Is This Your First War? (13 page)

I got a cab to my hotel just northwest of Tehran University, then and now a flashpoint for democratic unrest. Students rose up here in 1999 to demand greater press freedom and again in 2009 to protest a stolen election. In both cases Iranian authorities, especially the Islamist Basij militia, responded with murderous violence. It was still night when I got to my hotel. In the morning, eager to look the part of a naïve and earnest tourist, I tried to engage the young woman behind the check-in counter in a conversation about things to see in Tehran.

“What about Ayatollah Khomenei's mausoleum?” I asked, referring to a massive shrine complex devoted to the founder of Iran's Islamic Revolution. “Is it nice? Have you been there?”

The young woman looked up from the reservation book she was writing in, her eyebrows furrowed and quizzical. “Why would I ever want to visit such a place?”

I skipped the mausoleum and instead wandered through central Tehran. The same contradictions in Iranian society that were so apparent when my plane landed were still evident. In many of the predominantly Muslim areas of London, bookstores are full of religious texts and, often, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic polemics. In Tehran, the titles most prominently displayed included Fyodor Dostoevsky's
Notes from the Underground
, Shakespeare's
Henry IV
, and
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë. But graffiti spray-painted on nearby walls urged death for women who don't wear hijabs, and when I tried to reach a contact by phone, misdialing, a recorded voice informed me, “In the name of God, the number you have dialed does not exist in our networks.” Everywhere people were surprised and happy to see a foreign tourist. One shop owner chased me down the street to return change — the equivalent of a few cents — that I had inadvertently left on the counter. Another refused my money altogether.

There were people I had planned to meet in Tehran. By chance, though, I ended up spending much of my first couple of days there with Mir Waiz, a twenty-two-year-old Afghan businessman from Kabul. Most of Mir's once-wealthy family had fled Kabul before the Taliban's advance, but he had stayed behind. The family chef woke him up days later to warn him that the Taliban had taken the city and begged him to hide indoors. But Mir, who had a strong anti-authoritarian streak even as a teenager, refused. “Why should I hide?” he said. “Kabul was my home. Not theirs.”

He left his house and was promptly confronted by a Talib who seemed capable of speaking only in short, barking sentences. He pointed his rifle at Mir's face and ordered him to grow a beard. Mir had several run-ins with the Taliban over the next few years, almost always because of his insufficient beard, or his hair, which he liked to style like a Western skateboarder — long on the top and front, short on the back and sides. He was thrown in jail for two days because he had applied for permission to travel to Iran using a photograph in which his head was uncovered. Once released, he asked a friend with Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the photo so it looked like he was wearing a cap and returned to the same Taliban official, who let him leave the country. “You see how stupid they are?” he asked me. “They probably don't even know what computers are.”

Mir was happy to see the backs of the Taliban and said he liked Hamid Karzai, then Afghanistan's interim president. But he was suspicious of any government that might come to power in his country and liked to say “Only business is free.” That was why he was in Iran: to develop trading contracts. He had been back and forth many times, and unlike the many Afghan refugees who provided Iran with a pool of cheap construction labour, Mir could make decent money here. But he still didn't like its Islamic system of government.

“Iran is not like the Taliban, but it is not free. Here they have secret freedoms when no one is watching. But officially nothing is allowed,” he said. “Most of my Iranian friends are young. They are the new generation. They think religion should be their own business, and I think so, too. I don't care about religion. I'm Sunni. They're Shia. People should be free to decide on their own. This is what they think, and they want a government that respects that.

“But I also have an older friend. He is a mullah in Mashad, in northeast Iran. You get there from Herat in Afghanistan. You know it? Very beautiful place. You should come. I tell this mullah that change is coming to Iran, more freedom is coming, and that people will fight for it. He says that he too will fight for his religion, for an Islamic government. But this man is also a hypocrite, and I tell him so. I say, ‘You like to drink beer and have girlfriends, so why don't you let anyone else have these freedoms?' I tell him he's like the Taliban. He just laughs. We're friends, so I can say these things. But he knows it's the truth.”

Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought with it countless tragedies for Iran and for the rest of the world. And compared to the mass murder of political prisoners, the oppression of women, and the export of radical Islam, it is a small thing to lament that Iran's three decades of isolation have meant that few foreigners, at least in the West, can see for themselves how jaw-droppingly beautiful the place can be. And yet that was all I could think about when I first saw Esfahan. Once the capital of Shah Abbas the Great's Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth century, Esfahan is exquisite. It is a city of blue-tiled mosques and madrassahs, and arched bridges that, while beautiful, somehow make you feel sad — as if they were songs composed in a minor key.

I took one of these bridges, the Si-o-se Pol, across the Zayandeh River to Jolfa, commonly known as the Armenian Quarter. Shah Abbas had brought thousands of Armenians from the original town of Jolfa, now on Iran's northern border, to his capital, Esfahan, where he reasoned that their skills as merchants would be more useful. Their Christian faith was respected. Afghan invaders massacred thousands when they sacked Esfahan and brought down the Safavid dynasty in 1722, but today Jolfa remains predominantly Christian and contains several understated but elegant churches and cathedrals. It's also home to Esfahan's trendiest café scene, which was why I was there.

I ordered a tea in a coffee house panelled in dark wood and filled with cigarette smoke and tiny Parisian-style circular tables. Young men and women sat around them, leaning toward each other so that their foreheads were only inches apart as they drank their espressos. Several of the patrons sported white bandages across the bridges of their noses — evidence of recent cosmetic surgery. All the women wore headscarves perched so far back on the top of their heads that it seemed that the fabric would slide onto their necks if they moved suddenly. A stereo blasted Green Day's “Time of Your Life.”

I hadn't been seated for more than a few minutes when three young men at a nearby table beckoned me to join them. One, Nasser, a burly veteran of the Iran-Iraq war with a wide, slightly pudgy face and thinning hair, was drinking non-alcoholic beer. He gestured at it almost apologetically.

“It's no problem for us to get liquor,” he said. “Myself, I like beer, brandy, wine, everything. But it's illegal. We need to drink it in our homes. Muslims like us sometimes make it ourselves, but we usually come here to get it from the Armenians. They have it smuggled over the mountains from Kurdistan. We drink in our homes, but sometimes it's nice to get together with friends at a coffee house like this. I like this place. Half the people here are Christians, half Muslims. We're all together.

“But you know,” he continued, “ten years ago this wouldn't be possible — men and women sitting side by side and smoking so late at night. The police would harass us. Change is coming. Slowly. Our best parties are still private ones. Sometimes I'll have one in my apartment. There is a lot of music and dancing. My neighbour calls the police but it's not a problem.” He rubbed his thumb and finger together to indicate a bribe. “I give them something and they go away.”

Nasser invited me to the apartment of his uncle, Farouk, who lived nearby. We picked up some ground beef kebabs and chicken wings dressed with onions, bitter herbs, and yoghurt from a street-side shop that blasted pulsating Persian dance music from its open windows.

“Should we get something to drink?” I asked Nasser.

“My uncle will take care of that.”

We climbed the stairs to Farouk's apartment. A neatly dressed elderly man with walnut-coloured skin and a sad and gentle face opened the door. His expression lit up when he saw Nasser. Farouk embraced him and, after the briefest explanation of who I was, hugged me, too.

“Come in, come in,” he said.

Farouk's shelves were lined with books of poetry and philosophy. He had written several himself, but they were all unpublished. He was a committed leftist and had clashed with the Islamic Republic since its foundation. It landed him in jail several times. Now a white-haired septuagenarian, he was mostly left alone.

“Do you believe in God?” Farouk asked me.

“Yes.”

“You shouldn't. Religion is a racket.”

Nasser spread the food we had bought on the kitchen table, while Farouk went to his fridge and retrieved two large pop bottles. One was filled with smuggled Kurdish moonshine. The other looked as though it contained Coke. The label had the same familiar red background and white script. But Iran's ruling clerics periodically tie themselves in knots because of Coca-Cola's supposed connections to the governments of Israel and the United States. So instead of Coke, we were drinking Mecca-Cola, the founder of which, a French Muslim entrepreneur named Tawfiq Mathlouthi, launched the brand with the claim that it would contribute to the “fight against American imperialism and the fascism of the Zionist entity.” A small message on the bottle asked that drinkers avoid mixing the cola with alcohol.

Farouk poured some of the smuggled moonshine, which smelled and tasted like paint thinner when consumed straight-up, into each of our glasses and added the Mecca-Cola. We worked our way through both bottles over the course of the evening — the booze and the anti-Zionist soda. Farouk preferred to talk about religion and poetry. His favourite poet, appropriately enough, was the fourteenth century Persian icon, Hafez, who wrote odes to earthly pleasures and who mocked the hypocrisy of self-declared guardians of virtue. A painting on Farouk's wall depicted a drinking party celebrated in verse by Hafez.

Farouk also made me memorize, in Farsi, the lyrics of a traditional Persian nomad's song. Years later I can still remember the translation of its repeated chorus:
“Spring is coming/The flowers are here/I am going to the desert.”

“It's about hope,” Farouk said. “It's about believing that all winters end and that dry earth will bloom again.”

Nasser's politics were less subtle. He became more animated as the evening progressed. He desperately wanted an end to Islamic rule in Iran but rejected the idea of an invasion or of any sort of outside interference to achieve this end. “If people have problems with their government, it is up to them to change it. If the Americans come here, I will fight them.”

Nasser paused and clenched his jaw, slicing at the air with an open palm. His rising frustration was evident before he continued.

“But they must go, the mullahs. They must go. I don't know how. Maybe we will have another people's revolution. I think our spirit is like that of France. A French democracy is best for us.”

Sometime after midnight, Farouk shuffled from the kitchen into the living room, his slippers slapping on the tile floor. He looked back and beckoned us to follow before turning on his illegal satellite television and flipping through the channels until he found one showing pornography. He sighed, sank into his chair, and raised a glass to his lips.

“All men and all women are like that,” he said. “There is something of an animal in them. They desire each other like they need food and sleep. It's normal.”

In truth, though, I don't think Farouk cared one way or the other about the mechanically coupling bodies on screen. He barely looked at them. I think he simply wanted to demonstrate his disdain for the Muslim theocracy that had been running his country for the last three decades, and getting drunk on moonshine and Mecca-Cola while watching porn was a neat and tidy way of accomplishing this.

“I am seventy-one years old,” Farouk said. “All my life I have been lucky to continue learning as if I were a young man. If you don't learn, if you don't continue to learn, you are frozen. They mullahs are frozen. They are trapped 1,400 years ago.”

I left a short while later. Farouk took one of the paintings off his wall and pressed it into my hands as I walked out the door with Nasser.

By now it was very late, and most of the streets were deserted. On our way back to the cheap guesthouse where I slept, we passed by the Kjaju bridge, another architectural gem. Candlelight was glowing from beneath its vaulted arches, where a group of middle-aged men had gathered to take advantage of its acoustics. One played a flute. Another earnestly belted out the lyrics of a song by Googoosh, an Iranian pop singer and actress who was silenced by the Islamic Republic's ban on female performers for twenty years before she finally left the country in 2000. She's sung for enormous crowds in Europe, the United States, and Canada. But her fame never diminished in Iran. Earlier that evening Nasser had played for me a bootlegged video of Googoosh performing in Toronto.

The men beneath the bridge were scruffily dressed but sober. “Of all the men in the world,” one sang, “you're the one for me.”

Iran's double life was a strange and sometimes intoxicating thing to experience. Everywhere there seemed to be a visible chasm between the government's official slogans and restrictions, and how its citizens wanted to live. It was evident in the simple act of a woman removing her headscarf the moment she stepped indoors; in the Muslim teenagers who held hands in an Armenian coffee shop; in the hidden satellite dishes, the alcohol, the over-the-top hospitality.