Among the Believers (13 page)

The tomb was not old, as I had expected. It was new, built by the Shah: a square marble tower with pre-Islamic columns at the corners, part of the Shah’s attempt to recall the pre-Islamic Iranian past. On the wall beside the steps going down to the vault there were sculptures in a version of the old style of famous scenes from Firdowsi’s epic. But all the inscriptions had been defaced; every reference to the Shah or the royal family or the monarchy had been obliterated. Where the letters were raised they had been covered over with rough slaps of cement or plaster. And there were photographs of Khomeini everywhere on the marble.

It was as though the scholar in Mashhad had sent me to Firdowsi’s tomb less for the sake of Firdowsi than for this evidence of the people’s rage. And rage was what I saw—more clearly in this rich, reconstructed town than in Tehran—when we returned to Mashhad: the burnt-out buildings (among them the Broadway cinema, with its English lettering and Las Vegas façade), the ruined, burnt pedestals in the gardens without their royal statues, all the Persepolitan, pre-Islamic motifs of the Shah’s architecture mocked. The holy city was also a city of rage.

Behzad was happier at lunch.

He said, “I’ve spoken to my girl’s sister. She’s all right. The telephone’s out of order. I talked to the operator and he gave me the number of the sister. I’m going to see them this evening. I was worried.”

“Is the sister communist, too?”

“My girl is the only communist in the family. All the others are religious.”

You were religious or communist: there was no middle, or other, way in Iran.

We decided after lunch to go and buy tickets for the Tehran train that left on the following day. But the taxi driver told Behzad that the railway station booking office opened at six and closed at twelve.

Behzad said, “I will go and queue at six tomorrow morning.”

I said, “Do you think it’s true, what the driver says?”

“Why should he lie?”

“I didn’t mean that. I only wanted to know whether what he said was correct.”

We didn’t go to the railway station. We went to the shrine, to the library. It was closed.

Behzad said, “What should we do?”

“Shall we go to the railway station?”

We went there. The booking office was open and they were selling tickets for the Tehran train. Behzad made no comment. There were four sleepers in a compartment. I thought we should buy all four. Behzad appeared to agree. But then he said, “You don’t like the poor classes, do you?”

Poor classes! Was it the poor who travelled first class? But I gave in to his blackmail, and we bought three tickets, Behzad paying for the third, for his girl.

T
HE
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 upper-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.