Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (43 page)

As we were going up the steps to the manuscript room Mehrdad said that the director of the library had stood up when we entered his office. This was a gesture of respect in Iran; the director wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t known about us.

And then, beyond an iron-barred door, we were in the quiet of the manuscript room, and among old things of great beauty. So that, abruptly, after the disorder of the streets, and my nerves, and the obstructiveness downstairs, we were again in another world.

It was already half-past eleven. Even if Emami came now we would be an hour late for Khalkhalli. I began mentally to write that meeting off, and thought that, rather like the people downstairs leaning against the aluminum cage to get the healing emanations of the dead holy man, it might be good for me, after all, to linger here for half an hour or so, in the calmer emanations of an older world. I thought of the library of the University of Salamanca in Spain, another collection of idle learning, or its mirror image, almost from the same period. But without warning the English-speaking guide who had been deputed to show us round was taken away, and there came a young cleric in a tunic and gown who, small and frowning, saying nothing, marched us from case to case, the skirt of his robe swinging above his small, light-colored slippers, and finally marched us out of the manuscript room, closing the iron-barred door with a bang behind us.

He led us then without speech or friendliness to other sections of the library: printed books, conservation, fumigation, copying. And then to rooms with more and more printed books: the unending stream of Islamic theology, elaborated without haste in places like Qom, and put out in “sets” of many volumes, uniformly and garishly bound: so many sets they made you wonder how far they had been checked and proofed, whether they were intended to find readers, or whether they were issued as sacred objects, the emanations of a revered ayatollah, their publication or manufacture being somebody’s act of piety or charity.

So many sets to see, now, in the company of our surly attendant, that at last I said no and stopped. I felt that we should be content with the adventure we had had, should go and look at the shrine of Hazrat Masumeh, eat lunch or something, and drive back to Tehran. Mehrdad agreed. He thought we had drawn too much attention to ourselves. It worried him that I had written down my name and address; and he didn’t think that we should hang around.

We broke off from our attendant, walked down two floors to where the library proper began. And found Emami, the talebeh.

He was relaxed and easy, a tall and slender man of about thirty, and he didn’t seem to know that he had kept us waiting an hour. He wasn’t in tunic and robe and turban, but in trousers and a silky or shiny white shirt with a textured pattern. No word from him—or Mehrdad transmitted none—about how he happened to be where he was, or why he hadn’t telephoned, or even why he hadn’t been there an hour earlier. All that came from him, in his calm, soft way, was yes, he knew where Khalkhalli lived, and would take us there.

I asked about his clothes. He said he was entitled to wear the tunic and the robe and the turban of the talebeh, but he didn’t like wearing them. He presented this—or so it came out in Mehrdad’s translation—as an aspect of his modernity; he saw himself as a modern man.

We went to the director’s office to say good-bye. The big man in the black turban was civil but distant; his business with us was over. The white office pad with my name and address was still where I had left it on his desk, on a pile of papers and old books. It looked glaring and noticeable; I could understand Mehrdad’s worry.

Downstairs, we passed the visitors to the shrine sitting or praying on the carpet below the photograph of Ayatollah Marashi or pressing their faces against the aluminum cage of his grave. Outside, on the busy sunlit street, we passed an open-fronted bookstall or shop: Persian books in a glass case, two very young students in turbans and tunics and gowns excitedly buying what appeared to be a concise textbook from the stall-keeper, and looking like people who had found treasure. Perhaps the little book was a simple question-and-answer book. The scene was like a stage set, with props—new books of antique learning, a shop of such books—that had ceased to be props, and with costumed actors—bookseller, students—who had become their roles. It would have been nice to stop and look, and to play with some of the fantasies the scene suggested. But we were already an hour late for Khalkhalli.

We found Kamran and the car some distance away, on the sunny side of the street. When we were all inside, the car wouldn’t start.

We all pushed, even Emami in his shiny white shirt, Kamran demonstrating even at this speed his capacity for handling his car recklessly, now steering out without warning into the traffic, now pushing directly against the traffic. He had Iranian luck; no one hit us. After about a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards the car bucked and started. And then Kamran and Mehrdad and Emami—in spite of what he had said, he didn’t absolutely know where Khalkhalli lived—asked and asked the way, doing what we should have done on our own earlier in the morning. Everyone knew the ayatollah’s house, and said it was very near. But it took some finding.

At last we came to a short residential street: white houses, newish, the houses with high fences or walls in the Iranian way. Emami pressed the bell of one house. Nothing happened. Emami pressed the bell of a second house and talked for a little into the intercom. The gate of the first house opened, and a very old woman, not in the black chador of Qom, but with a light patterned scarf (which she was tying around her head), came out to the pavement and pointed to a third house.

Emami pressed the bell there. Mehrdad also pressed, and after a while a man opened. He was not in uniform; but Mehrdad observed—and told me later—that the man had a gun at his waist, below his shirt. He said he didn’t know anything about a meeting, but he would go in and ask the ayatollah. The ayatollah was reading. He came out again after a while and said, “The ayatollah was expecting you. He was expecting you at eleven.” (But Mehrdad didn’t tell me that until the end of the day.)

We went through the tall gate and found another guard. He was in dark green trousers and shirt, the old-style uniform of the Revolutionary Guard komiteh.

A small front courtyard, short flight of steps, a verandah: I remembered something like that from 1979, but I couldn’t be sure that it was the same house, because the surroundings seemed to have changed so much. In 1979 Khalkhalli’s house was at the edge of the town, in a new street with young trees; the desert felt close. This lane looked established and was deep within the town.

We took off our shoes and went into the reception area. To the right was a library or study with bookshelves packed with books in sets. To the left was the sitting room, a formal, almost empty area spread with carpets. The walls were a pale gray-green. Green-striped oblong cushions were propped against the inset radiators in one wall. A thin palliasse on the carpet, oddly intimate, showed where at one stage the ayatollah might have
been resting (or waiting for us). On the other side of the room were four or five dark armchairs. On the lace doily on the side table next to one of the chairs were three or four toothpicks or tooth-sticks: the master of the house, no doubt. That must have been where he was, reading, when we pressed the buzzer on his gate.

Hanging on the wall with the radiators was a ready-wrapped black turban, looking somewhat thin and squashed and pathetic; and, above that, were photographs of the ayatollah with Khomeini. The photographs were high up on the wall—perhaps to prevent them from being pilfered—and it wasn’t easy to see the details. One photograph was a candid-camera, black-and-white shot of Khalkhalli and Khomeini, both in turban and robe, both frowning, walking purposefully in snow at the back of a car: a street scene, no doubt. Khalkhalli’s robe came down almost to his ankles, outlined his belly, and didn’t stress his shortness; in fact, striding beside Khomeini, he didn’t look much shorter. A formal group portrait to the left of that was of Khomeini, his son, and Khalkhalli; Khalkhalli had been the teacher of Khomeini’s son and was proud of the distinction. Next to that was a color photograph of Khomeini and Khalkhalli, both men laughing this time: Khomeini on the right reclining on what looked like a chaise longue, Khalkhalli leaning conspiratorially over him from the left, Khalkhalli turbaned and black-gowned and with his thick-lensed, black-rimmed glasses. Khalkhalli’s black gown—like a protective wing over Khomeini—occupied much of the left side of the photograph. The photograph was not properly focused or had been badly enlarged: there was a kind of blue-white halo around Khomeini’s chair. It was a disturbing photograph: Khalkhalli the jester making his master laugh. It was the only photograph I had seen in which Khomeini was laughing, and the laugh altered the face, stressed the sensuality.

Khalkhalli was now out of everything, people said; he had been pushed aside. The photographs on the wall were like proof of his power in the old days, his closeness to the Imam, the leader of the revolution. But in a time to come the photographs on the wall might say something else: the busy men of the revolution frowning in the street, laughing in private.

He came in now. And it was an entrance. He was barefooted, in simple white, like a penitent, and he moved very slowly. A short-sleeved white tunic, wet with perspiration down the middle of his chest, hung over a loose white lower garment. Step by dragging step he came in, very small, completely bald, baby-faced without his turban, head held down against his
chest, looking up from below his forehead, eyes without mischief now and seemingly close to tears, as though he wished to dramatize his situation and needed pity.

He invited me to sit in a chair. He sat next to me. We were separated by the little side table with the lace doily and the tooth-sticks.

I didn’t know how to start. I really wanted to hear about his work as a judge, and to hear what he had to say now about the revolution. But I didn’t know how to get to that. I thought an indirect approach, with questions about his childhood or his early days, would begin to take us there. But, as in 1979, he didn’t want to talk about his life.

If we were to go back so far, he said, it would tire him. He had had a heart operation, a triple bypass. And, either because it was hard for him to sit on the chair, or because he wished to show he didn’t like my questions, he got up from the chair next to mine and moved to the palliasse on the carpet.

I asked when he had become a revolutionary. He said he had always been a revolutionary, ever since he knew himself; he had always hated kings.

The guards brought in tea in little glasses. They sat and listened to our talk. I felt they liked the break in their routine.

And social graces came to Khalkhalli. He said he had learned a lot from Nehru. This was meant as a courtesy to me: he saw me as someone from India. He had especially liked Nehru’s book
Glimpses of World History;
in the Persian translation it was in three volumes. I reminded him of his interest in the Polisario movement in 1979, and asked what he thought would be the future of societies that were revolutionary today. He said, in Mehrdad’s translation, “Reality will always prevail.”