by John Freeman
Our companions began by joshing, if a little nervously. They reached out of the window and shook hands with a few of the Komiteh guys. Cigarettes were offered and accepted, but not lit. The boys still didn’t let us through. A lot of questions were being asked, that much was evident, though the conversation was entirely in Farsi. Our friends offered wordy explanations, upturned palms, apologetic shrugs and lot of nods and some head-shaking. Once they even turned to look at us in the back of the car as if surprised to find us there. Finally one of the checkpoint guards took a step backwards and I saw that they were going to let us go; the rest stood clear of the car, but they didn’t raise the barrier. Our driver executed a swift three-point turn and we drove straight back home.
I have long been interested in beginnings: to trace things back, from the first flap of the butterfly’s wings to the hurricane. I wonder if my interest originated in Iran when I was fifteen years old and I saw how when things start, they start small. The summer of 1979, the butterfly had already taken to the air. Liberals and left-wingers, secular Muslims and non-Muslims had supported Khomeini because they believed him when he said he had no desire for power and they believed only he could muster the authority to oust the Shah. Be careful what you wish for. But when you are in prison you will wish for anything other than to be in the place you find yourself. Shortly before we were stopped by the Komiteh, the clergy had tried to force an edict through the provisional government which would oblige women to wear Islamic attire in the workplace; they’d backed down in the face of protest. By then beaches and sports events had become segregated; the huge swathes of grey were all those parts of everyday life in which behaviour had not yet been mandated by the law: men and women walking, dining, driving together, men and women talking to each other. What I had witnessed at the checkpoint was a show of strength. The Islamists were gradually gaining power over the liberals in the government and in the streets.
A viscous silence had filled the car, but by the time we got home the boys were trying to make light of what had happened. They only tapped their forefingers to their temples and shook their heads. Thus we neglected to learn our lesson, and instead we went for a swim in the pool at my parents’ house, laughing and splashing until the enraged caretaker burst through the hedge and ordered us all out of the water. That evening when my stepfather came home I ran down the steps to greet him, fussing over him under the gaze of the caretaker, who planned, I believed, to report me to my stepfather for my behaviour and now waited at the gap in the hedge for his moment. But I did not leave my stepfather’s side until eventually I saw him give up and turn away.
I was afraid I’d end up having to go with my stepfather down to the local police station to be reprimanded by the Komiteh. I think also I was frightened of being thought a fool. The whole of my adolescence, my transition away from girlhood, seemed marked by a heavy sense that I ought to know better, should conduct myself with more propriety, be more dignified. I now seemed capable of earning disapproval simply by being the way I had always been. I had swum with boys hundreds of times, including that summer in our pool. I’d never ridden on a motorbike or in a car alone with boys before, and now I had done so with dramatic consequences. I could not work out what I would say in my defence, or indeed exactly what it was I was being charged with.
In the end nothing bad happened to me. The caretaker never made his report; the only difference was that next day the caretaker’s son was gone. I did not see him again.
5. Persia
In the early months of the 1979 Revolution the alliances that had brought down the Shah held together, but by summer the liberals, the left-wingers and the hardliners were battling for control of the Revolution. The liberals had already lost, but didn’t know it yet. The leftists were being edged out, and some were accused of being counter-revolutionaries. The provisional government under Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan was trying to draft a new constitution and everyone – the women’s groups, the clergy, students, writers and artists – wanted a say. The Revolutionary Council who controlled the Komiteh was becoming increasingly bullish and the prime minister (who kept trying to resign only to have his offers turned down by Khomeini) had agreed to a power share. There were daily executions: men who had been part of the Shah’s regime. Photographs of their corpses appeared on the front page of newspapers: naked barrel chests with grey chest hair, half-open eyes, bloodied faces, unbuttoned flies. In the summer of 1979 hope and vengeance ran hand in hand.
The museums were open again and one day I was invited to visit a small, private museum in one of the suburbs of Tehran. The building had been the house of a wealthy trader a century ago. Inside the courtyard the sound of traffic died away, fountains played. Upstairs in a vast, silent room I stood before a hunting scene: turbaned men on horseback chased deer; in the centre a lion clawed the back of a gazelle; at the edges fish swam in streams. In another scene on another carpet a woman reclined in the arms of her lover; a man and a woman rested under a tree; a third man invited a woman to sit by him.
Two countries exist in the space where Iran lies on the map: there is Iran and there is Persia. The Shah’s father lovingly recreated Persia, replacing the Islamic lunar calendar with the Persian solar one, purging Arabic words from Farsi and banning the veil. He also set about crafting a modern state out of an underdeveloped land ruled by clerics. His Iran, the one he set about creating, was an oil-rich nation of highways and tall buildings. The Iran of the Western imagination, on the other hand, is home to a population given to outbreaks of religious hysteria and governed by stern mullahs obsessed with female apparel. Neither of these countries, of course, really exists. But if you were to look for them, Isfahan is where you might find Persia, while the Holy City of Qom is Iran.
We drove out of Tehran one weekend, along hot tar roads south to Isfahan: stretches of moonscape interrupted by flashes of green, a spread of irrigated fields and quiet groves where once or twice we stopped to picnic and where I saw, for the first time, peacocks in the wild, and experienced the sudden shock of their unearthly beauty. In Isfahan, twice capital of Persia, we stayed at the Shah Abbas Hotel which was, as far as I recall, entirely empty of guests apart from us. The hotel, the most luxurious in the city, was built on the site of a fourteenth-century caravanserai when the city was part of the silk route. Now it was offering pretty good discounts on account of the lack of business, otherwise I am sure we would never have been able to afford it. Though Isfahan had given its share of martyrs to the Revolution, there was far less evidence of the unrest here: no roadblocks, no graffiti or burned buildings. The turquoise domes of the city’s mosques, walls covered in mosaics of the same colour, were reflected in ornamental pools of water. We took photographs of ourselves standing at the iwan entrance and wandered through the bazaar.
How melodic a word is ‘Isfahan’. Is-fa-han. How short and sharp is the word ‘Qom’. The Holy City of Qom is where the Ayatollah lived before exile and where he returned as soon as he stepped off the Air France plane. To Qom and into seclusion, from where he insisted that he did not wish to be leader, just a spiritual adviser to the nation. He never uttered the word ‘theocracy’. On our way back to Tehran, after our weekend in Isfahan, we stopped in Qom, in the main square, a huge expanse of dust in my memory, a barren football field, with a few stalls around the edges and people going to and coming from the mosque. Neither my mother, sister nor I were allowed into the mosque unless we were veiled. My mother borrowed a chador from a local stall; my sister and I refused to wear one and so were obliged to wait outside. We stood: unchaperoned, unveiled, in the middle of Iran’s holiest city, beneath the eye of the sun and of the Ayatollah. Soon enough we began to attract attention. There was no way of forgetting you were female in Iran. In Tehran I’d been groped by a middle-aged man as I took a stroll round our neighbourhood. Whenever we visited the bazaar, Ali Baba trotted alongside us, trying to shield our bodies from men’s stares with his bulk. Sometimes he even spread his arms out like a chicken protecting h
er chicks. In Qom, our decision not to join our parents and brothers was looking decidedly problematic within minutes. We folded our arms across our chests and sat on a low wall until a stallholder, the same one who had lent my mother a chador, invited us to conceal our immodesty beneath the awning of his stall.
A few weeks after we passed through Qom the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci went to the city to interview the Ayatollah. As a condition of the interview she was told that she must be veiled in the Ayatollah’s presence. She complied but then questioned him about the position of women within Islam, and the wearing of the veil in particular, until Khomeini snapped: ‘If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women,’ which is a pretty funny answer, but perhaps was not intended to be. Fallaci wrenched off her chador and the Ayatollah had her thrown out.
6. Amrika
If anyone asked, we were to say we were British. People asked quite often, as it happened. Since three of us were brown-skinned, at checkpoints they’d ask if we were American. In Tehran in the summer of 1979 America was the Great Satan, on walls around the city were written the words: DEATH TO AMERICA, or MARG BAR AMRIKA. Soon, saying you were British would become a problem too, after all Britain was Great Satan’s concubine.
We may have distanced ourselves from the Americans in public but we didn’t let that stop us taking advantage of their generosity. The American Embassy occupied a huge, walled compound in downtown Tehran. Most embassies had evacuated non-essential staff by then and my mother, like many diplomatic wives, was drafted in to fill the gaps in administrative assistance, working first at the British and then at the New Zealand Embassy. With only the rump of their staff left in Tehran, the Americans opened up their commissary to the rest of us. The commissary provided Americans posted abroad with the comforts of home. Every US embassy has one and there you can buy the same canned foods and condiments found in supermarkets in Topeka or Tuscaloosa, as well as American newspapers, magazines, videos, white goods and even – in the Tehran commissary – a motorbike. The day the commissary opened its doors we were there: enthusiastic looters, stuffing our trolley with giant jars of Goober Grape, tins of hot-dog sausages, sauerkraut and French’s mustard.
Another time one of the American diplomatic staff invited us to a party at the American Embassy. It was a swim party which later turned into a barbecue; someone’s leaving do, no doubt. My brother and I spoke to a man with a moustache called Rich, who asked us a question that struck as curious: ‘Have you ever been into the town?’ It took us a while to work out that he was talking about Tehran, the city we were in. I replied yes, we went into town most days, in fact we had travelled through town to reach this party. Rich told us he had never seen Tehran; he spent most of his days in the compound which his apartment abutted. He was a consular officer, charged with responsibility for processing visa applications. Thousands of Iranians wanted to leave the country, not just the supporters of the former regime – the wealthiest of whom had by and large already left – but now others. It was nearly the end of the summer and some people must have begun to get a sense of which way the wind was blowing. The queue to submit visa applications at a hatch in the side of the embassy building curled around the block like the tail of a cat. Whenever Rich left the compound he was recognized and mobbed. He longed for home.
I spoke to another guest, an Irishman who had arrived in Iran the year before to manage the racing stables at the racecourse and who now found himself alone in charge of two hundred racehorses, whose owners, including the Shah, had fled in the first months of the Revolution, followed soon afterwards by the grooms and jockeys, many of whom came from Pakistan. He hadn’t been paid for months and the money to feed the horses was running out. He said I could come and help exercise them if I liked and a few days later I galloped past the empty stands of Tehran racetrack and later walked through block after block of stables, patting each abandoned horse on the nose. I fell in love with an Arab grey with delicate nostrils called Blushing Boy and the Irishman wasn’t joking when he said I was welcome to keep him – if I could find a way to feed him.
The last trip our family took was into the mountains to hike. In our group was the New Zealand ambassador Chris Beeby and his wife. Beeby was a ginger fellow, with the rangy frame of a natural walker, and set quite a pace. We climbed in the heat of the day and were racked with thirst: we had not thought to bring much water, just one small bottle between us. After two and a half hours we reached the summit and began our descent to the stony valley where a river and its tributaries flowed. Nomads camped near the water with their horses and tents made of stitched leather squares; the women wore veils of yellow and pink sprinkled with flowers, which you saw less and less often in Tehran where the black veil was becoming ubiquitous.
In mid-September I left to go back to school. In October Jimmy Carter granted permission for the cancer-stricken Shah to enter America for treatment at a hospital in New York. On 4 November the US Embassy in Tehran was taken over. Rich and the other guests at the party were among the hostages. My parents had been camping in the Turkoman steppes the weekend before with Chris Beeby and several Americans who worked at the embassy, among them the chargé d’affaires. On the way back the Land Rover broke down and they were late home, and so the Americans had stayed with them that night, all except the chargé who went on, saying she had to open the office the next day. She was taken hostage, remaining captive for 444 days. The next day Chris Beeby hid the four American guests under blankets in the back of his Chevrolet and drove them to the New Zealand Embassy. For a few days my mother smuggled food from home in to them; sworn to secrecy she told nobody, not even my stepfather. Beeby consulted with the Canadian and British ambassadors, and between them they decided that their best chance was to try and pass the American diplomats off as Canadians. They were moved to the home of the Canadian ambassador and issued Canadian passports and exited the country with the aid of the CIA – the story became the subject of the film Argo. When the movie came out my mother was angry with Ben Affleck for ignoring the roles of the New Zealanders and gave an interview to the newspapers. In Tehran she spent her remaining days at the New Zealand Embassy shredding documents and taking an axe to the code machine. My stepfather was allowed into the US Embassy building to check on the welfare of the hostages; I saw him on the news, filmed as he left the building. Rich, or Richard Queen, as I discovered his name to be, was taken gravely ill and released some months later. He was carried out on a stretcher. I don’t think the news report gave his name, but I recognized his moustache.
On 5 November, the day after the storming of the US Embassy, the moderate prime minister, Bazargan, resigned and fled. The Revolutionary Council took control of the government and the country. On 6 November, Khomeini gave his blessing to the student kidnappers. The remaining Western embassies closed their missions, as did the UN. For us, it was over.
The Shah died the next summer. At times I remember Iran the way you do a former lover whose name you hear being spoken by somebody else. A decade after we left, following dinner in a Thai restaurant one rainy evening in London I recognized the people standing a few yards away who had left the restaurant at the same time: the Empress Farah, her daughters, the Crown Prince. I watched as they hailed a taxi and disappeared.
I have tried for a long time to discover what happened to N. I remember both her first name and surname as clearly as I remember her face; I have searched for her on the Internet, but no search has ever produced an Iranian artist of that name. I hope she got out before it became impossible to do so; the country Iran was to become had no place for a woman like her.
I saw the Irish racehorse trainer once more, when he came to ask my mother to help him out of the country, and gave me a vivid account of his escape from the Komiteh who appeared at the stables, he said, to arrest him. They set fire to his office. Before he fled he ran through the stable blocks and loosed the horses rather than leave them to burn or to st
arve to death locked in their pens. Sometimes when I think of Iran, the summer of 1979 before a people’s hard-won freedom was scattered by the wind, I imagine the Arab horses galloping through the suburbs of the city, past the houses and the factories towards the desert – and pray that they at least never were recaptured.
A SPARROW FALLEN
New York City, September 1962
Dave Heath
Courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto and
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
GRANTA
* * *
YOU REMEMBER THE PLANES
Paul Auster
* * *
You remember the planes, the supersonic jets roaring across the blue skies of summer, cutting through the firmament at such exalted speeds that they were scarcely visible, a flash of silver glinting briefly in the light, and then, not long after they had vanished over the horizon, the thunderous boom that would follow, resounding for miles in all directions, the great detonation of blasting air that signified the sound barrier had been broken yet again. You and your friends were thunderstruck by the power of those planes, which always arrived without warning, announcing themselves as a furious clamour in the far distance, and within seconds they were directly overhead, and whatever game you and your friends might have been playing at that moment, you all stopped in mid-gesture to look up, to watch, to wait as those howling machines sped past you. It was the era of aviation miracles, of ever faster and faster, of ever higher and higher, of planes without torsos, planes that looked more like exotic fish than birds, and so prominent were those post-war flying machines in the imaginations of America’s children that trading cards of the new planes were widely distributed, much like baseball cards or football cards, in packages of five or six with a slab of pink bubblegum inside, and on the front of each card there was a photograph of a plane instead of a ballplayer, with information about that plane printed on the back. You and your friends collected these cards, you were five and six years old and obsessed with the planes, dazzled by the planes, and you can remember now (suddenly, it is all so clear to you) sitting on the floor with your classmates in a school hallway during an air-raid drill, which in no way resembled the fire drills you were also subjected to, those impromptu exits into the warmth or the cold and imagining the school as it burned down in front of your eyes, for an air-raid drill kept the children indoors, not in the classroom but the hallway, presumably to protect them against an attack from the air, missiles, rockets, bombs dropped from high-flying Communist planes, and it was during that drill that you saw the airplane cards for the first time, sitting on the floor with your back against the wall, silent, with no intention of breaking that silence, for talking was not allowed during these solemn exercises, these useless preparations against possible death and destruction, but one of the boys had a pack of those airplane cards with him that morning, and he was showing them to the other boys, surreptitiously passing them down the line of silent, seated bodies, and when your turn came to hold one of the cards in your hands, you were astonished by the design of the plane, its strangeness and unexpected beauty, all wing, all flight, a metal beast born in the empyrean, in a realm of pure, everlasting fire, and not once did you consider that the air-raid drill you were taking part in was supposed to teach you how to protect yourself from an attack by just such a plane, that is, a plane similar to the one on the card that had been built by your country’s enemies. No fear. You never worried that bombs or rockets would fall on you, and if you welcomed the alarms that signalled the start of air-raid drills, it was only because they allowed you to leave the classroom for a few minutes and escape the drudgery of whatever lesson you were being taught.
