by John Freeman
A year later the Iranian people had had enough of 2,500 years of monarchy. There were more protests, strikes. By summer of that year the Shah had squarely entered the business of making martyrs. On 7 September he put the country under curfew and when protesters gathered in Jaleh Square he unleashed his security forces upon them, hundreds were killed.
My family – mother, stepfather, elder brother and sister, younger brother and I – arrived in Tehran shortly afterwards, posted there by the United Nations for which my stepfather worked. I was fourteen, and about to see a part of somebody else’s history be made. I wish I had been older, wiser. I wish I could remember more, had paid more attention, understood more – but then I remind myself that I was not alone. What happened in 1979 has happened many times before and many times since, in places where people have set themselves free and believed with all their hearts that the freedom they had fought for was real and lasting, only to be recaptured.
1. Winter 1978
My sister and I flew Pan Am to Tehran from boarding school on 15 December 1978. Snow on the ground in England, our train had been unable to reach the platform and so we disembarked and plunged into two foot of snow, struggling with our suitcases along the tracks. We would have missed our plane, had it not also been delayed several hours because of the weather.
In Iran the workers of the National Oil Company had been on strike since the massacre in Jaleh Square. Kerosene and heating oil were in short supply and our house in Ekhteshamiyeh Street was freezing. We had a row of juniper trees at the end of the garden and a view of the Elburz Mountains. We knew scarcely a soul, had no television. There would have been little point; the programmes were all in Farsi. We listened to the BBC World Service and Voice of America for reports of what was happening in the country: the roadblocks, the soldiers, the graffiti, the curfew, the power cuts.
I was, at that time, an ardent revolutionary. I had a poster of Che Guevara on my wall and a sweatshirt bearing his image. I read his speeches and admitted to no one that I found them utterly impenetrable. I was ardent – all I lacked was a revolution. And now here was a revolution and I had no idea whose side I was on. The Shah was a tyrant who controlled the nation’s wealth and tolerated no opposition. From our house we often drove past Evin prison, where the political prisoners were held, and they included intellectuals and artists. Confusingly, the Shah also had a reputation as a social progressive who believed in the education of women and planted trees. Khomeini was unappealing and as a religious leader disbarred himself from my support. But when I heard people on the radio warning that the Communists would take over from the mullahs if there was a revolution in Iran, I decided to back the rebels. I spent my evenings reading by candlelight before taking a freezing shower (if there was water, which often there was not) with which I tried to imbue myself with revolutionary spirit. I fell asleep huddled under blankets and woke to clear blue skies and the startling sight of the mountains.
Pahlavi Avenue was the main thoroughfare through the city, and it seemed every other street or building was named Pahlavi something: Pahlavi Square, the Pahlavi Institute. Reza Shah and his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had built modern Tehran and wished their efforts to be acknowledged. My stepfather was invited to present his credentials to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose titles were strung across the top of the crested card: ‘His Imperial Majesty, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Head of the Warriors’.
In the Tehran of 1978 there was Kentucky Fried Chicken, an Ice Palace rink, Polidor Cinema, the City Theatre and a casino in the Hilton Hotel. We visited none of those places. The city was in virtual lockdown, and many places were no longer open or only open on certain days. The Shah had tried to placate the mullahs by closing coffee shops and banning the sale of alcohol. We visited the bazaar where my mother bought vegetables from a green-eyed Kurd whose stall faced the street. Trouble often kicked off at the bazaar, stoked by the bazaaris, the trading class who had dominated trade and imports until the Shah allowed himself to be courted by foreign interests. The main bazaar in Tehran became emblematic of the bazaaris’ loss of influence to the executives of multinationals and was a flashpoint for protests. The inside of the bazaar was a web of shadowed alleyways, where getting lost was all too easy, so we dared only peek from the relative safety of the street at the ubiquitous carpets, cassettes, plastic flowers, heaps of rose petals and saffron.
There was nothing to do. Everything that might have made life more bearable – our stereo, our books – was held up in a shipment along with the rest of our household goods. One day the telephone rang, even though there was nobody who was likely to call us. I picked it up but there was no sound save the distant murmur of male voices. I told my stepfather who remarked that the line was likely bugged. SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, were known to be very thorough. In my boredom I would sometimes pick up the phone and listen: they were always there, the tiny, tinny voices. Often I’d yell or sing or whistle, but there was no response. It was a household with three cold and bored teenagers and we bickered and bitched. It snowed and for a couple of days we were trapped. I built a snowman with my five-year-old brother while men shovelled snow off the roof. In the photograph of us, separated by the looming snowman, you can catch a glimpse of my Che Guevara sweatshirt under my woollen jacket.
Winter bore down on us. We kept the windows of our house sealed tight against the cold, which is perhaps why, at first, we didn’t hear the singing. Or perhaps it had just taken a while for the singing to reach our suburb of Darrous where the avenues were wide and the walls high. Fury with the Shah spread from the poor of south Tehran to the wealthy in the northern suburbs. People took their rage and fashioned it into a song and at night they sang it from the rooftops to others who caught the tune and sang it back.
From somewhere far off: a single voice, then a moment of silence. From close by: a chorus of voices, some young, some old, a family. From elsewhere, other voices answered. Soon the night was filled with the sound. The same thing in every city, town and village across the land, the nights before, that night and every night from then on. I came to know when it would happen. I waited and listened. At the approach of nine o’clock people turned out the lights, dimmed kerosene lamps, blew out candles and climbed the stairs to their roofs and I would turn out my light too. For precisely ten minutes they sang a nightly recitative, the sound of people calling to God for their freedom: two words, two notes, five syllables each stretched until it resonated like a string:
‘Allah-hu Akhbar!’
2. Curfew Parties
There are two kinds of curfew party. At one you arrive just before curfew and leave at dawn. The other kind requires a little more imagination. Guests arrive dressed to the nines in broad daylight, sip Martinis at two in the afternoon and depart before curfew. We received an invitation to a New Year’s party from the mother of a school friend, Mrs P., an expatriate married to an Iranian. She ran a bakery in town which remained open, indeed thrived, as these places are reputed to do in troubled times, trading cinnamon Danishes, chocolate dainties and a few moments of oblivion.
The party gave us something to look forward to. New Year’s Eve fell on a Sunday, a working day in Iran. The Iranian New Year, Nowruz, falls at the beginning of spring so the day of our party was otherwise just an ordinary day. My mother, brothers, sister and I went into town, for what reason I cannot remember, and were on our way home when we ran into a demonstration of thousands on Pahlavi Avenue. Our driver, Ali Baba, turned the car around and drove us to the British Embassy on Ferdowsi Avenue where the huge metal gates were just being closed. The guards let us in and then locked the gates, backing a Land Rover up against them. We waited by our car, swapping stories with others also temporarily seeking sanctuary.
At first the drama pleased us, but what should have been exciting soon became boring. By about one o’clock we began to worry about getting to the party, due to begin at two. In decades to come I would read about people in Sarajevo who risked the fire of snipers to sit i
n a cafe and drink coffee. I would understand exactly why a person would do such a thing. In the places I grew up – Sierra Leone where part of my family is from, Nigeria, Zambia, Iran because that’s where my stepfather’s job took us – curfews and coups were depressingly common; in Sierra Leone we seemed to live in a perpetual state of emergency. In the final years of the 1991–2002 war there, ordinarily sane friends would risk their lives for a last drink in a favourite bar and drive home without headlights, skirting the army checkpoints. I did it myself.
In Iran in the winter of 1978, after less than a month of confinement in Tehran, getting to the party became of the utmost importance. My mother asked that the embassy gates be opened. The security staff reluctantly complied. A great deal of reversing, manoeuvring and tutting ensued. When we set off down Ferdowsi Avenue we just about had time to get home and change, but at the Freedom Monument our luck came to an end as we ran into the protest again. This time we had no option but to drive on. People banged on the roof of the car, thrust their faces at the windows. Sweat rose on the back of Ali Baba’s neck as he edged the vehicle forward. Down a side street a car burned. We never should have put Ali Baba in that position; all the same, thanks to him, we made it through. At home my stepfather reported troubles of his own, having been besieged in his office while a mob had gathered outside and loudly contemplated burning the building down. He’d gone out, located the ringleaders and addressed them in Arabic, though he spoke the language quite badly having learned it long ago when he first joined the UN, along with Esperanto, which the organization had all its staff learn for a while, with the perfectly logical and democratic but ultimately unpopular idea that it might become the UN’s official language.
Beneath high ceilings, we gathered round tables laid with crystal and silver. Guests drank champagne, whisky and good wine. We ate guinea fowl and saffron rice sprinkled with slivered almonds and raisins. Our hostess wore an oyster-coloured satin gown that left her shoulders bare. The heavy drapes were drawn tight and not a ray of sun broke through. There was music; we danced deep into the night, or so it seemed. Except it wasn’t night. Such was the success of the party that we all forgot about the curfew. Around a quarter to eight there was a terrific scramble as guests made for their vehicles. My stepfather was driving. There was no street lighting and Tehran is anyway virtually impossible for a visitor to navigate. Somehow getting lost had been written into the poetry of the day, the final stanza. The first thing we did was to argue, but as the minutes passed we grew nervous and shut up. Everyone pitched in, trying to work out the route. We drove past the same street sign twice; nothing looked familiar. We’d no idea what part of town we were in. Then we ran into a checkpoint and a soldier stepped into the headlights and waved us down. Even if he didn’t shoot us our chances of making it home by curfew were now just about zero. My stepfather spoke to the soldiers in fitful Arabic. Arabic is not a bit like Farsi and the Iranians are proud of the difference, but I guess a good many people in Iran went to Koranic school and studied Arabic there. The soldier pointed us in the right direction. We shouted with relief when we recognized Ekhteshamiyeh Street. At one minute to eight we turned into our front gate. The party expedition had united us – never more so than in that single minute.
Then we got inside, turned on the lights and decided it wasn’t such a big deal – we would have made it home safely anyway.
3. Chocolate, Exile and Return
At my boarding school in England we had a tradition that any overseas girl belonging to a country which had chosen to implode was given permission to stay up late and watch the news reports of it doing so in the housemistress’s apartment. Two days after I left Tehran for the new school term, the Shah of Iran and his family left too, saying they were going on an extended vacation. Along with the Iranian girls, I was called downstairs in my dressing gown to watch the news. We carried our mugs of cocoa with us and so my memory of the Shah’s defeat comes with the taste of chocolate. The Shah left at night and there was no news footage of the occasion, but I remember a photograph of him and the Empress Farah which I suppose must have appeared in the newspapers around that time. The Empress is wearing a fur hat, a coat with a fur collar and holding a pair of gloves. Behind her are half a dozen men in dark suits. The Shah is holding a hat in his left hand. They are a procession, but one which is proceeding nowhere because a man in a military uniform has dropped to his knees in front of the Shah and is trying to kiss his feet. The Shah is bent towards the man, as if to raise him up, as if this act, which has been performed many times by countless others, is now embarrassing for him. What’s odd about the photograph is that the Empress appears to be laughing. A long time later I read that when the Shah was leaving his imperial guard tried to prevent him. I think that’s who the man in uniform must be.
A fortnight later I was back drinking chocolate in the housemistress’s apartment to watch Ayatollah Khomeini’s jet land at Mehrabad Airport. Senior air force commanders loyal to the exiled Shah begged him to permit them to shoot the plane down. As no airline would risk having him on board as a passenger, the Ayatollah had been obliged to charter an aircraft from Air France. The plane circled Tehran three times before it landed. There were scenes of jubilant expectation. And then, there on the TV screen standing at the top of the aircraft steps was the Ayatollah: a man seemingly composed entirely of a black turban, white beard, a long black gown and a pair of astonishing eyebrows. His image, painted on walls all over Tehran and now held high on the placards of the waiting masses, had become as iconic as the one of Che Guevara on my sweatshirt. Standing next to the captain of the aircraft the Ayatollah was unsmiling. Shortly before take-off, a foreign journalist had asked him how he felt. He replied: ‘How I feel? Nothing.’
4. Summer 1357
I returned to Iran twelve centuries before I left. According to the entry and exit stamps on my passport, my last visit to the country had taken place in 2537. The Imperial calendar had been replaced with the Islamic calendar since then, so the stamp in my passport gave the current year as 1357.
We were invited to lunch at the home of an Iranian couple. At the door rosewater was sprinkled on our heads, and we were offered fennel seeds and mint. Later we ate lamb on the balcony and in the shade of pomegranate trees.
A woman called N. asked if she might join me. I was at an age when I was still surprised when anyone addressed me directly; moreover, N. asked questions and actually listened to my replies, my views of the Revolution. She was pretty, with a few strands of silver in her auburn curls; she laughed and spoke with her hands. She was an artist and a supporter of the Revolution, a left-winger whose father had been imprisoned under the Shah. N. had recently returned from California to set up studio in Tehran. One of her paintings hung on the wall of the house. She led me through to the sitting room to see it: a huge piece, heavy streaks of red paint on a dark background. When it was time to go we gave N. a lift and she sat in the front seat, flirted with my stepfather and told my elder brother he was handsome. We dropped her off and she dipped her head back inside the car and invited my brother to have lunch with her the next day without bothering to include the rest of us. I watched her walk away. I had never met a woman like N.
At midday her car and driver arrived to collect my brother and much later that afternoon I sat on the veranda and waited for him to come back. I wasn’t jealous, I wanted to know about his day, but all he would tell me was that they had had lunch.
Of all the people I met in Tehran at that time, N. seemed to embody the spirit of 1979. That summer the Revolution still belonged to everyone; after the repression of the Shah’s era, the artists, the poets, the writers were heady with the possibilities of liberty.
Gone was January’s dark and frigid city. This year Nowruz had brought a truly new beginning. The mood in Iran was euphoric, and the whiff of freedom still hung like fireworks’ smoke in the air. The Shah had taken with him the curfew, the power outages, the water shortages. Mrs P.’s bakery was open and people qu
eued to buy her dainties as before. The bazaar was open. We had a swimming pool and in the dry heat of the Tehran summer I spent my days diving in and out of the water.
A hedge of cypress trees separated our house from the house next door and where there was a gap I would sometimes I see a boy – a young man really – watching us swim. On occasion I would nod or wave and he would wave back. One day I said hello and told him my name. I assumed he lived in the house next door but discovered later that he was the caretaker’s son. He didn’t speak any English and so we went back to nodding and waving.
One day he appeared at the gap in the hedge with a friend around his own age. By then my sister had joined us from a stay in France. She was seventeen and newly sophisticated; the friend spoke English, had a motorbike and a quiff. He gave us each a ride around the block. Another time he turned up in a car (borrowed, as the bike had been) and we went driving around the neighbourhood with no destination in mind. A few streets from home we ran into an impromptu roadblock. The checkpoints were no longer manned by the army but by the Komiteh, or Revolutionary Committees, who operated under the auspices of the mosques and drew their membership from the local youth. During the Revolution the Komiteh had been Khomeini’s foot soldiers: whipping up protests, acting as vigilantes, tracking down supporters of the Shah’s regime, issuing beatings. Increasingly they saw it as their role to enforce the new Islamic orthodoxy and arrested people arbitrarily for anti-revolutionary behaviour. The ones who stopped us were young, wore jeans and T-shirts and carried automatic weapons. They crowded around the car and several of them leaned in through the windows staring at us. They demanded to know what we were doing in the car.
