Shadow of the Silk Road (41 page)

‘Then? Then I was sacked. There were thirty-seven thousand of us sacked, just before the war against Iraq. Suddenly we were told to go. Without reason. At the moment when we were needed. Some left for the States, some for England, or just went into commerce, into anything.’

‘Because you were the Shah’s people…’

‘Well yes, that was the secret reason. They didn’t trust us. They only wanted people who felt like they did.’ His sadness is open now; but this is as far as he will condemn them, as if from some innate courtesy. ‘After that I didn’t know what to do. Three of us got together and tried to buy sand-mixing machines from
Armenia. Enormous things, as big as here to there…’ he waved a hand to the far side of the street. ‘We would have made a huge profit. But between them the Armenian police and immigration office took everything. We were Azeris, you see, and the Armenians hated Azerbaijan even then. Twenty years later our ministry is asking Armenia to compensate us.’ His face mists into dreaming. He stops to sell a few grams of pistachio nuts. ‘Anything is possible. I’ve learnt that. Only God has all knowledge…’

Now he looks at me harder, asks suddenly: ‘How old are you?…Ah yes, and I am sixty-one…Why do our people age so fast? I think it is because we are not happy. When people are sad, they age.’ I tell him that age has left him trim, fine-boned. But he says: ‘We cannot enjoy ourselves as in the past. Last year my wife and I went to the sea, but all the time we felt watched. These police everywhere. Checking. Listening. What are we doing? What are we saying? What are we thinking? Even by the sea. Now if my compensation comes…’–he is straying into dream again–‘I’d like to travel with my wife, to go back to your country. If I should live so long, fifteen years maybe…and then we will meet again and celebrate together.’

Momentarily believing this fantasy, I write down my address for him.

‘My wife loved to travel. She is always hopeful. When I was put out of the air force, I felt a great despair. But she said: go on, be strong, it will be all right. Always.’ Quaintly he adds: ‘She is my dear friend. When I go home tonight, I know she will be there. That is a wonderful thing. To have a friend.’

For a second I see him in her eyes: a decent man to whom the wrong things happened. Parting, I take his hands. He presses a bag of dates on me. My address is lying among the almonds, forgotten.

In 1257 the Mongol Hulagu–after rooting out the Assassins–poured his cavalry and siege engines west into the nerve-centre of Islam. Within a few weeks Baghdad fell, and the venerable Abbasid Caliphate, which previous conquerors had revered, was brutally
extinguished. The caliph himself was rolled up in a carpet and trampled to death under horse-hoofs, so his royal blood did not soak the ground. Soon afterwards Hulagu advanced to the conquest of Syria, in whose sacked cities the Muslims were slaughtered and the Christians spared, until dissension in the Mongol heartland called him home.

At Maragheh, where he raised the first capital of his Ilkhanid empire, only the tall brick tombs remain, like petrified nomad tents, from this and earlier times. I found them down dilapidated alleys. Their tranquil towers, domeless now, still glowed in a web of patterned bricks, and Islamic inscriptions rambled above their doors. The loveliest of them, older than Hulagu, was raised on a plinth of hewn stone: a lyrical turret of rose-coloured brick. Its dome had been sheered off, and its vault was empty. But its bonded brickwork–clothing even the columns and the broken octagon of its roof–teased the whole building into a dry, shimmering life.

But Hulagu himself was buried secretly, in the Mongol way. Islam was his inherited enemy (his mother and favourite wife were Nestorian Christians), and like his pagan ancestors his mind was haunted by the night sky. After he captured the Assassin eyrie of Maimundiz, almost the only inmate he spared was the celebrated astronomer Nasir ad-din Tusi, who had persuaded the wavering Grand Master that the planets favoured surrender. To Tusi Hulagu entrusted the creation of an observatory on the plateau above Maragheh, which was soon bristling with the latest refinements of science and magic. By a pinpoint of sunlight through its dome a giant quadrant assessed the meridian altitudes of the sun, and an army of other instruments–armillary spheres, astrolabes, a dioptra for measuring the diameter of sun and moon–were built out under the stars. Even Chinese astronomers were recruited; and a library of four hundred thousand volumes, many salvaged from Baghdad, confirmed the observatory as the greatest of its time.

Within thirty years, using instruments more precise than those of Copernicus two centuries later, its scholars produced astronomic tables of an accuracy to supersede the calendar derived from Ptolemy. But Hulagu–addicted to alchemy and astrology–could not wait for Saturn to complete its thirty-year revolution.

For him the heavens were the mind of God: they moved affairs below. And he would soon be dead. He demanded results within twelve years.

On the half-abandoned plateau above Maragheh, beyond the sentries of a military broadcasting station, I came to a white canvas dome. Its canopy was torn by wind, the circling hills alight with new snow. When I pushed at its doors, hung with unlocked chains, they grated open on the trace of a perfect, circular building. In this filtered light the stone foundations radiated barely two feet high. A paved aisle divided the rooms. Thistles were edging between. I could make out the circle of a small tower. The armada of instruments had long ago been plundered or destroyed. Only I blundered with surprise upon the snapped arc of Tusi’s quadrant–three feet of stone curving from the earth, the grooves still clear on it.

Hulagu died six years after his observatory’s foundation. Tusi followed him in 1274. Saturn completed its awaited revolution, and the celestial tables were refined. Then the Ilkhanid dynasty fractured, and by 1340 the observatory lay in ruins. Some sixty years later, Ulug Beg, the astronomer-grandson of Tamerlane, wandered its ruins as a child, enchanted. He went on to create his own great observatory, whose quadrant I had seen beneath the ground in Samarkand.

But by then its parent at Maragheh had fallen to dust. Hulagu himself had questioned the wisdom of knowing the future, if you could not change it.

In a derelict yard I come upon a last tomb-tower. Its walls are spun with a tissue of lace-like brick, and perhaps it is for this that tradition assigns the tomb to the mother of Hulagu. But over its door the inscription gives a date sixty years before Hulagu’s coming, and the Mongol matriarch–the mother, too, of Kublai Khan–would not have been entombed in the Islamic way, for she was a Christian. Already Nestorian missionaries had been at work among the Mongols for two centuries. Hulagu’s formidable wife,
Dokuz Khatun, was Christian too, and their son was to marry the daughter of the emperor of Byzantium.

In these anxious years of the mid-thirteenth century, the whole Mongol empire, in European eyes, was close to conversion. Pope Innocent IV and St Louis, King of France, sent envoys to the Great Khan seeking help for the Crusades against the Arabs, and Asian Christians hailed Hulagu’s destruction of Baghdad as a triumph over the second Babylon. As the Mongols advanced toward the Mediterranean, the last great Muslim power, the Mamelukes of Egypt, mustered to meet them. But disruption in the Mongol homeland forced Hulagu to withdraw, leaving behind a depleted force under his general, the Christian Kitbogha. Had Kitbogha prevailed, almost the whole Muslim world would have fallen under a Mongol aristocracy sympathetic to Christianity. But he was slain at the battle of Ain Jalut, and his army decimated.

What kind of Christianity the Mongols embraced may hardly be guessed. King Louis’s ambassador to Karakoram described the Nestorian clergy as debauched and ignorant, and their services as little less than orgies. One Sunday he saw the empress of the Great Khan reeling back from High Mass.

Eighty miles north-west of Maragheh, oil refineries and power plants cluster the sky round Tabriz, capital of Iranian Azerbaijan, where past destruction–earthquakes that buried a hundred thousand at a time–overcasts any memory of earlier splendour. A mighty Ilkhanid capital, and a fourteenth-century metropolis whose income (wrote a marvelling Franciscan friar) exceeded the annual revenue of the king of France, its past has withered to the exquisite but fractured tilework of one mosque, the shorn hulk of another, and a maze of bazaars.

I am walking, in my mind, the streets of Maragheh writ large. Tabriz’s reputation is of roughness and bigotry. The twilit spider’s-web of its markets–many vaulted in fifteenth-century brick–glimmers with delusory richness. Posters of the seventh-century Shia martyrs show soft, doomed faces under green-turbaned
helmets. They are selling for sixty pence. Elsewhere baseball caps labelled ‘Oakland Raiders’ or ‘For Someone Nice’ mix for sale with army shoulder-tabs, and portraits of Bruce Lee and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

At evening somewhere in the northern suburbs, starved of contact, I sidle into an English language college, where I am passed like a talisman from teacher to teacher. They have never seen an Englishman before, and I feel suddenly responsible for my country. Soon a young tutor monopolises me, his long, burnished face wreathed in some private amusement. He is teaching ten young women, and wants me to talk with them. As I enter the room, they rise from their chairs along the wall with a rustle of chadors and emit a demure cheer. I perch on a stool before them, the teacher beside me. I wonder what to ask. They are in their late teens, early twenties. They shift against the wall like shadows. I cannot tell anything about them. Banally I begin: ‘Why are you learning English?’

A voice pipes up at once: ‘Because I’m in love with our teacher!’

They burst into laughter–the teacher too–and the shadows body into life. There is a fair one with grey eyes: her chador is black silk, embroidered. Another is lean-faced, high-browed; another already owlish and matronly. The humorous one, pretending to be in love, slips her headscarf back from raven hair. They wear jeans under their chadors, and sport silver bracelets and wristwatches.

When I ask what they think about the West, another burst of levity ensues. ‘Manchester United! Football! David Beckham!’ Somebody asks astonishingly: ‘Did you know that Manchester United beat Portsmouth 3–2 last night?’

‘How do you hear?’ I ask. ‘On satellite TV?’ Then I wonder if I’ve gone too far. Satellite is forbidden. But laughter trembles like an infection up and down the line of shadows. ‘Satellite?’ they chorus in irony. ‘Oh no, no, we don’t have satellite! Never!’

The teacher grins. ‘Everyone has it.’

A pretty, voluble woman–he calls her feminist–breaks in irritably: ‘This is all nonsense. They’re just footballers.’

What they dislike about the West, she says, is its racial prejudice, but I cannot grasp if they have garnered this from films or from
state propaganda. English, they signal, holds a cosmopolitan glamour for them. They all own computers. Only the owlish one, who does not smile, says she loves English literature. She had seen Laurence Olivier’s
Hamlet
as a girl, and never forgotten.

Now I have the illusion that their chairs have edged closer. Their chadors no longer hide them, but accentuate their brimming eyes, their manicured hands. Several are beautiful. Sometimes I feel faintly uncomfortable, as if our roles have reversed, and that they hover in black inquisition, thinking: so this is how England reacts, this is what England believes…I had expected shyness, but instead I find humour, anger, outspokenness. Perhaps they look more darkly mature than they are. And what, I wonder, do they expect of marriage?

The humorous one spits out: ‘A henpecked husband!’

‘Nothing,’ the feminist says. ‘I don’t expect anything. No, no children. It’s not worth it.’ She dusts the matter out of her lap. ‘Nothing.’

I try out: ‘In the West, many people have relationships before they marry…’

The lean-faced woman says at once: ‘Yes. That’s better.’ Nobody dissents. ‘Better to know your man. Better to love before.’

‘But segregation only stops at university,’ the fair woman says. ‘And by then it’s terribly awkward.’ Under her silk chador her jeans are sown with imitation rents. ‘If we had an affair, we’d be jailed.’

‘You can’t do anything you want here! Nothing!’ My presence has released them now. The lean woman is angry. ‘You can’t say what you think! You’d be imprisoned. Freedom is a joke here!’

The humorist covers her friend’s mouth with her hand in mock alarm. ‘She didn’t say anything! She never spoke!’ But the laughter is edged with nerves, and she is suddenly serious. ‘I should like to go on loving after marriage. But men are hard.’

I wonder, from her opaque tone, if she has a secret lover. Men are hard everywhere, I say, in the West too, laughing a little.

‘But not like here!’ they chorus. ‘Here it’s impossible!’

‘And we’re still unequal before the law…Our government is only men.’

I ask: ‘What about voting?’ I know this may change nothing, but
there will be a presidential election next year (it was to bring in a hardliner).

‘Sham! Useless!’ They reject it with a hard, bright hopelessness. ‘I’ll vote,’ the feminist says. ‘I’ll write down:
Nobody
.’

With the lean-faced woman and the joker, she sometimes forms a mock-angry clique, lifting pallid fists and clasping each other’s hands. The teacher says: ‘They’ve read a few feminist books from the Shah’s period.’

‘I go on the web,’ the feminist answers, overhearing. ‘You just have to click on feminism. You get it all.’

I warn myself: these women are an elite, who touch me with such hope. Their parents are rich. And now the owl is looking at me sombrely. Suddenly she says: ‘I’m sorry to say so, but eighty per cent of Iranians hate the British.’

I should have expected this. Ever since the early nineteenth century, Britain had misused Persia as a playing-field in the Great Game against Russia. Even now, suspicion of Britain equalled that against the United States.

She goes on: ‘We were great once. We were great when you were grazing sheep.’