Among those I had met to whom the internet was a lifeline out of solitude, nobody lived within it as obsessively as Amirali. As he veered all afternoon between his four computers and a maze of personal websites, the Persian prince became a Bohemian obsessive. His long hair hung adrift, his check shirt flapped over his jeans. For him these screens assembled a universe more real than the repressive world around him.
He showed me a film he had made, hoping forlornly to sell it abroad. It portrayed himself and some friends as they travelled to a village beyond Demavend in winter, planning to collect picturesque stories and scenes of village life. They were blinded, he said, by middle-class romanticism. ‘But we found those villages had no memories. No stories. There were no lullabies they sang their babies. The songs they sang were the same as ours.’ He smiled wanly. ‘It was an unhappy place. The young had abandoned it for the towns. The only one left was mad. They were complaining about how bad the road to the village was. They wanted tarmac. So we made a film about that. About how there were no stories. How history had disappeared.’
The images wavered bleakly over the screen. Even the village’s sense of God had faded. One old woman, kneading dough, equated Him with good health. The film ended with a quote from Nietzsche that God was dead. He had died of pity for mankind. Amirali liked this film. It refuted urban fantasy about the countryside. He wanted to make war on clichés, his own and Western ones. ‘Western movies want our suffering. They just want women in chadors, suffering. But I can only show this film on my website, because our censors are dinosaurs. On the internet we’re left alone, but when we display to the public–my paintings, for instance–then things are different. There’s a borderline. But you can never be sure where it is…’
Perhaps from some inner loneliness, or perhaps in unconscious self-censorship, Amirali had fallen in love with inanimate objects. A year before, working in his garage surrounded by coat-hangers where his clothes dangled, he had sensed a life in them. ‘I started to think of the coat-hangers as having histories.’ He pulled them out of a box, one by one, some twisted, others hung with ties or a sleeve: fat ones, spindly ones, one dangling half a bra. He had transformed them for an exhibition. The coat-hangers became collages against canvas, grouped with other objects–a broken compass, a tea-bag or a scrawled word. Sometimes he had projected light on to them so their sepia shadows fell on a painted canvas, and these he had photographed to produce an oblique familiarity. None of this could he quite explain. Since childhood, he’d felt the emotion in lifeless things. ‘A while ago I became attracted to cups. It began with a cup of coffee left cold, abandoned.’ He added unsmiling: ‘It struck me as lonely…’
I wondered how the censor would view them. Just as the word had been dangerous in Soviet Russia, so the image was precarious here. Would some mullah sniff in those teacups a pagan animism, the endowment of dead things with life?
But the exhibition would move through the ghostly rooms of the internet. Which was a way of hoping. Amirali clung to this. Sometimes his asthma came back in the polluted city. Sometimes he couldn’t get out of bed. He needed work. ‘Two years ago,’ he said, ‘when I separated from my girlfriend, it was work that saved me. And when I wasn’t working, I started writing poetry.’
‘To her?’
‘No. I invented another girl, different. And this one became real for me.’ He said with his odd, matter-of-fact dreaminess: ‘I spoke to her, went out with her, slept with her. All the poems were about her. The poems created her. They were her.’
So he had produced her as he had recreated teacups and coat-hangers. They might not have a life of their own, but they had the life you gave them. And a teacup did not laugh at or desert you.
Later, while hunting for something else, he came with a shock on a sketch he had made of his girlfriend, the real one. He had drawn her on black paper, like a commemoration. She had already left him: a gauntly beautiful face torn by withheld lips and eyes like dark glasses.
He folded her back among sketches of inanimate things, and changed the subject. Soon his friends would be coming to view the back-projections he had created for their rock concert, he said. It was going ahead. He wanted me to come too. The dinosaur censors had listened to a tape of the music, subtly watered down, and had passed it. There were no lyrics, of course: lyrics were a problem. And the censors would probably come to the concert. ‘They hate anything that brings people together. They hate anything that rouses emotion.’
Of course they were afraid, I thought: afraid as the Soviets had been afraid, and the Taliban: of the power of music to raise up anarchy. Amirali said: ‘But you’ll come, won’t you? Listen to us.’
Yalda is distractingly beautiful. Once she crosses her office threshold, she flings off her hijab, and her hair shimmers to her shoulders. It is not hard to scent some privilege in her. But when she talks of her country, the flashing eyes and full, made-up lips are ablaze:
‘Iran is finished. It will take twenty years–or more–to recover from the mess the mullahs have made of it, even if they were thrown out tomorrow. Incompetence, dogmatism and corruption! The corruption is vast and everywhere. It filters from top to bottom. It’s hard to see how it can be reversed. The street vigilantes are less active now, but they can still search a person and extract a bribe. That’s what they’ve come to. And the secret police–there’s a whole army of them–are ruthless, they’ll throw acid in your face, slash you…’
Her fingertips brush her cheek. ‘And everything’s getting worse. All the time. The traffic here–everybody’s talking about it–has become a hell. In the last six months it’s become easier to buy a car without a deposit, and they’re selling four thousand a day in Tehran…’
I listen, wondering where her radiance comes from. She is at once furious and happy. She asks: ‘Where have you been? Meshed!’ The city deepens her rage. ‘That’s how the mullahs control! That’s the cast of mind! They say such-and-such an imam said this-or-that, and people will obey. If people really believe the Mahdi’s been alive for thirteen hundred years, they can be persuaded of anything. And men’s dominance here is total. The marital laws are appalling.’ She glares at her discarded scarf. ‘When I wear that hijab in summer it’s intolerable. You’ve seen how our women dress…’
‘Yes.’ Pared to their veils, the women’s features looked darkly classical. But under their chadors they wore jeans and trainers, and hectic locks of hair and jesters’ shoes peeped out. Many opted for coats buttoned to the knee over trousers.
‘Our world is made by men. I’ve seen a report that fifty per cent of patients in our intensive care wards are failed suicides.’ I hear this with astonishment; but she is in a position to read such reports. ‘Another twenty-five per cent are drug addicts. Cocaine and heroin. It’s everywhere. You can get them at the street corner. And nobody works. After eleven in the morning you can’t get anything done. The calendar’s packed with religious holidays, usually mourning some saint.’ She shakes her freed hair. She has two passports, she says at last. If she wants, she can get out. But this is her country. All the same, she says: ‘I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.’
The rock concert happened in an old military hospital on the heights of the northern suburbs, while beneath, in the dusk, half Tehran winked with smothered lights. In the atrium of the makeshift lecture theatre some hundred youths were milling, arrived by word of mouth. Amirali–in baseball cap and spectacles–was dithering between his projector and backstage; Yalda was there; and after a while a gang of teenagers coalesced, self-conscious with privilege, who wore their hair and clothes in rude defiance. Their jeans fell in baggy folds round their feet, and were slung with chains from pocket to pocket. Woollen hats teetered above their shoulder-length hair, their wrists flashed spiky bracelets, and their T-shirts were blazoned ‘Jackass’ and ‘Born Wild’. Several wore rings in pierced lips. In my crumpled trousers and drab shirt I faded into anonymity. A bar was serving weak tea and macaroons.
‘These yo
uths are rich,’ Yalda said. ‘You’d never see them like that in public.’
At the centre of the stage was no one. The guitarists played on either wing, as if awaiting an absent star, while above and in between them, across a big screen, Amirali’s back-projections rolled in gaudy surrealism, flowing into one another like chemicals under a microscope. Often the guitarists and their drummer played in near-darkness. There was no backup group, no dancers–women on stage were all but banned–no stunts, no costumes: just three young men and their music. They played with elated concentration. This was their permitted moment, and they brought to it a tense commitment, as to something that might never happen again. Through the blistering beat and crash of the drummer the lead guitarist insinuated a trembling melody. The headscarves of the few women in the audience were sliding backwards over their hair, and their tiny, hesitant screams echoed faintly from an imitated West. Meanwhile Amirali’s back-projections reproduced the band in giant silhouettes, interspersed by fluid abstractions and a cheeky stream of sperm. Once the spotlight strayed above the proscenium arch to reveal the glowering portraits of the ayatollahs.
An intangible aura of the forbidden was brewing up. The gilded youths in their blazoned T-shirts began jerking backwards and forwards, their hair cascading over their faces. Cramped in their seats, they looked impotent and vulnerable. The music was passive, its beat indistinct, but they bobbed and bowed to a rhythm of their own, bent on being scandalous. A steward moved down the aisle beside them and told them to stop. But half an hour later they started again, more wildly, with strident shouts. A few stood up. They looked constricted and foolish. Two guards appeared on either side now, and ordered them to go. The music went on. They leapt derisively away down the aisles towards the door, raising their fists weakly to the band’s rhythm.
An hour later, as the last number ended, a formal applause went up, and the audience trickled away. But when I looked for Amirali in a room beside the lobby, I blundered into a hospital administrator. Under her white headscarf the matronly face was crimson with outrage. The band leader, sitting patiently in a chair, was deflecting her questions, while Amirali translated to me in whispers.
Who were those dreadful people? she demanded. Were they trying to break up her hospital?
A handful of the audience might have been like that, the band leader said, as if to a child. But there were no drugs and no smoking going on…and they were just kids.
The matron exploded. But what was that disgusting thing she saw going across her hospital wall? The band leader looked blank.
She exploded: ‘It was a sperm!’
‘I think it was a tadpole,’ the guitarist said, managing no trace of smile. Why did she consider it a sperm? It had not occurred to him…
‘It was revolting! It was a sperm. Swimming across my hospital wall!’
‘No, no. It was a tadpole. A young frog. And anyway, it was passed by the censors. The censors recognised a tadpole…’
It rises for miles over the plains. Even through the smog of south Tehran, its pylon-high minarets can be seen half an hour’s journey away, glimmering in new gold above the closed bud of its dome. Marble galleries are going up beneath the blue-tiled cupolas beside it, and acres of garden unfolding, studded with outsize vases; hostels are being built, and ranges of shops. The lavatories are marble palaces, already stinking. A vast, deserted car park is complete.
This is the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, where he was buried amid mass hysteria in 1989. It is not a mosque but a husseiniya, a place almost of leisure, as he wanted. The central chamber is over a hundred yards square, and rigged up in galvanised steel, like an exhibition hall. Its marble paving refracts ranks of chandeliers, and the rugs are a machine-made forest floor. Yet it is all but empty. Five or six pilgrims are trailing across the carpets, where a knot of visiting soldiers sit, their boots scattering the entrance. Some children are playing. It is as if a temporary exhibition had just ended, or had not yet begun.
The grave lies in a white cage, an airy cousin to the imam’s tomb at Meshed. Above it the dome twirls stained-glass tulips, and flashes down a jigsaw of mirrors. I approach it in a Westerner’s confusion. Who was the man who lies here? His followers called him imam, as if he were the Hidden One, returning in righteousness. He did not refute them. A strategic revolutionary, he created his own Islamic state above Islamic law, and from a period of youthful mysticism, perhaps, confused himself with God. He executed thousands, and sent thousands more to needless deaths. Yet in his mystic poetry, he cannot hurt a fly. He dreamed of resurrecting the imagined utopia of seventh-century Arabia. But he left behind a stricken economy, and an Islam so mired in politics that within a few years it had lost its old mystique and integrity.
The pilgrims are circling his tomb. The laughter of playing children drowns out the whispering prayers of the women. I touch the bars of the cenotaph, feeling nothing. Under a frosty chandelier the grave is covered by a green brocade and a Koran, and heaped with donors’ money. I turn back into the void which was planned to hold a giant. Some workmen are asleep against the walls. Only on the anniversary of the Ayatollah’s death, I’ve heard, the tomb swells with pilgrims, and the ancient Shia grief rises again.
A few hundred yards from where the aged Ayatollah is enshrined lie the youthful legions he sent to their deaths in the Iraq war. I crossed the road beyond the shrine, and was suddenly among their graves. Aisle after aisle, hundreds of yards long, hedged by junipers and roses, the grave-slabs of young men multiply in tens of thousands, their portraits carved in the stone, with slight moustaches or beards and a young bush of hair. Behind each one stands a small glass-fronted cabinet, filled with mementoes. In this Behesht-e Zahra, ‘the Paradise of the Radiant Daughter of the Prophet’, some two hundred thousand lie. Their aisles sag with national banners. The poorer gravestones, given by government, are inscribed only with a name, or with nothing, unknown. Relayed through loudspeakers in the trees, marching songs throb with triumphant doom, and recorded sermons mount into hysteria. ‘Ali!…Ali!…Hussein…’ A few years before, every Friday, the fountains gushed with crimson-dyed water.
Ever since entering Iran I had been walking among tombs, and here it was Thursday, the day for cemetery visits. Families were picnicking with their dead, perched on benches or reclining on the grave-slabs. They brushed the leaves from the stone, scrubbed it with detergent, sprinkled it with rose petals. On the name-day of the dead they offered food to anyone nearby–you must accept it–biscuits, buns, dates. An old woman thrust on me a meal wrapped in cellophane, with a plastic spoon, smiling through spent tears. But she spoke of somebody whose name I did not know and could not pray for. Several old men were bowed by the Unknown Martyr’s Grave, for those who had simply disappeared.
Here and there, as families aged, dereliction was creeping in. The war had lasted from 1980 to 1988. Iranians call it ‘the Imposed War’, for Iraq had attacked first, unprovoked, then slowly been repelled. When Iran might have made peace, it refused. Khomeini had his eyes on Baghdad, on the Shia holy places, and on oil. But the Iraqis, in their homeland, stood firm as the Iranians had, and Khomeini was forced to agree a peace, crying: ‘I drink this chalice of poison for the Almighty.’ He never recovered. For once, he had misjudged God.
The war was fought far from Western sight, and Western caring. It inflicted over a million casualties. Often the Iranians advanced in human waves, preceded over the minefields by ill-armed boys and old men. Revolutionary Guards and volunteer militia alike were on their way to paradise. They had few tanks or planes, and no international friends. The Iraqis were equipped with both, and the United States covertly supported them. The war stagnated among trenches, machine-guns, barbed wire. Massive concentrations of infantry bogged down after advancing a few hundred yards. Sometimes Iran lost a thousand men a day. They were cut down by helicopter gunships as they struggled forward trying to sever the Baghdad highway, or they drowned in the water-filled defences north of Basra, their lungs blistered by must
ard gas, while the Iraqi artillery, banked up behind earth bunkers, rained down shells and cyanide.
If you lift the covers from the glass-fronted cabinets, their photographs look out at you. Sometimes they grasp rifles or hold up banners. Bottles of rosewater stand beside them, or a lantern for remembrance. The faces are earnest and callow. A few of the cabinets hold a Koran or a pile of expended cartridges. But mostly the things assembled are intimate with another life–snapshots of them as boys, a woman’s necklace, a child’s surrendered toy–so that I turn away from the smeared glass.
11
The Mongol Peace
By mid-November a cold wind was stilling the hillsides, and the last green fading. Ninety miles west of Tehran, where the Elburz massif began to shadow the Caspian north-west, I left the main road and the oases of Qazvin behind and entered a labyrinth of mountains to the valleys of the Assassins. The tracks into this wilderness had been newly asphalted, and the few truck-drivers who travelled it, starved of company, would stop at the plea of an outstretched hand, and charge a few pence for petrol.
One of these, a bluff old man, had once been a merchant seaman. He remembered Glasgow and Portsmouth and a smattering of English. Crustily outspoken, as if still on open seas, he despised the road Iran had taken. ‘Ninety per cent of our people hate these mullahs, I’d say. We just want them to go. They only teach us to weep. We’re a country of martyrs. Every town has its tomb for some relative or other of Hussein. I’m a Shia, but I think the Sunnis are better. They don’t have all this mourning. We have no singing or dancing. Only sorrow.’
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