by Terence Ward
At sunset, dark clouds gathered overhead and a soft rain began to fall. We looked up from the glazed courtyard at the blackened sky. Chris pointed out a double rainbow arcing over the dome. Color prisms cast by the dying sun were even more daring than the florid tiles that encircled us. We took it as an omen.
* * *
That evening, our hotel manager assured us that we should be content here at the Apadana, a low-budget rival of the five-star Homa across town. The name Homa had been borrowed from the Persian winged griffin that once sat atop Persepolis’s columns and still graced the tails of Iran Air planes as an obedient mascot. But I wanted to believe that the name might have been a corruption of haoma, the euphoria-inducing beverage of choice for Zoroastrian priests. Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, modeled his narcotic soma after the ancient recipe. I was imagining a hotel chain with a similar theme—the Guinness Magic in Lagos, the Vin Santo in Florence, the Mouthful of Qat in Sana’a—when the manager raised other concerns with my father.
“Mr. Ward, excuse me, the other hotel where you were going to stay, please, is not good.”
“Why? It has five stars.”
“In lobby, they are hanging very big sign. It is in English. ‘Down to Amrika.’ ”
“I see.”
“But under these English words it is also written in Farsi, ‘Marg bar Amrika.’ ”
“Doesn’t that mean ‘Death to America’?”
“Yes. They are hoping if guests can’t read Farsi, then it won’t hurt feelings so much.”
“So tell me, just what does it say at the Homa Hotel? ‘Down to’ or ‘Death to’?”
“Both. Is better you stay here instead.” The manager winked at Dad. “We are private hotel, not government. Much more friendly. No politics.”
I admired his ingenious marketing. Not missing a beat, my father shot back, “Well, if it says ‘Down with America,’ we’ll turn the other cheek.” He flashed a mischievous grin.
In the lobby, I noticed a group of five Italian ladies wrapped in brightly colored headscarves. If this were a movie set, Fellini would have had his camera rolling. A guide held their attention with his story.
“During Moharram, I was with Italians who walked by a holy procession and they wanted to do filming with their cameras. And there was a very good-looking girl among the group.”
The ladies giggled.
“Her hair was uncovered, and one religious guy saw her from the crowd and came up to her. Of course, she was very afraid. She expected him to be angry. But then he told her, ‘You are sooo cute, I just like to kiss you.’ ”
“Ah sì,” the ladies burst out. “Che carino!”
* * *
More than a century ago, Victorian travelers passed freely through Shiraz. Edward Granville Browne, in his book A Year Amongst the Persians, found the inhabitants “amongst all the Persians, the most subtle, the most ingenious, the most vivacious, even as their speech is to this day the purest and most melodious.” Harry de Windt also described the city, in A Ride to India: “Shiraz has been called the ‘Paris of Persia,’ perhaps from the beauty and coquetry of its women.” And in 1870, H. M. Stanley, the controversial explorer who searched for Livingstone along the Congo, noted, “The Shirazi are a people whose thoughts dwell upon passionate love, and shades of trees. They are a people of sleepy eyes.”
* * *
It took me a long time to fall asleep that first night; an eerie tingling of pleasure came over me. It felt surreal to be back, to hear Farsi being spoken, to hear the wind rustling through the trees’ new leaves outside my window, to see a huddled figure walking home under the lamplight, and to think that somewhere out there over the mountains, maybe, was Hassan. Richard, slumped over, had fallen asleep, leaving his reading light on. His face held a faint smile of contentment. I wanted to thank him for his brainstorm that brought us here. The youngest brother had made it all possible.
Breakfast offered flatbread, sour-cherry jam, butter, honey and yogurt spooned into bowls. Buckets of tea were poured. My father spoke of a rooster’s call that lifted him vertically out of bed. My mother had woken to the smells of fresh-baked bread. Chris’s eyes had opened to cries of “Goal!” from a nearby schoolyard. “I felt a cold sweat. It got my blood running,” he said. A semiprofessional goalie, Chris cringed whenever he heard roars of a scored goal. Kevin had dreamt of our old garden in Tehran.
Suddenly the door was flung open and Vaz entered the fluorescent-lit room. He sat down and poured tea.
“And so, who is this Hassan?” he demanded with his peculiar upturned eyebrow.
Silence. He had been listening in on our conversation.
“A school friend.”
“Ahhh.” His eyes rolled.
Slowly, we got up from the table one by one.
As we walked outside, my father warned us quietly. Vaz, he said, was the perfect spy for such a low-level training mission.
“But there’s no way around it,” Richard said. “Foreign Ministry rules. Unfortunately, we’re stuck with him.”
“Just watch what you say,” said Dad.
I looked back. Vaz was still eating. Pointy chin, sunken cheeks, pinched nose and piercing eyes behind his John Lennon glasses, this Armenian was a mystery to me.
While we regrouped in the lobby, Vaz repeated his story about working in Toronto as a night cashier. He never got a promotion, so he returned to Iran and adopted a new work ethic. “When I got back to Tehran, I used to give it one hundred and ten percent, but they didn’t care. Actually, they want much less. Now I only give it twenty percent. Sometimes thirty.”
Perplexed and suspicious, he had developed an entangled survival strategy. Each day, he told me, was a new day. The truth was flexible. Whatever had been said could always be denied later. All his statements ended with “more or less.”
“Well, Vaz,” I said, “remember one thing. When it’s time to board the minivan, there’s only one truth. When it’s time to leave, we will leave, with or without you.”
* * *
That morning, with our fierce driver Nasrollah at the wheel, we drove through the Allah al-Akbar gate going north out of Shiraz. An hour later, over tawny rolling hills, we reached the pine forest that blankets the entrance to Persepolis. Tucked into the vertical folds of Kuh-e Rahmat, the Mountain of Mercy, rose the mighty creation of Darius.
In biblical and Greek texts there is no mention of Persepolis. But that’s understandable. It was never a city, only a ceremonial sacred site used once a year by Persian kings. However, Vita Sackville-West, of the Bloomsbury set, did jot down her first impressions: “The space, the sky, the hawks, the raised-up eminence of the terrace, the quality of the Persian light, all give to the great terrace a sort of springing airiness, a sort of treble, to which the massive structure of bastion and archways plays a corrective bass. It is only when you draw near that you realise how massive that structure really is.”
And huge it was. A shadow of its former glory, Persepolis rose fifty feet high on an immense limestone platform stretching about three hundred yards across. Towering over an evergreen pine forest—planted during the Shah’s day—the imposing vertical wall of blocks dwarfed a crowd standing underneath. Around the grand ceremonial double-ramped staircase clustered dozens of visiting schoolgirls clad in obligatory black, ready to begin their climb to the top. From below, I could see only a few slender coral-white pillars piercing the azure sky. My mother called it a colossal birthday cake, its columns rising like candles.
At first glimpse, it reminded me of Epidaurus, the great open-air theater in Peloponnesus, tucked into a similar encircling hill and chosen for its sweeping vista across a valley to the rising peaks in the north. But where Epidaurus was carved into a hillock, Persepolis boldly extended out from the Mountain of Mercy on a constructed stage that once supported the palaces of Darius and Xerxes, the royal harem, paradise gardens, baths, the imperial treasury and the grandiose Apadana Hall.
Giant hand-cut stones rivaled the wor
k of Inca master builders. Where Epidaurus is poetic, Persepolis is audacious, a daring feat of levitation, raising man above nature. And these days you ascended by climbing the staircase. Holding my mother’s arm, I followed the schoolgirls.
At the top, a small, lonely kiosk selling drinks appeared on the left, and I turned to face the Apadana Hall, one of the world’s great spaces in monumental architecture. As we passed through the Gate of All Nations, two Asian centaurs—mammoth curly-bearded faces on torsos of horses—stared down on us with Ozymandias’s gaze. When we turned around, my mother gasped as we looked back across the plain that spread to mountain-fringed horizons. We stood in silence. There were no surrounding walls, no defensive perimeters, no fortifications, no scent of fear. This palace was clearly designed to face the broad panorama of the Marv Dasht plain as a showcase for dazzling spectacles. The view was simply staggering.
I was wary of certain descriptions I had read: “Barren and dusty like all ruins.” “Abandoned, far from water, like petrified fossils.” “An insignificant echo.” “All destroyed.” “Imagination has to work in overdrive to populate the once powerful site.”
Robert Byron, in The Road to Oxiana, dismissed it all with a flick of the wrist, repelled by the gray stone that shone like an “aluminum saucepan.” Disillusioned, he particularly resented a German archaeologist named Herzberg, who ruled the ruins as if they were his fiefdom, offering visitors a booklet with “a code of academic malice compiled from Chicago.” These scholars, he wrote, struck a mood like “that of a critic at an exhibition.” Today, all foreign archaeologists have long since fled. Byron would have been pleased.
I realized that the best time to visit Persepolis is when the ancients did. Then it all makes sense. During Nowruz—at the birth of spring and the Persian New Year—the sprawling plain is streaked with young green wheat, the mountains flecked with wildflowers, crocuses, poppies and herbs. White-blossoming almond and pink-splotched cherry trees bud at this turn of the season. Rebirth and regeneration are all around. Life returns. The emerald vistas are vibrant and inviting.
The ceremonial site of Persepolis was chosen carefully, strategically placed in the Persian heartland between Ecbatana, the summer capital, and Susa, the winter capital. The surviving walls are incised with trees of life, the lotus and solar rosettes that represent fertility. Inscribed prayers welcome the Zoroastrian god, “Ahura Mazda, who has created this Earth, who has created Heaven, who has created man, who has created good things for man.” Built by Darius the Great in 500 B.C., Persepolis served as his empire’s pilgrimage abode during the sacred New Year festival.
* * *
Before us flowed a chatty gaggle of high school girls, picnicking families of three generations, curious university students led by professors, and rambunctious running children, their huffing grandmothers in hot pursuit. All flooded in as if pulled by ancient collective memory. This was the time, in spring, to pay tribute.
A dozen teenage girls swarmed the ruins ahead of us. I watched as some lingered to touch the stone faces of lost Achaemenian rulers carved in the amber-streaked blocks. One girl looked over her shoulder self-consciously before caressing a bas-relief of a soldier. She brushed some dust away. Suddenly she turned and caught me watching her moment of intimacy with a long-lost ancestor.
As I looked away, she rearranged her scarf and slipped behind a half-fallen column. A voice called out. One of her friends fiddled with an antiquated camera. Focused on her ancient world, she studied the composition and moved closer to the stone figures. Her finger snapped the shutter and she looked up with a smile. Wasn’t taking pictures of these ancestors haram, forbidden? For decades the Islamic Republic had denounced Iran’s pagan past with great fervor. Evidently, some faint music still resonated from these empty chambers.
* * *
During the golden age of the Persian Empire, lords and ladies, dignitaries and ambassadors gathered here in Persepolis from the far reaches of Asia, Africa and Europe to pay homage to the Achaemenian king of kings, Darius. From distant realms they hailed—the mighty Danube, the immortal Nile, the azure Aegean and the Indus—all loyal subjects spread across the oecemene, the one world.
Bas-reliefs carved in the grand stairway proclaimed the story of their arrival: Egyptians in horse caravans bulging with tribute, Greeks from Lydia proffering gold and precious gifts, Libyans leading antelopes, Babylo-nians with buffaloes loaded with embroidered garments, Indians offering weapons and mules, Ethiopians bearing ivory on horseback, Arabian camels laden with spices and incense, Afghans bringing sheep and textiles. I studied a repetitious frieze of a powerful lion sinking its teeth into the haunches of a bull. This announced the summer sun overcoming winter’s rain: the triumph of good over evil. Astronomers who re-create the skies of antiquity submit that on the vernal equinox at Persepolis, the constellation Leo was at its zenith while Taurus was setting.
Ascending the stairway, each delegation filed through the Gate of All Nations, and on their way to pay tribute to their great king, they passed near the Apadana Hall. It must have been an overwhelming sight to peer inside the largest auditorium ever built, able to accommodate ten thousand people, reserved for Median and Persian nobles attending the ceremonies. Proceeding farther, they entered the Hall of Hundred Columns advancing slowly with their gifts in dim light toward the golden throne, where the awaiting king sat in dazzling splendor amid dignitaries in brilliant robes while incense burned.
After each gift was suitably acknowledged by the king, it was transported to the treasury. At day’s end, as Darius walked back to his private palace, he could see thousands of smoking campfires on the plain below, stretching westward, keeping vigil until dawn.
When Pietro della Valle, an Italian merchant visiting Persepolis in 1621, walked the length of the Apadana Hall, he counted twenty-five columns still erect out of the original seventy-two. Today I counted thirteen. Earthquakes, fire and poor maintenance have left little standing.
* * *
In The Iranians, Sandra Mackey, with the guidance of her mentor, R. K. Ramazani, described the national character as “two warring psyches: one which evolved from the cosmopolitan, worldly culture of ancient Persia, the other from a conservative, emotion-laden Islam.”
While modern Iranians may patriotically admire their distant ancestors, they can’t escape their clergy’s judgment: simply pagans. Mullahs in Tehran speak in unison: those ancestors have no role in our lives. The ancients were born before the true revelation of God, before the prophet Mohammad. Nothing can change that fact. The stigma will stand forever. They are divorced from Islam. Today’s black-robed guardians of the faith have tried to sever the past cleanly. The sharp blade of heresy silenced protests.
It was no coincidence, then, that Hassan, Fatimeh and their children were all named after the Prophet’s sacred family, heroic figures of Shia Islam. Hassan’s older brother bore the name of the great martyr Hussein. None of their children carried the great “pagan” name of Cyrus or Darius. The ghosts of Persepolis, the sun-washed glories of historic Persia, rich and magical, were too removed from their world.
In the twentieth century, the pendulum of national identity swung between Islamic culture and Persian heritage. The short-lived Pahlavi dynasty of fifty years overreached for the Achaemenid Empire of Darius and Xerxes. The Shah resurrected and flaunted it at his own peril. Ayatollah Khomeini ended all that. The “hand of Islam” violently pushed the pendulum away from the royal heathen ancestors back to the holy heirs of the Prophet and the Koran.
* * *
Thank God for Akbar, the local guide from Shiraz who had joined us at Rich’s insistence. Iranian history was his passion, Persepolis his love. Where Avo was vacant, Akbar was urbane, well versed, spiritual. We followed him into Darius’s Hall of Hundred Columns.
“The darkest area was in here,” he explained. Not a single column was still standing. The sun shone brilliantly. We had to use our imaginations. “The king would sit on his throne exactly on this sp
ot.” He made a circle in the dirt with his foot.
“But why in darkness?” asked Rich.
“In Eastern countries, the leader must be surrounded by mystery. Even today, we have never seen the wife of Imam Khomeini in public. The same holds true for the wife of Ayatollah Khamenei, our Supreme Leader. We never get to see their families. Those in power don’t show themselves in their daily life at home. In our society, the leader acquires a charismatic holy identity, and people look up to him. If you obey me, they say, you obey Allah. So they keep their distance from the people, and their regular life is a secret.”
“No photographers, paparazzi?”
“No, absolutely not! For thousands of years, common people have been governed by one ruler, the king. Now we have President Khatami. Patiently we wait for decisions of change. For instance, according to the constitution, mayors should be elected by the people, but this has not happened and the mullahs still choose all city mayors. People want new political parties that will try to improve the economy. The majority of mullahs in government are conservative villagers who spend their time studying shari’a—Islamic law. What do they know about economics? To save the economy you need specialists, economists, businessmen. This is the main problem nowadays. Schools, hospitals, roads, electricity and all the great things that have been done for the people after the Revolution are no longer enough. One thing we all agree on, Iran must build a strong economy.”