by Terence Ward
If Ping-Pong diplomacy helped normalize relations with China, could soccer and wrestling do the same for Iran? Iranian hard-liners were concerned, and for good reason. Thunderous applause and chants of “USA! USA!” echoed when American and Iranian wrestlers hugged each other after a friendly match in Tehran a month later, in February. The recently announced World Cup draw was nothing less than miraculous. Iran was scheduled to play Team USA in Lyon, France, on June 21.
* * *
A black-and-white photograph had haunted my family for years. It was a weathered picture sitting on my mother’s desk in Berkeley in which Hassan, the proud father, stood with his young wife and his mother-in-law. Both women wore scarves. Fatimeh peered sheepishly with large brown eyes through her horn-rimmed glasses. Khorshid held baby Ali, who grinned under his pointed elfish cap with drooping earflaps. Hassan beamed handsomely, and his smile bore a half-moon of white teeth under his mustache, aquiline nose and glistening eyes. Four faces shining in the living room as silent reminders.
Late at night, during spirited reunions, when our talk circled back to earlier days in Iran, my mother would always raise the same ghostly question left hanging in suspended conversation: “I wonder what happened to Hassan. I just pray he’s all right, that his family is safe.” My mother, especially, was tortured by a lingering guilt about not having done enough for the Ghasemis. Frustration and worry would swell in her eyes.
“But what more could we have done?” my father would ask.
My father’s Irishness weighed in heavily whenever my family spoke of those halcyon days. In the wee hours of the morning, after we had conversed our way back through Persian time with bittersweet memories of cherry orchards, the snow-crested Elburz and Hassan’s magical fables, my father would repeat Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Celtic adage to remind us, “It’s no use being Irish unless you know the world is eventually going to break your heart.”
* * *
“Nostalgia” comes from the Greek word nostos, to return home, and algos, pain. The ancients used the term to describe the state of mind of Hellenic soldiers of Alexander the Great garrisoned in far-off Asia. There was only one effective cure: the journey back. André Aciman, the New York–based writer, haunted by his native Alexandria, described his sense of separation in his essay “Shadow Cities”: “An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.”
My parents’ exuberant voices were firm and fearless when I first asked them about the journey back. Playing the seer, my father chose the departure date that he felt symbolically mirrored our quest: April Fools’ Day 1998. I was elated, but also troubled.
Hassan and Fatimeh Ghasemi in Tehran, 1963. Their son, Ali, smiles from the arms of his grandmother Khorshid, Fatimeh's mother. With only this photograph in hand, the Ward family returned to Iran in 1998 to begin their search.
I wondered how our search would alter our cherished memories and our nostalgia for Hassan’s “Mullah Nasruddin” tales, mint tea, buttered steamed rice and glistening eyes. Any journey of return runs that risk. Odysseus’s crew paid dearly for their homing instinct: only the captain survived. Peering through smoked glass blurs memories. Aging mirrors may reveal strangers. And what if the past were to be erased, finally and completely, no longer there? What then? Were we doomed to Chekhovian dreams of lost cherry orchards?
After the Islamic Revolution, questions haunted my family for years. Did Hassan pay a terrible price before a judge? Had he become embittered, betraying our memory, denouncing my family as crude imperialists? They were unresolved questions, a haunting abandonment, unfinished business. My mother’s worries about Hassan surfaced whenever the word “Iran” was mentioned, while in my brothers’ homes, Hassan’s storytelling antics were carefully being passed on from one generation of wide-eyed children to the next.
But what of Hassan himself? Had he survived? After two decades, the Islamic Republic’s impassable gate, long padlocked, was finally creaking open. The answer lay inside.
* * *
Yes, the time for our journey back had finally come. To arrive at his doorstep we would need Irish luck and Allah’s blessing. In the cold light of day and on close study, our search for Hassan seemed improbable. Only two clues existed. The first one was that faded black-and-white photograph taken in the spring of 1963. The second lay embedded in my mother’s memory: the name of his ancestral village, “Toodesht.” Our only hope was that he had settled there. But the multiple pronunciations of the town were daunting. Over the years, her uncertainty bred extraordinary mutations.
At dusk, as the thick San Francisco fog crept up the Berkeley hills to engulf my parents’ redwood observation deck on Grizzly Peak, my mother ran up and down her scales of names, hoping to catch the true melody of Hassan’s mysterious village, wedged somewhere in the mountains between Isfahan and Nain. It was a recurring theme, a broken record that always ended with gasps and laughs, exasperation and hopelessness.
“Think back, Mom. Now, what do you remember Hassan telling you before we left Tehran?”
“That one day he’d return to his village.”
“And it was?”
“Toodesht.”
“You’re certain?”
“Absolutely. Well, just a minute …”
“Yes?”
“Maybe it was … Tadoosht. Or … Qashtood.”
“Sure?”
“Toosquash!”
My father summed it up: “No Ithaca this, I assure you.”
No matter how upbeat we all tried to be, we were certain that Hassan hid behind clouded mists, never to be seen again.
* * *
U.S. State Department officials mouthed predictable doom. My brother Chris voiced his fears repeatedly. No visas could be obtained in America. Kevin remained skeptical. Only my parents and Richard were defiantly thrilled. When a Foreign Service officer told me, “Americans are strongly advised not to visit the country,” I countered by saying, “A moderate mullah has been elected president.” Unfazed, he snapped, “And public floggings have tapered off.”
Chris skittishly pleaded with my father over the phone, “You know, I’ve got two sons to worry about.”
Dad cut him short. “So what? I’ve got four and I’m going.”
The Ward clan’s view about the journey remained divided. It was decided that the wives would not join us, which suited them just fine. Terror and dire omens underlined our phone conversations. Friends kindly offered unsolicited advice, showering us with warnings. “It’ll be hot, dry, dangerous, dirty and scary. There’s no embassy to protect you, you’ll be taken hostage, your books will be confiscated. You’ll be confiscated. And your parents, how can you put them at such risk?” One dapper bicoastal socialite reminded me darkly, “There’ll be no fashion.”
I asked my father, “What’s the dress code?”
“Dress for a funeral,” he advised.
So, like fashionable New Yorkers, we packed black.
* * *
Riffling through my files, I found a faded piece of paper. At the top was written: “Useful Arabic Translations.” During the height of Lebanon’s civil war, in the early 1980s, it was slipped to me before I boarded a flight for Beirut. I realized only later that this sorry attempt at Arabic was gibberish mixed with a few Persian words. I faxed it to Chris and Kevin:
Meternier ghermez ahliah, Gharban.
The red blindfold would be lovely, Excellency.
Balli, balli, balli.
Whatever you say.
Shomah fuhr tommeh geh gofteh bande.
I agree with everything you have ever said or thought of in your life.
Akbar kheli kili hfir lotfan.
Thank you very much for showing me your marvelous gun.
Khrei, japahah mansh va fayeti amrikany.
I will tell you the names of many American spies traveling as reporters.
Suro arraigh davatsaman mano sepahen-hasi.
It is exceptionally kind of you to allow
me to travel in the trunk of your car.
My brothers faxed back terse responses. They were not amused.
* * *
For advice, I browsed through Lonely Planet’s Iran: A Travel Survival Kit, the only serious guidebook published since the Revolution. The author, David St. Vincent, a tenacious English chap, was not one to flinch. All his tips came from firsthand experience. During one of his four trips, he was dragged before a revolutionary court on the charge of “plotting to import Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.” Wedged between the exhaustive lists of hotels and monuments lay a few unorthodox words of counsel: “Never underestimate the ruthlessness or strength of the Komiteh and its network of informers … Don’t be the first to discuss politics with a stranger.” He described the Revolutionary Guards as “a combination of Spanish Inquisition and the Gestapo.” About photography and cameras he offered further advice: “There’s still a certain amount of paranoia about foreign spies, and Iranians can get very suspicious of Westerners with cameras.” He suggested getting OKs before shooting, “if you don’t want to risk having your camera smashed or stones thrown at you—don’t think it doesn’t happen.” I especially appreciated his culturally sensitive how-to advice in dealing with authorities: “Answer your interrogators in such a way that their curiosity is satisfied, their suspicion allayed and their self-importance flattered.” And, most of all, his upbeat succinct reminder: “You have been warned.”
Another young writer, William Dalrymple, had also passed through Iran recently. In his book In Xanadu: A Quest, he delivered a witty and learned trans-Asia travel account, tracing Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century footsteps to the East, from Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre to Kublai Khan’s mythical palace in Mongolia. He was stunned by contemporary Iran: “Mullahs speeding past in their sporty Renault 5s. Iran was proving far more complex than we had expected. A religious revolution in the twentieth century was a unique occurrence, resulting in the first theocracy since the fall of the Dalai Lama in Tibet.”
It was so true. Some historians suggest that the Iranian Revolution stands as the most original of this century. Only Iran’s revolution defied Marxist ideology. Dalrymple explained: “Yet this revolution took place not in a poor banana republic, but in the richest and most sophisticated country in Asia. A group of clerics was trying to graft a mediaeval system of government and a premediaeval way of thinking upon a country with a prosperous modern economy and a large and highly educated middle class.”
* * *
My Florentine wife, Idanna, told me of her ancestral city and a fiery Dominican priest named Savonarola. When Lorenzo the Magnificent ruled Florence during the Renaissance, a brilliant and charismatic friar spoke audaciously from the pulpit of San Marco, railing against the city’s decadence. With Lorenzo’s death in 1493, Florence’s popolo sent the entire Medici clan fleeing for their lives. The new Repubblica Fiorentina was born. Its guide was a visionary monk.
Quickly, the world’s wealthiest and most cultivated city reinvented itself. Florence found renewed faith. Humility was in order. Dark shrouds and capes became de rigueur. Church attendance overflowed. In the Piazza della Signoria, the political heart of the city, a symbolic public repentance of sins took place. All frivolous, beautiful things—makeup, pendants, embroidery, mirrors—were gathered in a monstrous pile and set to the torch. It all went up in smoke. Savonarola, with his “bonfire of the vanities,” openly challenged the moral authority of and even dared to reject the infamous Borgia pope Alexander VI.
Unfortunately for Savonarola, his prophetic vision could not replenish the gold in Florence’s dwindling coffers. Popular support eventually waned. His fate and that of the republic were tied to a promise of new prosperity that never came to pass. Artisans in Lyon and Amsterdam made lovely silks and textiles, sapping sales of Florence’s traditional money spinners. Trade routes east to the Indies and west to New Spain opened new markets in Lisbon and Seville that bypassed Italy altogether. It all ended abruptly when the pope struck back, excommunicating the charismatic priest and his noble city. Enemies rallied, and Savonarola was burned at the stake after only four years of rule. However, the republic survived.
Yet today his theocratic guidance and inspiration is greatly admired by many Florentines. Idanna reminded me that, after all, it was the republic. This was the epic moment when Michelangelo and Leonardo faced off in the Palazzo Vecchio’s Hall of the Five Hundred, composing frescoes of war battles. Florentines called their city the New Athens. There was no Machiavellian prince. Elected councils served. The Medicis, she said, had been cast out like the Shah.
But was theocratic Iran really similar? Historians and journalists had drawn parallels, comparing Khomeini’s rise with that of Savonarola. But unlike Savonarola, twenty years after the Revolution, the clergy in Iran still held a firm grip on power, society and the economy.
* * *
It was late when the phone rang in my apartment in Manhattan. I recognized the singular voice of Amir, my Iranian friend, who wailed loudly.
“Listen to your friend, baba. You’re crazy to go to Iran.”
“You think so?”
“I know so! Your sweet madar, Donna, and dear pedar, Patrick, what if something happens and they never get out?”
“There won’t be any—”
“Police! I know they will catch you at Tehran Airport.”
“But we fly to Shiraz.”
“Even worse.”
“Then we drive north.”
“Followed by secret police.”
“Come on, Amir.”
“You come on, baba. First American family to go back, and you think you only will hear big salaams, drinking tea, with big welcome?”
“We’re also Irish, remember?”
“Haaah! Think again.”
“Chris is very afraid,” I said.
“He’s smart, your brother. Not like the rest of your family, who won’t listen. Baba, promise me one thing. Don’t ask anyone about Hassan.”
“I promise.”
“Tell no one. Khub, I go now.”
“Goodbye, Amir.”
“Khoda hafez. May God protect you.”
“Khoda hafez, my friend.”
Few friends viewed our family journey as anything less than raving mad. Amir was no different. Since the Revolution, he had not set foot on the soil of his homeland.
* * *
After hearing my parents’ irreversible decision to make the trip, fence-sitting Kevin was finally pressured into saying yes. A week later, ever-wary Chris also reluctantly agreed. The entire family planned to converge on the humid island sheikdom of Bahrain, just fifty miles east of Richard’s home in Saudi Arabia. There we would secure our all-important visas.
Two days before leaving New York, I found a detailed atlas of Iran, printed in the Persian script that resembles Arabic. At a friend’s apartment on 44th Street, near Times Square, I leafed through the pages, searching the index for phonetic sounds, beginning with t, then oo, then d, and suddenly my eyes rested on a village: T-u-d-e-sh-k. Was this it?
I double-checked the lettering and stared at the map in disbelief. There it was, our needle in a haystack, a tiny speck hidden in a central mountain range bordering the Dasht-e Kavir Desert! Perhaps my mother had been right all these years. Tudeshk.
* * *
To be scrambling after this forgotten village in a distant Asian desert in hopes of finding our long-lost friend seemed unconventional, to say the least. Then again, we had never followed a predictable life, one cast in the classic American mold. In fact, at times it seemed as if our life in Iran had been scripted by an unseen hand.
My father, Patrick, first saw the writing on the wall in Manhattan in 1950. Young GIs were bleeding in deep Korean snow. The question of “Who lost China?” raged in the Potomac’s corridors of power. President Harry Truman promised a new hydrogen bomb. A blacklist was brewing. Bizarre new expressions were creeping into the political lexicon: “premature antifascist,” �
�radical New Dealer,” “social activist.” And, of course, there was “fellow traveler.”
The words always had an allure for me when I was a child. A fellow traveler was clearly someone to confide in, swap stories with, a partner in adventure. It sounded endearing, something I would have liked to be called, until my father explained its Cold War meaning. “Fellow travelers,” he said, “were once thought to be special. They didn’t carry Communist Party cards because they were the true subversives, and worked undercover. Aiding and abetting. Puppet masters behind the scenes. Always seen in curious places, much more dangerous.”
In 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee had already launched their conspiracy crusade. Fires of inquisition burned; their hearing room had become a celebrity circus. Their tactic: naming names. Anyone who had questioned the system in the thirties and forties was at risk. Intellectuals, writers, actors, activists, labor organizers, all became targets.
My father would be one of them. As a natural rebel with a flame of red hair, he embodied an exotic mix: a Yeatsian romantic son of Irish parents, a passionate socialist and a natural ham with dreams of acting on Broadway.