Читать книгу Farewell Shiraz - Cyrus Kadivar - Страница 15
ОглавлениеAs he rode in a horse-drawn droshky that clattered down the street from the railway station to the main square, my father found the experience of arriving in Tehran thrilling. He gawked at the noisy streets bustling with motorcars and buses. Here and there helmeted policemen, in pale blue uniforms and black leggings, directed the traffic. In this new world there were no donkeys and camels since, as symbols of backwardness, they had been banned. Many of Tehran’s arched gates and high ramparts of the Qajar era had been razed to the ground. Only a few old palaces and aristocratic mansions requisitioned by the army had survived demolition.
Coming from a provincial town like Shiraz, my father and his parents were overawed by Reza Shah’s capital. The city of half a million inhabitants looked clean, bright, and full of promise. In the distance the majestic Alborz Mountains stood out in the dazzling light. Tehran had broad avenues with resonant names: Ferdowsi, Naderi, and Pahlavi. Along every street, between the asphalted roadway and the tree-shaded sidewalks, ran a ditch, the jube, which supplied water to the houses and gardens. In the center of town there were modern shops, wide spaces, and new public buildings: the War Ministry, Police Headquarters, the National Bank, the Officers’ Club, and other fine edifices. A giant equestrian statue of Reza Shah towered in the middle of town.
In Tehran, Mohammad Kadivar and his family moved into a rented house located behind the Baharestan Square, where the Majles, or parliament, was situated. In October 1935 my grandfather joined the Ministry of Justice, reorganized several years earlier by Ali Akbar Davar, Reza Shah’s minister of justice. Besides creating secular courts and appointing judges, Davar had already established a National State Registry Department, where my grandfather was later appointed as manager. These were exciting times. Reza Shah had just ordered that henceforth Persia would officially be referred to by its correct name: Iran, the Land of the Aryans. Patriotism and hard work were the new mottos. Most Iranians credited Reza Shah for unifying their country and bringing law and order, but there were others who felt the brunt of his iron rule. His head of police, Colonel Mokhtari, had created a network of spies and informers. Hundreds of political prisoners languished in Qasr Prison. Several tribal khans and noblemen had died in mysterious circumstances, including Abolhossein Teymourtash, the former court minister.
Other changes were afoot. In the spring of 1936, the wearing of the chador and all hijab in public places by women was banned. Taj ol-Moluk, the dowager queen, and her daughters had already set an example for Iranian women by appearing in western clothes. One morning my grandfather was informed by his boss that his salary for the following month would not be paid to him, but to his wife, and that she would have to attend a reception held at the ministry wearing a European dress. “It is His Majesty’s order,” he was told. My grandmother took the edict with aplomb. She knew a White Russian woman, a refugee from the Bolsheviks, who had settled in Iran and turned her drawing room into a salon de mode, producing stylish creations from a Paris catalogue. Discarding her usual public attire of a head-to-toe chador, Sheherzad went to the party wearing a fashionable dress, white gloves, shoes, and hat.
When my grandmother entered the reception room with her husband, it was not a few paces behind him but at his side. The wives of other officials did the same. But for many conservative women the unveiling law was traumatic. The question of the veil and the emancipation of women was bound up with that of religion. Reza Shah had nothing against Islam but he felt that a Persian woman could never be truly free and educated unless she was released from the chador. The akhunds, or mullahs, were upset by these scandalous developments. Many conservative husbands tried to stop their wives from leaving the house unveiled, but large numbers ignored them. In some cases, overzealous officers tore off the veils of any woman ignoring the shah’s edict. There was an outcry in the holy city of Mashhad by a grand ayatollah, accusing Reza Shah of blasphemy. The governor-general tried to arrest the cleric but his men were attacked by seminary students and ordinary people. The next day a mob took to the streets. Soldiers surrounded the theological school and machine-gunned several people. After the bloodshed in the holy city, Reza Shah moved harshly against the clergy’s power base. He banned passion plays and sharia law, and confiscated the lands of many religious foundations. The Arab lunar calendar was replaced by an Iranian solar one.
After the banning of the veil, my grandmother often joined her friends in making cosmetic changes. Eyebrows were plucked to slender arches, nails were painted, lipstick applied, and trips made to hairdressers and dressmakers. When the recently widowed Aminollah Khan visited his son’s house in Tehran and saw his daughter-in-law unveiled he was speechless. He was so upset that he didn’t look at or speak to her for days. Eventually he came to terms with the changes when my grandmother caught the old man carousing with a pretty woman he had picked up from a cabaret. We used to laugh at the story of how Sheherzad Khanoum chased the harlot out with a broom and scolded her father-in-law.
With the clergy in retreat, western-educated Iranians led the way in bringing about change in Iran. Many Iranian students who came back from their studies in Europe brought a cosmopolitan air to the capital. In 1936, Crown Prince Mohammad Reza returned from Switzerland, where he had been spending the previous four years studying at Le Rosey, a private boarding school. After an emotional reunion, Reza Shah enrolled his son in the Tehran Military College. Two years later, when the crown prince graduated, his father appointed him army inspector. When not busy with his military duties, Reza Shah took his son on tours of the country. Court photographers documented their every movement: visits to ports, factories, schools, clinics, and the opening of the National Library and Archaeological Museum with Ali Asghar Hekmat, the minister of culture.
All this took place while my father enjoyed a typical Persian childhood. He was, as his mother recalled, adept at playing silly games. Once, while teasing the goldfish in the square pool, my father fell into the water. He would have drowned had he not been rescued by a servant boy. In the winter, he would join his mother and aunties beside the korsi, a low table with a coal brazier underneath and blankets thrown over it. My father had fond memories of his family celebrating Yalda Night, which dates back to Zoroastrian days and is held on December 21. Yalda Night marked the longest night of the year, the renewal of the sun, and the victory of light over darkness, but also the birth of the goddess Mitra. On that special night candles were lit to ward off the evil eye, and dried nuts, pomegranates, and a special pudding were handed out by family members for good luck. In the spring my father waited eagerly for the Nowruz celebrations, when he received gifts and new clothes. Then there were visits to relatives. Among his cousins my father was closest to Bahman, the son of a police officer, and Anis Khanoum, his mother’s sister. Then there was Anoushiravan Pouyan, the son of a wealthy nobleman and his aristocratic wife, who lived with his beautiful sister Victoria and two brothers. As a boy my father liked to be outside the house, kicking a ball around with his street friends or going for a stroll with his father. There was a sense of pride in being an Iranian. Nationalism had come at a time when the king’s prestige was at a high.
On the Tehran boulevards, restaurants, and cafés, smartly dressed Persians and foreigners congregated. Mixing with them were many gallant Iranian army and cavalry officers. They were the elite and they knew it. Elegant in their Balkan-style military caps, belted and square-shouldered Russian tunics, and gleaming black riding boots, they sipped tea, drank spirits, and flirted with the European ladies. Some days my father and his school friends went to the bustling Lalehzar, the Avenue of the Tulips, where Azeris, Jews, and Armenians sold perfume, beer, silk ties, fabrics, and lamb kebabs. On weekends they saw Tarzan and Chaplin films. In the summer, to escape the heat, the Kadivars went on picnics and visited friends in Shemiran, a lush suburb north of Tehran.
After the summer holidays came school. My father joined his classmates every morning at registration in singing the national anthem, expressing loyalty to king and country as the Lion-Sun flag was raised. Tutors pushed their pupils to study hard and become good citizens. “One day you will participate in making this country great,” the teachers preached to the boys, repeating Reza Shah’s slogan. Father hated school but his mother encouraged him not to give up his studies. Attending class was not what terrified my father, but the strict, bald headmaster, who kept order by subjecting the weaker students to corporal punishment. Once my father threw a rock and broke a window. The headmaster ordered two older students to hold my father tight while he beat the soles of my father’s feet with a stick.
My grandfather’s career kept him too busy to worry about his son’s treatment at school. Over the years my grandfather’s workload had only multiplied. Files piled up on his desk. Every time he came to work, Mohammad Kadivar would pass through a marble hallway greeted by the ever-present and scowling, commanding portrait of a uniformed Ala Hazrat—His Imperial Majesty, as the shah was referred to by his colleagues.
My grandfather was an unabashed admirer of Reza Shah. He often recalled his meeting with the old king one winter morning in 1937. That day my grandfather put on his top hat and morning coat and joined the minister and his staff on the steps of the grand building inspired by Persepolis. At precisely ten o’clock, the punctual, serious-looking Reza Shah arrived in a bulletproof Rolls-Royce car. A soldier at heart, the “King of Kings” was wearing his caped military uniform, as he always did in public. Grandfather was thunderstruck by the sight of Reza Shah, a giant man, six feet tall. Not daring to stare into his golden-brown eyes, he had, like his nervous colleagues, performed the customary ta‘azeem, a graceful and symbolic bow. The minister briefed the shah on the latest legal reforms and gave him a short tour of the extensive offices. Afterward, Reza Shah lit a cigarette and was driven back to his palace by his chauffeur.
On August 26, 1938 the country celebrated the opening of the railway link connecting the north with the south. The German engineers involved in the project were ordered by the shah to stand under the bridges they had built as the royal locomotive passed over them. The national press reported the event with big, triumphant headlines and a picture of Crown Prince Mohammad Reza and his smiling, uniformed father glancing at his pocketwatch, presumably to check that the train ran on time.
In March 1939 the whole country was galvanized by footage and reports of the marriage of Crown Prince Mohammad Reza to the lovely Princess Fawzia, the sister of Egypt’s King Farouk. Newspapers and tabloids showed images from the wedding, held at the Abdin Palace in Cairo. The royal couple’s arrival in Tehran heralded seven days of national celebrations. The streets of the Iranian capital were filled with festooned arches, flags, and banners. My grandfather took his son to Toopkhaneh Square to see the firework display, and bought tickets to see an acrobatic performance at the ten-thousand-seat Amjadiyeh Stadium in the presence of the crown prince and his bride.
One morning, my grandfather went to a shop and bought a telephone and a radio. Another day it was a gramophone. At night he put on a record and danced with his wife and son to the music of the diva Qamar Vaziri. Every now and then my grandparents drank a glass of wine but otherwise remained faithful to their Islamic beliefs. Unlike some middle-class Tehranis, women included, who gambled at the poker and rummy tables in the houses of their friends, my grandparents had other pastimes. Grandmother had a peculiar relationship with religion. She wore her veil only when visiting the Sepahsalar Mosque to pray or when observing the religious holidays. She never wore the chador when she left her house. At home she preferred wearing a long dress. On weekends she and her husband entertained their friends in their newly built house several blocks from the City Park.
As always, my grandfather kept up his interest in Ferdowsi and Hafez. Once a month he held an informal gathering known as a dowreh, where his friends came to drink tea in the salon or in the courtyard and recite verses. Among the people who came was Dr. Lotfali Suratgar. My grandfather was elated to see Suratgar again, who had returned from London with Olive, his English wife. Professor Suratgar had a job at the Ministry of Education assisting in purifying the Persian language of Arabic influences, restoring the old classics, and translating famous European works for students at the Faculty of Letters. He often spoke of Reza Shah’s education plans for a modern Iran. Already many schools and colleges, and even training schools, had been opened, including educational facilities attended by both sexes. But conversation soon moved to that terrible war in Europe, which was already casting a shadow over Iran.
Reza Shah’s admiration for the Third Reich was shared by many Iranians, not for ideological reasons, but more because an alliance with Germany was seen as a wedge against Anglo-Soviet intrigue. In the cinemas of Tehran, newsreels showing Nazi victories drew cheers from the audience, as did scenes of the saluting Führer. My grandfather often puzzled his friends when he predicted that the cigar-smoking Churchill was the only man capable of stopping Hitler. In diplomatic circles, Reza Shah was seen as another Atatürk, or simply a dictator in the mold of Fascist leaders in Europe. At home he ruled by fear and tolerated no opposition. Having eliminated his political rivals, he made his ministers quake in his presence. Three years earlier, Ali Akbar Davar, the former finance minister and the architect of Iran’s modern judicial system, went home after quarrelling with the shah during a grain crisis and committed suicide by drinking poison. Reza Shah’s contempt for elected officials and the Majles led one deputy, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, to decry the Pahlavi dictatorship, which ended with the politician being arrested and jailed. People whispered that the old shah was now one of the richest men in the country, after having seized property from members of the former Qajar elite and tribal chieftains. While most Iranians listened to Berlin Radio, my grandfather and the Suratgars regularly tuned in to the Persian Service of the BBC for the latest news. Mohammad Kadivar did not like what he heard. A crackling voice accused Reza Shah of being a “land-grabbing tin-pot dictator and Nazi sympathizer.”
Nothing pleased Reza Shah more than reviewing his loyal army, by then composed of a hundred thousand men. In the spring of 1940, a grand military display was held in an army parade ground located on the outskirts of Tehran. My grandparents were among the privileged guests invited to sit inside a big grandstand below the royal box. There was also a space for the Axis and Allied diplomats and their wives. Once everyone had taken their places, a military band played the rousing Iranian national anthem. “Ala Hazrat has arrived,” my grandfather whispered to my excited grandmother as the crowd rose and hailed the old king. Although in his sixties and in ill health, Reza Shah left his car and mounted a powerful white stallion with ease.
Flanked by the crown prince and his senior generals on horseback, Reza Shah was cheered as he galloped toward the grandstand. For two hours, while the monarch sat in the royal balcony, regiment after regiment of soldiers from the infantry, cavalry, and artillery passed by and gave the salute. After the imperial army came the scout contingents, and after them, the guides, school after school in uniform, including the Razi School students and my stumbling ten-year-old father. When Reza Shah rode out into the field to hand the colors to his regiments, my grandfather stood up with the others, clapping and shouting, “Zendeh bad Ala Hazrat!” (“Long Live His Imperial Majesty!”). The jubilation was short-lived. By the summer of 1941, with the German Wehrmacht invading the Soviet Union, the Allies had decided to seize Iran’s southern oil fields before Nazi agents blew them up. By capturing Iran’s railway system the Allies were able to send millions of tons of war matériel to Stalin’s Russia in order to resist and ultimately defeat Hitler’s armies. Reza Shah’s refusal to expel the Germans living and working in Iran was the perfect pretext for London and Moscow to remove the old lion from power.
Every night my grandfather and his friends would sit by the radio listening for the latest developments. On August 25, 1941, Soviet and British armies invaded Iran from the north and south of the country and pushed on toward the Iranian capital. When Soviet planes flew over Tehran, my grandmother took her eleven-year-old son into the basement, prayed, and placed a Quran over his head. Refusing to be intimidated, my grandfather stayed above ground, pondering the future. Two bombs were dropped near Tehran in Karaj, causing panic but no casualties. The Iranian army, Reza Shah’s pride and joy, surrendered after three days of token resistance. News of Reza Shah’s forced abdication was broadcast on Tehran Radio on September 16, 1941. The same day, twenty-two-year-old Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was sworn in as the new shah by Iran’s parliament.
British and Soviet troops occupied Tehran. Reza Shah was exiled to Mauritius and then to South Africa. In 1943, after the Tehran Conference attended by Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, Iran was firmly in the Allied camp in the war against Germany. News of Reza Shah’s death on July 26, 1944 was greeted with sadness by many Iranians, including my grandfather, who wept at the news.
For the untested shah this was a humiliating and frustrating period in his reign. To escape the burdens of kingship and to satisfy his bored wife, the young shah would exit the Marble Palace with Queen Fawzia and drive around town in a Bugatti. In the winter they went skiing in the snow-capped Alborz Mountains and mingled with ordinary people, taking tea with them.
But the couple were unhappy in their marriage. No longer sharing a bed with her husband, Fawzia spent her time alone in her room playing cards or moaning about the king’s infidelities to her Egyptian maids and her tennis instructor. In the evenings, to lift the shah’s spirits, his friends took him to the Kolbeh nightclub, surrounding him with society beauties, before going dancing at the Darband Hotel in the foothills of Tehran, where the elite partied and gossiped. Back at the palace the shah spent sleepless nights worrying about his position and the fate of the country. Except for a small number of upper- and middle-class families who led lavish and comfortable lives, the majority of Iran’s fifteen million people were poor and illiterate, with opium and religion as their only refuge. In the capital there were shortages, a thriving black market, and bread riots. To alleviate some of the sufferings the shah’s sisters gathered a handful of female volunteers to visit the poor, distributing hot food, blankets, and medicine. They even set up an orphanage and a school.
With the end of the Second World War in May 1945, Iran entered a period of grave political instability that threatened the survival of the monarchy and the country. The presence of foreign troops in Iran fanned xenophobic sentiments. In certain provinces the tribes went back to their old ways, and law and order in the countryside deteriorated. The mullahs called for a return to Islamic ways. In an attempt to be seen as democratic, the young shah pardoned many nationalist, socialist, and communist leaders imprisoned by his father, all of whom participated in free elections and won seats in the Majles.
Few of the politicians who entered parliament could match Dr. Mohamad Mossadegh, the Majles deputy for Tehran. He seemed made for the role. His father had been a high government official and his mother a Qajar princess. A supporter of the Constitutional Revolution, Mossadegh had been educated in Tehran, Paris, and Neuchâtel, where he had obtained a Swiss doctorate of law. During the 1920s he served as finance minister, and briefly as governor-general of the provinces of Khorasan and Fars. His opposition to the British and Reza Shah’s dictatorial rule twice landed him in jail. In 1940, after the crown prince persuaded his father to pardon Mossadegh, Reza Shah ordered the old man transferred from Birjand Prison to his estate in Ahmadabad. Mossadegh’s house arrest ended a year later, after the British forced Reza Shah’s abdication in favor of his son. In November 1944, when Mossadegh won a seat in parliament, he lost no time in incting the National Assembly to back his passionate calls for Iran’s political and economic independence from foreigners.
Mossadegh believed that his nation’s fate was intertwined with the question of oil. From the day William Knox D’Arcy, a British national, was granted a concession in 1901 by a weak Qajar king to explore Iran’s southern provinces leading to the discovery of oil in 1908, the British, Mossadegh reminded his compatriots, had “cheated” and “plundered” Iran’s wealth. He was critical of Reza Shah’s handling of the oil negotiations in 1933 after the latter tore up the D’Arcy agreement, demanding a better deal for his people. Despite the shah’s efforts, his government had been forced to extend the concession for another sixty years and settled for a measly 12 percent share of profits from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Although Iran’s share later increased to 20 percent, the British held all the keys by practically colonizing the Khuzestan Province, running the Abadan refineries, and as my grandfather told his son, treating Iranian workers with contempt. While Mohammad Reza Shah, Mossadegh, and many Iranians fumed against the British Empire, Stalin’s Russian was playing a more dangerous game that involved encouraging separatism in the northern provinces of Iran and seizing the Caspian oilfields.
My father was a teenager when he learned of the autonomy movements in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, led by Jafar Pishevari and Qazi Mohammad respectively. The creation of two puppet republics in December 1945 and January 1946 with Soviet backing alarmed the shah. When British and American troops withdrew their forces in March 1946 the Soviet army stayed on. The shah turned to President Truman to mediate in the crisis. In the end, Prime Minister Ahmad Qavam’s diplomacy and international pressure forced the Soviets to withdraw from Iranian soil. Toward the end of the year the shah ordered General Haj Ali Razmara to move his troops against the secessionists. By 1947 Azerbaijan and Kurdistan were liberated. Pishevari escaped to Baku and was later killed in a car accident. Qazi Mohammad was hanged. Hundreds of separatists were jailed or executed, others killed in revenge by lynch mobs. When the shah visited Azerbaijan and Mahabad he was received with great patriotic fervor by soldiers and locals.
In 1948, two years after Fawzia left for Cairo, leaving her husband and only daughter, Princess Shahnaz, behind in Tehran, the couple’s marriage officially ended and diplomatic relations between Iran and Egypt were in tatters. The shah traveled to London to meet King George VI and the Queen. When he returned, he found that anti-British feelings were running high in Abadan, with many Iranians feeling that their country was being grossly exploited. Mossadegh had formed a parliamentary committee to negotiate a fairer deal with the British, who were loath to give up their most strategic asset.
At the time, Father and his cousin Anoush were studying at the Lycée Razi, a private school, where boys and girls received their education in Persian, French, and English. Many of Tehran’s Francophile elite sent their children here in the hope of sending them to Europe for higher education that would open career opportunities when they returned to Iran. On weekends, when not revising for exams, Father and Anoush went hiking in the mountains.
For the youth, Tehran’s street life was an exciting diversion from school and the political debates one heard everywhere. On Wednesday nights my father and Anoush liked to explore Naderi Street with its trendy cafés. The semi-democratic atmosphere was a creative time for writers, intellectuals, and artists. Iranian theater enjoyed a period free of government censorship. Hollywood films drew large crowds. Like all young men, my father and his cousin went to the barbershops and asked to have their hair cut and slicked back like their heroes Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, and Cary Grant. Father went even further and grew a mustache.
Occasionally the two cousins tried slipping into the lively cabarets and smoke-filled nightclubs at Shahr-Now (New City), the sleazy red-light district. In the daytime the Iranian capital was a busy city. There were now more buses and private cars driving around Sepah Square east of the capital with its bank and post office. The middle-class neighborhoods boasted electricity, telephones, and modern plumbing. Having led privileged and overprotected lives, my father and Anoush were shocked by the squalor and despair of the poorer districts near the bazaar and mosques and the people living there. “How can the shah allow these things?” my father asked Anoush. His cousin ignored his question. He preferred to discuss girls at a time when the shah was facing opposition from the Tudeh (Masses), Iran’s communist party, founded during the war by Iraj Eskandari, a Qajar prince and one of the Group of fifty-three communist leaders arrested under Reza Shah.
An idealist at heart, my father vowed that one day he would follow his mother’s advice and study medicine in Paris and return to help the people. In the past my father had read Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Proust, but also the works of Sadegh Hedayat and Ahmad Kasravi. Now he studied Marx and Lenin. I suppose my father’s political awakening really began during this time, when a high-school friend took him to a big rally organized by the Tudeh Party, which continued to attract large segments of the professional middle class, military officers, and left-wing intelligentsia. One day my grandfather, a staunch anti-communist, caught his son reading an anti-government Tudeh pamphlet at a café. He was so angry that he grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and took him home. “Stay out of politics,” he warned his son.
On February 4, 1949, during a visit to Tehran University, a man called Nasser Fakhrarai, posing as a reporter, pulled out a pistol hidden in a false camera and fired three times at the shah as he arrived for a ceremony at the University of Tehran. Two bullets struck the shah, one in the cheek and one in the shoulder, while a third passed through his military cap. When Fakhrarai pulled the trigger a fourth time, his gun jammed. At that stage the royal bodyguards chased the would-be assassin and beat him to death with rifle butts. With blood dripping on his military uniform, the twenty-nine-year-old shah was bundled into a limousine and rushed to a hospital, where five physicians tended to his wounds. That evening my grandparents and my father listened to the shah’s voice as he thanked Providence for being alive.
For Mohammad Reza Shah, the attempt on his life was a miraculous and golden opportunity to strengthen his position as constitutional head of state and reassert control. It was never clear whether the assassin was a communist, a religious fanatic, or a British agent. That year the Tudeh Party was outlawed by the government and their newspaper was shut down. Hundreds of communists were arrested; many fled underground or escaped to the Soviet Union. Iraj Eskandari turned up in Paris and formed a party in exile. Troubled by the ongoing unrest, my grandparents decided to send my father away. They knew of his ambition to become a doctor, but they also wanted him far from the frenzied politics and compulsory military service. For my grandmother, separation from her beloved only son was hard, but she held back her emotions the day she said goodbye to him at the airport.
