In Xanadu (20 page)

'Eggspress, eggspress, change, change....'

Trailing sleeping bags, water bottles and maps we were ousted onto a deserted stretch of line. No one had warned us that we were going to have to change.

'Eggspress he coming ten minutes,' shouted the conductor -unconvincingly - from the departing train.

It was still dark but you could smell that we had left the river behind. The ground around the tracks was hard and coarse, sprouting only litter and broken glass. Three other figures stood around silhouetted against the moon. We unrolled our sleeping bags, spread out the ground sheet and lay down beside the tracks, waiting.

We reached Erzurum at ten-thirty a.m., fourteen hours late.

It took several hours to walk across the town, a bleak expanse of bus parks, roundabouts and
kebabji,
as unattractive as Mersin, only larger. It is distinguished by its tiny university campus, possibly the only such in the world to be seasonally terrorized by wolves.

A lorry took us as far as the Seljuk bridge at Horassan, where the drivers stopped to swim in the Aras Nehri, a tributary of the Euphrates. They dived in fully clothed, stripped, and washed themselves, their hair and their clothes in an orgy of soap and splashing. Then they lay down, stretched, and dried themselves in the sun. When they were dressed, Laura was allowed out of the truck, and we sat under a clump of silver birch quartering watermelons and drinking the juice. We spent that night in the truck. After a breakfast of thin
chorba
soup we flagged down a
dolmus
heading for Dogubayazit.

It was a long journey, through wild, upland country. The ground and the stone was dark, black and volcanic and Yuruks were moving slowly across the planisphere flats, faces cast downwards, gypsy locks tied into buns and pigtails. Some drove cattle ahead of them.

We reached the town in a Neolithic late-evening gloom. Dogubayazit was full of sinister, swarthy Turks. A few had slit-eyed Mongol features. They wore ragged waistcoats and stared deadpan from open doorways. Tartar children were kicking a ball, wind raked along the street.

We found a hotel and lay flat on our beds. Sometime later the patron knocked on the door and told us he could rig up some hot water if we would like it. In so bleak an evening it seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately it was. When I got into the shower and turned the tap, the water spluttered, dripped, then gave up. I called Selim (we never discovered his real name, but named him after the manic Ottoman, Selim the Grim), and explained the problem. He fiddled around, banging the boiler and hammering the pipes. I stood by uselessly in my bath towel. He went off and returned with a spanner. He fiddled a bit more. Then he turned around.

'Wallah,' he whispered in undertaker tones, 'much hot, but no water.'

Laura tried to ring home from the post office; I sat in a cafe writing postcards to my friends and family. An air of terrible finality hung over that evening. Only a few miles away from Dogubayazit was the Iranian border. Tomorrow we would try and cross it. We had no idea what would happen. The officials at the Iranian Embassy in London had given us contradictory statements. One had said that we would be put in a bus and driven straight across the country. Another thought that we would be given a minder, our very own Revolutionary Guard, who would 'protect us' and keep us away from what the official picturesquely called 'sensitive areas'. A third diplomat who Laura confronted said what we would be left to our own devices - and the tender mercies of the Iranian people. It was difficult to know which of the options was the least appealing.

Our ideas of the country itself were little more
developed.
On the one hand we had seen perfectly civilized Iranians with our own eyes. But then again, we had seen the pictures: crazed revolutionaries burning effigies of Uncle Sam, incarcerating hostages and calling down hellfire on the Great Satan (Ronald Reagan) and the She-Devil (our own Prime Minister). The British Foreign Office was little more cheering. The man we had spoken to at the Iranian information desk had warned us
that
Britons were strongly advised not to visit the country. Two Englishmen, one a student, were languishing in Iranian jails on trumped-up charges of espionage, and a backpacker of our own age had been shot dead at the border. He was thought to have been carrying drugs, and to have panicked when they were discovered at customs. Then there were the reports of the Morality Police, the Islamic Secret Service set up by the Ayatollah Khomeini. They operated both in Iranian homes, through a network of informers it was said, and more publicly, through a fleet of plain-clothes agents. Men and women walking together in the streets could be stopped and asked to present a
marriage certificate. If none was forthcoming, the Morality Police could order an instant public flagellation. They had similar powers in the enforcing of the Dress Laws. If anyone, men as well as women, were regarded as immorally dressed, wearing a T-shirt or simply revealing an ankle or a wrist in public, that person could be immediately arrested and flogged. Travelling unmarried with Laura was going to be risky, however much trouble we took with our dress. Finally there was the Gulf War and the dangers of bombing raids by the Iraqi airforce.

Laura did get through to her mother. Her news did not add to the general air of jollity.

'My mother says she has spoken to the British Embassy in Teheran.'

'Good. What did they say?'

'They say we are mad to cross the border.'

Oh.'

The Morality Police have stepped up their operations.' ‘I see.'

They've been ordered to double the number of public beatings every month.' ‘Ah.'

'And apparently the Iraqis have been night-bombing Teheran and Isfahan.' 'Well at least we'll be able to sleep through that.' 'If we go.'

Neither of us spoke for several minutes. I sipped at my tea. 'My mother sends her love,' said Laura. 'How nice of her.'

I played with the tea leaves at the bottom of my glass.

'Have you written lots of postcards?'

'Lots.'

We sat in silence for another minute. 'Do you want some more tea?' 'No.'

'Well, what do you think?'

'What do you mean "what do I think?" '

'You know exactly what I mean.'

'What
do you
think?'

Laura considered.

'Well I think it would be a shame if we got killed.' 'So do I.'

'And I don't much fancy being flogged.'

'Not my idea of a good time either.'

'But I couldn't face anyone at home if we wimped out now.'

'So we go?'

I found a small-time crook in one of the
cay
shops. He had a thin red scar under his right eye and he chuckled as he changed our lira into Iranian rials at the black-market rate. He put the lira under the label in his flat cap, winked, then slipped out into the darkness. Then we packed, set the alarm clock and went to bed early.

FOUR

We were not a very cheery party in the bus the next morning. It ha i dawned hot and muggy, and the
dolmus
was two hours late. Laura and I sat in the middle row. Behind us were two families of grumbling Iranians. Ahead sat a solitary Japanese. His name, so he said, was Condom.

Laura had woken in a foul mood. She had snapped at Selim when he serenaded her with grisly stories of what Iranian Revolutionary Guards liked to do to immoral Western girls, then had sat in silence as she waited for the bus, staring pink and cross from her
chador
battle-dress. Ten minutes into the journey she had still not said a word.

'You're very quiet,' I said eventually. How are you feeling?'

Laura scowled from beneath her headscarf.

'Hot.'

Never mind. Nearly there.' 'I know.' 'Happy?' 'No.'

Condom, I had already discovered, spoke no English. He sat picking his nails, staring out of the window. I looked at him. How could he be so clean, calm and neat-looking? It seemed as if hardly a speck of dust had fallen on him since he left Tokyo. He wore a white zipper anorak, dazzling in the sunlight, his mauve canvas slacks were neatly pressed and spotless Even his rucksack appeared to have received a recent, energetic scrubbing. He did not look at all nervous. He looked bond. He was about to enter revolutionary Iran, a country ruled by religious extremists, but for all the apprehension on his face he might have been about to embark on a bus tour of the Home Counties.

I followed his gaze out the window. According to my guidebook. Mount Ararat and the remains of Noah's Ark lay to our left, but I could see only the ghost of the mountain's shape through the heat haze. I got out my pocketbook and began to quiz one of the Iranians on the basics of Farsi. I copied down the Persian for 'Yes' and 'No', and a few other essentials, then asked Laura what else we might need. She turned to the Iranian.

'What is the Farsi for "If you arrest me there will be a diplomatic incident"?'

The border post was a sprawl of concrete bunkers surrounded by barbed-wire fences. We passed the Turkish authorities without problem, and stepped through the border gate, beneath a huge portrait of Attaturk in a white tie. A Turkish guard gave me a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

'Iran good,' he said.

We found ourselves in a huge hall full of Iranian women in black
chador
attended by their menfolk. Many were sitting patiently on benches set along the walls while customs officials ransacked their cases. While we queued I asked my Iranian friend from the
dolmus
to guide me through the iconography of the Islamic Republic. We worked our way along the posters on the wall.