Searching for Hassan

by Terence Ward

  * * *

  On each day of the two-week New Year’s festival, Hassan initiates us with equal passion. On the actual day of Nowruz, he invites us to his red-brick home, which faces the cherry orchard, for chai o shirini, tea and cookies. We exchange small gifts, and he explains the meaning of haft sin, the seven offerings—green sprouts, apple, garlic, vinegar, sumac, wild olive and a dish called samanoo—that adorn his table. The sprouting wheat grass wrapped with red ribbon symbolizes new growth, while the garlic is meant to keep away bad omens. A candle burns brightly next to his holy Koran, and a mirror reflects its light. A sour orange floating in a bowl of water, he tells us, is our Earth floating in the cosmos.

  During that festive fortnight, as my father sits on the porch with his nightly glass of Shiraz wine, Hassan counsels him: “If you’re drinking wine, Mr. Ward, you might as well throw some in the garden for the spirits. Then they see you’re not selfish, that you’re willing to share. It purifies your act. You know, it’s good to do that.”

  After he leaves, I watch my dad look twice over his shoulder, then splash some red wine into the bed of roses below, before filling his glass again.

  On the morning of Sizdeh Bidar, the thirteenth day of Nowruz, Hassan says to my mother, “Your family can’t stay here today. Impossible.” My mother asks him to explain. “To stay indoors is a bad omen,” he insists. “We must go to the countryside and throw all bad things of the past away. Nature will take care of them. They’ll become wind, trees, rivers and blossoms.”

  So together we join the entire city in the search for a spot of green where we can lay down our picnic blanket, samovar and rice, and spend the day with nature. Walking to the nearby stream, Hassan carefully places the green sprouts in the rushing water. With that final ritual, the days of Nowruz come to a close, and life returns to normal.

  * * *

  Spring gives way to summer. When the sun’s suffocating heat falls over Tehran like a thick wool blanket and melts the asphalt into soft pools of black gelatin, the people abandon their brick homes.

  “From tonight, we will sleep under the stars,” Hassan announces. We drag our beds out onto the verandah, into the sweet breath of night, and a whole new cycle begins. During these months it never rains. All the bedding goes outdoors—mattresses, blankets, pillows and sheets—and when the light fades in the west and trembling stars begin spinning across the heavens, Hassan arrives with his lamp and his treasure chest of stories: King Solomon’s ring; Moses and the shepherd; parables of holy Ali; Jesus and the donkey; passages from the Koran; poems by Hafez; and tales from Hazar Afsane, composed for Humai, the daughter of Bahram, the legendary ancient king of Persia. Each evening, we boys gather under the cool night skies with unbridled excitement, never knowing where we will set sail. Each night is hopeful, even in defeat.

  A princess can fall in love with a common boy. God will open the heavens and speak. A hidden hand shall direct our path. Lovers take the stage: Leili and Majnoon, Shirin and Farhad. Each new night reveals a secret, a truth. The mythical bird Simorgh awaits us. As we listen, Chris, Rich and I watch Hassan’s impish eyes glisten. Struck with surprise as his saga unfolds, we are also hypnotized by his enthusiasm. With a talent for mimicry, he imitates expressions, gestures and gaits of people, deftly slipping into the skins of colorful characters in his pageant of morality tales. Thieves, grand viziers, prophets, street urchins, princesses, fishermen, barbers, con artists, vagabonds, warriors and fortune-tellers all come alive.

  Lying on his back, Kevin, the dreamer, gazes up at the moon’s pale white mountains and shaded Sea of Tranquility. Some nights he uses our telescope. As each story unfolds, we imagine the geography: castles in the clouds, ruby-filled tombs, windswept monasteries, night caravans, alchemists’ studios. When the tale-weaving stretches too late and little Richard nods off to sleep, Hassan pauses. In that time of silence, as slumber sets in, he slowly draws away, leaving us with the burping frogs, buzzing crickets and blowing wind. Like Scheherazade, he keeps us waiting until the next night to complete the tale. Somewhere out there, we know, a princess is falling in love with a brave farmer, another will run off with a young mariner. Hope, Hassan tells us, there is always hope.

  * * *

  Our household staff grew to embrace not only Hassan and Fatimeh but also her mother, Khorshid, who took care of Fatimeh’s two children, Ali and Mahdi. And then there was Hassan’s brother, Mohammad. Just discharged from the army for overturning a jeep, he was out of work. So he became our driver. Although we generally rode in the back seat while he negotiated traffic, we had to hold on tightly to avoid being vaulted into the windshield by his sudden braking. Once Hassan asked my mother to go to the police station in his brother’s place when an infraction was traced to our car. Hassan rightly feared his brother’s license might be in jeopardy if Mohammad appeared before the police. In his gentle and humorous way, Hassan ruled our lives.

  Although officially he managed our household, Hassan was for us much more than that. Like Virgil, he guided us through the labyrinths of dimly lit bazaars and lovingly taught us all the customs needed to ease our way into his culture. He became an important part of our family, feeding our imaginations, enlarging our world. Stocky and strong, with his splendid black mustache, he offered his folk wisdom with a deft wit. In the absence of television, he gave us the comic antics of the confounding “Mullah Nasruddin,” presenting life’s dilemmas and wise solutions in a hilarious way. In his eye, a spark was always lit.

  We longed for the moment when Hassan would call us to see the musicians and Haji Firouz black-faced clowns who appeared dancing at our gate just before New Year, amid feasting and gifts. My brothers and I chattered away in our broken street-Farsi and danced to Iranian pop music. As the seasons changed, so did our frantic occupations: buying silkworms in mulberry groves, riding the grumpy mules of passing nomads, trekking up poplar-lined river gorges, playing hide-and-seek in hollowed-out caves outside our back wall, skiing in the high snows of Shemshak, wandering deep into treasure-filled bazaars, licking saffron-flavored ice cream under thick shade trees and dressing up for the U.N. festival at our polyglot Community School.

  On the Fourth of July, we would lie outstretched on our blankets and gaze at the booming fireworks exploding above the great lawn of the U.S. embassy. We had heard only faint rumors about a giant called Willie Mays and the mythical Central Park. We were oblivious of distant America. For us children, Iran, not the United States, was home.

  * * *

  Describing her passage back to Ireland in A Book of Migrations, Rebecca Solnit writes poignantly about the meaning of home in one’s memory. “Home, the site of all childhood’s revelations and sufferings, changes irrevocably, so that we are all in some sense refugees from a lost world. But,” she goes on to say, “you can’t ever leave home either; it takes root inside you and the very idea of self as an entity bounded by the borders of the skin is a fiction disguising the vast geographies contained under the skin that will never let you go.”

  For my family, after ten years it all came to an abrupt end. Our decision to leave Iran and return to the States was reluctantly agreed upon after Kevin, separated from the family for the first time, found only misery at Deerfield Academy, a prep school in New England. He described it as being like Lord of the Flies. I was scheduled to leave for the same boarding school the following September. My parents couldn’t bear the idea of casting their four boys to the winds. Our family would remain united, they decided. And so we left Iran.

  Sadness and confusion clouded our last days in Tehran as we packed up our lives into boxes, walked under pergolas and mulberry trees in a haze, bit into Hassan’s last supper of chelo kebab, fighting back the tears. My mother had found someone to take over our rented villa. He vowed to treat Hassan Ghasemi and his family with respect and pay them well.

  We stood somberly outside our gate to say our goodbyes. Strangely, it was July 4. Hassan and Fatimeh hugged us all while we made solemn promises to stay in tou
ch. He pulled my ear one last time, telling me to “respect mother and father.” Choked up, I nodded my promise. He countered with a contented wink. Young Fatimeh reached out and took my mother’s hand in hers. The two women held each other closely. Time slowed for that long farewell. Then we heard the beeping horn.

  As the taxi pulled away, our last sight out of the rear window was of Hassan, Fatimeh, baby Maryam, little Ali and Mahdi, grandmother Khorshid and Mohammad, clustered together, waving sadly at the red gate.

  * * *

  Once in America, my mother wrote to Hassan and Fatimeh. She waited. Finally, an airmail letter arrived bearing news from her friend Elie Dugan, with red stamps bearing the Shah’s portrait.

  Dear Donna,

  Hectic always seems to be the way in Tehran and this fall is no exception. I know that news about your family is what’s most important for all of you. I spoke to them before the new tenants moved in and at the time Hassan and Fatimeh said they did not think they could work for anyone but Mrs. Ward.

  I urged them to give the new people a chance. About three weeks later, Mrs. G. was at home in the villa, with workmen all about. Hassan had stayed on for a month to get her started and was marvelous, and she said she cannot find anyone else like him and so on. But, she understood that they wanted to leave, and Fatimeh apparently said she never did like Tehran, etc. I said nothing.

  From what I can put together they have bought a truck with Mohammad, and left Tehran. Hassan and M will be truckers? So it goes. But don’t be upset. You did so much for the family and they no doubt learned the Ward esprit and that, after all, is all anyone can do …

  That letter seared like a hot iron. Written by my mother’s dear friend Elie Dugan, who helped her pack in our final days, these words announced the unimaginable. My mother was distraught. “How will we ever find them?”

  Hassan had told her that he would stay at the house for years to come. She hadn’t expected the Ghasemis to leave. At least not so soon. And despite the letter’s warm spirit, her friend never thought to ask Hassan for his new address. Or to send it to us.

  My mother faintly remembered his village’s name: “Toodesht,” she thought it was. Soon, telephoning and writing letters, she enlisted Tehrani friends in the search. Al Gross, the director of the Bank of America in the capital, told her that no one on his staff had ever heard of any village by that name. Our friends the Farmanfarmaians wrote diplomatically of the daunting task of locating Hassan with such sketchy information. Other responses came back. The village Toodesht? It didn’t exist.

  So what began as a small break in contact grew into a chasm. The Ghasemis had vanished. Gone. Without a trace.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, we had become nomads as well. Back in America, we moved four times in six years before settling in Berkeley’s redwood-studded hills above the University of California campus, where both my mom and I enrolled, she in the School of Nutrition, I in the Near Eastern Studies Department. Kevin headed off to Harvard. Chris packed his bags for Cornell, and Rich chose Stanford. Later, seeking to be closer to Iran, I traveled to Egypt to study.

  * * *

  On my dust-coated balcony that overlooked the palm trees of the American University in Cairo, in 1978, I first heard the ominous news: BBC reports of riots and massacres crackled in from the provincial Iranian city of Tabriz. Students were demonstrating, government troops opening fire. Many lay dead, scores wounded. On Cairo’s hazy horizon, the red afternoon sun was setting behind the pyramids.

  These warnings, like Cassandra’s, would fall on deaf ears. Diplomats ignored the signs. Martyrs would now be buried. The Shia forty-day mourning period passed, and then new protests ignited in Mashhad, Tehran, Isfahan. Bullets were said to have been fired into unarmed crowds. Mothers wept offstage. Iranians had finally lost their fear. A tidal wave no army could control rose up from this storm-blown ocean of resentment against the ancien régime. Soon this revolution would blow the Shah off his peacock throne along with his dazzling court of poseurs and sycophants. All would be swept away, stunning the world.

  My brothers back in the States couldn’t believe or accept that the Iranian people had so drastically changed. The Islamic Republic was proclaimed and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini hailed as the Supreme Leader. Arrests filled the prisons. Revolutionary courts ordered the execution of “traitors” by firing squad. Factories, homes, land and private wealth were confiscated, sending thousands fleeing into exile.

  Then, on November 4, 1979, hostage fever gripped America in a drama that would last 444 days. Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh’s nightly rhetorical games and Ted Koppel’s arching hairstyle became bizarre sources of fascination.

  Refugees kept flooding out of Iran by air, sea, horseback and foot. A diaspora of a million Iranians was born. The Islamic Republic closed its borders. Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed America the “Great Satan” and Americans personae non gratae. Then a terrible war broke out. Saddam Hussein, without warning, invaded the southwest province. Iranian soldiers battled Iraqis in trenches and nerve-gas horror. Hundreds of thousands would die.

  All our attempts to contact Hassan over the years had failed. A wall of silence had risen. He and his family had disappeared. Their fate was unknown. His young sons, Ali and Mahdi, had surely joined the war.

  At night, I dreamt of pomegranate groves with blood-red fruit so ripe it burst its skin. Time passed. One decade, then another.

  1. Fellow Travelers

  The start of a journey in Persia resembles an algebraical equation: it may or may not come out.

  —ROBERT BYRON, THE ROAD TO OXIANA

  In early April 1998, my family began our long-awaited journey back home. Not to our ancestral Ireland, but to Iran. While most Americans still recoiled with images of ranting hostage takers and wild-eyed terrorists, we put our fears aside. My three brothers and I, with our elderly parents, would cross the vast Iranian plateau on a blind search for Hassan, our lost friend and mentor who had taken care of us in Tehran so many years ago. Our seven-hundred-mile overland trek, from the ancient southern city of Shiraz, once called the Paris of Persia, all the way north to Tehran, the metropolis of modern Iran, would be a cross-cultural odyssey to rediscover a country, its people and our much-loved adopted Iranian family.

  * * *

  Journeys are often conceived in a miraculous split-second flash that illuminates the purpose and route of passage. Once the embryo forms, everything else falls into place in scattered pieces—visas and plane tickets, weathered maps, oblique itineraries—a jigsaw puzzle of fact and fantasy.

  In early December 1997, my youngest brother, Richard, phoned me with surprising news from his home in Saudi Arabia. In the Gulf island state of Bahrain, he said, visas for Iran could be found. His voice, broken up by a poor connection, barked and echoed.

  “Just heard that ladies from Arabia-bia flew into Iran on a shopping binge. They landed in Isfahan, bought their carpets-pets and got out safely … a rug under each arm.”

  “No!”

  “Got their vi-sas … in Bahrain.”

  “For how long?”

  “Less than a week.”

  “Any Americans?”

  “Don’t know. Tomorrow I’ll find out. So, baba, are you ready-eady to go back-ack?”

  “Mamma mia,” I stammered.

  “Goo-ood. Great id-ea! Ask Mom and Dad … What about the whole family-mily?”

  His question fell through the receiver with the weight of heavy granite. The entire family?

  “A tough sell,” I remarked.

  “No tougher-er than the Karakoram-ram.”

  After living in the Persian Gulf for eight years with his wife and two young boys, Richard had developed a thick skin. His baptism in Middle Eastern turbulence began in 1991. Overnight, Saddam Hussein’s army poured across the Saudi border into Kuwait, only to be stopped by an accidental and chaotic firefight in a small village called Khafji, a few hundred miles from Rich’s green suburban lawn in Dhahran. While his kids play
ed in their treehouse, Scud missiles rained down.

  For his latest vacation—Rich was an environmental geologist—he had climbed in Pakistan’s rugged Himalayas, the infamous Karakoram Range. His hiking trip swiftly turned into a feat of endurance. Halfway into the trek, his companion fell twenty feet onto a rock ledge, fracturing his leg. Single-handedly, Rich fashioned a leg splint, lifted him onto his shoulders and hauled him down to the Hunza Valley to be airlifted out. Rich had long before earned my admiration as a fearless, no-nonsense scientist. He was in love with nature’s geological wonders and was determined to witness each one in person. But Iran seemed daunting, as remote and impassable as his snowbound Karakoram peaks.

  When I asked my brother Chris whether he would be coming along, he replied, “Are you nuts?”

  * * *

  For years, only the odd foreign journalist had dared venture into the somber Islamic Republic. News reports were dismal: Boys used as human minesweepers on the Iraqi front. Women trapped under black chadors. Clenched-fisted zealots led by mullahs in the ritual chant “Marg bar Amrika, Death to America.” Cast as a pariah, Iran had been cut off from the world. All travelers except the foolhardy few kept a safe distance. And rightly so. This fundamentalist state had flogged offenders, covered women and defiantly thumbed its nose at the West. Yet there was reason to be upbeat: a moderate cleric had just been elected president.

  Mohammad Khatami’s surprise landslide victory in August 1997 ushered in a new era. Many hailed this heady period as “Tehran Spring.” In a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour on January 7, 1998, President Khatami welcomed cultural exchange. He offered an olive branch to Washington for the first time since the Shah’s fall in 1979 and spoke of “people-to-people” contacts with Americans. His fluency in German and English surprised world leaders, as did his penchant for quoting Kant and Tocqueville. The smiling, soft-spoken leader dared to suggest reform, democratic rights and change. Responding characteristically to his critics, he spoke of the need for a kinder, gentler Islam. Women and young voters had responded with overwhelming support. In Tehran’s bazaars, this refreshing moderate who promised to restore a “civil society with rule of law” was jokingly being called “Ayatollah Gorbachev.”