by Jill Worrall
Among the crowds are young sailors and naval officers, army ratings and air force cadets. Civilians and military alike are finding seats along the sea wall to watch the sun sink into the Persian Gulf. Young couples sit snuggled together on park benches.
‘We’ll never find a space,’ I say, but then notice that no one is sitting on the large dry rocks piled up at the base of the promenade. We perch there as the sun, now an improbably large deep orange orb, slowly sets. Silhouetted against the dying light an array of ships sits like a collection of cardboard cut-outs between the molten sea and the deepening dark sky over the Arabian peninsula. A path of shimmering golden sea stretches from the horizon to our vantage point, lighting up the plump rats that are scampering around the rocks close to our feet, which explains why no one else is sitting with us.
(It was only the next day, when I checked my emails, that I found a number of somewhat panic-stricken messages from family and friends. ‘I think you had better skip the Persian Gulf,’ said one. ‘In the news today it says the US is undertaking naval manoeuvres in the Gulf – it’s not a safe place to be.’ I have no idea if any of the ships we saw in the distance were of US origin – we, and the rest of the promenaders, including hundreds of military personnel, were too busy admiring the sunset and buying snacks to worry.)
We retreat to a concrete picnic table out of reach of the cavorting vermin. A little boy of about eight, with jet-black straight hair and melting large brown eyes, sidles up to us clutching a set of bathroom scales under one arm.
‘He is an Afghan refugee and he wants to weigh us – for a small charge, of course,’ Reza tells me after a brief conversation with the boy. I baulk at the thought of a public weigh-in. Once again I am proving a novelty item along the foreshore and if I stand on the scales it will be a sure-fire crowd-puller.
‘You do it and I’ll pay,’ I say.
The boy puts the scales down on the ground and carefully wipes them with a very grubby handkerchief. Reza, trying to look very earnest, stands on them and we all look at the dial that resolutely sits on 0. The little boy clucks anxiously, asks Reza to get off the scales, and fiddles, fruitlessly, with the dial. He looks like he is going to cry.
Reza reaches out and touching him on the shoulder, hands him some rial notes with the other hand. A smile flits across the boy’s face.
‘He thought I might not pay him. I can’t imagine someone doing that to him.’
I want to find out if he is on his own, but after thanking Reza he disappears into the crowd.
We eat dinner in a converted bathhouse beside the sea. The restaurant is crammed with sepia photos of Bushehr’s heyday as an important port, but of most interest to us is the clientele, which includes a group of Russians trying to make the best of the Iranian brands of non-alcoholic beer. A passing waiter confirms that they are working on the nuclear power plant.
Beside us are six Asian men in suits being fêted by local officials. Each is presented with a bouquet of gladioli then a giant basket of fruit. There is much bowing and hand-shaking, but despite a lot of shameless ear-flapping on our part we are unable to work out what is going on.
We over-order dinner so Reza asks the waiter to make up several doggy bags to deal with the leftovers.
‘We’ll find some people to give the food to on our way back to the hotel,’ he says.
As we drive past the promenade I remember the small boy and his broken scales and mention him to Reza.
‘Just what I was thinking,’ he says. He asks Reza B to stop the van and leaps out with the food and quickly merges into the crowds that are still enjoying the warm sea air. A group of young men is singing under an archway – strictly an illegal activity in Iran where public performances of music are still banned, hence one of their party is on the watch for any officials.
About 10 minutes later Reza returns, still clutching the bags of food.
‘I can’t find him so that might mean he has found somewhere warm to go for the night,’ he reports.
Giving away the food proves more difficult that expected. Eventually we find a somewhat incredulous road-cleaner in a dark street near our hotel. ‘Well, he wasn’t a beggar, but I think he is the most deserving person we are going to find tonight,’ Reza says.
I share the lift to my suite with two men. They are not Iranians but when I ask them where they are from, they choose to look purposefully blank. Maybe they’re spies checking out the power station, I muse as the lift stutters upwards. Then, as we all stand staring at the lift safety notice, it occurs to me that they could be equally suspicious of me. When I get to my room and take off my headscarf I realise that spies, of whatever nationality, probably don’t spend their evenings with their headscarves thickly festooned with leftover saffron rice from dinner. The street cleaner had clearly been short-changed.
I go to bed with the window open and the mosquito net wafting gently around my four-poster. There are no mosquitoes but if someone did decide to wipe out the nuclear plant overnight the net might stop the chandelier dropping on me. It will certainly be a picturesque setting to be found in; I wear my best nightie just in case.
8
THE PLAINS OF OIL AND DEATH
Khuzestan
He falls and gets up, falls again
Floundering on the sharp reed-ends
People come and find him dead, the ground
Wet with blood and written on every reed-top
The word Allah.
This is the way one must
Listen to the reed flute.
Be killed In it and lie down in the blood.
Attar
We wave goodbye to the giant prawn long before most of Bushehr’s residents are up and moving. As we head north, on a road running parallel with the Persian Gulf, our route once again takes us through extensive date palm groves.
Along the side of the road are stalls selling fresh dates and I notice that each stall also features a half-metre-tall piece of peeled palm set on a wooden table alongside the dates. The vendors stand in front of these pale cream stems, whittling at them with knives like contemplative sculptors and I presume it’s a way to while away the time between customers.
I’m wrong. When we stop at one of these stalls to supplement the fruit already rolling around in the van and the plastic bags full of seeds and nuts I watch as the Rezas consult with the salesman. He cuts off several hunks of the palm and parcels it up along with the dates. I should have guessed – it is yet another Iranian travel snack and of course I’m keen to try it, anticipating that the flavour might be at least reminiscent of dates. However, I soon find that eating date palm is what I imagine chewing on a piece of balsa wood would be like.
Reza B, who is enthusiastically munching through his piece of palm, asks me what I think of it. I tell him, as best I can through a mouthful of tasteless stringy fibre, that I’ll stick to the dates, thanks.
He replies in Farsi and Reza, laughing, translates.
‘He has two new phrases for you to learn: “We are eating dates” and “We are eating trees”.’
We are travelling in one of the most fertile regions of Iran and the roadside stalls selling boxes of sweet, moist dates are soon joined by stalls offering mountains of melons and boxes of huge tomatoes and cucumbers. Spring wheat and barley sprout in the fields.
But it is the wealth under the ground that makes this corner of Iran one of the most important in the country, both economically and strategically. As our road heads north towards a low range of hills I’m riveted by the sight of flaming orange-and-gold oil flares leaping skywards from the top of tall, slim chimneys. Trails of smoke from the flares drift even higher through the winter-blue sky. At ground level, kilometres of metal pipes snake through the gorges, undulating with the landscape.
Khuzestan is the largest oil-producing region in Iran. As the country is the second-largest of the oil-producing OPEC nations, with 10 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves, I am smack-bang in the middle of one of the most oil-rich
areas on the globe.
More used to the concept of off-shore oil rigs, I’m fascinated by the landscape of perpetually burning gas, especially as many of the oil fields (there are about 27 in Khuzestan) are surrounded by lush green pastures. Fields of cucumbers, carrots and salad greens stretch right up to the chain-mesh fences that surround some of the extraction plants. It’s such an extraordinary combination I want to photograph it, but Reza isn’t keen.
‘I don’t think it would be a good idea ... we don’t want anyone to think you are a spy,’ he explains.
Oil might be Iran’s greatest source of wealth but with it has come more than a hundred years of intermittent strife, political upheaval and death.
In 1901 the British, via the Anglo-Persian Petroleum Company (which later evolved into British Petroleum or BP), were granted control of the Khuzestan oil fields for 60 years. By 1950, 85 per cent of the profits from these vast reserves was lining the pockets of foreign interests and so in that same year the Iranians put a stop to this happening by nationalising the entire oil industry.
But the troubles surrounding the Khuzestan oil fields were not over. By the 1970s Saddam Hussein, in neighbouring Iraq, had his eye on Iran’s oil fields, along with the fertile lands that surrounded them. He claimed the region was historically part of Iraq, and in 1980 his soldiers poured over the border. This was the beginning of an eight-year war – a war that would end with about 500,000 Iranians dead and millions more displaced. Those events have left deep and painful scars on the country, especially as many of the weapons directed at them were supplied by the United States, other Western nations and the former USSR. As a result every town and city in Iran commemorates its ‘martyrs’ or war dead on huge billboards. Throughout the country young bearded faces with earnest expressions and eyes burning with patriotism look down on traffic roundabouts and city squares. The war is not forgotten and certainly not forgiven.
Personally I hold very strong objections to the death penalty and after the execution of Saddam Hussein, I commented to Reza that I found the circumstances surroundings his death to be extremely distasteful, although I hated what the man had done to his own people and especially to Iran. Reza, who has one of the most peaceful and sweetest of dispositions of any person I know, was not having any of it.
‘He was an evil man, a despotic dictator and it was right that he should die. He brought misery to both countries.’
As we continue our drive north I notice that Reza B has become uncharacteristically thoughtful, then suddenly he starts a long, impassioned conversation with Reza.
When our driver pauses for breath, Reza tells me that Reza B had been a soldier in the war.
‘He fought as a regular in the artillery against Iraq for the whole eight years of the war. He knows this region very well but the memories are not all good ones. This is the first time he has seen many of these places since the war ended.’
‘I do not know why God let me live when so many men died,’ Reza B says.
I reach forward from my seat and touch him on the shoulder.
‘Mashallah (thank God), he did,’ I say. Reza B sniffs.
When we cross the Karim River that runs past the city of Alvaz, only about 50 km from the Iraq border, Reza B points into the water.
‘The Karim flows into the Shatt-al-Arab [the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers which form the border between Iran and Iraq], where some of the bloodiest battles of the war took place,’ Reza B informs us.
‘There were so many corpses here it attracted sharks from the Persian Gulf. When the war ended, we saw sharks swimming about a hundred kilometres upstream to Alvaz looking for more bodies.’
Near Alvaz we can see the hills between Iran and Iraq. Reza B has slipped into the role of tour guide as memories of the war engulf him. He stops the van of his own accord and points out a small stream weaving its way though undulating pastureland.
‘My unit found a young Iraqi soldier here. We knew that if the local farmers found him they would kill him so we dressed him in one of our uniforms and let him escape. That is the way it is in war.’
Although it is more than 20 years since the war ended, evidence of that terrible time still litters the landscape – concrete bunkers and ammunition stores with gaping holes for windows and doors nestle among the low hills, and the land itself is pockmarked and scarred.
‘During the war where we are standing now was only ten kilometres from the enemy.’ He gets out of the van and looks around. ‘It was about here that one of our mobile mess caravans overturned and killed one of our soldiers...’
I ask what the Basijis had been like. The Vahed-e Basij-e Mustazafin (Unit of Mobilisations of the Deprived) were volunteers, usually recruited from Iran’s mosques, including boys under 18 – some as young as 12 – and women and men over 45. Some of the missions for which they volunteered meant almost certain death such as leading the way through minefields. They were recognisable because they wore a red or yellow headband, which proclaimed the greatness of God or Iran’s leader, Imam Khomeini, and a large key hung around their neck – the key to paradise (Moslems believe that all martyrs go direct to paradise or heaven).
‘There was great unity back then,’ Reza B remembers. ‘Volunteers or ordinary soldiers, we were all the same and rank was not important.’
As we drive further into the hills, eerie jets of flame suddenly appear above ridges of swirling, tortured rock strata. If it’s a surreal landscape now, it must have been a vision of hell in war.
‘This was once a minefield,’ explains Reza B. ‘One of our units was trapped right in the middle of it. We went to rescue them ...’ His voice trails off as he unearths memories that Reza and I cannot, and probably would not want to, imagine.
We leave him, alone and thoughtful, in a car park beside one of Iran’s 12 World Heritage sites and probably the least visited by foreigners. The Choqa Zanbil ziggurat, 60 kilometres north of Alvaz, is the largest well-preserved ziggurat (a tiered temple, rather like a truncated pyramid) in the world. We are still in the war zone but if the unfired bricks of Choqa Zanbil could speak they could tell of not one battle, but hundreds as this structure has stood here for more than 3000 years.
This ziggurat would once have boasted five storeys reaching to a height of about 60 metres. Now only 25 metres with just three tiers remaining, it is still an arresting sight rising up as it does in the midst of a remote plain.
Ironically this ziggurat, which vanished from sight for over 2500 years, was rediscovered by accident during Anglo-Persian Petroleum Company surveys.
It was built by the mysterious Elamites, who are considered to be Persia’s first empire builders and whose realm extended from the Tigris Valley across modern-day Western Iran and down to the Persian Gulf. Contemporaries of the illustrious Mesopotamian civilisations in what is now Iraq, the Elamites built the temple of Choqa Zanbil as a place to worship their chief god Inshushinak. The five concentric towers were intended to replicate the feeling and grandeur of a mountain (as mountains were considered auspicious places for worship, the Elamites built artificial ones in those regions lacking a suitably high promontory). The actual temple was located at the very top of the towers.
Reza leads me to a large flat-topped stone at the base of the ziggurat.
‘Experts think that animals would have been sacrificed on this stone and then the offerings would have been carried up to the temple by priests who would probably have been the only people, along with possibly the Elamite kings, with access to the temple. There may have been statues of the gods at the top as well.
‘It’s remarkable what the Elamites developed here – the first arches in Iran, the earliest examples of glazed tiles were here, they even developed decorative water cascades down the sides of the pyramid that also acted as drainage channels.’
We gaze up at a giant sundial set on the south-facing wall – no one is absolutely sure of its significance, but Reza’s guess is that it was connected with the timings of ceremonies
held in the temple.
Some of the bricks set in the walls and even in the pavements are covered with cuneiform writing, with its distinctive angular style, proclaiming the name of gods and Elamite kings.
Reza stops near one of the steep staircases set into the centre of each side of the ziggurat. In the pavement of bricks at its base is a deep footprint; probably made by a worker or even a child more than 3000 years ago.
It’s almost impossible to even attempt to grasp the passage of time between a man forming this brick and me standing gazing at it more than three millennia later. But for me, the footprint is a kind of link. I can almost hear the sigh of exasperation from the builder as his brick was spoilt by that footprint, feel the ooze of clay between the toes, and I can’t help but wonder about the person who left this one solitary tangible very human touch on this site devoted to unseen gods.
Reza wants to visit some of the ruins of the town that stands beside the ziggurat so we cross the road and climb the gentle slopes that have built up over the centuries around more ancient walls and archways.
A tinkling of bells alerts us to the presence of a flock of drab-coloured sheep among the mounds. A young man in a black leather jacket is leaning on a crook nearby, watching us.
He calls out and signals we should meet in the gully that separates us. He leaves a tan dog guarding his sheep.
The shepherd is a Lor, an ethnic group whose true origins are lost in the mists of time. However, they are thought to be an Arab-Persian mix with possibly some ancient Mede and Kassite thrown in for good measure.
‘What is the significance of this place?’ he asks Reza in halting Persian, pointing at the ziggurat in the distance.