Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  In such a setting, with sunlight dappling through the trees, and cool, clear water rippling over my feet, I almost forgot that Fin Garden was also the site of one of the most infamous crimes in Persian history. It was one that could have been scripted by Shakespeare—the assassination of Amir Kabir, the nineteenth-century prime minister and leading reformer who took bold steps to modernize Iran and suffered the consequences.

  The story of Amir Kabir is the kind of rags-to-riches tale that would find a welcome home in American mythology. Born Mirza Taghi Khan Farahani in today’s province of Markazi, Amir Kabir’s start in life was as modest as modest could be. His father worked as a cook for a local official, Mirza Aboul, but moved to Tabriz when Aboul was reassigned to the northwestern province. There, Amir Kabir was put to work as a domestic helper in Aboul’s household. Aboul soon noticed the boy’s quickness of mind and decided to educate him alongside his own children. Amir Kabir grabbed the opportunity, continued to excel, and was eventually made the supervisor of Mirza Aboul’s stables. He then made the leap to government service, finding a niche as a reliable bureaucrat, first becoming the registrar for the Azerbaijan army and later overseer of the all the army’s finances.

  Amir Kabir’s career then turned to foreign affairs. He spent almost a year in Russia on a diplomatic mission, which gave him the opportunity to see up close the advances in military, economic, and administrative life that had been taking place in the Russian Empire. He then spent four years in Erzurum, Turkey, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was undertaking many reforms in its military and government bureaucracy. His experience in Turkey taught him a lesson he would have great difficulty applying to today’s Iran: “The Ottoman government was able to begin reviving its power only after breaking the power of the mullahs,” he wrote.

  Two hundred years earlier, Peter the Great, imperial Russia’s first modernizer, took several trips through Western Europe to study the advances in science, education, engineering, and judicial practices that had been sweeping the continent and returned home intent on pushing a backward, agrarian, peasant-dominated Russia into the modern era, and he imported European expertise back to Russia to speed the path. Amir Kabir followed in Peter’s footsteps. In 1851 he founded Dar ul-Funun to teach courses in advanced sciences, with most of the professors imported from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Long before the era of the internet, he started the newspaper Vaqaye-ye Ettefaqiyeh to disseminate information about scientific developments and global events to the people. To increase agricultural production he encouraged the cultivation of sugarcane in the province of Khuzestan. He also encouraged the planting of cotton, one of the world’s most profitable cash crops, imported from the United States. He built factories for the production of housewares, carriages, textiles, and other consumer goods, and raised taxes on imports to nurture the growth of the new domestic industries.

  The sweep and pace of Amir Kabir’s reforms was certain to step on sensitive toes. As part of his economic reforms he reduced the salaries paid to civil servants, who had long enjoyed do-nothing sinecures, but even more challenging was his effort to cut the handouts paid to members of the monarchy. He also sent tax collectors around the country to shake overdue revenues out of local governors and tribal chiefs. Anger mounted. Disempowered elites resented his rapid rise to power and revolutionary approach to change. A cabal of conspirators was formed, headed by the Queen Mother, a collection of grumbly princes, and the royal accountant. The Queen Mother persuaded her teenage son and the current shah, Nasser Al-Din, to clip Amir Kabir’s wings. To do his mother’s bidding, Nasser Al-Din first stripped Amir Kabir of his powers and later arrested and expelled him from Tehran, to be held in de facto imprisonment in Fin Garden. But Amir Kabir’s isolation was not enough to make the royal family feel secure. The Queen Mother convinced her son that Amir Kabir was plotting to regain power, perhaps through connections with the Russian Empire, and so on January 10, 1852, a gang cornered him in the garden’s bathhouse—the location of choice for political assassinations—and stabbed him to death.

  Fin’s bathhouse no longer functions but is open to visitors, so I dried my feet and walked over to have a look. No monument or plaque memorializes the site, an indication of the government’s reluctance to lionize a former leader primarily remembered for his attempt to upend the status quo. Only a modest sign at the entrance stated that it was the scene of one of the most infamous events in Iranian political history. The inside of the bathhouse shows no sign of restoration or even minimal upkeep. One is even left to guess where the assassination took place—for fear it might become a place of pilgrimage and revive revolutionary sentiments.

  A century and a half after his death, Amir Kabir still remains a threat to the status quo. The proof is in the feeble acknowledgment of what took place in Fin Garden and the impact it had on Iranian history. Many claim that with Amir Kabir’s death the pernicious practice of government perks and culture of entitlement that had long strangled Iranian society were allowed to continue, and the fruits of the assassination can be found in the widespread corruption, interweaving of business and political power, and lining of pockets from government coffers that still continues. It is what many Iranians complain about more than the government’s repressive laws and the limits on personal freedom—the pilfering of the nation’s wealth and culture of cronyism that has hampered Iran’s development for nearly four decades. Walk the streets of Tehran or any other city, step over broken pavement that has not been replaced in too many years, pass through parks that receive minimal upkeep, and one gets a mere glimpse into the ways in which Iranian society has been starved of much-needed rials to keep it going. Combined with atrocious economic mismanagement, this has stifled the country more than censorship, gender segregation, and its arcane restrictions on dress.

  It was time to go. We would not be staying in Kashan that night, Sohrab told me. He had worked in a diversion to the traditional mountain village of Abyaneh, south of Kashan and nestled at the end of the long, fertile Borzrud Valley. On the way we had one stop to make, the regional center for pottery, ceramics, and other crafts that had made the Kashan region famous.

  We hustled out of town along a dusty, two-lane road that cut across the edge of the dry plain that begins where the city of Kashan ends. Sohrab was true to his word. The main street was lined with pottery workshops and showrooms to peddle the wares produced by the local craftsmen. We saw a sign that advertised handmade pottery and pulled up to the door, but inside it was dark and quiet. We guessed that the potter and his crew had taken a long lunch break to beat the heat. But tacked to the wall was a faded campaign poster that showed that Kashan was still Ahmadinejad country: The former president beamed squinty-eyed and raised a fist to rally his faithful. But it was all for naught. In his tumultuous eight years in office the firebrand hardliner had made so many internal enemies, with his grandstanding style, his reckless pronouncements on affairs both domestic and international, that he had been barred from running again in the 2017 elections, and so his gesture fell flat, as political gestures do when changing times render them a relic of a former one.

  We cruised the main street and had better luck at the other end of town. Inside another shop the smell of wet clay filled the reception area, which functioned as a combination workshop, showroom, and salesroom. At one of the wheels in the corner of the room the head potter was at work, turning sodden lumps of clay into common bowls and slender vases and pitchers with graceful spouts and handles. The creation of each took a few minutes. As soon as the clay was slapped onto the wheel his hands went to work, guiding the glop of goop into the shape of a pitcher with an S-shaped handle and a beak-like spout. Then he used a wooden stick to coax the clay into decorative whorls and ribs as the wheel spun. As we watched, he made three or four pitchers, each in the span of a minute or two, transforming the hunks of clay into functional objects that could arguably be called works of art, once the finishing touches were applied.

  There was more. We went downsta
irs, to where the clay was subjected to the heat of the furnace and the finishing touches were applied. Wooden skids stacked with newly formed vases awaited the heat, and as we watched, Farhad, the forger and decorator, subjected one of the vases to the 2,000-degree oven and then sat down to add the artistic flourishes to one of the already hardened pieces.

  The setting, the grimy basement on a dusty main drag, was unusual for what was taking place: Farhad, both resident Vulcan and Michelangelo, propped one of the vases on his knee to complete the transformation. Fine black outlines delineated the boundaries of flowers and spirals and curves that formed the pattern that circled the vase. These he applied with surgical care. Then came the colors: bright yellow and pale blue, splashes of indigo, and an occasional pink highlight were stroked and dabbed into the carefully sketched outlines.

  As Farhad worked on one of the pieces, he asked, with little fanfare, where I was from. I told him, and he beamed—but only slightly. His was not the dumbfounded awe of foreigners, Westerners, and especially Americans, that one often is greeted with. Farhad was not awed. He was used to meeting foreigners. Americans, however, were another matter. Mounted on the wall was a telephone, and scrawled all over the wall were phone numbers with international prefixes, some stretching to nine and ten digits. These were left by visitors, Farhad explained. He had collected numbers from all over the world—Japan and Germany, Brazil and Russia—but he had no phone number from America. He asked me to add mine and said that if I did he would be honored. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hadn’t lived in the U.S. for several years and no longer had an American phone number. That would never do. So I took the pen hanging from a string tied to a nail and scribbled the last number I had in the U.S., being sure to include two zeroes and the number 1 country code to show that it was, if anyone doubted, a bona fide American phone number.

  Now that Farhad had his American phone number, I asked him when he discovered he had an artist’s touch and wanted to pursue pottery painting as a career.

  When he was a boy, he said. He loved to paint objects, never images on canvas or a drawing board, only objects, like the ones stacked by the palette-load and awaiting his brush.

  Why not paintings, miniatures—Iran had a long history of miniature painting?

  He liked the three dimensions, he said, rotating the object and seeing it from different angles. Then there was no front or back, no two views the same.

  I asked him how long it would take to finish the vase he was working on. He looked at a paint-spattered clock nearby. It was getting late to finish it by day’s end, he said, but by midmorning the next day the once bare shaft of dark orange clay would be transformed into a fine piece of decorative art, or, depending on the admirer, a work of art itself.

  I thanked Farhad for his time, the demonstration, and the nugget of insight into his craft, but before I left he had a question: “How can I get a visa to the U.S.?” Farhad had a brother living in Canada, and he had thought of trying to migrate there, but if he chose to leave Iran his sights were set on the U.S.

  I didn’t want to tell him that his chances of ever being granted even a tourist visa to the U.S. were next to none, so I chose a selective truth: that his talents would be widely admired in the U.S., that there was a great interest in crafts and art from all over the world. And so I danced around the matter, claiming, with semi-honesty, but more than semi-guilt, that I didn’t know all that much about American immigration law or any of the arcane regulations of the massive U.S. government bureaucracy, but I could wish him all the best.

  This was always one of the most difficult experiences traveling in Iran: listening to the hopes of so many Iranians to migrate to their “dreamland,” as one woman told me, while disguising the searing truth—that what they longed for was almost certainly beyond their reach. It was a slight consolation knowing that life in the U.S. would almost never live up to the fairytale that Iranians like Farhad imagined. In their eyes “America” was everything Iran was not and everything they wanted it to be—an open, secular, liberal society that cherished “freedom”—in thought, behavior, and expression—a land unencumbered by the weight of history, invasions, and the insults of geopolitics, a land where opportunities for economic and social mobility were limitless. In many ways this image of what America stood for was little different from those of many others around the world driven by the need to envision an earthly paradise that might provide a release from all their woes. I even often thought it might be better that they never did get to America, that to live with an unfulfilled hope, no matter how illusory, was far better than to face the disillusion of seeing their dreams, so long nurtured, only shattered, like one of Farhad’s choice vases.

  8

  Abyaneh

  Heading for the Hills

  He who wants a rose must respect the thorn.

  —Persian proverb

  It was late in the afternoon by the time Sohrab and I headed out of Farhad’s workshop. The afternoon heat was beginning to lift and the slanting rays of the sun deepened on the sand-colored façades. We got back in Sohrab’s Volvo and after an hour entered a valley to begin a long, slow rise into the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. Willow and poplar trees lined the road as it angled around the curves that clung to the hills on the north side of the valley. I rolled down my window to catch the mountain breeze, beginning to blow fresh and crisp now that the plain was quickly receding behind us. It was time for music, so Sohrab dug into his stash of CDs and popped Dexter Gordon’s Round Midnight into the dashboard player.

  After a series of twists and turns we arrived at a cemetery belonging to a village that had been built on the hillside between the road and the valley below. I had visited cemeteries in other parts of the Muslim world but never a Persian one, so I asked Sohrab to pull over to have a look.

  The graves were simple, unadorned slabs of white stone lying almost at ground level, with little more for a marker than another upright stone engraved with the date of birth and death of the deceased, almost always accompanied by a few lines of poetry. Sometimes these were the words of the great poets—Hafez, Saadi, Omar Khayyam—sometimes they were crafted by the family members themselves. In this predominantly Muslim cemetery one stone bore an engraving of Ahura Mazda, the deity of Zoroastrianism, and below this the last words that the loved ones wished to offer to the deceased:

  I was told that you left and this was not welcome.

  You responded that it was fate.

  May his soul rest in peace and paradise be his home.

  I was surprised that a Zoroastrian would be permitted to lie beside his Muslim neighbors for all eternity, but Sohrab said that this was not uncommon. Religious minorities usually have their own burial grounds, but in small villages where there aren’t enough Zoroastrians, or Christians, or Jews, to warrant a separate cemetery, they will be laid near the neighbors with whom they had shared their entire earthly lives.

  We wandered some more. The words on another stone began: “The resting place of my caring father,” and then continued with Ali, the father, speaking from the grave:

  Alas, there is no life in my body anymore.

  The only thing I need is forgiveness.

  Father and brothers, think of me.

  I left life on a long journey from which there is no return.

  The plea for forgiveness was slightly unusual, for in the Persian tradition it is the living who seek forgiveness from the deceased. Perhaps Ali had some things weighing on his soul he wanted to unburden.

  Portraits had been chiseled into some of the stones and decorated with flowers or makeshift picture frames. For these the stone was polished black marble rather than the more common white. Some of the engraved texts had been recently refreshed, a sign of the dedication family members extended in looking after the graves of their ancestors.

  Another grave showed a family bond continuing into the afterlife. Two brothers, Reza and Hossein, had been buried together, and the epitaph on the polished black stone wa
s meant for both:

  May your souls be acquainted with God.

  May God shed light on your grave.

  The light of our lives, we think of you.

  May you be happy in the Garden of Eden.

  Within the field of stones one grave stood out, that of Ali Ahmadi, father of Hamid Ahmadi, a shaheed, or martyr, of the Iran-Iraq War. The two had been buried together. We were far from the killing grounds of Khuzestan, but Ahmadi’s grave was another indication of how far the shadow of the war had stretched, and the black slab was another indication of the depth of the imprint it had left.

  Earlier in the day we had passed another martyr’s memorial in the center of Kashan. On the side of a roundabout, the entire front of a building had been covered with enlarged photos, all black-and-white headshots, of some of the city’s shaheed, inscribed with their names and dates of death. Most of the men were in their twenties or early thirties, but there were many older faces too, men with speckled grey hair and beards, their eyes dulled by the toll of the eight years of war. On the way into Kashan, we had passed another memorial, this time a signboard like the kinds that advertise fast-food outlets or budget motels in other parts of the world. But this one was covered with more headshots, more names, more grim faces, and more dates of birth and death. Beside a mosque that was being renovated on the outskirts of the city was another photo, this one in color. Again, the man was young, and a garland of dried plastic flowers hung from a post on which the photo had been mounted. It was framed in cheap gold laminate and protected by a cover of glass, but, perhaps symbolic of the war’s longevity, the photo had faded almost into invisibility from decades of punishing sunlight.