Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “If we have any wishes,” added another, “we do dagger-striking and our wishes are answered.”

  I turned toward this man. He had the same uniform of blood all over his face, while the crown of his head was lumpy with scabs. He heaved himself across the rug, until he was so close that a drop of his blood splashed, like a raindrop, on my knee.

  “I will tell you something,” he said, “and then you will believe. It is about my wife. She was a good woman, the best of women, but one day we discovered she was ill. God is merciful! She had a problem with her heart, it was too difficult for her to breathe, so we took her to hospital and the doctors did everything they could. Not just one operation, not two, but three! Three times, you understand? Three times they operated, but still they could not make her better. You know what they said to me? They said, ‘We are sorry, there is nothing else we can do.’ The doctors said this! The doctors, with their certificates and their training! They said there was nothing they could do!”

  He tapped his head, which was still bleeding—judging by the wet red stains on his fingers.

  “That same night,” he said, “I took out my knife and beat it against my head. The wound was so deep the blood poured out until sunrise.”

  Even the unsmeared parts of his face were turning red now, as if he were challenging me to doubt his conviction.

  “And you know what? It was worth every drop! Because my wife became better, of course. The next day there was an improvement and a week later she was able to leave the hospital, and now she has excellent health. All because of the blessing of Imam Hossain!”

  He looked up, nodding, as if the imam were watching over us, and several of the men recited the salavat: “Peace be upon Mohammed and Mohammed’s lineage.”

  When I first met Reza I saw him as a typical rebel—the ponytailed artist who painted stories from the Shahnameh in protest against the government. It was only during the ashoura festival that I started to understand how different he was from other “nationalists” like the Professor. I had assumed he shared the Professor’s obsession with “Persianness,” but I was starting to realize that, to Reza, Islam was just as important a part of his Iranian identity. This was why he’d painted Zahhak in the first place—because he felt the mullahs had betrayed the true Islamic principles on which the revolution was founded. The Professor knew exactly where he stood in Iran’s cultural battle, but for Reza it was more complicated, because he was standing in the middle. No wonder he’d told me he was “divided from society.”

  “You know what the shah’s wife bathed in?” he said during one of our evening chats. “Milk! Is this someone whose heart is open to the ordinary people? And Savak tortured anyone who didn’t support the shah, especially the Communists. But now look—these fat mullahs, with their mistresses in the Gulf and their shiny new cars. It’s the same all over again, we might as well ask the son of the shah to come back!”

  Reza didn’t slice his head at the dagger-striking ceremony (he mentioned his drinking, insisting he didn’t have sufficient “nafs,” or spirituality—dagger-striking was a privilege only for the most pious). But he did take part in another of the ashoura rituals, as I saw later that day when we squeezed through the streets to the city center.

  Men were handing out dishes of mutton and jugs of watered-down yogurt around us, while actors in tinfoil armor were camel-riding between the chains of the crowd. Passing by several hundred prostrating bodies, Reza led me through a wooden door decorated in gold writing and hexagons of glass. At the back of the prayer hall, raised on a dais seemingly formed from the hands of the worshippers reaching out toward him, was a rawi—a reciter. He had a tangled beard like a river god and on his head was wound an enormous example of what the Professor would have called an “onion”—with which he shared the ability to induce tears.

  The story the rawi was telling—hurling it against the walls in a deep, rumbling bass, then soaring up into the vault in a trembling alto—was the death of Abu’l Fazl, Imam Hossain’s brother, at Kerbala. It’s the middle of the caliph’s siege against Hossain. Abu’l Fazl has been sent to fetch water, but he refuses to drink even a drop before he has slaked the thirst of the children. He will never have the chance to complete his mission: as he’s filling up a leather gourd, his body is ripped apart by the arrows of the caliph’s soldiers and he falls dead against the riverbank.

  I turned on my Dictaphone, the reels spinning like my head in that dank, sweaty chamber. There was an old man underneath me, who was cradling his forehead in the outstretched fingers of a hand. In front of him was a mullah in a turban as woolly as his beard, and to his side a teenager in a New York Yankees baseball cap. They were all shaking. Tears streamed down their faces and greased their beards so that their hands slid down their cheeks.

  Then a sound like thunder: The teenager had struck his face. Another thumped his forehead against the palm of his hand, while the old man underneath me assailed his cheeks as if he were trying to knock out his teeth. The sound of thumping echoed around the hall. The reciter’s cries ricocheted against pillars that were being used by some of the worshippers as an alternative to their hands. Here was the old Iranian way of showing your grief—a ritual that is enacted by grief-stricken characters in the Shahnameh (for example, by Kawa the blacksmith, bewailing the killing of his seventeen sons by snake-shouldered Zahhak); a ritual that is still central to the Iranian mourning culture.

  Panting beside me, a man had grabbed the shoulder in front of him, moaning over his neighbor’s neck. Now he pulled himself up and started unbuttoning his shirt. It was, to be fair, very hot, but he didn’t just undo a couple of buttons: This man was taking it all off. And he wasn’t alone. Shirts and vests were unbuttoned, unzipped and unpeeled. Everyone around me was wriggling out of their tops, rushing toward the reciter. Surrounded by this nakedness, I felt naked. I turned to Reza—but he was taking off his shirt too.

  “Wait here,” he whispered.

  He stuffed his shirt in my hands and disappeared into the crowd. Arms were flailing and hair swinging, a stew of sticky skin spreading around the prayer hall, shirts dropping in its wake. I felt dizzy and clung to the pillar to keep myself upright. The stench of body odor and smelly socks was punching through my nostrils, the smacking of hands and heads was thundering in my ears, and the air was too heavy to swallow. I pressed against the pillar, convinced that I was going to faint at any moment. But I could feel a tingle all over me, as the reciter’s words swam through the crowd and a tremulous wail echoed from behind the bookshelves dividing us from the women.

  Why had Reza, who compared the mullahs to a mythical tyrant in his art, stripped off his shirt and thrown himself in front of a cleric? He didn’t explain it, but perhaps it was for the same reason the crowds in the streets, and here in the mosque, had burned with such passion. Imam Hossain had a pull on people’s hearts that I never encountered at any other time in Iran.55

  The Professor would have been horrified. When I vaguely mentioned “such rituals” to him a few days later, he let out a dismissive snort: “These people are sheep! It is the same for them as if they are taking drugs.” But Reza was closer to the pulse of Iran’s religious sensibility. Brought up in the Shia cooking pot of the bazaar district, with many religious members in his family and an uncle who painted pro-mullah murals, he was unable to detach himself when the fervor of ashoura reached out to touch him.

  Holding on to the pillar, I peered into the crowd. All around me, men were plunged into an act of imaginative gymnastics—hurling themselves into the past so that, as Reza put it later, “in my heart I was there.” Boosted they might have been by the hallucinogenic of religion (and the rawi’s rousing recital) but they were showing that the distant past really can come to life—in this case, with enough intensity to make grown men weep.

  Watching Reza rip off his shirt and dance in front of the rawi made me realize the Professor and his family occupied only one side of the culture. It was as if there was a river cutting thr
ough the city and Reza was on the other bank. But Tehran isn’t split neatly in half by a river, and no one really knows where the different sides divide. So every once in a while they slide into each other, washing temporarily over the divisions.

  TEHRAN. APRIL.

  “Oh, Farhad! Oh, Farhad!”

  Tahmineh was kneeling on the floor, wearing a sequined gown over bright red pantaloons, her head wrapped in yellow silk and gold thread, a pickaxe gripped between her hands. Lying beside her was a man in a long black robe with eyes turned pandalike by kohl. Given that he hadn’t moved since knocking himself out with the same pickaxe a few moments earlier, there was only one logical conclusion: He was dead.

  Wailing beside him, Tahmineh flung out her arms—then, like the mourners at the ashoura ceremonies, she slapped her forehead. The splintered shriek emanating out of her was so impressive you could hear it bouncing against the walls, echoing like a cry in a cave.

  “It is true,” whispered the Professor sorrowfully.

  Sitting in the vinyl seat beside me, he was dabbing his eyes with his wife’s handkerchief. As I looked at him, then at Khanom—her small brown lips pursed in a mother’s proud smile—I realized they were watching two completely different people. To Khanom, the girl on the stage was her daughter, but to the Professor, she was Princess Shirin—wife of the Sassanian shah Khosrow Parviz and heroine of Persian literature’s most famous love triangle.

  The tale of Khosrow, Shirin, and the sculptor Farhad is the Romeo and Juliet of Persian literature, its storyline familiar in every corner of the Persian-speaking world. Khosrow is the shah, who falls for the beautiful Shirin at first sight. But a sculptor called Farhad is also in love with her. So the shah sets him a challenge: He can have Shirin’s hand in marriage—if he manages to cleave a road through the enormous Mount Bisotun. No one at the royal court gives Farhad an onion’s skin of a chance, even though he has the muscles of a bull and the strength of two elephants. But his strength isn’t the only factor in his favor: Driven by a combination of his love and the assistance of nature (moles tunneling through the rock and birds breaking the stones with their beaks), he comes perilously close to completing the task. Khosrow is astonished, but his wits haven’t deserted him. He sends a message to Farhad, informing him that Shirin has died of a fever. The sculptor can’t believe the shah would lie, so he climbs to the top of the mountain and throws himself off (or, in the more stage-friendly version, he smites himself with his pickaxe). When she finds out what has happened, Shirin is devastated. She builds a dome over his grave and turns her heart away from Khosrow, refusing to forgive him until she is sure of his remorse.

  The play was one of three shorts being performed in the theater of a medical college in west Tehran. A cloth-covered trestle table was set up in the tiled lobby, with plates of pastries and plastic cups of orange juice under a medallion of the region’s most famous doctor—the eleventh-century physician Ibn Sina. A queue had already formed, but as we followed the Professor and Khanom to join it, Sina pulled me back. He had spotted a familiar face in the crowd.

  Standing by a stout concrete pillar was Reza, his ponytail swinging behind him as he waved, his long, angular face as melancholy as ever. Greetings were exchanged, then Sina sprung away to pick up a few cups of juice, while Reza and I stayed by the pillar, keeping out of the Professor’s line of sight.

  “Did you enjoy it?” asked Reza.

  “Oh, sure, it’s a great story,” I said.

  “In the West, the romance tales always have a happy conclusion, don’t they? But here our love stories are sad.”

  “Well, not all our stories are happy,” I said. “I mean, Romeo and Juliet isn’t exactly a bundle of laughs.”

  “So you weren’t surprised by the ending?”

  “No, not really,” I said. But it wasn’t any similarity with tales from my own part of the world; there was a more practical reason why I had known how the story would end.

  “You know it’s Sina’s sister playing Shirin?” I said.

  “Oh yes, of course!” Reza shook his head and slapped it with his palm, not so much in mourning as to say what a dunce he was. “So maybe you heard her practicing her lines?”

  “Heard her? Reza, for the last two weeks I haven’t heard anything else!”

  I remembered Khanom muttering in the taxi to the theater: “I feel like I could say her lines myself.” And she wasn’t the only one. Because Tahmineh had been practicing those lines, loud and clear, at every available opportunity. You knew the shower was occupied because you could hear Shirin singing her love for Farhad under the sound of the spray. When you asked Tahmineh to pass the cherry jam at the breakfast table, she would deliver it along with a couple of lines in praise of the bull-muscled engineer. And even when you were watching the news, the latest bomb scene in Baghdad would be accompanied by Shirin’s lament for her dead lover.

  The role of Shirin was Tahmineh’s first part since I’d been staying at the Professor’s. That it was a story from medieval Persian poetry seemed to be providential—although hardly unlikely, since it’s the era of the most popular stories. I’d been fascinated by the theater since I was a child, and spent a considerable portion of my student days skulking around cramped, dimly lit studio theaters—so I was eager for a back-stage glimpse of the Iranian stage. All I needed was an intro—and when Tahmineh left her script behind one afternoon, my chance had come.

  “Let your hand not be injured!” I declared to Khanom in my best Persian burr. “For me this duty is pleasing!”

  The rehearsal building wasn’t far. All it required was the most basic kind of trip you can take in Tehran—an hour and a half, three shared taxis, and a couple of near crashes—before I was shouting into the intercom at the gate of a three-story block.

  “Salaam! Please may I speak to Madame Tahmineh?”

  Static crackled, mingling with what sounded suspiciously like a giggle:

  “That is me!”

  Inside on the top floor, the actors were sitting on square wooden classroom tables. The men were in jeans and T-shirts, but the actresses were all wearing their headscarves and hadn’t taken off their trench coats. One of them kept flapping her scarf to cool herself down, and you could see the beads of sweat on her forehead.

  “You saved my life!” whispered Tahmineh as I handed over the script.

  There was another actress sitting beside her, whose makeup gave logic to her name—Mahtab or “Moonlight.” She pressed a hand to her chest to greet me, while a short man brushed between the women, carrying a blackfaced marionette like a golliwog on strings.

  “I greet you with a kiss!” he declared, lifting the strings so the marionette’s nose was touching mine. It was part of his act as “blackplayer,” a comic role in traditional Iranian theater.

  “Oh, don’t mind Valli,” said Tahmineh, laughing as she whispered to me. “Don’t let him stand too close to you!”

  The director was itching to rehearse, so I sat on one of the tables while the actors positioned themselves in the center of the room. Most of Tahmineh’s lines were from the twelfth-century verses of the poet Nizami (who adapted the story from an earlier, much shorter account in the Shahnameh). She enunciated them in a fast but stagey rattle, and when she wasn’t speaking, she wrapped herself in a haughty intensity, like a vamp in a 1920s silent movie. One moment flicking back her head, her nostrils flaring with pride, the next her eyes were darting about and her face flushed. The director was delighted. At the end of the scene, his announcement of “God’s blessing” appeared to be directed principally at his leading lady.

  Iranians have always loved a show. In Ferdowsi’s day, the marketplaces buzzed with mimics and minstrels, as well as shadow plays and full-on sketch shows, like the Play of Abu’l Qasim of Baghdad, in which a scurrilous scrounger, “more stinking than the smell of the tanners,” dresses up in a cleric’s gown and chastises a party of revelers with self-righteous quotes from the Quran. Oddly enough, one of Tehran’s biggest box office
hits of the past couple of years had been a film called The Lizard, in which the hero is also a reprobate disguised as a cleric. But whereas the medieval version flirts with a singing girl, farts in her presence, makes jokes about the plumpness of slave girls, and descends into a drunken stupor, the “Lizard” ends up seeing the error of his ways and finds God: proof that writers in this region could get away with a lot more in the past.

  Anyone who doubts the Iranian aptitude for acting only needs to take a taxi in Tehran. You ask for the fare and the driver declares, “Let your hand not be injured!” You ask again and he proclaims you to be his guest, declares himself “your sacrifice,” and implores God to pour down blessings upon you. But when you ask for the third time, he doesn’t just demand the fare—he wants double. You’ve been stung by taarof, or “offer”—the Persian politeness code.

  “But sir, did we not agree? You must pay twice as much as this!” he will exclaim, his brow creased with the sort of expression you’d expect if he was six years old and you had just strangled his pet hamster. It certainly pays to have elastic features here—which is why taxi drivers tend to display the most expressive faces in town.

  Up a flight of stairs and through a swinging glass door, cigarette smoke drifted up our noses. Moonlight, taking a packet out of her handbag, inserted a Pleasure Light into the Cupid’s bow of her lips and puffed out streams of smoke as she put on her best pout.

  The talk was mostly about the play, and it was a couple of notches above my ability, so I found myself watching the other tables instead. A boy was entertaining his friends with a joke, but judging by the looks he was stealing across the aisle, the joke was really for the benefit of a girl at the brushed metal table beside him, who was holding a hand to her mouth like a geisha while pretending to listen to her friends. At the table in front of us, another boy dropped a piece of paper before striding on. A young woman in a white beret, who was sitting opposite an older, serious-looking man, picked it up and unfolded it. The man leaned forward to see what it was, but she scrunched it up like waste, before dropping it casually into her pocket.