by Lois Pryce
Then, amidst all this dark, ghostly wilderness my headlight beamed on a big, neatly printed sign at the side of the road. The words couldn’t have been more welcome: the Hotel Alborz, seventeen kilometres away. For a moment I wondered if I was hallucinating a modern traveller’s version of the Assassins’ promised paradise; forget the exotic flower gardens with their fair maidens, this was my fantasy – a comfy bed and a cup of tea. But no, this was no mirage, the sign was right there, real and solid in front of my weary eyes. Seventeen kilometres. Roughly ten miles. I did the now well-practised kilometres to miles conversion in my head and checked my trip meter, watching the numbers turn slowly with every revolution of the wheels. Come on! I willed us on into the night, fired up with the knowledge of a refuge ahead and hoping that I would shake off my chase vehicles when I pulled into the welcoming civility of the hotel car park.
The cars tailed me all the way. My trip meter rolled slowly through the digits but when the estimated seventeen kilometres arrived there was no hotel to be seen. The road remained as empty and inhospitable as ever; there were no lights ahead and it was hard to imagine any kind of building cropping up in a place like this. Eleven miles, twelve, fourteen. Still no sign of any human habitation. Still the cars tailed me. Then, on a straight stretch, I saw signs of life in the distance on the left-hand side of the road, lights ahead. A building of some kind. My heart leapt with joy and relief. This must be it. At last! But as I approached I could see it was just a lonely house with no sign or car park, nor any other welcoming features of a hostelry. The cars remained behind, still close. The road darkened again. All I could do was keep moving on into the night, my body tense with apprehension. Five more miles and I was beginning to give up hope when I came around a bend to see a three-storey building built into the mountainside. It had lights and a carport at the front, and yes, thank heavens, a sign outside. The Hotel Alborz. At last! I didn’t use my indicators, not wanting to reveal my intent. With a quick glance over my shoulder, I swung a sharp left across the road into the car park, only to hear the crunch of tyres on gravel behind me as my pursuers made the exact same manoeuvre.
The car doors flew open and eight people bundled out, loud voices, speaking fast, and now approaching me where I had stopped, still astride my bike, trying to assess the situation that was unfolding. Who were these mysterious night travellers? One of them was lumbering towards me, a big moustachioed figure with wild, messy hair, and I realised I was cornered. I offered a Salaam in a voice more confident than I felt. And then I saw the glint of metal in his right hand as he raised it in my direction.
5
Iran Underground
‘HEY! YOU WANT some coffee?’
He offered the shiny steel espresso maker at me by way of greeting. I found myself laughing and babbling with hysterical relief. The wild-haired man smiled and, unusually, shook my hand, which I took as a coded message for I do not subscribe to the beliefs of the Islamic Republic.
‘We have all been wondering about you. Where are you from? What are you doing here in Iran? My name is Jafar, welcome!’
The others gathered round, introducing themselves, asking questions. It soon transpired that my gang of murderous bandits was in fact a group of friends in their late twenties and early thirties, both men and women, from Tehran, who had come out to the mountains to escape the city for a few days – their destination, the Hotel Alborz. In the dim light of the carport I could see that they were a different breed from the Iranians I had met so far. Their clothes and hairstyles suggested an arty, bohemian flair, and beneath the women’s regulation manteaus I could see evidence of skinny jeans and trainers.
The hotel owner appeared from the front door, an elegant older gentleman dressed in an immaculate light grey suit and open-necked shirt. He possessed an air of serenity and quiet intelligence that immediately put me at ease. Unfazed by this late and unusual guest, as if British women on motorcycles were always turning up in the middle of the night, a shed was found for my bike and I was informed that dinner would be served in half an hour. It was taken as read, of course, that I would be joining my gang of pursuers after dinner for the real action. Catching a glimpse of the qalyān water pipes and intriguing unlabelled bottles being unloaded from the cars, it appeared I had stumbled upon a party. Contrary to my stone-cold terror of the ride here, I now felt entirely at ease – excited even – about the night ahead, and as I stretched out my tensed-up limbs on the bed before dinner, staring up at the familiar arrow to Mecca, I admonished myself for my foolish paranoia.
I was used to the uncertainty of life on the road, of always having to judge every stranger I met and assess the safety of every social situation that came my way. I also knew that the unease and anxiety of the early part of a trip are part of the process that cannot be rushed. You have to go through it to hone your instincts; in the same way as your aching muscles ease out after the first couple of weeks, so does the mind. But I wondered if this process of acclimatisation would ever happen in Iran. The threats here seemed more real than in other countries I had visited. The idea that the security services really could, and would, lock you up was genuine – I had met people who had experienced just that: being arrested and interrogated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, for snapping what seemed like an innocuous photo or talking to the wrong person. Simply by being here, alone and on a motorcycle, I was flouting the very bedrock of the Islamic Republic, confronting them with a real-life, freewheeling female. Everything about my journey was a direct challenge to their laws and beliefs. So far, my dealings with the authorities had raised nothing more serious than some suspicious questioning and excessive fingerprinting. But, unlike in other countries where I had fallen foul of the police or military on occasion, in Iran I was constantly aware of being up against not only ‘cultural differences’ but a heavy-handed code of conduct enforced by a rigid regime. I feared my usual strategies of using reason, politeness or even hard cash would be futile if I ever had to wheedle my way out of a difficult situation.
Downstairs in the dining room, the charming proprietor and his wife were busy making me a fish supper. Sadly, his cooking skills didn’t match his general bonhomie and I chewed my way through an unidentifiable blackened carcass with the usual mountain of rice and a can of the dreaded Zamzam cola. I was all alone in the room, so had plenty of opportunity to study the maps of the local area on the walls. They were Iranian-made so not of much practical use to me, but seeing the familiar land mass covered in Persian script made them seem all the more enticing, and I felt a thrill from seeing the shading of the mountains ahead and the curving line of the Caspian coast that awaited me. Amongst the maps were glossy images of flower-filled mountain meadows and nearby Mount Damāvand, the highest peak in the Middle East at 5,610 metres, a mountain so perfectly formed in its symmetry and snowy topping that it was almost cartoon-like in its perfection. I could see how Freya Stark had become so enraptured with this part of Iran and could only imagine how otherworldly and mysterious it must have seemed eighty years ago.
As if reading my mind, the hotel manager entered the room and beckoned me over to a glass display cabinet in the corner. Carefully he unlocked the case and reached in to present me with an English copy of Freya Stark’s Valleys of the Assassins. He was beaming with pride as he opened it to the page of her hand-drawn map and pointed to his home village of Garamund, just a few miles up the road from where we stood.
‘You know of Freya Stark?’ he asked.
‘Yes, she was a great explorer.’
‘English lady. Like you! She came here in 1930.’
I nodded.
‘You are Freya Stark, but on motor!’ he declared, smiling as he carefully laid the book back in its rightful place and locked the glass door of the cabinet. It seemed an excessive amount of reverence for an eight-quid paperback, but this book, like its author, had travelled a long way to get here and was considered deserving of as much respect. His tiny village and these mountains were immortalised in
exploration history.
My fellow guests had eaten earlier and were getting straight on with the business of getting the party started in the upstairs lounge, unpacking tea-making equipment, qalyān pipes and tobacco, and what looked like contraband alcohol. Glasses and cups chinked, hot water bubbled on a stove and headscarves were already discarded, strewn around the sofas and floor cushions. They called me in to join them and I felt immediately comfortable in their company. Sitting around in jeans and T-shirts, the couples together on the sofa, arms around each other’s shoulders, a drink in hand, it was a scene that was so normal to me but that I now realised had been missing from the tableau of everyday Iran. You simply did not see this kind of activity in public places. When I commented on this, one of the guys shook his head in weary exasperation.
‘It’s been getting better lately. They don’t hassle people so much now but it used to be a lot worse. I was arrested a few years ago for holding my girlfriend’s hand; we were just walking down the street. I spent a few nights in jail.’
His friend nodded, adding, ‘Most people have a story like that …’
‘But still, we could not be like this in a café or tea house,’ said his girlfriend, surveying the scene with a sweep of her hand. ‘So many stupid rules! You know they have rules for everything, even men’s hairstyles, no long hair, no spiked hair, women’s make-up, no bright lipstick and no nail varnish on your toes, no open-toed shoes, pah …’ She waved her hands in disgust. ‘Even the mannequins in shop windows must wear hijab!’
The others joined in, each outdoing the other with increasingly outrageous examples of the demands of the ‘morality police’: ‘My friend was arrested outside the bazaar for wearing a yellow T-shirt!’; ‘My brother was stopped for wearing a necklace!’; ‘They made my girlfriend’s sister take off her make-up in the street and then arrested her for being too tall!’
‘Are you making this up?’ I asked, incredulous.
They shook their heads. They were laughing but it was the laughter of resigned despair.
As we settled down on the sofas and the qalyān was passed around, we talked about our meeting and were soon laughing real laughter at our misconceptions, on both sides.
‘I thought you were following me’ I said as I juggled a glass of tea and a lungful of sweet, apple-flavoured smoke. ‘I was starting to get scared!’
‘Well, I suppose we were following you,’ said Jafar. ‘We wondered where you had come from, what you were doing. We kept looking at your bike, trying to work it out, if you were a woman, who you were.’
‘I guess I was trying to work you out too. I thought you might be basiji.’
Now they roared with laughter. They were about as far removed from an Islamist militia as could be imagined.
‘This is the problem with our nations, this is the fault of our governments,’ Jafar said, suddenly serious. ‘They have made us all distrustful; you come to Iran and think you will be arrested and locked up, and we are looking at you, wondering what is this person doing here, what are they up to? We are more likely to think you are a spy than a tourist!’
I explained why I had come, about the closing of their embassy in London, and about Habib’s note. They nodded sympathetically.
‘Yes, I remember the embassy protest in Tehran,’ Jafar said. ‘But that is just a small group of idiots! Unfortunately, this is all you see on the television around the world, so everybody thinks this is Iran, full of crazy people.’
‘Most people at home thought I was crazy coming here.’
‘I work abroad,’ he continued. ‘I am a music teacher so I know how Iran is perceived throughout the world. It is sad, and wrong.’
‘It is good that you are here,’ said one of the women, Shirin, turning to me. ‘Now you can go back and tell people the truth.’
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ I said, recalling Habib’s almost identical words in his note. I told them what he had said about Shiraz, and that I was heading there.
‘Ah yes,’ they all agreed, ‘Shiraz is a wonderful city, the city of poetry, you know the Iranian poet, Hafez? And the Shirazi people, ah yes, everyone loves the Shirazis!’
‘But I am sorry,’ said Shirin, smiling, ‘you will find there are many men called Habib in Iran!’
I had never expected to actually find Habib – that would be akin to travelling to England in the hope of finding someone called Dave – but the thought that he was out there somewhere was always at the back of my mind. ‘I’m just glad to be here, and to have met you all tonight,’ I said, ‘even if you did scare the hell out of me!’
We all raised a glass to each other and our home-grown brand of international relations. I was happy that Habib’s hopes seemed to be coming true. When the tea was finished, the mysterious unmarked bottles were uncorked.
‘Now let’s get the party started,’ said Jafar. ‘This is araq, like home-made vodka but made from raisins, and this is home-made wine. The Armenians make it – they are allowed to drink alcohol in Iran, you know?’
‘So, everyone should have an Armenian friend?’ I said.
‘Ha! You would make a good Iranian!’ said Jafar, laughing and nodding.
The araq was lethal moonshine, almost undrinkable, and the wine dark and sickly, both as unpalatable as homebrew the world over, but in Iran you take your booze where you can find it. The strange brew flowed along with more tea, laughter and conversation, translated mainly by Jafar for some of the others who were not so fluent in English. He explained to me that they were a group of old friends who were involved in music, the arts and film. Back in Iran for a short holiday from his teaching job abroad, he had rounded them up for the weekend, the plan being to get away from Tehran and head to the mountains. There was definitely a sense of illicit escape about their trip, and out here, away from the city, it was easier to elude the Gashte Ershad, the dreaded ‘morality police’.
A couple of other guests wandered in and out of the room on occasion, sometimes staying for a glass of tea and a little conversation. They seemed unperturbed by the un-Islamic activities going on around them, and I noticed the women did not rush to cover their hair as they entered. One of them, an elderly man from Tehran, spoke fluent English and German and explained that before the revolution he had been a chemical engineer for Mercedes, travelling the world, setting up plants and systems.
‘And then—’ he trailed off and smiled sadly.
I nodded expectantly, but he stood up, clearing away his empty tea glass, ‘Well, you know, everything changed then—’
This was the narrative I was beginning to hear again and again. ‘Before the revolution’ was the opening line of so many life stories in Iran, always with a weary shake of the head or a sorrowful gaze into the distance.
‘Oh, they all thought it was a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘They thought life would be better: no more Shah, no more SAVAK torturing people! It is hard to imagine now, how angry the people were back then. But I never believed it, not with this donkey, Khomeini, in charge! I would have left but it was not possible for me.’
As he turned and left the room he gave a resigned shrug. ‘I never wanted this— this Islamic Republic!’
‘Is this how most people feel about the revolution nowadays?’ I asked Jafar.
He pondered for a moment but his friend butted in, angry.
‘These old guys, they say this now, but they forget, they wanted it, they wanted the revolution.’ He jerked his thumb after the man. ‘He would have voted for Khomeini, everybody did. This is the generation that have made it like this for us. Now they are all sorry and say it was a mistake. But it is too late now!’
‘Yes, this is true,’ Jafar was nodding thoughtfully. ‘But now I would say it is like this: maybe five per cent of the population still support the revolution and the regime – these are the hardline religious; often they are poor, working people. They will be the ones you see on BBC and CNN, burning the flags and shouting “Death to America” and all of that crazy s
tuff. Then another five per cent, they are actively against the regime, they are protesting, demonstrating, getting arrested …’
‘Are they part of the Green Movement protests that happened a few years ago?’
‘Yes, they would have been involved with that protest, but you know, thousands of those people are in prison or have disappeared. So, the remaining population – say, ninety per cent – they are unhappy with the situation but they will not do anything, or say anything.’
‘Because they are scared of what would happen to them?’
‘Yes, they are scared but it’s not just that. Life in Iran is bad in many ways, but in some ways, for many people, it is quite comfortable, just comfortable enough for them to not want to, how would you say, “rock the boat”?’
‘Yes. You mean they have too much to lose? It is easier to just carry on as it is?’
‘Yes, the middle classes will probably have a job, a house, good food, and if they know the right people they will have satellite television and’ – he motioned to the bottle of wine – ‘they will know where to get alcohol, and the authorities will ignore this most of the time. The women will probably be well educated, maybe have a good job and can send their children to a private school …’
‘So everyday life is just about bearable?’
‘Exactly, and this is not by accident. Sometimes when there is unrest the government will make a show of relaxing certain rules, maybe about clothing, or they will stop arresting people for small crimes, like having satellite television, or they will stop raiding house parties, and then people feel like things are getting better.’