Softcore

by Zolghadr, Tirdad;

  Cyrus huddles on the easy chair on the terrace, next to a middle-aged woman bearing a startling facial resemblance to Gerhard Schröder, and whom I have met several times before, but whose name consistently escapes me. Draped over her shoulders is a gold and purple sari, strongly reminiscent of a packet of Gold Love Deluxe Extra Milds. Rather typically for what I assume is a university-educated Tehran housewife, she has read every available Farsi translation of the writings of Khalil Gibran, Carlos Castaneda and the Dalai Lama. When Cyrus happily relates to her the conversation in the cab, she sighs and starts rearranging her sari.

  ‘Always making fun of poor San,’ she says. ‘You mustn’t forget how awful Tehran can be for foreigners. They’re all under so much pressure. I feel sorry for them, bi chareha. Poor things. Must be awful.’

  Cyrus flirtatiously tugs at the hem of the sari. ‘Poor things,’ he giggles. ‘Bi chareha.’

  ‘And I really don’t know about conspiracy theories. If you look at the British, it’s fact, and not theory. Remember the Iran–Iraq war.’ Schröder is smiling her Hare Rama smile. ‘Cunning little fuckers, the British. With all their smokescreens and Great Games. But Americans, they just blow stuff up. Bomb everything to hell, easy as that. Simple people, but honest. I like that. I really prefer it.’

  Someone has replaced the Madonna remix CD with a Manu Chao. No es tu culpa que el mundo sea tan feo mí amor. Cyrus sits up on the easy chair, cracks his knuckles and looks over at me. ‘You weren’t here during the war, were you? You were in Chad, no? Wherever it was, you really missed out. When Tehran was bombed during the war, people became hooked on their own adrenaline. Try to imagine. Every day, you’d have a radio warning, then you’d have the missile approaching the city. No idea where it would land. Then the explosion, and then the slow echo, and then the sound bouncing off the Alborz mountains in the north. That was when your muscles relaxed. So when the war was over, people were hooked. Addicted to the kick of wondering whether they were next. Suddenly all these people were buying Playstations and Gameboys, playing shoot-’em-ups.’ He cracks his knuckles again.

  A bomb scare reenactment, I suddenly realize, reaching for the notebook in my inside pocket, could work well as an audio installation, fetching and gutsy.

  As a soldier at the front, Cyrus was responsible for warmongering murals and standard portraits of revolutionary leaders and martyrs, much like those lining the streets of Tehran. By and by, public murals of the kind, clever combinations of early Soviet constructivism, Shiite folklore and sappy Heavy Metal carnage, started losing credibility and now count as little more than decorative blasts of screaming, bloody bathos.

  ‘Used to be art, now it’s Burger King,’ Cyrus says in an unpublished interview. Cyrus’s latest sculptural series is a rueful perspective on the eight-year war.

  I can hear Mehrangiz at the other end of the terrace, holding a joyful diatribe on Arhundati Roy, a small audience excitedly jiggling their cocktail glasses as they listen, the ice cubes in their vodka tonics making happy clinking sounds. ‘Goddamn mangos! Going on and on and on – it’s, like, lady, please stop piling all those adjectives on top of each other.’ Mehrangiz, chubbier and stouter than ever, is dressed in black, in what she ostensibly considers to be a kind of femme fatale outfit, complete with thick black mascara, heavy perfume and an enormous necklace consisting of glittering silver projectiles.

  ‘Playstations.’ Still seated next to Cyrus, Schröder Rama is once again rearranging her sari. ‘Imagine. Instead of doing something with their minds. You would think that hardship makes you smarter, wiser, but no. Playstations and Gameboys.’ I see San standing in a corner behind Mehrangiz, an olive stacked with pomegranate paste in one hand, an unlit Winston Light in the other. Although I persistently feel embarrassed for San, I’m secretly quite fond of her and regularly quote her underhandedly, in the notebooks as much as in dinner-table conversations. When San sees me watching her, she shuffles over to take a seat on the easy chair next to Cyrus, and I catch myself wishing I had my notebook with me.

  ‘Tehran, you guys. I’m telling you. One psycho-historical mille-feuilles. One fucking psycho-fucking-historical headfuck. Cataplexy. Burma. The Fiji Islands. I mean, have you been to Zagreb? Or Tirana? Tirana is happening. But, I mean, Tehran? This guy Reza, you know Reza? He says to me: So I saw you wear Doc Martens when we went hiking. So I say: Yes, Reza, so what? I always wear Doc Martens when I’m hiking. I think he’s going to say something about good footwear. But so then Reza says: But don’t skinheads wear Doc Martens? Typical. See what I mean? How can we have a fucking dialogue of civilizations when this guy cannot distinguish me from a skinhead? Fucking hopeless.’

  Everyone nods but is visibly trying to follow what Mehrangiz is hollering at her living-room audience in the background.

  The apartment is filling up. People are dancing to a Bollywood theme tune, wagging their hips and pressing their palms together above their heads in puerile, mock Indian gesticulation, when someone finally puts Madonna back on. I watch the guests fall over each other to get to the minced chicken kebab, looking for more lime, somaq spice or fresh herbs, until I notice Mehrangiz standing just next to me, talking to one of the editors of Ordak magazine, deliberating on a downtown café that offers ‘art performances’ every Wednesday. Yes and so now art is mainstream all of a sudden, you know how every family used to crave those Nissan Patrol cars, now they want a daughter who goes to art school I’m telling you.

  I make my way to the kitchen, nervously mixing a vodka and Coke with a twist of lime, then walk back to Mehrangiz and hand her the drink, grinning and nodding and chuckling at all the jokes, especially hers, until the critic finally waddles over to the kitchen to refill his glass.

  I steer the conversation away from the subject of Mehrangiz’s work, concentrating on other matters, and find myself staring at her neck and lips, then at her hands and wrists. Tehran and Shiraz, Shiraz is sweet but you wouldn’t want to live there, and Tehran and Isfahan, Isfahan is fine for a weekend but you wouldn’t want to live there either, Zahedan, speed or freebase, speed and freebase, Bret Easton Ellis, yeah you know how he’s always mentioning these slogans on people’s T-shirts, I mean how would you translate those, you can’t really, that’s the thing about literary translations, you know there must be a difference, like, between Fortschritt progress taraqi I mean a language is a world of its own, right, that’s just so true you know, angenehm or agréable, modern moderne, sympathique sympathisch, and would koskesh qualify as an example of the remarkable accumulation of Persian terms for pimp, when I abruptly, hastily ask her whether she would like to go home with me.

  Leaning with my back to the bedroom wall, listening to the traffic outside my window, I’m relieved I could make her come through oral sex alone. This doesn’t happen very often. The confusing architecture of plaits, folds and flaps always leaves me perplexed and exhausted. Besides, I can never decide whether the evermore abundant quantities of fluid are erotic or repellent to me. But Mehrangiz tensing her muscles, and coming as crudely and coarsely as she just did, was one of the best things that could have happened to me, at least tonight.

  Around four-thirty the next day, I’m meeting Cyrus for a water pipe at a south Tehran teahouse, a mise-en-scène of red bricks, ivy, lanterns, cushions, rugs, carpets, candles, fountains, folksingers and costumed waiters. Traditionalist Tehran teahouses are a popular mid-nineties thing that was quickly to rival Louis XV armchairs. Besides Tehranis of various classes and persuasions, even the devoted authors of Lonely Planet: Iran recommend the establishment in the most affectionate terms.

  Wating for Cyrus, I try to reiterate last night’s conversation with Mehrangiz, so as to put it down in the notebook under ‘Fashion’, or ‘Hearsay’, but I’m distracted by the LG color TV propped up in the far corner of the room. On the screen, a man and a woman are facing each other across a coffee table, upon which is placed a gigantic bouquet of spring flowers, with purple petals and orange pompons. The woman is a celebra
ted talk-show host, the man a token university professor submitting his views on the subject of the day, a recent foreign policy speech by Dick Cheney.

  ‘It all goes back to the concept of Satanism,’ he says, matter-of-factly. The hostess nods, trying to look detached and interested at the same time. She sports a gray and light blue veil and an appalling nose-job. Not only is the nose reminiscent of the King of Pop’s from Neverland, it is also disproportionately, shockingly small for her head.

  ‘At the dawn of the twenty-first century we witnessed a tremendous, tremendous boom in Satanic cults and Devil worship throughout the West. But the Bush administration, let me put it this way, when they use the term “satanic” or “evil”, they don’t use it in this popular, contemporary form. Their use is strictly biblical. Let me put it this way.’

  Cyrus arrives, bringing an unexpected guest along, Tarofi, whom I haven’t seen since slipping out of his apartment in Zirzamin. He looks frail and insecure without his mullah’s robes, especially next to Cyrus with his immense frame and black leather coat.

  He doesn’t like water pipes, so Cyrus hands Tarofi a Gitane sans filtre, which he smokes self-consciously, holding it awkwardly away from himself. When I ask how they met, Cyrus stares at the TV as Tarofi goes into a long spiel on his many endeavors to support the local art scene. ‘And Cyrus: he’s one of the best. Very good, good nice! But listen, my dear, seriously, I’ve been trying to reach you by mail. I have to talk to you. Is it still welovekalegondeh@ parsnet.net?’ I nod, and Tarofi takes an awkward drag from his Gitane. ‘Don’t you read your mails?’ he croaks.

  ‘Been having trouble with the server.’

  ‘Well it’s about the Promessa.’ Tarofi turns around to watch the screen. ‘Bush might be a piece of shit. But at least he isn’t a chummy piece of shit like Clinton was. Not that it makes a difference. No one even notices Mr Bin Laden’s a Sunni. That he’s saying a dead Jew is worth four dead Shiites. Did you know that?’

  I shrug and order another tea. I’ve barely slept, and I’m also rather tired of chiding foreigners for their little misconceptions and faux-pas. Admittedly, the Islamic Republic encounters an impressive amount of shopworn media bacchanalia, and with life perhaps not imitating, but reacting and overreacting to art, things have become touchy and strained. But that’s no excuse for succumbing to self-righteous intellectual folklore. That aside, few things are as telegenic as Islam, and the imbecility with which it’s taken at face value is very understandable.

  When I moved to Tehran last fall Cyrus took the time to show me around the main bazaar. Sunlight was breaking through the domed brick roof, piercing the dimness inside with silver shafts of smoky light. The air smelled of spices and heavy rolls of carpet. Among the merchants and porters crowding the busy passageway, an old, blind man began reciting a prayer. A sad, majestic, reverent melody, his lone voice cutting sharply through the clamor around him. Slowly, two other men picked up his song, answering in melodies equally morose and mournful, a scenario desperately beautiful to my baffled ears.

  ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ said Cyrus.

  ‘Funny?’

  ‘Poor bastard can’t sing. They’re taking the piss.’

  Cyrus is now having trouble with his water pipe. Tarofi and I watch him struggle, sucking and heaving at the mouthpiece, trying to get the charcoal going. He takes an enormous lug and screws up his face in disgust. Thick, brown speckled liquid runs out of the corners of his mouth. He bends over and spits it into his tea, which turns a milky, dark beige. ‘Too much goddamn water in there,’ he bellows, spraying tiny chunks of wet tobacco over the table.

  On the TV screen, I recognize a new afternoon program which demonstrates the many ways in which women can make merry in their free time. Knitting, embroidery, kitchen plants. The program is called Going Right Back Home. Ten or twelve television screens, all tuned to retrogressive government channels, I realize, would indeed be handsome at the Promessa, lined up along the back wall, perhaps.

  ‘The police shut down Womanhood this morning,’ Tarofi says to no one in particular.

  ‘Good riddance.’ Cyrus looks up at the screen.

  ‘What was wrong with it?’ asks Tarofi. ‘You don’t support the women’s movement?’

  Cyrus doesn’t answer.

  ‘What was wrong with it?’

  ‘What was wrong with it?’ Cyrus impersonates Tarofi, somehow managing to sound prissy and effeminate while croaking like some demented, oversized reptile. ‘What was wrong with it? What was wrong with it? You know who owns the women’s magazines? All this liberal press? These pimps from the government, the government foundations. They’re running the country. Used to be murder and bloodshed, now they just buy everything and anyone they need. Nice and civilized. They own the country. I read yesterday that this Badbakht guy, the reformist guy with the weird glasses, you know, he was going on about how he can get this whole mess sorted out. “Investigation this”, “commission that”, “committee this”, “inquiry that”. Fat chance.’

  ‘What about Women’s Weekly? Do you support Women’s Weekly?’

  The presenter of Going Right Back Home sports an even more callous nose-job than the talk-show hostess. She’s now smilingly introducing a fourteen-year-old girl in a judo outfit, who is to recite a short poem on springtime.

  I try to change the subject. ‘So you think the Americans are coming over?’

  ‘Get a thrashing if they do, I can tell you that. It’s a matter of dignity.’

  Cyrus has given up on his pipe. ‘I don’t agree. People won’t support another war for the sake of dignity.’

  ‘How would you know?’ Tarofi raises his voice. ‘You and your chi-chi north Tehran art scene.’

  ‘I know. I just happen to know. They’re not doing another war. And I’m not from no chi-chi north Tehran art scene.’

  ‘Listen, azizam. People still do believe in the clergy. Sorry to say. In Karaj, we’re building this new neighborhood library. Are you listening? When I take off my turban, roll up my sleeves, and start digging with the rest of them, we make twice as much progress as usual. And by the way’, he pauses, ‘aren’t you late for an opening somewhere? No installations to take care of? Performances?’ He smiles, clearly pleased with his caustic, clever self. I finish my tea, cast a sideways glance at Cyrus and Tarofi, both of whom are staring at the nose-job on the TV screen, and head for the door.

  With three weeks remaining, the Promessa is now taking shape. The interior designer has promised that, with the team of Afghan laborers having grown to fifteen, they will finish the plumbing and the terrarium by next week. My furniture dealer has just returned from Beirut, from where she brought four lamps of moulded polypropylene and six clear acrylic side tables. She also pledged to find four chandeliers, three distinct series of vintage cigarette holders and ashtrays, two Ecusson chairs in original baby-blue skins and eight stretched Lucite lounge chairs, all by next week. What’s more, a Dubai pet dealer has sent me a suggestion for the terrarium, drawing up a colorful blend of Tokay geckos, green iguanas, Chinese crocodile lizards, veiled chameleons, hummingbirds, lories and lorikeets and a variety of small rodents. That aside, an equally colorful mix of curators, galerists, diplomats, foreign correspondents, government clerics, art critics, magazine editors, artists, filmmakers, textile designers, furniture dealers and Ministry of Culture bureaucrats have promised to drop by for the opening. The opening night shall be marked by readings, not one but several. Stella has agreed to read a piece on the stoning of a Zoroastrian porn star, while a celebrated novelist from Kurdistan has consented to read from his eighties torture memoirs.

  The Kurdish writer was once a key member of the ‘Third Way’ Communists, although I’m not sure which of the many factions he belonged to. Shortly after the 1979 revolution, a ‘Third Way Minority Party’ split off from the rest of the group and opted for armed underground resistance against the newly-founded Islamic regime. The remaining ‘Third Way Majority’ faction, in turn, soon split into a �
�Majority of the Third Way Majority’, which was trying to actively collaborate with the regime, and an ‘Alternative Minority of the Third Way’, which preferred not to. The ‘Majority of the Third Way Majority’ was disintegrating even further, into the ‘Pacifist Alternative Minority of the Third Way’, the ‘Democratic Alternative Majority of the Third Way Majority’, the ‘Democratic Majority of the Third Way Majority’ and the ‘Bolshevik Devotion Society’, when the cadres of all the factions were hunted down, arrested and, in most cases, executed by Tarofi and his colleagues. The Kurdish novelist only escaped execution by insisting, even under physical torture, that there had been some kind of mistake and that he’d never even heard of the ‘Third Way’ in the first place.

  To follow the novelist, I’ve invited an African-American Muslim from Baltimore, a soft-spoken woman with a passion for sixties road movies and good Turkish coffee. The Baltimore Muslim fled the US for Tehran in 1980, after disguising herself as a DHL delivery employee and shooting the former Iranian ambassador in the forehead. She has since spent her time in Iranian exile, regretting that Baltimore morning with increasing bitterness and desperation. By way of a title for her reading, I suggested she choose ‘Return To Sender’, but it appears she will stick to ‘Iran: A Democracy Betrayed’. I briefly consider inviting the Isfahan University Re-enactment Society, which specializes in staging historical battles in public parks and community centers, to reconstruct the Baltimore shooting at the Promessa but decide against it. Stella would most probably disapprove. By way of a token academic, she has suggested I invite Uncle Tan Christenhuber himself.

  When Stella first met Christenhuber in 1991, the two reportedly spent an entire evening sipping single malt whiskey and discussing various remote detonation technologies as allegories for the Globalization of Knowledge. Apparently, the evening ended with a midnight discussion on ‘the creative Muslim psyche’. The ‘creative Muslim psyche’, Stella was later to quote Uncle Tan, sought seclusion and privacy, while the ‘destructive Muslim psyche’ needed to surround itself with witnesses of its doing, for it destroyed even the traces of its own work. The destructive psyche was comfortable among onlookers precisely because it did not mind being misunderstood. It could even accept the possibility of everything going completely wrong at any moment, for its one preoccupation was fresh air and open space, and the ‘entitlement to destruction’ that pervaded, organized and accommodated everything before it.