Shadow of the Silk Road (40 page)

Something odd was happening to my own language too. It came
out lisping and misshapen. For several hours my mouth had been filling with pain, and now I was seized by nausea. In the train’s mirror I saw a swollen, discoloured face. Its two halves might belong to different people, one cheek so inflated that its eye was closing. Beneath a wobbling tooth, the gum was inflamed by a livid abscess. I wondered with misgiving what dentist might work in the old Mongol town of Maragheh ahead of me, and regretted leaving behind the delicate hands of Persia.

My third-class sleeper had none of the communal festivity of carriages in China or Central Asia. Its six-bunk cabins were closed by sliding doors in clouded glass. They were noiseless and private. Dosed with aspirin, I lay awake on an upper bunk, while the rain-soaked wind clanked in the ventilator by my head, and we moved into darkness. A policeman had warned me as I boarded: ‘Keep your things close: if anyone offers you to eat or drink, refuse it.’ Now, faint from sickness, with the vulnerability of the lone traveller, I wedged my rucksack behind my back and curled under the railway’s flowery sheets, and tried to sleep.

The other passengers seemed far away. Below me two soldiers sprawled in battledress; beneath them an old woman lay asleep in her hijab, a scarf lashed around her face, while her husband sat awake, telling his prayer-beads with tiny cries. Sometimes we drifted past small stations where nobody stirred, or stopped in emptiness; and platform signs lit the dark incongruously with English–‘Prayer Room’, ‘Ablutions Place Women’–while the rain thickened into the night.

I stared out unsleeping. Once I saw a fox. And once we stopped a long time beside a station awning, where a youth and a girl were seated on broken chairs, oblivious of us. His head and body were turned to her with fierce, beseeching eyes, his shoulders hunched almost to his ears, while she–beautiful in profile–sometimes granted him a smile, then tied her headscarf more decorously and looked elsewhere. Then he would say something pleasing, and her smile would return and her feet in their trainers tapped nervously under her chador, on and on, until our train slid away.

Laughter floated up from the berth opposite me, where a pale-faced man had followed my gaze. He was young, but his round
head was balding, with fine, close-shaven features. His English came lucid, tinged by something like American. ‘In two years they’ll be kissing!’

I said: ‘How do they find any privacy?’

‘Maybe they’ll go back to one of their parents’ houses. Young people do that.’ He spoke as if he were no longer young. ‘But here in the provinces it can be terrible if you’re caught.’

Outside our window I glimpsed low hills, blacker than the sky, sensed the train climbing. Its lights nosed far ahead over scrubland and gravel sidings. The man’s face came into focus opposite me. He had frank, hard eyes. I asked: ‘How do you speak English?’

‘I was in Canada by the age of sixteen. I was there four years.’

‘Your father…?’

‘No, I was alone.’

The strangeness of this hung in the air a moment, with the snoring of the soldiers. Then he said: ‘I escaped before being called up for the Iran–Iraq war.’ He waited, as if testing the silence. Perhaps it was the intimacy of darkness which eased these confidences, I thought, or our suspension above the sleeping others. He said: ‘My parents were divorced. He had another woman, and I didn’t get on with her. I wanted to get out. I didn’t want to fight that war. I thought it senseless. So I left.’

‘How?’

‘Over the mountains. Into Turkey. There was a whole gang of us. The Kurds ran an escape network, and smuggled us over. We were shot at as we went, and twice we were nearly caught by Turkish police. The Kurds mocked up a passport for me–we all laughed at it–before my father paid for a Canadian one to reach me. There was a racket going on using passports sold by Western drug addicts. Mine had belonged to Gordon——, I remember. I was sixteen and he was thirty-four, but at the Greek border they never bothered even to open it. And at Montreal airport I flushed it down the lavatory and claimed refugee status.’

I felt an uneasy wonder. Had he not done this, he might be lying beneath the flower-fetid soil of the Martyrs’ cemetery, with tens of thousands of other teenagers. Instead he had worked as a waiter in
a fast-food restaurant in Montreal, and studied English. He had changed his name from Vahid to David. ‘Canada was good,’ he said. ‘But I was sorry for the family I’d left behind. By the time I was twenty, the war was over, and I felt homesick. I decided to return. Because I’d been a minor when I escaped, I wasn’t jailed. I was just fined. But now I’m sorry I ever left Canada. I want to go back.’

‘I don’t blame you.’ But I wondered if he had left it too late to return.

He said: ‘That was a futile war, you know. They’ve never told us how many died. And they’re still bringing back the bodies. You see the billboards everywhere, of the faces of the martyrs. Half the streets are named after them–big streets for big martyrs, little streets for little ones.’ His laughter disappeared into the silence. I wondered if he felt himself a deserter, after all, compelled to belittle those who had stayed behind.

He shifted nervously. ‘Now we’ve had enough blood. There’ve been too many dead. The people are exhausted. They don’t want any more. So we wait. We wait for these old mullahs to die out. It may take ten years. Their holy city, Qum, is a kind of mullah factory, churning them out. And they’re in league with the rich
bazaaris
–they have a common interest in keeping the country backward. But in the end it’s got to change. We’re a softer people than the Arabs, you know, more open to things. It’s an irony.’ He was whispering now. ‘We need a secular government. Everyone I know wants that. We want access to the world.’

‘Can you wait ten years?’

‘No. I’ll go back to Canada.’

For a while we were silent under the slurr of the rain and the grinding wheels. We were climbing more steeply now, into Azeri country: the land of his people. Turkic tribes had drifted south into Iran over many centuries, as the nomads had into China, and founded dynasties. The great Safavid dynasty was Turkic; so was the whole nineteenth-century Qajar house; and the Azeris still wielded power in government and commerce greater than their numbers. Persian-speakers ridiculed them. ‘They tell donkey jokes about us,’ Vahid said, and reckoned it jealousy.

By now my sedated toothache had stilled to a sullen throb, and
I was fading in and out of sleep. Vahid too had turned his face to the cabin wall, but he went on talking in a pained monotone. ‘Of course I love my country…but not to live in, just to dream of…We live a lie here, we even have two economies…Western stuff gets smuggled across the Gulf from Dubai…nobody can police those waters…Satellite dishes everywhere, receiving foreign channels, and drugs galore…They say we have two million addicts among the poor…’

Blurred by painkillers, I had the illusion now that the voice belonged to no one in particular, floating in the night like the disembodied lament of all his country.

‘…Tehran’s grown terrible…The whole city’s polluted, petrol’s so cheap…yet we have to send it abroad to be refined…My women friends walk about like sheets in the day…but indoors they dress in miniskirts and drink imported vodka and their parties make such a racket they get stopped by the police…then my girlfriend has to go home before the night’s over because of her parents…’

Somewhere out in the rainswept night we had passed the town of Mianeh and the fifteenth-century bridge over the gorge of the Qizil Uzun nearby. The murmur of his voice merged with the murmur of the train-wheels. ‘I think the Mongol invasion changed my people…So much devastation. Every city. We were a happier people before…’

Much later, it seemed, I emerged from sleep again, and heard him say: ‘That war against Iraq…I pretend I disagree with it, even now. But I remember one of my teachers at school was killed fighting there…They just said he was dead. It made me tremble…The truth is I didn’t have the guts to fight…’

Light dawned over another land. The dusty plains had gone. Vahid too, at some time in the night, had gone. Through eyes swollen half shut I gazed out at the hard plateaux of the Turkic world, rolling their brown grass into a changeless sky. I leant outside to cool my inflamed face. Through the hills in front, our multicoloured carriages moved like a harlequin snake, obscenely bright.

Half an hour later I stumbled out on to the platform at
Maragheh, and into the first hotel I saw. On its lobby wall the trio of ruling clerics had shrunk to two, the hardline Khamenei surviving alone while the dead Khomeini loured behind him like an angry ghost. In these poor rooms–along with the Koran, the prayer-mat and the sacred stone–a lonely touch of the past surfaced: a hung carpet, perhaps, or some faded plasterwork.

Anxious, hunting for a dentist, I tramped the grid of streets between the hills and a thin river. I felt faint, my own footsteps far away. Under the dusty chestnut trees I became aware of a harsher world. The food stalls were shut for Ramadan and gangs of out-of-work youths were marching the pavements. Their stubbled beards seemed to stem more from poverty than faith. Through my pain-blurred nerves I imagined some unexpended force, even threat. The Persian suavity had gone.

I found two dentists in a tiled alley. Off their waiting room one door led to the male dentist, the other to the female, and nobody mingled. In the mirror my abscess was erupting like a livid anemone. It hung in my upper jaw above the failing tooth. My smile, when I tried it, was a slit in a mask. The only other patients were two green-faced women with handkerchiefs clamped to their mouths.

I had hoped for an elderly practitioner, a leftover Armenian perhaps, who would probe tenderly into my mouth, disperse the abscess and send me away with an antibiotic. Instead the male door opened on a stocky mechanic with a crew cut. He beamed welcome. I said in a panic that I didn’t want a tooth extracted. But he spoke no English. In the basement an old man worked an antique X-ray machine. On its photograph my tooth looked like a rotted mandrake, its roots coagulated. The dentist held this to the light, and murmured foreboding. Then he motioned me to his divan–patients lie here, they do not sit–and chose his instruments. He gave no anaesthetic. Overhead a lamp shed a baleful pool For two hours he drilled and dug and chiselled, first at one tooth, then at its neighbour, and I had no idea what he was doing. From time to time he realigned my head left or right by pulling my nose. He seemed to be grinding my skull with pumice stone. I mewed again that I wanted to keep my tooth, most of my
teeth, any teeth, but he only grinned uncomprehendingly, and went on excavating with the help of medieval-looking tongs and files, while I tried to recall what instruments my London dentist used.

Slowly the ache of my abscess turned into the raw pain of whatever he was doing. He chattered to me in Turki and once, with a spark of hope, I heard the word ‘root canal’. Then he stopped for another X-ray. He was looking bewildered. My heart sank. He motioned me to rest, take a walk. An hour later I was on his rack again. But something had changed.

One by one, three colleagues in chadors filtered in. Their heads circled close above me, fascinated, as if a Western mouth might be different from an Iranian one. Then they started to hand out instruments and murmur suggestions. Their headscarves turned them sleek as seals. There was a pretty one who scowled, and a homely one who smiled, and one who had no expression at all. Finally, heretically, from the circle of murmuring seals, a woman dentist took over. For another hour she picked delicately into my gums, refining something which the man had been unable to do. Beneath her chador and surgical mask only a pair of spectacles gleamed, like headlights in a fog. The man stood back, with no visible shame, while she filled my root canals.

In the end, when someone produced a mirror, I did not know what I would see. For an instant I expected a landscape of cracked incisors and a cave where the tooth had been. Or perhaps, after this four-hour ordeal, I would see a mouth surgically transformed. But when I looked, all seemed perplexingly the same. Only the sac of the abscess hung empty, and the pain had gone.

The November wind rustles the dust in the streets. A weak sunlight falls. Passing faces, especially the old, elicit curiosity again. I wonder what the tired eyes have seen. Gently my head is clearing.

In the grocery, a modest corner-shop, the man’s soft English arrests me. He hands me sweet bananas, refusing money. I linger in curiosity. His long, pared face and silver cockscomb dip and
reappear behind sacks of fragrant nuts until the last customers have left, and he talks again.

Forty years ago he had served in the air force–once the Shah’s pride–transporting military equipment. Even now, in his wallet, he keeps photographs of those times, and he shows them to me with sad pride. Here he is in London outside the Passport Office, standing rather diffidently in fashionable flared trousers. Behind him a passing girl in miniskirts pinpoints the era. And there he is again, nonchalant under the Arc de Triomphe, a cigarette drooping from his fingers, with a forgotten friend. His young face is empty, more ordinary than now, waiting, his hair boyishly parted.

‘Life was good then.’ His shoulders have straightened among the walnuts. ‘I had memberships in all the officers’ clubs. I even bought parachutes in your England. I remember the chains of shops in Motherwell, beautiful. Do you know Motherwell?’ For a moment, as others enter his store, I have the notion that he and I are alike: our starved features and light eyes. ‘I remember a demonstration too. Young people with no shirts and long hair. I didn’t know what it meant, because we didn’t have demonstrations in Iran. Things were fine then, under the Shah. Goods were cheap. In those days one dollar was only seventy rials. Today it’s eighty-three thousand. By the week’s end now my income looks quite big, but…’ He puffs it away across his palm.

I wonder: has he forgotten the hubris of which he was a part? The build-up of useless arms, the Shah’s mismanaged reforms, the secret brutality? I ask: ‘And then?’