Ali Bader - The Tobacco Keeper

So what was his maxim at that time? It was ‘Have a light head, and a lighter foot. Live your life with the person you love and enjoy the shit and the kitsch’. It accurately described his affair with the Armenian musician, which was mysterious in every sense of the word and which nobody knew anything about. Despite his life having taken a new turn at that time, events brought him back to earth whenever he climbed too high. His contacts with the world were largely pale and colourless. The images of his wife and son began to fade slowly while his interest in music grew. Was he still working on the great symphony that he had dreamed of composing since he’d stood as a fifteen-year old lad in front of the Russian conductor? Was he still thinking of the work he wished to compose after his escape to Moscow?

All those questions were drowned in the Iranian Revolution that changed the course of his life once and for all.

It would be appropriate for us to mention Tahira’s uncle, who was intimately connected with this narrative. His name was Saleh and he was in the habit of visiting their house almost every week to see Tahira. He had a dark complexion and deep, dark eyes. He wore glasses with black plastic frames and his beard was sparse. He buttoned his shirt at the collar but never wore a tie. His hair was also unique, for he left a black lock of hair falling over his forehead. His jacket was always too broad. He was a Muslim intellectual in the Shia tradition. He read books by theologians such as the Iranian thinker Ali Shariati and Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr.

Saleh wasn’t a fanatic in any sense, but was fairly broad-minded. He had a girlfriend at university and didn’t care whether Tahira wore the veil or not. But the real turning point in his life came when the Iranian Revolution took place. He felt ecstatic that he was no longer the humble individual talking reasonably about the revolution to come. The revolution, he said, was the avalanche that would demolish everything, the earthquake that would shake the whole earth to its foundation. It promised salvation for the nation and declared the appearance of the Imam. It predicted the dawning of the Islamic age of the Caliphate, Saleh screamed at the top of his voice. The promise had finally been fulfilled. Haidar tried to talk rationally to Saleh. He had no argument with the revolution, but he was terrified by the popular mood and by the mass psychology, which was at its peak. Sickly Tahira did not see Haidar’s anger those days as he read the papers or followed the news of the revolution on television. But he was angry. He was so angry that he trembled when he saw the crowds on the streets. On their faces he detected a loss of individuality that happened only in traumatic situations. Hundreds of people who were essentially different from each other suddenly became copies of each other, clones. Their wild gestures and absurd shouts were indistinguishable. He stared at the escalating frenzy of the masses. Although he understood the causes of popular anger and the state of political, social and economic turmoil in Iran, he hated mass hysteria. He hated the agitation that took hold of the people and guided their actions.

With his beard and plastic-rimmed glasses, Saleh reeled and swaggered through the house, and declared that the East had changed. Haidar Salman smiled at him and said in a low, scornful voice, ‘But the people cannot create any real change. The people are dangerous, very dangerous, because they represent the disappearance of rational behaviour. The people are against critical thinking. In fact, their thoughts are completely different from mine. Their ideas and movements are driven by pure chance. They do not think, but only flare up and become wild. They combine the most contradictory tendencies and represent the dissolution of the particular into the universal. One word is enough to transform the people into a bull in a china shop.’

‘No,’ screamed Saleh, ‘these people wish to abolish the tyranny of the individual and establish a communal society. They want to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate and the precepts of the prophets.’

Haidar was absolutely terrified, for he never had any faith in the people. Something in them inspired fear in his heart and made him tremble. He was scared of the mob and tried to keep as far away from them as possible. He had very little confidence in angry popular fervour. Perhaps the Farhoud was the reason, when he’d seen the same ecstasy in the eyes of the mob, the ecstasy of sacrificial offerings, which turned individuals into a herd in a state of exhilaration. The mob’s anger would break out at the slightest provocation and was impossible to control. He feared all impassioned appeals to the emotions.

The passion of the mob spiralled higher without end, as was to happen later with Saddam. Extreme agitation seized people’s minds and hearts and drove them to rush forward. When Saddam climbed the podium, the masses beneath ran like maniacs. The same thing was happening in Iran. Like Saddam, Khomeini depended on manipulating the masses with his personal charisma. The people, the public, the crowd went out in a state of agitation, shouting so hard they became senseless.

Poverty, deprivation and loss were responsible for creating charismatic leaders. Those leaders exercised their authority and hegemony in order to compensate for their own sense of inferiority and their absolute spiritual vacuum.

‘Do you think that Khomeini has declared the revolution against the Shah?’ asked Tahira.

The small sitting room looked out onto the garden. The windows were open and the sunbeams cast their golden rays inside the house while the birds sang outside. Tahira poured more tea into Haidar’s cup as she sat in front of him with her oval face, still sparkling eyes and tender lips. She had a beautifully aristocratic expression.

He realized that the country was in a perpetual state of mass turmoil, especially after announcements in the press that Khomeini had left his exile in Neauphle-le-Château, twenty miles west of Paris. He read the papers almost every day and stayed from morning till evening in a state of constant apprehension. He walked along Al-Rashid Street, thinking of the demonstrations that marched out of Tabriz’s mosques and which the security forces were unable to control. Haidar walked past the statute of Al-Rusafi as if unconscious. One image dominated his mind. It was the image of Bloody Friday, when four thousand people lay dead on the ground. His ears tried to pick up the news, for the Tabriz riots had just broken out, which led pro-Shah Iranian officials try to find a solution to the problem. Then the media embarked on a self-critical evaluation of government institutions and the activities of the ruling Rastakhiz Party, with the aim of appeasing the people whose anger extended to Tehran, Qom and Tabriz.

He went home with a heavy heart. He felt that the crazed scene was pressing on his mind. The Shah was sticking to his guns, refusing to acknowledge opposition, whether moderate or extreme. He even described the opposition groups as outlaws and murderers. His categorical refusal was the green light for the opposition to ignore their basic ideological differences and unite against him.

Haidar read in the morning papers that General Nasser Moghadam, the director of the SAVAK, had gone to see the Shah wearing all his medals on his chest and dressed in his pressed military uniform. But the Shah had looked at him haughtily and rejected his proposal for reform. Haidar had heard at a tea shop at Bab al-Moazzam that the great bazaar merchants, almost a quarter of a million shops, had decided to stop working. The sky was clear with just a few white clouds tinged with crimson streaks. Dust rose high into the sky and pollen filled the air. He felt a childish joy that made his heart dance. He stood at the corner of the street, listening to the news of demonstrations everywhere. A man in a black tie told another that demonstrations in Iran had spread to forty cities. When Haidar came closer to the man who was providing this information, he recoiled in fear. When Haidar went home, Tahira was sitting on the sofa, wearing a striped white shawl. Her dark eyes sparkled magnificently like two jewels outlined by kohl. Her complexion showed that even though she was much older, her body hadn’t lost its physical lustre. Nor had her lovely eyes lost their sparkle. She offered him sahoon , the traditional Iranian sweets that Abadi wrote about in his novels. She offered him fresh water out of mosaic and alabaster vessels. Her Iranian maid slept in the shade as though she had materialized out of the books of Gobineau or Chardin a hundred years earlier. He took out the photo album. Tahira had invited him to discover the mysteries of Tehran and its art through a tour of its old museums. She was the one who lured him into horse-drawn carriages to put him in touch with society. For a change, she accompanied him on a visit to Tajrish Bazaar, whose passageways they walked for hours. Then she took him to the wonderful museums and to Marshad Jaafarpour. They climbed Mount Toshal, played backgammon near Al-Ghareeb cave and sat at the celebration of the birthday of Hazrat Fatima. They went to an open-air pool, where Tahira swam in her swimsuit, and then visited the Shahr Park, south of the city. Haidar Salman remembered the Tehran bazaar where Tahira had taken him for the first time. They sat on a bench in the shade of a large tree near the mosque. A Sufi wanderer passed in front of them. There were cypress and sycamore trees. He heard the sound of water falling from a tap. He heard a swallow singing on a huge tree, and beneath it there was a vendor selling a cold ginger drink in copper cups.