The tattoo artist looks relaxed, even pleased with himself. A simple act of retribution, he says, matter-of-factly, for his clients’ ‘ignorance and arrogance’ towards the ethnic import of what was decorating their arms and shoulders, backs and buttocks.
I switch the Sony portable back to CNN, then to Balkan Bang for a glimpse of anal sex in a horse-drawn wagon in the old part of Prague, before turning off the set. When I try to reach Mehrangiz, who stayed on at Zsa Zsa’s last night, her cellphone is switched off. I light another Super Love Lights Deluxe, then turn the Sony back on.
TF1 is interviewing Uncle Tan, or Dr Christenhuber, rather, who is presented as an ‘expert en matière de terrorisme’. Tan is wearing a peculiar felt hat on his large, conic head. There’s something intriguing about the way he cranes his long neck, staring at the ceiling with droopy eyelids, then suddenly jabs his impeccably manicured fingers to the rhythm of what he’s saying.
‘This way,’ he purrs, ‘the terrorist turns the whole world into a realm of signs, anything can be an indication of their presence, but also, anything, any snippet of text, or any bomb scare, can be a coded message for their own network, or a camouflage operation, a calculated distraction.’
Somehow, despite the dogged, virile air about him, Christenhuber’s eyelids make him look as if he’s always fighting an urge to fall asleep out of sheer disinterest.
‘But you see, the Twin Tower affair notwithstanding, they’re now running the risk of repetition. Of becoming a gimmick. Which is why I say they’re bound to come up with something new any moment now. Something unprecedented in ambiguity and mystery and, and, well, in visual intelligence and entertainment value and so on.’
I switch off the TV set, light another cigarette and mix myself a homemade grape vodka, with crushed ice and a touch of lemon.
How is everything? Still in Russia. Getting things done. Someone said Cantonese is now officially the second language of St Petersburg, and I’m immensely attached to this fact, not because of what it means, but because it is the only thing I’ve managed to remember lately. Went to see this Vuillard exhibition at the Royal Academy, and I definitely favor the zero-psychology style of a portrait painter who just has someone reading a paper or dealing with things, and not demanding to be read by the viewer, which is reassuring. Like all the Russians here in St Petersburg – just wearing mink and getting on with it. But whether I do or do not make it to Tehran, you will have the kitsch Tehran Flower cacophony on Shariati to attend to please. After which most certainly you will have the interrogations, the threats, possibly beatings or worse and the Montana Lights. Remember they remove the filter. Oh and a big ‘salaam’ to Tarofi. Must rush (patent exaggeration, but, you know, ‘at work’). Yours, Stella
I wake up towards noon, and take a walk to the corner store on the corner of blocks 44D and 44E, to buy a fresh pack of cigarettes and a new flask of Gol-e Khalkhali mouth spray. Early in the morning, the store is invariably filled with construction workers standing around drinking ice-cold chocolate milk in tiny glass bottles, but this time of day the shop is empty. I have a bottle of cold chocolate milk and talk soccer with the shopkeeper, and I’m just about to leave when a strictly veiled woman walks in.
She has the classic, almond-shaped bulging eyes you see in the miniature paintings, along with healthy cheekbones, a nose-job and ruthlessly plucked eyebrows, down to a minuscule, graceful sliver of dark stubble. I tightly clutch my bottle, pulling the air deep into my gut, watching from the corner of my eye as she orders a packet of Golden Love Deluxe Lights, a family pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint, biodegradable Tampax Slender Regular, transparent Scotch tape and two 80-watt light bulbs.
While the clerk is adding up the bill on his solar-powered calculator, she suddenly turns towards me, opens her veil and lifts it up above her head with her arms outstretched. After holding it there for perhaps half a second or less, she rearranges the fabric with small, quick movements of her hands, then pulls it down tightly again, straightening the veil by yanking it firmly against the back of her head, before flapping it around herself once again. A flurry of shimmering black folds reflects the neon light from the ceiling. For this brief span of time, lasting no longer than four seconds, the blank expression on her face doesn’t change. I cannot even tell whether she’s noticed me standing there in front of her. It’s only now I realize she’s been talking soccer with the shopkeeper all along. No Stuttgart VFB they’ll never get anywhere but Werder Bremen they seem to have a few tricks up their sleeve what’s with that new midfielder what’s his name.
I follow her out of the store, walking only ten feet behind her as she moves towards blocks 39 and 38, but I give up when I see her enter the Vafa fitness center, where today, like every other Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, is women only day.
This evening, I’m invited to a wedding party in south Tehran. I do not know the bride, nor the groom, so I’m grateful to my friend, the sculptor Cyrus Rahati, for taking me along. The party is certain to be different to the inebriated, trashy disco nights that apparently pass for wedding celebrations up north.
Chaotic as Tehran may be, if you consider its division between north and south, balaye shahr and paine shahr, which marks the partition between the haves and have-nots, the city is very organized, even quaint. One is generally liable to size people up not only by their neighborhood wedding ceremonies but by the way they sip their tea or pluck their eyebrows. It can be worse than London. Even Munich.
Cyrus’s neighborhood, where the party is held, is further south than the main station, deep within the darkest depths of working-class neighborhoods. So decidedly paine shahr, I’ve never been able to see it as anything more than an abstract blur at the bottom of my city map. This is where, as Cyrus is always happy to point out, ‘chi-chi gallerists’ do not particularly like to set foot, unless they’re presenting Historical Tehran to nervous tourists.
Cyrus was once a bassiji militant after the revolution, then a foot soldier in the war against Iraq, after which he returned to Tehran to earn a living as a watermelon and grapefruit vendor. This was when Cyrus taught himself how to sculpt, in the back of his fruit stand after closing shop in the evenings, later enrolling at an art academy and now actually enjoying the frills and the media attention of a budding career on the international art market. Behold the south Tehran modernist, said the BBC, trying to sound apocalyptic, enthusiastic and nonchalant at the same time.
I meet Cyrus at the train station, where we share a motorbike cab to the wedding hall. From outside, the ballroom is marked by a shop window full of voguish bouquets of artificial flowers and neon lights spelling ‘Hall of Mirrors’, in searing orange. We go up two flights of stairs and reach a corridor, which is where we take a left, into the men’s section, an enormous room awash with stark neon light, filled with rows of men, chewing on cucumbers and tangerines. In the spirit of public decency, the excesses of the bachelor party are hidden from the women’s section by a wall reaching almost to the ceiling.
Having arrived with Cyrus, a man of credibility well acquainted with nearly every guest in the room, I follow him up and down countless rows of men and boys, shaking hands and smiling what I hope is a likable, thoughtful sort of smile that doesn’t look too apologetic. Khoshbakhtam khoshbakhtam. Beaming an especially likable, thoughtful, apologetic sort of smile whenever I’m introduced as a gentleman who has just arrived from abroad.
I take a seat and, doing as everyone does, first have a cucumber, then go for the tangerines. I feel alienated from the men around me. After a lifetime of telling Americans and heavily perspiring Swiss expats I was Iranian in a self-important and stubborn sort of way, I find myself feeling oddly xenophobic. I succeed in starting a conversation with Cyrus’s second cousin, who turns out to be writing a thesis on ‘The Backgammon Motif in Postmodern Persian Literature’ and begin to feel a little better. Most of the men are still peacefully staring at their napkins.
Later on in the evening, the lettered second cousin starts
explaining his fondness for the Beats. As he elaborates on the ‘widely misread relationship between Dean Moriarty and Kerouac’ I reach for an apple, then change my mind and have another tangerine. From the women’s section, I can hear the happy sounds of people shouting, clapping and leaping up and down. ‘So by the time he finally gets to Tangiers, where he meets up with Burroughs and Ginsberg and everything, Kerouac is totally burnt out. He’s totally fucked up.’
When the designated entertainer takes to the stage the men hardly blink. The entertainer is the type of middle-aged Iranian who looks very much like Al Pacino. Slow, deliberate movements, sad, drooping eyes and arched eyebrows that convey a permanent expression of disbelief. He goes into a long spiel on the religious status of clapping. ‘I know there’s a looooota mullahs out there in the audience tonight’, he croons, ‘and we know they reeeeally don’t like the idea of clapping.’ He begins a long chain of anecdotes, cracks and proverbs on the theological status of applause.
‘So let’s give the newlyweds a hand,’ he coyly concludes. People chuckle, put down their cucumbers and clap. By now the shrieking, stomping, whooping and clapping from the women’s section is all but deafening, and it’s hard to understand what the man is saying.
He starts telling jokes. A plane crash-lands on a cannibal island. Papa cannibal and his son are watching the passengers stumble out of the aircraft. ‘Let’s eat that woman!’ says the son. ‘No, son, she’s too scrawny,’ says Papa Cannibal. ‘Then let’s eat that guy!’ ‘No, son, he’s too fat, it’s not good for you, imagine the cholesterol.’ Finally, this young, bad hejab woman comes out of the plane. Her headscarf is pulled back waaaay over here, she’s got makeup, short skirt, high heels, no socks, you get the picture. ‘Let’s eat her!’ says the son. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ says the father, ‘We’ll eat your mother instead!’
The men giggle, yawn or play with their toothpicks. Pacino launches into song. He has a good voice and goes through religious songs, folk songs, male bonding songs. One is a slow hymn to the women of Iran. If you want a woman who’s pretty and sweet, gooo to Shiraaaz – If you want a woman who’s funny and cheerful, gooo to Abadaaan – If you want a woman who’s smart and strong, gooo to Tabriiiiiz – but remember, gentlemen, remember it takes money, it takes a car, it takes a house. And so on.
The groom finally arrives, looking utterly exhausted, and everyone stands and applauds as he’s surrounded by digital hi-8 video cameras and big clouds of cash that people throw at him as he passes, hordes of little boys squabbling over the money as it floats to the ground. As he walks around the ballroom, shaking hands and smiling politely, the kids stumble around him, kicking over chairs and glasses and sending fruit and cutlery flying through the room as they fight over the cash.
He finally makes it to the stage, where he takes a seat between two young men in suits, his saqdush. Strictly speaking, the lettered second cousin explains, a saqdush is a ‘good-looking, experienced young man who stands by the groom during his wedding’ and offers him advice, particularly when it comes to what, supposedly, only married men have been through before. In practice, the saqdush is merely expected to sit beside the groom and look pretty for a little while. Piled up before them on silver platters are handsome, pyramidal architectures of tangerines, oranges and cucumbers.
Pacino is bursting into song once again, when there’s a whiff of food in the air, and everyone scrambles to their feet, throws themselves at the meat sauce and the rice cakes, eats as quickly as they possibly can and leaves immediately, to wait for their sisters, mothers, wives and girlfriends in the searing orange neon light outside the door.
At an opening at the uptown Shahrzad art gallery the next day, I was surprised to walk into Tarofi, still surrounded by his many sons. Art and paint. Very good nice.
Though I try to keep my distance, Tarofi lays a chummy arm around my shoulder and tells me of a Rotterdam Conference honoring the ‘Planetary Peace Prize for People’s Rights’, where he has been invited to speak as a ‘voice of reformism in the Islamic world’, very good, very nice, then croakingly introduces me to an illustrious abstract painter who has spent the past two decades teaching his own work to students of the various Tehran art academies: sixties op-art with meaningful admixtures of lyrical, folkloric touches.
I chuckle at the professor’s jokes, compliment his wife on her Chanel headscarf and even offer the professor a solo exhibit at the Promessa, complete with a lecture series on retinal exhaustion, along with an all-night reading of the key texts of Gestalt Psychology, then move away, intending to leave as soon as I possibly can.
I’ve already reached the exit, lighting a cigarette and checking my watch as I walk, when I remember Stella’s email and thus have to make my way back through the blur of nose-jobs, platitudes and eau de cologne, to give Tarofi Stella’s regards. Predictably, he lightens up and insists what a shame it is I am leaving so early and couldn’t we have coffee the next day or the day after, reminding me he has only just acquired an apartment in Zirzamin, block 70 or thereabouts, in one of the slabs a touch more brutalist than those of Franco-Iranian make, perhaps because they were built by Korean engineers at a later date. Oh so you’ve never seen the Korean ones from within, well that’s a shame. I mean isn’t it great we’re neighbors now, we could get to know each other a little better, now wouldn’t that be something – see, I’ve only just just moved there, and already I get a letter from the tenant’s association saying how proud they are to have me, believe me, they were so sweet.
If, at least to Stella’s mind, there are common denominators in Iran which cut through profession, religion, class and gender – classical poetry, Aryanism or any type of junk food soaked in sweet ketchup – even these are subject to styles and modes of consumption that differ. One of the few phenomena that truly unite the proud people of Persia as a whole is the fascination for paw-foot rococo armchairs with baroque crimson paddings and gold trimmings, shaped into teeny-tiny crests and curls, leaves and feathers. In Tehran, more is more, and every other apartment is a painstakingly arranged baroque furniture showroom, full of flamboyant loops and adorable little curves, a cross between Ziggy Stardust and Louis XV. At times, as in the case of the Tarofi duplex, the sofa still sports the original plastic wrapping.
On Tarofi’s coffee table is a small, ceramic canoe filled with porcelain apples, peaches and pears. Sipping my Earl Grey tea, I admire the ormolu chandelier, fringed curtains and framed reproduction of an oil painting of a Dutch peasant woman in clogs and a peaked white hat.
Tarofi is chuckling to himself and wagging his hands about in small flapping motions. He has taken off his sunglasses and turban and placed them beside him on the plastic wrapping of the sofa. Although Tarofi’s eyes are sagging and bloodshot, like some gigantic cocker spaniel’s, he seems more relaxed and more cheerful than usual. His sons are nowhere to be seen; perhaps that had something to do with it.
‘You’ll find quite a few contradictions between private Gestalt and public design in Tehran.’ He chuckles.
I nod, but I’ve seen the apartment and would like to leave, its build being little more interesting or noteworthy than those in 44D. The rooms too small, the corridors awkward. The Zirzamin project certainly has its majestic, brutal, uncompromising splendor from without, but once inside, it is at best the furniture that leaves a lasting impression.
‘See, the Islamic revolution was clearly a postmodern gesture, and so a project such as Zirzamin would be out of place here. But clearly the advantage of big, monumental projects, whether they’re revolutions or books or buildings’, he pauses and leans forward, speaking quickly and quietly, almost in a whisper, ‘is that, if you have the right proportions, you can adapt from within. Silently, discreetly. From post to neo – and back.’ Even though Tarofi clearly isn’t the moron he appeared to be at first glance, I hadn’t expected him to be as stilted and highbrow in his architectural positions.
‘Corbusier no good nice,’ he adds, in his customary baby English, before
continuing in solemn, grandfatherly Mullah Farsi. ‘This is clearly the kind of thing people like you and I should be thinking about. You know the rumor about Zirzamin being one big calligraphic homage to the Shah? That it spells out “Long Live the Shah” if you look down from above? I smile nervously, close my notebook, open it again and pretend to take notes.
‘Writing, you see, is just as monumental as architecture. Why is this? Because it generates the truth in history, the truth in the family name. Architecture does not depend on construction sites, but on the knowledge of approved principles. On the authority to build on them. Take Alexander’s Persian porch. What do we find here? All these majestic columns, each one a Persian soldier supporting the edifice.’
I’m reminded of Mehrangiz, who I’m meeting later on today and who lives nearby. We’ve agreed to drive around the city in her Honda Civic this evening, to see the streetlights marking the twenty-second anniversary of the revolution and perhaps document them on video. Every year, the whole of Tehran, north and south, is filled with blinking neon butterflies in pink and yellow, neon swans in purple and green, neon flowers in blue and orange, and climactic government slogans in bright red.
I briefly speculate on her taste in living-room furniture but soon find myself rehearsing fantasies involving her generous bust, along with her ankles and the small of her back, as well as her broad shoulders and Germanic cheekbones. The idea of dropping by on a surprise visit makes me enjoyably nervous and uneasy.
Softcore Page 3