Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “That’s me!” she whispered.

  She was pointing at the crepe-gowned heroine floating to the front, whose name she shared—a princess who falls in love with Rostam and gives birth to his son. As the hero approached her, Princess Tahmineh glided toward him, her long uncovered hair cascading down her back. Wait a moment . . . Uncovered hair? Cascading? But that’s impossible, or certainly illegal . . . There could only be one possible explanation for such an illicit act of strumpetry. Oh yes! Like all the other characters, Princess Tahmineh was a puppet.

  For all the chatter, it was hard not to be won over by the score: It had an oomph from the off. The woodwinds conjured a playful, romantic atmosphere, complemented by the ripples of the strings, while in the court scenes the horns made a ceremonious grab for the harmony. Warbling up the arpeggio like a ringdove, Princess Tahmineh declared her love to Rostam, who hurled it back in a rumbling baritone, their voices washed by the soft caressing waves of the strings.

  Marionettes may not exactly be ideal for a story full of battles, but these were no Thunderbirds: They moved around with an extraordinary agility, bending at the elbow and performing jumps and pirouettes, and when the action required a mass mobilization of troops, the use of shadow play added to the spectacle. Slowly, we were all drawn into the story: By the time Rostam was locked into a fight with his son, we were transfixed.

  The duel had come about because Rostam, shortly after impregnating Princess Tahmineh, decided to head back home. His horse had been found, which was his main priority—so what was the point in hanging around? But this being the fertile world of myth, a child had been conceived. His mother named him Sohrab, and when he had grown to manhood, he was determined to meet his stay-away father. Only one option could bring him close—fighting in the army of Iran’s mythical enemy, Turan. Fate—which has a major role in most Persian myths—drove father and son toward a tumultuous reunion, which was set on course when the shah (infuriating Rostam, who was binging on wild horse) ordered his champion to tackle the new enemy threat.

  The baritone of Rostam thundered against the tenor of his son, the tension rising to the fall of the pitch. Swooping up the accelerando like a bird up a thermal, the strings conjured an atmosphere of imminent danger. The kettle drums rolled in, the trumpets sounded, the drummers’ beats became the crunch of the soldiers’ boots and the crescendo of the chorus’s chant became the pace of the march, as the armies of Iran and its enemy, Turan, assembled for war. Neither Rostam nor Sohrab knew who the other was, but Sohrab appeared to be the more likely winner, throwing his father to the ground and raising his dagger to cut off his head—until Rostam made a cunning appeal:In wrestling you cannot bestrew your foe’s blood

  The first time his back is laid out in the mud;

  But throwing him twice, now endowed with the name

  Of one like a lion, you slay without blame.

  I looked at the Professor. His back was straight but his lip quivered as his head inched forward. He knew Sohrab would let Rostam go, and Rostam would pray to God to increase his strength; he knew the heroes would fight once more and this time Rostam would throw his son. He knew that Rostam, still unaware he was fighting against his own flesh and blood, would drive his sword through the younger man’s chest. Even though he had heard the story many times before, he still turned to Khanom with a shake of his head, as if to say, “Why must it be like this?”

  The shadow screen rose and Sohrab’s head lifted as he faced his killer.

  “My father, on knowing I’ve died / Will seek to avenge me,” he gasped, declaring his father’s name: “Rostam.”

  This is the most famous moment in Persian literature—a moment I would hear throughout my travels in the Persian-speaking world—by an eighteen-year-old boy in the mountains of central Iran, reading the tale in a nasal, mystical voice over a leather-bound edition of the Shahnameh; by a man with a drum between his thighs in a traditional athletes’ hall; by a swordsmith in Afghanistan, sitting near the oven where he melted his metal. The moment when Rostam, the mightiest of all Iran’s legendary champions, realizes what he has done and collapses over the corpse of his slaughtered son.

  “Come, child,” said the Professor, leading me into the lobby after the show to introduce me to the composer.

  He was called Loris Tjeknavarian—an Armenian-Iranian, with a tuft of tousled white hair like a lick of ice cream. As we shook hands, I could feel the crowd pressing around us. I clearly wasn’t going to have long with him, so I asked him why he had chosen to score this story in particular.

  “This,” said Tjeknavarian, “is the story. The most famous in Persian literature, the most spoken about, the most popular.”

  The lobby was heaving now, and Tjeknavarian was quickly lost in a wave of admirers. It was hard to disagree with him. After all, the puppets had received a standing ovation, and there had been a gleam in the audience’s eyes as the final aria was being sung. Even Sina was impressed.

  “Eh, Nicholas,” he whispered on our way to the taxi, “you know what I am thinking? I’ll bring my girlfriends to this show. They will love it!”

  “Not if you bring them all at the same time!” I said.

  “No, no!” He laughed. “You think I’m stupid? But the show is on for a few weeks; I will bring them one after another.”

  The images of the brightly dressed puppets stayed in my head for weeks. The Professor was right—I did enjoy it. And I started to wonder why this story, a story written half a millennium before Shakespeare, could draw such a large, admiring crowd. Did it say something about what it is to be a Persian today?

  A few days later, Sina took me up the Alborz mountain. A friend of his was making a “clip,” a video for a pop song he would be releasing on the Internet. He had a terrific, melancholy voice, low and gruff, like all the pleasure had been picked out of it with a scalpel. He sat on a wooden fence under a judas tree, its bright white flowers mixing with the cherry blossom scattered on his shoulders, crooning across the mountain while someone filmed him on a digital camera. As we sat waiting for the next take, the guy in charge of the microphone asked me what was the most exciting thing I’d seen so far in Iran. And it wasn’t the parties I mentioned, or the drinking sessions up in the hills. It was the puppet opera of “Rostam and Sohrab.”

  “This is a good answer,” he said, nodding his head over the mike. “If you understand Ferdowsi, you understand everything about what it means to be Iranian.”

  I looked at him in surprise. This was the sort of sentiment I expected to hear from someone like the Professor—but not from a student barely out of his teens, who was usually to be found toking up between takes. Was he right? I’d come here to find out about the present, but I was becoming mesmerized by Ferdowsi and his bloodsplattered poem. I wondered if the Shahnameh really could shine a light on contemporary Iran; if the best way of getting to grips with this strange, secretive country might be through the unlikely binoculars of a thousand-year-old epic.

  The story of “Rostam and Sohrab” gets going when Rostam is welcomed into the house of the King of Samangan, practicing the hospitality code that is still a feature of Iran today (it was exercised, for example, by the Professor in inviting me to stay, and I would experience it on numerous occasions around the country). In the story, Rostam is ordered to fight against Sohrab by the shah but at first he rebels, going so far as to tell the shah he’s “fit for a madhouse.” Like the Professor, railing against the current regime, Rostam is a typical Persian, unhappy with a cruel and incompetent authority.

  On the other hand, he is the older figure, deceiving the idealistic young upstart with a false rule (In wrestling you cannot bestrew your foe’s blood / The first time his back is laid out in the mud . . . ). This rings true with many young Iranians today, unhappy with the “tricks” of the old bearded men whose faces appear on the billboards above them. As the translator Dick Davis puts it, Rostam is a “trickster hero” (on other occasions, he disguises himself as a merchant to sack an enemy
fort, uses the help of a mystical talking bird to overcome an apparently invincible opponent, and lies about his name). Iran is hardly the “Splendide Mendax” it was branded by Lord Curzon in the nineteenth century, but a country in which shopkeepers push aside your pay until you’ve offered it three times, or dinner invitations are issued when everyone knows they will have to be refused—a country, that is, in which insincerity has its own ritualized code,25 is one in which a clever hero is likely to be cherished. “Every particle of the world is a mirror,” wrote the poet Mahmud Shabustari; “In each atom lies the blazing light.” Ferdowsi’s story is one such mirror. Its frame might be old-fashioned, but if you look carefully into the glass you can see today’s Iran reflected back.

  “Come on, Tahmineh-dear!”

  I could hear Khanom as I stepped out of Sina’s room—she stretched the long vowel of “jaan,” or “dear,” as if it were a lasso to draw her daughter back toward her. But Tahmineh was already approaching me in the corridor: She wasn’t going to be swayed.

  “You will have to tell us one day,” said Khanom. “They only ask because they care about you.”

  She was holding the kitchen phone against her apron—I guessed she had been talking to one of the many aunts who were always ringing up for family gossip. But Tahmineh wasn’t going to be caught out by any cheap tricks: This, after all, was the girl who was invincible at backgammon, even against her father.

  “Your shirt is missing a button,” she said to me—it was a common tactic of hers to point out other people’s dishabille when she was backed into a corner, and I was a hapless target. “Mama—Nicholas wants a needle.” There was a loud chuckle, the bang of her door, and she had disappeared.

  A few minutes later, while I was trying to work the needle through a spare button, I could hear the sound of Googosh, Iran’s favorite diva, singing in her rich, fruity soprano. Her most popular songs were recorded before the revolution, when she was the country’s number-one style icon. But even though they predated Tahmineh’s birth, she played these songs as often as the more recent hits by stars like Binyamin and Arash. Like many young Iranian women, she looked on that earlier era with the rose-tinted nostalgia of never having lived through it, and no one, as far as I could tell, represented it for Tahmineh as much as Googosh.

  “I think she’s beautiful,” she said, when a friend of hers was mocking her for not being more familiar with the new “in” acts. “She always dresses in an interesting way,” she explained, “and she was at her best when our country was good.”

  It was only when I saw her film collection that I realized why Tahmineh looked on the earlier era with such affection. She would watch the films in the evenings, when she came back from her acting classes (or more recently, rehearsals—for a play based on Persian literature’s most famous romance, which I was looking forward to seeing in a few weeks’ time). Tucking her feet under an armchair in front of the TV, she would dig a spoon into a tub of ice cream. Some of the films starred the B-movie heartthrob Mohammed Fardin, famous for playing hard-drinking, hard-playing heroes in black-and-white boy-gets-girl adventures. He could rip off his shirt and dive off a bridge as easily as he could break into song or flirt with a woman in a tiny dress whose car had just broken down.

  “I love Fardin!” Tahmineh exclaimed one night, when the Professor was criticizing the “Fardin cinema” for being crass.

  Trashy these films might have been, but when characters in current soap operas had to wear the veil even in kitchen scenes, the films of Fardin were a glimpse of a more fun-loving, but still Persian-speaking, world.

  The films of Googosh were more complicated. The ones I saw were all tearjerkers that were attempting to engage with the social problems of Iran under the shah. In one of them, Googosh played a young woman who discovered she was pregnant and traveled to Tehran with her boyfriend to get an abortion, staying at the house of an opium addict. For Tahmineh, however, far from being a gritty account of prerevolutionary Iran’s social problems, the film was about one thing above all, which set it apart from any film made since the revolution: It was all about the hair.

  “I wish I could look like that,” she announced during one scene, in which an abandoned Googosh, sporting a glorious golden bob, was sprinkling her flat with tears.

  Living in a country where films were so strictly censored, Tahmineh had adopted a censorship of her own—so she could pick out from any film she watched precisely the qualities she was looking for.

  “Nicholas, come!”

  The Professor was standing by the walnut bookcase, sliding back the glass door to take out his copy of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.

  “I know just the story to start with,” he said.

  The puppet opera wasn’t alone in drawing me toward Ferdowsi. Many other incidents had pushed the epic closer, nudging it up time’s narrow corridor.

  A friend of Sina’s who had been hoping to avoid military service by paying a $10,000 bribe, had only been able to produce the necessary funds when it was too late. “Like the elixir that came after Sohrab’s death,” sighed his father. He was using a popular proverb, referring to a potion that Rostam is given in Ferdowsi’s story, but only after it’s too late to save his son’s life. When I mentioned this encounter to the Professor, he exclaimed, “Ha! You see—you are starting to understand. Shahnameh isn’t just in that book in the bookcase—it’s everywhere.”

  Now, while Khanom was hard at work in the kitchen—fashioning a giant ball out of several pounds of ground lamb—the Professor was setting his copy of the Shahnameh on the glass table in the living room. It was the same green-jacketed volume that, many months later, I would show to my companions on the bus to Afghanistan. The so-called Moscow edition, it has a hundred lines to the page, and more than 60,000 verses in total: four times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.

  The Professor leaned forward eagerly, like the pages were pieces of cake and he was greedy to gobble them up, licking a finger each time he turned them. As I sat down beside him, the smells from the kitchen—the buttery rice, the garlic and parsley, a tingle of turmeric—were seeping into the living room—a teaser of the meal to come, adding their aroma to the atmosphere of the verses.

  Strictly speaking, the Shahnameh is a chronicle: the story of fifty kings, or shahs, from the prehistoric Gaiomart to Yazdagird III, whose defeat at the hands of the invading Islamic army in the seventh century CE brings the Persian empire to its calamitous end. Although the shahs would be revived many years later, there is no need, in the minds of many Iranians, for their reigns to be chronicled—they are simply repeating the original cycle, right up to their demise at the hands of the “Islamic army” of the ayatollahs.

  In many ways—especially in the mythical first half—Ferdowsi’s epic takes place in an unfamiliar world. A world that is flat and supported on the horns of a bull, where a dragon is just as likely to swoop over your head as a buzzard and demonic divs26 are always lurking in wayside ruins. It’s a brutal world, where troops become so caked in blood “that none knew another until they had bathed”; but it’s also a sensuous world, where tulip-cheeked princesses smell of jasmine and ambergris and the sun shines “like the ruby of Badakhshan.” For the English-speaking reader, these tales evoke the legends of King Arthur, the epics of Homer and the magic of The Lord of the Rings. Many of the storylines have a familiar ring to them: the youth Zal, brought up Mowgli-like in the wild; the hero Rostam, who has to perform a series of labors like Hercules; the prince Siyavash, tempted and slandered by his wicked stepmother, like Joseph by Potiphar’s wife; the nearly invincible Asfandiyar, whose eyes are his Achilles’s heel. The best stories transcend the national history for a global appeal, so it’s no wonder they have traveled so far and wide—entertaining the courts of Mughal India (where Emperor Akbar was advised by his chief minister to read them), painted in miniatures that now hang in Windsor Castle and the National Library of Russia, filmed in Central Asia, retold in the novels of the Nobel-winning Turkish autho
r Orhan Pamuk, and most recently printed in comic books in California. But in the principal homeland of the Shahnameh itself, they have been out of favor ever since the Islamic Revolution.

  When the mullahs came to power in 1979, Ferdowsi’s epic was an inevitable casualty. Under the Pahlavi shahs, it had been recited on television and at coronation ceremonies; papers were delivered on it by an acting prime minister; and in 1929 a government edict forbade the teahouse storytellers from reciting anything else. It was as public as a poem could be. But in the wake of the revolution, Ferdowsi’s bronze statue was taken off its plinth in Tehran, his tomb was attacked, and the Shahnameh was written out of the school curriculum. There were even reports of copies of the epic being burned in the streets. Like so many other pleasures in Iranian life, the Shahnameh had gone private.

  What turned it into a pariah? Well, the title didn’t help. Book of Kings isn’t the best choice if you want to get on with the regime that’s just pushed the kings out. Under the Pahlavi shahs, the Shahnameh had been the official state poem, endorsed by a regime that fired on demonstrators in the nation’s holiest shrine, tried to ban the headscarf, and whose secret police once raped a leading mullah’s daughter (and forced the mullah to watch by burning his eyelids with cigarettes). A regime that used every opportunity to associate itself with the sort of kings Ferdowsi was writing about—most ostentatiously in 1971, when the shah celebrated the so-called 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy at the ancient palace complex of Persepolis. Serving foie gras and stuffed peacock to the likes of Nicolae Ceaucescu and the Duke of Edinburgh, pouring the Chateau Lafite into Limoges crystal and decorating the air-conditioned hospitality tents with Italian drapes, the shah was fueling the mullahs’ argument: that he was more interested in abroad and had lost touch with real Iranian values.