Читать книгу In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs - Christopher Bellaigue de - Страница 11

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.

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.

We entered the square, and I looked at Mr Rafi’i. In the half-light of the mosque, my attention had been drawn by his thick torso and neck – not a taut musculature but a ragged peasant virility. His face was red, bulging. He wore a check shirt and dusty baggy black trousers.

‘I just got in from my fields,’ he said, guiding me across the square. ‘Next week, we’re going to start harvesting. But it’s a busy time of year; I have to teach at the same time.’

Mr Rafi’i’s subject was the sayings, sermons and letters of the Imam All. For Shi’as, Ali is the supreme example of a just and generous sovereign. During his caliphate, he is said to have bought two shirts and offered the finer of the two to his servant. His judges were so independent, one found against him in a case.

As my ears got used to Mr Rafi’i’s rural accent, my eyes were drawn to his forehead. Many Shi’as have a purplish blotch there, from the baked tablet of earth they press down upon as they pray Mr Rafi’i’s blotch had gained a crust, with small features of its own. It seemed to laugh whenever he did – a wizened sprite, living in his head.

‘Here’s my horse, said Mr Rafi’i, pointing to an old motorbike with a hempen packsaddle that might have been designed for a donkey. ‘Get on.’

We went hoarsely down the little streets, into a main road that carried us, by way of one of the newer bridges, across the river. We strained up the hill on the other side, towards a shelf of mountains. We turned well before the mountains, continued for a couple of hundred metres and stopped at the gate of the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. We dismounted and Mr Rafi’i mouthed a greeting to the martyrs.

There are some seven thousand of them and each grave is surmounted by a metal frame that contains a photograph of the man in the grave. The graves are bunched, like copses, one copse for each major engagement. They represent a fraction of the martyrs from the province of Isfahan – I’ve heard of villages with a population of two or three hundred, and a score of graves in the War cemetery. The martyr’s families would come each week, Mr Rafi’i explained, usually on Thursday evenings. He said: ‘Come and meet my friends.’

He’d been their ally, their chaplain. He remembered the occupants of many graves; there was barely one whose name meant nothing to him. The photographs were formal, taken in a studio to commemorate earthly achievement – a school diploma, an engagement to be married. Perhaps a mother had sensed the coming martyrdom and requested a memorial pose.

‘These boys were nothing like the boys you see on the streets today. Nothing! They were clean! And they were fighting for God. They were fighting for the government of Ali; they longed for his caliphate.’

He pointed. The photograph depicted a very young boy with the beginnings of a beard. ‘He and his cousin died on the same day, coming back across the marsh. He was a good boy. They didn’t find his body.’

‘His grave’s empty?’

‘No, no … Listen! His parents tracked down some survivors from the operation, and got conflicting reports. One said he’d seen their boy being crushed by a tank. Another said he was electrocuted when the enemy diverted power into the marsh …’

Mr Rafi’i paused; he’d seen someone he knew, a bald man holding a watering can over a grave.

Mr Rafi’i called out: ‘Salaam Aleikum!’ The bald man smiled and beckoned us over. Mr Rafi’i introduced him: ‘This is Mr Mousavi, and that’s the grave of his nephew who died on the last day of the War. The great Creator saw fit to draw him to his breast …’

‘Thanks be to God,’ interrupted Mr Mousavi dutifully.

‘I was explaining to Mr Duplex here,’ said Mr Rafi’i, ‘the reason why these boys went.’ He turned back to me. ‘Boys like Mr Mousavi’s nephew – Amin, wasn’t it? – were in love with justice and God. Right, Mr Mousavi?’

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Mousavi. ‘The last time I saw him, he said – it was the end of the War, we thought he’d been spared … he said he was sorry that God hadn’t judged him worthy of martyrdom …’

‘Mr Duplex,’ Mr Rarf’i said, ‘you must know it’s an honour to be martyred; not everyone gets called.’

Mr Mousavi went on: ‘God heard him and took him on the last day of the War.’ His expression went dead. He was awed by the severity of God’s kindness. I looked at the photograph of Mr Mousavi’s nephew. A normal kid, with 1970s bouffant hair and a beard and a spiky shirt collar. I looked along the line of photographs, at his neighbours. They had the same confidence; God wouldn’t let them lose.

Mr Rafi’i and I went back to the grave of the boy whose body hadn’t been found. ‘At the end of the War,’ he said, ‘some of the old soldiers volunteered to go back to the battlefields and try and find the bodies of the missing lads. They even crossed the border, into Iraq. They used their knowledge of the sites, and their memories of the battles, to find the bodies. Then they dug them out and brought them back to their families.’

‘So they found him?’ I asked, gesturing at the grave.

He nodded. ‘Five years after he died, they found him – his father told me. His trench had taken a direct hit. The strange thing is, his face was preserved, perfect. There was no smell, either. You know, the body decomposes and produces a smell. There was none of that …’ He looked at me closely. ‘Do you believe what I am saying?’

I wanted to believe him. Perhaps. It was fantastic, no? I nodded vaguely.

He started to cough, weakly, like a kitten. His face had got redder. A sort of yellow scum had accumulated at the corners of his mouth.

I said: ‘Shall we sit down?’

We walked towards the trees. Mr Rafi’i laid his packsaddle on a grave. As we sat down, I said: ‘Among Christians, it would be considered offensive to sit on a grave or walk over someone’s grave.’

Mr Rafi’i was breathing a little easier. He grinned. ‘The soul cannot be sat on.’

Something made him remember a young seminarian, Hamid, during the War. ‘He was sixteen years old. He was a good boy: pure! They were all pure, back then.

‘I remember – such a fine looking boy! Like the moon! He had an accident – I’ve forgotten what it was – and his front teeth were smashed in. I said he should go to the dentist and get his teeth repaired, and he said: “I’m not going to bother, because I’ve been summoned.”

‘A few days later, we went out to try and get an idea of the enemy’s strength in our sector. We were twenty-two of us, in a column. As we set out, Hamid kissed me on both cheeks. He smelt of cologne, and he’d put on clean clothes.’ If you’re going to meet God, there’s a protocol to be followed.

‘The Iraqis were on the heights above us. When we came under fire, we hit the deck, and Hamid was next to me. I noticed my leg was hot and I thought, ‘I’ve been hit’, but something stopped me looking down. I was afraid. Then, a few seconds later, I felt that my groin and stomach were also hot and wet, and I looked down and I saw I hadn’t been hit. It was Hamid’s blood. I looked at his face. He smiled, and slept.’ Mr Rafi’i looked up at the sky, to the bending tops of the cypresses and pines. ‘You have to be clean, to be a martyr.’

Anticipating my next question, he said: ‘God didn’t want a grizzly old sinner like me.’ The sprite laughed with us.

I asked: ‘What did the men do, before they went off to battle? Did they pray? Were they silent? Did they chatter to try and settle their nerves?’

‘I remember, before one operation, my battalion was given leave to go to the nearest town, to the public bathhouse. Normally before an operation you do your martyrdom ablutions and ask God to let you come to him. At any rate, everyone went along to the baths – we must have been about four hundred people. And I got a shock, I can tell you, because the lads in the bathhouse started mucking around, splashing each other with cold water. Afterwards, someone told me you could hear the shouts and laughter from down the street.’

‘Did you joke around and splash, too?’

‘No, it’s not correct behaviour for a cleric to behave like that. I washed myself quickly and left.’

‘How many of the boys who went to the bathhouse are still alive?’

‘There can’t be more than a few dozen alive now.’

He got out a bottle of water from his pack and took a swig, making sure his lips didn’t touch it. Then he handed it to me. He said: ‘So, you’ve come to Isfahan to learn about the War?’

I said, ‘I hope to come to Isfahan several times.’

‘You should meet Hossein Kharrazi.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘He’s over there.’ He gestured behind him. ‘I’d take you myself, but I need to have my injection. With your permission, I’ll be on my way. Just go over there, and ask where Kharrazi is. Everyone knows.’

‘Does he work here?’

Mr Rafi’i smiled gently.

After he’d gone, I went over to the area he had pointed to. I started walking up and down the lines of graves, reading the inscriptions and trying to find Kharrazi. After a while, I came across a group of people standing in front of a grave. It was identical to the other ones, but had more flowers. Flowers from a shop, some wild flowers and some plastic ones, too.

Shortly after the Revolution, Iran’s mainly Sunni ethnic minorities started to demand administrative, religious and cultural autonomy – even, in some cases, independence. In the north-east, the Turkmens of Turkmensara; the Arabs of the south-western province of Khuzistan; the Baluchs on the border with Pakistan; Kurds living adjacent to Turkey and Iraq; all tried, using violent and diplomatic means, to persuade Khomeini to dismantle the centralized bureaucracy that the Shah had bequeathed him. Before the Revolution, Khomeini had promised freedom for all. That was before.

The worst violence was the Kurdish violence. The Kurds had welcomed the Revolution because they hoped to influence its course; the Shah’s departure would not serve them unless the new regime recognized their historic separateness. The Kurds have more ethnic and cultural affinity to the Persians than they have to the Arabs and the Turks, their other hosts in an ancestral home the size of France, but they have been taught by history to distrust them all. The Kurdish imagination is littered with memories of betrayal and misery, much of it self-inflicted.

There’s no reason to suppose that Khomeini rejected the regional stereo-type of Kurds as murderous and untrustworthy. A fear of separatism, as much as his hostility to left-wingers and liberals, had persuaded him, shortly after the Revolution, to set up the Revolutionary Guard. When the Kurdish violence broke, Bazargan and some of his allies favoured conciliation; Khomeini and the clerical hardliners wanted to send in the Revolutionary Guard. Hossein Kharrazi, along with some fifty friends and acquaintances, got ready to fight.

Kharrazi was the third son of a junior civil servant in Isfahan, and his father couldn’t pay for him to take up the university place he’d won before the Revolution. As a conscript in the Shah’s army, he’d spent part of his military service in the tiny sultanate of Oman, across the Strait of Hormuz from the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. Iran had kept a military presence there since the mid-1970s, when the Shah’s troops had helped the Sultan suppress a guerilla uprising. Kharrazi went AWOL when, the day after the Shah’s flight, Khomeini called for a mass desertion from the imperial army. Compared to many of his friends, whose military experience amounted to lobbing Molotov cocktails at the former regime’s police stations, he was a seasoned soldier.

To Kharrazi and his friends, putting down the Kurdish rebels was a religious duty. He and most of the other lads had joined the Revolutionary Guard. (In time, the Guard would grow, allowing Khomeini to reduce his dependence on the regular army; he suspected it of remembering the Shah with fondness.) By a process of informal election, Kharrazi and another local boy, Rahim Safavi, became leaders of the group.

At twenty-two, Kharrazi was older than most of the others; being bright and fervent, he was able to articulate their ideals. America, the mortal enemy of the new Islamic Republic, was trying to turn Kurdistan into another Israel. Saddam Hussein, who feared the new Islamic Republic, was helping. As Shi’as and Iranians, it was their duty to fight. If they were killed – as long as they had not actively sought death, but rather the glory of Islam – they would be martyrs and go to heaven. (The Qoran and the sayings of the Prophet made that clear.) If they stayed alive, and won, they would recreate the Imam Ali’s perfect caliphate.

To the boys in Isfahan, and across the country, that seemed like a terrific deal. The new warriors were mostly poor boys; similar boys in other countries, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, would have been drawn to extremist politics. Many were illiterate. The Shah’s rule had disoriented them; the elite had been devoted to money, while much of the rest of society continued to profess its old attachment to spiritual rewards. These lads had a penury of both. Now, wealth was being measured in ways that favoured them. You were rich if you enjoyed the favour of God and the Imam, if you were going off to Kurdistan for a grand adventure – a love affair with the Revolution. You were worth a million if your mother shed tears of dread and pride on your shoulder: ‘God speed your return!’

There was a jackpot up for grabs: martyrdom.

A minority of the boys – the more thoughtful ones – conceived of heaven abstractly. It was a state of grace, God’s mingling with the soul. (By contrast, hell was regret, a longing for divine favour that throbbed into eternity.) Most of the lads, however, thought of heaven as a mild spring day, where the heavenly facilities could be smelt or touched.

Kharrazi, Safavi and the lads took a bus to Kermanshah, more than one hundred kilometres south of the war zone. They commandeered a helicopter and went to Sanandaj, the capital of the province of Kurdistan. As they touched down, the airport was being mortared. According to Muhammad – Reza Abu Shahab, who went on to become one of Kharrazi’s aides, ‘We had no knowledge of military operations, or military theory. God was helpful and gave us false confidence; we thought we’d beat them easily.’

The Kurds made insulting, overweening demands. (They were showing that they didn’t understand the Revolution, and put their own petty nationalism above the rule of God.) They boycotted the referendum on the new constitution. Meanwhile, some misguided or treasonous elements inside the government continued to promote a peaceful settlement. They came to the region for peace talks, bartering with the Islamic Republic, when they should have been killing and dying for it.

Kharrazi and the others hated the army and mocked its daintiness. (The army was known to balk at orders to bombard Kurdish villages.) But the army was essential to the struggle to put down the Kurds; the Revolutionary Guard were too few, inexperienced and ill disciplined to win on their own.^[*]

Kharrazi’s men carried cumbersome old automatic rifles. These had been supplied – with great reluctance – by the regular army. If they wanted heavier weapons, they were told, they would have to steal them from the enemy. Gradually, as they killed more Kurds, they picked up their Kalashnikovs and Uzis.

There were cakes, presented to the Revolutionary Guard by local girls, which exploded once the girl was out of view. There was the beheading of a convalescing Revolutionary Guardsman in a hospital ward. There was the rape and disembowelling of boys whose fathers supported the government. There were government sentries found with their genitals stuffed in their mouths. There was the fear of fighting in tall valleys far from home, of depending on Kurdish guides who might be leading you into a trap. No one said the Kurds fought like gentlemen.

I don’t know whether Kharrazi’s group perpetrated what I, or you, might deem an atrocity. A bullet in the head for a Kurdish Sunni – punishment for refusing an invitation to join the Shi’a faith? A bastinado for a shepherd who failed to disclose the whereabouts of an enemy patrol? A shelling for a village whose inhabitants had given the rebels bread? Abu Shahab and others deny that such things happened. But the government’s campaign was famous for its savagery. Kharrazi and his lads were fighting the enemies of God, and nowhere in Islam does God prescribe for them a gentle rehabilitation.

That was perfectly understood by Khalkhali, scourge of Hoveida and destroyer of the Pahlavi tomb. For a while, he was in the rearguard of the advancing government forces, dispensing justice. His trials would last ten minutes or so. Verdicts depended on his whim. There was no appeal.

A magnificent society was being created. The unit was its microcosm. Men addressed each other as ‘brother’. Kharrazi and his aides were obeyed because their authority, everyone assumed, came from God. When there was a shortage of food, Kharrazi would pretend he wasn’t hungry and give his share to the younger lads. He took guard duty like everyone else, and went on dangerous reconnaissance missions. ‘No one missed the cities,’ one of his men told me, ‘because they were still full of sin; here, in the fields, we were fighting alongside God.’

Kharrazi taught them:

No drop of liquid is more popular with God than the drop of blood that is shed for him.

The best deed of the faithful is fighting for God.

Participate in holy war, so you will be happy and need nothing.

One hour of holy war is better than sixty years of worship.

The wives of those who have gone to war must be respected and treated as inviolable.

An ideologically pure army is better than a victorious army.

They didn’t realize it at the time, but it was all a preparation, a rehearsal for a grander struggle.

Even before the Revolution brought Iran’s Shi’a clerics to power, Iraq’s Baathist state had been suppressing its own discontented Shi’as. Although they constitute a majority of Iraqis, Shi’as had been underrepresented in the dictatorship that Saddam helped set up in 1968. They had been alienated by its espousal, variously, of secularism and Sunni nationalism. Saddam, who had been vice-president since 1968, but overshadowed the president in influence, regarded the new Iranian regime as a challenge – one that he might be able to turn to his advantage.

Before the Revolution, Iran and Iraq had been rivals, but the Shah had enjoyed the advantage. Being Arab nationalists, the Baathists had been furious when Iran, supported diplomatically by Britain and America, occupied three islands in the Persian Gulf in 1971. In response, Iraq expelled some seventy-five thousand Shi’as of Iranian origin and allied itself to the Soviet Union. But the Iraqis and Russians never built up the kind of intimate relationship that the Shah enjoyed with the US. In case of war, Iraq’s elderly Soviet kit would be no match for Iran’s expanding arsenal of sophisticated American weaponry. Access to US armaments was Iran’s reward for being the ‘third pillar’ – the other two pillars being Israel and Saudi Arabia – of America’s anti-Soviet policy in the Middle East.

In 1974, with American support, Iran intervened to help the Kurds of northern Iraq revive their intermittent insurgency against the government in Baghdad. As the likelihood of a destabilizing war between Iran and Iraq increased, so did international efforts to broker a lasting peace between the neighbours. In 1975, in Algiers, the Shah and Saddam signed an accord that required their respective governments to stop interfering in each other’s domestic affairs, and which ostensibly settled outstanding border disputes. Iraq conceded to Iran part ownership of the strategic southern reaches of their fluvial border, the Arab River. The Shah, and the Americans, ended their support for the Kurdish revolt.

Four months before the Revolution, the Iraqis complied with the Shah’s request that they expel Khomeini, who had been living in exile since 1965 in the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf. He went to Paris, which turned out to be a far better place from which to organize a revolution. On his return to Iran, he made it clear that he wanted political Islam to spread. In Iraq, thousands of Shi’a clerics, who remembered Khomeini from his period of exile, agreed. Ayatollah Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr, the most prominent of them, sent Khomeini a telegram in which he predicted that ‘other tyrants’ would also meet their reckoning. The Baathists put him under house arrest.

In June 1979, Saddam seized absolute power. He stepped up repression of militant Shi’a groups that Iran was arming and training. As the revolt in Iranian Kurdistan intensified, he took a leaf out of the Shah’s book, providing the insurgents with cash and arms. (The Islamic regime started supporting the remnants of the Iraqi Kurdish group whose rebellion had been crushed in the wake of the 1975 Algiers Accord.) Saddam also armed secessionist groups in the Iranian province of Khuzistan, which sits on most of Iran’s on-shore oil and gas.

In the first half of 1980, hostilities became overt. An Iran-backed Shi’a group made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s foreign minister. Iraq bombed an Iranian border town and expelled more Shi’as of Iranian descent. When he learned that al-Sadr was planning to visit Tehran, Saddam had him executed. The following month, Iran foiled a coup attempt sponsored by exiled monarchists. The death of the deposed Shah deprived the monarchists of their figurehead. If the Baathists wanted to bring about Khomeini’s fall, it was clear that they would have to push him themselves.

In 1979, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had become the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel, earning the gratitude of the US and the opprobrium of millions of Muslims. With that deal, Egypt was deposed as unofficial leader of the Arab world. A show of force and determination, Saddam calculated, would make the position his. He wanted to suck Khuzistan into his sphere of influence, and to have a say in the composition of a post-Khomeini government in Iran, a government that would be friendly to Iraq. Iraq’s state television was to describe the Iranians as ‘flies’; the hatred, amply requited, of Arabs for Persians may have facilitated his decision to attack.

For the first time since the Baathists assumed power in 1968, it seemed as though Iraq could win a war against Iran. The revolutionary regime was split between moderates and hardliners. Although the ethnic rebellions, with the exception of the Kurdish one, had been put down, other armed groups, some of them leaning to the left, seemed to be preparing to come into conflict with the new clerical establishment. The Iraqis, Saddam was advised, would be welcomed as liberators by the Arabs of Khuzistan. In the event of determined aggression, Khomeini’s republic would collapse.

Assessment of the two countries’ respective military capabilities suggested that Iraq had closed the gap on its neighbour. Executions, desertions, purges and reassignments had cut Iran’s army by 40 per cent. The US Embassy hostage crisis, along with Iran’s hostility to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had isolated the new regime from the world’s biggest arms producers. On the eve of war, about 30 per cent of Iran’s land force equipment, and more than half its aircraft, were not operational. Iraq’s armed forces, on the other hand, kept on growing.

On 22 September 1980 Iraq invaded Iran. The land offensive, launched at four points along a seven hundred-kilometre border, was strikingly similar to an exercise that had been devised forty years before by British instructors at the Baghdad War Academy. An inefficient command structure, excessive caution and unfamiliarity with combined arms operations slowed the advance. After four days it came to a temporary halt.

For the first two days of the War, the advancing Iraqis were not met by any large unit. Iran’s mobilization, when it finally got underway, was calamitously managed. It took one division six weeks to get from a base in eastern Iran to the theatre in the west. Many volunteers who went to the front were armed with Molotov cocktails. A plan, predating the Revolution, for the Americans to computerise Iran’s spare parts inventories, had not been completed. The Iranians didn’t know what they had in their stores.

It’s a few weeks into the Iraqi violation. Saddam’s expectations have been confounded. Rather than divide them, the invasion has united normal Iranians; they’re rushing to enlist in a kind of euphoria. The Iraqi advance has been slower and more costly than anyone expected. The Arabs of Khuzistan have reacted sullenly to their Iraqi ‘liberators’. In a couple of weeks, when the front stabilizes, the Iraqis will have overrun more than ten thousand square miles of Iranian territory, including a third of Khuzistan, but only one important Iranian city, the port of Khorramshahr.

It’s a cold day, and the Imam is sitting on a dais, underneath a sign that reads Allah. The men in front of him, most of them wearing military uniform, are crying. They’re crying because their Imam is praising them and they consider themselves unworthy of his praise. ‘I feel admiration,’ he’s saying, ‘before these smiling celestial faces, before these heartfelt sobs.’ The fighters, killers of Iraqis, convulse, tears pouring down their faces. ‘I feel insignificant,’ the Imam goes on. The weeping reaches a crescendo.

He’s the greatest communicator. He understands television instinctively. ‘In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,’ he starts his speeches, and then … silence. Fifteen seconds, or twenty: the Imam looking at you, through you, and the hairs on the back of your neck rise. His frail head slightly bowed, thick black brows like guillotines about to fall.

Marvel at his contempt, his contempt for Saddam’s accounting of power and advantage, for the unmanliness of his assault. When the Imam talks to his people, it’s without the histrionics of the actor Saddam, or Carter’s wheedling. You learn to love, and fear, his inviolable monotone.

Like the imamate of Hossein, or Ali, his leadership is supranational. When he speaks, the world listens. (Before, when Kennedy and Nixon and Carter spoke, the Shah listened.) America, mighty America, quakes. As he addresses the people, the Imam inlays the War into the marble of Islamic endeavour. When he finishes, you realize it’s impossible – morally, logically, physically – for Iran to give in.

‘The difference between our army and theirs,’ he says, ‘is that ours is constrained. For our army, it’s Islam that lays down responsibilities, whereas the other side has a free rein. They launch their shells and their ground-to-ground missiles … and they destroy an entire city. And they get congratulated. Our men don’t do that. They can’t. They won’t.’

There will be no compromising the principles of Islam. How, then, can there be compromise with Saddam Hussein? What use is it to live, unless God is smiling and your conscience is at peace?

Having invaded, and got bogged down, Saddam is in the mood to settle. His first negotiating position: complete control of the Arab River, autonomy for Arabistan (that’s Saddam’s name for Khuzistan), and some tinkering with border areas. Impossible for the Iranians to accept, but a basis, some people think, for discussions that could go somewhere.

Now look at the Imam’s (strictly rhetorical) counterproposals: Saddam’s resignation; the surrender of all Iraqi arms to Iran; the handing over of Basra, Iraq’s vital southern hub, to Iran … the Imam enjoys delivering these insults, these unconscionable conditions. They show the completeness of his contempt. Saddam can only be rattled by his placid fury.

‘What motive,’ the Imam asks, ‘did he have in doing – without studying the subject, without understanding what the consequences would be, without taking into account our people – what a few devils like himself, whispering into his ear, told him to do? … What is his motive, rushing from pillar to post and inviting us to make peace with him?’

The Imam’s questions aren’t meant to be answered.

‘How can we make peace? With whom? It’s like someone telling the Prophet of Islam to go and make peace with Abu Jahal. In the final analysis, that’s not someone you can make peace with.’ Abu Jahal was Muhammad’s uncle. He planned to have the final Prophet of God assassinated. He’s the only one of God’s enemies wretched enough to merit a verse in the Holy Qoran.

Khomeini draws himself up, pulls his heavy brown gown of camels’ wool around him. It’s a cold day. He’s frail, elongated, monochrome in his white beard and black turban. He berates the arch-pipsqueak:

‘You’re the one who committed all these murders in your own country, and in ours, you’re the one who had all those Muslims killed … Now! Imagine that our president and our parliament and our prime minister sit down and give you the time of day, and say: “Come in the name of God: the Arab River’s yours, just leave us alone!”’

Khomeini, chuckling inwardly at Saddam’s naivety: ‘Is that what it’s all about?’ Across Iran, in villages and small towns, the people, looking at the TV, know that it’s not.

At the end of our lives we must compile a log of our activities and present it to the authorities. Points are totted. Heaven, purgatory or hell; you go to one, and your performance on earth determines which. If we let God down in this world, he’ll catch up with us in the next. Where’s the gain in that?

‘How are we to answer the downtrodden of the world, and what are we to say to the people of Iraq? If we get a missive from Karbala, and it says: “What are you doing, making peace with a person who killed our holy scholars, who jailed our intellectuals … ?” What peace does that leave us with?’

Here, the Imam is laying out the second big responsibility of the Muslim – to the community at large, to the oppressed. ‘The question’s one of religion. It’s not one of volition. Our dispute is over Islam. You mean we’re to sacrifice our Islam? What … Islam is land?’

No, Islam is not land.

‘We shouldn’t imagine that our criteria are material, or define victory and defeat in terms of what is organic and material. We have to define our objectives in sacred terms, and define victory and defeat on the holy battlefield … even if the whole world rises against us, and destroys us, we will still have prevailed.’

(This is just as well. The Gulf States and Jordan; some western European countries; several members of the eastern bloc; they’re helping Iraq, militarily, diplomatically, morally. In Resolution 479, which calls for a cease-fire, the UN Security Council didn’t even name Iraq as the aggressor!)

Iran is alone, like the fulfilment of a prophecy. The Imam rises and the men shout: ‘Khomeini! You’re my spirit! Khomeini! The smasher of idols!’

The day I returned from Isfahan to Tehran, I went from the terminal to the office of Ali-Reza Alavi Tabar. In 1997, Alavi Tabar had opened a newspaper that argued that the Islamic Republic should be reformed. In 1999, the judges, who had different ideas, had closed it down. Shortly afterwards, he’d started a second newspaper, with more or less the same staff and typeface. That, too, had been closed. Later, he’d opened a third newspaper, with the same staff and typeface, and a name that was facetiously similar to that of the first newspaper. And so on. A few weeks before I visited him on my return from Isfahan, a judge had banned Alavi Tabar’s sixth newspaper, after eight issues.

Alavi Tabar was plump. He would talk about the sport he was doing: mountain walking, running and swimming. He said he ate only yoghurt and salad leaves for lunch. But he was puffy round the chops and his eyes were watery. When I first knew him, he trimmed his beard, rather than shaved it, for revolutionary grooming contends that shaving is a Western effeminacy. Later on, perhaps reflecting his alienation from orthodox thinking, he’d shaved his cheeks and jaw, sparing only a severely shorn goatee.