Читать книгу Farewell Shiraz - Cyrus Kadivar - Страница 17
ОглавлениеOne day in March 1966, my father received a letter that would change our lives forever. It was from the Imperial Iranian Embassy in Washington, encouraging him to return and serve his country. Dr. Anoushiravan Pouyan, my father’s cousin, had gone back to Iran with his French wife, a pretty model. Not only was Dr. Pouyan thriving as a top general surgeon but, thanks to his connections at court, the shah had appointed him as his civilian adjutant and dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Tehran’s Melli (National) University. “There is much to do here,” Pouyan had written to my father, urging him to come home soon. “Iran needs qualified people.” He promised to help in any way he could. If that wasn’t temptation enough, Asadollah Alam, now acting as the chancellor of Pahlavi University in Shiraz, was prepared to offer my father a teaching post at the Faculty of Medicine. And Iran was looking for well-trained surgeons to staff the hospitals of Saadi and the ultra-modern Nemazi.
That night over dinner my parents discussed the letter of invitation. My mother encouraged her husband to go back home. “You have been away from your parents for a long time,” she said. “Besides missing you, they haven’t yet seen their daughter-in-law or grandchildren. We can see my parents on the way to Tehran.” I was only three at the time and had started walking on the day Kennedy was assassinated. My brother Darius was a few months old. Father had been absent from Iran for almost eighteen years. He wasn’t sure whether he would be able to fit in there any more, and then there was his young family. How would they cope in a different culture? There were also other concerns. My father was worried that his past political sympathies might cause him some problems with the authorities and Savak, the secret police. But, as a friend assured him, many Iranian professionals in Europe and the United States, some anti-shah, had recently gone back and, to their surprise, had been given top positions.
There was some soul-searching, but, after lengthy discussions, my parents decided to take a leap of faith and go to Iran. “We can always come back if things don’t work out,” my mother told my father. So that April we flew aboard a Pan Am jet to London and took a connecting flight to Paris, where we stayed one week with my French grandparents, who were thrilled to see us. On the way to Tehran my mother read a guidebook on Iran while my brother and I slept in our seats. At noon, our plane landed at Tehran’s new Mehrabad International Airport. As we left the plane my father was unnerved to see a neatly uniformed police officer standing at the bottom of the stairs.
“Welcome back to your country,” said Colonel Ali Qetmiri as he kissed my father on both cheeks. The colonel, another cousin of my father’s, had wanted to meet us at the airport. He led us to a government car. As he traveled through the Iranian capital, my father stared with bemusement at a changed city, with its flashy buildings, wide avenues filled with modern cars and buses, well-kept parks, and public monuments. People were dressed fashionably and, as my mother noted, girls and boys walked hand in hand, openly. The emotional homecoming and reunion at my grandparents’ house was filled with tears of joy. Relatives, friends, and neighbors rushed over to embrace my father and compliment his French bride and children. Having their son back in Iran with a foreign wife and two children brought my grandparents immeasurable happiness, but my father’s status as a surgeon was also a source of pride.
For my mother the Persian language was a challenge. Her vocabulary did not exceed a few words, which she spoke with a French accent, such as salaam, khoda-hafez, and of course merci (used commonly for ‘thank you’ in Iran). Her favorite was Djounam, man chôma roh doost daram, learned from my dad, which means “Darling, I love you!” Every morning at ten o’clock my grandfather would sit under a tree in the courtyard near a rectangular pool. Here, he would teach his daughter-in-law Farsi while she taught him French. Mother kept a notebook where she jotted down words and sentences phonetically and repeated them until they were firmly in her mind. I don’t recall much about that period except that my grandparents did everything they could to make us feel at home. Golzar, the housekeeper, took care of our daily needs: cooking, washing, shopping, and preparing our beds and mosquito nets.
We stayed in Tehran for almost five months. In late August my father went to Shiraz, where his maternal uncle, Mohammad Farjoud, helped him find a two-story house in a quiet neighborhood. A week later we joined him, flying south to a new life. My grandparents joined us soon afterward. The details are a haze but Mother used to tell me that my father often held lengthy discussions with Papi Kouchik, mostly about the political situation in the country. A lot had happened in Iran while my father had been away. Since the fall of Dr. Mossadegh, the shah had amended the Iranian constitution so that he now controlled the executive, legislative, and judiciary. The western oil majors had formed a consortium and were now obliged to deal directly with the National Iranian Oil Company, which gave Iran more control over its revenues.
The shah’s White Revolution had turned society upside down. It had begun in the early 1960s with the king shaking up the centuries-old feudal ownership pattern by weakening the power base of the landlord class and the Islamic clergy. He had done so, my grandfather said, by confiscating an immense amount of land from them and redistributing their estates to millions of peasants. The reforms had angered the wealthy family elites, many of whom occupied seats in the Majles and enjoyed privileges. In Fars Province, after the murder of a government official, the Qashqais had rebelled again and briefly taken Shiraz, only to be repulsed by the army under the command of General Aryana. In response to criticism from certain members of the ulama (clerics), the shah had denounced them as “black reactionaries.”
Only one man had stood up to the king: Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini. On June 4, 1963, in a passionate sermon given at the Feiziyeh School in Qom, the firebrand cleric accused the shah of betraying Islam and Iran. The next day, a commando team arrested Khomeini at his home. He was driven away to a military base in Tehran in an unmarked car. His arrest sparked three days of rioting. There was considerable damage to life and property. Many banks, offices, shops, and cinemas were torched. When a crowd of ten thousand protesters, many of them wearing white shrouds in preparation for martyrdom, headed toward the palace, Prime Minister Alam called the shah and demanded full powers to put down the uprising. With the king’s approval, Alam declared martial law. Tanks rolled down the streets. The army was ordered to shoot to kill. Most of the worst clashes took place behind my grandparents’ house, which was near the Park-e Shahr, or City Park, where key government buildings were situated. The sound of gunfire had kept them awake. By morning, according to the government radio, 120 people lay dead—later, Khomeini’s supporters would falsify the number of victims, claiming that tens of thousands had been killed. Fearing that the government was planning to execute Khomeini, Shi‘i clerics bestowed upon him the title of Ayatollah to save his life. Khomeini remained in Savak custody until order was restored. Alam’s firmness and the army’s willingness to kill and injure hundreds of protesters in cold blood had saved the shah’s throne. As a reward for his services Alam was named chancellor of Pahlavi University by imperial order of the king.
In November 1964, as a precautionary move, the shah ordered Ayatollah Khomeini exiled to Turkey and later Iraq. Two months later, on January 22, 1965, Prime Minister Hassan Ali Mansour was killed by a member of the outlawed Fedayan-e Islam, a group composed of religious extremists. The shah quickly appointed Amir Abbas Hoveyda, a French-educated technocrat and Mansour’s friend, as prime minister. To strengthen security, the “soft-natured” General Pakravan, head of Savak, was replaced by the tough General Nassiri. From then on the western and Iranian press slavishly praised the shah. Once the land reforms were approved in a referendum, the monarch was promoted as a benevolent leader and spiritual father of the nation, compassionately tending to his people’s needs. Propaganda films showed him distributing bundles of land deeds to groups of peasants around the country. Bowing ministers and state officials clapped and cheered each time a villager bent down to kiss His Imperial Majesty’s hand or dust-covered shoes.
My grandfather saw the madness and chaos this top-to-bottom revolution had generated in the countryside. At the Ministry of Justice he was also appalled to see the way land distribution was implemented. Documents were forged, deeds altered, dissidents intimidated, landlords evicted, and peasants with no knowledge of managing the rural estates put in charge. However, my grandfather’s loyalty to the shah forbade him from criticizing him personally. Instead my grandfather put the blame for the mismanagement and corruption on the royal hangers-on. That is why he retired early and spent his time reading and visiting his shrinking estates in Fasa, which were in danger of being taken over by the state. My grandfather was skeptical about the land reform. “These poor farmers and villagers lack experience and will one day leave the land and head for the big cities,” my grandfather predicted. Father listened to my grandfather with sympathy but hung on to the hope that the situation would sort itself out. I was of course too young to comprehend any of these things, content in the warm bosom of my loving family and spending many blissful moments in the company of Papi Kouchik.
There was a point in each day when my grandfather realized that his grandson needed more than books to keep him from getting bored. On such occasions we went for our daily walks. One morning, Papi Kouchik took me to a toy shop on Rudaki Street and bought me a plastic gun for my fourth birthday. Later, we stopped for some carrot juice to refresh us before continuing to Zand Boulevard. All along the main artery of the city, flags tied to trees and lampposts fluttered in the autumn breeze. On that sunny day, Shiraz was abuzz. Officers in smart brown uniforms, policemen, and elite soldiers in helmets with rifles and fixed bayonets formed a wall between the large cheering crowd and the main street decorated in triumphal flower arches. “What’s going on?” my grandfather asked a young man beside him. “It’s the shah,” he cried out excitedly. Lifting me to his shoulders, my grandfather pointed to the king as his motorcade swept by.
Standing in an open silver-blue car, the king was a distant figure in a dark suit and prematurely white hair. He smiled and waved. People shouted: “Javid Shah!” (“Long live the King!”). Then in a flash the shah and his motorcycle escort were gone. That was the one and only time I ever saw Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi up close. Despite the excitement around us, Papi Kouchik’s beaming expression had suddenly turned sour. He looked terrified. Waving a gun, even a cheap plastic one, at the mighty ruler of my country was a serious offense. The previous year the shah had survived another attempt on his life, this time at Saadabad Palace when a soldier of the Imperial Guard had opened fire on the monarch as he went to his office. The would-be assassin and two royal bodyguards lost their lives in the shoot-out but the king escaped unscathed.
Not surprisingly, on that day in Shiraz my toy gun caught the attention of two security men. They came running toward my grandfather in their dark suits and sunglasses. There were some sharp exchanges. One of the agents asked to see the gun, which my grandfather had taken from me and hidden in his pocket. Surrendering the pistol defused the situation. The fake weapon was returned to my grandfather with a curt apology. Wiping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, my grandfather took me home.
Hearing the story, Mamie Kouchik berated her husband for buying me the toy. “Couldn’t you have bought something else?” she shouted. Father cooled matters down with his usual tact. He was worried about my grandfather’s health. He rolled up Papi Kouchik’s sleeves and took his blood pressure, which was very high. “There, there, you need to rest,” Father told him, putting away his stethoscope. That day I hugged my grandfather, telling him how much I loved him, and waited for him to get better.