Granta 125: After the War (16 page)

I
f anyone asked, we were to say we were British. People asked quite often, as it happened. Since three of us were brown-skinned, at checkpoints they’d ask if we were American. In Tehran in the summer of 1979 America was the Great Satan, on walls around the city were written the words:
DEATH TO AMERICA
, or
MARG BAR AMRIKA
. Soon, saying you were British would become a problem too, after all Britain was Great Satan’s concubine.

We may have distanced ourselves from the Americans in public but we didn’t let that stop us taking advantage of their generosity. The American Embassy occupied a huge, walled compound in downtown Tehran. Most embassies had evacuated non-essential staff by then and my mother, like many diplomatic wives, was drafted in to fill the gaps in administrative assistance, working first at the British and then at the New Zealand Embassy. With only the rump of their staff left in Tehran, the Americans opened up their commissary to the rest of us. The commissary provided Americans posted abroad with the comforts of home. Every US embassy has one and there you can buy the same canned foods and condiments found in supermarkets in Topeka or Tuscaloosa, as well as American newspapers, magazines, videos, white goods and even – in the Tehran commissary – a motorbike. The day the commissary opened its doors we were there: enthusiastic looters, stuffing our trolley with giant jars of Goober Grape, tins of hot-dog sausages, sauerkraut and French’s mustard.

Another time one of the American diplomatic staff invited us to a party at the American Embassy. It was a swim party which later
turned into a barbecue; someone’s leaving do, no doubt. My brother and I spoke to a man with a moustache called Rich, who asked us a question that struck as curious: ‘Have you ever been into the town?’ It took us a while to work out that he was talking about Tehran, the city we were in. I replied yes, we went into town most days, in fact we had travelled through town to reach this party. Rich told us he had never seen Tehran; he spent most of his days in the compound which his apartment abutted. He was a consular officer, charged with responsibility for processing visa applications. Thousands of Iranians wanted to leave the country, not just the supporters of the former regime – the wealthiest of whom had by and large already left – but now others. It was nearly the end of the summer and some people must have begun to get a sense of which way the wind was blowing. The queue to submit visa applications at a hatch in the side of the embassy building curled around the block like the tail of a cat. Whenever Rich left the compound he was recognized and mobbed. He longed for home.

I spoke to another guest, an Irishman who had arrived in Iran the year before to manage the racing stables at the racecourse and who now found himself alone in charge of two hundred racehorses, whose owners, including the Shah, had fled in the first months of the Revolution, followed soon afterwards by the grooms and jockeys, many of whom came from Pakistan. He hadn’t been paid for months and the money to feed the horses was running out. He said I could come and help exercise them if I liked and a few days later I galloped past the empty stands of Tehran racetrack and later walked through block after block of stables, patting each abandoned horse on the nose. I fell in love with an Arab grey with delicate nostrils called Blushing Boy and the Irishman wasn’t joking when he said I was welcome to keep him – if I could find a way to feed him.

The last trip our family took was into the mountains to hike. In our group was the New Zealand ambassador Chris Beeby and his wife. Beeby was a ginger fellow, with the rangy frame of a natural walker, and set quite a pace. We climbed in the heat of the day and
were racked with thirst: we had not thought to bring much water, just one small bottle between us. After two and a half hours we reached the summit and began our descent to the stony valley where a river and its tributaries flowed. Nomads camped near the water with their horses and tents made of stitched leather squares; the women wore veils of yellow and pink sprinkled with flowers, which you saw less and less often in Tehran where the black veil was becoming ubiquitous.

In mid-September I left to go back to school. In October Jimmy Carter granted permission for the cancer-stricken Shah to enter America for treatment at a hospital in New York. On 4 November the US Embassy in Tehran was taken over. Rich and the other guests at the party were among the hostages. My parents had been camping in the Turkoman steppes the weekend before with Chris Beeby and several Americans who worked at the embassy, among them the chargé d’affaires. On the way back the Land Rover broke down and they were late home, and so the Americans had stayed with them that night, all except the chargé who went on, saying she had to open the office the next day. She was taken hostage, remaining captive for 444 days. The next day Chris Beeby hid the four American guests under blankets in the back of his Chevrolet and drove them to the New Zealand Embassy. For a few days my mother smuggled food from home in to them; sworn to secrecy she told nobody, not even my stepfather. Beeby consulted with the Canadian and British ambassadors, and between them they decided that their best chance was to try and pass the American diplomats off as Canadians. They were moved to the home of the Canadian ambassador and issued Canadian passports and exited the country with the aid of the CIA – the story became the subject of the film
Argo
. When the movie came out my mother was angry with Ben Affleck for ignoring the roles of the New Zealanders and gave an interview to the newspapers. In Tehran she spent her remaining days at the New Zealand Embassy shredding documents and taking an axe to the code machine. My stepfather was allowed into the US Embassy building to check on the welfare of the hostages; I saw him on the news, filmed as he left
the building. Rich, or Richard Queen, as I discovered his name to be, was taken gravely ill and released some months later. He was carried out on a stretcher. I don’t think the news report gave his name, but I recognized his moustache.

On 5 November, the day after the storming of the US Embassy, the moderate prime minister, Bazargan, resigned and fled. The Revolutionary Council took control of the government and the country. On 6 November, Khomeini gave his blessing to the student kidnappers. The remaining Western embassies closed their missions, as did the UN. For us, it was over.

The Shah died the next summer. At times I remember Iran the way you do a former lover whose name you hear being spoken by somebody else. A decade after we left, following dinner in a Thai restaurant one rainy evening in London I recognized the people standing a few yards away who had left the restaurant at the same time: the Empress Farah, her daughters, the Crown Prince. I watched as they hailed a taxi and disappeared.

I have tried for a long time to discover what happened to N. I remember both her first name and surname as clearly as I remember her face; I have searched for her on the Internet, but no search has ever produced an Iranian artist of that name. I hope she got out before it became impossible to do so; the country Iran was to become had no place for a woman like her.

I saw the Irish racehorse trainer once more, when he came to ask my mother to help him out of the country, and gave me a vivid account of his escape from the Komiteh who appeared at the stables, he said, to arrest him. They set fire to his office. Before he fled he ran through the stable blocks and loosed the horses rather than leave them to burn or to starve to death locked in their pens. Sometimes when I think of Iran, the summer of 1979 before a people’s hard-won freedom was scattered by the wind, I imagine the Arab horses galloping through the suburbs of the city, past the houses and the factories towards the desert – and pray that they at least never were recaptured.

Courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto and
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Y
ou remember the planes, the supersonic jets roaring across the blue skies of summer, cutting through the firmament at such exalted speeds that they were scarcely visible, a flash of silver glinting briefly in the light, and then, not long after they had vanished over the horizon, the thunderous boom that would follow, resounding for miles in all directions, the great detonation of blasting air that signified the sound barrier had been broken yet again. You and your friends were thunderstruck by the power of those planes, which always arrived without warning, announcing themselves as a furious clamour in the far distance, and within seconds they were directly overhead, and whatever game you and your friends might have been playing at that moment, you all stopped in mid-gesture to look up, to watch, to wait as those howling machines sped past you. It was the era of aviation miracles, of ever faster and faster, of ever higher and higher, of planes without torsos, planes that looked more like exotic fish than birds, and so prominent were those post-war flying machines in the imaginations of America’s children that trading cards of the new planes were widely distributed, much like baseball cards or football cards, in packages of five or six with a slab of pink bubblegum inside, and on the front of each card there was a photograph of a plane instead of a ballplayer, with information about that plane printed on the back. You and your friends collected these cards, you were five and six years old and obsessed with the planes, dazzled by the planes, and you can remember now (suddenly, it is all so clear to you) sitting on the floor with your classmates in a school hallway during an air-raid drill, which in no way resembled the fire drills you were also subjected to, those impromptu exits into the warmth or the cold and
imagining the school as it burned down in front of your eyes, for an air-raid drill kept the children indoors, not in the classroom but the hallway, presumably to protect them against an attack from the air, missiles, rockets, bombs dropped from high-flying Communist planes, and it was during that drill that you saw the airplane cards for the first time, sitting on the floor with your back against the wall, silent, with no intention of breaking that silence, for talking was not allowed during these solemn exercises, these useless preparations against possible death and destruction, but one of the boys had a pack of those airplane cards with him that morning, and he was showing them to the other boys, surreptitiously passing them down the line of silent, seated bodies, and when your turn came to hold one of the cards in your hands, you were astonished by the design of the plane, its strangeness and unexpected beauty, all wing, all flight, a metal beast born in the empyrean, in a realm of pure, everlasting fire, and not once did you consider that the air-raid drill you were taking part in was supposed to teach you how to protect yourself from an attack by just such a plane, that is, a plane similar to the one on the card that had been built by your country’s enemies. No fear. You never worried that bombs or rockets would fall on you, and if you welcomed the alarms that signalled the start of air-raid drills, it was only because they allowed you to leave the classroom for a few minutes and escape the drudgery of whatever lesson you were being taught.

I
n 1952, the year you turned five, which included the summer of Lenny, the beginning of your formal education, and the Eisenhower–Stevenson campaign, a polio epidemic broke out across America, striking 57,626 people, most of them children, killing 3,300 and permanently crippling untold numbers of others. That was fear. Not bombs or a nuclear attack, but polio. Roaming through the streets of your neighbourhood that summer, you often came upon clusters of women talking to one another in doleful whispers, women pushing baby carriages or walking their dogs, women with dread in their eyes, dread in the hushed timbre of their voices, and the talk was always
about polio, the invisible scourge that was spreading everywhere, that could invade the body of any man, woman or child at any moment of the day or night. Worse still, there was the young man dying in the house across the street from where your closest friend lived, a Harvard student whose first name was Franklin, a brilliant person, according to your mother, someone destined to accomplish great things in life, and now he was wasting away with cancer, immobilized, doomed, and every time you visited your friend Billy, Billy’s mother would instruct you to keep your voices down when you went outdoors so as not to disturb Franklin. You would look across the street at Franklin’s white house, the shades drawn in every window, an eerily silent house where no one seemed to live any more, and you would imagine the tall and handsome Franklin, whom you had seen several times in the past, stretched out on a white bed in his upstairs bedroom, waiting to die his slow and painful death. For all the fear caused by the polio epidemic, you never knew anyone who contracted the disease, but Franklin eventually died, just as your mother had told you he would. You saw the black cars lined up in front of the house on the day of the funeral. Sixty years later, you can still see the black cars and the white house. In your mind, they are still the quintessential emblems of grief.

Y
ou can’t remember the precise moment when you understood that you were a Jew. It seems to you that it came some time after you were old enough to identify yourself as an American, but you could be wrong, it could be that it was a part of you from the very beginning. Neither one of your parents came from a religious family. There were no rituals practised in the household, no Sabbath meals on Friday night, no lighting of candles, no trips to the synagogue on the High Holy Days, let alone on any Friday night or Saturday morning of the year, and not a single word of Hebrew was uttered in your presence. A couple of desultory Passover Seders in the company of relatives, Chanukkah gifts every December to offset the absence of Christmas, and just one serious rite that you took part in, which occurred when you were eight days old, far too early for you to
remember anything about it, the standard circumcision ceremony, or bris, when the foreskin of your penis was lopped off by a fastidiously sharpened knife in order to seal the covenant between your newborn self and the God of your ancestors. For all their indifference to the particulars of their faith, your parents nevertheless considered themselves Jews, called themselves Jews, were comfortable with that fact and never sought to hide it, unlike countless other Jews over the centuries who did everything in their power to disappear into the Christian world that surrounded them, changing their names, converting to Catholicism or one of the Protestant sects, turning away from themselves and quietly obliterating their pasts. No, your parents stood firm and never questioned who they were, but in the early years of your childhood they had nothing to offer you on the subject of your religion or background. They were simply Americans who happened to be Jews, thoroughly assimilated after the struggles of their own immigrant parents, and therefore in your mind the notion of Judaism was above all associated with foreignness, as embodied in your grandmother, for example, your father’s mother, an alien presence who still spoke and read mostly in Yiddish, whose English was nearly incomprehensible to you because of her heavy accent, and then there was the man who turned up occasionally at your mother’s parents’ apartment in New York, a relative of some kind by the name of Joseph Stavsky, an elegant figure who dressed in finely tailored three-piece suits and smoked with a long black cigarette holder, a sophisticated cosmopolitan whose Polish-accented English was perfectly understandable to you, and when you were old enough to understand such things (at seven? at eight? at nine?), your mother told you that cousin Joseph had come to America after the war with help from her parents, that back in Poland he had been married and the father of twin girls, but his wife and daughters had all been murdered in Auschwitz, and he alone had survived, once a prosperous lawyer in Warsaw, now scraping by as a button salesman in New York. The war had been over for some years by then, but the war was still present, still hovering around you and everyone you
knew, manifested not only in the war games you played with your friends but in the words spoken in the households of your family, and if your first encounters with the Nazis took place as an imaginary GI in various backyards of your small New Jersey town, it wasn’t long before you understood what the Nazis had done to the Jews, to Joseph Stavsky’s wife and daughters, for instance, to members of your own family for the sole reason that they were Jews, and now that you had fully grasped the fact that you yourself were a Jew, the Nazis were no longer just the enemy of the American Army, they were the incarnation of a monstrous evil, an anti-human force of global destruction, and even though the Nazis had been defeated, wiped off the face of the earth, they lived on in your imagination, lurking inside you as an all-powerful legion of death, demonic and insidious, forever on the attack, and from that moment on, that is, from the moment you understood that you were not only an American but a Jew, your dreams were populated by gangs of Nazi infantrymen, night after night you found yourself running from them, desperately running for your life, chased through open fields and dim, maze-like forests by packs of armed Nazis, faceless German soldiers who were bent on shooting you, on tearing off your arms and legs, on burning you at the stake and turning you into a pile of ashes.

B
y the time you were seven or eight, you were beginning to catch on. Jews were invisible, they had no part to play in American life, and they never appeared as heroes in books or films or television shows.
Gentleman’s Agreement
notwithstanding, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture the year you were born, there were no cowboys called Bernstein or Schwartz, no private eyes called Greenberg or Cohen and no presidential candidates whose parents had emigrated from the shtetls of eastern Poland and Russia. True, there were some boxers who had done well in the thirties and forties, there was the quarterback Sid Luckman and the three notables from the land of baseball (Hank Greenberg, Al Rosen, and Sandy Koufax, who broke in with the Dodgers in 1955), but they were such flagrant
exceptions to the norm that they qualified as demographic flukes, mere statistical aberrations. Jews could play the violin and the piano, they could sometimes conduct symphony orchestras, but the popular singers and musicians were all Italian or black or hillbillies from the South. Vaudevillians, yes, funnymen, yes (the Marx Brothers, George Burns), but no movie stars, and even when the actors had been born Jewish, they invariably changed their names. George Burns had been Nathan Birnbaum. Emanuel Goldenberg was transformed into Edward G. Robinson. Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas, and Hedwig Kiesler was reborn as Hedy Lamarr. Tepid as
Gentleman’s Agreement
might have been, with its contrived plot and sanctimonious positions (a non-Jewish journalist pretends to be Jewish in order to expose prejudices against the Jews), it is instructive to look at that film now as a snapshot of where Jews stood in American society in 1947. That was the world you entered as an infant, and while it was logical to assume that the German defeat in 1945 should have, or could have, snuffed out anti-Semitism for good, not much had changed on the home front. College admission quotas for Jews were still in force, clubs and other organizations were still restricted, kike jokes still got the boys laughing at the weekly poker game, and Shylock still reigned as the principal representative of his people. Even in the New Jersey town where you grew up, there were invisible barriers, impediments you were still too young to understand or notice, but when your best friend, Billy, moved away with his family in 1955, and your other good friend, Peter, vanished the following year – wrenching departures that both puzzled and saddened you – your mother explained that too many Jews were quitting Newark for the suburbs, that they too wanted their patch of grass, just like everyone else, and therefore the old guard was decamping, running away from this sudden influx of non-Christian homeowners. Did she use the word
anti-Semitic
? You can’t remember, but the implication was nevertheless clear: to be a Jew was to be different from everyone else, to stand apart, to be looked upon as an outsider. And you, who until then had seen yourself as thoroughly American, as American as any
Mayflower
blue blood, now understood that there were those who felt you didn’t belong, that even in the place you called home, you were not fully at home.

T
o be a part of things and yet not a part of things. To be accepted by most and yet eyed with suspicion by others. After embracing the triumphal narrative of American exceptionalism as a little boy, you began to exclude yourself from the story, to understand that you belonged to another world besides the one you lived in, that your past was anchored in a somewhere else of remote settlements in Eastern Europe, and that if your grandparents on your father’s side and your great-grandparents on your mother’s side had not had the intelligence to leave that part of the world when they did, almost none of you would have survived, nearly every one of you would have been murdered during the war. Life was precarious. The ground under your feet could give way at any moment, and now that your family had landed in America, had been saved by America, that didn’t mean you should expect America to make you feel welcome. Your sympathies turned toward the outcasts, the despised and mistreated ones, the Indians who had been chased off their lands and massacred, the Africans who had been shipped over here in chains, and even if you did not renounce your attachment to America, could not renounce it because in the end it was still your place, your country, you began to live in it with a new sense of wariness and unease. There were few opportunities in your little world to take a stand, but you did what you could do whenever an occasion presented itself, you fought back when the tough older boys in town called you Jew-boy and Jew-shit, and you refused to take part in Christmas celebrations at school, to sing Christmas carols at the annual holiday assembly, and therefore the teachers allowed you to stay alone in the room when the rest of the class tromped off to the auditorium to rehearse with the other classes in your grade. The sudden silence that surrounded you as you sat at your desk, the click of the minute hand on the old mechanical clock with the Roman numerals as you read your Poe and Stevenson
and Conan Doyle, a self-declared outcast, stubbornly holding your ground, but proud, nevertheless proud in your stubbornness, in your refusal to pretend to be someone you were not.