The House of the Mosque

by Kader Abdolah

  He went out into the garden, where two rugs – a large one and a small one – had already been spread on the ground. He took off his shoes and stepped onto the small rug. Then he reached into his pocket, took out a compass and tried to find the east, but couldn’t see the needle. So he patiently put on his glasses, consulted the compass, and turned to face Mecca.

  Beheshti was standing behind him, on the large rug. Khalkhal had deliberately kept out of sight. He knew that, as Khomeini’s most loyal adviser, it would be better to remain anonymous.

  Khomeini’s wife, Batul, shrouded from head to foot in a black chador, came out for the prayer and took her place behind Beheshti. The camera focused on her for a moment, and she stood as still as a statue. Then the scene shifted to a green hedge, where a few French women and their children were watching in amazement.

  Within days a horde of journalists from all over the globe descended on Neauphle-le-Château, thereby focusing the attention of the world on the approaching revolution.

  Until then Beheshti and Khalkhal had been the only men at Khomeini’s side, but within twenty-four hours of the interview seven more arrived from America, Germany, England and Paris. For a while they formed the new Revolutionary Council.

  Later, after the shah had been toppled and the revolution had been won, they were appointed to top government posts. It was these men who became president, prime minister, minister of finance, minister of foreign affairs, minister of industrial affairs, chairman of the Parliament and chief of the newly formed secret police.

  What became of these seven men? Within a few short years, one was executed as an American spy, another was imprisoned for corruption, three of them were assassinated by the Resistance, the man who’d served as president fled to Paris, where he requested political asylum, and shortly thereafter the prime minister was dismissed from his post.

  In Tehran millions of people took part in demonstrations being held almost daily. It seemed that no earthly power could prevent Khomeini’s return.

  The face of the country changed almost overnight. Men grew beards and women enveloped themselves in chadors.

  Massive strikes in the oil sector brought the country to an economic standstill. Workers abandoned their machines, students stopped attending classes, schoolchildren left their schools and everyone took to the streets.

  The revolution also left its mark on the house of the mosque.

  Zinat openly distanced herself from the family, and Sadiq went out more often. Both she and Zinat often attended mass gatherings of Islamic women.

  Sadiq, who had never worn a headscarf inside the house, now swathed herself in a chador when she was at home. She used to spend all of her time indoors, cooking and taking care of Lizard. Now she dropped everything in order to go out. She came home late, grabbed a bite to eat and went to bed.

  Aqa Jaan went to the bazaar every day, but the carpet business was the last thing on people’s minds. He felt himself to be more and more of a stranger in his own shop.

  The storerooms were stacked with rugs that should have been posted to other countries weeks ago. The corridors and workrooms were filled with yarns and other materials that should have been sent to the workshops in the outlying villages.

  His trusty office boy, whose job it was to usher customers into his office and bring them tea, had grown a beard. He no longer came to work on time, and left the building at odd moments, saying only that he had to go to the mosque.

  The employees had cleared out one of the offices and turned it into a prayer room. They had removed the desks and chairs, put down a few rugs and hung a large portrait of Khomeini on the wall. They had even brought in a mosque samovar and set it on a table.

  No one did any work. His employees hung around the shop all day, discussing the latest events. They drank tea in the prayer room and listened to the BBC’s Persian broadcasts so they could follow the developments in Paris.

  Aqa Jaan could see that his business was on the brink of collapse, but he was powerless to do anything about it.

  At home he saw that Fakhri Sadat no longer sparkled. She had lost her customary cheerfulness. She used to go into town periodically to buy new clothes, especially nightwear, but her shopping sprees were now a thing of the past.

  Aqa Jaan always enjoyed watching Fakhri standing in front of the mirror, feeling her breasts to see if they were still firm. But she didn’t do that any more, and she also stopped wearing her jewellery. One day she tidied up her jewellery box, which had always lain on her dressing table, and put it away for good.

  Nasrin and Ensi were also victims of the change. No one seemed to notice that Aqa Jaan’s daughters had reached a marriageable age and were still not spoken for.

  Aqa Jaan missed Shahbal. He wanted to talk to him, to pour his heart out to him, but he didn’t get the chance. Shahbal came home for a quick visit every once in a while, then left again. Aqa Jaan knew that he was no longer attending classes. He tried to approach him a few times, but he got the feeling that Shahbal didn’t want to talk to him.

  And yet he trusted him. He knew that Shahbal would eventually come back to him.

  Aqa Jaan had taken to going down to the river and strolling along its banks in the dark. He remembered his father’s advice: ‘When you’re feeling sad, go down to the river. Talk to the river, and your sorrows will be borne away on its swift current.’

  ‘I don’t want to complain,’ Aqa Jaan said to the river, ‘but there’s a lump in my throat the size of a rock.’

  His eyes were stinging. A tear rolled down his cheek and fell to the ground. The river caught it and bore it away in the darkness, without telling a soul.

  Tehran

  Aqa Jaan was in his office at the bazaar. The office boy had just brought him a glass of tea when he heard a sudden commotion downstairs in the workroom. The employees had left their posts and were watching the two o’clock news.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Aqa Jaan called.

  ‘The shah has fled!’ the boy yelled up the stairs.

  ‘Allahu akbar!’ someone exclaimed.

  There was no mention on the news of the shah fleeing, so apparently it had been a rumour, yet it was such a persistent rumour that the regime had been compelled to put the shah on television. He was shown receiving some of his generals, which only aggravated the situation. The shah, who used to appear on television every night, had been absent a great deal in recent months. Now people couldn’t believe their eyes: he had grown thin and looked like a man who was terrified of losing all he had.

  The rumour had contained only a small grain of truth.

  The next day a new rumour was making the rounds: ‘Farah Diba is fleeing to America with the children!’

  This wasn’t entirely true. Farah Diba wasn’t fleeing with the children; her mother was.

  A street war was about to break out in Tehran. The protestors were getting close to the palace. According to army intelligence, the mullahs were planning to attack the palace, so the shah had asked Farah Diba to leave the country and to take the children with her.

  She refused. ‘I’m not going to abandon you at a time like this.’

  ‘I’m thinking about the children’s safety, not my own,’ the shah replied.

  ‘Then we need to come up with a different plan. I’ll ask my mother to go with them,’ was her answer.

  While a helicopter was conveying the shah’s children from the palace to a nearby military base, where they would be flown out of the country in an air-force jet, Nosrat was taking the night train to Senejan.

  The train drew into the station at four o’clock in the morning. Nosrat took a taxi to the house, then tiptoed into the guest room and fell asleep.

  In the morning Lizard came to his room and woke him up.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ Nosrat said, and he took a pair of leather gloves out of his bag. ‘Here, put them on, then we’ll go to the bazaar and get something to eat. I’m starving.’

  Lizard put on the gloves and crawled in
to town on his hands and feet alongside Nosrat. When they reached the giant statue of the shah on horseback, Lizard looked at Nosrat to see if it would be all right for him to climb onto it. Nosrat winked, and a few seconds later Lizard was seated in the saddle behind the shah.

  Lizard was the only person who’d ever had the nerve to do such a thing.

  At first no one noticed, but soon people stopped to stare. When he realised that he had a crowd of enthusiastic onlookers, Lizard got bolder. He leaned forward, threw his arms round the horse’s neck and pretended to gallop. Then he leapt from the horse’s neck to the shah’s head, slid down the horse’s long tail and hopped back into the saddle – all with such extraordinary agility that he looked more like a monkey than a lizard.

  More and more people gathered round, and they were all clapping.

  Two policemen came striding up, but didn’t dare to intervene. One of them reported the incident on his walkie-talkie. A while later a van pulled up with a squad of riot police, but since they hadn’t been ordered to disperse the crowd either, they merely kept an eye on things. The situation in the country was so tense that anything they did could trigger a riot.

  On the one hand, it could be viewed as a minor incident in which a crippled child had climbed onto the statue of the shah. On the other hand, his innocent antics were not without political overtones.

  The weakness of the regime was obvious to everyone who saw Lizard cavorting on the horse. Yet no one could have suspected that the shah’s statue would soon be toppled by a hysterical mob.

  The next day the front page of the local newspaper featured a picture of Lizard, dangling from the neck of the royal horse. Within an hour the paper had been sold out – for the first time in its history.

  Everyone who read the article hurried over to the mosque to see Lizard with their very own eyes. They usually found him sitting on the roof.

  It was a turning point in Lizard’s life. He had always been in the habit of climbing to the top of one of the minarets – where the storks used to have their nests – to read his books. Now he had an audience.

  No one had ever come to the mosque to demonstrate, but nowadays hundreds of young people came every day to see Lizard.

  ‘You’re a bad influence on him,’ Aqa Jaan grumbled to Nosrat on the phone.

  ‘What do you mean? I don’t see the problem.’

  ‘He climbs into the minaret like a monkey. He’s turning into a major attraction here in Senejan.’

  ‘Let him do something he enjoys. Besides, it might help to improve the mosque’s image.’

  ‘We’re talking about a mosque, not a circus. We shouldn’t make ourselves more ridiculous than we are already. First that business with Ahmad, and now Lizard.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ Nosrat said.

  Two nights later Nosrat once again took the night train to Senejan.

  He had no way of knowing that this was the last trip he would ever make to his home town with a head full of black hair. The next time he came, his hair had turned grey and his face had changed so much that no one recognised him.

  Nosrat asked Lizard to come to his room. He had a handful of flyers with a black-and-white photograph of Khomeini on the front, which he stuffed into the boy’s pockets. ‘The next time a lot of people are gathered outside the mosque,’ he instructed him, ‘climb into your minaret and toss these flyers down to them. You got that? See, like this,’ he said, flicking his wrist. ‘All of them in one throw.’

  At eleven-thirty Lizard climbed into the minaret. After a few wild leaps to attract everyone’s attention, he tossed the flyers to the crowd. Nosrat, positioned on the roof, began snapping pictures of the swirling flyers and the people trying to catch them.

  The images appeared in every major newspaper in Iran.

  It was the first time a photograph of Khomeini had ever been published in a newspaper. The regime was caught off-guard, but was unable to take any action since the newspapers were united in their support of the publication. Aqa Jaan bought the papers and tucked them into the chest in which he kept his journals.

  Nosrat and his camera were on hand for every major event. The photographs he took of these landmark moments were printed daily in the newspapers.

  He also had a cine camera, which he’d used to film the first big demonstration in Tehran, the one that had been led by Beheshti, who had crossed the border illegally to lead it. Nosrat had done a good job of documenting the presence of the ayatollahs and conveying the strength of their leadership.

  When you watched his film reports, you could see what was in store for the nation.

  Nosrat regularly sent his extraordinary footage to the Revolutionary Council in Paris. As a result, he and Beheshti developed a close working relationship. Beheshti began phoning him at home to tell him when a demonstration was going to be held so Nosrat would be sure to film it.

  The Council then arranged for a man who worked at the airport in Tehran to function as a secret go-between. Nosrat was instructed to hand him the pictures and film rolls, which were then put on the next flight to Paris.

  Nosrat was supposedly neutral, but sometimes he wondered which side derived the most benefit from his work. Was he making propaganda for Khomeini? No, he wasn’t committed to any person or any cause. Religion meant nothing to him. Nor did politics. He thought only of his camera. Other people’s wishes or his own personal viewpoint didn’t matter. He simply recorded what he saw.

  Nosrat was also secretly in touch with Shahbal. He often gave him photographs, which Shahbal then published in his underground newspaper. One time they ran into each other at a demonstration and had a long talk. Nosrat had read Shahbal’s newspaper, so he knew that his party was sharply divided on the issue of the Islamic state that Khomeini was hoping to establish.

  As Khomeini’s displays of power escalated, the leftist underground factions were confronted with the question of how to deal with him. Should they support Khomeini, or should they align themselves against him? Heated debates resulted in a painful break-up: a tiny minority refused to support Khomeini, choosing instead to continue their work underground, while the majority opted to lay down their weapons and support Khomeini’s anti-American crusade.

  Shahbal, who had left the university long ago, sided with the majority.

  The turning point came on the seventeenth day of the month of Shahrivar. The ayatollahs in Tehran had joined forces in an effort to get as many people as possible into the mosques. At eight o’clock that Friday evening the worshippers left their mosques and marched to Parliament Square, shouting slogans all the way. Both Khomeini supporters and the regime were determined to show their strength.

  As thousands of demonstrators headed towards Parliament Square from every corner of Tehran, soldiers left their barracks, determined to teach the protestors a lesson.

  The man in charge, General Rahimi, was sitting in an army jeep parked in a corner of the square, keeping an eye on things from behind his dark glasses. When every inch of the square was packed with protestors, he ordered his tanks to block off the side streets so the crowd wouldn’t be able to escape.

  Meanwhile, the unsuspecting demonstrators were passing out flowers to the soldiers, which the soldiers gladly accepted. ‘Peace! Peace!’ the crowd roared. ‘Peace, soldiers!’ And the officers in the square waved peacefully back.

  What the crowd didn’t know was that the goal of the demonstration was actually to seize and occupy the Parliament. Nosrat had been informed ahead of time and already had his camera in position.

  As soon as the first row of demonstrators reached the Parliament, a handful of young men started to climb the fence. Sharpshooters on the nearby roofs opened fire, and the young men fell to the ground, dead.

  People fled every which way, screaming, ‘La ilaha illa Allah!’

  Despite the mad scramble, dozens of other young men ran towards the gate and tried to scale the fence, but the sharpshooters shot them down as well.

  ‘La ilaha illa Allah!’ th
e protestors cried, pushing and pulling the fence, trying to tear it down so they could get inside the building. But before they got the chance, the army opened fire on the crowd from all four corners of the square.

  Within minutes, there were hundreds of dead and wounded.

  Nosrat, safely ensconced on a nearby balcony, recorded the incident on film.

  The soldiers chased after the demonstrators, shooting everyone in sight. Women pounded on the doors of houses, begging to be let in, while men climbed onto roofs and into trees, and children crawled under cars. The streets were strewn with shoes, jackets, caps, cameras, headscarves and hundreds of black chadors.

  Nosrat captured it all: the general in sunglasses giving the order to shoot, the young men falling off the fence, people crawling through drainage ditches, people trying to flee over the blockades, the tanks rolling into the square from the side streets, the scattered bodies.

  Seven minutes later a hush fell over the square. All those who could flee had fled, and hundreds had sought refuge in nearby houses. Only the dead and the wounded remained.

  The general removed his dark glasses, cast his eye over the scene of the battle and ordered the square to be cleared. Then he got back in his jeep and drove to the palace to deliver his report to the shah.

  His orders to his men were clear: no reporters were to be allowed in the square and any cameras that were found were to be destroyed on the spot.

  As soon as the general left, Nosrat escaped via the rooftops.

  Three days later ABC broadcast Nosrat’s film clip. More than seven hundred people had died.

  Aqa Jaan followed the events on Lizard’s television.

  The shah, shocked by the incident, addressed the nation: ‘I have heard the voice of the revolution! I have heard the voice of my people. Some mistakes have been made. To restore order I shall appoint a new prime minister. I ask my people to be patient a while longer.’

  His voice trembled. His speech was rambling, and he stuttered.

  A few days later he did appoint a new prime minister. Khomeini rejected the man, however, so the new cabinet lasted only a few weeks. The shah cast around for another candidate, but no one dared to side openly with him.