Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  9

  Esfahan

  Bridges to Everywhere

  Whereas the Ottoman genocide against minority populations during and following the First World War is usually depicted as a genocide against Armenians alone, with little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire; be it resolved that it is the conviction of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks.

  —International Association of Genocide Scholars, 2007

  Something was brewing. Metal scaffolding was going up on the north end of Imam Square, in prerevolutionary days known as Naqsh-e Jahan (Image of the World) Square, the second-largest public space in the world after Beijing’s Tiananmen. The semblance of a stage was beginning to appear, and security checkpoints were being set up in front of the souvenir shops, all of which had been ordered to shut for the following morning.

  I stopped into a carpet shop and asked the salesman what all the commotion was about. It looked like the setup for a rock concert, but that would hardly have been possible in conservative Esfahan, to say nothing of the rest of Iran.

  “Our president is coming,” he said, in a dull voice that radiated little enthusiasm. And he was.

  It was late 2009, months after the disputed presidential election. The president was the now disgraced Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, making one of his victory tours of the hardline heartland to whip up nationalistic sentiment among the diehard, the struggling working class he had showered with government largesse during his first term in office to shore up support for his hardline policies. They were ready converts, believing that Ahmadinejad’s hardscrabble background would make him sympathetic to their plight. By then he had proven to be a thorn in the side of the clerical establishment with whom he shared the same hardline views, for his freewheeling style had set him at odds with his natural backers.

  Well, this was going to be quite a show, I thought. The next morning I wandered over to the square, where all the entrances were now guarded with security booths manned by members of the Revolutionary Guard. I thought that would be as close as I would get, but I passed through after the most cursory of pat-downs and a quick inspection of the belt pack I was carrying, which contained only my guidebook, a pair of sunglasses, and an apple for lunch. The Guard member even nodded and smiled politely before allowing me to move on.

  The square was beginning to fill up with regime faithful—women draped in black chadors and civil servants and blue-collar workers who had been bussed in from the surrounding villages and given the day off and a small gratuity for their trouble. Twenty-five dollars and a sack lunch was rumored to be the going rate. But the much greater payoff was the credit they would receive, in perks and favors when needed, for turning out to show their allegiance to the Islamic Revolution.

  The rest of the trappings of a presidential visit were in place. Red banners draped from the roof of the square read, “Death to Israel!” and “Death to America!” More Revolutionary Guards were handing out posters bearing the likeness of Ahmadinejad with Ayatollah Khomeini. Sometimes the current supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei was thrown in for good measure, at times paired with Khomeini, at times alone. Whatever the arrangement, the backdrop was always a field of heavenly clouds, befitting the leaders of the Islamic Revolution. I eased my way through the crowd and eventually made it down to the fourth row of regime boosters. One side was designated for men. The chador-draped women had their own rooting section on the other side of a rope barrier that ran down the middle of the square. A metal barrier circled the stage, where more members of the Guard had been posted to provide a margin of security.

  At one o’clock in the afternoon the rally set for ten in the morning had yet to start. Authorities from the regional government mounted the stage to mouth revolutionary slogans—and keep the crowd from thinning. Gathered around me were the representatives of a forgotten Iran—plumbers and electricians, low-level government functionaries, and poorly paid truck drivers and mechanics, none of whom had the connections or capital to slide ahead in a brazenly corrupt system. And among them were likely some true believers in the regime. One of them standing next to me was a young man of about thirty.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked in passable English.

  “Tourist,” I replied, with strategic ease—asserting nothing, confronting nothing.

  “No, here,” he stressed, pointing at the ground.

  “Curious,” I said. His response was what one would expect from a weekend regime supporter running up against an American tourist at a proregime rally. He rolled his eyes and sighed.

  We continued to wait. Finally, at about two o’clock, Ahmadinejad’s motorcade rolled into the square. The president was standing through the roof of an SUV, leaning over to shake the hands of followers who darted toward it across the spacious lawn. Onstage he voiced his usual denunciations of the West and claimed the nation’s right to develop nuclear power. Cheers erupted at scripted applause lines. The men and women waved their posters in the air. The young man next to me asked where I was from, and I told him. Then word spread that an American was among the fold. Men several rows away nudged each other and smirked. Toward the end of the rally, on cue, chants of “Death to America!” broke out. The men pumped their fists in the air and did their best to show enthusiasm, but it was all a bit lackluster. The young man eyed me coyly. I extended a hand. It threw him off, but he reached over and shook it. The men around us chuckled. It was all great fun.

  All in all, it was a poor showing. Less than half the square was filled, and the three-hour delay drained what enthusiasm the crowd could muster. When it was all over the streets around the square were lined with busses, dozens of them, their engines rumbling, getting ready to ship the rent-a-crowd back to their towns and villages. I strolled around the margins, trying to read anything into the behavior of the crowd now that their job was done, but there was nothing. It was a desultory routine, another day on the job away from the job. Then a voice called out.

  “Did you see our president?”

  It belonged to a young woman in a black chador, standing beside another young woman still holding one of the posters portraying an ethereal Ahmadinejad surrounded by clouds against a background of powder blue. The faces of the young women glowed, misty-eyed, like teenagers at a 1960s pop concert. I wandered over, asked what they thought of the man they had come to see.

  “He’s a true global leader,” Negar said.

  “He wants to reach out to everyone,” added Shirin. “It’s not his fault if he’s refused.”

  Ahmadinejad had recently made a tour of South America, glad-handing Venezuela’s former president Hugo Chávez, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, and current president Evo Morales of Bolivia. He had also been chatting up Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan and Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Like many of Ahmadinejad’s antics, this trip was all a public relations stunt to show that he, if not the government he represented, had global support, even if not in the most favorable quarters. But, to Negar and Shirin, it was global diplomacy par excellence.

  Then a young man appeared, about eighteen years old, another friend of Negar and Shirin. They had all come to Esfahan together on a bus from a village in Esfahan Province and were savoring the last moments before beginning the ride back. His name was Amir, and he was fresh-faced and clean-cut, with a Colgate smile and an innocent face to match. There was none of the growsy look of so many of Iran’s male youth who strut the streets of Tehran in silver-studded black belts and kooky haircuts—rebels with a cause but no other way to express it.

  “Of course the government is honest,” Amir replied when I asked whether the regime’s obfuscations over its nuclear program were only cover for a nuclear weapons program. “Our country is based on the principles of Islam, and according to Islam one must tell the truth.”

&n
bsp; I asked Amir what he thought of Ahmadinejad.

  “He’s a good man. He cares about the people, but the rest of the world doesn’t see any of that. What they see is propaganda, to make Iran look bad.”

  I had to give Amir credit. Part of what he said was true—the foundation of the Islamic Republic had been based on Islamic principles—but his naivete would have been touching if it weren’t so troubling. With obligatory Persian hospitality he wished me a very pleasant stay in Iran and asked for my email address to stay in touch, before making his way over to the busses along with Negar and Shirin. He asked where I was from, and I told him, and without a flinch he again wished me a very good time in Iran. The point was clear but not surprising—the popularity of Americans crosses the starkest ideological lines.

  The crowd had thinned further, and back near the stage, which was already being dismantled, I met Mehrad, a graduate student in chemistry at Esfahan University. This time it was he who had spotted me, an out-of-place foreigner, and wandered over. He hadn’t attended the rally. He knew nothing about it. He was on his way home from the university and had only stumbled on it by chance. When I told him that I had just seen Ahmadinejad, he shook his head and winced.

  “All the politicians in this country are idiots,” he said, and went on to add that if he had gotten wind of the rally he would have avoided the square altogether. Our conversation took a few twists and turns and eventually landed on the subject of Mehrad’s grandfather, a master textile painter. He had a workshop nearby, within the warrens of the Esfahan bazaar. Would I like to see it? There was little in the square to stick around for now that the rally had broken up, and the specialty souvenir shops were still closed. The choice made itself.

  Esfahan’s bazaar is almost a thousand years old. The original structure dates to the eleventh century, but most of the current building was constructed six hundred years later, in the seventeenth. It is the largest covered market in the world, wrapping itself around the square in a mile-long arcade that offers everything from tourist souvenirs to household essentials—kitchenware, bed sheets, plastic buckets, and fine fabrics sold by the meter. And then there are the artisans and craftsmen who ply age-old trades despite the encroachment of modernization, like Mehrad’s grandfather.

  Mehrad led me through a series of winding lanes until we landed at his grandfather’s workshop, a grubby space set ablaze by powerful overhead lights that illuminated the table he was hunched over. The old man was certainly a master of the art of textile painting, a traditional craft dating back hundreds of years. A piece of cotton was stretched out on the surface of a table. As I watched, he dipped a wooden block with a linear pattern in ink and pressed it around the edge of the cloth again and again, seamlessly, until it reached the corner, where a different block was needed to make the turn. More wooden blocks with patterns to fill the interior were on hand once the border had been completed. The same pattern could be recreated in an infinite array of colors. An equally infinite array of patterns could fill the interior. The choices were only limited by the imagination of the printer. The blocks acted as the artist’s paintbrushes, the final creation the product of his eye.

  While Mehrad’s grandfather labored under the glow of the high-intensity light, I struck up a conversation with Mohammad, Mehrad’s brother, who had operated an internet blog until government authorities “advised” him to shut it down. I asked him what would have happened if he refused. He drew his finger across his throat.

  “They control everything here,” he said. “They run the economy, the military, the legal system. They’ve gained so much power. There’s no way around them.”

  Mohammad had firsthand experience with Iran’s security services. One day, when he was twenty-two, he was riding his bicycle home, and the police arrested him for attending a violent demonstration. Unknown to him, a few blocks away an explosion had gone off. He tried to reason with them: “If I had planted a bomb would I be running away on a bicycle?” He got nowhere. The police took him in, and he was held for two weeks but finally freed along with a group of men who had been picked up when the investigation went nowhere. But instead of simply opening the jailhouse door and giving the young men a kick in the pants, the police drove them into the remote countryside about thirty-five miles from Tehran and left them there.

  “We have to make you pay some way,” said the commanding officer as the van pulled away. “After all, we fed you for two weeks.”

  “When will things change?” I asked Mohammad, aware of the absurdity of the question. The point was only to see what kind of answer I would get. Would it be cynical? Optimistic? Speculative? I knew “optimistic” was out of the question. I also knew the answer was meaningless, because the only thing for certain in Iran is that no one knows anything for certain, not the workings of the government, not the decision-making process behind the decisions, or how the many factions of the government are lining up in their constant tugs-of-war for power. The Iranian government was like a car with many contentious drivers all struggling for control of the wheel, and the people were little more than helpless passengers along for the ride, wherever it may take them. So what was the point of seeking any answer? Only to hear the view of one of the passengers. When will things change? Mehrad’s grandfather had been listening in and asked for a translation. Mehrad supplied it. His grandfather offered an answer: “When the U.S. invades.”

  I had little doubt that the dour mood in the workshop was at least partly due to the presidential visit. The regime casts a long shadow across all parts of Iranian society, and today it had come uncomfortably close. Mehrad’s grandfather finished printing the border on the tablecloth and was getting ready to work on the interior, which meant a change of blocks and inks. This put the work on hold, like the change of sets between scenes of a play.

  Mehrad led me into the tiny courtyard behind the shop that served as a souvenir stand where the family wares were displayed for sale, stacked on packing crates, old chairs, and every other surface that could bear the weight of bolts of imprinted cotton. If I didn’t know better I’d have suspected that Mehrad’s sole reason for dragging over to the workshop was to help his grandfather make a sale, that our entire conversation was little more than prelude to a sale’s pitch. But no. He was anxious to share his views with a rare foreigner, and he wanted to show off his grandfather’s talent. It was a way of saying, “See, we are more than this ugly government and the ridiculous stage show you’ve just seen.” It was his way of lifting the curtain and giving me a glimpse of what was behind the grotesque afternoon spectacle.

  His grandfather’s work was definitely high quality, featuring painted outlines of birds and flowers and swirling floral patterns that interconnected almost seamlessly, yet there was an unmistakable roughness in the final products, welcome imperfections that indicated that they were made by hand. I had no inclination to buy but felt obligated, so I picked up a couple of sets of table napkins, and Mehrad, following true bazaar practice, haggled with me over the price but finally settled without much of a fight. And as I left, he naturally wished me a very pleasant stay in Iran.

  The square was returning to normal, the souvenir shops around the perimeter beginning to reopen. I ran into Reza, a man in his forties sitting beside a rectangular pool and dry fountains that no longer spurted jets of water. No, he had not attended the rally. He had only come to the square for a stroll once he’d heard it was over. For the past twelve years he had worked for an architectural firm in Dubai but shuttled back and forth to visit family members several times a year.

  “You know what it is?” he said, when I asked why the rally had been held that day; if it had any purpose other than to whip up government support. “The dam has cracked. It hasn’t broken, but it has cracked, and the government knows they have to patch it up.”

  “And what should the rest of the world do?” I asked.

  “The U.S., Israel—forget about military strikes. Cut off the money. If the government was going to fall, those Revo
lutionary Guards would throw away their uniforms and shave off their beards the next day.”

  Iranian politics has always functioned within the realm of the opaque, but questions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program add another dimension. The drive down from Kashan had bypassed the eastern slopes of the Zagros Mountains. About halfway along, Sohrab and I passed a battery of anti-aircraft guns, their barrels aimed skyward. Their purpose was clear. Not far away was the Natanz nuclear reactor, an underground bunker shielded from attack by concrete walls and a reinforced concrete roof. Where we were headed was the site of an even more important cog in the network of Iran’s nuclear research facilities. The site at Esfahan is Iran’s largest, employing as many as three thousand scientists before the 2015 nuclear agreement. Watchers of Iran’s nuclear program have long claimed that much of the government’s research was going on at Esfahan, but, in the murky world of political punditry, any view from outside Iran was no more clear, or less, than any view from within.

  Despite the sudden appearance of the anti-aircraft guns, the threat of war seemed far away. The sun was brightly shining in a cloudless sky, and the crisp ridgeline of the Zagros Mountains spread across the horizon.

  It was the time and place for a photo op. Up ahead, on cue, appeared a small roadside mosque with a terrace overlooking the valley. It was unusual to come across a mosque, even a small one, out here in the middle of nowhere, but this was no ordinary mosque. It had history to it, described on a signboard so faded by years of punishing sun that even Sohrab couldn’t read it. Instead of being bulldozed to be replaced with, perhaps, a gas station, it was being overhauled with a fresh coat of paint. The man in charge of the task was Javad, perched high on a ladder at the base of the dome. Javad wasn’t used to having visitors, and even less accustomed to foreign visitors. Nevertheless, he scrambled down to greet us but didn’t offer a handshake because his hands, like his overalls, were paint spattered. But he did produce, and proudly, an ID indicating his position as a bona fide restorer of Iran’s cultural and historic sites. He had been making the rounds of neglected mosques and other historic places in Esfahan Province, sprucing them up, bringing them back to life. This one wouldn’t receive many worshippers because there wasn’t a village or house in sight, but it would serve as a showpiece for passing travelers—and the odd American tourist. And Javad liked America. His craggy face brightened when he heard where I was from, his scraggly grey hair waving a little wildly in the wind. As we left, he tried to secure a commission.