Peripheral Visions

Improvisation in a Persian Garden
    W E BEGIN IN A P ERSIAN GARDEN . In summer it would be filled with scent and color, but on this midwinter day, some twenty years ago, only the bones of the garden and its geometries were visible: a classic walled garden, with ranks of leafless fruit trees between patches of dirty snow and rosebushes recognizable by their thorns. There was a row of dark cypresses along one end and a dry watercourse down the center, clogged with leaves.
    I had arrived in Tehran in January 1972 with my husband, Barkev, and our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Sevanne, known as Vanni, for the beginning of a period of research, teaching, and institution building in a culture and language new to both of us, even though I had studied the Islamic tradition in the Arab world and Barkev had grown up as an Armenian Christian in Aleppo, Syria. The day before, we had gone to tea—in fact, cocktails—at the home of our new landlords, and when they heard that I was an anthropologist, they invited us to come with them the next day to a garden on family land in a village near Tehran, where they would observe Eyd-e Qorban, the Feast of Sacrifice.
    At the same time that pilgrims are performing the Meccan pilgrimage, Muslims around the world are celebrating some of the steps of that weeklong ritual, one of which is an animal sacrifice, usually a sheep or a camel. It is said that in Saudi Arabia so many sheep and camels are slaughtered by pilgrims that they are simply plowed under by bulldozers. Many families in Iran also sacrifice a sheep on the Feast of Sacrifice, and here the meat is traditionally given to the poor. When our landlady invited us, although Barkev could not come, well, of course I said I would, but I would have to bring Vanni with me.
    On the way to the country, I began to have second thoughts and found myself running a mental race with the car, trying to work out the implications of the invitation I had lightheartedly accepted: to come and see a sheep being slaughtered, bringing a two-year-old child. I worried about what to say to her, how she would react. I went back over the memory of seeing the necks of chickens wrung when I was a child, before chickens came reliably headless, neatly butchered, and wrapped in plastic on little nonbiodegradable white trays. Those who eat meat, I told myself, should at least know where it comes from. That trip to Iran was not the first time I had entered a strange culture, but it was the first time I had done so with a child, and this was the first of many moments when the double identity of mother and field-worker led me down new paths of reflection.
    I know now that to be in such a garden was to stand in the middle of a vision of the world. In the Persian tradition, a garden is itself a cosmological statement, a diagram reiterated in the design of carpets and the way they are used. Gardens are generally symmetrical in plan, but within that ordered framework the rich particularity is varied and relaxed. Gardens are bounded, walled; within, all is fertile and hospitable, but there is always an awareness of a world outside that is less benign, an unruly and formless realm of desert harshness and marauding strangers.
    Water is a part of every garden, either flowing water or a pool large enough for the ritual washing that precedes prayer. House agents used to point out the pools to Westerners as wading pools for their children, but in fact these pools, reflecting and doubling garden and sky, focus the ideals of purity and generosity. The shah built a palace in the northern part of Tehran, at the high edge of the city, so water from the palace garden would symbolically flow down through the city to his subjects. Every garden is a promise of the paradise to which the faithful will go after death.
    It was a cold, gray day, and all of us were bundled up. My hostess, elegant in a fur coat and stylish boots, explained that the butchering would be done by the gardener. She herself, she said, could never bear to look on at the moment the sheep was killed. When we arrived we found the gardener and his whole family waiting: his wife, wearing the dark printed cotton veil of a village woman, and three children of different ages. Our gathering modeled the tensions of Iranian society before the revolution: the affluent, Westernized urbanites, the villagers, the performance of a ritual that rooted all of them in the past—all this in a setting with its own affirmations about the