Among the Believers (7 page)

“How did you like the Hilton?” one of the hotel desk clerks asked me. He was less buttoned up than the others: he dealt in a small way in silver coins and was on the point of selling me two.

“It was empty.”

“All the hotels are empty. It will change in two months. There is no government now. In two months we will have a government. At least that’s what we say.”

He was a devout man, like the others in the hotel. No sermon on television was too long for him.

They spoke, in Iran, of the oneness of faith and deed. That oneness had overcome the Shah and his armed forces. That oneness was all that was still needed. But they were fooling themselves. What, after the centuries of despotism, they really believed was that the state was something apart, something that looked after itself and was ever restored. And even while, with their faith, they were still pulling it all down—hotel, city, state—they were waiting for it to start up again, to be as it was before.

I decided then to go to the holy city of Qom; and that was when I met Behzad. He led me through the traffic and said, “You must always give your hand to me.” I liked the words; they answered my need. Without the language, and in the midst of these Iranian contradictions, I needed now to be led by an Iranian hand.

Then Behzad translated the legend in the revolutionary poster—“Twelfth Imam, we are waiting for you”—and I was taken to another level of wonder.

  3
The Holy City

B
ehzad and I went to Qom by car. It was past noon when we got back to the hotel, and the hotel taxi drivers, idle though they were, didn’t want to make the long desert trip. Only one man offered—he was the man who had made me listen to the Koranic readings on his car radio one evening—and he asked for seventy dollars. Behzad said it was too much; he knew someone who would do it for less.

We waited a long time for Behzad’s driver, and then we found that between our negotiations on the telephone and his arrival at the hotel his charges had gone up. He was a small, knotty man, and he said he wasn’t a Muslim. He didn’t mean that. He meant only that he wasn’t a Shia or a Persian. He was a “tribesman,” a Lur, from Luristan in the west.

Qom had a famous shrine, the tomb of the sister of the Eighth Shia Imam; for a thousand years it had been a place of pilgrimage. It also had a number of theological schools. Khomeini had taught and lectured at Qom; and on his return to Iran after the fall of the Shah he had made
Qom his headquarters. He was surrounded there by ayatollahs, people of distinction in their own right, and it was one of these attendant figures, Ayatollah Khalkhalli, whom I was hoping to see.

Khomeini received and preached and blessed; Khalkhalli hanged. He was Khomeini’s hanging judge. It was Khalkhalli who had conducted many of those swift Islamic trials that had ended in executions, with official before-and-after photographs: men shown before they were killed, and then shown dead, naked on the sliding mortuary slabs.

Khalkhalli had recently been giving interviews, emphasizing his activities as judge, and a story in Tehran was that he had fallen out of favour and was trying through these interviews to keep his reputation alive. He told the
Tehran Times
that he had “probably” sentenced four hundred people to death in Tehran. “On some nights, he said, bodies of thirty or more people would be sent out in trucks from the prison. He claimed he had also signed the death warrants of a large number of people in Khuzistan Province.” Khuzistan was the Arab province in the southwest, where the oil was.

He told another paper that there had been a plot—worked out in the South Korean embassy—to rescue Hoveida, the Shah’s prime minister, and other important people from the Tehran jail. As soon as he, Khalkhalli, had heard of this plot he had decided—to deal a blow to the CIA and Zionism—to bring forward the cases. “I reviewed all their cases in one night and had them face the firing squad.” He told the
Tehran Times
how Hoveida had died. The first bullet hit Hoveida in the neck; it didn’t kill him. Hoveida was then ordered by his executioner—a priest—to hold his head up; the second bullet hit him in the head and killed him.

“Would this man see me?” I had asked an agency correspondent, when we were talking about Khalkhalli.

“He would
love
to see you.”

And Behzad thought it could be arranged. Behzad said he would telephone Khalkhalli’s secretary when we got to Qom.

The telephone, the secretary: the modern apparatus seemed strange. But Khalkhalli saw himself as a man of the age. “He said”—this was from the
Tehran Times
—“the religious leaders were trying to enforce the rule of the Holy Prophet Mohammed in Iran. During the days of the Prophet swords were used to fight, now they have been replaced by Phantom aircraft.” Phantoms: not American, not the products
of a foreign science, but as international as swords, part of the stock of the great world bazaar, and rendered Islamic by purchase.

There was a confusion of this sort in Behzad’s mind as well, though Behzad was not religious, was a communist, and had been kept away from religion by his communist father. Behzad’s father had been imprisoned during the Shah’s time, and Behzad had inherited his father’s dream of a “true” revolution. Such a revolution hadn’t come to Iran; but Behzad, employing all the dialectic he had learnt, was forcing himself to see, in the religious fervour of Khomeini’s revolution, the outline of what could be said to be true. And as we drove south through Tehran—at first like a bazaar, and then increasingly like a settlement in a polluted desert—it was the city of proletarian revolt that he was anxious to show me.

Low brick buildings were the colour of dust; walls looked unfinished; bright interiors seemed as impermanent as their paint. Tehran, in the flat land to the south, had been added and added to by people coming in from the countryside; and clusters of traditional square clay-brick houses with flat roofs were like villages.

We passed a great factory shed. Some kind of beige fur had adhered to the walls below every window. Behzad told me it was a cloth factory and had been a centre of the revolution. The army had gone in, and many workers had been killed.

After the oil refinery, puffing out flame from its chimney, we were in the true desert. There were no trees now, and the views were immense: mounds, hills, little ranges. The road climbed, dipped into wide valleys. Hills and mounds were smooth, and sometimes, from a distance and from certain angles, there was the faintest tinge of green on the brown, from tufts of grass and weeds, which were then seen to be really quite widely scattered.

From the top of a hill we saw, to the left, the salt lake marked on the map. It looked small and white, as though it was about to cake into salt; and the white had a fringe of pale green. Behzad said that sometimes it all looked blue. Many bodies had been dumped there by the Shah’s secret police, from helicopters. And the lake was bigger than it looked. It was a desolation when we began to pass it; the green water that fringed the white was very far away. The land after that became more broken. Hills were less rounded, their outlines sharper against the sky.

It was desert, but the road was busy; and occasionally there were
roadside shacks where soft drinks or melons could be had. Behzad thought we should drink or eat something before we got to Qom; in Qom, where they were strict about the Ramadan fasting, there would be nothing to eat or drink before sunset.

We stopped at a bus-and-truck halt, with a big rough café in Mediterranean colours and a watermelon stall on a platform beside the road. The watermelon man, seated at his stall below a thin cotton awning that gave almost no shade, was sleeping on his arms.

We woke him up and bought a melon, and he lent a knife and forks. Behzad halved the melon and cut up the flesh, and we all three—the driver joining us without being asked—squatted round the melon, eating as it were from the same dish. Behzad, I could see, liked the moment of serving and sharing. It could be said that it was a Muslim moment; it was the kind of sharing Muslims practised—and the driver had joined us as a matter of course. But the driver was a worker; Behzad was sharing food with someone of the people, and he was imposing his own ritual on this moment in the desert.

Two saplings had been planted on the platform. One was barked and dead; the other was half dead. Between them lay an old, sunburnt, ill-looking woman in black, an inexplicable bit of human debris an hour away from Tehran. Scraps of newspaper from the stall blew about in the sand and caught against the trunks of the trees. Across the road a lorry idled, its exhaust smoking; and traffic went by all the time.

We squatted in the sand and ate. The driver spat out the watermelon seeds onto the road. I did as the driver did; and Behzad—but more reverentially—did likewise. Abruptly, stabbing his fork into the melon, saying nothing, the square-headed little Lur jumped off the platform. He was finished; he had had enough of the melon. He walked across the dingy desert yard to the café to look for a lavatory, and Behzad’s moment was over.

I had imagined that Qom, a holy city, would have been built on hills: it would have been full of cliff walls and shadows and narrow lanes cut into the rock, with cells or caves where pious men meditated. It was set flat in the desert, and the approach to it was like the approach to any other desert town: shacks, gas stations. The road grew neater; shacks gave way to houses. A garden bloomed on a traffic roundabout—Persian gardens had this abrupt, enclosed, oasislike quality. A dome gleamed in the distance between minarets. It was the dome of the famous shrine.

Behzad said, “That dome is made of gold.”

It had been gilded in the last century. But the city we began to enter had been enriched by oil; and it seemed like a reconstructed bazaar city, characterless except for the gold dome and its minarets.

Behzad said, “How shall I introduce you? Correspondent? Khalkhalli likes correspondents.”

“That isn’t how I want to talk to him, though. I really just want to chat with him. I want to understand how he became what he is.”

“I’ll say you are a writer. Where shall I say you come from?”

That was a problem. England would be truest, but would be misleading. Trinidad would be mystifying, and equally misleading. South America was a possibility, but the associations were wrong.

“Can you say I am from the Americas? Would that make sense in Persian?”

Behzad said, “I will say that you come from America, but you are not an American.”

We made for the dome and stopped in a parking area outside the shrine. It was midafternoon, and hotter in the town than in the desert; the gilded dome looked hot. The Lur driver, in spite of our sacramental watermelon feast, was mumbling about food. Ramadan or not, he wanted to take the car and go out of Qom to look for something to eat; and he wanted to know what our plans were.

Across the road, near the watermelon stall at the gateway to the shrine, there was a glass-walled telephone booth of German design. Behzad went to telephone Khalkhalli’s secretary.

The high wall of the shrine area was aerosolled and painted with slogans in Persian. There were two in English—
WE WANT REPUBLIC, KHOMEINI IS OUR LEADER
—and they must have been meant for the foreign television cameras. The second slogan was a direct translation of
Khomeini e Imam
, but as a translation it was incomplete, suggesting only (with the help of the first slogan) a transfer of loyalty from the Shah to Khomeini, not stating the divine authority of the leader or the access to heaven that he gave. In Iran, where for eleven hundred years they had been waiting for the return of the Twelfth Imam,
Imam
was a loaded word; and especially here at Qom, where the sister of the Eighth Imam was buried. Access to heaven, rejection of nondivine rule, was the purpose of the “republic” proclaimed here.

Behzad, opening the door of the telephone booth, the telephone in his hand, waved me over.

When I went to him he said, “The secretary says that Khalkhalli is praying. He will see you at nine this evening, after he has broken his fast.”

It was 3:30. We had told the driver we would be only three or four hours in Qom.

Behzad said, “What do you want me to tell the secretary?”

“Tell him we’ll come.”

Then we went to break the bad news to the impatient Lur—or the good news: he was charging by the hour. He said something that Behzad didn’t translate. And he drove off to look for food, leaving Behzad and me to think of ways of spending five and a half hours in the torpid, baking city, where nothing could be eaten or drunk for the next five hours.

The shops opposite the shrine sold souvenirs—plates with Khomeini’s face, cheap earthenware vases—and sweets: flat, round cakes, brown, soft, very sweet-looking, breaking up at the edges. Food could be sold to travellers during Ramadan, Behzad said; but it wasn’t worth the trouble. Not many people were about. A crippled old woman, a pilgrim no doubt, was wheeling herself slowly past the shops. We surprised a plump boy in a booth taking a nibble at a brown cake, part of his stock; but he judged us harmless and smiled (though a couple of people had been whipped some days before for eating).