Magic Bus (9 page)

During the sixties, Iran was the ‘in-between' country: drugs
were illegal, torture was common and Islam was a religion too practical and grounded to appeal to most mystic-seeking hippies. No one came to Tehran to get high. ‘Iran is a repressive police state,' wrote one early Intrepid. ‘Get through it fast.' Then the Iranian Revolution closed the trail altogether. Only last year did the easing of restrictions and eviction of the Taliban from Afghanistan reopen the borders. But the abiding stereotype of angry crowds chanting ‘Death to America' had done little to revitalize the country's appeal to travellers.

At the border bus station, a detachment of money-changers, not Revolutionary Guards, besieged me. I hustled on to the departing Tabriz Express. Its bony-faced driver stared with a look akin to shock, then asked me in French, ‘In heaven's name, why are you in Iran?' I told him as we circled a dirt roundabout crowned by a concrete strawberry. ‘You stay tonight in Tabriz and we talk about Paris,' proposed Babak, hitting sixty miles an hour while turning around to shake my hand.

‘I hope to catch a connection to Tehran,' I said.

‘We talk about Paris, then we go girl-watching.'

Babak, aged thirty-six, was a war veteran and bus-driving hero. He tapped his leg and it made a metallic sound. The son of a dead
imam
, he had been gassed in Abadan and shot in the trenches during the Iran–Iraq war – ‘the Iraq-imposed war', as he called it. His physical injuries cured him of the mania that martyrdom was a path to salvation. He had a short shock of hair and shoulders which hunched over the wheel. At the lunchtime prayer stop he shared his plate of eggy
kuku
and cardboard
lavash
bread and grilled me with questions. What was my religion? How much did I earn? When will America attack Iran? He didn't answer my questions about women's non-existent rights, rigged elections or the nuclear-weapons programme in return. Instead, he told me about his love of foreign travel.

‘Where have you been?' I asked him.

‘Only Turkey so far,' he said, making a coarse gesture with his fingers. ‘But one day I will see the whole world.'

Beneath a scalding sky the colour of thin milk, the bus hummed
along the new highway, running fast, with me aboard feeling elated, unleashed, like an arrow shooting east towards India. Babak wanted to be hospitable. Understood. Accepted by me. He said he lived alone. At least only with a sister. I decided to accept his invitation. And to wash my clothes. They hadn't seen soap since Istanbul and had started to smell like salted fish.

‘You want to know about Iranian women,' Babak told me later in Bozorg Square, a wealthy northern suburb of Tabriz. In my starchy, sun-dried shirt and crumpled chinos I was the worst-dressed man at the ice-cream parlour. Around us, thousands of stylish, single Iranians strolled under the trees, enjoying the balmy evening air, greeting friends in English. ‘
Salam
. Hello hello. I love you.' I saw no
mullah
's turbans.

‘Of course you do, you are a young man,' Babak went on, watching the promenaders. ‘And I will tell you all about them.' He licked a spoonful of sticky honey ice-cream. ‘In Tabriz, there are two types of women: the proper, religious ones who hide behind the
chador
and these enticing girls who reveal themselves, pushing their headscarves back one centimetre every year. Look at her, wearing sandals without socks.' His eyes searched my face. He dropped his voice. ‘You also want to know about virgins.'

In truth, I wanted to know the times of the Tehran bus.

‘Young women must be intact when they marry,' he explained. ‘It is a father's job to protect his daughters, not to let them walk late at night. If there is not a little blood the first time, then the marriage can be cancelled.'

‘And the man?'

‘You cannot tell if a man is a virgin or not.'

For my entertainment, he engaged three college students at the next table in conversation, pretending to be an American. The girls didn't believe him, wouldn't meet our eyes, but were pleased to practise their English. One asked me, ‘What you say that I never have boyfriend?'

Babak presented Tabriz as Iran's most liberal city, which it was, given its proximity to the western border. In its time the oasis had
served as a capital for the Mongols, Persians and Azerbaijanis. Turkish was once the only language heard in its brick-vaulted bazaars. The city had been occupied by the Russians during two world wars. Yet, in Babak, as in the country as a whole, there was much theatre at play: in his obsession with sex, in the schizophrenic division between private and public life, in Tehran demonizing America for domestic advantage. Concealment was part of life in Iran.

‘Let's go look at the prostitutes,' suggested Babak, pandering to a stereotype, rising to his feet, moving without grace.

I couldn't imagine a prostitute in a
chador
. Nor could I fathom the dichotomy in him, a cocksure certainty undermined by liberal aspirations. He wanted to show me tolerant Iran yet insisted that men and women should not shake hands in public. He boasted of Persia's deep-rooted civilization yet hungered for details of celebrity culture. He was proud of his self-sufficient republic but admitted that the revolution had been a bitter, failed experiment.

‘You can spot a whore by the way she chews gum and wears strong lipstick,' he pointed out as we took to the street. ‘And how she looks at a man. Some of our reformers want to legalize Houses of Chastity – brothels – as a way of coping with our one million homeless women. I think this is not so different in Europe.'

We strolled along the suburban ‘Champs-Elysées'. We drank Coolack Cola. A girl – smooth empty face in the halogen shadows, chewing gum – turned away when he asked her a question. ‘And for two?' he called after her, exercising his licit superiority, a sour look on his anxious face.

In the taxi back to his house, Babak yelled in my ear the sordid dreams of a crippled life, his neck muscles straining, his hand on my thigh. ‘I did not tell you the truth about Turkey,' he confessed. ‘I can't… you know.' He made a pumping motion with his fist. ‘Landmine.'

In the morning, outside my window, a young woman moved through a walled, private garden. Babak had said only of his sister, ‘She teaches English and looks after our father's dying flowers.'
When he and I sat in the garden, surrounded by rosebushes and jasmine, she stopped her dead-heading to serve our breakfast: black tea, dates and crumbling goat's cheese.

‘Your presence blesses our home,' she told me in a formal expression of politeness.

‘Are there no eggs?' Babak asked her. He believed eating three eggs every day would restore his strength. She shrugged – there was a cool distance between them – then sat down and asked if I would stay for dinner.

‘I don't want to be any trouble.'

She said that nothing would give her more pleasure. Her heartshaped face narrowed into a pointed chin. Her uncovered, hennaed hair gleamed like spun copper thread in the sun. I complimented her on the garden.

‘It is a gift,' said Laleh, assigning credit for earthly beauty to the divine. ‘A little paradise.'

‘And a big headache,' complained Babak.

‘“Paradise” comes from an old Persian word meaning “walled garden”,' she added.

The late
imam
's paradise was oblong in shape, surrounded by whitewashed walls and overlooked by the half-closed windows of the house. There were dwarf tulips, musk roses and a hidden alcove of pink orchids. A small fountain rose from under a persimmon tree, feeding miniature stone waterways and a turquoise tile pool shaded by mulberries. Above us, the blue sky rippled beyond its branches, as did the crude balconies of a neighbouring apartment block. I thought of the first Eden, both garden and paradise, which was said to lie not far off the trail, either to the east of Palestine or near the source of the Tigris and Euphrates in Turkey.

‘Would you like to watch the TV5 news?' Babak asked. ‘We have a satellite dish.'

‘I'm happy here, thanks.'

‘I tell Laleh she should keep up with events in the outside world.'

‘I'm more concerned with matters at home,' she said.

‘At least television would keep you indoors.'

Laleh smiled at me, brushing aside an old argument, pouring fresh tea. I could see that Babak struggled to control his sister. She was a woman, fifteen years his junior, so his word took precedence, yet his moral inferiority and physical wounds emasculated him. She had been born to ageing parents who had answered Ayatollah Khomeini's call for patriotic acts of procreation during the Iran–Iraq war. With Babak embittered by his injuries, she alone perpetuated their hope and piety.

‘She goes to demonstrations,' Babak confided in me, as if she wasn't at the table, as if male solidarity might rein in her behaviour. ‘Last week she stood outside the university with masking tape over her mouth.'

‘It was a silent protest.'

‘Which will change nothing in this Shia paradise,' he exploded, at once angry, on his feet, pacing away from the table then turning back to speak with an undertone of fear in his voice. ‘If Hazbollahi take her away, who will visit her in prison?'

Ansar-e-Hazbollah
, the ‘Helpers of the Party of God', were a small cog in Iran's vast security apparatus. Its members had been responsible for uncounted violent acts against protesters: lashing students with chains in their dormitories, throwing a dissident out of the window to his death, killing some eighty Iranian journalists and writers.

‘I have a class to teach,' she said, turning her watch with tapering fingers and making formal apologies to me.

‘And I have a business meeting. You should go with her,' he told me. ‘Her students never have the opportunity to listen to a native English speaker. To hear what they're missing.'

Babak went out to find us a taxi, filling the role men assign to themselves to sustain the impression of superiority. Some senior clerics assert that a woman needs a man's permission even to go shopping. When the taxi arrived, Laleh appeared on the threshold in full black
chador
, draped in her public façade.

On the drive, she sat in silence, seemingly unaware of me, as though no words had ever passed between us.

Her features were clearly delineated: a pronounced nose, a
strong, firm mouth, deep-set eyes that were neither happy nor defiant, beneath which lingered pale shadows. The long, smooth line of her eyebrows traced the contours of her skull, turning sharply down above the corner of the eyes like the wings of black seagulls.

‘Do you wear the veil by choice?' I asked her after a couple of minutes.

‘I wear it out of loyalty.' To her parents, her society, her traditions.

‘But you believe in change,' I said, confused.

‘You misunderstand. Women put on the
chador
in defiance of the Shah, to reclaim themselves from alien ideals. I protest now because the revolution promised women dignity and equality.'

‘And after a quarter of a century you have neither?'

‘One of the great falsehoods, deployed by men, is that the Holy Koran decrees women should remain in second place,' she said.

Outside the window, a billboard of martyrs – led by thirteen-year-old Hossein Fahmideh, the world's first suicide bomber – marched off to a paradise of sunflowers and roses. Beneath it, a young man tried to cut across the frantic press of traffic. His T-shirt read ‘Broken System'.

Laleh's private language-school was above a row of electronic shops selling pirate Berlitz tapes and Holy War DVDs. The class was a waste of time, at least for me. The students, all of whom were male, only wanted to know about New York salaries and the cost of flats in London. I answered them, of course, even though the information would be useful only in gilding their fantasies.

‘Those boys think Europe is a utopia,' Laleh said later in the school office. ‘In the cybercafés they trawl sex pages. On satellite television they see couples kissing in the street. They think if they get to the West they will have a job, a house, a nice life. I tell them it is not so. I tell them that there are 22 million unemployed in Europe. But still they go, at least as far as Turkey – you probably know for what reason – and many never return.'

After lunch, Laleh went to the university for a Koranic Studies lecture. She, like other modern Iranian women, was rereading the
Koran, not to please the male clerics but to ease Islam away from bigots and chauvinists, to seek an interpretation for the twenty-first century.

In the evening, I did not catch sight of her. She stayed out – perhaps because she had no father to prevent her from ‘walking late', perhaps to avoid Babak. He let me cook him supper.

The next morning, the sound of digging woke me. We had an hour together in the garden – pruning the fig, watering the honeysuckle – before her brother returned from another business meeting. I talked to them about the sixties. I asked Laleh if she could see a parallel between Western students then and Iranians now: in the popularity of Aldous Huxley and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, in bra-and
hejab
-burning, in Berkeley's sit-ins and Tabriz's silent protests, in the shootings at Kent State and Tehran universities.

She mocked the notion; the sixties were about individualism, promiscuity and decadence, she said, forces which undermine Islam and its brotherhood of believers. Then she considered my argument about the shared aspiration for self-knowledge and an earthly utopia.

‘I think your spiritual awakening has much in common with the sixties',' I said.

‘Maybe there are similarities,' she admitted. ‘At both times, a mass of young people try to bring about change.'

‘The big difference is that in America the Church never seized executive power,' interrupted Babak.