Authors: Ramita Navai
‘You’ve been away a while.’ The young officer did not look up as he flicked through the passport. ‘And now you’ve decided to come back.’ Still flicking. ‘After all these years.’ He picked the plastic corner of the first page.
Dariush could not remember being this scared since he was a little boy. He slid his tongue along the hard plastic side of the cyanide pill lodged between his gum and cheek. They had told him the regime had a list of all their names, a blacklist of dissidents wanted by the state. They had said that prison would mean torture and a slow death.
The officer was staring at him. ‘Why did you leave?’
‘My parents left because of the war, I wish I’d stayed but they took me.’ He had answered too quickly.
‘Why are you back?’ The man scanned his passport. It had cost
20
,
000
US dollars from a Shia militant in Baghdad who had supplied passports for some big names. It was a work of art; you could not buy a better fake.
‘I’ve come to see some relatives. I – I miss my country,’ his voice was trembling. The officer leant over his desk and pressed his hand on Dariush’s chest.
‘Your heart’s beating like a little sparrow,’ he said. Then he burst out laughing and tossed Dariush’s passport across the counter.
‘You new ones, you’re always so scared. Don’t believe what you read mate, we won’t eat you. You’ll see life is better for people like you here. You’ll never leave.’
It was as easy as that, returning to the country that had haunted his every day since he had fled the revolution with his mother over twenty years ago. It seemed almost too easy. He should be cautious, as they might still be onto him. Dariush knew Iranians were masters of double-bluffing.
As the Group had forewarned him, his bags had to be X-rayed before he was allowed out. The tightened security wasn’t just regime paranoia or fear of separatist movements. It was also fear of people like him, it was fear of the MEK, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, the Warriors of the People.
It had been just over a year since Dariush had officially joined the MEK. His mother, a primary school teacher, had reacted angrily when he had first started to talk about them. The MEK had played a crucial role in the
1979
Islamic Revolution that brought down the Shah and Dariush’s mother blamed them as much as the Islamists for having ruined her life. She had hoped he was going through a phase; the MEK were Iran’s first modern Islamic Revolutionaries and she remembered how, as a student, some of her own friends had been impressed by their talk of socialist values and equality. But she began to start to notice more serious changes in Dariush; he began praying, and even though she practised her faith, her son’s new-found religiosity unsettled her. He had started lecturing everyone around him about the
sazman
, the organization – the Group – showing photographs of MEK prisoners of conscience. She argued back, reeling off anecdotes about family friends who had become involved and been brainwashed and separated from their loved ones. His mother had been proud of his American education and of their new life in a small town near Washington, DC. She could not abide watching him pouring all his savings and earnings into the Group’s bank account. Dariush did not accept a word of what she said. He started spending less and less time visiting home until he stopped calling her. She begged him to leave the MEK. Instead, he cut her out of his life.
Dariush stepped out into the early-morning spring sky, breathing in the dusty smell of Tehran. It was the smell of his childhood: mothballs, dried herbs, earth and petrol. He was home.
Walking to the taxi queue he savoured every small step, his head jolting around like a pigeon scanning for food. The famil-iarity was almost overbearing; everywhere he looked it was as if he were surrounded by relatives. He had never felt such a strong sense of belonging, not even with the Group.
‘Listen, we haven’t got all day, get in the car or out the queue.’ A man in a bib and a clipboard was staring at him.
‘Sorry, deep in thought. Vali Asr Street, Parkway, please.’
Dariush had been surprised when the instructions came to meet in north Tehran, but the Group had learnt from bitter experience that there are few places in the city where they could blend in. People are less interested in your business on the streets of north Tehran; too involved in their own conversations and recoiling at anything that may prick the bubble in which they live. In the early days, first meetings between an operative and his handler used to happen in secluded downtown parks, but now those were full of drug addicts, dealers and cops. Even when there appears to be no one around, in every alley and corner in downtown Tehran there are hidden eyes and ears. Once, a meeting of comrades near the bazaar had gone disastrously wrong. Whispers of a hushed conversation spread through the area. Two group members saw the police coming and ran for their lives. They lived in hiding for three months before they were smuggled out on donkeys over freezing mountains by outlaw Kurds, having persuaded them that they were student protesters, for the Kurds would never have taken them if they had known they were MEK members. They still remember how the MEK helped the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein battle Kurdish uprisings. Under the Shah, most political prisoners and those executed on political grounds were members of the MEK and that had helped swell their support. Just two years after the revolution, the MEK had half a million active followers. Feeling threatened by its burgeoning power, the real men behind the Islamic Revolution – the clerics and the fundamentalists – did what they would repeatedly do when faced with a threat from within: they turned against their own. Calling MEK members
monafeqin
, hypocrites colluding with imperialist Western powers to wage an unholy war, the revolutionaries hanged or shot thousands as part of a systematic cleansing. Survivors escaped to Iraq, where Saddam gave them protection and installed them in Camp Ashraf, a stretch of land north of Baghdad where he armed and trained them. The MEK had even joined the Iraqi army to fight against Iranian soldiers during the Iran–Iraq war, killing many of their own countrymen. That is when attitudes towards them shifted.
‘God, you haven’t been here for a while, where d’you get that accent from? Sorry sir, I don’t mean to be rude, but that accent’s thicker than George Bush’s – it’s got to be America?’
The driver stretched his neck as he laughed and gave him the once-over in his rear-view mirror. Dariush winced.
‘Yes, America, near Washington. But we never wanted to leave Iran, we had no choice.’ He was apologizing.
‘Twenty years! You’ve earned that accent, not like these rich kids who go on holiday for a week and come back pretending they’ve forgotten their Farsi. Ah, the Great Satan, what I’d give to go and live with that devil. My girlfriend spent three days queuing up at the US consulate in Istanbul and they practically laughed in her face. We’re all terrorists you know.’ He turned up the tinny Euro-techno that was softly thudding away. When Dariush had fled, Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ had been a taxi favourite.
Even though the windows were all shut, cold streams of wind blew through the cracks and gaps of the white Peykan, Iran’s improvised version of the
1960
s Hillman Hunter, as it thundered along, full-throttle.
There is only one driving speed in Tehran: the fastest your machine will go. The battered old Peykans can still manage a lurching eighty miles an hour with a new engine, nearly as good as any Peugeot, the middle-class car of choice. The Group had joked it was more likely Dariush would die on Tehran’s roads than at the hands of the regime, and they were probably right. Mangled cars, bloodied passengers and even dead ones lying on the tarmac are familiar sights in Tehran. Of course the traffic was also a major concern for the Group; they had decided on using a motorbike as the getaway vehicle, as a car would get stuck. But at this time of day the freeway was eerily clear. Dariush watched Tehran unfold from his window, his eyes tracking the rise and fall of houses, apartment blocks, offices, hospitals and schools.
He had not remembered Tehran being so ugly. His memories were of old stately homes, winding alleys, elegant French-built apartments; villas and orchards and gardens; a clean city with no traffic. But now all he could see was an unsightly mash of grey concrete slabs, gaudy blocks of flecked marble, towering mock-Grecian pillars and primary-coloured plastic piping for good measure. They had pissed all over it. Dariush clenched his teeth shut as the hate convulsed him. The anger was always a relief. There were moments when he could feel the rage dissipating from his body, it was a physical sensation; his muscles would loosen and his chest would rise. He would panic in anticipation of losing his motivation, of giving up the struggle. But not now. They had taken over his city, and he was ready.
The taxi turned into Vali Asr Street, the road that reminds all Tehranis of home. At first glance Vali Asr looked more or less the same. There were still the greengrocers, the boutiques, the cafés and restaurants, the glitzy shop fronts and the hawkers. Only the bars were gone, the whisky joints his parents loved, the smoky billiard halls open all night, the discos with their queues outside. It pained him to admit that Tehran was better off without all these things – the pernicious, corrupting influence of the West that had taken root in his country and cracked the foundations of his land. It pained him because this was the time his parents had been happiest, dancing and drinking up and down Pahlavi Street. But it also hurt Dariush to think his parents had indulged in a culture that was so louche. He had tried to exonerate them in his mind; they had simply embraced the aspirations of any young middle-class Tehrani in the
1970
s. But he had turned his back on all that. The Group had shown him the way and he knew God was watching.
The roads were not so empty now, the city slowly crawling out of its slumber. An old, bent man pushing a wheelbarrow stacked with oranges edged past the car. Despite a full head of hair, he looked
100
years old, and sounded even older, his frail croaks muffled by the engines and snatched by the spring breeze.
‘Poor old thing. OI, GRANDDAD, HOW MUCH?’ The driver beckoned him over.
‘Three hundred tomans for a kilo of oranges my son, they’re fresh today, picked from the sweet soil of Mosha,’ whispered the old man, lifting his small eyes, shimmering with cataracts, from under his hunched back. Even his clothes looked ancient: a threadbare, stained shirt with incongruously starched collar and cuffs hung from his little emaciated body, the worn folds of his peasant trousers billowing towards the ground.
‘Granddad, you’ve got more hair than me and him put together – keep the change.’
‘It’s the only thing I’ve got more of than anyone else,’ the old man’s smiling gums glistened, ‘may God give you a long life.’ The taxi rattled forward and the driver shook his head at the image of the old farmer in his rear-view mirror. ‘Even if he sells all the fruit from his village, that guy still won’t have enough to feed a family. This ain’t living, it ain’t even surviving. This city’s fucked.’
The Peykan emerged from the tunnel of trees into Parkway, a huge concrete intersection stuffed with people and cars zigzagging in every direction underneath a flyover. The driver stopped at an island in the middle, clipping the side of an office worker’s briefcase. The man didn’t even bother turning his head as he waded out into the roar. Dariush got out of the taxi and into the middle of the morning mayhem. He realized there would be no lull and he would have to cross the road Iranian style, throwing himself into the oncoming traffic. It took him over five minutes to cross the ten yards to the other side; each time he inched forward a car or a motorbike screamed towards him. Finally an old woman in a chador told him to follow her, and as her hefty body waddled through the onslaught of cars she told him he must have been away a long time. He sighed.
Dariush walked north to a café on the corner of Vali Asr and Fereshteh Street. It had been open for hours, serving
kalepacheh
breakfasts, an entire sheep’s head: tongue, eyes, cheeks and all. It looked more like a laboratory than a café, with shiny white tiles on every wall and surface. The waiters even wore spotless lab coats as they dished out the dissected cuts of soft, slippery meat, the unforgiving glare of the high-voltage strip lights piercing through every slither of fat and muscle on the cheap white china plates. Dariush breathed in the sweet, warm stink of disintegrating flesh, bones and cartilage. His mother had tried to make
kalehpacheh
in America a few times. They had eaten it glumly, in silence, for
kalehpacheh
is a man’s dish and it reminded them of his father, who could make it better than anyone. His father, a devout monarchist, had been a civil servant in the Shah’s government. When the militia had been roaming the streets and rounding up anyone they could find, he had been taken in for questioning and was never seen again.
Dariush spotted an empty table at the back, near the kitchen counter. He weaved his way through the room and, as he sat down, a small glass of tea was banged on the table by a passing waiter. Behind him, steel pots puffed out streams of steam, the gentle murmur of boiling broth a steady hum underneath clashing plates and voices. He had kept an eye out in the taxi to see if he was being followed. From where he was sitting he had a clear view across the restaurant to outside. Nobody. He was early. He relaxed a little, allowing himself to survey the room.
The diners were a curious mix. Bearded lone workmen and office clerks eating quickly, heads bowed. Old regulars in pressed shirts trading banter across the tables, their breakfast rituals unchanged for decades. Bright-eyed ramblers in windcheaters and woolly socks fuelling themselves after treks in the Alborz mountains, walking sticks and rucksacks propped up against the tables. They ate the slowest, enjoying every morsel after their dawn summit visits, having beaten the merciless sun and the trails clogged up with the amateurs.