Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  Look inside my playful verse,

  For Hafez is barefoot and dancing

  And in such a grand and generous,

  In such a fantastic mood.

  A biography of Hafez would be one of the shortest Persian books because almost nothing is known about his life. Scholars claim he was born in Shiraz in 1315, maybe 1317, and he died there, probably in 1390. And that is where the facts of his life begin and end, and the mystery is partly what makes him so mythic.

  It is not hard to understand Hafez’s grip on Persian culture. If there is any word that appears more often in Hafez’s poetry than wine, it is love, and throughout his poetry it is continually shapeshifting, at times representing physical beauty, at others sensual emotions, sometimes the deeply spiritual or profoundly mystical. Whatever its source, for Hafez it was the force that drives all existence:

  We are people who need to love,

  Because love is the soul’s life,

  Love is simply creation’s greatest joy.

  If Hafez were nothing more than a gauzy sentimentalist, his works would be gathering dust in some literary archive, but he could also be the gadfly of entrenched government elites and religious pretenders, a role far more useful in Iran today than in its medieval past, and this is one of the reasons his works resonate so loudly in contemporary Iran:

  The dregs of society are godly compared to you pompous poseurs.

  I would rather frequent infamous hovels

  Such as a tavern or a cabaret

  Than places infested with you hypocrites.

  I would rather choose an abject wine seller or a debauchee

  As my spiritual guide than any one of you liars and cheats.

  It was after ten o’clock, but the gates were still open and dozens of visitors were wandering around the grounds. At the entrance a handful of vendors were selling steaming bowls of aash and warm slices of barbari bread. A late-night chill had settled in, hinting that winter had yet to fully yield to spring. Women with delicately made-up faces and displaying carefully groomed locks of hair pulled their veils more snugly over their heads.

  It is no accident that the tombs of both Saadi and Hafez have gardens as their settings. Gardens are as central to Persian culture as they are to all the great civilizations of the East—China, Japan, and Mughal India—and the glory of the natural world spills out of Persian poetry. And like the transcendentalist philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Hafez saw nature as a gateway to eternal truths:

  How did the rose ever open its heart,

  And give to this world all its beauty?

  It felt the encouragement of light against its being,

  Otherwise we all remain too frightened.

  The modernist design of Saadi’s tomb would never have been fitting for the burial place of Hafez. His is a modest, walled enclosure. Beside the garden stands a grove of orange trees, surrounded by reflecting pools and flowerbeds. In the middle of it all, under a circle of columns that support a stone gazebo, stands a marble bier. As at the tomb of Saadi, visitors approach and place a finger or hand on the surface. With a simple touch, those who have been nurtured on the verses of Hafez, which means almost the entire Iranian population, are able to touch the beauty of his simplicity, and the simple beauty of his wisdom.

  I wandered the grounds for an hour or so, taking in the delicate strains of the santour and dutar as they tinkled from the speakers. The site seemed designed so that love, the emotion Hafez prized most, could never leave him. With no bars or nightclubs or any of the usual places where young people meet, Iran’s parks and gardens have become venues where young couples may sit and discreetly nuzzle, taking inspiration from Hafez’s lines in ways the ruling mullahs would frown upon. Toward the end of my walk, the music was cut and replaced with an announcement stating that the gates would be closing. It was time to leave. On the way to the exit, I met three young women, and one threw out a question: “Where are you from?”

  “Oh, we just love America!” one tittered, after I responded.

  “What do you like about it?”

  “Everything!” the third said.

  “The freedom!” the first one threw in.

  I asked what they meant by freedom.

  “From this!” the second girl chirped, fingering the edge of her veil.

  The girls rattled off more reasons for their love of the U.S.—the culture! democracy! everything about it!—and then, of course, they wanted to know: Why had I come to Iran? What did I think of Iran?

  I answered with my timeworn script—that the country had always interested me, that I always knew it was much different from the Arab world but wanted to see it firsthand. One of the women concluded: “Isn’t it strange, as long as you’ve wanted to come to Iran, we’ve only wanted to go to the U.S.”

  It was all a little sad. For all the affection for America among young people, there is still very little understanding of what “America” is all about. For some it is everything that Iran isn’t, but to actually articulate its appeal is a tougher task. None of the girls had been to the U.S., but all were dying to go. One had cousins living in suburban Los Angeles, and the brother of another was studying at the University of Miami. The women were art students and had set their sights on doing graduate studies at an American university. I admired their dreams but didn’t have the heart to tell them that their chances of receiving a student visa were almost nil. Back in the pro-American days of the shah, fifty thousand Iranians were studying at American universities. Now there are only about eleven thousand. The girls might be accepted at any of a number of graduate art programs, but the odds of a young, single Iranian woman being granted a student visa were, as the saying goes, worse than hitting the lottery.

  I wished them all the best and caught a taxi outside the gate and was soon back at the hotel. It was late. The Happy Hour café had closed for the night, so I checked my email at the computer set up in the lobby. The connection had become ornery, though it had been working fine earlier in the day. I asked Mahmoud, the night clerk, for help. He fiddled with the connections and restarted the terminal but could not cajole it into cooperation.

  “No freedom!” he sighed. “They do this”—by “they” he could only mean the government—“to let us live a normal life, for a while, but then they turn it off. It’s a way of reminding us that they control our lives, that they can do whatever they want.”

  “What about your guests?” I asked. “Don’t they ever complain?” I knew it was a stupid question, and he replied as expected.

  “It wouldn’t matter. The guests from Iran, they know there’s nothing we can do. We say anything, they will put us in jail, kill us, torture us.”

  I knew that nothing like that would happen over a fluky internet connection, but his point was made.

  Like hotel night clerks everywhere in the world, Mahmoud’s constant battle was how to pass the hours of interminable boredom, and there was no better relief than a late-night chat with a night-crawling guest. With no guests to pander to (“Welcome to Iran! You can have anything you like!”), he could drop his professional pose. We moved to the sitting area in the lobby and dropped into two overstuffed chairs.

  “You know what we want?” Mahmoud began, leaning forward. “We just want to be a normal country. So many countries want to be important in the world. We’d like to be completely unimportant for a change, for no one to care about us at all. These leaders talk about Iran being a power in this part of the world, but the power they want, they only want it for themselves. They don’t care about the people. You’re from America?”

  I nodded, but Mahmoud kept going.

  “You know what we don’t want? We don’t want to compete with anyone, not even America. Power only brings trouble. Everywhere in the world, they hear ‘Iran’ and we know what they think: ‘Iran wants a nuclear weapon, Iran supports terrorism, Iran does this, Iran does that.’”

  I listened to Mahmoud’s gripes with much empathy, but he was only repe
ating the chorus of a song I had heard too many times, and it always came down to complaints about the government. A sullen Mahmoud, sitting alone in the gloom of the lobby with a fitful internet connection, was the entire situation’s sad but fitting representation.

  The next morning Sohrab and I drove to Bagh-e Eram, or Eram Garden. It was a relief to get out of the hotel. Mahmoud’s lament still hung in the lobby area like the stench of burnt coffee. The other guests in the breakfast room, daintily eating their croissants and jam, sipping from teacups with the practiced elegance of Victorian aristocrats, again seemed like a group of dinner guests who had been taken hostage and had no choice but to defy their captors with all the dignity they could muster.

  Day-to-day reality in Iran may be as glum as Mahmoud described, but Iran’s gardens, dating to Achaemenid times, have always served as a representation of paradise, originally a Farsi word meaning “enhanced space.”

  In the Persian view, paradise, as represented on Earth, is an expanse of green neatly divided into linear water channels and pathways, with a rectangular pool to reflect the sunlight and provide cooling relief in the heat of summer, but at this time of year to serve as a launching pad for the burst of spring. It is a setting that represents natural beauty as a mystical arrangement of balance and order, where geometric symmetry expresses balance and harmony, a concept that dates to the ancient Greeks and found resonance in the Christian world in the design of its massive cathedrals and the altarpieces that decorated them.

  The Bagh-e Eram is more than a garden. Situated in the center is the Qavam House, a rambling thirty-two-room villa decorated with painted tiles inscribed with lines of verse by the only Persian who could honor such a place—Hafez. The house was built by the ilkhanate, or leader of the Qashqai tribes that inhabited the Shiraz region in the middle of the nineteenth century. Cultural influences from eastern and central Europe were filtering into Iran at the time, and the result was a building that borrowed heavily from Bulgarian and Turkish design.

  It had rained in the night. Not much, just enough to dampen the grass and turn the leafy canopy into a latticework through which the hanging droplets could fall. I was lucky enough to get to the Bagh-e Eram before the sun had risen high enough to burn off the moisture from the overnight rain, so the grass was still glistening in the sunlight and the flowers were freshly aromatic, as flowers should be in the morning, and as any Persian poet, classic or modern, would agree.

  I had circled the Qavam House and was crossing in front of the rectangular pool below the façade when a voice called out from a short distance away in smooth, unaccented English: “Hey, are you an American?”

  The man looked about fifty and had the same stocky build as the wrestler Jamshid. Before I could reply, he strode over with very un-Persian-like nonchalance.

  “I can tell. I just love Americans.”

  A little stunned by his forwardness, all I could reply was “have you been there?”

  “Have I been to America?!” he replied.

  His name was Arash, and as we stood under the drooping fronds of the palm trees he told me the story of his life in America. He had one to tell, and he wanted to unburden it to the only person in the Bagh-e Eram, or probably all of Shiraz, or all of Iran, who might understand.

  Arash had gone to the U.S. in 1976 on a student visa, when Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi still held a firm grip on power and the U.S. and Iran were at least nominal allies. In 1980 Arash graduated from the University of Texas into a different world. The exiled shah was dying of cancer in Egypt, and Ayatollah Khomeini had become the Supreme Leader of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Despite the turmoil back home, Arash’s life continued relatively unruffled. He married and had a son. I didn’t ask him what kind of work he did because it didn’t matter. Years passed, and then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

  “To be honest, the year before I got in a little trouble with the IRS,” he said. “My bank accounts were audited, and I thought that was the end of it. But then my house was raided. They came at about four o’clock in the morning. An FBI SWAT team broke the door down, took my computer and all my files, and they arrested me. A couple of days later they charged me with supporting a terrorist organization—Al-Qaeda. I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t they know, Al-Qaeda is Sunni and almost all Iranians are Shiites?

  “The next few months were a nightmare. They took everything I had. My son had just gotten out of college and had a couple of job offers from the federal government, but they were withdrawn. My wife was a high school principal and up for a promotion, but she was passed over.

  “That wasn’t the worst. For a year I was held in a federal prison in Texas, and then they moved me to another one in Louisiana. A couple of months later I was moved again, this time to the CIA prison in Big Springs, Tennessee. I was there four and a half years. They tortured me, but whatever they wanted to know I don’t have any idea. After a while I think they didn’t know what to do with me, so they said they would drop all the charges if I agreed to return to Iran and give up any chance of returning to the U.S. I had lived in the U.S. for twenty-eight years, and my wife and son are still there, but what was I going to do, sit in prison the rest of my life? So I came back here. It’s not over though. I have a lawyer who works in human rights, and we’re trying to take this to the International Criminal Court.”

  What he’d said thus far wasn’t all that surprising. What followed, though, was.

  “You know,” he said, with surprising ease, “I’ve got nothing against the American people. I can’t say much for the government, but the American people, they’re the best in the world. I just love Americans.” A grin appeared on Arash’s face. “You know, I still follow the Dallas Cowboys.”

  Arash wished me a very pleasant stay in Iran—“I hope you like it here, this is a great country, you know.” And then he turned away, and as he retreated under the canopy of tree limbs, the blooming flowers, the morning sunlight, the decorated façade of the pavilion, and even the water in the reflecting pool left with him. I didn’t know if Arash’s story was more startling, sad, or admirable, or an odd mixture of all three. I was finally able to sort it out this way: The pitiful treatment he received from the country where he had made his home spoke for itself. It was surprising that it didn’t color his entire view of America and Americans, and that he was still able to feel affection for the people he had lived among helped to prove the power of human relationships to overcome the divisive world of geopolitics.

  After the encounter with Arash I needed something to brighten the day and knew where to find it—the Shah Cheragh Mosque.

  According to Persian folklore, sometime in the early fourteenth century the cleric Ayatollah Dastghaib saw a light from the top of a hill and followed it to a nearby cemetery. A newly dug grave was discovered, and a body was unearthed wearing a coat of arms. A ring identified the body as that of the warrior Ahmad Ibn Musa. He and his brother Mohammad were the sons of the seventh of the Twelve Holy Imams, Musa Al-Khadim. The two holed up in Shiraz while on the run from Abbasid persecution at the end of the eighth century. It was in Shiraz where the two met their end. Many mosques in Iran are grand edifices with a history behind them to match, but the Shah Cheragh is relatively small and has no historical significance whatsoever. This is all to its credit, for it celebrates the beauty of light and color and nothing more. It is a poem in architectural form. It is also called the Pink Mosque because of the pink tiles that cover the interior, but the most brilliant color is found in the prayer hall facing the courtyard. Lined with arched windows of colored glass that catch the sunlight early in the morning, they transform the interior into a shimmering, kaleidoscopic display. Mirza Hassan Ali, the ruler of Shiraz at the time, built the mosque to create the unusual light effect and configured the design so that it would be strongest in the morning.

  The beauty of light often finds expression in Persian poetry, and when it does it is usually linked to the spiritual world. In his Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam
wrote:

  Wake! For the Sun, who scattered into flight

  The stars before him from the field of night,

  Drives night along with them from Heaven,

  And strikes the sultan’s turret with a shaft of light.

  I was a little late getting to the Shah Cheragh. The sun had risen so high that the light in the prayer hall had dimmed, though flickers were still streaming through the windows and dancing off the carpet and the vaulted ceiling, enough to resemble the last glimpse of the sun at evening.

  Back at the hotel, the diversions to round off a day of sightseeing were the same as the day before: the room TV offered nothing in English except predictable Press TV, and the “Happy Hour” crowd consisted of a handful of couples sipping fruit juices and munching on tasteless snacks.

  Instead of returning to the Sharzeh for dinner I decided to try its satellite branch across the Roodkhaneye Khoshk, the dry river that cuts through the heart of the city. The Sharzeh II was located in an upscale neighborhood where the young were known to frolic, and therefore a good place to witness what passes for Iranian nightlife.

  But Sharzeh II was no match for Sharzeh I. The plastic-coated menus displaying photos of each dish gave it a coffee shop feel, and the two musicians—again both male—were crowded onto a tiny stage in a corner of the dining room. The only touch of cultural flavor was the open-mouthed oven at the entrance, where arriving guests could watch flat slabs of dough being slapped against the inner walls and quickly transforming into steaming, sweet-scented taftoon loaves.

  There wasn’t much reason to linger once I had finished my dinner, so I paid the bill and returned to the street. It was Wednesday night, the beginning of the Iranian weekend. The stores were open, and moneyed Shirazis were out on the town: Top-end BMWs and Mercedes backed up the traffic, and women in form-fitting manteaux and hair-revealing headscarves paraded, catwalk-style, between the jewelry stores and cosmetic boutiques as they attempted to stretch their greatly devalued rials.