The House of the Mosque (27 page)

‘Yes,’ Ahmad said, his face ashen with fear. He leaned over and touched his forehead to the ground, as if he were continuing his prayer.

When he sat up again, the agent was gone.

With trembling hands, he slipped on his
aba
and hurried home, his shoulders hunched as if he were in the grip of a fever.

The first thing he did when he reached the house was to go into Aqa Jaan’s study and fall to his knees. ‘Save me, Aqa Jaan!’ he wailed. ‘I’ve been framed!’

Aqa Jaan, astonished at the sudden outburst, stared at his nephew.

‘The secret police have taken pictures of me! Dirty pictures, with women, opium! They want me to go to Qom and be an informer. If I don’t, they’ll publish the pictures in the paper!’

Aqa Jaan sat speechless in his chair. This was the last thing he’d expected. ‘Where did it happen?’ he finally asked.

‘In a cellar here in town.’

‘The opium isn’t a problem, but who were the women?’

‘
Siegeh
women.’

‘The secret police are trying to even an old score. Have you cooperated with them in any way or worked for them before?’

‘No! Never!’ Ahmad said.

‘Have you ever passed on any information to them?’

‘No, none!’

‘I repeat,’ Aqa Jaan said, with emphasis, ‘have you ever told them anything?’

‘No, I haven’t said anything. I haven’t done anything,’ Ahmad replied.

‘Consider yourself lucky, because if you had, I would have kicked you out of the house this instant. However, if we act quickly, I think we can keep the damage to a minimum. Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. In the next few months I’ll make sure you’re never left alone. I’ll go down to their headquarters tomorrow and see what I can do. They need us to keep the peace in Senejan, so they’re not about to print those pictures in the paper. They’re just using them to blackmail us. Don’t say a word. And no matter what happens, stick close to me.’

‘I have another confession to make,’ Ahmad said. ‘I can’t preach a sermon without smoking opium first. I’m sorry, I know how much this must hurt you.’

‘It does. It pains me even more than your other news,’ Aqa Jaan said sorrowfully. ‘Anyone can make a mistake, but your addiction is an insult, a humiliation to us all. I can’t bear to think that the imam of our mosque can’t preach unless he’s smoked opium first. You’ve hurt me to the quick. I’m not going to compromise on this, you’re going to have to kick the habit, even if I have to lock you in a cage. From now on you’re not to step foot outside this house unless I say so!’

The next day Aqa Jaan cancelled all of Ahmad’s appointments and called the family doctor to ask if he could come in for a confidential chat.

Going directly from the doctor’s office to the headquarters of the secret police, he demanded to see the director immediately, even though he hadn’t made an appointment. He was ushered into the office and seated in a big leather armchair. The director showed him the photographs of Ahmad. Aqa Jaan had no choice: he had to make a deal. He promised to keep the mosque free of the trouble that was now plaguing Qom and, in return, the director agreed to keep the photographs in his drawer.

That evening Aqa Jaan opened his journal. ‘The imam of our mosque is addicted to opium,’ he wrote. ‘We are in for hard times.’

A
long time passed in relative tranquillity.

Aqa Jaan got Ahmad back in line by making him follow a strict set of rules and not letting him travel to other cities by himself until he was sure that he had conquered his addiction.

Though the matter of the photographs had been taken care of, Aqa Jaan thought of it as a turning point in the history of the mosque.

At first Shahbal came home from university at least once a month, and then his visits tapered off. Sometimes he phoned Aqa Jaan at the bazaar, but all they did was talk about business: ‘How are you? How’s the work going?’

‘What can I say? The world has changed, my boy. We need a man with new ideas. I’m getting old.’

‘You? Old? You’re not old!’

‘Well, maybe not old, but old-fashioned. You can’t compete these days at an international level with the traditional methods we use here. Study hard; I need you. We’ll talk about it the next time you come home.’

But when Shahbal did come home, it was late at night, and the next evening he’d take the night train back to Tehran, so there was never any time to discuss the carpet trade and the bazaar.

Shahbal had not yet told Aqa Jaan, but he was no longer interested in business and certainly not in carpets. At the university he had joined an underground student movement – a different group from the one he’d been involved with in the Red Village.

He soon found himself appointed to the editorial board of the clandestine student newspaper, where he felt at home. Since he wrote well and was more mature than his fellow students, he was quickly regarded as a man with leadership potential.

Shahbal had changed, but so had the world around him. The bazaar, which used to play such an important role in Senejan, had been relegated to the sidelines. Persian rugs were no longer the determining factor in either the economy or in politics; their place had been usurped by gas and oil.

Aqa Jaan had once wielded a great deal of power in the bazaar, and the authorities had always held him in high regard. Now they had grown so bold that they dared to send secret policemen to the mosque and to suggest that the imam be used as an informer. The mayor used to call him at least once a week to maintain contact between the bazaar and the local government, but the new mayor hadn’t even invited Aqa Jaan to his inaugural banquet, much less phoned him. Some of the other merchants had been invited, however, which meant that the regime was attempting to destroy the unity of the bazaar. Meanwhile the bazaar was losing its dominant position as the producer of carpets. Several new carpet factories had sprung up in the city. In the old days no one would have dreamed of buying a cheap factory carpet that reeked of plastic, but nowadays everyone seemed to have one.

Until only a few short years ago, having a television aerial on your roof was taboo in Senejan, but times had changed. Once, when an enterprising businessman had decided to convert the old bathhouse into a cinema, all it took was Khalkhal to rally the faithful and rout out even Farah Diba. Recently someone had bought the oldest garage in the city and transformed it into a modern cinema. Every night hundreds of young people queued up to buy tickets.

So many attractive businesses had opened in the city that the younger generation had lost touch with the bazaar. A few years ago, young people used to go to the bazaar just to take a stroll. Now the city had built a broad boulevard, to which they flocked during the evening prayer, eating ices and strolling beneath the trees in the garish neon light.

The shah had finally conquered the city. Posters of him were plastered on every government building, and his voice could be heard on every radio station in the country. In the past, shopkeepers used to keep their radios under the counter, for fear of offending their customers and losing trade. Now they displayed their radios prominently on a shelf, so that everyone could hear the broadcasts.

Some of the traditional carpet merchants in the bazaar even had portraits of the shah hanging in their shops. Only a few years ago, that would have been unthinkable, but things had changed so rapidly that sometimes you didn’t recognise your own city.

The focal point of Senejan was no longer the bazaar, but the new boulevard, where a large equestrian statue of the shah had been erected.

The shah’s voice now reached almost every home in Senejan; even the thick old walls of the house of the mosque could no longer shut it out. Every time the shah gave a new speech in some part of the country, the authorities parked a jeep next to the mosque and broadcast the speech through a loudspeaker. All day long the shah’s voice would echo through the courtyard. Fakhri Sadat couldn’t understand why Aqa Jaan didn’t speak up and why Ahmad didn’t protest.

Recently the shah had visited the grave of Cyrus, the first king of the ancient Persian Empire, and said with great hubris, ‘Cyrus! King of kings! Sleep quietly, for I am awake!’ The jeep outside the mosque had broadcast the speech non-stop for an entire week.

‘Such gruelling days! Such gruelling nights!’ Aqa Jaan wrote in his journal. ‘It’s a great humiliation to us all, but there’s nothing I can do about it! I’m so ashamed that I hardly dare to show my face at the mosque.’

No one could keep the shah out of the house any longer. Even the pictures of him, which a helicopter had scattered over the city, had been blown into the courtyard by the wind. Lizard had picked up a couple of them and put them on Aqa Jaan’s desk.

One day Aqa Jaan was standing in the courtyard when he heard loud music coming from the house of Hajji Shishegar. Music in the house of the pious Shishegar? It must be a special occasion.

Aqa Jaan looked over and thought he saw a television aerial on Shishegar’s roof. A television aerial on the roof of one of the most respected glass merchants in the bazaar? Surely his eyes must be deceiving him?

There was another burst of noise.

Aqa Jaan went up the courtyard steps and carefully picked his way through the darkness until he was directly opposite his neighbour’s roof. No, his eyes hadn’t been deceiving him. A long aluminium aerial was poking up from the roof!

Hajji Shishegar had decided that he and his sons needed to keep abreast of the latest developments. He had been invited to the mayor’s inaugural banquet, where each of the guests had been given a portrait of the shah to take home. And that portrait, now in a gold frame, had been placed on the mantelpiece, directly above the television.

But why was such loud music coming from the hajji’s house?

Aqa Jaan crept over to the edge of the roof and peeked into his neighbour’s courtyard.

The hajji was giving a party, to which he’d invited his many friends and relatives. It was a hot evening – too hot to sit inside. Shishegar’s twin sons, dressed in long cotton tunics, were lying next to each other on a wooden bed, which had been carried out into the courtyard and set down by the
hauz
. A group of street musicians was playing an American pop song with a strong beat, and a few of the men were dancing hand in hand.

Apparently they were celebrating the circumcision of the hajji’s sons. The mother of the twins was talking gaily to her guests with her chador down around her shoulders and only a wispy scarf on her head. There was no sign of the hajji’s first wife and her seven daughters.

Bowls of biscuits and sweets had been placed here and there, and the children were chasing each other round the large courtyard. The hajji chatted with his guests and offered them biscuits. Every once in a while he snatched the camera out of the photographer’s hands, took a few shots of his sons, then flopped down on the bed beside them for the umpteenth time and shouted, ‘Take a picture of the three of us!’

At a certain point he rounded up a couple of other men, went into the living room and came back out with a huge cabinet television. They set it down by the
hauz
, under the tree that was sheltering his sons. The hajji switched it on and a group of female dancers from Tehran filled the screen. Everyone crowded round and stared at the dancers in awestruck silence.

Aqa Jaan retraced his steps until he was standing by the big blue dome. He touched its cold glazed tiles, then walked over to the edge of the roof, where he could look down into the courtyard of the mosque and see the
hauz
and the trees. He looked up at the minarets, but noticed to his surprise that there didn’t seem to be any storks, or even any nests. Maybe it was too dark to see them from where he was standing, Aqa Jaan thought, so he walked over to the other side of the roof to view the minarets from that angle. No, he hadn’t been mistaken: there was no trace whatsoever of the storks.

He opened the trapdoor in one of the minarets, climbed up the narrow stairs and stood at the top. There was a snap of twigs beneath his feet – all that remained of the stork nests. Something inside him snapped as well. He had grown old. This unexpected realisation took him by surprise. He looked out over the city. Coloured lights twinkled everywhere, and the giant portrait of the shah near the entrance to the bazaar was lit by floodlights. The cinema’s red and yellow neon lights were flashing on and off in the new centre of town. Although it was late, he could hear music and women’s voices drifting over from the boulevard.

When had the sounds of surahs disappeared from the city? He knew that the mosque, the bazaar and the Koran were up against a powerful enemy, but he hadn’t expected the regime to conquer Senejan quite so easily.

Where were the ayatollahs who had fought against the shah?

What had happened to the guerrillas who had been organised enough to arrange an escape from prison?

What changes had been brought about by the clandestine books read by Shahbal?

Where were the radios that had once railed against the regime?

Where was Khalkhal, who had fought the shah with such ferocity?

Where were the students who had wanted to change the world?

And where was Nosrat, who could have filmed all these changes?

These were quiet years. How could Aqa Jaan have known that a new era was going to dawn with dizzying swiftness? Or that a storm of destruction was heading his way? A raging storm that would lash him so hard that he would bend in trembling fear.

He climbed down the stairs, shut the trapdoor behind him and went into the courtyard, a broken man. He wanted to crawl in bed beside his wife and forget his troubles, but decided to go down to the river instead.

It was dark and quiet. Even the river wasn’t making a sound. He looked at the vineyards and at the mountains on the opposite bank. All was still. As he walked, he thought about his life.