My Part of Her

by Javad Djavahery

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  Other summers went by without any major event.

  Then the people of Iran rose up. But why? For what reason did the people take to the streets to demand the Shah’s departure? I assure you that if we asked the question today, the majority of Iranians wouldn’t know how to respond. For liberty? I don’t think so. For a better life? I don’t think that’s it either. Because, starting in 1979, they have been far less free, their lives more difficult than before, and yet they don’t rise up. So why was this country handed over to mullahs? In exchange for what? No one knows. It’s strange how in a society revolt can suddenly become a necessity. And to be revolutionary, a virtue. In the summer of 1978, around the fire, we had emptied the last bottles of our local Shams beer and gulped the last drops of our artisanal arak as we watched the Caspian unfurl over the golden sand. In the few years, since the construction of the bridge, Chamkhaleh had become a prime tourist destination. Solid houses had replaced bungalows and cottages. The roads, no longer dirt paths, were now illuminated, and the chess games between boys and girls in the darkness of the night had fallen into oblivion. We no longer went out as families on the strip of sand, formerly the place of our romantic summer rendezvous, for access to the mouth of the river had been closed off by the walls of a newly constructed hotel complex. Of course, Vaveli still existed, but its magic had disappeared ages ago. It now had high walls, a powerful sound system, and comfortable chairs. A bouncer at the door now asked for an exorbitant sum, and the natives had deserted it. This campfire burning on the beach was the last one, it would soon go out and, without this semaphore, the circle of boys would forever disband. Parand, unaware of the bullet that would strike his heart in the near future, was still showboating. He was more convinced than ever of his chances with Niloufar and was determined to seal the deal before the end of the summer. Mostafa, whose body would soon be torn to shreds by shrapnel, was improvising another song, which would be his last. Ahmad, who would be decapitated in the explosion of his tank, was pulling frantically on the hashish pipe. Behnam, who would hang himself one night from the tree in his garden, still had his wit and was telling a simple story with enthusiasm. Those around the fire would all perish, each in his own way. Our generation would be decimated. If we were to have a reunion one day, it would have to take place in a cemetery. A chasm would open beneath our feet from one moment to the next and cut the summer short, offering the ultimate excuse to Parand for not having clinched his unreciprocated love. Unwavering, he told us to meet him the next summer, always just as sure of himself, but there was no next summer. There wouldn’t be another summer for a long time. You remember…

  I’m the one who gave those first books to Niloufar. Nana by Zola, The Enchanted Soul by Romain Rolland, Mother by Gorky, The Quiet Don by Sholokhov, The Seed Beneath the Snow by Silone. These were the classics of what we called anti-system literature. Niloufar devoured them avidly and talked to me about them passionately. I read a bit of everything. Anything that was considered subversive. In my readings, the religious thinkers rubbed shoulders with the Marxist theorists, the humanists frequented the Stalinist determinists. By blending them as best I could, I created my own mixture and enlivened my nights with Niloufar. That modest progress was enough for me to become something of a spiritual guide for her, a mentor. I had quickly understood: in her relentless fight against her circumstances, Niloufar needed an intellectual arsenal. In her eyes, her parents were nothing but traitors to the cause, sellouts. She thought she’d be able to find the proof in the books I was secretly giving her. Those same books that her parents had surely also read and whose precepts they knew, but which, in an act of political treason, they had stopped believing, Niloufar said.

  Those ideas gleaned here and there, I put them end to end, as one builds a Meccano set, to formulate a system of thought to test on others. It worked pretty well. Little by little, I forged myself a reputation as a subversive thinker, formidable and feared. Bullshit! I understood nothing of my own gibberish. But it didn’t matter. The important thing was being able to maintain a line of thought. Fabricate a supposed idea that was out of the ordinary. And I did that. I had a good memory, and I had a gift: my formidable power of conviction. Already, at thirteen years old, I was capable of proving something and, later on, its opposite, without being caught in the contradiction. And while being profoundly sincere each time. Conviction is a virus that you carry inside you and that you can use to inoculate others. It’s a magical thing, which people need and lack. I understood that very early on. It was a gift I was polishing in secret, like a weapon, and that, like all gifts, could turn out to be a curse. A weapon that, like all weapons, could one day come back to hurt its inventor. But this was the moment, the coveted opportunity to use it to my advantage. I possessed knowledge that the others around me didn’t. Thus, I held the power. Again, that magic word, “power.” Because of that, I was treated with respect. I had finally had a taste of the pleasure of politics. Even if at the time we didn’t really consider it as being political. It was something else for us. More of an ideal. A reason to be a mystic, romantic, and revolutionary at the same time. I thought I had begun a career that a few years later would procure me a social rank similar to that of the Doctor. I was convinced that I could even do much better than the Doctor and his friends. I had a head start and had learned from their failure. I was set to become a powerful and prosperous man like him, with hair on top of it. In those times, the power of the shah still seemed solid. There was the famous secret police, the SAVAK, who seemed to have ears everywhere. They might have heard everything, but they certainly didn’t understand much! We learned that later, when everything crumbled like a house of cards. You lived through those years, you know what I’m talking about. Under the Shah’s dictatorship, being a revolutionary was as easy as being a counterrevolutionary under Pol Pot. To be labeled as such, a professor had only to propose a subject that was slightly different or a book that was a bit unusual to his students. I understood. I refined the machine. I was crafty. I had the skill to walk the line between the licit and the illicit. Between the tolerated and the forbidden. Despite the popular belief, the Shah’s regime was more tolerant than that of the mullahs. An edifying example was the case of the Doctor, of Niloufar’s mother, and people of their generation. They were declared enemies of the Shah’s regime, even joined the resistance, but, once politics were put aside, they were able to become doctors, mayors, or congressmen. Because the Shah’s police were concerned with what you did or said, but not with your thoughts. The Islamic Regime goes after what you think. Not what you’ve done, but what you’re likely to do.

  I have to tell you right away that the “Grand Soir,” the “Homme Nouveau” and the Socialist International were not at all my cup of tea. I didn’t care about them at all. I was seeking something else. I was following a path that had been marked for me, my own destiny. During my nights with Niloufar, I didn’t care about progress or the future of humanity, I sought only her proximity. I wanted her to see me in a new light, to treat me differently. And I had obtained what I wanted. She was finally mine. Though I didn’t have her body, I had her soul.

  The Doctor sometimes regarded my comings and goings with suspicion, wondering what I was scheming with his daughter, but her mother seemed rather content. She believed that, thanks to me, her daughter was finally walking in her footsteps. She even contributed, furthermore, by unearthing the books of the Tudeh Party she had kept, mostly Russian literature, translated into Persian by Behazin, the appointed translator of the organization. She secretly slipped these books to me for her daughter to read, thinking Niloufar would accept them more readily from me. One day, she had entrusted one of them to me as if she were putting a time bomb in my hands. It was Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? It was a show of trust, a priceless present to her eyes. I read the three hundred pages several times, written in microscopic letters, but I didn’t really understand anything. The internal debates between Lenin, whose name I already knew, and Buk
harin, who I knew nothing about, were so abstruse, so opaque, that I couldn’t even pull anything from them to flaunt in front of my disciples. It was disappointing. But it was in my repertoire, arranged next to the love poems of Nazim Hikmet, like a secret tunnel toward the inexpressible. Except that with the poems of Nazim, I understood absolutely every word. I drank up every syllable. I read them on a loop, like secret seances of mental flagellation. Knowing deep down that I was incapable of living them. For me, everything was more complex. The road that led to love was long and tortuous. My words from the heart had to be soaked in blood and pain. I couldn’t do anything simply.

  The Doctor had turned the page long ago. At least that’s what he thought. Later he would learn that, in the eyes of others, a member of the Tudeh Party always remained a member of the Tudeh Party, even if he became king one day. But, at that time, he was still busy with his important friends, occupied by his games of backgammon, his mayoral mandates, his medical practice, and his mistresses. For Niloufar’s mother, it was different. She was following the rumors of revolt that were spreading in the four corners of the country and sweeping through the regions like a brush fire. She was probing the air, scrutinizing the flow of water. She would listen to Radio Moscow and Persian BBC every night, in the hope of finally finding the proof of her victory over her eternal enemies: world imperialism, the shah’s regime, and their undercover agent, her husband, the Doctor.

  Under the republic of mullahs, the Doctor spent two years of his life in the horrific Rasht prison. In addition to his links with the former regime, he was accused of having helped and cultivated underground activists—something he did do and didn’t deny. When he was let out of prison, he was banned from the medical profession. He ended up dying in the home of one of his mistresses, who had welcomed him purely out of pity, ruined, sick, and crushed by too much opium.

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  The groans rumbling in the background started to turn into a real uproar, a prophetic sign of an enormous earthquake that would bring back the old country. The ancient kingdom. The students of the universities in Tehran protested openly. The clashes with the police multiplied, under any pretext, sometimes even for no apparent reason. My semi-clandestine activism was in full swing. I grew a nice leftist mustache. I had square-frame glasses and a strategically worn gray vest. People were fighting to participate in the covert gatherings we organized regularly, whose cadence heightened as the social climate heated up. “Clandestine” was a rather grand word. We had to really push our naivety to think they were. We were infiltrated down to the bone. Reports on our notorious gatherings were written up by several people and scattered on the desk of the chief investigator before we had even returned to our homes. Reports that, later, the chief of police would brandish, cackling, before my eyes. In the summer of 1978, Cinema Rex in Abadan caught fire. More than four hundred people died there, burned alive. All evidence suggested arson. Accusatory fingers pointed to the Shah and his secret police. Unanimously, you remember? No matter what side you were on. It was the fatal blow. The spark in the powder kegs. Charred bodies were shown in photos that circulated in secret. The Shah’s regime couldn’t recover from that.

  What an enormous lie! What a tour de force! Who can still deny today that the cinema was set on fire by Muslim activists, following a fatwa issued by an ayatollah? What interest did the Shah’s regime have in setting fire to a cinema in a working-class neighborhood of a second-tier city? Really, what interest? But in that moment, in this country of nearly forty million inhabitants, no one was lucid enough to ask that simple question and denounce the absurdity of the idea. We had all taken part in this lie. That very day, I wrote a few incensed lines, bloated with spiteful sentimentality, against the presumed assassins, who I called poodles of American imperialism, lines copied that very night by the members of our circle and distributed throughout the city. The impact was guaranteed. A revolution whose instigators are individuals like me cannot engender anything better than the monsters it birthed. A few days later, a spontaneous protest took place in the center of town. We chanted “Killer King!” with conviction. A police officer panicked. A bullet was shot, ricocheted somewhere and struck Parand’s chest. What was he doing there, that rich kid? What skirt had he come to chase in this part of the street? Who knows. That said, Parand was the perfect martyr, young and handsome enough to become an icon, with a powerful father and a large family. Just the members of his family alone were enough people to start a revolution in a small European country. Considered by his family to be his best friend and perhaps the most dignified of the group, I became the organizer of his funeral services and also the guardian of his martyrdom. I’m the one who made all the decisions. The hour and the place of the transport of his body, the itinerary of the funerary procession, the slogans, the chants, the music, everything. It was grandiose. I carried his coffin myself, and I spoke on the public square to the bereaved crowd. I denounced that odious crime. I spoke of Parand, his generosity, his propriety, his simplicity, and his loyalty, his youth destroyed for capital’s continued reign. Yes, I said “capital,” but I don’t think anyone understood what I meant. They imagined the worst, something very, very bad. At the end of the ceremony, his father took me in his arms and publicly declared that from then on I would be like a son to him and he would watch over me like his prized possession. Many cried; I wiped away a tear.

  It was the beginning of the summer, but no one was thinking anymore about the sea, summer flings, or other vacation trifles. That year, the summer exodus to Chamkhaleh didn’t happen. A few families made the move, but the majority remained in the city. The spirit of the summer was dead. The floodgates were open. Chamkhaleh would surrender without a fight, and without even knowing. Finished. Even if we blew up the bridge, even if we dug another river, it wouldn’t help, nothing would protect it, for, like for the other towns, Chamkhaleh would be defeated from within. Those who were supposed to defend it were now gravediggers. No one dreamed of relighting the fire on the beach, of singing at night, stringing up the volleyball net, mooring the boats, nor of a thousand other things. Villa Rose remained empty. Its windows dark and its terrace lifeless. That page had been turned in the memory of the Caspian. The end was already here. We couldn’t have seen it coming, that sad end, as busy as we were destroying our world.

  My career had officially been launched. Parand’s blood had supplied the fuel, the collective ignorance the base, the brandished fists and the mass fervor the vehicle. My path seemed clear. I would be propelled to the summit, but not exactly the one I was hoping for. I was wrong on one point, a significant one. It wasn’t us who would kiss the victory cup and take power. The history of the Tudeh Party wouldn’t repeat itself. An entirely different destiny awaited me. I know now that every population creates its lies. Lies have no sides, no defined color, they’re not anyone’s monopoly. To devise an ideology, a religion, a revolution, you also have to fashion lies to go along with it. The higher you go in the spheres, the more the taboo of lying dissipates. Its meaning and its substance transforms. Up high, they don’t debate anymore what is true or false. Truths and non-truths alike are made up by them. I am convinced that even the grand ayatollahs, the cardinals, even the pope, once at that level, stop believing in God. Just as the bigwigs, so-called socialists or communists, no longer believe in the myth of social equality. I understood all of that very quickly. Perhaps faster than many others. Certainly faster than you. That’s why you were able to keep your faith, your innocence, and I wasn’t. When you fought for your ideas, which you believed were vital, life-saving, and just, others like me were busy making them up. And I fabricated them in my own way. I came up with my own ideas first, then the ideas that were useful to me. I’m not saying there’s no real conviction, no real desire to do good, I’m just saying that the higher you climb, the rarer it becomes. I know. I was at the summit.

  Cyrus came to find me one day. He had heard of my exploits. Officially, he was a student, originally from our city, studying at the U
niversity of Tehran. A chubby young man, not very tall, who blushed at every hint of emotion in his conversations, far from the prototypical underground activist. However, he’s the one who introduced me to the organizations and the schools of thought in Tehran. I don’t know how we decided to meet for the first time in Chamkhaleh. Perhaps because it was the off season and his family had a villa that could serve as a secure location. For some mysterious reason, Chamkhaleh would remain a part of my destiny. It was winter. The seaside was almost empty, sad and somber, as cities can be without their inhabitants. The sky was low, the sea black and agitated. The bad weather had destroyed the soft face of the coastline by digging crevasses and savage streams. The meeting place wasn’t far from Villa Rose. I felt like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. Everything reminded me of the stories of previous summers. The phantom of Mohamad-Réza haunted the wet sand of the deserted roads. Gusts of wind brought back the notes of a plaintive song audible to only my ears. Someone was bemoaning a lost love, a squandered passion. I sat with my back to the window so I wouldn’t see Villa Rose, the sea, and the phantom silhouette.

  Shut in the house, we spoke for hours and hours. Cyrus was trying to convince me of the necessity of joining an organization, in particular the organization for which he was campaigning. It was a movement that had active members in Tehran, in the big universities, and maintained links with Iranian students abroad. I retorted that a local anchor was always more efficient, less vulnerable to police attack. He advanced the necessity of a more general workers’ movement, a party, the new revolutionary communist party. I didn’t let myself be taken in. I said that a party of that caliber wasn’t something to be created by leftist intellectuals, that it would only result in a territorial struggle. I was devilishly convincing, at the peak of my craft, and Cyrus found himself lacking in arguments to convert me. In the end, he took a book out of his bag and handed it to me as if he were brandishing a winning card. He suggested I read it before our next meeting. I immediately recognized the work. It was a new edition of What Is to Be Done? by Lenin. I looked at it with a certain condescension, finally understanding how that book would be of use to me. I told him he could keep it or give it to someone else. I already had the original edition.