“‘The Lyautey Affair’ was mentioned two days later by Charles-Henri de Fouchécour, then Director of our Institute, who must have been severely reprimanded by the Embassy; Fouchécour is a great scholar, so he was able to forget the incident almost immediately and plunge back into his beloved princely mirrors, and while we should have been worried about Lyautey’s health, we all — friends, researchers, authorities — preferred not to get involved.”
Gilbert de Morgan paused in his narrative to empty his glass, still full of ice cubes; Sarah again threw me a worried glance, even though nothing in the calm discourse of the scholar hinted at the slightest trace of intoxication — I couldn’t help but think that he too, like Lyautey whose story he was telling, bore a famous surname, famous at least in Iran: Jacques de Morgan was the founder, after Dieulafoy, of French archaeology in Persia. Did Gilbert share any kinship with the official pillager of tombs of the French Third Republic, I have no idea. Night was falling over Zafariniyeh and the sun was finally beginning to disappear behind the foliage of the plane trees. The Avenue Vali-Asr must have been a huge traffic jam at that hour — so blocked that there was no point in blaring your horn, which brought a little calm to the garden of the tiny villa where Morgan, after pouring himself another glass, continued with his story:
“We didn’t hear any more of Fred Lyautey for some weeks — he would appear from time to time at the Institute, have tea with us without saying anything special, and leave. His physical appearance had become normal again; he didn’t take part in our discussions on the social and political agitation; he would just look at us and smile with a vaguely superior air, perhaps a tiny bit scornful, in any case it was extremely irritating, as if he was the only one who understood the events that were occurring. The Revolution was underway, even though, in early 1978, in the circles we frequented, no one could believe in the fall of the Shah — and yet, the Pahlavi dynasty had no more than a year left.
“Around the end of February (it was not long after the ‘uprising’ in Tabriz), I saw Lyautey again at the Café Naderi, by chance. He was in the company of a magnificent, not to say sublime, young woman, a student of French literature named Azra, whom I had already seen once or twice and, why prevaricate, noticed for her great beauty. I was flabbergasted to find her in the company of Lyautey. At the time, he spoke Persian so well that he could pass for an Iranian. Even his features had been slightly transformed, his complexion had gotten a little darker, it seemed to me, and I think he was dyeing his hair, which he wore shoulder-length, in the Iranian style. He called himself Farid Lahouti, since he thought it sounded like Fred Lyautey.”
Sarah interrupted: “Lahouti, like the poet?”
“Yes, or like the rug merchant in the bazaar, go figure. Still, the waiters, all of whom he knew, greeted him with Agha-ye Lahouti here, Agha-ye Lahouti there, so much so that I wonder if he himself ended up believing that was his real family name. It was absolutely ridiculous and annoyed us no end, out of jealousy no doubt, since his Persian was really perfect: he had mastered all the registers, the spoken language as well as the meanderings of classical Persian. I found out later that he had even managed to obtain, God knows how, a student’s card in the name of Farid Lahouti, a card with his photograph on it. I have to confess, I was shocked to discover him there, in the company of Azra, at the Café Naderi — which was our regular haunt. Why had he brought her precisely to that place? At the time there were many cafés and bars in Tehran, not at all like today. I imagined he wanted to be seen with her. Or perhaps it was a simple coincidence. Still, I sat down with them,” Morgan sighed, “and an hour later I was no longer the same man.”
He was looking into his glass, concentrating on the vodka, on his memories; perhaps he saw a face in the liquid, a phantom.
“I was bewitched by the beauty, the grace, the delicacy of Azra.”
His voice had lowered a tone. He was talking to himself. Sarah threw me a glance as if to say “he is completely drunk.” I wanted to find out more, to learn what had happened next, at the Café Naderi, in the middle of the revolution — I had been there, in that café where Sadegh Hedayat was a regular, Sarah had taken me there; like all the cafés in post-revolutionary Tehran, the place was a little depressing, not because you could no longer drink alcohol there, but because the young people who emptied their fake Pepsis while gazing into each other’s eyes or the poets who read the paper there with a cigarette dangling from their lips all looked a little sad, defeated, crushed by the Islamic Republic; the Café Naderi was a vestige, a remnant from long ago, a memory of the center of the city from before, when it was open and cosmopolitan, and thus apt now to propel its customers into profound nostalgia.
Sarah was waiting for Gilbert de Morgan to either continue his story or collapse, conquered by the Armenian vodka, onto the well-cut grass of the little garden in front of the terrace; I was wondering if we’d do better to leave, go back down to the lower part of the city, but the prospect of finding ourselves in an immense traffic jam in this heat was not very encouraging. The Tehran metro was far enough from the little villa in Zafariniyeh that, on foot, you’d be sure to reach it soaked in sweat, especially Sarah, under her Islamic headscarf and her roopoosh. It was better to stay a little while longer in this typically Iranian garden, savoring the nougats from Ispahan offered by Nassim Khanom, even playing a little game of croquet in the tender grass, which had remained green thanks to the care of the tenant and the shadow of the tall trees, to stay until the temperature fell a little and the high mountains seemed to inhale the heat from the valleys around sunset.
Morgan paused for a long while, a somewhat embarrassing pause for those listening. He was no longer looking at us; he was gazing into his empty glass at the sun’s reflections transforming the ice cubes into fragile diamonds. Finally he raised his head.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, forgive me.”
Sarah turned to me, as if to seek my approbation — or to apologize for the hypocritical platitude of her next phrase:
“You’re not boring us at all, on the contrary. The Revolution is a fascinating period.”
The Revolution immediately snapped Morgan out of his reverie.
“It was a rumbling that grew louder, now muffled, now louder, every forty days. At the end of March, for the commemoration of those who died in Tabriz, there were demonstrations in several large cities in Iran. Then more on May 10, and so on. Arbein. The forty-days’ mourning. The Shah had taken measures, though, to pacify the opposition — replacing the bloodiest leaders of the SAVAK, ending censorship and allowing freedom of the press, freeing a number of political prisoners. So much so that in May the CIA sent a famous memo to its government, in which its agents posted in Iran stated that ‘the situation was returning to normal and Iran was not in a prerevolutionary, even less revolutionary, situation.’ But the rumbling became even more amplified. Ordered to fight against inflation, the main complaint of the people, the Prime Minister, Jamshid Amouzegar, had applied a draconian measure: he had systematically put a damper on activity — cut off public investments, stopped the government’s large building projects, and put in place systems of fines and humiliations against ‘profiteers,’ mainly the bazaar merchants who passed along price increases. This rigorous policy had been crowned with success: in two years, he had gotten the economic crisis under control, and had brilliantly succeeded at replacing inflation with a massive, urban unemployment rate, alienating not just the middle and working classes, but also the traditional merchant bourgeoisie. Which is to say that in fact, aside from his huge family who were conspicuously spending the billions from oil pretty much all over the world, and a few corrupt generals parading through the weapons exhibitions and the salons of the American Embassy, Reza Shah Pahlavi no longer had any real support in 1978. He was floating over everyone. Even those who had gotten rich thanks to him, those who had benefited from the free education, those who had learned to read thanks
to his literacy campaigns — in short everyone he naively thought should have been grateful to him desired his departure. His only supporters were so by default.
“As for us, young French scholars, we were following the events from something of a distance, along with our Iranian colleagues; but no one, and I mean no one (aside possibly from our intelligence services at the embassy, but I doubt it) could imagine what lay in wait for us the following year. Except for Frédéric Lyautey, of course, who was not only imagining what could happen — the overthrow of the Shah, the Revolution — but desired it. He was a revolutionary. We saw less and less of him. I knew through Azra that he was active, like her, in an ‘Islamist’ (the word had another meaning at the time), progressive splinter group that wanted to apply the revolutionary ideas of Ali Shariati. I asked Azra if Lyautey had converted — she looked at me in an entirely surprised way, without understanding. For her, obviously, Lahouti was so Iranian that his Shiism went without saying and, if he’d had to convert, that had happened a long time ago. Of course, and I want to insist on this, Iranology and Islamology have always attracted religious nutcases to a degree. Someday I’ll tell you the story of the French colleague who during Khomeini’s funeral in 1989 wept copiously, crying out ‘Emam is dead! Emam is dead!’ and almost died of sorrow in Behesht-e Zahra, in the middle of the crowd in the cemetery, sprinkled with rosewater by the helicopters. She had discovered Iran a few months earlier. That was not the case for Lyautey. He wasn’t devout, I know that. He had neither the zeal of the converted nor that mystical force you sense in some people. It’s incredible, but he was simply Shiite like any other Iranian, naturally and simply. Out of empathy. I’m not even sure he was a real believer. But Shariati’s ideas on ‘red Shiism,’ the Shiism of martyrdom, revolutionary action, faced with the ‘black Shiism’ of mourning and passivity, inflamed him. The possibility that Islam could be a force for renewal, that Iran could draw the concepts of its own revolution from itself, filled him with enthusiasm. As well as Azra and thousands of other Iranians. What I found amusing (and I wasn’t the only one) is that Shariati had been trained in France; he had attended the classes of Massignon and Berque; Lazard had directed his thesis. Ali Shariati, the most Iranian or at least the most Shiite of the thinkers of the Revolution, had constructed his thinking around French Orientalists. That should please you, Sarah. One more stone to add to your cosmopolitan concept of ‘common construction,’ Does Edward Said mention Shariati?”
“Um, yes, I think, in Culture and Imperialism. But I forget in what terms.”
Sarah had bit her lip before replying; she hated being caught out. As soon as we got back, she’d hurry to the library — and complain if by chance Said’s complete works weren’t there. Morgan took advantage of this detour in the conversation to pour himself another little glass of vodka, without insisting, thank goodness, that we accompany him. Two birds were flitting around us, occasionally perching on the table to try to peck at some seeds. They had yellow breasts; their heads and tails were bluish. Morgan kept making wide, comical-looking gestures to try to scare them away, as if they were flies or hornets. He had changed a lot since Damascus and even since Paris and Sarah’s thesis defense, when I had seen him before going to Tehran. Because of his beard, his hair plastered back in sections, and his clothes from a different era — his satchel with its blue-and-black imitation leather, a promotional gift from Iran Air in the 1970s; his cream-colored jacket, grimy at the elbows and along the zipper — because of all these fragile details that were accumulating on his body, and because of his breathing, which was becoming increasingly more labored, we thought he was falling, that he was in free fall. The slightly neglected aspect sometimes presented by some academics, scholarly and absentminded by nature, was not the issue here. Sarah thought he had come down with one of those diseases of the soul that devour you in solitude; in Paris, she said, he treated this disorder with red wine, in his little two-room apartment, where bottles were lined up in front of the bookshelf, under the respectable divans of classical Persian poets. And here, in Tehran, with Armenian vodka. This great professor was full of bitterness, even though his career seemed to me brilliant, entirely enviable, even; he was respected worldwide; he was earning sums that were no doubt stupendous thanks to his new post abroad and yet he was falling. He was falling, and was trying to catch himself in his fall, catch hold of branches, women especially, young women, he sought to cling to their smiles, their gazes, which gnawed at his wounded soul, painful balms on an open wound. Sarah had known him for over ten years, and was afraid of finding herself alone with him, especially if he’d been drinking: not because the old scholar was a fearful tiger, but because she wanted to avoid humiliating him, avoid making him feel rejected, which would only have aggravated his melancholy, if she had been forced to turn him down. As for me, I thought the eminent professor, great specialist in Persian and European lyric poetry, who knew Hafez as well as Petrarch by heart, Nima Yooshij as well as Germain Nouveau, was just showing all the symptoms of the noonday devil, or rather the three-in-the-afternoon demon, considering his age; the climacteric is hard for an inveterate seducer, a man whose ruins showed he had once been handsome and charismatic, and it seemed likely to set off a definite moroseness, a moroseness interspersed with desperate manic phases, like the one we were witnessing, in the midst of the roses and birds, the bergamot and the nougat, in this heat that was weighing more heavily over Tehran than all the veils of Islam.
“After our meeting, we saw Lyautey regularly, with Azra, throughout 1978. She was officially Frédéric Lyautey’s ‘fiancée,’ or rather Farid Lahouti’s, with whom she spent her time agitating, demonstrating, discussing the future of Iran, the possibility and then the reality of the Revolution. The Shah was putting pressure on the neighboring Iraqi government, during the summer, for it to expel Khomeini from Nadjaf, thinking this would cut him off from the Iranian opposition. Khomeini was in the Parisian suburbs in Neauphle-le-Château, with all the power of the Western media in his hands. Much farther away from Tehran, indeed, but infinitely closer to the ears and hearts of his compatriots. Once again, the measures taken by the Shah were turning against him. Khomeini called for a general strike and paralyzed the country, all the administrations, and especially — much more serious for the regime — the oil industry. Farid and Azra took part in the occupation of the campus of the University of Tehran, then in the clashes with the Army which would lead to the riots of November 4, 1978: the violence was becoming general, Tehran was in flames. The British Embassy partly burned down; shops, bars, banks, post offices burned — anything that represented the empire of the Shah or Western influence was attacked. The next morning, November 5, I was with Azra at my place. She had come by without warning around nine in the morning, more beautiful than ever, despite her air of sadness. She was absolutely irresistible. She was floating in the burning wind of freedom that was blowing over Iran. Her face was so harmonious, sculpted with shadows, delicate, her lips the color of pomegranate seeds, her complexion slightly dark; she gave off the scent of sandalwood and warm sugar. Her skin was a balsam talisman, which made anyone she came in contact with lose their reason. The sweetness of her voice was such that she could have consoled a dead man. Speaking, exchanging words with Azra was so hypnotic that very quickly you let yourself be lulled without replying, you became a faun put to sleep by the breath of an archangel. In that mid-autumn, the light was still splendid; I prepared some tea, the sun was pouring onto my tiny balcony, which overlooked a little koucheh parallel to the Avenue Hafez. She had come to my place only once, with a party of the little group from the Café Naderi, before the summer. Most of the time, we would see each other in cafés. I spent my life outside. I haunted those bistros in the hope of seeing her. And now she was turning up at my apartment, at nine in the morning, after crossing a city in chaos on foot! She had remembered the address. The day before, she told me, she had witnessed clashes between the students and the army on campus. The soldiers had fir
ed real bullets, some young people had died, she was still trembling with emotion. The confusion was so great that it had taken her hours to get away from the university and reach her parents’ house. They had formally forbidden her from returning — she had disobeyed. Tehran is at war, she said. The city smelled of fire; a mix of burning tires and burnt trash. Curfew had been declared. Curfews — that’s the Shah’s political strategy. That very afternoon he announced a military government, saying: ‘People of Iran, you have risen up against oppression and corruption. As Shah of Iran and an Iranian, I can only salute this revolution of the Iranian Nation. I have heard the message of your revolution, people of Iran.’ I too had seen, from my window, the smoke from the riots, heard the shouts and the noises of windows being broken on the Avenue Hafez, seen dozens of young men running down my dead-end street — were they looking for a bar or a restaurant with a Western name to attack? The orders from the embassy were clear, stay home. Wait for the storm to end.
“Azra was worried, she couldn’t stand still. She was afraid for Lyautey. She had lost sight of him during a demonstration three days earlier. She hadn’t heard any news of him. She had called him a thousand times, had gone to his place, had gone to the University of Tehran to find him despite her parents’ interdiction. Without success. She was terribly anxious and the only person she knew among his ‘French friends’ was me.”
The mention of Azra and the revolution gave Morgan a slightly alarming air. His passion had become cold; his face remained impassive, immersed in memory; while he spoke he was looking at his glass, clutching it with both hands, profane chalice of memory. Sarah was showing signs of embarrassment, boredom possibly, or both. She kept crossing and uncrossing her legs, tapping the arm of her wicker chair, playing absentmindedly with a sweet before finally setting it down, uneaten, in the saucer her glass rested on.
Compass Page 33
