Kader Abdolah - The House of the Mosque

‘As you know, Qom is in an uproar again. We want you to go there, make the rounds of the ayatollahs and find out what’s going on. I assume you still have my phone number?’

‘Yes,’ Ahmad said, his face ashen with fear. He leaned over and touched his forehead to the ground, as if he were continuing his prayer.

When he sat up again, the agent was gone.

With trembling hands, he slipped on his aba and hurried home, his shoulders hunched as if he were in the grip of a fever.

The first thing he did when he reached the house was to go into Aqa Jaan’s study and fall to his knees. ‘Save me, Aqa Jaan!’ he wailed. ‘I’ve been framed!’

Aqa Jaan, astonished at the sudden outburst, stared at his nephew.

‘The secret police have taken pictures of me! Dirty pictures, with women, opium! They want me to go to Qom and be an informer. If I don’t, they’ll publish the pictures in the paper!’

Aqa Jaan sat speechless in his chair. This was the last thing he’d expected. ‘Where did it happen?’ he finally asked.

‘In a cellar here in town.’

‘The opium isn’t a problem, but who were the women?’

‘ Siegeh women.’

‘The secret police are trying to even an old score. Have you cooperated with them in any way or worked for them before?’

‘No! Never!’ Ahmad said.

‘Have you ever passed on any information to them?’

‘No, none!’

‘I repeat,’ Aqa Jaan said, with emphasis, ‘have you ever told them anything?’

‘No, I haven’t said anything. I haven’t done anything,’ Ahmad replied.

‘Consider yourself lucky, because if you had, I would have kicked you out of the house this instant. However, if we act quickly, I think we can keep the damage to a minimum. Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. In the next few months I’ll make sure you’re never left alone. I’ll go down to their headquarters tomorrow and see what I can do. They need us to keep the peace in Senejan, so they’re not about to print those pictures in the paper. They’re just using them to blackmail us. Don’t say a word. And no matter what happens, stick close to me.’

‘I have another confession to make,’ Ahmad said. ‘I can’t preach a sermon without smoking opium first. I’m sorry, I know how much this must hurt you.’

‘It does. It pains me even more than your other news,’ Aqa Jaan said sorrowfully. ‘Anyone can make a mistake, but your addiction is an insult, a humiliation to us all. I can’t bear to think that the imam of our mosque can’t preach unless he’s smoked opium first. You’ve hurt me to the quick. I’m not going to compromise on this, you’re going to have to kick the habit, even if I have to lock you in a cage. From now on you’re not to step foot outside this house unless I say so!’

The next day Aqa Jaan cancelled all of Ahmad’s appointments and called the family doctor to ask if he could come in for a confidential chat.

Going directly from the doctor’s office to the headquarters of the secret police, he demanded to see the director immediately, even though he hadn’t made an appointment. He was ushered into the office and seated in a big leather armchair. The director showed him the photographs of Ahmad. Aqa Jaan had no choice: he had to make a deal. He promised to keep the mosque free of the trouble that was now plaguing Qom and, in return, the director agreed to keep the photographs in his drawer.

That evening Aqa Jaan opened his journal. ‘The imam of our mosque is addicted to opium,’ he wrote. ‘We are in for hard times.’

A long time passed in relative tranquillity.

Aqa Jaan got Ahmad back in line by making him follow a strict set of rules and not letting him travel to other cities by himself until he was sure that he had conquered his addiction.

Though the matter of the photographs had been taken care of, Aqa Jaan thought of it as a turning point in the history of the mosque.

At first Shahbal came home from university at least once a month, and then his visits tapered off. Sometimes he phoned Aqa Jaan at the bazaar, but all they did was talk about business: ‘How are you? How’s the work going?’

‘What can I say? The world has changed, my boy. We need a man with new ideas. I’m getting old.’

‘You? Old? You’re not old!’

‘Well, maybe not old, but old-fashioned. You can’t compete these days at an international level with the traditional methods we use here. Study hard; I need you. We’ll talk about it the next time you come home.’

But when Shahbal did come home, it was late at night, and the next evening he’d take the night train back to Tehran, so there was never any time to discuss the carpet trade and the bazaar.

Shahbal had not yet told Aqa Jaan, but he was no longer interested in business and certainly not in carpets. At the university he had joined an underground student movement — a different group from the one he’d been involved with in the Red Village.

He soon found himself appointed to the editorial board of the clandestine student newspaper, where he felt at home. Since he wrote well and was more mature than his fellow students, he was quickly regarded as a man with leadership potential.

Shahbal had changed, but so had the world around him. The bazaar, which used to play such an important role in Senejan, had been relegated to the sidelines. Persian rugs were no longer the determining factor in either the economy or in politics; their place had been usurped by gas and oil.

Aqa Jaan had once wielded a great deal of power in the bazaar, and the authorities had always held him in high regard. Now they had grown so bold that they dared to send secret policemen to the mosque and to suggest that the imam be used as an informer. The mayor used to call him at least once a week to maintain contact between the bazaar and the local government, but the new mayor hadn’t even invited Aqa Jaan to his inaugural banquet, much less phoned him. Some of the other merchants had been invited, however, which meant that the regime was attempting to destroy the unity of the bazaar. Meanwhile the bazaar was losing its dominant position as the producer of carpets. Several new carpet factories had sprung up in the city. In the old days no one would have dreamed of buying a cheap factory carpet that reeked of plastic, but nowadays everyone seemed to have one.

Until only a few short years ago, having a television aerial on your roof was taboo in Senejan, but times had changed. Once, when an enterprising businessman had decided to convert the old bathhouse into a cinema, all it took was Khalkhal to rally the faithful and rout out even Farah Diba. Recently someone had bought the oldest garage in the city and transformed it into a modern cinema. Every night hundreds of young people queued up to buy tickets.

So many attractive businesses had opened in the city that the younger generation had lost touch with the bazaar. A few years ago, young people used to go to the bazaar just to take a stroll. Now the city had built a broad boulevard, to which they flocked during the evening prayer, eating ices and strolling beneath the trees in the garish neon light.

The shah had finally conquered the city. Posters of him were plastered on every government building, and his voice could be heard on every radio station in the country. In the past, shopkeepers used to keep their radios under the counter, for fear of offending their customers and losing trade. Now they displayed their radios prominently on a shelf, so that everyone could hear the broadcasts.

Some of the traditional carpet merchants in the bazaar even had portraits of the shah hanging in their shops. Only a few years ago, that would have been unthinkable, but things had changed so rapidly that sometimes you didn’t recognise your own city.