Magic Bus (14 page)

In this serene space, beneath the mountains where he spent the summers of his childhood, I can't stop thinking of Sahar.

‘Hey, Mister, where are you from?' shouts a bold young man, shattering my thoughts. I ignore him, walking away from him and his friends. He calls after me again. ‘We are Pink Floyd fans.'

This I had not expected.

‘The lunatic is in my head…' he quotes, arresting my step. ‘You lock the door, and throw away the key. There's someone in my head but it's not me.'

The four men are engineering students from Mashhad on a study visit to the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre, part of the ring of weapon and defence industries which surrounds the city. They're all in their late teens, with pale skin from indoor lives, wearing clean white shirts and black slacks. One of them carries the latest issue of the Ferdosi University magazine –
Fanoos Khial
or
Lantern of Dreams
– which features a six-page article on Pink Floyd.

‘We know all about Roger Waters.'

‘And Steve O'Rourke going to that great gig in the sky.'

Their knowledge of the band is better than mine. They also tell me that a previous issue of the magazine was devoted to Dylan interviews and reviews.

‘Hey, Mister, what is the song at the end of
Dark Side of the Moon
?' I am asked.

‘The song?'

‘If you listen to the very end of ‘Eclipse' and turn the volume up really high, you hear faint music.'

‘Paul is dead?' I suggest.

‘Some people do think it's a Beatles number.'

‘I heard it was classical music.'

‘You know, these songs are over thirty years old,' I say to the students.

Then, in the vaulted main sanctuary, standing on a black pavingstone under the great dome, the four young men start to sing. ‘And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too…' Other visitors stop and stare. Old men dozing in the cool of the
madraseh
sit up on their prayer blankets. ‘… I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.'

I'm shaken by their display, anxious of its impiety, denied my moments of both reflection and ‘absolute peace'.

As the clear echo reverberates a dozen times around the sanctuary, a stranger pushes forward, not meeting our eyes. He puts down his mobile phone and, as if to nullify their irreverence, chants up into the dome,
‘Allah Akbar.'
God is Great. Now, his words ring around the dome.

The agitated caretaker is at our side, hissing at the students in Farsi, shepherding them out of the mosque.

‘Mister, you know there is no dark side of the moon really,' one of them calls back to me, paraphrasing Pink Floyd's lyrics. ‘It's all dark.'

Salt stains leech across the earth. Sand dunes pool around mountains, stranding mouse-brown islands in a waterless sea. A tarred road slithers between scorched fields like a black serpent searching for water.

The Simorgh Top Train – air conditioned, on time and with a flask of tea by each padded seat – slices out of the stark Salt Desert, a gritty cyclone in its wake, and east into Khorasan province, ‘the land of the sunrise'. Ahead on the wide plain lies Mashhad, Iran's most sacred and remote city. Its name means Place of Martyrdom, for here the eighth Shi'ite
imam
, Reza, a direct descendant of Mohammed, was interred in
AD
817. Here, too, in 1970, Penny ate a noxious banana pancake.

I'm sharing this leg of the trail with 15 million pilgrims who every year cross the flat and featureless plain to pray at the Holy Shrine. But this Friday morning, the city's streets are almost deserted. I walk alone from the station. Beneath leafy
chenar
trees, a grocer lays out his trays of aubergines and carrots. A baker shapes a ball of dough, pounds it flat, then tosses it in the oven. A single
mullah
, in long, collarless gown, rides past me on a motorbike.

At the reception desk of my hotel, a dozen Turkmen girls with bulging suitcases and boxes of new kitchen appliances are checking out. I assume they are religious tourists, escaping both the paucity of consumer goods and restrictions of Islam at home. Until the loud-mouthed Turjik beside me nods at them and asks the porter in Farsi, ‘Do they use
arz
?' Meaning foreign currency.

‘Not
arz
,' the porter replies, lowering his eyes, ‘but
darz
.' Meaning slot.

Not every hotel guest uses their complimentary prayer-mat.

*

‘Shall we just bum around together?'

Mashhad's broad, baking avenues burst from the Holy Shrine like the points of a star. I'm jostled by the crowds, trying to make notes, when Nazzer Poor spots me, drives up on to the pavement and almost knocks down a white-robed Afghan in his rush to shake my hand.

‘You are my guest,' he says.

Which won't mean his services are free.

Nazzer is a professional tour-guide, a sweet-tongued humanist who arouses my interest at first sight. He's about sixty, devout and ebullient, with unblemished good looks. His beaming face is punctuated by jet-black eyebrows between a white goatee and groomed, silver hair.

‘What can I show you of our sacred city?' he asks.

I tell Nazzer I want to see the shrine and the Martyrs' Cemetery.

‘So you are writing the new Koran.'

‘I'm writing a travel book, not a guidebook.'

‘
Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Let's Go
: they are the travellers' bibles.'

‘You make them sound blasphemous,' I say.

‘Not at all. Our government wishes foreign tourists to be our political envoys, so to speak, to show the world that life in Iran is good.' He's quoting the official line, looking at the reflection in a shop window, but whether of himself or the people around us, I cannot tell. ‘You are most welcome here.'

Nazzer manages to park his car without injuring another worshipper and we join the press of rich Bahrainis and impoverished Azerbaijanis converging on the vast, walled complex. He launches into a routine history of
ziyarah
as we push towards the golden domes of the shrine.

‘
Ziyarah
or pilgrimage is probably the most important act of a Shi'ite's life… a deeply significant expression of faith… ensuring a place in paradise…'

On woven carpets, barefoot Kuwaiti pilgrims in voluminous robes sing, drink green tea, read the Koran. Bands of Caucasian Turkmen hustle between the airy courtyards. Three boys brandish
plastic revolvers, chasing one another around a clutch of mourners and an open wooden coffin. In the low concrete crypt, the deceased are laid to rest on payment of a $10,000 fee. The air – and the devotion – are hot. The Holy Shrine has little of Isfahan's beauty, none of its peace or humility, but I am moved by the outpouring of prayer.

‘Constructed between 1405 and 1416, this exquisite building…' Nazzer babbles, leading me around the eight gold-tiled minarets, through grandiose arched doorways and into the Great Mosque of Gohar Shad. He rattles off historical dates and hands me a souvenir prayer disc of Meccan clay. In the Qods Courtyard with its carved drinking fountain dedicated to Palestinian martyrs, he recites the improvements made to the shrine since the Revolution. Then he moves on to criticize the Shah.

‘That snake was an empty drum, the grasping puppet of America. He banned the
chador
and allowed girls to wear tight blouses that showed off their overhead lamps.' He shakes his head on cue. ‘The idiot tried to westernize Iran.'

‘Westernize or modernize?' I ask him.

‘This is not New York, you know,' he answers, disregarding the distinction. ‘The Shah never understood that ours is a traditional society.'

In this most reverent place, I suddenly want to tease impiety out of him. I want to shake him – and myself – out of regurgitating a complacent, unquestioning view of the world. So I tell him about Penny.

His diatribe falters.

‘The word “hippie” entered our language,' he says in a different tone, ‘to mean an idealist who takes life easy.'

‘Did the hippies help to spark the Revolution?' I ask, again trying to provoke him.

Nazzer laughs in shock, holding his hand over his mouth. He searches for the correct response from the prepared text.

‘The hippies who crossed Iran were… on a kind of pilgrimage,' he says.

I shake my head. Pilgrimage seems to be a means of reinforcing
certainties of faith. Independent travel can be about challenging one's idea of living.

Nazzer's mouth moves but no words escape. He considers my question again. A perplexed look crosses his face. He glances around the courtyard. He presses his lips together. ‘Let's go somewhere else,' he replies.

The air in the Hezardestan Tea House is as cool and still as the ornamental fish in its central blue-tiled pond. Its walls and pillars are decorated with scenes from Ferdosi's
Shah-namah
, the Iranian
Iliad
which harks back to an older, pre-Islamic Iran. Guests descend a discreet flight of stairs, settle themselves cross-legged on sofas, wait for tea and
qalyan
water pipes, moving as infrequently as the fish. If a guest does stir himself to talk, he – or she, for there are a handful of couples here – does so in the lightest voice.

‘In 1967, I was a young conscript at Do-qaram on the Afghan border,' says Nazzer, letting drop both hyperbole and facade. ‘One day, a group of hippies – three boys and a girl – came through in a van. They wanted to relieve themselves, but there was no toilet, only one small bush. So when the woman crouched behind it, I turned my binoculars towards her.'

‘What did you see?' I ask him.

‘Nothing. Apart from another bush.'

He smiles as if to hide his embarrassment, though I'm sure he feels none. According to the Koran, men and women should not let their pubic hair grow longer than ‘a grain of wheat'.

‘That sight was like the first bite of a forbidden fruit,' he hurries on. ‘Next, I heard about an oasis, a little paradise fed by artesian wells near the border, where hippies often stopped to sunbathe and swim.'

‘And you spied on them there too?'

‘Who does not love to see a naked woman? Who can ignore such perfection?' he says, pleasure in his voice. ‘An Iranian man may have seven or eight children, yet he will never have seen his wife unclothed. I went there often.'

Again, I wonder aloud if the hippies had in some small way strengthened the traditionalists' anti-Western resolve; the vaunting
of personal freedom helping to send an unsettled nation reeling back towards an antique world.

‘Their revolution changed
my
life,' Nazzer concedes, his eyes now shining. ‘After the army, I had decided to go into law. One day in Vahdat Park I met – what did you call him? – an Intrepid? In our short encounter, he taught me that one of the best subjects in the world is human science: that is, human relations, human rights, how complicated it is to be a human.'

Before my eyes, Nazzer Poor is transformed from the dutiful, rote-reeling guide. His smile is no longer forced.

‘That philosophy moved me,' he nods in agreement. ‘I realized then that under the Shah our lawyers were cowards. They didn't try to protect those who were less than equal. They only wanted power and influence for themselves. A door opened and I walked through it to find – as you said – a different idea of living.'

‘How?' I ask.

‘By moving to a commune in Yorkshire.'

Now I laugh out loud. Few places on earth could be more different – and damper – than sun-struck Mashhad.

‘A nudist commune,' he adds.

Iranians will never cease to amaze me.

‘To walk naked in the open air, to allow the body its natural allocation of sunshine.'

‘In Yorkshire?' I repeat.

‘Not far from Wetherby,' he says. ‘In those days, many of us – in Iran and the West – believed that a sickness hung over society, a society based on the accumulation of capital and the suppression of the underprivileged. I joined a community of equals and waited for the next revolution.'

‘Didn't you get cold?' I ask.

‘I grew Elvis Presley sideburns.'

In the late sixties, at the height of the commune movement, many hundreds of co-operatives, kibbutzes and collective squats operated around the world. In Welsh valleys, on the West Bank and in Nicaraguan jungles, dreamers, escapists, radical Shakers and naturist-socialists built earthly utopias, experimenting in post-modern
survival, group marriage and ‘non-acquisitive contentment'. Publications like
Resurgence, Akwasasne News
and
Country Bizarre
held the movement together, linking the isolated communities. But by the end of the seventies, the euphoria of most communards became bogged down in mud and jealousy. Some communes even found themselves in the middle of war zones.

‘In 1979, I came home. Joyfully. During the Shah's years, a million Iranians – engineers, intellectuals, artists – had left the country. After the Revolution, many of us came back.'

‘Only to emigrate again in even greater numbers,' I say.

‘We thought we were putting our ideals into practice. We trusted in perfection, in equality, in
jamé tohidi
– a pure society of believers. I shared the dream of living and working in a community where everyone served a common good. At the beginning it was altogether superior to Yorkshire.'

I try to imagine this devout, dutiful guide, after striding naked across the Moors in the name of one revolution, donning green battle fatigues to help to fight another. In both cases, he believed himself to be healing a sick society. I raise my glass of tea to Nazzer and to his dreams.

‘That was our utopia,' he smiles. ‘But within a year I wanted to run away into the ground like water.'