The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (10 page)

It was mid-afternoon at the car-hire office and what I thought would be a quiet time. I actually needed the car for the following morning, but I thought a long trip might require some advance notice. The receptionist was standing, busy answering the two phones on her desk plus her cell phone, which she had to fish out of her handbag every few minutes, so I waited and stared at the Ayatollahs. I stared not because I was fascinated by their photos, the same photos that greet you at Mehrabad Airport and all over town, but because I didn’t want to stare at
her
. She was wearing a black hijab, every single strand of hair tucked away out of sight, and an ankle-length black outfit cut far more stylishly, probably by herself, than the shapeless ones I’d seen on the streets outside. Her pale face, bright pink lipstick, and heavily mascaraed eyes under perfectly plucked eyebrows contrasted sharply with the black cloth enveloping her, as well as with the photos of the bearded men I was looking at. She was probably no more than twenty-two—tall, thin, and with long slender fingers that held the two phone receivers. She was, dare I say it, very sexy. When she hung up the phones, she sat down and looked at me inquisitively. “Yes?” she said.

“I need a car to take me to Qom tomorrow. A good car.”
³

“Okay,” she said. “Where do you want to be picked up?”

“Just up the street, number 95. Or I can come here.”

She studied me for a few seconds. “I’ll get you someone
nice
,” she said. “Mr. Arab. He drives a Peugeot. Do you want to meet him now?” I realized then that she was the receptionist
and
the dispatcher.

“Sure,” I replied.

“Then have a seat and I’ll get him.” She pushed her chair back and leaned over a wooden partition. “Mr. Arab!” she shouted. “Come to the front!”

She turned back to answer the ringing phones. I waited patiently while she answered phones, plugged her cell phone charger into the wall, and occasionally shouted an order to one of the drivers on the other side of the partition. She glanced at me from time to time, but I tried to avoid eye contact, looking up instead at the photos of the Supreme Guides. “Mr. Arab!” she shouted whenever her eyes fell on me. “Where is he?” she finally said to a driver who stepped into the reception area. He shrugged his shoulders, quietly said he didn’t know, and picked up one of the chits she had signed and walked outside to the street. “Where is Mr. Arab?” she yelled angrily across the partition.

“He’s praying,” a disembodied voice answered meekly.

“Praying?” snorted the receptionist derisively, standing up. “Mr. Arab!” she yelled again. “Come on, even the
akhound-ha
[mullahs] don’t pray
that
long!” She turned to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “He’ll be out in a minute, I’m sure.”

A few minutes later Mr. Arab showed up, apologetic and humble. “This is Mr. Arab,” said the dispatcher huffily. “I told the gentleman that you were
nice
,” she said to him with a tiny hint of sarcasm. She went back to her phones while I arranged an early morning pickup with the driver, a middle-aged man with a quiet demeanor who assured me that he would be on time, perhaps sensing that I had my doubts about someone who had made me wait and had ignored the dispatcher’s frequent shouts. He gave me his cell phone number, just in case, he said, and I walked out, muttering a goodbye to the young woman, who nodded vigorously without looking up at me. This one, I thought as I watched her barking out orders to the much older men through the glass pane, would probably not be amused by reading
Lolita
. In Tehran, or otherwise.

The following morning Mr. Arab was on time. We were to pick up a friend who was going to come with me to Qom, and I tried to make small talk in the heavy Tehran traffic. Small talk has a way of ending up with politics in Iran, and Mr. Arab wasted no time in getting to the subject, starting with the economy and finishing by declaring that Ahmadinejad was ineffective in his dealings with foreigners, which only contributed to the danger of war and the bad state of the economy. Rafsanjani, in his mind, would have been much better. “You see,” he said, “Hashemi [as Rafsanjani is referred to in Iran] cuts throats with cotton.” He turned and looked at me. “With
cotton
! So that even the victim doesn’t know his throat’s been cut!” I laughed, nodding my head in agreement. “There wouldn’t be any talk of war with Hashemi,” he continued, then paused for a moment. “With
cotton
,” he repeated with obvious admiration. For a while after we picked up my friend, J. I’ll call him, Mr. Arab fell silent. He listened to our conversation and glanced in the rearview mirror, trying, I believe, to figure us out. J. and I of course talked politics, and from the conversation it must have been clear to Mr. Arab that J. was closely connected to one of the hard-line conservative Ayatollahs in Qom. What he couldn’t tell was that J. is actually quite liberal himself, for, although religious, he has no patience for intolerance and couldn’t care less about imposing Islamic values on anyone. Talk turned to war, and J. was adamant that the United States would never attack Iran. This, apparently, was the cue that Mr. Arab was waiting for.

“Never,” he said, glancing in his mirror.

“You don’t think so, huh?” I asked.

“They wouldn’t dare!” he replied, perhaps emboldened by J.’s nods. “No matter what anyone thinks of the government, the United States knows that if it attacks, everyone will defend Iran.”

“Yes,” said J. “It would be madness.”

“If America attacks,” continued Mr. Arab, “every Iranian will take up arms and fight to the death.” He was getting excited. “I will take up arms,” he declared. “I’m almost sixty, but I’ll definitely fight.”

“Everyone will,” said J., egging him on.

“Yes! I’ll fight, my children will fight, the old men will fight. America isn’t stupid.”

“I understand,” I said. “But…”

“
You’ll
fight,” said Mr. Arab, interrupting me. “Everyone!”

“But…” I started again.

“What do they think, the Americans? I’ll take up arms and fight them to the last breath,” he exclaimed with braggadocio, a true Iranian art if there ever was one, and one that this taxi driver, perhaps mindful of his bearded passengers, was employing skillfully. Boastful exaggeration, or
gholov
, is almost a national trait in a people that has long suffered from deep superiority/inferiority complexes. It alternates and contrasts nicely with the other great national trait, ta’arouf, the exaggerated politesse, modesty, and self-deprecation that Iranians seem to be born with the use of. It is why some fights in Iran will go very quickly from two parties declaring emphatically that they have had sex with the other’s mother
and
sister to both sides’ insistence that they are the other’s obedient servant, or worse.

“Baleh!”
said J., “yes!” taking a long drag of one of the many cigarettes he had been chain-smoking since he got in the car. The driver momentarily turned around and looked at us. We were passing the heavily fortified Parchin military complex outside of Tehran, a munitions site that is suspected by the West as secretly developing nuclear weaponry. I wondered what Mr. Arab made of us, two bearded men on their way to Qom in the back of his car, one with close connections to the center of religious power. We hadn’t broached the subject of the Supreme Leader’s health yet, but I felt it was time and I’d had enough of war talk. I wanted to talk to J. about it anyway, and see what he thought of all the rumors now that it was certain that Khamenei was not dead.

“What about the Rahbar?” I asked him. “Do you think he’s on his last legs?”

“Na baba,”
interrupted Mr. Arab, glancing at me in his mirror. “All this talk…He’s not young, of course.” J. nodded, fumbling for another cigarette.

“So you think he’s fine?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Mr. Arab, with a dismissive wave of the hand. “He just has a cold.”

“Yes,” repeated J., holding a lighter to the cigarette between his lips. “It happens. The Ayatollah has a cold.”

IF IT’S TUESDAY, THIS MUST BE QOM

On an insufferably hot August afternoon in Qom, the desert town a couple of hours south of Tehran and a great center of Shia learning, I was sitting on the Persian-carpeted floor of the living room of a decrepit old house within a walled garden, a yard really, staring at the stained sheet hung from a rail that served as the summer door while the women—covered head to toe in the cloth known as the chador—served hot tea to the men and an air conditioner, or
cooler
, as the water-operated ones are known in Iran, struggled noisily to make the room bearable. Typical of old homes, nowadays almost exclusively working-class if in poorer neighborhoods (which this was not), the small pond in the yard outside was surrounded by clotheslines, an illegal satellite dish, and an outhouse.
¹
Yes, a still-functioning outhouse, and one that reminded me of my grandfather’s house in Tehran, where the outhouse stood its ground (and was used by the occupants) long after a Western toilet was installed inside for the benefit of the offspring visiting from abroad.

The owner of the house, a fifty-something man with a slow, nasal twang, missing his front teeth, and extraordinarily polite (other than when he ordered his wife or daughter to bring more tea or his twelve-year-old son to run out and buy some cold drinks), seemingly had nothing to do all day but hang out and play host to anyone who bothered to drop by. I had never met any of the residents of this house: I had come knocking through an introduction, and my back was self-consciously stiff.

A well-built young man, clean shaven and with gelled hair, entered the room in soccer gear and was introduced as the son-in-law; he sat down quietly and stared at me with a furrowed brow as if I had just arrived from Mars. His young bride, the daughter of the house, followed him in, said a quiet hello, and sat down on the floor next to him, also staring, but averting her eyes whenever I glanced in her direction. She switched on the old television set perched on a low table and tuned the channel to PMC, the Persian Music Channel, a satellite station beamed in from Dubai and received illegally by just about every household in Iran. PMC features nothing but Iranian pop music videos from Los Angeles, and the young woman pulled her chador tight across her cheeks as she watched other young Iranian men and women, sans chadors or scarves, sexily cavorting across the Southern California desert in a vintage American convertible.

No one but me in this house seemed terribly interested in the nuclear crisis with the West that was all the news in Europe and back home in the States, and had been a major topic of conversation in middle-class Tehran homes since I had arrived a few days before President Ahmadinejad’s inauguration in 2005. Iran had just angrily rejected a European proposal to end the nuclear stalemate and was heading rapidly toward a major confrontation over its plans to restart the uranium fuel cycle, something the United States claimed would lead to nuclear-armed Ayatollahs, perhaps as frightening an image as can be planted, post-9/11, in the minds of ordinary Americans. Ahmadinejad’s new hard-line government, perhaps picking up on a cue from President Bush’s own lexicon, seemed to be saying, in so many words, “Bring it on” to the entire world. But in this household, there was little concern with the possibility of armed conflict. A middle-class family, religious but educated and wise to the ways of the world, if only through their television screen, they were far more concerned with the more mundane aspects of life, even though they stubbornly continued to live in a house that should have long ago given way to a modern apartment building, with perhaps a nice penthouse for them, the owners of the land underneath.

A noise from the yard signaled the arrival of other guests; an older man and his toothless young companion carrying a heavily crumpled plastic bag pushed aside the sheet and entered the room. Grateful that I wasn’t to be the sole source of amusement, I stood up as introductions were made and as the young daughter quickly fled to the safety of other rooms where strange, meaning nonfamilial, men are not allowed. The men shuffled in, the younger one saying his hellos and nodding while the older man gestured, apologizing for the lack of vocal cords, I understood. Although they had been removed recently in an operation, our host told me, the man seemed quite nonchalant about it and even accepted a cigarette proffered by his companion. He sat down on the carpet, lit his cigarette, and began to prepare for what I knew was to be the afternoon activity and part of the reason for the lifestyle of the family: smoking
shir’e
.

Shir’e is made from the charred remnants of previously smoked opium and is the preferred method of drug taking among the hardest of hard-core opium addicts in Iran, who number in the hundreds of thousands. Boiling the burned opium in water, removing the scum, and then straining the gooey residue results in an opiate perhaps tens of times more potent than fresh, raw opium, itself by far the most popular drug in Iran. Always plentiful and almost a part of Iran’s heritage (and widely used in the courts of previous dynasties), opium under the fanatically pro-Western and anti-traditionalist Shah was mainly used by provincial Iranians, the lower classes, and a handful of the landed gentry who stubbornly clung to the past and the seductive habit inherited from their forefathers. The modernism the Shah promoted in the 1960s and ’70s (along with a huge increase in tourist and student travel to Europe and the United States) meant that among the young at least, Western, and therefore cool, drugs such as marijuana and cocaine replaced the backward, and now plebeian, domestic high. In my maternal grandfather’s house in the 1960s, as traditional a household as there could be in Tehran, I had witnessed my great-grandmother, well over ninety years old, eating, yes,
eating
, her daily dose of opium. Her dementia, quite advanced as far as I was concerned since she never seemed to recognize me, not even a few minutes after I told her whose child I was, was noticeably improved after she swallowed the little brown pellets, although I now think it may have been more because she was just too high to be a nuisance to anyone. My mother used to tell me she was taking her medicine, but I heard enough about her
taryak
, “opium” in Farsi, to know better.

My father’s father, who died quite young of a heart attack when I was in first grade abroad, was an opium user of some repute in Ardakan, the provincial village he was from: the lengthy afternoon sessions at his
bagh
, or “garden,” as grand homes (which are presumed to have extensive gardens) are known in the provinces, were attended by village notables who, like him, were landowners not in need of a day job, I later discovered. But people of my generation stayed away from opium or, if they indulged, preferred to keep it private lest they be viewed by their ganja-smoking friends as hopelessly square. The Islamic Revolution, which inverted class distinctions and frowned upon anything Western, changed things a bit when it inadvertently caused a resurgence in the use of opium as a recreational activity, perhaps because of the ban on alcohol and the ready availability of opium (although illegal) as a substitute, but also perhaps because the old-fashioned, and particularly
Iranian
, customs were now in vogue. Drug use in general, though, has escalated dramatically since the revolution first intentionally created a modern republic without bars, pubs, or real public entertainment, and unintentionally a birthrate that has produced far more employable youths than the economy can provide jobs for. And although opium tops the list in terms of favored drugs, heroin, crack, and even crystal meth, known as
sheesheh
, or “glass,” are becoming commonplace among the working and middle classes. According to the almost boastful headline in an issue of the English-language daily
Iran News
during my stay in 2005, “Iranians hold the 1st spot among world countries regarding narcotics consumption. Moreover, 4–6% of Iranians are drug addicts.” Yes, “moreover,” although most Iranian experts put the figure as high as 10 percent and some even at 15 percent and higher.

Shir’e is the traditionalist’s hard drug, not too dissimilar from the heroin preferred in the West. Smoking it is a labor-intensive process, though: a small homemade paraffin burner is set on the floor, and the shir’e, a brown paste the color of a Tootsie Roll, is carefully kneaded onto the tip of a homemade pipe that looks something like an elongated kazoo. (Regular opium smokers often use beautiful pipes, sometimes made to the owner’s specifications, and handsome tongs, usually in pure silver, to lift white-hot charcoal briquettes from extravagantly decorated ash pits to their pipes.) Lying on the floor, one smokes shir’e upside down: unless you’re an expert, you need an assistant to guide the inverted pipe to the open flame. One puff and your head starts floating, pain now an adversary that appears vulnerable to conquest; two or three puffs and you experience a high that is serenely beautiful: problems fade completely away, anxiety and pain surrender, and nothing, you think, can take away the beauty. Not even a full-scale invasion by the U.S. military.

When it was my turn at the pipe, I lay down on the carpet and rested my head on a dirty pillow. The voiceless man painstakingly prepared the makeshift pipe by kneading and twisting a thick paste on its tip over and over, softening the shir’e by bringing it close to the flame and then quickly pulling it away several times. A gentle prod was my signal that the pipe was ready: I drew the smoke in short inhales until it completely filled my lungs, and then exhaled slowly. The cooler had been switched off to avoid any twentieth-century interference with the purity of the occasion, and although the heat in the room was now the equivalent of a turned-up sauna, I felt surprisingly comfortable. I begged off a third drag and instead moved away and sat up on the carpet, mumbling profuse thank-yous. I tried unsuccessfully to cross my legs, but they were happier stretched out, so I leaned on a big pillow and slowly drank a cup of tea with a few sugar cubes, sugar that I knew would be the only guarantee that I wouldn’t throw up, for opium, like heroin, dramatically lowers the blood sugar level—perhaps the one side effect that can diminish the seductiveness of the drug.

The owner of the house was up next. He didn’t put down the pipe until he’d taken five good hits of shir’e, carefully exhaling the sweet-smelling smoke in what seemed to me an impressive performance. The TV was still blaring: a long-haired young man was dancing by a tree surrounded by California blondes and Persian girls in skimpy outfits competing for his interest by swaying seductively to his song. I struggled to keep my eyes open, but my eyelids were uncooperative, the opiate seemingly having taken over some of my motor functions, so I decided to give in and quickly nodded off. Not quite asleep, but definitely not fully awake.

After a few minutes, or at least what I thought were a few minutes but could have been much more, I spoke, and with some difficulty managed to ask about the latest news. I was still curious about the reaction in this house—middle-class, although admittedly by no means ordinary—to Iran’s threat to resume its nuclear activity, but rather than offer a reply, the owner of the house quietly switched the TV to IRNN, the Iranian CNN, and left it at that. I thought that his fatalistic disinterest in the nuclear crisis, shared by many other Iranians but in his case fortified by the calming effects of the shir’e, could be best understood in the context of faith: “The will of Allah will prevail.” The news network offered no new news, and I willingly went back to my altered state between consciousness and deep slumber. Some time later I stirred, and was politely informed by the younger man that it was again my turn at the pipe. By now the TV was back to PMC, and despite my protestations that my delicate Western constitution would surely be overwhelmed by the shir’e, I found it hard to argue with the fact, repeatedly mentioned, that I had only taken two drags so far and a third couldn’t hurt. When I finished, not one but two long drags, I again popped some sugar cubes into my mouth and slurped a fresh cup of tea. My eyes closed again involuntarily, and I only half-listened to conversations of lost business opportunities and the general state of economic affairs, which are in present-day Iran characterized by inflation, joblessness, and stagnation. Three hours a day at the shir’e pipe could certainly mean lost business opportunities, I thought, particularly for these men, who seemed like they could use a few extra rials, but I kept quiet. I wasn’t sure I could speak coherently anyway.