On many nights, the restaurant would come to a standstill when my mother stood to close with a solo lament – the kitchen would stop, and the waiters would be held back by the staff doors, bringing the noise in the eatery to a standstill, and only leaving the faint sounds of cars and crowds in the street beyond; and my mother’s voice. At the moment of her last note, scores of Iranian fathers and mothers would return from the place their minds had drifted to, look up, smile and roar with applause. These nights were some of their fondest memories, living amid the neighbourhood traditions of a culture that felt impervious to change.
*
Joan first saw Leslie John in a photo, shown to her by the Australian Mike Walsh. Probably in a failed setup, my mother had met Mike the geologist at a dinner organised by Glen, the Scottish manager who knew both of them. With red wine, low couches and a late-night conversation among a large group, Mike spoke of a friend from Kalgoorlie called “Les”, who’d be coming out soon. David took out the photo, and passed it to my mother, saying, ‘Yup, he’s a bit of a character.’
The first thing she saw was a mop of curly hair on a tall, lanky man grinning at the camera, his arm around Mike, with the deep red dust of the West Australian landscape filling out the photo. Joan thought nothing further of it. The Irish girls lived above her, and all of them were young, and obsessed with foreign men. If anything, Joan thought it would be a story to tell the other ladies at the hospital the next day.
She lived with Chris, the American nurse, but with Chris increasingly alone and uneasy in the city, Joan spent almost all her time with the Irish girls. After the Apadana Town meals came the bright lights and bars of the Armenian Quarter, with countless expats trying to chat them up. Joan, Maureen, Philomena and Kay could all hold their own with liquor, which naturally impressed the men. South African lift engineers, English mining technicians, diplomats from half a dozen countries – the company they kept seemed exotic and ever-changing.
On a night out in the Armenian quarter of Tehran, Kay clomped up the stairs with Joan to a bar that overlooked the red and yellow lights down the turning street. When they stopped for breath at the turn of one of the stairwells, Kay turned in a fierce Irish curl and asked, ‘Where’s your man, Joan?’
My mother stared blankly, taken aback. ‘I haven’t got one.’
Drawing breath and laughing, Kay said, ‘Well, maybe you should get one!’
Still laughing to each other, they turned up the last stairs, and saw a tall Caucasian man standing at the centre of the wide doors beside the bar – it was my father.
Still in the afterglow of the carefree conversation up the stairwell, Joan’s immediate thought was, He’ll do. She felt something in his 6’ 3” height (she was 5”1 herself), or at least the sense of a professional man who earned a decent wage. As she approached the entrance, my mother saw a poise and manner in the way he held his beer that showed he was confident of his place in this new and foreign world.
He came over immediately, introduced himself, and instantly my mother realised it was the Australian man from the photo! His hair was shorter, and with a glancing gaze that late night at the manager’s home, she’d not fully taken in the details.
Les asked questions, lots of questions. With the music blaring, and both leaning in to compensate for their difference in height, they talked about things to do in Iran. Joan shared that she’d often go out on the motorbikes with the South African Otis lift engineers. In a confident Aussie drawl, Les advised her to “give up” the motorbike boys, as she’d be safer with him in his Land Rover. She was touched by the sentiment; not only a statement of intent, but also one of an older man showing genuine care.
Ultimately, it was far from love at first sight; more a spark that merited exploring. My mother’s mind was always on the atmosphere with her girlfriends, and the need to be young and “try out” different nationalities. The majority of men Joan had spoken to in expat Persia so far were English, Scottish, Maltese and Irish – Australia seemed a new and impressive addition to her list.
*
If my mother’s first memories of Iran were the colour, noise and history, then my father’s time was a more distinctly Persian experience. Through his fourteen months as a mine manager in the eastern deserts, and in the bath house towns of Naein and the mine’s surrounding area, he was always in the minority, living and working with the people, and feeling the big winds and isolation in the movement of every day. The mine site was a place where he led with presence. His frame, commanding presence and ability to explain engineering problems meant the staff trusted his decisions, and the local staff who explained his announcements smiled with confidence when they translated to the villagers employed on the mines.
Many times, he would stand on a metal platform, next to his geologist Arash, just a few feet above a crowd of tired, illiterate men squinting in the heat, waiting for his weekly plan to be translated in the local tongue. Most of the time, the dust in the wind filled the moments after, as tired men said nothing and shuffled to their stations. But when the sun fell and the day ended, he saw their smiles, and accepted every invite to a village hovel or a roadside family home, eating all of the meals prepared, and sitting legs folded amid the flakes of unfinished hut cement and desert dust.
Being male, he saw parts of the Iranian way of life my mother never could have imagined. He ate sheep’s testicles over fifty times on village visits – always the delicacy for “special guests’ – and watched, listened and nodded through hours of tribal rituals. It reminded him of his Australian home, and the years of running from the world: the big skies and the bright midday light, the dry storms and gusts, and the desolation. The city sounds of Tehran and Isfahan were certainly beyond those of any Australian metropole: mad noisy hooting, men yelling across the car roofs, and a bustling, frantic movement that never relented. In that respect, Iran enchanted both of my parents. But every week, Les had the chance to drive for hours to the eastern deserts, out in the country, with long stretches of hushed emptiness in the enormous mountains. Sometimes he would turn the Land Rover off the main road and stand in a deep valley as the sky turned apricot and lavender. It was almost beyond silence, a sense of vastness and human irrelevance that stayed with him forever.
But of all the interactions and experiences during his time in those deserts east of Isfahan, nothing compared to his friendship with Ali – one of the great, most cherished companions of his life.
Ali was no more than nineteen, with poor, tattered clothes and a light Iranian tan. When playing with older boys as a small child, he had fallen into a fire at the centre of the cluster of houses by the alley where his family lived. The right arm that braced for his fall into the flames had been so badly damaged, it could not be saved. With no arm beyond the elbow, he was left out of sports classes, and the last to be given time by the teachers to read or write. Uneducated, he left school in his early teens, and wandered the village unemployed ever since.
When my father’s site Land Rover first strode up to his village near the mine site in late 1977, Ali was perched on a rock beneath a tree, with his chin resting on an ivory white prosthetic hand. Les’s eye was immediately caught by the strange colour of the prosthetic against his skin. After my father’s meetings with the locals, he saw Ali scribbling faces in the dust on the Land Rover windshield with his left-handed fingers. My father joined in, and they smiled and laughed together.
On his next two visits to the village, hiring labourers for the barite mine, Ali saw the Land Rover in the distance and raced up to wait at the same spot. My father turned to Arash, his trusted Iranian geologist who spoke fluent Farsi and English, and asked, ‘Would there be any role for an “offsider” on site?’
Arash saw Ali in Les’s line of sight and was confused. ‘What good can this boy do?’
‘Let’s see,’ said my father.
From that day forward, Ali followed my father around all day and night o
n site – running messages, fetching supplies from the vehicles, and filing reports together for management that he didn’t even understand. Each night, he’d sleep in the back of Les’s Land Rover, or retrieve a lift to the village with a smile and spring in his step.
My father hated the way Ali’s prosthetic stood out. He watched the way no one shook his hand or took him seriously, and it felt a denial of the enormous heart my father saw in him every day. Unbeknownst to him, Les spent a morning every month back in Isfahan, obsessing over ways to find Ali a new prosthetic that matched the colour of his skin. He spoke to hospitals and day surgeries and wrote letters to foreign medical suppliers – some of which Ali mailed without being able to read them – asking for the best approach. Responses were slow, and a mould of the exact size hard to come by. But still he persisted, hoping for a breakthrough.
*
In the autumn of 1977, Tehran stayed warm late into the nights. One evening, Joan and Chris came home from the hospital to their apartment with some groceries and bags from work over their arms – but keys weren’t needed, with the front door slightly open. They entered, walked to a position five feet between the front entrance and kitchen living space, and called out. No one answered. There was an obvious explanation: Mohammed, the houseboy for their wing of the apartment building, had probably left after chores without closing the door. Mohammed was typical of the Iranian class divide: a short, gangly and uneducated boy lacking confidence, and not from a wealthy family. He walked with his head to the floor tiles, and only looked up to give a resigned smirk or answer a question. Every two days, he would shuffle in, cook a meal if requested, take any laundry and shake dust from the carpets. They left the door open at the identical angle to show the error; and later that evening, Mohammed’s feet could be heard shuffling near the lower stairs. When Joan and Chris called him up to talk about the door his expression went from docile to cold and suspicious; not because he’d left the door ajar, but because he hadn’t, and knew only one other obvious party had – SAVAK.
A few days later, Joan returned home to find the door closed, but the paintings and lamp shades moved around the property. That night both of them sat in their soft couches – still just 23 and 22 years old – and tried to piece the puzzle together. Both agreed a closed door was a new warning: either Mohammed or the landlord was now under orders to let them enter at will, or worse, SAVAK had made their own key.
The following week, Joan returned home from her hospital shift on a Thursday night. As she turned into the gated doors, a compact royal blue car sat outside the apartment. A lone driver sat motionless inside. Joan took her uniform off, showered, and with her hair still drying, checked the kitchen to find she was short of eggs. As she threw on some other clothes, turned out the gate and made the five-minute walk down the street, the blue car turned its engine on, and followed her at a meagre 5/mph. Joan walked into the convenience store, and spent around three minutes inside. With her eggs in hand, she left the store to see the car turned around.
On her step out of the store, and with the bright lights to her back, the driver’s face emerged from the dim black shadows on the other side of the street – he was a calm, blank face, in ordinary clothes, with a typical Iranian moustache, beard and black hair. Maybe 35 years old, maybe older. She remembered the vacuum in his stare; like she was important enough to scare, but unimportant enough for him to really care whether she came or went. The car followed her slowly as she walked back.
Chris was home when Joan sped up by the gate and raced through the door. My mother went to fasten the lock tight, but looking down, remembered the events of the last week and realised an extra precaution on the door was futile.
Chris sat quietly, and without needing the full story, assumed it involved SAVAK again.
‘I don’t know what to do. They want me gone from the hospital – almost every shift, management tell me Americans are not welcome anymore.’
Chris was the last US citizen in the entire American Hospital of Tehran, and one of the last of all the Americans she’d been friends with the past two years. Within a week, she’d decided to leave.
For Joan and her Irish nursing colleagues, the situation was not so simple. They’d signed two-year contracts in the middle of 1977, back when they were right out of university and Iran seemed like just another exciting overseas destination. Their passports were held by the American Hospital in Tehran. Unlike the Americans who were not welcome, non-American Westerners (or double foreigners, as they were known) were desperately needed for managerial experience. An odd confluence of factors led to people in my mother’s situation being disliked by many local strangers in the street, but also forced to fill the gaps being vacated by thousands of Americans. Repeated requests to break their contracts were met with blank refusals from the HR team.
So, she persisted with her shift work, even when Chris Sheedy took the hints and left for America. Joan moved in with the Irish girls in the flat above, and for a few months, they laughed it off and lived like sisters – exchanging clothes, eating together, swapping in and out of double beds, and scampering into the next room if someone brought a handsome expat boy home. My mother had broken off contact with one or two other men who’d been calling through the late summer, telling them she “was with someone now”. But in truth, she still didn’t know what might come of her interest in Les, the Australian. She put the brushes with SAVAK to one side and continued trying to live in the moment.
*
The last months of 1977 were the time my parents came to remember of Iran. All their friends were still together; none of their core circle had returned home, and no one knew what the future held. Large salaries paid for supplies of good wine and gourmet food to celebrate the Christmas period in huge apartments that hung over the mountains and the city. Most of Joan and Les’s friends were – like them – working class and used to a lot less. Moments of celebration in the 1970s for them felt unique and impenetrable; like people had their own personal defiance that the gloom of the decade didn’t need to define their youth.
Men arrived in bright-coloured shirts – oranges, purples, pattern blues – and sharp-cut Levi jeans. The women wore long maxi dresses, drenched in duty-free French perfume, with air fans whipping the smell of Chanel and cigarettes across the room in the late summer evenings. My father sourced Australian lamb from the two stores in Tehran that stocked it and was popular with his roasts and oven-baked vegetables. From a distance, Joan would watch the carefree Australian men by the BBQ; and my father, so composed in the kitchen, and so passionate about his cooking.
The house parties were long and raucous. Double cassettes lined up two hours of music at a time – everything from Barry White, to the Grateful Dead, to Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, thundering from the speakers on full volume with expats swaying on the tables. The Christmas of 1977 felt carefree, and 1978 another exciting year of possibility.
History would ordain one final – and in retrospect, bittersweet – “last supper”, with US President Carter and the First Lady’s one-night visit to Tehran on 31st December 1977. In that moment, it must’ve felt like a brave new world for everyone: Nickelodeon’s first incarnation had burst onto cable; the Concorde had commenced regular flights between London and New York City only weeks earlier; and Saturday Night Fever had been just released in theatres, catapulting John Travolta and the Bee Gees into the global spotlight for the rest of their careers.
Carter had been accompanied by 500 staff, journalists and security officials, and a grand New Year’s Eve banquet at Niavaran Palace was remembered for Carter’s after-dinner speech, which leaked out without any difficulty. With a glass of Dom Perignon champagne in his hand, Carter spoke glowingly of his host:
‘Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect and love and ad
miration which your people give to you.’
As the clock struck midnight, and the grand old heart of Persia ushered in 1978, neither of the two men could imagine the year’s events – how they would crush the Shah’s near-four-decade rule and, by 1979, spiral into a 444-day hostage crisis that would even undo Carter’s own American Presidency.
1978
Every revolution looks entirely avoidable, or entirely unavoidable in retrospect. Could Iran’s actually have been avoided? We’ll never know. Might it have been triggered by another chain of events? Perhaps. It might’ve happened many ways – but it happened the one way we know; and in the words of British Ambassador Parsons, that one way began with “the government’s own lighting of the fuse.”84
For much of Khomeini’s recent exile in Iraq, he had been taping mischievous sermons on a double cassette recorder in his seminary, which were shared with his followers around the region. In early January, someone in government – the Minister of Information, the Shah, SAVAK, or maybe the Cabinet as a whole – decided that he needed to be openly discredited.85 An article was printed on page seven of Ettelaat, one of the most traditional Iranian newspapers, which detailed Khomeini’s personal background, his morals, his (false) connection to Egypt and, crucially, his flimsy religious credentials (namely the elevation to “Grand Ayatollah” in the chaos of 1963).
The newspaper editor feared reprisals, and even conferred with the Prime Minister’s office – but the response from high up came to print. When the edition landed on the Saturday evening of 7th January in the Khomeini’s spiritual home of Qom, the students and teachers of the seminaries agreed to meet the very next morning on Sunday, debating the need for a furious response. On Monday, seminary classes were suspended, and – not for the last time in Iran’s journey to disintegration – the Qom bazaar chose to shut its doors. In clashes with police late on the Monday afternoon, between five and nine young men were killed.86 Rumours swept the country that the actual death toll was in the hundreds, and such was the track record of the Iranian state by that stage that there was little the Shah or the press could do to dissuade the talk. Demonstrations and bazaar strikes followed in Isfahan and Tehran, and religious leaders announced the customary forty-day mourning period for those slain in Qom.87
Mother Father Revolution Page 7