Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  Like my fellow walkers, I put the afternoon behind me.

  2

  Tabriz

  Seat of a Revolution

  No one can be summarily arrested, save flagrante delicto in the commission of some crime or misdemeanor, except on the written authority of the President of the Tribunal of Justice, given in conformity with the law. Even in such case the accused must immediately, or at latest in the course of the next twenty-four hours, be informed and notified of the nature of his offence.

  —1906 Constitution of Iran

  For a mega-metropolis of seventeen million, Tehran does not take long to escape. The day of departure I met my new guide, Aydin, in the breakfast room of the hotel before the last of the breakfast dishes had been cleared away. Tall, fresh-faced, bespectacled, Aydin better resembled an honor medical student than a professional tour guide. But he was prompt—even early—and ready to go.

  We threw my bag in the trunk of his Saipa and zigzagged through the one-way streets until one dumped us onto Ferdowsi Street, and then we headed west along Enqelab Avenue. Luckily we were driving against the horrendous rush-hour traffic, and we had a last look at Azadi Tower before the rest of the city disappeared into the cocoon of smog that would envelope it for the rest of the day. We were going northwest, to Tabriz, with stops along the way that would take up the next four or five days. The first destination was Qazvin, one of the many former capitals of the Persian Empire but now the capital of only the Qazvin Province. But as a former seat of the empire it had collected its share of gargantuan mosques and gaudy shrines and other must-see sights, enough to make it a must stop on the northern tourist trail.

  Past the city of Karaj, a half an hour west of Tehran, factories and other industrial buildings began to appear beside the road—the depot of a trucking company, the reactor of a nuclear power station, a forest of electrical towers—first lining the highway and then stretching far from it, all the way to the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. Yet in spite of the congestion of industry the air was clear and the sun beamed brightly through a cloudless sky.

  “Almost all of this is relatively new,” Aydin said, as the tracts of industrial acreage sped past. “It’s to keep the pressure off Tehran. No more industrial development can take place within a hundred kilometers of the city. Too many people are coming to the city for work and it just can’t handle any more. This way people will also be able to live closer to their jobs.”

  It wasn’t all smokestacks and docking ramps. There were housing developments too, bland, chockablock apartment complexes that had sprung up between the warehouses and shipping centers to minimize commute times for the newly citified and city dwellers eager to migrate out to these industrial exurbs. But fast-forward ten or twenty years and it is hard not to imagine these residential-cum-business tracts swallowed up by a swelling metropolis. Tehran is faced with the plight of many of the world’s mega-cities—too many people for too few opportunities, too little space and infrastructure to bear the weight, and too little time to cope with the crisis. Expanding ever further beyond the city’s limits seemed like a desperate attempt to buy time, hoping that a miracle cure for the problem of uber-urbanization would magically appear and make everything right.

  But at the moment none of that was our concern. We had gotten out of the city before the daily traffic snarls could get the best of us and now had only Qazvin in our sights. After two hours of cruising the double-lane highway we rolled into town. It was early afternoon, time enough to see some of the sights of Qazvin before the day was done. Our first stop was the local laundromat—nineteenth-century style.

  One hundred years ago, fresh water came to Qazvin from the natural springs found both within the town and the surrounding hills. Rather than scrub their laundry in open rivulets, the women of Qazvin brought their bundles of sheets and undergarments to the municipal wash house, where clear, cold water running through the qanats, or water channels, passed through what was in nineteenth-century terms the local laundry room. In the brightly lit, low-ceilinged hall the water bubbles along the blue-tiled qanats as local women, as costumed mannequins, prepare to load their wet bundles for the trek home.

  On the way out I stopped at the ticket counter to ask if there was any information in English about the museum. The ticket taker slid me a brochure, with a nod that conveyed an odd mixture of acknowledgment and thank you, and then he made a request of his own: Did I have any coins? He collected coins from around the world, he explained, and had a habit of asking foreign visitors for any change they might spare.

  I fished in my pocket but found nothing. But I wasn’t done. I went back to the car, rummaged in my bag, and found two quarters, a dime, and a handful of pennies. Unfortunately, I had no nickel, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that. I returned to the counter and handed over the coins.

  “American,” I said.

  His face brightened—without the nickel. He showed them to his boss, shuffling papers at a desk in the back of the room.

  “Am-ra-ka-ei,” he said, jangling the precious coins.

  The boss ogled a quarter and held it up to the light to get a better look. Then he dug in a drawer and scooped out a handful of coins, brought them to the ticket window, and handed them over.

  “Irani,” he said. It was a cache of rials—one-thousand- and two-thousand- and five-thousand-denomination coins—rare because they are encountered so infrequently, and encountered so infrequently because, at an exchange rate of sixty thousand to the dollar, they are almost worthless. But it was the thought that mattered, so I scooped them up and expressed heartfelt thanks, which in Persian culture always carries currency.

  Aydin and I hopped back in the car and headed over to the Shahzadeh Hossein shrine, where there was a funeral to attend. It wasn’t planned that way. The Shahzadeh Hossein is the burial place of the son of Imam Reza, the eighth imam in the line of Shiite imams. The site is surrounded by a courtyard and shielded by a retaining wall. An elaborate façade done out in blue tile work with six minarets welcomes visitors. The tomb for the son of an imam is suitably grand.

  Aydin and I had passed through the entrance gate when the funeral procession appeared. It had entered at the back of the complex, a dozen men carrying the bier that held the body. Many more paraded alongside, some wracked with emotion, wiping away tears. There were a few women too, old and young, treading along at the edge of the crowd, some carried away by emotion, others stone-faced. It was an insight into gender roles and gender expectations in the expression of emotion: either men or women may weep or remain consummately stoic. A man is no less a man for bursting into tears, and a woman no less a woman for refraining from doing so. Emotional expression knows no gender.

  I asked Aydin if it was apropos to take photos. Sure, he replied, and so I snapped away as the cortege marched to the front of the shrine, where it stopped and the crowd gathered for a ritual recitation of prayers.

  As the funeral procession paraded through the shrine the other visitors went about their business unperturbed, and the funeral marchers went about their business unperturbed by the presence of the visitors. It was the passage of life and death in a place meant to both honor the dead and acknowledge the honorariums extended by the living.

  The funeral procession finished, we left the Shahzadeh Hossein. There was one more sight to see, if we could find it—the Cantor Church, also known as the Russian Church, built to serve the Russian engineers employed in road-building projects in the early twentieth century. Aydin had never heard of it, so he popped the name into his GPS, and we struck out, following wherever the GPS led us until it got us lost in the back streets of Qazvin. After a few twists and turns we were close, and find it we did, after soliciting help from a few Qazvinis strolling the back streets.

  The Cantor Church is little more than a tiny redbrick building topped with a steeple that identifies it as a church. What had once been the diminutive nave has been converted into a gift shop selling postcards, icons, wooden crosses, and othe
r Orthodox memorabilia to the few passing Christian faithful. It is more a museum to the Russian presence in Iran than Christianity itself, but still it remains, as a reminder of a complex period of Iranian history and the many invasions the country has borne.

  The day was done. It was time to head to the hotel. And we found it without Aydin’s GPS—a high-end five-star resort complex that had been designed to boost the country’s tourist sector. It was modeled after multiperk resort complexes common to tourist destinations all over the world. It had a play area for children and a swimming pool and sauna—separate hours for men and women—and an onsite restaurant and café. The rooms were decorated in bland color schemes carefully chosen not to offend, with flat-screen TVs and toilet baskets brimming with shampoo bottles and other amenities. Of course there was no bar or nightclub, and none to be found anywhere in Qazvin, and therefore the effort to break into the international tourist market was doomed.

  At the check-in desk I made a new friend. He had overheard my American-accented English while I was talking to the concierge and felt impelled to cut in. His name was Amir, and he had lived in New Jersey for about thirty years. For an Iranian American back in Iran, overhearing American-accented English, especially in Qazvin, was all the invitation he needed. As expected, questions poured out: Where was I from? How long was I in Iran? What was I doing here? Just traveling? What were my impressions?

  Then Amir told me his story, or his woes. He was back in Iran to resolve a property dispute with the government, or, more accurately, an appallingly inefficient, disorganized, cumbersome bureaucracy. His case was exceptional, even by Iranian standards. Amir was trying to reclaim a parcel of land that had been seized by the government shortly after the Islamic Revolution.

  “When it was all over they just took property if they wanted it,” he said. “It happened a lot in the years of the war.” For Iranians “the war” always meant the Iran-Iraq War. “If they had an eye on your property and there was an absentee owner, or if there was any confusion over its ownership, people from the government came snooping around, and they would come up with a reason to take it.”

  Frustrating, time-consuming, cash-draining, it sounded little different from any number of struggles with local government authorities, or trying to “fight city hall.”

  “I have two lawyers, but they’re lazy and don’t do anything. They don’t know anything. I have to do all the work myself. But I still need them to represent me, so I have to pay them.”

  A gripe of this kind might resonate with frustrated citizens anywhere in the world, but Iran is forever Iran, and the social and judicial institutions don’t quite work (or not work) like those in other parts of the world. I could see what Amir was up against—a deeply embedded culture of corruption, opportunism, stagnation, and passivity that had been implanted, nurtured, and allowed to spread through virtually all of Iranian society since the 1979 revolution. Yet, despite the odds, Amir was hopeful: “Finally, after coming back for the last couple of years, I have the title to the land back.”

  Anywhere in the world this would be a great coup, but this was Iran, where layers of administrative ambiguity and corruption run deep.

  I asked, a bit naively—if he had the title to the land, wasn’t that the end of it?

  “Oh, no. There are more steps to go through, and more after that, and along the way everyone has their hand out. All of this is put in place so everyone who has something to do with it can get something out of it.”

  The land that Amir’s family owned was in Rasht, about sixty miles to the north near the shore of the Caspian Sea, and because it was in Rasht it reminded me of a recent Iranian film I had seen—A Man of Integrity, by Mohammad Rasoulof. It deals with the dilemma of Reza, a disgruntled man from Tehran who owns a fish farm near Rasht, where he has lived a peaceful life with his wife and daughter until local commercial interests attempt a land grab by destroying his livelihood when he refuses to sell out. The film pointed an accusing finger at the endemic corruption and cronyism that has spread through all levels of Iranian society. Even Reza’s wife, Hadis, the head teacher at the local high school, is dragged into the stew when she must confront the daughter of the powerful local tycoon behind the land grab.

  Initially, and surprisingly, the film was allowed to be screened in Iran, but it was quickly pulled when its ripples roiled the political waters. The image of a principled individual battling a fatally corrupt system resonated too loudly with audiences, even though such a mythic theme would have spoken equally loudly to audiences far outside Iran.

  A few days later I had a similar conversation in Zanjan, another regional city on the other side of the hills that rise from the Caspian Sea. I was sitting at a table in a late-night coffee shop frequented by frustrated and alienated Iranian youth. A group of young men had gathered around the TV on the other side of the room to watch a Real Madrid–Barcelona football match. Gathered at the other tables were young couples and small groups of liberal-leaning Iranians, indicated by the women’s meticulously tailored hair styles, revealed by headscarves that slipped off the back of their heads, and the natty jeans and unclipped beards worn by some of the young men.

  A few eyes looked my way, and then one of the football fans wandered over to my table, extended a hand, and started a conversation. Or tried to. His English was rudimentary, though I understood that his name was Parviz and he had a degree in internet technology. Like many Iranian youth, he was unemployed. The next one to wander over was Hamed, another football fan. He shook my hand, welcomed me to Iran, asked where I was from, and then took a seat next to Parviz. Hamed had a degree in chemical engineering but had been working as the café’s cook for the past five years because he couldn’t find a professional job. Finally came Javad. Javad had a degree in civil engineering but was managing the café in the evenings until he could also find a more suitable job. Now all of Real Madrid’s cheering section was gathered around my table, and I felt flattered that the on-field dazzle of Christian Renaldo could not compete with the novelty of a visiting American. As a visiting American my first obligation was to listen to their woes, for it was their rare opportunity to sound off to the most prime of sounding boards—a visiting American. Their gripes were much different than Amir’s. They weren’t trying to squeeze retribution out of a maddening, knotty bureaucracy.

  But they did have deep frustrations to voice against a political and social system they saw as having failed them.

  Of the three, all with degrees in areas that in many parts of the world could translate to career success, none were working in their chosen career paths.

  “Unless you’re religious, or your father was a martyr in the Iran-Iraq War, or you know someone high up in the government, it’s impossible to get ahead in Iran,” Javad moaned. He offered an abbreviated translation for the others. Heads nodded.

  “All the stupid people, they go to the religious schools,” he went on. “They can’t get into the good universities. And while they’re in school they’re paid, and they don’t have to do military service, and when they finish they get the good jobs. The rest of us, with degrees from the good universities, we get the lousy ones.”

  There was another translation. More nods of agreement. I offered a simple interpretation: “So everything is upside down. The smart people stay at the bottom unless they’re religious or their fathers were martyred in the war or they have good connections, so the less capable people end up running the government.”

  Another translation. More nods of agreement.

  “The problem is that there is way too much religion in Iran,” Javad went on, seeking to strike at the core of the matter. “Everything goes back to religion—what we should eat, what we should buy in the stores, how the economy of the country should be run—‘All this will lead to paradise!’—that’s all we hear, but none of it works.”

  A translation. More nods.

  “But it’s all lies. Everything we’ve been told is lies. We were told the Prophet Mohammad divi
ded the moon in half. This is the twenty-first century! How can anyone believe this? A lot of these stupid people who can’t get into the good universities, they don’t even believe in religion, they just see it as a way to get ahead, so they go along.”

  I asked him if there weren’t students at the university who still considered themselves religious whether or not they supported the government. Javad was emphatic: “No one at my university believes in religion, or the government. Religion is something, but not everything. My father drinks and he believes in God, but he doesn’t believe in the government.”

  Now there were amused nods of agreement. Parviz, the cook, added, “Half of Iranians don’t believe in God anymore. Look at the Friday prayers. Almost no one goes to the mosque, not the young people.”

  I knew this was a slight exaggeration, and that the liberal class tended to overestimate their support as a form of wish fulfillment. Many Iranians were devout Muslims and believed in the tenets of the religion. But I also remembered a joke I had once heard, that the mosques in Saudi Arabia are crumbling piles of stone but filled on Fridays. The mosques in Iran are magnificent works of art but empty on Fridays. And there was some truth to this. Decades of government-enforced religious principles in what had long been a quasi-secular society had driven even the semi-faithful away not only from Islam but religion entirely. “It’s a shit religion! It’s shit!” Sahar, another friend, told me. But there were still hangers-on, those who hadn’t allowed the notorious hypocrisy and dictums of the regime to dent their beliefs. Still, the comments of Javad and Parviz reflected the depth of alienation that many of the youth felt, and, with the Iranian population heavily tipped toward its younger generation, this meant widespread, critical, profound alienation, and this needed no translation.