Back of Beyond (32 page)

After a breakfast at dawn of fresh-baked flat bread, honey, and mast, I thanked my hosts profusely with presents from my bag (I often wonder what Hassan does with my red Moroccan leather spectacle case. He didn’t own any spectacles, he just loved its rich color), and set off again for Gorgan and the land of the Turkoman.

More ruts, more skidding around sharp bends, a muddy stretch where a downpour of night rain in the mountains had made surging rivers out of a string of dry streambeds—but no more knocks. The improvised shock absorber repair worked fine. I passed ghostly ruins of two caravansarys, ancient resting places for camel trains on the great trading routes between Afghanistan and Turkey.

Eventually I arrived in Gorgan, a rambling town on the edge of a vast green plain. Unlike the mud-walled enclosures of most desert villages, the buildings here were mainly two-storied constructions with large balconies. Heavy roofs, covered with pantiles, gave protection to the balconies and often to a large part of the street below. This was particularly noticeable in the bazaar, a long rambling lacework of tiny streets where one could gaze comfortably at the small shops and remain perfectly dry even in the worst rainstorm. Actually, it was in the bazaar that I saw my first Turkoman.

He was bargaining for a bundle of coarse rope. He had high Mongolian cheekbones and almond eyes, a browny yellow complexion and a magnificent curved beard, which started abruptly below his bottom lip and swung in a scimitarlike arch to a pointed tip.

But it was his hat that caught my attention. Like a huge black upturned Persian rice pan, it immediately conjured up pictures of cossack horsemen, dancers, balalaikas and cries of “
Ra
!”

I tried to engage him in conversation, “conversation” being a polite way of explaining my hand-waving antics combined with a very limited vocabulary. In desperation, I pointed to his hat. “
Kojast?
” (where?) I asked. He smiled, lifted it from his head, and put it into my hands. Made from closely coiled Persian lambs’ wool, it was a beautiful thing to look at and to hold. I put it on—much to the amusement of the rapidly increasing group of spectators. I should have known better. It was impossible to give it back. He insisted, almost in a menacing manner, that I keep it (an Iranian custom, actually more of a social obligation, when any possession is admired by a stranger). I shall never forget the proud way he smiled, bowed, and left me rather embarrassed, holding his prize possession. A Turkoman without his hat. Impossible!

On the following day, the weather changed. The clammy mist disappeared, revealing soft tree-covered hills. Below the town, a great green plain stretched northward toward the border. A fresh, clean breeze blew in from the Caspian Sea.

I had made many inquiries about the Turkoman people and had been advised to travel first to Pahlavidej, fifty miles into the plain, where a market was held in the town every Thursday. Unfortunately it was Sunday. Nevertheless I was determined to buy some more of those hats and a few of the locally produced shawls made from crude cotton and printed in brilliant oranges and greens.

The road to Pahlavidej from Gorgan was a rough dirt track, posing no problems in a dry summer but not quite so straightforward during a wet spring. After the third river crossing, when at one stage the water reached halfway up the doors, I began to wonder whether I should ever reach the town.

On either side, wheat fields stretched as far as the eye could see. There was no one about. No sign of movement anywhere except for a gentle almost hypnotic waving of the young wheat. Gorgan had long since faded into the heat haze. It was not without some anxiety that I lurched across the next flooded stretch, the car bravely pulling itself through the mud on three of its six cylinders.

A crazy little humpbacked bridge formed the entrance to Pahlavidej. The town consists simply of two wide streets crossing at right angles at the central maidan. The buildings were mainly two-storied brick and wooden structures. At first sight a dusty, uninspiring place.

Then I began to sense its character. I felt as though I’d passed into another country, seemingly oblivious of the rest of the world. The women walked freely in the streets wearing brightly colored dresses and shawls. Their Mongolian heads were adorned with the most elaborate earrings and necklaces. Almost all the men had beards, some carefully groomed to a fine point, others dangling in great matted masses onto their chests. Some even had long Mandarin-type mustaches that hung limply from the outer edges of their upper lips. And every man had a hat, huge inverted pyramid hats; high narrow ones; short, stocky ones, and flat, wide ones, but all, nevertheless, true Turkoman hats.

I was regarded initially with what appeared to be amused contempt, at least until I made it known that I’d like to purchase a few hats. Suddenly, everyone became very friendly, and I was led off by a small boy into the narrow streets behind the maidan.

I bought six. They were so beautiful and so cheap (about $4.00 each), made by a little wizened black-cloaked man who looked more like some mysterious magician than a hatmaker. His eyes were narrow slits, and a continual smile flickered over his lips and his face. His wife was wrinkled, plump, and equally cheerful in appearance. She wore what appeared to be at least four brightly colored dresses, surmounted by a huge bright red cotton shawl. Her smile was as infectious as the old man’s.

The bargaining completed, I was literally forced to sit down cross-legged on the crudely made Turkoman rugs and join them in their meal of local goat’s milk, cheeses, yogurt, eggs mixed with rice, and flat chapati-like bread. Glass upon glass of hot tea was pressed into my hands. I felt like royalty.

After lunch, the old man led me proudly round “his” part of the town, pointing out the magnificent Turkoman stallions, famous throughout the world as racing horses. In Pahlavidej, they form the only satisfactory means of personal transport and are also used extensively as plough horses in the wheat and cotton fields. He told me, through one of his English-speaking sons, of his younger days when the whole of Turkomania was part of Iran. He had led a nomadic life rearing horses and sheep. He used one beautiful phrase: “My life was like the air.”

Now, he said, since the division of the Turkoman area, most of the tribesmen on the Iranian side had settled down in permanent villages scattered throughout the plain—Gomishan, Crupan, Fenderisk, and many others. Their nomadic yurt tents were now used to protect the harvested wheat from storms. Cooperatives were being established. Many of the young men were moving to the cities along the Caspian coastline and to Tehran. He was watching a way of life disappear. And he was sad.

I left Pahlavidej in the evening. The sun was a great red ball slowly dissolving into the wheat fields. I passed a few Turkoman riders sitting proudly on their young stallions and saw women gathering water from a well, their red-and-gold shawls softly gleaming in the dusk light. I waved at some of the children as they gazed at the car. When they grow up, will they be riding the same stallions and wearing the same hats and looking every evening across those vast green-and-gold plains?

Like the old man, I too was a little sad, and also curious about the future of this isolated corner of Iran, recently involved in border disputes with the USSR. “My life was like the air,” he had told me. But now there were new storms brewing in the north….

I headed west, along the coast of the Caspian Sea toward Rasht. The Elburz Mountains rose to snowy fourteen-thousand-foot peaks. Their southern slopes facing out over Tehran and the great Salt Desert, Desht-e Kavir, were dry and cracked, but on this side they received abundant rain and were covered in dense subtropical jungle.

I finally found my village again, at the marshy edges of the Caspian, beyond Rasht. The headman M’mad recognized me in spite of a new beard, expanded midriffs, and all the signs of an overindulgent Western life.

Nothing much had changed. Their homes were still simple affairs of wood plank walls and reed-thatch roofs, and I went fishing again in the early mornings in a wooden canoe, catching catfish with an ease that almost made me feel guilty. They just seemed to lie there in the shallows waiting for me to toss in the bait, almost as if they wanted to be caught. Oh, and did we eat! Fat catfish steaks sprinkled with ground sumak, cauldrons of lobster-red crayfish, cracked open and dipped in melted butter, fresh salty slabs of goat cheese, thick dollops of mast and honey on hot flat bread and—God how I’d missed it—pungent, gray caviar (the villagers made their own caviar illegally, from sturgeon caught a few miles away in the Caspian Sea shallows). We spread it thickly on small rice flour pancakes cooked by the women on a griddle over a log fire.

And then someone suggested a boar hunt.

Well, I’m not much of a huntsman type, but the idea of photographing wild boar out in the marshes was too tempting a prospect to reject.

“Fine,” I said, having no idea what I’d let myself in for.

“Good,” he said. “We leave after breakfast tomorrow.”

It was a warm clear morning, hardly a cloud anywhere. We left the village in three
quayk
canoes. The first carried four beaters, young men who had volunteered to arc through the northern edge of the outer marsh and drive the boar toward us in a shallow lagoon. They knew the place well. It was a favorite village hunting locale, the scene of regular forays for meat. The other two boats carried five older men, experienced hunters, and me. Their guns seemed old and rusty, but they’d obviously performed well on previous trips if their tales were anything to go by.

We paddled slowly through fields of water hyacinth, waves lapping placidly under a rapidly warming sun. Unfortunately the mosquitoes were up as early as we were, waiting for us in biting clouds as we entered the lagoon. They were impervious to repellent and seemed much more attracted to my fleshy torso than the lean, muscular bodies of my companions. I lit a cigar. That didn’t seem to make much difference so I lit a second. Then everyone in the boat wanted one and in the other boat too. Pretty soon we were all paddling across the lagoon under a cloud of Jamaican cigar smoke, and the mosquitoes went off in search of other less aggressive antagonists.

We beached the boats on the far side of the lagoon at the edge of a forest of reeds, well over head height. M’mad imperiously handed out rubber boots and gloves to ward off the razor-edged reeds, and then issued instructions. The hunters were to move north toward the beaters; I was to remain near the boat in a narrow stretch of lagoon to photograph any boar that made it through the gauntlet.

The voices of the hunters faded away into the reeds. Soon I had the place to myself. There was no breeze. The sky was cloudless and the sun oppressively hot. And it was so quiet. I have rarely known such a stillness. The only sound was my heartbeat and the murmur of blood in my ears, rather like the kiss of a soft shower at dusk. There were no mosquitoes either. I felt an enormous surge of peace.

I seemed to be there for hours. Occasionally, far, far away I’d hear the noise of the beaters, and then nothing more for long periods.

Sometime around midday my troupe of frustrated hunters returned for lunch, complaining about the lack of boar.

And it was then I noticed the leeches.

In spite of my thigh-high rubber boots those cunning little black threads had switchbacked through every available gap in my loose clothes. I could see them in the green water, like discolored spermatazoa, but I missed them on the lily leaves and the overhanging fronds of marsh palm. The hunters’ legs were dripping in them. I thought I was safe until I pulled off my boots during lunch and found a dozen or so happily sucking away on my shins. They’d somehow slipped over the tops and down through two pairs of socks to find flesh.

The local custom is to leave them alone until their sticky bloated bodies, ballooned to full finger-sized capacity, sealed up the wound and dropped off involuntarily. But some customs are hard to honor. I couldn’t bear to see them slowly increasing in girth with my blood. So I tried the other remedy of burning their tails with a lit cigar until they wriggled and fell. The only problem then was that in their haste to evacuate, they forgot to coagulate their incisions and I was left with oozing wounds. Khusrow, M’mad’s son, shook his head at my stupidity, scooped up a palm full of soft marsh mud, and placed little piles of the stuff on each sucker hole.