Among the Believers (5 page)

The afternoon cars and motorcycles went by, driven in the Iranian way. I saw two collisions. One shop had changed its name. It was now Our Fried Chicken, no longer the chicken of Kentucky, and the figure of the Southern colonel had been fudged into something quite meaningless (except to those who remembered the colonel). Revolutionary Guards, young men with guns, soon ceased to be surprising; they were part of the revolutionary sabbath scene. There were crowds outside the cinemas; and, Ramadan though it was, people were buying pistachio nuts and sweets from the
confiseries
—so called—that were open.

Far to the north, at the end of a long avenue of plane trees, an avenue laid out by the Shah’s father, was the Royal Tehran Hilton. It was “royal” no longer. The word had been taken off the main roadside sign and hacked away from the entrance; but inside the hotel the word survived like a rooted weed, popping up fresh and clean on napkins, bills, menus, crockery.

The lounge was nearly empty; the silence there, among waiters and scattered patrons, was like the silence of embarrassment. Iranian samovars were part of the décor. (There had been some foreign trade in these samovars as decorative ethnic objects; two years or so before, I had seen a number of them in the London stores, converted into lamp bases.) Alcohol could no longer be served; but for the smart (and non-Christian) who needed to sip a nonalcoholic drink in style, there was Orange Blossom or Virgin Mary or Swinger.

Chez Maurice was the Hilton’s French restaurant. It was done up in an appropriate way, with brownish paper, a dark-coloured dado, and sconce lights. On the glass panels of one wall white letters, set in little arcs, said:
Vins et Liqueurs, Le Patron Mange Içi, Gratinée à Toute Heure
. In the large room, which might have seated a hundred, there was only a party of five, and they were as subdued as the people in the lounge. The soup I had, like the sturgeon which followed it, was heavy with a
brown paste. But the waiters still undid napkins and moved and served with panache; it added to the embarrassment.

Every table was laid. Every table had a fresh rose, and prerevolutionary give-aways: the coloured postcard (the restaurant had been founded four years before, in 1975); the little ten-page note pad that diners in places like this were thought to need:
Chez Maurice, Tehran’s Most Distinctive Restaurant, Le Restaurant le Plus Sélect de Tehran
. Six months after the revolution these toys—pads, postcards—still existed; when they were used up there would be no more.

The pool at the side of the hotel was closed, for chemical cleaning, according to the notice. But the great concrete shell next door, the planned extension to the Royal Tehran Hilton, had been abandoned, with all the building materials on the site and the cranes. There were no “passengers” now, the waiter said; and the contractors had left the country. From the Hilton you could look across to the other hills of North Tehran and see other unfinished, hollow buildings that looked just as abandoned. The revolution had caught the “international” city of North Tehran in mid-creation.

And I thought, when I went back to my hotel, that there was an unintended symbolism in the revolutionary poster on the glass front door. The poster was printed on both sides. The side that faced the courtyard was straightforward, a guerrilla pin-up of Yassir Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization in dark glasses and checkered red headdress.

On the reverse was an allegorical painting of blood and revenge. In the foreground there was a flat landscape: a flat, featureless land bisected by a straight black road, marked down the middle by a broken white line. On this road a veiled woman, seen from the back, lay half collapsed, using her last strength to lift up her child as if to heaven. The woman had a bloodied back; there was blood on the black road. Out of that blood, higher up the road, giant red tulips had grown, breaking up the heavy crust of the black road with the white markings; and above the tulips, in the sky, was the face of Khomeini, the saviour, frowning.

Khomeini saved and avenged. But the tulips he had called up from the blood of martyrs had damaged the modern road (so carefully rendered by the artist) for good; that road in the wilderness now led nowhere.

Also, in this allegory of the revolution, personality had been allowed
only to the avenger. The wounded woman, small in the foreground, with whose pain the upheaval began, was veiled and faceless; she was her pain alone. It was the allegorist’s or caricaturist’s licence; and it wouldn’t have been remarkable if there hadn’t been so many faceless people in the posters and drawings I had seen that day.

In one election poster a faceless crowd—the veiled women reduced to simple triangular outlines—held up photographs of candidates of a particular party. In a newspaper the face of Ali, the Shia hero, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, was shown as a surrealist outline, transparent against a landscape. In one poster Khomeini himself had been faceless, his features (within the outline of turban, cheeks, and beard) replaced by a clenched fist.

Facelessness had begun to seem like an Islamic motif. And it was, indeed, the subject of protest in
Iran Week
(lettering like
Newsweek
), a postrevolutionary English-language paper I had bought in a kiosk. The paper was for the revolution, but it was protesting against what had begun to come with the revolution, all the Islamic bans on alcohol, Western television programmes, fashions, music, mixed bathing, women’s sports, dancing. The cover illustration showed a twisted sitting-room where walls had been replaced by iron bars. The family posing for their picture in this room—father, mother, two children—were dressed in Western clothes; but where their faces should have been there were white blanks.

Individualism was to be surrendered to the saviour and avenger. But when the revolution was over, individualism—in the great city the Shah had built—was to be cherished again. That seemed to be the message of the
Iran Week
cover.

I
N
the morning, traffic was heavy on the flyover to the left of the hotel. The mountains to the north were soft in the light, but fading fast in the haze.

I telephoned the editor in chief of
Iran Week
and he asked me to come over right away. I had to be careful, though, he said: there were two buildings in the street with the same number, 61. And when I had found the right 61, I had to remember that if I took the lift, the office was on the sixth floor; if I walked up it was on the fourth.

The hotel taxi driver had trouble finding any 61; and the one we
did find, after doing a number of Iranian turnarounds in Iranian traffic, was the wrong one. So we hunted, the morning melting away; and then we saw the second 61. Sixth floor for the lift, the editor had said; fourth if I walked up. But the board in the lobby said the paper was on the fifth; and there was no sign of a lift. The driver and I walked up and up.

The office was unexpectedly spacious, with a cool girl at a desk in the front room. And after all the time I had taken to get there, and after his own brisk invitation, Mr. Abdi, the young editor in chief, was frankly disappointed in me. I represented no English or American paper, as he had thought. He said he could give me ten minutes; I shouldn’t send the driver away.

But then, in his own office, he softened his executive manner and, becoming more Iranian, graciously ordered tea, which came in small glasses. He said that to understand Iran I should go to the holy city of Qom and talk to the people in the streets. I said I couldn’t talk Persian; he said they couldn’t talk English. So there we were.

Softening again, he said—but in a way which permitted me to see that nothing was going to happen—that he would try to get one of his researchers to make an appointment with me.

Just then the head researcher came in. He promised to see what he could do for me. Underground work had kept them all very busy for three years, the head researcher said; and they were still very busy. He was tall for a Persian, and grave, and he had a pretty leather briefcase. But he wasn’t as stylish as his editor in chief, who was unusually handsome, and in whose executive manner there was a certain amount of mischievousness.

I asked about the
Iran Week
cover. Were Iranian families, even middle-class families, as “nuclear” as the cover suggested? I had expected Iranian families to be more traditional, more extended. Sharply, as though to head me off the topic of Muslim polygamy, Mr. Abdi said that Iranian middle-class families were as the cover had shown them.

There was a big map of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico on the wall. I thought it might have been there for the sake of Cuba and Nicaragua, old and new centres of revolution. But no. Mr. Abdi had gone to Cayenne, French Guiana, to write about Devil’s Island for a Persian magazine that was doing a series on prisons.

He said, “It’s bad to travel alone. You should have a girl.”

He had had a girl on his Cayenne trip: West Indian women were
lovely. West Indian? A black woman for Mr. Abdi? He said, “I am wrong. She wasn’t West Indian. She was
mexique
.” He raised his head a little, as if remembering; and his black eyes went hollow.

This was the dandy side of the revolution. Even after a day in Tehran—and in spite of the advice to go and talk to the people in Qom—I felt it was far from the revolution of Khomeini and the streets. And six months later, when I returned to Tehran at the end of my Islamic journey,
Iran Week
was hard to find.

T
HE
next day was going to be a public holiday again—Constitution Day, to mark Iran’s first written constitution, achieved only in 1906—and the commercial streets were busy.

On Nadir Shah Avenue—Nadir Shah was the Persian king who raided Delhi in 1739 and stole and broke up Shah Jahan’s Peacock Throne, the jewels of which are still part of the Iranian state treasure—pavement hawkers and the sun and the dust made India feel close. And in Firdowsi Street, where the moneychangers’ booths faced the long blank wall of the British embassy compound, the atmosphere was a little like that of a red-light district, with everybody on the prowl, accosting or waiting to be accosted.

The moneychangers offered better rates than the banks. They had their nameboards, and some of them offered a window display of coins and facsimile notes; but, after that, their little booths were furnished strictly for business: desk, chairs, telephone, iron safes, a portrait of Khomeini. And their manners matched their rooms. They looked up, they said no, they looked away. They didn’t want my signed traveller’s cheques. Only Mr. Nasser was interested; but then he wanted all the cheques I had; and then he wanted to sell me the old silk carpet hanging on the wall for five hundred pounds.

Some of the changers worked from what were literally gaps in the wall. Some had no offices; they, more carefully dressed, prowled up and down Firdowsi with their briefcases.

At the top of the street, near a newspaper kiosk, I saw a small middle-aged man who looked more Indian than Iranian. At first I thought he was taking the air; then I thought he was a changer. I accosted him and he behaved as though I was a changer.

He was an Indian, a Shia Muslim from Bombay, and he had been
living in Iran for twenty years. He wasn’t a changer; he was a buyer; he had come to Firdowsi to buy dollars. He had been offered dollars at 115 rials. It was a good rate; but he was a man of business and he thought that if he stood his ground, if he continued to show himself, he might eventually tempt one of the ambulant changers to come down a rial or two.

A young man—Indian, Pakistani, or Iranian—came and stood anxiously near us. He was a friend or a dependent relative of the man from Bombay. He had been brought out to help with buying the dollars and had been making inquiries on his own.

And, as though he felt some explanation was necessary, the man from Bombay said, “In the old days these shops used to be stuffed with foreign currency. Stuffed. Nobody cared for any foreign currency here. Everybody wanted rials.” But he wasn’t grieving for the Shah’s rule. “You must forgive my language. The Shah was a bastard.”

It was a hard word; it encouraged the young man to shed his anxiousness and talk. The topic of foreign currency was laid aside; it was of the injustices of the Shah that the two men spoke, each man supporting the other, leading the other on, until—in that dusty street with the plane trees, the shoeshine men, the pavement coin-sellers—they were both at the same pitch of passion.

When the Shah ruled, everything in Iran had been for him. He had drained the country of billions; he had allowed the country to be plundered by foreign companies; he had filled the country with foreign advisers and technicians. These foreigners got huge salaries and lived in the big houses; the Americans even had their own television service. The people of Iran felt they had lost their country. And the Shah never really cared for religion, the precious Shia faith.

“What a nice thing it is now,” the man from Bombay said, “to see the rule of Ali! Getting women back into the veil, getting them off television. No alcohol.”

It was astonishing, after the passion. Was that all that there was to the rule of Ali? Did the Shia millennium offer nothing higher? The man from Bombay and his companion could say nothing more, had nothing more to say; and perhaps they couldn’t say that the true rewards of the revolution—as much a matter of undoing dishonour to Ali and the true faith, as of overthrowing the wicked—lay in heaven.

And the man from Bombay had another surprise for me. He wasn’t
staying with the rule of Ali. He was leaving Iran, after his twenty good years under the bad Shah, and going back to Bombay. That was why he had come to buy dollars in Firdowsi. His excess air baggage—and I gathered there was a lot—had to be paid for in dollars.

He said, and it was like another man speaking, “I don’t know what’s going to happen here now.”

A
T
Iran Week
I had been given ten minutes. At the
Tehran Times
I was almost offered a job. The
Times
was the new English-language daily; its motto was “May Truth Prevail.” The office was new, well equipped, and busy, and there were some American or European helpers.