Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  When Shah Abbas herded the Armenians to Esfahan he may have had their commercial prowess in mind, but today they are valued by many Muslim Iranians for their access to a special commodity—alcohol. It has been officially banned in Iran ever since the Islamic Revolution, but the Islamic regime turns a blind eye toward its use in the Armenian community. The positive spinoff for nonobservant Muslim Iranians is that the Armenians serve as their bootleggers.

  “Oh, sure—my father has his Armenian contact,” Shadi, a friend in Tehran, told me. “He’ll call him and he’ll bring him whatever he wants. He got his name at work. All he had to do was ask around. It’s not hard.”

  The privileges allowed Armenians are not all hush-hush. In any city with a substantial Armenian community, such as Tehran and Esfahan, specially licensed “Armenian clubs” provide a place where the Christian minority can socialize as Christian Armenians. Beyond their doors the constraints of the Islamic Republic are suspended, and they are allowed to welcome non-Muslims. On one of my first nights in Tehran I went to an Armenian club for dinner, just a short walk from the Kosar Hotel. It was not hard to find. Down one of the dimly lit side streets a bright light illuminated an ornately carved wooden door. There was no sign, and it didn’t need one. The glowing bulb above the entrance and the brightly painted yellow wall said it wasn’t just another house front in another nondescript Tehran neighborhood.

  The door opened easily, and I was greeted on the other side by an elegant middle-aged woman in a dark brown silk dress and curly brown hair that tumbled beyond her shoulders. Her English was minimal, but she knew what I was there for and led me into a large dining room that had once been the reception room of a well-to-do house. The menu was printed in Farsi, Armenian, and, of course, English, to accommodate foreign guests. The women had checked their headscarves and manteaux at the coat rack near the door and were seated at the tables in sleeveless tops and other summer garb common in public before the revolution. An elderly man at a nearby table asked for a tumbler of ice, and when it came he added a double shot of Scotch from a half-pint bottle tucked in the pocket of his sport coat. The fish filet with French fries and salad I ordered was no better or worse than I could have had elsewhere, but the experience was one no Muslim Iranian could share.

  I once asked a friend in Tehran if she had ever been to one of the Armenian clubs. She worked for a multinational company, the kind of employer that typically includes members of every conceivable race, religion, and ethnicity among its staff.

  “One of my Armenian colleagues told me she would love to invite me but it would be much too risky.”

  For you? The friend? The club?

  “Everyone,” she replied.

  I found my way back to Julfa’s shopping street as the evening dusk was settling over the district. The boutiques and upscale shops were coming to life. Female shoppers were crowded into one selling stylish manteaux and headscarves in a boggling array of patterns. At the cosmetics shop next door more women were picking through the selection of lipsticks, mascara, and choices of hair dye that would add streaks of red or yellow or orange to their dark brown and black locks, to expose beneath their habitually slippery headscarves. In the perpetual battle against the Islamic dress code, the women are at the frontlines.

  Julfa is known for having some of the best restaurants in Esfahan, but tonight I was ready to swap quality of cuisine for ambience, so I headed back to Naqsh-e Jahan Square, setting my sights on the Bastani, atop the bazaar beside the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque. At the Zayandeh River the dusk was passing into darkness. The lights of the bridges had come on, brightening the soft yellow stone and taking Esfahan back to its postmedieval heyday. The Khaju Pol and Si-o Se Pol became shimmering golden necklaces. This time I chose the Khaju Pol to cross, and the series of archways along the lower level. It was more like crossing the river through a tunnel than a bridge, but one that offered nighttime views both up- and downriver, which were blocked by the stone lining the walkway up top.

  Halfway across I could hear voices up ahead, men’s voices being carried through the underground corridor by the series of archways. They weren’t the voices of speech but of song. A group of young men had gathered under one of the domes between the arches and were reciting, or singing, lines of Persian poetry. The Khaju Pol is a popular place for impromptu poetry readings, especially when events on the global political scene generate angst in Iranian society, which is most of the time. This time the occasion was the demise of the 2015 nuclear agreement and the prediction of harsh sanctions and more economic doom for the country’s already staggering economy. It is illegal for women to sing in public in Iran, a violation of a most basic human right rarely publicized, so expression of the most recent letdown was left to this group of young men. One of them took his position directly under the arch and sang:

  Life is full of the good and the bad.

  I can laugh at the wind and the sea,

  Because I can tolerate anything . . .

  I didn’t want to linger, not because I was hungry, which I was, but because listening to the woes of Iranians can become tiring. It’s not that they aren’t justified, but that they are very justified, and so longstanding, and without any end in sight. So I left the dour chorale and moved on to the square. The warm evening air had kept the square full of loungers and picnickers. The blue domes of the Imam and Sheikh Lotfollah mosques glowed in the beams of the surrounding floodlights. A full moon was rising over the dome of the Sheikh Lotfollah, turning the curved blue surface a haunting purple in the twilight.

  I found the tiny staircase leading up to the Bastani and decided to bury myself in a corner table so as not to attract attention and the inevitable litany of questions that would follow: Where are you from? What do you think of Iran? But it was not to be. The Bastani had no corner tables. It favored traditional seating, which meant no tables or chairs but takht platforms, open to the entire room to make dining a social experience—Persian style. But, aesthetics as a recompense, I really couldn’t complain. The takht the hostess led me to had a front-row view of the dome of the mosque, brilliantly lit and radiantly blue—and she never asked where I was from.

  I had the entire space to myself, a colossal waste of footage with the restaurant beginning to fill up. I had just removed my shoes and squiggled into place when a couple at the takht next to me asked, like friendly new neighbors chatting across a backyard fence, “Where are you—?”

  They were Reza and Asfaneh, both licensed tour guides, both managing to make ends meet in a woefully depressed tourist market. Reza spoke near-fluent English and Asfaneh German, but she had also been studying Chinese. As expected, they invited me over to their takht, mainly to hear the uncensored views of Iran from a foreigner who wasn’t a client. But this time I was first out of the gate. I asked them what impressions they had of foreign visitors to Iran.

  “They are usually better educated than the tourists you find in many other parts of the world,” Reza said. “And most of them have a lot of travel experience. Iran isn’t the kind of place one goes to for their first trip abroad.”

  Earlier that day Asfaneh had taken a group of Germans to Esfahan’s airport, where they would catch a domestic flight to Tehran and then a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. German was a handy language for a tour guide to know in Iran. For Germans, the allure of Iran is the spirit of adventure and the draw of the unique, as it is for many, but also the discovery of a distant historical tie. Ever since the revolution, the drive to emigrate has prompted many Iranians to make new lives for themselves in Germany, also drawn by a distant historical tie. A popular theory claims that the Farsi language, part of the Indo-European family, migrated out of central Europe millennia ago. It traveled southeast across the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor, and finally settled in present-day Iran. The word Iran is derived from Aryan. The result is that, among the cultures of Europe, Iran has cultivated more of a “special relationship” with Germany than with any other.

  Although Iran officially
declared neutrality in both world wars, it tacitly backed Germany, prompting an invasion by British and Soviet forces in 1941 and the seizure of Iran’s oil fields, the Allies fearing that the crude would secretly be funneled to the German army.

  I asked Reza how many Americans he had guided in the last year.

  “We get quite a few,” he replied brightly, but numbers are always relative, and I wondered what “quite a few” really meant. I had often traveled for weeks in Iran and never encountered another Western traveler. Many times I wondered if I was the only American in the entire country. I ran into small groups of Chinese, and a few Koreans being led by a Korean-speaking guide, but a European or North American was a rarity. But Reza had led Americans. A few months back he had guided two professors from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, the organization responsible for the excavation of Persepolis after it was discovered in 1931. A mammoth limestone bull’s head from the ruins hangs in the institute’s museum on the South Side of Chicago.

  Asfaneh’s rudimentary Chinese had come in handy, not guiding globe-trotting Chinese but leading Iranian tour groups to China. China had become her forte, and I asked how many times she had trooped through the Forbidden City or bussed out to the Great Wall.

  “I have no idea—at least forty.”

  Current geopolitics has caused the Iranian tourist industry to be stymied in both directions. Despite the rosy outlook generated by the 2015 nuclear agreement, and the Iranian government’s best efforts to put a better face on the country, the expected boost in tourism is still waiting to happen. And Iranians have long faced towering hurdles in obtaining visas to the world’s favorite travel destinations—Western Europe, the United States, the Mediterranean. The fear of the visa refusers is not the threat of terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism. It is unheard of for an Iranian to be implicated in the kind of “soft-terror” attacks that have rocked European and American cities. Instead, the concern is that the “tourist” will use the visa path to gain illegal status and seek a new life outside of Iran. And the fear is justified.

  Holiday destinations for many Iranians are limited to countries considered to be at least marginal allies or places so hungry for tourist income that almost any source of revenue will do. I had run into Iranians at Peterhof, the summer getaway of Czar Peter the Great in the suburbs of St. Petersburg, and before the horrifying civil war many Iranians could plan a getaway to Syria. Iranians regularly visit nearby Armenia and Lebanon, and Istanbul has been another favorite destination, but Reza found the experience so unpleasant he refused to lead any more groups to Turkey.

  “They aren’t interested in what Turkey has to offer at all,” he said with a sigh. “Each day they’ll go along with the program but just want to get it over with so they can go out drinking at night and hit the nightclubs. Some of the men will ask me where they can find Turkish women.”

  Then the conversation took an odd turn. It would seem wildly ironic that two people who had spent the better part of their adult lives promoting Iran would have in mind leaving, but that was the case. Reza said that the two had been exploring the prospect of relocating to the U.S., where they could start off guiding groups of Iranians around a country they hardly knew. But they had been boning up on American history and culture to become at least minimally credible authorities in the eyes of newcomers. And they had started laying the groundwork, contacting several tour companies in the U.S. run by Iranian Americans to sell their services.

  Reza asked me what their chances were of getting a U.S. work visa, eventually even a green card. I didn’t have a clue, but as always when talking to Iranians about migrating to the U.S., I didn’t want to burst their balloon. As always, I found a way to preserve a vague sense of hope, and said something about the booming American tourist industry and the number of Iranians aching to inflate it some more. Visa restrictions? Tightening borders? I swept those questions away.

  Then the check for our dinners came, but there was no fight over it, just the ritual dance of taarof:

  Let me take that.

  No, no, why should you?

  You’re my guest.

  But I intruded on you.

  Not at all. It was a pleasure.

  Then let me return the pleasure.

  But you’re our guest.

  I lost, as I knew I would, and should. After all, in Persian terms I was a guest. The only question was how it would play out, and it did as expected, with Reza paying the bill for the three of us. Then he offered to top the sundae with a cherry. Did I still have room for dessert? He had a special treat in mind, so we left the Bastani and headed down one of the streets leading out of the square. I thought Reza had gaz in mind, the soft, chewy chunks of nougat stuffed with pistachios that are the pride of Esfahan, but no. We arrived at what looked like an ice cream parlor, but no. It was a bastani sonnati parlor—an appropriate choice after dining at the Bastani restaurant. What is bastani sonnati? Reza told me: a blend of vanilla ice cream mixed with saffron, rosewater, and the mother of all Persian ingredients—pistachios. A line had formed at the counter as the postdinner crowd waited to satisfy their sweet tooths. The scoops were plopped in paper cups or wedged between cookie-like wafers. I tried to pay for the dessert, but lamely, knowing I’d only be beaten down in another battle of taarof. So Reza treated again, and we licked and slurped our bastani sonnatis out on the street as other customers did the same. When it was time to part, both Reza and Asfaneh, predictably, wished me a very pleasant stay in Iran, and Reza handed over one of his business cards.

  “Let us know if you need anything, and let us know the next time you’re here.”

  With that we parted, and I watched them vanish under the arches that formed the Ali Qapu Whispering Gallery.

  There was still time for a nightcap—Iranian style. The café on the square, with its panoramic view, was closing down, but there was an alternative—the Azadegan, a cave-like, below-ground café near the eastern entrance to the square. I had stumbled on it my first time in Esfahan and was glad to see that, beyond the dingy entrance, illuminated by a single bulb, time had stopped. It still had wobbly tables and beaten-up chairs, and the cushions of the seating that lined the walls hadn’t been replaced in at least thirty years. Most important, it still resembled a pack rat’s overstuffed attic. Brass serving trays, coffee urns, broken clocks, and every other kind of discarded bric-a-brac lined the walls and dangled from the ceiling. It was frumpy and cluttered and chaotic, but oozed more charm than any chain coffee shop could muster in a century of cappuccinos.

  I sat down at one of the tippy tables, and a young man of about twenty brought me a glass of black tea with an accompanying bowl of sugar cubes, to drink tea the Iranian way. It was the Persian way of mainlining sugar—placing a cube between the teeth at the front of the mouth and using it to filter the tea. At the other tables, clusters of men were puffing on water pipes while a few couples snuggled discreetly. A football match was playing on the TV mounted in the corner, but no one was watching. One of the tea sippers caught my eye—a woman of about thirty-five or forty with Western features, peering at a travel guide. Now it was my turn to be curious, receptive, and intrusive, that odd combination of qualities that Iranians managed to blend so well when running into foreigners. I edged over.

  “May I ask—where are you from?”

  Her name was Alena, and she was half-British, half-Greek, but had been living in the Netherlands for the past twenty years or so, where she ran a vendor’s stall at the Waterlooplein open-air market, selling clothing and jewelry and other odds and ends from India, Bangladesh, and the Asian subcontinent. Alena was used to rambling around less-traveled parts of the world. Every year she spent two months touring India, scooping up goods to stock her stall at the Waterlooplein. But the trip to Iran was strictly a holiday. She had set aside a month and was nearing the end of her third week.

  I asked what it was like traveling by bus as a single woman, and a foreign single woman. She spoke no Farsi, and almost e
veryone she encountered spoke no English, Dutch, or Greek.

  She bubbled up. “The women keep showing me how to keep my scarf in place. They keep offering me sweets. Wherever we stop, the driver points to his watch to indicate how much time we have before we leave.”

  It isn’t unusual for Western travelers to be met with expressions of disbelief and even dire warnings when they tell friends or family they are planning a trip to Iran. And a single woman? When Alena was back in Amsterdam, what would she tell her friends? Her reply was razor sharp.

  “It was like traveling in a sea of gracious gentlemen.”

  I wasn’t surprised. One of the reasons Iranians extend such hospitality to foreigners is to say, “See, they are not us.” They, of course, means the regime, us means the “real” Iranians, the true Persian character, everyone and anything more than an arm’s length from the government.

  Then the chat with Alena was cut off. The waiter had overheard two foreigners bantering in English and decided to display some Persian hospitality. The football match on the TV was Brazil versus the U.S. in a World Cup qualifier. He turned up the volume and pumped his fist in the air.

  “Go America!” he shouted.

  10

  Yazd

  Land of Fire and Ice

  Doing good to others is not a duty. It is a joy, for it increases your own health and happiness.

  —Zoroaster

  The day was waning, but the heat was not. It was six o’clock, more or less, and I was watching the sun go down behind the hills to the west of Yazd, turning the rooftops and badgirs, or wind towers, the defining symbol of the city, a mystifying combination of orange and purple. I had no thermometer but guessed, by the degree of fatigue that had overcome me, that the middle of the day must have hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Now I was sitting in the shade on a rooftop terrace of a restaurant in the center of the city, but the tabletop was still warm to the touch. A light breeze, blowing across the rooftops, balmy and refreshing though it was, still carried the residue of the afternoon heat. I heard a sharp squeal and looked down to see a cat scamper across the terrace, the baked tile surface singeing its bare paws.