Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (48 page)

Feyredoun was going to be home on leave that afternoon, and Mehrdad and I went to his family flat. The flat, in a city street, was much smaller than Mrs. Seghir’s. It was darker, much less opulent in intention, and now clearly with little money; but it had something of the same atmosphere. It had too much furniture, the remains of old family style. The flat was on the first floor, and it was full of traffic noise, not the roar that came to the top
of Mrs. Seghir’s block and through her half-open French window, but a more immediate and more jagged noise that came in all the time through the open metal windows. There were two dining tables in the small sitting room. The longer one, which was at right angles to the other, was prepared for us. It had chocolates in a glass dish, fruit in a larger dish, and tea in small, gilt-decorated glasses with handles.

Feyredoun’s mother was in the kitchen. She called Mehrdad. He went to her, and they talked for a while. When Mehrdad came back to the sitting room he was distressed.

He said, “I’ve been hearing miseries. Sometimes I think I can’t bear any more.”

Feyredoun’s mother worked as a pharmacist in a hospital. There was a gardener there whose son had gone to the war. The boy hadn’t returned, but the gardener never believed that his son was dead. He always said that his son was going to come home again. The gardener was a devout, bearded man, so bearded and devout that people at the hospital thought he might be an ideological spy, keeping an eye on the staff. The war at last ended. Prisoners began to return. Lists of returning prisoners were printed, and the gardener always came to ask Feyredoun’s mother whether his son’s name was among them. The name never was.

About three months before, there had been a mass funeral for three thousand unknown martyrs whose remains had been recovered from old battlefields. The air force had flown the boxes to the Martyrs’ Cemetery. Each box was covered with the Iranian flag (green, white, and red with the emblem of Allah in the middle). The boxes were stacked up in pyramids. Mehrdad had seen the ceremony on television and had been overwhelmed. The men whose remains were being buried had died in army uniform; Mehrdad, doing his military service, had worn that uniform; he had felt linked to the dead men. Telling the story in the sitting room, he plucked at his shirt, to indicate how much the uniform had meant to him.

One of the boxes contained the remains—“two bones,” as Mehrdad said—of the gardener’s son. Up to that moment the gardener had been fortified by his faith. Now he began to grieve. Just a week or two ago the gardener had died. There had been an autopsy at the hospital a few days before; it showed that the gardener’s stomach had been eaten up with cancer. That was what Feyredoun’s mother had wanted to talk to Mehrdad about. That was what had sent Mehrdad out to me saying, “I’ve been hearing miseries.”

When, many days before (which now seemed to me like many weeks before), I had asked Mehrdad what he felt about the war, he had said, “I
feel nothing about it.” He hadn’t meant that. What he had meant was what he had just said: “Sometimes I feel I can’t bear any more.”

There were rules and more rules. But young people, those who had known nothing but the religious state, were learning their own ways of disobedience. They had their bodies; their bodies were their own. There were stories of a sexual revolution among the young; and there were other forms of disobedience.

Feyredoun’s brother was nineteen. He was just five or six years younger than Feyredoun, but he belonged to a different generation. Feyredoun was a philosopher, a doubter, intellectually curious. Only a wall, he said, separated him from his brother. But while there were serious books on Feyredoun’s side of the wall, on his brother’s side there were photographs of football teams and a “heavy-metal” pop group, and a swastika. Feyredoun’s brother was a Nazi. He said that as an Iranian he was Aryan; therefore he was a Nazi. And he took being a Nazi seriously.

Sitting at the big table in the main room of the flat, Feyredoun told me that his brother and his friends had driven out the Jewish family who used to live next door. They had slashed the tires of the family’s car and broken their windows. The family had not only left Tehran; they had left the country.

Iran was not Europe or the United States. Iran had its own stresses, and the story Feyredoun was telling, with his own strange innocence, wasn’t just about young Iranian Nazis. His story was more about the difference now between the generations, the difference that five or six years had made. There was another aspect of this difference: Feyredoun’s Nazi brother and his friends were not frightened. Their principal sport now was to go out taunting the Guards, challenging them to arrest them. There were consequences: Feyredoun’s brother had often spent a day or so in jail.

The brother had been in the sitting room when Mehrdad and I arrived. He was sallow and very thin. I didn’t know anything about him then, and hadn’t thought about his black clothes. He had been polite but withdrawn, and I had seen him as someone else deprived and poor and lost, without an idea of a future, and more desperate than his brother or Mehrdad. Now that I had heard about him I wanted to talk more to him. But—and this, as Feyredoun said, was another sign of cultural change, a break with the past—the boy had gone out of the flat without telling anyone.

The revolution had bred strange children.

Feyredoun and Mehrdad took me to a new part of Tehran that was booming. It was like another city. It served the new rich, the people who had done well out of the revolution. It was in the northeast of Tehran, and was about ten years old. There was a new commercial center with expensive shops that served the new condominiums going up on one side. The people who lived there were traders and people who were cutting deals, Mehrdad said; not productive people. But in the commercial center their daughters moved with an ease and an allure that were immediately noticeable: high heels, slender legs in stone-washed jeans, stylish short chadors.

“And the skin,” Mehrdad said, with his own sensitivity to the beauty of young girls. The good skin that came with good air and good food and an idea of the future: the skin his own sister didn’t have.

Another kind of person, another kind of disobedience. In the high, well-lighted watch-post at the entrance to the commercial center, a young girl stood blank and unabashed before the Guard. “He’s got her,” Feyredoun said. Some un-Islamic behavior; something against the rules, something perhaps about showing too much of her hair. Mehrdad said, “He’ll talk to her and let her go.”

When we were in the coffee shop Mehrdad showed a girl in the reflection in the glass. He said, “She’s drugged.” The girl’s eyes were blurred, unfocused; her scarf had fallen very low at the back of her head. In the corner a khaki-clad Guard was talking to the proprietor. It was the big, yellow-jacketed waiter who came to the girl and told her to watch her chador. She merely touched the top of her head; and after a while the Guard, perhaps not wishing to make a scene, or to appear to have been challenged, went away. A little later, when the girl staggered out, I saw that her long chestnut hair was hanging out of her scarf at the back. It was a fashion, Mehrdad had told me some days before, and also a display of disobedience.

Later, on the road outside the commercial center, we saw a group of young people who had just been searched by the motorcycle Guards—for videos, compact discs, drugs, or other forbidden things.

9
 

I
SFAHAN AND
S
HIRAZ
, famous cities with romantic names, were receiving foreign tourists once again. I went to Isfahan first. I had no idea what to expect. No special tourist or cultural motif attached to the name. Java, much farther off, had the mystical Buddhist pyramid of Borobudur and the Hindu towers of Prambanan; India had the Taj Mahal and the sculptured temple towers of the south. But Isfahan, like Samarkand, was its romantic name alone. Such ideas as I had of its glory had come indirectly, through Indian painting. From certain over-wrought imperial Mogul pictures I knew that for the emperor Jehangir (who ruled from 1605 to 1627) the India of his empire and the Persia of Shah Abbas (who ruled from 1587 to 1629) were the central powers of the globe; no other country really mattered. Britain (even after Queen Elizabeth, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and Shakespeare) was far away, on the margin; the ambassador sent by King James in 1618 had a hard time getting attention from Jehangir.

A Hindu artist of Jehangir’s court spent six years with a Mogul embassy in Isfahan doing portraits of Shah Abbas, to enable Jehangir to understand, and at the same time to be at ease with, his great rival. It was those—sometimes deliberately shrunken—portraits of a short-legged Shah Abbas (with
a curved sword almost too big for him), rather than any concrete idea of his great city, that I carried in my head. So—such is the power of caricature—I was not ready for the splendor and extent and cosmopolitanism of Isfahan, its breathtaking confidence and inventiveness and, always, the rightness of its proportions: the immense main square (bigger than St. Mark’s in Venice), the bridges, the domes of both mosques and churches, the delicately colored tiles in whose color and pattern and effects large and small one could lose oneself, the mighty halls of audience. It was possible to understand Jehangir’s uneasiness: so much of Indian Mogul architecture was already here, in Shah Abbas’s Isfahan, in addition to so much else.