Shah of Shahs (2 page)

I used to carry a small transistor radio and listen to the local stations. No matter which continent I was on, I could always find out what was happening in the world. Now that radio is worthless. When I turn the dial I get ten stations, each using a different language, and I can't understand a word. If I travel a thousand miles, I get ten new equally incomprehensible stations. Are they saying that the money in my pocket is no longer any good? Are they saying that war has broken out?

Television is the same.

All over the world, at any hour, on a million screens an infinite number of people are saying something to us, trying to convince us of something, gesturing, making faces, getting excited, smiling, nodding their heads, pointing their fingers, and we don't know what it's about, what they want from us, what they are summoning us to. They might as well have come from a distant planet—an enormous army of public relations experts from Venus or Mars—yet they are our kin, with the same bones and blood as ours, with lips that move and audible voices, but we cannot understand a word. In what language will the universal dialogue of humanity be carried out? Several hundred languages are fighting for recognition and promotion; the language barriers are rising. Deafness and incomprehension are multiplying.

After a short break (during which they show fields of flowers—they love flowers here and plant colorful, luxuriant gardens around the tombs of their greatest poets) the photo of a young man appears on the screen. An announcer says something.

"What's he saying?" I ask my cardplayers.

"He's giving the name of the man in the photo. And telling who he was."

Then another photograph appears, and another—photos from student identity cards, framed pictures, snapshots from automatic photo machines, photographs with ruins in the background, one family portrait with an arrow pointing
to
a barely visible girl to show who is being described. Each photograph appears for a few moments; the list of names the announcer is reading goes on and on.

The parents are asking for information. They have been doing this for months, hoping against hope. The people in the photographs disappeared in September, December, January, that is, in the months of heaviest fighting, when the glow of fires over the city never died. They must have marched in the front ranks of the demonstration, right into the machine-gun fire. Or sharpshooters on nearby rooftops picked them off. We can suppose that each of these faces was last seen in the gun-sight of a soldier taking aim. Every evening, during this program, we listen to the announcer's matter-of-fact voice and meet more and more people who no longer exist.

More fields of flowers appear, followed by the evening's next program, also presenting photographs; but the people here are completely different. These are, for the most part, elderly men, sloppily dressed (with wrinkled collars and rumpled denim jackets), their desperate faces sunken and unshaven, some bearded. A big piece of cardboard with his name written on it hangs from the neck of each. When a particular face appears, one of the cardplayers exclaims, "Aha, so
that's
the one!" and everybody looks intently at the screen. The announcer is reading the personal data of each and the list of crimes that each committed. General Mohammed Zand gave the order to fire on an unarmed demonstration in Tabriz: hundreds were killed. Major Hossein Farzin tortured prisoners by burning their eyelids and pulling out their fingernails. A few hours ago, the announcer says, the firing squad of the Islamic Militia carried out the sentence of the tribunal against them.

The hall feels stuffy and oppressive during this parade of good then evil absent ones—all the more so because the wheel of death that's been turning for so long keeps spinning and throwing off hundreds of new people (faded photographs and ones just taken, graduation pictures, prison mug shots). This procession of still, silent faces flowing past in fits and starts becomes depressing but at the same time so absorbing that I expect suddenly to see my cardplayers' faces on the screen, then my own, and hear the announcer reading our names.

I walk back upstairs, through the empty corridor, and lock myself in my cluttered room. As usual at this hour I can hear gunfire from the depths of an invisible city. The shooting starts regularly at nine as if custom or tradition had fixed the hour. Then the city falls silent. Then there are more shots and muffled explosions. No one's upset, no one pays attention or feels directly threatened (no one except those who are shot). Since the middle of February, when the uprising broke out in the city and the crowds seized the army munitions depots, Teheran has been armed, intensely charged, while in streets and houses, under cover of darkness, the drama of assassination is enacted. The underground keeps a low profile during the day, but at night it sends masked combat squads into the city.

These uneasy nights force people to lock themselves in their own homes. There is no curfew, but getting anywhere between midnight and dawn is difficult and risky. The Islamic Militia or the independent combat squads rule the looming, motionless city between those hours. Both are groups of well-armed boys who point their guns at people, cross-examine them, confer among themselves, and occasionally, just to be on the safe side, take those they've stopped to jail—from which it is difficult to get out. What's more, you are never sure who has locked you up, since no identifying marks differentiate the various representatives of violence whom you encounter, no uniforms or caps, no armbands or badges—these are simply armed civilians whose authority must be accepted unquestioningly if you care about your life. After a few days, though, we grow used to them and learn to tell them apart. This distinguished-looking man, in his well-made white shirt and carefully matched tie, walking down the street shouldering a rifle is certainly a militiaman in one of the ministries or central offices. On the other hand, this masked boy (a woolen stocking pulled over his head and holes cut out at eyes and mouth) is a local fedayeen no one's supposed to know by sight or name. We can't be sure about these people dressed in green U.S. Army fatigue jackets, rushing by in cars, barrels of guns pointed out the windows. They might be from the militia, but then again they might belong to one of the opposition combat groups (religious fanatics, anarchists, last remnants of Savak) hurrying with suicidal determination to carry out an act of sabotage or revenge.

But finally it's no fun trying to predict just whose ambush is awaiting you, whose trap you'll fall into. People don't like surprises, so they barricade themselves in their homes at night. My hotel is also locked (at this hour the sound of gunfire mingles with the creaking of shutters rolling down and the slamming shut of gates and doors). No friends will drop by; nothing like that will happen. I have no one to talk to. I'm sitting alone looking through notes and pictures on the table, listening to taped conversations.

Here's the oldest picture I've managed to obtain. A soldier, holding a chain in his right hand, and a man, at the end of the chain. The two gaze intently into the lens. This is clearly an important moment in their lives. The soldier is an older man, on the short side, a simple, obedient peasant, wearing an oversized, clumsily stitched uniform, trousers rumpled like an accordion, a big cap tilted onto protruding ears—in sum, an amusing figure reminiscent of the good soldier Schweik. The man on the chain: thin, pale face, sunken eyes, bandaged head, obviously wounded. The photo's caption says the soldier is the grandfather of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (the last Shah of Iran) and the wounded man is the assassin of Shah Nasr-ed-Din. Accordingly, the photo must date from 1896, when Nasr-ed-Din, after reigning for forty-nine years, was killed. The grandfather and the murderer look tired, which is understandable, since they have been wandering for days from Qom to the place of public execution in Teheran. They have been trudging down the desert road in scorching heat and stifling air, the soldier at the rear and the gaunt killer before him on his chain, like a member of an old-time circus troupe and his trained bear working their way from village to village, earning food for themselves. At times the assassin complains
about the pain in his injured head but for the most part they are silent, because finally they have nothing to talk about. The murderer has killed, and the grandfather is leading him to his execution. Persia is a country of extreme poverty; it has no railroads, only the aristocracy own horse-drawn conveyances, and thus these two men must walk to the distant goal established by sentence and order. From time to time they come across a few clay huts where haggard peasants surround the dusty travelers. "Who is that you're leading, sir?" they shyly ask the soldier. "Who?" the soldier repeats the question and holds his tongue for a moment to heighten the suspense. "This," he says finally, pointing to the prisoner, "is the Shah's murderer." The grandfather's voice betrays a note of unconcealed pride. The peasants gape at the assassin in horror and admiration. Because he's killed someone great, he also seems somehow great. His crime has elevated him to a higher realm of existence. The peasants cannot decide between glowering indignantly and falling to their knees. Meanwhile, the soldier ties the chain to a stake driven into the ground at the roadside, unslings his rifle (which is so long, it almost touches the ground when slung over his shoulder), and orders the peasants to bring water and food. They scratch their heads. There is almost nothing to eat in the village, because a famine is raging. We should add that the soldier himself is a peasant, just like them, and no more than they does he even have a surname of his own—he calls himself Savad-Kuhi, the name of his village—but he has a carbine and a uniform and has been singled out to lead the Shah's assassin to the place of execution, so he takes advantage of his high position and again commands the peasants to bring water and food, since he is excruciatingly hungry and, furthermore, cannot allow the man on the chain to perish of thirst or exhaustion. If that happened, the extraordinary spectacle of hanging the Shah's assassin in a crowded Teheran square would have to be canceled. Badgered ruthlessly by the soldier, the peasants end up bringing what they themselves would have eaten: withered rootlets dug from the ground and a canvas pouch full of dried locusts. The grandfather and the murderer sit down in the shade to eat, eagerly popping locusts into their mouths, spitting out the wings, and washing the remains down with water, while the peasants look on in silent envy. As evening draws near, the soldier chooses the best hut, throws out its owners, and turns it into a temporary jail. He winds the prisoner's chain around his own body, then, tired from countless hours of marching under the blazing sun, the two stretch out on the clay floor black with cockroaches and fall into deep sleep. In the morning they get up and continue on the road to the goal established by sentence and order, northward, to Teheran, across the same desert, in the same quivering heat, the murderer with his bandaged head, his long swinging tail of iron chain held up by the hand of the escorting soldier, in his clumsily sewn uniform, looking so comical with his large cap resting askew on his protruding ears that when I first saw him in this photo I thought it was Schweik himself.

Here we see a young officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade standing next to a machine gun and explaining the principles of the deadly weapon to his colleagues. This particular weapon is the updated 1910 model of the Maxim gun, so the photograph must be from about that year. The young officer, named Reza Khan and born in 1878, is the son of the soldier-escort we met leading the Shah's murderer across the desert less than two decades earlier. If we compare the two pictures, we immediately notice that Reza Khan, unlike his father, is a physical giant. He is taller than his colleagues by at least a head, has a bulging chest, and looks like the sort of muscleman who could break a horseshoe with ease. He has a military mien, a cold, piercing look, a wide, massive jaw, and clenched lips on which even the faintest smile would be out of the question. On his head sits a broad cap of black caracul, for he is, as I have mentioned, an officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade (the only army that the Shah of those days had) commanded by Vsevolod Lyakhov, a Tsarist colonel from St. Petersburg. Reza Khan is the protégé of Colonel Lyakhov, who has a fondness for born soldiers, and our young officer is the model of the born soldier. He joined the Brigade as an illiterate boy of fourteen (he will never learn to read and write well) and climbed gradually through the echelons of professional soldiery thanks to his Obedience, discipline, decisiveness, innate intelligence, and what the military likes to call leadership quality. Great promotions come his way only after 1917, however, when the Shah, (quite mistakenly) suspecting Lyakhov of Bolshevik sympathies, sends him back to Russia. Now Reza Khan becomes a colonel and the commander of the Cossack Brigade, which soon falls under British protection. At a reception the British general Sir Edmund Ironside stands on tiptoe to reach Reza Khan's ear and whispers, "Colonel, you are a man of great possibilities." They walk out into the garden where the general, in the course of their stroll, suggests a
coup d'état
and conveys London's blessings. In February, 1921, Reza Khan enters Teheran at the head of his brigade, arrests the capital's politicians (it is winter, snow is falling; the politicians will later complain about their cold damp cells), and forms a new government, in which he serves first as Minister of War and then as Prime Minister. In December, 1925, the obedient Constitutional Assembly (which fears the colonel and the Englishmen standing behind him) proclaims the cossack commander Shah of Persia. From now on our young officer—in the photograph explaining the principles of the updated 1910-model Maxim machine gun to his colleagues (all wearing belted Russian peasant shirts and quilted jackets)—will be known as Shah Reza the Great, King of Kings, Shadow of the Almighty, God's Vicar and the Center of the Universe, and also as founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, which begins with him and, destiny decrees, ends with his son, who, on a winter morning as chilly as the day his father seized power and throne, fifty-eight years later, will depart the palace and Teheran, by jet, to an ambiguous fate.