Stephen Orth - Couchsurfing in Iran - Revealing a Hidden World

“Three to five men went into the water simultaneously, always the youngest, all between fifteen and twenty. I didn’t have a beard like this at that time.” Every night Mahmoudi swam for his life with a plastic key to Paradise around his neck. Never will he forget the beginning of Operation Dawn 8. “On February 11, 1986, we were two thousands snorkelers. We were the first to land to secure important posts, then came the highspeed patrol boats. We conquered Faw and managed to hold the city for two years and two months.”

The war seemed to be turning in favor of Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the counterattack and wanted to advance to the holy city of Karbala. But the military superiority of the enemy in the end was too much. The units were driven back, and two years later Faw was again in Iraqi hands. Operation Dawn 8 was a pyrrhic victory. But in the long run Mahmoudi thinks Iran did better, and he is pleased that Saddam Hussein is now dead. “Saddam kodja ast? Iran kodja ast ?” he asks. “Where is Saddam now? Where is Iran now?”

The answer to the second question is to be found on the jetty, where Iran stops and the water starts, on a signpost: Karbala: 375 miles .

I take a few photos, but Yasmin whispers that it would be better to go. “The soldiers are becoming suspicious; they don’t think you are a normal tourist.” As a parting gift, Mahmoudi gives us two black-and-white Basij bandanas and kisses me on both shoulders. A soldier is pointing a camera in our direction and seems to be filming us. No one is unfriendly, but I feel that the atmosphere is about to shift. We climb into the car, and our driver puts his foot down. Yasmin casts aside the bandana with an energetic movement.

“I’m annoyed that he didn’t mention the navy once. He was acting as if the Basij militia won the battle alone. My father fought here, and he was in the navy.”

“Why would Mahmoudi keep it a secret?”

“It sounds more heroic. The Basij were volunteers without military training. If they can defeat heavily armed Iraqi troops, then it’s evidence that Allah was on our side.”

“What has your father told you about Operation Dawn 8?”

“He was here for more than two years. During an attack, a bomb landed right next to him, and three friends were totally ripped apart. He was luckier, but is deaf in one ear. He calls that his ‘souvenir’ of the war.”

“As a child did the conflict affect you?”

“Up to the age of seven I knew nothing but war. We were always afraid about dad. Once he didn’t contact us for six weeks, no sign that he was alive. Then a soldier rang our doorbell and told us that he had been found on a seventy-foot island near Bandar Abbas. He had swum there to avoid advancing tanks, and he had survived for weeks almost solely on American chocolate. When he came back he had a huge beard and was just skin and bones.”

“Was he acclaimed as a war hero?”

She laughs. It isn’t a cheerful laugh, but one full of bitterness. “Two years ago he was thrown out of the navy because he wasn’t a devout enough Muslim.”

Over an evening meal of spaghetti our hostess, Maryan, tells of low-flying jets over Ahvaz. “Saddam’s MIGS,” she calls them, adding that Iranians always say “Saddam” when they are talking of the enemy, as fundamentally they have nothing against Iraq. “Saddam’s MIGS sometimes flew so low that they brushed the treetops, and branches fell to the ground. I had to cover my ears to avoid being deafened.” While we are still eating, Farshad releases the mynah from its cage. A screeching bundle of black feathers catapults through the kitchen and uses this sudden freedom to catch up on all the movement that it has been denied in its daylong imprisonment. It hurtles from the sink to the kitchen cabinet, then from the mantelpiece to the table leg, from Yasmin’s hair to my feet.

Maryan, despite the distractions, tries to continue her account. “When I was thirteen, in 1983 or 1984, Saddam announced on TV that Ahvaz was going to be bombed at midnight.” Conquest of the oil city was a declared goal of the leader. “Hundreds of thousands left the city by foot on the same day, taking with them only gold or money. My father remained at home because he was worried about looters. Luckily, the bombing didn’t happen. After a week in a tent, we returned home. Several people died from scorpion or snake bites during this time.”

I find it difficult to follow her, and it has nothing to do with a lack of drama in her words. What a tree trunk is for a woodpecker, my foot is for a hyperactive mynah. Continuously it pecks away at my socks with its small beak. Its understanding of the correct food chain seems to be pasta, tourist, bird. Maryan has different ideas and grabs a brush and sweeps the bird aside. Farshad dashes after it. I wonder whether Angry Birds was conceived after such a moment. They almost manage to trap it on the table, but my plate is in the way. Spaghetti and ground meat and porcelain plummet to the floor, and the mynah flaps up to a shelf.

“Mynaaah, mynaaah ,” it goads.

Farshad jives and dives, the bird flaps and flees. After three minutes of hot pursuit worthy of a computer game, the creature is captured and returned to its cage. Maryan gets me a new plate, and I wipe the red Bolognese sauce from the laminated tiles with a napkin.

SO LONG ASwe are traveling near the border to Iraq, the war doesn’t let us go. In Kermanshah, 250 miles northwest of Ahvaz, we are guests of a military friend of Yasmin’s father. She contacted him a day ago because no couchsurfers had offered accommodation, and on the spur of the moment he invited us to stay. “You’ve become fat,” says Azim as he hugs Yasmin. He is forty-seven but looks over sixty. Thin hair, melancholic eyes, an emaciated but still muscular body. He is wearing only training pants and an undershirt. He has a tattoo on his right upper arm in Persian lettering done by a fellow soldier, which reads: Even if I was poor and had no roof over my head, I would never swap my honor for a good meal.

“Salam ,” I say as a greeting.

“Don’t say ‘Salam .’ I hate these Arabic words. You have to say ‘ Dorut .’ That’s Persian.” Then he apologizes for his simple apartment. “My house is small. I wish I could offer you something better.” With his wife, Susan, thirty-seven, and their five-year-old daughter, Azadeh, he lives in a five-hundred-square-foot apartment in a plain apartment block with a sand-colored concrete facade. The stairwell stinks of decaying garbage. “The military pays the rent, so there’s no chance of anything bigger,” says Yasmin. Azim has been without a job for six months; he is a plumber by trade.

He gathers a few photo albums and opens a pack of Golden Deer cigarettes. The pictures show tanks and smiling men with Type 56 assault rifles, the Chinese variant of the Kalashnikov. Young soldiers with naked chests pose on the beach on the island of Tonb-e Bozorg. Azim was there during his military training. Today he no longer smiles when he talks about the war. “Thirty-six countries supported Iraq.” Azim draws the number 36 on his hand with a pen, as if he can only believe it if it is written down. “The Germans and Dutch supplied nerve gas, the Russians tanks, the French Mirage F1 fighters, the Arabians money.” He doesn’t speak English, so Yasmin translates for me. Little Azadeh clambers onto her father’s lap and shows him a picture of an eagle that she has just drawn. He strokes her hair.