by Terence Ward
“No,” Kev pointed out. “Now we’re on our own.”
* * *
My mother was determined to pay a visit to Mrs. Sakineh Ziai, President Mohammad Khatami’s seventy-eight-year-old mother. She wanted to congratulate Mrs. Ziai and tell her what an admirable man her son was. She felt it only right to want to share her enthusiasm over the recent rapprochement with the world community brought about by her son. Plain and simple Kansas logic.
President Khatami, elected with 70 percent of the vote in August 1997, carried a Kennedy-like aura in Iran. Wildly popular among women and young people, he refused to view the world as Khomeini had done: a clash of East and West. Schooled in pre-Islamic Persian history, Shia Islam and Western philosophy, he was also fluent in English and German, having lived two years in Hamburg. The Internet-literate leader spoke eloquently about women’s advancement and dialogue among nations. He was a fresh wind of change.
“And he dresses well. You should see his leather shoes,” Vaz said, “not those rough slippers that mullahs like to wear. And his beard is always neat. Everyone loves him.”
On February 1, two months before we arrived in Iran, the New York Times quoted him: “We love all the people in the world and we want them to love us in return. Resentments should be turned into kindness and love.” Later, he spoke over Iranian radio, asking the people to stop chanting the Revolution’s mantra, “Marg bar … ,” or “Death to … ,” during his public speeches.
“I stand for life, not death,” he said. “Ours is the God of love.” After reading this, my mother was determined to bring her message of praise to his mother.
* * *
Akbar was sorely missed. Our calm, poetic patriot had left us squarely in limbo. I studied my map again: Ardakan, twenty miles north of Yazd. As we approached the dusty town, forlorn and dun-colored, my mother asked Vaz for his help in finding the president’s family home. But he was being difficult again.
“No, no, no! I’m not going to ask for directions to Khatami’s house,” he said. “There could be secret police, Revolutionary Guards!”
Chris quickly agreed. “He’s right. Why stir up trouble? Mom, do we have to? Can’t we just keep going?”
“Besides,” said Vaz, “we don’t have an appointment or anything, do we?”
“No,” my mother answered.
“So, you see, we can’t go.”
I leaned over and asked Nasrollah if he could help.
“Yes, of course,” he answered coolly and stared straight ahead.
Our zealous driver enjoyed my mother’s singular challenge. Refusing to listen to Vaz’s protests, he called out his window to passersby for directions. One young student waved us to the left along a dusty boulevard.
With his flaring eyes, thick mustache and a two-day beard, Nasrollah earned sudden respect from rival motorists. He kept asking as we careened through the town. At a stoplight, a taxi driver shouted back and pointed to the right. We turned down that street and after five minutes came to another intersection. Vaz was still protesting, but no one listened. Nasrollah was in charge. One driver timidly pointed back in the direction we had just come. Hearing this, Nasrollah immediately spun us around in a wrenching U-turn.
At the next red light, he leaned out the window and called to an old haji, who agreed to help and hopped into the van. He guided us toward the parched fringe of town, to a simple brick house. No trees, no police. The street was deserted.
My mother got out and rang the doorbell. Vaz reluctantly joined her to translate. The rest of us remained in the van, except Richard, who slipped out behind Vaz.
A green metal gate swung open, and a woman in a black chador greeted my mother. Behind her, I could see a small compound sprouting a modest wind tower. Mom and Vaz disappeared inside. The dwelling behind the brick wall looked spartan. Mom had entered the Khatami family’s inner sanctum; her wish had been fulfilled, I thought. Now she would speak as a mother who has always loved Iran, and in this moment of openness and friendship, she would extend her heartfelt wishes to the family whose son spoke of breaking the Islamic Republic’s isolation from the outside world.
* * *
An hour later, when my mother emerged, a desert gust lifted her veil like a sail as she boarded the van. The haji guide and Nasrollah seemed quite pleased. Mrs. Ziai, Khatami’s mother, was not at home, she said. But she had been made welcome by the president’s sister Maryam Khalili.
The two women conversed with compassion and hope, heart to heart. Maryam spoke of her deep religious faith. Mom praised her and her family for their public service. They explored world affairs, public health, housing for the poor, young boys lost in the Iran-Iraq War and Khatami’s call for international dialogue.
My mother asked her questions about raising her children. Her older son worked for the university and headed a commission to create unity between Shiite and Sunni in Iran. Her oldest daughter was the principal of a high school in town; her other son was the principal of a secondary school in London. The youngest daughter was sixteen years old and still in high school. The room where my mother and Mrs. Khalili spoke was spare and spotless. They sat on a carpet, and the whitewashed walls were dominated by a large photograph of her third son, who was killed in the war.
“He was only seventeen,” Mom said. “She is still overcome by grief. I assured her that the death of a son was the greatest sacrifice a mother could give. She mentioned a German film crew that came to film her home during that time. ‘They were given much hospitality,’ she said, ‘but then they betrayed our trust and misused the material.’
“Then her granddaughter came out, looking very pretty, and served us cardamom biscuits and tangerines.”
As we drove off, my mother spoke about her plans for when we visited the Vatican of the Shia. “In Qom, I’ll wear my full chador.”
“No, Mom,” countered the ever-fearful Chris. “I’ll wear your chador in Qom.”
I looked across the street as we made our U-turn. Still no police. Khatami’s family chose to live modestly, a refreshing change from patriarchs in the clergy who flaunted their exalted status and newly gained wealth. As Nasrollah pulled away, I felt a flush of pride for my mother. Rarely do men summon up the courage to bridge barriers. We prefer to fight or accuse. Poison seeps into souls and hardens like cement. It’s so much easier to refuse to budge than to reach out.
Once again, Mom was teaching us in her powerful way. Hope and reconciliation fill the human heart. No gift can be greater than the burial of fear. The Reverend Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco called it by another name: radical love. If we ever find Hassan, insha’allah, we’ll be ready.
* * *
Ironically, many of the revolutionary figures who stormed the U.S. embassy that night of November 4, 1979, including Khatami’s younger brother Reza, now called for normalizing relations with America. The twentieth anniversary of the occupation was approaching. Reformers treaded very softly indeed, sensing that change would come. On the other hand, one of the hostages, Barry Rosen, a diplomat who had been held for all 444 days, had publicly met in Paris with his former captor Abbas Abdi, and together they spoke of reconciliation between Iran and the United States. Any diplomatic opening would be a boon to the sick economy.
Yet such a breakthrough would gravely threaten the legitimacy of hard-liners as protectors of the faithful. What they risked losing was their raison d’être for leadership. For almost two decades, they had been guarding the Iranian people against the Great Satan, who once controlled the evil Yazid, incarnated as the Shah. What would happen if they shook hands with Evil? If the great divide was bridged, they might well have to quit politics and return to the mosques.
* * *
We drove north of Ardakan in the direction of Nain, still a long way from Hassan’s village. A battery of ominous peaks tracked us along our western flank, jagged and sharp as razors. Collectively their pointed armor looked like a migrating herd of stegosaurs. To our right, along the eastern
horizon, stretched a bleak salt desert, Dasht-e Kavir. “The desert between Isfahan and Yazd seemed broader, blacker, and bleaker than any,” Robert Byron wrote.
We spotted a caravansary—caravan-sahra, “resting place for caravans”—off the road, and we pulled over. Constructed during the Safavid dynasty in the seventeenth century to provide shelter and protection from bandits for those plying the desert trade routes, it had seen better days. It included a four-hundred-year-old inn that could house and feed dozens of travelers, a storage building, and a huge fortified pen for horses and camels that also held a green grazing area. But now it all seemed haunted. Black crows hovered above two crumbling turrets. There was no sign of human life. A portal led to a courtyard where two mangy camels were tethered amid discarded truck tires.
* * *
Hassan used to tell us stories of caravans leaving his village. For years, his father had embarked in camel trains, lugging goods along the arduous north–south route. From the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas, he had ferried over the Zagros passes north across the country. In Tabriz, he would pick up loads of wheat for his trip back. During his lifetime, he had witnessed the Soviet Union squeeze the last drops of overland east-west trade out of the central Asian republics.
Then, in 1941, a British invasion ended the caravans forever. From their Gulf staging base, Churchill’s troops roared over the Zagros in huge, bulky trucks. Iranians called them camions. In Tehran, “Uncle Napoleon” shuddered; his greatest nightmare had come true. The British were coming! And come they did. Over the Persian highlands the Tommies and Indian sepoys hauled war supplies north to besieged Russian allies dug in at Stalingrad, blocking Hitler’s desperate dash for the Baku oilfields. Reza Shah was shipped off to Mauritius, and his son was propped up on the throne. Four years later, with Germany’s surrender, the British troops withdrew, Hassan told us, leaving their trucks behind.
Hassan’s father, who had once said that he would rather kill his own young son than one of his precious camels, now did the next best thing: he became a truck driver. The caravansaries along the trade routes became relics of the petroleum age.
* * *
We explored the artifacts: Chris whistled his way into the fortifications with his sketch pad, Kev fed the camels some dry hay left behind by an unknown benefactor, Mom and Dad crossed under the deteriorating archway hand in hand, and Rich scaled the walls above for a better view. How many people had slept here? I wondered. I leapt up on the bricks too. The footing was treacherous, but the vista was incredible. Climbing mud-brick walls had been a mad passion of mine in childhood.
After school, with Ahmad Khamsi, my Bahai friend, we would romp through abandoned construction sites with mountains of bricks and skeletal unfinished walls and roofs. Atop the walls, we slid along the crumbling mud like careful tightrope walkers. The bird’s-eye views were exhilarating. How many hours had we passed like this? Hundreds. Each step was a gamble, a balance between a vicious bone-breaking fall and silent Zen-like poetry.
After the Revolution, Ahmad’s family and other Bahais were labeled stooges of Zionist conspirators, Westernized apostates. The mullahs had always condemned as heresy this Iranian faith, founded in 1844 by Mirza-Ali Mohammad, who proclaimed himself the long-awaited twelfth imam. Accusers claimed that British imperialists, bent on weakening Iran, had promoted Bahais into key positions of power. Bahais were rumored to be a fifth column, doing the bidding of foreigners—the British and, later, the Israelis.
During the Pahlavi era, some Bahais amassed fortunes, causing great envy and thrusting them into the uneasy spotlight with another wealthy minority, Iranian Jews. The urbane, orchid-obsessed prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda, who ran the Pahlavi government in its final thirteen years, fueled the deep-seated belief that the Shah was controlled by Bahais and, consequently, foreign interests. Arrested after the Revolution and then dragged from his prison cell, Hoveyda was shot by a firing squad before his trial.
My friend Ahmad’s family surely must have fled Iran, escaping for their lives. His father had no doubt been labeled an agent of the West. After all, he owned a Pepsi bottling plant and Iran’s first television station. And his wife was an American.
Perhaps Ahmad’s tightrope walking on decaying walls and dilapidated roofs had unknowingly prepared him for the years to come. Like Hassan, he too seemed to have disappeared in the shadows, fallen through the cracks.
* * *
Nasrollah inspected one of the caravansary’s turrets, perilously weakened by the wind. Weathering had turned the outer walls to clay, from which grass grew.
“Not a good idea for brother Rich to climb up there,” he said.
He showed me a gaping breach in the arch just below where Richard walked. A large dirt clod fell from the hole. Nasrollah picked it up. Then he looked over his shoulder and back at me, making sure no one could hear us.
“What if Hassan doesn’t want to see you?”
Vaz had obviously told him. I did not respond.
Nasrollah gestured like an actor, stroking a make-believe beard. “Maybe he became a mullah.”
A knot gripped my stomach. “Don’t make jokes,” I said.
Nasrollah chuckled. “Hameh Irani-ha khuband. All Iranians are good.”
When we returned to the van, Vaz was snoring, stretched out in the back. Nasrollah checked the radiator, then got behind the wheel and drove through the dust to begin our final leg to Tudeshk.
“Well, lads,” my father said, “let’s hope someone’s waiting on the other side.”
* * *
With each passing mile, my parents and brothers became more excited and edgy. With six headstrong travelers, we needed a leader. Yet only anarchy prevailed. We finally resorted to an odd form of consensus decision-making. It went like this. Let’s say someone made a suggestion. First everyone would make fun of it. Then we’d make fun of the person who made the suggestion. And then one of us would come up with a different idea, which often had no logic whatsoever besides being the opposite of the original suggestion. After that, whoever remained focused enough to keep yelling usually prevailed.
On the map, Tudeshk appeared to be just fifty miles away. Arguments broke out without prompting. The hostile landscape bucked back into the sky. The road promised to lead us over another jagged collection of rumpled mountains. High-altitude climbing strained every fiber of Nasrollah’s poor van. He stroked the dashboard with pity and anxiety. Each grinding whine from the engine brought a wince of pain to his graying temples. It was as if we were beating and abusing his favorite horse. I grimaced in sympathy with him. He appreciated knowing that a fellow sufferer was on board. And we kept climbing.
Sharp switchbacks slowed our progress to a high-pitched crawl. Suddenly, hurtling around a particularly steep blind curve, an oncoming truck roared toward us in our lane. Nasrollah cut the wheel sharply, pitching us out of our seats. The truck whisked past us downhill. Vaz woke up and looked at my mother in a panic. The whites of his eyes betrayed his flustered words: “Don’t worry.” Gathering his breath after our near miss, he launched into yelling at Nasrollah.
“What are you doing!”
“Shut up!” Nasrollah snarled back. He fixed his eyes on the road.
“Yeah, shut up, Vaz,” Richard yelled from behind.
“Why? He’s crazy. We almost got killed.” Vaz’s sharp voice sounded shrill, hysterical. No one was in the mood to listen. Especially to him.
“Calm down or I’m going to be upset,” Rich’s voice boomed over the clatter of the engine.
“It’s my custom to yell if he makes mistake!”
“Listen. Shut up and don’t speak to the driver.” Rich’s eyes flared.
Another hairpin turn. The sound of a horn somewhere. Nasrollah cursed, twitching his eyes, pulling at the wheel.
Vaz turned to unleash another round of bellowing, but Rich cut him off.
“Aaaaggghh!” Vaz screamed as Rich shook him by his ear.
“Richard!” cried Mom.
&n
bsp; This time a bus hurtled around yet another blind curve. His blaring horn drowned out all sound. We gripped the seats, bracing ourselves. I prayed. It was over in seconds. Blazing past us in a suicide maneuver, the bus driver missed us with only centimeters to spare. A hat flew out the window and tumbled on the asphalt in the tailwind before curling over the cliff.
“Definitely a believer in fate,” muttered Kev, turning to watch the speed racer blaze down the mountainside.
* * *
We descended very slowly into a sparse plain, still a bit shaken and subdued. Seeing another barren village of mud-brick houses, I looked at my map. Where was it? I measured distances and made calculations. The map promised signs of life. I scanned the horizon. To our right, in the distance, lay a small air force base. To our left, nothing, empty dry terrain. A line of qanat holes. Then, like a vision, a bright green road sign glowed with the magic words: “Tudeshk 20 kms.”
Our minds swam in disbelief. It all came crashing back: our casual jokes about my mother’s memory over the years, our deep suspicions about ever finding the village, our ridicule about this mad idea. And yet now we were close. In this godforsaken desert, could it actually be Hassan’s Tudeshk? After all these miles, after all these years?
“Mom, you were right,” Chris said, hugging her. We cheered.
“My God, boys,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
Nervous excitement filled the van. Like chattering magpies during spring mating, our uncontrollable emotions bubbled over. We strained to spy the road ahead. And after twenty long minutes, where earth meets sky, we finally saw it.
A few mud huts lined the left side of the road. I struggled to recognize the village through Hassan’s stories: silhouettes of walls, shapes of doors, contours of qanats and wells. Grim, dry land ringed the town’s outline. Where was the farmland that Hassan spoke of? The orchards? The fortified town walls that protected the inhabitants from raiding Qashqai? Just a collection of rambling huts straddled the road. Not a shred of grass. No sign of life. Richard broke the silence.