In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

On the car radio, a woman greeted us. ‘To all you respected drivers and dear, dear bureaucrats, to you conscientious teachers and workmen, I say: Salaam and good morning! To all the beloved professors and students of the Islamic world, I say: Good morning!’

According to the scientists, we in Tehran take in seven and a half times the amount of carbon monoxide that is considered safe. This information starts to mean something only after ten days or two weeks without rain, without wind. One morning, you look towards the Alborz Mountains and they’re not there. Rather, they’re impressionistically there. They’re lurking behind a haze that’s pink-grey, like the gills of an old fish. If you go out for long, you get cruel headaches for which lemon juice and olives are the recommended cures. Windless weekdays are said to carry away scores of old people, all of them poisoned. In the town centre, there’s a pollution meter whose optimistic readings, naturally, no one believes. The sunsets look like nuclear winters.

The woman speaking on the radio sounded as if she was on LSD. She said: ‘I think it would be a good idea for us to perform some simple acts that enable us to start the day in fine fettle. If the window of the car you’re in is closed against the cool of the morning, start by asking the driver if he would mind winding it down. Actually, why don’t I ask him myself? “Mr Driver? Would you mind lowering your window a little?” And to all those housewives at home, I say: open the window a bit, the weather’s splendid!’

Tehran has too many cars and not enough buses. There’s a plan to replace fifteen thousand elderly taxis. There’s a plan to give out loans so that taxi drivers can run their vehicles on compressed natural gas. There’s a plan to extend the metro, which at present has limited reach and is overwhelmed by the rush hour. There’s a plan to increase public awareness, to tell the middle class it’s not below their dignity to use public transport. Plans, plans.

‘Take a deep breath, and keep it a few seconds inside your chest. Now, slowly let it out again. Exactly! During the next song, I want you to do this several times.’

There should be a plan to teach Iranians how to drive. On the road, there’s no law, no ta’aruf. There’s no inside or outside or middle lane; the heavier the traffic, the more lanes come spontaneously into being, and the narrower they are. There’s no indicating left or right. There are pedestrians who can’t be bothered to take the pedestrian bridges, crossing the motorway like morons. Some evenings, when the kids are out, with the ducking and weaving at extraordinary speeds, you might think you’re in a rally or a computer game. Or you could think of it this way: the vehicle you’re in is a laggard sperm and the end of the freeway is the last egg available to humanity.

I’ve seen cars prostrate over advertising hoardings; I’ve seen a compressed pedestrian dead like a slug in the middle of the road. I’ve seen cars skittle mopeds – no helmets of course, that would be sissy – and drive on regardless. Drivers communicate by leaning on their horns and flashing their headlights. They use symbols: the thumbs-up (a rough equivalent of the finger), the clenched fist (a bit worse). Tempers fray. Once, as a passenger in a taxi, I found myself leaning out of the window and deploying a Turkish profanity that I had learned while living in Ankara but had never, on account of its considerable obsceneness, dared to use.

The elderly taxis are Paykans. In winter, Paykan drivers stick a piece of cardboard across the grille, giving the car the appearance of an asthmatic with a hanky in front of his mouth. Paykan means arrow, but the Paykan is as unerring as the Hillman Hunter, its almost identical antecedent from the 1960s, was sharp-nosed and predatory. In the old days, Paykans were mainly British-made and assembled in Iran. But the British don’t make Paykan parts any more, and 97 per cent of every Paykan is Iranian. I have been told that every new Paykan rolls off the production line with an average of two hundred faults. This is the reason why a fifteen-year-old Paykan, which has more British parts, will cost you more than a new one.

‘And now it’s the turn of the smile. Everyone smile to everyone! The rose of a smile will beautify your face. The scientists have established that people who smile in response to daily challenges are more likely to retain their health. Don’t frown!’

Something happened and we started to move. Sometimes, it’s not obvious why these traffic jams happen, and why they stop. It’s one of the mysteries of Tehran.

In the 1990s, Karbaschi let the magnates into north Tehran, where they developed Elahiyeh and other neighbourhoods with little regard for taste or safety. (It’s not unknown for new buildings to subside as a result of vibrations from nearby building sites.) The city’s infrastructure couldn’t keep up with the pace of growth, and there was a bad smell of impropriety. When Karbaschi was jailed in 1998, everyone knew his trial was politically motivated. But no one suggested that his municipal empire wasn’t corrupt.

Now, four years after he was pardoned and freed, Karbaschi is infrequently criticized. His freeways, his skyline, his parks and his cultural centres: they symbolized a regeneration, Tehran’s version of the building boom that bulldozed and revived Europe’s cities in the 1950s. Karbaschi was announcing: the War’s over. Let us look to the future.

But a revolutionary state can’t look to the future. The Revolution is everything, and it has already happened. The War was the Revolution’s crescendo, so the authorities have preserved it. Living in Tehran is like listening to the sea in a shell.

The authorities made the War part of the fabric. They put it on the city maps. As casualty figures rose, so the localities started changing. Thousands of streets called after nightingales, angels and pomegranates were given new names. Martyr Akbar Sherafat (this was the street where he grew up; his parents still occupy a flat in number sixty-one); Martyr Soufian (his daughter was born a few days after an Iraqi shell scattered bits of him over the front); the Martyrs Mohsenian – two brothers whose faces, smiling down from heaven, have been painted on a wall.

In the process of finding a friend’s house, you commemorate heroes:

‘Excuse me, madam, where’s Martyr Khoshbakht Alley?’

‘Well, you go down Martyr Abbasian Street, turn right into Martyr Araki Street, and then turn left immediately after the Martyr Paki General Hospital …’

So much for the little men with their little places; the prestige memorials – the boulevards and autobahns – are reserved for the dead elite. In the north of Tehran, there’s Sadr Autobahn – that’s Iraq’s Ayatollah al-Sadr, Iraqi Shi’ite, whom Saddam Hussein executed for sedition. Sadr is tributary to the main north-south autobahn, Modarres (Ayatollah Modarres, who was known for his opposition to the last Shah but one). Closer to the Square of the Seventh of Tir, there’s Beheshti Avenue. (Ayatollah Beheshti was the Islamic Republic’s first chief justice.) Before the Revolution, Beheshti Street was called Abbasabad.

My taxi was going on slowly. I saw that scaffolding was up in front of a mural that had interested me since my arrival in Iran. Men in overalls were sitting on the scaffolding, under a canopy. There were pots that I assumed to be full of paint; they were preparing to paint over the mural.

The mural showed a dead man, a martyr, lying in his bier, with his daughter standing over him, holding a rose. The daughter couldn’t have been more than four years old, but she wasn’t looking down on her father with the exuberant grief that you might expect. Her expression said: ‘I understand. You were my father but, more important, you were a Muslim. Having weighed your competing responsibilities, you went off to defend the Revolution, and Islam, from the Iraqi rapists. Good for you.’

I couldn’t imagine the little girl giggling, or whining, or tugging at her mother’s chador and demanding ice cream. Her dress was fanatically Islamic; who ever heard of a four-year-old wearing a black smock to cover her hair, and a chador over that, with not so much as a lock on display? A four-year-old alive to the diabolical temptation represented by a woman’s hair? She wasn’t a girl, but an idea.

We passed Mottahari Street (former name: Peacock Throne Street) – that’s Ayatollah Mottahari, Khomeini’s colleague and friend, who was assassinated a few months after the Revolution. We reached the Square of the Seventh of Tir – former name: the Square of the Twenty-Fifth of Shahrivar, the date of the Shah’s accession to the throne. Not a square in the Western sense, or a grassy maidan in the Indian – more an oxbow for Karbaschi’s meandering freeway, with a scum of shared taxis and cars and buses.

On the Seventh of Tir 1360 – that’s the Iranian calendar date for 21 June 1981 – a huge explosion that is thought to have been planted by the Hypocrites killed seventy-two people, including Beheshti, four cabinet ministers and other bigwigs. (Two more later died of their wounds.) On a wall overlooking the square there is a mural of Beheshti with his wiry beard and olive-stone eyes. Underneath, there is his eccentric adumbration of Iran’s foreign policy: ‘Let America be irritated by us; let it be so irritated, it dies.’

The carnage of the Seventh of Tir convinced Khomeini that there could be no mercy. The enemy, the Communists, liberals and pseudo-Islamists, had to be destroyed. In the months that followed, thousands of members and sympathizers of the Mujahedin and other opposition groups were executed. On 18 and 19 September 1981: 182 (according to official figures). On 27 September 1981: 153.

We entered Roosevelt – it acquired a new name after the Revolution, but everyone still calls it Roosevelt. We passed the Nest of Spies. It’s the regime’s name for the former US Embassy. Low-slung walls: easy enough for the students to get over. I remembered pictures from Time magazine at the end of 1979, of the hostage-takers using an American flag to carry away rubbish from the embassy compound, and a lurid Khomeini, Hammer Horror with blood-red irises, on the cover.

A few months before I’d visited a temporary exhibition at the Nest of Spies. The people had come to smell America. They’d come to look at the eavesdropping equipment that the embassy staff had used, and the shredders and incinerators they’d fed with documents as the students took over the embassy. (The students then spent months piecing together the shredded material. Some of this, they were able to claim, implicated their domestic rivals in CIA plotting. This was helpful to Khomeini, who used the findings to discredit his opponents.)

The organizers of the exhibition had placed dummies of American diplomats around a table, in a soundproof room that had apparently been used for secret meetings. As a visitor to the exhibition, you stood outside the room, which was made of two thick panes of glass with a vacuum between them, and looked in at the Americans. They wore ties: a Western affectation. They were seated on chairs: a kind of enthronement. They had crossed their legs, or splayed them, showing off immodest American crotches: canine. As you stood there, pressed up against the glass, and viewed their washed-out complexions and ugly auburn hair, you could imagine them talking over ways to control Iran, to defeat Islam. At the end of the working day, you could imagine them drinking beer and taking a slut for the night. That was what Americans did, wasn’t it?

We carried on south. We crossed a flyover. On one side, the houses had not been fully demolished – just enough to allow the flyover to be built. They were half-houses. The upstairs rooms still had wallpaper. The grid of south Tehran started to take shape. Scraps of yellow and turquoise tile were visible on the older façades, and rust-coloured roofs. There was less building activity in this part of the town and more traffic. The women mostly wore chadors. A different town, conservative and claustrophobic.

Sometimes, I’ve wondered what it would be like to live here. There would be a mode of conduct, proximity to the neighbours, a feeling of impermanence. These old communities are under attack – by unemployment and highly adulterated heroin at fifty cents a hit, by women who aren’t family and the influx of migrants from the provinces. Nothing stays the same. A neighbour leaving, another taking his place, a divorce, a business success, an iron ball crashing into a corner shop.

The defences are religion and the watchful eyes of neighbours, the chador and Islam. If the community is an island, and if the roads and bazaars full of strangers are the sea around them, then people behave themselves on the island and swim free in the fathomless waters of moral decay.

Then, we were caught in the bazaar traffic. Small vans carrying carpets and cans and wooden palettes on their sides. Men pushing carts: the porters, the lowest form of bazaar life. The day before, the bazaar had closed its doors in protest at an aggressive speech made by President Bush. It was to show America that Iranians were united in their continued hatred for the Great Satan.

As we approached the South Terminal, I looked out for a large black building, a plant that produced vegetable oil, which I was used to seeing at the roadside. But the factory was doubled over – in pain, badly winded. The roof had collapsed. One of the chimneys had toppled.

I got out of the taxi, holding my bag, and turned to face the Peugeot drivers.

‘Isfahaaaan! Isfahaaaan!’

One of them came up to me. He had a bronze complexion, purplish lips. ‘Isfahan! Leaving right now!’ His face was convulsed by the opiate’s bonhomie. (In Iran, the masses have both religion and opium.) His hand gripped me insolently.

I picked another driver, one with a clean moustache and an ironed shirt. The back seat of his Peugeot was occupied by a man in his twenties and another chap with a beard. I took the third place. A young couple shared the front passenger seat and fed each other crisps.

We moved off. The driver shifted position in his seat, hunched over the wheel. He flicked the gears with his palms and ran his hands through his shiny hair. There was a short conversation about what music we would listen to. The field was narrowed down to the titans of Turkish pop: Tarkan or Ibrahim. Ibrahim won. The driver pushed Ibrahim into the cassette player with the tips of his fingers. He lit his cigarette, but not before putting it in a mahogany-coloured holder. Every elegant move seemed designed to beguile the senseless boredom of his hours. We left south Tehran.

The sun in my eyes; Ibrahim lamenting through his moustache; the proximity of the five others; cigarettes; the speed and a rococo driver.

I thought: why don’t I have a car? Now that baby’s on the way, well have to get a car. Must be air-conditioned. But expensive! Government monopoly over car making, and demand far exceeds output: prices artificially high. Paykan? Forget it; Bita would sooner walk. Best alternative? Eight grand for a Kia Pride, a Korean-designed paper cup set on Smarties.

I was feeling sick and we were pelting along. We were driving through Zahra’s Heaven, the main cemetery in south Tehran. Seventy thousand dead soldiers in there. Other fathers’ sons, other men’s exercise, mirth, matter.

Then we were speeding down dust tracks that had been thrown across fields of barley. We could follow the asphalt, but that would take us through the tollbooths at the beginning of the motorway. This way, we’d emerge onto the motorway a few kilometres beyond the tollbooths and cruise for free.

We skidded onto the motorway. One hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, in an Iranian-built GLX 2000. Tired driver, straight road; he could fall asleep at any moment. One careless bolt, cruelly loosening. That’s all it would take. I looked at the other passengers. The bearded chap was silently mouthing an invocation, again and again, using dead time to accumulate credit with God. The couple had fallen asleep entwined. No one was thinking about seat belts. If we had to brake suddenly, we’d be scattered over the tarmac.

MR DRIVER, HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THAT EVERY ACTION HAS A CONSEQUENCE? WHAT DO YOU THINK OF CAUSE AND EFFECT?

The thought of never seeing my wife again. Or the little one, when he/she emerged. Right now just walnut size or strawberry size or whatever. A thing, not a person, but promising. Something I will love, and will love me, even if I prove to be unworthy.

MR DRIVER, WHY ARE YOU DRIVING SO FAST?

I tapped the driver on the shoulder.

‘Mr Driver?’

He looked at me in the rear-view. He turned down the music a little bit and said: ‘You don’t like Ibrahim?’ The young man was looking at me.

‘No, no, Ibrahim’s fine, I was wondering, could you drive at a more … er’ – I groped for the word – ‘reasonable speed?’

The driver’s expression in the rear-view mirror was puzzled. What did ‘reasonable’ mean? What did I want him to do?

He put his foot down. The speedometer gave up the ghost.

I was in Isfahan, zigzagging towards the Shah’s Square. (New name: the Imam’s Square.) I was on my way to meet a cleric called Mr Rafi’i, to talk about the War. Bobbing above the surrounding houses was the blue dome of the Mosque of the Shah (new name: Mosque of the Imam), which dominates the southern end of the square. As I walked I passed iron gates that led into new tenements, or into an old courtyard that may have contained a fig tree and a tethered goat. The tight turning streets were still and baking, and my mouth was dry. I wanted to be close to the mosque, with its shadows and ablutions pool, and its moist revetments.

The normal way into the Shah’s Square is through the roads and lanes that feed it from east and west, or from the bazaar, which debouches into it from the north. But my hotel was south of the square and I didn’t feel like walking half its length before entering it from the side. I was trying a short cut. Having approached the mosque from behind, I would surely come across a passage or lane that ran alongside it, and that would take me into the square. I pursued the dome.

After a few minutes, I rounded a bend and met a massive brick wall. Lying in the dust, there were bits of broken tile – yellow and turquoise and blue. I realized I was under the tiled dome; it had moulted faience. I was standing at the foot of the rear wall of the main dome chamber.

If you approach the east end of a Gothic cathedral, you’ll come across the apse’s satisfying bulge, some gargoyles, a ribcage of flying buttresses. The Ottoman mosques are mystic spheres; whatever your viewpoint, there is always a painstaking accretion – of domes and half-domes, ascending to the main dome, and thence to heaven. Both have been conceived sculpturally. You’re allowed to approach from all directions. But here: this rude wall!

When I stood a little to one side of the wall, I could see much of the mosque’s skyline. From the Shah’s Square: a pageant. From this side: a chaos of features and perspectives, without colour. I made out the western vaulted portico, or aivan. Viewed from the mosque courtyard, it is dazzling; the lavish stalactite decoration is intensified by mosaics and tiles. Now, from behind, it was unkempt, pregnant with its own vault, made of old bricks.

I had always assumed that the upstairs bays over the small vaulted shop fronts that flanked the mosque were the façades for storerooms and cells. Viewing them from the rear, I realized they were a screen. The Shah’s Square was a theatre and I had blundered backstage.

There was no corridor past the mosque. I retraced my steps and walked north along the main road running parallel to the square. I turned right and felt the anticipation the architects intended I should feel. I entered the square where they plotted I should enter and saw what they wanted me to see. A vast bounded esplanade, bay upon bay, greatly monotonous. At the northern end: the entrance to the bazaar. At the southern end, the Mosque of the Shah. About two-thirds down, opposite one another: the Palace of Ali Qapu, and the Mosque of Sheikh Lutfollah.

The portico of Ali Qapu was crowned by a veranda with a roof supported by spindly wooden legs. From here, Abbas had watched polo matches, executions and military parades that took place in his honour. Beyond, at the southern end of the square, shivered the Mosque of the Shah. Slender minarets crowning the entrance portal; the dome’s colossal bulk and the harmonious disposition of traditional forms – four aivans, facing each other around a courtyard. With one renowned aberration: in order to face Mecca, the entire mosque after the entrance portal had been oriented obliquely.

In Iran, the beloved monuments are not buildings but gardens. The most respected engineer does not make roads but the underwater channels that carry the water that cools the houses and moistens the desert. The great mosques are clay cups, and the Mosque of the Shah has water to the brim.

Up close, the tiles are coarse. Their prodigious acreage is almost unattractive. From a distance, however, you long to be submerged.

Around the square, families were claiming the garden and pavements that had been laid over Abbas’s esplanade. There were picnics on the grass and girls playing badminton. Mothers chewed sunflower seeds and spat out the shells, while their husbands lit paraffin stoves. Urchin boys clung to the axle-bars of phaetons that propelled gently the well-to-do. Every now and then a shuttlecock would rise and fall before the dome of the little Mosque of Sheikh Lutfollah, like a tropical bird in front of a tapestry.

The Sheikh Lutfollah is one of the triumphs of all architecture. It has no courtyard, no minaret. The dome is low and made of pink, washed bricks, articulated by a broad, spreading rose tree inlaid in black and white. This dome catches the light shyly; the inlay is glazed, but not the bricks. The dome floats upon an aivan of typical ostentation – but askew, for the chamber has been placed twenty metres to the north. Why?

I crossed the square and went in. A small corridor opened off to the left: dark and dimly gleaming. I followed the corridor, and the darkness virtually obscured the tiles on the walls and vault. A few paces on, I was forced to take another turn, to the right, thick-wrapped in the corridor.

Ahead, a shaft of light, strained through window tracery, appeared from a wall two metres in girth. (The walls need muscle, to withstand the dome’s thrust.) The shaft of light pointed like a Caravaggio. I followed it, turning right and standing at the entrance to the dome chamber. The dark corridors had disoriented me and made me forget where I was in relation to the square outside. I’d taken no more than twenty-five paces.

A man and a woman and a little girl were standing under the dome, talking. There was one other person in the sanctuary, a heavy man.

The architect – whose name, Muhammad Reza b. Hossein, is inscribed in the sanctuary – skewed the dome chamber so it faces Mecca, but that is the extent of the Lutfollah’s resemblance to the Mosque of the Shah. In the Lutfollah, the dome chamber’s orientation is not an ostentatious oddity, but hidden, subordinated to the serenity of the whole.

The light in the sanctuary was more plentiful but dappled through the tracery of windows in the drum and by the glazed and unglazed surfaces around the chamber. It illuminated, seemingly at random, a section of the inscription bands and a bit of ochre wall inlaid with arabesques, and a clenched turquoise knuckle, part of a frame for one of the arches.

Imagine Abbas, at prayer in his oratory, his head bared and vulnerable, fluid sunlight catching his shoulder.

The little girl, idling while her parents examined the enamelled lectern, gazed up at the dome, put her arms out, and whirled.

The thickset man addressed me: ‘Mr Duplex.’

I said, ‘Mr Rafi’i?’

The man said: ‘Can you smell him?’

I sniffed.

He tried again: ‘Can you smell God?’

I followed Mr Rafi’i back along the corridor, towards the mosque entrance. He stopped outside a door that I hadn’t noticed and pushed it open. We looked in on a plain cell. ‘The Sheikh was Abbas the Great’s father-in-law,’ he said. ‘This is where he prayed, and where he was buried.’ Mr Rafi’i seemed to approve of the Sheikh’s simple tastes.