Later trips to Persepolis did not afford me much relief from loneliness and hunger. The American daughters, when they were available, were usually unwilling to interrupt the perfection of a bored-to-death expression just to grapple with me. The French girls were much more interested in Houshang, and seemed to consider him wasted on their mothers.
Up in my neat little room on the second floor of the Parki Saadi, I lay in bed at nights struggling with the mess not only of the past few months but of the entire seventeen years of my life. My essential query was this: ‘What the hell are you doing here? Iran? Why?’ I rescued my sanity with narrative, by amending my yarn. I decided to fall in love. I was not trawling the earth for sex; I was trawling the earth for love (so the new version of my story went). And I had been driven to travel to Iran because I would find the girl who was meant for me, the one girl I could marry. I was in Iran because it was meant to be. There is no more potent element in autobiography than this.
I went further. I typed out the story of the love affair I would have liked. The story was called, ‘Meant To Be’. The principal female character, an exceptionally tender-hearted young woman, had for years harboured a secret desire to win the heart of a young Australian travelling in Iran. It was an Australian boy she wanted—not an American, not a Frenchman, not a German, but an Australian. She herself was Iranian. She was a stewardess with Iran Air. Houshang had told me that the only respectable Iranian girls who slept with men before marriage were Iran Air stewardesses. This suited me, because Iran Air stewardesses stayed at the hotel between flights. They were cheerful girls, very saucy. Parivash was the name of the stewardess with whom I fell in love.
It was the custom of Iran Air stewardesses, once they’d been taxied from the airport to the hotel late at night, to meet up with the men they’d just finished plying with food and drink on the flight from Tehran—men who were also staying at the Parki Saadi. If a man didn’t have the freedom of his suite for one reason or another—he could be travelling with his wife, for instance—then the meeting would take place somewhere in the gardens of the hotel. I didn’t know all this. Houshang explained it to me later. What I did know was that the stewardesses often wandered down to the lobby after checking in. So on flight nights—Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays—I remained at the reception desk until very late, re-reading For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Six stewardesses served on the Tehran–Shiraz route. They wore smart navy-blue suits with above-the-knee skirts and jaunty little caps. Much of their good cheer and cheekiness was bravado, as I was to learn from Houshang. A peasant girl who had lost her virginity before marriage had no option other than to become a prostitute. Lots of such women worked the highways in and out of Shiraz, always dressed like any respectable housewife: head-to-toe black shawl. A middle-class girl or a daughter of minor aristocrats could either go abroad for a very long time and maybe marry a non-Muslim, or she could join Iran Air, if she were pretty enough. The stewardesses kept a sharp lookout for a European man to marry, Houshang said. I saw the injustice in all this and said so. Houshang shrugged and closed his eyes briefly, a familiar expression. ‘Who can say? Indeed, who can say?’
The hotel lobby at midnight was a very quiet place. A few guests from the flight would check in and go to bed. The only night-life in Shiraz was enjoyed by members of the National Police and the Shah’s secret police, who would hobnob at private houses where they drank themselves sick and told stories of the torture of communists and clerics—according to Houshang. In the tomb-like silence of the foyer, I would hunch over my book, waiting for the opportunity to fall in love. Or I might gather up the desk equipment and make a little design or a toy town using the stapler, sticks of staples, rubber stamps, ink pad, pens and pencils.
Whenever the stewardesses appeared, they were in a hurry. They crossed the lobby rapidly in their high heels and were swallowed by the night. They might murmur ‘Salaam’ or ‘Hi’, but they did not stop to establish a relationship. The first stewardess to talk to me was not named Parivash but Peggy. She was Canadian. She had short red hair and dense discs of freckles on each cheek. She asked me for a cigarette and suggested that I was a little young to be out in the world alone. I asked her how come she was working for Iran Air. Listening to her explanation, I revised my story about falling in love with an Iranian girl. In the deftly composed new version of my story, I fell in love with a Canadian girl on a hostess-exchange program.
After chatting to me for ten minutes or so, Peggy was met by an astonishingly handsome Frenchman whom I’d checked into the hotel a half-hour earlier—together with his wife and two sons, not yet in their teens. He was one of those superbly accomplished charmers who never bother to tone down the glow, no matter if the beneficiary of the radiance is boy, girl, grandma, child or beggar. He had spoken to me in French earlier but, finding me unable to respond, had switched to English.
‘A young man of Australia? A country of great beauty. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Mister Ernest Hemingway. A superb writer. You have read others? I place him in the top rank. The front door remains open for a little while yet? Wonderful.’
Two nights later, I was compelled to revert to my original love story. One of the genuine Iranian stewardesses came down to the lobby and chatted. This one called herself Moo Moo, a name that lacked the magic of Parivash. She was pretty, certainly, but her eyebrows met in the middle, forming one thick arc. I wasn’t crazy about the eyebrow, but I was sure I would get over it. She was nervous, and kept asking about the condition of the gardens. Were there things out there she might trip over in the dark? No, I promised her, nothing at all to trip over. She reluctantly ventured out into the night. Once she was gone, it suddenly struck me that she had been asking me in a roundabout way to accompany her. I bolted out the front door and into the gardens, searching high and low. The more desperately I searched, the more certain I was that I loved Moo Moo. I loved her big thick eyebrow. I loved everything about her. After searching for an hour all over the gardens, hearing nothing but the chirruping songs of crickets, I went wretchedly to bed.
Next day I told Houshang about Moo Moo. It turned out that he’d slept with her a number of times. Tousling my hair, he explained that Moo Moo had a drinking problem. Had she been carrying a shoulder bag when she went outside? Yes, she had. Well, that shoulder bag would have contained a bottle of Raki, Moo Moo’s spirit of choice. She would have polished off the bottle, re-entered the hotel by the kitchen door and gone up to bed. She had terrific powers of recuperation and would have made the Shiraz–Tehran flight that very morning. Moo Moo probably would have slept with me if I’d escorted her into the garden, Houshang said, but there was no point in falling in love with her. Besides, she was already married to an Egyptian Christian who sold fake Rolex watches in Tehran. He promised me once again that he would find me a nice French or American girl.
Twenty-five years after her departure from my life, my mother flies to Melbourne from the city in which she’s been living all this time to be reunited with my sister and me. It is winter in Melbourne. My mother wears a red overcoat, but not the one in which she left.
It is the initiative of my sister that has brought about the reunion. My father is too tired and frail to care much if we invite our mother back into our lives. Marion had placed advertisements in newspapers far and wide. ‘Contact your daughter. Love forever.’ And a telephone number. By chance, my mother sees one of these advertisements. She responds, books an airfare, and so we meet.
I recognise my mother at the airport before she recognises me. Her hair is white and abundant. The drama of the red overcoat is in keeping with the intensity of her beauty. The gaze of her black eyes rests on me, turns away, takes in my sister who has dissolved in tears, then returns to me and my five-year-old son, pressed to my hip. We embrace and kiss. ‘Dear son,’ she says.
My mother grips my wrist so fiercely in the car on the way back to St.Kilda that I wince in pain.
We dri
nk tea in my apartment. My sister cannot stop her tears.
‘I want to hear everything,’ my mother says. ‘Leave nothing out.’
I summarise the years that followed her departure. When I speak of travelling, of the ship, of my arrival in Greece, she asks in a puzzled way how old I had been at that time. When I tell her, she says that it was wrong of Frank to have allowed me to do such a thing. ‘I wouldn’t have let you,’ she says. ‘And what did you do for money? Did you have a job?’ Yes, I tell her. I taught in a college. Without ever having known me in those days, my mother realises immediately what a ridiculous figure I must have cut as a schoolteacher. She raises her eyebrows, seems indignant, as if she had been overruled in her opinion all those years ago. I don’t remind her that she had not been in a position to intervene.
Before I have time to complete the story of my search for the green island, my son’s mother arrives to take him back to her home in Coburg. He lives there most of the week; on the weekends, he stays with me. It is an arrangement that the three of us—my son, my wife and I—are still getting used to. My son finds it particularly difficult. Only a month has passed since I left his mother.
Academy
I thought of the weeks as junior maître d’ as a training period. I had made mistakes. I would improve. I would learn French inside out. I would ask the international guests more interesting questions. I had already seen the senselessness of typing quotations from books at the end of the menu. I had stopped trying to flirt with Parivash. Soon, I would buy a new suit.
Ahmoud, however, had seen enough, and he sacked me. In the letter of dismissal, he said that I ‘had not carried out my duties in the way expected’. I was horrified. In my town, in my family, the worst thing that could ever be said about you was that you had not carried out your duties in the way expected. If my father had known that I’d been sacked, he would have blushed with shame. Better to be dismissed for theft, assault or indecent exposure than for falling down on the job.
I left the hotel after a final breakfast—Ahmoud insisted on the breakfast—and lugged my suitcase into town with tears running down my cheeks. I was struggling to put together a story that my father might accept. ‘Dad, it seems I just wasn’t cut out to be a maître d’, French was a big problem, Dad—I couldn’t really speak French all that well, and my suit wasn’t the proper sort of suit.’ And so on. Excuses. My father would see that I was just making excuses. He would say, ‘You didn’t want to get your little pink hands dirty.’
Without money, it was difficult to know what I could do. I couldn’t sponge off Jo and Randall, who were busy establishing their own lives. I saw them now and again, and it was obvious that we were no longer all in the one boat. I booked into a cheap hotel and went out to find a job. Making my way along Boulevard Pahlevi, one line of work after another suggested itself, only to be dismissed. I couldn’t be a baker, for example. I couldn’t start up a small restaurant. Maybe I could get a job as a shop assistant on the basis of my experience in the Myer Emporium, but what about language? I could barely make myself understood in Farsi. I came to the office of Iran Insurance, and called in to see Houshang.
‘Well, it’s not surprising, is it?’ he said, when I told him I’d been sacked. ‘You are too young for such work. Also, you stopped paying attention to Parivash.’
‘But you told me to!’
‘No. I told you that you would not succeed. I didn’t tell you to stop. You insulted her.’
‘Is that why I was sacked?’ I was suddenly dizzy with hope. My father would easily, easily accept me losing my job because I had refused to sleep with the manager’s wife. I could tell him that the manager’s wife was bad tempered or ugly, and he would say, ‘Not to worry, not to worry,’ and put it all down to the malice of a scorned woman.
‘No,’ said Houshang, ‘Ahmoud intended to sack you after four weeks. As soon as he hired you, he knew that he was wrong. You looked foolish.’
He had a suggestion. I should go down to the Iran–America Society office and see if they needed teachers. ‘Have you been to university in Australia?’ he asked, in a way that suggested that the only acceptable answer would be ‘Yes’.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Good. Speak to Louis at the Iran-America Society.’
The Iran–America Society office was on Boulevard Pahlevi. I had only a vague idea of the business of the place. I found it was a goodwill society and that it ran an English-teaching academy. Louis was lounging with his feet on his desk and his tie loosened. He looked like a private eye. I gave my name and told him that Houshang had sent me.
‘He’s a cunt, isn’t he,’ Louis said genially. ‘Ladies’ man. I must be jealous. What can we do for you? Sit down first.’
‘I want to teach.’
‘Teach what?’
‘English.’
‘Suits me. What’ve you got? BA? You look a bit young.’
‘BA,’ I nodded. I knew what it was.
‘Not a limey, are you? Australian? Something like that? What university? Doesn’t matter. Gimme your passport.’
Louis studied my passport for a minute or more without betraying any surprise. The date of birth would have shown me to be one of the few Arts graduates of my age in the world.
‘I can give you three classes. You take each class four times a week. You’re taking over from Janey. Gone AWOL somewhere. You start tonight. Don’t tell me that’s too soon, okay? If you don’t do it, I have to. It’s not too soon, is it?’
‘No.’
I had time to skim the textbook. I walked into a classroom on the second floor in which twenty students, all my age or older, sat in silence with their books on their laps. There were no desks. I felt a rush of power. I was to spend quite a number of my future years teaching kids of just this age, but never again with the authority that buoyed me up that day.
After the class (on prepositions, with reference to a chapter from Tom Sawyer) a number of the students gathered around me, smiling shyly.
‘Mister Roberts, you trousers too small for you.’
‘Mister Robert, Ostraya far very far!’
‘I shake you hand, Mister Illman.’
‘Beatle, Mister Robert! Music, Beatle!’
‘My students,’ I wrote to my father that night, ‘are quite friendly. I am glad that I changed my career because the people were not so friendly as this at the hotel. Also, a woman there wanted me to do something I didn’t wish to do.’
Louis proposed an advance on my salary, and I accepted. At the hotel where I’d put up, Reza the manager, a good-natured boy of eighteen who had been given this responsible position by his uncle, slapped me on the back when I told him that I was now working as a teacher. A vernacular news service as rapid as the Internet conveyed information all over town, and Reza, who spoke English, confessed that he’d known of my teaching job at the society before I’d told him. But he hadn’t wished to spoil my pleasure in telling him. In Shirazi culture (as I would learn) it was considered vulgar to spoil someone’s surprise. I was never able to gauge whether I had succeeded in telling Reza anything about my circumstances that was not already well known to him.
What pleased Reza about my job was the salary. I would now be able to pay my hotel bill. He had, he said, been troubled when I’d booked in. He knew I had no money. He may have been required to throw me out. Now he was happy. He paraded me before the group of friends and relatives hanging about in the hotel office. These little groups of the unemployed, the unemployable and the retired gathered all over Iran. At the heart of the group you’d find a single occupied individual, but even he was occupied in such a desultory way that the distinction was hardly noticeable. Worry beads were counted, cups of tea ordered from a café.
Anything at all will fire the interest of these masters of enforced leisure. With Reza translating, they asked me a series of questions about the distant land of Austral
ia, and each reply was met with either polite nods or short rounds of applause, with the hand not holding the teacup or cigarette beating a light tattoo on the thigh. Inevitably, the highlight of my account was a report on the stature and leaping prowess of the kangaroo. The bi-cameral parliamentary system baffled them, but they were interested in the Queen. Reza could not translate the word ‘stupid’; I had to provide approximates.
‘Fool.’
‘Fool?’
‘Silly.’
‘Zealy? What is zealy mean?’
‘Mad.’
‘Ho! Mad?’
He translated ‘mad’, to the delight of the audience. It was, I think, a close neighbour of a term they would have wished to apply to the Shah. The laughter had a guilty-gleeful sound to it. I wanted to show just how bold I could be, perhaps telling the audience that my Prime Minister was also mad, but Reza thought it best to change the subject. He called over Ali, the hotel dogsbody, a tiny, toothless man with floppy ears like oven mitts, and told me that Ali was now my servant. ‘You give Mister Ali three toomans,’ Reza whispered. Since I had the money, I immediately offered it. Ali’s gestures of obeisance embarrassed me. But I could not resist telling my father in my next letter that I now had a servant. ‘I treat him very well,’ I wrote. ‘I disagree with slavery.’
The green island was as far away as ever, but at least I was supporting myself with the sweat of my brow. Sitting on my bed in my narrow little room, I wrote to my father every other day. What I craved was some endorsement from him; some recognition that by collecting a pay envelope each week, I was shaping up as I should. I had been collecting a pay envelope each week since I left school, of course, but now I was doing it in a foreign land. I thought some special mention should be made of the fact.
The Boy in the Green Suit Page 13