Authors: Pico Iyer
It was pure madness, a part of him knew, all the more so since his thesis had been not so much completed as abandoned.
As the pilot made his announcement of their imminent arrival, she stirred, and he followed her gaze out to what seemed to be utter darkness, broken by the great lights of a building they recognized as the Khomeini shrine. Beyond it, the fainter lights of the city going on and on till they ended in emptiness again, and darkness. “It really is a desert,” she said, marveling, as if she’d never believed it until now. “Like L.A. Except the lights are all turned out in parts.”
When they stepped out of the terminal—the scowling guards having waved them through—the winter cold slapped them in the face, and as they lurched towards the center of the city, and the mountains to the north, the taxi driver said that it was only truly Nowruz, New Year, when the snow had melted on the slopes. The hotel that was waiting for them was bare and cold—heating another of the luxuries apparently banned by the Revolution—and as soon as the door was locked behind them, he jumped into her bed for warmth. For superstition’s sake, they’d taken two beds instead of one.
Out in the street the next day, the cars coughing on all sides—the Shah’s most audible legacy—he had the sense of being lost inside a maze. Belching trucks and constant horns, and over everything a sense of grime, or chaos, as if the city itself were wearing old black clothes that hadn’t been cleaned in years; and deeper than the disorder, a sense of constant apprehension. The people around them were all dressed in brown or black, as if to mock the comparisons with Los Angeles, and he thought of the men he’d seen in Damascus, their fraying shirts and moth-eaten jackets giving a poignancy to their talk of revolution.
“I don’t think you’re going to find what you’re looking for,” she said, and he realized she wasn’t talking only of taxis; it was impossible to find anything in the town, and even the mountains by which they’d been told they could orient themselves were often hard to make out in the smog, brown over black over brown.
“Even not to find something might be something,” he said, and she looked back at him strangely, though not without affection.
As they waited and waited for a car, a woman came up to them, and said something to her in a Farsi so colloquial he couldn’t make it out. Then another woman, as if emboldened, came up and handed her an orange. A few children came over to inspect the aliens, and a third woman, eager perhaps to show off her English, came and started asking them questions, or translating the questions of the others. “How long have you been married? How many children do you have? Why do you come here?”
He gave them answers, as the official leader of the party, but the women were mostly looking at her, smiling or gesturing as if to make some contact. An old lady stopped and plucked at the fabric of her coat, as if to remark on its quality. Another one motioned at her scarf, as if to say they were all in this together.
She smiled at them, gestured back, and when they were back at last in the hotel, she said, “It’s like the black-and-white Los Angeles.” The perfect way to put it, he realized; and they like those beings who long to step into a black-and-white movie, as if that is the way to step into simplicity or purity, or something innocent they’ve lost.
The next day, a Friday, the day of prayer, they went up into the mountains, as did half Tehran, it seemed, and soon the downtown area was a brown smudge in the distance. It was sunny still—pale, thin winter sun—and the people around them streamed past the tea-houses as if to put behind them the imported chaos of the modern city: the coughing cars, the running gullies, the kids lighting fires in the streets. Here whole families were sharing food—Persia the country that had invented the picnic—and couples took themselves off into the shadows, or sipped shyly at orange Fantas under trees.
They stopped for tea, and he looked at her as she drank—her dark face-scarf, her black pants, the dark coat she wore over everything, for concealment—and realized that she’d neutered herself in a way, and covered up all that she usually showed in public. And yet, in the same breath, she’d recovered a kind of light. The winter brought color to her cheeks, and some layer of complication that she usually wore was gone. A part of her was the rosy-cheeked schoolgirl in Scandinavia she might have been years before.
“You look well,” she said, as if reading his thoughts.
“You, too. This place agrees with you.”
“I never thought . . .”
He said nothing, so she’d get the thought out.
“I guess”—she paused again—“I guess I never thought it would be so rich. The poverty I expected. The dirt and the chaos, all the bad stuff. But I didn’t expect all this.” In the streets, the previous day, it had been she who had pointed out to him, with a smile, the sign that said, “DEATH TO AMERICA”: the only sign she’d admit to being able to read.
As they went back towards the hotel, they found themselves in one of the gracious, tree-lined streets which the regime had not yet managed to turn into high-rise buildings or mosques.
“He must have grown up somewhere like this,” she said, and then said nothing more. The next morning, they were in the desert again— a great brown emptiness for as far as they could see, with nothing to relieve it, as they drove towards the south, but the glittering golden domes where the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—“the soul and voice of God,” as his name meant—now slept.
He’d had the feeling, ever since he’d come back from Damascus, that whatever he would find in the context of his manuscripts, he would find in Isfahan; and the intuition had been strengthened when he had remembered that it was the city where Sefadhi had studied (and, he thought now, the city that had roused her to rage on the rainy night in the abandoned house). The imperial capital announced itself with a sudden blaze of blue, visible from far across the desert, after miles and miles of scrubby grass and blankness. Turquoise, lapis, aquamarine—a great shine of color in the winter sun that looked like an oasis of extravagance.
They took a room in a small travelers’ inn near the river, and began to take the measure of a town that felt relaxed, itself, in a way that Tehran, the modern capital, could never be. Couples were drinking tea under the famous bridges, and groups of students were walking along the river, laughing and pushing one another as they did. The center of the city was not some grey building that changed name with every change in government; it was the great mosque made of holy verses, its blue impenitent. “It’s more like Persia here,” he said, and she began to say something and then held back. He looked at her and realized she was moved, in some part of herself; it wasn’t anything like what she’d imagined.
“It’s still Iran,” she said, as they passed a group of boys who stood against the wall watching them as they passed; the city remained a Hizbollahi stronghold, and some of the boys who looked like college students were the same ones who, on ayatollahs’ orders, picked off journalists on motorbikes, or placed bombs on the doorsteps of maverick professors. Yet here, too, as in the capital, women and children came up to them everywhere they went, offering small presents. “How many children do you have? What sport do you practice? What do you think of Iran?” An old woman stopped in front of her, eyes so moist it looked as if she would cry, and handed the strange woman from the far-off, rich country a bag of sunflower seeds.
They were going back to the hotel to rest when they passed a gang of small boys on a bridge, pretending, not very successfully, to look away from them. She stopped, and suddenly, impulsively, bent down and gestured towards one of the smallest boys. He looked away, not happy to be approached by a foreigner (and a foreign woman, at that, with a strange-looking instrument in her hands). But finally his curiosity got the better of him, and he stepped forward a little, to see what it was she was carrying.
She showed him with gestures how to push the pink button, and then they stood before him with a smile. The boy focused, clicked, and handed the camera back to her, delighted.
“You see?” she said. “They’re just like children anywhere.”
They hadn’t come only for sightseeing, of course—or told themselves they hadn’t—and when they stopped at a café for tea, he said, “I don’t really expect to find anything.” She smiled, as if she knew that his saying so meant he did. The poems that he carried round with him everywhere here, in spite of the risk they represented, were growing more creased every time he pulled them out, and soon, they both knew, they would be torn, and lost entirely (photocopying secret poems did not seem a good idea in Revolutionary Iran). He took them out now, and put them back again, as if not to hex the enterprise with his hopes.
Back in the hotel, she said she wanted to sleep; the desk clerk had nodded his greetings at them as if still impressed that this foreign woman, explaining why she had a different name from her husband, said she kept her mother’s name as a gesture of respect. She was tired, he realized—all the years of waiting, the seasons of looking through catalogues, the stresses of the last few weeks accumulating. But she was also telling him silently to go off in search of what he needed without worrying about her.
He took off in the direction of the synagogue, and, once there, began to see if he could find somebody who could speak English (he would never get out what he had to in Farsi). But the Jews who lived in Iran had kept alive only by living quietly, among themselves; the last thing they needed was to jeopardize their security by tending to the trivial concerns of a foreigner. Nearby, at the Church of St. Luke, he couldn’t even find a person to answer the bell. “Hello?” he called out. “Anybody home?” but there was nothing, no sign of movement.
He began walking back to the room, defeated, and then, passing a library, he had an idea. Years ago, at a conference, someone had told him that they kept lists of the Revolutionary faithful in the libraries, as a public gesture of gratitude (and, too often, as a secular reward for their martyrdom). He went into the place, nodded at the man behind the desk—he’d deliberately dressed down for the trip and not bothered to shave—and then went to the back, where they seemed to keep public records.
He found what looked to be the area for public listings, and, coming to the volume for 1359 (or 1981, as it would be in the West), he pulled it out. There was a long list of names of those who had “served the Truth,” and among these there were three Sefaredis, though none of them began to look like the man he knew. Going quickly through the long rows of tiny pictures of men, solemn-faced and bearded, on page after page after page, felt eerily like looking along the rows of gravestones in the cemeteries, a young boy’s picture on each one, and a photo of Khomeini on the other side. He put the book back—no “Javad Sefaredi” here—and began to walk out.
As he did so, something made him think of another library, across the world, and Pauline’s mention of how their adviser, in his younger days, had sometimes chosen to go, for whatever reason, by his father’s name. He went back to the same shelves and pulled out the volume for 1358, seeing if he could spot any sign of an “Ardeshir Sefaredi.”
He went quickly through the pages, and then a boy looked back at him—a full head of hair, a virgin’s eyes, and some quality of ardor and possibility that looked nothing like the man he knew. The boy’s beard was young, unformed, and he looked as if he had never heard of cuff links or Italian suits, let alone of California; the strongest element in his eyes was fear. But just behind the fear was something else, a kind of pride almost, that he could give himself over to the Revolution. The look of someone who might write a fiery treatise on the desert of faith in a land of anarchy.
He put the book back, and began to walk along the road he’d come on before. Children came up now and then and shouted,
“Khareji, khareji!”
A couple of boys looked at him as he walked past: who else but a spy would leave a rich country behind and come to their more difficult land? There was the sound of ironworkers in the distance, the ceaseless honking of taxis.
He heard almost none of it, though. He was thinking of a man—a boy, really—who had given up everything he knew, or loved, to serve it far away, in a place where his sacred texts would be turned into greeting cards, and his prayers treated as if they were just love songs.
“You look better,” she said, looking up when he came in. “You must have found what you were looking for.”
“I think I did,” he said, and started packing away his things.
In the evening, when she fell asleep again, he went out one final time, following whatever prompt it was that told him he’d find what he needed here. In the late afternoon they’d gone, as if magnetically pulled, out to the great mosque, and found themselves in what might have seemed a whole city made of words; the yellow-and-blue patterns on the columns and the walls took its visitors into a realm of pure worship. In one area, she’d pointed out the calligraphy so free that even a mullah couldn’t read it; the point, she’d said (no longer shy about telling him what she knew), was that you had to give up your rational mind and stop even trying to understand it. All that mattered was the pattern.
Walking through the mosque, and the square that led up to it, he’d felt erased, as if they’d moved, in some way, from a place where they were monarchs of everything they surveyed into another order, where they were very small indeed. Not just in space but in time as well, the centuries around them stretching out like the grand expanse of the desert. They’d left a world of moments for one in which people were governed by, even buried under, the grievances of four centuries before, or the rivalries of a previous dynasty. And all the years of enmity and suspicion gave the city a somewhat melancholy air, the more pronounced for all its beauty; he thought of a man who got up in his Sunday best—coat and tie and polished shoes—though his wife had died ten years ago and now he was eating alone every night.