by Jill Worrall
‘Today we start your Persian lessons,’ he says, launching into the dialogue at the start of chapter one before I can draw breath.
Snow-dusted mountains that had been hacked and rent apart by eons of geological tumult close around us as we begin conjugating my first Persian verb.
‘Man khorshal hastam, to khorshal hasti ... (I am happy, you are happy...),’ Reza intones.
I follow suit. Reza B takes his hands off the wheel as we speed down the road using his arms to conduct all three of us through the rest of the verb table.
The lesson is interrupted by our arrival in the village of Robat-e-Safed, named after its caravanserai.
‘There are some interesting theories about the word robat,’ Reza explains. ‘One is that it is an Arabic word for caravanserai, but another is that it comes from the Persian word rabt: to connect. The Arabs took many Persian words and adopted them after they conquered Persia.’
Reza’s explanation reminds me of an earlier conversation we’d had when I, in a blonde moment, had called the Persian Gulf the Arabian Gulf. Reza, normally the most equable of personalities, had bristled with indignation. Despite my attempts to retract what I’d said by saying I really did know it was the Persian Gulf and that it had been a mere slip of the tongue on my part, it was too late.
‘Just recently some cranky Arabs have renamed it the Arabian Gulf but it has been called the Persian Gulf from at least Achaemenid times and that’s two and a half thousand years ago. Then it was the Sinus Persicus or Persian Sea. Now some Westerners are calling it the Gulf to be politically correct but it’s not correct.’
There’s a complicated relationship between the Iranians and the Arab world. It was the Arabs who introduced Islam to Persia in the late seventh century AD, but the Persians later carved out their own path in the Islamic world by following the Shia line rather than the Sunni. The first language of Iran – Farsi or Persian – is an intrinsic part of national identity for the majority of Iranians, but it is written in Arabic script.
To many Iranians the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula are simply nomads with sand in their shoes who happened to get lucky with the discovery of oil. No amount of wealth can ever, to the Persian mind, compensate for a lack of an illustrious and sophisticated heritage. It’s an on-going frustration for many Iranians that so many ill-informed Westerners call them Arabs. Robat’s caravanserai is in a depressing state of near-ruin. But very strangely one of the first things we see is a badminton court that has been marked out in the courtyard; a moth-eaten net sags between two posts. To get into the courtyard proper we must edge our way past two dogs with matted hair – possibly of Saluki heritage – that are chained to a post on a mound of rubble.
I’m aware that I haven’t seen many dogs in Iran. Interestingly, they are widely regarded by Iranians as being unclean; I’ve noticed Reza always gives any dogs we see a wide berth. I certainly don’t need much encouragement to leave these two – with their bared teeth – well alone.
Beyond Robat, veils of rain hang between the distant mountains and the road, wafting closer as we drive south. I can smell the moisture in the air, but it remains tantalisingly just out of reach. However, the water suspended in the sky turns a usually harsh landscape into a soft watercolour world.
On Reza’s suggestion that we stop to meditate for a while, we pull up at the side of the road. We walk towards the hills across a plain strewn with rock shards and small struggling plants. After a short distance Reza chooses a small ridge and gracefully sits down cross-legged. I follow, inelegantly.
We sit as the emptiness wraps around us. Reza has his eyes closed but my mind, never easy to still, wonders what Reza B might be doing. I look around and see he has the back of the van open and is preparing morning tea. Reza opens his eyes.
‘You’re not concentrating.’
I put the thought of fresh dates out of my mind and turn back to look at the hills. I shut out the view and my head seems to echo with the absence of noise.
The whining of a truck engine breaks the spell. The sound intensifies and then, when the truck approaches our van, which is the only man-made object for hundreds of kilometres and clearly stationary, the driver blasts his horn. I assume this is in case Reza B suddenly takes it into his head to leap into its path.
Reza’s eyes snap open. ‘Tea, I think.’
The road takes us ever closer to the Afghan border. There has been some rain here and the plain on our left is carpeted in green. Even the mountains along the border look flushed with vegetation.
I stare into the hills, wondering what is going on behind them. Ever since I’d lived in Pakistan more than 20 years earlier, Afghanistan has fascinated me. I’d stood in the Khyber Pass and gazed into its mountains, seen its boundaries from the Uzbek border – and now from Iran. One day I’ll get there.
As we pass through a small nondescript town with a concrete box of a police checkpoint Reza spots a ruined icehouse in the fields beyond. Without being asked, Reza B turns the van down a side road so we can investigate and as we make our way down the potholed track we see an entire town, albeit abandoned, of adobe arches, tunnels and houses over a small ridge.
It is beautiful in its ruin and I am out of the van, camera in hand, almost as soon as we stop.
‘Just be a little careful with the camera – we are close to the border,’ Reza says.
But as far as I can see there’s no one else for miles and I am just about to plunge into a crumbling covered alleyway when we spot a military-looking ute bouncing down the road towards us.
‘Put your camera away and look respectable,’ Reza instructs.
‘I always look respectable,’ I reply.
‘More respectable,’ he says firmly.
I pull my headscarf further forward until it is almost in my eyes. ‘Now walk back to the van.’
There are times when even I can see the point of obeying instructions and being discreet. I return to the van, trying to find a balance between casualness and decorum.
From under my scarf I glimpse two young armed men climb out of the ute – one in camouflage blue and the other in khaki. They engage in discussion with the two Rezas, with occasional gestures at me.
Reza returns to the van and asks me for my passport, but won’t catch my eye or answer my question about what’s happening.
Meanwhile, things are becoming rather more animated outside. The two soldiers are still leafing through my passport, but Reza is pointing at the ruins. The passport is returned, then everyone looks intently at the old village followed by a round of hand-shaking.
The two soldiers return to their ute, passing by me in the process and I just can’t help myself; I break decorum and wave at them. They wave back and grin.
‘They saw us go past and wondered who we were,’ reports Reza. ‘They didn’t think it could be a tourist because no one comes here. No one except for smugglers, that is,’ he adds.
Apparently the abandoned buildings, so close to the Afghan border, were under suspicion of being used by drug runners and other criminal types.
‘They told me they’d been here for a year so far but have never visited the village. I told them the houses were very beautiful and they should explore them. They said they would,’ Reza says.
Only an enthusiast like Reza could turn the discussion from my possible impact on national security to the beauty of adobe ruins. But, as usual, his passion for Iran’s past proves to be contagious. At Gonabad we stop at the town’s ethnographical museum. The curator is astonished to see us – and a little nonplussed. This is definitely the off-season in an area that even in peak times only receives a very sparse number of overseas tourists. He is having lunch into the bargain.
But, Reza, ever persuasive, manages to get him to open up the museum. Many of the small arched rooms around the courtyard have been converted into re-creations of local village life, complete with wax models in traditional dress.
In one room a family sits on the floor removing the precious anthers from the saffron cro
cus. A huge metal tray piled with purple flowers is in their midst, along with a small plate of the extremely valuable orange-red anthers.
It is the local version of a grain-mill that fascinates me most. An enormous beam has been set in the crook of a Y-shaped tree trunk. Attached to the high end of the beam is a vertical post that points down toward a cylindrical stone jar. It’s a two-man operation in that one man positions himself at the lower end of the beam in order to pivot it up and down, while another straddles the high end, adding weight to the post when it crashes into the grain.
Although it is a beautifully constructed display, I can’t help wondering who on earth will ever come to see it.
From Gonabad we leave the main highway for a minor road that will take us to Tabas. Iran’s two vast deserts lie on either side of us, the Dasht-e Kavir desert to our right and to the left, the Dasht-e Lut.
We have one last stop to make before nightfall. Reza wants to check out the restoration of a madrasseh (theological school) in Ferdows. The newly cleaned brickwork glows pale yellow in the winter sun that has emerged from the cloud. It is an impressive building that must have once housed dozens of students and their teachers.
Madrassehs are today an integral part of Islamic society and function rather like an Oxford or Cambridge college in that students study in small groups with their tutors and, in most cases, live on campus. Most traditional madrassehs are of a similar design – usually two storeys of small rooms that serve as both teaching space and living areas set around a courtyard. Where this madrasseh in Ferdows departs from the conventional layout is that rather than the central space being on one level, its steps lead down to a sunken pool and garden area.
Theological debate was and is an important part of Shia theological training and it’s easy for me to imagine students of yesteryear sitting around the pool, protected from the desert sun by the steep walls on all sides, earnestly discussing the religious issues of the day.
Among the ruins of an old village outside the madrasseh are the remains of an icehouse and the crumbling entrances to several underground reservoirs.
‘Has anyone excavated these places?’ I ask. Layer upon layer of village life must have been building up here for centuries.
‘Probably not,’ says Reza. ‘Iran has so many archaeological sites and there simply is not enough money to study them all.’
We are still hours away from Tabas, where we plan to stay the night, and to slow us down further it is snowing on the 3000-m Robat-e-Sang pass. As the snowflakes drop onto the windscreen, Reza B moves the kiwi from its perch and puts it beside him.
‘If he gets cold again he will be bad-tempered again tomorrow.’
The snow brings a crisp definition to the mountain folds, the fresh white contrasting with the tawny foothills that are scarred with vertical runnels where sometime in the past water must have cascaded.
As the sun sets we pull up outside a small lonely mosque. The entranceway and even the minarets are decorated in a rather garish shade of green and shiny white tiles. A few men in working clothes drift in as the loudspeaker on one of the minarets crackles into life with the early evening call to prayer.
Reza B decides it’s time for a cup of tea, but there is much consternation on his and our part when he discovers the pump pot of hot water has developed a crack. There is water in the bottom of the van, but none for the cups.
While he mops up, Reza gallops across to a small teahouse set into the wall of the mosque complex and appears a few minutes later clutching a battered stainless steel teapot full of water. We drink our tea quickly as the air temperature begins to plummet.
The mountain range behind Tabas is a formidable black cutout shape against a sky of deep apricot when we finally descend through a small pass towards the oasis town.
‘What a perfect silhouette,’ I say.
Reza pricks up his ears. He is always on the lookout for words to extend his English vocabulary.
We practise the pronunciation for some time, and then insert the words into sentences.
Meanwhile, Reza B, who did not appear to have been listening, suddenly asks Reza to enquire of me what shapes I could see along the silhouette.
‘A sleeping dragon with a long tail,’ I say, ‘and an old man with a very short nose.’
Reza B seems happy with my answer, then points at a very distinctive pointed cone to the east and says something to Reza in Farsi. I force him to translate.
‘He says he does not have your imagination, but that mountain is very easy,’ Reza says, looking a little embarrassed.
Reza had researched the Tabas accommodation scene before we left Tehran and had read about a teachers’ hostel that lets out rooms cheaply during the college holidays. But as he doesn’t know where it is we spend some time driving around the dark streets of Tabas, making repeat circumnavigations of several of the town’s roundabouts, until we find a lone man at the roadside who points us in the right direction.
We turn into the gate of an anonymous-looking three-storey building and Reza hops out of the van and disappears inside to check.
I watch him lean over a counter in the foyer. After a few seconds a man struggles into view on the other side – clearly he’d been having a nap having quite reasonably decided that no guests were likely to arrive at 9 pm on a mid-winter’s night. Reza signals to us that we are indeed at the right place and Reza B and I traipse in with our bags.
‘Apparently there is a big neon sign on the roof,’ Reza says. ‘This man does not know how we missed it.’
Upstairs there are rooms galore from which to choose and before long I’m installed in one offering four beds and an immaculate bathroom. The two Rezas move in next door, where Reza B immediately collapses onto the bed and turns on the TV. His evening routine is set in stone – he never eats dinner (preferring instead to consume a massive lunch) and usually watches television until he falls asleep, leaving Reza to switch off the latest instalment of his favourite Iranian soap opera.
The two of us then venture out on foot into the dark and apparently totally deserted streets of Tabas to look for something to eat. Only a few metres from the hotel we come across an Iranian-style fast-food shop, which Reza calls a sandwich bar, in which a number of men are slouched on padded wrought-iron chairs watching a soapie on the huge wall-mounted television set. Until I walk in, that is. Blonde-haired tourists in the middle of winter in Tabas are clearly a rare sight.
A huge domestic drama erupts on the television but the histrionics of an overwrought matron and her beautiful daughter go completely unheeded as everyone stares at me. Reza suggests I sit at a table with my back to the audience and we order the equivalent of an Iranian subway and a local cola.
While we eat, a regular stream of customers begins to pull up outside, mostly young couples on small motorbikes. They invariably head up the stairs to a mezzanine floor where they sit, heads close together, over fast food.
After our dinner we walk back to the hostel, which now that we can see it in the right perspective, is clearly one of the tallest buildings in the neighbourhood and is indeed topped with the brilliant green and red neon sign referred to earlier by the caretaker.
On our return to the hostel Reza suggests we set up the laptop on the dining table that stretches about 10 metres down the length of the wide corridor and view the day’s photos. I can’t find a plug in the hall so suggest, as I have four desks and plenty of space in my room, that we look at the photographs there. The room is also several degrees warmer.
‘No, we certainly can’t do that,’ says Reza, looking horrified.
‘But there’s no one else here and anyway, we can leave the door wide open.’
He refuses point blank. Every now and then the strictures of life in an Islamic republic totally infuriate me and this is one of those times. With bad grace I stomp around looking for an extension cord all the while muttering to myself, then set up the computer on the table immediately outside my room.
‘Shall I sit on
the other side of the table?’ I say sarcastically, immediately feeling ashamed of myself. ‘I’m sorry. It just gets a bit much sometimes.’
‘I understand, but that is our reality in Iran,’ Reza says. He looks hurt.
That makes me feel worse.
Before leaving the oasis town of Tabas in the morning for the eight-hour desert drive to Yazd, we stop at the Bagh-e-Goshan, a walled garden in the midst of the city.
It’s always disorienting to arrive in a new place at night, and my previous evening’s impressions of Tabas as a place of rolling tumbleweeds and a lone sandwich bar have to be hastily revised.
The streets are lined with palm trees and even though it is early there are plenty of people about, most of them making their first visit of the day to the bakery to take home the huge sheets of flat bread for breakfast.
The Bagh-e-Goshan is undergoing extensive renovation so we have to negotiate our way around piles of building materials to the ticket booth.
‘There is something special I want you to see here,’ Reza says, walking quickly along a pathway lined with more palms and flowering oleander. We stop outside an empty metal cage that, although recently hosed out, smells rather strongly of guano.
‘Oh, no, where are they?’ he exclaims, turning on his heel and heading down a path stretching along one side of a long channel of flowing water studded with small fountains.
Catching a flash of white behind some shrubs he darts down a side path. I follow him, mystified. There in front of us are three giant pelicans basking in the morning sun, lazily clacking their huge beaks which makes the baggy pouches that hang beneath them wobble.
The pelicans, intent on warming up after a cold night, ignore us but I pelt Reza with questions; where the birds have come from, for starters...
A local ruler Amir Hassan Khan had created the Bagh-e-Goshan in the 18th century. Although renowned throughout Iran for its palms, citrus trees and pomegranates, it is the pelicans that everyone loves to visit. No one seems to know when or how the pelicans came to be in Tabas, but after a colossal earthquake in 1978 that killed 80 per cent of Tabas’s citizens outright, they disappeared only to reappear some time afterwards.