Shadow of the Silk Road (38 page)

‘These youths are rich,’ Yalda said. ‘You’d never see them like that in public.’

At the centre of the stage was no one. The guitarists played on either wing, as if awaiting an absent star, while above and in between them, across a big screen, Amirali’s back-projections rolled in gaudy surrealism, flowing into one another like chemicals under a microscope. Often the guitarists and their drummer played in near-darkness. There was no backup group, no dancers–women on stage were all but banned–no stunts, no costumes: just three young men and their music. They played with elated concentration. This was their permitted moment, and they brought to it a tense commitment, as to something that might never happen again. Through the blistering beat and crash of the drummer the lead guitarist insinuated a trembling melody. The headscarves of the few women in the audience were sliding backwards over their hair, and their tiny, hesitant screams echoed faintly from an imitated West. Meanwhile Amirali’s back-projections reproduced the band in giant silhouettes, interspersed by fluid abstractions and a cheeky stream of sperm. Once the spotlight strayed above the proscenium arch to reveal the glowering portraits of the ayatollahs.

An intangible aura of the forbidden was brewing up. The gilded youths in their blazoned T-shirts began jerking backwards and forwards, their hair cascading over their faces. Cramped in their seats, they looked impotent and vulnerable. The music was
passive, its beat indistinct, but they bobbed and bowed to a rhythm of their own, bent on being scandalous. A steward moved down the aisle beside them and told them to stop. But half an hour later they started again, more wildly, with strident shouts. A few stood up. They looked constricted and foolish. Two guards appeared on either side now, and ordered them to go. The music went on. They leapt derisively away down the aisles towards the door, raising their fists weakly to the band’s rhythm.

An hour later, as the last number ended, a formal applause went up, and the audience trickled away. But when I looked for Amirali in a room beside the lobby, I blundered into a hospital administrator. Under her white headscarf the matronly face was crimson with outrage. The band leader, sitting patiently in a chair, was deflecting her questions, while Amirali translated to me in whispers.

Who were those dreadful people? she demanded. Were they trying to break up her hospital?

A handful of the audience might have been like that, the band leader said, as if to a child. But there were no drugs and no smoking going on…and they were just kids.

The matron exploded. But what was that disgusting thing she saw going across her hospital wall? The band leader looked blank.

She exploded: ‘It was a
sperm
!’

‘I think it was a tadpole,’ the guitarist said, managing no trace of smile. Why did she consider it a sperm? It had not occurred to him…

‘It was revolting! It was a
sperm.
Swimming across my hospital wall!’

‘No, no. It was a tadpole. A young frog. And anyway, it was passed by the censors. The censors recognised a tadpole…’

It rises for miles over the plains. Even through the smog of south Tehran, its pylon-high minarets can be seen half an hour’s journey away, glimmering in new gold above the closed bud of its dome. Marble galleries are going up beneath the blue-tiled cupolas beside
it, and acres of garden unfolding, studded with outsize vases; hostels are being built, and ranges of shops. The lavatories are marble palaces, already stinking. A vast, deserted car park is complete.

This is the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, where he was buried amid mass hysteria in 1989. It is not a mosque but a
husseiniya
, a place almost of leisure, as he wanted. The central chamber is over a hundred yards square, and rigged up in galvanised steel, like an exhibition hall. Its marble paving refracts ranks of chandeliers, and the rugs are a machine-made forest floor. Yet it is all but empty. Five or six pilgrims are trailing across the carpets, where a knot of visiting soldiers sit, their boots scattering the entrance. Some children are playing. It is as if a temporary exhibition had just ended, or had not yet begun.

The grave lies in a white cage, an airy cousin to the imam’s tomb at Meshed. Above it the dome twirls stained-glass tulips, and flashes down a jigsaw of mirrors. I approach it in a Westerner’s confusion. Who was the man who lies here? His followers called him imam, as if he were the Hidden One, returning in righteousness. He did not refute them. A strategic revolutionary, he created his own Islamic state above Islamic law, and from a period of youthful mysticism, perhaps, confused himself with God. He executed thousands, and sent thousands more to needless deaths. Yet in his mystic poetry, he cannot hurt a fly. He dreamed of resurrecting the imagined utopia of seventh-century Arabia. But he left behind a stricken economy, and an Islam so mired in politics that within a few years it had lost its old mystique and integrity.

The pilgrims are circling his tomb. The laughter of playing children drowns out the whispering prayers of the women. I touch the bars of the cenotaph, feeling nothing. Under a frosty chandelier the grave is covered by a green brocade and a Koran, and heaped with donors’ money. I turn back into the void which was planned to hold a giant. Some workmen are asleep against the walls. Only on the anniversary of the Ayatollah’s death, I’ve heard, the tomb swells with pilgrims, and the ancient Shia grief rises again.

A few hundred yards from where the aged Ayatollah is enshrined lie the youthful legions he sent to their deaths in the Iraq war. I crossed the road beyond the shrine, and was suddenly among their graves. Aisle after aisle, hundreds of yards long, hedged by junipers and roses, the grave-slabs of young men multiply in tens of thousands, their portraits carved in the stone, with slight moustaches or beards and a young bush of hair. Behind each one stands a small glass-fronted cabinet, filled with mementoes. In this Behesht-e Zahra, ‘the Paradise of the Radiant Daughter of the Prophet’, some two hundred thousand lie. Their aisles sag with national banners. The poorer gravestones, given by government, are inscribed only with a name, or with nothing, unknown. Relayed through loudspeakers in the trees, marching songs throb with triumphant doom, and recorded sermons mount into hysteria. ‘Ali!…Ali!…Hussein…’ A few years before, every Friday, the fountains gushed with crimson-dyed water.

Ever since entering Iran I had been walking among tombs, and here it was Thursday, the day for cemetery visits. Families were picnicking with their dead, perched on benches or reclining on the grave-slabs. They brushed the leaves from the stone, scrubbed it with detergent, sprinkled it with rose petals. On the name-day of the dead they offered food to anyone nearby–you must accept it–biscuits, buns, dates. An old woman thrust on me a meal wrapped in cellophane, with a plastic spoon, smiling through spent tears. But she spoke of somebody whose name I did not know and could not pray for. Several old men were bowed by the Unknown Martyr’s Grave, for those who had simply disappeared.

Here and there, as families aged, dereliction was creeping in. The war had lasted from 1980 to 1988. Iranians call it ‘the Imposed War’, for Iraq had attacked first, unprovoked, then slowly been repelled. When Iran might have made peace, it refused. Khomeini had his eyes on Baghdad, on the Shia holy places, and on oil. But the Iraqis, in their homeland, stood firm as the Iranians had, and Khomeini was forced to agree a peace, crying: ‘I drink this chalice of poison for the Almighty.’ He never recovered. For once, he had misjudged God.

The war was fought far from Western sight, and Western caring.
It inflicted over a million casualties. Often the Iranians advanced in human waves, preceded over the minefields by ill-armed boys and old men. Revolutionary Guards and volunteer militia alike were on their way to paradise. They had few tanks or planes, and no international friends. The Iraqis were equipped with both, and the United States covertly supported them. The war stagnated among trenches, machine-guns, barbed wire. Massive concentrations of infantry bogged down after advancing a few hundred yards. Sometimes Iran lost a thousand men a day. They were cut down by helicopter gunships as they struggled forward trying to sever the Baghdad highway, or they drowned in the water-filled defences north of Basra, their lungs blistered by mustard gas, while the Iraqi artillery, banked up behind earth bunkers, rained down shells and cyanide.

If you lift the covers from the glass-fronted cabinets, their photographs look out at you. Sometimes they grasp rifles or hold up banners. Bottles of rosewater stand beside them, or a lantern for remembrance. The faces are earnest and callow. A few of the cabinets hold a Koran or a pile of expended cartridges. But mostly the things assembled are intimate with another life–snapshots of them as boys, a woman’s necklace, a child’s surrendered toy–so that I turn away from the smeared glass.

By mid-November a cold wind was stilling the hillsides, and the last green fading. Ninety miles west of Tehran, where the Elburz massif began to shadow the Caspian north-west, I left the main road and the oases of Qazvin behind and entered a labyrinth of mountains to the valleys of the Assassins. The tracks into this wilderness had been newly asphalted, and the few truck-drivers who travelled it, starved of company, would stop at the plea of an outstretched hand, and charge a few pence for petrol.

One of these, a bluff old man, had once been a merchant seaman. He remembered Glasgow and Portsmouth and a smattering of English. Crustily outspoken, as if still on open seas, he despised the road Iran had taken. ‘Ninety per cent of our people hate these mullahs, I’d say. We just want them to go. They only teach us to weep. We’re a country of martyrs. Every town has its tomb for some relative or other of Hussein. I’m a Shia, but I think the Sunnis are better. They don’t have all this mourning. We have no singing or dancing. Only sorrow.’

The slopes heaved bleakly round us. Beneath their skin of thistles the bones of a slatey, lichened rock were pressing, and stones littered the hills. I asked: ‘What about Khomeini?’

‘He was good, mostly, but he only had one idea. And now the mullahs just cry
Allah! Allah!
Allah is fine, but not all these mosques going up, all these saints. We need hospitals and businesses. And you know who’s behind the mullahs?’ He glanced at me without rancour. ‘Your government. The British.’ I heard this fantasy with only small surprise. Suspicion of Britain had long
preceded that of the United States. It clung like moss. ‘They want to keep our country poor.’

Beyond a last ridge we were dropping into another land. Between its naked slopes rose the golden spires of poplars, with maples and reddening cherry orchards. The morning sun traced the rivers in splintered silver down their clefts, and suddenly the whole wall of the Shah Rud valley surged up to meet us: a vast, unbroken battlement where erosion tossed mauve foothills this way and that, and villages clung to near-perpendicular scarps.

We corkscrewed down to where the Shah Rud river wound and forked between gravel shoals. Ricefields appeared, and salt pans. The farmers looked darker, wilder. In the valleys above, where the grim sect of the Assassins had scattered its castles, I lost my bearings. But somewhere an iron bridge crossed the Alamut river at a village which the driver called Shutur Khan, and here, I remembered, the writer Freya Stark, a loved friend of my youth, had collapsed with malaria after exploring the castles in 1931, when the going was harder. Her map was in my rucksack. Almost half a century later, walking with her in the hills of the Italian Veneto, I remembered her speaking with elation of this country, where my truck now jarred to a halt beyond the river. I got out into still air. I wondered if any memory remained of the sharp-eyed Englishwoman who had lain sick in the headman’s house, listening to the rivulet diverted through his garden for her pleasure, not knowing if she was going to die.

But the village since her time was unrecognisable: a single street of tractor repair yards and barracks. After my truck left, I found nobody to speak with. I rested a while by the river, until another driver took me on in silence into the mountains, where the rock Alamut, the Assassin nerve-centre, was filling up the sky.

The implacable sect was an offshoot of the Ismaili, whose founder’s lonely tomb, perhaps, I had stumbled upon five hundred miles east at Mazinan. An early history records that the Assassins’ progenitor, the darkly brilliant Hasan-i-Sabah, was a schoolmate in Nishapur of Omar Khayyám and Nizam al-Mulk. The three became blood-brothers, swearing that the first to attain eminence would help the others. After Nizam was appointed grand vizier of
the Seljuk empire in 1063, his friends arrived to claim their promise, and he offered them provincial governorships. Omar Khayyám claimed a modest pension instead, happy to return to his studies. But Hasan-i-Sabah sought higher office, and from there he began to undermine his benefactor, who was at last forced to exile him.

This unlikely story–its dates conflict–became part of the Assassin legend. In fact Hasan-i-Sabah converted early to Ismailism, was outlawed for sedition from his native Rey and gathered followers who seized the castle of Alamut by trickery. His power spread through the valleys, subverting other fortresses, until it reached even to Syria. By now he had refined his disciples into a ruthless order of messianic secrecy, dedicated to overturning the Seljuk and Sunni imperium, indoctrinating followers who murdered in the certain hope of paradise, making no attempt to flee; and his successors continued his terror for a century and a half.

In the Western imagination the Assassin lord, ‘the Old Man of the Mountain’, wielded a ghoulish magic. Marco Polo spoke of an enclosed garden beside Alamut, where his drugged agents awoke among young women and rivulets of wine, to imagine themselves in paradise, and this memory never left them. They were falsely said to be
hashashin,
drugged on hashish, and bequeathed the name Assassin to the world.

No one was safe from their hand. The religious divines who condemned them and the generals who fought them might all die by the dagger. Their first victim was Nizam al-Mulk, stabbed in his litter as he left his audience chamber. Over the years there followed two caliphs of Baghdad and a Seljuk sultan, the Fatimid caliph of Egypt and his vizier, the Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Crusader Count Raymond of Tripoli. Sometimes the Assassins waited for years, inveigled into the service of their victim. ‘Like the devil,’ wrote a German priest, ‘they transfigure themselves into angels of light, by imitating the gestures, garments, customs and acts of various nations and peoples.’ The ruler of Damascus, surrounded by armed guards, was yet struck down by men who seemed his protectors. Conrad of Montferrat, the Crusader king of
Jerusalem, was murdered by agents robed as Christian monks, and the ruler of Homs by men masquerading as Sufis. They killed the Qadi of Isfahan during Friday prayer, and Philip of Montfort as he knelt in church. Rulers who opposed them walked in a thicket of bodyguards, with armour beneath their robes. Edward I of England, while still a prince on Crusade, was stabbed near-fatally (legend had his queen, Eleanor of Castile, sucking the poison from his wound), and Saladin himself was saved only by a cap of mail beneath his turban. As far away as Mongolia, the Great Khan went in fear, while the Seljuk sultan Sanjar awoke trembling in the night to find a warning dagger by his bedside.

Now the rock of Alamut swam like a battleship across the valley. Nine hundred feet above the village of Gazur Khan, it loomed with no sign of access. I was walking toward sheer cliffs. But as I skirted their northern foot, the enormous overhang, plunged in shadow, disclosed a beetling path among the rocks. Snow-peaks broke over the eastern horizon as I climbed. In the cliff-face towering beside me I glimpsed fragmentary walls and an arch bridging a gully. I could hear the wind howling over the heights above, but here in the rock’s lee clouds of thistledown were drifting. Around the escarpment the path lifted at last to the wreckage of a curtain wall. Its rubble core, shorn of hewn stone, still lurched up fifty feet, and beyond, its ramparts torn away, the long, precipitous spine of the castle reached into space.

For hours I picked among its stones. There was almost nothing left. The Mongols, muscling through the valley with their own mercilessness, had extinguished the enfeebled sect in 1256, and tipped their battlements into the abyss. Years later the place became a prison, and often I could not tell their foundations apart. Here and there a leftover skin of Ismaili brick coated the sheer wall sliding a thousand feet into the valley; and on the heights above it the same brick traced a few rooms or the circle of a cistern. I wondered where the great library and archives had been, destroyed as heresy, or the room where Hasan-i-Sabah, in grim seclusion, had taught and studied, never passing through the castle gate for thirty years.

I stumbled among lost chambers in the tearing wind. On all sides
the labyrinthine mountains were awash with scudding clouds, and rust-brown hills banked into crags or faded to snow in the east. Almost at my feet a tributary of the Alamut river filled the valley with orchards and a faint shine of water, and a narrow road shadowed the track where the messengers of the Old Man of the Mountain had brought him the news that rejoiced his heart.

A pair of builders–hospitable, bored–invited me to their camp for the night. In an isolated valley thirty miles away, they were constructing a hospital–its steel frame was already up–but the track there had been torn up by rains the year before. Our Land-Cruiser plunged between torrent-strewn boulders as big as cottages, before weaving to the valley’s end and a village misted in walnut and apple orchards.

They lived with three others in a two-room hut of mud walls hung with overalls. In their makeshift kitchen they brewed up a supper of chicken garnished with hazel nuts, which we ate on the earth floor. I felt curiously at peace, as if nothing else mattered–not the deepening cold, the stench of the lavatory outside nor the insects crawling over the timber ceiling–except the unruffled courtesy around me. These men–two of them spoke tentative English–were touched by a delicacy which I was starting to recognise, of people educated for something else, derailed by hard times.

The foreman Mahmoud, suave, grey-locked, sat like a vizier cross-legged on the polished earth; while his frail assistant Daniel, whose domed forehead seemed to touch him with learning, confided wrecked dreams. He had wanted to be a market gardener. ‘Greenhouses were what I loved. Years ago I started a business, and built greenhouses under Mount Demavend, but they were blown away in a gale. Cucumbers, tomatoes, I had, and a special banana shrub only two metres high, which produced’–he laughed–‘rather bad bananas.’ He had been trained as an agricultural engineer, yet now he was a builder’s aide. ‘But one day, if my country gets better, I will go back to greenhouses.’ He flexed his fingers. ‘Tomatoes…cucumbers…’

Later Mahmoud dragged an old television from under a quilt
and we settled, replete with chicken, before its flickering box. To my astonishment a bare-shouldered chanteuse with streaked hair walked across the screen. ‘I thought that was forbidden!’ I cried. ‘Is that from Iran?’

They burst into laughter. ‘Never!’

They had wired a video machine to the back of the television, and we were viewing pirated programmes. ‘There’s a fellow here with a computer who gets them off the internet,’ Mahmoud said, ‘and we have videos of our own.’

I watched in mute amazement. Even from this village of a hundred and twenty, somebody had accessed the world outside. Theirs were black-and-white films for the most part, shot at pop festivals among the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles and Germany. Even after twenty-five years of Western exile the singers looked demure, almost grave, while the expatriate audience around them stood in rapt nostalgia–old and young–listening to songs now banned at home, the music of their severed past, perhaps singing itself into extinction. The builders’ favourite was a programme acquired by Mahmoud ten years before. Swathed in quilts against the dirt and cold, they listened with the hunger of dissidents. But the film staged no rebellion, no anger, no sex: only a portly middle-aged chanteuse who lilted and trilled and careened up and down marble stairways, shadowed by an obese tenor in baggy trousers.

When this ended we went out into the starlight to look at the hospital. A month before, they had unearthed its foundations from twenty feet of rubble, where the cliff above had crumbled into avalanche, and they had started again. Now a gaping geometry of doors and passageways hovered before us like a Meccano set, and the loose-bouldered cliff still loomed behind, so that I imagined the next rains washing everything away again.

Soon the villagers, seeing the builders’ return, filtered into the hut with questions. Their ancestors, in local tradition, had come up from the Caspian long after the Mongols swept through the valleys, and had survived here in isolation. ‘They belong to just two families, intermarried,’ Daniel said. ‘They’re all called Hosseini or Rashvand. No, it can’t be good. I’ve seen four or five imbecile children here, and at least one mad adult. I think the girls
would marry outside if they could. You sense it, the way they look at you…’

Employed as casual labour, villagers arrived with petitions or simply to sit, when the television became too boring, and gaze in unblinking puzzlement at the foreigner. In my frayed shirt and trousers I imagined myself little different from them. The day before, when I glanced in a mirror, a hardened face had glared back at me through seething eyes. But its harshness, of course–with its windburn and darkening stubble–was temporary. Life had been kinder to it than to these others, whose ruggedness had accrued like tree-rings, and whose hands hung knotted at their sides. Standing before Mahmoud they were mumbling and deferential. A driver couldn’t understand the hours he should come and go, and an old plasterer was frightened that somebody else–perhaps me–was being drafted in to replace him. Sometimes, after the foreman had explained very slowly, patiently, what had to be done, a sweet smile would spread over the beard-blackened faces, and they would bow their thanks with an old-world humility before leaving.

Only by midnight did we curl under our quilts on the hard floor, the timber ceiling shifting with insects above us, and sleep to the mechanical pipe of winter cicadas from the orchards outside, and the howl of the village dogs.

For a century and a half the Assassin heartland in these valleys remained unassailable. Then nemesis came suddenly. In 1256 the Mongol khan Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, crossed the Oxus with an immense army. The last Grand Master of the Assassins, Rukn-ad-din, walled himself up in his palace-castle of Maimundiz, and hoped to endure until snows choked the valleys. But that year winter was the mildest in memory. For four miles the Mongols set up siege works around the cliff-castle, while their Chinese engineers bombarded it from mangonels and giant crossbows which shot bolts of fire into the battlements. The defenders answered with a blizzard of catapulted rocks, and the first Mongol
assault was repulsed. But the flaming arrows drove the defenders inside the cliff-face, and the Grand Master–a poor wraith of his predecessors–lost his nerve and sued for peace. Some of his soldiers, hardier than he, retreated to an upper keep and sold themselves dearly. Then the castle–with all its immured chambers and galleries–was put to the torch.