Then the cranes arrived as backup, with armed men who bluntly pushed people out of the way. They cleared everyone out by whipping their belts. The statue was ripped out in a cracking of concrete, a crumpling of iron, the din of motors pushed to full capacity and cries of “Allahu Akbar!” The iron horse fell, folded in two, its rider kissed the ground, the people stomped on it, spit on it, took photos of it, took photos with it, then took off under the beating rain, drunk with joy. The hangover would come later. Niloufar’s mother was thrilled. She had had her revenge. The shah’s reign was finally over. She was right, and the Doctor was wrong. The pitifully outstretched horse and the trampled king were the proof. The square emptied. We were able to resume the thread of the future, which could not under any circumstances resemble the past. Terrible mistake. We had forgotten the most important thing. Yes, the rider had fallen, but the pedestal was still in its place. And it wouldn’t remain empty forever. Another statue would be erected there. Bigger, more ferocious, and more difficult to unbolt. A statue that didn’t wear boots, but babouches, that didn’t dress in a military uniform, but wore a mullah’s cassock, that didn’t salute the people, but God. Yes, my friend, we had erased “the shadow of God on earth” to put God in its place. Yes, God Himself.
Our small town had no statue of the king to tear down. Instead, we destroyed the movie theaters and vandalized drinking establishments, deemed symbols of the decadence of the former regime. When I saw the burnt carcasses of film reels thrown in the streets, our movie theater’s seats ripped open, the smashed ticket booth and the torn posters, I should have asked myself questions. Asked myself who was capable of doing such a thing. What revolutionary explanation would I invent for those acts?
Our small town had two movie theaters. One that mostly played Persian films. That’s how we learned about Iranian cinema. And the other, situated on a main avenue, showed foreign films: American Westerns, French dramas, Indian melodramas, and not long before the revolution, Italian soft pornos. The theaters were magical places, open doors onto the marvelous world that wrested us from the narrow and dusty streets of our daily lives, a world of adventures, beauty, and enchantment, a world that had to be somewhere at the end of the roads where those cars filled with strange passengers were driving. Thanks to the movie theater, those cars stopped, and their strange passengers got out in our city, walked into our lives: Fardin, Behrouz Vossoughi, Forouzan, Marilyn Monroe, Burt Lancaster, Amitabh Bachchan…
The cinema was important to the life of our city. With a few exceptions, even the most traditional families went out to the cinema. We went to the cinema Friday nights as a family and during the week with friends, skipping school. We went to the cinema to dream, see the world, take advantage of the dark theater to hold hands with a girl. So why was it destroyed? Why vandalize the drinking establishments? They said that the owners, as they tried to salvage their business, recognized their clients among the assailants. The same ones who came to have a drink after work. Even Mohamad-Réza’s father, whose personal stash had enlivened our summer nights, had been at the head of a militia responsible for the destruction of several restaurants where alcohol was served. Why? Something was happening before our eyes, and we refused to see it. “It’s a revolution,” I explained to my disciples. “The future is now being built on the ruins of the past.” I justified the unjustifiable. I told them that it was the inexorable revenge of the poor, the outcasts of the capitalist system, on the symbols of an unjust and unequal society. Bullshit. What poor? The most fervent Hezbollahis, like the father of Mohamad-Réza, were rich bazaar merchants. If it was revenge, it was that of the past on the future. That of the most reactionary religious archaism on a modernity that had been injected but not yet assimilated. The revenge of the peasants on the city-dwellers. And we, with our complicity, were only feeding the monster that was growing in the shadows, secretly multiplying. I didn’t approve of the women protesting in Tehran and in the big cities, taking to the streets to protest having to wear the hijab. Worse still, I asked my female friends to wear a headscarf when they distributed pamphlets, so as not to offend the “religious sensibility” of the people. Yes, me. The Supreme Leader had taken the throne in Tehran. This time, the Shah would not return.
The disfigured offspring of the Islamic revolution was moaning in its basin, bathing in tears and blood.
A few days later, a large protest was organized in the city to support the new power growing in the shadows. It was the day before the referendum that would guarantee the rise of the Islamic Republic. A bogus referendum. Constructed around an absurd dichotomy: “Islamic Republic. Yes? No?” And no one took offense to that ridiculous question, which would trap us for decades. An immense crowd filled the city’s streets. Who were these people? Where did they come from? We didn’t know any of them.
§
Chamkhaleh was the spoils of war. A captive miscreant virgin promised to the vanquishers. The village was another symbol to destroy. It was taken without resistance. No one thought to defend its sandy paths, its beaches, its sea, and its morning sun. No one had thought to protect its strolling girls, its boats on the river, its summer flings. The summer arrived a few months later. Once more, the great exodus from the city toward the seaside didn’t take place. It was, if I’m remembering correctly, a horrendously hot summer, but most people preferred to remain in town, even if it meant sweating like hell. The bridge was cut off to traffic and because of this the village had regained its former insular character. The difference was that this insularity was not to protect it, but to enclose it. Henceforth, you had to identify yourself at a checkpoint stationed on the bridge, as if to enter a military barracks. The armed Basij stopped the cars with an obvious hatred and rifled through them with an excess of inexhaustible zeal to destroy anything remotely related to fun and pleasure. Alcohol, obviously, but also music cassettes, whose magnetic strips were torn up yard by yard before the wide eyes of their owner, card games, backgammon or chess, annihilated with brazen joy, all was prohibited. As well as any material evidence of relationships between illicit couples or groups of men in the company of women. But the real misery for the vacationers began once past the checkpoint. There were mobile patrols that watched over everything. Flirting, laughing, games, anything that involved contact between the opposite sexes was strictly controlled. On the main road that led toward the sea, the shops were closed for the most part and within the rare few that were open, the owners displayed a funereal air. Worried like drug dealers on the alert. The macabre ambiance was completed by the speakers perched on the newly installed poles and that dissimulated verses from the Quran. Yes, the Quran, distorted by the speakers pushed to their limit, unintelligible. The antonym of Vaveli. As for Vaveli, it would become a public restroom. At the end of the main road, the sea was no longer in its place. We thought we were dreaming. The sea, the immense Caspian Sea, was no longer at the end of the beach. A wall of sand had been erected, high enough to obstruct the sight of the azure expanse. How was it possible? It was, of course, forbidden to scale the artificial hill to access the sea. One had to pass through an opaque portal, guarded by the Basij. But the real horror was on the other side of the wall of sand. Behind the entryway, the sea had been split in two. Enormous pillars had been erected in the water to support a dividing wall that extended far into the waves. In a signal tower, they separated the male swimmers from the female swimmers, the women on one side, the men on the other.
You understand… They had managed to transform the sea into a public hammam! A place for men to take a dip and a place for women to take a dip. And the worst part was the insane number of people. A new world of people. People who settled for the sea mutilated in this way. Summer vacationers like we had never seen before. Who were they? Where had they come from? These women who were bathing fully dressed, these men who were strolling in exclusively male groups. Unshaven, with extra-long bathing trunks.
I don’t know if you can imagine the extent of the damage. The sea had become entertain
ment without pleasure. It was Chamkhaleh without its night strolls. Chamkhaleh without its bonfire, without its prowling boys, without its joyous swimmers. Chamkhaleh without its sea. A Chamkhaleh without Chamkhaleh.
That summer, Villa Rose experienced some timid activity. Stumbling painfully against the wall of sand, it resembled a besieged bunker. The German cousin had not come, nor the other friends, to brighten up the gloomy days. Niloufar went out rarely and no longer swam in the sea. She swam only once, and it was in the river, in a case of emergency. One night, she was strolling with her mother on the banks of the river where people had started going since they could no longer walk on the seashore. During their walk, they were alerted by screams. A boat had capsized, and several people had fallen into the water, including two children. The survivors, not knowing how to swim, clung to the skiff, but one child had still not resurfaced, hence the distressed cries of the parents. They say that Niloufar simply removed her shoes and then threw herself into the water. A few quick breaststrokes, as she was able to do, and she had reached the boat, but the child had already sunk. She immediately dove down to look. She remained underwater for a long time, so long that they thought she had drowned too. Then she reappeared, holding the vanished child in her arms. When she emerged from the water, she was of course completely soaked and her shirt clung to her body. They say that as soon as she was out of the river, she was stopped by the cold metal of a gun barrel pressed against her belly button, held by a young Basij who was probably asking himself if he had to pull the trigger or continue getting an eyeful. Niloufar had broken several laws: swimming in a forbidden place and exposing herself in an indecent fashion. The child was saved, but Niloufar, arrested by the mobile patrol, wasn’t freed until several hours later and only after important family members intervened. Immediately after that incident, without awaiting the autumn rain, the inhabitants of Villa Rose left Chamkhaleh and didn’t return for several years.
During that time, I was very busy. My entourage grew every day. I traveled to different cities to host meetings. I was a good orator and packed the room every time. They treated me with respect. Niloufar followed my exploits. When she could, she would come listen to me debate. At the end of the night, we would walk together and continue the discussion on the way back. She would ask me questions, taking me by the arm, as she would have done with a brother if she’d had one. That’s how it was for her, but not for the eyes that observed us in the street. We found ourselves again at Niloufar’s house for our organization’s internal meetings. Her mother welcomed us with hospitality. We had the illusion of being free, but it was rather due to the embryonic nature of the repressive machine of the new regime. Too good to last! One autumn day, a group of Islamist students attacked the United States Embassy and took its sixty-six American employees hostage. They were shown on the TV, hands tied and eyes blindfolded. The Islamists burned the star-spangled banner, then the Union Jack. An Iranian invention adopted by all the anti-Westerners. A few months later, Saddam Hussein publicly tore up the famous Algiers Agreement, considered humiliating, and unleashed his tanks on the oil-producing cities of Southern Iran. The Iran–Iraq War had been declared. The regime rid itself of the last men in suits still present within the ranks of power. Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Republic, was dismissed. The bloody attacks multiplied. A bomb exploded in the Islamic Republican Party headquarters, the only party in power. Seventy-five leading officials died on the spot. To make up for lost time, the repressive machine was doubling down. The Basij militia armed itself more and more. A ferocious repression began. The country plunged into its darkest years.
You know the rest. It’s around this time that you were enlisted into the ranks of the dissidents. You must remember… As at the arrival of a storm, everything suddenly changed. Things that, a few days earlier, had still been permitted—walking with friends, buying books, traveling from city to city—were suddenly no longer allowed. At each entry into town, at each intersection even, the young armed militia controlled the traffic. Everyone knew instinctively that they had to obey. The war served as an excuse to muzzle society. Eroding the last scraps of freedom that had resisted the assault of the bearded men. Our town found itself twelve hundred miles from the front. So what were they looking for in the trunks of cars, in the bags of women, in the pockets of men? Weapons for the Iraqi enemy? There was a reason the Supreme Leader had described the war as a “blessing,” a “gift from the heavens.” Yes, that useless and deadly war served as grace and salvation for the Islamic regime. It gathered Iranians behind a new patriotic-Islamist ideology, with inconspicuous power. In the high schools, the classes emptied. The young people gathered in the mosques with budding beards, tied “Ya Hossein” bandannas around their heads, and then left for the front in jam-packed cars, shouting: “We are all your soldiers, Khomeini.” You remember? To come back in small pitiful coffins, in a thousand pieces. That’s how Ahmad, the most skilled bomb-maker, and Ali, the most daring Don Juan in Chamkhaleh, came back: between four planks of wood. We carried their coffins through the streets of the city and other young people left to take their place.
The death factory had started up and would run at full capacity for several years.
One day, we saw Mohamad-Réza leave. In front of the crowd assembled on the central square, he said goodbye to his mother who was crying beneath her brand-new black chador, bowed three times under the Quran his father was holding to bless him, climbed into the bus, and disappeared at the end of the road that turned at the foot of Leila Kooh.14 Left without ever coming back, not on leave, nor in a coffin, disappearing simply and definitively from the life of our town. His absence was not really noticed. There had been so many others.
§
The terror operation was in full swing and kept rhythm with the tempo of the war. The new power was stripped of inhibitions, the first raids on dissidents’ homes had already taken place. We had started to go into hiding. I returned to Niloufar’s house for a bit. The rules of the game had changed, we had to behave differently. I didn’t know if I could or wanted to play the game. The price to pay increased with each day. As you guessed, prison and corporal punishment were not my thing. And martyrdom even less so. I had to leave, go elsewhere, but where? The Doctor’s house was no longer safe for me. The Doctor’s past as a mayor, and his relationships with the fallen higher-ups, had caught up with him. He was unsuccessfully trying to keep his clients. His doctor’s earnings were no longer sufficient to maintain the familial lifestyle. He suddenly realized that he had nothing. For all those years, he had set nothing aside, spending everything he earned without keeping track, on his friends, his sumptuous parties, and his mistresses. The town preacher had declared him impure during a Friday sermon and, ever since, his clientele diminished a bit more each day. Eaten away by the nostalgia of his unrestrained parties, his mistresses, and his games of backgammon, the Doctor was visibly growing thinner. And his alopecia only highlighted his thinness. He was sinking into a strange silence. Formerly so sure of his knowledge, so facetious, so verbose, he was now growing quieter and quieter, no longer taking part in discussions, letting his wife have the last word. He didn’t like to play backgammon with me. Not because I played badly—I knew the rules and followed them all very carefully. The problem for him was that I didn’t express enough joy when I won, or, worse, enough disappointment when I lost, and he didn’t see the point in challenging an adversary whose self-esteem was so underdeveloped. So he invented an invisible partner to play games of backgammon that went on endlessly because, after each game, the winner or the loser would launch a new challenge, impossible not to accept. One could hear behind the door of his bedroom, sometimes until early in the morning, victorious laughs or disappointed cries, amidst the familiar noise of dice rolling over the shiny wood of the board.
My Part of Her Page 11