by Lois Pryce
Glancing sideways at the police chief, I guessed he was a bit younger than me; probably in his mid thirties, which meant he would not remember his country’s turbulent remodelling. He was the pure product of the Islamic State; indoctrinated in school by carefully vetted teachers, at the mosque by fervent clerics and at home via state-controlled television and radio. A loyal soldier of Islam, but I wondered how typical he really was; by all accounts, the Iranian people had been falling out of love with the Islamic Republic pretty much since it began. Or maybe my treatment was simply the unwelcome result of the wider British–Iranian relationship, the downside of bearing that passport, once so well regarded around the world. In the queue for the train I had seen a couple of other Europeans but hadn’t had a chance to speak to them. They looked Nordic – tall and blonde with oversized backpacks and expensive outdoor clothing – and I had heard them talking to each other in what I guessed to be Norwegian or Danish. Now they were nowhere to be seen and I thought enviously of them tucked up in their bunks somewhere on the train, sleeping the peaceful sleep of travellers fortunate enough to hail from a country that hadn’t spent the last century meddling in Iran’s affairs.
I felt suddenly, terribly weary, crushed by the weight of a history that felt so remote yet wielded so much influence over this little business between me and the police chief, a guy of my own age, who, I supposed, would say that he was just doing his job. After half an hour of sitting patiently nothing had happened. My fear turned to boredom, which turned to frustration. I wanted to know my fate, to get it over with. ‘Excuse me, when are you going to take my fingerprints?’ I asked the police chief in my most polite voice.
This was clearly the wrong move. He turned to me, his face clouded with anger. I was tolerable if I sat there and shut up, but asking questions was a no-no. He muttered something under his breath to his colleague, who answered me.
‘Not here on the train. We stop at the next town and we will go to police station.’
My stomach churned. They were taking me off the train to a police station? Where was the police station? Would the train wait for me? What about my bike, currently strapped into the goods wagon? I wanted more information. I needed to feel I had some sort of handle on what was happening, some kind of control over my destiny, but I knew that without my passport I was utterly helpless. This is how it happens, I thought, this is how foreigners get locked up in Iran. The naysayers had been right all along! The suspicion of the police chief was tangible. His unsmiling eyes focussed on me.
‘How much do people earn in the UK?’ he asked.
This seemed a strange turn in the conversation, but I came up with a rough figure. He translated my answer to his colleagues, who all made sucking-in breath noises and gestures to suggest this was a large amount of money.
‘But things cost more there,’ I pointed out. I didn’t want them thinking I was rolling in it.
He pointed at my boots, a pair of scuffed leather Fryes.
‘How much are these boots, to buy new?’
‘Well, they would be about two hundred pounds but—’
I was about to say that I got them second-hand on Ebay for eighty quid but I didn’t get a chance. I was interrupted by more translating and indrawn breaths from the policemen. This was not going well.
‘How much is a house?’
‘How much is a new car, a BMW?’
‘Er, well … ’
‘What about a television? Flat-screen?’
‘How much is an iPad?’
‘Um …’
I tried to keep up, but never having bought a house, a new car, a television or an iPad, I was completely out of my depth. I got the impression that there was a ‘right’ answer I was supposed to give, but I couldn’t work out from his inscrutable expression what it was supposed to be. Times were tough in Iran right now, or at least for a large part of the population. The UN sanctions that had been in place for seven years, following the nuclear enrichment row, had hit the economy hard and the trickle-down effect was affecting all Iranians in a myriad of ways. Inflation was escalating, certain medicines were hard to come by, and businesses that had depended on international import and export, facilitated by the global banking system, were killed dead.
The officer’s eyes continued to burn into me, the interrogation was relentless and I could understand how he had come to rise through the ranks. Although he was undeniably good-looking, he had a strange tic that added to his menacing demeanour. When he spoke his head rolled around, his eyes widened and he bared his teeth, which were sharp and white. The whole effect was extremely disconcerting. I imagined finding myself alone in a prison cell with him – although, at least if he ended up as my captor there was always the possibility of Stockholm syndrome to look forward to.
My unsavoury thought process was interrupted by the screeching of train brakes, and I was marched out of the dining car by all four officers and led over the railway sidings to a bleak building a few hundred yards away. In a suitably intimidating, windowless interview room an inkpad and paper form was laid out in front of me. Fingerprints weren’t enough, it seemed. Whole palm and knuckle prints were also required. I was rolling my hands around and splodging red ink all over the place like a sixth-form experimental art project. Then it was time to fill in all the usual personal details: name, date of birth and the one that always seems to crop up in oppressive patriarchal regimes – name and profession of father. As I transcribed the same old information, I imagined all the various Third World bureaucrats whose forms I have filled in over the years tracking down my dad to his semi in Swindon. I felt a rising hysteria at the image of a throng of Congolese, Colombians, Algerians, Angolans and now Iranians plodding up my dad’s garden path, and feared I was going to be overcome with giggles. The lack of sleep and underlying terror that I was about to be arrested for espionage were taking their toll on my mental state.
‘Now this one,’ said the police chief, presenting a form headed with the Interpol logo. Really? I wanted to say. You’re adding me to the Interpol database? I’ve only come here for a holiday. But of course I kept quiet and dutifully filled in the blanks while my tormentor stood over me.
I was directed to a bathroom to wash my ink-stained hands. A sign on the wall informed me that the water was suitable for ‘derinking’. Out in the corridor the police officers were waiting for me.
‘Now we go back to the train.’
Their expressions and voices remained stern and I still didn’t know if I was free. Was this about my illegal form of transport, or was it simply my British passport? There were no explanations forthcoming. I followed them back over the tracks, feeling guilty about holding up the train, but we were already six hours late and nobody seemed to care, so I decided my fretting was simply another indication of my British neurosis about punctuality, efficiency and queuing. When was I going to lighten up and get into the Iranian mode?
Back in the dining car the police chief took my passport out of his pocket and made a big performance of handing it back to me, as if he was doing me a huge favour by not having me arrested and banged up in Evin Prison. Maybe he was.
‘Am I free to go?’ I asked.
He nodded slowly and his cruel eyes gave a final roll in their sockets. ‘For now,’ he said, baring his shiny teeth. But he wasn’t smiling.
I collapsed into my bunk with a mixture of relief and exhaustion but I was too wired to sleep and an hour later the train pulled into Tabriz station. There was much commotion as every passenger disembarked, either because this was their final destination or to watch my bike being unloaded from the goods wagon and to wish me well on my journey. The crowd of well-wishers was a sight to see; phone numbers, email addresses, sweets and fruit were thrust into my hand, and from Arshia, a prayer.
‘It works,’ she promised me, ‘I said it when we were at the border, I prayed they wouldn’t search my bag, and they didn’t!’
Is there any remover of difficulties, save God?
Say praise b
e God. He is God.
All are his servants and all abide by his bidding.
‘It is a prayer against difficulties,’ she said, giving me a hug.
I said goodbye to the elderly Bahá’í lady and her gentle son. The strong lady in the chador squeezed my face again and revved her imaginary throttle, and the Ali G lookalike computer programmer helped me pack my bike while his family insisted I call if I needed any help, promising assistance all the way to Shiraz, should I need it. Then the conductor was blowing the whistle and shouting and everybody bundled back on to the train. I stood on the platform, waving to every carriage, sad to see my troupe of friendly faces disappear from view.
I was suddenly aware of being surrounded by emptiness and silence, and for a moment I was frozen with indecision and the sheer enormity of what lay ahead of me. Shiraz was a long way down the road. But there was nothing to do but get on with it; I had to take that first step, that first revolution of my wheels, of this ride. This was always the hardest part. I pushed my bike out of the station into the street and paused for a moment before swinging my leg over the saddle. The sun was high in the sky and the thin mountain air was laced with a tang of diesel fumes. I fired up the engine and, beneath a vast banner of the Supreme Leader, set off alone, into the Islamic Republic of Iran.
3
Islamic Republic, Yes or No?
TABRIZ STATION WAS located some way from the city centre, so I made my way downtown, riding gingerly into this new world. Khomeini and Khamenei were everywhere; on giant billboards at the roadside, as vast lurid murals on concrete apartment blocks and, less impressively, on sagging vinyl banners outside schools and mosques. With their almost identical appearance and surnames they reminded me of an Islamic Thomson and Thompson, the hapless detectives of the Tintin books. But that, I feared, was where the similarity ended.
Khomeini was by far the most sinister of the pair, with his stern, furrowed brow and cold stare. Although dead for over two decades, he still represents everything the outside world finds terrifying about Iran. Architect of the Islamic Revolution, creator of Iran as we know it today, he was heralded as the saviour of the people in 1979 when he came out of exile to supposedly liberate the Iranians from the lavish excesses and cruel inequality of life under the US-backed Shah. Discontent had been smouldering for decades and the people of Iran were ripe for revolution. They took to the streets in their masses, chanting ‘Death to America!’, denouncing the Shah and everything his reign stood for. The Shah, with the help of his secret service, SAVAK, responded with violence, firing at protestors. Meanwhile, Khomeini, in exile in Paris, was busy broadcasting his revolutionary message via the BBC Persian Service and the nation was tuning in and turning on – his fervent rhetoric was music to their ears. On 1 February 1979 Khomeini returned to Tehran to a hero’s welcome and a referendum was held at the end of March. The question on the ballot paper could not have been simpler: Islamic Republic – Yes or No? A glorious future was promised and the disillusioned masses signed up for it in their millions.
Thirty-five years on and things haven’t quite worked out as hoped. Even in my short journey on the train, talking to the Iranians returning home and then being frogmarched around by the police, it was clear that one form of brutality and inequity had merely replaced another. As soon as Khomeini gained power he began his own reign of terror, starting with the merciless and public executions of the Shah’s top men and eventually extending to the political parties and organisations that had supported his campaign. Although now regarded as an Islamic revolution, the campaign had in fact been a group effort, bringing together disparate strands of Iranian society from the middle-class intelligentsia to the Communist Party and the trade unions, all united by the same goal – ridding Iran of the Shah. But once he had his feet under the table, Khomeini had no interest in keeping his new gang together; he had seen what trouble they could be and, rather than risk them turning on him, he made sure they never got a chance. Khomeini and his loyal clerics won and their power has never waned.
Seeking total control of his citizens, strict dress codes for women were enforced, newspapers, nightclubs and cinemas were closed down overnight, and anything remotely suggestive of western decadence – dancing, drinking and pop music – was banned. This was in complete contradiction to statements he had made to the European press just months earlier, in which he had claimed there would be no oppression under his regime, that women would be as free as men, and even that he had no desire to govern this new Islamic Republic. The moneyed elite, including most of Iran’s once thriving music industry, left in their droves, fleeing to Europe and the United States. The faithful remained, but over the years the murmur ‘This wasn’t what we signed up for’ grew from a low grumble to the sweeping pro-democracy ‘Green Movement’ protests of 2009 led by a youth population who hadn’t even been born at the time of the revolution. Yet each year on the anniversary of Khomeini’s death, officially titled in typically melodramatic style, ‘The Heart-Rending Departure of the Great Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran’, millions make the trek to his shrine on the outskirts of Tehran, although whether they go out of genuine devotion or coercion is another matter. The nation enters several days of official mourning, or, as one of my train travelling companions summarised it with an arch raise of the eyebrows, ‘Yes, we all pretend to cry for a week.’
Ali Khamenei, Iran’s leader at the time of writing, appointed after Khomeini’s death in 1989, wields the same power as his predecessor, but possesses a slightly more benevolent expression in his promo photo. I wondered if this was something of a conscious PR move by the Iranian government, realising that the hardline stance was falling out of favour amongst the people. Khomeini’s stare sends a chill through your bones while Khamenei’s official portrait features a tiny hint of a smile peeking out of the big white beard, lending him a cuddly Father Christmas look. You could almost imagine him bouncing the kids on his knee at Debenhams. Almost.
As I rode into downtown Tabriz, gazing around at my new world, I realised I still had very little sense of what Iran would look like from a day-to-day travelling point of view. This north-west corner of Iran, the province of Azerbaijan, was mountainous but hot and dry, its faraway hills barren and brown. In contrast, the city was a hub of feverish human activity and a constant source of novelty as I weaved through its streets, head spinning at every turn. Of course, I had seen pictures of the great mosques, intricately tiled with gleaming gold domes, and the famous sites of Isfahan and Persepolis, but it was also the everyday and the mundane that intrigued me. The housing, the street signs, the petrol stations. Where people shopped and ate and got their cars fixed. My ignorance about the quotidian aspects of Iranian life was unsettling in one sense but in another way it was refreshing not to have textbook images or holiday brochure promo material to raise expectations – and the inevitable disappointment when it didn’t materialise. It made me realise, even in our world of information overload, how little of daily Iranian life is known outside its borders, and how rare it is to be able to arrive in a country with the sensation of an utterly blank canvas waiting to be filled.
The area around the station seemed unusually quiet, but Tabriz had seen plenty of action over the years; Iranians even claimed it to be the location of the Garden of Eden. As the former capital city, due to its strategic position as Iran’s closest major city to Europe, it had always been an important trading post. In 1721 one of the world’s worst and deadliest earthquakes had wreaked havoc, but it had survived and been rebuilt. As the largest city in north-western Iran and an important halt on the Silk Road, it has always been a natural stopping point for travellers heading to and from Turkey, a place to gather your breath and thoughts after crossing the border, or to say your farewells to Iran if heading west. It felt like a good spot in which to pause and realign one’s mindset for whatever hemisphere lay ahead. I also found something strangely reassuring about this sense of perpetual toing and froing; I was just another weary eastbound travell
er on this well-trodden overland route, and maybe Freya Stark had cooled her heels here, or possibly, even Marco Polo himself had stood on this very spot, gazed up at those mountains and wondered, like me, what was going to happen next.
As the indecipherable signs, shop names and adverts flashed past me in a mind-bending jumble of lurid Persian squiggles, I was overcome with a rush of excitement followed by dread of the unknown. The foreignness of the car registration plates and the road signs was impossibly exotic and thrilling but I couldn’t understand a damn thing going on around me. How was I going to find my way? Order food and fuel? Change money? Ask directions? I was used to travelling in countries where I couldn’t speak the language, but being faced with a completely unfamiliar alphabet took the challenge to a whole new level.
Although giddy from lack of sleep and food, I was eager to see my new world. After checking into a downtown backstreet hotel, where I was met with bemused politeness by the male staff, I dumped my bike gear and headed out on foot. I was itching to be out there, to be amongst it, to see, smell and feel Iran happening all around me. In my headscarf and shapeless manteau – a thigh-length dress coat required by law for women in Iran – I felt self-conscious and more exposed than I had on my bike. The motorcycle draws attention but it also provides protection, status and, most crucially, autonomy. On a ‘male’ form of transport you become an honorary man. But as a pedestrian, I was most definitely a foreign woman alone.