Among the Believers (69 page)

Across that lane, there was another book stall, then a picture stall: the beauty of tears again, inexplicable tears running down the cheeks of beautiful women and innocent children. But that Persian sentimentality, the other side of Shia misanthropy, here served the revolution: one picture, all in brown, was of a crying, ragged child, eyes blurred with tears, shirt cuffs frayed, jacket worn out at the elbow, resting a small hand on Khomeini’s shoulder. He, Khomeini, frowned, and seemed to look beyond the child; he was like a man meditating revenge. It was a powerful picture. A middle-aged woman in a black
chador
, catching sight of it in the near-darkness, gave a start and put her hand on her left breast.

The television service ended that evening with a five-minute camera study, without comment, of Khomeini resting in his Tehran hospital room after his heart attack. He was sitting in an easy chair; his legs and feet were covered with a yellow blanket. The camera moved slowly from the man to his bed and the simple furnishings of the room and back to the man. Once the camera rested on his left hand: long fingers, the skin extraordinarily smooth for a man of eighty. Once or twice the
little
finger lifted, as if involuntarily, and then fell back. There was no other movement from him during the five minutes of this camera study, no sign of any emotion. He was not a man meditating revenge; he was a man whose work had been done. And all the time, in the background, a male choir sang a three-word song:
“Khomeini e Imam! Khomeini e
Imam!” “Khomeini is the Imam.” The ruler above everyone else, the deputy of the hidden Twelfth Imam, the regent of God.

The second time I walked past the American embassy there was a smaller crowd, and no demonstration. In a green tent not far from the main gate a young man and a young woman in quilted military clothes were selling big four-colour posters: the hands of the Iranian people around President Carter’s throat, the president’s mouth opening wide to half-disgorge a small Shah, leaning out of the president’s mouth with a moneybag in each dangling hand.

A tall foreign photographer in a brown leather jacket, with his equipment slung from his shoulder, was talking to a guard at the main gate, apparently pleading to be let in. The gate opened, but it was only to let another guard in. No drama, nothing more to see.

That came later, on my way back to the hotel. On Revolution Avenue, one cross-street down, in an area of once-elegant shops, part of the great middle-class city the Shah had created in North Tehran, a small boy sat on the pavement not far from plastic sacks of store rubbish. He had lit a fire in the middle of the pavement, using rubbish from the sacks.

The fire was new. Sparks and burning paper blew onto passers-by. The boy, who was about ten, sat right up against his fire. But he wasn’t warming himself. With a face of rage, he was tearing at his shirt; and he was already half naked from the waist up. It was very cold; there was a wind. The boy, sitting almost in his fire, with two boxes of matches beside him, tore and tore at his shirt. His bare feet were grimy; his face was grimy. People stopped to talk to him; he looked up-staring eyes in a soft, well-made face—and continued to tear at his shirt; and the people who had stopped walked on. A hunchback, mentally defective, appearing out of the pavement crowd, walked around the boy and the fire, hands dangling, mouth agape; and walked uncoordinatedly on.

A fire in the middle of the rush-hour crowd: a signal of distress, but there was no one who could respond. It was only in pictures that the tears of children were beautiful. The hysteria of this child, stretched to breaking point, would have matched the mood of many of the passers-by; and was too frightening.

It was frightening to me, too. And without the language I could do even less than the people who had, at the beginning, stopped to talk to the boy. I walked on along Revolution, turned down Hafiz, dodging the traffic in the cross-streets (one, formerly France, now relabelled Neauphle-le-Château, after the French town from which Khomeini, in exile, directed the revolution); walked past the long brick wall of the Russian embassy (something like a water tower being installed on the top of a modern apartment block: the embassy compounds of the nineteenth-century powers, Britain, Russia, France, Turkey, occupy great chunks of central Tehran); and at length, after the boutiques and the shops and typewriter shop and the French bookshop and the shop with a big stock of electrical goods (a little girl, wrapped in a flowered cotton
chador
, sitting in the doorway and selling chewing gum from one little box), came—in the shadow now of the very big traffic flyover whose
pillars marched down the middle of a much-dug-up Hafiz Avenue—to my hotel, behind its own high wall.

If I had followed my original plan, if I hadn’t been put out by the boy with the fire, I would have walked down Revolution Avenue to Tehran University. And there I would have come upon the big event of the day. Sixty thousand Mujahidin students had gathered in the university grounds. The Mujahidin, “soldiers of the faith,” were Muslims, but they were also of the left, and for that reason not acceptable to everybody. Elements of the Tehran street crowd, “the people,” had set upon the Mujahidin, and there had been fighting with sticks and knives and stones. Thirty-nine people had been injured.

Of that great disturbance just a short walk away not a ripple reached the hotel. And if I hadn’t heard about it later that evening from a foreign correspondent, I might never have known. The next day was Friday, the sabbath, and the English-language
Tehran Times
didn’t publish on that day.

One year after the revolution Tehran was still drifting. Everybody was free; everybody was waiting; everybody was nervous. The city could appear to be without event. But it was a battlefield, full of private wars.

T
HE
drama—of the American embassy—that had brought hundreds of journalists to Tehran had, ironically, shattered the local English-language press. Where was
The Message of Peace
, so combative in August, so full of the rightness of the faith and the wrongness of everything else? And
Iran Week
(cover lettering like
Newsweek
)—such new offices, and the people inside a little vain of their revolution—why was
Iran Week
so hard to find?
The Iranian
(
New Statesman
-like) was considered the better weekly, but the issue I bought turned out to be the last. The decision to close must have been taken in a hurry: the back cover invited subscriptions, the half-filled editorial column said good-bye.

The daily
Tehran Times
had shrunk. It was now four pages, a single folded sheet. In August it had been a paper of eight pages, bright with advertisements and writers and religious features. It had been a paper of the revolution and the faith. The office had been busy; there were even some Europeans or Americans giving a hand (one American,
reportedly a Shia convert, out-Shiiteing them all). Mr. Parvez, the editor, busy with his proofs, had thought, when I went to see him, that I wanted a job. And, kindly man that he was, he seemed ready to give me one.

No such mistake could be made now. There was no such busyness. Mr. Parvez wasn’t sitting at a proof-strewn desk. He was walking listlessly about the empty room. He didn’t remember me, but he seemed glad to see someone, glad to talk. He sat down at his bare desk and invited me to sit on the desk.

Things were bad, Mr. Parvez said, very bad. Since the students had seized the embassy, many foreign firms had closed. He had lost advertisements and readers. The circulation of the paper was now only thirteen thousand, and he wasn’t even recovering his printing costs. He lost three hundred dollars with every issue. So that for him, and his business associates, Friday, the sabbath, when the paper wasn’t published, was truly a day of rest.

I said, “Why don’t you suspend publication until times are normal?”

“No, no. I say that if we miss
one
issue—”

He didn’t finish the sentence. To speak of disaster was to bring disaster closer.

He was forty-nine. In August I had understood him to say that he was an Iranian from India. Now, less professionally pressed, more nostalgic, he said he was from Bhopal in Central India. He had begun his literary career in that country as a poet, in Urdu, the half-Persian, half-Indian language that is especially dear to Indian Muslims. Parvez was his pen name from that Indian time. In Iran, where he had become naturalized, he had turned to English-language journalism. All the money he had made from earlier ventures he had put, after the revolution, into the
Tehran Times
. He hadn’t got any of that money back so far. “I haven’t touched a rial.” To fail now would be to lose everything.

“We will borrow some money, find money somewhere, and continue until the New Year.”

The Iranian New Year, in the third week of March, five weeks away: it was the magic date of which many people in Tehran spoke. On that good day, it was felt, things might change. Something might be worked out and the American hostages might be released, and the country might get started up again. The revolution within the revolution
had laid the country low. The students who were holding the hostages had become a law unto themselves. They called themselves “Muslim students following the line of Imam Khomeini,” but there was no telling who controlled them and what they might do. They were critical of everybody; they were using embassy documents to make “revelations” about everybody; they had even made “revelations” about the
Tehran Times
.

Mr. Parvez said, “They might hold the hostages for a year.” His voice went very thin. “The hostages might even be killed.”

He sat quite still in his chair. But his face, not always turned to me, quivered with nervous little movements: the grey eyebrows, the eyes, the corners of the mouth. He spoke softly, surprise always in his voice, as though from minute to minute he awakened afresh to his calamity.

He said, “We were thinking of expanding to twelve pages. We had a meeting in October. From the first of January we were going to have twelve pages. Then this happened.”

Posters were still on the windows facing the street.
Everybody is reading the Tehran Times. Ask for it everywhere every day. We’ve got news for you
.

Uncovered typewriters were still on the empty desks. Across the room was the standard typewriter at which Mr. Jaffrey had worked in August. It was to Mr. Jaffrey that Mr. Parvez had passed me when he understood that I only wanted to talk to someone. And Mr. Jaffrey, though with a half-finished column in his machine, had given me a little time.

“How is Mr. Jaffrey?”

“I’ve had to let him go. I’ve had to let them all go. There used to be twenty of us.”

Like Mr. Parvez, Mr. Jaffrey was a Shia from India. He had migrated to Pakistan before coming to Iran, the Shia heartland. It was Mr. Jaffrey who had introduced me to the queer logic—as queer to me at the end of my journey as it had been at the beginning—of the Islamic revival. Speaking of the injustices of Iran, Mr. Jaffrey had said he had begun to feel, even in the Shah’s time, that “Islam was the answer.” This had puzzled me. Religious assertion as an answer to political problems? Why not work for fair wages and the rule of law? Why work for Islam and the completeness of belief?

But then Mr. Jaffrey had revealed his deeper longings, the longings
that had lain below his original, political complaint. As a Muslim and a Shia, he said, he had always longed for the
jamé towhidi;
and he had translated that as “the society of believers.”

That society had come to Iran: ecstasy in the possession of a true imam, mass prayer rallies, the perfection of Islamic union. But out of that society had not come law and institutions; these things were as far away as ever. That society had brought anarchy, hysteria, and this empty office. And now Mr. Jaffrey’s typewriter, out of which Islamic copy had rolled, was still: uncovered, askew on the empty desk. (No office boy now, bringing a plate of fried eggs to the desk of the harassed journalist.) That typewriter, the modern office, the printing equipment, advertisers, distributors, readers: that required the complex, “materialist” society—of which, unwittingly, Mr. Jaffrey was part. This complex society had its own hard rules. It required more than faith; it required something in addition to faith.

I said to Mr. Parvez, “Is it hard now for Mr. Jaffrey?”

“It is hard for him. It is hard for everybody.”

“His typewriter is still there.”

Mr. Parvez considered the office. His eyelids trembled. He said, and his voice broke, “That—that was a special area.” With a slow, Indian swing of the head, he said, speaking as of a very old and very sweet memory, something that might have been the subject of his Urdu verses, “It used to be our city room. And that”—the room at his back—“was our reporters’ room. Now there are only two of us.”

“Who writes the editorials?”

“I write them.”

“They’re good.” And, in the Iranian minefield, they were.

“I can’t concentrate. The financial problems are too great, too complicated.”

“This is where you need your faith.”

But after three months he had been worn down. Every day since the embassy had been seized, there was some statement or incident that encouraged him to think that the crisis was about to end; every day that hope was frustrated. And there were family problems as well. He had a son who was studying in the United States; fortunately, the boy had written that he didn’t need money from home just yet. Another son had been about to get a student visa for the United States when the embassy was seized.

I said, “Mr. Parvez, you are a good Muslim and a good Shia. Your paper used to be full of criticism of materialist civilizations. Why are your sons studying in the United States?”

It wasn’t the time to push the question. He was too weary. He said, speaking of the second son, the one who hadn’t been able to get the visa, “It’s his future. He’s studying computer engineering. And Britain—it’s expensive.”