It would have seemed like play—if there hadn’t been a revolution and real blood. Blood seemed far away from this atmosphere of the campus and the winter street fair. At street corners and on the pavement there were candied-beet-root stalls, smelling of hot caramel: spiked rounds of beet-root set about a bubbling cauldron of syrup, the beet-root constantly basted and candied over and kept hot with the syrup: a winter food, better to see and smell than to taste, almost flavourless below the caramel.
At the Friday prayer meeting at Tehran University there was still a crowd, but nothing like the million or so I had seen on the second Friday in August, when I had gone with Behzad, my interpreter and guide, and for two hours we had watched the men and black-covered women stream up in separate columns until they had filled the university grounds and choked the streets, when the sound of walking feet had made a noise like a river, and dust had risen and hung above the crowd in the university. That kind of enthusiasm—the perfection of Islamic union, as some had seen it—couldn’t last. And the much-loved Ayatollah Taleqani, who had started these meetings, had died; and it was winter, and not easy to sit and listen to revolutionary speeches by lesser ayatollahs who used guns like pastoral staffs.
The revolutionary activity this winter Friday was at the front gates of the university, where supplies were being collected for the flood victims of Khuzistan, the oil province in the southwest. Volunteers were waving down traffic; others were tossing up or manhandling bundles into vans and trucks, where other volunteers, far too many, were waiting to stack them. There were too many volunteers altogether, too much shouting, too many people trying to control traffic, too many people being busy and doing nothing.
What was going to happen to that carload of flat Persian bread? It had cost money; it had been brought hot; it steamed as it was shouldered out in the cold air; and then it was frenziedly stuffed—as though it was a matter of life or death—into plastic sacks and dumped into a truck with blankets and clothes. Wouldn’t that bread have turned to brick by the time it got to Khuzistan?
But the bread didn’t matter. The gesture and the excitement mattered. These volunteers in quilted khaki jackets and pullovers were revolutionaries who, one year on, were still trying to live out the revolution, still anxious to direct traffic (to show their solidarity with the police, now of the people, not of the Shah), still anxious to demonstrate the Islamic “union” that had brought them victory. They were revolutionaries—like those who had stormed the United States embassy and taken the hostages—whose cause was dwindling.
BEHZAD had said in August, of that great prayer meeting, “This is not a religious occasion. It is a political occasion.”
The communist son of a persecuted communist father, Behzad had read Islamic union in his own way, had interpreted Shia triumph and misanthropy in his own way, had seen a revolution that could be pushed further to another revolution. And these Islamic revolutionaries, in their Che Guevara costume, did see themselves as late-twentieth-century revolutionaries.
The Shia faith of Iran, committed after thirteen hundred years to the lost cause of Ali (denied his worldly due, murdered, his sons also killed), was the religion of the insulted and the injured. “The inhabitants of the earth are only dogs barking, and annoying beasts. The one howls against the other. The strong devour the weak; the great subdue the little. They are beasts of burden, some harnessed, the others at large.” This was from The Maxims of Ali, which had been given me by the gentle Shia doctor in Rawalpindi in Pakistan. It was his book of comfort; he thought it could also be mine.
Injustice, the wickedness of men, the worthlessness of the world as it is, the revenge to come, the joy of “union”: Behzad was a communist, but the Shia passion was like his. And in August Behzad, like a Shia, was collecting his own injustices: Khomeini’s revolution had begun to turn against the men of the left.
We had gone together to the holy city of Qom, a hundred miles south of Tehran. We had met theological students; we had been to see the Islamic judge of the revolution, Ayatollah Khalkhalli. On the way back through the desert to Tehran we heard on the car radio that the left-wing paper Behzad read, Ayandegan, had been closed down, its offices occupied by Revolutionary Guards.
Later we had gone to the holy city of Mashhad, far away in the northeast, near the Afghanistan border. We had travelled back by train with Behzad’s girl friend. She, too, was a communist, the daughter of a family who had once been big landowners. During the journey she had ostentatiously read some local communist pamphlet. And she and Behzad had played cards until a Revolutionary Guard had come into the compartment and told Behzad that card-playing was banned during the month of Ramadan, and especially on that day of mourning for Ali. Behzad had raged afterwards. He hadn’t seen the Guard as a man of the people; he had seen him as a servant of the oppressor class.
And he was to return to further trouble in Tehran. Revolutionary Guards had seized the headquarters of Behzad’s communist group. Later I was to see the scene: sandbags, machine guns, young men, Islamic revolutionaries, in guerrilla clothes on one side of the busy road; the ejected, unarmed men of the left on the other side of the road, dressed like students or city workers, just waiting. And Behzad himself was to join the waiting men that afternoon.
The picture I had carried away was of Behzad and his girl friend on the platform of the Tehran railway station, after the overnight journey from Mashhad. Friends of the girl were waiting for her; and she and Behzad walked ahead of me. He was tall, slender, athletic from his skiing and mountain climbing. She was small, with one bad foot, and her hip on that side was shrunken. She was the daring one—without a veil, leaving the communist pamphlet face down on the seat in the train so that anyone in the corridor could see the red hammer and sickle on the yellow cover. He was the protector, bending slightly towards her as they walked, happier in her company than she appeared to be in his.
BEHZAD had moved, and he was busy with an examination. When at last I got him on the telephone and asked how he was, he said, understanding my concern, “Don’t worry. Nothing has happened to me.”
The next day, two days before a six-hour examination, he came in the early evening to the hotel, to take me to the apartment he was sharing with a friend. I had remembered someone boyish, someone giggling in a railway compartment and playing a simple card game with a girl. The Behzad who met me in the lobby was a man, and grave. He was wearing a jacket; in August he had told me he didn’t have a jacket. He also seemed to have more hair.
“Have you curled your hair, Behzad?”
“It was always like that.”
“You look older.”
“I’m twenty-five. That’s not young.”
We went out and walked towards the Avenue of the Islamic Republic, formerly Shah.
I said, “The hotel people seem a lot happier.”
“Everybody has begun to understand that life is going to go on.”
“I feel they’ve got used to their freedom.”
“Freedom for them, maybe. But not for people like us. There will have to be another revolution.”
We crossed the avenue, Behzad leading me through the traffic, as he had done in August, and we waited for a line taxi. The ones that weren’t full moved on and left us when Behzad told them where we wanted to go. It was cold; I had no pullover or topcoat. We were standing on the road itself, two or three feet away from the traffic, and just behind us was one of the deep gutters of Tehran, now running with muddy water.
I said, “Let’s go back and take a hotel car.”
He said, “This is how the people of Tehran travel. We will get a taxi.”
Eventually one of the orange taxis stopped. A fat woman in black, who had been waiting a few feet ahead of us, moved to get in.
I said, “How will we sit?”
“I will sit next to her.”
When the taxi moved off I said, “How is your girl friend?”
“I don’t see her any more. It happened not long after you left. I’ve see
n her only once.”
“Since Mashhad?”
“Since I stopped seeing her. I hear she has a new boy friend now.”
“But why? What happened?”
“It was my decision. It was a matter of the personalities. They didn’t fit.”
We were in the early-evening traffic of Tehran. The shops were bright: a metropolitan glitter. Eight years before, in Buenos Aires, a city which Tehran in some ways resembled, an Argentine had said to me with some acidity during the rush hour, “You might think we are in a developed country.” I thought of those words now, sitting beside Behzad, feeling his new gravity, trying to look at his city with his eyes.
He said after a while, “But I love her still. I still think of her.”
“How often do you think of her? Every day? Once a week?”
“I think of her when my mind is clear. There are many things now. But I think of her.”
We got out at the street called Felestin, Palestine, so named because the office of the Palestine Liberation Organization was now there. It was darker, quieter, and lined on both sides with plane trees.
I said, “Was it political, this incompatibility of the personalities?”
“There was that, too. I wanted to start some organized political activity. She didn’t want that. She wanted us to continue as we were, fighting the régime wherever we could.”
“Guerrilla activity? Drama?”
“Something like that.”
It fitted: the revolutionary who was also the landowner’s daughter, the educated woman in a Muslim country, the woman driven for many reasons to exaggerate her position. She would want to look for the fire.
Behzad said, “But it wasn’t that that came between us. Politically there’s no difference between us. It was the personality thing—you should understand.”
We turned off into a side street and then into a lane. It was an area of apartments in low buildings. Cars were parked right against the buildings. It was quiet and dark, with few street lights, and little light coming from the curtained apartments.
In the darkness Behzad said, reflectively, “I feel I may not be able to finish my course. If I could have got a job I would have given up already. But there are no jobs.”
“How long have you been doing your course?”
“Five years.”
“How much longer do you have to go before you finish?”
“A year.”
“Then why give up now? A year is nothing.”
“Even if I finish there will be no job.”
“But it wouldn’t always be like that. Whatever happens, whatever political activity you take up, it will always be better for you to have a definite skill.”
“Yes, it would be a waste of the five years.”
It was like something he had reasoned out many times before.
We came to Behzad’s building. An apartment on an upper floor was lit up, the curtains open, and there was the sound of pop music.
“What sort of area is this, Behzad? Middle-class?”
“No, no. We’re right in the centre of Tehran. This is an upper-class area. Isn’t it strange that I should be living in an upper-class area?”
(But was it strange? The revolutionary son of a provincial teacher; the university in the capital; the girl friend or former girl friend from a landowning family, the expanding circle of acquaintances, the foreign contacts: wasn’t Behzad moving in the only direction he could move, if he wanted to be with people like himself?)
An upper-class area, but the rented apartment was sparsely furnished; and it looked like the apartment of two bachelors sharing. A central living area suggesting—in spite of the furniture—space waiting to be filled; a glimpse of a bedroom—or a room with a bed—on one side; the kitchen on another side. A desk, spread with Behzad’s books and papers, was in the far corner, next to a small bookcase with many big textbooks and dictionaries. It wasn’t warm.
From the kitchen, where he went to make tea, Behzad said, “There was a strike and we had no heating oil. No oil in Iran. Yesterday there was no heating for twenty-four hours. It’s on now.”
But the radiators were cold. The music we had heard in the lane was directly above, and loud.
Behzad said, “They’re a divorced couple, and they have parties every night.”
“A divorced couple?”
“They were married. Then they got divorced. Then they began living together again, and now they have parties every night. It is very distracting.” He came out from the kitchen and said, “I’ve been so busy in the last few months. There are so many things. But I just think and do nothing. I don’t know what to do.”
“You mean political activity?”
“It’s such a mess. I spend so much time thinking of what to do. You wouldn’t call this a political activity, but it is. You have to know where you are going. Nothing has changed here since the Shah, you know. The workers and the lower classes are living under the same conditions. Nothing has changed for them. So for the third time in this century the people of Iran have been broken. This is what I think about every day. It prevents me studying sometimes. Seventy years ago we wanted to get rid of the Qajar kings. We got a constitution then. But it was never carried out. That was the first time we were broken. The second time was in 1953, when we wanted to get rid of the Pahlavis, who had replaced the Qajars. The American coup d’état broke everything. And now, for the third time, you see what’s happening. A revolution, and then nothing. Khomeini is a petit bourgeois. They are going to start the whole system up again and they’re going to call it Islamic. That’s all.”
They were thoughts, I felt, that had been gone over many times.
I said, “It’s a strange way of describing Khomeini.”
“He’s lived two lives. He was the revolutionary leader against the Shah. We must never take that away from him. None of the American journalists who have come here have really understood about Khomeini, his greatness as a revolutionary. But he’s lived two lives, before and after the revolution.”
“The kettle is boiling.” It was roaring away in the kitchen.
“It isn’t boiling. I know that kettle. It makes another noise when it is boiling. In Iran and countries like Iran there are three classes, mainly. The bourgeoisie, the petit bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. In a bourgeois democratic revolution the petit bourgeoisie can be revolutionary. But when it seems that the system of the country is really going to be changed, this class, the petit bourgeoisie, resists the revolution. Khomeini belongs to this class. He is a petit bourgeois and he cannot accept socialism.”
“But didn’t you always see it like that, Behzad? When Khomeini talked about tyranny and brotherhood and equality, didn’t you know he was talking about Islam? Islam can sound like a political ideology. Didn’t you know that?”
“People find different ways to say what they want. And so the petit bourgeoisie say, ‘We are Muslims. Islam is not for socialism.’ ”
“Wasn’t the mistake yours? When we went to Taleqani’s prayer meeting in August, you said it was a political occasion. I didn’t see it like that.”
“Perhaps I don’t see it like that now. But I said that because religion all over the world is dying. There are a lot of people trying to keep it alive, but they cannot. Even the Americans now are trying to keep it alive, coming and talking to us about Allah. But they cannot.”
He decided that the kettle was boiling, and I went with him to the disordered little bachelors’ kitchen. After he brewed the tea he used the aluminium kettle like a samovar, inverting the lid and resting the teapot on it—so often, in Iran, were these reminders of the nearness of Russia.
We drank the tea from glasses.
Behzad said, “There is no freedom for us now.” He meant his group. “They closed down our paper. That was in August. You remember we heard the news when we were driving back from Qom. Then they took over our headquarters. You remember the morning we came back from Mashhad? Some friends of my girl friend—my old g
irl friend—came to the station to meet her. They told her the news and took her away with them. I joined the demonstration against the seizure in the afternoon.”
“That was when I got worried about you.”
“That demonstration lasted for three days. On the third day they called for a public demonstration against us. It was a very big demonstration, very powerful. We couldn’t resist. They broke us. And now we can do nothing.”
“But the booksellers outside the university are full of communist literature. Nobody seems to be stopping that. And there are all those cinemas showing Russian films.”
“Selling the communist literature is nothing. You can read and write as much as you want. But they won’t let you do anything. Two months after they threw us out of our headquarters in Tehran, there was that trouble in Kurdistan. Did you read about that? Khomeini appeared on television and said the army was to crush the movement with all the power it had. They sent in tanks, helicopters, 106 cannon. They killed at least five hundred. Then Khomeini said he had made a mistake; he had been misinformed of events there. Do you know about the executions there? Shall I show you the pictures?”
“Don’t show me. I’ve seen too many of those pictures in Iran.”
He didn’t listen. He went to the bedroom—the pop music above us dinning away—and came back with two photographs and a photocopied pamphlet in Persian. The photographs were not as gruesome as I had feared. In fact, I had seen them before. They were official photographs: ten blindfolded men awaiting execution by Revolutionary Guards standing a few feet away. The scene had been photographed twice, once from the right, facing the men to be executed, once from the left. In the second photograph a man had been killed and was on the ground; a few feet away was the crouched Revolutionary Guard with the levelled gun: an intimate act, nothing neutral about that killing. As affecting as that was the figure of one of the blindfolded men on the right: he was holding his head high. It was a good way to die. But to what purpose? Had he even served his cause?