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At lunchtime on Hoveida’s last day, Khalkhali reports in his memoir, the prisoner was treated to a repast of rice, lamb and broad beans. Khalkhali claims to have made do with bread and cheese. (Next to photographs of him, excessively crapulent, this ascetic self-portrayal is unconvincing.) During the afternoon session, Khalkhali didn’t allow Hoveida a defence counsel, nor was a jury present. As the presiding judge, Khalkhali didn’t pretend to be impartial; in the vehemence of his harangues, he rivalled the prosecutor.
By trying Hoveida, Khalkhali jabbed his finger in Bazargan’s eye. Bazargan disapproved of the revolutionary court – he was planning for Hoveida an exemplary trial that would establish the Revolution’s reputation for justice and moderation. But Khalkhali, who plausibly claims to have taken hints from Khomeini, had different ideas. He gave orders that no one was to be allowed out of the prison where the trial was taking place. To ensure that word didn’t reach Bazargan, he locked the prison telephones in a fridge. And so Hoveida was sentenced and shot in the prison courtyard. His final words were patrician, and a bit surprised: ‘It wasn’t meant to end like this.’
Khalkhali’s theatre travelled on. It gave perhaps its most memorable performance at a famous shrine in south Tehran. Khalkhali and two hundred revolutionary militiamen set out to destroy the Pahlavi family vault, which was in the shrine’s precincts. Khalkhali was opposed by the government and by the resilience of the granite structure. The spades and picks used by the Revolutionary Guard proved insufficient. Khalkhali called for reinforcements. (National television was already on site to record his endeavour.) Bulldozers and cranes arrived, but the tomb withstood. At ten o’clock that night, the valiant revolutionaries went home to bed.
In his memoir, Khalkhali craves his readers’ indulgence: ‘Perhaps you don’t grasp how strong they’d made this tomb.’ But he was not deterred; the tomb would have to be blown up, by degrees. And when, after twenty epic days, the job was done, and the dust of imperial bones blended with the smell of cordite, ‘the sound of cheers and joy rose from the people, and the enthusiasm and joy were indescribable’.
You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. That might be Khal-khali’s epitaph.
Today, Mr and Mrs Zarif are coming to lunch with us, here in Elahiyeh. I wonder what they will make of Bita, my wife, and what she’ll make of them.
Elahiyeh is a desirable suburb on the slopes of north Tehran. It used to be so green that, even in midsummer, you had to sleep with a light blanket. The British and Russian embassies kept grand legations in Elahiyeh, to which their respective ambassadors decamped in the spring. Now, the compounds remain but most of the gardens have been built over. Elahiyeh is rarely more than two or three degrees cooler than the dustbowl of south Tehran.
Elahiyeh’s name is derived from the name of God in Arabic, Allah, but few places in Iran are more reputed for impiety. Behind entry gates crowned with barbed wire, illicit booze is consumed and dancing committed by mixed assemblies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that sex happens between men and women who aren’t married to each other. The Islamic Republic is an avoidable botheration.
In the Shah’s time, the area was inhabited by suave monarchists who built Swiss-style chalets. Fearing for their liberty after the Revolution – many of them had taken part in the Shah’s oppression, or dipped into the public purse – they fled. The new regime appropriated their houses and grounds, building on them or turning them into, say, a sports club for the families of a privileged caste of civil servants.
Elahiyeh’s present inhabitants are an uncouth upper class. They have done well in recent years out of high oil prices. They inhabit marble-clad apartments in escapist blocks and enjoy the view during the rare instances when smog hasn’t settled in the lap of the Alborz Mountains. Many of them have residence rights and property abroad – the Revolution taught them that it pays to keep your options open.
It’s difficult to ascertain exactly where their money comes from. Knowing the right people has a lot to do with it. They are terrific name-droppers. Having access to commodities beyond the reach of the common man – foreign currency at preferential rates, import licences – is also important. Their skill is acquiring what exists in artificially small quantities and selling it at a price reflective of this scarcity. Their wives take lovers and visit a French-educated psychologist downtown.
Their teenage daughters, matchsticks marinated in Chanel, are yanking up their coats; in recent years, hems have drifted above the knee for the first time since the Revolution. Their favourite activities are having nose jobs – there is one model: retroussé – buying illegally imported Italian shoes and rearranging their headscarves in public, by mistake on purpose exhibiting their hair.
The daughters gather on a Thursday night, outside pizza parlours and coffee shops, discharging arch glances and pollinating scents. They’re treading water while their parents find them a mate. (Likely as not, he will be their first cousin – the families know each other, and the mehriyeh, a kind of pre-nup, will not be prohibitive.)
They are courted, if the word is applicable, by boys who wear a minimalist variant on the goatee, driving Pop’s sedan. A chance meeting in a coffee shop; a telephone number flung into a passing car – such are the first moves. Oral sex is, of necessity, popular; there will be a great to-do if the girl doesn’t bloody her wedding bed. In case of penetration, however, all is not lost. A discreet doctor can usually be found to sew up the offending hymen.
There’s a hollow thrill to be got from bettering the morals police. (They cruise Elahiyeh in their Land Cruisers, looking for miscreants to shake down for a few dollars, smelling breath for alcohol, rummaging through handbags for condoms.) For the rich kids, it’s the best way of getting back at the state, at parents, at the predictability of life.
In a strange way, Elahiyeh’s social vacuum suits us, too. We like the traditional notion of an Iranian community, but are not sure we could inhabit one. Unlike almost everywhere else, you can live in Elahiyeh as you can in a Western city: in peace and anonymity.
Before 1979, Bita’s parents had nice ministry positions; both regarded a deputy ministership or another senior bureaucratic post as their due. Bita and her younger brother – a second brother was born on the eve of the Revolution – led blameless, privileged lives.
There were three choices when it came to educating your children: the French school, the German school and the American school. (You didn’t send your child willingly to an Iranian school; foreign languages and contacts were indispensable aids to getting on in the world.) The trouble with the American school was that its graduates spoke Persian with an American accent. There was no German connection in Bita’s family. Her mother, on the other hand, had studied law in Paris, so Bita was sent to the French school. It was run by nuns. Each year, on the anniversary of her martyrdom, the school commemorated the exemplary life of Joan of Arc.
Bita wore a dark-blue collarless tutu over a white T-shirt. In winter, she wore a roll neck jumper over the T-shirt. If the driver was late collecting her after school, she would wander down nearby Lalehzar, Tehran’s Pigalle, where there were whores and the smell of alcohol, and ornate cinemas with putti on the ceilings. In the summer evenings, when her parents were out, she would go swimming in pools that belonged to the parents of her friends. She and her friends danced to Googoosh, Iran’s answer to Shirley Bassey.
They admired Farah, the Shah’s third wife. It’s arguable that Farah was not as exquisite as wife number two, an Isfahani whom the Shah abandoned for failing to sire. But, she was tall, wore fabulous clothes and had an artistic eye. She was an alumna of the French school and came to visit.
In 1978, there were riots and atrocities. Bita got used to the sounds of firing and being sent home early from school – and the worried look on the face of Ma Soeur Louise. She didn’t realize that she and her friends, and Farah and the Shah and the whores of Lalehzar, were the reason for the hatred.
And so the Shah left. An old man with frightening eyes came. The French school was closed. (Of course it was; it was named after a Roman Catholic saint!) A lot of the girls, including Bita, were removed to an Iranian school where French was taught. Friends started leaving. First, the foreigners and the Jews, and the Bahais – members of a religious sect, originally an offshoot of Islam, that had been favoured by the Shah. One day, little Ziba would come to school. The next, she’d be gone. A few weeks later, her family would surface in Orange County, California.
It seemed to Bita that everything had been turned upside down. The people who were now giving orders looked like the people who had taken orders before. In the past, her mother and father had been on top. Now, they were at the bottom. If they wanted to get something done, they had to flatter coarse men with beards and rosaries. In the past, Bita had associated beards with building workers and dervishes. Now, everyone was growing them; you had to, if you wanted to get on.
A few months into the Revolution, Bita’s new school was closed and she went to another. They didn’t teach French at the new school. Arabic, the language of the Holy Qoran, was compulsory. The girls had to wear headscarves and long coats. They were told to despise the wearing of ribbons in hair, and bare ankles. In the streets, there were Hezbollahis patrolling, checking peoples’ adherence to Islamic rules concerning dress and behaviour. They threw acid in the faces of women who were inappropriately made up.
Bita had lived for colour. It was as important to her as the sun. The Revolution had killed colour, declared it to be evil.
Mr Zarif had delivered his school to the Revolution; in the precincts, he was unchallengeable. He turned his attention to a Qoranic injunction that Muslims promote virtue and prevent vice. It meant implementing Islamic law and practices, eradicating decadent ways of behaving. It meant starting at the bottom of society. He and the gang started hanging around parks and shopping centres. They would approach boys who were chatting to girls and ask, ‘What is your relationship? Is this woman your sister? Why are you talking to her?’ If they got an unsatisfactory answer, they’d hustle the boy away and tear off a few shirt buttons. They’d tell the girl: ‘Bleached jeans are a sign of American cultural corruption. Go home and put on Islamic clothes.’
The ban on booze was hitting the alcoholics. Liquor prices had rocketed. Every morning, a park or a vacant lot yielded up a new body, full of petrol, turpentine, meths – anything they could get their hands on. Mr Zarif felt that society was being cleansed, spewing harmful matter. He was learning Arabic, the language of the Holy Qoran.
Sometimes, he and his lads caught boys and girls flirting in shops, under the cover of deciding on a purchase. Mr Zarif and the gang would smash the windows of shops where such things went on and spoil some of the merchandise. If they saw girls flouncing in a park, they seized their handbags and tipped out the contents. ‘Who do you wear make-up for?’ they demanded. ‘What is that music cassette you’ve bought? Haven’t you heard what the Imam said about Western culture?’ If they came across a young man wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, they said: ‘Your hair is longer than Islam permits. Everyone should groom himself as the Prophet did. Here; let us cut it for you.’
They would deliver serious offenders to the boys at the mosque. The boys would consult one of the mullahs and get a sentence passed. Whippings would be administered, in accordance with Islamic law. The gang’s effectiveness was enhanced by the recruitment of two middle-aged women with long nails; they seemed to enjoy scratching the faces of pretty girls who were resistant to the Islamic dress code.
The doorbell rings. It’s the Zarifs. We’ve cooked Indian food, because we reckon that Mr and Mrs Zarif should be open to new experiences.
Not too new. Bita is wearing her headscarf. She’s careful not to put out her hand to shake Mr Zarif’s. She helps Mrs Zarif get out of her black chador for outdoors, and into her colourful indoor chador. Mr and Mrs Zarif look around for indoor slippers to put on. But we don’t ask people to take off their shoes when they enter our house. There aren’t any slippers available. Mr and Mrs Zarif take off their shoes and walk on in their socks.
‘What a house!’ they both say it at the same time. They look at Bita. (She’s the interior designer.)
The hall is burgundy. (My father-in-law says it looks like a nightclub.) There is a batik wall hanging depicting the Hindu goddess Durga, wearing a necklace of human skulls.
The sitting room is two shades of tangerine. There’s a picture of a woman in a bright red dress and a challenging stare, standing next to an androgyne with diaphanous blue skin and yellow hair. There are red-backed chairs and an Indian sari turned into curtains, and a dark green sofa from the 1940s, and a green tribal tunic with red paisley lining put in a frame and attached to the wall. The bolsters are richly coloured and patterned. There are riotous Baktiari carpets, Armenian rugs.
Mr Zarif is wearing a grey shirt, and grey trousers, and white socks. His house has white walls.
As we sit down to eat, I wonder whether he ever threw acid in the face of a girl who had red on her lips, or hair escaping from her headscarf.
[*] (#ulink_ff5c888a-1d1c-5b1a-84a4-61cd3a091d4f) ‘You should know about ta’aruf In Arabic ta’aruf means behaviour that is appropriate and customary; in Iran, it has been corrupted and denotes ceremonial insincerity. Not in a pejorative sense; Iran is the only country I know where hypocrisy is prized as a social and commercial skill.
Three examples:
When the taxi driver offered us tea and cigarettes, and we refused, this was ta’aruf. He had no intention of giving us tea and cigarettes, and we reacted accordingly. A man may propose that his son marry the daughter of his impoverished younger brother without having any intention of permitting the match; the son is already engaged to the daughter of an ayatollah, and the brother’s daughter is a repulsive dwarf. But the quintessence of ta’aruf can be found in the behaviour of a mullah I once observed entering a Tehran hospital in the company of several other men. As the mullah crossed the threshold, he said to the men waiting behind him, ‘After you.’
If, through some mistake or misunderstanding, an offer extended through ta’aruf is accepted, it will be retroactively countermanded. I remember reading somewhere of a foreigner who was arrested for theft after being denounced by a shopkeeper who had repeatedly refused to take his money.
[*] (#ulink_41fd5fc6-a40d-59ad-8f16-d6b750616259) I have a book, Celebration at Persepolis, that commemorates this party, which was held in celebration of what the Shah arbitrarily judged to be the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of continuous Iranian monarchy. The book relates that some sixty tents the size of villas, designed by a Parisian firm in beige and royal blue, were erected to house the guests, and that a hatter was on hand should one of the guests squash his topper. Haile Selassie brought with him a Chihuahua wearing a diamond-studded collar. A breakfast of raw camel meat was made available for the Arab emirs. The dinner menu included quail eggs stuffed with Caspian caviar, saddle of lamb with truffles and roast peacock stuffed with foie gras. The vin d’honneur was Château Lafite Rothschild 1945. Representing the Vatican, I learned, was Cardinal Maximilian de Furstenberg, a relation of my Belgian grandmother’s. Although he was only a few years older than her, my grandmother always referred to him as Uncle Max, possibly because he worked for the Pope.
CHAPTER THREE A Sacred Calling (#ulink_53599a37-a75a-5ace-a150-55fa71cce854)
One morning in the autumn I found myself in the back seat of a stationary taxi, facing due south, inhaling exhaust fumes. The authorities call this road an autobahn, because it’s meant to be quick and efficient. They have flanked it with lush verges on which they squander the city’s meagre water resources. I don’t think the former mayor, Ghollam-Hossein Karbaschi, who built this and most of Tehran’s other freeways, listened to foreign experts when he was drawing up his ideas on public transport. Had he done so, he would have learned that more asphalt does not lead to less traffic, but to more. Karbaschi’s urban arteries do not race. They loop clownishly. During the rush hour they atrophy.
On the car radio, a woman greeted us. ‘To all you respected drivers and dear, dear bureaucrats, to you conscientious teachers and workmen, I say: Salaam and good morning! To all the beloved professors and students of the Islamic world, I say: Good morning!’
According to the scientists, we in Tehran take in seven and a half times the amount of carbon monoxide that is considered safe. This information starts to mean something only after ten days or two weeks without rain, without wind. One morning, you look towards the Alborz Mountains and they’re not there. Rather, they’re impressionistically there. They’re lurking behind a haze that’s pink-grey, like the gills of an old fish. If you go out for long, you get cruel headaches for which lemon juice and olives are the recommended cures. Windless weekdays are said to carry away scores of old people, all of them poisoned. In the town centre, there’s a pollution meter whose optimistic readings, naturally, no one believes. The sunsets look like nuclear winters.
The woman speaking on the radio sounded as if she was on LSD. She said: ‘I think it would be a good idea for us to perform some simple acts that enable us to start the day in fine fettle. If the window of the car you’re in is closed against the cool of the morning, start by asking the driver if he would mind winding it down. Actually, why don’t I ask him myself? “Mr Driver? Would you mind lowering your window a little?” And to all those housewives at home, I say: open the window a bit, the weather’s splendid!’
Tehran has too many cars and not enough buses. There’s a plan to replace fifteen thousand elderly taxis. There’s a plan to give out loans so that taxi drivers can run their vehicles on compressed natural gas. There’s a plan to extend the metro, which at present has limited reach and is overwhelmed by the rush hour. There’s a plan to increase public awareness, to tell the middle class it’s not below their dignity to use public transport. Plans, plans.
‘Take a deep breath, and keep it a few seconds inside your chest. Now, slowly let it out again. Exactly! During the next song, I want you to do this several times.’
There should be a plan to teach Iranians how to drive. On the road, there’s no law, no ta’aruf. There’s no inside or outside or middle lane; the heavier the traffic, the more lanes come spontaneously into being, and the narrower they are. There’s no indicating left or right. There are pedestrians who can’t be bothered to take the pedestrian bridges, crossing the motorway like morons. Some evenings, when the kids are out, with the ducking and weaving at extraordinary speeds, you might think you’re in a rally or a computer game. Or you could think of it this way: the vehicle you’re in is a laggard sperm and the end of the freeway is the last egg available to humanity.
I’ve seen cars prostrate over advertising hoardings; I’ve seen a compressed pedestrian dead like a slug in the middle of the road. I’ve seen cars skittle mopeds – no helmets of course, that would be sissy – and drive on regardless. Drivers communicate by leaning on their horns and flashing their headlights. They use symbols: the thumbs-up (a rough equivalent of the finger), the clenched fist (a bit worse). Tempers fray. Once, as a passenger in a taxi, I found myself leaning out of the window and deploying a Turkish profanity that I had learned while living in Ankara but had never, on account of its considerable obsceneness, dared to use.
The elderly taxis are Paykans. In winter, Paykan drivers stick a piece of cardboard across the grille, giving the car the appearance of an asthmatic with a hanky in front of his mouth. Paykan means arrow, but the Paykan is as unerring as the Hillman Hunter, its almost identical antecedent from the 1960s, was sharp-nosed and predatory. In the old days, Paykans were mainly British-made and assembled in Iran. But the British don’t make Paykan parts any more, and 97 per cent of every Paykan is Iranian. I have been told that every new Paykan rolls off the production line with an average of two hundred faults. This is the reason why a fifteen-year-old Paykan, which has more British parts, will cost you more than a new one.
‘And now it’s the turn of the smile. Everyone smile to everyone! The rose of a smile will beautify your face. The scientists have established that people who smile in response to daily challenges are more likely to retain their health. Don’t frown!’
Something happened and we started to move. Sometimes, it’s not obvious why these traffic jams happen, and why they stop. It’s one of the mysteries of Tehran.
In the 1990s, Karbaschi let the magnates into north Tehran, where they developed Elahiyeh and other neighbourhoods with little regard for taste or safety. (It’s not unknown for new buildings to subside as a result of vibrations from nearby building sites.) The city’s infrastructure couldn’t keep up with the pace of growth, and there was a bad smell of impropriety. When Karbaschi was jailed in 1998, everyone knew his trial was politically motivated. But no one suggested that his municipal empire wasn’t corrupt.
Now, four years after he was pardoned and freed, Karbaschi is infrequently criticized. His freeways, his skyline, his parks and his cultural centres: they symbolized a regeneration, Tehran’s version of the building boom that bulldozed and revived Europe’s cities in the 1950s. Karbaschi was announcing: the War’s over. Let us look to the future.
But a revolutionary state can’t look to the future. The Revolution is everything, and it has already happened. The War was the Revolution’s crescendo, so the authorities have preserved it. Living in Tehran is like listening to the sea in a shell.
The authorities made the War part of the fabric. They put it on the city maps. As casualty figures rose, so the localities started changing. Thousands of streets called after nightingales, angels and pomegranates were given new names. Martyr Akbar Sherafat (this was the street where he grew up; his parents still occupy a flat in number sixty-one); Martyr Soufian (his daughter was born a few days after an Iraqi shell scattered bits of him over the front); the Martyrs Mohsenian – two brothers whose faces, smiling down from heaven, have been painted on a wall.
In the process of finding a friend’s house, you commemorate heroes:
‘Excuse me, madam, where’s Martyr Khoshbakht Alley?’
‘Well, you go down Martyr Abbasian Street, turn right into Martyr Araki Street, and then turn left immediately after the Martyr Paki General Hospital …’
So much for the little men with their little places; the prestige memorials – the boulevards and autobahns – are reserved for the dead elite. In the north of Tehran, there’s Sadr Autobahn – that’s Iraq’s Ayatollah al-Sadr, Iraqi Shi’ite, whom Saddam Hussein executed for sedition. Sadr is tributary to the main north-south autobahn, Modarres (Ayatollah Modarres, who was known for his opposition to the last Shah but one). Closer to the Square of the Seventh of Tir, there’s Beheshti Avenue. (Ayatollah Beheshti was the Islamic Republic’s first chief justice.) Before the Revolution, Beheshti Street was called Abbasabad.
My taxi was going on slowly. I saw that scaffolding was up in front of a mural that had interested me since my arrival in Iran. Men in overalls were sitting on the scaffolding, under a canopy. There were pots that I assumed to be full of paint; they were preparing to paint over the mural.
The mural showed a dead man, a martyr, lying in his bier, with his daughter standing over him, holding a rose. The daughter couldn’t have been more than four years old, but she wasn’t looking down on her father with the exuberant grief that you might expect. Her expression said: ‘I understand. You were my father but, more important, you were a Muslim. Having weighed your competing responsibilities, you went off to defend the Revolution, and Islam, from the Iraqi rapists. Good for you.’
I couldn’t imagine the little girl giggling, or whining, or tugging at her mother’s chador and demanding ice cream. Her dress was fanatically Islamic; who ever heard of a four-year-old wearing a black smock to cover her hair, and a chador over that, with not so much as a lock on display? A four-year-old alive to the diabolical temptation represented by a woman’s hair? She wasn’t a girl, but an idea.
We passed Mottahari Street (former name: Peacock Throne Street) – that’s Ayatollah Mottahari, Khomeini’s colleague and friend, who was assassinated a few months after the Revolution. We reached the Square of the Seventh of Tir – former name: the Square of the Twenty-Fifth of Shahrivar, the date of the Shah’s accession to the throne. Not a square in the Western sense, or a grassy maidan in the Indian – more an oxbow for Karbaschi’s meandering freeway, with a scum of shared taxis and cars and buses.
On the Seventh of Tir 1360 – that’s the Iranian calendar date for 21 June 1981 – a huge explosion that is thought to have been planted by the Hypocrites killed seventy-two people, including Beheshti, four cabinet ministers and other bigwigs. (Two more later died of their wounds.) On a wall overlooking the square there is a mural of Beheshti with his wiry beard and olive-stone eyes. Underneath, there is his eccentric adumbration of Iran’s foreign policy: ‘Let America be irritated by us; let it be so irritated, it dies.’
The carnage of the Seventh of Tir convinced Khomeini that there could be no mercy. The enemy, the Communists, liberals and pseudo-Islamists, had to be destroyed. In the months that followed, thousands of members and sympathizers of the Mujahedin and other opposition groups were executed. On 18 and 19 September 1981: 182 (according to official figures). On 27 September 1981: 153.
We entered Roosevelt – it acquired a new name after the Revolution, but everyone still calls it Roosevelt. We passed the Nest of Spies. It’s the regime’s name for the former US Embassy. Low-slung walls: easy enough for the students to get over. I remembered pictures from Time magazine at the end of 1979, of the hostage-takers using an American flag to carry away rubbish from the embassy compound, and a lurid Khomeini, Hammer Horror with blood-red irises, on the cover.
A few months before I’d visited a temporary exhibition at the Nest of Spies. The people had come to smell America. They’d come to look at the eavesdropping equipment that the embassy staff had used, and the shredders and incinerators they’d fed with documents as the students took over the embassy. (The students then spent months piecing together the shredded material. Some of this, they were able to claim, implicated their domestic rivals in CIA plotting. This was helpful to Khomeini, who used the findings to discredit his opponents.)
The organizers of the exhibition had placed dummies of American diplomats around a table, in a soundproof room that had apparently been used for secret meetings. As a visitor to the exhibition, you stood outside the room, which was made of two thick panes of glass with a vacuum between them, and looked in at the Americans. They wore ties: a Western affectation. They were seated on chairs: a kind of enthronement. They had crossed their legs, or splayed them, showing off immodest American crotches: canine. As you stood there, pressed up against the glass, and viewed their washed-out complexions and ugly auburn hair, you could imagine them talking over ways to control Iran, to defeat Islam. At the end of the working day, you could imagine them drinking beer and taking a slut for the night. That was what Americans did, wasn’t it?
We carried on south. We crossed a flyover. On one side, the houses had not been fully demolished – just enough to allow the flyover to be built. They were half-houses. The upstairs rooms still had wallpaper. The grid of south Tehran started to take shape. Scraps of yellow and turquoise tile were visible on the older façades, and rust-coloured roofs. There was less building activity in this part of the town and more traffic. The women mostly wore chadors. A different town, conservative and claustrophobic.
Sometimes, I’ve wondered what it would be like to live here. There would be a mode of conduct, proximity to the neighbours, a feeling of impermanence. These old communities are under attack – by unemployment and highly adulterated heroin at fifty cents a hit, by women who aren’t family and the influx of migrants from the provinces. Nothing stays the same. A neighbour leaving, another taking his place, a divorce, a business success, an iron ball crashing into a corner shop.
The defences are religion and the watchful eyes of neighbours, the chador and Islam. If the community is an island, and if the roads and bazaars full of strangers are the sea around them, then people behave themselves on the island and swim free in the fathomless waters of moral decay.
Then, we were caught in the bazaar traffic. Small vans carrying carpets and cans and wooden palettes on their sides. Men pushing carts: the porters, the lowest form of bazaar life. The day before, the bazaar had closed its doors in protest at an aggressive speech made by President Bush. It was to show America that Iranians were united in their continued hatred for the Great Satan.
As we approached the South Terminal, I looked out for a large black building, a plant that produced vegetable oil, which I was used to seeing at the roadside. But the factory was doubled over – in pain, badly winded. The roof had collapsed. One of the chimneys had toppled.
I got out of the taxi, holding my bag, and turned to face the Peugeot drivers.
‘Isfahaaaan! Isfahaaaan!’
One of them came up to me. He had a bronze complexion, purplish lips. ‘Isfahan! Leaving right now!’ His face was convulsed by the opiate’s bonhomie. (In Iran, the masses have both religion and opium.) His hand gripped me insolently.
I picked another driver, one with a clean moustache and an ironed shirt. The back seat of his Peugeot was occupied by a man in his twenties and another chap with a beard. I took the third place. A young couple shared the front passenger seat and fed each other crisps.
We moved off. The driver shifted position in his seat, hunched over the wheel. He flicked the gears with his palms and ran his hands through his shiny hair. There was a short conversation about what music we would listen to. The field was narrowed down to the titans of Turkish pop: Tarkan or Ibrahim. Ibrahim won. The driver pushed Ibrahim into the cassette player with the tips of his fingers. He lit his cigarette, but not before putting it in a mahogany-coloured holder. Every elegant move seemed designed to beguile the senseless boredom of his hours. We left south Tehran.
The sun in my eyes; Ibrahim lamenting through his moustache; the proximity of the five others; cigarettes; the speed and a rococo driver.
I thought: why don’t I have a car? Now that baby’s on the way, well have to get a car. Must be air-conditioned. But expensive! Government monopoly over car making, and demand far exceeds output: prices artificially high. Paykan? Forget it; Bita would sooner walk. Best alternative? Eight grand for a Kia Pride, a Korean-designed paper cup set on Smarties.
I was feeling sick and we were pelting along. We were driving through Zahra’s Heaven, the main cemetery in south Tehran. Seventy thousand dead soldiers in there. Other fathers’ sons, other men’s exercise, mirth, matter.
Then we were speeding down dust tracks that had been thrown across fields of barley. We could follow the asphalt, but that would take us through the tollbooths at the beginning of the motorway. This way, we’d emerge onto the motorway a few kilometres beyond the tollbooths and cruise for free.
We skidded onto the motorway. One hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, in an Iranian-built GLX 2000. Tired driver, straight road; he could fall asleep at any moment. One careless bolt, cruelly loosening. That’s all it would take. I looked at the other passengers. The bearded chap was silently mouthing an invocation, again and again, using dead time to accumulate credit with God. The couple had fallen asleep entwined. No one was thinking about seat belts. If we had to brake suddenly, we’d be scattered over the tarmac.
MR DRIVER, HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THAT EVERY ACTION HAS A CONSEQUENCE? WHAT DO YOU THINK OF CAUSE AND EFFECT?
The thought of never seeing my wife again. Or the little one, when he/she emerged. Right now just walnut size or strawberry size or whatever. A thing, not a person, but promising. Something I will love, and will love me, even if I prove to be unworthy.
MR DRIVER, WHY ARE YOU DRIVING SO FAST?
I tapped the driver on the shoulder.
‘Mr Driver?’
He looked at me in the rear-view. He turned down the music a little bit and said: ‘You don’t like Ibrahim?’ The young man was looking at me.
‘No, no, Ibrahim’s fine, I was wondering, could you drive at a more … er’ – I groped for the word – ‘reasonable speed?’
The driver’s expression in the rear-view mirror was puzzled. What did ‘reasonable’ mean? What did I want him to do?
He put his foot down. The speedometer gave up the ghost.
I was in Isfahan, zigzagging towards the Shah’s Square. (New name: the Imam’s Square.) I was on my way to meet a cleric called Mr Rafi’i, to talk about the War. Bobbing above the surrounding houses was the blue dome of the Mosque of the Shah (new name: Mosque of the Imam), which dominates the southern end of the square. As I walked I passed iron gates that led into new tenements, or into an old courtyard that may have contained a fig tree and a tethered goat. The tight turning streets were still and baking, and my mouth was dry. I wanted to be close to the mosque, with its shadows and ablutions pool, and its moist revetments.
The normal way into the Shah’s Square is through the roads and lanes that feed it from east and west, or from the bazaar, which debouches into it from the north. But my hotel was south of the square and I didn’t feel like walking half its length before entering it from the side. I was trying a short cut. Having approached the mosque from behind, I would surely come across a passage or lane that ran alongside it, and that would take me into the square. I pursued the dome.
After a few minutes, I rounded a bend and met a massive brick wall. Lying in the dust, there were bits of broken tile – yellow and turquoise and blue. I realized I was under the tiled dome; it had moulted faience. I was standing at the foot of the rear wall of the main dome chamber.
If you approach the east end of a Gothic cathedral, you’ll come across the apse’s satisfying bulge, some gargoyles, a ribcage of flying buttresses. The Ottoman mosques are mystic spheres; whatever your viewpoint, there is always a painstaking accretion – of domes and half-domes, ascending to the main dome, and thence to heaven. Both have been conceived sculpturally. You’re allowed to approach from all directions. But here: this rude wall!
When I stood a little to one side of the wall, I could see much of the mosque’s skyline. From the Shah’s Square: a pageant. From this side: a chaos of features and perspectives, without colour. I made out the western vaulted portico, or aivan. Viewed from the mosque courtyard, it is dazzling; the lavish stalactite decoration is intensified by mosaics and tiles. Now, from behind, it was unkempt, pregnant with its own vault, made of old bricks.
I had always assumed that the upstairs bays over the small vaulted shop fronts that flanked the mosque were the façades for storerooms and cells. Viewing them from the rear, I realized they were a screen. The Shah’s Square was a theatre and I had blundered backstage.
