Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  An hour later, I was writing at the desk in Sina’s room when the door crashed open. Enter Tahmineh with a tray—a glass of tea and a plate of sliced melon. It was just like a few weeks ago, when she’d read me the story of “Bizhan and Manizeh.” She set it down on a pile of hardbacks and offered a toothy smile. I thought she was thanking me for Reza’s message, but when the door had closed I saw that the contents of the tray weren’t just for my refreshment. Underneath the plate, written on a sheet of notepaper and sealed with tape, was a new message. Printed on top, in ink clear enough for me to read, was a single word: “Reza.”

  THE TALE OF BIZHAN AND MANIZEH (PART TWO)

  In the first part of the story, Manizeh is a giddy party girl, a “jasminebosomed beauty” who sprinkles the air with rose water. But in the second part, she fulfills a different feminine role: the constant beloved. Reduced to begging at people’s doors, she collects what scraps people throw at her and pours them into a tiny hole above the pit in which Bizhan has been imprisoned. Things are looking bleak for the lovers, but help is at hand.

  Rostam has been alerted to Bizhan’s whereabouts by the surveillance camera of legendary Iran—a magic cup “that mirroreth the world.” He sends a roasted bird wrapped in bread, inside which he has hidden his signet ring, and when Bizhan receives it he knows he will soon be saved. Manizeh stokes a bonfire to light Rostam’s way, and when he arrives he picks up the boulder on top of the pit, then hurls it all the way to China. He hauls Bizhan out with his lasso, snapping his chains and passing him to Manizeh, who clings with joy to her emaciated lover. Before long, they are happily married and will never have to worry about a father’s wrath again.

  Killers say that once you’ve committed your first murder, the next one is easy. So it is with delivering romantic messages between the daughter of your host and his enemy’s nephew. After my initial reservations, I was starting to enjoy it: Having watched all these people acting around me, I finally had a role of my own.

  In a passage from the tale of Khosrow and Shirin (the story in which Tahmineh had been acting), a court painter is dispatched by the prince to the land of his beloved. There, in a meadow where Shirin often picnics, he hangs a painting of his master on a tree branch, in the hope that she will fall in love with him. Delivering Reza’s messages to Tahmineh, I felt like I’d landed the part of the painter. Every few days I would turn up with a new secret message for Tahmineh, and once I was even asked to carry a present.

  “It’s not . . . well . . . ” I suggested, “it’s not exactly the most romantic gift I’ve ever seen.”

  But Reza was operating on another wavelength. “She’ll understand,” he said.

  It was a Saddam Hussein rubber mask.

  Perhaps I should have said no and refused to play postman. Perhaps I should have been more loyal to my host. But if Persianness is about anything, it’s about love and secrets and people going behind the backs of higher authorities—although I doubted this would hold any sway with the Professor if I were caught.

  As the summer heat intensified—squeezing out the sweat until you were like a juice carton that’s been pierced by all the kebab skewers in the kitchen drawer—I continued delivering Reza’s messages, wondering if they would ever run out.

  TEHRAN. A FEW WEEKS LATER.

  “Do you think,” said Tahmineh one evening, “there is a man in the moon?”

  We were standing on the balcony, gazing up at the stars. They glimmered like fireflies in smoke, shining through the violet haze of the smog.

  “I did when I was younger,” I said.

  “When I was small, people told us Khomeini was in the moon. If you lit a fire under a glass and looked at the moon you could see his face.”

  She picked my lighter off the balcony rail and lit it under her glass. The moon was only a few nights off the full, but it was hard to twist its surface into the face I saw on the billboards every day.

  “Well, I can’t see him,” I said. “Can you?”

  “Of course not!”

  She pressed her hands on the rail, swaying as she breathed in the air. She wasn’t smiling—she was looking up at the sky as if she was searching for something; as if she was half expecting some galactic space-hopper to turn up and carry her away. It was a long while since I had seen her smile.

  There had been no messages from Reza for a fortnight. I had feared that one of them would be intercepted by the Professor or Khanom, that I would be hurled out of the house in disgrace and my relationship with the Professor’s family would be wrecked, but of course this hadn’t happened. Instead, Reza had lost interest and started talking about a girl he knew from his sculpture classes.

  Even when Tahmineh and I were alone in the living room, out of everyone else’s earshot, she didn’t mention him anymore. A few days earlier, we had been watching a prerevolutionary film starring her favorite actress, Googosh—one of those joyously uplifting stories about a young woman who watches her lover die, terribly slowly, of an incurable disease. Tahmineh had spent most of the film looking at the palm of her hand, occasionally moving her index finger to scoop a tear off her cheek.

  “Will you miss us when you’re away?” she asked.

  I was heading off soon to travel east, into the mysterious neighboring region of Central Asia. Given the atmosphere in the house, I was looking forward to it.

  “Of course,” I exclaimed. “My heart will become tight.”

  She laughed at my use of the expression. “So many places you will see, and I saw nothing.”

  “I bet you will one day.”

  There were no teeth in her smile. She pressed down on my shoulder and squeezed.

  “Say hello to the world,” she whispered. She turned on her bare heel, treading softly on the chipped tiles as she stepped back inside the mosquito-net door.

  10

  Poets, Polymaths, and Pleasure-Daughters

  Iran/Central Asia. June.

  Planning a trip to Central Asia was one thing—getting in was another.

  Sheep scuttled out of the farmsteads, sticks beating against their backs. Bony rock poked through the flesh of the hills underneath them and broke out above us in menacing formations, while gray clouds were hovering like zeppelins, threatening to empty their contents over the bus. This was the Galway of Iran. The brawler of landscapes. The sort that could give Fars a black eye.

  The Turkmen officer was housed in a wooden hut with only a tiny gas heater to warm himself up. He looked like he’d been sentenced to man this post forever—and like his face had been growing longer ever since he’d started.

  “Border closed,” he said.

  “Closed?”

  “Terrorism.”

  “What?”

  “Closed. Terrorism. Border closed.”

  “I don’t underst—”

  “Terrorism!” He stood up and snarled, “Tashkent! Border closed!”

  “Tashkent? The bombs? But that’s in Uzbekistan.”

  Slowly it was unraveled. There had been a series of bomb blasts and shootings in Tashkent and Bukhara a few days earlier, in which nearly fifty people had been killed, and the Uzbeks had closed their border with Turkmenistan. It shouldn’t last long, but until it was resolved I wouldn’t be allowed in. My entry date was specified on my visa, which was only a five-day transit. Which meant that, unless I could wangle my way into Turkmenistan in the next two days, it would be useless.

  There was just one loophole. I knew of another border, at Sarakhs, about three hours’ drive east. I crossed my fingers and hitched a ride with an apple truck.

  There’s nothing like a good scenic diversion to raise the spirits. Grass furred the hills around Sarakhs and rolled across the meadows down to the brooks, more plentifully than anywhere else I’d seen in Iran. Turkoman nomads were flitting among their felt tents, pegged above the banks in a village of cloth, with clouds of shaggy-coated sheep billowing beneath them. In this sort of setting, how could I not feel optimistic?

  “Sir,” said the cu
stoms official in the passengers’ hall, “they do not permit the transit travelers to pass.”

  Was Central Asia intent on keeping me out? I clutched my passport, sitting down in the waiting hall, sinking into the gloomy realization that my foray to the East just wasn’t going to happen, when fate decided to offer a nudge. Two brightly dressed women were struggling with an enormous rolled-up carpet. Their minivan was parked on the road outside the customs hut and their papers had already been stamped. I helped them to heave the carpet into their minivan, along with a couple more and a dozen cardboard boxes filled with small porcelain tea bowls, and consequently found myself hidden behind the merchandise. When I stumbled into the light, it was flashing off the gold lapel pins of the Turkmen security guards, all bearing the plump image of Turkmenbashy—“father of the Turkmen,” one of the most eccentric dictators of recent times.63 Fortunately, the guards were sufficiently confused by all the teaware in the minivan to wave me through.

  “Well yippadeedooda!”

  I was so pleased to have crossed the border that I was perilously close to breaking into song. My driver, however, didn’t exactly look like he would welcome such an occurrence. He pulled me back down to earth with an expression of unremitting misery.

  “Turkmenistan rubbish!” he muttered.

  We were driving across a desert devoid of anything. A desert in the most literal sense of the word: the Karakum, or “Black Sands”—a giant oven where nothing grows except for the odd silvery sauxal bush and a few scarlet threads of camel thorn.

  “I’m sure it’s not that bad,” I said.

  I wouldn’t be staying long enough to find out. My visa required me to pass through as quickly as possible, so I would be taking the old Soviet railroad toward Uzbekistan and the city I was itching to visit: Bukhara.

  I tried to tell the driver what had spurred me here—the great Samanid empire of the tenth century, the biggest power in the Eastern Islamic world when Ferdowsi was a boy—a kingdom that traded with China and Tibet and had so much fruit it was fed to animals as fodder. But the bridge between his Turkmen and my Persian was too flimsy to cross, and as I peered out at the bare landscape around us, it was hard to find anything with which to refute him. Throughout my travels in Iran, I had always been surrounded by mountains; but now it was as if the horizon had lost its defense. It was as naked as the strangely un-scarfed heads of the women I would see in the Central Asian cities.

  All that had become familiar in recent months—mountains and melon juice, shared taxis and Shiism—was being swept aside for the new: marshrutnoe minivans, soda drinks sold out of big glass tubes like scientists’ alembics, and a Turkic language that left me pining for Persian. Even the names of the countries I was traveling through—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan—spelled out uncertainty and strangeness. No wonder Rudyard Kipling called this region “the back of Beyond.”

  Before I traveled to Iran, like many people I had thought of the Central Asian countries as Russian satellites. After all, they were gobbled up by the tsar in the mid-nineteenth century and they remained under Moscow’s thumb until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, while their current borders were the work of Stalin in the 1920s. But the Professor had told me about another side to the “stans”—the Persian side. He often talked of friends in Dushanbe (the capital of Tajikistan), hard at work on books about the Shahnameh or Zoroastrianism, and of trips he’d made to the city of Bukhara, to research the old Persian heritage.

  “You will see if you go,” he said. “The Tajik government is proud of our Persian culture, not like our onion-heads!”

  Slowly the Soviet covering was lifted and I began to see what was underneath. A few generations ago, there were Persian-speaking khans, oriental despots in the traditional manner, who hatted themselves in lambswool and begemmed their gowns with precious stones from the Badakhshan Mountains. The British officers Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly made their acquaintance in the 1840s, when Central Asia was being tugged between the Russians and the British as part of the “Great Game.” For their troubles, they ended up in a bug pit in Bukhara, from which they were finally lifted only to have their heads chopped off. The suspicion of foreigners is still at large—as I discovered on the train across the Black Sands Desert. Having been refused a ticket by an anxious station clerk, ordered to sit on my own by a couple of soldiers, and finally (when a sympathetic party of Russian judo players spirited me onto the train and stowed me in their cabin) ordered to pay a bribe by the ticket inspector, I was at my wits’ end. I was starting to sympathize with the nineteenth-century mullahs who preached against this new form of transport, calling it “the devil’s cart.”

  The amount I’d been asked to pay was $2,000—just the sort of sum, in the ticket inspector’s opinion, that a foreigner should have on hand, but not the sort of sum I was likely to part with, even if I could. In the end, it took the negotiating skills of a pair of prostitutes from Tajikistan (the only Persian speakers I could find on the train—and therefore the only people who could act as my go-betweens) to haggle the ticket inspector down. I ended up handing him a crisp ten-dollar note.

  Stoddart and Conolly witnessed a dying world: A generation later, Central Asia had fallen to the tsar. To the region’s traditions of hospitality, veils, turquoise-tiled mosques, and some of the best headwear in the world, the Russians would add collectivism, vodka, and—as I would soon discover—prostitutes in fishnet tights, along with the railroad on which I was traveling and an improved education system. Whether the old Persian ways had survived, though—whether the culture that flourished under the Samanid empire had been smothered by the centuries—I was hoping to find out. . . .

  “If a person stand on the fortress of Bukhara and cast his eyes around,” wrote the tenth-century geographer Ibn Hawkal, “he shall not see anything but beautiful green and luxuriant verdure on every side of the country: so that he would imagine the green of the earth and the azure of the heavens were united.” He would be shocked if he saw Bukhara now. From the top of the fort, I had a magic carpet’s view of flat-roofed houses and water tanks, turtle-shell domes and burnt-brick towers squiggled with storks’ nests. At dusk the walls turn golden brown, so it looks like the whole city has been baked in some giant cook’s fantasy oven, with the odd splash of aquamarine icing where a dome or a pishtaq mosque-screen rises. But however far you peer, it’s hard to find the greenery celebrated by Ibn Hawkal. And that’s not because the old hundred-mile city wall has been flattened. It’s down to a policy introduced by the Soviets, which is threatening to destroy the whole of Central Asia.

  Monoculture. What the mullahs have tried—but failed—to do to Persian culture, the Soviets succeeded in doing with Central Asian horticulture: They stripped it down to a single component. Fields and orchards, once bright with the different colors of rice or wheat, paprika, tomatoes, onions, or olives, now turned the white of cotton. The waters of the region’s great rivers, the Oxus and the Jaxartes, were diverted into canals and irrigation ditches. Bled for the cotton, the rivers shriveled, while the Aral Sea shrank to the size of a pond (and the population around its banks is stricken by typhoid, intestinal infections, lung diseases caused by industrial pollutants, hepatitis . . . the list goes on). At the same time, the salt rose, encrusting the land and making it infertile. If this continues, Central Asia will run out of water altogether and the whole region will be uninhabitable.

  Ibn Hawkal offers a glimpse of the region at its peak—but as you look out from the rooftop of Bukhara’s citadel, it’s hard to imagine it will ever be like that again.

  It wasn’t only its fertile soil that made Bukhara bloom. The tenth-century historian Tha’alibi called it “the Focus of Splendor, the Shrine of Empire, the Meeting-Place of the most unique intellects of the Age.” Its royal library enchanted the physician-philosopher Ibn Sina, who claimed he had “never seen such a collection of books either before or since”; while its book bazaar was unequaled, filled with pages pulped from the branches of
the local mulberry trees, according to an old Chinese recipe; and its princes divided their time between the polo field and the songs of the latest lute players. But not everyone was impressed. “Bukhara,” announced Abu Bakr the Secretary, “is the anus of the world, and we have rushed headlong into it! Would that it would fart us forth at this minute, for we have stayed there too long!” It was overcrowded and filthy, its streets full of garbage and its buildings prone to fires. It’s still pretty filthy, and its walls hang together like conspirators. Pipes clank overhead and plaster sprinkles the children who kick tins against the walls, while you have to duck when an iron-bossed door flings open and a housewife—holding up a bucket as lethally as a medieval archer with a quiver of poplar-head arrows—sprays the day’s slops into the alley. The city looks like what it is—a backwater that once ruled the roost. There’s a world-weary atmosphere seeping between the stones, as if to say, “We know how it works. You get all dressed up, everyone loves you, then one day they can’t even remember your name.” Bukhara is the ultimate has-been.

  One of the reasons for the city’s decline turned up here in the thirteenth century. Central Asia’s vandal supreme—Genghis Khan (hurtling across the steppe in revenge for the shaving of his messengers’ beards by the ruler of nearby Khwarezm)—tore the place apart and put thousands of its citizens to the sword. Only one building from the Samanid era survived his purge, saved because it had been buried under a graveyard (and it was only rediscovered in the nineteenth century, by a Russian scholar with a pitchfork).

  An artist was sketching this monument as I came by, holding out his brush like a wand to conjure the old Samanid era to life. Gripped by pillars on either side, with salt-cellar domes peeking around the cupola on top, it was the size of a garden shed and the color of an oatmeal cookie. A spray of geometric shapes splashed across its surface, the baked-brick texture weaving a latticework, making it look like a giant wicker basket and underlining the Samanids’ replacement of wood by brick as the principal material of construction.