Suddenly a guard was making the rounds, announcing that it was closing time. But it was only 4:15—forty-five minutes should have been left for stragglers to wander. Still, he was fidgety, nervous, insistent, and when I stepped outside I found out why. The corner of Fatemi and Karegar Avenues was shrouded in tear gas. The shouts of protestors could be heard on the other side of the bushes that separated the museum from the street. Police vans filled the intersection. Protestors were being thrown inside.
Sohrab appeared, holding a plastic trash bag.
“Take this—put it over your face.”
We threaded through knots of protestors, their eyes red and faces running with tears. In the middle of the street an old woman in a black chador was shouting in a frenzy.
“What’s she saying?” I asked.
“She’s cursing the government,” Sohrab replied.
“But what’s she saying?”
“‘Fucking bastards, beating your own people!’”
We reached the car and zigged and zagged in the direction of the hotel wherever the path was clear. Tehranis not battling with riot police were heading home from work, hailing taxis, and descending the steps of metro stations, maintaining an appearance of calm, even if the pace was brisker.
My hotel was the Kosar, off Vali Asr Square. Outside a crowd of protestors filled the narrow street, sprouting green streamers, green wristbands, green T-shirts, green bandanas—waving the color of the antigovernment green movement. One of the desk clerks had emerged from the reception area to watch, then motioned for me to stand back under the cover of the parking area, out of range of snipers who might be planted on the rooftops. Without warning, a team of basij militiamen raced the length of the block on motorbikes, clubs raised.
Shortly after the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini saw that the regime could hold on to power only by maintaining an army of grassroots enforcers to quell dissent and to serve as riot police should protests erupt. So he formed the basij, or “guardians of the revolution.” Today their forces number over a million, spread over the entire country. Its ranks, both men and women, are drawn almost exclusively from the marginalized working class and others without a clear path to advance in Iranian society. For their service they are rewarded with perks such as preferences in hiring, job promotions, and admission to universities. These were the young men now revving their engines and waving their truncheons, challenging the crowd. Some, no doubt, were true believers in the Islamic regime, others little more than hired guns but using the moment to make the most of their show of force.
The crowd gathered in front of the Kosar and headed toward Vali Asr Square, where several hundred riot police had massed. A column of Revolutionary Guard troops were marching down Vali Asr Street, while several dozen basiji swirled into the roundabout on motorbikes, weaving defiantly in and out of the rush-hour traffic. Around the square people had gathered on sidewalks and squeezed between the parked cars to watch the militiamen on the other side, waiting for—neither knew what.
Stretching thirty miles, from the southern suburbs to the apron of the Alborz Mountains to the north, Vali Asr Street is Tehran’s main artery and political mileage marker. Running as straight as a compass arrow, it cuts through the conservative, working-class neighborhoods, bypasses the Tehran bazaar, and then begins a long, sleepy climb toward the mountains and North Tehran, de facto headquarters of the reformist movement and all that rankles the government. To travel the length of Vali Asr Street is to experience the many facets of Iranian society that the media lens usually overlooks.
“If they make a move, get out of the way,” a man beside me said. “They show no mercy.”
Almost on cue, a team of basiji rounded the corner, riot shields raised. Their commander—a bullish, pudgy man with razor-sharp eyes set in a taut face—had given the order to break up the thickets of onlookers, and so they charged up onto the sidewalk astride their motorbikes as the spectators cleared out, retreating to the side streets.
There were a lot of sparks but no fire. I began walking up Vali Asr Street, and soon—all too soon—an odd sense of normalcy returned. Pedestrians filled the sidewalk and shopkeepers were sitting on stoops, absorbing the late-afternoon sun. But a few blocks later the traffic stopped. Horns began blowing, at first only a few, but others soon joined in. Near the intersection of Beheshti Street a young woman pulled me aside. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen.
“They’re spraying tear gas ahead,” she said in fluent English. “Be careful.”
She paused, and in her voice was the certainty of uncertainty, of being sure only of what one does not know.
“They took my sister and my parents away. They were shouting with their fists in the air when the police came. I don’t know where they are.”
She paused again.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I apologize for my country . . .”
I would hear this many times over the next few days: “I’m so sorry . . .” and “I apologize for my country.” Always I brushed these off—“Don’t worry about it” . . . “It’s not your fault”—as though a violent insurrection was no more an inconvenience than street litter, and any individual could be responsible for either. But one afternoon I heard it again—“I’m so sorry”—and this time the apologist gave the reason for his sympathy: Michael Jackson had died.
Around the intersection the sweet, acrid mist of tear gas still hung thick in the air. By the time I reached Sae’e Park I felt like an actor who had wandered off the stage and out of the theater entirely. Couples sat on benches in the dusk of the summer evening, and the vendors did a brisk business selling ice cream cones and cotton candy to giggling children.
My destination was Bix, an upscale restaurant advertising California-Mediterranean cuisine in the Gandhi Street Shopping Center, which was more of a center for trendy restaurants and cafés than any retail trade. When I arrived almost all the tables were empty, but in a little while the patrons began filing in—women in pressed jeans, colorful headscarves, and form-fitting manteaux, the thigh-length jacket worn by most Iranian women. Men wore European-cut shirts and polished shoes. These were classic “North Tehran elites,” upper-class professionals able to obtain Western visas to escape Iran for holidays abroad, and until recently their higher incomes allowed them to escape the financial strains brought by years of economic sanctions. But no more. Galloping inflation and a plummeting rial now had even the formerly financially insulated complaining about the price of pistachios.
I was about to dig into my roasted vegetable pizza when Parviz and Raha, a couple seated at the table across from me asked what I was doing in Iran—under the circumstances. It was an understandable question—under the circumstances—and one that deserved an honest answer: I had been planning the trip for more than a month, the time it took for my visa to be approved, and I saw no reason to cancel it because of the circumstances. Then I had a question for them, one that they might choose not to answer, or one they might, here in the bastion of the green movement and the “North Tehran elites.” What did they think of the election results? The candidates?
“Same shit, different shade,” Parviz was quick to reply.
I asked him to explain.
“All of them—they’ve all served the same rotten system.”
Parviz’s “same shit” referred to Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the reformist candidates preferred by reformist-minded Iranians like Parviz and Raha, but four years later the “same shit” label would have applied to current president Hassan Rouhani. Like Mousavi and Karroubi, Rouhani had been nurtured by the same political system that had produced Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and the other hardest of the hardliners, Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, chairman of the Assembly of Experts, and Ali Larijani, former nuclear negotiator and secretary of the National Security Council. Since candidates must prove their ideological stripes to be allowed to run in any race, liberal voters are always left with the choice of the least bad.
In Parviz’s vie
w, the outcome of the election, no matter how it was tilted or fudged, mattered little. Hardliner, reformist—both meant the perpetuation of “the same rotten system.” So, I asked, was nothing gained? Was there no point to the people taking to the streets?
Parviz forced a thin smile. “The people have finally seen that there’s nothing inside these leaders,” he said. “And the leaders have learned that the people are willing to fight them.”
Raha cut in. “We deserve better,” she said. “All this talk of nuclear power and arguments with the West are just ways of keeping the people distracted. They’re not what the people really care about. We want to see much more attention paid to the problems in our own country.”
I asked her—if the government were to collapse what would the people want?
“I’m not sure. I’m not really sure what I want. There would be a lot of confusion. For many of us this is all we’ve ever known, but we do know we don’t want all this religion in politics.”
I finished my pizza and then had a pot of tea at the Café de France, which, like Bix, was on the second floor of the complex. A brick fireplace and a set of floor-to-ceiling bookcases gave it a cozy, homey feel. A vintage poster for the 1960s western A Fistful of Dollars starring Clint Eastwood was tacked to the atrium-like ceiling, which made the small room feel much larger than it was. Flamenco guitar pumped from a CD playing behind the serving counter. A scan of the bookshelves showed a sincere interest in American culture, even if the titles could provide only the smallest of peepholes into a sprawling, complex subject. There was The Anatomy Lesson, by Philip Roth, and Ralph Nader’s The Big Boys: Power and Position in American Business. Not all young Iranians were battling the basiji out on the streets. The Café de France and the other coffee shops on the second floor had their share of customers. Were these late-night café loungers apolitical, apathetic? No, not at all. A revolutionary movement is like an army, its ranks filled with various specialists. Some rebels will resist the regime by circulating news via Facebook posts and tweets. Others ask provocative questions in the university classrooms. Both men and women will push the boundaries of the Islamic dress code. And then there are those who will shout, “Where is my vote?!” in the streets.
Witnessing a society in chaos is like watching a windshield splinter after a pebble has hit it. One never knows where the cracks will spread, which areas will be left untouched, or how extensive the damage will be.
I stayed at the café until closing time and chose to forgo a taxi, preferring to walk back to the hotel the same way I came, along Vali Asr Street. Tehran looked like any city about to shut its eyes for the night. Metal gates had been pulled down over the storefronts, though the lights of the occasional pizza shop or juice bar still glowed. Then the chanting started.
“Allahu Akbar! Death to the dictator! Allahu Akbar! Death to the dictator!” sounded across the rooftops from somewhere in the shadows of the dim side streets. After about fifteen minutes the street was lined with basiji, standing in pairs about thirty feet apart, their helmets hanging from the handlebars of their motorbikes, riot shields propped against the trees. Further along, in the small square at the intersection of Vali Asr and Jamal Od-Din about fifty young men had gathered under a street lamp. One held a pipe and another a long stick of wood. One of the men climbed on top of a road barrier and spoke while the rest gathered to listen. His speech finished, they restarted their bikes and rode off into the night. Minutes later, a fleet of fire trucks raced toward Vali Asr Square, followed by a column of troop transporters packed with riot policemen.
Back at the Kosar, there was no point in trying to find out what was happening. The internet connection had been slowed to a speed that rendered it useless, and every TV channel besides the state-run networks had been blocked, or reception was fitful. Word of mouth was the only way news traveled, and the night desk clerk told me that along Enqelab Avenue two buses and a bus shelter had been set ablaze.
The next morning Sohrab picked me up after breakfast for a tour of the sights of Tehran, or those we could get to depending on whatever demonstrations might pop up. Our first stop was Golestan Palace, not far from the hotel. It was still midmorning, so things were quiet out on the streets, but when we reached the access road that led to the palace entrance we hit an impasse. The road ran alongside the building housing the Ministry of Justice, and the police had blocked it. Tensions were simmering, and nervous leaders do not take risks. I thought Sohrab was going to return to Nasser Khosro Street, but no. He tapped the horn for the guard to move, as gentle a tap as a horn tap can be, but a honk of the horn nonetheless. The guard shouted that we could go no further and waved us back toward Nasser Khosro. Sohrab grabbed a manila envelope from under his seat and held it out the window.
“We’re from the foreign ministry!” he shouted.
The guard shouted back and waved us back to Nasser Khosro.
No horn tap this time, but we didn’t move. Sohrab waved the guard over to the car and showed him the envelope. He didn’t open it, just displayed the seal identifying it, as he said, from the foreign ministry. It contained nothing more than the papers certifying his role as my guide during my stay in Iran, but it was enough to prod the guard to draw the barrier aside, and we proceeded to the palace.
I had to ask him how he had managed to get us in.
“Simple,” he said. “They push, you push back. Don’t take their shit.”
We parked and passed through the entrance, which had not been closed, despite the barrier and the presence of the obtrusive guard. We had the grounds to ourselves. As we stood in the grand courtyard, Sohrab was more animated by the troubles of the present than the glories of the past.
“Everything that has happened in the past thirty years is alien to our society,” he said. “We haven’t always had good leaders and political freedom, but at least we had social freedom. That son-of-a-bitch back there,” he said. “Nothing in our culture tells us to accept that. Look at the words of our poets. They tell us that the people are supposed to guide society, not the rulers. We’re not the kind of people to do what we’re told just because someone says so. Our challenge now is to get back to the true character of our society.”
This reminded me of my own characterization of revolutionary Iran: Think of it as a third-grade classroom run by a strict schoolmaster whose students just won’t behave. They may pretend to when he stands in front of them, but as soon as his back is turned they make faces and hurl spitballs, and worst of all they don’t take him seriously.
“In Iran religion isn’t a cultural unifier like it is in the Arab world,” Sohrab continued, “and it isn’t as central to the Iranian identity. When the Arabs brought Islam here we took from it what we wanted, and things that ran counter to the Persian culture we ignored. It became more of a philosophy of life, not the kind of rules associated with religion.”
What I was getting was part tour-guide talk, part political science lecture, but the circumstances could not have been better for a fusion of the two. Evidence for Sohrab’s claim appeared on the palace walls, which were arrayed with blue-and-yellow tile paintings portraying elegant peacocks and hunting scenes in swirling rococo curves. Such images were common in Persian art but unthinkable in traditional Islamic painting, which forbids the portrayal of any living creature.
Sohrab wasn’t so distracted by the guard at the gate, and the political reality he represented, that he neglected to fill me in on the history of Golestan and what it signified in Persian history. He told me that the palace became the seat of the royal household in the mid-eighteenth century under the rule of Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar. Most important, it was during the nineteenth century that Iran absorbed many cultural influences from the West, primarily central Europe. Consequently, the many grand halls would feel right at home in the Balkan peninsula, so meticulously do they mimic the decorative style of nineteenth-century southeastern Europe, with Persian touches. Chandeliers brightened the interiors, which were given the illusion of even gre
ater grandeur by the ceiling-high mirrors that filled the rooms. Polished wooden tables and velvet seat covers replaced the hopelessly out-of-fashion sofas and bolster cushions. A special hall was added to show off Golestan’s chinaware, some of it presented as gifts by European royalty. The message, expressed in the design of the palace, was clear: Iran was eager to shed its Asian identity. Another hall features Iranian and European paintings. And then there is the tilework.
The interiors of Golestan Palace may be magnificent in their seamless blending of Persian and European design, but it is the tilework that steals the show. The walls of the courtyard are decorated with elaborately painted hunting scenes, depictions of court princes, wild animals, and exotic birds, all painted on square tiles in brilliant blue and yellow, with accents in green, white, and pink. Throughout the courtyard tapered palm trees stand at attention like a distinguished honor guard, and tall, delicate archways connect the courtyards to the halls inside.
The beauty of the place had a soothing effect even on Sohrab, who dropped his political gripes to lead me over to the Edifice of the Sun, two towers that were added to give anyone who climbed to the top a bird’s-eye view of the city. And he showed me the private retreat of Nasser ad-Din Shah, a small terrace with a marble throne, dubbed “the nook” (kherbrat), which once had a fountain and small pool. It was here that the shah preferred to spend his quiet time, to allow the affairs of state to be washed away by the water from the fountain.
Descendants of Cyrus Page 2