Among the Believers (10 page)

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 assumed 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 petitioner 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 passion?

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 amusement 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 glasses, 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 café 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 café 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 café, and was on the other side of the river, I passed 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.

T
HE
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

B
ehzad 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.”