by Terence Ward
While Akbar was holding forth, I spotted a young girl in a black chador spying on us from behind a column. Sensing her curiosity, I drifted in her direction, pretending to admire the view. As I walked past her, she called me.
Gate of All Nations, Persepolis.
“May I ask you a question, Mister? Why do you take pictures?” She pointed to my camera.
“Because we used to live in your country, and we want to remember this trip.”
“I know. I spoke to your parents before. Your mother told me she always wanted a girl.”
“Of course, because she has four boys.”
“I also want to have only boys.”
“Why do you say that?”
“A boy is free to come and go without this.” She touched her headdress. “Nothing is written in the Koran about wearing it. But tell me, what would you like to have, a boy or a girl?”
“Both.”
“I want only boys, so they can be free,” she repeated.
“Maybe change is coming,” I said, speaking about the new elections.
“No. This is all the mullahs have ever cared about. They just want to keep us covered.” She shook her head. Then a voice called out, “Maryam, Maryam.”
Her eyes darted around to see whether her teachers had noticed her talking with me.
“Please say my goodbye to your mother.” She smiled fleetingly, then quickly moved away.
My mother had been watching us, and walked over to me with her slight limp. She sighed. “Poor baby, she really feels trapped.”
I took my mother’s hand and we sat down on the base of a column that once helped support the gigantic ceiling of precious Lebanese cedar. Broken pillars were strewn everywhere around us in the sand. A small dust devil swirled up the hill.
* * *
Kevin asked the million-dollar question: “What about the burning of Persepolis?”
Akbar related his version of the holocaust, when the Macedonian victor feasted and flames leapt sixty feet to lick the cedar beams and silver roofs. “Alexander, when he invaded Persia, wanted to put his hand on the heart of the country.” Akbar raised his hand and made a fist. “He wanted to show the people his power. That’s why he set Persepolis on fire. This was the heart and soul of the Achaemenian Empire.”
In the autumn of 331 B.C., golden-maned Alexander the Great rode onto these plains at the head of his half-starved troops and saw the roofs shining brightly. Parmenio, an adviser, argued that if he burned it, he would be destroying his own heritage. Already his soldiers had sacked the capitals of Susa and Ecbatana, but Persepolis was the sacred city, the seat of holiness, as venerable as the Acropolis. Only ten miles away lay the cliff-face tombs of Xerxes and Darius at Naqsh-e Rustam. With half the empire still unconquered, Alexander could not leave Persepolis standing. Out of political necessity, this symbol was destroyed.
Patrick and Chris stand dwarfed before the 2,400-year-old tomb of the Achaemenian king Darius II.
The Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe described the tragic moment in Tamburlaine the Great:
Alexander, Thais and the Macedonian soldiers,
Reeling with their torches through the Persian palaces,
Wrecked to flaring fragments pillared Persepolis.
Richard offered a defense of Alexander, describing the classic version of the bacchanal. Feasting with wine in the banquet hall, the drunken Macedonian prince and his generals watched Thais, the dancing courtesan, cry out for vengeance with torch in hand. She set fire to the heavy gold lace curtains, “and, like another Helen,” Marlowe wrote, Thais “fired another Troy.”
“When Alexander sobered up and everything was burned to the ground, did he really weep?” Richard asked.
“Of course, he was angry,” Akbar replied. “When you study history in schoolbooks, you hear only great things about Alexander, but if you look at the other side, you’ll understand why in Iran we call him gostakh. The important thing about traveling is that you can see two sides of the coin.”
“Go-stakh,” I said, and wrote it down.
“It’s a word from Old Persian.”
“And it means?”
“Well … son of a bitch.”
* * *
I stopped with my mother at the tin-sided kiosk next to the former royal ladies’ quarters, now a museum. A line of boisterous girls climbed up the stone path of nearby Kuh-e Raghbat, the hill that led to honeycomb tombs carved into the rock face. I asked the fellow behind the counter if it was like this every day.
“Do many Iranians come here?”
“What do you think?” He smiled. “This is Takht-e Jamshid, the Throne of Jamshid.” He extended his hands, palms up, as if taking personal credit for the entire site. “Baba, the whole world must come, like you and Mother, to Takht-e Jamshid.”
That name struck me. I had forgotten it. Iranians have always called these ruins the Throne of Jamshid, not Persepolis. If Alexander’s hand erased the past, as Akbar said, then the past had been rewritten as myth. The mythmaker was Ferdowsi, the tenth-century bard whose epic poem, Shahnameh (The Story of Kings), is four times longer than the Iliad. With a stirring cadence, Ferdowsi charted Iran’s pre-Islamic history, from its origins to the last heroic Sassanian kings, who ruled before the Arab Muslim conquest. His Shahnameh is Iran’s national epic. Because of Ferdowsi’s mighty pen, for centuries Iranians have attributed Persepolis to Jamshid, a mythic king of whom there is no historical record. Jamshid, glorious son of Kayumars, Ferdowsi tells us, sat here on the Persian throne as master of the world and reigned for seven hundred years in a time when death was unknown.
* * *
Reclaiming the past can be tricky business. In 1925 Reza Shah proclaimed his dynasty Pahlavi, after the language of the Sassanian dynasty, which ruled before the birth of Allah’s prophet. Reza Shah Pahlavi’s heir, Mohammad Reza, eventually wrapped himself in the robes of Darius, resurrecting all things Achaemenian with glossy son et lumière productions and Hollywood-style sets of ancient Persia. His peacock throne glinted in the sun. The young Shah named his soldiers the Immortals, after the ten thousand elite warriors of Xerxes. Dreaming of his Persian Gulf empire, he financed a military second to none. Children’s names at birth reflected the new epoch: Cyrus, Darius, Jamshid and Manijeh. All goods that were modern and Western, coupled with the new identity of pre-Islamic Persia, were the rage. Like the Greeks who resurrected the Parthenon and Pericles for their new national identity, the Shah tried to do the same.
He knew the Persian mystique would play better for Western audiences than the Islamic identity. A Swiss schooling ensured that the Shah spoke French better than Persian—his grammatical errors in his mother tongue were embarrassing. Blindness reigned in his lavish Niavaran Palace. He and his advisers ignored the people’s Islamic faith; they denounced and persecuted mullahs and curtailed the mourning rituals centered on Hussein’s martyrdom during the month of Moharram. Iranians slowly learned to be ashamed of their own culture. Something was bound to snap.
* * *
Akbar led us to the edge of the broad terrace. We stared into the distance. He pointed at a huge collapsing tent structure in the pine forest below and spoke of a more recent gathering. In orotund, mocking tones he recounted the Shah’s 1971 extravaganza to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire. Champagne flowed freely, and the food was flown in by Air France from Maxim’s. Celebrities, royalty and jet-setters adorned the Cecil B. DeMille pageantry: nine kings, three ruling princesses, thirteen presidents, ten sheiks and two sultans flocked to Persepolis for the $200 million fete. An emperor was present: Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. Even Imelda Marcos came. Vice President Spiro Agnew represented the United States.
“Every Iranian knows that the Shah’s father was a corporal with a Cossack brigade, and the Pahlavi dynasty lasted only fifty years!” Akbar laughed. “So silly for Shah to speak of Cyrus as his blood ancestor.” He then described Empress Farah’s avant-garde artistic spectaculars in Shiraz and one infamou
s incident in 1975: “Imagine a French troupe of stark-naked performers romping in broad daylight through the Vakil bazaar!” Shirazis were scandalized. Royal credibility reached a new low.
Five years later, the Shah sat poolside in permanent exile in a Panamanian island hideaway, the guest of President Manuel Noriega. As the pineapple-faced general eyed the sad empress, her husband was lost in conspiratorial thought about the CIA, the MI6 and his demise. The Shah’s last ride was nearing its end. David Frost arrived for his long-awaited interview with the deposed monarch, accompanied by a young BBC reporter, Andrew Whitley, who had covered Iran during the Revolution. Recognizing him, the Shah became hysterical and shouted, “You are the reason why I lost my country!” He was convinced that even the BBC had a hand in plotting his overthrow.
At the same moment, halfway around the world, on the Marv Dasht plain of Persepolis, the notorious Ayatollah Khalkali, who was responsible for sentencing thousands of people to death for violating Islamic law, commanded a column of bulldozers to drive straight for ancient site. His dream was to plow the Achaemenian monuments into the earth, a cultural cleansing for the Islamic Republic. The bulldozers stopped a kilometer from Apadana Hall. “A mob of angry villagers shouting and throwing stones turned them back,” said Nasrollah proudly. Miraculously, the site was spared.
6. Nightingale Gardens, Sufi Poets and a Tavern
Let sound once more in me the Persian’s verse …
—JORGE LUIS BORGES, RUBAIYAT
At sunset, we arrived in Bagh-e Eram, Paradise Garden, where we met a group of college students thrilled to find willing guinea pigs with whom they could practice their second language. Shiraz University, set on a tawny hill above the garden, has a medical faculty that lectures solely in English. My brother Chris, having put his fears to rest momentarily, joked with one blond inquisitor. Other coeds thronged around him, asking where he was from.
He answered, “I’m from the Great Satan.”
They broke out in laughter.
“Where is your home?”
“Philadelphia.”
“Pheeel-dul-phya?”
“Exactly.”
Vaz looked terrified. “Don’t say ‘Amrika,’ ” he warned, his eyes flitting back and forth like a nervous sparrow waiting for a hawk to pounce. “It’s not funny, Chris. You never know who’s listening.”
As the students practiced their English, asking the usual questions about how we liked Iran, I noticed a budding Chinese hawthorn nearby. Its familiar pungent scent held Kev spellbound. I could almost hear him purring. An Ivy League dreamer who never fully recovered from the abrupt loss of the sights and smells of his childhood, Kev closed his eyes in rapture, his nose plunged into the blossoms like a drunken hummingbird. I mimicked him, bending my neck to the white petals. The sweet scent, I recalled, had saturated the air around our Tajrish house each spring. Now it was pulling us back to our original garden.
* * *
In the autumn of 1960, my mother rented Mr. Jalali’s red-brick villa because she fell in love with the garden. Eight years of Saudi Arabia’s sand dunes had fortified her longing. Turquoise-tiled fountains stretched into the distance, framed by columns of tall pines, climbing vines, bursting flowers, pergolas and pools. At the end of the shaded waterway stood a neoclassical Italianate pavilion. Under it, you could gaze into a Neapolitan grotto with stalactites gently dripping water. Two white statues, set inside the cave on rocks, faced each other, locking eyes, transfixed: a handsome shepherd serenading with his flute and a reclining damsel, swooning. Her graceful forefinger brushed her upper lip. His toes curled with excitement. Frozen in time, the piper was seducing the nymph. It was my favorite hiding place. Especially when Kev took to stalking us as the “Phantom Killer,” disguised in his black cape. Hunting season officially opened when the red iron gate slammed shut and my parents drove off into Tehran’s nightlife. Younger brothers, as usual, were fair game. Too small to question Kev’s favorite pastime, we ran for cover. Seeking refuge, I would sneak into the cave, behind the shepherd. Panting under my shirt to quiet my breathing, I listened to the stalactites’ drops of water hitting a shallow pool at regular intervals. The mysterious love of the shepherd and the nymph seemed eternal. I was terrified of being discovered here. Heart pounding, a scream, then mad scampering into the shadows again.
Those evenings spent as fugitives taught us patience and resilience. We never thanked Kevin for this gift. When Hassan heard our pleas, he encouraged Kevin to retire his Phantom Killer cape, and Kev obeyed.
Our landlord, Mr. Jalali, was a leftist journalist who lived in California, where he helped organize underground activities against the Shah. His politics, like my dad’s, had sent him into exile. Each had used the other’s country for safe refuge. However, Jalali’s garden was anything but proletarian. Pure fantasy, this Oriental “Garden of the Finzi-Continis” reached for a higher level.
* * *
One twilight hour, when the sun’s rays softened and faded and breezes blew, my father powerfully confirmed my suspicions about the garden’s spirits. He pointed at a few glowing lights, fleeting down the mulberry tree and then along a magenta bed of snapdragons. “See them, Terry?” I looked up. Flickers like gossamer alighting from leaf to leaf, pulsing for a few beats, then moving on. He bent down and turned toward me, staring into my eyes.
“Green-eyed people are close to the fairies,” he said. “One day I’ll be taking you to their native land, behind Mount Errigal in Donegal. Look over there, Terry. The garden’s full of them!” I watched the lights brighten and fade. “Shy little fellas,” he said. “So far from Ireland, so far from home.”
Later that night, I opened the atlas to trace the route of these wayward spirits back to Donegal. First there was the eighteen-thousand-foot Elburz to climb. I imagined them all flapping their tiny wings over the pass at Ab Ali through the Chalus Tunnel and then scurrying down into the humid jungles of Sisangan on the Caspian Sea. A steamer from Bandar Pahlavi could get them to Baku. Tramping across the unfriendly Caucasus to the Black Sea, they could stow away on a freighter sailing through the Bosporus, past Gallipoli, rounding the Peloponnesus on their way to Venice at the far end of the Adriatic. Once there, they would huff and puff up the Dolomites, cross the Brenner Pass and float down the Rhine. Somewhere in the Black Forest, I felt drowsy and closed my eyes. When I woke, it was all painfully clear to me: reaching Donegal would be impossible. My father was right. Too far.
I spoke to Hassan about this. “That’s why we must be kind to them,” he said. The next evening, we placed a bowl of fresh milk out on the kitchen stoop.
* * *
Our gardener, Iraj, was a big bear of a man. With his balding head and furry eyebrows atop his heavy torso, he looked uncannily like Popeye’s rival, the tough-nosed bully Brutus. Under his stubbly beard, he sported a never-ending scowl. His tree-trunk arms and the dark rings around his eyes spoke of thuggish tendencies. He threatened my brothers and me often, and once barked menacingly at my mother: “This my garden, that you house.” Jalali had told him that one day the workers would own all the property. His words were prophetic. Although Jalali spent his whole life fighting for the overthrow of the Shah, in the end, after Khomeini came to power, his garden was confiscated.
Iraj hated Hassan and saw him as an intruder in his world. In a crafty, well-planned move, he tried to sabotage Hassan’s position. When a bicycle was reported stolen, the local police dragged Hassan off to jail for questioning. My mother, hearing this, went to the police station and demanded Hassan’s release. The captain, an old crony of Iraj, was taken aback by Mother’s plea. His usual method of interrogation, “softening up” the accused with a beating, ended before it began. Hassan was freed. Back home, my mother went to Iraj and asked him to take her to his house across the alley. Reluctantly, he opened the door, and there stood the bike, as well as vases, carpets, pottery and tools that he and his wife had “liberated” over the years. “Keep them all and I’ll say nothing,” my mother
said, “but I ask you to kindly look for another job.” Iraj never set foot in our garden again. He took his booty and went back to his hometown of Yazd. Hassan was all smiles. A dark spell was lifted.
* * *
After Kevin and I pulled our noses out of the hawthorn blossoms, we stumbled in a pleasant daze down Bagh-e Eram, not taking our eyes off the noble cypresses that stood in rows, framing paths to a vanishing point. Shiraz, I knew, was long known for its cypresses. Then something else tugged at me. It nudged and pushed until I understood it was the mental imprint of Villa dei Vescovi, the Villa of Bishops, in the cypress-studded hill of Fiesole, where Idanna and I often strolled with a friend. Years ago, when I first walked its paths, I felt a sudden homesickness for Iran without really knowing why. In the Tuscan twilight, it all became clear: the long central avenue of slender cypresses, its quadrants of fruit orchards, fountains set in symmetrical positions, one in the center, the others at each end. This Italian garden design traced its origin to ancient Persia. And here in Bagh-e Eram lay its original blueprint.
Paradise. Eden. Elysium. Arcadia. Shangri-la. Utopia. Abode of the Blessed. Medieval maps of the world always placed earthly Paradise in the East. Medieval Europe’s Paradiso, most famously described in Dante’s Divine Comedy, was rooted in the Latin word paradisos, which in turn descended from the classical Greek paradeisos. But to find its true source, one had to look farther east, across the hostile deserts of Asia’s gnarled landmass. In ancient Persian, pari-deiza meant “enclosed garden.” The linguistic roots of the “divine” garden sprouted here.