The Cypress Tree

by Kamin Mohammadi

  The second event was less joyful. One night a few weeks after we celebrated my first birthday in Tehran, my mother had a dream. In the dream her dadash Shapour was telling her to hurry home, that Abbas was waiting for her. She told me that in the morning she was prepared for the phone call from Shapour who told her that Agah-jan had suffered a stroke and was dying. ‘He is waiting for you, Sedi-joon,’ he told her, his voice heavy. ‘Everyone else is here and he is waiting just for you. Hurry.’

  My family was given to visions and dreams. Maman-joon had always told us that as a child she saw djinns, playful spirits that messed up her clothes, and she was convinced that she heard the call of the Vag Vag birds, as she called them, before something terrible happened. ‘Naneh,’ she rasped at me, ‘I heard the Vag Vag birds one day in Abadan just after your khaleh Mina was born, and that night we were sleeping on the roof when, suddenly, the war started.’

  My mother too sometimes had prophetic dreams, although they stopped abruptly after we had moved to England and the events of the revolution had driven a wedge between her and God. My daiey Pardis to this day can read the future so accurately from the remains of Turkish coffee grounds that his family periodically pleads with him to give up work and become a full-time fortune-teller. For the Abbasian family, the curtain between this world and that was thin at best, and they accepted the magic of life without seeking too hard for rational explanations.

  My mother kicked into action after Shapour’s phone call. Before long, we were back in her childhood home in Farahabad in Abadan where my grandfather was lying in a bed made up on the floor – the Abbasian household had never shaken the habit of living on the floor – looking like a bag of bones. My mother joined all her siblings gathered around his bed – they had flocked from all corners of Iran to be there. Abbas did indeed wait for his favourite daughter to arrive before he slipped away, holding Sedigheh’s hand, her head bowed over him, her tears falling on his face.

  In the days that followed, people poured into Maman-joon’s home to pay their respects, to add their voices to the howls of pain and the downpour of tears that racked through the Abbasian house during the seven days of mourning that followed. Abbas’ sons-in-law had come to attend the ceremonies from their different corners of Iran, and my Kurdish cousins were there too. Our families were united in grief for this man who had come so far in his life, had created not only this large family but even himself from nothing, from some lost place behind the Caucasus mountains.

  Abbas Abbasian had realised his final and greatest ambition – to produce a family so numerous, and be head of a household so generous and welcoming, that often when he returned home at the end of the day there was no room for him at the sofra. His wishes had come true, but so he did the curses he was so quick in invoking when his disorderly younger sons tested his patience. Unable to control his temper, quick to shoot off his tongue when the fury overtook him, Abbas would curse his children for fighting so much: ‘One day you will all be scattered all over the world, like the seeds of the poppy, so far away from each other that you will finally understand the value of family, finally learn that you should have known the worth of having each other close.’ Abbas’ unthinking fury was to prove strong for indeed the events of the years to come were to see his descendents scattered wider than even he had predicted.

  Fatemeh Bibi mourned her husband in the traditional way – she wept and beat her head and tore at her chest when the loss felt too much to bear. Shia Islam, being a religion built on grief and mourning, sanctions such releasing actions, and my grandmother, aunts and uncles allowed the deep suffering of their loss to be expressed in such operatic lamentations. In calmer moments, Fatemeh Bibi sang the praises of her husband, remembering the time Abbas had made the hazardous overland journey to Iraq with the body of her dead mother to fulfil a promise that he would make sure she was buried next to her own mother in Kerbala. Abbas was a serious man, a man of his word, a man pricked by a strong conscience. My grandmother was, until her dying day, a woman with the lightest of hearts. She loved to laugh and enjoy herself, was still that carefree girl who wasted the mangoes and coconuts of her father’s storeroom with no thought to the future, relaxed in the knowledge that there would always be someone else ready to do the worrying, someone else who would knit their brow and let anxiety cast a shadow across their face. Fatemeh Bibi liked the fun side of life, was never one to miss a party; in her eighties, bent double and hardly able to walk, she nonetheless tottered across the world to be at my sister’s wedding in London, saying to anyone who would listen: ‘As if I would miss my little girl’s big day, be khoda! She was like my own child, I brought her up myself.’

  Abbas had been a man for living, as Maman-joon often said, and he had made life sweet indeed for the cherished only daughter of Mirza Esmael Khan.

  10

  New Iranians

  After the first week of mourning for Abbas was over, after helping her mother, sisters and sisters-in-law prepare the customary foods for the ceremonies marking the week of his death, Sedi scooped us up and returned to Tehran.

  Settling into her new life, Sedi was glowing in both Bagher’s attention and the respect that her new status afforded her. My mother was a born hostess, charming and attentive with beautiful manners. Hospitality has never been in short measure in Iran – the Islamic belief in the blessing inherent in extending welcome to strangers met, on colliding with the ancient culture of Iran, a well-established system of courtesy and hospitality that already had roots thousands of years old. The combination of these two heritages knit together in such a way in Iran that the practice emerged deeper, richer and more striking that in any other Muslim country. In this way – as in so many others – Iran Persianised Islam and gave it a depth and refinement not present when the religion was born in the barren deserts of Arabia.

  Sedi Mohammadi embodied the latest incarnation of the hospitable Iranian wife. She served her dinners on a large dining table rather than on a sofra flung across the floor, and her guests sat on straight-backed chairs, rather than cross-legged on the floor reclining on cushions. But nonetheless the choice and variety of dishes on her table, the steaming khoreshts, mountains of saffron-stained rice, the ‘belly-full’ stuffed fishes, yoghurts sprinkled with crushed dried rose petals and mint and a myriad of pickles and salads. Her table was abundant and if it differed from the sofra at the Abbasian house, it was only in the style and the presentation. The same spirit that animated the Hayat Davoudy and Abbasian sofras moved through the Mohammadi table. As with so much in the New Iranian lifestyle that Sedi was now fully entered into, underneath the Western laminate, they were still Iranian through and through.

  My mother loved to sing and she was apt to break into song at any given moment. Sometimes as she was talking, she would stop and sing a snatch of an Iranian tune, complete with expressive intonation, clearly deciding that the music better expressed what she was trying to say. I have often thought that, had my mother had her way, she would have lived her life as in a musical movie, the most important events in her life lived as big song and dance numbers. My father had discovered musical theatre in England and always made sure to take in the latest shows whenever work took him to London, telling me in years to come of how he saw Julie Andrews playing Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on the West End stage and how Carol Bruce had sizzled in Pal Joey as I excitedly riffled through his record collection to find the original cast recordings of the shows. We watched all the old MGM musicals together, all of us muttering approval of Gene Kelly’s moves, Fred Astaire’s lightness, Ginger Rogers’ twirls. My parents passed on to us their love of singing, music and musicals and I too have wished that life allowed more spontaneous singing and dancing in moments of great emotion.

  My mother sang one song so frequently when we were living in Tehran that it is etched into my brain even now. ‘Morgh-e Sahar’ – ‘Bird of Dawn’ – is an old Iranian song dating back to the Constitutional Revolution, speaking of my nation’s long yearning for f
reedom in the customary Persian metaphors and symbols, a song whose popularity penetrates every strata of Iranian society and whose lyrics, speaking of caged nightingales and the cruelty of tyrants, are as relevant to our nation now as during the Constitutional Revolution. I can still recall it today.

  Every summer, Fatemeh Bibi would visit for the three months that the schools were closed. My grandmother was then a small white-skinned creature with a barrel-like figure and legs that were beginning to bow out at the knees. Maman-joon may have been small but there was a charisma and joie de vivre to her that belied her size. At the airport where we went to greet her, she would walk out into the arrivals hall, her steps tiny but each one possessed of a graceful confidence, leading Yassi and Mamaly, who were both already taller than her, by the hand, to our excited squeals. We always met them ourselves – although there was the Company-provided Lincoln at Sedi’s disposal in Tehran, she never let a member of her family be met by anyone else.

  My mother drove us to the airport in her Paykan. Although the shiny BMW that was parked in the garage in Darrus belonged to her too, she preferred to use the Iranian car that had been modelled on the British Hillman. The Paykan was reliable, if not especially glamorous, and famous for its tenacity – Daiey Shapour had once completed an eight-hour journey in a Paykan held together by the skin of some persimmon fruit.

  Khaleh Mina was also a frequent visitor to our villa in Tehran. Once she had graduated from night school, finally the proud possessor of her high school diploma, she would leave Busheiry in Khorramshahr and come for blissful extended visits with us. When I was just nine months old, my mother started travelling the world with my father again, spurred on by Fatemeh Bibi who urged her to wean me and return to being ‘the wife of your husband’. Maman-joon believed strongly in the importance of the sensual life of a wife and husband – to which her twelve children bore testament – and she thought it unhealthy, if not downright dangerous, for my father to take those long foreign trips, touring the world to negotiate and bargain on behalf of Iran and her oil projects, on his own. While my parents took off for regular trips, my grandmother and Khaleh Mina would move into the villa in Darrus to look after me and my sister and I felt I belonged as much to them as I did my parents.

  My Kurdish family were equally present in our lives and, led by Sa’adat-khanoum’s example, I grew as fond of picnics and hiking in the hills as she was herself. Sa’adat-khanoum instilled in us her love of the outdoors and on weekends we would squeeze into two cars, my amoo’s family and mine, and we would drive out to the foothills of the Alborz, picking a beautiful spot shaded by trees and gurgling with streams. We would take a long walk, my sister and I running off the path, for which we were normally scolded by my mother, then playing while Guity and Mehry helped our mother spread out the Persian carpets and set out the feast that issued, as if by magic, from the trunks of the cars.

  Our picnics were no different to the meals we ate at home – rice would be par-cooked and brought along in a huge pan to be steamed on a portable gas ring, while the men built a fire over which skewers of chicken soaked in lemon juice and saffron would be grilled, the whole served up in large pieces of flat bread, bought fresh from the baker that morning. A samovar would be brought along and while we were eating, tea was made and the pot left to brew. Along with the china plates, we always packed the little pinch-waisted glasses which we drank tea from, and these, with quantities of sugar cubes and little silver teaspoons, would complete the sofra.

  The only thing I loved more than our picnics was winter, with the water frozen in the joobs and the city chilled to its bones. As children our ambition was for the snowfall to be so heavy that schools were closed and when this happened – which to my memory was often – we would excitedly phone our cousins across town and, practically panting with excitement, announce to them: ‘It’s snowing and they have closed the world. Let’s build snowmen!’

  Snowy winters never failed to thrill us Khuzestani kids especially when, in Amoo’s house, a room was given over to the korsy, the traditional answer to the cold. A low table was covered in quilts, a brazier was placed underneath and the heat spread under the table. Large cushions were ranged around the korsy and placed against the wall for leaning on. The top of the korsy was used as a table, always scattered with delicious nut mixes and bowls of winter fruit. We sat around the korsy and tucked our legs underneath, eating meals there and, as little children, getting lost under the table as we played our games, invariably pulled out by an angry adult who would tell us off for going near the hot brazier.

  Khaleh Mahvash and her family were frequent visitors in Tehran, and her children learnt to swim alongside us in our children’s pool. Of her four kids I was especially fond of Mahnaz, the second daughter who was a few years older than me. I loved her huge smile and generous spirit, she was funny and her grey eyes twinkled with intelligence. Our bond had only deepened one winter when, out playing in the snow-covered garden, she had slipped and fallen into the iced-over pool. I had dashed inside and fetched the adults, and they had fished out a shivering Mahnaz who from then on maintained that I had saved her life.

  Although I was shy when I had to put on a pretty dress and be presented to my parents’ friends at their many lavish parties, when in the midst of my huge extended family I was a confident and cheeky child, spoilt by all. Even the strict Sa’adat-khanoum would pause as I passed to plant a kiss on my cheek, stroking my hair and calling me her ‘Kam Kam’ and I thrived, nourished by such love.

  Sa’adat-khanoum, like my Maman-joon, adored the shah. She was a woman who had been liberated by Reza Shah’s reforms and her version of modernity was always tied in with the Pahlavis, who she found as admirable as Maman-joon found them glamorous. She kept scrapbooks devoted to the royal family and these swelled in 1971 when the shah finally held the long-promised celebration commemorating 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy. Vowing to deliver the ‘greatest show on earth’, the shah neglected to mention which date he was commemorating since this celebration had first been mooted in the fifties. As with so much else in the shah’s insistent myth making, the details were vague, but the image was brilliantly drawn, designed to dazzle, to spellbind the public and fill their scrapbooks.

  Many years later, when the Pahlavi dynasty had long fled and I was visiting the Islamic Republic for the first time, one of my cousins took me to visit the site of the shah’s big party in the desert on our way to Persepolis. The tented city was no longer impressing anyone, empty and flapping in the desert wind, the tents that had once harboured heads of state were now as faded as the dynasty they had been erected to celebrate. The shah’s city was in reality fifty luxurious suites that were no less opulent for being constructed of canvas. Inviting sixty-nine heads of state – monarchs were given precedence over presidents – the shah laid on the biggest party the world had seen; it even made the Guinness Book of Records as the most lavish official banquet in modern history. The foreign dignitaries lapped up 20,000 litres of wine, magnums of Chateau Lafite flowing like water. Quails’ eggs, pheasant and Iranian caviar were on the menu – in this celebration of Iranian monarchy and nationhood, there was a surprising lack of traditional Iranian cuisine on the tables, or Iranian culture on display. To his critics, an impatient shah replied, ‘Should I serve heads of state stale bread and radishes instead?’ in one fell swoop reducing the way most people lived as not good enough to be served up to his foreign friends.

  The ordinary people did not care for the adulation the shah was enjoying abroad. Alienated from the celebrations, they found the sum of $100 million spent on the entertainments distasteful when so many lived in abject poverty and the fiery Ayatollah Khomeini – who had become ever more vocal from his exile in Iraq – vociferously criticised not just the celebrations and the shah himself, but all Iranian monarchs. The parade of the Iranian army at Persepolis was intended as a display of Iran’s military might, a subject close to the shah’s heart since taking over from his military father and being th
e recipient of so many millions of dollars in aid and arms from America. The shah’s ambitions had extended beyond strengthening his position at home – he wanted to not only be the top power in the region but, within the space of a decade, the world.

  At the climax of the celebrations the shah walked ceremoniously to the grave of Cyrus the Great – the man who had founded an empire, had freed the Jews of Babylon from slavery and had encouraged ethnic diversity and tolerance within his empire – at Pasargadae and, lit up dramatically and turned out beautifully in the middle of the desert, he made a rousing speech in which he declared, ‘Cyrus, we have gathered here today at your eternal tomb to tell you to sleep in peace for we are awake.’

  The shah had truly arrived on the world stage.

  The shah was increasingly thumbing his nose at the West and declaring that he would create in Iran a Great Civilisation, a project that he promised would see all of Iran literate and economically and technologically as advanced as the West in a matter of twelve years. The shah embodied the peculiarly Iranian paradox of being both in awe of the West and at the same time considering himself and his own nation and culture to be far superior. This contradictory mixture of shame, inferiority and superiority has blighted the Iranian sense of self ever since our once great nation fell into backwardness and we saw the newly enlightened West take our crown of achievement and accomplishment. The Iranian psyche had never really recovered from its encounters with a stronger and more advanced Western world, and the machinations that had seen Iran used as a pawn throughout the twentieth century did nothing to heal this damage. The shah, like his subjects, craved acceptance by the West while claiming superiority to it, and with the power that controlling the world’s oil supply gave him, he increasingly used his influence to lecture the West on its failings, on the corruption of its morals and social systems and to insist on a new world order. Time magazine crowned him ‘Emperor of Oil’ and warned the world that it had better take him seriously. His star could not have shone brighter.