Читать книгу Farewell Shiraz - Cyrus Kadivar - Страница 22

11

Gathering Storm

Who is Ayatollah Khomeini?” a girl sitting next to me asked. It was October 1977. Just moments earlier our Farsi teacher had asked the class to write an essay on the shah and the Pahlavi dynasty. I was halfway through my paper when my classmate asked her question. The teacher’s face went pale. “Shush . . . never mention him again,” he replied nervously. I went home perplexed, wondering what the fuss was all about. When I asked my father about this man he replied: “Oh, him, just a crazy mullah!” Mamie Kouchik was offended by my father’s comment but remained silent, not wanting to have another argument with her son. Religion was one topic my father refused to discuss.

She waited until we were alone to explain to me that Ayatollah Khomeini was a “respected religious leader” who had been living in Iraq since the early 1960s, after the shah exiled him from Iran for his opposition to the government. Opening her Quran, Mamie Kouchik took out a copy of Khomeini’s message condemning a lurid incident that had taken place during the Shiraz Arts Festival. She blushed as she explained how a Hungarian group had staged a play on Ferdowsi Street behind our first house. One of the actors dressed as a soldier had pretended to rape a woman. The play had caused an uproar among the pious townspeople.

“Indecent acts have taken place in Shiraz,” the exiled cleric had declared. He had urged the ulama and the people of Shiraz to speak out against such “corrupt acts.” Mamie Kouchik explained that on October 23, 1977 the ayatollah’s eldest son, the forty-six-year-old Mostafa, had died in Najaf. Although his death was from natural causes, the religious opposition to the shah accused Savak of poisoning him and called for memorial services to be held at mosques around the country. By November 1977 Khomeini’s name was on everybody’s lips. At about this time I started reading my father’s foreign magazines. Several articles in Time and Newsweek described the shah as “an enlightened despot.” There were also photographs of Iranian students wearing paper-masks protesting the royal couple’s visit to the United States with placards calling our king “a bloody murderer.” Police had intervened with batons and tear gas when this group attacked a crowd of Iranian royalists by kicking and punching them. The shah’s humiliation and President Carter’s discomfiture were there for all to see as they and their wives stood wiping their eyes with handkerchiefs.

From then on, criticism of the Pahlavi family was on an upward swing. One evening while my parents were entertaining their friends, I was in another room watching television when an Iranian doctor wandered in and stood beside me. From his breath it was clear he had drunk too much. As he pointed at the image of the shah on the screen, his eyes filled with contempt. “Look at that dictator!” he blurted. I was speechless. Although this prominent surgeon had done well under the monarchy he blamed the shah for allowing his cronies, brothers, and sisters to build fortunes and palaces. He was also scathing about the government’s plans to build nuclear reactors when there were still villages that remained without electricity, running water, or paved roads. His wife was also critical. She spoke of the “pimps and fixers” at court, the alleged philandering, and the huge sums being spent to build a casino and a hotel on Kish Island to entertain the rich and famous. Dr. Haghighi and my father dismissed such talk as “malicious gossip.”

A few days after this strange evening, an intern came to our house to discuss a patient. While having tea with us he took out a copy of a letter written earlier in the year addressed to the shah by three pro-Mossadegh opposition leaders—Karim Sanjabi, Daryoush Forouhar, and Shapour Bakhtiar—demanding that His Majesty return to the spirit of the 1906 Iranian constitution. Father studied it with a serious expression and said nothing until we were alone. “Something is happening,” he said. Besides the revival of the National Front, political agitation had been taken up by left-wing groups who campaigned among university students and oil workers. But it was the radical mullahs who seemed to be stirring up passions among the poor and illiterate masses. On December 15, 1977, hundreds of young worshipers gathered at the Shah Cheraq Mosque in Shiraz to listen to a recording in which Khomeini violently attacked the shah, whom he blamed for the “moral degeneration of society” and “murdering innocent Muslims” who dared to oppose his “tyrannical” rule. Prayers quickly turned hostile. When people began chanting angry slogans against the shah, Savak units moved in and arrested Ayatollah Rabbani Shirazi, a leading cleric, and confiscated the seditious tape. That seemed to quiet matters, for, as the year drew to an end, Anthony Quinn, Jennifer O’Neil, and Michael Sarrazin came to Shiraz to shoot Caravans, a film based on James Michener’s novel and directed by James Fargo. Iran’s heartthrob actor Behrouz Vosoughi co-starred with Hollywood actors alongside hundreds of Qashqai tribesmen.

Every morning I would stand outside our house gates with Darius and Sylvie, waiting for the blue school bus. Our driver, Akbar Agha, always insisted that I sit in the front seat so we could chat during the journey. One day we discussed the new U.S. president, Jimmy Carter. “He’s different from Nixon and Ford,” he intoned gravely. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Carter is a Democrat,” he said. “He won’t be as friendly toward the shah as the Republicans.” Mr. Tunnicliff, one of my Californian teachers, explained that the White House was eager to pressure the shah to liberalize his “dictatorial regime, cut back on arms sales, and improve human rights.” It thus came as a surprise to me when, on New Year’s Eve, we watched the live broadcast of a state banquet at the Niavaran Palace, where the blue-eyed President Carter praised the Shahanshah for his “great leadership in one of the most troubled regions in the world” and called Iran “an island of stability.”

That night we tasted Grandma Julia’s caviar blinis while Mother put on a new red dress she had bought in Paris. But my father seemed distracted. “Let’s hope next year will be a better one,” he sighed, pouring us champagne. Looking back, it seems extraordinary that we were so ill-prepared for the events that followed. We hardly took any notice of the religious rumblings in the country, although in several interviews the shah had warned that “certain reactionary elements” were planning to “take Iran back 1,400 years.”

In January 1978, our high school was given permission to stage its annual International Week program at the Pahlavi Hall on the grounds of Shiraz University. Our new principal, Dr. Russel, had opened the ceremony with a speech. I was in the back row watching a dancing troupe when the lights went off. There was panic in the audience until Dr. Russel appeared with a candle. “The show has been canceled,” he announced. We were asked to leave the place. Outside the auditorium, we noticed that police cars had surrounded the Pahlavi Hall. The officer in charge politely told us that our evacuation was for our own safety. He suspected sabotage. I later learned that a group of students had switched off the electricity to protest against an incident that had taken place a week earlier in the holy city of Qom, where several people demonstrating against a press article critical of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini had been killed by the police. The ayatollah now had his “martyrs,” and in an angry sermon circulated in mosques around the country he called the shah “the son of an anti-Islamic imposter and a western puppet.”

Iran was changing but not in the way we had hoped. In late February 1978 we learned of new riots. Large crowds armed with sticks and gasoline bombs had gone on a rampage through the streets of Tabriz. I think it was Mr. Kojouri who showed me the pictures in Kayhan International of damaged banks, cinemas, public buildings, and offices of the Rastakhiz. One of my father’s former medical students was in Tabriz at the time and later told us that he had almost been hit by a bullet after it smashed his car window. The army had to be called in when the police lost control of the situation. A dozen people were killed and 125 wounded. The increasingly unpopular Prime Minister Amouzegar brazenly accused “foreign agents” and “hooligans” as the instigators of the Tabriz riots. Rastakhiz party members staged huge rallies in support of the shah. Then everything was calm for several weeks.