by Stephen Orth
Tehran—Blocking the messaging app WhatsApp has triggered a dispute between the government and censorship authorities. “The government is firmly against the ban,” says Iran’s Communications Minister, Mahmoud Vaezi, to the state news agency IRNA. Previously, the head of the judiciary filtering committee, Abdolsamad Khorrambadi, was quoted as saying, “The reason for this is the adoption of WhatsApp by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is an American Zionist.”
London—Journalist Masih Alinejad has created a Facebook page inviting Iranian women to post photos of themselves without a headscarf. The feedback is enormous, and within a couple days hundreds of photos are posted on the site, attracting thousands of likes. Alinejad lives in exile in London, having been forced to leave her country after exposing a corruption scandal.
Tehran—Many people demonstrate in front of the Ministry of the Interior in Tehran for “chastity and moral security.” They are protesting against any softening of the dress code regulations for women. According to official figures, four thousand men and women take part in the rally. Eyewitnesses speak of some five hundred demonstrators, many of whom are theology students.
In the weeks since I landed in Tehran, a lot has happened in Iran. European media, as usual, are concentrating on reports about nuclear energy disputes, the death penalty, and women’s rights. They are all valid topics, and it is important to write about them, but it’s not the whole picture. People who learn about the world from news programs tend to subconsciously categorize the images of extremes: the Africans starve, Afghanis carry out suicide bombings, Chinese plagiarize, and bearded Iranians tinker with their atom bomb. The daily grind is not mentioned, and even when everyday life is featured in reports about foreign lands, it is often in the form of romanticism—out with the modern and in with the traditional and old-fashioned. Who would present photos of shopping malls in Tehran or Shiraz that look almost exactly like their counterparts in Europe or North America? Readers and viewers easily forget that reality in every country is ten thousand times more diverse than what is shown.
ISFAHAN
Population: 1.7 million
Province: Isfahan
A RIVER WITHOUT WATER
IN THE LARGEST public square in the world that is completely enclosed by buildings and walls some urban sanitation workers are going through their morning exercises. They do aerobics to Eurodance music at club volumes. Somehow I had expected my first few minutes in Isfahan to be a more Oriental experience. The common name of the square is Naghsh-e Jahan, “Image of the World,” so I suppose that turbaned water-pipe smokers or swirling dervishes also wouldn’t really fit the bill. At precisely 5:45 AM the fountains are turned on, and forty-five minutes later the sun rises. Showtime.
At 1,800 feet by 500 feet, five times three soccer fields, it is framed by decorated two-tier arcades, mosque domes, palaces, and bazaar tunnels. It’s impossible not to be overwhelmed by the dimensions. I arrived so early because the night bus from Hamedan took less than seven hours to get here. So as not to annoy my host with an early-morning alarm call, I have to putter around a bit.
One of the cheekier actions of the Ayatollah Khomeini was renaming Isfahan’s architectural masterpiece “Imam Square.” The word “imam” referred to himself, although he had absolutely nothing to do with it, as it was laid out over four hundred years ago by Shah Abbas. Before 1979 the official name was Shah Square for a couple decades. But most of the inhabitants couldn’t care less about the ego trips of their leaders and still refer to the square as Naghsh-e Jahan.
Once again, I think it’s a pity that there are no cafés here to while away some time, but in a side street I manage to find a tea house with wooden tables and men inhaling energy for the day through hookahs. About a third of the guests are bearded, turbaned men with long cloaks who mingle among the other guests giving advice from the Quran for their problems.
To: Sofia Isfahan
Good morning, I arrived in Isfahan now, how are you? Do you have time to meet today?
From: Sofia Isfahan
Hi, let’s meet@ music school. I arranged a class for you.
Don’t hurry, but be there @ 10.30, not later
My host, Ahmad, lives twenty-five minutes by car north of the city center. Again, I call up a stranger, pass the phone to a cab driver, and gaze out of the window, curious about where he will drive me. Routine. A new day, a new apartment. Also routine. The excitement of always meeting new people is beginning to wear off.
Every long-term traveler knows the point when the usual “Where are you from/What’s your name/Where did you go” conversations with other backpackers get on your nerves, even if you are talking to a potentially incredibly interesting person.
Ahmad greets me in jogging pants, a quiet but cheerful type who runs a T-shirt store in the city. Before my arrival I only had e-mail contact with Sofia, who arranged accommodation with Ahmad. It seems to be a common practice because Iranian women are afraid of breaking the rules and endangering their reputations by having male guests.
On the wall of Ahmad’s bedroom there is a sheet with a handwritten saying on it. Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying: You are beautiful and I love you, but I have to go. A good idea: I have to go, too, and disappear with the next taxi. I contacted Sofia because she had written in her profile: If u r interested in music and language u will have some good experience with me. And because she’s learning German. As I wrote that I was interested in Iranian instruments, she suggested showing me a music school and gave me the address for the cab driver.
At 10:27, three minutes too early, I’m standing in front of the door. Sofia is a wispy young lady dressed in a mustard-colored gown with an Indian-style pattern and ballerina shoes. The twenty-six-year-old manages to look both extravagant and traditional at the same time. Her eyes and lips are heavily made up but not overdone, like the fashionable young prefer it. I read in a survey that Iranian women buy more makeup than women in most other countries, and this can easily be ratified by a tour of any city here. The motivation to make the best out of that little bit of skin that is shown must be huge. Iran is also the world champion in the number of nose jobs performed.
Mr. Amini, the music theory teacher, leads us via a courtyard to the classrooms. We are allowed into various classrooms for a few minutes and listen to private concerts. Teenagers in black-and-white school uniforms beat with virtuoso precision on the tonbak, a goblet drum, and play the dulcimer-like santur, the kamancheh, a bowed string instrument, and the tar. The teacher hands me a tar, a wonderful instrument with the fingerboard made from camel bones; the body, in the shape of a figure 8, is carved from mulberry wood, with a thin membrane of lambskin stretched over the top. It is played with a small brass plectrum, with a grip for holding it made from beeswax, which sticks to the fingers. The tone is full, percussive, and sometimes jarring, similar to a clunking guitar. It is love at first sound, and I decide that I must get such an instrument.
“Where did you learn to play the tar?” asks Sofia, and suddenly I feel very Iranian.
“It’s very similar to a guitar and so not too difficult for me.”
She has an idea. “Would you like to do a guitar workshop with the children?”
“Sure!”
Mr. Amini agrees to do it the day after tomorrow, then we say goodbye and go on a short tour of the city. Isfahan is famous for its bridges over the Zayanderud, the “River of Life.” At the moment, however, it’s a dead river without a drop of water. A strip of desert that bisects the city. On the opposite bank there are a couple dozen pedal boats with swans necks as figureheads, high and dry on the riverbed.
“The government redirected the water, and nobody actually knows why. Maybe because fields had to be irrigated elsewhere. It hasn’t rained much, and everything has just withered. We don’t even know when we will have water here again,” says Sofia. On a bank there is a No Swimming sign like a bad joke. Imagine Paris without the Seine or London without the Thames.
Green parks border on the river, and ancient grand stone bridges cross it. Now they are just decorations without practical use; you can just as easily walk to the other bank 15 or 150 feet either side of the bridges.
I ask Sofia if she’s not annoyed that the water has been switched off.
“I don’t think about the government,” she says. “It’s just a strain. Many people grumble the whole day. I simply get on with my life.”
“And the moral police? Your shoes are pretty risky. I can see your ankle.”
“Quite a lot of my outfit is risky—the makeup, even the color. But I work as an English teacher for girls of elementary school age, and the children love it when I wear colorful gowns. It’s only the school directors who have problems with it.”
She works at a private school, where only affluent parents can afford the afternoon classes, which cost 1 million toman a year ($400).
“I will ask if I can bring you as guest teacher.”
From: Mona Hamedan
III miss you so much, you are really really kind & friendly, ich le be diech;-)
To: Mona Hamedan
I miss you too!! Too bad we had so little time in Hamedan!
We end our walk at Naghsh-e Jahan Square, where we meet André and Luciana from Brazil. They also contacted Sofia and, like me, were passed on to Ahmad. The two young doctors have a video camera, which they give me to film them doing a three-second dance routine ending with them both screaming, “Elves in Isfahan!”
“We do a vlog where we present ourselves as elves on a trip around the world, and in every city we make such a clip,” they explain. “And what do you do?”
“I’m working on a book, with pencil and notepad.” I feel like a relic of bygone traveling days. All that is missing is telling them that I travel by coach and horses, pointing at one of the nearby carriages offering tours of the square.
It is getting dark, so we say goodbye to Sofia. Ahmad picks us up in his car and drives us to Khaju bridge, sandy yellow in the light of the night illuminations. “You’re lucky I know a few secrets.” He informs us that the bridge has thirty arches, fifteen on each side, and “that number corresponds to the Juz, or equal parts, of the Quran.” Above each arch there are different floral designs made from decorative tiles. He then shows us what he calls the “oldest telephone in the world.” At the end of the arches there are some tiny holes, and if you hold your ear to them you can clearly hear what someone has whispered into a hole diagonally opposite. Even the elves are impressed. We walk to a life-sized stone lion guarding the entrance to the bridge. In its jaws there is a human head. “That is a symbol for the power of the government over the people,” says Ahmad quite matter-of-factly, as if it were a perfectly normal metaphor for the governors and the governed. “But now I’m going to tell you something really incredible! Have you seen a cat by night? How the eyes light up?” He points to an identical lion on the opposite bank of the dead river, three hundred feet away. Where its human head should be, two spots of light can be clearly seen. “You won’t believe this but I once dreamed that the eyes glisten, and I came here and it really was just as I had dreamed it.” We can’t explain the phenomenon; it must be some sort of reflection of the lamps at the entrance to the bridge.
Iran, spring 2014. A lion king with spotlight eyes eats human heads and guards the dried-up River of Life.
“Do you feel like some lamb’s head?” asks Ahmad suddenly. “Or are you vegetarians?”
All three say no. So at this late hour we head for a corner restaurant in which a fat man with a bloody apron heaves braised lambs’ heads from a huge cauldron with a kind of spade. This is served with a side plate of pita bread and a cloudy, fatty soup, on top of bits of brain, cheek, and jaw. Other pieces of offal appear on the table. “I always call the lungs ‘hand towel,’” says Ahmad. “Because they have a surface just like terry cloth.” They taste better than hand towels, but only just.
On the drive home he has one last highlight up his sleeve, just for me. Ahmad shows me a road sign with Freiburg Avenue on it. Quite a surprise, as I have become so used to all the Shariati-, Beheshti-, Azeri-, and Imam Khomeini streets, whose omnipresence is the cause of much confusion on street plans. “There is only one street with this name in Iran. Freiburg is twinned with Isfahan,” Ahmad explains.
DICTATORSHIP
From: Sofia Isfahan
Cu@ 10:00 music school:-)
• • • • • • • • •
THE FOLLOWING DAYS always begin with a text message containing brief instructions and a meeting place, followed by a colon, dash, and closed parenthesis. Orders and a smiley face—Sofia must be a good teacher. “I am the perfect dictator,” she says when I bring up her nonconsultative style of planning the day.
The music teacher, Mr. Amini, has borrowed a guitar especially for me, a Yamaha, Made in Indonesia. The strings are so old that they have traces of rust in some places. We wait in a kind of reception room.
From nearby I hear the sound of applause, three times within a short interval. I ask myself what kind of activity has triggered that amount of enthusiasm. Then Mr. Amini rings the school bell; it is precisely 10:45. “Let’s go!” he says, beckoning me to follow him.
We cross the courtyard and enter a hall. Some fifty schoolkids are sitting on yellow plastic chairs and are looking, full of expectation, toward the entrance. A single piano stool is on a raised stage with the obligatory Ayatollah Khomeini/Khamenei double portraits as a backdrop.
I walk toward the stage and again applause resounds; the previous times were just the trial runs. When I agreed to run a guitar workshop I had imagined two or three children asking me to show them the finger placement for G major or the chords to “Hotel California.” Big mistake.
I sit down on the piano stool. Silence; expectant faces. A black hole forms in my stomach and tries to suck in the rest of my body, which would be a wonderful opportunity for me to disappear. I feel a strong pull, but unfortunately, I am not sucked away. Sophia sits at the back of the hall and positions her cell phone camera. Mr. Amini gives a short address and then, with a flourish of his hand, gestures to me. More applause. Never before have I been so frantically applauded just for showing up—maybe that is the best metaphor for Iranian hospitality.
“I will play two classical pieces by the Spanish composer Francisco Tárrega,” I announce. I tune the guitar, giving me a few valuable seconds, and off I go with sweaty fingers. The piece is called “Lágrima,” tears. Actually, I can play this piece in my sleep. I falter at two points, but nothing particularly bad. I continue with “Adelita,” almost perfect, and now things are running smoothly, applause with stamping of the feet. The next song, “Someone Like You” by Adele, is a safe bet. Adele is popular everywhere in Iran. More applause.
Mr. Amini asks if anyone has any questions.
A small boy with horn-rimmed glasses sticks his hand up. “Can you play something heavier?”
The black hole reappears and sucks and sucks to no effect.
“If you can dance to it, then sure,” says Mr. Amini, the skillful diplomat.
“Okay, I’ll give it a go,” I say. And so it comes to pass for the first time in the history of the music school an improvised rendition of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” is adapted for classical guitar. On average every fourth tone is wrong, but, to compensate, I am loud—and heavy. It’s almost impossible to listen to it without moving to the beat. Fifty young boys in school uniform, however, manage without effort.
Restrained applause, and a few words of thanks from Mr. Amini. I have survived, and the children can go back to their classes.
“You were good,” says Sofia.
Inside the magnificent throne room, murals depict fighting warriors on elephants, musicians strumming their instruments, and kings receiving other kings. We are sitting outside on the steps in front of the Chehel Sotoun pavilion, next to dumb-looking stone lion statues. To anyone eavesdropping, our conversation would sound a bit weird. “The tre
e is beautiful. The woman is pretty. The man is important,” says Sofia in German. “I am not normal. The child is not exact. The tomato is free. I am free. We are free. The man is free. The woman is exact. That is positive.”
“Where did you learn these funny sentences?” I ask.
“I copied them from an online language class.” She had transcribed the words neatly into an exercise book and is now reading them out.
“I don’t think it was a good web page. No one says, ‘The woman is exact,’” I explain.
A European family with a small boy, probably about five, walk by. He is wearing huge sunglasses and a small baseball cap.
“Oh my God, is he cute!” squeals Sofia. “Do you think I could ask them if I can take a photo with him?”
She has already run to the bewildered parents and grabbed the child and given me her cell phone. I snap away as she kisses the boy on his cheeks. He seems a bit overwhelmed, since nobody asked him about this. Sofia gushingly thanks the parents.
“He wasn’t that cute, a bit chubby,” I say, trying to provide a slightly more objective viewpoint. But she is glowing, as if the tourist family had just told her she had won 10 billion rial in the lottery.
“Nonsense, he was awesome! Now I absolutely must go to Europe.”
Mothers, hide your children.
“Are they all so cute there?”
“At least. You should have seen me at five.”
“Sure! Come on, let’s practice languages.”
Not only Sofia’s language skills but also my research project on love and marriage are making progress in Isfahan. For lunch I meet up with Massi, a very relaxed, pleasant soul with a black headscarf, who works as a broker at the stock exchange and occasionally as a tourist guide for official guests of the city. We go to a bistro in the Armenian quarter with waiters wearing black suspenders on white shirts. On the tables are tissue boxes from Hermès, and hanging from the ceiling are some mobiles, which on closer inspection turn out to be designer lamps, one consisting of dozens of yellow painted teapots, the other of knives and forks.