After that initial trip, when Behrooz saw that I was sturdy enough to take on mountains, he planned a longer, more challenging journey, a two-day trek starting in a village just outside of Tehran, then through the mountains, and ending in a northern village, inaccessible by car, known for its untouched beauty. The minute we got off the bus in the village of Taleghan, our backpacks strapped to our backs, ready for the trek through the wilderness and into the village of Deleer, a group of little boys crowded around us. It was a beautiful summer morning, bright, birds mad with song, profusion of flowers, tall grass, the air cool and crisp, the joyful chatter of those little boys with their sparkling eyes. An old woman walked in our direction. She wore a floral print dress over baggy turquois pants. In all that radiance, the old woman walked over the bridge that crossed a gurgling stream, past the bus, past every other member of our party, through the crowd of little boys, who parted respectfully for her, and she stopped in front of me. Then, she placed her aged hand right on my belly and looked me directly in the eyes.
“What have you come seeking?” She asked.
I knew enough about the culture of Iran to know that old women were ascribed with a special kind of magic. Old and wise, they were said to be powerful. I wasn’t partial to superstition, but I wasn’t about to trample centuries-old beliefs without a little tact, either.
“Only to walk through the mountains, mother,” I said. “With your permission.” I would have liked to share a cup of tea with her in her home, beside her hearth, and listen to her stories.
“From where are you coming?” she asked.
“America,” I said.
She nodded. We stood beside each other in silence for a while. I watched the boys climb on top of one another’s shoulders to nail a banner from the top of one telephone pole to another, each critiquing the previous boys’ techniques. Someone must have entrusted these little boys with this rather dangerous task, handed them nails and hammer, and instructed them to hang banners from the top of telephone poles for an upcoming event. They took it very seriously. The eldest, who couldn’t have been more than eight, assumed the role of leader. My uncle spoke to the bus driver, then paid him. The rest of the members of our group readied themselves to leave. Somewhere in the distance came the jangle of bells from a flock of sheep. An old man ushered a mule past us, loaded with an impossible burden of sticks.
The old woman finally spoke.
“I, too, came from far away,” she said. “I was a girl when my husband brought me over these mountains from the village where I was born. I have known these mountains, walked them, become like them. Many seasons I have seen in these mountains. Not many more seasons before I return to them.”
Then, she held my arm, came in real close to my face and said, “You will see the face of death, my child, but G.d walks with you. Listen for Him in the mountains. Go. Walk without fear.” She placed a finger on my forehead, then turned away and began walking back to the cluster of earth-plastered homes beyond the wooden bridge that crossed the gurgling stream.
Back during the Iran-Iraq War in the eighties, while my family became refugees in America, Behrooz and his young family stayed in Tehran and left for the wilderness whenever the bombings became heavy. He’d pack up the family, his little boys and his wife, and set off for the mountains. Snow or shine. They lived in the quiet of nowhere while fire rained down on the cities. When the planes stopped droning overhead, they’d walk back into the city and resume life in their home, the kids returned to school, and Behrooz went back to being an architect, not too profitable a career when buildings were being reduced to rubble regularly.
He used to send us pictures, along with letters he wrote in a code our family had devised so that we could communicate with one another without arousing the suspicions of the agents who opened the letters or listened in on the phone conversations that anything of importance was being exchanged. Mundane sentences like “How much did you sell the TV for?” meant “Do you need money?” And with these letters written in double-speak, Behrooz included photographs. His wife and the boys on the peak of a green mountain. The boys on skis in the snow. He and his wife reclining on tapestried pillows on thick rugs in the tents of Bakhtiari nomads in their encampments along a river.
The world I grew up in did not have nomads or missiles or encampments along a river. The world I knew was a suburb of orderly homes, one of two prototypes in a shade of tan with a green manicured lawn, with or without a pool, a repetition of this sameness that stretched endlessly toward oblivion. Two cars in the garage. Two kids, each in their own rooms. A multitude of TVs, air conditioning, washing machine, dryer, a dog, a cat, two-week vacations. Growing up in that American suburb as a kid, there was no wilderness. Even the future was mapped out, clearly. School. College. Career. Marriage. Children. The repayment of debts, followed by retirement, probably in a home for the old, lonely, forgotten. Death.
It had been Behrooz’s stories, far and fantastic from the world I knew, that enticed me and had brought me back to Iran. Stories about avalanches, packs of wolves, of being lost and surviving with nothing more than your wits and your desire to live. After my father’s death, I could feel the muffled angst inside all those suburban homes surrounding ours. The boredom. The rage. We were all like a bunch of caged gorillas, pounding against the glass in fits of desperation, knowing that, somewhere, there existed something more than just this tedious comfort. And something in me hollered for that wilderness. Something in me bellowed for an unknown freedom.
Of course, I appreciated the fact that I didn’t have to go to bed at night fearing imminent death by bomb, though I had a taste of that, briefly, as a child. The war began before my family escaped Iran, so I experienced the air-raid sirens, and the scrambling to the dark basements in the middle of the night, where the landlord’s wife screamed that we were all about to die, while her husband tried to muffle her cries, and the rest of us, trembling, listened for the planes overhead. My first week at elementary school in America, there was an earthquake drill during lunch on the playground. I thought it was an air-raid siren. All the kids around me fell to the ground and covered their necks with their rumps in the air. I stood among all those ducking children and searched the cloudless blue skies until I spotted the airplane passing overhead. I didn’t know how to scream, “Get up and find cover, you turkeys, they can see you!”
I assimilated. I pushed that knowing deep down into some hidden place in my psyche. I replaced those nights of terror with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street. But there was more to my childhood in Tehran than terror. There was an entire world of joy I was forced to leave behind, too. My early childhood in Tehran was spent playing on the streets after school until dusk. All the kids of our neighborhood, right in the middle of the street, games of tag and soccer and hide and seek, explorations of gardens, discoveries, snowball fights, and sledding, riding our bikes, helmetless and haphazardly, planting in community gardens that sprang up in any vacant lot that wasn’t fenced in. We knew all the adults on the street, and they knew us. Everyone watched out for everyone else.
The suburban streets of Los Angeles were deathly quiet in the afternoons, like those Westerns of ghost towns with tumbleweeds. All the kids sat inside, watching TV. Not interacting with real children or real adults, but experiencing that relationship as a viewer, behind a screen. Community was something that happened somewhere else, community as fictional storytelling. Even our tragedies were lived through the TV, only interrupted by commercial breaks. We didn’t live, really. We watched.
But Behrooz had always lived in the quick of things. Death came raining down, and he took his children into the wilderness and taught them how to keep living. And when the war came to an end, and the Islamic theocracy managed a chokehold on the Iranian people, Behrooz watched his kids grow up strangled by this new regime and started taking whole groups of kids out into the wilderness. He took his teenage boys and their friends into the mountains, trekking, where they cou
ld shed the hijab, ignore the Islamic laws, the instilled fear, and live freely, if only for a moment, in nature with nothing more than the bare necessities and their own will to be. So, when he came to America and found me off-kilter, he invited me to Iran to participate in these journeys.
It took a while for me to realize that I needed to accept that invitation. One day, at work in the high-rise beside the CNN building, I was finalizing the subtitling files of some horror film. It was the deadline for that project, but one of the scenes in the film still needed synching. In that scene, a young woman, scantily clad in a bikini, sat in a hot tub before a man broke in upon her, tried to kill her with a power drill, which ultimately fell into the water and electrocuted her to death. I watched this scene twenty-five times, checking the dialogue in twenty-five languages, and that was when I realized the utter futility of my work. I had just witnessed my father die a long, slow, devastating death. How could I squander the life given to me? What was I doing at this desk? So I completed that project, walked to the human resources office, and told them I quit.
Now I was standing here, in this little village tucked into a valley in the midst of the Alborz mountains, and an old woman, a village elder, had just placed her hand on my belly and read the signs, then touched my forehead and commanded me to walk bravely forth into the wilderness.
And wilderness trekking in Iran was not easy. There were no trails. There were no kindly rangers or little trail books to sign your name and write a message. There were no signs mentioning if you were on the right path, no developed drinking spouts for water, and if you got lost or stuck hanging from the side of a cliff, no search-and-rescue team would come to save you. There were, however, shepherds strewn here and there with their flock of sheep or goats. Other than that, it was a vast desolation, a reckoning with your own mortality.
After the old woman’s blessing, we started out of the village. Behrooz headed the team and Pouya brought up the rear. Behrooz studied topographic maps and knew how to find freshwater springs. Our route followed this path, from spring to spring, with Behrooz as our chief. Behrooz was a Jewish man living in a predominately Muslim country and, more often than not, a country hostile toward Jews and other religious minorities. The people who participated in the treks he led were mostly Muslim. And they loved Behrooz. Adored him, respected him, entrusted their lives to him and learned from him. This was a narrative often kept from the Western audience, the love and respect and friendship that existed between Muslims and Jews, so that when we heard that such a thing happened, when we saw it, it came as something of a shock. Sure, the strife between the two parties was real, but it was also the only story we were told. So here’s another story, to add to the collective narratives of the East . . .
Once upon a time, in Iran, a Jewish man took a crowd of Muslim kids under his wing and led an exodus of them out of the tomb of the city and into the wilderness, where the kids laughed and walked and breathed in freedom, where they found themselves and the strength and the courage to walk back into that city without losing the beautiful glimmer of hope that sustains the human soul.
And what a pretty wilderness it was. Tall, green mountains. Rushing rivers. Wildflowers all over. We climbed to summits, climbed down from summits, climbed to other summits. By sunset, we arrived at our first camp, at the top of a mountain, which plateaued in a grassy field full of irises. In the center of this plateau was a beautiful, blue lake. A German seismologist and his Iranian guide and their cute little donkey loaded with supplies had already set up camp. The Alborz mountains have a record of significant seismic activity, and this guy had come out to study them. He was handsome, in a Germanic way, and he came up to our group, not speaking a word of English, which all the kids spoke, and the only way he could communicate was through the translations of his Iranian guide. The German made it known right away that he had been “dry” for quite a spell, and would we be kind enough to share some of our wine with him? Soon, we were all drinking beside a blazing fire, singing “Hotel California” beneath the stars that sparkled overhead.
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, alcohol is illegal. If someone is caught with it, unless they can afford a very handsome bribe to the police, the prison ward, and the judge, they can expect a minimum of eighty lashes from a whip. In the old days, the Jews and the Armenians, who were exempt from the prohibition of alcohol, made their own wine and sometimes sold it to Muslim patrons, in secret. Uncle Behrooz had carried on the tradition of making wine. Each year, at the near-end of the grape season, he’d send his sons to the fruit bazaar to buy crates and crates of grapes, and the boys disinfected the bathtub and invited friends to mash these grapes.
Pouya believed that the wine, both its taste and its potency, was directly linked to who stepped on the grapes, their mood and thoughts at the time, the combination of the people in the tub, and their particular relationships to one another, so he carefully orchestrated the whole thing. That summer I made wine with them, we played Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew,” and read out loud from Omar Khayyám’s poetry, and drank wine from the previous year straight from the bottle. Pouya swore, the following year, that the bottles from that barrel led to a terrifying and exhilarating drunkenness. Behrooz’s apartment building was situated between a mosque and a Bureau of Intelligence. The Intelligence building had a floodlight on the rooftop that shone right into Uncle Behrooz’s apartment. Meanwhile, the mosque was always celebrating the birth or the death of this or that imam, with amplified chanting and chest beating, and with the comings and the goings of the devout. To be in a tub full of grapes with Miles Davis playing, surrounded by the police and dead imams, it was terrifying, and it was exhilarating.
After a few more rounds of “Hotel California” interspersed with attempts at ballads by Metallica with the German beside the fire, one by one, we retired to our tents and fell into a deep sleep. When we awoke, the seismologist had already packed and left, and there were two large billy goats sitting on either side of Behrooz as he sipped his morning tea and watched the mist rising from the valley below. A shepherd showed up to collect his billy goats and he told us there was a faster path to our next stop, Amoorok, a little encampment on a river where a large family of nomads lived with their sheep in the summer months. The shepherd pointed us in that direction and swore it would get us there in two hours’ time, instead of the full day hike we had planned. Behrooz took him at his word, and we changed our route.
It was not that the shepherd was dishonest. His reality was different from the common man’s. He lived in the open, beneath the bare skies. He drank the milk of his goats, and sometimes ate the flesh. He watched for wolves, and slept among dogs just as fierce. And his idea of a path was a goat’s idea of a path. His feet were trained differently, his sense of danger, of falling off a cliff, of rockslides, these instincts were totally different from ours. Perhaps he could have walked that day’s hike in a couple of hours. But we couldn’t. In fact, after several hours of walking, the sun ready to set, we still hadn’t reached our destination. We stood in the middle of nowhere. Lost.
That night, I sat at the top of a rocky mountain, leaning against a ruined hovel, a couple walls of rocks kept in place by mud that, maybe a hundred years ago, served as some poor shepherd’s shelter against the elements. We had made a fire and heated up the last of our food. There wasn’t much singing. We were all pensive, and we watched the shooting stars overhead quietly until we retired to our tents to sleep.
Morning came. Behrooz boiled up a bit of bulgur wheat he kept at the bottom of his pack for emergencies, and we each ate a spoonful. Our water bottles were pretty low, and we didn’t know when or where we’d find clean water again. We started walking. By noon, we were a haggard bunch. It didn’t feel like trekking anymore. Now, it was a downright fight to survive. Our bodies were fatigued, thirsty, hungry, and I was the weakest link in the whole group. Behrooz asked Pouya to stay behind and walk with me, while the rest forged ahead to find a way off that mountain.
There we were, on the top of a very high mountain, at the edge of which was a very sharp cliff, and the distance between where we walked and where things fell off into the abyss was very little. At one point, I accidentally kicked a stone. It tumbled twice and disappeared off the ledge. Just like that, one tumble, two, and gone forever into the unknown.
That’s when I froze. I could not take another step forward. I was done. I stood there, beneath that mercilessly hot sun, and then collapsed into a little heap. Pouya came strolling up to me and said, “Let me carry some of your stuff.”
Funny thing, ego. Even though I was convinced that I was dying, no hyperbole, I mean I was literally dying, I believed that my pack was a metaphor for the burden I was meant to carry in life, and no one but I could bear that weight, so I said, “No. I can do it.”
Pouya knelt down, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Sometimes, you have to give others the opportunity to do good, too.”
And that was a good enough argument for me. I really did need to work on trusting others, and being close to falling to my death felt as good a time as any to start. He emptied my pack into his, placed the empty bag back on my shoulders, and helped me to my feet. But still. Despite my trusty Das Meindl boots, which the salesman had assured me would carry me through any situation, my feet refused to walk. Some synapse between my brain and my feet had snapped, and the command to walk just didn’t reach my heals any longer.
Standing there, I remembered my mother on the day of my father’s death. During the three years of my father’s illness, my mother slept on the floor beside his bed. She bathed him, dressed him, fed him, searched the world for a cure that might help him, prayed for him, wept with him, carried him when he couldn’t walk anymore. I was never home, and when I was, I was unpredictable and angry.
Home Is a Stranger Page 8