by Lois Pryce
First I heard the rustle of footsteps among leaves, then the sound of soft breathing above my head, and then a tentative ‘Hello …’
A young man, probably in his late teens, was standing beside me, beaming. My first instinct was to throw my headscarf over my hair, but he waved his hand as if to say, don’t worry about that. He stood next to me, smiling shyly, and said again, ‘Hello.’
‘Hi,’ I said back.
‘Hello,’ he repeated, not making any attempt to move.
I wondered where this was going. I felt no danger. He had a childlike expression of wonder that radiated from his face; there was no threat of menace or even a hint of wariness or cynicism in his eyes. It struck me how rare a sight this was. I could not think of a time when I had seen such an open, unguarded face on a young man.
‘Do you speak English?’ I asked him.
‘Yes. A little.’
‘What is your name?’
He told me he was called Alan. My first thought was that this was an unusual name for a Bakhtiari shepherd, but I didn’t press the point. He said he lived in a town further north with his family, but they had come out to the country to help his uncle with the herding. He wore the traditional baggy trousers but no hat, and he had topped off the outfit with an army surplus jacket over a grubby faded T-shirt bearing a cheesy montage of a Union Jack, a Routemaster bus and Big Ben. I wondered if I had stumbled on the only teenage anglophile in the Zagros Mountains. He saw me looking at his T-shirt and grinned.
‘London!’
‘Where I live,’ I said, and his face practically exploded with delight.
‘Where did you get this?’ I said, pointing at his T-shirt.
‘In my town there was a man from Australia. He stayed with our family. He gave it to me. And books. This is how I learn English, from him and the books. Harry Potter. And a dictionary.’
Who was this mysterious Australian? I wondered. Probably some young backpacker making his own traditional overland migration to the mother country, or back home again, scattering Harry Potter books and tacky T-shirts in his wake. Where was he now and did he realise the effect he had had on one young boy in a small Iranian town that most people couldn’t find on the map? I was suddenly, acutely aware of how every interaction makes an indelible mark. I smiled at Alan and introduced myself.
Behind him appeared an older man in the full traditional Bakhtiari dress, carrying a staff, who I guessed to be the uncle. He was welcoming towards me too, but his manner was more reserved. Daylight was running out and I made a move towards packing up the bike, but Alan had already made plans for me. He spoke eagerly with his uncle in a dialect I didn’t recognise.
‘My uncle has house here in the village. You will meet my family, my mother.’
As usual in Iran, there was no discussion required and I sensed it would have seemed strange, and possibly rude, to refuse their hospitality. So I agreed to follow them, safe in the knowledge that if things turned strange, I would be out of there in two shakes of a Bakhtiari lamb’s tail.
‘We bring the sheeps in the village,’ said Alan, as we emerged on to the road to see his uncle coaxing his flock into line. ‘They sleep with us too. Tomorrow we bring them out again.’
The uncle was one of the settled tribesmen, his home one of the low, flat-roofed breezeblock dwellings I had seen throughout the mountains. Located on the edge of a small village, it comprised just two rooms and a small outbuilding containing a squat toilet and a cracked sink with one tap that offered an occasional trickle. Behind the house was a well-tended, bountiful vegetable garden with squash and beans and fruit trees. Inside the building, the rooms were bare except for the worn but still beautiful rugs on the floor, and what I guessed to be Quranic verses pinned on the wall. There was no furniture; we sat on the floor around the rug, where the women – Alan’s mother, his aunt and grandmother – surrounded by a handful of children whose various relationships I could not quite grasp, served us tea and bread and white cheese. The women wore long full skirts and removed their headscarves once inside the house. The three of them made an imposing sight of matriarchal power; they were well-built women with strong jaws and rough hands who would have looked equally at home in charge of a herd of goats, a swarm of children or an AK-47. But when they greeted me their tanned faces opened easily into toothy smiles. They were warm and welcoming and seemed unperturbed by my arrival; I parked my bike in the yard and was simply slotted into the proceedings.
During her expeditions to the Zagros, Freya Stark spent most of her nights in the tribal camps and gave much thought to their laws of hospitality. Her interpretation was that the nomads consider a stranger to be an enemy until they enter the sanctuary of someone’s tent. Once they enter the tent, however, the host takes his role very seriously, accepting ultimate responsibility for their comfort and safety, as well as assuring the rest of the tribe that they are not a threat. The adoption of a guest is therefore a considerable responsibility and one that is usually taken only by an important member of the tribe. I wasn’t sure how much of this remained in twenty-first-century Iran, but the tradition of hospitality certainly ran deep in every strata of society. In all the social situations I had found myself, my hosts had been exceptionally gracious and conscientious in their role, often going way beyond the call of duty, but never showing any sense of being burdened. It was one of the most notable and endearing elements of my journey, and I wished I could import this easy selflessness back home to our time-poor, suspicious little island.
Nobody spoke English except for Alan, so he was tasked with translating and explaining, to the women mostly, why I was travelling without my husband and why I didn’t have any children. Their smiles were replaced with expressions of confusion and pity at my child-free status and at my errant husband who allowed me to travel so far and so dangerously without his company. As usual, I responded politely, privately amused that seventy years earlier, and just a few miles north of here in Lorestan, Freya Stark had been answering these very same questions from the Lur tribespeople. I expect she gave them short shrift and I wondered if there would ever come a time when women could wander the world freely without having to explain their marital status and breeding habits. Probably not in my lifetime. So I resigned myself to gamely carrying on with the courteous responses required for social harmony.
My suspicions about my new friend’s name turned out to be correct. He revealed that Alan was the name of the mystery Antipodean, but that in some kind of divine serendipity, his given name was Ali, so he had since taken on a kind of anglicised version. They were ‘brothers’, he said, with a nostalgic smile.
‘Have you ever been to the USA?’ he asked me quietly.
I told him I had and he nodded in deep thought, as though this required some real consideration.
‘I have never left Iran,’ he said eventually.
I asked him if he considered himself primarily Iranian or Bakhtiari and he looked almost confused by the question.
‘Both. I am both. I cannot choose one only. I think it is possible to be different things. Do you agree?’
In this one, awkwardly translated statement in his hard-won second language, I saw another side of Alan. A thinker, maybe an outsider even, rejecting the very notion of tribalism here in his own tribal lands. A citizen of the world, although he would not describe himself as this. I asked him what he would do after he left school and he said he was going to study English, adding, ‘I will be the first of my family to attend university.’
He was vague about the rest of his family’s employment. He had a younger sister who was here, sitting with their mother, and he mentioned two brothers, but they were back in the town. He didn’t mention his father and I didn’t want to ask in case there was some strangeness or tragedy involved. Families are tight in this part of the world, and the father was notable by his absence. Instead I asked him what he wanted to do for a job after he left university.
‘I am not sure,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I think maybe
I would like to become a teacher. There are not many opportunities for work here, it is not easy. Many people are unemployed. The people I know, some of my friends, they make their money from smuggling. You see the trucks, yes?’
I said I had seen a few of the ubiquitous blue Zamyad pickups thundering past in both directions but I hadn’t realised their mission. Now it made sense.
‘Yes, you will see them more often at night, with oil drums in the back. Diesel going to Iraq. Fuel is cheaper here. They come the other way with alcohol.’
With the Iraqi border running along their western edge, the Zagros Mountains had long served as a smugglers’ paradise. In Freya Stark’s day it had been cloth, tea and sugar. Under the Islamic Republic it was cheap fuel one way, whisky and vodka the other.
I bid my farewells in Persian, ‘Khoda hafez!’, and Ali responded with an unexpected ‘Cheerio!’ as I wheeled my bike out of the yard and rode away down the bumpy road into the darkening mountains. That night I made my own camp in a moonlit, silent valley, huddled up in the lea of the hills. At dawn I was woken by the sound of a hundred sheep bleating gently and their bells chiming as they passed along the valley floor.
13
Dark Times in the Desert
I SPENT A few more days winding south through the Zagros Mountains, revelling in the wild scenery and marvelling at the good fortune that had landed me in such a striking and remote landscape. It was a simple routine: exploring any track or trail that took my fancy, invariably getting lost and stopping to picnic, Iranian style, on flatbread and white cheese, on the banks of winding rivers and small rocky streams. It was easy to picture the nomads treading these routes before the tarmac and steam-rollers came along, making their encampments of tents around communal fires with their hordes of animals grazing on the open land, the last gasps of a centuries-old lifestyle that was already on its way out.
Eventually, though, modern life snapped me back into reality. Just as the nomads had been crushed into submission by the fist of centralised bureaucracy, I too was a slave to Iranian officialdom. I had a ticking visa and I didn’t fancy finding out what fate awaited an overstay Brit. Shiraz was now firmly in my sights; I could have made it there in a couple of days if I’d wanted, but first I was heading east to the ancient city of Yazd, at the heart of Iran’s two great deserts, the Dasht-e Lūt and the Dasht-e Kavīr.
With the mountains behind me as I entered the fringes of the Dasht-e Lūt, I thought about Alan and his family, and Habib and his note, grateful to them both for what I now understood to be a typically Iranian gesture, although many thousands of miles apart – a heartfelt offer of hospitality and a desire to communicate, connect and exchange ideas, simply as one human being to another, away from politics, religion, tribe or any other identifying label. Finding Habib’s note in the heart of hectic, cynical London had seemed strange, incongruous even, but now, after spending time in his home country, I could imagine most of the people I had met here doing the same thing. Here in Iran, among Iranians, it seemed a perfectly natural response, and I was struck again by the easy openness, the joyful hospitality of this nation. No wonder Habib had been so distressed by our diplomatic spat.
After meandering my way out of the mountains with the usual navigational challenges, I was running low on fuel and daylight, and I headed on to a main highway to make up some miles and fill up my tank. Although the road was empty, it was still a shock to the system after the timeless tranquillity of the Zagros. Dirty industry and litter-strewn verges made for a bleak backdrop. This was not a picture-postcard desert of dunes and palm trees but flat, empty parched land where nothing grew and nobody lived. The roadside was lined with shredded tyres, unidentifiable scraps of ill-fated vehicles and the occasional abandoned wreck. Brown and grubby, the featureless plains stretched out for miles in every direction but, unlike the Zagros, the emptiness felt forbidding rather than exhilarating. With the sun moving westwards and a dwindling tank of petrol beneath me, I became increasingly uneasy. The only evidence of human activity was a factory spewing out fumes far away on the horizon and a vast scrapyard, piled high with cannibalised Zamyad trucks, smashed-up old Paykans and a mountain of twisted little motorbikes that rose up from the sea of metal like a bad omen; a funeral pyre for motorcyclists foolish enough to take on Iran’s drivers. I stilled my silly, fitful imagination and focussed on the most pressing issue. I needed fuel.
Strangely, for a country that produces millions of gallons of its own cheap petrol, Iran’s filling stations are few and far between and it was not uncommon to see queues at the pumps. I had last filled up the day before at a small village garage in the mountains and had expected to find a service station once I hit the main highway, but I had been going for hours now and so far, nothing. I estimated I could eke out another fifty miles at the most, but on a long desert road that would pass by in a flash. A few little settlements were marked on the map, but they turned out to be nothing but abandoned truck stops or collections of rundown shacks with no signs of life, just scatterings of broken glass and unintelligible graffiti. I was becoming increasingly jittery, riding at a strict fifty-five miles an hour, recalling some ancient parental advice that this was the best speed for optimum fuel efficiency. Who knew if it was true, but at least it gave me the sense of having some control over my situation. As a last resort I supposed I could flag down a passing car and syphon a few litres in exchange for some tomans, but the idea did not appeal out here. I felt a powerful need to keep moving until I reached some kind of civilisation. Although I had spent much of the last few weeks marvelling at the hospitality of the Iranian people, this deserted highway was not the kind of place I wanted to stop and accost a stranger.
It was hard to know if I was being unduly paranoid. While the culture of hospitality is indelibly imprinted into the Iranian DNA, and I had reaped the rewards of this tradition, there were definitely places that were not so female-friendly. While I was always welcomed and treated courteously in public locations such as shops, markets and hotels, where it was conceivable a solo foreign woman would be likely to make an appearance, I had the sense that certain places were out of bounds, to any woman. Sometimes this was obvious and enforced by law, such as the menonly tea houses where signs above the door explicitly banned females from entering, but more often the segregation was implied rather than imposed. I had discovered this on my wanderings in the towns along my route, when I would find myself straying accidentally into what I had come to refer to as ‘Man Street’. Every town had one; a shopping street dedicated solely to building equipment or car parts or tools, where the working men’s club atmosphere spilled out from the shops on to the pavement and my appearance raised suspicious looks amongst the proprietors and their customers. Just by being there I had broken a social code. The babble of conversation would stall in an uncomfortable silence as I picked my way past pallets of car batteries or bags of cement and other such male ephemera, feeling their eyes burning into my back.
This highway I was riding along now was one giant Man Street. The only women I had seen were a couple of chador-clad passengers in the back seats of passing cars, squinting at me as they sped past. A few tyre repair workshops cropped up in the middle of nowhere and I thought about stopping but there were no petrol pumps, just guys kicking around outside the corrugated iron sheds or spannering on beat-up trucks, smoking and watching with unsmiling expressions as I rumbled by at my sedate, fuel-saving speed, eyes firmly on the road ahead. These semi-industrial badlands were most definitely a man’s world, and not the men of the cities with their shiny shoes and fitted shirts, hair slicked back, iPhones in hand. It was not even the men of the mountains with their quiet welcome and weather-worn faces. It was a world of men in poorly paid, dirty manual labour in a harsh climate with no comforts. In my darkest imagination it was a world where deals went down, where home-grown justice was meted out, where anything or anyone could disappear, and nobody could hear you scream. I tried to stop my mind inventing such lurid scene-setting, but this
was definitely a side of Iran I had not encountered up close before, and not one in which I wished to linger.
With every mile, I watched the odometer make its dreadful turn and imagined the endless repetition of the four-stroke cycle happening beneath me, using up my precious petrol. Suck, squeeze, bang, blow, the actual process of my last gasps of fuel flowing into the carburettor, exploding and ultimately disappearing out of the exhaust, each thump of the piston emptying my tank, little by little. But the horrible truth about running low on fuel is that there is nothing else for it but to keep going, and hope.
Mercifully, a few miles later, on a long and particularly lonely stretch of highway, the familiar slab of a petrol station roof loomed into sight. It was so incongruous in this wasteland that it appeared like a crash-landed alien craft. My heart leapt with relief and I whooped out loud, punching the air in triumph and delight. The station stood alone on a strange little spit of land between the two carriageways, requiring me to veer across the lanes and ride over a piece of rough waste ground to reach it.
There were two pumps but only one man working them, a young, regular-looking guy, clean-shaven, short-haired, dressed in jeans and a checked shirt who was busy filling up a truck as I pulled up alongside the vacant pump. The truck driver gave me a wave and a smile from his cab, but as soon as the pump attendant turned his attention to me I knew there was something wrong. I could not say why or what, but I just knew. Over the years I had learnt to trust this instinct and had come to respect my gut reactions as the ultimate self-defence tactic, far better than any gun or knife. I didn’t know how it worked; I could only assume it was true animal instinct – the sixth sense, the most essential survival skill of all.