Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (29 page)

In the flat land and below the high sky people looked small. They looked small in the mausoleum too. Their unshod feet made almost no sound. They looked through the bars at the tomb of the Imam; every kind of vow and hope was in that looking. That was what they had come to find. What was outside was incidental.

In front of the mausoleum was a big courtyard paved with concrete slabs, and in the middle of this was a pool for ablutions. The half-finished dust-colored concrete structures at the side of the courtyard were going to be hostels. Everywhere there was concrete, rough concrete spreading over the desert. The concrete platforms at the side of the main building were already crumbly. The paving slabs of the courtyard in its extension here were broken in places, or abraded down to the aggregate, and finally at the outer
edge worn back to simple earth, with puddles of water here and there, and patches of loose gravel.

Mehrdad said, “They clean it only for the anniversaries.”

The recesses in the brick wall around the mausoleum, traditional sleeping places for pilgrims, were screened, some of them, with blankets and sheets hung on lines. The dawn breeze caused the sheets to lift above the recesses, exposing the families with their blankets and bedding and goods. People without the privacy of screens were already up and about. Many of them were poor-looking village people. Some of them were saying their prayers. The chadors of the black-clad women flapped in the breeze and made the women seem taller than they were. Seen from close to, many were very small and thin, and some were starved-looking. They would have come from far: old village distress, not yet reached by any idea of reform.

Orange-colored drums were stenciled with the Persian for “garbage.” Scattered about the main courtyard, and looking like a kind of post-box, were fancifully shaped blue-and-yellow alms boxes. The box said at the top, in Mehrdad’s translation,
ALMS MAKE YOU RICHER.
On two sides were stylized hands, one holding or receiving, one giving. The hands were colored yellow and the giving hand was stenciled in red
BEGIN YOUR DAY WITH A GIFT, WITH ALMS.
The business or collecting bit of the box was colored blue; the message there was
TO GIVE ALMS IS TO PROTECT YOURSELF AGAINST SEVENTY KINDS OF ILLNESS.
The whole thing rested on a yellow pillar about three or four feet high. The concrete paving slab of the courtyard had been dug through for the pillar and then mortared up again; so the alms boxes looked like somebody’s afterthought.

The alms from the boxes were for the “Helping Komiteh of Imam Khomeini”; this
komiteh,
or revolutionary committee, had been set up in the first year of the revolution. There was a joke in Tehran about those komiteh alms boxes, Mehrdad said. A rustic Turk (an Iranian Turk: many jokes are made about the community) went and gave his alms and almost immediately was run over by a pilgrim bus.

Mehrdad said, “For the Turk it was like a telephone booth that didn’t work.”

There were also suggestion boxes in the courtyard, unexpected in a shrine, but perhaps they, too, had been put up by the komiteh; and the idea behind them might have been only that all public places had to have suggestion boxes. These were like little birdhouses on pillars. The pillars, like the pillars for the alms boxes, had been set in holes dug through the concrete
and roughly mortared in again; so that they too looked like an after-thought.

The sun began to come up. It was time to leave for the Martyrs’ Cemetery. The three-branched metal lamp standards at the entrance to the concrete courtyard were damaged already. I had missed them on the way in. The dome-shaped tops of the lamps, looking like a kind of high ecclesiastical hat, had been done in aluminum. The plinths, too, were damaged.

It had all been run up very quickly, as Mehrdad had said. Perhaps it was how shrines had always begun, to meet an immediate need, to absorb some overwhelming public emotion or grief. Perhaps this shrine, or its ancillary buildings, would be built over and over as long as there was the need. I felt that for most of the people who had come there would always be the need; the world would always be outside their control.

On the pavements now, beside the cars and the vans in their parking places, and among the oleanders, families were sitting round a formal spread of the flat bread and white cheese they had brought. Some of them had samovars.

In 1979 there were revolutionary posters and graffiti everywhere. The graphic art of the revolution was high, like the passions. There was almost none of that now; instead, there were the signs and exhortations of authority.
DO NOT THINK THAT THOSE WHO ARE SLAIN IN THE CAUSE OF ALLAH ARE DEAD. THEY ARE ALIVE AND PROVIDED FOR BY ALLAH:
this was the English sign on the left-hand side of the board above the main gateway to the Martyrs’ Cemetery.

The avenue at the entrance was wide and well kept and watched over by soldiers in ceremonial uniform. That avenue led to other great avenues between plantings of pines and elms. The graves were there, below the trees, and among shrubs. Aluminum picture-holders, standing on two poles, like signboards, were close to one another. They were of varying sizes. At the top of each holder was a glass case with a photograph of the dead man; and these photographs were disturbing, because the men were all young and were like the young men you could still see on the streets. The Revolutionary Guards I had seen in Tehran in 1979, driving around with guns, as if only to show themselves, had seemed to me theatrical. They might have been that, but they also were as ready to die as they said; and they had died by the ten thousand in the war.

The most famous martyr of the war was thirteen years old. He had strapped a bomb to himself and thrown himself below an enemy tank.
Khomeini had spoken of his sacrifice in one of his speeches. A small hand-written sign, decoratively done, as if in celebration—the script in black, shaded with red—was nailed to a pine tree to point people to where the grave was.

The young martyr’s brother had also died in the war, and they had been buried together. The plaque on the headstone had the logo of the Revolutionary Guards: like a gun. In the main section of the glass case there were framed photographs of the brothers, with artificial flowers on lace on either side. On a shelf below there was a mirror and a lace doily again, and more artificial flowers. Mehrdad told me that a mirror and lace were traditional gifts for a bridegroom. Khomeini’s famous tribute, in his famous literary style, was also there, done in white or silver on black: “I am not the leader. The leader is that boy of thirteen who, with his little heart which was worth more than a hundred pens [his faith, that is, was more valuable than any amount of writing], threw himself with a bomb under the tank and destroyed the tank, and drank the martyr’s glass and died.” This happened two months after the war began; no one knew at the time that the war would go on for eight years.

The simple headstones, easy to recognize, had been provided by the government. Families had paid for the more ornamented ones. One very simple stone was seen again and again. It said, in beautiful Persian script,
UNKNOWN MARTYR.

Mehrdad said, “There are thousands here. Families who don’t know where their son is come and say their prayers over one of these stones.”

Below the pines and the elms everything was close together, the lines of headstones and picture-holders, the spindly shrubs that grew in the sand, and the flags, hemmed in by the shrubs and trees and not able to flutter, and like part of the vegetable growth.

Mehrdad said, as we picked our way through, “You can see the flags everywhere. The flags of Iran.” He meant the flag of the Islamic Republic: green, white, and red, with the emblem of Allah in the middle of the white, and, just below the white, a Koranic line in a script looking like a Greek-key pattern. He said, pointing to one, and then another, “Losing their color. Losing its meaning.”

Mehrdad had done his military service in the army. What appeared to be irony in his words was a form of pain. The army and the flag mattered to him; and these flags, never moving, never meant to catch a breeze, put up by the families of martyrs, were coated with the dust of the desert.

Pink oleanders grew among the shrubs. They were like the oleanders that grew between the parking lanes at Khomeini’s shrine. The crowds
were there, at the shrine. There was hardly an attendance here. The few people who were about were mostly cemetery workers. The public came, Mehrdad said, on certain special days.

The desert dust, kicked up by motorcars or by cleaning vehicles, had ravaged the aluminum picture-holders at the edge of the avenues. Some of them were absolutely empty now; sometimes the photographs had decayed or collapsed within the frame. It might have seemed impossible at one time, but no one from the families came any more, Mehrdad said. The mourners might themselves have died. Personal memorials last only as long as grief.

Around one corner, above neglected gravestones and picture-holders, there was a signboard, still new-looking, with a saying of Khomeini’s:
MARTYRS LOOK TOWARD ALLAH—THEY THINK OF NOTHING ELSE. THEY SEE ALLAH. THEY ARE CONCENTRATED ON ALLAH.

We went to the blood fountain. It used to be famous. When it was set up, early on during the war, it spouted purple-dyed water, and it was intended to stimulate ideas of blood and sacrifice and redemption. The fountain didn’t play now; the basin was empty. There had been too much real blood.

2
 

I
WENT LOOKING
for people from the past. One of them was Mr. Parvez. He was the founder and editor of the English-language
Tehran Times
(with the motto “May Truth Prevail,” of which he was proud); and in August 1979 he had seemed to me to be on the crest.

His paper had well-appointed offices in central Tehran, and a staff of twenty, some of them foreigners, young English-speaking travelers pleased to be picking up a few rials for their English. The paper was doing so well that Mr. Parvez and his fellow directors were planning to expand it from eight pages to twelve in the new year. There was still enough revolutionary excitement in Tehran, and foreign coming and going, for Mr. Parvez to feel, like the hotel and restaurant people, that after the upheavals of the revolution, and the temporary stalling of the economy, things would pick up again, and the liberated country would soon once more be the boom country it had been at the time of the Shah.