Читать книгу Farewell Shiraz - Cyrus Kadivar - Страница 16

5

Love and Politics

There was a cold wind blowing on that January day in 1950. At Mehrabad Airport, standing on the tarmac, my father wore a raincoat and was carrying a suitcase. He tried to comfort his weeping father. Aminollah Khan, then in his seventies, was there to offer support. He had aged and, with not long to live, he had traveled all the way from Fasa to see his nineteen-year-old grandson in Tehran. “Kayomars Khan,” Aminollah Khan whispered, “be brave and never forget your roots.”

The flight to France was through Beirut. In Paris my father found rented accommodation near the university thanks to his cousin Anoush, who had arrived a few months earlier. As they were bothfluent in French, neither of them had trouble integrating in their new environment. When not at class my father and Anoush went out looking for fun. As handsome Iranian students with money in their pockets, everything in this city of inexhaustible delights aroused their curiosity. Here in the French capital, they discovered, you could speak, think, laugh, and love as you liked. Nobody cared how you dressed or what you did in your personal life. More importantly, there were so many bistros to visit and pretty girls to meet.

While his son was away in France, my grandfather, then in his forties, was following the political situation in his country very closely. Judging from the boisterous articles printed in the numerous papers being sold on the street corners of Tehran, everyone was talking about the sixty-nine-year old Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, now a Majles deputy. There was something unique about this man that made him stand out from other corrupt and self-serving statesmen and politicians. Unlike the power-hungry aristocrat Ahmad Qavam, who saw politics as a grand chess game, Mossadegh stood for something decent. A brilliant orator, he could talk for hours about what mattered to the people of Iran, and yet he had been raised in a privileged family.

At a time when foreign powers bribed editors, Majles deputies, military officers, and court officials, Mossadegh was incorruptible. The young shah, like many of his patriotic subjects, had been swayed by Mossadegh’s passionate demand that Iran should have more control over its oil. My grandfather and his friends had followed reports of the debates raging in the Majles. As leader of the National Front coalition Mossadegh had the support of secular and European-educated politicians, university professors, bazaar merchants, and several enlightened mullahs. In February 1951, two weeks after the shah’s wedding to Soraya, a green-eyed woman of Iranian and German blood, Mossadegh caused a storm in parliament when he and Ayatollah Kashani, the religious conservative speaker of the Majles, unleashed a torrent of abuse against Prime Minister Hajj Ali Razmara, the former military leader who had liberated Azerbaijan after the war. Facing pressure from the British to bring the oil negotiations with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to a peaceful resolution, Razmara had urged diplomacy and moderation.

Mossadegh threatened to take the issue to the people and demanded a national referendum. It was all or nothing, Mossadegh and Kashani told the nation. In the eyes of the nationalists and Islamic extremists, Razmara was a traitor. On March 7, 1951 Razmara was shot and killed by a religious fanatic as he arrived at the Shah Mosque in the heart of the Tehran Bazaar. Father read the news in a Parisian newspaper while sitting at a café. As it turned out, Razmara’s youngest brother Manuchehr was living in the same apartment building as he was, also studying medicine. On April 28, 1951, a day after Prime Minister Hossein Ala resigned his post and in an open session of the Majles, Dr. Mossadegh’s nomination to replace Ala was approved with 79 out of 100 representatives voting in his favor. Two days later, the shah, aware of Mossadegh’s rising popularity, appointed him Prime Minister. On May 1, Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) by canceling the oil concession and expropriating her assets. The nationalization bill that carried the shah’s signature was acclaimed as a victory for the Iranian nation. From the outset Mossadegh faced concerted foreign and domestic opposition. His decision to oust the British from the Abadan oil fields convinced Churchill to approve plans to overthrow Mossadegh at a time when relations between the king and his prime minister had cooled.

It was during this period, while studying medicine in France, that my father met my mother, Jeannette Cybulski, a blonde and blue-eyed nineteen-year-old beauty. The daughter of Catholic Lithuanian–Polish immigrants, she lived with her parents in a Paris apartment with her cat Pushkin. One spring day in 1952, while opening her window, my mother noticed a handsome foreigner in the building opposite. She watched him pacing his room, holding a skull in one hand and a book in another. Was he rehearsing a play, she wondered? This went on for several days until one evening he caught her staring and waved at her. She blushed and pulled the curtain. Not long after, on a sunny afternoon, as my mother left her apartment on Rue Truffault in the Batignolle district, she ran into my father on the corner of Rue des Moines. The Iranian excused himself and politely asked her name. After introducing herself, she turned down his offer to have a coffee.

Several weeks later he asked her again and this time, after talking it over with her mother and her best friend, Monique, she agreed to meet at Les Deux Magots. In a quiet corner, they sipped cappuccinos, gazing at each other and chatting. Mother would later say that she had found my father a study in contrasts, his dark brown eyes and soft voice enchanting. “Are you an actor?” she asked him. “No, I’m studying to become a doctor,” my twenty-two-year-old father replied earnestly. Lighting his cigarette, he revealed that he was in his second year of medical school. Mother was instantly drawn to this dashing Persian from Shiraz. In those days my father had a full head of black hair and a thin mustache. Only three years older than my mother, Father seduced her with tales of his life in Iran. He quoted Hafez love poems and she told my father about her studies. She was in college studying literature and wanted to become a teacher.

They saw more of each other and their love deepened. Promenading on the tree-lined boulevards, bridges, and the banks of the Seine and the Latin Quarter, they embraced and held hands, like many light-hearted young couples in Paris. Everywhere there was music and laughter in the air. As they grew closer my mother revealed some details about her personal life. Born in Soissons, France, on November 26, 1933, she was an only child and very close to her parents. Her father, Joseph, had fought the Nazis during the Second World War while serving in a Polish cavalry unit attached to the French army. Captured by the enemy, he had served five years in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Her mother, Julia, an active member of the local resistance, had been a pillar of strength and love during those hard years. After the war her father had returned a military hero. When she was a teenager, she moved to Paris. The more he listened to my mother, the more my father fell in love with her. Several outings later my parents started courting seriously and one day my father met my French grandparents. They took an instant liking to him.

Every weekend my father would ring the doorbell and take my mother out. They went dancing and attended parties with the tall and charming Anoush, who was always dating the prettiest girls, and spent time at the pleasant cafés and lively bistros of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. As my mother discovered, Father had a serious side to him. Besides his medical studies, he often asked her to accompany him to noisy gatherings where politically active Iranian students—royalists, communists, and nationalists—met to argue and debate the stormy developments in their troubled homeland. There was a lot to discuss about events in Iran and one name always loomed above all others: Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh.

In July 1952 Mossadegh resigned as prime minister in protest after the shah refused to hand over control of the army to him. Ahmad Qavam’s tenure as head of a new government lasted four days. After large-scale disturbances in the capital, the shah was forced to reinstate Mossadegh. To pressure the Iranians the British closed down the oil wells and the Abadan refinery. In the autumn Mossadegh flew to New York with his foreign minister, Hossein Fatemi, and an Iranian delegation to fight Iran’s case at the United Nations. The Security Council voted in favor of Iran. Mossadegh returned home a national giant. But people around the shah were not happy with the prime minister’s reckless policies, which undermined the king and risked a political explosion.

On February 28, 1953 rumors that the shah was planning to leave the country led to a backlash against Mossadegh. Huge crowds appeared outside the palace demanding that the king remain in Iran and calling for Mossadegh to resign. The prime minister, who was in audience with the shah that day, had to flee from the palace through a back door. The shah appeared on the balcony to reassure the crowds, who cheered him. The British then led a boycott of Iranian oil, causing an economic crisis. Ayatollah Kashani and several senior religious leaders openly declared their support of the king and denounced Dr. Mossadegh as an “unbeliever” for making common cause with the Tudeh Party.

In Paris, there were demonstrations outside the Iranian embassy and scuffles broke out between Iranian students with differing political views. The majority of them were on scholarships but those who, like my father, received money from their families were temporarily destitute after the government froze all bank transfers. By now my father had lost patience with his pro-Tudeh friends. He accused the leadership of the communist party of exploiting the naive students and taking their pocket money to line their own pockets. Since the death of Joseph Stalin on March 5, 1953, stories of his murderous regime had emerged in the press. It was clear as day to my father that in the Cold War, the Soviet Union, not the United States, was the biggest threat to Iran’s sovereignty.

With his eyes opened, he saw the Tudeh as a fifth-column party working for the Kremlin with the sole aim of taking Iran into the Soviet sphere. My father often confronted his friends with the question: How could any patriotic Iranian be a communist? The euphoria that had made Mossadegh a national figure in the early years of the oil nationalization movement had started to wane. During the spring and early summer months of 1953, fearing that Iran was in danger of falling into the hands of communists, American emissaries urged Mossadegh to compromise with the British over the oil dispute. When he refused, the CIA and MI6 activated their covert plans for his overthrow, which later came to be known as Operation Ajax. The shah, worried about losing credibility if he moved against his prime minister, reluctantly agreed to play along. President Eisenhower sent him a letter of support. Politically, Mossadegh was on shaky ground. Ayatollah Kashani and General Zahedi had fallen out with Mossadegh after he accused them and his enemies in the Majles of being in the pay of foreigners.

Sensing danger, Mossadegh gave himself emergency powers, dissolved parliament, and muzzled the press. Iran teetered on the brink. The Tudeh Party had started to infiltrate the armed forces and repeatedly warned Mossadegh of a coup by the shah and his Anglo-American backers, but the prime minister refused to believe them. That August, the shah, exercising his constitutional right, finally signed a royal decree dismissing Mossadegh and appointing the loyal General Zahedi as his successor. On the night of August 15, 1953, Colonel Nematollah Nassiri, the commander of the Royal Guard, arrived at Mossadegh’s house and delivered the king’s decree. Mossadegh responded by having Nassiri and his fellow conspirators arrested. In the morning, as Mohammad Kadivar was shaving, he heard Mossadegh’s foreign minister on the radio openly accusing American and British agents of a plot to overthrow the government.

Then came the shocking news. The shah and Queen Soraya had fled the country to Baghdad. The next day, Tudeh activists defaced Reza Shah’s mausoleum and began toppling the statues of Mohammad Reza Shah. Mossadegh declared martial law. Fatemi urged the prime minister to abolish the monarchy and declare a republic, but the latter refused on the grounds that it was against Iran’s constitution. Twenty-four hours later, news arrived that the plane carrying the shah and Queen Soraya had landed in Rome. Unsure of which way the wind was blowing, the Iranian ambassador had preferred not to be at the airport to greet the royals. At the Excelsior Hotel the shah declared that he had not abdicated, although privately he wondered whether his days as king were over.

On August 19, 1953 my grandfather was told by a neighbor that a large crowd in Tehran led by members of the Zurkhaneh (House of Strength), a traditional gymnasium known for its royalist sympathies, as well as local thugs, tradesmen from the bazaar, mullahs, and even prostitutes, were chanting “Death to Mossadegh!” Gangs of young men were running through the streets distributing piles of Iranian and American banknotes to anyone who shouted “Long live the Shah.” With each passing hour the mob grew bigger. At half past two in the afternoon, after Tehran Radio was captured by the army, General Zahedi, who had emerged from his hideout, took to the air denouncing Mossadegh and reading the shah’s edict naming him prime minister. Anxiously, Mohammad Kadivar and his friends followed the hourly radio bulletins. The end for Dr. Mossadegh came when a Sherman tank pulled up behind the former prime minister’s palatial house and fired a single shot which demolished half the building. One report claimed that Mossadegh had been seen fleeing the scene and climbing into a neighbor’s garden in his pajamas. Forty-eight hours later he surrendered to a chivalrous General Zahedi. The army now controlled the situation. Shaban Jaffari, a Zurkhaneh champion, toured the capital with his thuggish friends, brandishing a huge portrait of the king, and beating up any communists they encountered.

On August 21, 1953 the shah left Rome and, after changing planes in Baghdad, was back in the palace the next day, convinced that the “national uprising” was proof that he had been “elected” by his people to lead them and that God was on his side. In a Tehran park my grandfather noted that a large equestrian statue of the shah had been hastily restored. He was relieved that Iran had been rescued from the abyss. Miles away, my father followed the developments with his friends. Most students declared their support for the king; others bitterly claimed that he owed his throne to American dollars and a British conspiracy. Father had mixed feelings about the 1953 events but was deeply aware that a crucial turning point in the history of modern Iran had been reached.

In the aftermath of the pro-shah coup, hundreds of National Front and Tudeh leaders were rounded up. Dr. Hossein Fatemi and fifty or more communists discovered in the army were executed. The defiant Dr. Mossadegh was tried in court and sentenced to three years in prison. Mohammad Reza Shah was determined to rule as an absolute monarch. Depressed and repulsed by the political developments, my father chose to focus on his medical studies. One afternoon, bored of discussing Iran, my mother dragged my father away from his talkative friends to see a movie. My parents always joked that during the screening of Roman Holiday, starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, they spent so much time kissing and cuddling that they never saw the end of the film. My mother went home walking on a cloud. Before going to bed that evening she wrote down her feelings in her diary, saying that she considered my father the man of her dreams. Four years later, in March 1957, during the Persian Nowruz celebrations with a group of Iranian friends at the Hotel Lutetia, my parents proudly announced their official engagement.

In the spring of 1959, President de Gaulle hosted the shah, who had divorced Soraya almost a year earlier. One night, the Iranian ambassador to France held an embassy reception in honor of the shah. Several students, among them my father’s cousin Anoush, had been invited to greet His Imperial Majesty. The king rewarded him for graduating at the top of his class with the keys to a brand new sports car. Then an amusing incident occurred. Anoush later told my parents that a tall art student by the name of Farah Diba caused a stir when she complained to the shah that his government had not done enough for Iranian students abroad. Instead of being angry with the girl, the shah was smitten by her and promised to look into the matter.

In the summer of 1959, my mother went to England and took an English-language course at Reading University. After graduating from medical school my father had decided to train as a surgeon in the United States. In June, he joined my mother in England, where for the next three months he worked on perfecting his English. One day, as the course drew to an end, my father took my mother for a walk. He told her seriously that she would have to be patient as he would be away for a long time. As they spoke, my mother, who was already upset at the thought of her man leaving her, suddenly tripped and fell into his arms. They laughed. “My love, will you marry me, here in England?” my father asked. “Oui,” she replied tearfully, kissing him. A week later they received their marriage papers.

Until the last minute my father struggled to learn his marriage vows in English. The ceremony was a simple affair. At noon on August 11, 1959 the couple arrived at the Reading registry. The bride wore a blue dress and the groom a suit. Aziz Shirazi, a dear friend of my father’s, and the journalist, poet, and Oxford novelist John Barrington Wain acted as witnesses. My mother’s landlady, Frida Knight, an author and English communist activist, and her daughter Frances were also present. Over a wedding lunch my father smoked a Cuban cigar that Wain had brought back from Havana. Mother would later recall that she and my father spent their honeymoon at a mansion hotel in Botley, near Southampton. Seventeen days after their marriage my father left for the United States. In the autumn, Mother returned to Paris to finish her university degree.

She wrote daily to her husband and counted the days until they would be together again. Aziz Shirazi and Anoush were always ready to help her if she needed anything and reassured her that she would soon be with her husband. Making her way through a park one day, my mother recognized Farah Diba sitting alone on a bench eating a sandwich. They exchanged complicit smiles. In those days French magazines were filled with photographs of the twenty-one-year-old Iranian art student who, by the end of the year, became the shah’s wife and queen. Her fairy-tale wedding in Tehran on December 21, 1959 attracted worldwide attention, especially her gown designed by Yves Saint Laurent, then working at the House of Dior. To go with her dress, she wore a tiara with a pink diamond. In October 1960 Farah gave birth to a boy, winning the hearts of her people and securing the Pahlavi dynasty.

About this time, Father started his career as a surgeon. From Minnesota, my father sent regular letters to his parents in Iran and his wife in Paris. Everything about the United States, he wrote, was exciting. It was the age of Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, NASA space travel, and the Kennedys. In January 1962, Mother sailed from Portsmouth aboard the Queen Elizabeth, bound for New York. On the long journey to the United States my mother was entertained by a group of lively Iranians eager to teach her a few words in their language. Reunited with her husband, she noticed that his dark hair was receding and his mustache gone. That didn’t stop Mother from kissing him passionately. It was snowing when they arrived at their rented apartment in a friendly Minneapolis neighborhood.

Once settled, my enthusiastic mother began giving French lessons at a girls’ college and was very popular with her students. That April, the Shah of Iran and Queen Farah arrived in Washington for a three-day state visit. President Kennedy found America’s Cold War ally a suave leader resolved to improve the lives of his people. At the White House state dinner, the president toasted the shah and his dark-haired, exotic, twenty-three-year-old Persian queen who glittered from head to toe with diamonds and emeralds as she sat next to the glamorous Jackie. In his farewell speech before leaving for Tehran, the shah charmed the American public with his eloquence, flair, and optimism about Iran’s future.

My father’s previous ambivalence toward Mohammad Reza Shah turned to grudging admiration. It seemed normal that Iran’s government should ask for more economic and military assistance from the United States. Reading Time magazine, my father, who enjoyed geopolitics, learned that Prime Minister Ali Amini, a darling of the Americans, had been replaced by the shrewd and loyal Asadollah Alam, a long-time confidant and companion of the monarch. Under pressure to please the U.S. Democrats and eager to shake up his country’s feudal and religious foundations, the shah was talking about unleashing a bloodless revolution.

Having read the shah’s book, Mission for My Country, Father learned of his plans to bring health, education, and personal security to all the people of Iran in a way no king, landowner, plutocrat, mullah, or ideologue had done so before. All this was happening far away from where my mother and father were living. They were happy in Minneapolis. Their American friends were easygoing, nice, and generous. They enjoyed their trips to the lakes. In love, my parents looked forward to having a family. On October 18, 1962 my pregnant mother gave birth to a boy in the Swedish Hospital. My parents called me Cyrus after a Persian king.