I had visited other memorials honoring victims of war and other human horrors—the siege of Dubrovnik, Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia, the bloody rule of Haile Mengistu in Ethiopia—and the most appropriate were those that made no attempt to glorify the victims but presented them as the simple, unassuming human beings that they were. The martyrs from the Iran-Iraq War were portrayed similarly, human rather than heroic, more victims of geopolitics than the bullets or missiles hurled from the other side. The depictions confirmed a lingering perception—that our popular presentations of heroism destroy the very humanity they aspire to celebrate.
After another tour of the graves, Sohrab and I were back on the road. The cemetery stop had thrown a pall over the afternoon, but with Dexter Gordon again oozing from the CD player, the mood lightened. In less than an hour we pulled into the village of Abyaneh. Choice of accommodation was simple: Abyaneh has only one hotel, unmistakably named, so it could not be missed—the Abyaneh Hotel. It is a bare-bones, clean, three-star affair at the end of town, where the second-floor rooms are fitted with balconies that overlook the town’s rooftops and the green valley beyond. I dropped my bag in the room and again looked forward to the luxury of wandering on my own. Sohrab had gone to great lengths to tell me that Abyaneh was best to explore aimlessly and unguided, that the web of winding lanes offered surprises when they were least expected, that the few locals who still lived in town were friendly and welcoming of visitors, and that he did not want to distract from my own personal exploration. All this was probably true, but I guessed that he also was weary from the day’s heat and welcomed a predinner snooze.
Rising above the village are the ruins of a Sassanid-era fort that once protected Abyaneh as well as the fertile lands that spread across the valley and the trading caravans that crossed it. Now the pile of broken stone, topped with tufts of grass and weeds, couldn’t protect much of anything. But it hardly mattered, because there is little in Abyaneh left to protect. The town’s population, once several thousand, has dwindled to a few hundred, mostly elderly men and women who have no reason to leave and who only remain to maintain the age-old traditions that draw weekenders from the cities and curiosity-seeking foreigners.
Abyaneh possesses no magnificent monuments, mosques, or historic sites, and that is precisely its charm. Abyaneh’s only attraction is itself—its reputation as one of the oldest villages in Iran, with mud-brick-colored houses arranged like chess pieces on a sloping hillside and the preservation of religious practices that survived the arrival of Islam in the seventh century. In Abyaneh, the fires of Zoroastrianism have never been snuffed out. Elsewhere in Muslim Iran the feet of the dead are washed before burial, but not in Abyaneh, because the practice pollutes the element of water, regarded as holy in Zoroastrianism. And rather than facing Mecca for prayers during religious festivals, residents turn to the East—the direction of the sunrise.
Before heading into town I decided to put the fort to good use. I climbed to the top to get an overview of all that lay below, thinking this would help in navigating the ins and outs of the village. Thinking I had a good lay of the land, I scrambled down and headed into town, but the bird’s-eye view proved to be useless. Immediately I was lost, but as Sohrab had said, Abyaneh is best experienced through aimless wandering, and so I wandered, and aimlessly, back and forth through the narrow, brick-colored lanes. In tiny squares where a few of the rugged streets intersected, women wearing the traditional long white scarf splashed with a pattern of red flowers sold fruits and vegetables. Old men, dressed in baggy, billowing pants, gathered in clusters, like old men everywhere, to puff on cigarettes and exchange a few words between heavy, lengthy silences.
Abyaneh has not died completely. Most of the houses may be locked and shuttered, but on this day, a weekend, some of the shutters were drawn back, and windows were open to catch any breeze passing down the knotted lanes. High above, garlands of laundry were draped over latticed balconies. What was noticeably absent was the sound of children—no flocks of giggling schoolgirls playing hopscotch or skipping rope, no boys chasing down a beaten-up football as it caromed off the mud-brick walls. But what had not abandoned the town was the tradition found everywhere in Iran—Persian hospitality.
Rounding a corner, I met an old woman sitting on a rickety chair beside an open doorway. She didn’t dart inside, like my peek-a-boo partner outside the Borujerdiha. Her face broke into a wide smile, and her eyes beamed with the fire of youth. I smiled and nodded, and raised my camera as a way of asking for a photo. She didn’t dodge into the doorway. She rose from her chair and assumed an elegant, dignified pose, firm and upright, hands clasped behind her back. The shutter snapped, and an even brighter smile spread across her face. I thanked her with another nod and was moving on when she went to the doorway and—waved me inside? I didn’t get it. I didn’t think she could be inviting me into her home, here in the back streets of Abyaneh, but she was, and, once the message hit home, I swallowed a pang of shame and followed.
Instantly, I was back at the Borujerdiha, in taste and character if not splendor. Only a mud-brick wall and weathered wooden doorway may have been visible on the outside, but within, handwoven carpets were spread across the wooden floor, two small rooms were lined with hand-carved tables and chairs, and a pair of chest-high cabinets were topped with enamelware and glass objects, glazed pottery, and any other knickknacks that could find room on the polished surfaces. But most striking were the photographs. One of the chests was doubling as a display case for a collection of black-and-white photos. Some had turned sepia, but all showed Abyaneh in livelier times—a group of men and women working in a field, anonymous neighbors gathered in a square, sitting on stoops outside their houses. Some of the photos were personal—an old man with a grey mustache and eyes that gazed vacantly into space, two women, much younger, probably the age of the woman now, one of them perhaps the woman now.
She moved to the kitchen, and I knew what was coming. She lit one of the burners on her stove and “put a kettle on.” In a minute the water was bubbling, and loose tea leaves were sprinkled into the bottom of a small glass teacup. At the front of the house there was only a door and a single window that faced the narrow street, but at the rear was a wall of windows that overlooked the town and valley beyond.
I sipped slowly while taking in the view, a panorama that made the modest interior immensely rich. All of the valley lay within sight of her window, wide and green and sweeping to the mountains and ridgeline on the other side. After a minute, the woman steered me over to the photos of Abyaneh in decades past, long before the Islamic Revolution, when rural Iran was rural Iran, untouched by decades of changes. One by one she picked them up and indicated through the gaze of her eyes, “This was our town. . . . This is where I shopped. . . . These were my friends and neighbors.” As she recounted those times past she showed no pain of loss or air of remorse, and her eyes retained their glow, as though all of the life that she had lived, and what was left of it, captured in these fading photos, was something to be proud of, and to share with any visitor curious enough to have a look.
I finished the tea and handed her the cup, with a smile, as a gesture of appreciation and a signal that I was prepared to leave. She held up a hand, went to the kitchen, and returned with a handful of oranges. I took them, smiled, and nodded again, and, passing through the door, was once again back on the street.
I kept strolling through Abyaneh’s lanes, and after a few more turns and dead ends met Mohammad and Sorour. It was clear they were not year-round residents. Mohammad was dressed in jeans, not the baggy, billowing pants of the local men. Sorour donned the flimsiest of headscarves, pushed back on her head as far as possible without drawing the attention of the dress police, if any dress police could be found in Abyaneh. It was a Tehran habit brought here to the countryside, where the morals police numbered zero, but a habit it was, and hard to shake in a country where guardedness is a fact of life. Mohammad and Sorour were brother and sister, both gradu
ate students in Tehran, and they had come to Abyaneh to look after their grandmother’s house, still kept up by the family after Grandmother was unable to live alone here in the village and had to move to Tehran.
Once we had passed the “Where are you from?” introductions, Mohammad and Sorour invited me in to have a look. One glance said the house hadn’t been lived in for years. Wall decorations had been removed, and the carpets pulled up. Furniture filled the tiny rooms, but everything was disheveled, orderly enough only for a weekend stay. But for Sorour and Mohammad it was their ancestral home and therefore worthy of a visit to fix whatever needed fixing to prevent it from falling into further decay—and to justify a getaway from Tehran. The latter may have been the primary purpose of their visit, but ancestral lineage runs deep, along with all its obligations, so their visit was likely a two for one.
We got through the expected follow-ups—Why had I come to Iran? What were my impressions of the country?—and then they invited me up to the roof. The house was not much of a talking point, they said. The best was yet to come. We climbed a narrow, winding staircase that led up through the second level and onto the rooftop deck. They were right. The cramped, musty rooms and tight hallways were behind us. The view from the roof took in the entire village and valley. A plastic table and two plastic deck chairs suggested that Mohammad and Sorour spent their mornings and evenings here, watching the arrival and departure of the sun in its passage across the valley—not a bad way to spend a few days out of Tehran.
As the sun edged westward and the colors deepened across the valley, Sorour and I took seats on the deck chairs, while Mohammad, the gentleman host, perched on a block of concrete. We talked about Hassan Rouhani, the reelected reformist president: Were they supporters? Could Iran have better relations with the West? How long could the regime hold on to power? The future was all a mystery, they concluded—as it always is in Iran. Eventually, and almost inevitably, the conversation landed on the subject of Iran’s nuclear program. Did they believe Iran had the right to develop nuclear weapons?
“Every country has the right to develop nuclear energy,” Mohammad asserted, a bit reflexively. His answer was safe and noncommittal, and once again showed that, as much as young Iranians may deplore the government and the Islamic regime, national pride is something else. It convinced me, once again, that were Iran to be attacked—by the United States, Israel, it didn’t matter—the nation’s youth would rally around the government in its defense, but only temporarily, very temporarily.
But did this include nuclear weapons, I asked.
“No!” Mohammad exclaimed, with sudden fervency.
No?
“No! We don’t want war. We do not want conflict with any countries. We want to be friends with everyone.”
Anywhere else such statements, which essentially parroted the government line, would have been dismissed as regime propaganda, but in private settings Iranians are not afraid to speak their minds, and it is not uncommon for extremely contentious views to be expressed. I believed that Mohammad was speaking for himself, but, as her brother held the stage, Sorour was shifting uneasily. When I asked her opinion of Iran becoming a nuclear-armed state she was far more pragmatic, and dubious, which translates as quintessentially Persian. “Let’s face it,” she said, “we are all alone in the world.”
Dusk had begun to suffuse the valley with deep shades of purple and brown. It was time for me to find my way back to the hotel. I bid Mohammad and Sorour goodbye and returned to Abyaneh’s tangle of lanes. On the way, I stumbled across the remains of the town’s atashgahdeh, or fire temple, a 1,500-year-old remnant of its Zoroastrian past. I had been looking for it ever since I entered the town, and suddenly there it was, its flame long extinguished and the temple now succumbing to time as well as the gathering dusk. I managed to find Abyaneh’s main street and began the climb out of town, along the way passing a few grocery shops, awaiting the last customers of the day under signs lit by single bulbs, and Abyaneh’s only internet café.
Back at the hotel the tables in the dining room were being set for the voluminous, over-the-top buffet that is the central feature of the Persian dining experience. Stainless steel serving bins loaded with roasted lamb and chicken appeared, followed by billowing pillows of saffron rice; white rice laced with spinach and lima beans, green lentils, and raisins; pots of stewed vegetables; flats of steaming loaves of taftoon and barbari breads; bowls of lentil and aash soup; and an array of salads. In the days of the shah, the lavish spread would have been accompanied by jugs of smooth, fine Shiraz wine, and no doubt some of the guests had a bootlegged bottle or two stashed away in their rooms. But, for the sake of public appearance, the soft drinks, fruit juices, and nonalcoholic beer would have to do.
Other guests were already starting to take their seats, and soon the room was filled with a cross-section of Iran’s middle class—young couples seeking a romantic country getaway, parents with children in tow in need of a few days relief from hectic urban lives, and even a few pensioners, the retired class with enough time on their hands to see the unseen parts of their own country.
I filled a plate and found an inconspicuous part of the room to engage in a bit of people watching. Weary parents were preoccupied correcting the table manners of rambunctious children. Young couples were too preoccupied with each other to be distracted by the rambunctious children or the cornucopia of food. For a moment I was able to enjoy some anonymity. For a moment no one wandered over to say, “Welcome to Iran—where are you from?”
After eating, I stepped outside to take in the cool mountain air. Night had settled in. The sky had darkened, and the ridgeline of the surrounding hills was visible beyond the valley. Outside the hotel entrance a small patio was lined with takhts, and some of the after-dinner crowd had already moved there to nibble on sweets, sip cups of strong coffee, puff on galyoons, and enjoy the night air. I found a spot on the only unoccupied takht and began nursing a pot of mint tea, but it wasn’t long before I fell under the gaze of two young couples on a nearby takht. We made eye contact, and I prepared for the inevitable. “Where are you from?” one of the women asked.
I replied, and as expected, in keeping with Persian protocol, they asked me to join them. Then came the introductions. Shapur worked in IT for an Italian company in Tehran. Neda was an accountant for the French energy company Total. Nassim had just returned from Brussels, where she had spent two years studying languages. Navid was an account supervisor for Bank Melli, one of Iran’s largest financial institutions. Back in the heady days of the postelection riots of 2009 these would have been Green Movement revolutionaries, and now, since the departure of firebrand and controversial President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they were likely ardent supporters of current president and quasi-reformer Hassan Rouhani—or anyone who could inject an inkling of liberalism into Iranian society. Their liberal stripes showed themselves in the postures of Neda and Nassim. Here, in the relative isolation of Abyaneh, far from the ubiquitous eyes of Tehran’s morality police, the two women allowed their scarves to slide all the way down the backs of their heads. It was a moment of freedom to be taken whenever the opportunity offered it, and a welcome reminder of normalcy in a country where, for almost forty years, the “new normal,” in women’s dress and religious restrictions of every kind, may have been accepted as “normal” but never natural.
Everyone in the group was glad to see the end of Ahmadinejad, and his quixotic attempt to return to power in the 2017 election was never taken seriously by anyone but his most ardent backers. Kashan itself was a region where Ahmadinejad had won many followers, primarily by showering it with revenue-generating infrastructure projects and largesse from the national coffers. In American terms, Ahmadinejad was the ultimate pork-barrel politician. As a former mayor of Tehran he knew that political loyalties are easily bought, but his antics during his eight years in power, including Holocaust denial and provocative statements that only stoked unnecessary conflict with the West, earned him the reputatio
n of “loose cannon” among his fellow hardliners, not a reputation to be welcomed in a regime based on top-down, hierarchal control.
“He was an idiot, and a dangerous idiot,” said Shapur.
“But he could connect with the common people and those with little education, so the leaders who were out of touch with the people used him for that, to win support for the government,” Nassim added.
Navid was a little more glum. “For eight years he was the public face of this country. People all over the world got a very negative impression of Iran, but he never really represented the people.”
I agreed with Navid, that Ahmadinejad was grossly out of step with most Iranians, but there was a flaw in his reasoning. The 2009 election was widely regarded as stolen, but Ahmadinejad did win a clear majority to take power in 2005, and so he may not have represented “the Iranian people” as represented by Neda, Shapur, Nassim, and Navid, but there was a swath of Iranian society that did see part of itself in his image.
I thought this might be hard for a group of Green Movement sympathizers to accept, so I kept quiet. But in some respects Iran was not all that different from many countries in the world. There was a large segment of society, urban and educated, eager to embrace liberalism and modernity, and another group that sees those values as a threat to their more conservative, tradition-based lives. Ahmadinejad, like many politicians, was able to exploit the fears of the latter.
Did the rejection of his candidacy in 2017 by the Supreme Guardian Council, the branch of the government charged with approving candidates for the presidential election, mean that the pitchfork army that he represented was also being shown the door? Not at all—it was only being sidelined, and for the moment, Navid explained. “The government has learned how to manipulate us, or how to try. When tensions rise too high, they will allow a reformer to take control, as they did with Mohammad Khatami in 1997, but they won’t let him actually make any changes. It’s a strategy. It lets air out of the balloon. But when they feel they need to crack down, they will make sure that hardliners are back in power.”
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