by Terence Ward
In contrast, the thought of returning to Iran was profoundly appealing. Something there had snapped. Globalization had received a swift and unexpected kick in the teeth. America’s cultural icons of McDonald’s, Nike, MTV, pierced eyebrows and Planet Hollywood had been mercifully kept at bay.
* * *
Careening in Rich’s van along the palm-lined corniche, we circled the Gulf waters that shimmered silver in blinding sunlight. Blasts of thick humidity poured through our windows. Strolling Bahrainis flowed by in white gowns with soft cotton headscarves and black camel-hair double coils that held their headgear in place.
Rich told us he planned to spirit us across the bridge to his home in Saudi Arabia, where our eager parents had arrived. Apparently, Mother was limping from a recent fall and a sprained ankle that would have kept any of us bedridden. Dad was in marvelous shape for seventy-three.
Observing my brothers one by one, I realized how much had changed since our Tehrani childhood days. Chris’s blond curls had straightened, Kevin’s black mane of hair had disappeared, as had Richard’s.
Chris stood taller than all of us, athletically slender at six feet. His artistic hands—which once gathered talismans, stones and shells into an aquamarine jar he called his “magic box”—now shaped elaborate sculptures, pouring molten bronze into life-size white plaster casts. In his Philadelphia studio, he endowed his figures with a viridian patina similar to that of the ancient Luristan Bronzes of Iran. His creative gift mystified my parents. “He walks lightly,” Dad once told me. “He touches the earth every fourth step.”
Kevin, on the other hand, enjoyed playing two roles: “brother number one” and Ivy League literary aesthete, quoting T. S. Eliot at the drop of a hat. After graduating from law school he turned his back on the profession, confessing to my father that he found all lawyers to be insufferable masochists. He wrote a satirical work called Not the Official Lawyers’ Handbook while navigating the currents of New York’s nightlife, sporting black tie, tennis sneakers and a faded Hudson Riverkeeper baseball cap. A nonconformist and self-styled futurist, he now crafted speeches for high-tech CEOs and created gargantuan productions for corporate powwows. He did his best work while seated in a boat off Shelter Island, where J. M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan. Once a week, Kevin enthusiastically commuted to Cambridge to teach a course in American literature at Harvard.
Chris and Kevin had carved out their own worlds in America. But at nightfall, when they herded their little children off to sleep, the echo of a familiar Persian voice rose in their bedtime stories. In this way, verbal heirlooms—like Hassan’s tale of Solomon’s ring—were gently passed on to a new generation.
The Bahrain causeway, a seven-mile bridge constructed over salt flats and the Gulf’s choppy waves, presented a cultural shock. Saudi Arabia’s Islamic restrictions were more severe than anywhere else in the world, except perhaps in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Women, always covered, were not allowed to drive, work or vote. But there was folly. Saudis still joked about the original design plans for the causeway that included an arrow-straight bridge crossing to the “pleasure island” of Bahrain, where wet bars served cocktails and draft beer while Gulf Air stewardesses tanned their pale English skin by luxurious hotel swimming pools. Coming back, the joke went, the engineers’ design had the road weaving left and right to compensate for all the drunk Saudi drivers returning to teetotal Arabia.
At the wheel, Richard, with his close-cropped hair and round spectacles, radiated an unruffled, Indiana Jones air. He was an explorer at heart. Since childhood, nature’s wild grandeur had pulled him by the collar. When he was in a geology program at Stanford, he once trekked for months in Nevada’s remote Snake Range to map unknown lands. From there, a package arrived at my door. In it I found the skin of a five-foot rattlesnake on which Rich had scrawled: “They say these mountains are just outside of God’s country—California. But if you only knew what my eyes have seen. Whispering crocus, alpine poppies, hidden springs, beguiling ravines, screeching F-16s overhead, deadly rattlers underfoot. This one is special. It almost got me.”
Richard’s job in Saudi Arabia seemed to be a twist of destiny. Aquifers trapped underground in geologic folds had become his obsession. His environmental mission with Aramco centered on preserving the Saudis’ most precious patrimony: water.
With his wife, Ellen, and their two young boys—both born in Saudi Arabian hospitals like their daddy—he lived in Dhahran, an American-designed town that had a golf course, a bowling alley, baseball fields, a library, a movie theater, a snack bar, a gymnasium, an elementary school and ranch-style homes. It was a strange oasis. To enter and exit, one had to cross military-style security checkpoints.
As we pulled into Richard’s driveway, I saw my brother’s eccentric imprint on Dhahran’s Levittown monotony: on his garage door was painted a giant replica of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. Inside, among hand-carved Rajput columns, brass doors and inlaid tables, we all sat down for our last supper.
Intrepid Ellen laid out our lavish feast while their two young boys hovered close to their father. Little Brendan and Ames knew they would not be coming on the trip. Over the meal, we caught up on old family news and retold stories that brought gales of laughter and tears to our eyes. Then we turned to the business at hand.
Tomorrow at dawn we would leave. We discussed our itinerary, which Richard had researched and painstakingly arranged. Instead of flying to Tehran, we would go in through the back door, landing in the southern city of Shiraz. From there, we would strike north, past Persepolis and the Zoroastrian city of Yazd to the edge of the Dasht-e Kavir Desert. According to my map, a village spelled “Tudeshk”—we hoped Hassan’s birthplace—lay in the mountains east of Isfahan.
Over dinner, our old friend Tom Owen, whose monthlong Land Rover treks into the lifeless Rub al-Khali desert were legendary, rose with a toast. “To the Ward clan.” He raised his glass of homemade red wine. “To your audacious leap into the familiar and the unknown.”
“This,” Chris said, sliding our itinerary across the table to Tom, “is so you’ll know where to begin your search in case we don’t return.” Then he asked about survival tips.
“Each person keep a separate stash of money,” Tom counseled, “in case you need to bargain yourself out of tight situations.”
Over dessert, Chris read slowly from the Lonely Planet guide. “Before entering Iran, memorize the address and phone number of your diplomatic mission in Tehran.” He paused. “The right of a foreigner to telephone his consul is not always observed, so insist before being whisked away.”
Tom rose to leave with a time-honored Arabic farewell: “Allah maakum. God be with you.”
Chris circled the telephone number of the Irish embassy. “Now, everybody listen carefully to this number …” Three of us carried Irish as well as American passports.
* * *
At one-thirty in the morning, the warmth of our reunion gave way to the cool desert breeze. We had four hours left to sleep. Unearthly howls of cats fighting outside my window fueled my insomnia. Fresh doubts surfaced about the sanity of this whole affair. Were we placing ourselves in jeopardy for a dream that no longer existed? Where could Hassan be? Could he sense our homecoming, I wondered. Richard had told us the reward bounty of $1,000 that he had offered to several travel agencies was still uncollected.
Lights of a yellow gas flare at a nearby refinery danced on the bedroom’s white lace curtains above my pillow. Crickets’ chatter pulsed in the shadows. As I drifted off to sleep, images of the flare sparked in my mind. I saw Hassan’s face lit by a long row of crackling bonfires. He started to run. Taking a deep breath, I followed his footsteps. My brothers cried out behind me. Over the first flame I leapt. Sweating and panting, blinded by the light, I ran through the night chasing his vanishing heels.
* * *
Early the next morning, I awoke to Chris’s loud complaints about the books I had packed for the trip. He was emphatic, his voice trembling from fray
ed nerves.
“Are you trying to get us arrested?” He held up Sandra Mackey’s The Iranians as evidence.
“Not at all.”
“Good, then you’re leaving it here.”
“But when I travel to Italy, I bring Barzini’s The Italians.”
“We’re not going to Italy.”
He tossed it on the table. I showed him the cover.
“Look, women in chadors,” I said.
“But there’s the Shah with his crown.”
“You can barely see him.”
“Go ahead, put all our lives at risk.” Opening my suitcase, he peered at the rest of my movable library. “What else do you have in there?”
One by one he inspected: Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Borges’s Labyrinths, Marco Polo’s Travels, Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana, Freya Stark’s Valleys of the Assassins.
“And this?” Chris held it aloft. “When was it written?”
“Are you bothered by the word ‘assassins’?”
“Before or after the Revolution?”
“It’s a classic.”
“Answer my question.”
“In the thirties. I told you, it’s a classic. Calm down, Chris.”
“Look, you don’t have kids, but I do. And you’re trying to smuggle in these hand grenades.” His pleading eyes radiated only grim fear. “Why don’t you bring the whole damn Salman Rushdie collection while you’re at it!”
* * *
The Iranian embassy in Bahrain is tucked away in Fashaneya, a shabby suburb of Manama strewn with run-down villas, blinding white sand, paved roads that abruptly end and street signs that have nothing to do with the official government map that Richard was using to navigate. We arrived late. A lonely guardhouse was abandoned. As we entered the embassy, the sound of overworked air conditioners drowned out conversation. We handed over our passports and sat down to wait. A coffee table offered promising travel brochures of Isfahan—the turquoise city of Shah Abbas—and of jungle-lush Mazandaran, a province on the Caspian Sea.
A book lay in full view: The Imposed War, an official pictorial record of the Iran-Iraq War. Imposed? Yes, it was the Iraqis who had started the war. Saddam Hussein attacked across the Shatt al-Arab, annihilating the oil cities of Khorramshahr and Abadan, crippling Iran’s economy and launching a killing rage. The photos told the gruesome story. Unspeakable slaughter in Mesopotamian marches matched the horror in the fields of Flanders eighty years before—blinded men, severed torsos, trenches full of contorted dead. I closed the book quickly, thinking about Hassan and his two sons.
The Iranian consul general’s office was businesslike and roomy. The consul greeted us graciously, in the no-nonsense revolutionary attire of a white shirt without a tie and a three-day beard that partially hid his dimpled chin. We chatted, his voice deep and formal. Ayatollah Khomeini’s stern face stared down at us with eyes like black olives. After our ceremonial cup of tea, an ink-coated stamp pressed down on our passport pages. He signed all six visas with a flourish, smiled and offered us good wishes in Persian. It was done.
We drove off in disbelief. A Saudi Shia friend, Abdullah, seeing us off at the airport, dismissed the antipathy between Arabs and Iranians. “We are all Shia here in eastern Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. We need ten more years to catch up. We can learn from the Iranians. They have a civilized ancient culture like Egypt.”
Few Westerners know that all the great oilfields of Saudi Arabia lie beneath historically Shia land. A dream for any Saudi Shia is to reach the Iranian holy cities of Mashhad and Qom, the Vatican of the faithful.
“They’ll like you because you have respect,” Abdullah said.
“Insha’allah, God willing,” I replied.
Armed with hollow bravado, residual fears and my mother’s wheelchair, we joined other pilgrims, mostly Arabian Shia traveling to the holy sites. Judging from our half-empty Iran Air 727, we seemed to be the only Westerners on board. The plane cruised above the Persian Gulf, home of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, and flew over a phalanx of American warships, plying the iron-gray waters like a sleek school of sharks.
To my left, Richard began chanting his special “get out of jail” mantra quietly to himself: “Bebakhsheed, nemidonam, man kami divaneh hastam. I’m sorry, I don’t know, I’m a little crazy.”
Recent reports in the Gulf press were ominous. The sudden jailing of the popular mayor of Tehran, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, on trumped-up corruption charges signaled another sinister offensive from hard-liners. Moderate technocrats were “on the run.” My mother quizzed a stylish Iranian businessman from Hamburg, Germany, who was returning for a visit. Recent political events were the subject. Karbaschi, accused of embezzlement, was a rising star in the reform coalition and one of the brains behind President Khatami’s surprise 1997 election victory, which upset the conservatives no end. Always probing for controversy, my mother asked her usual incendiary questions.
“He’s such a wonderful man, Karbaschi.”
“Yes, madam, he’s done many good things.”
“So why in heaven’s name is he in jail?”
“Only Allah knows.”
“But Mr. Karbaschi is such a vital leader for the country.”
“But things change.”
“So why won’t the mullahs leave him alone?”
“Well, maybe he’s guilty,” he answered, looking over his shoulder.
“Oh, come on now.”
“Some people know much more about this than we do, madam.”
I noticed Chris’s flurry of elbow pokes had failed to stop her. Ignoring him, Mom kept chattering away about the mayor, the mullahs, Khatami, and the ruling right wing. Sliding into the seat directly behind the businessman was a suspicious-looking fellow with the same three-day beard as the Iranian consul in Bahrain. He leaned forward to listen.
“No more politics, please,” Mom’s conversation partner pleaded, waving her off. He slithered over to the far window.
“We’re surrounded,” said my father.
“Now, will you please shut up, Mom, and put on your headscarf,” muttered Chris.
“But, dear, it’s too hot.”
“I don’t care,” said Chris.
“You really mustn’t worry so much, boys.”
My father groaned. “Can’t we change the subject?”
Kevin closed his eyes and began reciting Yeats’s prophetic poem “The Second Coming” as the airplane’s wings dipped one last time over the bleak Zagros Range on its descent toward the greening Fars plateau and the Persian heartland.
“ ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world … and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’ ”
We sipped our warm mint tea. The onboard snacks had included pistachio nuts, a yellow apple, peach halves and a violet box in which two Persian winged lions held a chocolate wafer. Curious, I thought, that these pre-Islamic images survived. Even Darius the Great’s “heathen” winged griffin still reigned as the Iran Air mascot, not the newer calligraphy of Allah al-Akbar, God is great. A grape juice container had a label that read, “Don’t stare at me, drink me.” I obeyed.
When the wheels touched ground with a violent skid, Kevin was voicing the last stanza.
“ ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards …’ ”
The engines roared, drowning him out. We had landed in Shiraz.
Looking over at me, Chris sighed. “Getting through customs will be a highlight of our trip.”
I took stock of our contraband: my books, Richard’s vitamin pills, my forty rolls of film and telephoto lens, a tape recorder with ten cassettes, New York Times articles, Herald Tribune editorials, and my mother’s ever-questioning curiosity. Her wheelchair was stuffed with dollar bills. I hoped for mercy.
* * *
Taxiing to the terminal, we were all visibly nervous, but clearly not alone. Every passenger on the plane looked equally skittish, filled with his own private trepidation. Soon we would be confronted by our first Revolutionary Guards and customs officials. What reception awaited us? Would books and papers be confiscated? Would we be followed?
The battered airport terminal spoke silently of past Iraqi bombing raids; the chipped concrete and faded paint were signs of neglect and an impoverished economy.
All those anxious feelings melted with our first steps off the plane. My mother gazed up at the sky and filled her lungs with a gasp of crisp air. Passing clouds seemed so close. Familiar smells, distinct and faint, dislodged childhood memories. An immediate feeling of home washed over us. A warm and ancient welcome was in the air.
At passport control I solemnly pushed my mother’s wheelchair. She smiled at the bearded military guards. They showed pity. At customs, no search took place. We walked straight through. Chris, expecting the worst, stood frozen in disbelief until I pulled his arm. Then, grinning splendidly, he grabbed my bag of contraband and we wheeled past the armed soldiers.
At the doorway, we were greeted gravely by Vazgin, a bespectacled Armenian who bore all the attributes of Inspector Clouseau or a low-level spy. He asked to be called Vaz and said he had been assigned to join us by our travel agency. There was no room for protest: it was regulation, he told us in English; all Americans had to be accompanied twenty-four hours a day.
Stepping outside, I stood overwhelmed. Luminous sunlight reflected off the surrounding Zagros peaks under the immense sky. I could taste the altitude. It colored every sense. Floating a mile above sea level, I felt featherweight. There was a lightness of being, as if gravity’s hold had just slipped.