Trees, I remember Martin Heidegger saying in a TV documentary on RAI Uno, are no longer felled by a peasant catering to his and his family’s needs. But by men, be they peasants or tree industry tycoons, who respond only to the frame, the worldwide Gestell, the anonymous superstructure manifesting itself only through its demands upon its subjects. Heidegger was perched on a log, just outside his iconic mountain cottage, walking cane in hand, his ontological grumblings translated into Italian for the Rai Uno edition, which, in precious moments when his lip movements matched the dubbing, made the philosopher look like a wary Sardinian shepherd complaining about the subsidies.
It’s obvious, predictable even. Stare at any one point long enough, and a fresh semantic opacity will emerge, invariably more attractive and persuasive than the one it’s replacing. In due course, a capillary circuitry of pyramid structures, of unsuspected hierarchies unfolds, and even, at times, a puppet-master, a cosmic souffleur overlooking a Giant Plot and Scheme. Along with intrigues, planted evidence, pawns, dupes, couriers, agents provocateurs, sub-medial spaces, feigned nonchalance and calculated blunders.
I open the window and lean out until I see the courtyard below, where three girls are standing in a triangle, playing badminton. I light a cigarette and watch the heavy traffic on the freeway just beyond the courtyard, which, though dense, is flowing very quickly for a weekday afternoon.
My phone line makes clicking and humming sounds, as it usually does when it’s tapped by the assiduous employees of the Information Ministry. Judging from pre-revolutionary family anecdotes, the reputation of the Shah’s SAVAK was such that mere rumors sufficed to turn every disco into a potential anteroom to secret torture chambers hidden behind hypothetical trapdoors, every neighbor and relative into a possible spy. Subversive literature, such as existentialist novels, was read in daylight, behind double-locked doors, while nighttime reading required thick blankets to be draped over both reader and reading lamp.
Things loosened up during the course of the eighties, while the nineties introduced Farsi translations of Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault and Rushdie to every academic bookstore. Today you can no longer sit in a taxi without someone comparing the classe politique to all sorts of zoological species and organic materials.
During the prelude to my fourth interrogation, back in Shekufeh, Zip discs, VHS, mini DV tapes, minidiscs, audio tapes, CDs, handwritten notes, newspaper articles and photographs from my apartment were piled in a single heap in the middle of the room. A man in a tea-stained shirt and plastic flip-flops saying ‘Xanadu’ in neon orange and green walked up to the pile, picked up an article from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, loudly and annoyedly assumed it was Swedish, then grabbed a Zip disc and held it up to the light. Unsatisfied, he pondered a minidisc for a little while, placing it thoughtfully onto a standard CD, to confirm the wondrous difference in size.
I’m reminded of a news correspondent, a seven-foot Polish sociologist working for Newsweek, by the name of San, who, one winter evening, heard mumbling, crackling noises emanating from the ventilation shaft, immediately after calling her relatives in Danzig. Somewhere in her apartment building, somebody was playing a recording of that telephone conversation and translating it aloud into Farsi. She stood in front of the shaft, screaming vulgar insults in Polish, Russian, German and English, mostly referring to prostitutes, family relatives and faeces, until it eventually fell silent.
But then again, of course, since the men in power have widely been held responsible for more disappearances than, say, Mullah Omar, Pinochet and Putin put together, some say the nonchalance is not to be taken at face value.
Brief jail terms on erratic charges seem to be a custom running through the family. Zsa Zsa herself was on trial before a military tribunal of the French Foreign Legion, for slipping an uncocked hand grenade into a sleeping night guard’s vest pocket, as a lesson for the other troops. She was later acquitted.
Before returning to civilian life in Tehran, indeed just before opening the Promessa, as final architectural touches were being made to the venue, much as they are being rendered right now, Zsa Zsa worked as a military advisor to the government. This was the time she gained access to an army tank and used it to destroy the entrance gates of the Armenian Social Club, two hours after the cocktail waiter referred to her boyfriend as a ‘dirty Muslim-fucker’. This, too, although leading to legal complications, resulted in little more than a fine.
Zsa Zsa did finally run into a spot of trouble shortly thereafter, following a clumsy attempt to take revenge on her oppressive boss at the Defense Ministry. The man in question was the type to shave the upper half of his moustache and wear transparent ankle stockings and wristwatches with tiny clockfaces saying New York, London, Paris and Sydney. He also installed a hidden back room in his office, perfectly concealed behind mahogany wall paneling, specifically for having sex with his alternating secretaries, most of whom were over six feet tall and had a speech impediment of some kind. Zsa Zsa discovered the room by pure coincidence, while working late on a Wednesday evening. She walked into the boss’s office unannounced, caught a glimpse of a missionary position through a half-opened doorway in the paneling and silently backed out unnoticed.
Zsa Zsa was soon to realize that her superiors were collaborating with army officers and Soviet bureaucrats to embezzle government money through fictitious arms deals, and bragged to her drinking buddies that she’d give away that dirty pimp scumbag bastard to the military police. Following this fit of pointless, drunken bravado, the dirty pimp scumbag bastard used his military contacts to have Zsa Zsa arrested by Column 2, a Mossad-trained, anti-espionage unit. Upon which she underwent a long interrogation in a mangled armchair, which, as the officer informed her, was replaced weekly, due to the ‘shredded upholstery and the urine stains and all the rest of it’.
To prove her case, and to locate the necessary documents to back it up, Zsa Zsa directed the Column 2 agents to the concealed office parlor, where she rightly assumed all the relevant files and photocopies to be. Over the next few days, the outlines of the cinematic storyline were carefully leaked to the press. Key accomplices among the military cadre, not knowing who’d betrayed them, panicked and started disclosing ever more names and details, for the sake of revenge but also in a vague hope of saving their own necks. The plot culminated in several high-profile arrests and a number of suicides, technical and otherwise.
Zsa Zsa wasn’t freed from the Column 2 premises, however, until an official decision was reached on whether she was to be done away with, or released under protective surveillance. Eventually, a handwritten letter from His Majesty Shah Reza ‘St Moritz – j’adore’ Pahlavi was flown in from the Winter Residence, politically embarrassing as it might have been, graciously sparing Zsa Zsa’s life.
Finally, by way of a finale furioso, Zsa Zsa was arrested one last time, under the Islamic Republic only ten years later. Her phone line had been tapped for eight months running, as a result of which she came under charges of forgery, gambling, illicit foreign currency exchange deals, purchase and distribution of alcohol, purchase and distribution of marijuana, purchase and distribution of opium, purchase and distribution of illegal audio cassettes, purchase and distribution of pornographic Video CDs, and intent to commit adultery.
Her eighteen-year prison sentence was waived, however, thanks to a small politico-financial network of mutual esteem stretching across the municipality of Tehran, and the sentence was reduced to ninety lashes. These too were omitted by the officer in charge when Zsa Zsa discovered they shared a passion for horses, and she invited him over for a long weekend on the farm. Bring your family, it’ll be smashing, we’ll have lots of fun. Don’t forget the sunblock, you’ll need some sunblock for the kids.
The next morning, I wake up earlier than usual, switch on the Sony portable to BBC World Service, then walk down to the corner store to buy a new flask of Gillette Peau Sensible shaving gel and a box of Sea Pearl cotton swabs. The razor blades and the L’Oréal face scrub c
an, unless I’m very mistaken, wait until Wednesday. As I head back home after talking soccer with the shopkeepers, I remember I’ll soon be running out of band-aid, but decide to take care of that on Wednesday as well.
After noting ‘band-aid’ in the current notebook, in order to break the torpor of basketball championship reruns and John Le Carré, I take a cab to the National Library, where, in the newly renovated East Wing, I might catch a glimpse of a rare manuscript once belonging to eleventh-century explorer and poet-historian Jabir Fat’ollah Kalegondeh. It so happens that Cyrus Rahati’s new lover, a nineteen-year-old art student named Mina, works part-time at the information desk of the library, and surely she could show me the manuscript if it were still barred from public view.
Jabir Fat’ollah Kalegondeh, a man most revered for his witty, homoerotic inversions and Sufi parables, is one name I wish I could include more regularly in these notebooks. Beauty of such poise and power / even a humble Hebrew scribe / sighs for the blooming desert boy. And suchlike.
Kalegondeh’s prose, on the other hand, was far less celebrated than his poetry, and was largely written in exile, under the suspicious patronage of Shah Zahremar the Grand. A narrator may play a game of plunging, content to know not, and yet, bequeath a word with a speaker, however weak or strong, and you bless it with vigor. The quote, though all but completely incomprehensible, offers a self-indulgent fatalism of the kind I find impossible to resist.
The Kalegondeh citations in my older notebooks, from my days as a student in Arabic and Hebrew, are mainly under ‘Travel’. Travel conjures the very core of every deserving tale in history, the solitary, wayfaring man, seeking his proper sense of truth and ethics. Future ‘Travel’ entries will hopefully include case studies, quotes and excerpts from travel novellas written in medieval Venice and Liguria, the Homeric epics, Crusader biographies, G.W.F. Hegel’s university lectures, Reinhold Messner slide shows, George Lucas, Gaugin, Le Corbusier, Tomb Raider, Mirza Saleh Shirazi, *Wallpaper magazine, Hades mythology, Bounty advertising, Beatniks in Tangiers, the Arthurian quest for the Grail, Coppola, Stella, Mehrangiz, the Old Testament, Bouvier, Chatwin, Lord Byron, Black Hawk Down, Hiroshima mon amour, Anand Ram Mukhlis, Nek Rai, Christian Kracht, recent memories of Hamburg and Beirut, childhood anecdotes and Ferdousi’s Shahnahmeh. Saiawush rode on undaunted, and his white robes and ebon steed shone forth between the flames, and their anger was reflected upon his helmet of gold.
I’m greeted at the information desk of the National Library by a fake blonde with ruthlessly plucked eyebrows who looks vaguely familiar, and it takes me a moment to realize I’m looking at the very same woman with the discreet nose-job and the biodegradable Tampax Slender Regular whom I’d seen at the corner store several weeks ago. Mina seems very different now, tacky, blow-dried strands of dark blonde stretching out in all directions from under her headscarf, and looking disappointingly slender without her veil.
She is, however, delightfully plucky and flirtatious once I introduce myself, and we do not move from the entry hall for well over an hour. Kalegondeh, Khayyam, Fitzgerald, Dialogue Among Civilizations, the Peacock Throne, Indian restaurants.
Mina tells me about the photographs she’s been working on, which, incidentally, were greatly inspired by our common friend Mehrangiz’s recent work. The photographs are entitled ‘Exile of Homeland’, a black-and-white series of pigeons with Sufi love poems dabbled onto their wings. To change the subject, I ask her which enticing perfume is it that she’s wearing, and it turns out to be Chloë by Karl Lagerfeld, which is when Mina demands we exchange phone numbers, and I am thoroughly flustered to see her slip my calling card into her bra. I am even more elated when she impishly whispers in my ear that she might just steal me a gift from the library collection.
When we’re at long last making our way to the East Wing, Mina hands me, in passing, a booklet bound in dark brown leather, Kindermärchen written across the cover in Gothic font, a collection of Gebrüder Grimm folk tales apparently, with colorful drawings of blue-eyed toddlers exploring dark forests in menacing shades of purple and black. The book, she whispers, was a personal gift from Adolf Hitler to Reza Shah, who, of course, was tremendously flattered by the Austrian’s ebullient aryophilia, and grateful for an enemy of his enemies to be his friend. You like it, don’t you? No one would notice. Come on, be serious. It’s like a love token.
But when I call her a week later, inviting her out to the new Tandoori restaurant in Elahieh, she says she has very little time, and perhaps I could call back in a week, which I do, only to hear her say precisely the same thing once again, although, she adds, if ever I wanted to see the ‘Exile of Homeland’ series, I was very welcome to drop by at her Zirzamin studio. After the fourth subsequent invitation, all received with the same coquettish and yet emphatically evasive tone, I decide to look up another Kalegondeh manuscript, but the library is closed, due to a public holiday.
Skimming the local online dailies late one morning, the birdlike chirps of the plumbing in the background, I’m struck by the headline of a conservative paper, ‘Last Israel-Critical Voice of Europe Extinguished’, next to a picture of German MP Jürgen Möllemann. I take my time reading the article, and put down the names of several sources all claiming the German party leader, an amateur skydiver whose parachute failed to open, had been murdered by a ‘transcontinental scheme’ shortly after sharply criticizing Israel in a pamphlet. I decide to read the online papers more regularly, seeing as they obviously hold outstanding material for the notebooks.
Another front-page article announces the pending visit of Fidel Castro to Tehran. Skimming the rest of the pages, I’m surprised to learn that the three Khuzestanis in Shekufeh have been sentenced to death by hanging. I stare at their blurry photographs on the webpage, feeling slightly dazed, and for a brief moment I feel I may throw up on the computer keyboard. But the moment passes, and I quickly calm down as I realize it’s my own sense of shock and despair that moves me more than anything else. I continue reading the article to find that the hijack story was soon to be converted into a feature film titled On Wings of Desperation, with Cyrus Rahati playing a young co-pilot with a broken heart and nothing to lose.
Before leaving for the Promessa, I walk over to the bathroom mirror to check my Ceasar’s cut and my shirt collar, briefly reassessing my tubes, boxes, flagons and flasks, making a mental note of what to replace by the following week, including the band-aids, then briefly glance out the window at the apartment opposite. As I leave the apartment, double locking the door, I routinely wonder whether I’ll find it empty on my return. Remembering Stella’s last mail in the elevator, I make a note to call San and book a flight to Munich the next day.
It’s dark by the time I reach the gallery, and I spend the rest of the evening sitting at the edge of the circular dance floor, the oversized disco ball still suspended where it was three decades ago. Ever since Shekufeh, I haven’t regained my confidence in the joint venture with Stella and can no longer discern my true motives for going through with a project of the kind. The aim, I reassure myself, is to put the Promessa to proper use. To make a lasting statement, however bewildering, and however unfair it may be in the short run.
Staring at the surfboard tables and barstools, I think back to pre-revolutionary Tehran, a place I’ve come to know from seventies magazines and slushy family anecdotes, and which had its own type of zest. Cocktail bars, open-air Shirley Bassey concerts, Buicks, Chevrolets, Oldsmobile station wagons, ballroom dancing, eurohippies, seventies Chanel as worn by Queen Farah – with sunray pleats and gathers, along with arabesque ornaments of silver and bronze – sidewalk cafés, fake eyelashes, fantastic political pageantry watched on small black and white TVs.
These days, you do find, say, food courts, West Coast Hip Hop, international film festivals, Nike and Puma and Swatch and Longines, along with a heavy-metal scene, pizza burgers, Jim Jarmusch retrospectives, Dutch and Korean package tours of Isfahan and Shiraz and flamboyant teenagers in daddy’s BMW
convertible. But you won’t find a Hard Rock Café, nor $50 cocktails, nor loud Kuwaiti tourists in Motörhead T-shirts, nor Voodoo theme parties, nor sanctimonious Greenpeace demonstrations. A marvelous stroke of luck. If little else, the 1979 revolution still is, and hopefully always will be, a matter of dignity.
I begin to feel a distinct, crushing sense of wasted effort and bored futility, a Weltschmerz I haven’t undergone in a long time, perhaps ever since reading Catcher in the Rye and Siddhartha in my early teens, paperbacks in which I’d feverishly highlight every one of the many sentimental validations of pubescent, petitbourgeois romanticism with a fluorescent marker. My discovery of French existentialism, a year or two later, was to evoke a similar sense of self-indulgent, pampered exasperation.
At the time, at the age of fourteen or so, I was still living in Lagos with my parents and our nextdoor neighbor, whom everyone still affectionately called ‘Uncle Tan’, and his Austrian wife, a schoolteacher at the local Deutsche Schule. The couple owned a breathtakingly handsome German Shepherd named Matze who, in the sweltering humidity of West Africa, would do nothing but stretch out flat in the living room, where the air conditioning was persistently humming with Arctic efficiency. The times Matze did venture outside, his tongue a dripping quivering pink protrusion flopping from his open mouth, the neighborhood kids, who seemed to spend every single afternoon, evening and night in the street, would taunt the dog with sticks and pebbles, prompting violent tantrums in nasal Austrian accents. Stopp set nau you cräzy boys. I always found the neighborhood adolescents threatening and coarse, and so I never truly challenged what amounted, de facto, to many years of house arrest in outlandish tropical environments, self-imposed.
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