Granta 125: After the War (15 page)

A fortnight later I was back drinking chocolate in the housemistress’s apartment to watch Ayatollah Khomeini’s jet land at Mehrabad Airport. Senior air force commanders loyal to the exiled Shah begged him to permit them to shoot the plane down. As no airline would risk having him on board as a passenger, the Ayatollah had been obliged to charter an aircraft from Air France. The plane circled Tehran three times before it landed. There were scenes of jubilant expectation. And then, there on the TV screen standing at the top of the aircraft steps was the Ayatollah: a man seemingly composed entirely of a black turban, white beard, a long black gown and a pair of astonishing eyebrows. His image, painted on walls all over Tehran and now held high on the placards of the waiting masses, had become as iconic as the one of Che Guevara on my sweatshirt. Standing next to the captain of the aircraft the Ayatollah was unsmiling. Shortly before take-off, a foreign journalist had asked him how he felt. He replied: ‘How I feel? Nothing.’

I
returned to Iran twelve centuries before I left. According to the entry and exit stamps on my passport, my last visit to the country had taken place in 2537. The Imperial calendar had been replaced with the Islamic calendar since then, so the stamp in my passport gave the current year as 1357.

We were invited to lunch at the home of an Iranian couple. At the door rosewater was sprinkled on our heads, and we were offered fennel seeds and mint. Later we ate lamb on the balcony and in the shade of pomegranate trees.

A woman called N. asked if she might join me. I was at an age when I was still surprised when anyone addressed me directly; moreover, N. asked questions and actually listened to my replies, my views of the Revolution. She was pretty, with a few strands of silver in her auburn curls; she laughed and spoke with her hands. She was an artist and a supporter of the Revolution, a left-winger whose father had been imprisoned under the Shah. N. had recently returned from California to set up studio in Tehran. One of her paintings hung on the wall of the house. She led me through to the sitting room to see it: a huge piece, heavy streaks of red paint on a dark background. When it was time to go we gave N. a lift and she sat in the front seat, flirted with my stepfather and told my elder brother he was handsome. We dropped her off and she dipped her head back inside the car and invited my brother to have lunch with her the next day without bothering to include the rest of us. I watched her walk away. I had never met a woman like N.

At midday her car and driver arrived to collect my brother and much later that afternoon I sat on the veranda and waited for him to come back. I wasn’t jealous, I wanted to know about his day, but all he would tell me was that they had had lunch.

Of all the people I met in Tehran at that time, N. seemed to embody the spirit of 1979. That summer the Revolution still belonged to everyone; after the repression of the Shah’s era, the artists, the poets, the writers were heady with the possibilities of liberty.

Gone was January’s dark and frigid city. This year Nowruz had brought a truly new beginning. The mood in Iran was euphoric, and the whiff of freedom still hung like fireworks’ smoke in the air. The Shah had taken with him the curfew, the power outages, the water shortages. Mrs P.’s bakery was open and people queued to buy her dainties as before. The bazaar was open. We had a swimming pool and in the dry heat of the Tehran summer I spent my days diving in and out of the water.

A hedge of cypress trees separated our house from the house next door and where there was a gap I would sometimes I see a boy
– a young man really – watching us swim. On occasion I would nod or wave and he would wave back. One day I said hello and told him my name. I assumed he lived in the house next door but discovered later that he was the caretaker’s son. He didn’t speak any English and so we went back to nodding and waving.

One day he appeared at the gap in the hedge with a friend around his own age. By then my sister had joined us from a stay in France. She was seventeen and newly sophisticated; the friend spoke English, had a motorbike and a quiff. He gave us each a ride around the block. Another time he turned up in a car (borrowed, as the bike had been) and we went driving around the neighbourhood with no destination in mind. A few streets from home we ran into an impromptu roadblock. The checkpoints were no longer manned by the army but by the Komiteh, or Revolutionary Committees, who operated under the auspices of the mosques and drew their membership from the local youth. During the Revolution the Komiteh had been Khomeini’s foot soldiers: whipping up protests, acting as vigilantes, tracking down supporters of the Shah’s regime, issuing beatings. Increasingly they saw it as their role to enforce the new Islamic orthodoxy and arrested people arbitrarily for anti-revolutionary behaviour. The ones who stopped us were young, wore jeans and T-shirts and carried automatic weapons. They crowded around the car and several of them leaned in through the windows staring at us. They demanded to know what we were doing in the car.

Our companions began by joshing, if a little nervously. They reached out of the window and shook hands with a few of the Komiteh guys. Cigarettes were offered and accepted, but not lit. The boys still didn’t let us through. A lot of questions were being asked, that much was evident, though the conversation was entirely in Farsi. Our friends offered wordy explanations, upturned palms, apologetic shrugs and lot of nods and some head-shaking. Once they even turned to look at us in the back of the car as if surprised to find us there. Finally one of the checkpoint guards took a step backwards and I saw that they were going to let us go; the rest stood clear of
the car, but they didn’t raise the barrier. Our driver executed a swift three-point turn and we drove straight back home.

I have long been interested in beginnings: to trace things back, from the first flap of the butterfly’s wings to the hurricane. I wonder if my interest originated in Iran when I was fifteen years old and I saw how when things start, they start small. The summer of 1979, the butterfly had already taken to the air. Liberals and left-wingers, secular Muslims and non-Muslims had supported Khomeini because they believed him when he said he had no desire for power and they believed only he could muster the authority to oust the Shah. Be careful what you wish for. But when you are in prison you will wish for anything other than to be in the place you find yourself. Shortly before we were stopped by the Komiteh, the clergy had tried to force an edict through the provisional government which would oblige women to wear Islamic attire in the workplace; they’d backed down in the face of protest. By then beaches and sports events had become segregated; the huge swathes of grey were all those parts of everyday life in which behaviour had not yet been mandated by the law: men and women walking, dining, driving together, men and women talking to each other. What I had witnessed at the checkpoint was a show of strength. The Islamists were gradually gaining power over the liberals in the government and in the streets.

A viscous silence had filled the car, but by the time we got home the boys were trying to make light of what had happened. They only tapped their forefingers to their temples and shook their heads. Thus we neglected to learn our lesson, and instead we went for a swim in the pool at my parents’ house, laughing and splashing until the enraged caretaker burst through the hedge and ordered us all out of the water. That evening when my stepfather came home I ran down the steps to greet him, fussing over him under the gaze of the caretaker, who planned, I believed, to report me to my stepfather for my behaviour and now waited at the gap in the hedge for his moment. But I did not leave my stepfather’s side until eventually I saw him give up and turn away.

I was afraid I’d end up having to go with my stepfather down to the local police station to be reprimanded by the Komiteh. I think also I was frightened of being thought a fool. The whole of my adolescence, my transition away from girlhood, seemed marked by a heavy sense that I ought to know better, should conduct myself with more propriety, be more dignified. I now seemed capable of earning disapproval simply by being the way I had always been. I had swum with boys hundreds of times, including that summer in our pool. I’d never ridden on a motorbike or in a car alone with boys before, and now I had done so with dramatic consequences. I could not work out what I would say in my defence, or indeed exactly what it was I was being charged with.

In the end nothing bad happened to me. The caretaker never made his report; the only difference was that next day the caretaker’s son was gone. I did not see him again.

I
n the early months of the 1979 Revolution the alliances that had brought down the Shah held together, but by summer the liberals, the left-wingers and the hardliners were battling for control of the Revolution. The liberals had already lost, but didn’t know it yet. The leftists were being edged out, and some were accused of being counter-revolutionaries. The provisional government under Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan was trying to draft a new constitution and everyone – the women’s groups, the clergy, students, writers and artists – wanted a say. The Revolutionary Council who controlled the Komiteh was becoming increasingly bullish and the prime minister (who kept trying to resign only to have his offers turned down by Khomeini) had agreed to a power share. There were daily executions: men who had been part of the Shah’s regime. Photographs of their corpses appeared on the front page of newspapers: naked barrel chests with grey chest hair, half-open eyes, bloodied faces, unbuttoned flies. In the summer of 1979 hope and vengeance ran hand in hand.

The museums were open again and one day I was invited to visit a small, private museum in one of the suburbs of Tehran. The building had been the house of a wealthy trader a century ago. Inside the courtyard the sound of traffic died away, fountains played. Upstairs in a vast, silent room I stood before a hunting scene: turbaned men on horseback chased deer; in the centre a lion clawed the back of a gazelle; at the edges fish swam in streams. In another scene on another carpet a woman reclined in the arms of her lover; a man and a woman rested under a tree; a third man invited a woman to sit by him.

Two countries exist in the space where Iran lies on the map: there is Iran and there is Persia. The Shah’s father lovingly recreated Persia, replacing the Islamic lunar calendar with the Persian solar one, purging Arabic words from Farsi and banning the veil. He also set about crafting a modern state out of an underdeveloped land ruled by clerics. His Iran, the one he set about creating, was an oil-rich nation of highways and tall buildings. The Iran of the Western imagination, on the other hand, is home to a population given to outbreaks of religious hysteria and governed by stern mullahs obsessed with female apparel. Neither of these countries, of course, really exists. But if you were to look for them, Isfahan is where you might find Persia, while the Holy City of Qom is Iran.

We drove out of Tehran one weekend, along hot tar roads south to Isfahan: stretches of moonscape interrupted by flashes of green, a spread of irrigated fields and quiet groves where once or twice we stopped to picnic and where I saw, for the first time, peacocks in the wild, and experienced the sudden shock of their unearthly beauty. In Isfahan, twice capital of Persia, we stayed at the Shah Abbas Hotel which was, as far as I recall, entirely empty of guests apart from us. The hotel, the most luxurious in the city, was built on the site of a fourteenth-century caravanserai when the city was part of the silk route. Now it was offering pretty good discounts on account of the lack of business, otherwise I am sure we would never have been able to afford it. Though Isfahan had given its share of martyrs to the Revolution, there was far less evidence of the unrest here: no
roadblocks, no graffiti or burned buildings. The turquoise domes of the city’s mosques, walls covered in mosaics of the same colour, were reflected in ornamental pools of water. We took photographs of ourselves standing at the iwan entrance and wandered through the bazaar.

How melodic a word is ‘Isfahan’. Is-fa-han. How short and sharp is the word ‘Qom’. The Holy City of Qom is where the Ayatollah lived before exile and where he returned as soon as he stepped off the Air France plane. To Qom and into seclusion, from where he insisted that he did not wish to be leader, just a spiritual adviser to the nation. He never uttered the word ‘theocracy’. On our way back to Tehran, after our weekend in Isfahan, we stopped in Qom, in the main square, a huge expanse of dust in my memory, a barren football field, with a few stalls around the edges and people going to and coming from the mosque. Neither my mother, sister nor I were allowed into the mosque unless we were veiled. My mother borrowed a chador from a local stall; my sister and I refused to wear one and so were obliged to wait outside. We stood: unchaperoned, unveiled, in the middle of Iran’s holiest city, beneath the eye of the sun and of the Ayatollah. Soon enough we began to attract attention. There was no way of forgetting you were female in Iran. In Tehran I’d been groped by a middle-aged man as I took a stroll round our neighbourhood. Whenever we visited the bazaar, Ali Baba trotted alongside us, trying to shield our bodies from men’s stares with his bulk. Sometimes he even spread his arms out like a chicken protecting her chicks. In Qom, our decision not to join our parents and brothers was looking decidedly problematic within minutes. We folded our arms across our chests and sat on a low wall until a stallholder, the same one who had lent my mother a chador, invited us to conceal our immodesty beneath the awning of his stall.

A few weeks after we passed through Qom the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci went to the city to interview the Ayatollah. As a condition of the interview she was told that she must be veiled in the Ayatollah’s presence. She complied but then questioned him about
the position of women within Islam, and the wearing of the veil in particular, until Khomeini snapped: ‘If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women,’ which is a pretty funny answer, but perhaps was not intended to be. Fallaci wrenched off her chador and the Ayatollah had her thrown out.