Читать книгу Farewell Shiraz - Cyrus Kadivar - Страница 21

10

A False Stability

In the last days of August 1977, Empress Farah came to our city to open the Tenth Annual Shiraz International Arts Festival in a special ceremony. “Art lives if people love it,” she once told a reporter. “But they cannot love it if they do not experience it, so we must give them occasion to see it.” For two weeks the event gathered an array of musicians, actors, directors, and dancers from east to west. In the past the shahbanu and her friends had relished the company of such luminaries as Xenakis, Béjart, Rubinstein, Grotowski, Brook, and Stockhausen. This time Parisa and Shajarian, two classical Iranian singers, gave sold-out performances held in famous gardens under the stars.

Now in her late thirties, the shah’s wife was a mix of intelligence, charm, elegance, and simplicity. She had always been a much-loved person. While her husband limited his travels inside Iran to development projects, the shahbanu visited leper colonies, earthquake-stricken villages in the desert, and remote tribal regions where the central government had a nominal presence. She was often moved to tears at the sight of so much misery. Not long before, she had visited an orphanage in our city and been so appalled by the conditions she witnessed that she ordered her name to be removed from that institution until it was upgraded to a place that she felt was fit for children.

The shahbanu took her responsibilities seriously and had matured over the years. She was too smart not to spot the difficulties that modernization was creating. The need for balance was important to her. No one had done as much for the promotion of art, music, and theater in Iran as the empress. She bought the works of western masters and contemporary Iranian painters for her private collection. She championed young architects, built museums, and raised funds to restore old buildings in many cities, including Shiraz. She also revived the craft industries and encouraged tribal designs. There was no question of her sincerity. Father used to say the empress was the one person who saw the problems, while the shah only saw the achievements. While her husband visited a petrochemical factory, inaugurated a dam, or toured a naval base, the shahbanu was always at hand to cut the ribbons of a new school, day care center, institute, or library.

That year, however, with the bad state of the economy, Empress Farah was criticized for the Shiraz festival’s extravagance. Ordinary Shirazi folk, but also the new urban class of aggressively enterprising businessmen, contractors, middlemen, speculators, and academics, were more disparaging of the avant-garde Tehran elite who were in attendance. Mullahs sneered at the empress’s friends who dyed their hair blonde and showed off their taste for things Parisian. Some of them spoke English or French as if Farsi were nothing more than the language of the plebs. Aware of the seething antipathy building up against the ruling class, the empress appeared low-key in a light dress at the Hafezieh. During one televised program I noticed her seated under a cypress tree listening to classical Persian music, completely lost in thought.

During the last days of that summer, I spent most of my free time with my chum Karim, who had just returned from a British boarding school. He frequently invited me over to his modern house. After our customary swim in his pool we would spend our leisure time playing cards and board games or listening to Elvis Presley records on his father’s stereo. Karim’s parents were often out at parties so we did what we liked, watching funny television shows and eating huge quantities of ice cream. Another friend, an Iranian–German boy called Farhad, and my brother Darius often joined us. We had many priceless moments trading jokes and had sleepovers, talking and laughing late into the night. The fun ended when Karim returned to his studies in England. My stomach crawled at the thought of returning to school and facing exams, but soon I was back playing football with my friends and flirting with the pretty girls in my class.

Meanwhile, my father had decided to take the advice of our French friend Didier Manheimer to buy a property in Europe. In October my parents went to France to take delivery of an apartment near Versailles, and I went on a three-day school trip to the oil-rich Khuzestan Province, staying at the Vahdati Air Force Base in Dezful, visiting Dez Dam, climbing an Elamite ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil, and touring the ruins of Shush. When I returned from the trip in time for my fifteenth birthday, my parents were already in Shiraz. They showed us pictures of our holiday apartment abroad and promised to take the family to see it next summer.

The coming of autumn transformed our orchard into a basket of yellow, rust, and orange. The sunshine became soft and gentle; the distant mountains turned a shade of purple till noon. In the evening a wind typical of the season had begun, making all of us, even the dogs, sleepy. Our gardener Almas told me that this wind always blew until it reached the grave of a forgotten poet. We still took our tea in the garden and picked open pomegranates, but the nightingales were eerily silent. At last the season of falling leaves was upon us. Father bought my sister a piano and hired an Austrian lady to give her lessons, while Mother obtained her driver’s license.

About this time, in late October, our driver Ebrahim and his family suddenly and unexpectedly left our home. Mother had never had an easy time with our driver but she did feel pity for his wife, Nargess, and her three children. We were sorry to see them go. When I asked the reason for Ebrahim’s dismissal, my father took me aside and said that he had discovered that our driver was using heroin, and that was a serious offense.

The day of Ebrahim’s departure, our country celebrated the shah’s fifty-eighth birthday. At school, our principal, Mrs. Shahin Copeland, a patriotic Iranian woman married to an American, mobilized the teachers and the students to sing the imperial Iranian anthem, known as the Salaam Shahanshahi, praising His Majesty’s long and glorious reign. That evening we watched a special report showing the Golestan Palace, where the shah had received birthday felicitations from his government ministers, generals, religious dignitaries, and world ambassadors. This was followed by a biopic about the monarch’s eventful life over the past decades.

A few days later, my mother decided to take her children to the Bagh-e Eram Palace. She had always loved this place with its splendid mansion and watercourses amid ancient cypresses and abundant roses. Usually there were thirty or forty gardeners, all snipping leaves feverishly under gentle skies, giving the garden a sense of orderliness. That afternoon, arriving at the Bagh-e Eram, we found the gates shut and the gardeners replaced by security men milling about the place. Then came the whirring sound of the royal helicopter and we saw it land somewhere in the park. An officer of the Imperial Guard told us that the shah was in residence and would be spending the night in the mansion, which also served as the headquarters of Pahlavi University.

The next day thousands of Shirazis lined the streets to applaud their monarch as he traveled through the city in a bulletproof limousine. It was reported that the shah met with Ayatollah Mahallati at the Shah Cheraq Mosque in the morning; toured a site on a hill overlooking the city where an observatory and the Pahlavi Library were to be built; and handed out prizes to a group of university students. In the evening Dr. Farhang Mehr and faculty members held a cocktail party for the shah. On his last day, the king inspected the privately owned and ultra-modern Shahryar Hospital, where my father worked.

Mohammad Reza Shah was in high spirits as he walked down the corridor greeted by smiling nurses and interns. In the main hall a dozen handpicked physicians and surgeons in white overcoats were introduced to the shah by the hospital director. One by one they kissed his hand according to a long-held custom. To everybody’s surprise my father contented himself with a respectful handshake. An awkward moment ensued. His Majesty raised his dark eyebrows and threw an icy glance at his nervous adjutant, then asked my father to follow him to a nearby room. For the next ten minutes behind closed doors, the shah questioned my father about his department and examined a sophisticated dialysis machine. Before leaving the hospital ward the king quipped, “God save us from doctors! I truly hope never to be tied to this or any other machine in the future.”

The medical staff clapped obediently. When my father came home I asked him what he thought of the shah. He told me that, unlike his official image, he had found the monarch approachable and technically minded. Weeks later my father received a gold coin with the king’s face, issued by the Imperial Court. My father was beaming as he let me look at it before my brother Darius grabbed it and ran off shouting to show it to my sister. I remember my father telling me later over a game of chess that the shah had looked tired. He wondered why he didn’t slacken the reins a bit more, allow some genuine freedoms, and let other political parties loyal to the monarchy to participate in national elections. People needed to feel they had a say in the running of Iran.

Although my father considered the shah an intelligent and hard-working leader, he was no blind supporter. Like many reasonable Iranians he felt the king had made a big mistake when, two years earlier, he had abolished the two-party system in favor of a single one. The Rastakhiz Party had a million members but it had turned into a circus. Ignoring the ills of the nation, the party bigwigs cultivated an atmosphere of egomania and sycophancy. They praised the White Revolution at a time when the overheated economy had begun to slow down, discontent was brewing among the expanding intelligentsia, unemployment was increasing, and farmers were leaving their villages for a better life in the cities and towns. If this was His Majesty’s idea of guiding and educating his people in “gradual democracy,” then it had failed.

For the government the shah remained the sole decision-making body, casting his shadow across the entire country. Looking back, it is obvious to me that the shah had started to believe in his own propaganda. He was convinced that he was the beloved ruler of a contented, grateful people. In his obsession to be ranked among the immortals of Iranian history he had become fatefully isolated from the truth. He heard only what he wanted to hear: praise of his heroic services to the nation.

Hundreds of millions of dollars of our oil wealth had been used to build a formidable army, navy, and air force, the largest in the Persian Gulf. One late afternoon I was in the family room watching the coverage of an impressive military parade on our new color Panasonic television. A commentator bombastically announced that Iran’s armed forces now ranked fifth in the world. Resplendent in his commander-in-chief outfit, the shah saluted and reviewed the passing Chieftain tanks, Phantom jets, the disciplined officers in their gleaming uniforms, and the strutting imperial troops. I felt proud. Father looked impressed. “With such an army nobody will dare attack Iran, not even Iraq. We won’t be another Lebanon.” In fact, the stability and social freedoms we Iranians were enjoying under the shah’s reign may have seemed unique given the turmoil in the Middle East, but it was a fleeting moment. How long, my father once admitted, could this “one-man show” go on for?