Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

  THE train, of German or Swiss manufacture, was waiting at the platform. The outer panel of one of the double-glassed windows was smashed, as if with a pebble or a stone. Behzad said, “The revolution.”

  We found our compartment, but there was no question of waiting there. The air conditioning would begin to function only when the train was on the move; and the heat in the more or less sealed compartment was barely tolerable. A family scene in another compartment—complete with water in a big green plastic bucket—awakened some of my anxiety about our own vacant berth. But I kept that anxiety to myself and we went out to the platform, cool below its high, cantilevered concrete roof, to wait for Behzad’s girl.

  Almost at once Behzad left me, saying he would come back in good time. He didn’t. I was alone in the compartment when, just before the train left, Behzad’s girl turned up. She was small, with glasses, her skin rough (perhaps from the summer heat), not pretty or plain. She wore blue slacks and a shirt. And there was more than a sister to see her off. She seemed to have come to the station with a family or a large part of one. Her family! Religious people! I began to understand something of Behzad’s difficulties over the weekend, and the deceptions he had been practising on me as on others.

  He came to the compartment after the train had left the station. He never really introduced me to his girl, never gave me her name; he only apologized for her, saying that she spoke no English. She acknowledged me but never looked directly at me. Old constraints worked on her, as they worked on Behzad.

  And yet, with an unveiled woman in slacks in the compartment, free and easy and perhaps a little too restless with her legs, it was easy to forget that women wore the veil or head-cover in Iran, and that this day was the stillest in the Shia calendar, the day of the death of Ali: there had been no music that morning on the Hyatt Omar Khayyam bedside radio.

  At the edge of Mashhad we passed a village of flat-roofed clay houses. Village boys at the bottom of the high embankment began fiercely, but with no malice, to stone the train. They were fierce only because the train passed so quickly, and they wanted to get in as many throws as possible. Behzad had said that the broken window in a coach had been caused by the revolution. And perhaps it had; perhaps the sport came from that brave time. But I was glad he was taken up with his girl, and didn’t see.

  With his girl he was as easy as a child; talk never stopped between them. Almost at once they began to play cards—she had brought a pack. She knew only one game, Behzad said, remembering me for a minute; and it was a very simple game. They played that game until it wearied them.

  A landscape of mountains, hills, and irrigated plain. The hills were isolated, and the train curved between them. The fields were golden, after the harvest; and in the late afternoon the distant hills became warm brown. The land was dug up here and there by watercourses, which had sometimes cut right down, creating little bluffs; but now, in the height of summer, the watercourses had dwindled to rippled rivulets a couple of feet wide and a few inches deep. Flocks of lambs fed on the stubble. Sometimes men could be seen winnowing. But the modern road was never far away, and the brilliantly coloured trucks; and power pylons marched across the plain.

  The villages were the colour of mud; and the houses had domed clay roofs (timber for beams not being easy to come by here), with slanting pipes at the bottom to drain the water off. From the train, the domes seemed to cluster together; the projecting pipes, with black shadows more sharply slanted on the clay walls, suggested miniature cannon; and at the angles of the village walls there were round towers, like watchtowers. The hills became smoother, and the folds and wrinkles in them were wrinkles in human skin. The desert came slowly. The ground was pitted with earth-rimmed wells, like giant molehills; and, often in the barrenness, mud walls enclosed wonderfully green groves of poplars.

  The sun set on Behzad’s side of the coach. The land was dusty: Behzad said the desert was near. He didn’t agree with me that the land was well cultivated and that much had been done about village roads and electricity. He was with his girl; with her he had a developed eye for injustice, a feeling for injustice being one of the things that bound them together. He told me—and translated what he had said for the girl—that 75 percent of the villages in Iran were without roads or electricity.

  But the country was enormous, difficult, its villages widely scattered. And though Behzad said that we were now in unirrigated desert—and though he turned on the top light, imposing mirror reflections on the fading view—I could see the level plain still cultivated in strips and patches, until it became dark.

  Behzad’s girl offered food—waiting, perhaps out of habit, for sunset on this Ramadan day. Her Adidas bag was heavy with plastic sacks of pastries and doughnuts—which Behzad said he had never eaten before—and dried figs and other kinds of dried fruit. This was what she was taking from Mashhad to give to friends in Tehran. I had some dried fruit—a smaller kind of fig, wrinkled, cracked, the colour of clay on the outside, soft and sugary inside, a fruit that felt grown in the land we had been passing, and had suggestions of sun and desert and enclosed gardens. Behzad had a doughnut; his girl had a bun.

  She leaned against the window, stretched her left leg out on the seat, and began to read a crisp new Persian booklet with a red star and a red hammer and sickle on the yellow cover. Behzad said the booklet had just been issued by the party—an independent party, not attached to Moscow—to explain why they hadn’t taken part in the elections for the Assembly of Experts.

  Behzad’s girl read with determination, but what she was reading didn’t seem to hold her. She stopped turning the pages. She put the open booklet face down on the seat, and she and Behzad talked. She took her leg off the seat, and they began to play cards again, the same simple game.

  We stopped at a station. And—after Behzad’s rebuke at Mashhad about my attitude towards the “poor classes” which had prevented my buying the fourth bunk—both he and his girl were now gigglingly anxious to keep out strangers. He drew the curtains on the corridor side.

  The train started. There was a knock at the door, and almost at the same time the door was slid open. It was the sleeping-car attendant. He slung in blue sacks with bedding: a blanket, a pillow, sheets, a pillowcase.

  There was another knock. Behzad drew one side of the curtain, I drew the other. It was a small young man in soldier’s uniform, with a revolver. He slid the door open, spoke to Behzad, and closed the door. He wore black boots.

  I said, “Army man?”

  Behzad said, “He is from the komiteh. He said we were not to play cards. Do you know what he called me? ‘Brother.’ I am his brother in Islam. I am not to play cards. It is a new rule.”

  After his shock, he was angry. So was his girl. She said nothing; her face went closed. To Behzad now fell his man’s role; and it was to me, witness of his humiliation, that he turned, working his anger out in English.

  “I don’t mind about the cards. It’s the power I mind about. He is only doing it to show me his power. To show me their power. I don’t see how Mohammed would have known about cards. They weren’t invented in his time.”

  I said, “But he spoke out against gambling.”

  “He did. But we were not gambling.”

  “The man from the komiteh wouldn’t have known that.”

  “He knew. Of course he knew.”

  My own sense of shock was developing. The appearance of the man in khaki had altered the journey, given irrationality to a land which, while the light lasted, I had been studying with an interest that now seemed inappropriate and absurd: trucks, roads, pylons and villages were not what they had seemed.

  Behzad said, “You see what I’ve been telling you. The power has to belong to the people. The workers and the farmers. The upper classes are all just wanting to show their power.”

  I thought that the power now did belong to the people, that what had just happened was a demonstration of that power.

  I said, “Was the man from the komiteh an upp
er-class man?”

  “He is upper-class. The army always serves the upper classes. That is why I call him an upper-class man.”

  We didn’t argue. Neither of us wanted it; and his dialectic would have been as difficult for me as Ayatollah Shirazi’s had been in Qom.

  He hadn’t wanted to play cards; his girl knew only the one simple game. Now they were like children forbidden to play. The cards lay on the seat between them, still not gathered up. The girl had simply dropped hers, with a gesture that was like a sigh. Her face, already closed, was hardening. I thought that it might have been easier for both of them if they had been alone together, and much easier for Behzad if I hadn’t been there as an extra witness. I was nervous of his pride.

  I said, “The komiteh man is not important. Forget him. You don’t have to fight every battle. Fight only the important ones.”

  It was a calming thing to say. He said, “It isn’t the cards I mind about. I’m not going to make a fuss about that. But if it comes to books—if they ask my girl why she is reading that book—” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  The unread booklet still lay face down on the seat. It had struck me, even when she had put it down, that she was displaying the yellow cover with the red star and the hammer and sickle, that she intended it to be noticed by people passing in the corridor.

  Still saying nothing, and with a gesture of feminine weariness, she gathered up the cards.

  Behzad said, “You know what they object to, don’t you? They see that my girl”—still, out of old constraints, avoiding the name—“doesn’t wear the chador. That is why they want us to feel their power.”

  She stood up, nodded towards the corridor, and she and Behzad went out and moved away, to be alone, as I thought, and also to challenge people who mightn’t approve of a veilless girl in slacks and shirt on this day sacred to Ali.

  They were away for some time.

  When they came back Behzad said, “The man who brought the bedding—I believe he reported us. He saw us playing cards and reported us.”

  He loved the people. But who, in Iran, were now the people?

  Less than an hour later the girl said she wanted to go to sleep. Behzad asked me to suggest the arrangements. I suggested, thinking of her privacy, that she should sleep on one of the bunks above; that I should sleep below her; that Behzad should sleep on the lower bunk opposite mine; and that the bunk above his should be pulled down, so that there would be no reflection in the mirror.

  She understood what I had said, and almost immediately began to climb up the ladder.

  Behzad said, “But—”

  And, following his eyes, for the first time I saw, as she stood on the lowest rung of the ladder, that her left foot was bad, that her left leg, which I had thought too restless, was shorter than her right, that her left hip was slightly shrunken.

  She insisted on climbing up. And Behzad didn’t sleep on the lower bunk across from mine. He slept on the upper, with his girl near to him. He wore no pyjamas; he had none or carried none in his little briefcase. He was amazingly daring, in Iran.

  It had been desert and mountain late at night. In the morning there were earth-rimmed wells, irrigation channels, the mud walls of groves and gardens, people at work in the neat, rich fields; villages; the outskirts of Tehran. An attendant brought tea, served in glasses and meant to be drunk in the Persian way, through a lump of sugar held in the mouth.

  Behzad hadn’t slept well; he remained tormented. When we were almost in the city—air-conditioning units set into the backs of the unlikeliest houses—we saw the komiteh man in the corridor: boyish, very small, unfussed, with no apparent memory, when he looked into the compartment, of his intrusion the night before.

  Behzad’s girl said good-bye without seeming to see me. Through all the hours we had been together she had never looked directly at me. I let them walk ahead on the platform at the Tehran station: she small and limping, he tall and athletic, protective, slightly inclined towards her. Friends were waiting for her; they took her away from Behzad. Young people of the revolution, people carrying danger with them; but the city they had come back to was for them that day a city of calamity.

  THERE had been riots over the weekend, between Muslims and people of the left, and the left had suffered badly.

  A week before, when Behzad and I were driving back from Qom, we had heard on the car radio about the closing down of Ayandegan, the newspaper of the left. Leftist protests had built up during the week; and Muslim groups had begun to counterattack.

  After the prayers at Tehran University on Friday—which Behzad, out of his own revolutionary emotion at the sight of the multitude, had seen as a political occasion, not a religious occasion—hundreds of Muslims had marched on the offices of Ayandegan. Thirty of the paper’s press workers had refused to leave the building; now they were ejected by Revolutionary Guards. Five of the ejected Ayandegan men were injured and had to be taken to the military hospital; twenty were arrested. On Sunday, at a leftist demonstration at Tehran University, there had been serious fighting with sticks and knives; many more people had been injured. On Monday—while we were getting ready to take the train from Mashhad—Muslim groups had stormed the headquarters of Behzad’s communist organization, thrown everybody out, thrown documents out, seized all the arms—grenades, mortars, tear-gas canisters, Belgian and Russian rifles.

  This was the news Behzad and his girl returned to. They heard about it—as I learned later—from the friends who had come to meet the girl. But Behzad, after his humiliation of the previous evening, told me nothing. He saw me back to the hotel and—his own obligations to me then over—left me to find the news out myself, from the Tehran Times.

  Newspaper items: set language, set phrases, that left everything to the imagination. But just a little while later, when I was on my way to the Intercontinental Hotel for their buffet lunch, the news items took on an actuality that was scarcely believable.

  A skyscraper, with a garden and sculpture; a side road barred by a car with a flashing roof light; men in camouflage battle dress with guns; sandbags at the corners of the skyscraper plot, with mounted machine guns. And across the busy road, the dispossessed communists, young men looking like city workers, in trousers and open shirts. A Persian battle arrangement; both sides waiting and intently watching; the life of the town flowing around, as peasants in the old days attended to their peasant tasks while the armies fought, to decide who was to rule.

  That afternoon on Firdowsi Street, the street of the moneychangers, I heard a siren, and an open truck with Muslims with guns raced by, followed by a police-style car. Later, on the Avenue of the Islamic Republic, formerly Shah, the siren sounded again, and again I saw the Muslims with guns. No emergency had called them out. They were just driving fast round the town, the siren their battle horn; and they were doing it, as Behzad might have said, to show their power.

  Two days later, on my last evening in Tehran, I saw Behzad for a few minutes. He was dark with sunburn. He had been standing with the dispossessed communists across the road from the sandbags and the machine gun. He was sad but calm. He had found his battle. I asked after his mother, who had come to Tehran and was staying with him. But—old constraints still—he said little about her; and he said nothing about his girl.

  Such emotion, such bravery; and, unavoidably in Iran, his cause was as simple as his enemy’s, and in the end really no more than a version of his enemy’s. Both sides depended on revealed truth and a special reading of historical events; both required absolute faith. And both were fed by the same passion: justice, union, vengeance.

  I was going on to Pakistan. My first plan had been to go by bus, to drop down south and east in stages, through old towns with beautiful names: Isfahan, Kerman, Yazd (important to Zoroastrians, Persians of the pre-Islamic faith, long since expelled, their descendants surviving in India as Parsis, Persians), Zahedan. But Qom and Mashhad had given me enough of desert travel in midsummer; I didn’t want now to run into komitehs
in out-of-the-way places; and I could get no certain information about transport across the Pakistan border. I decided to go by air, straight to Karachi.

  There were not many flights. The one I chose left at 7:30 in the morning, and Pakistan International Airlines said it was necessary to check in three hours before. I was on time, and I thought I had done the right thing. I was quickly through, with my little Lark bag. Half an hour later, when dawn was breaking, the queue was long and moving very slowly.

  Just as, at London airport, the flight pen for Iran had been full of Iranians who had done their shopping in Europe and the United States, so now Tehran airport was full of Pakistani migrant workers who had done their shopping in Iran. They were taking back a lot: boxes, trunks, big cardboard suitcases tied with rope, brown cartons stamped with famous names, Aiwa, Akai, Toshiba, National, names of the new universal bazaar, where goods were not associated with a particular kind of learning, effort, or civilization, but were just goods, part of the world’s natural bounty.

  The plane that was to leave at 7:30 didn’t arrive until 10:00. We began to taxi off at 11:25 but then were halted for a further hour, while American-made Phantoms of the Iranian Air Force took off. I thought they were training. They were in fact taking off on Khomeini’s orders to attack the rebel Kurds in the west. Later, in Karachi, I learned that two Phantoms had crashed, and the news was curiously sickening: such trim and deadly aircraft, so vulnerable the inadequately trained men within, half victims, yet men that morning obedient to the will of God and the Twelfth Imam and full of murder.

  To Kurdistan, following the Phantoms, went Ayatollah Khalkhalli, Khomeini’s Islamic judge, as close to power as he had boasted only ten days before in Qom. In no time, moving swiftly from place to place in the August heat, he had sentenced forty-five people to death. He had studied for thirty-five years and was never at a loss for an Islamic judgement. When in one Kurdish town the family of a prisoner complained that three of the prisoner’s teeth had been removed and his eyes gouged out, Khalkhalli ordered a similar punishment for the torturer. Three of the man’s teeth were torn out on the spot. The aggrieved family then relented, pardoned the offender, and let him keep his eyes.