The highlands of Persia are a strain on the nerves, the altitude depresses the spirits, the space and poverty weary the eye; but here, along the Caspian coast, the Westerner is filled with voluptuous emotions and is more at home. The towns and villages seem less Eastern and more Russian. When I said this to my Persian friends, they were offended and firmly explained to me that South Russia was “very Persian”. The Russians, in their century-and-a-half quarrel with the Persians, have in fact taken over some of the Persian provinces. But I was thinking of those wooden villas and town halls with wooden classical columns in the façades, painted turquoise blue, with fine windows and the fantastically cut, toylike metal decorations on the eaves and dormers.
Some of the women in the Caspian provinces wear the chadar. I called on a general and landowner who had a villa between Ramsar and Pahlevi, and he stopped to say a few words to two or three women as they passed us in a field, and admired the baby one of them was carrying. She drew the chadar across her face, looked aside with lowered eyes, and showed no sign of hearing the compliment. She was behaving according to polite custom. But most of the women are unveiled. They wear a spotted red or blue dress over their pyjama-like trousers, a broad tartan apron or stomacher, small black-and-white hats, flat and solid, for carrying their tins or jars of water or sacks of grain, and a white veil behind the head. They are short, sharp-faced, bright-eyed, often very pretty, and they lean forward from the hips as if this were their manner of resting: they almost always have a load on their backs or heads. It is usually the women who are hoeing in the tea gardens. They hack away silently in groups at an extraordinary speed. They march down from the hills with long mountaineer strides, five or six of them at a time, chattering and laughing. They have brought in their jars of yogurt to the market and go back with cloth or a large fish.
But to go back to the general, I found him reading Montgomery’s memoirs. He had the military man’s passion for organisation and “betterment”. He had bought a small, barren estate by the sea on the way to Pahlevi and had turned it into fine orange and olive groves and tea gardens. Angry about the state of Iranian politics, out of favour in Tehran, he had retired to show, in a small way, how the standards of agriculture could be raised. A handsome, cultivated man, he was in deep trouble with the peasantry and the politicians, neither of whom like new methods. He called them “the clowns”. He was a reserved man, a benevolent aristocrat, a man of boundless friendship, but stern with his children: “They must repay to Iran what they have learned in Europe. Knowledge is not for amusement.”
The general was rich; but the next day I spent some time with a workman who had a large wooden house in Pahlevi and a country bungalow outside the town. The bungalow was surrounded by poplars and a fence of rushes ; there he grew his broad beans, his runner beans, his garlic. This man was a working fitter in the shipyard at Pahlevi. We sat out on the porch. His son, the headmaster of the high school, sat beside his father, who had built the structure with his own hands and installed his own electric light and water pump. They ordered vodka for me, but the father—a strict Moslem—would not touch it; nor would he smoke; and, in the presence of his father, the forty-year-old son would not dare to drink or smoke. We ate our garlic and our radishes in the soft, warm, damp evening air. But for the gnats it was very restful, like a scene from Chekhov. We talked about hunting, for the father was a crack shot; on the Caspian people go for miles along the beaches after wild duck.
Fathers are despots in Persia, but the real struggle between this father and his son was not about smoking and drinking; it was the struggle between custom and the modern, Western world that was breaking in, the struggle between old and new. “I will not go to my daughter-in-law’s house,” the old workman said. “They have complained that I eat with my fingers.”
Pahlevi is the caviar port of the Caspian. It is a pretty, prosperous town of fishermen who toil at putting out their quarter of a mile of net into the sea and then, in shouting teams thirty strong, haul it in. This is one of the sights of the town. The state has only lately installed a mechanical capstan. Sturgeon and what they call white-fish, a kind of sea bass, are their favourite catch. Muffled in Russian-styled clothes, the men in the sturgeon trade work in the cold-storage plant where thousands of frozen sturgeon and small, yawning whales are stacked—an awful death house. But you are fed on the best caviar in the world, the grey-green oily kind, in the laboratories ; and they are breeding sturgeon by artificial means now. A rich American market has opened up for Pahlevi, but most of its caviar and fish goes to Russia.
My week-end with my schoolmaster’s friends and relations was marred for me only by the reckless hunting habits of my hosts, who drove along the beaches shooting falcons, seagulls and teal in an indiscriminating slaughter and, when we got home, let their young children play with the wounded birds. There is a savage side to life in this country, but it is not altogether the fault of the Persians. After the war they learned from American and British troops to hunt gazelles from jeeps and to kill anything at sight. In a few years the automobile has destroyed the ancient skill, the grace and art, of the Persian chase.
When I was in the south I drove out from Shiraz to the ruins of Persepolis. They are the Persian, indeed the Aryan foundation. This was the spiritual centre of the ancient world empire of Artaxerxes and Darius ; Babylon and the Greek colonies fell to it and at one time the Persians were on the Danube. To the Greeks the Persians were, like all foreigners, barbarians, yet in administration and tolerance the Persians certainly surpassed the Greeks. Alexander the Great destroyed the great palaces of Persepolis: this was his revenge for the burning of Athens. Today, to stand on the great stone platforms of this fantastic ruin, under its heavy arches, is one of the great emotional moments of travel in Iran. The ruin is highly placed, so that from it one surveys a wide valley. Its tombs, cut high in the rock, convey a sense of great power.
Persepolis stands by the roadside, one of those main roads that traverse the country, and after the sombre marvel of the site, it is this road that remains in the mind. This country is a road. It is a road that has seen empire after empire, kingdom after kingdom, because it is a road that first offered itself to the outsider and then detained and cultivated him. It is a road that has been a meeting ground and, eventually, an island of civilisation in which we can, in an obscure yet real way, recognise things connected with our own.
To My Wife
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © V. S. Pritchett 1964
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ISBN: 9781448200344
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