Emails from the Edge (12 page)
Read Emails from the Edge Online
Authors: Ken Haley
WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN DAY 185 (1 NOVEMBER) TEHRAN
To go, or not to go? I see now that the international and internal situationsâor, in plain language, al-Qa'eda, Afghanistan and my bumâhave made the decision for me.
I recognise that, although al-Qa'eda has warned Westerners not to set foot on the Arabian Peninsula,
jihadis
are unlikely to waste bullets or bombs on a lone itinerant when they could be out perpetrating massacres. I make a mental note to keep out of tall buildings and away from large groups of Western party-goers around New Year.
DAY 185 (13 NOVEMBER): TEHRAN
My gel-filled cushion, a superior solution to the orange tube, has arrived by courier service from Melbourne, and with Jorik's all-clear, accompanied by a less gloomy pronouncement on my health prospects, I resume the journey where I left off almost a fortnight ago.
Regional flights are so cheap in Iran I decide to break my surface-travel rule and fly to Isfahan a week from today. Tehran has plenty of sights to disclose, which two weeks on a bed has deprived me of seeing. This is catch-up time.
Two decades ago, the kidnapping of 52 Americans inside their own embassy became the longest-running news story of my life. To Americans it was an outrage; to Ayatollah Khomeini and his fervent followers it was a fitting humiliation inflicted on a neocolonial tiger trapped in his own lair.
From 4 November, the anniversary of the 1979 embassy takeover, until tomorrow, a commemorative exhibition is being mounted under the grandiose title â13th Aban Great Exhibition, Shattering of the Glassy Palace' (13th Aban being the equivalent of 4 November by the Persian solar calendar).
The Great Exhibition comprises 20 smaller exhibitions, each filling a single room of this squat red-brick building that looks like a high school but is, in fact, the old US Embassy itself, now re-branded the Den of Espionage. The âglassy palace' derives from a ceiling-high glass cube in which a diorama shows William Sullivan, the last US ambassador to Iran, talking to two unidentified âspies'. According to my tour guide, Reza, âthe glassy room for top-secret negotiations' was a bug-free retreat for these parasitic enemies of the host state. A 1970s telephone switchboard, telex machines and cipher equipment, now primary exhibits in the Eavesdropping Room, are similar reminders of the Americans' sinister intent.
From one point of view, all embassies are spy dens, so there is something comically melodramatic in making an exhibit of a typewriter, perhaps the very one allegedly used to falsify staff identity documents.
Behind the embassy building sit the rotor and metallic spine of the helicopter that crash-landed in central Iran in April 1980, dooming a mission to rescue the hostages and, many analysts believe, Jimmy Carter's presidency along with it.
DAY 186 (14 NOVEMBER): TEHRAN
This afternoon I visit Vanak Shopping Mall, a slice of the West. In a city where the whole side wall of a 20-storey building is covered with an eye-riveting mural of the Stars and Stripes being dive-bombed by torpedoes under the banner âDOWN WITH THE USA', this is a haven. Here, a coffee shop attracts a cross-section of Iran's rising generation, who pay just enough attention to their malted milkshakes to avoid spilling any on their American-style youthwear.
Today there is a buzz of excitement as a woman in her early twenties spreads the word that females of her acquaintance are going to risk a beating with police truncheons by daring to sit in the men-only grandstand at Azari Stadium for tomorrow night's soccer qualifier against Ireland.
Although the chador is common on the streets of this bustling metropolis, conversations during my stay have revealed a clear division of opinion between those women who welcome it for shielding them from unwanted male advances and thoseâgenerally younger, in their teens or early twentiesâwho spurn it as a symbol of conformity and repression. Even those women who reject the chador are careful to dress in clothes that do not show too much flesh; and a colourful, raffishly worn hejab provides an excellent sartorial substitute for any woman who dares show her face.
DAY 188 (16 NOVEMBER): TEHRAN
Every holy Friday, when the weekday market shuts its doors, people with leisure and shopping money throng the Juma Bazaar, an underground car park crammed from end to end with everything you could imagine being bought or sold, and that includes kitchen sinks. Gold and silverware, 78 rpm records, embossed Korans, chessboards, spices from the East, TVs from the West: here is a cornucopia too rich and varied to take in at a glance.
Needless to say, this visual feast is more than matched by the assault on your eardrums. So, when I emerge from a tight knot of people crowded around a space at the far end of the cavernous room, even the sight of a tall merchant smiling agreeably, as if expecting me, takes a startled moment to register.
âHello,' the lips move, but surely the words cannot be addressed to me, âI'm Osama bin Laden.'
My eyes confirm his claim but, at a rare loss for words, I dip my right hand into my backpack and, after frantically rummaging through its jumbled contents, produce my camera.
âUh, may I take your photograph?' I ask. Osama beams his approval. âI mean, you know, George W., $1 million he will give me for this'âand then, on a sudden inspiration, I mime the sign for a half, striking one hand across the knuckles of the other like a karate blowââhalf for me, and half for you.'
Osama's smile is now a broad grin, and I prepare to get my official photographic proof of what is either a significant victory in the war on terror or an imposture to dine out on for years to come.
By now, Tehrani shoppers are in on the joke, and hamming it up themselves. One stout matron who speaks English cups a hand over her face, eyes bulging with mock fright as she says to me in a stage whisper, âDo you know who that is?'
âYes, it's Osama bin Laden, he told me so,' I reply, to general laughter.
âBut,' she adds, âdo you know who is the old man behind him with the grey beard?'
I haven't had time to give that one much thought. Seeing that Osama is selling a fine array of Persian and Afghan carpets, and assuming it to be a family business, I blurt out, âHis father?'
âNo,' she lowers her voiceâbut by now the flow of shoppers has stalled and 50 pairs of ears are hanging on her final chilling disclosureââthat's Mullah Omar!'
Just yesterday, I surmised to someone that the world's most famous caveman appeared to have just two options apart from staying to get himself martyred by the Americans. One was to escape to Pakistan, the other to head for Iran. I deemed the latter more likely because, although the Iranians and Taliban were deadly enemies, going to Pakistan while it was acting as a staunch ally of the Americans would probably seem like courting the greater of two evil fates.
DAY 189 (17 NOVEMBER): TEHRAN
Rebecca Hathaway has intrigued me with talk of another âShell wife', a Dutchwoman who has completed a gruelling trek overland from Damascus with a team of camels. I must meet her, was my response. Today is the day.
Lilianne Donders was born Dutch but has long looked upon herself as a Bedouin. A self-described nomad, she is both a mover and a Sheikha, having been honoured with that courtesy title by the al-Janabah tribe in the Sultanate of Oman.
Her solid European-style mansion in Tehran's plush northern suburbs lurks behind a steep flight of stairs so, this warm autumn day, we sit outside in her garden. Those who know her better inform me that the interior décor is dominated by a camel motif: camels in the carpets, camels on the walls. I can easily credit itâa pair of silver earrings, miniature ships of the desert, do not go unnoticed.
Donders has actually undertaken
two
camel treks. The one everyone talks about, though, traversed 1600 kilometres on foot and cloven hoof. The middle part was done by truckââthey're desert camels, they couldn't cross the mountains'âbut the successful expedition amounts to a triumph of the will nevertheless.
Her acceptance by the Bedouin (under the tribal name of Laila) had been public knowledge for years when I worked in Oman in the late 1980s, but she was also known as a well-connected businesswoman. Her Muscat boutique bristled with Bedouin bowls, baskets, bric-a-brac and carpets, giving hundreds of Bedouin women a toehold in the cash economy.
In 1999, when a London specialist diagnosed her with a malignant breast tumour, Dondersâfar from cancelling plans to make the trekâ christened her endeavour the Caravan for Cancer.
Others in Tehran's expatriate community tend to describe her as an eccentric. Ask why she loves camels, and the response sums up her character to perfection, âThey go their own way. Camels will never follow someone else's track. That says everything about me.'
DAY 193 (21 NOVEMBER): ISFAHAN
The sublime and breathtaking beauty of Iranian art is largely due to the strict interpretation of Islam's taboo on any depiction of the human form as a blasphemy against Allah, who alone has power to create, change and destroy his creatures' features.
That prohibition has resulted in such a concentration on the aesthetic possibilities of non-figurative art that calligraphy and abstract geometric design have long flowered in these climes. Indeed, they have reached such a pitch of intricate perfection that they bedazzle the onlooker.
Imam Khomeini Square, formerly Nagsh-e-Jahan Square, is the largest in the world after Beijing's Tiananmen. Five hundred metres long and 200 across, what is technically a quadrangle rather than a square is best navigated at clip-clop pace in a horse-drawn buggy.
At the âcity' or Mecca end of the quadrangle, we pause in front of the Masjed-e Emam (Mosque of the Imam). Before 1979 it wasâsurprise, surpriseâMasjed-e Shah.
Yesterday evening, with another Melburnian met at a small but Internet-equipped hotel around the corner from mine, I defied the attempt of a gate guard to keep us out (simply because the ticket office had decided to close early). We took a chance on clambering through the 30-metre-high portal, and even the guard, though incandescent with rage at our audacity, respected the sanctuary by not pursuing us into its interior for an unseemly showdown.
Thus undisturbed, we found a vaulted hall deep within the mosque and, as I sat next to him, my friend stomped on black paving stones (as recommended by one and all), producing seven distinct echoes. When the seventh had died away, utter tranquillity reigned once more.
DAY 195 (23 NOVEMBER): ISFAHAN
It's Friday morning and Imam Khomeini Square fills with what must be an assembly numbering in the tens of thousands. Today marks a special commemoration, as the loudspeakers broadcasting a sermon from the great mosque make clear even to a non-Farsi speaker by constant repetition of the term
âbasiji Isfahani'
. The
basiji
âlest we forgetâwere Iran's child soldiers, twelve years old when sent into battle during the war against Iraq in the 1980s.
In conversations with even quite open-minded Iranians about this, I have found that whenever I question the dispatch of thousands of children to certain death I risk being thought a blasphemer. If that is how a detached intellectual reacts, I am going to keep my trap firmly shut today, having no desire to court an attack by a frenzied relative of one of the fallen.
In the afternoon I visit Golestan-e Shohada, the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. Located on Isfahan's outskirts, here are thousands upon thousands of extensively inscribed tombs. This is the closest I can come to absorbing the enormity of that eight-year war in which a million people perished. Each tomb is watched over by a photograph, except those where presumably none could be obtained. In most of these cases, Ayatollah Khomeini or Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei takes his place. More occasionally still, a portrayal of the Twelfth Imam of the Shias, Ali, superintends the grave.
An old man sits on the end of a shiny slab intoning verses from the Koran; a middle-aged woman mumbles in grief from behind a corner of her chador; a worker applies paint to whiten the loving inscriptions chiselled on another tomb. On yet another memorial to yet another life cut short, the family themselves rub the stone with water, the great reviver.
It is early evening and I am back in Isfahan. The city is justly famous for its bridgesâthere must be as many as in London or Pragueâbut one glorious example, the Bridge of 33 Arches (Pol-e Si-O-Se), outshines them all. After dark, its illuminated span sets off the Zayande River like a giant necklace. The arches are used to roof teahouses, where shisha is smoked and the herbal brew consumed in style.
Under one arch my Melburnian friend and I are welcomed like long-lost relatives to a table of young Isfahanis eager to hear about the outside world, of which the Internet has given them an enticing view. Grateful for a chance to speak English and show their goodwill, they contrive to pay for everything before weâwho can far more easily afford toâhave a chance.
DAY 196 (24 NOVEMBER): ISFAHAN
I couldn't help noticing that Iran's mobile-phone numbers carry the prefix 0911. What would the White House make of this?
DAY 198 (26 NOVEMBER): KASHAN
This craft centre and oasis on the edge of the Great Salt Desert has seen conquerors come and go for two and a half thousand years. Today, though, it offers antique charm as a counterweight to monumental Isfahan.
In the afternoon I visit the Fin Garden. Its chief delight is the
qanat
(canal) runnels that crisscross it. The gentle flow of water reticulated on a grid pattern combines ancient know-how with a sense of beauty seldom equalled by the designers of Western fountains.
This evening I hear on the BBC that George Bush has called for a crusade to defend civilisation. Let him at least come here first, I tell myself, so they can get acquainted.
DAY 199 (27 NOVEMBER): ISFAHAN TO AHWAZ
To go, or not to go? I see now that the international and internal situationsâor, in plain language, al-Qa'eda, Afghanistan and my bumâhave made the decision for me.
I recognise that, although al-Qa'eda has warned Westerners not to set foot on the Arabian Peninsula,
jihadis
are unlikely to waste bullets or bombs on a lone itinerant when they could be out perpetrating massacres. I make a mental note to keep out of tall buildings and away from large groups of Western party-goers around New Year.
DAY 185 (13 NOVEMBER): TEHRAN
My gel-filled cushion, a superior solution to the orange tube, has arrived by courier service from Melbourne, and with Jorik's all-clear, accompanied by a less gloomy pronouncement on my health prospects, I resume the journey where I left off almost a fortnight ago.
Regional flights are so cheap in Iran I decide to break my surface-travel rule and fly to Isfahan a week from today. Tehran has plenty of sights to disclose, which two weeks on a bed has deprived me of seeing. This is catch-up time.
Two decades ago, the kidnapping of 52 Americans inside their own embassy became the longest-running news story of my life. To Americans it was an outrage; to Ayatollah Khomeini and his fervent followers it was a fitting humiliation inflicted on a neocolonial tiger trapped in his own lair.
From 4 November, the anniversary of the 1979 embassy takeover, until tomorrow, a commemorative exhibition is being mounted under the grandiose title â13th Aban Great Exhibition, Shattering of the Glassy Palace' (13th Aban being the equivalent of 4 November by the Persian solar calendar).
The Great Exhibition comprises 20 smaller exhibitions, each filling a single room of this squat red-brick building that looks like a high school but is, in fact, the old US Embassy itself, now re-branded the Den of Espionage. The âglassy palace' derives from a ceiling-high glass cube in which a diorama shows William Sullivan, the last US ambassador to Iran, talking to two unidentified âspies'. According to my tour guide, Reza, âthe glassy room for top-secret negotiations' was a bug-free retreat for these parasitic enemies of the host state. A 1970s telephone switchboard, telex machines and cipher equipment, now primary exhibits in the Eavesdropping Room, are similar reminders of the Americans' sinister intent.
From one point of view, all embassies are spy dens, so there is something comically melodramatic in making an exhibit of a typewriter, perhaps the very one allegedly used to falsify staff identity documents.
Behind the embassy building sit the rotor and metallic spine of the helicopter that crash-landed in central Iran in April 1980, dooming a mission to rescue the hostages and, many analysts believe, Jimmy Carter's presidency along with it.
DAY 186 (14 NOVEMBER): TEHRAN
This afternoon I visit Vanak Shopping Mall, a slice of the West. In a city where the whole side wall of a 20-storey building is covered with an eye-riveting mural of the Stars and Stripes being dive-bombed by torpedoes under the banner âDOWN WITH THE USA', this is a haven. Here, a coffee shop attracts a cross-section of Iran's rising generation, who pay just enough attention to their malted milkshakes to avoid spilling any on their American-style youthwear.
Today there is a buzz of excitement as a woman in her early twenties spreads the word that females of her acquaintance are going to risk a beating with police truncheons by daring to sit in the men-only grandstand at Azari Stadium for tomorrow night's soccer qualifier against Ireland.
Although the chador is common on the streets of this bustling metropolis, conversations during my stay have revealed a clear division of opinion between those women who welcome it for shielding them from unwanted male advances and thoseâgenerally younger, in their teens or early twentiesâwho spurn it as a symbol of conformity and repression. Even those women who reject the chador are careful to dress in clothes that do not show too much flesh; and a colourful, raffishly worn hejab provides an excellent sartorial substitute for any woman who dares show her face.
DAY 188 (16 NOVEMBER): TEHRAN
Every holy Friday, when the weekday market shuts its doors, people with leisure and shopping money throng the Juma Bazaar, an underground car park crammed from end to end with everything you could imagine being bought or sold, and that includes kitchen sinks. Gold and silverware, 78 rpm records, embossed Korans, chessboards, spices from the East, TVs from the West: here is a cornucopia too rich and varied to take in at a glance.
Needless to say, this visual feast is more than matched by the assault on your eardrums. So, when I emerge from a tight knot of people crowded around a space at the far end of the cavernous room, even the sight of a tall merchant smiling agreeably, as if expecting me, takes a startled moment to register.
âHello,' the lips move, but surely the words cannot be addressed to me, âI'm Osama bin Laden.'
My eyes confirm his claim but, at a rare loss for words, I dip my right hand into my backpack and, after frantically rummaging through its jumbled contents, produce my camera.
âUh, may I take your photograph?' I ask. Osama beams his approval. âI mean, you know, George W., $1 million he will give me for this'âand then, on a sudden inspiration, I mime the sign for a half, striking one hand across the knuckles of the other like a karate blowââhalf for me, and half for you.'
Osama's smile is now a broad grin, and I prepare to get my official photographic proof of what is either a significant victory in the war on terror or an imposture to dine out on for years to come.
By now, Tehrani shoppers are in on the joke, and hamming it up themselves. One stout matron who speaks English cups a hand over her face, eyes bulging with mock fright as she says to me in a stage whisper, âDo you know who that is?'
âYes, it's Osama bin Laden, he told me so,' I reply, to general laughter.
âBut,' she adds, âdo you know who is the old man behind him with the grey beard?'
I haven't had time to give that one much thought. Seeing that Osama is selling a fine array of Persian and Afghan carpets, and assuming it to be a family business, I blurt out, âHis father?'
âNo,' she lowers her voiceâbut by now the flow of shoppers has stalled and 50 pairs of ears are hanging on her final chilling disclosureââthat's Mullah Omar!'
Just yesterday, I surmised to someone that the world's most famous caveman appeared to have just two options apart from staying to get himself martyred by the Americans. One was to escape to Pakistan, the other to head for Iran. I deemed the latter more likely because, although the Iranians and Taliban were deadly enemies, going to Pakistan while it was acting as a staunch ally of the Americans would probably seem like courting the greater of two evil fates.
DAY 189 (17 NOVEMBER): TEHRAN
Rebecca Hathaway has intrigued me with talk of another âShell wife', a Dutchwoman who has completed a gruelling trek overland from Damascus with a team of camels. I must meet her, was my response. Today is the day.
Lilianne Donders was born Dutch but has long looked upon herself as a Bedouin. A self-described nomad, she is both a mover and a Sheikha, having been honoured with that courtesy title by the al-Janabah tribe in the Sultanate of Oman.
Her solid European-style mansion in Tehran's plush northern suburbs lurks behind a steep flight of stairs so, this warm autumn day, we sit outside in her garden. Those who know her better inform me that the interior décor is dominated by a camel motif: camels in the carpets, camels on the walls. I can easily credit itâa pair of silver earrings, miniature ships of the desert, do not go unnoticed.
Donders has actually undertaken
two
camel treks. The one everyone talks about, though, traversed 1600 kilometres on foot and cloven hoof. The middle part was done by truckââthey're desert camels, they couldn't cross the mountains'âbut the successful expedition amounts to a triumph of the will nevertheless.
Her acceptance by the Bedouin (under the tribal name of Laila) had been public knowledge for years when I worked in Oman in the late 1980s, but she was also known as a well-connected businesswoman. Her Muscat boutique bristled with Bedouin bowls, baskets, bric-a-brac and carpets, giving hundreds of Bedouin women a toehold in the cash economy.
In 1999, when a London specialist diagnosed her with a malignant breast tumour, Dondersâfar from cancelling plans to make the trekâ christened her endeavour the Caravan for Cancer.
Others in Tehran's expatriate community tend to describe her as an eccentric. Ask why she loves camels, and the response sums up her character to perfection, âThey go their own way. Camels will never follow someone else's track. That says everything about me.'
DAY 193 (21 NOVEMBER): ISFAHAN
The sublime and breathtaking beauty of Iranian art is largely due to the strict interpretation of Islam's taboo on any depiction of the human form as a blasphemy against Allah, who alone has power to create, change and destroy his creatures' features.
That prohibition has resulted in such a concentration on the aesthetic possibilities of non-figurative art that calligraphy and abstract geometric design have long flowered in these climes. Indeed, they have reached such a pitch of intricate perfection that they bedazzle the onlooker.
Imam Khomeini Square, formerly Nagsh-e-Jahan Square, is the largest in the world after Beijing's Tiananmen. Five hundred metres long and 200 across, what is technically a quadrangle rather than a square is best navigated at clip-clop pace in a horse-drawn buggy.
At the âcity' or Mecca end of the quadrangle, we pause in front of the Masjed-e Emam (Mosque of the Imam). Before 1979 it wasâsurprise, surpriseâMasjed-e Shah.
Yesterday evening, with another Melburnian met at a small but Internet-equipped hotel around the corner from mine, I defied the attempt of a gate guard to keep us out (simply because the ticket office had decided to close early). We took a chance on clambering through the 30-metre-high portal, and even the guard, though incandescent with rage at our audacity, respected the sanctuary by not pursuing us into its interior for an unseemly showdown.
Thus undisturbed, we found a vaulted hall deep within the mosque and, as I sat next to him, my friend stomped on black paving stones (as recommended by one and all), producing seven distinct echoes. When the seventh had died away, utter tranquillity reigned once more.
DAY 195 (23 NOVEMBER): ISFAHAN
It's Friday morning and Imam Khomeini Square fills with what must be an assembly numbering in the tens of thousands. Today marks a special commemoration, as the loudspeakers broadcasting a sermon from the great mosque make clear even to a non-Farsi speaker by constant repetition of the term
âbasiji Isfahani'
. The
basiji
âlest we forgetâwere Iran's child soldiers, twelve years old when sent into battle during the war against Iraq in the 1980s.
In conversations with even quite open-minded Iranians about this, I have found that whenever I question the dispatch of thousands of children to certain death I risk being thought a blasphemer. If that is how a detached intellectual reacts, I am going to keep my trap firmly shut today, having no desire to court an attack by a frenzied relative of one of the fallen.
In the afternoon I visit Golestan-e Shohada, the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. Located on Isfahan's outskirts, here are thousands upon thousands of extensively inscribed tombs. This is the closest I can come to absorbing the enormity of that eight-year war in which a million people perished. Each tomb is watched over by a photograph, except those where presumably none could be obtained. In most of these cases, Ayatollah Khomeini or Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei takes his place. More occasionally still, a portrayal of the Twelfth Imam of the Shias, Ali, superintends the grave.
An old man sits on the end of a shiny slab intoning verses from the Koran; a middle-aged woman mumbles in grief from behind a corner of her chador; a worker applies paint to whiten the loving inscriptions chiselled on another tomb. On yet another memorial to yet another life cut short, the family themselves rub the stone with water, the great reviver.
It is early evening and I am back in Isfahan. The city is justly famous for its bridgesâthere must be as many as in London or Pragueâbut one glorious example, the Bridge of 33 Arches (Pol-e Si-O-Se), outshines them all. After dark, its illuminated span sets off the Zayande River like a giant necklace. The arches are used to roof teahouses, where shisha is smoked and the herbal brew consumed in style.
Under one arch my Melburnian friend and I are welcomed like long-lost relatives to a table of young Isfahanis eager to hear about the outside world, of which the Internet has given them an enticing view. Grateful for a chance to speak English and show their goodwill, they contrive to pay for everything before weâwho can far more easily afford toâhave a chance.
DAY 196 (24 NOVEMBER): ISFAHAN
I couldn't help noticing that Iran's mobile-phone numbers carry the prefix 0911. What would the White House make of this?
DAY 198 (26 NOVEMBER): KASHAN
This craft centre and oasis on the edge of the Great Salt Desert has seen conquerors come and go for two and a half thousand years. Today, though, it offers antique charm as a counterweight to monumental Isfahan.
In the afternoon I visit the Fin Garden. Its chief delight is the
qanat
(canal) runnels that crisscross it. The gentle flow of water reticulated on a grid pattern combines ancient know-how with a sense of beauty seldom equalled by the designers of Western fountains.
This evening I hear on the BBC that George Bush has called for a crusade to defend civilisation. Let him at least come here first, I tell myself, so they can get acquainted.
DAY 199 (27 NOVEMBER): ISFAHAN TO AHWAZ
Other books
El manuscrito carmesí by Antonio Gala
Thief by Anitra Lynn McLeod
Crónica de una muerte anunciada by Gabriel García Márquez
Wakening the Crow by Stephen Gregory
Bounty Hunter 1: The Bounty Hunter's Revenge by Joseph Anderson
Always in My Dreams by Jo Goodman
Berry Picking by Dara Girard
Home Is the Sailor by Lee Rowan
Raw Vengeance (The Rich Fordham Series) by Josh Handrich
