by Terence Ward
In preparation for our children’s future, American agents, Russian operatives and Chinese analysts were already mastering the obscure geography of central Asia with the same scrutiny as the Pentagon strategists who memorized every inlet and island, every oilfield and airstrip in the Persian Gulf.
For the moment, the Caspian coast was still a holiday destination. There, in a seaside resort by Bandar-e Anzali, Hassan, Fatimeh and their family spent four relaxing weeks. The children romped about, covered in sand. In their black chadors, the women entered the waves.
14. The Color of God
I want to beg you, as much as I can … to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try and love the questions themselves … Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE
My friend Nezam’s driving passion was a lifelong quest for the mystical places in Iran that for centuries had evoked the sublime in all pilgrims and seekers. So I could imagine his excitement when a British archaeologist sought his assistance for a BBC film about a search for the original Garden of Eden.
Challenging the foundations of Near Eastern history, this archaeologist had pored over topographical maps, using clues from Genesis and paleo-environmental imaging, and deduced that a certain lake was the one that fed the four rivers of Paradise. The lake was close to the city of Tabriz in northwest Iran. No stranger to controversy, he had challenged scholastic orthodoxy years before by arguing that the original pharaohs migrated down from the Zagros Mountains to found their empire in the Nile Delta.
Nezam lived in northern Tehran with his wife, Nora, a painter, in a large red-brick house with unkempt hedges and climbing ivy. Over the years of widespread confiscations of private property, Tehran’s prosperous families understood the need for shabby exteriors. The logic was clear: if you fix it up, they may take it from you.
Inside, their home was an eclectic mix of Bakhtiari tribal carpets, low divans in front of the fireplace and Nora’s oil paintings—enormous feminine Cycladic figures with encircling cuneiform script, hieroglyphics, Sanskrit and Chinese characters, like a unified Babel.
Raised in Northern California, Nora had moved back to Iran during the time of the Iraqi War. “You know, Terry, once you leave your place of birth, you lose your center. Don’t get me wrong,” she said, nibbling on a sweet, “San Francisco and Marin, where my parents live, are beautiful, we all know that. But I always felt like something was missing, like I didn’t quite belong. That’s why we came back. I didn’t want my children to go through that experience too. Now they speak Farsi and they know their culture. When they grow up, they can choose.”
Fariba, another painter, had stopped by. She was Nora’s close friend, a brunette with short hair bunched in trendy spikes and heavy kohl shadows on her lower eyelids. She lit a cigarette. “Do you know Lou Reed?” she asked, catching me by surprise.
“The musician? Sure.”
“Great. Can you give me his address in New York?”
“What?”
“I need to let him know,” she purred, “that all my new work is based on his latest album.”
Nora explained. “She loves Lou’s music. She’s crazy about him. Her latest painting is called American Flag, after one of his songs.”
Fariba handed me a photograph. I saw her figure dwarfed by an immense canvas splashed, Basquiat style, with yellow streaks and emerald-green and electric-blue geometric shapes. I offered to help her find Lou Reed. Her flag gave new meaning to President Khatami’s call for a dialogue among civilizations.
And what about Nezam’s scouting trip for the BBC? It had been quite different from what he had expected. He was bone-weary. They had driven eight hundred miles. The trip had been a travesty.
“The cameraman would get out of the van,” Nezam said, “spend ten minutes setting up his tripod and sound equipment, and by the time he was ready, a cloud would block the sun. Instead of waiting, the archaeologist would yell, ‘No, no, sorry chaps, no time. The hell with it.’ And off we would go without the shot.”
Their grand quest soon became grand folly, all frenzied energy and nothing to show for it.
“The whole time, we were searching for this one spot, mind you, the garden of Adam and Eve with the four rivers. Paradise. And all the time I was thinking, Just look, can’t you see it? It’s all around us. But they couldn’t see it. If they had just looked, even just in the eyes of a simple villager, they would have seen it all!”
“But did you finally find the garden?” I asked.
“Yeah, in Urumiyeh. So they said.”
“And what did it look like?”
“It was at the end of a backbreaking journey. Our van broke down twice that day. When we finally arrived, we all looked out on a valley.”
“And?”
“Well … it’s a bit industrial now. There’s a huge cement factory.”
“And the rivers?”
“No rivers. At least I didn’t see any. There’s a lake nearby, heavily salted. No fish, no life.”
“So what about this film on Paradise?”
“Well, you know,” Nezam said, smiling, “computer graphics can do wonders these days.”
* * *
Behrouz had refused to serve in the army and was without a passport. He lived in a kind of limbo, waiting for the government’s amnesty. Only then would he be allowed to leave the country, join his sister in New York and finish his university studies. His field was cognitive neuroscience, viewed from both Eastern and Western traditions.
In his basement flat near the British embassy, we listened to two jazz guitarists, Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden. He sipped a liqueur made from raisins. Two posters hung on the wall: a wild-haired Einstein and Brueghel’s Tower of Babel. We talked about Charlie Parker and movies. Then we shifted to other matters.
“Abdulkarim Soroush is the most powerful agent of change,” Behrouz told me. The scholar Soroush was an ideologue and a spokesman for the reformers in Iran. He had introduced the student movement to modern ideas—democratic principles, freedom of speech, human rights, the rule of law—while stressing the absolute importance of keeping the Islamic Republic in place. Change and tolerance must come only from within, from the people, Soroush said, always mindful of the Islamic identity of Iran. Although he was attacked by the hard-liners, students flocked to his lectures.
I thought back on the journey that brought us to Tehran. In the historic cities of the south—romantic Shiraz, splendid Isfahan, remote Yazd—people lived traditional lifestyles in keeping with the culture, surrounded by artistic and poetic wonders. But here in thoroughly modern Tehran, a megalopolis with little history or charm, I felt a clinging sense of angst. While Isfahanis, Yazdis and Shirazis lived with one foot squarely in the past, Tehranis struggled daily with the future.
After leaving Behrouz, who kindly invited me to a party later that evening, I walked alone down Bobby Sands Street past the British embassy. I thought of the delusional “Uncle Napoleon” and the conspiracy of all things British, and it seemed only natural that Churchill Boulevard would be renamed after the Revolution. I couldn’t help but smile. After all, the British Unionists and the Irish nationalists were finally sitting down together at a peace table after four hundred years and speaking of sharing power. But could this peace last?
* * *
Every Friday in downtown Tehran, crowds gather at the flea market to sift through generations of relics. The Jomeh bazaar holds court in an underground parking garage.
Kev and I, determined not to miss it, hailed a cab. The driver, thrilled to hear we spoke some Farsi, began to chat. We had grown accustomed to free-ranging discussions.
“You know how the mullahs deal with reformers?”
“No.”
The cabby pointed his finger like a
gun. “They kill them all.” He shot at an imaginary victim. I followed his finger’s trajectory and spotted a passing car with an American flag decal on the bumper. Kev quickly tried to take a picture, but the car raced ahead in the river of traffic.
“They’re hypocrites, liars, the mullahs. No one believes them anymore. At the beginning, yes, we all hoped. They promised free electricity, free gas. Heaven on earth. Hah!”
Kev and I did not interrupt his tirade.
“You know, now taxi drivers won’t stop for clerics anymore. I heard one mullah complain that he waited two hours for a taxi, and they kept passing by. He had to go and change his robe before he could get a ride.”
Loud beeping sounded behind us.
“Years ago, the Shah and his friends stole all the money. Now the mullahs and their families do the same. Poor Iran! Whoever has the power always takes from us.”
He made a sharp turn.
“Bad Shah and his corrupt thieves. Bad mullahs, they abuse our God and bankrupt our nation. Poor Iranis!”
The cabby raised a finger to his mouth. Saket, silence. But it didn’t last long.
“We wait. We’ve put up with the Greeks and the Arabs, the Mongols and the Turks, the British, the Shah, and now …” He paused as he ran a traffic light that was changing from orange to red. “Now we must wait again for our children to grow up, the new generation.”
We screeched to a halt. I handed him the fare. But he refused my money with a sweep of his hand.
“No, please, you are my guests.”
“Please.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“A thousand times no.”
Down two flights of stairs, in the underground parking lot, I gasped on the exhaust fumes lingering in the air. Kev used a handkerchief to cover his sensitive nose. Thick layers of pollution clung to gray concrete walls. There was no natural light, only flaring white gas burners. It was the opposite of the traditional seductive bazaar charm. And to top it off, it was frantically popular.
Each vendor displayed his wares on protective blankets or rugs spread on the floor. We passed antique pocket watches, a cuckoo clock, bronze Russian samovars, aged dolls, water pipes and used fluorescent-yellow tennis balls. The Shah’s portrait—ramrod arrogant, dripping with medals—covered old currency collections. Kev spotted a miniature Model T Ford that was not for sale, a painting of the Last Supper on velvet and an Arthur Murray Let’s Dance the Cha-Cha-Cha record.
I studied two faded photos of the Wailing Wall and Washington’s Capitol and examined an African wooden mask, a pair of used boxing gloves, an accordion and a weathered libretto of Verdi’s La Traviata, from its premiere at La Fenice in Venice, dated March 6, 1853. As I leafed through it, a high-pitched “Excuse me” yelped behind me. A girl in her teens skated by on Rollerblades, narrowly missing me. “Sorry,” she peeped.
A group of diplomats’ wives took turns haggling with Afghan refugees over their tribal carpets. A young Iranian stood out in the dense crowd with his baseball cap and Stars-and-Stripes shirt. Another young man, surely a war veteran, hobbled by on crutches, one leg missing, sporting a T-shirt with a beach scene of Pattaya, Thailand.
We sifted through czarist coins, Buddha figures and Prussian medallions. I was tempted by an azure tile with Moses holding the Ten Commandments, a painting of green-turbaned Saint Ali and a figurine of Christ hanging on a cross. But my only purchase from that day now hangs in my kitchen: an engraved copper plate crafted by an unknown artisan. Below a profile of John F. Kennedy are the dates 1917–1963. Around the edge an inscription reads, “And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”
* * *
Like most Persian musicians, Dr. Safvat combined sacred verse with rhythmic, hypnotic improvisation. Using only the ear and the heart—no written notation—he raised classical music to a religious dimension. A master of the sitar and santur, he also delved into the realm of the soul. Many superlative Persian musicians are mystics. Dr. Safvat was no exception. His white hair crowned a face that shone with boundless serenity. Educated in France, formal yet warmly welcoming, he invited me to his modest home.
Beside him, a Kurdish ney flute player sat in silence.
Dr. Safvat spoke of our human dualist nature, the physical and the spiritual.
“The body,” he said, “needs food. So does the spirit. All the world’s prophets speak about the need to nourish the spirit. They each say the same thing: we must try to connect with God. Love is everything, and art is the food of the soul. About one hundred and fifty years ago, the Industrial Age, with science as the new religion, brought disbelief in God, and now many wander in darkness.”
We sipped our tea. The ney player twisted his dramatic handlebar mustache and offered to take me into the mountains of Kurdistan, a rugged region along the border with Iraq long known for its spiritual power.
Dr. Safvat spoke again about our bifurcated nature, but this time he called it “the carnal and the angelic.” “Creative power in he who has only a carnal rapport with life,” he explained, “provokes superficial excitement, which is transient art. But he who connects with God and finds the angel within will create art that will live on in the future.”
I asked him about the present government. He paused, cleaning his glasses, and then said, “We must approach the mullahs with a defensive posture, retaining the holy gift of forgiveness. This is the path. Politics is bad for mental health, bad for the soul. Begin with humility, evolve yourself, and then you can help others. Remember that any system built on the wrong foundations has no future. In time, it will collapse under its own weight. No need to push.”
An hour later, stepping into a cab, I immediately noticed the driver’s grand drooping mustache, like that of the Kurdish ney player.
I dared to ask him, “Are you a mystic?”
He smiled and turned toward me. “Yes, of course.”
“Me too,” I offered.
“That’s great,” he said, amused, as he maneuvered effortlessly through traffic, curly hair flying in the wind.
Dr. Safvat’s parting words still clung to me: “We must fight the darkness with ishraq illumination. Listen to Hafez, Rumi, all our great poets.”
The caretaker of the Isfahan Synagogue and his wife.
Who were now the keepers of the flame? Who, in this highly politicized climate, focused on the culture’s enduring power?
When I met the filmmaker Majid Majidi, I was struck by his humility and depth. Under his wavy dark mane of hair, his eyes held a well of sensitivity. His words were thoughtful, measured, as if he wanted to impart a secret that clearly had transformed him. I asked him why he chose film to tell his stories.
“In film, I can speak to the world through a universal language,” he said. “Many people are searching for God. They go to the mosque, to church, to the synagogue, and still they ask, ‘Where is He?’ My belief is that God is inside each of us.”
Majid is a lion of Iranian cinema. Nominated in 1997 for an Academy Award for best foreign film, his Children of Heaven has touched film buffs around the world with its poignant story of the love between two children, brother and sister.
“As a child,” he continued, “I always wanted to touch God. If someone wants to see God, just tell him to take a good look at nature. The hero of my latest film is Mohammad, a blind boy. One day during filming, he touched a small stone and uttered the word ‘God.’ I marked that stone and mixed it with other, similar ones and then asked him to choose one of the stones. He picked up the same stone and said, ‘Mr. Majidi, the name of God is right here. I’m going to take this stone and translate for you.’ Now,” Majid said, “I’m conscious that maybe God is in the stone I’m about to step on.
“I’m having an unusual experience with Mohammad. I’m discovering that nature has its own language—one we can’t read—but it’s there all the time speaking to us. This new language is like Braille.”
I did not know then that this film, known in the Wes
t as The Color of Paradise, would earn Majid his second Oscar nomination. In Iran it was called The Color of God.
I asked him about the filmmakers he admired.
“Intellectual films affect only intellectuals. Action films are in fashion but have no endurance. Instead, filmmakers who aim for the heart, like John Ford, Hitchcock, Rossellini, Pasolini, never lose their power.”
Majid rarely uses professional actors; he gathers his players from real life. But Majid is not the only Iranian filmmaker who chooses to tell stories from the heart. Defying all politics and censorship, Abbas Kiarostami, winner of the 1997 Palme d’Or at Cannes, paved the way, unashamedly revealing his country’s human face.
Following the Great Depression, several American moviemakers painted compassionate portraits of dignified Americans in the grips of economic hardship. Movies like The Grapes of Wrath and It’s a Wonderful Life gave Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart arguably their noblest roles. These socially conscious American films and the later Iranian films shared a celebration of the common man. And it is this universal theme that still connects with audiences everywhere. Like his fellow storytellers, Majid penetrates the inner sanctum of simple homes and lives, endearing his people to us. He is one of the unappointed ambassadors carrying the message of humanism to the world. He is one of the keepers of the flame.
I told Majid about our own journey, our search for Hassan and how we found him at last. I spoke about Hassan’s late-night prayers, his love of nature, and Majid smiled. “You see, Hassan knows,” he said. “You must come back to Iran.”