THE highway to Tehran was busy. There was a moon, but the lights of cars and buses killed the view. It was only in snatches that the desert and the moonlight and the outlines of hills could be seen. Behzad was tired; he dozed off. When he awakened he asked the driver to put on the car radio for the news.
The news was bad for Behzad. Ayandegan, the newspaper of the left, the paper Behzad read and had told me about, had been closed down by the Islamic prosecutor in Tehran. The paper was charged with publishing “diversionary ideologies and beliefs among the revolutionary Muslims of Iran”; with attempting “to create dissent among the various Muslim groups of Iran”—a reference to the racial and non-Shia minorities; with falsifying its circulation figures; with sending out incomplete copies of the paper to some parts of the country, in order to save newsprint “for publishing material aimed at dividing the nation.” The assets of the paper had been handed over to the Foundation for the Deprived; and Revolutionary Guards had occupied its offices.
Behzad—in spite of Shirazi and Khalkhalli—still claimed the revolution as his own, seeing in one popular movement the possibility and even the beginnings of another. The revolution, though, had now turned against him. But revolutionaries have to be patient; and Behzad had learnt patience from his revolutionary father. The loss of the paper was serious—it would have been shattering to me, if the cause had been mine—but Behzad bore his disappointment well.
He didn’t go back to sleep. From time to time, as we drove through the moonlit desert, he went abstracted. We passed the white salt lake on the right, where he had said bodies had been dumped by the Shah’s secret police; the cemetery, on the left, where martyrs of the revolution had been buried, which we would have visited if we had returned in daylight; and then Tehran Refinery on the right, puffs of flame leaping from its tall chimney—Iran making money while it slept.
About midnight we got back to the hotel. And it was at the hotel gate that the Lur slapped on the extra charges that he must have been meditating for hours. He charged for both distance and time; he charged for late hours; he was in the end more expensive than the hotel taxi we had turned down. But it had been a harder day than he had bargained for, he had been denied the lunch he badly wanted; I had studied, with growing tenderness, the back of his square little head for so long; his passion for his rice and mutton, when eating time had at last come for him, had been so winning; the lean and knobby face that he turned to me to ask for more was so appealing, in the dim saloon light of the car; he was so completely Behzad’s ideal of the good and gentle worker; that I paid without demur.
4
The Night Train from Mashhad
Behzad came from a provincial town, one of the famous old towns of Persia. His father was a teacher of Persian literature. About his mother Behzad had nothing to say—he spoke of her only as his mother—and I imagined that her background was simpler. He had studied for some time at an American school and he spoke English well, with a neutral accent. Now, at twenty-four, he was a science student at an institute in Tehran. He had an easy, educated manner and a Persian delicacy. He was tall, slender, athletic. He went skiing and mountain walking, and he was a serious swimmer.
The provincial background, possibly purely traditional on one side, the American school, the science institute in the capital, the athletic pursuits: it might have been said that for Behzad, living nearly all his life under the Shah, the world had opened up in ways unknown to his grandparents.
But that was my vision. I was twice Behzad’s age. I had been born in a static colonial time; and in Trinidad, where I spent my first eighteen years, I had known the poverty and spiritual limitations of an agricultural colony where, as was once computed, there were only eighty kinds of job. I therefore, in places like Iran, had an eye for change. It was different for Behzad. Born in Iran in 1955, he took the existence of national wealth for granted; he took the expansion of his society for granted; he had an eye only for what was still unjust in that society.
I saw him as emerged, even privileged. He saw himself as poor, and as proof he said he didn’t own a jacket; in winter he wore only a pullover. The idea of poverty had been given Behzad by his father, who, as a communist, had been imprisoned for some time during the Shah’s rule. And that idea of poverty was far from mine in Trinidad twenty-five years before.
When he was a child—it would have been in the mid-sixties—Behzad had one day asked his father, “Why don’t we have a car? Why don’t we have a refrigerator?” That was when his father had told him about poverty and injustice, and had begun to induct him into the idea of revolution. In Behzad’s house revolution had replaced religion as an animating idea. To Behzad it was even touched, like religion, with the notion of filial piety. And Behzad, in his own faith, was as rigid as any mullah in Qom in his. He judged men and countries by their revolutionary qualities. Apart from Persian literature, for which he had a special feeling, he read only revolutionary writers or writers he considered revolutionary, and I wasn’t sure that he could put dates to them: Sholokhov, Steinbeck, Jack London. He had never been tempted to stray.
He told me, as we were walking about central Tehran two days after our trip to Qom, that there was no true freedom in the West. The workers were oppressed, exchanging their labour for the barest necessities. True freedom had existed only once in the world, in Russia, between 1917 and 1953.
I said, “But there was a lot of suffering. A lot of people were jailed and killed.”
He pounced on that. “What sort of people?”
He had no religious faith. But he had grown up in Shia Iran, and his idea of justice for the pure and the suffering was inseparable from the idea of punishment for the wicked. His dream of the reign of Stalin was a version of the dream of the rule of Ali—the Prophet’s true successor.
I said, “Have some of your friends changed sides now and decided that they are Muslims?”
“A few. But they don’t know what they are.”
He showed me the city of the revolution. On this tree-lined shopping avenue, in that burnt-out building (its blackened window openings not noticeable at first in the fume-stained street), the Shah’s soldiers had taken up their positions. They had fired on demonstrators. And here, in this doorway, a man had died. After six months the blood was barely visible: just dark specks on the dirty concrete. In two places someone had written, with a black felt-tip pen, in Persian characters of a size that might have been used for a private note: This is the blood of a martyr. “Martyr” was a precise religious word; but Behzad could also read it politically.
On Revolution Avenue, formerly Shah Reza, opposite the big iron-railed block of Tehran University, were the publishers (mingled with men’s shops) and the pavement booksellers and cassette-sellers and print-sellers. The cassettes were of speeches by Khomeini and other ayatollahs; they were also—in spite of Khomeini’s ban on music—of popular Persian and Indian songs. Some booksellers had books in Persian about the revolution, its ideologues and its martyrs. Some had more solid piles of communist literature, Persian paperbacks, with hardcover sets of Lenin or Marx in English, from Russia. One revolution appeared to flow into the other.
And there were photograph albums of the revolution. The emphasis in these albums was on death, blood, and revenge. There were photographs of people killed during the Shah’s time; photographs of the uprising: blood in the streets, bodies in the morgues, with slogans daubed in blood on the white tiles; galleries of people executed after the revolution, and shown dead, page after page, corpse upon corpse. One corpse was that of Hoveida, the Shah’s prime minister, hurried out to death late one night by Khalkhalli’s orders and shot twice, first in the neck, then in the head: and the black bullet hole in Hoveida’s old-man’s neck was clear in the photograph.
These were the souvenir books of the revolution, put out by competing publishers. It was the other side of Iranian sentimentality, also available here, in the stock of the print-sellers: dream landscapes of water and trees, paintings of childre
n and beautiful women with thick, inexplicable tears running half-way down their cheeks. Behzad loved those tears.
All the buildings in the university block—founded by the Shah’s father—were disfigured with slogans. The university was the great meeting place of Tehran, and even on a day like this, a day without any scheduled event, it was full of discussion groups. Behzad said, “It goes on all the time.” What did they talk about? He said, “The same things. Islam, communism, the revolution.” It looked like a pacific campus scene; it was hard to associate these young men in jeans and pretty shirts with the bloodiness celebrated in the books and albums across the road.
But violence was in the air, and just after we came out through the main gate we saw this incident. A student in a white shirt, small and with glasses, inexpertly and with some comic effort taped a leaflet onto the iron rails of the gate. The leaflet was a protest about the closing down of Ayandegan, the paper of the left. A workman near a food stall at the edge of the pavement walked slowly over, drew a red hammer and sickle on the leaflet, crossed the whole sheet with an X, slapped the student twice in the middle of the pavement crowd, and then, without hurry, taped up the defaced leaflet more securely.
The student had ducked to save his glasses and his eyes. No one moved to help him. Even Behzad did nothing. He only said, as though appealing to me for justice, “Did you see that? Did you see that?”
The two revolutions appeared to flow together, the revolution of Khomeini and what Behzad would have seen as the true revolution of the people. But they were distinct. The previous weekend Behzad and some of his group had gone to a village to do “constructive” work. They had run into trouble with the Revolutionary Guards: every village had its komiteh, young men with guns who were now the law in many parts of Iran. The Guards, Muslims, didn’t want communists in the village.
Who were these Muslim militants? Behzad said, “They’re lumpen. Do you know the word?” The village Guards were lumpen, like the workman who had slapped the student. The doctrinal word helped Behzad; it enabled him to keep his faith in the people.
IT was a different scene at the university the next morning. It was the Friday sabbath again, and this was the third successive Friday on which there were to be mass prayers in the university grounds.
Behzad and I walked from the hotel, and when we got to Revolution Avenue it seemed that half Tehran was walking with us. No buses or trucks had brought these people in; they had walked. The crowd was thick outside the university; cars moved carefully; separate little groups among the walkers shouted slogans that were barely audible in the deep hubbub.
We passed the pavement booksellers and print-sellers and at the end of the block we turned off to the right, following the university rails. The wide side street, sloping up to North Tehran, was lined on both sides with plane trees and narrow water channels, flowing fast. A bearded young man outside the university rails, a book-pedlar, was holding up a booklet in each hand and shouting, “These books are against communism and imperialism.”
Behzad said pityingly, “To them the words are the same.”
We passed the man and were continuing along the rails when Behzad pulled me back. He said, “Here we must follow Islamic law. This side of the road is for women.”
We crossed the road, walked up some way beside the fast water channel, and for an hour or more, on the pavement reserved for men (as we thought), in the contracting, thinning shade of a plane tree, we watched the crowd coming up from Revolution Avenue, the women black-veiled and black-gowned on one side, the men on the other. Fervent, frenzied men squatted by the water channel, did their ritual wash, and then pelted on; it was as if there was a competition in frenzy or the display of frenzy. Whenever Behzad and I stopped talking we heard the sound of feet, the chatter of the walking crowd, the occasional cry of a baby. A faint dust rose above the university grounds.
From time to time groups came up shouting slogans about unity; once there was a group in paratroop camouflage clothes with G-3 rifles. Revolutionary Guards appeared, keeping the flow moving, keeping men separate from women. Once I saw a Kurd or a man in Kurdish costume: the loosest kind of belted dungaree, with very baggy trousers tapering off at the ankles. Once, amazingly, on our pavement there passed by a plump young woman in tight jeans and high heels bound on some quite different business. She walked as fast as she could on her heels, looking at no one.
The crowd thickened, men and women now in distinct streams, the men moving, the women slowing down, bunching, checked by the crush at the women’s entrance some way up. A speech began to come over the loudspeakers, in a breaking, passionate voice; it added to the frenzy. The pavement on the women’s side filled up. Women began to settle down on newspaper and cheap rugs on the street itself, at first in the glare-shot shade of the plane trees, then anywhere. They invaded our pavement, or the pavement we had thought was ours. Indifferent to us, they dug into their baskets, spread their bits of rug and cloth and pieces of paper at our feet; and after being part of the anonymous, impressive, black-gowned flow, they turned out to be peasant women with worn faces, fierce about their patch of pavement or street.
A Revolutionary Guard came and spoke roughly to Behzad and me. Behzad said, “He says we must let the women pray.”
The Che Guevara outfit of the Guard—the dark glasses, the gun—the gear of revolution serving this cause: the incongruity was at that moment irritating. But Behzad said gently, “Let us walk with the people.”
We joined the walkers in the street, became part of the sound of feet, and Behzad said, “I like walking with the people.” Then he said, “This is not a religious occasion. It is a political occasion.”
At the gate for women it was black with women’s veils and gowns, women inside unable to move, women outside waiting to get in. Dust rose from the black mass. The intersection at the northern end of the university block was kept clear by men in battle dress, with guns. The northern side of the university was reserved for men; already they had spread over half the road. Every gate was guarded. And it was through one of the northern gates (many more gates for men than for women) that Behzad led me in, after telling a Revolutionary Guard, in reply to the Guard’s casual question, that yes, I was a Muslim.
Behzad wanted to see the crowd. I was nervous of being caught by the prayers. Behzad understood. He said it would look bad for us to leave when the prayers started; and, of course, if we stayed we wouldn’t know what to do, and it would look worse. But the prayers weren’t going to start for a while. It was still only time for the speeches, and they could go on and on, as this first warm-up speech (by a lesser ayatollah, and not worth translating) had been going on, booming out over the loudspeakers.
The true crowd was in the centre, around the university mosque. But even a few yards in from the gates men had settled down for prayer in the half-shade of every little tree and shrub. Some had handkerchiefs or folded pieces of cloth on their heads; some wore newspaper hats and cardboard caps, like people in a sports stadium.
Two workmen came in, running, still acting out their frenzy. They jostled us deliberately as they ran, and one man shouted, “If the Shah’s father knew that the university was going to be like this one day, he would never have started it.”
The ayatollah at the microphone asked for chants from the seated multitude. And again and again the responses came, drowning the amplification from the loudspeakers. The chants were about unity. Unity, union, facelessness, in an immense human coagulation: what was joy to the crowd quickly became oppressive to me—if only because I had never before been in an enclosed space with nearly a million people—and it was a relief, when we went outside through one of the eastern exits and began to walk back to the hotel, to find that there were still other people about, doing other things.
We had something to eat in the hotel dining-room. A radio was on loud in the kitchen: the speeches at the university were still going on.
The only other people in the big dining-room were a party of stranded I
talians who had been in the hotel for a few days. Their company must have been paying their hotel bills, and possibly they had no money of their own. They were elegant, in their thirties, and they all wore trousers of the feminine Italian cut: tight, high-waisted, hip-rounding. They seldom went out; they ate every meal in the hotel; and their liveliness and their consciousness of their style diminished from day to day, from meal to meal. The hotel, once known for its food, had lost its chef since the revolution.
And what, after the walking and the frenzy and the waiting in the sun, were the university crowds—and our uniformed waiters—hearing?
“Iranians should keep the flame of Islam burning.”
They had heard it before, but the familiarity was like ritual. And the speaker was the much-loved Ayatollah Taleqani, the leader of the prayers. It was Taleqani who had decreed these mass prayers at Tehran University as a demonstration of revolutionary unity, unity as in the days of the Prophet and the desert tribes. Taleqani was an old man, and he was to die a few weeks later. He was thought, even by the left, to be the most moderate and intelligent of the ayatollahs; but at his death it was to come out that all this time he was the head of the Revolutionary Council.
The Prophet himself, Ayatollah Taleqani was saying, might have had the Iranian revolution in mind when he predicted that the Persians, the descendants of Salman-e-Farsi, were to be “the pioneers of Islam at a time when the world had deviated from the faith.”
In 637 A.D., just five years after the death of the Prophet, the Arabs began to overrun Persia, and all Persia’s great past, the past before Islam, was declared a time of blackness. Pride in Persia remained: the Persians had grown to believe that they were the purest Muslims. It was at the root of their Shia passion, their animosity towards what was not Shia.
THE ayatollahs, great prelates, had dispersed for Ramadan, each man, like a medieval baron during this month of retreat, staying close to the source of his power. Khomeini ruled from Qom; and in Qom Khalkhalli was close to Khomeini. Taleqani led the prayers in Tehran. And in Mashhad, five hundred miles to the northeast, near the Russian and Afghanistan borders, Shariatmadari cultivated his Turkish following and was reportedly sulking. It was said that he didn’t like how the elections for the Assembly of Experts had gone.