Stranger to History (18 page)

Amir only ever wore black. He wore loose black trousers with a collarless black shirt. His hair was long, as was his beard, and he wandered about barefoot. We shared a taxi one day and the driver asked why he was wearing black.

‘For me, every day is Ashura,’ he replied, referring to the tenth and most bloody day of the Shia mourning.

Amir was a film director and lived with his beautiful actress wife, Anahita, in a small house in a residential colony in northern Tehran. The couple were part of the country’s loudest collective dissenting voice: its film industry. Over the past two decades, it had produced some of the strongest films anywhere in the world. But the industry, which grew in the brief spring it had been allowed under President Khatami, was now being suppressed. Ahmadinejad’s government had given permission for no more than two or three films in the last year and Anahita’s most recent film had been shot without permission, secretly, in Kurdistan. ‘I feel as if I’m starting to censor myself,’ she said, her almond-shaped eyes widening. ‘My thinking is changing. I don’t think of things outside the censorship because I know it won’t be possible. It’s terrible because I know that this is what they want.’ We sat in their small, cluttered kitchen. Its colourful cabinets, little stove, solitary table and weak light from bulbs and candles gave it a protected atmosphere. A big spring night came in through an open door that led onto a paved veranda. Anahita, her thick black hair in a plait, talked between preparing yoghurt, kebabs, salad and Iranian smoked rice.

Amir poured us red wine and a newly invented cocktail called Whisky Albaloo. Alcohol was banned in the Islamic Republic, but could be bought fairly easily through bootleggers and in grocery shops once they knew you. ‘The people suffer from a kind of schizophrenia,’ Amir said, ‘because in the day even a little girl has her head covered in school and has to learn about religion, but when she comes back there’s no religion and she takes her headscarf off.’ I realised I had heard the same words in reverse from Abdullah in Istanbul. ‘For example,’ he had said, ‘I would go to school, and Atatürk was in school, just in school. Outside there was no Atatürk.’

‘Have you seen the mosques?’ Amir said. ‘They’re empty except for a few people and Basiji. People use them as bathrooms!’ The Basiji were a militia of young Iranian men whom the regime allowed to enforce religious morality. ‘They’re like a different species of people,’ Amir said. ‘If you look in their eyes, they seem like a different species. We call them
Homo Islamicos
.’

Anahita’s father was a theatre director whose plays the regime suppressed. On one occasion the censors showed up three hours before his play was to go on and made him perform the play, itself three hours long. When it was over, they proposed cuts and revisions. He said he couldn’t possibly introduce them at this late stage. They said he would have to or they would stop the performance. The actors did the best they could, but the regime’s inspectors were not pleased and during the interval, the theatre owner appeared to say that there had been a power cut. The director turned to his audience and asked if they would mind the actors performing the rest of the play in the dark, using light from candles and torches. There was a roar of approval. But the owner declined, stating a security risk. He turned them out on to the street where they saw that the entire neighbourhood, but for the little theatre, had lights.

Amir told the story not to show artistic repression in the Islamic Republic but to point out the sophistication of the regime’s methods. ‘You say Syria is a police state,’ he said. ‘In Iran, they’ve planted the police state in our heads.’

A candlelit sadness lingered in the kitchen as Amir and Anahita spoke. My heart went out to the young Iranians I met. Anahita described Iran as a place where she felt she kept hitting her head as she tried to grow: ‘There is no appreciation for what I do here, no appreciation, and that’s why I’ll have to leave one day.’

I didn’t think she would. Her resistance was like a kind of addiction. It would be difficult to feel as worthwhile elsewhere. And, besides, there must have been some appreciation because everyone knew her name. For people with no outlet, it was a different matter.

In Tehran, I reconnected with Reza, a young vet I had met on my journey north. He was a light, jovial character with floppy black hair and teeth that clambered over one another, but when he spoke of the Islamic regime, his lightness vanished. ‘It’ll be the death of this religion at least in Iran. Seriously, if they continue like this, religion in this country is finished. Do you know how many spiritual groups are cropping up now? There are Hare Krishnas, a man who teaches the
Mahabharata
, three hundred followers of the Sai Baba. People understand they need spirituality, but they are sick of this religion.’

Hare Krishnas in Tehran! I couldn’t believe it. In the Islamic Republic, and in Islam, to convert out of the religion was apostasy, for which the sentence is death. I couldn’t believe people would take risks like that. What interested me was not the rejection of faith – I had met many Muslims without faith – but the potential rejection of its political and historical character.

Reza roared with laughter when I said I wanted to meet the Hare Krishnas, making me think I had fallen for an elaborate joke. But then he assured me that the Hare Krishnas did exist and said he would speak to his friend, Nargis. He warned me that he thought her teacher, Gulbadi, was a fraud. ‘He teaches celibacy!’ Reza cried. ‘The whole country is exploding with sexual frustration and he teaches celibacy!’ A few minutes later he rang again with Nargis’s number, saying she was expecting my call.

The voice on the telephone seemed much older. It was slow, languid, and though the words came, there were no extra words, no colloquialisms, to iron out the discomfort of a first conversation. Nargis wanted to know what my project was, and though I was happy to tell her, I was nervous for her sake and mine about speaking on the telephone. We arranged finally to meet at her flat early the next morning. She said she would speak to the taxi-driver and explain where to come.

For the rest of that day a sly, superstitious uneasiness crept up on me, as if I had been right to be nervous about talking to Nargis on the telephone. It began at a lunch appointment with Violet, a half-German, half-Iranian ex-journalist who came to me through the Rahimis. I had found no equivalent in Iran of Eyup and Nedal, the students who helped me in Turkey and Syria, and I was beginning to need help, especially as I planned to travel to the religious cities of Qom and Mashhad in the next few weeks. Violet had been a reporter in Iran for a major Western news agency for many years and I thought she might be able to suggest someone safe and reliable.

I met her at her house in a dim room with heavy carpets. She was a pale, watchful girl, who had spent the last few years surrounded by sickness and death. She and her German mother had nursed her Iranian father who, after many months of illness, had just died. Violet was still finding her feet, still seeming to take solace from the endless duties that arise when someone dies. She had quit her job in the hope of writing a book, but found herself too tired and ‘burnt out’ to begin. The story she wanted to tell was semi-autobiographical and linked to other Iranian women’s stories, but the material was sensitive and she didn’t have the strength for it. The other reason she had left her job was because after 9/11 her employers pressured her to come up with certain angles and stories that amplified the dangers of radical Islam. It had been too much of a strain. I felt more than her fatigue in her: in that low, dark room, still heavy with the late presence of death, I felt her disturbance.

In the taxi on the way to lunch she asked me not to talk because it made her feel sick. She rolled down her window and looked out. We passed Vanak Square, at this hour crowded with buses, taxis and pedestrians. Even in bright sunshine, Tehran had a vertical, gassy quality; the light didn’t burn away the city’s black edges, or its fever. Violet stared at a green patch in the middle of the square, then turned to me and said she could recall when public floggings happened there; they had stopped under Khatami. It was hard to graft that image onto the square: it was so ordinary and congested, like a bus terminal. There was special menace in thinking of that desert cruelty transposed to the drab, municipal atmosphere of Vanak Square, with its crowds and traffic.

We went to an air-conditioned windowless restaurant decorated with mirrors and Persian scenes of banquets and the hunt. Once we sat down, Violet became more relaxed. She said she knew a few people she could call about my work in Tehran. She suggested Jasib, a young Iranian who had worked with her at the press agency. She said that when he arrived he had been very religious and conservative, but had opened up at work and improved his English. He was now working night shifts at another news agency and she thought he would be an ideal guide for me.

As she described her work as a journalist in Iran, I began to feel that Violet, with a foot in and a foot out of the Islamic Republic, was even more damaged than the people whose stories she recorded. She was over-exposed. I could see why she was having trouble with her writing. She was like an artist who had begun a creative work that took more and more out of her until she was too implicated in it to continue. She covered the 1999 student protests, which had led to a severe crackdown from the regime. Earlier that morning I had driven past the dormitories where it had taken place. I had wanted to stop but it was forbidden. The regime’s men had forced students to jump from their windows and the site had become an unmarked memorial to those who died. ‘They had thought a revolution would happen,’ Violet said, ‘and basically it didn’t. They counted on Khatami coming out in support of them, but there was just a neutral statement from his office. It was very disappointing.’ Violet added that though many felt Khatami hadn’t gone far enough, a great deal was accomplished in those years, especially in the area of press and individual freedom.

Jasib called while we were still at lunch. Violet suggested a few coffee shops and restaurants where we could meet but he insisted on a public park. We paid and left the restaurant. A taxi took us down an avenue, then on to a long, quiet street running next to the park. We stopped in front of a small kiosk that sold internet cards, chocolates, soft drinks and magazines. The park at this mid-afternoon hour was quiet, except for a few lone figures strolling down its paved paths. The foliage, still new and bright green, seemed almost to glow against the blackness of the branches.

I wandered up to the kiosk and was looking at an Iranian magazine with an Indian film star on the cover – the always amazing reach of Bollywood – when Violet gestured to me to come over. A man on a bike had dropped off Jasib, then driven off without a word. Jasib was a large, friendly man, heavyset and broad-chinned, but nervous. He smiled and looked behind him, smiled and scanned the street, the park and the kiosk. He managed to say hello to Violet in Farsi, but could hardly focus enough to greet me. I put out my hand for him to shake, but he offered me his wrist. He flicked his thumb up for a second; it was covered with blood. The sight of blood, breaking the afternoon stillness, made me recoil. Jasib kept shrugging his shoulders and smiling. I focused on his thumb. I had assumed at first that he had cut it on the bike, but now, as I looked closer, I could see that the thin stream of watery blood was not coming from a clean gash but from a cuticle; it was the worst I had ever seen. A whole piece, about a millimetre thick and wide, was bitten fresh from a torn cuticle.

His nervous, unfocused manner, interrupted by unprovoked bouts of laughter, made me uneasy. Also, his English was not good enough to interpret. He could barely understand me and was trying to hide it by answering me with a quick phrase, a nod, a laugh, then a full sentence in Farsi to Violet.

Violet looked sternly at him. She had insisted I keep up formalities and call him Mr Jasib. ‘Mr Jasib,’ she now said herself, ‘you haven’t been practising your English. It used to be much better.’