by Terence Ward
“May I kindly ask you where are you from?”
“Ireland,” Kev replied, disguising his American accent.
“Welcome, brother.”
“Thank you.”
We shook hands. “Ah, Irish. You know, we changed the name of Churchill Boulevard,” he told us as if it were something we should know.
“Yes? Well, we’ve just arrived in Tehran.”
“It’s now called Bobby Sands Street.”
“Oh, thank you, sir.” Kev bowed as if accepting a gift. The regime had obviously chosen the name of an Irish hunger striker to tweak the nose of the British lion. Martyrdom bonding their friendship, Kevin and the man walked together.
“Are you Muslim or Catholic?”
“There is only one God,” Kevin answered obliquely. His new friend smiled, taking his words as a yes for Islam.
“Yes, only one God.”
Gliding toward us like an apparition came a figure covered head to toe in a chador. It was my mother. Her beaming face protruded from her pitch-black wraparound like a Cheshire cat’s. What grace she had, with her soft smile and heartwarming eyes. Silently, I took her arm in mine and slowly we circumambulated the hall. After a peaceful ten minutes, we walked out of the shrine behind Kevin and his philo-Celtic buddy.
Still inside, Chris underwent an altogether different experience. He was accosted by a soldier.
“Is there film in your video?” the soldier snapped, his rifle slung on his shoulder.
“Y-yes,” Chris replied nervously.
“Did you take pictures?”
“No, of course not.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
The soldier studied his worried face.
“No, I swear,” Chris insisted.
The guard exploded, “But why not, baba?” His expression turned into a pained look. “Everyone else finds it so beautiful. You don’t like it? Baba, take some film now or you’ll miss it.”
Before Chris could say anything, the soldier had handed him the rifle, taken the video camera and turned it on. While we stood waiting in the semidarkness outside, I saw two silhouettes walking out of the mosque. I was sure that my brother was in trouble.
“Oh God, Terry, has he been arrested?” my mother asked.
“Don’t know, Mom. It looks like a soldier. He’s got a rifle.”
Then we heard a voice cry out, “Mom, come meet Ahmad!” Soon Chris was introducing us to his new best friend, who was very pleased to hear that we had made Ayatollah Khomeini’s tomb our first stop in Tehran. We all shook hands. I suggested they pose for a photo.
“Ready?” I lined them up with all four golden minarets streaking skyward in the background.
Ahmad straightened his green fatigues, his face gripped in a rigid pose. “Ready,” he said.
“I’m dreaming,” Chris said.
* * *
In 1926, Vita Sackville-West, after a grueling overland drive, described her entry into Tehran: “The air at this altitude of nearly four thousand feet is as pure as the note of a violin. There is everywhere a sense of oneness and of being at a great height; that sense of grime and over-population, never wholly absent in European countries, is wholly absent here; it is like being lifted up and set above the world on a great wide roof.”
Now, twelve million people called Tehran home. It seemed overly immense, gargantuan, beyond any proportions of memory. We recognized nothing except the familiar Elburz peaks, soaring thick and rugged, snow-streaked and lit with fairy lights fluttering on the upper slopes. The roads seemed strangely new. I felt lost. Chris was unfazed; he’d turned altogether sappy after his trial by fire in the mosque. “After that, nothing can scare me now,” he told us. It was late at night. A light sprinkle of rain was falling. The streets were empty and endless. Then a brightly lit pavilion, a white marble beacon, pierced the darkness.
“Rudaki Hall! Remember?” my father burst out. “The Vienna Boys Choir, the L.A. Philharmonic, Nureyev and Fonteyn?”
Ground zero for the cultural elite under the Shah’s “Great Civilization,” Rudaki Hall had entertained Tehran sophisticates with musical and dance performances of world-class caliber. And now?
“Not much,” said Vaz. “I never go. The performing arts aren’t on my social calendar, if you know what I mean.”
* * *
Our hotel, the Laleh, was a welcoming sight at midnight. Once called the Intercontinental—the enduring home of the world’s journalists during the hostage crisis—it now had a revolutionary name: laleh means tulip, the flower of martyrs. Disgorging all our belongings from the van proved embarrassing, as it took three sleepy porters to help us haul everything inside the brightly lit lobby. A sympathetic sigh was cast my mother’s way when her wheelchair appeared. Checking in at the front desk, I felt the hotel waking up to sudden action.
Eager autograph seekers circled a pair of close-cropped men wearing warmup jerseys that read across the back: IRAN. Squeals of delight sounded from the young boys who had emerged from nowhere, half asleep, to greet regal and handsome soccer players who had just stepped in from the night.
“Is this the national team?” Dad asked the concierge.
The concierge nodded. “Tomorrow is big match against Hungary.”
Not missing a beat, my father leaned over the desk. “Agha, sir, I need six tickets. Can you get them?”
“It’s not so easy, sir.”
“I’m sure, my dear friend, if anyone can find them, you can.”
“I will try, sir.”
The concierge turned to whisper in a colleague’s ear. A flurry of movement began behind the front desk while my father and I surveyed Iran’s young soccer hopefuls. The concierge and Dad traded knowing nods until a small envelope was slipped over the counter along with our electronic room cards.
Dad picked up the envelope and held it triumphantly aloft. Winking at me, he turned back to the concierge and said, “Better than opening-night tickets to a Broadway show, agha!”
And he meant it.
13. Valleys of the Assassins, Black Five Millionaires
Every homeland constitutes a sacred geography. For those who have left it, the city of their childhood and adolescence always becomes a mythical city.
—MIRCEA ELIADE, ORDEAL BY LABYRINTH
Racing north like homing pigeons, we drove past a long lime-green curtain of plane trees that still hugged Vali Asr Boulevard, once called Pahlavi. New highways and overpasses crisscrossed the megalopolis in confusing patterns. Tall residential towers and huge apartment complexes flashed by. All this was new to us. I began to understand Rip van Winkle’s disorientation after his long sleep.
In the northern suburbs, behind high walls topped with broken glass, we had spent our days in elegant gardens dressed with fruit trees: cherry, mulberry and pomegranate. Weeping willows hung their long tresses over a welcoming pond, like Narcissus hypnotized by his reflected beauty. We expected now to wander again through those footpaths of memory, but the new landscape resisted easy nostalgia.
Up Pesyan Street in Velenjak we went, searching for our home. Closer to the mountains, all our senses came alive. The street turned past the old barbari bakery, hemmed in by a suffocating chain of walls. Burgundy marble and gaudy structures suggested visions far from Islamic taste. But in the northern hills it was always so. Cosmopolitan influences abounded behind the walls: French Empire, Russian dacha, neoclassical columns and Italian statuary.
We soon found ourselves driving in circles. Apartment buildings had replaced open green spaces, orchards and gardens. The entire landscape was transformed. We drove past elephantine construction sites, our emotions trampled. The land was now full. Empty fields walled in. Blindly lost, we parked the car and started walking to an open space on our left. Suddenly the view opened up in front of us. Here was the gorge of our childhood!
But nothing around it made sense, only the riverbed below and the hint of caves in the eroded chasm where we used to play and hide. We peered w
est across the ravine to a plateau that once served as a resting stop for migrating nomads, who pitched their tents for the night and lit flickering fires under the stars. It was now concrete.
“This gully used to be like the Grand Canyon.” Forlorn, Kevin picked up a stone and tossed it down the cliff.
“And over there it was all barren,” my father said, pointing west to the sprawl of new buildings.
“That hill we used to climb and plant our flag—Rich, remember?” Chris stared up at the rising foothills. Rich nodded.
At least the rugged mountain flanks above us were still untouched. The craggy outcrops had proved too steep for land-hungry developers. We strolled slowly along a dirt path looking at our wild playground below. Then Kev scaled the stone wall that bordered the ravine to peer on its other side.
“I found it!” he yelled to us.
“You’re sure?” Mom asked excitedly.
“Yes, but …” Kev paused, staring over the top.
I climbed up the wall to look. Chris and Rich scrambled up too.
“There’s a fifty-foot hole in the ground,” Kev said.
“What do you mean?” my mother asked.
“Not even a tree was spared.”
I clung to the wall. Our mythical garden! Someone had destroyed every trace of it. A colossal hole had been dug, ready to receive the foundation of another mammoth high-rise. The villa, the verandah, the rosebushes, the pool, rows of slim-lined poplars, the weeping willow, the cherry orchard, Hassan’s rooms, all gone.
Chris mournfully began singing: “Memories are so beau-ti-ful and yet …”
Rich told him to stop. Chris’s off-key voice only added to our collective anguish.
We had to get inside. The old wall looked impenetrable; the back door was bolted shut. We continued alongside, traversing the compound. Mom and Dad followed in silence. But then we saw our red gate. It was unscathed. And open. We entered.
Before us lay our old place. Yes, the cherry orchard, along with Hassan’s four-room brick house, had been swallowed by the crater. And our villa—was it in the rubble under a cement high-rise under construction? Impossible to know for sure. Only three slender pines remained. Where was the statue of Venus? And the Neapolitan grotto where a shepherd seduced his nymph with a magic flute? Where was our swimming pool the size of a small lake?
We did not hesitate, and moved as if regaining possession of some familiar territory. Frantically, Chris called out to us as we stumbled punch-drunk around some rubble.
“Guys, aren’t we glad we found Hassan and Fatimeh? Places don’t matter, people do. Right?”
Dad scanned the property. “Thomas Wolfe was right,” he said. “You can’t go home again.”
“Say goodbye to the old homestead,” Rich said.
“They paved paradise,” Kev said, “to put up a condo.”
Steeling ourselves for a dignified exit, we chatted calmly with a man who had appeared beside us. He said that the land had been sold six years before.
Then Kevin shouted to us. In a small shed at the far end of the garden, he had found two sculpted figures. I walked over and was stunned. There they were, the two Hellenic lovers who once sat transfixed in our grotto staring deep into each other’s eyes. Broken, arms missing. These lonesome stone relics brought back memories of when we fell asleep under the summer stars listening to Hassan’s voice. Discarded in this new puritanical epoch, the lovers were symbols of a decadent bygone time.
“Let’s take them with us,” Kev said, holding the pieces of stone.
“Can you imagine the questions at customs?” protested Chris. “Do you want to be locked up? Besides, we gotta think about getting our carpets out.”
“Kev, just leave them,” Dad said, touching his shoulder.
“We can’t let them lie here,” Kev pleaded.
But we did. We turned our backs on the construction site and left.
Mom vowed to return for the statues.
* * *
Drooping wisteria climbed the walls. Weeping willows hid behind the tall gates. We drove past copper roofs atop cream-colored brick houses. Some parts of our neighborhood, it seemed, were still intact. Soon we wended our way back to the main boulevard, Vali Asr. In bumper-to-bumper traffic, we moved at a snail’s pace under the familiar canopy of leafy plane trees. We advanced as we had so many years before.
“Tajrish Square! It’s still here!” I cheered. The elegant square opened up dramatically just under the rising mountains.
“Where would it go?” Vaz said, puzzled.
“Quick, let’s check out the bazaar.”
Scrambling out of the van, we all scampered toward the dark entrance bordering the crowded bus stop. Plentiful fruit stalls splashed welcome natural colors. Under bright lights, wooden carts held bounty arranged geometrically: pyramids of blood oranges, kiwis and glossy tangerines, strawberries and green watermelons, violet grapes and hanging bananas. Butchers’ hooks dangled long flanks of lamb and freshly killed chickens. Fresh seafood and three-foot silver carp were handsomely displayed on chopped ice. Heads of lettuce, bunches of dill, long cucumbers, rich eggplants, towers of tomatoes, even string beans and red cabbage.
Rich marched straight into the market.
“The mosque is over there. I remember it so well,” he said, leading us to the corner where we once bought baby chicks and ducks. Chirping in cardboard crates still lay an assortment of chicks, dyed in pink, orange and blue fluorescent colors, hoping to catch the eye of a child or his indulgent parents.
“At least here, nothing’s changed,” said Chris, petting a bright pink chick while I gazed out at the expanded courtyard with its turquoise-domed Imamzadeh Saleh, the mosque and shrine where Hassan used to pray.
The upscale gold bazaar was new, as was an overhead sign in English that read, “Believers are men who neither commerce nor sale diverts from the remembrance of God—Quran 24/37.” Wishful thinking for bazaaris, I thought as I fished through a small box of silkworms munching on green mulberry leaves. In a pharmacy, Kev found his favorite shampoo, honey and egg. He opened the cap and sniffed. In Proustian fashion, his eyes rolled shut.
“This smell puts me right back in the bathtub at our old house.”
“And the bazaar?” Chris asked.
“It isn’t as big as I remembered it, but infinitely cleaner.”
“No donkeys, no flies. What do we navigate by?”
“In the old days, I used beams of sunlight.”
Chris pointed out Levi’s along with competing jean brand names: Cowboy and Cash. I caught a glimpse of Adidas sneakers, a poster of Dizzy Gillespie’s silhouette, two Stars-and-Stripes T-shirts, purple-polished toenails and Revlon faces, Champion sweat suits and Swatch watches, Nissan auto parts and a poster of Dexter Gordon blowing his sax.
Back in the square, outside the bazaar, I spotted our driver animatedly exchanging words with a defiant police officer. Vaz stood aloof.
“It will cost two thousand tomans,” Vaz muttered as I came near him. “It’s just between those two, not to write a ticket, you know.”
Our ambulance driver discreetly handed over the money.
“He’s not selling himself,” Vaz explained about the police officer. “He’s just doing his business.”
* * *
So much had changed that our memories were useless: the Tehran we once knew was now almost incomprehensible. Disoriented and confused, we drove on wide freeways dotted with huge, surreal hand-painted billboards of martyrs’ faces and slowly trekked across the mushrooming city.
After seeing our disemboweled home in northern Tehran, we balked at revisiting the Community School. Far better to leave those images and sentiments intact, we all agreed. Cruising south to the Laleh Hotel, Hussein turned off the main street because of a traffic jam, swerved up a side alley and turned again. Then, in a hysterical voice, Dad called out from the back seat: “That’s it! Stop! The old Iran-American Society.”
The van screeched to a halt. Outside our righ
t window rose the familiar concrete ornamented dome. We had to pay our respects at this holy site. After all, it was under that dome that all of my father’s theatrical productions were nurtured, staged and celebrated: Our Town, The Music Man and A Thousand Clowns, to name a few.
The sight of six khareji seeking entry to the theater complex provoked confusion among the staff, until a pleasant but officious woman in blue arrived to ask us our purpose—and she spoke flawless English.
“Madam,” my father said, “thirty-five years ago I directed a play that opened this theater to the public for the first time. Would you mind if my family and I could see it one last time?”
She pulled back, hesitant. With a nervous tremor in her voice, she began speaking defensively of written permission and cultural ministries. Then a silver-haired custodian in a green suit appeared and quickly started to explain to her about my father.
“He says that he remembers,” she translated, “the drama plays then. He has been working here since that opening day.”
Dad reached over and hugged the custodian.
“Please come in,” she said. “He will show you.” Then, after a moment’s reflection, perhaps to protect the sanctuary from any historic claims, she added, “But you may only see the outside.”
“Even so, we would be thankful,” my father replied.
She nodded and our custodian guided us down the open staircase until we stood before the lofty glass pavilion framing the entrance doors. A poster of Jafar Panahi’s film The White Balloon hung in the same place where I once remembered a Day-Glo orange-and-magenta poster of two surfers in The Endless Summer. The theater was used for movies and theatrical productions. Inside the doors lay the stage where Pat had directed Thornton Wilder’s Our Town before packed houses for the inaugural of the Iran-American Society. He’d molded an amateur troupe into respectable players.