Among The Believers Part 4

He asked, "What kind of Christian are you?"

I thought. "Protestant."

"Then you are closer to the truth."

"Why?"

"Catholics are inflexible."

He didn't mean that. He was only giving a Shia twist to Christian divisions. The Shias, with their own line of succession to the Prophet disregarded by other Muslims, see themselves as an embattled minority.

And conversation after that was as hard as I had feared. I asked whether history-the history of Islamic civilization-was something he had studied. He misunderstood; he thought I was asking a question about Muslim theology, and he said of course he knew Islamic history: when the Prophet first gave the message the people of his village didn't want it, and so he had to go to the next village. And always-whether I attempted to get him to talk about the scientific needs of Muslim countries, or about his ideas for Iran after the revolution-we slid down his theology to the confusion of his certainties. With true Islam, science would flourish: the Prophet said that people should go out and learn. With true Islam, there was freedom (he meant the freedom to be Islamic and Shia, to be divinely ruled); and everything came with freedom (this idea of freedom quite separate from the first).

There was a long pause.

I said, "You look serene."

He said, "I thank you for that." He didn't return the compliment.

I wanted to be released.

I said to Behzad, "Tell him I feel I am taking up too much of his time."

Shirazi said, with his smile, "I am free until I break my fast."

It was only 7:30. I said, just to keep the conversation going, "Ask him when he is going to break his fast."

Behzad said, "I can't ask him that. You're forgetting. I am a Muslim. I am supposed to know these things."

Someone else came in, a holy man in a white turban, a Turkoman, pale from his Ramadan seclusion, not as sunburnt or as meagre as the Turkoman pilgrim families camped in the courtyard of the shrine. With him was a very pale little girl. Shirazi was warm and welcoming. We stood up, to take our leave. The students fell again before Shirazi and kissed his hand. Shirazi smiled, and he continued to smile as-our own audience over-the little girl rushed to kiss his hand.

The awning over the courtyard and the fig trees had been taken down. The light was now golden; shadows were no longer hard. Our shoes waited for us at the bottom of the steps; and in the small room off the vestibule the barefooted bodyguard with the submachine gun was bending down to play with another child.

Outside, in the dirt lane, where dust was like part of the golden evening, the Pakistani students turned bright faces on me, and one of them said, "How did you like him?"

For them the meeting had gone well. They asked Behzad and me to dine with them, to break the fast together and eat the simple food of students. But that invitation (as the qualification about the simple food of students showed) was only a courtesy, their way of breaking off, of seeing us into the car and picking up again the routine of their Ramadan evening that we had interrupted.

The lane and the street at the end of it were full of busy, black-cloaked figures: it was like an old print of an Oxford street scene. But here the clerical costumes were not borrowed; here they belonged and still had meaning; here the Islamic Middle Ages still lived, and the high organization of its learning, which had dazzled men from the Dark Ages of Europe.

And there was more than old Oxford in the streets. This desert town-with its blank walls that concealed sunken courtyards, its straight pavements lined with trees, its enclosed, thick-planted garden squares-was the pattern for small towns I had seen far away in Spanish America, from Yucatan in southeast Mexico to the pampa of Argentina. Spain had been the vehicle: conquered by the Arabs between 710 and 720 A.D., just eighty years after Persia, and incorporated into the great medieval Muslim world, the great universal civilization of the time. Spain, before it had spread to the Americas, had rejected that Muslim world, and gained vigour and its own fanaticism from that rejection. But here in Iran, five hundred years on, that world still existed, with vague ideas of its former greatness, but ignorant (as the article about Islamic urban planning in The Message of Peace showed) of the contributions it had once made, and of the remote continent whose fate it had indirectly influenced.

The Pakistani students had given our Lur driver directions. As we drove to Ayatollah Khalkhalli's, Khomeini's hanging judge, Behzad said, "You know why I couldn't tell Shirazi you hadn't been brought up in any religion? He was trying to find out whether you were a communist. If I had told him that you had no religion, he would have thought you were a communist. And that would have been bad for you."

KHALKHALLI'S house was the last in a dead end, a newish road with young trees on the pavement. It was near sunset; the desert sky was full of colour. There were men with guns about, and we stopped a house or two away. Behzad went and talked to somebody and then called me. The house was new, of concrete, not big, and it was set back from the pavement, with a little paved area in front.

In the verandah or gallery we were given a body search by a short, thickly built young man in a tight blue jersey, who ran or slapped rough hands down our legs; and then we went into a small, carpeted room. There were about six or eight people there, among them an African couple, sitting erect and still on the floor. The man wore a dark-grey suit and was hard to place; but from the costume of the woman I judged them to be Somalis, people from the northeastern horn of Africa.

I wasn't expecting this crowd-in fact, a little court. I had been hoping for a more intimate conversation with a man who, as I thought, had fallen from power and might be feeling neglected.

A hanging judge, a figure of revolutionary terror, dealing out Islamic justice to young and old, men and women: but the bearded little fellow, about five feet tall, who, preceded by a reverential pet.i.tioner, presently came out of an inner room-and was the man himself-was plump and jolly, with eyes merry behind his gla.s.ses.

He moved with stiff, inelastic little steps. He was fair-skinned, with a white skull cap, no turban or clerical cloak or gown; and he looked a bit of a mess, with a crumpled long-tailed tunic or shirt, brown-striped, covering a couple of cotton garments at the top and hanging out over slack white trousers.

This disorder of clothes-in one who, given Shirazi's physical presence, might have a.s.sumed Shirazi's high clerical style-was perhaps something Khalkhalli cultivated or was known for: the Iranians in the room began to smile as soon as he appeared. The African man fixed glittering eyes of awe on him, and Khalkhalli was tender with him, giving him an individual greeting. After tenderness with the African, Khalkhalli was rough with Behzad and me. The change in his manner was abrupt, wilful, a piece of acting: it was the clown wishing to show his other side. It didn't disturb me; it told me that my presence in the room, another stranger who had come from far, was flattering to him.

He said, "I am busy. I have no time for interviews. Why didn't you telephone?"

Behzad said, "We telephoned twice."

Khalkhalli didn't reply. He took another pet.i.tioner to the inner room with him.

Behzad said, "He's making up his mind."

But I knew that he had already made up his mind, that the idea of the interview was too much for him to resist. When he came out-and before he led in someone else to his room-he said, with the same unconvincing roughness, "Write out your questions."

It was another piece of picked-up style, but it was hard for me. I had been hoping to get him to talk about his life; I would have liked to enter his mind, to see the world as he saw it. But I had been hoping for conversation; I couldn't say what questions I wanted to put to him until he had begun to talk. Still, I had to do as he asked: the Iranians and the Africans were waiting to see me carry out his instructions. How could I get this hanging judge to show a little more than his official side? How could I get this half-clown, with his medieval learning, to illuminate his pa.s.sion?

I could think of nothing extraordinary; I decided to be direct. On a sheet of hotel paper, which I had brought with me, I wrote: Where were you born? What made you decide to take up religious studies? What did your father do? Where did you study? Where did you first preach? How did you become an ayatollah? What was your happiest day?

He was pleased, when he finally came out, to see Behzad with the list of questions, and he sat cross-legged directly in front of us. Our knees almost touched. He answered simply at first. He was born in Azerbaijan. His father was a very religious man. His father was a farmer.

I asked, "Did you help your father?"

"I was a shepherd when I was a boy." And then he began to clown. Raising his voice, making a gesture, he said, "Right now I know how to cut off a sheep's head." And the Iranians in the room-including some of his bodyguards-rocked with laughter. "I did every kind of job. Even selling. I know everything."

But how did the shepherd boy become a mullah?

"I studied for thirty-five years."

That was all. He could be prodded into no narrative, no story of struggle or rise. He had simply lived; experience wasn't something he had reflected on. And, vain as he was ("I am very clever, very intelligent"), the questions about his past didn't interest him. He wanted more to talk about his present power, or his closeness to power; and that was what, ignoring the remainder of the written questions, he began to do.

He said, "I was taught by Ayatollah Khomeini, you know. And I was the teacher of the son of Ayatollah Khomeini." He thumped me on the shoulder and added archly, to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the Iranians, "So I cannot say I am very close to Ayatollah Khomeini."

His mouth opened wide, stayed open, and soon he appeared to be choking with laughter, showing me his gums, his tongue, his gullet. When he recovered he said, with a short, swift wave of his right hand, "The mullahs are going to rule now. We are going to have ten thousand years of the Islamic republic. The Marxists will go on with their Lenin. We will go on in the way of Khomeini."

He went silent. Crossing his legs neatly below him, fixing me with his eyes, becoming grave, appearing to look up at me through his gla.s.ses, he said, in the silence he had created, "I killed Hoveida, you know."

The straightness of his face was part of the joke for the Iranians. They-squatting on the carpet-threw themselves about with laughter.

It was what was closest to him, his work as revolutionary judge. He had given many interviews about his sentencing of the Shah's prime minister; and he wanted to tell the story again.

I said, "You killed him yourself?"

Behzad said, "No, he only gave the order. Hoveida was killed by the son of a famous ayatollah."

"But I have the gun," Khalkhalli said, as though it was the next-best thing.

Again the Iranians rolled about the carpet with laughter. And even the African, never taking his glittering eyes off Khalkhalli, began to smile.

Behzad said, "A Revolutionary Guard gave him the gun."

I said, "Do you have it on you?"

Khalkhalli said, "I have it in the next room."

So at the very end he had forced me, in that room full of laughter, to be his straight man.

It was fast-breaking time now, no time to dally, time for all visitors to leave, except the Africans. For some minutes young men had been placing food on the verandah floor. Khalkhalli, dismissing us, appeared to forget us. Even before we had put our shoes on and got to the gate, he and the African couple were sitting down to dinner. It was a big dinner; the clown ate seriously.

And at last our Lur driver could eat, and Behzad could repeat the sacramental moment of food-sharing with him. We drove back to the centre of the town, near the shrine, and they ate in the cafe where we had waited earlier in the afternoon, in a smell of cooking mutton.

They ate rice, mutton, and flat Persian bread. It was all that the cafe offered. I left them together, bought some nuts and dried fruit from a stall, and walked along the river, among families camping and eating on the river embankment in the dark. Across the road from the embankment electric lights shone on melons and other fruit in stalls: a refreshing night scene, after the glare and colourlessness of the day.

When I was walking back to the cafe, and was on the other side of the river, I pa.s.sed an illuminated shoeshop. It had a big colour photograph of Khomeini. I stopped to consider his unreliable face again: the creased forehead, the eyebrows, the hard eyes, the sensual lips. In the light of the shop I looked at the handful of nuts and kishmish raisins I was about to put in my mouth. It contained a drawing pin. Without that pause in front of Khomeini's picture, I would have done damage to my mouth in ways I preferred not to think of; and my own unbeliever's day in Khomeini's holy city of Qom would have ended with a nasty surprise.

THE highway to Tehran was busy. There was a moon, but the lights of cars and buses killed the view. It was only in s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 a.s.sets 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion for his rice and mutton, when eating time had at last come for him, had been so winning; the lean and k.n.o.bby 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 inst.i.tute 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 inst.i.tute 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 ca.s.sette-sellers and print-sellers. The ca.s.settes 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 alb.u.ms of the revolution. The emphasis in these alb.u.ms 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 children 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 a.s.sociate these young men in jeans and pretty shirts with the bloodiness celebrated in the books and alb.u.ms 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 gla.s.ses, 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 gla.s.ses 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 compet.i.tion 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 pa.s.sed 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, pa.s.sionate 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."