Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “This is . . . ” I tried to remember the name he’d mentioned. “Mira?”

  “No, she’s my other girlfriend.”

  “Oh, you’ve got two?”

  “No.”

  “Sorry . . . I’m a bit confused.”

  “I have six girlfriends.”

  “Well . . . You must be busy!”

  The show I had been watching was a folklore concert—partly organized, I later learned, by Sina’s father. I think the performers were good—I have a vague memory of some excellent Turkoman lute players and a pantalooned Baluchi tribesman with a tambourine—but Sina is my abiding memory of that evening, and of the next day. I’d given him the name of my hotel, but I never expected him to turn up at my door, telling me to hurry up and pack my stuff.

  “Come on,” he said, “again, come on! I told my baba about you and he says I must bring you in front of him.”

  As the shared taxi dodgemed up Valiasr Street, under dirt-smirched concrete and the winter plane trees, the talk was all about his father: how he’d once been seized by the Revolutionary Guard and thrown into prison, how he had a personal dealer to provide him with his vodka (which usually arrived in the back of a taxi), how he had been friends with a famous writer who was suffocated during a spate of murders in 1998.

  A black metal gate announced us with a squeak, the loose branch of an apple tree nudged us along, and the chipped tiles of the entrance balcony tipped under our shoes. Ahead of us, standing inside the mosquito-net door of a flat-roofed house were the figures of Sina’s parents. But they were quickly superseded by the extraordinary vision behind them.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, her dyed blond hair dusting her bare knees as she applied pink polish to her toenails, was Sina’s sister. She had several things I’d missed over my first few weeks in Iran—bare hair, flowing over her shoulders in what seemed like reckless abundance, bare shoulders, bare knees, and—as she stood up to greet me—a strip of bare midriff. I had to concentrate just to stop myself from staring, so I turned to my freshly unshod feet, which prompted Tahmineh to do the same.

  “You need new socks,” she said.

  “Oh . . . yes.” A big toe was peeking out, like an underground creature sticking its head out of the earth. “Whoops!” I added, curling my toes and trying to stop my face from turning the color of a bar-berry. As I would soon learn, Tahmineh might not be particularly keen on the government’s dress-code rules, but she had plenty of rules of her own—and scruffy dressing was a definite no-no.

  After several weeks on the public side of Iran, without a peek behind its secret, private walls, the Professor’s house was a different world. It was proof that the old Persian saying, “A man within his own four walls is like a king in his own dominion,” still holds. Outside, there were ayatollahs on the billboards and the screams of a million car horns; men in baggy trousers and women in bags, whose faces were as likely to be covered by a white surgical antismog mask as a full-on veil. But inside the house, the solemn, commanding world of outdoors was replaced by the forbidden sight of women’s hair, the forbidden sound of a woman singing on the tape deck (this was Googosh—an Iranian icon, whose ballads were Sina’s mother’s favorites), and the forbidden taste from a bottle of Akband vodka. The house was a treasure trove for all that was prohibited in public.

  Even the decor had a whiff of the unlawful—from the print of Darius the Great (a shah from the sixth century BCE, whose name was blacklisted from birth certificates in the wake of the Islamic Revolution of 1979) hanging in the living room to the walnut bookcase with its pile of white-spined under-the-counter paperbacks. If you were a member of the local morality police—the basijis—you would be clicking your tongue all the way down the corridor. You’d be flaring your nostrils at the poster of a bare-headed actress flapping over the desk in Sina’s bedroom, as well as several pairs of black-market Calvin Kleins. And if you took a few steps farther down the corridor into Tahmineh’s room, you would find your outrage very difficult to keep in check when your eyes settled on the pile of banned pre-revolution DVDs under her dressing table (not to mention a pirated copy of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith—although, to be fair, most of Princess Padme’s scenes had been cut, presumably to stop any young men from getting overly excited by her cinnamon-bun hairdo).

  After the shock of all this illicit material, you’d probably need one of the Professor’s stiff drinks just to recover (and maybe a few banknotes to help you forget this painful ordeal). And maybe you could tuck into one of Khanom’s (or “Madame”—the name by which I always addressed Sina’s mother) delicious meals too. Even this would be completely different from anything you could expect outside. You might find rice and chicken kebab in the street-side eateries (along with the ubiquitous sandwich stores), but not like this—with red barberries and saffron threads, the meat oozing with juice and seasoned with lemon and pepper. It made the dry, rubbery food sold outside all the more unappetizing.

  This contrast with the austere Iran of outdoors illustrated how the country had been turned inside-out by the revolution. For the better part of three millennia, Iran was ruled by shahs, or kings. They came in different forms—from the balloon-crowned pre-Islamic emperors to the Mongols in their owl-feathered headdresses, the Safavids in red plunger hats and turbans, and the extravagantly mustached Qajars, who gave themselves sumptuous honorifics like “Asylum of the Universe” and squandered the state funds in Parisian brothels; to the last two kings, the Pahlavis, who decked themselves in military medals and bought up the US arms industry.9

  But in January 1979, the last of these rulers, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, self-titled “Light of the Aryans” and “King of Kings,” fled the country with the best of his jewels and a clod of Iranian earth. All at once, like a flipped coin, the culture over which he had presided was switched for the “other side” of Iran’s identity. His father’s mausoleum was dynamited and replaced by an Islamic seminary, and the street that had been named after his dynasty was renamed after the twelfth Shia imam, Valiasr.10 Americans, who had enjoyed diplomatic immunity, were expelled, while a man who had been expelled by the shah took his place as the country’s new head of state. That man was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose broadcasts—which only months before had been sold on black-market tapes under the counter—now replaced royalist propaganda on state TV. It was a revolution in the most literal sense. A turning-around.

  Going down Going up

  mini-skirts headscarves

  family protection law polygamy

  pop music mourning songs for the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson

  neckties in public offices beards

  women in advertisements and on bicycles women being hanged for adultery

  Tintin (and especially his heavy-drinking comrade Captain Haddock), along with other examples of Western “cultural decadence” Mickey Mouse (who, along with other Disney characters, is all over the Tehran bazaar: on carpets, cushion covers, towels); one offshoot of the diplomatic impasse is that there’s no need to pay copyright duties

  streets named after royalist or Western figures, like Cyrus the Great Street and Churchill Street streets named after Islamic figures, like Ayatollah Beheshti Highway and Dr. Shariati Street, along with more spurious “anti-imperialists” like Bobby Sands Street, named for the Irish hunger striker

  Yet few of the newly forbidden activities were lost. People still drank alcohol (and became experts at making their own), still listened to pop music, still wore ties at home, and still watched American soap operas or prerevolutionary romances thanks to illegal satellite TV. They remained, as so much of the “new” identity had before them, hidden behind the walls that divide the parallel worlds of public and private.

  That first evening with Sina and his family, there was one almighty obstacle to my being accepted.

  “My son,” announced the Professor, his back erect, at the head of the table, “tells me you are a child of England.”

  Oh dear . . . Just when I thought I was
doing so well! I admitted that this was indeed the case and waited for the subsequent pause to end . . . And waited . . .

  The hiatus was interrupted, finally, by the squeak of a stifled laugh. I looked up, to see Tahmineh burying her head into her brother’s shoulder.

  “Tahmineh-dear!”

  A distinguished mop of silver hair crowned the Professor’s high forehead; underneath it was a pair of large owl-like eyes that swallowed you up whenever they turned on you.

  “If you have something to say,” he continued, in the tone of a commander-of-all-he-surveys, “you must have the courage to say it.”

  Tahmineh dropped her head into her hands and kept it there, leaving Sina to explain:

  “She calls you the Old Fox. That is our name for the English. Because they are cunning and they brought in the mullahs. We have a proverb—if you look under a mullah’s beard, you will find the words ‘Made in Britain.’”

  “Oh . . . ,” I said, with a weak smile.

  I was offered a second helping and a third, followed by a sticky pastry and a glass of tea in a filigree holder made out of silver. Everything was piping hot and served with the utmost courtesy—this, after all, was Persia, the land famous for its codes of politeness (it’s only “Iran” when you get into politics and the really bad stuff). But it wasn’t especially hard to feel the chill coming from the other end of the table. Especially when the Professor—glaring at me like a living glacier—decided to lecture me on how the British had ruined his country:

  “And what did he want, I ask you! What did he want? Freedom and equality!”

  He was talking about Mohammed Mossadegh, a great figure in Iranian history—especially to liberal intellectuals like the Professor—and its prime minister in the 1950s. Despite his habit of attending to state business in his pajamas and bursting into tears whenever he made a particularly impassioned speech, Mossadegh managed to pass a Free Press Law and to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company—thereby confirming himself as a hero to Iranian nationalists. The last of these achievements put the wind up Winston Churchill, who was so enraged that he told the Americans Mossadegh was about to become a Communist. President Eisenhower, never one to overlook a rumor of the reds, took the bait. The CIA was dispatched: Bribing the thugs in the Tehran bazaar when they realized fair play wouldn’t work, they stoked a coup and forced Mossa - degh out.

  “The British preferred the shah, of course,” continued the Professor, “because he was in their pocket! And when he wouldn’t play their game anymore, what did they do? They pushed him out so they could bring in the onion-heads! You don’t believe me, child? Then do you never wonder why the ayatollahs are always traveling to London for their medical operations?”

  It was clear, from the furrows over his brow and the continuously icy glare, that I would need to find a way of ingratiating myself. Scanning the room for something to work with, I latched onto my chance and bided my time. When supper was over, I sidled up to the Professor. My plan was ready and if it didn’t work, then I doubted anything would. In stumbling Persian and my politest voice, I declared:

  “Your books . . . for me . . . are a fascination.”

  It mightn’t have been the best expressed Persian sentence of all time—but it certainly worked! In a moment, we were standing next to the walnut bookcase, the Professor drawing out thick, vinegary-smelling tomes, tooled and gilded on the spines, and piling them into my arms as if I were a walking book cart:

  “Now, this is Farabi—wonderful man, he went around in disguise so he could interview the princes at their courts, and if you look at the instruments in his Great Book of Music, many of them are still played a thousand years later. . . . Ah! I am sure you have read this one. . . . No? But it is My Uncle Napoleon, it is one of our most famous comedies, and Savushun by Simin Daneshvar. It has been reprinted sixteen times. . . . No? And . . . ”

  “Oh, well, I have read some of that one,” I said.

  Trying to show that I wasn’t a complete donkey-brain, I pointed to an enormous green-jacketed hardback on the top shelf.

  “The Shahnameh of Hakim Abu’l Qasim Ferdowsi,” I read, to prove my point.

  “You know it?”

  The Professor’s owl-like eyes were sparkling; all the ice in his expression had melted.

  “I read some of the stories in England,” I said. “I like them.”

  “Ah, but did you read them in Persian? You must read them in Persian. Look around us. Look, child!”

  The sweep of his arm was taking in the whole of the room—from the bookcase to the TV set to the sofa on which Sina was lying, stretched out like a length of rope, to the Professor’s favorite armchair—a walnut-armed Louis XVI, with several of the brass tacks missing from the splat.

  “Because of this book,” he said, tapping its cover, “because of this book we are Persian. Without it—poof !” He lifted a hand, driving it through the air to illustrate a sudden disappearance.

  “Now tell me, child,” he said, tugging my arm toward the sofa, “how long do you intend to stay in Tehran?”

  I told him my course would keep me here for about six months.

  “Then,” he declared, “you will stay with us. As long as you are in Tehran, you are our guest.”

  I looked toward the bookcase and said a silent thank-you. Those piles of leather-bound, crinkly edged, yellowing paper—and above all the green-jacketed one on the top shelf—had nudged me toward the best accommodation upgrade of my life.

  2

  The Most Persian Persian

  Tehran. February/March.

  Over the course of that winter and spring, I saw how the Professor’s family negotiated the contrast between the different worlds of inside and out, and became used to negotiating it myself. I would address taxi drivers as “sir,” never shake hands with a woman outside, and keep mum about the latest joke on the Supreme Leader’s opium habit . . . until I was indoors. I learned how to dart like a bullet through the traffic and, when I needed a lift, how to haggle with a driver whose car was still moving; how to walk home at night without falling into the joob canals, and how to do so when I was too drunk to risk calling a taxi.

  The contrast between public and private was most visible in Tahmineh. Inside, she rarely concealed her arms or midriff, but if she stepped outside the mosquito-net door, she always wrapped herself in a knee-length trench coat (the standard uniform for young women—although Tahmineh’s was the right size for a twelve-year-old) and covered her hair with a brightly patterned headscarf, her fringe carefully sprayed to curl out underneath.

  “Eh baba!” she laughed when the Professor suggested one day that her choice of headscarf might attract trouble from the authorities (it was the size of a handkerchief). “If God wanted women to hide our hair, why did he make it longer than men’s?”

  Sina and the Professor also changed their clothes when they were inside, taking off their trousers and schlepping about in loose cotton pajamas, although Sina, who was pretty casual about such things, could just as easily be seen in his black-market Calvin Kleins.

  “But Nicholas,” he would object, when I persisted in wearing my khakis, “those trousers are for outside. You cannot be comfortable!”

  This contrast between inside and out was reflected in the Professor’s own professional experience, which had been turned on its head by the revolution. As the weeks went by, we got into a habit of talking together over a postsupper glass of arak11 or vodka (or, when money was tight, the Professor would produce a bottle of industrial ethanol—the only alcohol sold openly in Iranian mini-marts—and mix it with lemon juice. “It has an excellent taste!” he would announce, somewhat unconvincingly, on those occasions). It was one such evening that he told me how his career had been shaped by political events.

  “Before the revolution, you know what I was doing?” he said. “I was a rising star of our civil service! Ha! But when those onion-heads came to power, I said to myself, ‘Can you work under this system? Of course not!’ So I decided
to study the history of my country and save our culture before it eats the dust.”

  Even when he emerged in public, he was pushed back under the surface: intermittent teaching jobs at Tehran’s universities were canceled when the authorities got hold of poems he had published and came knocking at his door.

  “I had the honor of spending forty days in jail,” he explained, to the tinkle of the ice in his vodka glass. “They put a blindfold on me and made me sit in a cell with a dozen other gentlemen. My wife was expecting Tahmineh at this time, so I worried I would be too late. I worried a lot, I am not ashamed to tell you this, and do you know how I comforted myself? I turned to stories. Stories I remembered from my childhood, stories that have been with me all my life. For example, you know the story of Bizhan? It is in Shahnameh; he is thrown in chains in a deep pit because of his love for the daughter of the king. Well, I thought of this story—I thought of others too, many stories, and they gave me comfort at this time. Then, after forty days, they let me out and that same week, what do you think happened? My daughter was born!”

  Tahmineh was in her room, listening to her music. If she had seen her father’s smile as he uttered this last sentence, she could never have doubted his love for her. To him, this coincidence was proof that, however nasty the mullahs’ regime, there was enough goodness in the world with which to fight them. It enabled him to look back on his prison experience not as some scarring ordeal but as a proud moment that set him alongside his heroes in a brotherhood of victims.

  “If you never went to prison,” he said another evening, “you are nothing.”

  We were in the living room this time, sitting on the sofa, while Sina channel-hopped between MTV and the soccer.

  “But I was not only in prison under the mullahs,” the Professor continued. “The shah was also an enemy of the bright-thinkers. The things he would do to people who disagreed with him! You know, the Savak12 arrested many of my friends. Of course, these mullahs are monkeys, but they are not the first.”