Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  For the past hour or so I had been talking to Alireza, an Iranian American chiropractor living in southern California who was back in Iran for a few months to deal with “family business,” a catchall term for the limitless list of reasons that compel Iranians from the diaspora to return, often to resolve legal matters stemming from the 1979 Islamic Revolution. We had been paired together by one of the restaurant staff, who, noticing me sitting alone at one of the tables lining the wall, thought I should have some company, and so he introduced me to fellow countryman and English-fluent Alireza, who had also been sitting alone, munching on a pizza.

  “Would you like some?” he asked several times after he plopped what was left of the pie between us, and each time I told him I had already had dinner and my stomach couldn’t absorb another bite. As the last of the guests paid their checks and left he told me his story.

  He was born in Tehran and had gone to the U.S. to study physical therapy in the late 1970s, a few years before the beginning of the Islamic Revolution. When the country exploded in open rebellion against the oppressive rule of Shah Mohammad Reza, he concluded it was not the best time to return to Iran. Already he had shifted his career path and enrolled in the Life School of Chiropractic in Atlanta. He graduated, moved to Southern California, and still did not return to Iran, not for another fourteen years. The reason was simple. The devastating Iran-Iraq War had erupted, and he refused to be drafted into the Iranian army to serve as cannon fodder for what had become an ideologically driven regime that was using the nationalistic sentiments of the war to stoke its own special brand of Islamic fervor. So he remained in Southern California, where he has lived ever since.

  All of this came out in very no-nonsense fashion, and the longer Alireza and I talked, the more I found him emblematic of so many diaspora Iranians who had lived for decades in the West but had been born and come of age in prerevolutionary Iran. They found greater comfort in Western values than those of the Islamic Republic, yet they remained attached to a very different Iran, one that had been almost a hybrid of Asian-Persian culture and Western ways, that still floated in their imaginations. Family members who had remained behind were the unbreakable tie to both these expats’ homeland and the lives they had lost. For many a return occurred every year, usually in the summer. For others, the gap between trips could be years, even decades, but they did occur, if only to assure themselves that the Iran that they had known still existed, if only in the equally sentimental imaginations of friends and relatives.

  “You sure you don’t want a slice?” Alireza asked again, and again a few minutes later—the impulses of Persian hospitality returning—and again I declined, and again I assured him that I had just eaten. I was not put off by his persistent politeness. I knew where he was coming from. It was not pushiness. Old habits had resurfaced, and quickly. He was “home,” and therefore my host, and I was therefore his “guest,” and in Iran it was the sacred duty of a host to ensure that his guest wanted for nothing.

  I asked him what changes he had seen in the country since he was last back, fourteen years ago.

  “Back then, there was so much change. First the revolution, which completely transformed the society, and then came the war, which went on for eight years. The biggest problem was that even after it was over there was no opportunity for reflection, for the people to realize what had happened and how it had affected them. Everything was all about suppression, and it came from the government. This government is all about suppression, suppression of even the normal instincts of human beings. It doesn’t encourage exploration of any kind. It’s afraid that anything will lead the people away from the path of Islam. All through the war everything was all about slogans, how the country and the revolution had to be defended—simple statements, simple beliefs, anything to whip up support for the war. That was why I could never come back, not then. When it was over, there was no opportunity for the people to come to terms with what they had experienced, inside.”

  There have been reams of prose written about the effects of the Iran-Iraq War and war in general, but I had never heard them expressed with such depth and razor-edged simplicity. I asked Alireza if there were any difficulties he faced in adjusting to this new Iran. He threw his head back, paused.

  “It took me a while to learn what the new rules were, of how people are supposed to act in society. Everything was turned upside down. All of a sudden an entirely new set of principles were forced on us. We were supposed to become an ‘Islamic society,’ but what did this mean? We were never that religious, never in our entire history. After the revolution and the war people were told they were supposed to look at themselves in a different way. They were supposed to relate to others in society differently. Yet something had been driven deep down inside them that they didn’t know how to express.”

  Around the café there were a few tables of diners left, groups of young men and women chatting and laughing with as much ease as any group of young men and women anywhere in the world. On the surface, nothing seemed amiss. But this was, perhaps, a lesson in the illusions presented by surface impressions. I knew Alireza was on to something. The Islamic Revolution and the ensuing war had distorted Iranian society beyond all recognition. His years in a land that celebrated free expression almost to a fault had sensitized him to this “new normal” that had shifted the foundation of Iranian society away from one that for centuries had celebrated personal expression and indulgence in sensual experience to one that denied any experience that was not in line with “Islamic values”—as government officials interpreted them.

  Alireza continued along this theme, clearly one of his pet peeves with the “new Iran.” “People need to be free to express what they experience, and that is what is missing here. There is no opportunity for growth. That’s why I find it hard to stay here for any length of time. A few weeks, even a few months, is fine, but after that. . . .” He paused to search for the right words. “I can feel that. . . .” Another pause. “I’m not . . . ‘moving.’ My life isn’t moving. There isn’t any opportunity to grow.”

  Alireza was licensed to practice in Iran, and he took out his wallet and showed me his membership card in the Iranian Chiropractic Association, but he never saw patients, not on this trip, not on any of his previous returns. These were personal pilgrimages severed from the life that he had established in Southern California, not opportunities to develop professional contacts. That kind of effort would force him to combine phases of his life he still hadn’t reconciled. His trips back to Iran were akin to religious retreats—a rare chance to turn his back on his life in the U.S. and return to his roots, to reassemble the pieces of what had become a fragmented identity. If he were ever to accomplish that, his American life would have to be left behind.

  I asked him if he could speculate on the direction Iran might be headed?

  He leaned back, again threw his head back. “Every time I’m back it isn’t the same. There are more restaurants, more boutiques, more of a Western way of life.”

  He was buoyed by this. He was smiling. It seemed to assure him that the path on which Iran was headed in the days of the shah hadn’t been completely lost after all.

  As for his view on this “new Iran,” I had to agree. There had been a proliferation of stores selling high-end fashions, restaurants that would be classed as “upscale” in the West, and, most noticeably, a coffee shop explosion. In cities all over the country, social oases for mingling while sipping cappuccinos and espressos and munching on cakes and pastries had sprouted, and the background music that floated from their sound systems would have been banned just a few years ago as “Western cultural hegemony”—flamenco and bossa nova, jazz classics, American pop staples, and even what had come to be known as Farsi pop, pumped out by Iranian American bands centered in “Tehrangeles,” the capital of diaspora Iranian youth culture in Southern California. All of this had finally found its way to Iran, primarily through the e-waves that manage to pierce the most formidable e-walls erected by g
overnment censors. It was a losing battle, and hardline government figures seem to have realized it was simply no longer worth the effort, which could be better directed to the suppression of overt political challenges.

  “This has really helped,” Alireza went on, pointing to the laptop I had been carrying to catch up on emails and check out news websites. “The internet didn’t exist during the first twenty years of the revolution. Now people know what the rest of the world is like. There is exposure to other ideas and what is happening in other parts of the world. The government isn’t able to lie like it used to.”

  There was a problem here. A little way into our conversation, Alireza had lamented how the government had wedged religion into every aspect of Iranian life: “We have forgotten what it means to be Iranian,” he had said. At the time I knew it was a bit of exaggeration but let it pass. After all, I had been introduced to Alireza because one of the café employees thought I shouldn’t be sitting alone—a gesture of social decorum consummately Iranian. But Alireza had a point. Almost forty years of oppressive Islamic rule had sowed a degree of confusion about the Iranian identity.

  “We are still looking for our religion,” Alireza had said, and this had a resounding ring of truth. Islam had arrived in Iran 1,400 years ago, and it was still trying to find a foothold in the Persian identity. Then he added, with a ray of hope, “We have had such great philosophers. I hope we will find ourselves by rediscovering the thinking of another time.”

  It was no secret who and what he was referring to—the works of the great Persian poets who had both shaped and defined Persian culture and created a distinctively Persian literature—Hafez and Saadi, Rumi and Omar Khayyam, Ferdowsi.

  But now everything was muddied. “Looking for our religion . . . we will find ourselves . . .” Alireza was talking about the Iranian identity, but it involved a lot more than Islam and Hafez.

  All this was a little too much to pick apart over cold pizza near closing time, so I presented Alireza with a more immediate question: If the Persian identity were as confused as he claimed, wouldn’t the infusion of Western values, channeled through the e-stream of the internet, muddy the mix even further?

  “There is nothing foreign or strange about American culture,” he said, the ceiling lights reflecting off his glasses and brightening his eyes more than they already shone. “We need to have a good relationship with America.”

  He could have been referring to the heady days of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi at the height of the Cold War, when Iran, with its anticommunist stance, was viewed as a convenient bulwark against Soviet expansion. The high-water mark was arguably the champagne toast shared between the shah and U.S. president Richard Nixon. But for devout Muslims, the image of the shah raising a glass of champagne still stands as a shameful betrayal of Islamic values. For more secular Iranians it is a wistful reminder of the more modern image that the shah sought to project.

  “We all used to watch American movies as children,” Alireza went on, with obvious nostalgia. His face beamed. “I grew up on American cartoons. We connected with America.”

  Word that there was an American guest in the house had circulated among the staff, and now that the kitchen had closed the two cooks and one of the waiters sidled over to our table. They stood at a slight distance, polite, respectful, but curious. One of the cooks said something to Alireza, who translated.

  “He wants to know why you came to Iran.”

  “I always thought it was a nice country, and I wanted to see it.”

  Alireza translated, and the faces of the group nodded approvingly. The waiter asked what I had seen in Iran, and as I rattled off the names of the cities I had visited wide grins spread across the faces, and then there was a spark of laughter.

  “You’ve seen more of Iran than any of us,” said the cook.

  Another man joined the group. He was short but stocky with close-cropped black hair and a neatly trimmed beard. This was Hossein, the owner of the restaurant and café, and a friend of Alireza’s.

  “I love America,” he blurted out, in halting English. “That is my dream, to one day go to America.”

  “Everyone wants to go to America,” I replied, lamely. I had learned that this was the only approach to take with America seekers, not only in Iran but anywhere in the world. Always there was the whiff of a faint, delusional belief that I might, just might, be a conduit to the land of their dreams, and the only effective response was to express understanding and empathy.

  “Do you think I can get a visa?” Hossein continued.

  “It’s hard,” I said, lying. It wasn’t hard. For someone like Hossein, who had never been to the United States and had no ties in the country, it was next to impossible. But I wouldn’t tell him that. I didn’t want to spoil the party. Another employee appeared with a box of saffron cookies. The waiter produced a smartphone and began snapping photos—me with Alireza, the two of us with Hossein, me surrounded by the rest of the group. The restaurant may have closed, but the party was just getting started.

  “You’re really from America?” asked the other cook, and I knew what was coming. It was part of the ritual when meeting Iranians and as formalized as a mating dance in the natural world. “What state?”

  I told him, and there were more nods. After more than a month of touring Iran I had noticed that the more remote one’s city or state of origin the more pleased the questioners appeared, as though they were collecting pieces of America like some people collect stamps, coins, or bottle caps. This made Pocatello, Idaho, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, blue-chip properties, and it made these Iranians feel connected to America, not just New York, California, Miami, and other well-known spots but also the remote hinterlands, the “real America” they had seen only in pirated American movies and TV series.

  The last of the diners had paid their checks and left. One of the kitchen staff was sorting silverware at one of the empty tables. Hossein glanced around the room to make sure it had cleared out and then leaned toward me. “Would you like something?” he almost whispered, and then, after a loaded pause: “I like Americans. Would you like something? Wine? Whiskey?”

  “You have some?” I replied, but cautiously.

  He consulted with the cook.

  “Whiskey. No wine. Or some cognac? Would you like some cognac? It’s good. Homemade. But it will take a little while. It’s not here.”

  Alireza cut in, assuring me that Hossein did make some very good cognac, but if I was ready to sample it I better watch out—it was strong. “Iranians like strong alcohol,” he said. With that, the waiter disappeared out the front door, and I heard his motorbike start up and tear off into the night. There was some debate over whether the lights in the café should be dimmed in case the police passed by, but Hossein said there was no need and then explained.

  “After I opened this place the police came around and looked into every bottle in the kitchen. They even checked the bottles of the flavored syrups for the coffee drinks. They had heard that I might be serving alcohol, but I knew they weren’t really looking for anything. They just wanted money, so I paid them and then they stopped coming. If they came by now I’d give them a bottle and they’d go away.”

  The lights stayed on.

  After about ten minutes the waiter returned with a liter bottle of Absolut vodka spray-painted black, except for the Absolut logo that leaked through. Hossein produced two glasses. Alireza uncapped the bottle and poured. The cognac, clear as crystal, rained into my glass with the soft, tinkling sound of clinking ice cubes. I twirled the glass, swirling the contents, and it ran down the inner walls of the glass in evenly tapered lines—the sign of a first-rate cognac. I placed my nostrils over the lip. The aroma was heavy, woody, pleasantly smooth. Then came the test.

  “Let’s drink to the future of Iran!” Alireza said, hoisting his glass. We clinked glasses, and I took a sip. I expected to be hit with a blast of liquid lightning, but the cognac went down clean and smooth with only a gentle suggestion of its strengt
h. But Alireza was not kidding. It was strong. Very strong, but in the pleasant way the sun shines on a bright, clear fall afternoon. I could feel its warmth seeping through me, producing a sensation of cozy contentment. I was ready to curl up in front of a roaring fire.

  Alireza refilled our glasses. Again I twirled mine, watched the clear, even stream run down the inside of the glass, inhaled the soft, woody aroma.

  Alireza took a sip, deeper than mine. “Iranians are very emotional people,” he went on—the cognac was working its magic—“We can think and analyze, but sometimes we can think and analyze too much. In the end we are led by our emotions. The problem these days is that we don’t know how to love. We can read about it in the works of our poets, but we only know it in the abstract, as something to write about, or read about, but what about the experience?”

  He refilled our glasses. If any of the Ramsar police had dropped by I have no doubt Hossein would have placed more glasses on the table, sent the waiter out for another bottle, and the party and the discussion that it generated would have continued.

  It continued anyway, as conversations have no trouble doing when they are aided by fine cognac, but once the last drops had been drained from the bottle, Hossein told us it was time to lock up. Alireza extended an invitation to keep the evening going.

  “Why don’t you come up to my house? I have some good homemade wine that’s been waiting to be opened.”

  I asked him if he wasn’t concerned about the authorities, the same who had tried to shut down Hossein’s café and pizzeria.

  Alireza waved a hand. “Here no one bothers us. My house is far back up in the hills. No one from the police ever goes up there. And no one up there wants anything to do with them. If we have any problems, we work it out ourselves. No one would think of calling the police. That only brings trouble. Everything in this country is all about relationships. If you have good relationships, you don’t need the police.”