Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (44 page)

Reality: for him it meant truth. It was to be set against false systems, false gods, fraudulence. It was hard, though, to get him to talk concretely; he turned everything to abstraction. As an ayatollah that was his talent. It pleased him to be baffling my purpose; and as he talked in his ayatollah’s way about reality and fraudulence his eyes—seemingly so close to tears when he entered—brightened, began to twinkle: a glimpse there of old mischievousness, with something of the man of 1979 showing through.

He said to me, “Are you going to see Ayatollah Montazeri?”

I said, “I don’t think so.”

When Mehrdad had translated this, Khalkhalli looked at him and said, “He should see Montazeri.”

Mehrdad set his face and did the translation. And it was only later, putting together various things I heard, that I understood that this question
about Ayatollah Montazeri was a political question, and possibly even an attempt by Khalkhalli to involve me in his cause. Khalkhalli and Montazeri had both been important in the early days of the revolution (Montazeri at one time had even been Khomeini’s second-in-command); and both men had made themselves known for their virulence. If Khalkhalli was the hanging judge, Montazeri, as Khomeini’s second-in-command, had sometimes been even more zealous than his master. When Khomeini had said that the revolution should concentrate on the young, that people over forty were useless, Montazeri had gone one stage further. Pensions were useless, he had said; dead trees should be cut down. People still remembered that. Both those men, Khalkhalli and Montazeri, had been cast aside by a later generation of people in power; both were now kept quiet and harmless.

But nearly all of this I got to know later. So when Khalkhalli asked whether I was going to see Montazeri I missed the point of what he was saying, and I couldn’t take it up. Instead—and it would have been disappointing to him—I asked what he had been reading when we came: I said that the guard who had come out to us had said that he was reading. Was it a religious work?

It was only the paper. He said, in his lecturer’s way, “The world doesn’t stand still. There are always new things. That is why I read the papers.”

The words he was using were not meaning much. They didn’t tax him and they were enabling him to assess me. Sitting on the palliasse on the carpet, he had been looking up at me from below his forehead, and I became aware now of his counter-probing, between his rambling, abstract talk. How old was I? Did I have children? I said no. He asked why. I said if I had had children it would have been hard for me to do my work. He said many Persian writers had had a hundred children and written a hundred books. How many books had I written? Did I make a living? It was hard for a writer in Persian to make a living. Was I connected with some agency? What was my religion? He asked about India and Kashmir, and paid no attention to what I said.

He had become unhappy about me. He had been used to another kind of interview, something more political and immediate (and perhaps something offering more immediate publicity). He didn’t know what I was after. And perhaps I had lost my way. Perhaps the misadventure at the Marashi Library had made me too cautious. It might have been better if I had asked him directly about his reputation as the hanging judge of the revolution. But I didn’t want to do that; I thought that a question like that would have made him close up or give a set answer or grow hostile, and would have achieved only the obvious. I could have asked him about the photographs
on the wall. The photographs interested me, and they were important to him; he might have wanted to talk about them, and that might have led to other things. But that idea, about the photographs, came to me only many weeks later, when I was considering my notes.

I went on in my groping way. I asked how he assessed the revolution now. He talked for some time, clearly using a lot of meaningless words, and Mehrdad’s short translation of what he said was that a beginning had been made. How much of a beginning? Thirty percent. I saw an opening; and he must have seen what was going to come. Because, before I could ask about the 70 percent that still had to be done, he said he was tired. The eyes that twinkled while he talked or lectured became dead, the expression melancholy, empty. He dropped his head, pressed his chin against his chest, stood up slowly, the sweat showing on the front and back of his short-sleeved white tunic. Step by step he moved to a side room.

The interview was over. And now we had a problem. We had no car. Kamran had gone off to find a garage to mend his ignition. He had said he would be back in half an hour, but that wasn’t meant literally. We could only wait for him. It was the middle of the day and it was too hot to wait in the lane outside. So, waiting for Kamran, Emami, Mehrdad, and I continued to sit in Khalkhalli’s reception room with his guards, and we talked.

To talk to Emami had been part of my purpose in coming to Qom, to find out about the talebeh or students who were coming nowadays to Qom. Emami had already spent fourteen years as a student. He had started at a Tehran theological school when he was sixteen, and he had moved to Qom after being accepted by an ayatollah. He was married now, with a two-year-old child. His grant from his ayatollah was two thousand toumans a month, about fifty dollars. He earned a little extra doing a little teaching himself, and doing translations from Arabic. It wasn’t an easy life. Qom was dusty and hot. He endured it because from an early age he had wanted to be a propagator of the faith. He wasn’t the classical talebeh, he said, the son of the poor family looking in Qom for free food and lodging. His father was a businessman; they were middle-class people.

But when was all this studying going to end? When was he going to go out into the world? It wasn’t like that, he said. Some people could remain students for fifty years. Khomeini used to say that he was learning every day. But that didn’t explain how movement might come to a cleric’s life. How did people begin to stand out? He said people stood out because of their learning and personality. There was no end to learning. And with all
the commentaries, and the commentaries on the commentaries, on theology and philosophy and jurisprudence, all those book sets in the Marashi Library, it was possible to see what Emami meant. People could also stand out because of their ability, in this thicket of scholarship, to make fresh or interesting judgments. Khomeini, for example, did that with his statement that the game of chess was not against the law, provided there was no betting on the outcome. That was a judgment that people in Qom still talked about.

He himself wasn’t famous, Emami said. He was content to be what he was, one of the foot soldiers, as it were, of the faith, one of the propagators. That was his vocation. He wasn’t rich, but he didn’t mind. He didn’t care too much about eating. I said I thought he was putting it too strongly. I didn’t think he was too deprived. He had a fine physique; I was sure he played some sport. He smiled; he said he exercised every morning.

There was little more to be got out of Emami. He had this idea of the vocation; it was sufficient explanation of his fourteen years of study; he couldn’t step outside himself to consider his life and motives. His world had rigid limits. What passed with him for learning was really only a way of learning the rules. To know the rules was to simplify life, and Emami was a profoundly obedient man. It was what was required by the faith and the revolution; every day in the newspapers there was a message like that.

We had been talking for about half an hour or forty-five minutes in the ayatollah’s reception room, below the ayatollah’s turban and photographs, waiting for Kamran, listening for the sound of a stopping car, and going out from time to time to the verandah to check. And then Khalkhalli came in again, slow, sad, his loose top tunic wet down the middle. Mehrdad explained about the driver and the car. Khalkhalli asked whether we wanted some bread and cheese, Persian bread, Persian cheese.

This seemed to me a good idea; it might give me a chance to talk in another way to the ayatollah. But Mehrdad said with some firmness that the offer of bread and cheese was just a form of words, a courtesy, that the ayatollah was asking us to leave.

We stood up to say good-bye. If we wanted to see him again, Khalkhalli said, we would have to make an appointment. It would have to be next week, on Thursday; that was the day he wasn’t teaching. And this time we were to keep to the hour. His melancholy face began to alter with irritation. And we were to make notes. Nobody could remember everything. Talk without notes was a waste of time. We had been playing with him. I said that I made notes, but not right away; I hadn’t felt that our earlier conversation had got to the note-taking stage. Next week, he said, his irritation
beginning to melt; and we were to telephone beforehand. He gave the number and pointed to one of the guards: he would answer the telephone.

I began to feel that if we hadn’t been so delayed, and if things had gone better, he really wouldn’t have minded talking. But the moment had passed. We went out to the verandah, put on our shoes, and went out of the gate in the high wall. We crossed the street to the little strip of shade near the corner, and we stood there, waiting for Kamran.

Mehrdad said, “Did you see the gun?”

Emami said, “He has many enemies now.”

Mehrdad said, “They are like enemies to each other. The old timers and the new people.” Then Mehrdad said to me, “He asked you about Montazeri. I hope you are not going to try to see him. That is the way of death.”

He spoke with genuine dread. I did what I could to calm him down.

I said, “But these men are back numbers. They are very old, and they can’t be dangerous to anybody now.”

He said, “In this situation even the dead are dangerous.”

And standing there, opposite Khalkhalli’s house, I thought that even if I did come next Thursday—and if everybody remembered, and there was a meeting—there would perhaps be little to add to what I had seen that early afternoon: the justicer of the revolution, old and ill and anxious, subjected himself now to various controls, sitting below his photographs, which were more sinister and condemning than he knew, and with guards with guns, one of the guards wearing the old dark green uniform of the early komiteh and making it look like old clothes.

There had been guards in 1979. I could still remember—the desert sunset all around us at the end of the long August day—the heavily built man with a gun at the low front gate of the exposed house in the half-made lane; and the heavy frisking hands of that man; and his closed, foolish, exalted face. The revolution still belonged to the country as a whole, and all that business of guards and searching had been principally for the drama: the pretend idea of the revolution in danger, part of the excitement and celebration of the early days of the revolution. Now—though it was part of his restraint—he needed the high wall and the man with the gun.

Mehrdad said, unexpectedly, “It was very nice of him to say that he was tired. Iranians don’t do that. They don’t say things so openly. He is very old. But very clever.”

We waited in the shade at the corner. Mehrdad thought we should walk to where we could get a taxi, do what we had to do with Emami, and arrange
to meet Kamran at four-thirty on one of the well-known bridges of Qom. We could leave a message with Khalkhalli’s guards. We pressed Khalkhalli’s buzzer again, and the guard who came out, the bigger man with the moustache, didn’t mind at all being disturbed again.

We began to walk in the glaring white streets, Emami guiding us and talking at the same time about what was wrong with the philosophy course at Qom: too much old philosophy, not enough about contemporary matters, too much about Farrabi and Avicenna (an enchanted name to me: strange to hear it spoken so casually), who had taken their ideas, many of them wrong ideas, from ancient thinkers like Ptolemy and Aristotle. This criticism of Qom was approved thinking; Emami, though he saw himself as a modern man, ready to dress in a modern way, was not a rebel.

Surreally, as in a dream, after some minutes of walking, we saw Kamran’s car coming down the empty white street towards us. He had had his troubles with that ignition; he had gone from garage to garage, and then from car shop to car shop, looking for a replacement.