Soheili comes over. We sit down to eat. The kebab is not at all bad. The rice, too, had it been steamed long enough, would have been fine. Two peasants come and sit down next to us, with a rice and khoresh geimeh — they don’t just eat it, they make passionate love to it, their faces at kissing distance to the plate. They scoop up the food with a chunk of bread, and stuff it in their mouths; some stays in, some escapes to the loving bosom of the plate. They lick their fingers. They have nothing to do with spoons and forks. Between plate and mouth exists a spirit of unity and of intimacy. Soheili eats his white rice with a fork.
“I’m going from Istanbul to Karachi by Pan Am,” he says.
“I see.”
“How are you getting from Istanbul to Paris, Jenab Aryan?” “I have an Iran Air ticket, but. . . I’ll just have to wait and see.” “Iran Air doesn’t have a flight now, does it? Iran’s airports are shut.” “That’s right. They have a contract with Turkish Air, which apparently flies Iran Air passengers.”
“Is your ticket full-price?” he asks. “No. Forty percent discount.” “Are you a government employee?” “Oil company. In the south.” “Could I see your ticket?”
I show it to him. “No-cash-return and nontransferable,” he says. “But I’ve got friends in Istanbul who’ll fix it for you. If they have a new contract to fly Iran Air passengers, we’ll fix it. How long are you staying in Istanbul? It’s a very beautiful city.”
“I’m not planning to stay. I’ll get moving the day we arrive — if
I can.”
“You are worried about your niece?” “I must get to her hospital as soon as I can.” “What about your own leg? You have a limp. Were you hurt in the war?”
“It’s nothing. I tripped over a bottle of Coca-Cola.” He laughs. “If I may say, God bless you, good man. I hope that with our lord Ahura-Mazda’s help, all will turn out well for you and your niece, and everything will come to a good and happy ending right there in Paris!”
“I don’t know...”
We each light a cigarette. A boy brings us tea. “What happened?” he asks.
“What?”
“To your niece.”
“We don’t exactly know. In the letter we had, and the few telephone calls to my sister from Sorraya’s friends in Paris, we’ve been told that she was bicycling back from a friend’s house. Apparently the roads were slippery. She fell turning a corner.”
“And has brain damage?”
“Apparently.”
“How long ago?”
“She’s been in a coma for two or three weeks now, I think.”
“God. As simple as that?”
“Yes . . . as simple as that.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-three, twenty-two.”
He shakes his head. “How strange . . .”
I sigh. “Yes. A fifty-year-old banana like me survives in war-torn Abadan, and in the battle areas, comes through the palm tree plantations, gets on a dilapidated motor dinghy by night, traveling over a hundred kilometers under heavy bombing and shelling to Bandar Mahshah. A twenty-two-year-old young woman falls from a bicycle in the suburbs of Paris
“There’s no sense in anything in this world, is there, Jenab Aryan?”
“No . . . apparently there isn’t, Jenab Soheili!”
“And now, you’re going there to take her back to Tehran?”
“Well, not while she’s still in a coma, of course, but my sister does want me to bring her back to Tehran eventually.”
“Well, Lord willing.”
“You said it.”
“Don’t lose hope. Ahura-Mazda himself is the resolver of ills.” “Thanks.”
Around ten in the evening we board the bus again and move on. This time the passengers are mostly silent, and soon almost everyone is asleep. The good Soheili arranges all kinds of cushions and blankets around and under himself. I like this: he pampers himself and is excellently organized, too.
“Bless you, Jenab Aryan, if you would be so kind as to hand me that cushion up there, a thousand apologies. I really have put you to immeasurable troubles tonight.” He places the little silk cushion against the window, so that if his head rolls in his sleep, it should come to rest against something soft.
Outside, everything is dark; the coach moves on, groaning. Soheili is soon in the Seven Golden Slumbers. I cannot sleep. Although I have taken my medicine, I feel dizzy, my head aches as if things keep spinning round inside my skull. I look out. In the darkness the night seems silent, and the earth calm. But not within me. The silent night and the calm earth are out there. Or under little Soheili’s little silk cushions. Or perhaps it has slipped and fallen out of the window. It is the kind of night when the passenger is the bus, and the bus is the night, and it is the night that moves. It is the Jalal Aryan night. A man, almost fifty, teetering this year between life and death. When he walks, he looks like the late Charlie Chaplin — in slow motion. His face is the cross section of a full-frontal view of something between the long-armed Shah Ardeshir and the inventor of carrot jelly. When he breathes, his chest sounds like an asthmatic pig. Apart from all this, he’s healthy, handsome, and gorgeous.
At three in the morning, we arrive in Tabriz. Empty streets everywhere; cold, windy and drizzling. Abbas Agha pulls up in front of the local TBT bus terminal. A couple of new passengers board here. The Tehran passengers are mostly still asleep. Only Dr. Kiumarspur takes a child out to pee by the gutter. Tonight, her biology Ph.D. is worth nothing. Under the glow of the streetlight, her gold bangles and the arc of her son’s urine make the same spectral array of colors.
At daybreak, we pass through the clean steppes of western Azerbaijan, and head toward the Bazargan border. It is freezing outside, and daylight grows slowly. The steppes and the hills are bare, but it is beautiful when the first wide rays of the sunlight appear. In the plains, single ghostlike trees stand out here and there. The hills are empty. From time to time, a bird soars, spreads its wings in the strong wind blowing from Russia, rocking like a small dinghy in a storm. It reminds me of Sorraya.
We arrive in Maku in the early morning hours. Abbas Agha stops again, and we refuel. Maku seems to have turned stiff with cold, looking shrunken and wan. Even its main street, with its low stone-front buildings, shops and houses carved into the mountain, seems more empty and diminished than ever. In this ungodly dawn hour, the people are lining up, with empty cans for kerosene, standing rigid in lines, or sitting sleepily, or dozing. There are other lines, at the baker’s, at the grocer’s, people waiting for bread, foodstuffs, or some other rationed items.
I swallow my morning ration of medicine with a glass of water brought for me by Abbas Agha’s apprentice. After a while, Vahab Soheili — who is a fine sleeper — begins gradually to stir at my side. I am not in the mood to talk, but there is no stopping Soheili’s lingual engine.
“Top of the morning to you, Jenab Aryan.”
“Salaam.”
“Sabbah-Kum-Allah . . .”7
“Knock it off, Agha Soheili!” He laughs. “Any idea where we are?”
“Just past Maku.”
“Then we can’t be very far from the Bazargan border.”
“We’re supposed to be arriving there around seven-thirty, eight.”
He looks at me. “Morning dose, going down the hatch there?”
“Morning dose, down the hatch,” I answer.
“What are those long, orange pills? Aren’t they Gaverine?”
“That’s right, Gaverine Rx. Three a day.”
“Dilutes the blood and regulates the body’s salt. Yes, it’s the best kind. My brother took the very same pills after his first heart attack. They kept him alive for years. You know something else, don’t you, they must have told you. If you take these pills, then NO alcohol. Gaverine and alcohol don’t mix. They’re fatal enemies.”
“Yes, they’ve told me,” I say. And I remember, too, my promise to Farangis.
Then Soheili says, “Jenab Aryan, bless you
r little hand, would you be so gracious as to hand me down that little black bag up there?”
At about eight o’clock, we come into the Bazargan border installations. A dozen or so other passenger coaches and over a hundred trucks and cars have already parked in front of us.
The Bazargan transit building is a big, old single-story edifice, with only one narrow Dutch door now open, but controlled by Islamic revolutionary guards. Hundreds of travelers are crowded in front of it. There is no sign of the regular police force. Only a few boyish hezbollahi youths, quiet and polite, with G-3s and Uzi machine guns dangling from their shoulders, are assisting the passengers and attending to what has to be done. It is clear that one must wait for hours, perhaps even days, before getting through the rigamarole here.
The good Soheili is awake now — very much so. Like the other passengers, he has come out of the coach, but is silent and worried. He is busy gathering his pile of suitcases and packages together. Abbas Agha Marandi and his apprentice have just finished unloading all the baggage. Abbas Agha collects all our passports, and taking them, along with his own papers, somehow pushes his way through the mob and into the half-door. Orders are for all of us to carry our own baggage and belongings into the transit hall. A bearded, middle-aged man shouts out through the narrow doorway: if anyone has any extra currency, or gold, or any other valuable objects with them, they must be handed to the customs authorities and get a receipt. Otherwise, if anything is discovered, it will be confiscated, and the passengers turned back. The Iranian world travelers, who used to cruise abroad so elegantly in the years of the Shah’s regime, with so much pleasure and in luxury, are now waiting, silently, like deaf mutes. Not a peep out of anyone. All they want is to get out, somehow, anyhow. It is an emergency situation. The men are no longer “gentlemen,” they are “brothers.” The women are no longer “ladies,” they are “sisters.” The people are in batches and groups. “Iran-Peima Bus Company passengers, come forward. Mihan-Tour passengers, get back there!” Dr. Kiumarspur, with her baby in her arms, stands next to me. The German-bound student has abandoned her, and gone off to care for his own. She looks worried and at a loss, probably because of her jewelry. Her baggage is scattered everywhere, in bits and pieces. She sighs. “Have you read that book by André Gide,” she asks me, “The Narrow Door?” She’s glancing at the guarded half-door.
“No, I haven’t.”
“He says, ‘Try and enter through the narrow door.’”
I smile at her. “You don’t have that much luggage. Brother Soheili is the one who’s going to have to try awfully hard. . . .” I glance at Soheili behind me.
Soheili does not laugh. He simply shakes his head. However, he is looking cool and experienced.
“Gide doesn’t mean baggage,” Dr. Kiumarspur says, “he means resurrection.” I see.
“One of my sisters was a university professor, she’s now on the government blacklist: ‘Exit Forbidden.’ Another sister’s in prison, we’ve had no news of her for months.”
After two hours, it’s our turn. We somehow squeeze past the mob swarming in front of the tiny door for no reason, save perhaps anxious haste to get into the transit hall. We spend a good deal of time passing on Soheili’s numerous pieces of luggage hand-to-hand. At last, we all get in.
It is a large lobby, ending in a corridor leading to yet another hall. A gloomy hush suddenly reigns here. There are several lines. One for retrieving the passports. One for body search. Another for luggage search. Another for handing in valuable objects, and another for going out and into the transit hall on the Turkish side. I stand in the small passport line.
A boy with a scant fuzz of a mustache on his upper lip, and sensitive green eyes, is seated behind a very large table, with an Uzi machine gun on his lap.
“The reason for your trip abroad?” he asks.
I explain.
“Are you traveling alone?”
“Yes.” In my hand, I have a signed copy of an official memo, on government-printed stationery with the letterhead of the Ministry of Petroleum, National Iranian Oil Company, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Tehran Committee Caring for the Problems of the Employees of the War-Struck Territories, Abadan and Khunin-Shahr, instructed the deputy authorities of the passport office to render what emergency help the aforementioned (i.e., me) may need.8 The deputy oil minister has acknowledged the note. I show it to the “brother.”
“What was your position in the oil company?” I tell him.
“Who did you say issued your exit permit?” I mention the name of the deputy minister who signed my permit from the Oil Ministry.
“Why didn’t the minister himself sign it?”
I inform him that the oil minister is being held a prisoner of war by the Iraqis.
He hands me back my stamped passport. “Go on, brother.” “That’s all?” I ask. “God be with you.”
The lines for body search lead to two booths, one for the “brothers” and another for the “sisters.” After that the passengers move on to the luggage-checking lines, stand by their things, and shove them gradually forward. In the body-search booth marked “Brothers” is a slightly built boy no more than seventeen or eighteen. Standing before me, he is almost like my child. Without looking at anything, he begins to feel the lining and shoulder seams of my jacket, crushing them in his hands, asking the same questions about the reason for my trip, my occupation, who I am traveling with, etc. He reminds me of Seyyed Ma-trud’s retarded boy back in Abadan. Only this boy is plucky and alert. While he gives my shoe a through inspection, tapping the heel, he asks, “How are you? Well?”
“Oh, not bad.” He himself seems tired and dry. “How are you doing, yourself?”
He does not answer me, he just lowers his head.
“You do a thorough job,” I say. “But I noticed one point.”
He does not pay much attention, just glances at me dubiously. “What point?”
“It’s not that I mean to criticize the brothers’ work, or anything. But I’ve noticed that people who come out of the body-search booths go straight to their baggage. They could take something out of their cases and put it in their pockets. Don’t you think it would be better to do the body search after?”
“We’re terribly crowded,” he says, scratching his head. “We’re making some changes here . . . going to have a new corridor built.
He does not search the other shoe. “Off you go.”
“That’s all?”
“God’s hand be with you.”
I thank him and come out. Soheili is next in line. His face is the color of dried mustard. I could guess why. Even his mustache seems to have suddenly grown grayer and is standing on end.
“Do they search thoroughly?” he asks.
“Thoroughly as you could wish,” I assure him.
He gives up his place, leaving the line, and heads back toward his luggage. He changes his coat and shoes. (In Istanbul, he tells me he had 38,000 pounds worth of travelers checks and thousand-dollar bills sewn into the lining of his coat and shoes.) I join the luggage-search line, and because my lone suitcase is skimpy, and the money I am carrying is within the legal limit, I get through more quickly than most. I enter the transit hall. Dr. Kiumarspur is arguing with the Hezbollah brothers at the customs desk, for they have taken all her gold and jewelry and given her a receipt. She is fuming, all in vain.
In the main transit lobby a large, U-shaped counter turns across the hall. The door on this side of the counter opens to Iran, the one on the other side, to quote Abbas Agha Marandi’s Azerbaijani accent, to “Turchish” soil.
I do not see Soheili anywhere until noon, when finally he enters the Turkish transit hall through a side door. Not only is he now back to his normal color — he is positively glowing. Obviously, he has sneaked through whatever it was he had with him. This, however, is only the beginning of our trouble with the Turkish officials, who seem to enjoy their own signs of order or discipline. For a start, they have kept everyone waiting, saying the
inspector in charge has gone to make a phone call. Also, there is no electricity, because of a power cut. (Iran supplies the electrical power for both halves of the border and customs facilities.) Of course, the Turks blame this on Iran, saying Iran’s juice is gone, and find this very ludicrous. They talk and joke about it in Turkish, laughing merrily. Next, when the official inspector arrives on the scene, the first thing he says, and is translated for us, is that everyone should have had cholera vaccinations on the other side of the border.
The Iranian passengers, who have just been through the twelve tasks of Hercules with the Islamic Republic officials, raise their voices in shouts of protest, demanding to know why no one had told them about this cholera business beforehand. The Turkish inspector is un- moved. Passports must have cholera vaccination stamps. The only exceptions are those with International Vaccination Booklets. This is a recent order. Harsh discussions follow, but the Turkish inspector remains adamant. He has the passports in his hand, and he waves them in the air, saying they must go back and be stamped with cholera inoculation stamps, or else. My passport is there, too.
“I’m not going back!” Dr. Kiumarspur declares.
“Wild horses wouldn’t drag me back,” Soheili says. “They should have told us this before.” Then he booms in English at the Turkish official, “You should have notified us on the other side! You should have declared. . . .” I had not heard this voice of his on the other side of the border.
“How doltish this lot is,” Dr. Kiumarspur says. “They’re even worse than us!”
“It’s not right. It’s not fair!” Soheili cries. Everyone joins him, throwing in some insult. But it is no use arguing with the Turkish official.
I step forward, take the passports, and having commissioned Soheili to keep an eye on my little suitcase, I head back toward the Iranian side of the border. Asking as I go, I manage to locate a little booth at the far end of the corridor, where I find the Iranian quarantine officer, sitting in the dark, smoking. I explain the problem to him. Even before I open my mouth, he seems to understand. This, apparently, is nothing new. He takes the passports — there are fifteen or sixteen of them — opens them all to the next-to-the-last page, and lays them in a pile. Then he begins stamping them in rapid succession. He is a plump, sick-looking man of forty or so, and in the dark little room, he seems even more unreal than his actions.
Strange Times, My Dear Page 10