Revolutionary Ride

by Lois Pryce

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  He looked at me. ‘Yes. No … I don’t know—’ He stalled. ‘I try to be kind. To help people, it is important to be kind.’ He nodded silently as if thinking hard about his own words and intention. Then he broke into something that came out almost like a wail. ‘That is why I am so hurt by our government, you know the terrible things they do to people, to my friends.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They torture people. They lock them away. Why? Because maybe they write something online, or they speak out against the regime. A friend of mine, a man I worked with in Tehran. One day he never came to work. We didn’t know why. We are calling him, going to his house. His wife, she doesn’t know where he is gone either. Then two weeks later he comes back. No words. He will never say what happened but he is broken, he looks different, I hardly recognise him. He is like a wreck, like he is one hundred years older. He says he cannot tell me, but they took him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I cannot say, I do not know. He will not speak of it.’

  I sat in silence, unable to think of any kind of fitting response.

  ‘But we all know this can happen. We all have friends this has happened to.’ He looked so pained. ‘It could happen to me, to you. Please be careful.’

  It was the early hours of the morning. I had another long day’s ride ahead and after my wet, cold crossing of the mountains, I was ready to hit the sack. But I had one more question.

  ‘Hossein, if there are such risks here in Iran, if you feel you are always in danger, why did you stop me in the street and invite me, a total stranger, into your home? You and Leila have come here for a weekend away together. You could have just driven past me, or stopped to talk and then carried on.’

  ‘No! I could not drive past you. Because I know what it is like to be alone in a foreign land. I saw you and I felt that you needed help.’

  He placed his hand on his heart. ‘A human being is a human being. We must take care of each other. It does not matter if you are Christian, or Muslim, or any religion, or nothing! We must help each other if we can. This is what I believe!’

  Leila showed me to the spare room and as I closed my eyes, the conversations of the evening continued to churn in my head. Hossein epitomised all that was fascinating about this complicated, contradictory country; religious yet hedonistic, practical yet poetic, modern yet rooted in tradition, equally at ease taking his guidance from a prayer, a poem or an algorithm. I drifted off to the sound of him and Leila enjoying themselves in a time-honoured fashion, and was glad that I hadn’t cramped their style too much.

  7

  Riding the Revolutionary Road

  DAYLIGHT REVEALED THAT with regard to the Caspian coast, at least, Robert Louis Stevenson was on the money. The promise of sparkling waters and white sand that had spurred me on over the mountains manifested itself as a flat grey expanse lapping at a pebbled and garbage-strewn shore. Still, as I waved goodbye to Hossein and Leila and headed out along the coast road, it was thrilling to gaze across the water and think that on the other side of this great lake lay Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Russia and Azerbaijan. But no ferries ran from Iran these days, and the beaches were empty, save for a few lonely fishermen whose dilapidated shacks and boats demonstrated how Iran’s caviar industry, once a booming export, had become a casualty of both uncontrolled fishing and international sanctions.

  I clearly wasn’t the only person who had been optimistic about the potential of the Caspian Sea. Resorts, villas and motel complexes lined the corniche for miles, many built in the experimental styles of the sixties and seventies, featuring futuristic detailing that merged Palm Springs modernism with Eastern Bloc utilitarianism. It was easy to see how the Caspian coast would have been the grooviest place to be before the revolution, but the last three decades had taken their toll and many of the apartment blocks and hotels were long abandoned, their empty car parks reclaimed by weeds and the once bold architecture now streaked and pitted, victims of the mid-century curse of concrete cancer. It was a sad state of affairs, reminding me not just of business ventures crushed and summer holidays ruined, but of how the joy had been sucked out of this nation, or at least been forced underground and behind closed doors. Pictures and footage from the past showed laughing families, couples and friends frolicking in the Caspian, ice creams in hand, and I wondered if I would ever in my lifetime see Iranians returning to these beaches in their bikinis and Speedos, as had been the norm before 1979. Iranians still decamped here during the summer months, but there was a forlorn desperation about the whole strip. Nowadays, if an Iranian woman wanted to swim, she had to enter the water fully clothed.

  After an exploration of the coast, I was heading for Tehran, turning south from the Caspian and back over the mountains, taking a circuitous route over a few days that would see me skirt around Mount Damāvand, then touch the northern fringes of the salt desert, the Dasht-e Kavīr, before entering the capital. This time my crossing of the Alborz was on a brand new road with spectacular views, but there wasn’t much opportunity to enjoy the scenery as my full quota of concentration was required for dodging and tackling fellow road users. It was a mystery to me how the Iranians, so warm and helpful in person, became lethal maniacs behind the wheel. Cars, trucks and buses tore past at terrific speeds, so close I wobbled in their slipstreams. Often drivers would be yelling words of encouragement out of their windows, giving me the thumbs up, or even filming me on their mobile phones as they simultaneously forced me into the ditch. I mentioned the phenomenon to a few people in passing when I stopped for tea and fuel, and was met with laughter and cheerful boasts that Iran had the highest rate of road deaths and injuries in the world. It seemed churlish to complain in the face of such national pride.

  In Tehran I had a couple of contacts to look up, both British Iranians who had returned to settle in their homeland. My first port of call was a friend of a friend of a friend named Sina, who would apparently be able to help me extend my visa, which, when it had finally come through before I left the UK, had inexplicably been issued for just fourteen days. There had been no explanation for this and my visa fixer couldn’t explain it but had assured me it could be extended at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs once I was in Tehran. Iranian born, Sina had moved to England as a teenager and had returned to Iran a few years ago to help run the family business, a well-known patisserie that was considered something of a Tehran institution, having been in business since the 1950s. We had spoken on the phone a few times and I had felt immediately reassured by his incredibly precise directions to his house in north-west Tehran, where he lived with his wife and daughter. You can tell a lot about a person by how they give directions, and Sina was one of the best. And when it came to navigation, I needed all the help I could get. City plans were scant on my maps and some even featured pre-revolutionary road names; there was no way you would find a Kennedy or a Roosevelt gracing an Iranian street corner these days.

  After the revolution most of the major roads in the cities, especially in Tehran, had been renamed with the appropriate amount of anti-western fervour, changing the likes of Eisenhower Avenue to Azadi Avenue (meaning ‘freedom’ in Persian) and Shah Reza Square to Enqelab Square (the Persian word for ‘revolution’). My map recce also showed up a liking for using street names to show allegiance to Iran’s friends and allies, such as the ubiquitous Felestin – Palestine – which cropped up in many Iranian cities. There were more pointed allegiances too; the street that housed the British Embassy, Winston Churchill Street, had been renamed in typically cheeky Iranian fashion as Bobby Sands Street (it was transliterated as ‘Babisands’), in tribute to the IRA hunger striker. In 1981 the embassy had been forced to move their official entrance to a side street so as to avoid the embarrassment of having Sands’ name on their headed notepaper. Martyrs from the Iran–Iraq War, important ayatollahs and cultural figures such as the poet and author, Ferdowsi, made up most of the street names, but as I had found with
Freya Stark’s maps, the English spellings of these had never been formalised, so each map-maker seemed to have invented their own phonetic version. Each of my maps had its own virtues, so in the end I did some elaborate origami of the best three, enhanced them with my own hand sketches and directions, and carefully arranged everything in my map case so I could consult them simultaneously while navigating the traffic. My brain ached before I had even set off.

  Navigation headaches aside, this was a good time to be on the road in Iran. My journey coincided with a momentous occasion: the Iranian president, Rouhani, was in New York to address the UN and for talks on Iran’s nuclear programme, which, if they came to fruition, would mean a lifting of sanctions and Iran’s re-entry on to the world stage. The potential was enormous and the future exciting. At my first petrol station stop, the pump attendant revealed himself as a psychology student at the local university and was so excited about having a real-life English person to practise speaking with that I ended up staying for half an hour after filling up my tank.

  ‘I think our countries will become friends,’ the psychologist-in-training concluded, after sharing his thoughts on global politics and Iran’s societal and economic problems in immaculate English. He pointed at a newspaper that lay folded on a plastic chair.

  I unfolded it to reveal a clumsy composite picture of Rouhani standing next to Obama, both of them smiling. Although they hadn’t met in person they had spoken by telephone, the first time an Iranian leader had communicated with his American counterpart for thirty-five years. Unlike Britain, which had been upsetting the Iranians for a couple of centuries, Iran’s unhappy relationship with the US was relatively recent. Until 1953, when the CIA masterminded Operation Ajax, the coup that ousted Iran’s nationalist prime minister, Mosaddegh, the Iranians had considered America a friendly nation, even supportive in their future plans to break away from imperialism. Britain was the main enemy at that time, with its uncompromising stance on the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and refusal to allow Iran to nationalise the industry. The Brits had been angling to get rid of Mosaddegh and his uppity ways for years, but America, under President Truman, had always refused to get involved. But when the Eisenhower administration took office at the height of the Cold War, fearing that Iran would fall to the Soviets, the White House found a sudden enthusiasm for a coup. For most Iranians, who at that time felt positively towards the US, the revelation that the CIA had orchestrated the removal of their most popular prime minister was seen as a terrible betrayal. Any hope of democracy that the Iranians had ever had was snuffed out with Mosaddegh’s removal – and to discover it had all been organised by their ‘friends’, the Americans, was a shocking blow. It took another twenty-five years for this shock and anger to foment, simmer and finally explode into the Islamic Revolution, when the USA was frozen out for good.

  It had just been a quick phone call between Rouhani and Obama, but it was considered big enough news to warrant the Iranian picture editors knocking up hastily Photoshopped images of the two leaders standing side by side, positioning them as tentative new best friends. They had even made their goodbyes using each other’s respective colloquialisms. ‘Have a nice day!’ Rouhani had said, to which Obama had responded with a cheery ‘Khoda hafez!’ This is going to upset a few people, I thought, but my gas-pumping psychologist was enraptured by the idea. He held the newspaper up, triumphant.

  ‘Yes, yes, our countries are going to be friends, at last!’

  I didn’t bother pointing out the minor detail that Obama wasn’t my president. It didn’t seem important. American, British, whatever. Great Satan, Little Satan, we had all been merged into one by the Islamic Republic’s propaganda machine. No different from how Persians and Arabs are all one and the same in many western minds, I supposed.

  ‘Our last president, Ahmadinejad, he was very bad for Iran, he turned the world against us even more. But now we have Rouhani, he is better. I think he will communicate with your country. Iran needs to communicate more with the whole world, we must share more together.’ He smiled at me, his face glowing with optimism. ‘Do you agree?’

  I nodded emphatically.

  ‘Yes, this is good for our future,’ he said, smiling and patting the newspaper approvingly.

  Two older men who were filling up their cars looked over our shoulders, pointed at the picture and laughed between themselves. Maybe they had seen too many smiling politicians, and much worse besides. But I liked the hope in the young student’s face and his positive words sent me on my way with a good feeling about the journey ahead.

  ‘I am so glad you came here today,’ he said as we exchanged our farewells.

  Now the roads were becoming busier, little towns merged into one another, bustling with industry and commerce, and here the bike came into its own, easily nipping through the small-town chaos and beating fume-laden traffic jams. But even amongst the frenetic hustle, still I made for a curious spectacle, with clusters of onlookers gathering around me and the bike when I stopped, their reactions ranging from wary curiosity to unabashed excitement.

  Whenever conversation ensued, it was the UN meeting that was the talk of the town, of every café, every truck stop, of the whole country. Right now, on the streets, there was a tangible sense that Iran could be re-entering the world again, and I didn’t meet a single person who didn’t welcome it, although some were more sceptical than others. ‘Rouhani has no real power, he is just the puppet of the Supreme Leader’ was a grumble that came up occasionally. But most people were genuinely excited about the possibilities of Iran’s future. Everyone wanted to know my opinion on this momentous occasion, as if I was somehow directly involved, and perhaps more tellingly, as if they were directly involved; there was a belief their lives could be changed by this thawing of relations. Away from the cynical, disengaged landscape of contemporary British politics, I was reminded of an era, admittedly that I could only just recall in my lifetime, when the average person felt a direct connection to the actions of their leaders.

  Not everyone was so optimistic, though, and it wasn’t just the Islamic hardliners who were sceptical about this new dawn of international relations. That night I stopped at a hotel in a small town and was immediately pounced upon by a teenage girl whose sweet plump face and wire-rimmed spectacles belied the sharp mind and fearlessness of a rabble-rouser. She was on her way home to Tehran with her family after a trip to visit relatives in Turkey and happily settled alongside me for the evening after dinner. Like all the Iranians I had met, she was keen to discuss topics that two British strangers would skirt around politely. It was as though she had been saving it all up for this moment, and the frustration came pouring out of her.

  ‘When I leave school I am going to train to become a doctor,’ she told me, ‘then I can leave Iran. I will go to America. I have an aunt living in Colorado. I cannot stay in Iran, the way they treat women. Why must we wear the stupid headscarf, why can they tell us what to wear? They control every small detail of our lives, we cannot even listen to the music we want, they try to control the internet, television, everything …’ She looked away for a minute, out of the window at the darkening streets, and then turned back to me, fire in her eyes. ‘This is not living. I do not call this living.’

  I had to agree with her. It was no life for anyone, especially an intelligent, sparky teenage girl. I felt a fond admiration for her. She was angry but she wasn’t bitter. Despite her fury at the oppressive minutiae of her day-to-day existence she was full of life and hope and humour, and I knew that she would become a powerful, positive force some day. But, if things stayed the way they were, not in her home country. She struck me as an asset to any society, although I doubted the Iranian mullahs would agree – vocal women are not generally appreciated in a theocracy. Anyway, if she had her way they would lose her, and all her brightness and energy to the evil USA, but maybe they preferred it that way.

  ‘What about Rouhani?’ I asked her. ‘Do you think he will make a difference?’ I mentioned the e
xcited nature of the conversation I had had with the psychology student at the petrol station, but my new friend was unconvinced.

  ‘Hah!’ she spat, the contempt flashing in her eyes. ‘He can’t do anything, it is the Supreme Leader who controls everything in Iran. Khamenei has all the control.’

  ‘But what is the role of the President, if the Supreme Leader makes all the decisions? What does Rouhani actually do?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not very much. He will have talks with other world leaders, he can make decisions about economic policies, this type of thing, but,’ she shrugged, ‘that is all. Rouhani cannot change anything for us, for the people of Iran. The really big important things, they are decided by Khamenei. He controls the Army, the Revolutionary Guards, he can decide if we go to war, he can decide what the newspapers and television tell us, who is in prison, who is executed. He and his clerics, they rule everything.’ She gave a tired laugh that made her sound older than her fourteen years and said, ‘This is why he is called “Supreme Leader”!’

  Her words were chilling. They sounded Orwellian, almost fantastical, but this was her reality, her everyday life.

  ‘So, you feel your only future is to leave Iran?’

  She slumped her chin into her hands and looked up at me through cow-eyed lashes.

  ‘Yes, but I do not really want to. I love Iran, my family is here, my friends. It is my home. But what life is this? It makes me crazy!’ She grinned and polished her glasses, which made her look very un-crazy and rather sweet. ‘We tried in 2009. Did you hear about our Green Revolution in the UK?’

  ‘You mean the protests when Ahmadinejad was reelected? Yes, of course. It was reported all over the world.’

  I remembered it well. It was a story that nobody thought they would ever hear coming out of Iran, and the western news lapped it up. The youth of Iran, rising up against the ayatollah! This great swell of Iran’s young generation, the product of Khomeini’s revolutionary breeding programme of the early eighties, had turned against the regime that had created them. Could it really happen? Could the Islamic Republic be overthrown? Could our old adversary become a modern democracy? The answer was, sadly, no. The Iranian authorities reacted violently and swiftly, sending in the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij to kill protestors and crush the movement, making its leaders take part in show trials, forcing confessions from them, locking them up and ensuring they didn’t try anything like it again. But for a short moment there had been a glimmer of hope and the world saw a new image of Iran; a youthful, mobilised, internet-savvy nation using covert access to social media to spread their message, a million wrists bearing the green bands that came to symbolise the movement, young men and women chanting ‘Where is our vote?’ and ‘Death to no one!’, echoing the famous ‘Death to America!’ mantra of the 1979 revolution that is still heard among the hardliners at Friday prayers.