The Cypress Tree

by Kamin Mohammadi

  Fatemeh Bibi grew up in a rambling house set behind mud brick walls, outside which the port town bustled with a stream of goods and people. These southern ports have played host to passers-by for generations and once Vasco de Gama opened up the sea route from western Europe to India in 1497 European travellers sailed through too, bequeathing to the likes of my family their green eyes and fair skin.

  Maman-joon entered the world when Iran was first clamouring for freedom and democracy. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905 to 1911 had left Iran with a constitution and a majlis (parliament), the first country in the region to implement such nascent democratic processes – but the corrupt Qajar shahs were manipulated by Imperial Russia and wave-ruling Britannia who, behind the scenes, played the Great Game – the contest for dominion over the near East and central Asia – and Iran was a colony in all but name.

  The shahs of the Qajar dynasty were weak and they carved up and sold off the country, giving concessions for railroads, for banks, for printing Iran’s first paper money, for fishing for caviar, for drilling for oil. Oil was struck in 1908, and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed. In 1914, a certain Winston Churchill, Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, persuaded the British government to buy a majority share in the Company; Iranian oil had become crucial to them in 1912 when the Royal Navy converted all its ships from coal- to oil-fired engines. With Great Britain taking 84 per cent of the profits of Iranian oil, by the time Europe was rumbling towards war, profits from the nascent oil industry were already clinking in British coffers.

  When the Great War broke out, Iran announced her neutrality, but this did not deter Russia from occupying the north of the country, while the British added the oil fields of Khuzestan to their patch. The land was riven by fighting and famine – the Great War spared no one in its brutality, least of all a backward Eastern nation such as Iran that was so strategically situated. By the time the war was over, the country was in chaos. Tribal revolts and economic failure assailed the weak and unpopular shah. The populace, having survived the battle of the Great Powers in their land, were now starving to death or falling to typhus and the influenza epidemic.

  The war had brought nothing but devastation for Iran; her border provinces lost a quarter of their population to the fighting of foreign powers. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Russia had quit the war and Britain was left as the sole Great Power in Iran. In desperation, Iranians resorted to that most Iranian of desires: the wish for a saviour. Whether expressed as belief in Imam Zaman, the Mahdi who will come to save the righteous at the end of days, or in support for a foreign power, we Iranians are apt to always look outside ourselves for both salvation and blame.

  The country needed someone to take it in hand, a strong man, someone dynamic. That man was Reza Khan, a soldier born to a humble family in Mazandaran, in a small mountain village in the moist, green northern province of Iran. Reza joined the Cossack Brigade at the age of fifteen, with no formal education, unable to read or write, but his ambition and commanding presence saw him rise swiftly through the ranks. He attracted the attention of the British who saw in his raw form their next ideal puppet and they supported him as he marched on Tehran to execute a bloodless coup so efficient that in the morning no one realised there had been a revolution in the night. Within a few months, Reza Khan had been appointed Minister for War with responsibility for the whole army. He cut an impressive, if rather grizzled figure, was a formidable disciplinarian, stood ramrod straight and was adored by his soldiers. Reza Khan had arrived and he was determined to modernise the country, whatever the British thought.

  Maman-joon once told me that when she was a child and still living in Bushehr, Reza Khan had stopped at the port town on his way to Khuzestan to quash a tribal rebellion, and her father, Mirza Esmael Khan, had been a member of his welcoming party. Afterwards, her father had described the great man with such animation, exaggerating so enthusiastically for his daughter’s benefit, that Fatemeh Bibi could never be persuaded that Reza Khan was anything but a ghoul – a giant with frizzy hair standing on end, an onion for a nose and manners so uncouth that he was capable only of shouting. That was the first time she had become aware of him, perhaps the only time she had given him thought, but his influence was to shape her life. His rush to modernise the country and his impatient bulldozing of traditions sent out ripples that reached even Fatemeh Bibi’s walled-in world.

  In February of 1924, a new majlis, under Reza Shah’s mastery, passed a series of reforms that imposed a two-year national service, and abolished honorary titles, obliging all citizens to obtain birth certificates and register a family name, as well as announcing extra taxes that would finance the Trans-Iranian Railway. Reza Khan’s reforms did not stop there; the old lunar calendar was replaced with a solar one which, though still dating from the Prophets Hejira to Medina, replaced the Muslim names of the month with names of Zoroastrian gods drawn from ancient Persian beliefs.

  The new centrally organised government of Reza Khan needed civil servants to administer the imperial domains now that tribal leaders and feudal landlords no longer held such sway. Lands were being taken in lieu of taxes and resources finally feeding back to Tehran, and Reza Khan himself was proving no stranger to cushioning himself against the fickleness of Persian fortune with a nest feathered by lands and factories of his own. Reza Khan, casting an envious eye over the achievements of Atatürk next door in Turkey, toyed with the idea of making Iran a republic. But, finding the public and the ulama unreceptive, he abandoned the idea and, with the British whispering support in his ear, he instead plumped for ousting the Qajar shah and taking the throne himself.

  Reza Shah was crowned Shahanshah – king of kings – in Tehran on 26 April 1926. The illiterate army officer with no surname chose the name Pahlavi for his dynasty, one heavy with heroic overtones. He ordered a new crown to be made and his coronation robe was of white, pink and black pearls sewn together. The new shah sat on the Peacock Throne, built of uncut jewels: diamonds, rubies, pearls and turquoises. Emeralds hung as tassels over the arms of the throne, 200 carats each. The different ethnicities of Iran were represented in processions of tribesmen that marched through Tehran, their heads held high. The foreign dignitaries attended parties every night in the new king’s honour, the night skies of Tehran illuminated with fireworks. A preternaturally solemn boy of eight attended the coronation attired in miniature military uniform – Reza Shah’s son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was formally pronounced the Crown Prince of Iran and paid much conspicuous respect, even though it was rumoured that his father thought him soft.

  Reza Khan had become the Shah of Iran. The country had less than a thousand schools and only eight miles of railway. There was much work to be done.

  * * *

  After Reza Shah was crowned, Maman-joon’s life abruptly changed. My great grandfather and his brother gave up their hereditary lands to the crown and oversaw the transportation of their households to Khorramshahr in Khuzestan. The khans of Hayat Davoudy gave up their ancestral rights for positions in the new bureaucracy that Reza Shah’s centralisation of power called for. His victory in quelling the post-war tribal rebellions and bringing troublesome provinces such as Khuzestan to heel required a different way of running things, pulling together the threads that knitted Iran and with them spinning a new nation state.

  Fatemeh Bibi was transplanted to the unpromising soil of Khuzestan. Once there she flourished, settled happily and always called it home. Known as the birthplace of the nation, millennia back, a people known as Persians settled here even before making it to Fars, laying the foundations for all the splendid pre-Islamic dynasties: the Achaemenids, the Parthians, the Sasanids.

  Maman-joon had to wait until the ripe age of eighteen before she was wed. Her contemporaries were promised in marriage by the age of nine, but Maman-joon’s father doted on her so much that he never wanted her to marry. ‘I will keep her by my side until all her teeth fall out,’ he used to say. After rejecting suitor after suitor,
he had been persuaded by his wife not to let their daughter ‘remain in this unnatural state any longer’. Fatemeh Bibi herself was keen to get married and start her life, and all the jokes of being pickled whenever she attended a wedding were beginning to grate on her soft temper. Eventually her father had chosen a merchant named Abbas Abbasian, a serious-looking man, with a lean frame and dramatically strong features, hooded eyes, high cheekbones and a hawkish nose that had taken some growing into. As a skinny boy his nose had dominated not just his face but his whole body, but as a man in his early thirties that strong hawkish proboscis that is even now being borne on prettier faces than his in places as far-flung as North America and western Australia by the children of his children, had come into its own.

  The man who finally married the cherished Fatemeh Bibi had grown up with none of her privilege. Abbas had no formal education, but he was a sharp boy, quick to absorb information and particularly brilliant at turning chance his way. After experiencing famine in Tabriz during the Constitutional Revolution, Abbas’s family had moved to Esfahan where Abbas had grown up in the mostly Armenian neighbourhood of Jolfa. Before the Great War began, he had already exhausted the slim pickings in Esfahan for work and, at the age of fifteen, he decided that he should seek his fortune abroad. When the stories from Khuzestan caught his ear, Abbas was ready to quit his family and try his luck in the new world being built by the British in Abadan. He took his cousin Akbar aside and started pouring into his head the stories he had heard, of the booming new job market in Khuzestan. Yes, he had heard Khuzestan was unbearably hot and that in winter a wind blew that pierced your very soul, but what of that? They could make money!

  Abbas and Akbar pooled their savings, packed their bags, said goodbye to their families and left behind the dusty streets of Jolfa washed by their mothers’ tears and the glorious turquoise tiles of the Safavid city for the long and arduous trip across the country and its biggest desert, their destination an unknown dream set somewhere in Abbas’ imagination.

  Abbas and Fatemeh Bibi had become husband and wife in a simple aghd in November 1932. She often told me that she had instantly, instinctively known that this was her man for life, come what may. She had sat cross-legged on the floor, her head covered, and next to her had settled this tall thin man she had never met, this stranger she was to spend her life with. A white veil was stretched above their heads, held up by female members of her family, while a cousin rubbed together two plump cones of sugar, raining granules of sweetness on the veil, a symbol of the taste of their life together.

  The first time she saw her future husband was in the mirror set in front of them where they sat on the ground side by side. ‘Naneh,’ she confided to me years later, ‘I wasn’t supposed to look – it’s not seemly. But I couldn’t resist it. I was so happy to be married at last.’ He was thirty-five and Fatemeh Bibi was eighteen but she felt the ripeness of her age more acutely than his.

  Abbas Abbasian had made his fortune in the early boom of the oil industry and was settled in Abadan in a large house and made a living from selling ice. In the heat of Khuzestan and with Abadan’s large British population so inordinately fond of their G&Ts, ice was a precious commodity and Abbas was doing well. The skinny youth had used all his native wit to find work and build a nest egg since arriving in Abadan. Working on the miles and miles of oil pipelines which had to be laid to transport the liquid money spouting out of various wells in Khuzestan to the refinery in Abadan, he had picked up enough English to be able to charm his masters. Soon he was the favourite odd-jobman for the British running the various oil projects – as well as laying pipelines, roads and jetties had to be built too; the great industry of oil needed modern facilities to turn that black rain into gold coins.

  Never one to miss an opportunity, Abbas had diversified his work whenever he could. He worked and he sold on whatever he came across, including bits of opium that he himself did not want and gradually, he found he was buying and selling opium at ever increasing profits. Opium was a favourite – and legal – pastime for the masses that now thronged Abadan, from the old aristocratic men who loved to lounge at home with friends and forget the aches in their bones by sucking on beautifully made pipes, to the poor Arab workers who slept dozens to a room and made little money from their backbreaking work, to the refined British bosses who amused themselves ‘playing Persian’ by stretching out on luxurious silk carpets and takiehs with a pipe at their mouths. Abbas, long an opium eater himself, soon doubled his income with his opium dealing and, as the years wore on, he prospered.

  I have a photo of my grandfather from this period, a black and white picture that was shot in a photographer’s studio with an elaborate backdrop, my grandfather and his cousin standing alongside another man whose name has been lost. He stares into the camera with a suspicious glare, his long frock coat, slim trousers and Pahlavi cap set off by the small moustache that sat above his lip like a button. His hair is jet black and he is skinny, his eyes slightly slanted, his cheekbones nearly as prominent as his nose and he looks serious and wary, mistrustful of the camera, of the photographer, of the world in general.

  My grandfather lost his suspicious look when his first baby was delivered in 1934. The serious little boy was named Ali for Abbas’ father but he was always called Shapour – an ancient Persian name that Fatemeh Bibi loved. Within two years she had given birth to her next child, and on she went like that for two decades until she finally stopped after twelve children. From the age of nineteen until she was in her mid-forties, Fatemeh Bibi was pregnant or nursing. Looking back at pictures of this time in her life, it is impossible to tell whether she is pregnant or has just given birth. At some point, her body just gave up regaining its form after each pregnancy and assumed a barrel-like shape that somehow took nothing away from her beauty.

  On one of our outings together when I first went back, Maman-joon saw me fiddling awkwardly with my headscarf and launched into a story that I first thought was designed to distract me. She told me that one of the gifts her father gave her on Shapour’s birth was a cloche hat of the type worn by the Hollywood sirens. This was the time of Reza Shah’s dress reforms, I realised, when the new Shah had displayed an obsession with sartorial control of his people, and, seemingly every year, there was a new edict on what Iranians had to wear. It started with the men, who suffered years of confusion – first it was the Pahlavi cap (which the devout wore turned backwards, nearly a century before American teenagers adopted the habit, so they could touch their foreheads to the ground in prayer), the chapeau and finally the fedora – but before long Reza Shah, in his drive for modernisation, was determined not just to homogenise Iran’s diverse ethnic population, but also to emancipate women.

  In 1935, on his only state visit to another country, Reza Shah popped next door to Turkey, where he’d greatly admired the reforming ways of Kemal Atatürk. In 1936 the edict was passed down that Iran’s women must now appear in public only unveiled, something that filled the devout Muslim women of Iran with shame. Maman-joon recalled the stories that had circulated at the time, of the women who left Abadan in droves and settled a few miles away over the border in Basra so they could avoid shaming themselves in the eyes of God. ‘Naneh,’ she rasped at me, ‘I remember helping our neighbours come over our walls to go to the baths – they were at the end of our street you know – because they wouldn’t leave the house uncovered.’ Her neighbour had told her how she had seen with her own eyes an old woman fall down dead in the street when a soldier had pulled off her chador.

  Maman-joon herself, like most women her age, had settled on the compromise that was eventually reached – they could wear a headscarf (allowed as long as it was made of silk from the shah’s own factory in Chalus), and her light chador was wrapped around her body as she went about her chores, ready to be thrown over her head should she choose. Women could choose to be covered or uncovered, at least in terms of the law. Tradition, religion and pressure from family and society narrowed the real choice, but
the eventual result of Reza Shah’s enforced uncovering of women was that they could choose whether they wanted to don a chador or not. My grandmother told me that while she had understood that modernisation was needed, she could never understand what this had to do with whether she wore a chador or a hat.

  She might not have understood Reza Shah’s ways, but Maman-joon always adored his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. She had fallen for Mohammad Reza in 1939 when the crown prince and his new wife, Princess Fawzia of Egypt, had passed through Ahvaz on their way back from their wedding in Cairo, the royal party alighting at a port on the Persian Gulf down the coast and proceeding to Ahvaz where they boarded the royal train for Tehran. Fatemeh Bibi, heavily pregnant with her third child, had got a good look at the royal party in their full-length gowns, fur capes and long gloves, with their perfectly coiffed hair and little hats with delicate veils, the serious-looking crown prince in his army uniform, peaked cap on black Brylcreemed hair, his back ramrod straight and demeanour trying to project confidence. Fatemeh Bibi fell in love with the Hollywood looks of the women and the glamour that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi managed to project, even as he looked slightly unsure of himself.

  The day after the crown prince’s marriage in Cairo, Hitler conquered Czechoslovakia. Reza Shah, who loved to ride on trains, had invited the Germans to build his beloved Trans-Iranian Railway in a bid to reduce Iran’s dependency on Britain, and his links with the Nazis worried the Allies.

  Reza Shah saw much to admire in the fascists; many of the buildings that were erected in Tehran in the building boom of the thirties bore a sharp resemblance to Albert Speer’s. He banned the Iranian Communist Party and managed to worry the Allies so much that, in a secret deal with the Soviet Union, Great Britain removed Reza Shah from power in 1941. Britain invaded the south of Iran where their oil interests lay while the USSR partitioned the north of the country – and again Iran, officially standing neutral in another war, was invaded by foreign powers under the guise of protection of liberty, freedom and democracy. The Strong Man with the grizzled nose and domineering presence was forced by the foreign powers whose influence he had so tried to diffuse to abdicate in favour of his son.