Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar

by Matt McAllester

  I listened with fascination and envy. I had also attended college in Iran, at the very same university as some of these students, in the early 1990s. But our college years were completely devoid of political activism. In fact, a kind of apathy ruled back when I was a student. Unlike the students sitting before me, with their lofty ideals of reform and practical ideas about how to execute them, my generation believed we were powerless to change the status quo. The reform movement, which took Iran by storm in 1997 with the election of President Mohamad Khatami, had not been born then.

  During my college years, mornings and afternoons were withered away sipping cappuccino and café glacé at the-then popular Café Theater. We didn’t even bother reading the newspaper, because back then our choice was between two government-owned papers, one more dreary than the other. We discussed love affairs, parties, and also literature and art. But mostly my friends and I plotted our escape from Iran. Mine would be easy, a return to the United States, where I was born and had lived for a decade after the revolution.

  Our food options in the early 1990s were no more exciting than our newspapers. Our beloved Café Theater did not serve food. It was strictly a coffee joint, but thanks to the growing patronage of lingering hungry students, the owner—a shabby, chain-smoking, long-haired artist we called Uncle—finally put one item on the menu: an unimaginative cheeseburger and fries, served with a side of Iranian-made ketchup and mayonnaise.

  It wasn’t uncommon for Uncle to walk over to a table of young men and women, especially nonregulars, and segregate them by sending the girls upstairs. Or he would ask women to put their cigarettes down. He feared the morality police, who sometimes made the rounds in popular cafés and threatened to fine the owners or close their shops.

  At the Artist House Café, however, change was everywhere. A stack of more than a dozen daily newspapers carrying a colorful array of political views, from ultraconservative to reformist, was available to read. Young men and women mingled freely for hours and often tables merged, forming one big party.

  The vegetarian menu changed daily, based on the season and market availability. The restaurant was Iran’s answer to Chez Panisse. The manager was a cheerful Iranian yogi who kept a basket near the café’s entrance with leaflets advertising spiritual lessons, meditation, and yoga classes.

  He served an exquisite sampling of six courses in small glass bowls placed tastefully on a large round copper tray for each individual. A typical meal included a lentil soup; diced salad of cucumber, tomatoes, and mint; a mini bite-size eggplant-cheese pizza; saffron rice with lentils and caramelized raisins; a tofu stew cooked with chopped fresh herbs such as cilantro and chives. Dessert might be custard with Persian mulberries. No alcohol is served in public in Iran, so to drink you would get a healthy glass of fresh watermelon or pomegranate juice decorated with a bright paper umbrella.

  I had precisely this platter in mind that July day when I spotted the first gunman. He looked almost obese, his fat tummy bulging against the buttons of his checkered shirt, which was untucked over his baggy gray pants. His movements were swift, as if he was in a hurry, and his eyes darted around. I noticed him because he looked out of place.

  He grabbed one of the students by throwing an arm around the student’s neck. With his other hand, he pointed a gun at the student’s head.

  The student’s black leather pouch dropped to the ground with a thump. His scrawny body wiggled, his legs jerked, his arms flapped. The man tightened his grip on the student’s throat to still him. The student’s cheeks flushed. He gasped for air and gagged.

  We were standing on the sidewalk of Mottahari Avenue, one of central Tehran’s busiest intersections. Shops were open all around us. Traffic whizzed by. Passersby crossed the streets.

  When the student finally let out a scream, I also screamed.

  “Shut up, shut up. Do you hear me?” the man yelled at me, briefly removing his gun from the student’s forehead to point it toward where I was standing with my journalist friends.

  Two other gunmen emerged from a car dealership next door. They abducted two other students in the same fashion as the first one, with guns pointed at their foreheads. The students were dragged and shoved inside two unmarked cars parked at the curb. One of the gunmen kept glancing back at us, waving his gun in the air.

  Although they wore plainclothes, it was easy to identify them as members of the Basij paramilitary force. They had that stony expression of hate and rage in their eyes. I had seen that look many times before when Basij members waved their daggers, batons, and chains to disperse crowds of anti-government protesters.

  The Basij are a voluntary task force, estimated to be between one million and three million, who act as the Islamic regime’s chief enforcers. The Basij’s official—they are under the command of the Revolutionary Guards—and yet unofficial, nonuniform status allows officials to play a charade of accountability. The government claims ownership of the Basij when it wants to show high numbers of supporters on election days and at government-sanctioned demonstrations, but then it disowns them if their brutal actions come back to haunt or embarrass the regime in any way.

  In July 2003 the United States had just invaded Iraq. In less than two years, the United States had successfully removed two of Iran’s top enemies, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the Islamic Republic was now sandwiched, from east and west, between borders that housed massive American military bases.

  At home, reformists were deadlocked in a political battle with conservatives. After years of unsuccessfully trying to reform the Islamic regime, reformers, long viewed as part of the establishment rather than as challengers, were morphing into a serious force of internal opposition.

  The regime felt understandably nervous and vulnerable. Perhaps emboldened by the events in Iraq and Afghanistan, large protests and riots erupted spontaneously in Iran. Night after night, thousands of people poured out, on foot and in cars, near the campus of Tehran University to shout anti-government slogans. Anti-riot police, Basij, and the regular police were dispatched nightly to battle the unruly crowds, who threw bricks and set fires to keep the cops away.

  Student activists were at the forefront of these street demonstrations. For the first time, I heard the roar of “Death to the Dictator,” which protestors said was meant for Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And then more shocking words: “Mr. Bush, where are you?” Although Iranians did not wish for war, at that early stage of the American occupation of Iraq, when the depth of the fiasco had not yet materialized, many wondered if Iran was missing out on an American-imported democracy and economic prosperity.

  I had been quickly dispatched by the Wall Street Journal from Baghdad, where I was based, to my childhood hometown, Tehran. In the midst of street battles, speeches, and mass protests, meals (especially those lovingly prepared by my grandmother) had become a refuge for me, stolen moments of normality and appetite in a city where nothing much else seemed normal.

  At night, as my cell phone rang with news of riots, clashes, and arrests, my grandmother hovered around me insisting I finish a plate of lamb shank and green rice, made from fresh dill and fava beans, before I headed out the door.

  The charged environment of that summer was the backdrop of the student activists’ press conference. They wanted to tell us they had canceled their annual campus demonstration in light of recent crackdowns because they were afraid violent clashes would result. They did not suspect what awaited them outside the door that day.

  After watching the abduction, I remember feeling shocked and then confused. This wasn’t what I was used to seeing in Iran. Yes, dissidents and critics were routinely jailed and tortured, but rarely did the regime put out its iron fist in broad daylight for all to see, in front of a group of foreign journalists. Something was changing. The regime seemed to have acquired a sudden willingness to resort to open violence.

  Iran captured the world’s attention in the spring of 2009, when millions of people
poured into the streets contesting the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But for those of us who had been covering Iran for decades, the country’s downward spiral from the path of reform to dictatorship began that summer of 2003, with the protests and the arrests of students.

  On that day, many thoughts ran through my mind: Is it safe to linger around to gather more information, or should I ditch the scene? As I pondered, the students who were still inside the building called to us from the window.

  “Please don’t go. Please come back inside and stay with us. If you leave us they will raid the building and take all of us away,” pleaded one of them from the second-floor window.

  The students believed that the presence of international journalists would grant them some protection. And so I didn’t eat that day. We didn’t go to the Artist House Café. I spent nine hours, along with about half a dozen other journalists, acting as human shields to the student activists hiding inside the building. Lunch could wait.

  While gunmen waited for us outside, we worked the phones calling reformist Parliament members, the president’s office, and Tehran’s police chief. Although Iran’s shadow power structure allows for Basij to operate independently from the police, we still thought the police chief had the power to intervene. Eventually, teams of police officers were dispatched to escort us out of the area. They told us to head straight home and not stop on the way.

  It turned out that our efforts bought the students time, but not safety. In the weeks that followed, nearly every one of the students present at the press conference and the activist leaders with whom I had dined at the Artist House Café would be arrested and jailed. They were picked up, in more or less the same unofficial, brutal manner, by plainclothes men with guns.

  At my family’s home late at night unable to sleep, I combed through my notebooks, ticking off the names of the detained students. I imagined them confined to tiny cells in solitary confinement at the notorious Evin prison. I wondered how they coped with the lengthy interrogations and the torture they would inevitably face. I felt guilty for quoting them in my stories—even with their consent—and knew those published comments would be used against them in court. When these thoughts became unbearable, I remembered the students’ faces as they laughed and drafted speeches about freedom while passing around a bowl of saffron rice pudding, digging in their spoons with delight and insisting that I must have a taste.

  I didn’t have the heart to go back to the Artist House Café that summer. But on future trips, I did go back. A new generation of student activists, more seasoned and angrier, has emerged, and they still go there to eat lunch and share their dreams of a freer, more democratic Iran over a perfectly delicious dish of walnut and pomegranate stew.

  THE OVERSIZE HELMSMAN

  OF AN UNDERSIZE COUNTRY

  ~ ISRAEL ~

  MATT REES

  ARIEL SHARON WAS ASHAMED OF HIS WEIGHT. I COULDN’T TELL YOU exactly how heavy he was; the jacket of the light-gray business suit he usually wore disguised the extent of his belly and the dangling mass of his upper arms. Only when he walked could you make out the way he lifted his thighs around each other instead of moving them directly forward.

  For the most part, he kept his eating out of the public eye. The first time I saw him in the full of his copious flesh, he occupied a minor ministry in Benjamin Netanyahu’s first government. His aides scheduled a photo op on a train, as his ministry happened to be responsible for Israel’s piffling rail system. The flacks exchanged a helpless glance as the welcoming railroad officials guided the minister toward the buffet car. “Just for a coffee,” he called out to them. And a muffin. And another muffin, too.

  It could hardly have mattered less at that time, it seemed. In 1998, Sharon was already seventy years old, and he was generally acknowledged to be finished. He had been the outcast of Israeli politics since the Lebanon War of 1982, when a commission of inquiry found that, as defense minister, he had maneuvered Israel into a disastrous war and, to compound the error, had failed to restrain Israel’s Christian allies when they entered the Palestinian refugee camp of Sabra and Shatila to carry out a massacre. When Netanyahu won election in 1996, he overlooked Sharon, though the old man had been a founder of his Likud Party. Only a protest by a leading party hack persuaded Netanyahu to cobble together a ministry with little apparent power for Sharon. Everyone knew it was just a sop to a man almost no one wanted anymore.

  Let him eat cake. Or muffins. Whatever he likes. In fact, let him stuff his face so much he’ll keep quiet. That was Netanyahu’s formula.

  Yet the lack of self-control that overcame Sharon during his Lebanon war and in the face of oily baked goods was never again in evidence when it came to politics. From then until a stroke left him comatose, his was the most predatory and highly focused mind in the Israeli Knesset. He surprised Netanyahu by making his Infrastructure Ministry a focal point for the building of settlements on occupied land and the grabbing, as he put it, of West Bank hilltops in defiance of the peace agreement Israel had signed on the White House lawn in 1993.

  Sharon, it turned out, had a political appetite that, for a time, could only be sated by his hunger for Israel to consume the land of the West Bank. Although his body was obese, his mind was more nimble than ever before. He wasn’t going to let the United States and Europe hand his precious land on a plate to Yasser Arafat. (Arafat never developed more than a little pot belly, by the way. He mostly ate vegetables and, disturbingly, used to like to shovel wedges of bread and hummus directly into his guests’ mouths, while leering at them from a distance most of us would describe as very much inside our personal space.)

  As Sharon moved closer to the pinnacle of power, against all the odds, he became more circumspect about food. On several occasions, he even attempted to hide his eating from me.

  When I went to see him on his farm in southern-central Israel a few months before he became Israel’s prime minister in February 2001, he wasn’t wearing the business suit. His gargantuan form was revealed. In his casual shirt and jeans, he looked like Homer Simpson. His bulk was such that he seemed to lack all physical features. I could’ve drawn him as a single, smooth ellipse from forehead to toe.

  Yet he had timed my visit very carefully. As I arrived at Sycamore Farm, the name he gave to the home he’d had since the early 1970s and one of the few private ranches in Israel, he greeted me by saying that I had just missed the breakfast he had shared with his family—one of his sons lived with his wife and kids on the farm, and the other was visiting.

  After we had bumped through his cattle herd in a Jeep, stroked a bull that made even Sharon look lightweight, and strolled among his goats, we sat at his kitchen table for an interview. Sharon changed from a plaid shirt into a blue denim shirt that he thought would look better in a portrait photograph with his light-colored eyes. He had even made me hire a makeup artist to cover the patches of liver spotting on his cheeks and scalp. The table remained empty throughout our talk, even when he told me how convivial it was to sit there during the delicious lunches he shared with his family. As noon rolled around, the man they called the Bulldozer came to his feet and said, “Well, it’s time for me to have lunch with my family. I’m sorry you can’t stay.” He reached out for a handshake, which left makeup on my fingers. There’d been liver spots on the back of his hand, too.

  I assume he knew that, if I were to be invited to eat with the family, I’d be certain to open my story with that scene. Journalists, after all, like to demonstrate how far they’ve been allowed into a politician’s circle, to show that they’re privy to the confidences of the powerful. Compared to a stiff, formal interview, the breaking of bread is the closest one can get to the movers and shakers without breaking ethical rules. Sharon wasn’t a third-rate has-been anymore, plucking muffins from the tray of the dining car on the Haifa to Tel Aviv commuter line. He was the leader of the opposition, the man who told me he believed he’d be the next prime minister. The intifada was a few weeks old, and Sha
ron was one of the first Israelis to identify this conflict not as some kind of Palestinian uprising, but as an existential struggle for the nation’s survival. He didn’t want people to read articles in which he shoveled down potato salad and devoured chickens whole; didn’t want people saying, “Look, it’s the same old Sharon, the same old monster with no self-control. He can’t stop eating, and he can’t stop himself sending tanks here and there. He has no borders, no limits.”

  So he sent me home before he sat down with his family.

  It was okay by me. I never liked to eat with the people I was writing about. It always felt forced. The food, particularly in the Middle East, precludes too much serious talk. I always felt as though I were somehow expected to behave at such meals as if it were a social occasion. But I don’t like to socialize with politicians and, after all, they’re not my friends. Both sides of the table would be putting on an act. The shared meal strips bare what it’s actually supposed to disguise: the fact that the journalist is using the subject for material in an article, and the subject is using the journalist for publicity and the dissemination of a political message. Besides, I don’t eat so much, and when I do I like to be relaxed and focused on my food.

  I’d have wanted to know what was on the table in Sharon’s kitchen; I just wouldn’t have wanted to spend all that time grinning stupidly and making small talk with his daughter-in-law.

  As I left his home, I thought back to the photos I’d seen of the dashing young commando and general of the 1950s and 1960s. Sharon had been famous then for his relatively long blond hair. A bit of a sex symbol, though he was hardly spare in his build even then. All the stories he told as he looked out of the picture window in the kitchen were romantic tales of early Zionists defying violent Arabs to build a proto-state and along the way finding love. The self-abnegating pioneers presumably had little opportunity to gorge themselves as Sharon did.