The pull of a palace of childhood

Where I live now the walls are painted green and yellow and ocean blue. The ceilings are high, the rooms forever inundated with light. There are rosebushes in the yard, and bougainvillea and a lemon tree I once planted by mistake, not knowing what it was or whether it would grow, and which surprises me still every time it blooms. Up Benedict Canyon and right below Mulholland Drive, in the once-remote border between the Valley and the Westside where aging movie stars had come to hide before the developers arrived. There’s a market nearby where, in the time it takes to scan a gallon of milk, the clerk will tell you all about his latest fight with his wayward boyfriend, a coffee place where a young Russian woman -- bleached hair and too much makeup and clothes you suspect she can hardly afford -- arrives every afternoon with her elderly mother, and a deli with an outdoor patio where Joni Mitchell sits on hot summer evenings, smoking cigarettes and speaking softly to companions who seem to hang on her every word.

I’ve lived in this house for 14 years, and before it in others. I’ve lived in apartments and hotel rooms and even, for three years when I was in boarding school, in an ancient castle with famous ghosts and portraits of dead aristocrats.

But all that time I’ve also lived in that other house -- the one I left 30 years ago but that writes itself into all my stories still; where I spent my childhood, where memory began, and where I find myself, alone with a thousand voices every time I close a door, sit before a page, try to tell a tale.

That other house is where my grandparents had lived when they were still young and wanted to be uptown -- on Tehran’s Shah Reza Street that was, at the time, a prestigious address. My grandfather had made a small fortune selling French cigarettes in Iran. He owned one of the first automobiles in the entire country, had a chauffeur with a serious opium habit, and a butler who had been “given” to him as a child by peasant parents who knew they would not be able to feed him. My grandfather spent three years building a place that would reflect his good taste and social standing.

There was a three-tiered yard that spanned an entire city block, sparkling pools with fountains in the shape of dolphins and fish, giant statues of Persian emperors with silver skin and golden scepters standing guard in every corner. There were tall sycamore trees and stone walkways, a wide terrace, a set of French doors that opened into a large salon with red velvet curtains and crystal chandeliers. In the servants’ yard, a pair of heavy-set women squatted with their chadors wrapped around their waist and their arms buried to the elbow in pewter tubs. They washed the sheets with lavender bleach, hung them out to dry in the sun like the sails of a pirate ship. There was a room that was always locked and to which only one person -- my grandmother -- had a key, a ballroom that occupied an entire floor and where, for one brief moment when the stars were still bright, my grandparents had entertained the city’s elite.

But the moment had passed too soon and the lights had quickly gone out in the grand ballroom, and Shah Reza Street was abandoned by its upper-class residents in favor of the hills of Shemiran. Embittered and feeling betrayed by his friends’ exodus, my grandfather refused to follow suit and settled instead into the chaos of people and cars, of mules and bicycles and traveling salesmen who mingled in the gloomy light of Tehran at dusk. He gave up his office and moved into the first-floor salon where he read the paper, took his meals and received visitors. He left the house only a few times a year -- to attend a wedding or a funeral, or to avoid meeting with the tax man who dropped in to collect his bribe.

My parents were married at the Officers’ Club downtown, then came to live with my grandparents on Shah Reza Street. By then, the plaster on the walls had turned yellow and the black stone floor was cracked and uneven. The rooms were too large to heat properly in winter, the hallways too drafty, the roof teeming with pigeons that flew in through an open window and became trapped in the curtains on the dining room wall, in the kitchen alcove, behind the glass doors of the mirrored closet in my parents’ bedroom.

My mother learned to cook from the servants, sent the butler to buy bread and milk and groceries every day. She took sewing classes and learned to cut patterns, bought English wool and French silk and made clothes that my sisters and I would wear to our school plays and end-of-term dances. She read pirated American novels and went to the movies and collected postcards with black and white pictures of Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford. She kept talking about moving into a smaller, more modern place, a house she could furnish and maintain in her own taste. She talked about sending her children to study in Europe, leaving Iran with my father and setting up house in America.

All the time I was growing up, my grandfather sat in the first-floor salon and watched the flowers die in the yard -- victims, the gardener claimed, of the incessant waves of exhaust fumes that poured in from the street. He watched the paint fall off the silver emperors that had once seemed immortal, watched the servants give up on fighting the dust that settled onto every surface no matter how often they cleaned. He watched the peasant boy who was now a grown man fall in love and get married, only to have his wife run away the very next morning.

My sisters and I played behind the trellis covered with grapevine and hid in the empty greenhouse where my grandfather had once grown orchids. We sat in the yard on dark summer nights and watched giant lizards dart into and out of the cracks in the walls, stood at the top of the staircase that spiraled down five floors, and spied on our parents’ increasingly rare visitors. The older we became and the more the house fell apart, the stronger its hold on our imagination, and the greater the mysteries it held.

Before I left Iran for boarding school, I stole my grandmother’s key to the forbidden room and ventured in one afternoon when the adults were asleep. I found nothing but an empty chest, a window that had been walled up, a sea of dust. I crept into the servant boy’s house and looked for tell-tale signs of a crime -- a bloody ax, an exposed coffin, a body rotting in plain view -- anything to explain his wife’s sudden disappearance. I saw a closet full of expensive suits and ties -- clothes he had spent his life savings on, that he had never had occasion to wear, that he kept hidden like a secret.

My grandfather died in the first-floor salon that had become his place of exile. My parents bought a house in Los Angeles and moved here in the summer of ’77. The servant boy stayed behind to water the trees, replace the glass panels in the French door that cracked from the cold every winter, and fight off the stray cats and the occasional squatter.

When the revolution arrived, the house was used as a hospital, then a school. Then one of the mullahs’ wives moved in with her many children, cooked in the kitchen and slept in the bedrooms and, by her mere presence, took ownership of the house. I see them -- her and her children -- every time I look back: a family of ghosts, moving silently through the halls, standing on the edge of the terrace that overlooks the yard, sleeping in our beds with their eyes open and their arms stretched to their side.

I don’t miss the house on Shah Reza Street anymore. I don’t feel I ever left it, or managed to resolve its enigma, or believe that it was anything but a fairy tale image that will transcend the years and all of the lives of its inhabitants. In these hills and canyons where I now live, in this house full of light and open spaces and twisted little twigs that grow into magnificent trees, I still hear the music pour through the wide open windows of the third floor ballroom where my parents dance, forever young, surrounded by a sea of laughter and the glow of chandeliers that will not go dark.

Gina Nahai’s most recent novel is “Sunday’s Silence.”