Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “You are a foreigner,” he declares, probing me with his gaze.

  “Well . . . ” I stall, scrabbling in my head for some way of avoiding the inevitable answer, before succumbing at last: “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “So why do you read Shahnameh? You want to know how we defeat our enemies?”

  I’m puzzled. Are we talking about the same book? The same thousand-year-old book? Sure, there might be a lot of battles in it—in fact, there are times when you wonder if there is ever going to be anything else. But the warriors of the Shahnameh fight with bows and spears and occasionally an ox-headed mace—it’s not exactly the stuff of modern-day warfare.

  “Because,” he says, “if you read Shahnameh, you can understand why we will never let foreigners rule our country.”

  He is communicating a view I have often heard in Iran and will hear again in Afghanistan. It’s a view of the Shahnameh as more than just a collection of tales—a living, breathing entity; the most accurate account available of the psyche of the Persian-speaking people (in this case, meaning the Persian-speaking Afghans as much as the Iranians).

  Our conversation is interrupted by a whoop—a joyful trilling all around us. The bus is ready to move! The tick-tick of the engine transforms into a confident, definitely-making-progress rumble, to which the mujahideen respond with a declaration of the Doctrine of Divine Unity: “There is no God but God and Mohammed is the messenger of God.” They recite it at the same pitch as English soccer fans chanting a winning score: not so much one-nil as One God. Why are they so happy? To our right is the same craggy mountain that’s refused to budge ever since I arrived in Khorasan,3 while on the other side are mud-brick slums, soldiers sitting on tires, and square metal cargo containers—brought over during the Cold War and now doubling as shops.

  At the edge of a village, a crowd is milling around a man whose knee-length shirt is flecked with blood. The cause of the blood, I assume, is the car behind him—it’s been concertinaed by a truck lying sideways on the road, although he could just as easily have been wounded by one of the Kalashnikovs that are carried as copiously as iPods in London: unattended on the steps of domed mud-brick houses, in the laps of men sipping tea, resting against the cargo containers.

  It’s dark when we pass a copse of towers the shape of smokestacks. Where are the lights? There was more luster in the smallest Iranian village than there is now in Herat—Afghanistan’s second largest city. A taxi drops me at a crossroads called Flower, where the Taliban used to hang its “criminals”—musicians, drinkers, intellectuals, lovers. . . . In the lobby of the Hotel Mowaffaq (which means—for reasons that must have been clear an awfully long time ago—“successful”), scallops of plaster are peeling off the walls, as if the building is protesting its name.

  After a brief skirmish with the keyhole, I step inside a chipped door to find a bare, rugless room. There are cracks across the walls, a hole concealed by newspaper, and bedding so stiff you could probably sell it to a sculptor and pass it off as rock. Outside my window, the dogs are already starting to bark.

  Compared with the comfort I’ve enjoyed for the past few months—a warm bed in the coziest of houses in the most affluent part of Tehran—this is like falling through a trapdoor and ending up in the bowels of hell. I can hear a metallic clicking under my bed, but I don’t have the spirit to find out which particular species of creepy-crawly is lurking down there, waiting to feast. I drop my backpack on the floor, sprawl across the bed and close my eyes. . . .

  PART ONE

  IRAN

  “May the glad noise of revels long ring out!

  Perish the sanctimonious and devout!

  Be their patched frocks and azure gabardines

  Trod in the tavern by a drunken rout!”

  —THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

  1

  The Inside-Out City

  Tehran. Eight months earlier: January.

  “Turn it up! Turn it up!”

  Sina’s voice was bouncing around the car. We were racing up the Jordan Highway, one of Tehran’s most horn-honkingly overactive thoroughfares, under the icy peaks of Mount Alborz and the high-rise tower-blocks, buffed by the afternoon sunlight. Curly brown ringlets were shaking as he nodded to the beat, beaming out of the window of his friend Mustafa’s Peugeot 206.

  “This is the best place for listening to music!” he exclaimed.

  He turned toward me while simultaneously thrashing about to Persian electro-pop recorded in California.4 Forget about trying to find a nightclub on the street: If you want to dance in public in Iran, you have to do it on wheels. Out here on the highway, we were going too fast for the Morality Police to catch us.

  When we slowed down, creeping along with the traffic, Mustafa turned down the music and opened the window. The smell of diesel wafted through; you could taste it and see it too, hovering over us like some amorphous, mythical beast, feeding off the mobile kilns that pass in Tehran for cars. Driven by Iran’s two most abundant natural resources—petrol and testosterone—they went the wrong way down one-way streets, U-turned, ignored the red lights, and covered each other with dents. It was absolute mayhem—in fact, it was the only public space in which strict regulations failed to hold. But it wasn’t just the cars. The motorcyclists were too fast, the mobile fruit-cart pushers were too slow, and you never knew when a bus would come careening down its contra-flow.

  Now, as the traffic reached gridlock, people were spilling between the cars. Mustafa reached out, dropping some banknotes into an old woman’s pot of wild rue,5 and the smell dissipated the diesel stench, promising to keep us safe from the Evil Eye. On the other side of the car, a young woman, shivering in the winter chill, held a baby in one arm as she stretched out the other for alms, while a flower seller darted between the vehicles and a small boy carried a bucket of water to wipe down people’s windshields. The traffic jam had turned into a bazaar.

  “Jigaret bokhoram!” cried Sina, when he spotted something he liked in the next lane. Literally: “I want to eat your liver!”

  I could never get over the cannibalism of this classic Persian phrase—which he was actually using to express his admiration.

  A young lady—two-tone lipstick and bubblegum-pink handkerchief-sized headscarf—was gazing out of the car next to us. Ripping a piece of paper out of my notebook, Sina hurriedly scribbled something onto it before rolling down the window and passing it across.

  “What did you write?” I asked as we pulled ahead.

  “Eh!” he exclaimed with a grin. “It’s just my phone number.”

  We swept back into the highway steeplechase, and once again my friends were swinging their shoulders to the plastic beat.

  “I want this girl to call me now!” said Sina. “When I listen to this music, I want all the girls to call me!”

  That evening we were cruising the highways. On another occasion we were on foot. This time Sina came prepared—he’d written his number several times over, so he was able to stuff it into the hands of passing girls as we strolled down Valiasr Street, the major road that cleaves Tehran from north to south.

  “But how do you know they’ll want your number?” I asked.

  Sina laughed, his large brown eyes flashing as he shook his head. I think he found it hard to believe that anybody could be such a novice.

  “Didn’t you see the way they move their headscarves? If they make it open it means they are interested. You just have to look, if you use your eyes you can see the signs.”

  Occasionally, all the number exchanges would reap their fruit, and he would receive an invite to a party. He would empty out his tub of gel, spray himself with Dolce & Gabbana, and give his best shirt to his mother or sister to iron (although his sister, Tahmineh, would usually grumble, she always ended up doing what he’d asked). Mustafa would turn up in his Peugeot, shiny from a recent wash, and we’d set off for some house up in the hills or a soundproofed basement in the concrete labyrinth of the Ekbatan district.

  Glidin
g across the threshold of one such venue was a group of young women, buckled in trench coats and wrapped up tight in their headscarves. It was raining on this particular evening, so the men were all dripping as we stepped into the checkerboard hallway, but thanks to their scarves the women were untarnished. A few moments after they were in, bare legs and arms were out, and they were nuzzling their chins to their shoulders or flicking their glossy, un-rained-on ringlets, all coy glances as a dozen young bastions of hair gel and pluck competed to pour them a drink. Our ears pounded to the Black Eyed Peas, then DJ Ali-gator (an ex-pat Iranian now based in Sweden), followed by the Turkish superstar, Tarkan, while our eyes were locked to the belly-button rings catching the web of light from a teardrop chandelier: round, oval, butterfly-shaped, and one with tiny beads that swung on the barbell as its owner danced.

  Parties like this take place every night in North Tehran, charged not only with the usual chemicals you would expect at a gathering of twenty-somethings, but the added intensity of what might happen if the authorities turn up. Sometimes there will be a rap on the door and a bearded officer will be standing outside. Depending on his mood, the partygoers’ excuse (“Officer, peace be upon you, we’re celebrating the birthday of the blessed imam’s holy sister!”) and how much they can offer as a remuneration, he will either let them off with a caution or bundle them into an SUV to spend a night behind bars.

  No such visit had broken the party so far tonight. At the back of the flat, in the kitchen, a few people were gathering to talk away from the music. Some of them were discussing the latest escapades of the pop star Britney Spears. A couple of others were gossiping about an Iranian soap actress who had broken up with her fiancé. Struggling to keep up with the fast pace of their chatter, I pulled up a stool at the breakfast counter and sipped my vodka.

  “So you’re the English boy!” said a voice beside me.

  I turned, peering through the fug of smoke and eventually located her: a young woman in extremely high heels, a black miniskirt, and a white collared shirt with a necktie draped over her shoulder (the latter was a deliberate act of rebellion—they are banned from state offices and storefronts, as a symbol of Western decadence). She offered me a Pleasure Light cigarette, took a sip of my vodka as I was fiddling with the Zippo, and asked what I was doing here. I talked about a book I’d written—I thought it would impress her but she just shrugged, her shoulders catching the light as they rose.

  “It was about the past,” I said, “so now I want to look at the present.”

  “Then Tehran is exactly the right place to be.” Mischief was glimmering in her eyes as she drew on her cigarette. “You will find it is a very modern city. We have the most traffic accidents, and the worst smog . . . and the most heroin addicts, of course!”

  She was laughing. She tipped the rest of my drink down her throat and leaned toward me.

  “But it isn’t all bad,” she said. “We also have the biggest number of Internet bloggers outside America—so even if we are choking to death and overdosing, at least we are telling the world about it!”

  We sat together for a while, me with another vodka and she with a glass of red wine.

  “It’s what our poets always drank,” she pointed out, adding with a droll smile, “and it always makes me think deep thoughts!”

  Among these thoughts, it transpired, was a disapproval of my plans.

  “So what about the history?” she asked, leaning toward my cupped hands to light another cigarette. “You don’t want to write about that too?”

  “Well . . . ” I hesitated, looking into her eyes, sparkling on either side of the flame. “I suppose . . . I want to find out what’s going on today.”

  Again she was laughing. “So you obviously don’t know what this song is about?”

  I turned an ear toward the dance floor. It sounded like thrash metal—crashing drums and manically plucked guitar strings, although the singer had a strangely soulful baritone, drawing you into the whirlpool of noise. It was impossible for me to make out the words: Not only was the drumbeat too loud, there was the rush and thrum of people’s feet and bodies as they crashed against each other and the roar of the more excited men, chanting over the lyrics, not to mention the frailty of my Persian, which at this stage was lost outside a simple one-on-one conversation.

  “I wish it was as easy as you are thinking,” she said, sliding off her stool and flashing me one last smile, “but you know, the past times and today, they are like a tortoise and its shell. Even if you can pull them apart, it is not a good idea.”

  I was still trying to work out what she meant, testing her words in my head, enjoying the tang of my first Persian riddle, when I felt an arm on my shoulder. Beaming over me, with dance sweat dripping down his curls, was Sina.

  “Hey! Why are you alone?” he exclaimed indignantly. He grabbed hold of my arm, towing me back into the living room. “You know,” he said on the way, “I think my baba would like this song.”

  “Why?”

  His father was a wonderful and in many ways very eclectic man. But he wasn’t exactly what you’d call a heavy metal band’s target audience: a middle-aged academic, specializing in ancient Persian folklore. The idea of him turning up at this underground honky-tonk, taking off his homburg, and leaping about to the beat was utterly fantastical.

  “Because,” said Sina, “the words they are singing are from Shahnameh.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Shahnameh.”

  “You mean the one from a thousand years ago?”

  “Of course, Nicholas! What else?”

  “No, it’s just . . . well, where I come from, it’s just . . . medieval poems and pop music, they don’t usually go together all that much.”

  “Really?” Sina wrinkled his nose, as if I must have been spawned in some kind of barbaric hellhole. “Well,” he said, “poetry is poetry, isn’t it?”6

  He didn’t stick with me for long; his eye was on the dance floor. Leaping in among the dancers, he shook his hips beside the girl I’d been talking to a few moments earlier, whose movements were slightly restricted by the enormous spike heels on which she was perched.

  I turned back to the kitchen, where people’s glasses were being replenished from an ice-packed bucket of Central Asian vodka, and as I reached for another refill, I tried to make out the thousand-year-old words, spiraling over the ripple of the guitar and the clash of the drums.

  I had been in Iran for several weeks when I first bumped into Sina—several weeks of studying the Persian language at an institute connected to Tehran University, staying at a cramped hostel on a street full of tire stores and mechanics’ workshops. It wasn’t exactly the time of my life. I’d heard about all the underground bars and black-market pop records, and I was eager to find them. I suppose I wanted to be able to say what a hip, happening place Iran really is, how there’s a pop band in every block and a bottle of bootleg vodka under every shop counter. But here I was, waking up to the roar from the traffic and the recorded calls-to-prayer from the mosque next door, stepping onto a street where the air was so filthy you might as well have been pressing your lips to the exhaust pipe of one of the ubiquitous pickup trucks.

  If Tehran was a person, then for me it was one of the “thick-necks” who manned its bazaars. Pockmarked with potholes, scabbed with scaffolding, its wounds bandaged up by sheets of canvas, it was as pretty as its pinups—the gray-bearded ayatollahs,7 who look down on the people from the billboards and the sides of the smog-stained apartment blocks, often accompanied by slogans from the Quran, which are repeated on the girders of overpasses and the fence of the National Bank. You tear down the highways, crammed into a creaking Paykan—where you’re squeezed so tight you’re pressing thighs with a woman you’re not even supposed to talk to. You step out and straight into a joob—one of the narrow street-side channels that carry water down from the mountains—and sprain your ankle. You turn up late for your class, where your fellow students are mostly from the Korean em
bassy, so it’s quite hard to follow what they’re talking about in the mid-lesson break, and the teacher is so formal you still don’t know her name. And she tells you the city is wonderful, the country is wonderful, everyone is happy. Well, it doesn’t look like it from here.

  But there was a magical world under Tehran’s cold, austere surface, and when I met Sina that world came bursting out to pull me inside.

  “Excuse me, sir, you would like a program?”

  It was hardly an unusual question—coming from an usher. But as I turned toward Sina for the first time, there was a warmth in his face I hadn’t come across so far. By the time he’d shown me into a vinyl seat halfway down the auditorium, I had already told him more about myself than anyone else I’d met in Tehran. And I had learned more about him too.

  “You see that lady in the blue headscarf ?” he said, his grin sparkling in the splash of the house lights. “She’s a pleasure-daughter!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, sir, I’m not saying she’s like the women you get on the street—the ones who chew gum and smoke outside—but she’s kissed at least two of the directors here, and a few months ago one of the actors did her. My friend Fereydoun, he did her too. Although I must tell you, sir, Fereydoun’s done everyone—he’s got a cock like an Arab!”8

  It was hard to believe he was actually saying these things. With his patrician nose and curly brown hair, he looked like he could probably make a living pretending to be a Greek statue. He was far too dignified to have spoken so racily—look at him now, smiling sweetly at the lady in the row behind me, pressing a hand to his chest in the traditional Persian manner, as if he’s a eunuch at the court of the ancient shahs.

  “I have to go now,” he said when the house lights came up at the end. “I am meeting my girlfriend and I want her to give me a blow job.”