Stranger to History (19 page)

‘No!’ he said, with emphasis to imply fluency, and smirked awkwardly. Then, picking his words carefully, he said, ‘It – wasn’t – better.’ His large, ungainly figure shook with laughter.

‘Yes, it was!’ Violet scolded. ‘That was why I suggested you for this work.’ She seemed to be speaking more to me than to him.

‘I didn’t promise my English was perfect!’ he burst out.

‘No, the fault is mine. I thought it was much better. You haven’t been practising, Mr Jasib,’ she said again, in a tone of matronly reproach.

Turning to me, she said that it was a shame about his English because his contacts, especially in Qom, were very good. I made a last attempt to explain my interest in Qom, the Islamic Republic’s clerical capital. I could see he wasn’t following so I stopped.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jasib murmured, like an overgrown child about to start writing lines. ‘I am very sorry I haven’t been practising my English.’

In the car on the way back, I said, more out of politeness than sincerity, that I wished it could have worked because he had seemed ideal otherwise.

Violet’s pale face became serious. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’m beginning to think he wouldn’t have been. In fact, I think it’s a good thing it didn’t work out.’

‘Why?’

‘You have to watch these guys very carefully to see if they change when they join these agencies. Once the government knows they’re working for foreign publications, they come to them for information. Did you notice how agitated he became when you were putting your number into his phone?’ I did remember. He wrote down the wrong number so I corrected it and entered my name. He had jumped at me. ‘What are you doing?’ he exploded. It was one of his few fluent sentences. ‘And his insistence,’ Violet said, ‘that we meet at a park. It’s very strange. You see, they can’t obviously go to the foreign journalists so they go to these guys.’ I couldn’t understand why Violet, if she had known all this, hadn’t warned me of this in advance or met Jasib on her own first.

It was almost evening now. I was seeing some people for dinner and wanted to do some exercise at the gym I had just joined. I got out of the taxi and caught another one to Shiraz Avenue. Violet gave the driver clear instructions on how to get there. He nodded as she spoke, then, looking over his shoulder, stared with aimless intensity at the roaring street behind him. He was a lean man in his twenties. He wore a loose shirt through which his hard, wiry frame was visible. His collarbones were exposed and jutted out, seeming to hold up the rest of his bent torso. His eyes were small and sunken with a vacant polish, like billiard balls, and his stubble, though almost a shadow, was black against his unhealthy skin. He looked at me for a moment, thinlipped and smiling, as if he knew me from before.

Once we were moving, he said in English, ‘I don’t know where Shiraz Avenue is,’ and laughed. ‘These women are driving me crazy.’ For some reason I thought he meant a private domestic situation, but I soon discovered he meant the women of Tehran. On the heavily trafficked avenue, his eyes fixed on a pretty, made-up face under a light pink and blue scarf in a nearby car. She was worn out by the traffic delays. Her head rested against the car door and her delicate wrist hung out of the window. As soon as the traffic moved, the driver inched his car up to hers and slammed noisily on the brakes, making her look up.

He asked her where Shiraz Avenue was, but as she collected her thoughts to explain to him, he leered at her. He was uninterested in what she said, and when the traffic moved, he made a sucking sound and a kissy face and drove on. He drove fast, in an unsettling, predatory manner so that he seemed almost disappointed when his risk-taking did not cause an accident. After the first woman, there were one or two more. All the time, despite his speed, he didn’t seem to know where he was going. I began to question him. He dismissed me with a nod. Then absent-minded, his eyes scanning the traffic, he found himself channelled on to an exit for a multi-lane highway.

Sloping, grassy traffic islands came into sight, the familiar tall buildings of the avenue fell away and the road veered up ahead. Now I knew we were going in the wrong direction and raised my voice. He nodded and braked, causing the cars behind us to erupt into angry honking. Then already fifty metres or so up the exit ramp, he rested his arm on the seat, turned to face me and began reversing into the oncoming traffic. I started screaming at him, but his face was expressionless. He ploughed through the traffic, the other cars now as hysterical as I was, honking and swerving to avoid him. People rolled down their windows and hurled abuse at him as he went past, but he seemed untouched by their anger. His face, after the leering and the frustration, was serene, as if he had found the release he was looking for. When he reached the point where the road had forked, he swung the car back on to the avenue.

I called an Iranian friend, explained what had happened and passed the driver the phone. He spoke to my friend and now seemed to know where he was going. He made a few swerves, a jolting progress down an avenue, and soon a familiar blue-glass tower came in sight, the row of mountains swung to the right and before long we were going past bathroom-fittings shops on Shiraz Avenue. When we reached the multi-storey concrete blocks where my friend’s flat was, the driver asked for no more money than we had discussed. He just looked on as I paid him, one arm on the wheel, distracted again, frustrated, of a piece with the traffic.

I had barely arrived at my friend’s flat and was checking emails when the phone rang. It was a friend of Jasib. He spoke fluent English with an American accent, rattled off his CV and said he was the official stringer for ABC News in Iran. ‘I had a seminary training myself,’ he said, unprompted, ‘so I’ve been good for a lot of sensitive stories. I think because you’re writing on religion Mr Jasib suggested me.’ His constructions seemed to be from Farsi, but the language came easily to him.

‘Where did you learn English? Did you live abroad?’ I asked.

‘No.’ He laughed a cheesy American soap-opera laugh. ‘I’ve not had the opportunity to go abroad. I learnt my English right here in Tehran.’ He pronounced it Teh-
ran
.

‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty-six.’

I thought Violet should speak to him first. He said he’d call her and get back to me. I went to the gym, and by the time I returned to the flat, its windows showed a dark sky with bright city lights beyond.

I was in the shower when the phone rang again. The cordless lay on the bed and I came out to answer it. It was the translator. He said he’d spoken to Violet, and began to give me the names of some people he’d worked with. He mentioned Jeremy someone from a news agency, then Daniel Pearl.

‘Daniel Pearl?’ I said, feeling a sudden chill.

‘Yeah,’ the translator breathed, in his American fraternity accent, ‘and then he went off to Pakistan and got himself killed, which wasn’t so cool.’

Daniel Pearl, of the
Wall Street Journal
, had been beheaded in Pakistan while chasing a lead. His story was among the most grisly in recent memory. To hear it referred to in this casual, artificial voice, here in Tehran, scared me profoundly. It was fear of my own inexperience, of coming into a milieu of foreign journalists and stringers with dark cameos that I knew nothing about. I wanted to get off the phone. I had no taste for the journalist’s thrills, not even a good writing style for it. I thanked him and put down the phone. For the first time since I arrived in Tehran, I was aware of being alone in the flat and of its quiet, broken by the cyclical groan of a lift.

I called Violet back. ‘You know, I don’t think he should be working for anyone,’ she said. Apparently he had also worked for an old news-agency chief who was forced to flee the country with his wife, who later wrote a book scattered with suspicious Tehran characters. He was banned now from working with anyone other than ABC, and Violet assured me that he was watched.

She could tell she had unsettled me and asked if I would like to come over for some take-away food. I cancelled my other plans and went because I thought I might feel more at ease if I could go over the day with her, the day with its ambiguous sense of danger and unexplained premonitions.

That night in Violet’s drawing room, lampshades casting low-voltage parabolas across the walls, she began to tell me a story from when she was a child in Tehran.

Her parents had gone out to dinner, leaving Violet and her sister alone at home. The girls had a white West Highland terrier called Emily, and after their parents left, they took Emily for a walk. The streets around the house were quiet and residential. They would have been familiar to Violet, and walking the dog was a nightly ritual, which held perhaps, the possibility of bumping into neighbours. But that night the moral police were patrolling the streets and came down Violet’s.

When they saw Emily, their car stopped and a few men got out. Dogs, according to a Tradition, are unclean animals, but while the Tradition only discusses how many times a vessel should be cleaned if a dog drinks from it, the Islamic Republic incorporated the Tradition as another aspect of its tyranny of trifles. The men, despite appeals from the sobbing girl, arrested Emily.

Violet would not let the car go. One of the men said, ‘It’s either you or the dog.’ If they took Emily, they said, they would kill her. Just as the girls surrendered the little West Highland, an uncle or a friend appeared. He knew how to speak to the men and succeeded in arranging a bribe for the dog’s life. The weeping girls went back into the house with Emily. That night, Violet said, perhaps thinking only of the bribe and not of herself, ‘I wrote in my diary, “Tonight was my introduction to corruption.”’

People made corrupt, people stunted, twisted, criminalised by the tyranny of trifles. That was what the faith had become available for in Iran. The faith that Abdullah described as having something to say to the believer in every second of his life had been turned against the people of Iran; the regime used it to deal obsessively, almost voyeuristically, with the private details of people’s lives. Though Iranians had not known the great machines of socialist and Fascist repression, they knew a subtle, daily harangue. That it was conducted in the name of Islam was a great pain: the people’s deepest allegiances were used to subdue them, their religion turned to nonsense. It left a terrible vacuum. The young, who suffered most, didn’t remember a time when Islam was not in the hands of the Islamic Republic. The Book was not clear on the varied meanings drawn out of it. As in the case of dogs, some obscure Tradition, locked in the context of the Arabian oasis, was used to control everything from satellites to hairstyles, music, dress, socks and even elbows – in the worst days, men had been pulled over for wearing T-shirts because their elbows were considered attractive to women. At a time when people might have needed religion most, a hybrid of the world’s two most pernicious varieties, the bureaucrat and the cleric, was in charge of it.

It was pouring the next morning when I went to see Nargis, spring rain washing clean the city’s smoky air, its sooty buildings, making the fumes vanish in swirls of cold mist. The traffic was worse than normal and I spent many minutes behind a green van with ‘yah Mahdi!’ written on the back. We were on an avenue festooned with political slogans.

‘Imam Khomeini’s supporters are always supporting Palestinians and fighting their enemies’ was painted in white letters on a black background next to an American flag and a blue Star of David. Then we passed a powder-blue mural on the side of a grey building with blue-glass squares on the front. Half a dozen young faces with short beards, some smiling, others wistful, one with spectacles, gazed over the street. A huge billboard several feet high showed the famous Palestinian mother suicide-bomber against an astral background that made her look more like an astronaut than someone entering the afterlife. The words below said: ‘My children I do love, but martyrdom I love more.’ The Islamic Republic enjoyed provocations.

Nargis lived in a small flat in an angular white building, five or six storeys high. It was on a narrow street, with hardly any traffic, and large over-hanging canopies. She waited for me on her landing as I came up. In her twenties and strikingly beautiful, she had tight coils of thick black hair, bronze skin, round, slightly bulging eyes and a slim body, with heavy breasts. She wore a white net sweater with a purple skirt, and bits of turquoise dangled from her ears.

It was very early in the morning and I felt a little confused to enter a flat painted mauve, powder blue and beige with streams of incense smoke rising rapidly into the air. The room was full of things from India: little colourful stuffed birds and dolls, chimes, Krishna cushion covers, a standing rack of clothes with glass and stitch work. Hindi phrasebooks and India Lonely Planet guides lay about; a Krishna temple had been constructed near the kitchenette. Electronic music played in a monotonous cycle in the background. Nargis wandered into the kitchenette and put the kettle on for tea.

It was easy to see the effort that had gone into making the flat a cheerful place. Nargis was someone with an idea of how she wanted to live. She had realised this as fully as it was possible to do in the little space, down to its colours, the fittings, the choice of stone for the kitchen counters. There was a touching attention to order, detail and the
objets
from India that made the place distinctively hers. My feeling for it must have come in part from hearing that it had been ransacked not so long ago. It was only when I thought of the little flat’s plants ripped up, its temple broken, the clothes thrown everywhere, its careful, new-age serenity overturned, that I was moved by the optimism with which it had been restored.