very loud in Farsi she should have never married me, a kaseef soldier! None of her family were forced to leave the country; their names were not upon a death list, just her because she married me and the filthy kaseef air force and it is all your fault, Behrani! Our country is ruined because of you, you and your SAVAK friends!

It was then I hit my wife very hard across the face with my open hand and she fell to the floor and lay there crying, “Man meekham bemiram.” I want to die, she wept. I want to die.

Of course I would not have let her stay upon the carpet in that fashion if our son was in the home, but Esmail was playing in the streets with his young French friends, so I allowed Nadereh to lie upon her face and weep. Because she was quite wrong of my involvement with the secret police, SAVAK. I had very little to do with any of their affairs. And of course she before never complained of all our privileges; she never complained of the maids and soldiers she used for the upkeep of our home; she never complained of the skiing trips in the mountains to the north, or of our bungalow there overlooking the Caspian in Chahloose; she never complained of the fine gowns she was able to wear at the parties of generals and judges and lawyers and famous actors and singers; she never complained when on a Sunday afternoon I would order Bahman to drive our family to the finest movie house in Tehran and of course there would be a long queue of people waiting, but I was dressed in my uniform so we never waited, we never even paid; we were ushered up to the balcony reserved for the Very Important People, away from the crowd. And yes, I often saw fear behind the smiles of these theater managers as they bowed and led us personally to our seats, and yes, no one waiting upon the sidewalk outdoors dared make a complaint I may hear; but there was no blood on my fingers. I purchased fighter jets. I was not with SAVAK.

But there were moments in my career I had spent time with these men. In the final years, every Thursday evening, five or six of we senior officers would meet at General Pourat’s home for vodka and mastvakhiar. And how I have wished for that sort of company today. At the high-rise of pooldar Persians in Berkeley I attempted to organize some of the men together for an occasional evening, but these young doctors and engineers have spent so many of their years being educated in the west they do not even know the proper way to drink with each other like men; they do not know that the oldest and most experienced in the room is the saghi, that he, and only he, holds the vodka bottle and he will fill, or not fill, those cups around him. Each Thursday evening at Pourat’s, he, of course, was the saghi. In his large home a soldier would escort us to the den where we gentlemen would remove our shoes at the doorway, and we would sit in a circle on the dark red carpet from Tabriz. In winter, there was a fire burning in the tall stone fireplace behind us. Two or three musicians and a singer would stand in the far corner softly playing songs more than a thousand years old and still only a third as old as our country. Hanging on the east wall was a long woven tapestry of Hazrat Abbas and his holy companions charging down the sand hill of Karbala, racing to the thousands of enemy soldiers who would yield them to martyrdom.