Christopher Bellaigue - In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

‘To the Shah!’ they cried.

There was a second set of foreigners, drinking in the hotel courtyard. They were based in the capital, Tehran, but sometimes spent the weekend in Isfahan. They were oilmen and arms dealers, petrochemicals salesmen and dam-builders. They had come to Iran to suggest to the Shah ways of disposing of his massive oil revenues. They spent a lot of time and money bribing ministers and bureaucrats, chasing contracts that would allow them to retire. They enjoyed smearing thick-grained Caspian caviar on crustless toast, posing a shard of lemon peel on top and shoving the whole lot into their mouths.

The third group of foreigners was composed of US Air Force officers. They worked as engineers, instructors, communications officers at Iran’s biggest air base, outside Isfahan. Every Isfahani girl had a crush on a US Air Force officer. Their brothers dreamed of piloting a Tomcat. In the bazaar, among the butch porters, blond American boys were all the rage.

The Revolution started sometime in the late twentieth century. Who knows when?

The leftists say it started at the party of 1971, when the world’s despots, dynasts and democrats dined with the King of Kings at repugnant expense in the ruins of Persepolis, the magnificent temple complex that was started by the Achaemenian King, Darius, in 520 BC. [*]

The economists say it started with the oil-price hike two years later, when OPEC quintupled the price of oil. It turned the King of Kings into a superstar, beloved of arms dealers and industrial development gurus, and set inflation on its upward trend.

A taxi driver once told me it started when the people saw the Shah drinking alcohol with his foreign guests, and heard the rumour that certain members of his family liked to swim in milk.

Everyone agrees it had started by the time the Shah made his final trip to Washington, in 1978, when he and Jimmy Carter wept in the White House rose garden – not out of love for each other but because of the tear-gas canisters being fired at anti-Shah demonstrators in Pennsylvania Avenue.

Perhaps it started in Isfahan, the day a boy spat in the face of a German woman who was immodestly dressed.

I’m sitting in a basement in Qom that belongs to Mr Zarif. He’s smoking his hookah: short sucks and clouds spreading over his face. He doesn’t smoke to relax. The in-out helps him concentrate. He talks faster when he’s smoking, and he talks pretty fast anyway. He shouldn’t smoke, the doctors have made that clear, but he enjoys doing things he’s not supposed to – as long as they don’t upset God. Mr Zarif is small and balding. He has a big head and a button nose and ironic eyes. He looks like a djinn, with scented smoke wings.

He folds the snake, as etiquette requires, so that the nozzle faces away from me, before handing it across. His wife will be down in a minute, bringing tea and fruit cut into triangles. She’ll tut-tut when she sees the hookah, and she’ll smile; the pleasure of watching her husband’s pleasure is more powerful than the fear that smoking will kill him. (If God has heavenly plans for you, living well beats living long any day.) Then – for this is an enlightened household, with no fanatical segregation of the sexes – she’ll join us, stuffing the end of her chador, which is adorned by a field of peonies, between her teeth as she passes around tea. I’ve known Mr Zarif for several months, and I think of him as a friend. But it’s hard, listening as he explains his past, not to feel as though he’s talking about someone else.

Perhaps, I think, he’s deliberately trying to give the impression that he bears no relation to the Zarif of two decades ago; the present Zarif can analyse dispassionately the actions of the former Zarif. Perhaps it’s a way of shoring up regret or bitterness. Or Mr Zarif is trying to be honest. I’ve been confronted by two Zarifs, so different as to be enemies, and I want to know what makes them one.

‘Have I shown you my nanchiko ?’ Mr Zarif leaps to his feet – I’ve never known anyone rise from a cross-legged position so compactly and elegantly – and runs out of the room. He comes back holding two bits of wood joined by a chain.

‘You know how the Japanese invented this?’ I shake my head. It looks good for throttling people. ‘There was a time when they had a weak and paranoid Emperor who banned the people from bearing arms. So they went to the obvious place: the kitchen! Someone had the idea of joining two rolling pins with a chain.’ He limbers up, rolling his shoulders, crouching slightly. ‘Of course, I’m out of practice.’

He starts to whip the nanchiko in arcs about his body, threatening adversaries from every angle. The nanchiko buckles and snaps. One of Mr Zarif’s advantages is his low centre of gravity; knock him down and he’ll swoon like a top, bob up again. Wham! The nanchiko lashing at you, splitting your forehead, breaking your elbow.

You have to discount Mr Zarif’s eyes, which have been dappled by hindsight. Back then, they were … what? Angry? Crazy?

This much is certain:

The former Zarif would have had no Englishmen in the basement, smoking the hookah. The former Zarif divided the world into friends and enemies, and the outside world was composed almost exclusively of enemies. (Of course, the British; they occupy a privileged position in Iran’s demonology. The former Zarif had things to say about us.)

Mrs Zarif comes in with a tray. She piles my plate high with fruit, and then does the same to Mr Zarif’s. She teases me about my appetite, which is known to be insufficient and will be the cause of my enfeeblement. Mr Zarif says I’d better be hungry today, because his wife has made shirin polov . It’s a feast of barberries, crushed pistachios, walnuts and lamb – on a bed of rice.

The front door slams. It’s Ali, the Zarifs’ ten-year-old son, back from school. Within a minute or two of being greeted by his parents, he’s challenged Mr Zarif to climb through the small hatch between the sitting room and the kitchen, through which Mrs Zarif will pass us lunch.

‘Of course I can do it,’ says Mr Zarif. He looks at me. ‘It wouldn’t be right, though, with Mr de Bellaigue here.’

‘You can’t do it,’ Ali smiles. ‘You’d get stuck.’

Mr Zarif is smiling, but infuriated. ‘Of course I can. Is it that I’m too fat, or too old?’

Ali shrugs viciously, as if to say: ‘Try.’

‘Well, if Mr de Bellaigue gives permission …’

Ali: ‘You can’t do it.’

Mrs Zarif tells her husband not to be so silly. It’s not a very elegant thing for a grown man to do, to climb through the hatch at Ali’s urging. I tell him not to hold back on my account.

Mr Zarif climbs onto the little table, puts his hands through the window and levers himself up. For a moment, he’s caught on the ledge; he’s having trouble manoeuvring his legs around and through the window. But his legs aren’t long and he eventually gets through, grunting as he goes. Mr Zarif disappears, and we hear him land on the kitchen floor. When he comes back into the sitting room, his face is red and he’s triumphant. Mrs Zarif says, ‘I’m sure Mr de Bellaigue is impressed.’ Ali is climbing over his dad, ruffling his hair.

In another country, at another time, Mr Zarif would have been called a delinquent, a thug, a menace to society.

He was brought up in Isfahan, and he set up his first gang in 1978, when he was twelve. He and his friends copied and distributed illicit pamphlets. They pasted flyers and photographs of dissidents onto walls, at night. (Making sure that no one was around to turn them in to Savak.) The following day, as the people walked to work, they’d see Khomeini looking at them. His eyes would demand: ‘What have you done for the morally upright and economically downtrodden?’ They would accuse: ‘Acquiescence to tyranny makes you an accessory!’