Among the Believers (66 page)

The man who had taken my passport followed me out. He said, “What airline did you come by?”

“PIA.”

The Iranian girl who was the PIA representative was at the other end of the hall with her clipboard: the flight had brought a few problems. The man hailed her; she came over; they talked.

She said to me, “You have to go back.”

“I’ll leave.”

“You are a writer and you don’t have a visa.”

“I know. Can you put me on a flight to London?”

“That’s not possible today. You can go back to Karachi.”

“I don’t want to go back to Karachi. There is no room. A pediatric conference is starting today at the Intercontinental and all the rooms are booked.”

Where else could I go that day? What were the visa-less airline cities?

“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 advertisements 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 Japan 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 passport.”

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 Japanese 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 Japan, 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 passport 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 passport.”

“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 municipal 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 Assembly of Experts, people who would work out an Islamic constitution. Khomeini had asked people to vote for the clergy. And the clergy had won.

The Assembly of Experts had deliberated on a constitution, and they had given Khomeini a place above everyone else, even above the president. Khomeini had become the regent of God, 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 constitution; municipal 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 Assembly.

In between all this voting, the American embassy 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 reassuringly 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 doorknobs 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 sturdy. In six months there had been little deterioration.

The middle-aged hotel man, though, tall and thin and bald and with glasses, 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 button 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 mass 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 glass front door of the hotel: Yassir 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.

T
HERE
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, pricked 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.