Mr. Parvez got in touch with Mr. Jaffrey’s friends. He couldn’t believe that Mr. Jaffrey was a spy. He also began to think that Mr. Jaffrey might have been arrested. He got in touch with the security people. They said they didn’t know about Mr. Jaffrey.
In the afternoon the student from the embassy came again and asked for Mr. Jaffrey. He became angry when Mr. Parvez said he didn’t know where Mr. Jaffrey was.
The student said, “Why did you tell me he was going to be here at eleven o’clock?”
Mr. Parvez said, “Look. He was a nice man, an old man. I know there was nothing wrong.”
The student became very angry, and Mr. Parvez learned later that that student and some others broke into Mr. Jaffrey’s house and took away some things.
The next day Mr. Parvez got a telephone call from Pakistan. It was from Mr. Jaffrey. He said, “I am here with my Chevrolet.”
Mr. Parvez asked him, “How did you manage that?”
Mr. Jaffrey said, “I had to pay some money to the border guards. On both sides. Iranian and Pakistani.”
“You made a mistake. You are a clean man. You shouldn’t have gone.”
“No, no. I am an old man, and I am sick.”
Mr. Parvez, eating in the attic room of Iran News, sitting at the white plastic table with the big bamboo-leaf pattern, recounting the events of fifteen years before, said, “Fortunately he had a son and a daughter already in Pakistan. Then he started work there, in Islamabad. And then in 1990, I think, I received another call from Pakistan, from his son, to inform me that he had expired.”
That was how it had ended for Mr. Jaffrey, that dream, so sweet in Lucknow in India in 1948, of the jamé towhidi, the pure society of believers, which seemed worth leaving home for.
Mr. Parvez said, in a kind of final tribute, “He was very fond of playing bridge. At that time there were so many people here who played bridge.”
The time Mr. Parvez spoke of was the Shah’s time. The playing of cards was now deemed un-Islamic and banned.
At the time of Mr. Jaffrey’s flight Mr. Parvez (according to what he had told me in 1980) was losing three hundred dollars with every new issue of the Tehran Times. He felt nevertheless that he absolutely had to go on, and somehow he was doing so. But revolution was revolution; disorder had its own momentum; there were no happier times just around the corner.
Just a few months after Mr. Jaffrey’s flight—and after the pretend war outside the American embassy, and the pretend battle dress of the “Muslim Students Following the Line of Ayatollah Khomeini”—the real war came: the eight-year war with Iraq, a war so terrible that the Iranian newspapers now referred to it in certain emblematic ways: “the imposed war,” “the Iraqi-imposed war,” “the sacred defense,” “the eight-year sacred defense.”
On a long front to the west, a great bloodletting. And, very soon after, a revolutionary bloodletting at home as well: the revolution beginning to cut down some of its makers.
Mr. Parvez said, “After 1982 all the good leaders began to be assassinated. The top people. The assassinations were by different groups. Then comparatively second-grade people began to come up. Only Beheshti was left. And then he was killed. He had his own ideas about the Islamic Republic. They were very clear. He wanted relations with all countries except Israel and South Africa. And he wanted to end the war.” After his death, and the death of some others, the opposition began to be “wiped out.”
Mr. Parvez said, “Now they want to control your way of sitting here”—he tapped the white plastic table with the bamboo-leaf pattern—“and your way of talking. It has to be Islamic.”
Beheshti was the ayatollah who was, or had become, Mr. Parvez’s patron (though Mr. Parvez didn’t use the word); and I felt it was Beheshti who had helped to keep the paper going during the difficult months of the hostage crisis.
“As long as Dr. Beheshti was alive nobody could touch me. He was supporting me. Please mention Beheshti. He was martyred in 1981. With a bomb. He was addressing a meeting of economic experts of the Islamic Republic party. That party was later closed down.”
Mr. Parvez’s regard and tenderness for Beheshti, fourteen years after his death, showed in the use of the word “martyred.” And he had reason to mourn Beheshti, because a few months later the paper was taken over by the authorities.
Mr. Parvez had started the Tehran Times in 1979, after the revolution. “Tehran ‘May Truth Prevail’ Times,” he said, speaking the title and the splicing motto as it had appeared on the front page. Sitting in the attic room of Iran News, having lunch, with the newspaper prayer rug and the cake of holy earth at our back, Mr. Parvez’s eyes brightened at the sweet memory; and he spoke the title and the motto again.
“That title was registered. They have changed it now. They just came one day to the office and asked me to sign this blank paper. I signed it. The person who came is now an important ambassador. Now he is a good friend of mine. But at that time I didn’t know him.”
After a few days this man said to Mr. Parvez, “It’s better you take out your name from the newspaper. It’s better for you. You have never been a revolutionary. You have been working with a newspaper that was close to the Shah.” And it was true that Mr. Parvez had been associated with an English-language paper in the time of the Shah.
One day Mr. Parvez asked the new people in his office, “Is it possible that I have some compensation? Whatever I’ve earned here I have invested in the Tehran Times.”
Somebody in the accounts department said, “Don’t ask about money.”
Mr. Parvez said, “Why? I have no house. I have a son in America. I have to send him money. Look, the time when I was a journalist before the revolution, there was no journalist here. Either they fled from here, or they were in prison, or they were executed.”
The man from accounts didn’t take that as Mr. Parvez was expecting. He said, “Thank God that you are still alive and working.”
Mr. Parvez remained with the paper as editor. There was always a mullah in the office now. It helped that the mullah was a nice man, an open-minded man, as Mr. Parvez thought. The mullah would say, “Be moderate. Not extremist.” That was all. If he hadn’t been so nice, Mr. Parvez wouldn’t have stayed. And, in fact, the authorities treated Mr. Parvez with regard. On official occasions he would be introduced as “the father of English-language journalism in Iran.” Once he was even taken to meet Ayatollah Khomeini and Mr. Rafsanjani, the prime minister.
“They introduced me in a very refined way,” Mr. Parvez said. “Very respectably.” These forms mattered very much in Iran.
And Mr. Parvez was used to censorship. In the Shah’s time, until 1975, four years before the revolution, there used to be an intelligence man from SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, in the office of the Tehran Journal, which was the name of Mr. Parvez’s paper at that time. The SAVAK man would come at three in the morning with an English-speaking team, and they would go through everything, even the advertisements. In its reports of anti-government demonstrations or marches the Tehran Journal wasn’t allowed to use the words “student” or “youth.” “Hooligans” was the word that had to be used. In 1975 this day-to-day censorship of the newspaper pages stopped. But the government still controlled; the top people in the newspapers were told what to do.
There was no formal censorship now, Mr. Parvez said; there was only self-censorship. Journalists now knew how far they could go. In the Shah’s time they didn’t. Nowadays they could go surprisingly far.
“We have criticized presidents, ministers, etc. But we know that if we even try to hurt or destroy the basic system, we would not be spared.”
“Basic system?” The words were new to me.
“That’s the institution of leadership and obedience.”
That, too, was new to me. Mr. Parvez leaned to his left and took up a copy of that day’s Iran News. He marked two items and said, “These two stories would explain.”
The first story, “Ayatollah Kani Underscores Importan
ce of Ulama,” was from the paper’s “political desk.” The ulama are the clerics, the religious teachers, the men in turbans and gowns. “… Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani urged the ulama on Monday that they should remain active as politicians and executive officials and never think of abandoning these vital duties.… Speaking on the occasion of the start of the new academic year at Imam Sadeq (A.S.) University, Ayatollah Kani …”
The second story was more important: “Obedience to Leader Only Way for the Left Wing to Survive.” Though it was presented only as an interview with a “left-wing” deputy, it was an explicit re-statement of the principle of leadership and obedience. The writer first defined the Leader: “The highest authority in the Islamic Republic is the Leader—or alternatively the Leadership Council—who exercises the supreme political and religious powers and, indeed, is a manifestation of the integration of politics with religion, according to Article 5 of the Constitution of Iran.” And this was how the left-wing deputy defined his obedience: “The Left Wing believes in total obedience to the Leader without any terms or conditions, execution of government orders, implementation of pure Mohammadan Islam (Islam-e Nab) as the late Imam [Khomeini] wished, creation of social justice, implementation of the Article 49 of the Constitution.…”
The writer then quoted from Article 49: “The government has the responsibility to confiscate all wealth accumulated through usury, usurpation, bribery, embezzlement, theft, gambling, misuse of endowment, misuse of government contracts and transactions, the sale of cultivated land and other resources subject to public ownership, the operation of centers of corruption.…”
In spite of the punitive, religious tone, the aims of Article 49 might be said to be an aspect of the regulatory business of responsible government everywhere and in all times. What made it Islamic was “the integration of politics and religion,” a kind of institutional shortcut, since the integration was enshrined in the figure of the Leader, to whom absolute obedience was due. Islam meant “submission,” and in an Islamic republic, such as the people of Iran had passionately wanted and had voted for in a referendum, everyone had to submit. It could be said that the Shah also required people to submit; but the Shah ran a secular and corrupt tyranny; whereas now, in return for their surrender of everything, the people were made a gift of the almost unbearable beauty of “pure Mohammadan Islam, Islam-e Nab,” which the Imam Khomeini had wished for them.
It was like a version of Mr. Jaffrey’s jamé towhidi. Poor Mr. Jaffrey had had only the sweet dream. It had ruled his whole life: the dream of being a Muslim among Muslims alone, a Shia among Shias, living in a restored antique world, when the Prophet ruled and the little community obeyed, and everything served the pure faith. Only the dream; and then, like a man who had never truly wanted what he had made so much trouble about, he had objected at the first sign of religious rule, Khomeini’s Imamate, and he had finally run away in his Chevrolet, before this very bold realization of his dream, with the Leader and the Leadership Council standing in for the Prophet.
This “basic system”—of a leadership mysteriously evolving, and the people obeying—explained the official photographs of the three top men that appeared in many places. It explained the sometimes enormous painted portraits on the side of buildings, linking the present spiritual leader to the Imam Khomeini, and making a simple call for obedience.
Mr. Parvez said, “I never thought it would be like that in 1979. I thought that the régime of the Shah would go, and we would have a Western-style democratic government, as we had in India. I have never been Islamic as such.” His paper gave another impression in 1979. “That has made it difficult. My background was not religious at all. I voted in 1980 in the referendum. I voted for the Islamic Republic. It was a yes-or-no referendum. The people gave eighty-five percent for the Islamic Republic, without knowing what the Islamic Republic would be.”
Mr. Parvez was attracted to Khomeini because he spoke about the oppressed and the third-world countries. He especially remembered Khomeini’s famous speech in the cemetery when he returned from exile. Many promises were made in this speech: kerosene brought to houses, free electricity, free water.
“He promised employment, saying he would take away employment from the Americans. In the Shah’s time about one or two million people were unemployed or half-employed. Today there are ten million unemployed. But I will tell you one thing. The Imam was very sincere. He wanted to have good relations with all the third world. But he could not implement his plan. Because of the war.”
And then the cemetery had other associations.
As for himself and his own future, Mr. Parvez was trying to get the Tehran Times back. He was taking his case to court.
“But financially I will always be in trouble. Hostage crisis—if it hadn’t been there, my paper wouldn’t have been in trouble. The businessmen and foreign companies left, and there were no ads.”
So many things had happened in the world. So many things had happened to me. He endlessly re-lived the hostage crisis. It was strange to think of him—if the metaphor wasn’t too unsuitable—as nailed to that cross now as he had been fifteen years before. He had gone through a great deal; he would have done many things to survive. It would have been unfair to go too far into the uncertainties I had noticed in his narrative.
They want to control your way of sitting and your way of talking, Mr. Parvez said. And Tehran at night, in some of its main roads, was like an occupied city, or like a city in a state of insurrection, with Revolutionary Guards and, sometimes, the more feared Basiji volunteers at roadblocks. They were not looking—on these almost personal night hunts—for terrorists so much as for women whose hair was not completely covered. And not so much for weapons as for alcohol or compact discs or cassettes (music was suspect, and women singers were banned).
The people of Tehran could spot these roadblocks before the visitor did. One night, when we passed some people who had been picked up, the lady driving us said it was all a matter of knowing how to talk to the Guards. Once, when she was stopped, she had said, as though really wishing to know, “What is wrong with my hijab [headdress], my son?” And the young man, of simple background, not feeling himself rebuffed or challenged by the lady, but thinking he was being treated correctly, had let her go. Such were the ways of obedience and survival that people had learnt here.
But parallel with this was a feeling that this kind of humiliation couldn’t go on. Though all the capacity for revolution or even protest had been eradicated after forty years of hope and letdown, and people were now simply weary, after all the bloodletting—first of protesters in the Shah’s time, and then of the Shah’s people after the revolution, and the communists, together with the terrible slaughter of the war—there was a feeling now, with that weariness, that something had to snap in Iran. And, almost as part of wishing for that breaking point, stories were being told now that Khomeini had really been foisted on the Iranian people by the great powers; and that certain important mullahs were making their approaches to people to ask for their goodwill when things changed, and the Islamic Republic was abandoned.
From my new room in the Hyatt I had a view of the mountains to the north. On sunny days light and cloud shadows constantly modeled and remodeled the ridges and the dips of the bare, beige-colored mountains. On cloudy days the farther hills faded in color, range by range; and the low hills in the foreground seemed to come forward, defined by the paleness behind, and became brown or tawny or gold. The cropped or sun-beaten vegetation sometimes appeared very soft. The green of trees going up the hills stopped abruptly. The lower hills seemed leveled for further building.
3
THE GREAT WAR
SIMPLE BLACK-AND-WHITE POSTERS on roadside metal poles in Central Tehran announced the third seminar on Ayatollah Khomeini’s thoughts on defense. The posters were quite plain, with nothing of the graphic fury of revolutionary days; in spirit they were like the unplaying fountain of blood in the Martyrs’ Cemetery. An item in Iran New
s from the Iranian News Agency said more. The seminar was being arranged by a high cleric, Hojjatoleslam Qaemi, who was the head of the Ideological and Political Department at Defense and Armed Forces Logistics Ministry. The religious people were in everything now, and their political titles could be as resonant as their religious titles. Five hundred “personalities” were going to be at the seminar and—the department dealt in figures—fourteen papers were going to be presented, out of the hundred and thirty that had been sent in. “A photo show of the eight-year-long sacred defence (1980–88) and an exhibition of the documents of the imposed war are to be set up on the sidelines of the seminar.”
Arash, who was going to talk to Mehrdad and me about his war experiences, didn’t know about the seminar. Like so much else in government, it was happening very far away.
Arash was twenty-seven. He had been at the front for the last four years of the war. For the first two years, when he was sixteen and seventeen, he had been a volunteer; after that he had been a conscript. Now he was a taxi driver, like the officer who used to be his best friend. And Mehrdad wanted me to catch the special words Arash used for “taxi driver,” and the way he spoke them. The former officer, like Arash, was not a driver for an agency, which would have given him a certain standing; he drove his personal car back and forth along certain fixed routes, picking up fares, using his car like a bus, and he almost certainly had no taxi license.
Arash said, “This war didn’t have anything for me. Let’s see whether my memories of it have something for others.”
We went to a café in North Tehran, a middle-class place, glass-walled, on a busy chenar-lined avenue. The chenar is the Iranian plane tree, loved for its beauty there and in Kashmir (where its shade is even said to be medicinal), and it is often naturalistically rendered in Persian and Mogul painting.