Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  Two cuneiform inscriptions, hammered into the side of a boulder at the base of ten-thousand-foot Mount Alvand, are the focal point of Ganjnameh. The texts, written in three languages—Babylonian, neo-Elamite, and ancient Persian—begin by praising the Zoroastrian god Ahuramazda, but then a bit of megalomania takes over, as Darius II, author of the first inscription, and his son Xerxes, author of the second, proclaim the supremacy of their rule over an empire that at the time was as vast as any the world had ever seen. A few centuries later, more mercenary-minded Persians, unfamiliar with ancient cuneiform, believed the letters contained the directions to a buried treasure. Hence the name of the site—Ganjnameh, or “treasure epistle.”

  It is an artifact of the Persian Empire, but today Ganjnameh serves the residents of Hamedan in another way. The chiseled boulder is close to a stream that courses through a valley on the side of Mount Alvand. Beyond the gate, walking paths lead along a gradually inclining slope to a rock-lined pool fed by a waterfall. Further on, the paths become hiking trails, transforming the park into another one of those places where Iranians can escape the suffocating presence of the government and imagine what it would be like to enjoy “normal life.”

  Sohrab dropped me at the entrance, where a row of souvenir stands sold drinks, snacks, and an array of bric-a-brac. With international tourism flattened since the 1979 revolution, internal tourism has taken up some of the slack, as Iranians unable to obtain visas for foreign countries satisfy any itch of wanderlust by traveling in their own country.

  As Sohrab had said, it was the “perfect time of day” for Ganjnameh. The shade of the slopes stretched over the valley, and the park was filled with takht sitters, galyoon smokers, sippers of sweet tea, and guzzlers of Istak, a popular brand of nonalcoholic beer. Children romped, vendors hawked cigarettes and chewing gum, and young men sold fresh ears of sweet corn, roasted over small barbecue grills set up on the pavement.

  I stopped to study the inscriptions, fifteen feet above the ground, and then walked up the path following the stream as it babbled past groups of eight, ten, and even more taking up entire takhts. Young couples discreetly snuggled, half-hidden by the boulders that lined the path. Even in such a secluded setting, none of the women were bold enough to remove their headscarves. This was not the more liberal Tehran, where bold women may risk challenging the regime with impunity—if they are discreet. Here the message of the roundabout had not been forgotten: We are everywhere, and you will not forget that we are everywhere.

  At the end of the path a slender ribbon of water coursed from a cleft in the rocks and ended in a thunderous splash at the edge of the pool. Children played on the rocks along the water’s edge, the colorful veils of the older girls drooping on their heads like wilted flowers.

  I perched on a rock and soon struck up a conversation with Mohsen and Nasrin. It was Mohsen who broke the ice, asking the familiar question: “Where are you from?”

  Mohsen and Nasrin were also visitors. They had left Iran shortly after the Islamic Revolution and lived in the United States for twenty-eight years, first in Washington DC, then Columbus, Ohio, and finally Nashville, Tennessee, where Mohsen ran a real estate business. Like many Iranian Americans, they returned every year to visit relatives, and each year Nasrin stayed behind a few months so their ten-year-old daughter, Golnaz, could attend an Iranian school to preserve her Farsi and gain firsthand knowledge of her parents’ birthplace. For the first few years the arrangement had worked fine, but the parents had begun to have second thoughts.

  “God, there’s so much brainwashing,” Mohsen complained. “We have to reteach half of what she’s taught. Everything in our history is now seen through the influence of Islam. Everything begins and ends with Islam. Our society has never been like that. Sure, religion has been an important part, but it was never all of it. And it’s getting worse. Those bastards, they’re afraid of losing control. They know the young people are slipping away. Most of them are already lost—they have no belief in the regime or anything it stands for—so with the much younger ones, they just want to ram religion down their throats.”

  I had heard this often, that ever since the Islamic Revolution Iranian society had been plagued by what in the Western world might be called an identity crisis. No one could deny that Islam had been the dominant religious force for almost 1,500 years. After the Arab invasion, Zoroastrianism began to wither, and the Arabic alphabet replaced the Pahlavi script in which Farsi had previously been written, but Islam never carried the same cultural and social weight as it did in the Arab world. One could argue that Islam formed the basis of Arab culture, but one could never make this claim in Iran. Here Islam was an import, something forced upon the population, and so, despite its 1,500 years of existence, it still might be equated to a second language. The core of the Persian identity was still drawn from Zoroastrianism and the pre-Islamic social and political philosophies of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes. Even in the twenty-first century, Iran still adhered to the ancient Zoroastrian calendar, and the beginning of the year was marked by Noruz, the first day of spring, not the Islamic New Year nor the Gregorian January 1. Today it could even be said that “Persian” and “Iranian” described two conflicting identities, “Iran” becoming the formal name of the nation only in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, thirty-five years of full-throated Shiite Islam—and Shiite Islam as interpreted by the religious institutions in Qom—along with the disregard of the many other influences that shaped the Persian identity, have left many Iranians wondering: Who are we?

  Golnaz returned from cavorting in the pool, thoroughly soaked, but in the warm dry air of the summer mountains her jeans and cotton top would be dry in an hour, or less. Mohsen and Nasrin asked me to join them on a takht for a round of Istaks—a sundowner Iranian style—and so we strolled down the path as Golnaz pranced ahead to fetch one of the roasted ears of corn, waving the 10,000-rial note Mohsen had given her.

  We settled onto the takht, cold cans in hand. Fresh, moist air from the waterfall coursed through the canyon. The evening had cooled, preparing Mohsen and Nasrin for a sensitive question: I asked them if they thought Iran had been trying to build a nuclear weapon.

  Mohsen shook his head, not in response but to dismiss the question entirely. “Are these leaders trying to build a bomb? Who knows? No one ever knows what they’re thinking about anything. They are so divided and mixed up I’m amazed they can agree on anything.”

  Mohsen confirmed my suspicions, that the Islamic regime was so faction-ridden—with pragmatists and ideologues, hardliners and a few surviving moderates—that it was hard to see how it could agree on anything as decisive as the development of a nuclear weapon. A civilian nuclear program? Throughout Iran support for that was virtually unanimous. A weapons program? Expressions of opinion followed the common pattern of Persian debate—elliptical, equivocal, obtuse.

  I asked Mohsen if Iran’s history of invasions had shaped public opinion. Hamedan was a little too far east to have been ravaged by the Iran-Iraq War, but the martyr’s murals were haunting reminders of the half million lives lost. And that war was only the latest installment in a series going back to the invasion of Alexander.

  In classic Persian style, Mohsen didn’t quite answer the question. “Both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, and everyone knows Israel does,” he said. “I’m not saying that Iran should have them, but it’s a little hard to argue that we shouldn’t. The European countries have NATO. What do we have?”

  It is not hard getting Iranians to talk. Many welcome the chance to swap views with foreigners, especially Westerners. They have a lot to get off their chests, and Westerners offer a welcome sounding board for all that ails Iran. But Mohsen and Nasrin were a special find: Iranians who had lived most of their lives in the West but still returned, to visit relatives, to ensure that their children acquired some familiarity with their ancestral homeland, to ensure that they themselves didn’t lose touch with the social, historical, and cultural forces that had made them w
ho they were. This prompted another question: How were they received when they returned? Was there any lingering friction with longtime friends or relatives who stayed in Iran after the revolution?

  “When we get together, sometimes it comes up,” Nasrin said, “but it never becomes something to argue about. We all made our decisions years ago and what’s the point in bringing it all up, especially when our time together is so short?”

  It is also not like Iranians to court conflict, I could have added, not with strangers, and certainly not with friends and family. I had noticed this often in Iranian movies: Situations that one would expect to boil over into open conflict, even violence, in a Western context simply simmered until the story moved on to the next scene. These always rang true as an accurate portrayal of the Iranian culture and one that defied the dictates of an art form that demanded conflict and confrontation in any form. But Mohsen broke with protocol. The conversation had turned to the subject of the regime, one that regularly tests Persian niceties. “Those bastards at the airport, sometimes they give us a hard time,” he cut in. “When we return to Iran we use only our Iranian passports—that’s all they’re good for—but the immigration officials can tell that we don’t live in Iran, that we’re the ones who left and are just back for a visit. Our clothes, our body language, it all gives us away. Once one of those bastards said to me, ‘Mr. Sarraf, when you come back you should also show us your American passport.’ But that’s nonsense. I don’t have to show them anything but a valid passport—my Iranian one. And they know that. They say this just to intimidate us, to let us know they know that we live in the United States, that even if we think we’ve escaped, they know it, and they won’t let us forget it.”

  Darkness was settling in, and Golnaz was beginning to nod off, so Mohsen and Nasrin told me it was time to head back to Hamedan, where they were staying with Nasrin’s mother. Before they left they wished me a very pleasant stay in Iran and told me I should see some of the real country, not just tourist sites. Of course, I said—that’s why I had come to Hamedan.

  Hamedan may be a university town, but its choices for dining and nightlife are rather shabby, which means it is on par with most Iranian cities. When the Islamic Revolution banned alcohol, the lively nightlife that thrived in the days of the shah withered. Social life moved largely inside, to the private space of the home, where bootlegged alcohol could be drunk with abandon and the prying eyes of the dress police could not enforce the Islamic dress code. With the pickings for dinner rather slim, I set my sights on a restaurant a block off the central roundabout that a flyer in my hotel promised “authentic Persian cuisine.”

  After dark, Hamedan’s streets don’t come alive as much as they carry on the routines of the day. In Avicenna Square around the mausoleum of Avicenna, the leaves of the oak trees glimmered in the dim glow of the streetlights. A few of the book sellers still manned their posts, and one had set up a battery-operated light so passersby could browse his stock in the crisp evening air. Down the side streets some of the merchants kept their doors open, hoping to snag a few shoppers on a late-night prowl for anything from clothing to electronic goods.

  Ayatollah Khomeini’s face was still lit as I crossed the roundabout looking for “authentic Persian cuisine.” The signs on the storefronts, written in Farsi, did not help. I thought I had taken a wrong turn and was heading back to the roundabout when a voice called out, “Can I help you?”

  It was another young man about the age of Javad, tall and clean-cut, with the bookish look of the pseudo-intellectual who reads too much philosophy and political science. He crossed the street and asked if I was lost. I asked about the restaurant I was looking for, and he shook his head. It had closed a few months ago, he said, but he knew of another, also off the roundabout, and it had wonderful chicken and fish kebabs. The best in all of Hamedan, in fact, and he was just heading there. He told his name—Hamid. He was a research assistant in biochemistry at Hamedan University, and like many graduate students putting in late hours, he was having a late dinner as well.

  All this could have been a setup, or Hamid could have been another tiresome leech looking for a way to hook a Westerner with the hope of snagging a Western visa, but it was getting late and I was hungry, and most important, he showed none of the caginess that reeked from Javad. He had an innocent face that suggested he was anything other than what he seemed—a well-educated Iranian who spoke competent English and had seized an opportunity to converse with a Western visitor.

  Hamid led me around the corner and down a flight of stairs into a brightly lit dining room with cheery, canary yellow walls. We found a table, and a waiter took our orders, but Hamid was not going to wait for the food to arrive before serving up questions of his own: Why had I come to Iran? What were my impressions before arriving? What did I think of the country? Had my impressions changed?

  My answers were appropriately bland because I still wasn’t sure Hamid could be trusted. By the time our plates of fish kebabs arrived I was anxious to move on to questions of my own: What did he think of the state of the country? What could finally bring a change in the government? Would the election of Rouhani make any difference?

  In answer, Hamid stabbed at his food, wondering where to begin. Anxiety creased his face. “You said you were here during the 2009 election. Did you see all the celebrations after the last one?”

  I had. Crowds of horn-tooting revelers filled the squares in Tehran, and a few brave young women even tore off their veils and waved them in the air. It was the jubilation not of an election win but a homecoming parade, but at the same time it all seemed a little sad. Hassan Rouhani, former member of the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council, former head of the Supreme National Security Council, once Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, had always been a regime man. That he took a softer line on some hardline issues—freedom of speech, Iran’s relationship with the West, the loosening of social restrictions—was enough to win popular backing, and the hardest of hardliners were confident enough of their grip on power to allow his victory to stand, to throw this sop to the masses, knowing that they could keep him on a tight leash, and the masses had found such a grudging concession reason for celebration. This was as much of a victory as they could expect.

  “They do this every time,” an Iranian journalist told me. “Whenever the pressure from the people becomes too great they put a ‘moderate’ in power to let air out of the balloon. It was the same with Khatami. But whoever it is, he doesn’t have any real power.”

  Even Hamid seemed fooled, not knowing he may have been the victim of another cynical, strategic shuffling of the cards.

  “I’m glad,” he said, with more resolution than satisfaction. “The whole world once again saw that we don’t support this government, that we want real change.”

  If this had been my first conversation with an Iranian in Iran I would have been surprised that Hamid would express dissent so openly, but I was used to it. Everything he said was a mantra I had heard many times: The regime was stifling Iran. It didn’t represent the Persian culture or the Iranian people. We will only find our way again once we get rid of the awful regime. And on and on and on.

  The conversation was stirring Hamid’s appetite. He asked the waiter for more saffron rice, and a moment later it arrived—an entire dinner plate topped with a smooth dome of rice as large as a basketball. I’d already had my fill of the mahi and salad and aash, so I was content to listen while Hamid picked at the rice mountain and blew off more steam.

  “Are Americans really afraid of Iran?” he asked.

  “A lot of them see it as a threat,” I confessed.

  “Why??”

  “It all goes back to the hostage crisis, I think.”

  “But that was over almost forty years ago.”

  “Americans still haven’t gotten over it. It’s a wound that hasn’t healed. And then came September 11, and Iran being part of the Muslim world hasn’t helped. And then there’s all the anti-American rhetori
c coming from Tehran.”

  Hamid shook his head in disappointment and stabbed despairingly at his remaining mahi and the rice he had loaded onto his plate.

  “That’s so sad,” he said. “They think we’re primitive people, like the Taliban, but we’re not. We’ve had a long history of civilization, longer than Western civilization. This may sound strange, but we really admire the U.S. We really do. We want the same things.”

  His view was not surprising. Many Iranians feel a subliminal connection to the U.S., and favorability ratings of the U.S. among Iranians have long run at 70 to 80 percent, long the highest in the Middle East. But could the U.S. and Iran be brothers in aims, if not arms? I asked Hamid to explain.

  “We want freedom, democracy.”

  Another refrain. Often when Iranians talked about what they wanted for their country it was expressed as a simple wish: “To be a democratic country—like the U.S.” or “Freedom—like you have in the U.S.” Every time I heard it I thought of the gypsy curse: May you get what you want. There was never any explanation of the kind of democracy they wanted, or a discussion of the headaches that “freedom” brings. Freedom and democracy were stars at the end of a magic wand that when waved would make everything right, and America was the omnipotent wizard who held the wand.