Among the Believers (68 page)

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 girl 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?

Behzad said, “The people you see in these photographs are all left-wing people. Some were executed four hours after they had been arrested. Khomeini sent in Khalkhalli and he arrested everybody.”

Khalkhalli, the judge, the hatchet man of the revolution: the fat, jolly peasant from Azerbaijan who had never had any doubts about himself, who, from being a shepherd boy (yet never thinking of himself as poor), had risen to power, and killed Hoveida, the Shah’s prime minister.

I said, “In August you told me Khalkhalli was a clown, that he had no power.” But that was in August, when Behzad had his own idea of where the revolution might still go.

“I was wrong. You remember he told you he had the gun with which Hoveida was killed. You know who actually killed Hoveida? It was a mullah, one of these men with beards and turbans. A young man, in his thirties. He is known.”

The photographs of the execution were official photographs, but
Behzad’s copies were holy documents, perhaps at some future date to be put into another Iranian album of revolution and martyrs. In the official photographs the blindfolded men were anonymous, just rebels. In Behzad’s copies there was an Arabic numeral above each blindfolded man: they were all known. They were middle-class, city people. And though Behzad didn’t tell me, they were (as I learned from another source) that section of his group that had opted for guerrilla activity, attaching themselves to various ethnic minority movements. The leaders had gone underground; one of them was a woman.

Friends had died, and—having broken with his girl friend—he had remained in Tehran doing his studies and earning what money he could. Since October Behzad had fretted over his own inactivity.

He pointed to the Persian pamphlet. “There are fifteen hundred political prisoners in Iran right now. I tell you, printing and selling the communist literature is nothing.”

The hot tea had been welcome in the cold apartment. He went to the kitchen and filled the glasses again. He dropped the sugar cubes in his tea and stirred.

I said, “Don’t you hold the sugar in your mouth and drink the tea through it?”

He smiled. “Sometimes.”

“What was your girl like intellectually?”

He paused. It seemed he hadn’t understood. But then he said, “She was all right. We were all right, in every way. It was just what I told you. The personalities.”

“You told me her family was very Muslim.”

“Only her brother. He didn’t get on with me. He’s a businessman. But he had nothing against me. He just thought I was a boring man, always interested in politics.” His face brightened; he smiled. “Her father liked me, though. I think he liked me a lot.” He pointed to the booklet on the low table between us. “You remember we talked about that man?”

The booklet was in Persian. It had a photograph of Stalin on the front cover, and another picture of Stalin, a Russian-realist pencil portrait, on the frontispiece. I had seen the booklet without taking it in: it looked so much like the books and booklets on Revolution Avenue, opposite the university.

I said, “Where was this one printed?”

“Tabriz.” In Azerbaijan, in the far northwest.

“What do you think of him now?”

“I
love
him!” Behzad said. “The more I read about him, the more I love him. He was one of the greatest revolutionaries. Do you know his speech at the beginning of the war?”

“Nineteen thirty-nine, or forty-one?”

“When the Germans invaded Russia.”

“Nineteen forty-one.”

“ ‘The Motherland calls …’ Don’t you know that speech?”

“Why do you say he was one of the greatest revolutionaries?”

“Because he constructed socialism in Russia. That was the first socialist revolution in the world, and it was the greatest turn in human history. Maybe he made some mistakes. But I can say he was the most suitable man to do what he did. What he did in Russia we have to do in Iran. We, too, have to do a lot of killing. A lot.” He began to smile, as though he was worried that I might think him ridiculous, dreaming, in his present helplessness, of such a big task. “We have to kill
all
the bourgeoisie. All the bourgeoisie of the oppressor class.” And he smiled as he had smiled when he said that his former girl’s father had liked him.

He couldn’t walk back with me to the Avenue of the Islamic Republic, to put me in a line taxi. He had to stay with his books. He called a hire car for me.

He said, “Someone’s giving a party tomorrow. I know my old girl friend is going to be there. And the person giving the party telephoned me to ask me to come. I said, ‘But you know I don’t see her any more.’ She said, ‘That’s why I’m asking you.’ What do you think of that?”

I left him to his books and papers. His mathematical work was in his fine Persian script, with Western (or Arabic or Indian) numerals. Many of his textbooks were American. He had been fed by so many civilizations; so much had gone into making him what he was. But now, at what should have been the beginning of his intellectual life, he—like the Muslims to whom he was opposed—had cut himself off.

Behzad—and the other students of Iran, and the estimated three hundred thousand Iranian students abroad—were all really the Shah’s children, the first intellectual fruits of the state he had tried to build. But they were too new, too raw, unsupported by an intellectual tradition; they were too many; and neither they nor the state had been able to cope.

T
HE
Royal Tehran Hilton, high up in the north of the city, and with snow on the ground, was now the Tehran Hilton International. In August it had only ceased to be Royal. The word—in Oriental-style lettering—had been taken down from the sign over the drive and from the marble wall at the entrance; but in both places the raised letters had left a ghostly impression. That was no longer so. The marble wall at the entrance had been polished up and fitted out with the new name; and winter rains had washed away the dusty shadow of the old word from the white sign over the drive.

The hotel had a new monogram. But THI had been made to look so like the old RTH that it took some time to see that the paper napkins in the coffee shop were still Royal. They must have been part of some vast stock—like the currency notes, most denominations of which still carried the Shah’s picture.

In August the Hilton had appeared a place of gloom. Now it had revived. It advertised a one-hour laundry service. The shirt I gave in was returned to me in the coffee shop (where the china was Rosenthal) half an hour later, laundered and ironed and packed.

Behzad had told me that the hoteliers of Tehran had grown anxious since some students had occupied a well-known hotel. People who had been complaining about empty rooms had begun to jump about a bit, switched on lights at night in empty rooms, and generally tried to suggest—like the people in my own hotel—that things were all right with them.

But real life had come to hotels like the Hilton, and it had been given by the journalists and television teams who had flown in for the American-embassy story—the American television networks had been especially extravagant. It was strange: Americans held hostage in one part of the city, Americans made more than welcome in other parts. And not only Americans: there were Japanese and French and British and Spanish correspondents. Some of them, the newspapermen, had been ground down by the story, which now hardly seemed to move. The television people, with all their attendants and all their equipment, could appear to be more exciting than the events they reported on. Like the French correspondent I saw one day speaking his piece to his camera right in front of the Intercontinental: the scene oddly
inconsequential to me, coming out of the hotel only after the buffet lunch.

The drama of the seized embassy and the hostages behind the walls was always available. It was a short drive away; the hire cars were always ready to take you there. And—as with some too-famous tourist spot—it seemed a little shaming to go for the first time. The old hands no longer went; after three months there was nothing for them to see.

A long red brick wall; the low embassy buildings behind the wall; a background of snow-covered mountains—and here, in the north of the city, the mountains were quite close, with no smog or tall buildings to block the view. The long embassy wall was daubed with slogans in Persian and English; and there were more slogans on cotton banners, grey and dingy after more than three months. The pavement was roped off, the rope running from tree trunk to tree trunk, and armed young men in khaki trousers, black boots, and quilted khaki jackets stood at every gate. Outside the main gate the pavement ropes gave way to tubular steel scaffolding, erected less for security, it seemed, than as a form of crowd control.

The first day I went, at sunset, prayer time, there was a little demonstrating group, chanting responses to a leader as they might have responded to a mullah in a mosque; and the responses were mixed with the sounds, on many radios, of a broadcast call to real prayers. The guards remained unsmiling in the face of the indirect tribute of the little crowd. Evening clouds built up in the cold sky; evening light fell on the snow-covered mountains. The demonstration, like the radio prayers, ended. The crowd chatted and drank tea.

Except for the government crafts shop, which was, curiously, having a one-week bargain sale, the shops on the other side of the road seemed to have closed down, and some windows were blanked out on the inside with paste or paint. On the pavement on that side of the road, and on part of the road itself, there was a fairground atmosphere: book stalls, food stalls (mainly buns), tea stalls (tea bags dipped in glasses of hot water).

Beyond the scaffolding at the main gate, the embassy wall was hung with a polythene-covered display of photographs of revolutions and atrocities: Vietnam, Africa, Nicaragua: the late-twentieth-century causes to which these Muslim students wished to attach their own cause. There were sandbags at the angle of the embassy wall, and the lane that
ran down that side of the embassy compound was barred off and guarded.