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andaroun
, ‘inner house’. The soldier would not come to search where the
women lived!
In fact the noise of the soldiers had come closer only to get more distant
again, before fading away altogether. How could they have known into which of
the alleys I had vanished? The district was a maze, made up of dozens of
passages, hundreds of houses and gardens – and it was almost night.
After an hour I was brought some black tea, cigarettes were rolled for me and
a conversation struck up. In slow Persian phrases with a few French words they
explained to me to whom I owed my safety. The rumour had run through the
district that an accomplice of the assassin was at the foreigner’s hotel. Seeing me
flee they understood that I was the guilty hero and they had wanted to protect
me. What were their reasons for this? Their husband and father had been
executed fifteen years earlier, unjustly accused of belonging to a dissident sect,
the 
babis
, who advocated the abolition of polygamy, complete equality between
men and women and the establishment of a democratic regime. Led by the Shah
and the clergy, repression had been bloody and, aside from the scores of
thousands of 
babis
, many completely innocent people had also been massacred
upon a simple denunciation by a neighbour. Then, left alone with two young
girls, my benefactress had been waiting for the hour of revenge. The three
women said that they were honoured that the heroic avenger had landed in their
humble garden.
When one is viewed as a hero by women, does one really wish to disabuse
them? I persuaded myself that it would be unseemly, even foolish, to disillusion
them. In my difficult battle for survival, I needed these allies, I needed their
enthusiasm and courage – and their unjustified admiration. I therefore took
refuge in an enigmatic silence which, for them, lifted their last doubts.
Three women, a garden and a salutary misunderstanding – I could recount
forever those forty unreal days of a sweltering Persian spring. It was difficult
being a foreigner; I found it doubly awkward in the world of oriental women
where I did not belong at all. My benefactress was well aware of the difficulties
into which she had been thrown. I am certain that the whole of the first night,
while I was sleeping stretched out on all three mats laid on top of each other in
the cabin at the bottom of the garden, she was the victim of the most intractable
insomnia for at dawn she summoned me, had me sit cross-legged to her right, sat
her two daughters to her left and gave us a carefully prepared speech.
She started by hailing my courage and restated her joy at taking me in. Then,

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having observed some moments of silence, she suddenly started to unhook her
bodice before my startled eyes. I blushed and turned my eyes away but she
pulled me towards her. Her shoulders were bare and so were her breasts. With
word and gesture she invited me to suckle. The two daughters giggled under
their cloaks but the mother had all the solemnity of a ritual sacrifice. I complied,
placing my lips, as modestly as possible, on the tip of one breast and then on the
other. Then she covered herself up, without haste, adding in the most formal
tones:
‘By this act you have become my son, as if you were born of my flesh.’
Then, turning towards her daughters, who had stopped laughing, she declared
that henceforth they had to treat me as if I was their own brother.
At the time the ceremony seemed both moving and grotesque to me.
Thinking back over it, however, I can see in it all the subtlety of the Orient. In
fact my situation was embarrassing for that woman. She had not hesitated to
hold out a helping hand to me at great peril to herself, and she had offered me
the most unconditional hospitality. At the same time, the presence of a stranger,
a young man, near her daughters night and day, could only lead to some incident
at some point in the future. How better to diffuse the difficulty than by this ritual
gesture of symbolic adoption. Then I could move around the house as I pleased,
sleep in the same room, place a kiss on my ‘sisters’ ’ foreheads and we were all
protected and kept strictly in check by the fiction of adoption.
People other than me would have felt trapped by this performance. I, on the
contrary, was comforted by it. Having landed up on a women’s planet and then
to form a hasty attachment, through idleness or lack of privacy, with one of the
three hostesses; to try bit by bit to edge away from the other two, to outwit and
exclude them; to bring upon myself their inevitable hostility and to find myself
excluded – sheepish and contrite at having embarrassed, saddened or
disappointed the women who had been nothing less than providential – that
would have been a turn of affairs which would not have suited my nature at all.
Having said that, I, being a Westerner, would never have been able to come up
with the solution which that woman found in the never-ending arsenal of her
religious commandments.
As if by a miracle, everything became simple, clear and pure. To say that
desire was dead would be telling a lie, everything about our relationships was
eminently carnal yet, I reiterate, eminently pure. Thus I experienced moments of
carefree peace in the intimacy of these women who were neither veiled nor
excessively modest, in the middle of a city where I was probably the most

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wanted man.
With the passage of time, I see my stay with those women as a moment of
privilege without which my attachment to the Orient would have remained short-
lived or superficial. It is to them I owe the immense steps I made in
understanding and speaking idiomatic Persian. Although my hostesses had made
the praiseworthy effort to put together some words in French on the first day, all
our conversations were henceforth carried on in the country’s vernacular. Our
conversations might be animated or casual, subtle or crude, often even
flirtatious, since in my capacity as elder brother anything was allowed as long as
I stayed beyond the bounds of incest. Anything that was playful was permitted,
including the most theatrical shows of affection.
Would the experience have kept its allure had it gone on for longer? I shall
never know. I do not wish to know. An event which was unfortunately only too
foreseeable put an end to all that. It was a visit, a routine visit, by the
grandparents.
Ordinarily I stayed far away from the entrance gates, the 
birouni
gate, which
led to the men’s abode and was the main doorway, and the garden gate through
which I had entered. At the first sound I would slip away. This time through
recklessness or over-confidence, I did not hear the old couple arrive. I was
sitting cross-legged in the women’s room and for the last two hours had been
peacefully smoking a 
kalyan
pipe prepared by my ‘sisters’ and had fallen asleep
there with the pipe still in my mouth and my head leaning against the wall, when
a man’s cough woke me up with a start.

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