Days and nights and weeks passed, and still he laid stone upon stone, mirror alongside mirror, did the wiring, attached wood to steps and ate food, left throughout the labyrinth by frightened workers, tied to phosphorescent, bell-laden ropes. Eventually his connection to the world, politics and his subordinates was severed. He became self-consumed. Eventually he had made his way so deep into the maze of corridors, mirrors, winding staircases, and half-built rooms, that he no longer found any food because the workers had never set foot in such dark, distant corners.
He reached a point where there was neither electricity nor stairs, neither corridors nor halls, neither rooms nor even walls. It was a vacuum-like place where, when he really thought about it, he realised he couldn’t even feel the ground beneath his feet. It was pitch black and the flow of air constricted. No matter how much he groped, he couldn’t find a wall. Gripped with horror, he realised he’d reached the end of the line. He stopped fighting. Gasping now for breath, he moved his old, hunched body where he thought there should be light and a staircase, but again, found nothing. Occasionally a faint flicker of light in the distance allowed him to catch glimpses of his surroundings. In the dull reflections of the distant light, a fuzzy childhood memory would sometimes spring to life, only to disappear from memory as soon as he took a step towards it. He repeated the names of his grandmother, grandfather, aunts and uncles aloud to keep his mind alert. Upon reaching his cousins, he suddenly remembered that he had fallen in love with a cousin who was five years older than him, who had crystal-white arms. He was ten when he’d seen her wake up and grope around her mattress for her headscarf, eyes still heavy with sleep. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t recall ever seeing such a beautiful arm. When she saw him observing her from behind the door, she called to him and started laughing. But he fled—scared and embarrassed. Now, he couldn’t, for the life of him, remember her name. He thought maybe it was Aqdas, since her sister’s name was Akram. As though in a distant, foggy memory, he recalled with a sense of shame and denial how he had masturbated for the first time, under a thick layer of steam in the shower. Then, walking in the airless darkness and feeling all around to find a wall, he thought to himself that maybe her name was Fatima, since he remembered her brother was Ali.
He moved forward blindly and cursed himself for becoming so old and vulnerable. Then he tried to conjure his cousin’s face. She assuredly had a beautiful face; white as snow. Her eyes were blue, or maybe light brown. Either way, he remembered she bore no resemblance to Batul, his wife.
Walking in the nothingness and panting now, he suddenly thought that he had arrived at a door. When he reached out his hand, though, he found himself in front of a smooth, cold mirror. He continued onwards. Somewhere, he had lost his slippers so his feet were numb with cold on the mirrored floor. He reached a place that felt like a corridor; but when he called his name, “Ruhollah,” his voice flew out into the darkness, never to return. As he reached out on all sides, he touched nothing; there were no walls. Suddenly his foot hit a step: there was a stairway that descended to a room with no door, but led into another room. Then he passed through many doors and hallways and descended many stairs. He felt many pillars and windows that let in no light, even though they opened, because they had been built facing the mountain.
Once again, he called his name in the inky darkness, “Ruhollllah!” His voice flew out and away again, but this time an echo bounced back. He felt as if he was in a large hall. Then his foot hit steps that led upwards. He walked and walked, through corridors and hallways, up steps, through twists and turns, and rooms, until suddenly, as if awakening from a deep and disturbing slumber, he felt he was back where he had begun: at the darkest point his life had ever known. Windowless. Lightless. When he really thought about it he couldn’t even feel the ground under his feet. Now it would be impossible to remember his cousin’s name, much less her face. He wanted at least to test his voice again. His voice was still his own. This time, with all his eighty-seven-year-old force, he yelled, “Ruhollllllllaah!” and it went and went. And a childlike echo responded, “Yes?”
A pale light from an indistinct source illuminated the figure of a ten-year-old child leaning against a mirror, looking at him. The child asked, “Who are you?” Then, as though this sight of his reflection in the mirror had restored his strength and self-confidence, Khomeini said, “I am who I am. Someone for whom millions of people voted. Someone who managed an eight-year war. Someone who spread Islam to the far reaches of the earth.” The child smiled slightly and said, “Why?” Khomeini said, “Islam must become universal”. Again, the child asked, “Why?” “Because Islam is the last and most perfect religion.” Again, the child asked, “Why?” Heatedly Khomeini exclaimed, “There are no whys about it! Your understanding is not yet mature, otherwise you would understand that this question doesn’t have an answer.” Calmly but insistently this time, the child said, “But, really why?”
His bushy brows furrowed. When his eyes fell on the mirror he became decisive and self-assured again but as soon as he took his eyes from it and looked at the child leaning nonchalantly against the mirror watching him, he felt he was nothing more than a silly stammerer who couldn’t even explain his life’s greatest goal for which he had thousands killed or left displaced in foreign lands. For a moment, the dictator was silent as he probed the depths of the boy’s childlike “why?”. Then, as though understanding something that left him dumbfounded, the knot on his forehead suddenly released. He despaired in these, the last few seconds of his life, that he had no time to explain what he had only just now come to understand. His exhausted heart finally came to a halt, just as his one eye lingered on his own reflection while the other looked at the boy. In that split second, he understood that whereas in monologue he was a fierce ruler, in dialogue he was nothing but a bearded, illogical little boy, stubborn and pompous. He whispered a single sentence in the last moments of his life: “It took eighty-seven years to understand that the intellectual and rational rules of the monologue and dialogue are fundamentally different”.
Three months later, his body was found by people who had signed a two-billion-Toman contract with his son, Ahmad, before entering the palace. And although they used a satellite GPS, compass, radios, and phosphorescent ropes, it took them three months to find his rotten, decomposed corpse reflected in the mirrors’ blackness. In the end, it was the putrid stench that guided them. The same stench that all dictators secrete in the end.
* * *
1A prayer said by Muslims when they feel afraid.
8
Just like every dictator, Khomeini died without knowing how his revolution or the Islam it created, messed with people’s lives; not just the lives of the city-dwellers but also the desert and mountain-dwellers who would never set foot in a city, who didn’t even have roads that led to a city, who didn’t have a map to know where the capital was and, even if they had, weren’t literate enough to read it.
The Health and Literacy Corps during the Shah’s reign had gone to the farthest villages to educate people, but during the Revolution the Revolutionary Guards went to those places to recruit soldiers. The first whiff of danger came in 1979 when the Literacy Corps, which had been coming to Razan for years and whose members were by then practically considered locals— one of them having even married a village girl—went to the city for their annual salaries and didn’t come back. Nobody knew what this danger could be, but five teachers leaving and not returning did not bode well. The baby daughter of the one teacher was all grown when, one morning in 1986, the crunching sound of tyres could be heard throughout the village, drawing the sleepy yet terrified inhabitants to the village square to behold one of the five previous teachers entering the village in a muddy vehicle, waving. At first the villagers didn’t recognise him. The man was accompanied by three armed men with bushy beards sitting in two Patrols. All were wearing identical green uniforms and had large guns slung over their shoulders. Smiling, the teacher descended noisily fr
om the green patrol and walked towards the villagers. He shook the hand of one of them and quietly whispered, “It’s me, Bahram!” just as one of his fellow soldiers said, “Brother Hossein, are we finally there?” Bahram, whose name was now Hossein,1 answered, “Brothers, we’re here”. Then facing the villagers, again, he said, “These are my fighting brothers.” The people, confused by his strange appearance and words, asked, “Brother? Fighter?” Clapping an old man heavily on the shoulder, Bahram said, “Fighters in Islam and war! Brothers in religion!” Horrified, the villagers said together, “War?” Hossein looked at them incredulously and said, “The war between Iran and Iraq? You mean you don’t know? The Islamic Revolution? Imam Khomeini?!”
In our intentional failure to transmit news of events from Tehran to the people of Razan, word of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 only now reached the village, seven years later, by way of the teacher-turned-bearded-and-armed-Revolutionary Guard. He also informed them of the other four teachers’ fate: one had been executed because of his membership of the People’s Mujaheddin, another was killed on his first day on the front, the third was a traitor to Islam and the country and had fled abroad; while the fourth, sentenced by a religious judge, had been stoned, together with the woman with whom he’d fallen in love but who had not yet been formally divorced from her husband.
The simple-hearted villagers, whose biggest challenge in life was to co-exist and strike a balance with natural and supernatural forces in the surrounding forests and meadows, were left dazed and confused by this rapid-fire spray of frightening news. They knew neither how to react nor to what. To the revolution? To Islam? To war, or to the religious laws they had always heard described differently?
Although Hossein’s week-long visit with his fellow Guards was nice for his wife and daughter, it did not serve to lessen the people’s shock and horror about what had happened in the city during his absence from their village. Briefly Hossein explained that seven years ago people had taken to the streets, chanted death to the Shah and death to America. So, the Shah and his family had fled Iran, His Holiness, Ayatollah al-Azmi Imam Ruhollah al-Musavi al-Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in France, the Holy Islamic Republic replaced the tyrannical Pahlavi regime, nighty-eight percent of the people voted for the Islamic Republic of Iran, the leaders of the previous regime were executed, and any remaining opponents of the Islamic Republic were arrested and sent to prison. Ayatollah Khomeini ordered that housing, water, and electricity would be free for the average Iranian, women had to wear a headscarf and the Great Leader of the Revolution had ordered all relations with America and all other bourgeois countries be cut off. Hossein declared that Iraq had invaded Iran and now all men, young and old, and even children, were on the front, fighting to preserve the holy Islamic State. In the midst of all of this, just once did one old man ask, “Where is Iraq, anyway? And who is America?”
Had Hossein and his companions known that the lamenting voice of the war singer, Kuwaitipour,2 would so quickly touch the simple, trusting hearts of the villagers as he sang, Mohammad there were you not/ The destruction to see/ The city once freed/ The blood of your fellow men/ Bore fruit, that all the young men of the village would trip over themselves in their rush—transported in an ecstasy—to stand in line for a sip of the juice of martyrdom, they wouldn’t have taken the trouble to spend seven days and nights lauding the achievements of the Revolution and the Holy Islamic State before the weak and poor. Kuwaitipour’s wailing was so moving and heart-rending that before the cassette had played twice, dazed, teary-eyed teenagers, the oldest of whom was sixteen, stood in line so that Hossein could give them strips of green cloth upon which was written, War, war until victory, O Sarallah3 the path to the holy place is via Karbala, and Death to America, to tie around their foreheads, and boots too wide that they were to wear in honour of war until they were removed from their feet on the day of their martyrdom.
The songs and stories told by Hossein and his companions of mystical rescues by Imam Zaman4 on the front were so compelling that several of the simple-hearted village boys who had never even seen a paved road in their lives much less a car, a city or weapons, believed that if they did their ablutions and fasted for forty days, they would see Imam Zaman riding a white horse, come to greet them, and that he would grant them their greatest wish. Later, the bodies of three of these teenagers, already in their second round of forty-day fasting and each already a hunger-induced fifteen kilos lighter, were torn into forty pieces by Iraqi artillery before their dreams of seeing Imam Zaman came true, to tell him their only wish was to survive the horrors of war.
For the villagers, the world had suddenly become tainted and suspicious. Only a few months had passed since Hossein’s return when he came again, this time with a bushier beard, a harsher expression, and fellow soldiers who didn’t have time to laud the Revolution or Islam to win over young men and teenagers. From the middle of that rainy night when wet, muddy, irritable and hungry, they entered the village by way of forest shortcuts, thorns and swamps, they went straight to each house, banging door to door with the butts of their guns, forcing any male they could get their hands on into their muddy Patrols at gunpoint, and carting them away. After the sounds of the first bullets rent Razan’s peaceful night and fear tore through the hearts of the people, there was a sudden silence. The sparrows didn’t stir, dogs hid their tails between their legs and cowered behind houses. The crests of roosters drooped, and the udders of cows and sheep dried up in fear.
From the moment that Hossein and his companions first set foot in the village—taking us and everyone else by surprise—and their return several months later, there was not a young man left in the village who could shoulder the weight of a gun. The exceptions were those who had gone into hiding in the forest with the help of women, their whereabouts unknown to everyone except the women, who occasionally went to meet them and came back pregnant. Issa was one of those young men whose grandmother helped him flee into the forest to wait out the war. Another was Sohrab.
We had come all this way to escape Tehran—we had sought refuge here. And so our despair was greatest. All our dreams of life in a safe, tranquil environment dissolved the minute Hossein and his gang arrived. They came to the house unannounced to take Sohrab but, having just managed to send him into the forest minutes before, we denied his existence. Their expressions clearly showed Hossein and his gang didn’t believe us; at the time, we still believed there was a chance. But there wasn’t.
Nobody knew when this insatiable war, fought with the flesh of child mine-clearers, would come to an end. Women prayed they would only have girls, or not fall pregnant until it was over, because no man who left ever returned. Not even their bodies. It wasn’t until a year after the forced recruitment that a group of chador-clad women and armed men from the Martyr and Veteran Foundation came to the village—sent by Hossein. They arrived with several sacks of rice, cans of vegetable oil, and wall clocks, to meet with families, who greeted them with smiles, tea and sweets before they were told their children, brothers or husbands had been martyred. No sooner had the villagers placed a sweet in their mouths, than the envoy thoughtlessly blurted out, “Spread the good tidings that your children have risen to join the Fourteen Immaculate Imams!”5 The shock was so great the people didn’t know whether to swallow the sweet or spit it in the faces of these bearers of ill tidings. They cried. They wailed, they clawed at their cheeks and donned clothes of mourning. The world, so full of colour before Hossein’s arrival, was suddenly black. But, though the employees of the Martyr and Veteran Foundation turned their bags and car boot inside out and upside down in search of the martyr plaques for the families, they eventually realised that they had completely forgotten to pack them. Hurriedly, they asked for the provisions back, telling the families they had come by mistake and leaving them the wall clocks and an apology. With that, they leapt into their vehicle and sped away as fast as the track would allow, disappearing through the bushes and trees. It was years before Hossein
would show up again in Razan, and then it was with chainsaws.
Only the clocks from the Martyr Foundation hanging on walls of devastation remained to remind the people with every tic, tic of the second hand, that even with the passage of time, and all clocks in the village chiming in unison, their men would never come back.
Several months later, at exactly 9:24 and 3 seconds on an ordinary morning in 1988, just as a sad man with a sack of martyr plaques slung over his shoulder entered the village, all the clocks from the Martyr Foundation went to sleep.
*
Even though it was years before Hossein would set foot in Razan again—not even coming to see his wife and daughter— his shadow did not fall far from the village. Shortly after Hossein and his gang’s forced recruitment and the hapless arrival of the Martyr Foundation employees, the dream of a village child came to pass. A mullah climbed out of a military jeep in the village square and, holding a large metal megaphone, entered the tekyeh6 and soiled the steps of the saghe nefar7 with his muddy shoes. Then, facing the village, he blew several times into his megaphone and yelled, “People of Razan, raisers of martyrs, your attention please! People of Razan, raisers of martyrs, your attention please! … The Great Leader of the Islamic Revolution has decreed that all books, music cassettes and recordings of speeches must henceforth be examined to ensure the eradication of anything against the Revolution or against Islam! All villagers are therefore obliged to hand over any books or cassettes they have in their houses immediately so their Islamic nature can be verified!”
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree Page 8