by Parisa Reza
Bahram dumps the things he is carrying onto the ground and goes back for everything that is still in the room: books, notepads, newspapers. Talla covers the pile with straw, Ebrahim puts the portrait of Mossadegh onto the straw, and Talla sets it all alight.
Sardar joins them; he has been listening to the radio all day with Talla sitting beside him. They even listened to Tehran radio’s historic silence.
All four of them sit around the fire without a word. Talla thinks her son is out of danger now, but she still recites some verses from the Koran.
What times we live in . . . Sardar thinks. That afternoon he heard the announcement about the coup on the radio: “Your attention please, this is Tehran, in a few minutes . . .” What times! Even during the war, under foreign occupation, even our fear of the Russians and the English didn’t make us burn anything, in the night like thieves, like enemies of the state. My son’s a good man, he’s honest, shame on you! But, as usual, he does not say this out loud, he keeps his words locked inside. Except that this time he thinks it openly, for once he is not afraid the Shah might read his thoughts . . .
Bahram’s mind is flooded with shame and disappointment. He closes his eyes and pictures Mossadegh’s face, and when he opens them he sees that same face burning in his garden. He closes his eyes again and feels Mossadegh stroke his hair with a fatherly hand, before walking away. Bahram would like to go down on his knees before him, to clasp his legs and cry, “No! Don’t go! I’m lost without you, we’re all lost!” But Mossadegh walks away inexorably.
Bahram remembers the Spartans again, and their motto: “Behind the shield or on it.” It occurs to him that right now he is neither behind his shield nor on it, and that this is the definition of shame.
Then he thinks of the foreign minister, Hossein Fatemi, whom he sees as the most noble man on the current political scene. What will happen to him? The Shah despises him. He was first to talk of abolishing the monarchy, and to say that the Shah’s court was a hotbed of corruption . . . he has always been ahead of his time: with setting up the National Front, with nationalizing oil . . . “We have governed this country for three years and not killed a single one of our opponents, because we did not come here to kill our brothers. We rebelled in order to make our country unite against the stranglehold of foreigners. And we believed that even though in the past, under terrible pressure, some of our fellow countrymen were influenced by foreigners and obeyed their wishes, they would change when we secured our own sovereignty. But, alas, wolves beget only wolves . . . ” Fatemi will say before the firing squad. When Bahram hears of his death he will remember this evening, and will weep as only a man can.
A blank moment, the fire burning, nothing else. Then Bahram remembers the words of his party leader, Khalil Maleki: “Dr. Mossadegh, the path you have chosen leads to hell, but we will follow you all the way there.”
Bahram suddenly thinks of Elaheh and realizes her husband will end up right in middle of that hell. He’s had it! A sob makes Bahram shudder. He cries for Elaheh with all his heart. He cries because he has lost her, because she has lost her husband and because everything is lost. Then he thinks of Firouzeh, who is in the winning camp this evening. He can picture her in her Ava Gardner dress, standing in the bay window of her grandfather’s house with a glass of champagne in her hand, clinking it happily with other people. And he pictures Elaheh, her eyes full of tears. It’s too late now to swap things around. And he keeps on crying with anger, against Elaheh and for her; why do the losers always have to be the most sensitive? And then, spontaneously, he remembers the last verses from the book of Louis Aragon poems that Elaheh gave him:
One fine night the world met its demise
On reefs lit up by the shipwreckers’ blaze
But what I saw shining above the sea haze
Were Elsa’s eyes, Elsa’s eyes, Elsa’s eyes.
Ebrahim goes home. Talla invites Bahram in for supper, but he is not hungry. He goes out, walks through Gholhak’s narrow streets for while, with no particular aim. This evening he needs a father, a guide. This evening he feels he does not have the father he would have liked. So he decides to go see Darra’s father, Mr. Tabarrok.
It is the maid, Kokab, who lets him in and suggests he wait in the guests’ reception room. Bahram declines the invitation, saying he needs to see Mr. Tabarrok only for a moment. Kobab goes off to the living room, and Bahram hears a man’s voice calling, “Come in, please.” He steps toward the room, and Mr. Tabarrok is already on his feet, coming to greet him. When Bahram comes into the living room he sees Darra along with his older brother Homayoun and their mother. She gestures kindly to Bahram, inviting him to sit down.
He looks at Darra, and can read the distress in his eyes. He knows that Darra now regrets not following him and joining the Third Power because right now Darra is even more ashamed than he, Bahram, is angry: Darra abandoned Mossadegh, but is still going down with him in his disgrace.
Then he looks at Homayoun, who studies medicine in Paris and has come to spend the summer vacation with his family. He is not involved in all this. He has only one goal in life, to qualify as a doctor, a specialist, in France, to take over the consulting rooms from his aging father who is just a general practitioner, and become the uncontested pride of the family. At this moment Bahram envies him, some people are just like that, nothing can ever blow them off course.
Bahram joins the others sitting cross-legged on a mat, and turns to Mr. Tabarrok.
“I went into Tehran. There’s been a coup.”
“I know.”
“The place was in pandemonium. There were men armed with sticks and knives, there were even women with them. Some people were driving around in cars, brandishing their sticks and yelling, ‘Death to the traitor Mossadegh!’ There were armed police everywhere, all united against Mossadegh. But mostly there were masses of ordinary people, it was as if the whole city was out in the streets, demanding that the Shah be reinstated. But the day before yesterday the whole city was in the streets celebrating the Shah’s exile. How’s that possible? What’s going to happen now?”
“Nothing,” Mr. Tabarrok says flatly. “The arrests will start this evening. They’ll go hammering on doors, bursting into people’s homes, waving their guns, shoving women and children around, and arresting the men. They’ll tie their hands behind their backs, grab them around the neck, and bundle them into cars. They’ll imprison some and shoot others. No one will say a word and no one will move a muscle. People will go back to their old routines. And nothing else will happen.”
“But that’s not possible,” Bahram retorts fervently. “What about all the parties, and all the people who were out in the streets only yesterday, demonstrating every day for months. They’ll be back in the streets, they’ll bring the Shah down.”
Kokab brings in a tray of tea. They all help themselves. Mr. Tabarrok takes a sugar lump, puts it in his mouth, brings his glass of tea to his mouth, and takes one sip, then another, before eventually breaking the silence.
“Mossadegh made mistakes, too,” he says. “Even if everything he wanted to do was fair and needed doing in a perfect world. But he couldn’t do everything in such a short span of time, and on his own. They all get it wrong. They’re all in such a hurry, too much of a hurry. In a hurry to change everything, change people, change traditions. They’re all aristocrats with aristocratic tendencies, noble and arrogant. Good nobility but bad arrogance. They want everything to be the way they see it, they want the best, straightaway. Like in their own homes, where everything comes from the best sources in Iran. They send their servants out specially to buy cheese in Tabriz and cakes in Ispahan. And the same goes for their ideas, their thoughts. Men are sent off to Europe to come back with the best ideas. These people want the best of everything here: the constitution, a secular society, freedom of expression, civil rights . . . Except you can’t just place an order for things like that, or buy them; t
hey have to be learned and they take time, a long time. But they want it to happen quickly, to sweep all the religious aspects of public life aside, they want to do it in the space of a few years, in one fell swoop if possible, and this is in a mainly traditionalist country! And when I say mainly, I mean eighty percent illiterate. Take your time, my friends, take your time.”
The veins in Mr. Tabarrok’s neck are bulging, he is almost shouting. He needs to get it all out this evening. But saying it to his wife and sons would simply have been a husband and father trotting out the same old things again. Bahram is a blessing, God has sent him so that the old man is not stifled by all those words stuck in his throat.
“The worst of it is that, from Reza Shah to Mossadegh, they have the makings of great men, of visionaries. But there’s one thing that not one of them will countenance. Do you know why this country will never see a democracy, or freedom? Why we’ll always be led by dictators? Whether that’s the Shah or someone else . . . ” He takes a sip of tea before answering his own question: “Because all our troubles derive from our own weaknesses.”
He stops there, says nothing more, as if reflecting on how apt this Persian proverb is.
“If we’re to achieve freedom,” Homayoun says after a while, “if we’re to have national sovereignty and a democracy, there need to be a lot of us who believe in it in our hearts, deep inside our souls.”
He says it in a way that implies he already sets himself apart from them.
“Who really believed in it?” Mr. Tabarrok asks, fired up again. “Who? To be honest, of all those who claim they did, there can only be a dozen. The others would all reject an authoritarian regime, but they’ll all use force to implement their own ideas. And not one of them took the time to think about the day-to-day realities of Iranians’ lives, all Iranians. Take your parents, for example, who’s doing anything about their education? They’re recognized as illiterate and then what? Don’t they see? This country’s full of illiterates. Eighty percent! I’m sure that even you’re not doing anything about it. You’re more ashamed of them than anything else. We’re all ashamed of them, because we’ve broken away from them, from eighty percent of our own country. The only people who still talk to them are the mullahs. And then people complain that religion’s too powerful! Even the Communists talk about nothing but the workers in a feudal country! There are so few literate people here that they think they rule the place.”
Mr. Tabarrok is no longer really talking to the others, he is staring straight ahead, as if addressing the nation.
“They need to form an alliance with their own people, and the people need to be in alliance with their leaders. The people as they actually are, not as others would like them to be. Mossadegh managed it for a while, he really did. That’s why he’ll go down in history more than the others. But then where did he go wrong? Ah! I don’t want to judge him. Not this evening, anyway.”
“But we, the Iranians, we’re complicated and difficult to understand,” Homayoun says. “When I come back to Iran now I wonder what a foreigner would make of our obsessive good manners, our endless little thoughtful considerations, our terms of affection bandied about the whole time, calling everyone ‘my soul,’ even some stranger who’s just appeared, and saying, ‘May I be sacrificed for you,’ just as readily to the local grocer as to a child—”
“That’s down to our history,” Mr. Tabarrok interrupts him. “We learned to lie in order to survive. Probably because the truth is unbearable. Accepting once and for all that the empire no longer exists, and a more powerful force has annihilated Persia, and we can’t turn back time, and Cyrus won’t rise from his grave and launch his army against the invaders, or march into Babylon—we can’t cope with it. So we’ve told ourselves lies for centuries, and we’ve become very good at self-deceit. We’re lying to ourselves and to others, about our beliefs, ourselves, them . . . We’d rather tell someone else the truth with a knife behind our back. Some become traitors, others just take pleasure in the tragedy. And tragedy is a story that goes on and on. Tragedy won’t allow for grief because it keeps rising from its own ashes. Our national emblem should have been a phoenix. We enjoy being part of a personal and collective tragedy, it’s theatrical, with endless twists and turns, and we stitch together the same story every day, just using different colored thread, and it’s been going on for centuries . . .
“Do you see, my children, we’d like to think we’re still the Persians of old, it’s like opium, it dulls our pain. So we look away into the distance to avoid seeing what’s under our noses.
“I’m not saying we’re bad or good. I’m saying we are what we are and ever since Naser al-din Shah we no longer want to be us. We want to be them, but at the same time we hate them because we’re not them! We don’t realize that we all depend on each other, us and the Greeks, us and the Arabs, the Mongols, the Turks, the Russians, the Europeans, and the Americans, everyone who’s eyed up or occupied our land. Not out of some meaningful connection or mutual respect but to pool our strengths. They can offer their weapons, their schemes, their technology, and modern advances, us with our words, our appeal, and our charm. Oh, we can recite poetry, we can charm our invaders, we celebrate with them, drink their wine, and intoxicate them and, by seducing them, we force them to adopt our customs and that makes us very proud. Then when drunken revelries are over, we weep about the state we’re in, and it all starts again the next day.
“They’re only that magnificent and that powerful because we make them believe they are, and by making them believe that we make them dependent, and we save our own skins and let ourselves survive respectably. Except that we know and they know that they’re the ones holding the sword. That doesn’t stop us nibbling away at them slowly from the inside until one day the whole edifice they built up so well on our land collapses. And when it falls we cry tears of guilt. Guilty of admiring and loathing them at the same time.
“And when I say ‘we’ I mean you and me. I do realize that but I forget it and tend to mean ‘we the Iranians.’ Because at the end of the day, what do I know about what they want, what all Iranians want? It’s just, my son, I say it because when I’m thinking about what Iran really is I also automatically wipe eighty percent of the population from sight. And you do the same. Do you actually know what your father wants? Have you ever once asked him? Have you asked him, ‘Father, what do you think about Iran? How do you see its future? If you were in power what would you change?’ It’s never occurred to you to do that, has it? It never occurred to me either, to ask my old father what he thought about it all. And I don’t think it occurred to them to tell us what they thought either. Maybe because they felt nothing needed changing. Maybe they felt life is perfect as it is. How would we know? We never asked them.
“So that’s why, my son, this country will never experience peace and freedom in my lifetime nor, I’m sorry to have to say, in yours nor even, I would say, in your children’s. What would be the point of freedom when enslavement is so tragic, tragedy is so poetic, and poetry is so Persian!”
His wife is crying, so is Darra. Sitting in the doorway like any good servant, Kokab has drawn her chador around her face and is also weeping silently.
Mr. Tabarrok looks at them affectionately, one after the other, including Kokab, and he thinks, She’s Iranian, too, it never occurred to us to ask what she thought about all this either.
And this idea that never occurred to him seems strange. The idea of asking Kokab, his maid, what she thinks of, for example, how Iran is governed. Or, simpler still, what she would change if she were in power. Strange and cruel because he realizes that despite everything he has just said, nothing would make this conversation possible, Kokab herself would refuse to answer, at best she would think he was making fun of her. But mostly he himself would never dare to.
Mr. Tabarrok suddenly finds he is shaking as he looks at Kokab’s hidden face. He has just realized that he, too, would be incapable of
forming an alliance with Kokab or with people like her. Because he would immediately lose everything he has fought for all his life: distinguishing himself from them. And he acknowledges that, betraying his own words, he, too, has put the knife in his fellow countrymen’s back before grasping that he was one of them. What have I said? he thinks.
He smiles and then laughs, and tears roll down his face.
“Do you see, my son? Do you see that I’ve just contributed to it? I’ve just given you a tragic lecture about our tragedy! Forgive me, my son, for letting you down.”
But it is too late. His words have been too powerful, as powerful as the sense of powerlessness washing over him. He will not save them and he will not save himself either from this slow shipwreck that started so long ago.
He now knows that all that is left for him is to pass the time until his edifice—the one built by him and those like him on the land of the illiterate eighty percent he has just been describing—until that edifice collapses.
“There is one thing we can be proud of: We Iranians invented the only two things that give men any consolation for their cruel destiny—paradise and wine! And better than that, couched in our beautiful language, our poets serve them up to us in a single verse! Kokab, go and fetch a bottle of wine and four glasses, and pass me the book of Hafez’s poems.”
That evening fires were lit one after another in Gholhak’s gardens. That evening Gholhak’s little streets smelled of burning paper and desperate prayers. Yet the sky was clear and the stars shone. Sardar and Talla sat in their garden, side by side, without a lamp, by the light of the moon. A cool wind brought the smell of jasmine and damp soil; and not a single sound disturbed the familiar silence of Gholhaki nights. Sardar smoked his pipe, Talla poured the tea. There was nothing to bother them that evening, not even their son’s absence. Sardar put his hand on Talla’s.