Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  He pressed a finger to his lips and I promised to keep mine sealed. Then he led me through the gate and hailed Mustafa.

  “Come on,” he said, “we’re going for a hubbly-bubbly!”

  Reza was nowhere to be seen. For the next two weeks, whenever I went out with Sina, our route would studiously avoid the bazaar district, and if I mentioned him, Sina would turn cagey. “Reza is not necessary!” he once snapped. “I am your friend,” adding a phrase that I can only translate as “his mother has a donkey’s cunt.”

  The Professor was the hardest hit by the revelation: If he had been a cartoon character there would have been a rain cloud over his head. There wasn’t the same energy at our evening vodka sessions, and when I mentioned a romantic tale from Ferdowsi, I sensed a flash of pique behind his owl-like eyes.

  As their guest, my loyalty should have been with the family. But there was something uncomfortable about all this male anger. Everyone withdrew into themselves and whispered among themselves. I would come back from class to see Khanom and the Professor talking furtively in the kitchen. But as soon as I approached them, the air would fill with a stubborn, formal silence, or, even more frustrating, they would talk very quickly. I had thought I was getting to know the whole family, but a new screen had shot up and I was on the wrong side. When they spoke, I sensed there was a subtext—and my Persian wasn’t proficient enough to work out the sub.

  “Reza?”

  One afternoon, a few days after the secret had come out, I found him standing outside the language institute where I had my classes.

  “You will come and see me?” he asked.

  “I . . . I should . . . ”

  “You dropped me? I am not your friend anymore?”

  He’d never exactly been Mr. Ecstatic, but Reza’s face was now so long it was threatening to drip into his chest.

  “No, of course not,” I insisted, “but I . . . ”

  “So you will come and see me?”

  “Um . . . ”

  My first thought was that I should be loyal to my host. If the Professor didn’t like Reza and I was staying under his roof . . . My second thought was that I would really like to find out what was going on. . . . I had a quick internal tussle and the outcome expressed itself in my next sentence:

  “So,” I said, stepping closer to Reza, “when shall I come over?”

  The Zoroastrian guardian of the Chak-Chak (or “Drip Drip”) shrine near Yazd, where a daughter of Iran’s last pre-Islamic king was said to be swallowed by the rocks.

  The Gate of All Nations at Persepolis, the palace complex built in the 6th century BCE by Darius the Great.

  The Roman emperor Valerian and Philip the Arab submit to King Shapur I in a bas-relief in southern Iran. It is said that Shapur further humiliated Valerian by using him as a footstool.

  A zurkhaneh or “strength-house” in Tehran, where the ancient Iranian sports are still practiced.

  Traditional fortune-telling in Esfahan: a parakeet picks out a verse by the medieval poet Hafez, which will be taken as providential.

  Men taking part in the qamazadan or “dagger-striking” ritual, in honour of Imam Hossain, the Prophet’s martyred grandson.

  After the ritual, extensive bandaging is required.

  Rahim e Yadullahi, a Shahnameh-khwan or “reader of the Book of Kings,” with fans in his butcher shop in the Bakhtiari region of Iran, shortly after reciting one of his favorite tales.

  Mohammed Abbas, the youngest of the Shahnameh-khwans, with his father.

  A funeral procession in the Bakhtiari region.

  Villagers in Pazh, where the poet Ferdowsi grew up. Several of the villagers claim to be his descendants.

  A portrait of the poet Ferdowsi in the Tus Museum in eastern Iran.

  The poet’s mausoleum in Tus.

  Women outside the mosque of Tehran University.

  Qashqa’i tribeswomen in the Fars region of southern Iran.

  Women outside a mosque in Afghanistan.

  The author with friends in Sistan, the southeastern region of Iran near the border with Afghanistan. Many of the people in this region claim to be pahlavans, descended from the epic hero Rostam.

  . . . and in Afghanistan, having grown a beard for the journey.

  Traditional transport in northern Afghanistan.

  The opium ritual.

  Men wearing traditional telpek hats in Turkmenistan. These “high fur caps” were noted in the 10th century by the scribe Maqdisi and are made from the fells of month-and-a-half-old lambs.

  A minstrel in the sugar market of Khojand, in Tajikistan. He is performing on a dotar and singing words written in the 10th century by the poet Rudaki.

  A market outside the citadel of Herat in Afghanistan.

  Wrecked military vehicles and weapons in the fort of Farah in southern Afghanistan.

  The court of Sultan Mahmud, painted by Master Hadi Tajvidi in 1936. The long-bearded man in the chair to the left is Ferdowsi.

  The ruins of a palace in Lashkar Gah, in the Helmand region of Afghanistan. In the 11th century, this was where the Ghaznavid sultans came for their summer retreat.

  The tomb of Sultan Mahmud in Ghazni.

  And the Sultan’s modern-day counterpart—the governor of Ghazni today.

  A mural of Ferdowsi outside a school in Tehran, with words from the Shahnameh written beside the poet.

  9

  The Man in the Moon

  Tehran. April/May.

  Traveling on the Metro emphasized the difference between the north and south of the city. Without seeing it change around you, it’s like you’ve stepped into a wormhole, emerging in a different world—more crowded and less polished than the one you’ve left. Mowlavi Station was clearly in the south: The streets weren’t particularly narrow, but the clutter closed them up. Handcarts tilted between the pickup trucks, with rolled-up carpets swinging like tank guns, and a man in Afghan shalwar qameez had to bend back as he was abluting himself in a streetside canal, to avoid being poked in the eye by a construction rod.

  Keeping watch over this mayhem was Ayatollah Khomeini, peering down from the facade of a mosque as if to remind you that all this was transient. A similarly pious, otherworldly aura drifted across the hall to which Reza had given me directions.

  There, seated on a marble pulpit, with an otter-skin drum between his thighs, was a man in a damp blue vest called Akbar. He was reciting prayers to Imam Ali, while the men underneath him—standing in a meter-deep octagonal pit, most of them in vests and many with loin-cloths around their waists—were chanting the names of the twelve imams. Whenever someone new arrived, Akbar slammed a bell under a mirrorwork arch. If the new arrival was especially venerable, he rapped on the drum as well. All around me, I could hear the religious verses and holy names, hanging in the air like talismans of Islam.

  “Thanks for coming,” said Reza, who was in the process of wrapping his own loincloth. His bare chest was already soaked in sweat, which glistened in the glare from a skylight. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Well . . . it’s not like the gyms back home.”

  He smiled. “We call it a zurkhaneh.” A “strength house.” “You know it’s the oldest sport in Iran? We’ve been doing it since the time of Cyrus the Great.”

  Reza picked up a mulberry-wood block, setting it on the floor of the pit and performing push-ups on top of it. As I was watching him, an old man in an astrakhan hat lowered himself onto a bench near me, facing the pit. He invited me to sit next to him, introducing himself as “Sede Ismail,” and calling to a boy to bring us tea. He poured his glass onto a saucer to cool it, placing it against his mouth and tipping the contents down his throat, all the time lifting his eyes to watch the men in the pit.

  Hanging on the wall behind us was a series of framed black-and-white photographs. Bare-chested men stood proudly in leather plus fours, swinging large wooden dumbbells or packed together in matching shirts, like a rugby team. Among these figures was Takhti, the national hero
, who won gold for freestyle wrestling at the 1956 Olympic Games but was poisoned in his prime because he insulted the shah’s brother.61

  “We call these men pahlavans,” explained Sede Ismail. “But Takhti was the greatest, so we called him ‘Pahlavan of the World’” (which is the same title given to the hero Rostam in the Shahnameh).

  We continued looking at the photographs, but a drumbeat was resounding. All eyes turned to Akbar, who was about to start a new recital:Alighting, they tied both their steeds to a boulder,

  Advancing in casque and the garb of a soldier;

  Though troubled at heart, each as fierce as a pard,

  They wrestled and parried till sweaty and scarred . . .

  Sweat was dripping off Akbar’s brow as he recited, while the men in the pit did their push-ups on the mulberry-wood blocks. They were bathed in the sunbeams pouring through the skylight, their bodies yo-yoing to the rhythm of the verse. I was riveted, not because of the speed with which they were performing, nor the stagelike synchronicity (which became even more pronounced when one of them juggled with a pair of dumbbells, spinning around the pit like a whirling dervish), but because the words were from the Shahnameh.

  “It is poetry,” said Akbar, when I asked him why he recited these verses, “and Ferdowsi makes us feel strong. He writes about sports and battles, so he is good for the strength house.”

  The verses, taken from the tale of “Rostam and Sohrab,” weren’t the only details to recall the pre-Islamic era. According to Akbar’s brother, Mohammed, the dumbbells “are symbols of the ancient warrior’s mace.” The mulberry-wood blocks on which the men had been performing their push-ups represent “the soldiers’ shields.” When you lift them up you’re echoing the practice by which the soldiers would form bridges across the enemy trenches in ancient battles. An iron shaft, looped with copper discs, was “a bow, like the one Rostam used,” while the men’s leather plus fours symbolized the leather apron of the ancient hero Kawa, who raised it as a flag in the fight against snake-shouldered Zahhak. The drum represents the drums beaten in battle, and the bell is struck to signal the end of play, just as bells proclaimed the end of the ancient battles. Here was the old Iranian military system—preserved down the ages, like a prehistoric insect in amber.

  “Ferdowsi is our culture,” said Akbar, when I asked about the different sources of his recitals. “And so is the Quran.”62

  Living with the Professor, I had fallen into the assumption that the Shahnameh belonged to an exclusively nationalistic, secular “Persian” culture, distinct from the world of the mullahs. What I was starting to realize—what Reza and his neighborhood represented—was that you could be “Persian” and “Islamic” at once—in touch both with the country’s ancient culture and with its current religious identity.

  In some ways, though, the older members of the strength house were very similar to the Professor. Sede Ismail had been coming here since the 1950s and he shared my host’s concern for the decline of recent years.

  “We had so many people here in the shah’s time,” he said wistfully, “because everyone was rich then. But now it is only the ones who have a good income and can afford the time.”

  Back in the old days, the pahlavans were the most powerful men in the bazaar. Many of them acted as “thick-necks,” operating protection rackets but also looking after families within their communities. But now they are the old guard, as detached from events as Khomeini on the mosque facade outside, no longer able to take a leading role in how their streets are run.

  “This country is rotting,” exclaimed another elderly pahlavan, in a twill jacket, who had sat down beside Sede Ismail. Clicking his teeth, he sighed at the photographs of his predecessors. “When we were young,” he continued, “the air was clean. Now it’s polluted. Everyone used to help each other. Now there are too many opium addicts and same-sex players. The economy is ruined, all the good things are being destroyed.”

  He peered despondently into his tea saucer, then looked up at me, as if I should be able to answer his next question.

  “The strength house is the soil of Iran,” he said. “If we lose these things then please tell me—what will be left?”

  The strength house was one of several places where I came across the Shahnameh in an unlikely setting. Unlikely, at least, for a medieval poem—but not for this medieval poem. As the Shahnameh-khwans had told me, it could inspire farmers, feuding villagers, and soldiers; as Tahmineh’s reading of “Bizhan and Manizeh” suggested, it connected with the feelings of a person in love; as the opera of “Rostam and Sohrab” highlighted, it evoked and celebrated the Persian culture that it had been so instrumental in sustaining; and as Reza’s Zahhak painting showed, it commented on political circumstances today. Chaucer, eat your heart out.

  The Professor, more than anyone else, had introduced me to the Shahnameh—and I was extremely grateful for that. But it was Reza who had shown me the light it shines on today, and the strength house had added another layer to my appreciation of Ferdowsi’s poem, demonstrating how it coexists with a strong Islamic sensibility. On a broader level, this illustrated how the two most significant elements of modern Iranian identity—religion and the national culture—don’t have to be kept apart, like squabbling in-laws at a wedding, but occasionally can be called upon to behave themselves and sit peacefully together at the head table.

  “I think you know what my heart wishes to ask,” said Reza.

  I had a hunch. We were in his kitchen, sitting at the table where I’d drunk a gallon or six of “London” gin over the past few months. Given all that he had shown me in this time, I clearly owed him a favor. But even more than that—I was curious to know more about his relationship with Tahmineh. At the Professor’s, the only information came in hints: the molehill of ash from his cigarettes or the slam of Tahmineh’s door. Now, sitting in Reza’s kitchen, he answered everything I asked him, volunteered more, and turned the story from a rumor into a full-blown romance.

  Tahmineh had often accompanied her brother to Reza’s gallery shows. Once, when she needed a poster for a student play, Reza had offered to help:

  “So I gave her my number. I didn’t think she would call me, but she did and I was very happy. So where was the best place for us to meet? Well, here of course, in my flat.”

  The play had come and gone, but the meetings had continued. They usually took place after dark, to avoid her being seen by the furniture restorer across the street.

  “We think he’s an information man for the basijis,” explained Reza.

  When they met in the day it was at the National Park, where they would look at the peacocks, or in the coffee shops around Tajrish Square, the most youth-friendly area of the city. Although the law didn’t approve of fraternizing between the sexes, it usually turned a blind eye to couples taking a promenade, and they had even managed to go to the cinema together. There in the back row—something I never expected to hear about in Iran—they had kissed.

  On the occasions when he managed to smuggle her into his block, she had taught him about the old prerevolutionary films. Reza, in return, showed her how to sculpt a head from plaster and had even written poetry for her—although he refused to show it to me.

  “Drop it!” he said. “I know what you want. You want it to be the same as Ferdowsi, you want me to say her voice is like a nightingale and these things! But it isn’t like that. It doesn’t even rhyme, it is free.”

  Since Tahmineh’s phone had been confiscated, Reza was having trouble communicating with her, especially as she was grounded and allowed out only for classes and rehearsals. I looked at the piece of paper on which he was scribbling. It was easy to see why he had me down as an ideal emissary. Not only was I living at the Professor’s—so I could pass on his notes without any trouble—but I could read Persian only in tidy print and certainly not the spaghetti scrawl that Reza was producing. It might contain instructions for a secret meeting; it might be an erotic billet-doux. But whatever it was, it was a
s impenetrable to me as a medieval spy’s letter in invisible oak gall ink.

  “Reza,” I protested, “I’m a guest.”

  His eyes narrowed as he pressed the paper into my hand.

  “I didn’t think you were a coward,” he said.

  There was a pair of dumbbells, of exactly the kind they used in the strength house, in a corner of the living room at the Professor’s. I wanted to talk about my visit—to ask the Professor what he thought about the connections between the sportsmen’s equipment and the Shahnameh. But each time I was about to mention it, my more practical side kicked in.

  Tahmineh said nothing when I gave her the note. Her eyes were glued to the Jam-e Jam pop station and whenever I stole a glance, she kept whatever she was feeling under wraps. At least, until the Professor picked up the remote control and turned to the Geography Channel. She might not want to let on about her romantic state of mind, but there would be no discretion when it came to the TV.

  “Tahmineh-dear!”

  In the struggle for power, it was inevitably the father whose words proved the stronger, physically acting on Tahmineh so her shoulders sank and her head dropped, and soon she wasn’t there at all. There was a slam of her bedroom door, followed by the staccato beat of sobbing, which gave way in turn to the songs of Googosh.