Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (41 page)

Mehrdad said, “In Iran wheat is the symbol of generation.”

The films were transparent in a way that Abbas might not have known. His own idea of himself showed through: he was the man who had struck out on his own, and he was the man to whom life had come again.

In the taxi Mehrdad said, “You noticed? He didn’t mention Khomeini once.”

I said, “When he was talking about Qom he said there were many examples of religious learning not going with spirituality. I would like to ask him a little more about that.”

But Mehrdad didn’t think that was a good idea—he meant it was an idea with some danger—and I didn’t say any more about it.

Mehrdad said a while later, “He is to me a real hero, Abbas. In the war and in civilian life. The way he does things.”

Mehrdad was thinking especially of Abbas going back to school in his mid-twenties, to get his diploma, in order to go to the university, in order to marry his girl.

On a wall in a side street we saw in very big letters the English words
FAITH NO MORE.
Mehrdad said it was an album of American “heavy-metal” songs. But the letterer knew English well, and his English or Roman letters were done in a way that no one knowing only the Persian script could manage. (Even Mehrdad wrote the English script awkwardly.) In spite of what Mehrdad said, I thought the words were a kind of protest, like the
playing of the popular music of the Shah’s time, which you often heard coming out of flats and taxis.

Then, on a pier of a road bridge there was a big daubed sign in Persian in red and green:
MARTYRS SAY
(in red): (in green)
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE SINCE WE WENT AWAY?
That was critical, Mehrdad said. But Basijis have that privilege. They could daub what they wanted on the streets; no one stopped them.

In the hotel room—with the big window giving a clear view of the spread of lights, blue and brilliant white and orange, of Evin Prison—we reconstructed the evening. I asked Mehrdad, when we came to that stage of Abbas’s story, whether Abbas and his brothers, the mechanic’s sons, wouldn’t have moved forward anyway, even if the revolution hadn’t come; and whether the revolution hadn’t really been wasteful of talent.

Mehrdad said, “People are like ships.” (Abbas had used the ship metaphor, too, but in a different way, when he was talking about the goodbye ceremony on the battlefield.) “When the first ship goes in one direction, the others just follow. It’s like the firing squad, when they have to shoot a thief.” (Memories there of Mehrdad’s recent military service.) “The first shot is the important one. The others just follow. They hear the sound and they all pull the trigger. I have seen it many times. For example, in the swimming pool. In the military service I was a lifeguard at a swimming pool. The little boys who came were all nervous, but the minute the first boy jumped in, all the rest jumped in, not caring how deep the water was or whether they knew how to swim. And at the university. A professor is teaching badly, is known to be a poor professor. Nobody does anything. But one day some student gets up and objects to something, and then there is chaos. Everybody starts objecting to the teacher.

“That is my feeling about the revolution. My parents attended four or five demonstrations. But they didn’t know why. They didn’t know what they were doing. My father is not brave. He is not brave at all. Now when you ask him he says that he didn’t go to the demonstrations. But I remember it. We had a lot of books in our house. There was a pictorial one, full of colors. It was published by the Shah. It was about the royal family. It was a prize to my sister from her school. My father—I said he was not a brave man—he tore it up and put it in the dustbin. He said, ‘Maybe when the revolution comes they don’t want to see such things in my house.’ I said, ‘Nobody cares about your house.’ He was just doing what everybody else did. He was innocent—and frightened. Others had a lot of sin, but he was
innocent.” Mehrdad thought of himself as iconoclastic, but his language could still be religious.

I said, “There was something you didn’t translate. The story Abbas told the veterans when he handed out the questionnaires about their war experiences.”

“There were two friends at the front. One of them was always talking about sport and the jobs he had done in the city. He didn’t feel he was at the front. The other man was a spiritual person. He didn’t want his friend to lose touch with the spiritual side. He thought a lot about how to turn the friend from town talk to spiritual concentration. At last he got a notebook from one of the PBXs at the front. For ten days he wrote down whatever his friend said. At the end of the tenth day the sixty pages of the notebook were filled. He took the notebook to the friend and said, ‘Here you are. Here is your talk for ten days. I have written down everything. Read it and see whether you have been doing a good thing, a bad thing, or an indifferent thing.’ Two days later the friends met. The sportsman took the spiritual man to a silent and hidden place, brought out a plastic bag which was filled with burnt paper, and said, ‘This is my past. I understood what you wanted to say, and I won’t repeat the same mistake again.’ After a time, whenever he began to tell one of his old stories, he stopped himself and said, ‘Oh, forget it.’ And he was famous as ‘Mr. Oh, forget it.’ ”

I said, “The story fascinated you.”

“Abbas said that whenever he told this story to the veterans they began to laugh, but this laughter turned to weeping as they remembered the war and their own friendships. This story, Abbas said, was just to show the veterans that a simple story could be effective when they were filling in their questionnaires about their war experiences.”

I said, “What do you think of the story now?”

“I have no feeling at the moment.”

A little later he said, “It’s an Iranian story, because of the affection between the two soldiers. It is hard to tell a friend about his failings. The story was about a friend who found a good way of doing that.”

7
 

W
HEN
I
WENT TO
T
EHRAN
in August 1979, Ayatollah Khalkhalli, the hanging judge of the revolution, was a star. The Islamic Revolutionary Court in Shariati Street was sitting almost round the clock, as Ali had said. People were being killed all the time in Evin Prison and trucks were taking away the bodies through the blue gates at night.

There was nothing secretive or abashed about this killing. Some revolutionary official was keeping count, and regularly in the
Tehran Times
there was an update. In the beginning the counting was to show how clement the revolution was; later, when the killing became too much, the counting stopped. In those early days official photographs were taken of people before they were killed and after they were killed—killed and, as it were, filed away, naked on the sliding mortuary slab, in the giant filing cabinet of the morgue. These pictures were on sale in the streets.

Ayatollah Khalkhalli, the ruler of the Islamic Revolutionary Court, was open to the press. He was giving many boastful interviews. I went with an interpreter to see him in Qom. It was Ramadan, the fasting month; and Qom was where the ayatollah had temporarily retired to fast and pray. It was August and very hot in the desert. When we got to Qom we had to wait for more than five hours until the ayatollah had finished his prayers
and broken his fast. This was at nine in the evening. We found him then sitting on the floor of the verandah of his modest house, at the center of a little court also sitting on the floor: his guards, some Iranian admirers, and a respectful, formally dressed African couple (the man in a light gray suit, the woman in a chiffon-like, sari-like garment) who were visiting.

The ayatollah was white and bald and very short, a clerical gnome, messily attired. He liked, perhaps because of his small size, to clown. His jokes were about executions, and then his court threw themselves about with laughter. He also liked—and this mannerism might have come with his hanging duties—abruptly to stop clowning and for no reason to frown and grow severe.

He was from Azerbaijan in the northwest. He said he was the son of a farmer and as a boy he had been a shepherd. So, going by what Ali had said, Khalkhalli would have been just the kind of village boy for whom, fifty years or so before, the theological schools had offered the only way out: a room, food, and a little money. But Khalkhalli had almost nothing to say about his early life. All he said, with a choking, wide-throated laugh, was that he knew how to cut off a sheep’s head; and this was like another joke about executions, something for his little court. Perhaps, because he had never learned how to process or meditate on his experience, never having read widely enough or thought hard enough, his experience had simply gone by, and much of it had even been lost to him. Perhaps the thirty-five years (as he said) of theological studies in Qom had rotted his mind, pushed reality far away, given him only rules, and now with the revolution sunk him in righteousness and vanity. He was interested only in the present, his authority and reputation, and in his executioner’s work.

He said, “The mullahs are going to rule now. We are going to have ten thousand years of the Islamic Republic. The Marxists are going to go on with their Lenin. We are going to go on in the way of Khomeini.”