Mother Father Revolution

by Owen W. Cameron

  My mother steeled herself, and locked eyes with officer after officer. They would look at each other in confusion and fear, aware she was a foreigner and uninterested in the extra complication this might create. Finally, one officer relented and allowed the call. A scream and a cower ricocheted down from the inner cells. She turned in shock, then scrambled inside her uniform for the management telephone list, scribbled on a business card, and in her pocket for emergencies. The feeling of the paper in her fist brought a gasp of relief, but she turned to find an officer behind her, and his rifle at attention. The number she saw first? Dean Johnson, the Director of the Bell Clinic, American, the highest-ranking Bell Employee she knew, and the man she’d badgered into giving her a job all those months ago.

  ‘Hello, Dean? It’s Joan! We’ve been taken by the Army and are in a holding cell.’

  The phone went silent.

  ‘Joan. Tell me exactly where you are.’

  My mother recited each road block, each turn, flustering her recollections and backtracking when she felt she hadn’t been clear. Dean scribbled her recollections on a pad in front of him, always aware that the weak phone lines in the city meant the call could be cut at any moment. Joan spat out every little detail she could remember, followed by a number on the police station compound as they drove in. Dean kept calm but had a steel in his voice that showed his anger and resolve.

  ‘Joan, listen to me very carefully: don’t move. Whatever happens… however long this takes – don’t let them move you anywhere.’

  To this day, Joan and Lucy never learned what high-level phone calls took place that night. They never asked, and Dean never shared. When guards tried to shuffle them in a cell and drag them to other chairs further down the corridor, they fought them off every time – staring each attempt down and doing exactly what Dean had said: not moving.

  The Iranian driver was not by their side; he had been taken elsewhere and stood accused of assisting spies too (being a local, a much scarier fate). The long stretch of time after the call gave no answers, and every minute felt an hour. They knew this much: them being driven to the station was clearly a political struggle between the Army officials who’d brought them in, and the police officers at the compound who didn’t want to get involved. Again, they asked both ladies to go behind the metal bars and wait with the other prisoners, and they declined, saying again and again they had instructions to wait by the phone. Eventually, the police didn’t push it.

  After over an hour, there were more shouts, but with a different tone. Through a set of doors down the dark stretch of the corridor came their ambulance driver. When he saw the ladies, they all smiled, and with a hobbled spring in his step he rushed, but lightly brushed their shoulders when clearly he wanted to hug someone. With a long exhale, he said, ‘We’ve been allowed to continue. But we must move now before things change.’

  A police car was coerced by an official to provide the convoy, and finally they arrived at the Clinic, many hours after they were expected; perhaps expecting colleagues to be sympathetic to their story, the other staff were in fact upset at the delay, because the curfew ambulance had been supposed to drop them home.

  That night, as my mother moved through the Clinic for her rounds, her eyes felt the swelling of exhaustion and elation. She thought about the dark places behind the double doors at the end of the corridor, and the fragility of a system breaking in every place, where no court orders or fairness or due process held meaning anymore. It was another close call, and another few hours of anarchy that made her wonder how many more times luck would be on her side.

  *

  The very next day, on Sunday 5th November, Tehran erupted – wise old men who’d lived through every upheaval of the twentieth century wondered if this ancient city was finally on the brink of ruin. Liquor stores, empty cinemas and hotels were set on fire, while the nightclubs, bars and restaurants of Lalehzar and the Armenian Quarter were torched door by door. Cars and buses laid in the streets, burned out and overturned. Full beer cans melted into the roadside, and the stench of fire, metal and concrete trapped in the thin mountain air above the city.

  As the late afternoon fell, and the sky filled with a gunmetal haze, a group of men broke into a section of the British Embassy, found a consignment of bottled methane gas, and set fire to the Chancery Building and the Guardhouse. The explosions knocked out the telephone exchange and the cypher room. The second most powerful country in Iranian affairs at that moment was left with no secure contact to London. British Prime Minister Ian Callaghan was woken in the night to be told. Several UK officials were nearly killed or trapped in the demonstration outside.

  Conservative South Tehran and the more bourgeoisie North Tehran had rallies converge, showing that it now truly was a classless opposition to Pahlavi rule and modernity. The lasting effect of the day, apart from convincing the military and professional classes that Iran was on the brink of collapse, was the destruction of 400 bank branches around the city.

  The financial system teetered, and the National Bank nearly failed in its role as provider of last resort, or bank of banks. Daily withdrawals by most retail banks were capped at 5,000 Rials (70.00 US Dollars), and foreign exchange remittances at 200,000 Rials (2,900 US Dollars). This was a fraction of the money my father and mother had separately saved.

  Early that Monday, before Les headed to site, Joan opened the driveway gates, and planned to take the Land Rover to Marco Polo Square in Isfahan to see her bank, in the hope of withdrawing the last of her funds. The water was low on the gauge, and in the increasingly cool mornings, she leapt out to check the state of the engine, and whether it also needed warming up. She opened the bonnet, and saw a small note over the radiator in poorly scribbled English: “This time it is a note. Next time it is a bomb.”

  She raced in to show Les the note. My father stood silent for a moment, then said, ‘Get to the bank, I’ll deal with this.’

  The strip of bank branches along Marco Polo Square had not been attacked, but the din through the crowd was troubling, with cars parked three deep and at angles, blocking much of the main traffic. Tellers were scared, with weak army officers crowding the waiting area. Joan’s shouting and persistence counted for little; the full amount could not be withdrawn. Some of both their salaries had been saved and remitted immediately to accounts back home, but between both my parents, they eventually left several thousand US Dollars behind for good. She returned with the car and brought the bad news to Les. They counted out the last of their Iranian Rials and US Dollars and tried to calculate how long they could last – the answer was weeks, not months.

  At 2:00pm that Monday afternoon, Mohammed Reza spoke to the nation in a televised address. It was a decent, contrite speech, and he appealed for unity, with a promise to withdraw from active government. But he also used the word “revolution” to describe Iran’s present moment; it was a mistake, and a needless gift to Khomeini and his core followers.

  If the Iranian elite were nervous, events on 26th November rocked them. A group calling themselves the “Staff Society” of the Central Bank produced a fake list of Iranians who’d transferred ten million tomans (£726,000 at the time) or more out of Iran in the two months leading up to 22nd October. It was too topical and comprehensive to be true, when much of the money smuggled out had been done in very secretive means. But it looked plausible, and included generals, princes, politicians, and even the Governor of the Central Bank himself.

  As a tool of anti-establishment propaganda, publishing the list was a stroke of genius. Across the bureaucracy, it shattered morale. Hard-working officers, middle managers and clerks could no longer trust their own superiors; and crucially, in the military, many who’d been frustrated by indecision with demonstrators now felt like the senior ranks were preparing to desert them. Decades of hard-earned loyalty to the Shah across the armed forces felt close to evaporation.

  After the rage of early November,
the middle two weeks of the month led to a stay of execution. General Azhari, a shrewd but humane member of the Chiefs of Staff, took control of the economy at the Shah’s request, arrested several key strike leaders in the oilfields, and for a few weeks, production ticked closer to pre-crisis levels.

  But the month of November closed with Iran still unable to function. Nightly power cuts and burned-out debris in the streets gave people the visual reminder of the anarchy. Customs officers refused to admit goods at the borders, and much-needed cash failed to reach the outer provinces and villages. The nation was close to buckling.

  *

  It was bitterly cold on Les’s final night in the desert. A few lights and torches sat in the twilight over the site, but the movement was gone, the grinding equipment of full capacity a distant memory. Les sat with his geologist Arash, and the last of the finance team who’d kept turning up to work. They rode two trucks up next to each other and perched on the bonnets with the last dozen beers from the highway store amid the cloudless skies and abundant stars, and a soft green light that rose from the pit and melted into the ridges and sharp valley passes to the north.

  The finance team recited the daily crop of rumours from the village and the bazaar: Kurdish rebellion to the north, Mujahideen rebellion to the south, Azerbaijan wanting independence; many Generals shot, other Generals in control; prisons thrown open, mobs running amok; the Shah close to leaving, the Shah dead; America or the Soviet Union close to invasion.

  Les didn’t particularly care, with his mind on only one thing: Ali had been missing for days. Protests and demonstrations in the village had led to afternoon rallies of shaming and chaos. Some needed to name those working closely with foreigners, and they all knew Ali was a weak target to someone being forced to talk. Arash refused to answer if he’d heard from him; my father would continually ask, and he would look to the floor, and say ‘nothing new’, like he was hiding Ali’s fate.

  With a battery-powered cassette playing Persian music on the windowsill of the finance hut, my father took his beer and wandered around through the last dusk, walking slowly through the cooling sand, and looking on at the incredible waste.

  The site had been beset by strikes for months. Even with loyal workers, the clamour for wage increases in every job made holding out too tempting. Ore bodies littered the separator machinery. Bags of barite sat undelivered to the Gulf coast. On a call to his oil supplies partner, Les had heard stories of the mayhem at the Abidan refineries and coastal ports; poorly laid helipads from the boom now breaking up, miles of unused steel and plastic pipes in collection areas; valves, pumping stations, earthmovers and cranes all standing idle, with cracks up the wharf buildings that were never completed.

  Even from the remoteness of eastern Iran, he could see the entire economy had convulsed, and ground to a halt. On the site, perfectly viable expansion in early 1978 became impossible by year’s end, with mountains of concrete, steel mesh and sand left to show for construction never completed. Les had returned to site at the beginning of some recent weeks, and seen crates from the site kitchen looted, strewn open across the sodden tracks. How could he blame nearby villagers, close to starving after repeated bazaar closures?

  After a final night of laughter and reminiscing, he sent the men who had turned up home, settled what wages he could from the company float, and spent one final morning on the site, drafting letters and explaining the phased drawdown of operations in a series of letters to management.

  In a symbolic moment, just minutes after the sun fell, Arash pulled the last switch on the turbine generators, and the final spurts of power and lighting on the site began to fade. He and Les watched the landscape fall to silence; and as it was before they ever set foot in this place, the desert went deathly quiet. At some point, the oil economy would be revived, and in many phases of operation, work at my father’s mine could be delegated to locals; but he knew many of his superiors had fled months earlier. There would be little recrimination for whatever decisions he made.

  In the final drive back through the eastern desert, it became clear winter was coming. Stretches of the road grew snow-banked and slippery, and the sky hung dark and low over the rocky wilderness. Les knew there was little left to do. He needed to begin his and Joan’s own extraction.

  *

  Joan came to work and heard a rumour three times in one morning – a Bell bus had been blown up, with an American injured; but it was hushed up, with the nurses who treated the injured now piecing together their patient intake forms and visit sheets.

  ‘All the pilots are talking about it, Joan,’ said a patient in the rehab wing.

  That night, my parents discussed their situation. The central heating had failed, the windows were draughty, and there were rumours of oil shortages persisting through the coming winter. Isfahan had no order, with army officers and non-uniformed officials now cheering for the Shah’s demise in daytime rallies. Pamphlets had appeared on the eve of Moharram, calling on all foreigners (the French and news correspondents excluded) to leave Iran. Les had a strong sense of concern for Joan, because she was at an American company who were aggressively pulling Americans out. There was now no semblance of safety for any of them, and no guarantees for anyone left in December. The American School up in Tehran had closed. Virtually all Western families with children had left. The American Embassy had even issued a warning to the remaining 12,000 Americans to “think in terms of long-term Christmas holidays”.115

  A blue chill filled my mother, and after a sleepless night, she followed her instincts. In the last ten minutes of her Friday shift, Joan walked into the Clinic Duty Manager’s office, and demanded her contract release with a reference for her time there. The Duty Manager’s response came without hesitation: ‘Of course, Joan. I’d do no different in your shoes.’

  The chain reaction of my parent’s escape plan began on Friday 1st December 1978, when the Bell Clinic typed off a glowing reference of my mother’s employment, with Dean, the Clinic Director, even taking the time to scribble a handwritten endorsement under the typescript. The co-signers of the letter were to be the very last of the Bell medical staff in Iran. At twenty-four years of age, it was the most complimentary letter my mother had ever received. She has kept the faded original to this very day.

  *

  For the final time, Les walked into the Isfahan medical supplies facility he’d pestered for months and asked if the prosthetic had been delivered. The father that ran the family store was no longer the warm, helpful man of his earlier visits. Together they’d schemed for foreign contacts and sat on the glass cabinet with catalogues and colour options. When my father paid for the prosthetic, they shook hands and exchanged a deep smile; like they were part of a small, good act in the world. Now he kept a pistol in full view behind the counter, while checking through the glass frontage for possible looters. That beaming smile had disappeared.

  ‘I am sorry, Sir. You pay, and I order. But it has never come.’

  My father asked to use the store phone, and made one last call to Arash, who’d gone to see Ali’s family at my father’s insistence for news. It was a long call, with many scratchy drops in the feed. Les knew he needed to be direct, as he had little time.

  ‘Arash, please, just be honest with me. Tell me what his family told you.’

  Arash’s sigh and silence made their last words all the harder to bear. ‘I am sorry Mr Les. It is better you forget about Ali. It is better you forget about all of us.’

  My father left the store and leaned against his Land Rover for a moment in the winter sun. And then he cried, in the same way I saw him cry for Ali more than once in his later life. It was a sorrowful, regretful weep; like he knew Ali’s fate had not been all his fault, but the man he’d shown himself to be could’ve done more.

  He looked to the sky, shed a final soft tear for the loyal friend he would never see again. But the time for pity was not now. His immediate
concern was far greater: how he and Joan would survive.

  *

  Les and Joan’s plans to escape had a critical stumbling block – getting a plane out of Tehran Airport. By law, all Iranian nationals returning into the country had to surrender their passports to the Immigration Office upon entry, to be held there until they wished to depart again. To leave, they had to apply in person to the correct government office, with an identity card, valid reason to go abroad, and a prepaid plane ticket. The need for an identity card ruled out all of the working class and village communities trying to escape. Getting an exit permit took days or week for Iranians, and depending on someone’s position in government, might’ve led to detention for even attempting to flee.

  This sent the typical market for inbound-outbound commercial flights into chaos. There were no schedules, no priorities, and no computer ticketing. A flight sometimes sold its seats twenty times over; families camped in the airport with their worldly possessions until they found a seat. Air traffic controllers were regularly on strike, and the foreign carriers were reluctant to increase capacity beyond a daily flight when planes might be unable to get out. The airport went from chaos to gunpoint calm every few days; no planes leaving would cause the crowds to dwindle to the emptiness of a dawn terminal anywhere in the world, while rumours of new inbound planes would bring them back in the hundreds. Many airport officials got rich off wealthy Iranians jumping the queue; even more Iranian descendants around the world to this day can tell stories from this time, where some or all of their family managed to flee.