Among The Believers Part 33

"Can I go to Athens?"

I didn't particularly want to go to Athens. The name had come to me only because, from my compulsive reading of airline advertis.e.m.e.nts during the last six and a half months, Athens seemed a city to which many airlines went.

The girl seemed to like the idea of Athens. She held her clipboard against her chest and said, "There is a j.a.pan Air Lines flight on Thursdays."

"Book me on that."

"That's tomorrow, though."

"But today is Thursday."

She said, sharply, "Today is Wednesday the thirteenth."

"Where can I go today?"

"There are no flights today. There's only the Karachi flight now. Are you sure you don't want to go to Karachi?"

I said, undoing fate, "You know, I came in in August without a visa."

She behaved as though I had solved her problem. "You came in in August without a visa? Did you tell them?"

"It shows in my pa.s.sport."

She went to the crowded room and came out soon afterwards and said, "They've made a mistake. They'll let you in."

And when I was called into the little room, everybody seemed genuinely pleased that they had found a way around the recent directive from the ministry about journalists and visas.

"But you," an official said to the j.a.panese correspondent, who was still in the room, still arguing, "you will have to go back."

The red-haired Turkish woman had also been let in. Why had they thought she was a journalist? She was at the customs counter with an enormous amount of stuff, goods from Taiwan and j.a.pan, much of it brand-new, still in cardboard boxes and polystyrene moulds.

I entered the other lane and studied the back of the customs officer, a young woman in a heavy woollen skirt and pullover, her own clothes, not a uniform. She sat casually on the counter, her legs crossed, while she examined. Her pullover was tight; her skirt was tight over her thighs; she was stylish.

I had only my Lark carry-on bag. A man spoke to the customs girl and seemed to suggest that I should be allowed through. The girl swivelled-not a beauty, alas-and glanced at the pa.s.sport I carried, and then showed me her back again.

When at last my turn came the customs girl said, "You English?"

"No."

"But you have this pa.s.sport."

"That's my citizenship."

"Open."

The sight of my Marks and Spencer winceyette pyjamas-the un-Islamic "batik" of which Khairul and his Arabist group had disapproved in Kuala Lumpur, when they had surprised me in my room at the Holiday Inn-the sight of those pyjamas softened the daughter of the Iranian revolution, possibly made her think of father or brothers.

"This all you have?"

"Yes."

"No wine?"

"No wine."

"You're okay."

Outside, in the cold air, were the well-fed bandits of the Airport Taxi Service, more flourishing now than in August, with Iran big in the news again and journalists flying in and out by the score. They wanted eight hundred rials for the five-hundred-rial run to town. I bargained, but feebly; they knocked off a hundred.

One man said, "That hotel you're going to. It's closed."

"Closed!" It had been in pretty poor shape in August, I remembered. "All right, I'll go to the Intercontinental."

"You have a reservation?"

"No."

"Then it's closed for you. There are only five hotels in Tehran open for you." He reeled off some names.

I understood that he was using "closed" and "open" in a special way, that he was diverting traffic to certain hotels. I stuck to my hotel. He didn't seem to mind. He had done his duty by his hotels; it was cold; he went back to his shed.

The same traffic jams, the same exhaust haze; the same crazy driving, cars handled like pushcarts; the city of concrete and brick, in winter as in summer the colour of sand, the bare trees as dusty as the cars, winter mud drying out, the fruit displays of stalls and shops-oranges and pale-yellow apples-catching the eye, the multicoloured slogans and the stencillings and posters on walls like mixed colours on a palette, part of the general impression of muddiness. In a traffic jam I studied a winter-clad, fresh-complexioned man using a twig broom to sweep the dust off the streets into the concrete gutter at the side: again surprising, this evidence of munic.i.p.al life going on, apparently separate from the events that made the news.

I had arrived in August on an election day, a Friday, the sabbath. The streets were without their workaday traffic; the shops were shuttered. Tehran had looked like a place that had closed down for good; but in the evening I had seen ballot boxes being taken into cars, watched over by men with guns. The election that day-after an earlier referendum about an Islamic republic-was for an a.s.sembly of Experts, people who would work out an Islamic const.i.tution. Khomeini had asked people to vote for the clergy. And the clergy had won.

The a.s.sembly of Experts had deliberated on a const.i.tution, and they had given Khomeini a place above everyone else, even above the president. Khomeini had become the regent of G.o.d, the representative on earth (or in Iran) of the Twelfth Imam (in hiding or "in occultation" for a thousand years). Then there had been a referendum on this const.i.tution; munic.i.p.al elections; a presidential election. The clergy had lost the presidential election. In August the stencilled portraits on walls had been mainly of Khomeini; now there had been added the portrait of the man who, a few weeks before, had been elected president. And in a few weeks there was going to be another election, for the National a.s.sembly.

In between all this voting, the American emba.s.sy had been seized, and the first anniversary of the revolution had been celebrated: in the crush on that day some people had been killed by a tank. The people of Tehran lived with excitements. After three months the American-hostage story was like a popular but very slow serial, to which the man in the street could turn when there was no bigger drama.

The hotel wasn't closed. There were people at the entrance lodge; there were cars within. The front garden had browned down with the winter. The oval-shaped lawns were brown, with green patches, oddly like shadows, below shrubs and trees. Rain and snow and soot had muddied the laurel and other evergreens and the fir trees; and the winter sun and the dry air of the Tehran plateau had turned that city mud to fine dust. But hands were still at work. The drive was swept; the rosebushes had been pruned.

The lobby was rea.s.suringly warm, and the elevator that took me up to the eighth floor worked better than in August. There was a metal bed on its side in the corridor. But no chambermaid had been doing private washing for a hotel guest, as my chambermaid had done for me once in August: there were no clothes hanging out to dry on the doork.n.o.bs of unoccupied rooms.

My room hadn't been properly cleaned. A curtain had lost some hooks and drooped at one end. There were no ashtrays now; no hotel literature, no directory of services, no stationery; no card on the television set, as in August, giving programme details of the already suspended "international" service of Iranian television. But the furniture was good, the fittings st.u.r.dy. In six months there had been little deterioration.

The middle-aged hotel man, though, tall and thin and bald and with gla.s.ses, was absolutely wretched. It was as if the empty hotel, and his life in it, had been too much for him; as if he had deteriorated more than the hotel or his bellboy costume. I gave him a hundred rials. Too much; but it made no impression on him. He said, "Give me something. My head not good. You give me something." I gave him some headache tablets. It was that, the medication and the attention, rather than the rials, that he wanted.

Later I went down to the tea lounge on the mezzanine floor. In August this had been a place of especial desolation, staffed by men who had grown weary with idleness and seemed to have lost faith in themselves. It was empty now. A few of its many tables were laid with teacups and tea plates and paper napkins; but no one was having tea or coffee.

At an unlaid table a man in black trousers and a grey jacket was apparently asleep, drooping over his arms. A figure of extravagant despair, he seemed, someone enervated by the drama of Tehran. Was he a waiter? Or a customer? Either was possible. The centre of his collapsed head was bald, his sideburns very bushy. The mixture of pathos and flash was affecting.

He wasn't asleep. He lifted his head; his surprised, bleary, reddened eyes, set deep below a jutting forehead, took time to focus on me. The top b.u.t.ton of his white shirt was undone, his black tie was slackened. Still propped on his arms, he said at last, "You good? You all right? You come from?"

I told him.

"You want something?"

It seemed an imposition. But he was anxious to serve. And the coffee, when it came, wasn't bad.

"Coffee good? Service good?"

"Yes, yes. But how are you?"

"Not good. Cold. I have cold."

He had more than a cold. He was desperate for a second job, and he thought I could help. In the end I had to hide from him.

In August there had been twenty-seven guests, in a hotel that could take four hundred. Now-as I saw when I went down to the telephone room, where the girls were eating watermelon seeds from a pink plastic bag and trying to cope with the ITT equipment-there were forty-two. Not enough to make a difference. But the hotel people were trying. In the lobby there was a table with a free telephone below a sign that said Reporters Welcome! and then, in English, French, and Italian, Direct Line for Journalists. At the back of the reception desk, around a bar with an espresso coffee machine (the area had been closed off in August), there was an attempt at gaiety, with little handwritten mobiles dancing away and offering Persian Tea.

Like the immigration people and the customs girl at the airport, the hotel people gave the impression now of being a little bit at play. Everybody was less scratchy, friendlier, jauntier. In August the hotel had had no management, had been watched over by a revolutionary komiteh. On Fridays the radio in the dining-room had boomed out with the speeches being made at the ma.s.s prayer rallies in Tehran University. But with freedom and religious exaltation there had been practical anxieties. One of the men at the reception desk-traditional Persian skills reviving in him-had taken to dealing in old coins. Another man at the desk, always rude, had spoken frantically one day (when he was doubling as a hotel taxi driver) about his children's future. He had asked for my advice and we had talked about universities in India. When I raised the subject now he fended me off. The education of his children was a private matter again.

In the hotel-no longer ruled by a komiteh-they were like people who had got used not only to crisis but also to freedom, freedom inside the hotel and freedom outside it. They were like people returned to themselves. A waiter, to whom I had given fifty rials for bringing a pot of tea to my room, came up again almost immediately with two cupcakes on a plate, saying in English, "You are my guest."

In August there had been a revolutionary poster on the gla.s.s front door of the hotel: Ya.s.sir Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization on one side, Khomeini the avenger on the other side. There was no poster on the door now. Instead, inside, there were large framed portraits of Khomeini, official portraits of the man who was more than head of state. His eyes were no longer unreliable with anger; his old-man's eyes held victory. No frown, no gesture of defiance, no clenched fist: the hands were the hands of the man of peace, the man at peace. They lay on his knees, and the fingers were long and delicate.

THERE was snow on the mountains to the north of Tehran. Morning light, falling on the snow, revealed the direction and line of every ridge. Then the smog of the city of motorcars banked up and screened the mountains. In the summer the smog had been like the colour of the mountains; and it had seemed then that it was only the summer haze of the dusty plateau that hid the mountains. Now the smog could be seen rising against the snow like a dark cloud. By the middle of the day mountains and snow could no longer be seen, until, for a few minutes at the end of the day, the setting sun fell red on the snow of the highest ridges, and they were like a red cliff suspended over the clouded city, darkening fast, p.r.i.c.ked here and there with electric lights, and soon jumping with neon lights: the old glitter, remarkably surviving.

The city was free, but it remained the Shah's creation. A year after the revolution it was still awaiting purpose. To many-like the hotel people gathering to chat in unoccupied, half-serviced rooms, like the man in the ITT-built telephone room sleeping on the floor, as on the desert sand, covered from head to toe by a blanket-to many people the city was still like a camping site.

Here and there were small-scale building works. But the cranes on tall unfinished buildings didn't move. With the rain and snow, metal girders had rusted; and unplastered, roughly mortared brick walls looked weathered. The shops were full of imported goods: it was there the money was going, the oil money that gushed up every day like magic. Sudden great wealth had created-had imported-the modern city and bred the inequalities and alarms that had led to the revolution. That same wealth had bought time for the revolution.

On Revolution Avenue (formerly Shah Reza) south of Tehran University the picture-sellers still offered views of Swiss lakes, of forests; pictures of animals; a little boy zipping up his trousers, a little girl trying on her mother's shoe; pictures of children and beautiful women with tears running down their cheeks. Side by side with this was still the theme of revolution. The ca.s.sette-sellers played Khomeini's old speeches. Some people still offered old picture alb.u.ms of the revolution: executions, bodies in morgues, blood. There were pictures now, too, of Che Guevara, and coloured posters ill.u.s.trating various kinds of machine gun. And still, every few yards, solid piles of Russian communist literature in English and Persian-in spite of the cartoon that showed Iran, a st.u.r.dy peasant figure, fending off two snakes, one marked Russia, one marked America; in spite of the helmeted skull that in another cartoon stood for the composite enemy: Russia in one eye socket, America in the other, a scarf below the helmet flying the Union Jack at one end and the flag of Israel at the other.

It would have seemed like play-if there hadn't been a revolution and real blood. Blood seemed far away from this atmosphere of the campus and the winter street fair. At street corners and on the pavement there were candied-beet-root stalls, smelling of hot caramel: spiked rounds of beet-root set about a bubbling cauldron of syrup, the beet-root constantly basted and candied over and kept hot with the syrup: a winter food, better to see and smell than to taste, almost flavourless below the caramel.

At the Friday prayer meeting at Tehran University there was still a crowd, but nothing like the million or so I had seen on the second Friday in August, when I had gone with Behzad, my interpreter and guide, and for two hours we had watched the men and black-covered women stream up in separate columns until they had filled the university grounds and choked the streets, when the sound of walking feet had made a noise like a river, and dust had risen and hung above the crowd in the university. That kind of enthusiasm-the perfection of Islamic union, as some had seen it-couldn't last. And the much-loved Ayatollah Taleqani, who had started these meetings, had died; and it was winter, and not easy to sit and listen to revolutionary speeches by lesser ayatollahs who used guns like pastoral staffs.

The revolutionary activity this winter Friday was at the front gates of the university, where supplies were being collected for the flood victims of Khuzistan, the oil province in the southwest. Volunteers were waving down traffic; others were tossing up or manhandling bundles into vans and trucks, where other volunteers, far too many, were waiting to stack them. There were too many volunteers altogether, too much shouting, too many people trying to control traffic, too many people being busy and doing nothing.

What was going to happen to that carload of flat Persian bread? It had cost money; it had been brought hot; it steamed as it was shouldered out in the cold air; and then it was frenziedly stuffed-as though it was a matter of life or death-into plastic sacks and dumped into a truck with blankets and clothes. Wouldn't that bread have turned to brick by the time it got to Khuzistan?

But the bread didn't matter. The gesture and the excitement mattered. These volunteers in quilted khaki jackets and pullovers were revolutionaries who, one year on, were still trying to live out the revolution, still anxious to direct traffic (to show their solidarity with the police, now of the people, not of the Shah), still anxious to demonstrate the Islamic "union" that had brought them victory. They were revolutionaries-like those who had stormed the United States emba.s.sy and taken the hostages-whose cause was dwindling.

BEHZAD had said in August, of that great prayer meeting, "This is not a religious occasion. It is a political occasion."

The communist son of a persecuted communist father, Behzad had read Islamic union in his own way, had interpreted Shia triumph and misanthropy in his own way, had seen a revolution that could be pushed further to another revolution. And these Islamic revolutionaries, in their Che Guevara costume, did see themselves as late-twentieth-century revolutionaries.

The Shia faith of Iran, committed after thirteen hundred years to the lost cause of Ali (denied his worldly due, murdered, his sons also killed), was the religion of the insulted and the injured. "The inhabitants of the earth are only dogs barking, and annoying beasts. The one howls against the other. The strong devour the weak; the great subdue the little. They are beasts of burden, some harnessed, the others at large." This was from The Maxims of Ali, which had been given me by the gentle Shia doctor in Rawalpindi in Pakistan. It was his book of comfort; he thought it could also be mine.

Injustice, the wickedness of men, the worthlessness of the world as it is, the revenge to come, the joy of "union": Behzad was a communist, but the Shia pa.s.sion was like his. And in August Behzad, like a Shia, was collecting his own injustices: Khomeini's revolution had begun to turn against the men of the left.

We had gone together to the holy city of Qom, a hundred miles south of Tehran. We had met theological students; we had been to see the Islamic judge of the revolution, Ayatollah Khalkhalli. On the way back through the desert to Tehran we heard on the car radio that the left-wing paper Behzad read, Ayandegan, had been closed down, its offices occupied by Revolutionary Guards.

Later we had gone to the holy city of Mashhad, far away in the northeast, near the Afghanistan border. We had travelled back by train with Behzad's girl friend. She, too, was a communist, the daughter of a family who had once been big landowners. During the journey she had ostentatiously read some local communist pamphlet. And she and Behzad had played cards until a Revolutionary Guard had come into the compartment and told Behzad that card-playing was banned during the month of Ramadan, and especially on that day of mourning for Ali. Behzad had raged afterwards. He hadn't seen the Guard as a man of the people; he had seen him as a servant of the oppressor cla.s.s.

And he was to return to further trouble in Tehran. Revolutionary Guards had seized the headquarters of Behzad's communist group. Later I was to see the scene: sandbags, machine guns, young men, Islamic revolutionaries, in guerrilla clothes on one side of the busy road; the ejected, unarmed men of the left on the other side of the road, dressed like students or city workers, just waiting. And Behzad himself was to join the waiting men that afternoon.

The picture I had carried away was of Behzad and his girl friend on the platform of the Tehran railway station, after the overnight journey from Mashhad. Friends of the girl were waiting for her; and she and Behzad walked ahead of me. He was tall, slender, athletic from his skiing and mountain climbing. She was small, with one bad foot, and her hip on that side was shrunken. She was the daring one-without a veil, leaving the communist pamphlet face down on the seat in the train so that anyone in the corridor could see the red hammer and sickle on the yellow cover. He was the protector, bending slightly towards her as they walked, happier in her company than she appeared to be in his.

BEHZAD had moved, and he was busy with an examination. When at last I got him on the telephone and asked how he was, he said, understanding my concern, "Don't worry. Nothing has happened to me."

The next day, two days before a six-hour examination, he came in the early evening to the hotel, to take me to the apartment he was sharing with a friend. I had remembered someone boyish, someone giggling in a railway compartment and playing a simple card game with a girl. The Behzad who met me in the lobby was a man, and grave. He was wearing a jacket; in August he had told me he didn't have a jacket. He also seemed to have more hair.

"Have you curled your hair, Behzad?"

"It was always like that."

"You look older."

"I'm twenty-five. That's not young."

We went out and walked towards the Avenue of the Islamic Republic, formerly Shah.

I said, "The hotel people seem a lot happier."

"Everybody has begun to understand that life is going to go on."

"I feel they've got used to their freedom."

"Freedom for them, maybe. But not for people like us. There will have to be another revolution."

We crossed the avenue, Behzad leading me through the traffic, as he had done in August, and we waited for a line taxi. The ones that weren't full moved on and left us when Behzad told them where we wanted to go. It was cold; I had no pullover or topcoat. We were standing on the road itself, two or three feet away from the traffic, and just behind us was one of the deep gutters of Tehran, now running with muddy water.

I said, "Let's go back and take a hotel car."

He said, "This is how the people of Tehran travel. We will get a taxi."

Eventually one of the orange taxis stopped. A fat woman in black, who had been waiting a few feet ahead of us, moved to get in.

I said, "How will we sit?"

"I will sit next to her."

When the taxi moved off I said, "How is your girl friend?"

"I don't see her any more. It happened not long after you left. I've seen her only once."

"Since Mashhad?"

"Since I stopped seeing her. I hear she has a new boy friend now."

"But why? What happened?"

"It was my decision. It was a matter of the personalities. They didn't fit."

We were in the early-evening traffic of Tehran. The shops were bright: a metropolitan glitter. Eight years before, in Buenos Aires, a city which Tehran in some ways resembled, an Argentine had said to me with some acidity during the rush hour, "You might think we are in a developed country." I thought of those words now, sitting beside Behzad, feeling his new gravity, trying to look at his city with his eyes.

He said after a while, "But I love her still. I still think of her."