by Stephen Orth
The war seemed to be turning in favor of Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the counterattack and wanted to advance to the holy city of Karbala. But the military superiority of the enemy in the end was too much. The units were driven back, and two years later Faw was again in Iraqi hands. Operation Dawn 8 was a pyrrhic victory. But in the long run Mahmoudi thinks Iran did better, and he is pleased that Saddam Hussein is now dead. “Saddam kodja ast? Iran kodja ast?” he asks. “Where is Saddam now? Where is Iran now?”
The answer to the second question is to be found on the jetty, where Iran stops and the water starts, on a signpost: Karbala: 375 miles.
I take a few photos, but Yasmin whispers that it would be better to go. “The soldiers are becoming suspicious; they don’t think you are a normal tourist.” As a parting gift, Mahmoudi gives us two black-and-white Basij bandanas and kisses me on both shoulders. A soldier is pointing a camera in our direction and seems to be filming us. No one is unfriendly, but I feel that the atmosphere is about to shift. We climb into the car, and our driver puts his foot down. Yasmin casts aside the bandana with an energetic movement.
“I’m annoyed that he didn’t mention the navy once. He was acting as if the Basij militia won the battle alone. My father fought here, and he was in the navy.”
“Why would Mahmoudi keep it a secret?”
“It sounds more heroic. The Basij were volunteers without military training. If they can defeat heavily armed Iraqi troops, then it’s evidence that Allah was on our side.”
“What has your father told you about Operation Dawn 8?”
“He was here for more than two years. During an attack, a bomb landed right next to him, and three friends were totally ripped apart. He was luckier, but is deaf in one ear. He calls that his ‘souvenir’ of the war.”
“As a child did the conflict affect you?”
“Up to the age of seven I knew nothing but war. We were always afraid about dad. Once he didn’t contact us for six weeks, no sign that he was alive. Then a soldier rang our doorbell and told us that he had been found on a seventy-foot island near Bandar Abbas. He had swum there to avoid advancing tanks, and he had survived for weeks almost solely on American chocolate. When he came back he had a huge beard and was just skin and bones.”
“Was he acclaimed as a war hero?”
She laughs. It isn’t a cheerful laugh, but one full of bitterness. “Two years ago he was thrown out of the navy because he wasn’t a devout enough Muslim.”
Over an evening meal of spaghetti our hostess, Maryan, tells of low-flying jets over Ahvaz. “Saddam’s MIGS,” she calls them, adding that Iranians always say “Saddam” when they are talking of the enemy, as fundamentally they have nothing against Iraq. “Saddam’s MIGS sometimes flew so low that they brushed the treetops, and branches fell to the ground. I had to cover my ears to avoid being deafened.” While we are still eating, Farshad releases the mynah from its cage. A screeching bundle of black feathers catapults through the kitchen and uses this sudden freedom to catch up on all the movement that it has been denied in its daylong imprisonment. It hurtles from the sink to the kitchen cabinet, then from the mantelpiece to the table leg, from Yasmin’s hair to my feet.
Maryan, despite the distractions, tries to continue her account. “When I was thirteen, in 1983 or 1984, Saddam announced on TV that Ahvaz was going to be bombed at midnight.” Conquest of the oil city was a declared goal of the leader. “Hundreds of thousands left the city by foot on the same day, taking with them only gold or money. My father remained at home because he was worried about looters. Luckily, the bombing didn’t happen. After a week in a tent, we returned home. Several people died from scorpion or snake bites during this time.”
I find it difficult to follow her, and it has nothing to do with a lack of drama in her words. What a tree trunk is for a woodpecker, my foot is for a hyperactive mynah. Continuously it pecks away at my socks with its small beak. Its understanding of the correct food chain seems to be pasta, tourist, bird. Maryan has different ideas and grabs a brush and sweeps the bird aside. Farshad dashes after it. I wonder whether Angry Birds was conceived after such a moment. They almost manage to trap it on the table, but my plate is in the way. Spaghetti and ground meat and porcelain plummet to the floor, and the mynah flaps up to a shelf.
“Mynaaah, mynaaah,” it goads.
Farshad jives and dives, the bird flaps and flees. After three minutes of hot pursuit worthy of a computer game, the creature is captured and returned to its cage. Maryan gets me a new plate, and I wipe the red Bolognese sauce from the laminated tiles with a napkin.
KERMANSHAH
Population: 850,000
Province: Kermanshah
BACKGAMMON
SO LONG AS we are traveling near the border to Iraq, the war doesn’t let us go. In Kermanshah, 250 miles northwest of Ahvaz, we are guests of a military friend of Yasmin’s father. She contacted him a day ago because no couchsurfers had offered accommodation, and on the spur of the moment he invited us to stay. “You’ve become fat,” says Azim as he hugs Yasmin. He is forty-seven but looks over sixty. Thin hair, melancholic eyes, an emaciated but still muscular body. He is wearing only training pants and an undershirt. He has a tattoo on his right upper arm in Persian lettering done by a fellow soldier, which reads: Even if I was poor and had no roof over my head, I would never swap my honor for a good meal.
“Salam,” I say as a greeting.
“Don’t say ‘Salam.’ I hate these Arabic words. You have to say ‘Dorut.’ That’s Persian.” Then he apologizes for his simple apartment. “My house is small. I wish I could offer you something better.” With his wife, Susan, thirty-seven, and their five-year-old daughter, Azadeh, he lives in a five-hundred-square-foot apartment in a plain apartment block with a sand-colored concrete facade. The stairwell stinks of decaying garbage. “The military pays the rent, so there’s no chance of anything bigger,” says Yasmin. Azim has been without a job for six months; he is a plumber by trade.
He gathers a few photo albums and opens a pack of Golden Deer cigarettes. The pictures show tanks and smiling men with Type 56 assault rifles, the Chinese variant of the Kalashnikov. Young soldiers with naked chests pose on the beach on the island of Tonb-e Bozorg. Azim was there during his military training. Today he no longer smiles when he talks about the war. “Thirty-six countries supported Iraq.” Azim draws the number 36 on his hand with a pen, as if he can only believe it if it is written down. “The Germans and Dutch supplied nerve gas, the Russians tanks, the French Mirage F1 fighters, the Arabians money.” He doesn’t speak English, so Yasmin translates for me. Little Azadeh clambers onto her father’s lap and shows him a picture of an eagle that she has just drawn. He strokes her hair.
On a glass table in the living room there are a couple of apples. Azim picks up one and points to different places as if it were a globe: “Iran. Germany. U.S.A.” The green apple looks the same all the way around. “What are we people? Just tiny grains of sand,” says Azim.
Then he asks me to cut him an apple in small pieces. To show why he reaches inside his mouth and takes out an artificial lower jaw. “Karbala 5. A tank shell. Landed next to me. Killed some friends, sent stone chipping flying into the air, and one of them hit me in the mouth. Since that day in spring 1987, Azim gets anxiety attacks if there are sudden loud noises. Thunderstorms are hardly bearable. Operation Karbala 5 was the biggest battle of the war: 65,000 Iranians died in an unsuccessful attempt to storm the port city of Basra.
“We’re worried about him,” says Yasmin. “He is more sensitive than the others, and his lungs are damaged by the toxic gas, but there’s no money for treatment. It’s good to see him like that with his daughter.” The difference between Azim and the two model veterans at the battlefield for tourists is huge, not only because he probably weighs half as much as Sorkheh or Mahmoudi, but also because he doesn’t seem to be playing as well-practiced a role. The war ruined him—you can feel that.
Besides that, what he te
lls us now makes him more of a war hero than the other two. “I was a sniper,” he says. “One night we were recceing an enemy camp. One commander, two other soldiers, and me. We saw a couple Iraqis in front of their tents. ‘Shoot them,’ said my commander. I crawled forward a little, got my rifle into position. Instead of aiming at the men, I set my telescopic sight on one of their weapons, and pulled the trigger. They were startled and jumped up. I waved at them to quickly get lost, and they thanked me with a hand signal.”
While we are talking Susan lays a plastic sheet with a tropical island motif on the floor and brings in one delicacy after the other. Ghormeh sabzi, a traditional lamb stew with beans and seven herbs, grilled chicken, rice with a typical golden brown crust, and homemade yogurt and salad. In view of this feast I decide never to take the phrase “I wish I could offer you more” seriously again while in Iran.
Azim is no longer as talkative, his gaze often in the distance. Only once, on receiving a text message, does he hint at a smile.
“What’s up?” asks Yasmin.
“A friend’s just sent me a joke.”
“Come on, then.”
“It’s more a piece of advice. If your car breaks down, jump up on the roof and crap on it. Why? Because Rouhani crapped on Iran and Iran works!”
In backgammon, fifteen black checkers fight against fifteen white checkers. Whoever first bears off the last checker from the home board is the winner. If two or more checkers are on one point, then they are unable to be taken. If one checker is alone on a point it is vulnerable. Black and white, alone weak, together strong—the game, which was invented in Iran five thousand years ago, is a pretty good metaphor of war. “It’s 50 per cent head and 50 per cent luck,” says Azim, and I ask myself if he would say the same about his war service. He sets up a game on a handmade wooden board. Two checkers on point 1, five on point 12, three on point 17, and five on point 19. He plays against Yasmin, aggressively banging his checkers on the wooden board. Within a few minutes he has effortlessly won three times in a row. “He didn’t make a single mistake,” says Yasmin admiringly. “Besides, he got doubles slightly more often than me.”
• • • • • • • • •
THE WAR VICTIMS of Kermanshah are buried in a huge soldiers’ cemetery. Hundreds, thousands of polished gravestones, like toppled black dominoes on the stony ground. They are roofed, and every roof is shaped like a basketball court. There are at least ten such gigantic roofs. The cemetery is open at the sides. The date of birth, date of death, the soldier’s name, and the father’s name are written on the gravestones, and most of them have portraits of the victims. Where there are no portraits you can find a stylized dove with wings pointing upward. Its silhouette resembles a tulip, the flower of martyrs. Iranians believe that when a soldier dies in battle a tulip grows from his blood.
Azim stops at a grave. “A cousin of his. He was just seventeen,” explains Yasmin.
“All these men. And children. They all died for nothing,” says Azim.
A man with a high-pressure cleaner spraying the neighboring mass graves shouts something at us.
“We should go,” says Yasmin. “He said if the secret service people see us, they’ll arrest us.”
Azim begins a discussion, saying that he’s a veteran and we are his friends. Then we go back to his Paykan. Two men approach us on a motorbike, stop next to the driver’s door, and ask us what we are doing here. Azim repeats that he fought in the war, that he has dead relatives here, that we are his friends, then we drive off.
“During the war, lists were always being distributed with the names of the dead,” says Yasmin. “One day Azim’s name appeared on one of them. His family gathered at home all wearing black and mourning. The next day they discovered that it was a mix-up.”
We drive up to a roundabout near a mosque adorned with a gigantic mosaic Ayatollah Khomeini portrait, then on to a highway leading out of the city. The mountainous landscape all around combines incredibly beautiful nature with incredibly ugly factories.
Often, Azim looks nervously in the rear-view mirror. With every mile he becomes more and more quiet. At the next gas station, however, is the next unpleasant surprise. Gas has become almost 50 per cent more expensive overnight: instead of 2,700 toman a gallon, it now costs 3,800 toman. “The government sets the price,” says Yasmin. “If gas becomes more expensive, everything becomes more expensive. Great. Just great.”
During the journey Azim tells the story of Farshad and Shirin. I hear it for the second time. We are on the way to Mount Bisotun, where the brave stonemason was supposed to have hewn his tunnel as a token of his love.
We pay for the tickets at a small kiosk—fifteen thousand toman for tourists and two thousand for locals—the usual fee for Iranian attractions. The foreigner tickets are apparently sold out, and the ticket seller tears off eight local tickets to arrive at roughly the right price. Quite a pile of paper, which conveys the feeling of having paid too much far better than mere figures.
The footpath runs below a cliff towering above for more than 3,000 feet. It winds past a 2,500-year-old bas-relief depicting King Darius with captured enemies, hands tied and ropes around their necks, and a statue of Hercules looking strangely apathetic. Both are fantastic works of art impressively rich in detail, but it is a bare cliff face, 600 feet wide and 120 feet high, that attracts just as much attention. Dark vertical stripes show where the rainwater runs off, and a couple of bushes defy gravity. From an overhanging ridge you can see that the wall is not natural but has been hewn out of the rock face with enormous effort. It is called Farhad Tarash and according to legend is the work of the lovestruck stonemason. It does look like an awful amount of work, chippping away more than 52,000 cubic yards of limestone in his attempt at capturing the heart of Shirin. Historians have a less romantic explanation: it was probably intended as the base for a monumental relief but was canceled for reasons unknown.
Today’s descendants of Farshad and Shirin wear climbing belts with carabiners: a cheerful couple, roped up, are taking turns at leading the way up the rock face. I’m fairly certain that this is better for their relationship than digging a tunnel through the cliff
MUSIC
“WE HAVE TO go. The others are waiting,” says Azim suddenly. He has invited a couple relatives for the evening. The rush, however, doesn’t hinder him from serving a round of tea from a thermos at the car. There is an Iranian saying that indicates their understanding of punctuality: if you drown, it doesn’t matter if it is in one hand’s span of water or a hundred hand spans. So if you are late, being a little later isn’t going to make much difference. Still, Azim manages to make up a few minutes by consistently speeding, as far as that is possible with an ancient Paykan. Paykan means “lightning,” and it is roughly the same as naming a tricycle a “Porsche.” The charmingly angular cars are for Iran what the Trabi was for East Germany or the Ambassador for India. Twenty years ago you hardly saw any other makes, but nowadays they are becoming rarer.
At home various uncles and cousins are sitting in the living room and tuning traditional string instruments: tar, setar, and tanbur. A bottle of Teacher’s Highland Cream Blended Scotch Whisky is on the table. It doesn’t hold the original contents but homemade raisin schnapps, instead. Burns like fire, but the quality is good. We down it in one gulp from tea glasses, and as if to apologize to the throat and the tongue, we rinse it down with a spoonful of yogurt.
“I will now sing a song for a friend who was killed in the war,” says Azim. His cousin, Saeed, a professor of calligraphy with an impressive black mustache, accompanies him on a setar, a three-stringed plucking instrument with a body the size and shape of half a coconut and a long neck. What follows is more of a dialogue than interplay. The passionate smoky voice and the delicate instrument alternate absorbing the themes of the other and varying them. For European ears it is unusual music, as it consists not only of whole note steps and semitones but also quarter tones.
“It’s a forbidden song,
” says Yasmin. “Because it’s about the importance of freedom.” Azim doesn’t hit every tone perfectly, but he dives so deeply into the dream he is singing about that everyone is spellbound. Azim bows to the applause, placing his right hand on his heart. A few minutes later a text comes from the neighbors; they had never realized that he was such a good singer.
“Right, now it’s your turn,” he says to me. Saeed plays a short melody on the setar and then hands me the instrument. “Slant your right hand and then strum just using your index finger.” I fail miserably. He shows me again how to do it, and this time at least it sounds similar. “Affarin!” says Saeed. “Great! You’ve got a good ear! A couple months of master classes, and you’ll be a pro.”
Iranians love exaggeration. Iranians are wonderful, as are their schnapps and songs of freedom and their secret violations of the law.
The morning after, Azim has a headache and talks of dying. He squats on the floor near the window with one leg at an angle. The curtain is open for the first time. He stares out at the gloomy spring sky and smokes one cigarette after the other, daylight falling on his suffering face. He says a sentence without turning his head, and Yasmin noticeably delays translating it for me. Then she whispers, as if she can’t say it loud: “He said: I’m looking forward to joining my martyred friends soon.”
She again explains that the nerve gas is to blame for everything, and that he drinks excessively every day. He turns his head to a picture on the wall. It shows an avenue of trees in fall; the path between them is full of leaves, and there is a bright light at the end of the avenue. His eyes return to the window and seem to be fixed on a point in the distance. “They all died for nothing,” he says.
SMUGGLERS
THE CAB DRIVER taking us to Paveh looks like Mick Jagger at thirty, and the MP3 player is blaring Modern Talking. Compared to last night’s music, this is how a screaming hangover feels compared to enjoying an eighteen-year-old single malt.