Granta 125: After the War (14 page)

That was a different betrayal to
SNOW BETRAYAL
.

Perhaps I was reminded of the betrayal with the calf, with the two calves, because this night journey by lorry across the plain and the empty fields was as translucent as thin milk. Sitting in the slipstream of the emigration crate my mother had spoken only of
SNOW BETRAYAL
.

Then she was travelling to the camp in a sealed cattle wagon, and now she was travelling with me in a lorry to the customs point. Then she was guarded by soldiers with guns, now only the moon was watching. Then she was locked in, now she was emigrating. Then she was seventeen, now she was over sixty.

It was tough travelling on a lorry by moonlight through the February snow with sixty years and seventy kilos and an emigration
crate, but it was nothing compared to 1945. After many years of harassment I wanted out of this country. Even if my nerves were shot, even if I had to do it to escape the Ceau6escu regime and its secret service, and so as not to lose my mind,
STILL
it was something I wanted to do, not had to do. I wanted to get out, and she wanted to because I wanted to. I had to say that to her on the lorry, even if my gums froze as I was talking. ‘Stop comparing, it’s not the snow’s fault,’ I had to say to my mother, ‘the snow didn’t force us out of our hiding place.’

At that time I was not far from losing my mind. I was so exhausted my nerves were playing tricks on me, the fear I felt came through every pore and onto every object I tinkered with. They then tinkered with me. If you look just a little over the edge, manoeuvre just a little in that tiny space in your head between the abstruse and the normal, and if you watch yourself doing it, you have reached the farthest point of normality. Not much more can be added. One must keep an eye on oneself, try to separate thinking and feeling. One wants to absorb everything into the head as usual, but not into the heart. Inside yourself two versions stalk: one enlarged but totally strange, the other familiar but unrecognizably tiny and blurred. You feel yourself becoming increasingly unrecognizable, indistinct. This is a dangerous state to be in, however closely you pay attention you don’t know when it will topple over. Only that it will topple over if this shitty life doesn’t change.

It wasn’t just that there was no hiding place in the snow, as I said to my mother, there was none in my head: it was clear to me I had to get away. I was at the end of my tether, for several months I had confused laughing and crying. I knew when not to cry, when not to laugh, but it was of no use. I knew what was right, and I did it all wrong. I was no longer able to keep to what I already knew. I laughed and I cried.

It was in this state that I arrived at the Langwasser transit hostel in Nuremberg. It was a tall tower block opposite the site of Hitler’s rallies. The block contained little boxes for sleeping in, corridors with no windows, neon light only, countless offices. On day one there was
an interrogation by the German Counter-Intelligence Service. Then again on the second day, repeatedly, with breaks, and on the third, and on the fourth. I understood: the Securitate weren’t here with me in Nuremberg, only the German Counter-Intelligence Service. I was now where he was, but where was I, how the hell did I get here. Their interrogators were known as inspectors. The signs on the doors read Inspection Office A and Inspection Office B. Inspector A wanted to know if in fact I had ‘an assignment’. The word ‘spy’ didn’t come up, but they asked, ‘Did you have anything to do with the secret service there?’ ‘It did with me, there is a difference,’ I said. ‘I’ll be the judge of that, it’s what I’m paid for,’ he said. It was disgraceful. Inspector B then asked, ‘Did you want to overthrow the regime? You can admit it now. It’s yesterday’s snow.’

Then it happened. I couldn’t stand it that some inspector was dismissing my life with a saying. I leapt up from the chair and said, far too loud, ‘It’s always the same snow.’

I have never liked the saying ‘yesterday’s snow’, because it has no curiosity about what happened in the past. Now I knew clearly what it was I couldn’t abide about the saying, the snows of yesteryear. I couldn’t stand the meanness of it, the contempt. This expression must be very insecure to puff itself up like that, to appear so arrogant. We can gather from the expression that this snow was presumably important in the past, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about it, wouldn’t be trying to rid ourselves of it today. What went through my head next I didn’t say to the inspector.

In Rumanian there are two words for snow. One is the poetic word,
nea
. In Rumanian
nea
also means a man whom we know too well to address formally but not well enough to address familiarly. One might use the word
UNCLE
. Sometimes words determine their own uses. I had to defend myself against the inspector and against the suggestion in Rumanian that said to me, it’s always the same snow and always the same uncle.

And something else happened when, newly arrived from the dictatorship to a Nuremberg transit hostel, I was being interrogated
by a German Secret Service man. I’ve just been rescued, I thought, and I’m sitting here in the West like the calf on the sofa. Only when I saw the
HUNGER IN THE EYES
of the official did I understand that it was not only the tormented calf with the broken foot that had been abused, but also, every bit as much – only more insidiously – the spoiled calf on the sofa.

Every winter the white seamstress came to our house. She stayed for two weeks, ate and slept with us. We called her white because she only sewed white things: shirts and undershirts and nightshirts and brassieres and suspenders and bedclothes. I spent a lot of time near the sewing machine and watched the flow of the stitches, how they formed a seam. On her last evening in our house I said to her at dinner, ‘Sew something for me to play with.’

She said, ‘What should I sew for you?’

I said, ‘Sew a piece of bread for me.’

She said, ‘Then you’ll have to eat everything you’ve played with.’

Eat everything you’ve played with. You could also describe writing that way. Who knows: what I write I must eat, what I don’t write – eats me. The fact that I eat it doesn’t make it disappear. And the fact that it eats me doesn’t make me disappear. The same thing happens when words turn into something else as you write, to be precise, when objects proclaim their independence and verbal images steal what is not theirs. Especially when writing, when words become something different, to be precise, what is taking place is perhaps always the same snow and always the same uncle.

I
n the land of Ferdowsi, of Rumi and Omar Khayyam, Hafez and Scheherazade, in October of the year 1977, fifty-nine poets and writers assembled to read and recite for ten continuous nights. Ten thousand people gathered in the gardens and halls of the Goethe Institute in Tehran. The stories and poems were recorded and distributed to ten times ten thousand people. In the course of those nights, under the bright stars and moon of the city’s cloudless skies, the nation’s intellectuals joined chorus with peasants, workers and mullahs who raised their own voices in protest in towns and cities around the land. Two hundred and eighteen poems were read, and in the words they chose the poets spoke their anger to the Shah, to where he sat upon his Peacock Throne. The Shah’s anger grew and in the weeks that followed he tried to crush the people, but the people would not be crushed. And so he tried to appease them, he blamed his prime minister and sent him away, he repealed some laws and made new ones. But still, the people would not be appeased.

A year later the Iranian people had had enough of 2,500 years of monarchy. There were more protests, strikes. By summer of that year the Shah had squarely entered the business of making martyrs. On 7 September he put the country under curfew and when protesters gathered in Jaleh Square he unleashed his security forces upon them, hundreds were killed.

M
y family – mother, stepfather, elder brother and sister, younger brother and I – arrived in Tehran shortly afterwards, posted there by the United Nations for which my stepfather worked. I was fourteen, and about to see a part of somebody else’s history be made.
I wish I had been older, wiser. I wish I could remember more, had paid more attention, understood more – but then I remind myself that I was not alone. What happened in 1979 has happened many times before and many times since, in places where people have set themselves free and believed with all their hearts that the freedom they had fought for was real and lasting, only to be recaptured.

M
y sister and I flew Pan Am to Tehran from boarding school on 15 December 1978. Snow on the ground in England, our train had been unable to reach the platform and so we disembarked and plunged into two foot of snow, struggling with our suitcases along the tracks. We would have missed our plane, had it not also been delayed several hours because of the weather.

In Iran the workers of the National Oil Company had been on strike since the massacre in Jaleh Square. Kerosene and heating oil were in short supply and our house in Ekhteshamiyeh Street was freezing. We had a row of juniper trees at the end of the garden and a view of the Elburz Mountains. We knew scarcely a soul, had no television. There would have been little point; the programmes were all in Farsi. We listened to the BBC World Service and Voice of America for reports of what was happening in the country: the roadblocks, the soldiers, the graffiti, the curfew, the power cuts.

I was, at that time, an ardent revolutionary. I had a poster of Che Guevara on my wall and a sweatshirt bearing his image. I read his speeches and admitted to no one that I found them utterly impenetrable. I was ardent – all I lacked was a revolution. And now here was a revolution and I had no idea whose side I was on. The Shah was a tyrant who controlled the nation’s wealth and tolerated no opposition. From our house we often drove past Evin prison, where the political prisoners were held, and they included intellectuals and artists. Confusingly, the Shah also had a reputation as a social progressive who believed in the education of women and planted trees.
Khomeini was unappealing and as a religious leader disbarred himself from my support. But when I heard people on the radio warning that the Communists would take over from the mullahs if there was a revolution in Iran, I decided to back the rebels. I spent my evenings reading by candlelight before taking a freezing shower (if there was water, which often there was not) with which I tried to imbue myself with revolutionary spirit. I fell asleep huddled under blankets and woke to clear blue skies and the startling sight of the mountains.

Pahlavi Avenue was the main thoroughfare through the city, and it seemed every other street or building was named Pahlavi something: Pahlavi Square, the Pahlavi Institute. Reza Shah and his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had built modern Tehran and wished their efforts to be acknowledged. My stepfather was invited to present his credentials to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose titles were strung across the top of the crested card: ‘His Imperial Majesty, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Head of the Warriors’.

In the Tehran of 1978 there was Kentucky Fried Chicken, an Ice Palace rink, Polidor Cinema, the City Theatre and a casino in the Hilton Hotel. We visited none of those places. The city was in virtual lockdown, and many places were no longer open or only open on certain days. The Shah had tried to placate the mullahs by closing coffee shops and banning the sale of alcohol. We visited the bazaar where my mother bought vegetables from a green-eyed Kurd whose stall faced the street. Trouble often kicked off at the bazaar, stoked by the bazaaris, the trading class who had dominated trade and imports until the Shah allowed himself to be courted by foreign interests. The main bazaar in Tehran became emblematic of the bazaaris’ loss of influence to the executives of multinationals and was a flashpoint for protests. The inside of the bazaar was a web of shadowed alleyways, where getting lost was all too easy, so we dared only peek from the relative safety of the street at the ubiquitous carpets, cassettes, plastic flowers, heaps of rose petals and saffron.

There was nothing to do. Everything that might have made life more bearable – our stereo, our books – was held up in a shipment
along with the rest of our household goods. One day the telephone rang, even though there was nobody who was likely to call us. I picked it up but there was no sound save the distant murmur of male voices. I told my stepfather who remarked that the line was likely bugged. SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, were known to be very thorough. In my boredom I would sometimes pick up the phone and listen: they were always there, the tiny, tinny voices. Often I’d yell or sing or whistle, but there was no response. It was a household with three cold and bored teenagers and we bickered and bitched. It snowed and for a couple of days we were trapped. I built a snowman with my five-year-old brother while men shovelled snow off the roof. In the photograph of us, separated by the looming snowman, you can catch a glimpse of my Che Guevara sweatshirt under my woollen jacket.

Winter bore down on us. We kept the windows of our house sealed tight against the cold, which is perhaps why, at first, we didn’t hear the singing. Or perhaps it had just taken a while for the singing to reach our suburb of Darrous where the avenues were wide and the walls high. Fury with the Shah spread from the poor of south Tehran to the wealthy in the northern suburbs. People took their rage and fashioned it into a song and at night they sang it from the rooftops to others who caught the tune and sang it back.

From somewhere far off: a single voice, then a moment of silence. From close by: a chorus of voices, some young, some old, a family. From elsewhere, other voices answered. Soon the night was filled with the sound. The same thing in every city, town and village across the land, the nights before, that night and every night from then on. I came to know when it would happen. I waited and listened. At the approach of nine o’clock people turned out the lights, dimmed kerosene lamps, blew out candles and climbed the stairs to their roofs and I would turn out my light too. For precisely ten minutes they sang a nightly recitative, the sound of people calling to God for their freedom: two words, two notes, five syllables each stretched until it resonated like a string:

‘Allah-hu Akhbar!’

T
here are two kinds of curfew party. At one you arrive just before curfew and leave at dawn. The other kind requires a little more imagination. Guests arrive dressed to the nines in broad daylight, sip Martinis at two in the afternoon and depart before curfew. We received an invitation to a New Year’s party from the mother of a school friend, Mrs P., an expatriate married to an Iranian. She ran a bakery in town which remained open, indeed thrived, as these places are reputed to do in troubled times, trading cinnamon Danishes, chocolate dainties and a few moments of oblivion.

The party gave us something to look forward to. New Year’s Eve fell on a Sunday, a working day in Iran. The Iranian New Year, Nowruz, falls at the beginning of spring so the day of our party was otherwise just an ordinary day. My mother, brothers, sister and I went into town, for what reason I cannot remember, and were on our way home when we ran into a demonstration of thousands on Pahlavi Avenue. Our driver, Ali Baba, turned the car around and drove us to the British Embassy on Ferdowsi Avenue where the huge metal gates were just being closed. The guards let us in and then locked the gates, backing a Land Rover up against them. We waited by our car, swapping stories with others also temporarily seeking sanctuary.

At first the drama pleased us, but what should have been exciting soon became boring. By about one o’clock we began to worry about getting to the party, due to begin at two. In decades to come I would read about people in Sarajevo who risked the fire of snipers to sit in a cafe and drink coffee. I would understand exactly why a person would do such a thing. In the places I grew up – Sierra Leone where part of my family is from, Nigeria, Zambia, Iran because that’s where my stepfather’s job took us – curfews and coups were depressingly common; in Sierra Leone we seemed to live in a perpetual state of emergency. In the final years of the 1991–2002 war there, ordinarily sane friends would risk their lives for a last drink in a favourite bar and drive home without headlights, skirting the army checkpoints. I did it myself.

In Iran in the winter of 1978, after less than a month of confinement in Tehran, getting to the party became of the utmost importance. My mother asked that the embassy gates be opened. The security staff reluctantly complied. A great deal of reversing, manoeuvring and tutting ensued. When we set off down Ferdowsi Avenue we just about had time to get home and change, but at the Freedom Monument our luck came to an end as we ran into the protest again. This time we had no option but to drive on. People banged on the roof of the car, thrust their faces at the windows. Sweat rose on the back of Ali Baba’s neck as he edged the vehicle forward. Down a side street a car burned. We never should have put Ali Baba in that position; all the same, thanks to him, we made it through. At home my stepfather reported troubles of his own, having been besieged in his office while a mob had gathered outside and loudly contemplated burning the building down. He’d gone out, located the ringleaders and addressed them in Arabic, though he spoke the language quite badly having learned it long ago when he first joined the UN, along with Esperanto, which the organization had all its staff learn for a while, with the perfectly logical and democratic but ultimately unpopular idea that it might become the UN’s official language.

Beneath high ceilings, we gathered round tables laid with crystal and silver. Guests drank champagne, whisky and good wine. We ate guinea fowl and saffron rice sprinkled with slivered almonds and raisins. Our hostess wore an oyster-coloured satin gown that left her shoulders bare. The heavy drapes were drawn tight and not a ray of sun broke through. There was music; we danced deep into the night, or so it seemed. Except it wasn’t night. Such was the success of the party that we all forgot about the curfew. Around a quarter to eight there was a terrific scramble as guests made for their vehicles. My stepfather was driving. There was no street lighting and Tehran is anyway virtually impossible for a visitor to navigate. Somehow getting lost had been written into the poetry of the day, the final stanza. The first thing we did was to argue, but as the minutes passed we grew nervous and shut up. Everyone pitched in, trying to work
out the route. We drove past the same street sign twice; nothing looked familiar. We’d no idea what part of town we were in. Then we ran into a checkpoint and a soldier stepped into the headlights and waved us down. Even if he didn’t shoot us our chances of making it home by curfew were now just about zero. My stepfather spoke to the soldiers in fitful Arabic. Arabic is not a bit like Farsi and the Iranians are proud of the difference, but I guess a good many people in Iran went to Koranic school and studied Arabic there. The soldier pointed us in the right direction. We shouted with relief when we recognized Ekhteshamiyeh Street. At one minute to eight we turned into our front gate. The party expedition had united us – never more so than in that single minute.

Then we got inside, turned on the lights and decided it wasn’t such a big deal – we would have made it home safely anyway.

A
t my boarding school in England we had a tradition that any overseas girl belonging to a country which had chosen to implode was given permission to stay up late and watch the news reports of it doing so in the housemistress’s apartment. Two days after I left Tehran for the new school term, the Shah of Iran and his family left too, saying they were going on an extended vacation. Along with the Iranian girls, I was called downstairs in my dressing gown to watch the news. We carried our mugs of cocoa with us and so my memory of the Shah’s defeat comes with the taste of chocolate. The Shah left at night and there was no news footage of the occasion, but I remember a photograph of him and the Empress Farah which I suppose must have appeared in the newspapers around that time. The Empress is wearing a fur hat, a coat with a fur collar and holding a pair of gloves. Behind her are half a dozen men in dark suits. The Shah is holding a hat in his left hand. They are a procession, but one which is proceeding nowhere because a man in a military uniform has dropped to his knees in front of the Shah and is trying to kiss
his feet. The Shah is bent towards the man, as if to raise him up, as if this act, which has been performed many times by countless others, is now embarrassing for him. What’s odd about the photograph is that the Empress appears to be laughing. A long time later I read that when the Shah was leaving his imperial guard tried to prevent him. I think that’s who the man in uniform must be.