Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  Leaving the tomb, I took a stroll around the garden and stumbled on the top of a circular staircase, where a handwritten sign with an arrow pointed downward from the top stair. Down I went, following the twisting spiral deep underground until it touched bottom. There a café had been carved out of the rock, and in the center was a fishpond. Cozy niches had been dug into the walls and lined with thick cushions for seats. Paintings of birds, a favorite image of Saadi, hung on the walls.

  I ordered a mint tea and settled into one of the niches to scan the crowd, mostly Shirazis who sought this underground warren to hold on to a bit of Saadi while sipping cappuccinos and watching the fish scuttling around in the pond. But there was a puzzle. How did twenty-first century Iranians come to terms with the works of these literary greats, when so many of their verses paid homage to physical beauty, sensual pleasure, and even drunkenness, facts of human experience that the clerical establishment had spent the better part of forty years trying to deny? How could their poems even be read in schools, when every book had to be approved by religious authorities? I recalled a conversation I’d had with an Iranian American literature professor:

  “They tried to tell us that none of those references—to wine, pleasure, beauty—none of them were to be taken literally. The poets were really talking about spiritual beauty, spiritual pleasures, but they had to communicate these to the common people and so they used earthly imagery. Even Hafez—they told us he used wine as an image for spiritual intoxication. But we all knew this was nonsense.”

  The parents of her generation had attended school during the liberal reign of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, when alcohol flowed freely and Tehran teemed with bars and nightclubs. Surely they had to know that the ruling mullahs’ attempt at literary interpretation was a bit clouded, and not by drink. Even so, the mullahs were claiming that Hafez, Saadi, and Omar Khayyam were trying to direct their readers’ eyes toward heaven, not the wine bottle.

  She added: “A lot of young people today are quite confused. They see no alcohol or other pleasures in society and think that maybe it’s true, that the poets weren’t talking about the pleasures they want to have. But they’re young. They want to drink and dance and enjoy themselves.”

  I was a foreigner with no confusions other than those that come with wandering in a foreign land, so I was content to watch the fish circling in the pond and listen to the clinking of the teacups and the soft sounds of the ney, the Persian flute, that drifted from the café’s CD player. And there also were the curious gazes of the other customers watching this foreigner listening to the strains of the ney and watching the fish circling in the pond and observing the curious gazes of the other customers.

  As tranquil as the setting was, I couldn’t stay forever because I did have other plans for the evening: to dine at the Sharzeh restaurant, famous for its live Persian music, and then to make it to the tomb of Hafez by closing time. So I left the café and the images of Saadi’s beloved birds and headed back to the hotel to relax a bit before going out for the evening.

  There was little reason to do so, except to put my feet up. The café on the mezzanine advertised “Happy Hour,” but of course there were no drink specials, only tea, coffee, fruit juices, and the usual selection of boozeless beers. I went to my room and tried to find CNN, BBC, or any other satellite news channel but got only the state-run Press TV and its English-fluent anchors bashing Saudi Arabia and reporting cherry-picked stories that reflected negatively on the United States, Europe, and “the West.” With gun violence running riot through American society and Brexit problems in the United Kingdom, their job was not hard. After a few minutes I set out for the Sharzeh.

  It was close by, and in a few minutes I was at its doors, tucked down a passage just outside the entrance of Shiraz’s grand Vakil Bazaar. But the Sharzeh was still shuttered, and a sign indicating eight o’clock in Farsi numerals hung in the window. I had to wait, and if there was any doubt, the owner of a spice stall on the other side of the passage flashed a smile and held up eight fingers.

  The Vakil is one of those garishly elegant Middle Eastern bazaars that has fiercely resisted the advances of time. The arched ceiling is cathedral high, and its narrow stone passageways crisscross through densely packed vendors’ stalls. True to its timelessness, the Vakil is both luxury boutique and Persian Walmart, with stalls selling everything from precious stones and gold jewelry to underwear and kitchenware and other household goods. The design is part of the genius of the Middle Eastern bazaar: Endless variety means endless choice, and endless choice guarantees a constant stream of customers. So at seven o’clock, at the end of a workday, the aisles were jammed. Office workers on their way home were picking up new wallets and handbags. Housewives finishing the day’s shopping were dipping into spice sacks and picking through bins of pistachios. Bolts of colored silk were crammed onto shelves that rose to the ceiling. Brassware dangled from metal hooks, and the scent of olive oil soap and perfumes of lavender and lilac floated from hidden corners.

  I wandered right and left and left and right and learned, once again, that the Middle Eastern bazaar doesn’t only challenge the senses but all frames of reference. Instead of heading deeper into the Vakil, as I had intended, after a riot of twists and turns I found myself dumped back onto Zand Street. Rather than try again, with still time to kill I headed west, toward a row of contemporary storefronts.

  Zand Street is the main boulevard that bisects the center of Shiraz, and it is also the city’s primary shopping street—but only after the stores have closed. Its legitimate traders do legitimate business during the day, selling mobile phones and athletic gear and other goods that make up the bulk of the consumer trade, but after 6:00 p.m. the black marketers arrive, spread plastic tarps on the sidewalk, and set cardboard boxes on folding tables. Then the real dealing gets going, for most of the goods for sale are not to be found in the conventional retail market: Western pop music, Hollywood movies, and box sets of pirated American TV series. More commonplace items are also on offer—cheap electronics and kitchenware, household tools and secondhand books—but most of the shoppers are here for the contraband.

  I prowled through the stacks of CDs and DVDs, but the pickings were uninspiring—a few Hollywood westerns, more than a few romantic comedies, and troves of CDs by Iranian pop bands, mostly refugees from the Islamic Revolution that have established a Persian counterculture in Los Angeles. But there were a few finds. I bought copies of The Strange Case of Benjamin Button and Saving Private Ryan for a dollar each. But I had been taken. Later I learned that that was the “foreigner’s price.” An Iranian could have had each for fifty cents. But the fault was really my own, because they were so cheap I didn’t bother to bargain.

  More than a simple contraband bazaar, Zand Street offers insight into the government’s failure to repress the liberal inclinations of many Iranians, particularly the urban youth, and the allure of cultural products from the West. Sometime between the liberal presidencies of Hashemi Rafsanjani in the late 1980s and Mohammad Khatami in the 1990s, and after repeated failures to crack down on Western movies and music, the Iranian government made a tacit bargain with the country’s youth: Do what you want behind closed doors but at least pretend to obey us in public. Arbitrary crackdowns used to keep the black marketers looking over their shoulders, but as the underground traffic has risen to street level, even the crackdowns have proven futile.

  The blatant openness of the trade, and the hypocrisy it signifies, reminded me of a story told to me by a psychologist friend who has lived outside of Iran for more than thirty years. On a trip back to Shiraz she had to call on one of the city’s mullahs at the request of a friend.

  “I thought I should dress even more conservatively than I usually would, but when he picked me up at the station he was wearing Levi’s and a new pair of Nikes, and when we got to his house he had CD racks full of jazz and pop music. I caught a glance into his daughter’s bedroom. There was a poster of Britney Spears on the wall, and
lying on the bed was a Barbie doll in a bikini.”

  All this would have greatly depressed Karim Khan Zand, for whom Zand Street was named. Zand was not a tried-and-true conservative Muslim in the image the ruling regime would like to pretend. Zand was the first ruler of a dynasty that came to power in the middle of the eighteenth century, and he was known for his humble lifestyle and the transparency with which he ran his government. In a gesture of humility, he never assumed the title of shah, preferring to be referred to as a simple vakil, or local ruler. But the qualities for which he was most widely known were honesty and personal integrity. He sold the gifts he received from doting admirers and gave the proceeds to the state treasury. Forty years of destructive internal wars preceded his reign, and while the Shiraz was being rebuilt, a group of workers found a pot of gold coins in a pile of rubble. Zand let the workers divide it among themselves.

  Having survived decades of war, Zand built the stark, imposing citadel that still stands on Zand Street, just a short walk from the storefronts that line the street that bears his name, and he reconstructed the bazaar, which indirectly bears his name and was largely destroyed during the years of war.

  I became so absorbed in the black-market pickings that I lost track of the time. By the time I got back to the Sharzeh the doors were open and the first diners were filing in. Most were from the Persian middle and upper class—men in neat slacks and suits and women trying to outdo themselves in layers of makeup, jewelry, and headscarves with color-coordinated manteaux. The fashion parade was also a political statement, a way for women to thumb their noses at the authorities. It said: You try to suppress us, we will use whatever we have—our faces, our clothing, our figures—to fight back. And these kinds of fashion statements were de rigueur in Shiraz, which leans distinctly liberal on the Iranian social spectrum.

  The host showed me to a table on the mezzanine near a railing that overlooked the stage below. The rest of the tables filled up quickly. But there would be a downside to the evening: Any true celebration of Persian culture would be muted, and literally, because all of the performers, singers included, would be limited to men.

  Of all the deprivations of human rights suffered by women all over the world, the ban on women singing in public in Iran has long struck me as one of the most odious. At the beginning of the Islamic Revolution, the new ruling mullahs believed that men could be corrupted by the sound of the female voice. Ayatollah Khomeini went even further, linking the influx of all Western music to the incursions of British and Russian forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, calling Western music a form of “cultural colonialism.” “Music is said to unsettle the soul,” he wrote, “to lead people to indulge in the pure sensuality of the physical expression of their bodies.”

  Hafez would have taken great exception to Khomeini’s puritanism. He wrote:

  Come with your tender mouths moving

  And your beautiful tongues conducting songs

  And with your movements, your magic movements

  Of hands and feet and glands and cells—dancing!

  Know that to God’s eye,

  All movement is a wondrous language,

  And music—such exquisite, wild music!

  But Hafez was not leading the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Khomeini and his fellow mullahs were, so women’s mouths were shut and Tehran’s nightclubs were closed. Popular female singers like Marzieh, Homeyra, Hayedeh, and Mahasati were driven underground or into exile. In the years to come, “cultural freedom” would become a political football to be bandied about by would-be moderates seeking popular support. It is hard not to see more than a little misogyny at play. Mahsa Vahdat, who has rendered the verses of Rumi and Hafez into mystical tunes, has said, “Who could be sexually aroused by Hafez’s poetry? The government has a political problem with women’s voices. Singing will give women power and political influence.”

  But no Homeyra nor Googoosh would be appearing at the Sharzeh that night. Instead, a group of male musicians and two singers took to the stage, and while the diners dug into their plates of grilled fish and lamb kebabs they pumped out folk tunes that roused the clapping of the crowd and was enough to create the illusion that Iran was, once again, a place where creative expression was not a crime.

  Halfway through the first set and my plate of polo-mahi, accompanied by the usual mountain of saffron rice, a young couple nearby used a pause between songs to ask, as if there were any surprise: “Where are you from?” and “Why did you come to Iran?”

  They quickly introduced themselves. Jamshid had grown up on a farm near Shiraz where his father grew barley and wheat. He had thick hands and arms, and his girth was another sign of his former athleticism: He had been a champion heavyweight wrestler, winning bronze and silver medals in regional competitions. He graduated from Shiraz University with a degree in biochemical engineering and was working in eco-agriculture. Parisa had a degree in internet technology but had been having a hard time finding a job.

  “These days there are none,” Parisa lamented. “You can get an advanced degree in an important field but still there are no opportunities.”

  I asked—Were the sanctions to blame? The rial had lost more than 60 percent of its value, and inflation had propelled the prices of everyday goods into the stratosphere, beyond everyday budgets. Pistachios, a staple snack of rich and poor, had become a luxury.

  I expected Parisa to rail against the European Union, the Western powers, and all the other forces in the world that were, in the regime’s view, trying to cripple Iran. But no, she didn’t know if the sanctions were the prime cause of the country’s economic woes. She didn’t know if government mismanagement were more to blame. What’s more, she didn’t care. The hardships of life were painfully simple: Prices were high and rising higher. Money was tight and getting tighter. International politics was an abstraction, alien to the more immediate frustrations of Iran’s young professionals and the struggling middle class.

  “I don’t know why there is so much talk about Iran,” she continued. “All we hear about is Iran and Syria, Iran and terrorism, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Iran and the nukes. Everywhere it is Iran, Iran, Iran. Doesn’t anybody wonder how such a country can have so much power when it can’t even provide jobs for its people?”

  For a generation of Iranians whose constant aim was to shut the government out of their lives, it was hard to understand how Iran could command so much global attention. For Parisa and many young Iranians the regime was responsible for so much of the misery that people endured, and it was not going to go away. It couldn’t be voted out of office, like an unpopular government in a “normal” country. With no escape at hand, except for those lucky enough to emigrate to Canada, the U.S., or Europe, the regime and its corruption and anti-Western rhetoric had become an inescapable constant, like subzero weather above the Arctic Circle.

  The music break ended, the band returned to the stage, and the singing was met with rounds of applause. It was a welcome change from talk of Iran’s doldrums. I told Jamshid and Parisa that after dinner I was planning to head to the tomb of Hafez, and then Parisa’s eyes brightened. I asked her if it was true, that every household in Iran has a well-worn copy of Hafez’s poetry tucked away somewhere in a bookshelf.

  “I don’t have a Quran,” Parisa acknowledged, “but I have three copies of Hafez. One has been in our family for generations. My father gave it to me.”

  “Do you still read it?”

  She smirked. “Sometimes when we have to make an important decision or want to know what will happen in the future we’ll take a copy of Hafez off the shelf and open it to any page and read what it says. They say that’s the only way to uncover the truth.”

  “What about all the old female pop stars—Googoosh and Marzieh?” I asked. “Does every household also have a collection of vinyl beside their volume of Hafez?”

  “My brother has a collection of all the old pop singers, the women too, and he also has a copy of Hafez,” Parisa said.


  “When he has to make an important decision, does he open his Hafez or play a track of Googoosh?”

  Jamshid cut in: “I don’t know about Googoosh, but I bought an entire collection of Elvis Presley off the internet. I only paid a dollar for it. A friend downloaded it for me.”

  “Does Elvis tell your future?”

  “Now that’s silly,” Parisa concluded.

  “So is letting Hafez do it,” Jamshid added.

  “Who cares? We still do it,” Parisa concluded.

  It was time to go. The band was still running through its repertoire of pop tunes and folk melodies, hopping neatly from one to the other to keep the crowd happy, but Hafez was waiting. My bill came, but Jamshid and Parisa insisted on paying it, and I let them, but only after the expected and customary exchanges of taarof:

  “Of course you mustn’t . . .”

  “Don’t be silly, it’s nothing . . .”

  It was a battle I was sure to lose, but one that had to be waged. I was a visitor, a guest at their table, and a foreigner, three reasons why it would have been an inexcusable breach of Persian hospitality for them to allow me to pay, as it would have been a breach of Persian hospitality for me to refuse. So I thanked them profusely, which was also expected, and then made my way to the door and hopped into a taxi.

  Ten minutes later I was at the entrance to the resting place of Iran’s most revered poet. Call these the Big Five, the voice of each occupies a special place in Persian literature: Ferdowsi, the historian; Rumi, the mystic; Saadi, the wise advisor; Omar Khayyam, the philosopher-scientist; and Hafez, the voice of the commoner—humble, flawed, and self-effacing, but also longing and searching, a victim of human frailties and self-indulgence, but always joyful, always hopeful—a Persian Everyman: