Shadow of the Silk Road (37 page)

For the last hundred miles to Tehran the road curved round the invisible mass of Demavend. New-built mosques stood at intervals along the way, like wells on a parched journey. It was four days since I had left Nishapur. At noon a dust-storm brewed up in the north-east, blowing in waves low off the land’s emptiness. We entered dark hills, threaded by salinated streams. Cement factories appeared, and ironworks. The wind was thrashing the roadside poplars. Then the southern outskirts of Tehran thickened round, the festering-ground of revolution, and smokestacks protruded out of the smog and blown sand.

I had never meant to come here. In the days of the Silk Road, Tehran had hardly existed, and I was aiming pedantically for the caravan city of Rey. But Rey was drowned in the suburbs. When I found it that afternoon, the towers and ramparts noted by travellers a century ago had sunk under factories and apartment blocks. In one place only, above a once-sacred spring, a ridge of flinty rock was still crested by Seljuk walls which ran weakly over the suburbs. I followed them high along the track where their parapets had been, but they eroded to intermittent cliffs, scarred with vertical worry-lines, then petered into nothing.

Yet Rey was once compared to Baghdad. As early as pre-Christian times the Parthians built palaces here, and it became a mighty Sassanian way-station on the burgeoning Silk Road. Just as the Chinese guarded the secrets of the silkworm, so the Parthians, and the Sassanians after them, refused the Chinese true knowledge of the West. In
AD
67 a Chinese emissary seeking Roman Syria was deflected to the Persian Gulf by his Parthian hosts, then persuaded that the sea journey would take a preposterous two years and that people died of homesickness on it. The emissary turned back.

For centuries the Persians kept the overland trade in their own hands. Chinese silks reached them through intermediaries, bargained in dumb-show for Western gold and silver. In the salt-laden air of the Taklamakan, Chinese fabrics unearthed from archaic refuse heaps appear to have been woven for export as early as the first century
BC
. Their colours are faded crimson and copper now, and the blues darkened to myrtle-green. Han dynasty phoenixes and dragons fly beside the winged lions and goats of Parthia. Sometimes they are paired in the heraldic Persian style. The birds grow horses’ legs, the goats sprout wings, or unscroll themselves from clouds to carry a jewel or a flower.

By the time their silk banners unfurled before the dazed Roman legionaries at Carrhae, the Parthians had been trading formally with China for half a century. Their decorative inheritance was an ancient Mesoptamian one, rich with the hunt and beasts of Assyria and Babylon, and in time Persian silks, woven with Chinese yarn, came to beguile the West. As early as the fourth century
AD
a Christian bishop was rebuking his flock for wearing imported silks that portrayed lions, bears and panthers instead of the disciples; and a silk cope enclosing the corpse of St Mexme survives at Chinon on the Loire, blazoned with cheetahs chained to a Zoroastrian fire-altar.

By the fifth century the secrets of sericulture had long been out; mulberry trees were spreading along the Caspian; and the whole Sassanian court was glistening in silks–even boatmen and camel-drivers. Soon the opulence of the Persian designs was bewitching the Tang emperors themselves. I had glimpsed it in the frescoed gowns of Dunhuang Buddhas, and of Sogdian courtiers in
Samarkand. But in Rey, from their time, nothing but a shattered fort remains. The city’s greatness had continued after the Arab conquest, and now its relics were those only of Islam. Haroun al-Rashid was born here in 763, while his father rebuilt the city; Shah Rukh died here on campaign seven hundred years later. But the vibrant metropolis of the Seljuks, with its celebrated bazaars and gates, was so devastated by the Mongols that its scattered survivors never returned.

A few Seljuk ceramics shine in Tehran’s museums. Enamelled courtiers, forgetting the Islamic ban on living images, are riding their Mongol horses with whip and falcon to the chase. A haloed saint (or so he seems) sits beside a haloed woman, and lifts–O Omar Khayyám!–a little wine-glass. And a handful of silks, once laid in graves, retain their dragons and Trees of Life, where I can make out twin-headed birds with stiff wings and parrots’ bills, and gardens of faded flowers.

Tehran engulfed me. Hunting for friends–I had been given two addresses here–threading a tempest of traffic to the northern suburbs, so thick that motor-scooters mounted pavements and pedestrians zigzagged inch-close among cars, I looked out from my cab window on a city of public abstinence: one of the most polluted in the world, with a population of fourteen million that had doubled in twenty years. Everywhere the black-bearded heroes of the Iran–Iraq war gazed down from outsize hoardings: selected martyrs with the soulful eyes of premonition, yet too poorly painted to be quite real: symbols only of the Shia hunger to weep. ‘Beloved Khomeini!’ an advertisement cried. ‘We will never drop the banner you have raised!’

Impossible to tell, in the quiet streets that followed, what lay behind their steel gates and walled courts. Through a door in a closed alley, Amirali worked in the converted garage of his father’s house. I knew only that he was an artist and poet, who designed websites; but the man who greeted me was not quite a stranger. He had stepped from a Persian miniature, an inbred prince, with silky
beard and creamy skin. He was delicate, melancholy. His eyes behind their glasses flickered with nagging thoughts. He suffered from asthma and depression.

His rooms were plastered with photos, sketches, posters, any image that had appealed to him. Sometimes the place doubled as an underground art gallery. A dog-eared rank of books, some translated into Farsi before the 1979 revolution–Calvino, Nietzsche, Khalil Gibran, Kundera–mingled with videos of rock groups he admired. He had been influenced by Sting and heavy metal, he said. He spoke of them with a dreamy passion. Above all he studied the images projected behind bands as they performed, and had just created some for a half-illicit pop group. He dabbled in everything. And everything, he said, was available. Films appeared on the DVD black market within ten days of their premiere: ‘They get them in via Malaysia. You can pick up anything.’ He watched them with the hot love of the forbidden. ‘And everybody, of course, has illegal satellite dishes.’

Among those I had met to whom the internet was a lifeline out of solitude, nobody lived within it as obsessively as Amirali. As he veered all afternoon between his four computers and a maze of personal websites, the Persian prince became a Bohemian obsessive. His long hair hung adrift, his check shirt flapped over his jeans. For him these screens assembled a universe more real than the repressive world around him.

He showed me a film he had made, hoping forlornly to sell it abroad. It portrayed himself and some friends as they travelled to a village beyond Demavend in winter, planning to collect picturesque stories and scenes of village life. They were blinded, he said, by middle-class romanticism. ‘But we found those villages had no memories. No stories. There were no lullabies they sang their babies. The songs they sang were the same as ours.’ He smiled wanly. ‘It was an unhappy place. The young had abandoned it for the towns. The only one left was mad. They were complaining about how bad the road to the village was. They wanted tarmac. So we made a film about that. About how there were no stories. How history had disappeared.’

The images wavered bleakly over the screen. Even the village’s
sense of God had faded. One old woman, kneading dough, equated Him with good health. The film ended with a quote from Nietzsche that God was dead. He had died of pity for mankind. Amirali liked this film. It refuted urban fantasy about the countryside. He wanted to make war on clichés, his own and Western ones. ‘Western movies want our suffering. They just want women in chadors, suffering. But I can only show this film on my website, because our censors are dinosaurs. On the internet we’re left alone, but when we display to the public–my paintings, for instance–then things are different. There’s a borderline. But you can never be sure where it is…’

Perhaps from some inner loneliness, or perhaps in unconscious self-censorship, Amirali had fallen in love with inanimate objects. A year before, working in his garage surrounded by coat-hangers where his clothes dangled, he had sensed a life in them. ‘I started to think of the coat-hangers as having histories.’ He pulled them out of a box, one by one, some twisted, others hung with ties or a sleeve: fat ones, spindly ones, one dangling half a bra. He had transformed them for an exhibition. The coat-hangers became collages against canvas, grouped with other objects–a broken compass, a tea-bag or a scrawled word. Sometimes he had projected light on to them so their sepia shadows fell on a painted canvas, and these he had photographed to produce an oblique familiarity. None of this could he quite explain. Since childhood, he’d felt the emotion in lifeless things. ‘A while ago I became attracted to cups. It began with a cup of coffee left cold, abandoned.’ He added unsmiling: ‘It struck me as lonely…’

I wondered how the censor would view them. Just as the word had been dangerous in Soviet Russia, so the image was precarious here. Would some mullah sniff in those teacups a pagan animism, the endowment of dead things with life?

But the exhibition would move through the ghostly rooms of the internet. Which was a way of hoping. Amirali clung to this. Sometimes his asthma came back in the polluted city. Sometimes he couldn’t get out of bed. He needed work. ‘Two years ago,’ he said, ‘when I separated from my girlfriend, it was work that saved me. And when I wasn’t working, I started writing poetry.’

‘To her?’

‘No. I invented another girl, different. And this one became real for me.’ He said with his odd, matter-of-fact dreaminess: ‘I spoke to her, went out with her, slept with her. All the poems were about her. The poems created her. They were her.’

So he had produced her as he had recreated teacups and coat-hangers. They might not have a life of their own, but they had the life you gave them. And a teacup did not laugh at or desert you.

Later, while hunting for something else, he came with a shock on a sketch he had made of his girlfriend, the real one. He had drawn her on black paper, like a commemoration. She had already left him: a gauntly beautiful face torn by withheld lips and eyes like dark glasses.

He folded her back among sketches of inanimate things, and changed the subject. Soon his friends would be coming to view the back-projections he had created for their rock concert, he said. It was going ahead. He wanted me to come too. The dinosaur censors had listened to a tape of the music, subtly watered down, and had passed it. There were no lyrics, of course: lyrics were a problem. And the censors would probably come to the concert. ‘They hate anything that brings people together. They hate anything that rouses emotion.’

Of course they were afraid, I thought: afraid as the Soviets had been afraid, and the Taliban: of the power of music to raise up anarchy. Amirali said: ‘But you’ll come, won’t you? Listen to us.’

Yalda is distractingly beautiful. Once she crosses her office threshold, she flings off her hijab, and her hair shimmers to her shoulders. It is not hard to scent some privilege in her. But when she talks of her country, the flashing eyes and full, made-up lips are ablaze:

‘Iran is finished. It will take twenty years–or more–to recover from the mess the mullahs have made of it, even if they were thrown out tomorrow. Incompetence, dogmatism and corruption! The corruption is vast and everywhere. It filters from top to bottom. It’s hard to see how it can be reversed. The street vigilantes are less active now, but they can still search a person and extract a
bribe. That’s what they’ve come to. And the secret police–there’s a whole army of them–are ruthless, they’ll throw acid in your face, slash you…’

Her fingertips brush her cheek. ‘And everything’s getting worse. All the time. The traffic here–everybody’s talking about it–has become a hell. In the last six months it’s become easier to buy a car without a deposit, and they’re selling four thousand a day in Tehran…’

I listen, wondering where her radiance comes from. She is at once furious and happy. She asks: ‘Where have you been? Meshed!’ The city deepens her rage. ‘That’s how the mullahs control! That’s the cast of mind! They say such-and-such an imam said this-or-that, and people will obey. If people really believe the Mahdi’s been alive for thirteen hundred years, they can be persuaded of anything. And men’s dominance here is total. The marital laws are appalling.’ She glares at her discarded scarf. ‘When I wear that hijab in summer it’s intolerable. You’ve seen how our women dress…’

‘Yes.’ Pared to their veils, the women’s features looked darkly classical. But under their chadors they wore jeans and trainers, and hectic locks of hair and jesters’ shoes peeped out. Many opted for coats buttoned to the knee over trousers.

‘Our world is made by men. I’ve seen a report that fifty per cent of patients in our intensive care wards are failed suicides.’ I hear this with astonishment; but she is in a position to read such reports. ‘Another twenty-five per cent are drug addicts. Cocaine and heroin. It’s everywhere. You can get them at the street corner. And nobody works. After eleven in the morning you can’t get anything done. The calendar’s packed with religious holidays, usually mourning some saint.’ She shakes her freed hair. She has two passports, she says at last. If she wants, she can get out. But this is her country. All the same, she says: ‘I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.’

The rock concert happened in an old military hospital on the heights of the northern suburbs, while beneath, in the dusk, half Tehran winked with smothered lights. In the atrium of the
makeshift lecture theatre some hundred youths were milling, arrived by word of mouth. Amirali–in baseball cap and spectacles–was dithering between his projector and backstage; Yalda was there; and after a while a gang of teenagers coalesced, self-conscious with privilege, who wore their hair and clothes in rude defiance. Their jeans fell in baggy folds round their feet, and were slung with chains from pocket to pocket. Woollen hats teetered above their shoulder-length hair, their wrists flashed spiky bracelets, and their T-shirts were blazoned ‘Jackass’ and ‘Born Wild’. Several wore rings in pierced lips. In my crumpled trousers and drab shirt I faded into anonymity. A bar was serving weak tea and macaroons.