Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  When, to my considerable surprise, I’m led upstairs and onto the flight deck, I sit next to Flight Engineer Mohammed Reza Rafat. I ask him to outline difference between the pre-revolutionary IranAir of the Shah’s Iran, and the IranAir of the post-1979 Islamic Republic.

  “Well, we don’t serve alcohol anymore,” he grins. “And, of course, the female crew had to cover up.”

  While IranAir’s male staff sport generic, vaguely military, black and white uniforms, IranAir’s women are shrouded in an elaborate, but not ungraceful, dark blue and gold headdress.

  “Also,” says Rafat, “the men had to stop wearing ties.”

  I’d read that Khomeini objected to these on the grounds that they were offensively western.

  “I don’t know if that’s true,” says Rafat, adjusting the folded newspaper blocking the sunlight beaming into the cockpit’s port window. “That’s just what we were told.”

  At any rate, all the male aircrew maintain dutifully naked necks aside from the captain, James Farrahi—who is, as we swiftly learn, a man of firmly held beliefs. He initially refuses to be photographed for Monocle on the grounds that “I don’t like the English.” My efforts to make common cause with him on the grounds that I’m Australian fall upon stony ground. “There is no difference,” he harumphs. When I ask him to elaborate, he accuses England of “screwing the world up with their conspiracies.” (The UK ranks second to the US in Iran’s official menagerie of bêtes noir—sort of the Great Satan’s Little Helper; specifically, Iranians blame Britain, quite rightly, for its role in the 1953 coup d’etat which, with CIA connivance, removed secular nationalist prime minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and paved the way for the succession of dictatorial thuggery and theocratic foolishness which has misruled Iran ever since.) After a few cups of coffee, Christopher and I are able to persuade him a) that neither of us bear much, if any, personal responsibility for overthrowing Iran’s last vaguely sane government, and b) more importantly, for our purposes, to pose for a picture.

  Back in economy class, I meet a few Syrian contract labourers emigrating for building jobs in South America, but most of the passengers are middle-class Iranian professionals, hoping to take advantage of the tax concessions offered by Ahmadinejad to encourage business links with Venezuela. They ask me what I thought of Tehran, which is a potentially tricky moment, as what I think is that Tehran is about the least pleasant big city I can recall visiting, containing as it does everything that is bad about urban living (crowds, noise, traffic, filth) and redeemed by absolutely nothing that is good about it (freedom, opportunity, diversity, tolerance). However, I rarely lie, for the reason that I’m no good at it—I’m terrible at making things up, and even worse at delivering the falsehood convincingly—and so I tell them a version of the truth, which is that I hadn’t much cared for it, but was sure it had hidden charms that take a while to flower, and so forth.

  “No,” says someone. “It is a terrible place. Next time you come to Iran, you must visit Shiraz.”

  “And Esfahan,” says another. “My family are from Esfahan. You can stay with them.”

  “And Qom,” offers another, suggesting the Iranian holy city and spiritual heart of Khomeini’s revolution. “The religious guys are a bit weird, but it’s very interesting.”

  I mention that during my brief stay in Tehran, our compulsory minder had taken us to visit Khomeini’s vast and still unfinished mausoleum. This elicits the sort of patronising chuckles that a Londoner might make at hearing some rube’s wide-eyed tales of visiting Madame Tussaud’s. I ask one of my new friends—a grave, sharply suited management type—why he thinks IranAir have launched this new route.

  “You ask,” he retorts, in perfect English and a stentorian baritone, “why this flight is happening?”

  Yes, I reiterate.

  “This flight is happening,” he declares, “because of something very important that our two great countries have in common.”

  Sensing a punchline in need of a set-up, I ask him what, exactly.

  “Crazy presidents,” he replies.

  I ink this quote gratefully into my notebook with a promise that I won’t attach his name.

  “I didn’t,” he reminds me, returning to his newspaper, “say anything at all.”

  The return fare for the Tehran-Caracas route, another passenger tells me, is US$1500. He adds that there is a Lufthansa option via Frankfurt, which is only a little bit more expensive, so I ask whether his choice is informed at all by patriotic ardour.

  “No,” he says. “I like the space on board this one. And there’s a really nice atmosphere.”

  And he’s right. With so few aboard, and so much space, people—passengers and underemployed crew alike—meander and chat. Some visit the onboard prayer room, in which a screen displays a computerised graphic indicating the direction of Mecca. There is little else available in the way of distraction. IranAir offers none of the fripperies of modern air travel—no in-flight games, no seat-back movies, and only a couple of (entirely ignored) Iranian family comedies on the big screens, alternating with the SkyMap chronicling our progress across the Atlantic. There is an inflight magazine, Homa—named for the griffin-like creature of Persian mythology that also serves as IranAir’s tailfin motif—but it’s a drab melange of travel guide hackery unriveting even by the standards of inflight magazines. The halal food is pretty good, though—buttery rice with meat and vegetables.

  Surprisingly, but rather delightfully, this lack of the usual amusements proves an unalloyed blessing as our unlikely journey around half the globe unfurls. The absence of the usual vacuous distractions—and the lack of any mood-altering agent stronger than Iran’s Coca-Cola substitute Zam Zam—promotes an unusual focus on what a glorious thing air travel really is. We live in a world in which any middle-class wage earner can skip across the planet in less than a day, and we contrive to take this miracle for granted. Worse still, we actually complain about it (I mean, I did myself, only a few paragraphs ago). We whine about the food, moan about the queues, bitch about the legroom, sulk about being compelled to perform the dance of seven veils—or, rather, the dance of jacket, belt and shoes—at security. We’ve become so settled into a default position of reacting to flying like it’s detention that we’ve forgotten that roaring across the sky at 1,000 kilometres an hour is about the coolest thing we ever get to do, the moment at which we are in closest contact with the possibilities of human imagination. It is astonishing, really, that we as a breed have reached a point where, given a choice, we’d rather watch Friends than the tops of clouds, or take Richard Curtis movies over the sun dipping behind the Cordillera de la Costa mountains that shield Caracas from the sea. The relationship between Iran and Venezuela may strike many as worrisome, but it has produced one of the great romantic, quixotic, travel-for-the-silly-sake-of-it experiences presently available.

  Caracas’s airport, like Venezuela’s currency and any number of Venezuelan locations, is named after Simon Bolivar. It is, in every respect, a long way from Tehran: new, clean, spacious, as much like a mall with a runway attached as any major airport in Europe, and the large numbers of armed, uniformed men are at least friendly. For flight IR744’s pair of infidel passengers, Caracas also offers the welcome prospect of a restorative beer or several. Mighty forces appear determined to torment us further, however. The bars and bright lights of Caracas, in theory just thirteen miles over the hills, are in fact two and a half hours away, at the end of a traffic jam of such hilarious length that it could almost have been imported from Tehran.

  19

  (GET YOUR KICKS ON) BEIRUT 66

  The Road to Damascus

  AUGUST 2007

  ANOTHER ADVENTURE PROMPTED by a phone call from Andrew Tuck at Monocle. “The road to Damascus,” he declared. “Everybody knows what it means, but nobody knows what it’s like. Go and find out.”

  I was happy to do this, because I’m always happy for a reason to visit Beirut in particular, and the Middle East in general—not n
ecessarily for any rugged, righteous, bullet-chewing, seeker-of-truth-in-valley-of-death foreign correspondent reasons, but because the weather is lovely, the food fantastic, the scenery magnificent, the wine delectable, the women beautiful and the people in general supremely courteous and hospitable. If the Arabs could collectively grasp the wisdom of putting their lunatics and criminals in asylums and prisons, instead of installing them in their parliaments and palaces, they’d be the envy of all humanity.

  As it happened, my peregrination along the Road to Damascus did prompt an epiphany of sorts, and it went like this. There are few things that the professionally opinionated enjoy more than a few hundred words’ fulminating at the ignorance of the general public. My, how we love a good fulminate. We spend hours anxiously scanning news wires, searching for the latest poll which reveals that x percent of the population can’t name their own president, that y percent think Afghanistan is where Gandalf lived, or that $ percent don’t know the letters of the alphabet. From this raw material, we sculpt the prose equivalent of an accusingly pointing finger.

  The assumption underlying these self-righteous tirades (and I should know; I’ve written a few) is that it’s A Bad Thing that so many people know and care so little about politics. Mostly, this is an assumption to which I subscribe. However, the great thing about travelling is that one’s assumptions are continually being prodded in the sternum and asked who they think they are, and in this excursion to Lebanon and Syria I found myself wondering whether the bovine complacency often demonstrated by large swathes of first-world electorates is really a problem—and whether, instead, popular indifference to politics should rank alongside literacy and child health as measures of national prosperity.

  In Lebanon and Syria, as in all police states, war zones and sundry basket-cases, everybody knows their politics, because everybody has too. Not knowing your politics—not knowing who holds power, and where the limits of that power lie—can leave you dead, or ruined, or receiving a brisk education in prevailing realities as you hang by your ankles. Next time I read a lament that I live among people who, despite unparalleled opportunity for learning and participation, substantially choose not to give a crap, I plan to hum a happy tune.

  “AND as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined about him a light from Heaven. And he fell to the Earth, and heard a voice saying unto him ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest me thou?’”

  —ACTS 9:3-4

  WELL, THE SUN is certainly bright out here, but nothing my Ray-Bans can’t overcome. The only voices saying anything unto me are my translator keeping up a steady commentary on the view and, on the car’s radio, the wearisomely inescapable purveyors of the global mall’s muzak: Nelly Furtado, James Blunt, Christine Aguilera. As for persecutions, we hope to ward them off with a bagful of bureaucratic talismans: accreditation from Lebanon’s Ministry of Information, a number for a contact at the Syrian equivalent. The Road to Damascus isn’t what it used to be.

  We are, it should be conceded, fudging slightly. It is simply impossible, today, to retrace exactly the journey that made the Road to Damascus a universally understood allegory for conversion. When the first-century Jewish vigilante Saul of Tarsus set off for Damascus around AD 36, intending to deal some uppity Christians an exemplary smiting, he did so from Jerusalem. Somewhere en route, Saul perceived a dazzling beam from the sky and heard the voice of Christ asking him what, in his father’s name, he thought he was doing, or words to that effect. Saul swiftly got with the programme, and is remembered as St. Paul the Apostle. Thanks in no small part to the reluctance of Paul and other earnest types with beards to keep their revelations to themselves, his route between what are now the capitals of Israel and Syria is now blocked by barbed wire, fences, sandbags, minefields, history, blind fury and bad faith; the single border crossing between the two countries, at Quneitra, is only grudgingly open to Druze from the Golan Heights. So we’re leaving from Beirut.

  Not that this is a straightforward undertaking. In recent years, this version of the road to Damascus has hosted its share of upheaval. In 2005, Syrian troops withdrew along it, having been forced by massive popular protests to end their twenty-nine-year occupation of Lebanon following the immense bomb blast in Beirut that killed Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. His assassination was widely blamed on Syria. In 2006, a year or so ago, this road teemed with Lebanese refugees from Israel’s onslaught of that summer in response to the seizure of two Israeli soldiers by the Lebanese-based Hezbollah. Israeli aircraft struck several targets along the route.

  What with one thing and another, we’ve been told, the Road to Damascus isn’t as busy as it once was. At our hotel in Beirut, staff who help us wrangle a car and driver tell us that the road once thronged with Lebanese pilgrims visiting holy sites in Syria, and less devout voyagers seeking designer bargains (Benetton and other prized brands are apparently much cheaper in Syria). Now, with relations between the two countries at a sulky nadir—despite Syria’s withdrawal, a steady tick of Lebanese politicians and journalists espousing anti-Syrian stances continue to meet spectacular ends—fewer Lebanese are visiting the neighbours.

  Myself and photographer Cristobal Palma have persuaded two locals to join us: a driver, whom I’ll call Peter, and a translator, whom I’ll call Sheila. When we start out on the Damascus Road—that’s what it’s called—in Beirut, it’s immediately noticeable that most of the traffic is coming the other way. It’s quite early, and these are commuters descending from the hills for a day’s work. The first significant landmark en route, past a district called Hazmi, is outside the Lebanese Ministry of Defence, the entrance of which is graced by one of the weirdest works of public art anywhere in the world: a ten-storey pillar of concrete, embedded with decommissioned trucks, tanks and artillery pieces. The work of the French sculptor Arman, it was unveiled in 1996 as a monument to the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-90.

  The soldiers standing guard are used to bemused tourists photographing the thing—I’ve done it myself before—but they’re a bit edgy. Not all that far away—in tiny Lebanon, nothing is all that far away—their comrades are at war, fighting the militants of the Fatah al-Islam sect, who are mounting a prolonged last stand in the wreckage of a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli. More than a hundred Lebanese soldiers have died in three months of fighting. The soldiers outside the MoD allow Cris to photograph the monument, but only from a few prescribed angles, to avoid capturing any images of nearby buildings. Though I suspect that the chances of us learning anything the Israeli Air Force don’t already know are remote, we cooperate.

  From there, we detour through a verdant hill suburb called Yarze—the sort of place which boasts its own country club and a villa belonging to the billionaire Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi (which, Sheila laughingly notes, was commandeered by the Syrians for use as a headquarters, and is now in the possession of the Lebanese army). We rejoin the road in a queue of belching trucks, groaning up the hill towards a suburb called Araya. The climb is now steep enough to make a difference in the speeds of the opposing lanes. Coming downhill, Lebanese traffic looks like a demented cavalry charge, the sleek stallions branded with the logos of Audi and Mercedes-Benz whipping through the ponderous high-sided carthorses trucking freight into Beirut. Going uphill, wheezing, groaning and grinding gears, the same array of vehicles resembles a depressed, weary retreat after a regrettable result at the point of contact. By the roadside, billboards maladriotly translated into the snappy gibberish of advertising mark our path: Shhhh Silent Parquet; Sexy Hot Summer Shower Gel; Loke International Hair Transplant Centre; Burger King—Welcome To Aley.

  Aley, like its succeeding suburb, the resort of Bhamdoun, boasts glorious views across the barren uplands (the cool hills around Beirut, at least when not hosting invading armies or wars, are popular holiday destinations—in summer, Arabs vacation away from the heat). By this point, Peter has begun concentrating ostentatiously, hunched over the steering wheel, scanning the way ahead with the nervous
intensity of a sniper. His concerns, however, are not to do with anything so glamorous as militia activity or enemy aircraft, but with his fellow Lebanese motorists.

  “Very dangerous road from here,” he mutters.

  Proof is not long in coming. We pass a three-car tangle of metal, sprinkled with shattered glass, surrounded by soldiers and drivers sorting out who hit whom and how. Further along, an olive Range Rover, shortened the length of its engine block by what must have been an emphatic shunt, is being loaded onto a recovery truck. Beyond that, a crowd of laughing bystanders help rescue a four-wheel-drive whose careless owner has planted a front wheel in an open gutter.

  Aside from the cool haven of St. George’s church, still beautiful despite the Civil War-era shrapnel damage, and a children’s funfair, whose depressed owner offers to sell me the business for US$200,000, the buildings along the road are functional, modern and ugly. The industrial squalor is only interrupted by the surreally serene appearance of a Bedouin encampment, the nomads’ goats gathered beneath a canvas canopy. It may be that in this region there’s little point in dallying too long on attractively crenellated columns—you never know how long your building is going to stay up. A few years ago, a mighty bridge was built linking the suburbs of Sawfar and Daher el Baydar, shaving a decent lump off the journey time. Last year, an Israeli bomb punched the middle out of the bridge, returning the traffic to the winding slog through the valley it traversed. The span is being repaired now. By the valley road, a billboard erected by Hezbollah calls last summer’s war “A Victory From God.” I’ve barely been in Lebanon forty-eight hours on this trip, and this must be at least the hundredth giant Hezbollah poster I’ve seen: the road in from Beirut’s airport is lined with grinning portraits of Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and the whole city is upholstered with gloating images of wrecked Israeli military hardware (in the southern suburbs, Hezbollah have even established a temporary museum chronicling the war, which we’d visited the previous day: the highlight was an audio-visual display featuring a captured Merkava tank, surrounded by mangled dummies dressed in IDF uniform and splashed with red paint).