Among The Believers Part 5

The Che Guevara outfit of the Guard-the dark gla.s.ses, 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 ma.s.s. 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 mult.i.tude. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Italians 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sion, 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 a.s.sembly of Experts had gone.

Mashhad was a good base for an ayatollah. In Mashhad was a shrine more sacred than the tomb of the sister of the Eighth Imam in Qom; in Mashhad was the tomb of the Eighth Imam himself. He died in 817 A.D., one year after he had been nominated to succeed to the overlord-ship of the whole Muslim world; and the Shias say he was poisoned by a son of the Arabian Nights ruler, Harun al-Rashid. Dynastic conflict, palace intrigue, the ups and downs of Persian fortunes within the Islamic empire: they are the stuff of Shia theology.

Behzad and I should have been on our way to Mashhad that day. But there had been problems. First it seemed that Behzad's mother was coming up to Tehran; then it seemed that Behzad's girl friend was coming for the weekend. The girl friend was important. She was twenty-five, with a degree in economics, but with no job in postrevolutionary Iran; and, as I understood, she had gone to spend some time in the provinces. Then, oddly, it turned out that she was in Mashhad.

So we could go to Mashhad, after all; and Behzad and his girl could travel back to Tehran together. But Mashhad received a lot of visitors during Ramadan, and the queues at the railway station at seven that morning had been for two days ahead. So we had decided to fly, and had been lucky, after waiting for Iran Air to open, to get the last tickets for the following day.

They were first-cla.s.s tickets, but Behzad (who said he carried most of his wardrobe in his little briefcase) spread himself in the wide seat without embarra.s.sment. There were stewardesses, unveiled: on Iran Air, at least up in the sky, a prerevolutionary style still prevailed.

The land over which we flew was mainly brown. The flat green fields to the east of Tehran quickly went by; and soon we were flying over bare mountains, now with centipedelike ranges, now cratered, now hard and broken, now with great smooth slopes veined from the watercourses created by melted snow. The patterns and the textures changed continuously; the colours varied from ochre to dark red to dark grey. It was astonishing to see occasional green patches, to see the meandering of a road in a valley, or to see a road scratched straight across a brown waste. Everywhere that men could live was known; the land was old. An hour out of Tehran the fields occurred more often, dusty green on brown, or dusty green on pale red; and then, the mountains over, there was the wide plain where Mashhad lay: remote, isolated, and in this old part of the world perhaps always a meeting place and a centre of pilgrimage, long before Islam and the Eighth Imam.

The Hyatt Omar Khayyam Hotel was in business, in spite of its name. Upper-cla.s.s pilgrim traffic maintained it in all its American-international opulence: a big marble hall, elaborate lighting, a swimming pool (different hours for men and women), a sunny coffee shop separated by gla.s.s from the green, unmatured garden, a darker, carpeted, formal restaurant with a black-suited maitre. Strange, this style in the holy city of Mashhad; and then stranger, in this hotel setting, to find among the give-aways in the room a cake of Meccan or Medinan clay tastefully folded over in a brown face-towel: the sacred soil of Arabia, courtesy of Hyatt.

But what was incongruous to me was less so to Behzad. In the restaurant he said, "Look at that family. The old woman is holy or religious. n.o.body else. The old woman has come here for the Imam. The daughters and the sons-in-law have come for the hotel, to swim and to relax and to eat. They can eat during this Ramadan period because travellers can eat, and in Mashhad they are travellers."

So the Hyatt Omar Khayyam lived on in old splendour-in the bookshop there were still books in English that praised the Shah. But other hotels in the Hyatt chain were not so lucky; and, amid the bits and pieces of hotel literature in my room, the jaunty copy for the Hyatt Regency Caspian was like a sad American voice from a past that had hardly lasted. Remember when the Caspian Coast had no meeting place? BUT NOW THERE'S HYATT.

Behzad couldn't get through to his girl. So we went out after lunch. Much money had been spent by the Shah on the beautification of Mashhad. The great public works around the shrine area at the other end of the town were incomplete. The domes and minarets and courtyards stood at the heart of an immense, dusty, sun-struck circle.

Within the rails, but before the courtyards, we saw a drunken man being hustled off by Guards or policemen to a police building. A small crowd watched. Behzad said the man would probably be whipped, but not in public. Just after the revolution there had been public whippings, as part of the revived Islamic way, but the effect on the public hadn't been good.

"Not good?"

Behzad said, "People didn't like the man doing the whipping. It became hard for him afterwards."

The courtyards of the mosque and tomb were full of mountain people, camping in the open cells above the burial vaults at the side, sprawling in the shade, small, sunburnt, poor, perhaps poorer than the pilgrims we had seen in Qom.

Central Asia felt closer here, with the mountain faces. And into the shrine courtyard there came a vision: a tall, half-veiled woman in a short, flounced skirt of bright yellow, walking with her back arched, her shoulders thrown back, each high-heeled step measured, precise, steady, her gorgeous yellow skirt and all her under-skirts flouncing straight up from the thigh, swinging slowly then to one side, and then swinging back to the other: a dancer's steps, a performance. The Caucasian world of Lermontov and Tolstoy, still here!

Behzad didn't know where she came from; he knew only that she was poor, and from a village. We watched her cross the courtyard-an older, unveiled woman was with her, and a man-and saw her enter the booth beside the entrance to the shrine, to leave her high-heeled shoes with the attendant. We waited for her to come out, but in vain: there was a side door from the booth to the shrine. So many people from the mountains here, so many hard journeys; yet a journey for which, at least at the end, a village girl would put on her best flounced skirt.

Behzad said, "You know what they pray for? They pray for money, a job, a son."

In the museum, on the old bra.s.s gate of the shrine of the Imam, we saw relics of old, and still-living, prayers. When a visitor to the shrine offered a prayer or asked a special boon, he tied a strip of cloth to the gate; and all the lower rungs or struts-bra.s.s cylinders linked to bra.s.s globes-were thick with these strips of cloth. When the cloth became untied, the prayer was granted; and even in the museum people rubbed their hands over the cloths, to cause one or two to fall off, to help a fellow Muslim get his wish. The floor behind the gate was littered with fallen pieces of cloth that had gathered dust. The lower parts of the gate had been handled so often that some of the bra.s.s sections had fallen off.

Some people with especially difficult prayers or wishes had put cheap padlocks (most of them made in China) high up, attaching them to holes in the bra.s.s globes. How would the padlocks be undone without the key? Had they thrown away the key? Wouldn't that be tempting providence? Behzad wasn't sure. He thought it more likely that the key would be given to a friend, who might one day come to Mashhad and, out of all the padlocks, pick the right one.

BEHZAD didn't have the address of his girl friend. He had only a telephone number, and that number never answered, not at lunchtime, and not now, in the evening.

The telephoning that he did on my behalf was just as fruitless. I had been given the name of an Islamic scholar at the University of Mashhad, but he was nervous of foreigners. He said he had been transferred to Tehran and was busy packing and couldn't receive. When I invited him to have coffee he said he was developing a migraine and was at that moment lying flat on his back. He might be better in two or three days; I should telephone in the morning.

So Behzad and I didn't separate in the evening, as we had planned. We went, after dinner and after more telephoning, to Ayatollah Shariatmadari's Ramadan headquarters. The Ayatollah's secretary said that the Ayatollah received between ten and eleven at night, after breaking his fast. Then he lectured; then he went to sleep, to be up again for prayers before the pre-fast meal, at 4:30 sharp. Ramadan imposed on the pious this rhythm of food and fast and sleep and food.

The smiling, friendly maitre said, when he heard where we were going, "Be careful. Mashhad is a place where something bad can happen to foreigners at any moment." The warning was good and well intentioned. But then courtesy made the maitre add, "Not you, though. Indians are all right. Egyptians, Pakistanis-all right. Americans, Germans-that's bad. The Shah brought them here and made them lords of the country. He was bad." He smiled again-moustache tilting up, eyes twinkling. "Or stupid."

The house where Shariatmadari was to receive was in a little many-angled lane off the main road. After the evening traffic and the lights, it was dim and quiet. Dirt and dust m.u.f.fled the footsteps of the faithful; but there was no crowd, no hurry.

The gate was guarded, but casually, by two young men who sat on chairs outside and didn't show their guns. They let us in after Behzad explained. And it was like entering a little fairyland: an enclosed garden with electric lights in white globes illuminating peach trees in fruit, flowers, roses, patches of lawn. The level ground at the near end was carpeted and was being used for prayer by a few men; a strip of red carpet ran down one side of the garden, next to the high, ivy-covered wall. At the far end, beyond a shallow, blue-tiled pool, was a tent with more lights, and on carpets there people were sitting.

We took off our shoes and went right up, beyond the pool, and sat opposite the black cushions against which Shariatmadari, when he came, would recline. The house at the side of the tent was new, of concrete and gla.s.s; modernistic wrought-iron rails went up the tiled steps. It might have been Shariatmadari's own house, or the house of a religious foundation, paid for by the t.i.thes of the faithful: Behzad wasn't sure. An old man and a young man went around offering tea and sugar and water; there were bowls with sugar lumps on the carpet.

Behzad said, "Shariat wants to make himself more popular. He is using his opportunity. Khomeini is busy with the government. So Shariat is here, making himself more popular."

We all stood up when Shariatmadari arrived. And it was hard to attribute political wiliness to the benign old man who came up the red carpet and appeared to be smiling but perhaps wasn't: it might have been no more than the combined effect of the gla.s.ses, his beard, and the set of his mouth. His beard was white, his complexion pink and white, his cast of face oddly Scottish. His clerical costume was spotless. Among the mullahs in the crowd, so many of them paunchy and grubby and perhaps also (as in folk legend) over-wived, he was like a prince. His black gown was of very thin material, embroidered or patterned, with elegant tie-on ribbons at the top; the pale-fawn under-gown showed through.

He looked like what he was, a figure of high medieval learning. Philosophy and astronomy had been among the subjects he had studied in Qom in the 1920s under a famous divine: astronomy part of the Muslim intellectual expansion of centuries before, but long since frozen, with philosophy, into a theological discipline.

As soon as he sat down against his black cushions, people ran to kiss his hand. Two men became crowd-controllers, marshalling the queue that went out of the tent and turned down the red carpet beside the ivy-covered wall. Boys and men took his right hand to their lips, their forehead, their eyes. One man kissed Shariatmadari's hand twice, the second time for the camera of a friend; there were many cameras.

Shariatmadari seemed to smile all the while, hardly seeing the people who dropped before him and did as they pleased with his hand. He was already preoccupied with the pet.i.tions that two or three people, braving the crowd-controllers and the mullahs, had given him. Mullahs with their fancy turbans, black and white, and beards, black and white, pressed around him. The leaning bodies, the pale colours of the gowns, the angled heads, the turbans, the beards, all against the blank end wall, in strong light: the effect was pictorial, almost posed.

Faith like this-faith in the faith, faith in the guidance of the good man-had made the revolution. Shariatmadari, in the conflict with Khomeini, was now on the losing side, the victim of the faith of others. But he had been one of the leaders of the revolution; and even Behzad was awed to be in his presence.

The queue of hand-kissers stopped moving when Shariatmadari began to write on one of the pet.i.tions. It was hard, while the Ayatollah wrote, to lift and kiss his writing hand-though one or two people tried.

We were sitting right up at the front, and we had no clear cause. We had no pet.i.tion, no camera; we weren't kissing the hand. We began to attract attention; once or twice Shariatmadari himself gave us a brief, questioning look. Behzad thought it was time to move. We recovered our shoes and picked our way to the back of the garden. Mullahs were still coming in. One was blind. He was doing the tiniest shuffle down the red carpet while making wide, circular gestures with both hands. No one paid him any attention; people just ducked his hands and let him be. On the other side of the garden, in something like darkness, women had gathered in their special area.

We waited until Shariatmadari began to speak. And after the splendour of the setting, the garden and the water and the lights and the peach trees with their illuminated furry green fruit, after the splendour of the man himself, Shariatmadari had little to say. The Shah was bad and he had done bad things. He had forbidden polygamy and had thereby damaged women. Islam protected women; it protected them especially in cases of divorce. It had been said many times before; it could have been said by any mullah.

But the occasion remained an occasion-a Ramadan evening with a lecture by an ayatollah; and when we went out, past the men with guns, into the alley, we found it full of people just arriving.

The main street was busy with cars and scooters; a shop selling all the Iranian varieties of nuts and dried fruit was dazzling with fluorescent lights and gla.s.s; exhaust fumes hung in the air like foul cooking smoke.

Again, when we got back to the hotel, Behzad telephoned and got no answer from his girl.

Next morning he could not hide his distress. He had stopped believing that the line was out of order.

He said, "I hope she hasn't done something and been arrested. In a place like Mashhad it can be dangerous, with these Revolutionary Guards."

"Why should they arrest her?"

"She's a communist."

My own scholar, the man who had been transferred to Tehran and was packing and had migraine and was flat on his back, still had his migraine.

He said, "You know The Encyclopaedia of Islam? A Dutch publication. It will give you all the information you want about Islam and Mashhad."

Migraine or no, I didn't think I had come to Mashhad to be told to go away and read an old book.

The scholar said, "My head is bad. You've been to the shrine? The museum? The library? Go to Firdowsi's tomb. Yes, go to that tomb."

And that was where we went. It was some miles out of Mashhad, in the wide, dry plain that turns green when irrigated: a desolate burial place for Persia's great poet, who, four hundred years after the Arab conquest of Persia, wrote without Arabic words and, as Behzad told me, was against the imposition of Arabian culture on Persia.

The tomb was not old, as I had expected. It was new, built by the Shah: a square marble tower with pre-Islamic columns at the corners, part of the Shah's attempt to recall the pre-Islamic Iranian past. On the wall beside the steps going down to the vault there were sculptures in a version of the old style of famous scenes from Firdowsi's epic. But all the inscriptions had been defaced; every reference to the Shah or the royal family or the monarchy had been obliterated. Where the letters were raised they had been covered over with rough slaps of cement or plaster. And there were photographs of Khomeini everywhere on the marble.

It was as though the scholar in Mashhad had sent me to Firdowsi's tomb less for the sake of Firdowsi than for this evidence of the people's rage. And rage was what I saw-more clearly in this rich, reconstructed town than in Tehran-when we returned to Mashhad: the burnt-out buildings (among them the Broadway cinema, with its English lettering and Las Vegas facade), the ruined, burnt pedestals in the gardens without their royal statues, all the Persepolitan, pre-Islamic motifs of the Shah's architecture mocked. The holy city was also a city of rage.

Behzad was happier at lunch.

He said, "I've spoken to my girl's sister. She's all right. The telephone's out of order. I talked to the operator and he gave me the number of the sister. I'm going to see them this evening. I was worried."

"Is the sister communist, too?"

"My girl is the only communist in the family. All the others are religious."

You were religious or communist: there was no middle, or other, way in Iran.

We decided after lunch to go and buy tickets for the Tehran train that left on the following day. But the taxi driver told Behzad that the railway station booking office opened at six and closed at twelve.

Behzad said, "I will go and queue at six tomorrow morning."

I said, "Do you think it's true, what the driver says?"

"Why should he lie?"

"I didn't mean that. I only wanted to know whether what he said was correct."

We didn't go to the railway station. We went to the shrine, to the library. It was closed.

Behzad said, "What should we do?"

"Shall we go to the railway station?"

We went there. The booking office was open and they were selling tickets for the Tehran train. Behzad made no comment. There were four sleepers in a compartment. I thought we should buy all four. Behzad appeared to agree. But then he said, "You don't like the poor cla.s.ses, do you?"

Poor cla.s.ses! Was it the poor who travelled first cla.s.s? But I gave in to his blackmail, and we bought three tickets, Behzad paying for the third, for his girl.

THE train, of German or Swiss manufacture, was waiting at the platform. The outer panel of one of the double-gla.s.sed windows was smashed, as if with a pebble or a stone. Behzad said, "The revolution."

We found our compartment, but there was no question of waiting there. The air conditioning would begin to function only when the train was on the move; and the heat in the more or less sealed compartment was barely tolerable. A family scene in another compartment-complete with water in a big green plastic bucket-awakened some of my anxiety about our own vacant berth. But I kept that anxiety to myself and we went out to the platform, cool below its high, cantilevered concrete roof, to wait for Behzad's girl.

Almost at once Behzad left me, saying he would come back in good time. He didn't. I was alone in the compartment when, just before the train left, Behzad's girl turned up. She was small, with gla.s.ses, her skin rough (perhaps from the summer heat), not pretty or plain. She wore blue slacks and a shirt. And there was more than a sister to see her off. She seemed to have come to the station with a family or a large part of one. Her family! Religious people! I began to understand something of Behzad's difficulties over the weekend, and the deceptions he had been practising on me as on others.

He came to the compartment after the train had left the station. He never really introduced me to his girl, never gave me her name; he only apologized for her, saying that she spoke no English. She acknowledged me but never looked directly at me. Old constraints worked on her, as they worked on Behzad.

And yet, with an unveiled woman in slacks in the compartment, free and easy and perhaps a little too restless with her legs, it was easy to forget that women wore the veil or head-cover in Iran, and that this day was the stillest in the Shia calendar, the day of the death of Ali: there had been no music that morning on the Hyatt Omar Khayyam bedside radio.

At the edge of Mashhad we pa.s.sed a village of flat-roofed clay houses. Village boys at the bottom of the high embankment began fiercely, but with no malice, to stone the train. They were fierce only because the train pa.s.sed so quickly, and they wanted to get in as many throws as possible. Behzad had said that the broken window in a coach had been caused by the revolution. And perhaps it had; perhaps the sport came from that brave time. But I was glad he was taken up with his girl, and didn't see.

With his girl he was as easy as a child; talk never stopped between them. Almost at once they began to play cards-she had brought a pack. She knew only one game, Behzad said, remembering me for a minute; and it was a very simple game. They played that game until it wearied them.

A landscape of mountains, hills, and irrigated plain. The hills were isolated, and the train curved between them. The fields were golden, after the harvest; and in the late afternoon the distant hills became warm brown. The land was dug up here and there by watercourses, which had sometimes cut right down, creating little bluffs; but now, in the height of summer, the watercourses had dwindled to rippled rivulets a couple of feet wide and a few inches deep. Flocks of lambs fed on the stubble. Sometimes men could be seen winnowing. But the modern road was never far away, and the brilliantly coloured trucks; and power pylons marched across the plain.

The villages were the colour of mud; and the houses had domed clay roofs (timber for beams not being easy to come by here), with slanting pipes at the bottom to drain the water off. From the train, the domes seemed to cl.u.s.ter together; the projecting pipes, with black shadows more sharply slanted on the clay walls, suggested miniature cannon; and at the angles of the village walls there were round towers, like watchtowers. The hills became smoother, and the folds and wrinkles in them were wrinkles in human skin. The desert came slowly. The ground was pitted with earth-rimmed wells, like giant molehills; and, often in the barrenness, mud walls enclosed wonderfully green groves of poplars.

The sun set on Behzad's side of the coach. The land was dusty: Behzad said the desert was near. He didn't agree with me that the land was well cultivated and that much had been done about village roads and electricity. He was with his girl; with her he had a developed eye for injustice, a feeling for injustice being one of the things that bound them together. He told me-and translated what he had said for the girl-that 75 percent of the villages in Iran were without roads or electricity.

But the country was enormous, difficult, its villages widely scattered. And though Behzad said that we were now in unirrigated desert-and though he turned on the top light, imposing mirror reflections on the fading view-I could see the level plain still cultivated in strips and patches, until it became dark.

Behzad's girl offered food-waiting, perhaps out of habit, for sunset on this Ramadan day. Her Adidas bag was heavy with plastic sacks of pastries and doughnuts-which Behzad said he had never eaten before-and dried figs and other kinds of dried fruit. This was what she was taking from Mashhad to give to friends in Tehran. I had some dried fruit-a smaller kind of fig, wrinkled, cracked, the colour of clay on the outside, soft and sugary inside, a fruit that felt grown in the land we had been pa.s.sing, and had suggestions of sun and desert and enclosed gardens. Behzad had a doughnut; his girl had a bun.

She leaned against the window, stretched her left leg out on the seat, and began to read a crisp new Persian booklet with a red star and a red hammer and sickle on the yellow cover. Behzad said the booklet had just been issued by the party-an independent party, not attached to Moscow-to explain why they hadn't taken part in the elections for the a.s.sembly of Experts.

Behzad's girl read with determination, but what she was reading didn't seem to hold her. She stopped turning the pages. She put the open booklet face down on the seat, and she and Behzad talked. She took her leg off the seat, and they began to play cards again, the same simple game.

We stopped at a station. And-after Behzad's rebuke at Mashhad about my att.i.tude towards the "poor cla.s.ses" which had prevented my buying the fourth bunk-both he and his girl were now gigglingly anxious to keep out strangers. He drew the curtains on the corridor side.

The train started. There was a knock at the door, and almost at the same time the door was slid open. It was the sleeping-car attendant. He slung in blue sacks with bedding: a blanket, a pillow, sheets, a pillowcase.

There was another knock. Behzad drew one side of the curtain, I drew the other. It was a small young man in soldier's uniform, with a revolver. He slid the door open, spoke to Behzad, and closed the door. He wore black boots.

I said, "Army man?"

Behzad said, "He is from the komiteh. He said we were not to play cards. Do you know what he called me? 'Brother.' I am his brother in Islam. I am not to play cards. It is a new rule."

After his shock, he was angry. So was his girl. She said nothing; her face went closed. To Behzad now fell his man's role; and it was to me, witness of his humiliation, that he turned, working his anger out in English.

"I don't mind about the cards. It's the power I mind about. He is only doing it to show me his power. To show me their power. I don't see how Mohammed would have known about cards. They weren't invented in his time."

I said, "But he spoke out against gambling."