Major American contractors had arranged private charters for their staff, but these were American citizens first, and the breakdown in law and order in Isfahan meant Joan could not afford to wait for her turn in the queue. They realised they needed to run the gauntlet of the airport themselves.
Les rang six travel agents in Isfahan on the morning of Wednesday 6th December. All of them had power outages, or didn’t answer, or had no reliable telex connection to reserve seats on an outbound flight. Then Arash, my father’s loyal Iranian geologist, came around one last time to the apartment with news – there were rumours of an agent not far from Marco Polo Square, who’d been helping to extract the children of senior Iranian military families. His telex connection was working, and their tip-offs for inbound flights were highly reliable. My father took the address and leapt in the Land Rover.
*
It was before noon. With strikes across the city, and university students refusing to attend classes, the crowds were already building. Les crossed the river and turned into Ferdosi Street, with a demonstration slowly building; it had no formation, and was still in pieces, not yet a mob but so easily a mass close to turning. Around him the buildings felt tall, and the alleys narrow. The car slowed to a walking pace, and he decided to turn off on a nearby street and walk the last six blocks to the agent.
The agent’s address was a side street. As he turned down it, a young man made eye contact with Les, staring and acting motionless. My father put his head down and kept walking. Twenty feet into the street, he heard voices from the main road behind him, and words he didn’t understand. Strips of rubbish were laid out across the single lane, with tattered billboards from a riot and fire many months earlier that had still not been cleaned up.
It was a little hole in the wall, with a glass door that had warped and needing shaking to open. The lights were low, with no bulbs changed in months, and a grey tiled darkness filled the two desks at the back of the office. Still the Shah’s face hung from the wall.
‘I need two tickets out of Iran. Two non-Americans.’
A man walked around the desk to meet my father, guardedly wanting to know more.
‘Passports. Let me see.’
My father presented their separate Australian and British passports, safely inside a plastic sleeve that wrapped over. He held them for a half a minute, rifling through the pages, and reviewing the stamps. His guard came down, and he spoke with a different, softer tone.
‘This is very difficult for me, my friend. You are double foreigners? Very dangerous.’
‘I understand,’ my father said.
‘When can you go? Soon, no?’
‘We can go whenever we need. We would only need a few days. When are the flights?’
‘Swiss Air, very difficult. Air France, British. No. Let me see.’
The agent barked instructions to a man behind a glass back section. He emerged, the left of his face swollen and bruised. He stared blankly and didn’t smile.
‘Please wait five minutes, my friend.’ My father nodded and looked behind to the alleyway beyond.
‘Please, my friend, wait here. Don’t go back outside.’
The inside of the travel agent was like a land that time forgot. Faded brochures of the Gulf resorts, Paris and London had spilled across the floor, gathering dust. A world map on the wall had been torn and not replaced. Papers piled high everywhere. Every few minutes, the telex would whirl and tap. My father was relieved every time he heard it – like a gateway to the outside world still existed.
By a battered lampshade in the back room, the two men pointed and gawked at the telex, while the main agent argued with someone on the phone. All Les could do was wait. Finally, they emerged.
‘We have two tickets. Lufthansa. Frankfurt. You pay American cash? Yes.’
‘Great news!’ my father said.
‘Today is Wednesday.’
‘Yes.’
‘You fly Friday, at dawn.’
‘Wait, what?’
‘Friday. You are lucky, my friend. You wait longer, I don’t know what happens.’
This gave Les no time. It was now the early afternoon on Wednesday. A call with their last expat friends in Tehran would give them a place to stay on the Thursday night. But it was a day’s drive at the best of times. And that involved driving the straightest route possible – through the fanatical heartland of Qom. Remarkably, the flight prices were not inflated. Les paid in cash, confirmed the tickets through the telex, and received multi-part tickets that could be ripped out at each airport. He stuffed them in his inside jacket pocket, and beamed with a smile.
‘Thank you so much for helping us get out.’
The agent smiled and sighed. ‘You are welcome my friend. But we will all not be so lucky.’
They nodded to each other, and he left.
When Les returned through the rickety front door and back into the sunlight, he looked left up to the main road, and struggled to breathe. A short burst of gunfire stopped him, running like a straight line up the empty street, barely a few feet from the front of his shoes. For a moment he was still. His face pumped with blood, and he squinted to make out the danger in the distance. Standing in a semi-circle of plain-clothed armed men was the man who’d stood and stared on his walk in. Around him were half a dozen automatic rifles, and another spread of men scattered over two trucks with pro-Khomeini flags.
Nobody moved. For an uncountable moment, the street, the city, and my father’s world all slowed to a timeless state.
‘American!’ the leader shouted.
‘No…’ my father whimpered, barely able to hear himself.
‘American!’ the man said again, to loud group cries in Farsi that thundered down the narrow incline of the street.
Another militia member on the truck fanned out his gun like a crossbow and let a round rattle into the roofs and second floor windows of the street – this time, it was not a burst, but a shower. Les rolled to his right shoulder, crumpling in behind a nearby car and careful to put weight on the tickets in his left jacket pocket. Again, the bullets died down, and the street fell to silence. Like a cannonball rolling through the street, after the bullets came a long roar of laughter. They were toying with him; perhaps trying to scare him, but certainly oblivious to the laws of mathematics that meant the bullets had to ricochet somewhere.
Mobs are fickle, and Les knew he didn’t have a lot of time. All it would take was one member of the militia to bring the truck around, seal him in, and it would be a grim ending. Two alleys veered off on the opposite side of the street, and he knew they were too narrow to fit the trucks. And once again, that instinct of the Birthday Ballot returned for my father; a deep impulse to run while the laughter still hung in the air, when it meant certain death if any of the group had their guns cocked and loaded.
His legs sprung. He left the shade of the bullet-riddled car and in an instant felt the full face of light in the open street, crossing the line of gunfire and hurtling to the blind spot on the far alley. He didn’t remember anything of those fleeting seconds – in some ways, he probably didn’t even know them in any meaningful way. He might’ve thought of small things, old mistakes, or simply put the big thoughts of life out of his mind. He felt the light of the street.
And then he heard the gunfire. And the concrete crumbling of the boulevard walls, and the glass window of the travel agent shatter behind him. And the truck roaring into action. And the screams and bullets. And by the time he heard the engine of the truck roaring, it didn’t sound as loud as his feet, and the dry panting that ran through his chest, or the scream he let out as he leapt clear of an ancient garden wall and landed on his ankle, watching a few US dollar bills spill through the grass, but somehow staying balanced and continuing to run. And the blur of the gunfire drifted, and within a minute, he was two streets in the grid over, and nearly at the Land Rover.
And then a moment came when Les couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched his jacket pocket. A blue, ill feeling ran from his throat to his heart, and he slowly went to pat the left side of his chest, to see if he felt the envelope holding the Lufthansa tickets.
He had known a version of this moment many times; patting his pocket to feel the thick padding of his wallet or shaking the tail of a blazer to hear the jangle of house keys. But this was different. In the second he went to reach for the pocket, and after remembering that some of the US bills had fallen, he couldn’t think of a bigger moment in his life; not the day he was expelled from university, not the Birthday Ballot, and not even the gunfire of minutes before. His hand reached, and he felt the envelope, crumpled and a little torn, but wedged low in the depths of the pocket. And he closed his eyes, felt his head fall against the headrest, and laughed once more, engulfed in a strange cocktail of relief he would probably never know again.
*
With the tickets secured and the Wednesday sun falling in Isfahan, Joan and Les sat around their dining table, plotting an escape into Tehran by curfew on Thursday. Through a mix of light bulbs and fading oil lamps, they searched through all the files, documents, papers and diaries that had made up their life in Iran – in just an hour or two, they had to determine what parts of their life they would abandon or renege on, and what papers and clearances might be necessary to get out of the country.
My parents agreed they could take no more than a suitcase each, with clothes and passports only. When they considered every other item to take, they couldn’t rule out a bag search at the airport, and a pedantic reason for them to be held off a flight. Les had been collecting quartz, mica, barite and other museum-quality specimens from his walks through the mine site and desert edges – his head sank when he realised they all had to be left behind. Joan stuffed in one picture frame, and a single mosaic tile, and remembered that she’d at least brought a gold samovar and small rug out on a prior visit back to Scotland in November 1977.
By this point, Qom was near combustion. The government had not controlled the city for nearly a month, and if the car was trapped in any demonstration, they could easily be dragged through the car doors into a mob.
Arash provided unwavering support and agreed to drive the Land Rover the entire way. My father made it clear Joan’s escape was the priority. Arash had spoken with friends in the city and come up with a plan that involved a coffin he had borrowed from a funeral business on strike. Arash would drive, my father would sit in the passenger seat, and my mother would be wedged between the two, with the coffin behind. If trouble appeared ahead, or a crowd or militia group refused to let the car pass, Les would run from the vehicle as a distraction, and my mother would roll over the back seat to lie in the coffin, with Arash telling future checkpoints that he was driving a body to Tehran.
As they packed the car, my mother saw the coffin in the back – simple wooden slats and a flat lid that just fitted. She checked for air holes; naturally, there were none. However, Arash assured her they would tilt the lid at an edge for her to breathe. In her own private moments, she practised her circular breathing, and tried to calmly hold her breath for as long as she could.
It was a very uncomfortable trip up towards Qom; a tight squeeze and an air of tension the whole way, as Arash regularly changed the manual gears on Joan’s legs. It was against everything he’d been taught as an Iranian man, and yet the situation demanded it. All through the desert highway stretch, they wondered: would the plan work? The obvious point of weakness was Les’s height, and broad frame, distinctly different from most short, stocky Iranian men. He was desperate for a haircut in Isfahan, but there wasn’t enough time. He wore a big warm jacket, fawn jumper and ordinary shirt. He also had a dull pair of trousers and work boots. For the entire ride, they had nothing in their hands – theoretically ready to run.
*
The streets in Qom had a different air. For ten months, riots, fanatics and cleric martyrs had set the tone of the daily discussion. Heavy shooting in Tehran the week before had given the people of Qom the feeling that street junctions should be occupied and clogged with protestors almost every hour of the day. This way, loitering and strength in numbers made it hard for authorities still loyal to the Shah to mobilise and suppress. As a result, traffic was agonisingly slow. Arash would stand motionless for minutes at a time, then try to wind the steering wheel around a smaller car or cluster of young men standing in the street. All the while, my father feared their eyes; stung in his memory was the look of the man in the street back in Isfahan. In his mind, all he had to do was keep his head low, and ensure that chain reaction wasn’t needlessly started.
Then Arash took a risk. To avoid the gridlock around the slip roads by the river, he moved through two main intersections in central Qom, because policemen on point duty meant the traffic was still flowing. A crowd could be heard to the right, but a bus blocked his and Les’s view. My mother poked her head up, hearing the sharp, raucous chants getting louder. Arash thought the best chance was to run a yellow light and beat any jam if police allowed the crowd to move through peacefully. Seeing two cars move ahead, he put his foot on the accelerator and followed them, but halfway through the intersection, an officer screamed at Arash to wait back, so one lane could cross the other way. He now had been blocked, as the two cars ahead of him had sped through. They were trapped.
Les and Arash looked to the right. It was a pro-Khomeini crowd, with banners reading “Death to the Shah!” and portraits of the city’s most revered clerics. Fists flew in unison in the air, and men in leather jackets stormed the pavements, imploring strangers to join in.
‘Joan…’ My father’s voice trembled, as my mother wriggled her legs around the gearbox and shuffled to roll back towards the coffin. No one spoke. The crowd moved closer. With one hand over the seat, and her other hand patting the floor of the Land Rover, she leapt onto the edge of the coffin lid and felt the sharp cut wood and splinters along its edge. Still she crouched, waiting for the signal to roll and dive. The front curve of the mob began to move past two cars to their right, with men standing on car bonnets and leaping for effect. My father held back pants of breath and started to look through the traffic to his side. He was crestfallen when he realised his side of the car was facing the rally, with not even his own car as a shield if he needed to run. He kept his eyes fixed on the glove box. Arash and many cars were tooting their horns every few seconds, some in support and others to get the traffic moving. As the crowd twisted through the cars, it became clear Les would be jammed tight, with no escape. So Arash took another risk.
He drove his wrist into the horn, and put his foot down on the accelerator, ignoring the policeman’s demand to wait. The bull bar on the Land Rover forced two cars in the cross-traffic to swerve and brake, and with the policeman’s screams and rattles on the car window, and the crowd jabbing flags and fists into the glass, Arash sped through, with Les and Joan closing their eyes in fear. Seconds later, they’d pulled through, found a gap and reached a turnoff that had cars moving. No one dared look back in the rear-view mirrors, and no one spoke for ten minutes; they all knew how close they’d come. Joan slid close the lid on the coffin, and gripped its lip for a brief moment, thinking she’d probably never need to crawl into one alive again.
*
By evenin
g, they arrived at the Scottish manager’s house in Tehran – oddly, in the room my mother spent her first ever night in Iran in. Glen’s wife apologised through a nervous meal, as they didn’t have the usual food supplies and took efforts to stay from the glass at all times. Glen had a low silence over dinner.
‘Be careful at the airport, I’ve heard some awful stories. Planes trying to take off so fast, multiple people sitting on the same seat, and pets rolling down the aisles during lift-off. Just find a way to get on and get out.’
That night, Les and Joan sat awake in a double bedroom with their luggage, alone with their thoughts and the sound of gunfire down the street. Les repeatedly told Joan they were decoy recordings, but it was more a comment to assuage both their fears. The rooftops were vacant; gone were the days of a last nightcap and quiet conversation over the skyline.
The next day, Les wanted to protect Arash, and so they sent him back to the mine with the Land Rover and some of their last US cash in his hands. Les wanted a long, meaningful hug, but with both Les and Joan now safe in Tehran, Arash’s mind had turned to his own family, and problems that wouldn’t be easily solved. Their goodbye was swift and efficient, with Arash turning the Land Rover across the traffic, slamming on the accelerator in the morning dark. Les and Arash never saw each other again.
Now there was only the airport, where rumours of militant control or chaos could vary from day to day. In a bygone era, wealthy Iranian families would board Lufthansa flights, land in Munich by noon, be driven to lunch in limousines, and return to Tehran by sunset. But times had changed. As Les and Joan arrived in the taxi, they saw fences and guns, and people only being allowed through with valid tickets. The nervous driver put his foot on the brakes 300 feet from the drop-off and asked them to walk.
Mother Father Revolution Page 11