In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

Gradually, the lament got faster. The arms rose and fell faster, like the pistons of a locomotive. Someone turned off the light and the men took off their shirts; their torsos glistened in the street light that came in from the window. Faster and faster, the lament went, until the singer’s voice cracked; he started sobbing into the microphone. Inside the circle, the arms were rising and falling more swiftly; when the hands hit the chests, they made the sound of bones hitting hide. Drops of sweat fell off the end of Mr Zarif’s nose. His arms ached. His chest felt raw.

Everyone was shouting: ‘Hosseinhosseinhosseinhosseinhossein!’ and hitting their chests as hard as they could.

After it was over, someone turned on the lights. Mr Zarif blinked. Everyone had red splotches on their chests. The room was humid. The lads put on their shirts. Then someone brought in tea and biscuits. Someone cracked a joke.

(Standing up, hands out in supplication: ‘God! Favour us in this life and the next, and save us from the torment of hell.’)

After they had tea, one of the men came over to Mr Zarif and introduced himself. He asked some questions, about Mr Zarif’s political and religious convictions, and the situation at his school. Mr Zarif gave him what seemed – from the man’s reactions – to be satisfactory answers. The man asked Mr Zarif to monitor the Communists, and the Mujahedin, at school. These groups had seized arms from armouries in the chaos that preceded and coincided with the Shah’s flight. Their paymasters in Moscow were trying to take advantage of the situation, to suck Iran into their zone of influence.

(Sitting on his heels, hands on knees: ‘In the name of God, on him be praise and glory. I bear witness that God is one and that Muhammad is his servant and Prophet. Greetings and the benediction of God on Muhammad and his followers.’)

The following week, Mr Zarif and the other members of the gang followed the Communist kids. They found out where they lived, and discovered that their dads wore big moustaches, and called one another ‘comrade’. Some of the dads worked at Isfahan’s big iron works, which had Russian managers. One or two of them socialized with Russian families. The Russian families were poor and ugly.

One day, a couple of men arrived at the school to start political indoctrination. The men told the kids how to think about God and the Imam, and America and the Zionist Entity. When the principal saw that Mr Zarif was a friend of these men, he conceived for him a shaming fear. A kid of fifteen had become more powerful than he was.

Mr Zarif neglected his studies. He started doing sport, pumping iron, sticking out his chest. (He was growing a beard, though not fast enough for his liking). In school, he delivered harangues, handed round pamphlets. He organized prayer meetings in the playground. If he wanted to pass on a message to another boy, he would walk into the boy’s class and whisper the message to him – the teacher would pretend not to notice.

Mr Zarif’s boys got two of Cagney and Lacey’s favourites into the school store, and asked them some questions. They learned that Cagney and Lacey was a closet Communist. Shortly after, quite a senior person from the Revolutionary Guard arrived at the school. He spent a long time in the principal’s office. Cagney and Lacey was called in and invited to resign. The following day, at his word, ten of Mr Zarif’s lads surrounded the Communists; there were bleeding noses. The hammers and sickles got fewer.

(Sitting on his heels: ‘The peace and munificence of God be on Muhammad. Greetings on us and the right-acting servants of God. The peace and mercy and munificence of God be on you.’)

A few months after the Revolution, the Communists planned a meeting that was to be addressed by a high-up Communist from Tehran. Thanks to a spy he had planted among them, Mr Zarif got wind of the meeting. He went early and got a good spot near the podium. Just as the speaker was being introduced, Mr Zarif ran onto the podium and landed a good one on his nose. Before anyone had time to react, he hurled himself into the section of the crowd that was thinnest. He was small enough, and fast enough, to get away with only a broken rib.

At the beginning of November 1979, radical students allied to the Imam seized the American Embassy in Tehran, taking the staff hostage. The students announced that they would release the hostages only when President Carter handed over the Shah, who had been allowed into America for cancer treatment. Bazargan resigned; his government had been trying to repair relations with the US. After Bazargan’s departure, the Imam placed the government directly under the control of his kitchen cabinet, the Islamic Revolutionary Council.

Mr Zarif was delighted: he remembered that the Revolution was made up of steps.

Nowadays, when people think of the mullahs’ revenge, they think of Sadegh Khalkhali. There were scores of clerics who were more important than him; they actually took decisions, rather than implemented and interpreted the decisions of others, as Khalkhali did. Many of these mullahs were easier on the eye than Khalkhali; they had politer turns of phrase, more impressive qualifications. Khalkhali was a poor kid from the Azeri northwest, short on education outside the seminary, rotund, bald and coarse.

During the Shah’s time, Khalkhali had upset people by writing a treatise depicting Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenian empire and a figure whom the Shah admired, as a sodomite. He’d been imprisoned and internally exiled. Then, a few days after the Revolution, Khomeini appointed him to be a judge in the revolutionary court that was to try beneficiaries of the old regime and opponents of the new one. Khalkhali toured the country, trying monarchists and counter-revolutionaries. (Over a three-month period, he claimed to have condemned more than four hundred people to death. They included former senators, a radio presenter and a mob leader.) His pugnacious, fat face became as famous as his jokes, which often featured references to executions. V. S. Naipaul, who visited Khalkhali at the height of his notoriety, likened him to a jester at his own court.

Khalkhali made an indelible impression on Elaine Sciolino, an American journalist who witnessed one of the trials he presided over; she remembered him in a book she wrote two decades later. To counter the extremely hot weather, Sciolino recalls, Khalkhali removed his turban, cloak and socks, which must have made him look like a turnip. He sat on the floor and picked his toes while hearing the evidence against a defendant. He repeatedly left the room during the testimony of witnesses.

His most famous victim was Amir Abbas Hoveida, and Khalkhali must have enjoyed that bit of business. Hoveida was Khalkhali’s antithesis, thirteen years the Shah’s prime minister, a man whose Northampton brogues Khalkhali could not, before the Revolution, have dreamed of polishing. Hoveida was a francophone, but he also knew Arabic – the Arabic of Beirut society, not the Qoran. Even after their divorce, Hoveida’s wife made sure that a fresh orchid reached him every morning for his buttonhole. He’d not been personally venal or murderous, but he’d closed his eyes to the atrocities of others. Khalkhali charged him with waging war on God and corruption on earth. Over two court sessions, separated by several weeks, Khalkhali pounded the defendant’s moral ambivalence like saffron under a pestle.

At lunchtime on Hoveida’s last day, Khalkhali reports in his memoir, the prisoner was treated to a repast of rice, lamb and broad beans. Khalkhali claims to have made do with bread and cheese. (Next to photographs of him, excessively crapulent, this ascetic self-portrayal is unconvincing.) During the afternoon session, Khalkhali didn’t allow Hoveida a defence counsel, nor was a jury present. As the presiding judge, Khalkhali didn’t pretend to be impartial; in the vehemence of his harangues, he rivalled the prosecutor.

By trying Hoveida, Khalkhali jabbed his finger in Bazargan’s eye. Bazargan disapproved of the revolutionary court – he was planning for Hoveida an exemplary trial that would establish the Revolution’s reputation for justice and moderation. But Khalkhali, who plausibly claims to have taken hints from Khomeini, had different ideas. He gave orders that no one was to be allowed out of the prison where the trial was taking place. To ensure that word didn’t reach Bazargan, he locked the prison telephones in a fridge. And so Hoveida was sentenced and shot in the prison courtyard. His final words were patrician, and a bit surprised: ‘It wasn’t meant to end like this.’

Khalkhali’s theatre travelled on. It gave perhaps its most memorable performance at a famous shrine in south Tehran. Khalkhali and two hundred revolutionary militiamen set out to destroy the Pahlavi family vault, which was in the shrine’s precincts. Khalkhali was opposed by the government and by the resilience of the granite structure. The spades and picks used by the Revolutionary Guard proved insufficient. Khalkhali called for reinforcements. (National television was already on site to record his endeavour.) Bulldozers and cranes arrived, but the tomb withstood. At ten o’clock that night, the valiant revolutionaries went home to bed.

In his memoir, Khalkhali craves his readers’ indulgence: ‘Perhaps you don’t grasp how strong they’d made this tomb.’ But he was not deterred; the tomb would have to be blown up, by degrees. And when, after twenty epic days, the job was done, and the dust of imperial bones blended with the smell of cordite, ‘the sound of cheers and joy rose from the people, and the enthusiasm and joy were indescribable’.

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. That might be Khal-khali’s epitaph.

Today, Mr and Mrs Zarif are coming to lunch with us, here in Elahiyeh. I wonder what they will make of Bita, my wife, and what she’ll make of them.

Elahiyeh is a desirable suburb on the slopes of north Tehran. It used to be so green that, even in midsummer, you had to sleep with a light blanket. The British and Russian embassies kept grand legations in Elahiyeh, to which their respective ambassadors decamped in the spring. Now, the compounds remain but most of the gardens have been built over. Elahiyeh is rarely more than two or three degrees cooler than the dustbowl of south Tehran.

Elahiyeh’s name is derived from the name of God in Arabic, Allah, but few places in Iran are more reputed for impiety. Behind entry gates crowned with barbed wire, illicit booze is consumed and dancing committed by mixed assemblies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that sex happens between men and women who aren’t married to each other. The Islamic Republic is an avoidable botheration.

In the Shah’s time, the area was inhabited by suave monarchists who built Swiss-style chalets. Fearing for their liberty after the Revolution – many of them had taken part in the Shah’s oppression, or dipped into the public purse – they fled. The new regime appropriated their houses and grounds, building on them or turning them into, say, a sports club for the families of a privileged caste of civil servants.

Elahiyeh’s present inhabitants are an uncouth upper class. They have done well in recent years out of high oil prices. They inhabit marble-clad apartments in escapist blocks and enjoy the view during the rare instances when smog hasn’t settled in the lap of the Alborz Mountains. Many of them have residence rights and property abroad – the Revolution taught them that it pays to keep your options open.

It’s difficult to ascertain exactly where their money comes from. Knowing the right people has a lot to do with it. They are terrific name-droppers. Having access to commodities beyond the reach of the common man – foreign currency at preferential rates, import licences – is also important. Their skill is acquiring what exists in artificially small quantities and selling it at a price reflective of this scarcity. Their wives take lovers and visit a French-educated psychologist downtown.

Their teenage daughters, matchsticks marinated in Chanel, are yanking up their coats; in recent years, hems have drifted above the knee for the first time since the Revolution. Their favourite activities are having nose jobs – there is one model: retroussé – buying illegally imported Italian shoes and rearranging their headscarves in public, by mistake on purpose exhibiting their hair.

The daughters gather on a Thursday night, outside pizza parlours and coffee shops, discharging arch glances and pollinating scents. They’re treading water while their parents find them a mate. (Likely as not, he will be their first cousin – the families know each other, and the mehriyeh, a kind of pre-nup, will not be prohibitive.)

They are courted, if the word is applicable, by boys who wear a minimalist variant on the goatee, driving Pop’s sedan. A chance meeting in a coffee shop; a telephone number flung into a passing car – such are the first moves. Oral sex is, of necessity, popular; there will be a great to-do if the girl doesn’t bloody her wedding bed. In case of penetration, however, all is not lost. A discreet doctor can usually be found to sew up the offending hymen.

There’s a hollow thrill to be got from bettering the morals police. (They cruise Elahiyeh in their Land Cruisers, looking for miscreants to shake down for a few dollars, smelling breath for alcohol, rummaging through handbags for condoms.) For the rich kids, it’s the best way of getting back at the state, at parents, at the predictability of life.

In a strange way, Elahiyeh’s social vacuum suits us, too. We like the traditional notion of an Iranian community, but are not sure we could inhabit one. Unlike almost everywhere else, you can live in Elahiyeh as you can in a Western city: in peace and anonymity.

Before 1979, Bita’s parents had nice ministry positions; both regarded a deputy ministership or another senior bureaucratic post as their due. Bita and her younger brother – a second brother was born on the eve of the Revolution – led blameless, privileged lives.

There were three choices when it came to educating your children: the French school, the German school and the American school. (You didn’t send your child willingly to an Iranian school; foreign languages and contacts were indispensable aids to getting on in the world.) The trouble with the American school was that its graduates spoke Persian with an American accent. There was no German connection in Bita’s family. Her mother, on the other hand, had studied law in Paris, so Bita was sent to the French school. It was run by nuns. Each year, on the anniversary of her martyrdom, the school commemorated the exemplary life of Joan of Arc.

Bita wore a dark-blue collarless tutu over a white T-shirt. In winter, she wore a roll neck jumper over the T-shirt. If the driver was late collecting her after school, she would wander down nearby Lalehzar, Tehran’s Pigalle, where there were whores and the smell of alcohol, and ornate cinemas with putti on the ceilings. In the summer evenings, when her parents were out, she would go swimming in pools that belonged to the parents of her friends. She and her friends danced to Googoosh, Iran’s answer to Shirley Bassey.

They admired Farah, the Shah’s third wife. It’s arguable that Farah was not as exquisite as wife number two, an Isfahani whom the Shah abandoned for failing to sire. But, she was tall, wore fabulous clothes and had an artistic eye. She was an alumna of the French school and came to visit.

In 1978, there were riots and atrocities. Bita got used to the sounds of firing and being sent home early from school – and the worried look on the face of Ma Soeur Louise. She didn’t realize that she and her friends, and Farah and the Shah and the whores of Lalehzar, were the reason for the hatred.

And so the Shah left. An old man with frightening eyes came. The French school was closed. (Of course it was; it was named after a Roman Catholic saint!) A lot of the girls, including Bita, were removed to an Iranian school where French was taught. Friends started leaving. First, the foreigners and the Jews, and the Bahais – members of a religious sect, originally an offshoot of Islam, that had been favoured by the Shah. One day, little Ziba would come to school. The next, she’d be gone. A few weeks later, her family would surface in Orange County, California.

It seemed to Bita that everything had been turned upside down. The people who were now giving orders looked like the people who had taken orders before. In the past, her mother and father had been on top. Now, they were at the bottom. If they wanted to get something done, they had to flatter coarse men with beards and rosaries. In the past, Bita had associated beards with building workers and dervishes. Now, everyone was growing them; you had to, if you wanted to get on.

A few months into the Revolution, Bita’s new school was closed and she went to another. They didn’t teach French at the new school. Arabic, the language of the Holy Qoran, was compulsory. The girls had to wear headscarves and long coats. They were told to despise the wearing of ribbons in hair, and bare ankles. In the streets, there were Hezbollahis patrolling, checking peoples’ adherence to Islamic rules concerning dress and behaviour. They threw acid in the faces of women who were inappropriately made up.

Bita had lived for colour. It was as important to her as the sun. The Revolution had killed colour, declared it to be evil.

Mr Zarif had delivered his school to the Revolution; in the precincts, he was unchallengeable. He turned his attention to a Qoranic injunction that Muslims promote virtue and prevent vice. It meant implementing Islamic law and practices, eradicating decadent ways of behaving. It meant starting at the bottom of society. He and the gang started hanging around parks and shopping centres. They would approach boys who were chatting to girls and ask, ‘What is your relationship? Is this woman your sister? Why are you talking to her?’ If they got an unsatisfactory answer, they’d hustle the boy away and tear off a few shirt buttons. They’d tell the girl: ‘Bleached jeans are a sign of American cultural corruption. Go home and put on Islamic clothes.’

The ban on booze was hitting the alcoholics. Liquor prices had rocketed. Every morning, a park or a vacant lot yielded up a new body, full of petrol, turpentine, meths – anything they could get their hands on. Mr Zarif felt that society was being cleansed, spewing harmful matter. He was learning Arabic, the language of the Holy Qoran.

Sometimes, he and his lads caught boys and girls flirting in shops, under the cover of deciding on a purchase. Mr Zarif and the gang would smash the windows of shops where such things went on and spoil some of the merchandise. If they saw girls flouncing in a park, they seized their handbags and tipped out the contents. ‘Who do you wear make-up for?’ they demanded. ‘What is that music cassette you’ve bought? Haven’t you heard what the Imam said about Western culture?’ If they came across a young man wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, they said: ‘Your hair is longer than Islam permits. Everyone should groom himself as the Prophet did. Here; let us cut it for you.’

They would deliver serious offenders to the boys at the mosque. The boys would consult one of the mullahs and get a sentence passed. Whippings would be administered, in accordance with Islamic law. The gang’s effectiveness was enhanced by the recruitment of two middle-aged women with long nails; they seemed to enjoy scratching the faces of pretty girls who were resistant to the Islamic dress code.

The doorbell rings. It’s the Zarifs. We’ve cooked Indian food, because we reckon that Mr and Mrs Zarif should be open to new experiences.

Not too new. Bita is wearing her headscarf. She’s careful not to put out her hand to shake Mr Zarif’s. She helps Mrs Zarif get out of her black chador for outdoors, and into her colourful indoor chador. Mr and Mrs Zarif look around for indoor slippers to put on. But we don’t ask people to take off their shoes when they enter our house. There aren’t any slippers available. Mr and Mrs Zarif take off their shoes and walk on in their socks.

‘What a house!’ they both say it at the same time. They look at Bita. (She’s the interior designer.)

The hall is burgundy. (My father-in-law says it looks like a nightclub.) There is a batik wall hanging depicting the Hindu goddess Durga, wearing a necklace of human skulls.

The sitting room is two shades of tangerine. There’s a picture of a woman in a bright red dress and a challenging stare, standing next to an androgyne with diaphanous blue skin and yellow hair. There are red-backed chairs and an Indian sari turned into curtains, and a dark green sofa from the 1940s, and a green tribal tunic with red paisley lining put in a frame and attached to the wall. The bolsters are richly coloured and patterned. There are riotous Baktiari carpets, Armenian rugs.

Mr Zarif is wearing a grey shirt, and grey trousers, and white socks. His house has white walls.

As we sit down to eat, I wonder whether he ever threw acid in the face of a girl who had red on her lips, or hair escaping from her headscarf.

[*] ‘You should know about ta’aruf In Arabic ta’aruf means behaviour that is appropriate and customary; in Iran, it has been corrupted and denotes ceremonial insincerity. Not in a pejorative sense; Iran is the only country I know where hypocrisy is prized as a social and commercial skill.

Three examples:

When the taxi driver offered us tea and cigarettes, and we refused, this was ta’aruf. He had no intention of giving us tea and cigarettes, and we reacted accordingly. A man may propose that his son marry the daughter of his impoverished younger brother without having any intention of permitting the match; the son is already engaged to the daughter of an ayatollah, and the brother’s daughter is a repulsive dwarf. But the quintessence of ta’aruf can be found in the behaviour of a mullah I once observed entering a Tehran hospital in the company of several other men. As the mullah crossed the threshold, he said to the men waiting behind him, ‘After you.’

If, through some mistake or misunderstanding, an offer extended through ta’aruf is accepted, it will be retroactively countermanded. I remember reading somewhere of a foreigner who was arrested for theft after being denounced by a shopkeeper who had repeatedly refused to take his money.

[*] I have a book, Celebration at Persepolis, that commemorates this party, which was held in celebration of what the Shah arbitrarily judged to be the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of continuous Iranian monarchy. The book relates that some sixty tents the size of villas, designed by a Parisian firm in beige and royal blue, were erected to house the guests, and that a hatter was on hand should one of the guests squash his topper. Haile Selassie brought with him a Chihuahua wearing a diamond-studded collar. A breakfast of raw camel meat was made available for the Arab emirs. The dinner menu included quail eggs stuffed with Caspian caviar, saddle of lamb with truffles and roast peacock stuffed with foie gras. The vin d’honneur was Château Lafite Rothschild 1945. Representing the Vatican, I learned, was Cardinal Maximilian de Furstenberg, a relation of my Belgian grandmother’s. Although he was only a few years older than her, my grandmother always referred to him as Uncle Max, possibly because he worked for the Pope.

CHAPTER THREE A Sacred Calling

One morning in the autumn I found myself in the back seat of a stationary taxi, facing due south, inhaling exhaust fumes. The authorities call this road an autobahn, because it’s meant to be quick and efficient. They have flanked it with lush verges on which they squander the city’s meagre water resources. I don’t think the former mayor, Ghollam-Hossein Karbaschi, who built this and most of Tehran’s other freeways, listened to foreign experts when he was drawing up his ideas on public transport. Had he done so, he would have learned that more asphalt does not lead to less traffic, but to more. Karbaschi’s urban arteries do not race. They loop clownishly. During the rush hour they atrophy.