Shah of Shahs (5 page)

The only toys of my childhood were stones. I pulled a stone with a string—I was the horse, and the stone was the Gilded Chariot of the Shah.

Every pretext, he says, was good for rising up against the Shah. The people wanted to get rid of the dictator, and they flexed their muscles whenever they had the chance.

Everybody looked toward Qom. That's the way it had always been in our history: Whenever there was unhappiness and a crisis, people always started listening for the first signals from Qom.

And Qom was rumbling.

This was when the Shah extended diplomatic immunity to all U.S. military personnel and their families. Our army was already full of American experts. And the mullahs came right out and said that the Shah's move offended the principle of sovereignty. Now, for the first time, Iran would hear Ayatollah Khomeini. Before that, no one knew of him—nobody but the people of Qom, that is. He was already over sixty, old enough to be the Shah's father. Later he would often call the ruler "son," but of course in an ironic and wrathful tone. Khomeini attacked him ruthlessly. My people, he would cry, don't trust him. He's not your man! He's not thinking of you—he's only thinking of himself and of the ones who give him orders. He's selling out our country, selling us all out!
The Shah must go!

The police arrest Khomeini. Demonstrations begin in Qom. People call for his freedom. Next, other cities take to the streets—Teheran, Tabriz, Meshed, Isfahan. Then the Shah sends the army into the streets and the slaughter begins. (He stands up, stretches out his arms, and curls his hands as though gripping the stock of a machine gun. He squints his right eye and makes a machine-gun rattattat.) That, he says, was June, 1963. The uprising went on for five months. Democrats from Mossadegh's party and the clerics led it. More than ten thousand people were killed or wounded. Then came a few years of funereal but never total quiet since some sort of rebellion and fighting was already breaking out. Khomeini was thrown out of the country and went to live in Iraq, in An Najaf, in the greatest Shiite city, site of Caliph Ali's tomb.

Now I wonder just what conditions created Khomeini. In those days, after all, there were plenty of more important, better-known ayatollahs as well as prominent political opponents of the Shah. We were all writing protests, manifestos, letters, statements. Only a small group of intellectuals read them because such materials could not be printed legally and, besides, most people didn't know how to read. We were criticizing the monarch, saying things were bad, demanding changes, re-form, democratization, and justice. It never entered anyone's head to come out the way Khomeini did—to reject all that scribbling, all those petitions, resolutions, proposals. To stand before the people, and cry,
The Shah must go!

That was the gist of what Khomeini said then, and he kept on saying it for fifteen years. It was the simplest thing, and everyone could remember it—but it took them fifteen years to understand what it really meant. After all, people took the institution of the monarchy as much for granted as the air. No one could imagine life without it.

The Shah must go!

Don't debate it, don't gab, don't reform or forgive. There's no sense in it, it won't change anything, it's a vain effort, it's a delusion. We can go forward only over the ruins of the monarchy. There's no other way.

The Shah must go!

Don't wait, don't stall, don't sleep.

The Shah must go!

The first time he said it, it sounded like a maniac's entreaties, like the keening of a madman. The monarchy had not yet exhausted the possibilities of endurance.

Here we see a group of people standing at a bus stop on a Teheran street. People waiting for a bus look the same all over the world, which is to say that they have the same tired, apathetic expression on their faces, the same posture of sluggishness and defeat, the same dullness and antipathy in their eyes. The man who gave me the photograph, whenever that was, asked me if I noticed anything strange in it. I thought it over and said, no, I couldn't spot anything. He replied that the picture had been taken under cover, from a window across the street. I was to note, he said as he showed it to me, the guy (with the anonymous face of a lower-level bureaucrat) standing near, inclining his ear toward three other men talking. That guy was from Savak and he was always on duty at the bus stop, eavesdropping as people waited for the bus and absent-mindedly bantered about this and that. People could discuss only innocuous matters, but even then it was necessary to stay away from subjects in which the police could pick out significant allusions. Savak had a good ear for all allusions. One scorching afternoon an old man with a bad heart turned up at the bus stop and gasped, "It's so oppressive you can't catch your breath." "So it is," the Savak agent replied immediately, edging closer to the winded stranger; "it's getting more and more oppressive and people are fighting for air." "Too true," replied the naive old man, clapping his hand over his heart, "such heavy air, so oppressive." Immediately, the Savak agent barked, "Now you'll have a chance to regain your strength," and marched him off. The other people at the bus stop had been listening in dread, for they had sensed from the beginning that the feeble elderly man was committing an unpardonable error by saying "oppressive" to a stranger. Experience had taught them to avoid uttering such terms as
oppressiveness, darkness, burden, abyss, collapse, quagmire, putrefaction, cage, bars, chain, gag, truncheon, boot, claptrap, screw, pocket, paw, madness,
and expressions like
lie down, lie flat, spread-eagle, fall on your face, wither away, gotten flabby, go blind, go deaf, wallow in it, something's out of kilter, something's wrong, all screwed up, something's got to give
—because all of them, these nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns, could hide allusions to the Shah's regime, and thus formed a connotative minefield where you could get blown to bits with one slip of the tongue. For a moment, for just an instant, a new doubt flashed through the heads of the people standing at the bus stop: What if the sick old man was a Savak agent too? Because he had criticized the regime (by using "oppressive" in conversation), he must have been free to criticize. If he hadn't been, wouldn't he have kept his mouth shut or spoken about such agreeable topics as the fact that the sun was shining and the bus was sure to come along any minute? And who had the right to criticize? Only Savak agents, whose job it was to provoke reckless babblers, then cart them off to jail. The ubiquitous terror drove people crazy, made them so paranoid they couldn't credit anyone with being honest, pure, or courageous. After all, they considered themselves honest and yet they couldn't bring themselves to express an opinion or a judgment, to make any sort of accusation, because they knew punishment lay ruthlessly in wait for them. Thus, if someone verbally attacked and condemned the monarch, everybody thought he was an agent provocateur, acting maliciously to uncover those who agreed with him, to destroy them. The more incisively and lucidly he spoke the views that they kept hidden inside themselves, the more suspect he seemed and the more violently they backed away from him, warning their friends: Watch out, something fishy about this guy, he's acting
too
brave. In this way terror carried off its quarry—it condemned to mistrust and isolation anyone who, from the highest motives, opposed coercion. Fear so debased people's thinking, they saw deceit in bravery, collaboration in courage. This time, however, seeing how roughly the Savak agent led his victim away, the people at the bus stop had to admit that the ailing old man could not have been connected with the police. In any case, the captor and his prey were soon out of sight, and the sole remaining question was, Where did they go? Nobody actually knew where Savak was located. The organization had no headquarters. Dispersed all over the city (and all over
the country), it was everywhere and nowhere. It occupied houses, villas, and apartments no one ever paid any attention to. Its doors stood blank or bore the names of nonexistent firms and institutions. Only those who were in on the secret knew its telephone numbers. Savak might rent quarters in an ordinary apartment house, or you might enter its interrogation rooms through a store, a laundry, a nightclub. In such a situation, all walls can have ears and every door or gate can lead to the secret police. Whoever fell into the grip of that organization disappeared without a trace, sometimes forever. People would vanish suddenly and nobody would know what had happened to them, where to go, whom to ask, whom to appeal to. They might be locked up in a prison, but which one? There were six thousand. An invisible, adamant wall would rise up, before which you stood helpless, unable to take a step forward. Iran belonged to Savak, but within the country the police acted like an underground organization that appeared then disappeared, hiding its tracks, leaving no forwarding address. Yet, at the same time, some of its sections existed officially. Savak censored the press, books, and films (it was Savak that banned the plays of Shakespeare and Molière because they criticized monarchical and aristocratic vices). Savak ruled in the universities, offices, and factories. A monstrously overgrown cephalopod, it entangled everything, crept into every crack and corner, glued its suckers everywhere, ferreted and sniffed in all directions, scratched and bored through every level of existence. Savak numbered sixty thousand agents. It also controlled, someone calculated, three million informants, who denounced other people from such varied motives as money, self-preservation, or the desire for a job or promotion. Savak bought people or condemned them
to torture, appointed them to positions or clapped them into the dungeons. It defined the enemy and thus decided who should be destroyed. Of such a sentence there could be no review, no appeal. Only the Shah could save the condemned. Savak answered to the Shah alone, and those upon whom the monarchy rested quailed helplessly before the police. The people waiting at the bus stop knew all this and therefore remained silent once the Savak agent and the old man had gone. They watched each other out of the corners of their eyes, for all they knew the one standing next to them might have to inform. He might have just returned from an interview in which Savak told him that if by chance he noticed or heard something and reported it, his son would gain admission to the university. Or that if he noticed or heard something, the entry about his belonging to the opposition would be erased from the records. "For God's sake, I'm not in the opposition," he says in self-defense. "Yes you are; it's written down right here that you are." Without wanting to (even though some of them try to hide it so as not to provoke any aggressive outbursts), the people at the bus stop look at each other with loathing. They are inclined to neurotic, disproportionate reactions. Something gets on their nerves, something smells bad, and they move away from each other, waiting to see who goes after whom, who attacks someone first. This reciprocal distrust is the work of Savak, which has been whispering into all ears that everyone belongs to Savak. This one, this one, and that one. That one too? Sure, of course. Everybody. But on the other hand these people waiting for the bus might be decent folk, and their inward agitation, which they mask with silence and stony expressions, might stem from the fact that a moment earlier they felt the quick surge of fear that a close brush with Savak causes. Had their instinct failed them only for a moment, and had they begun discussing some ambiguous subject like the way that fish spoils quickly in the heat and the amazing fact that a rotting fish's head begins to stink first and has to be cut off immediately if you want to save the rest—had they broached such a culinary theme they might have shared the hapless lot of the man who held his hand over his heart. But they are safe for the moment and they stand at the bus stop wiping their sweat away and fanning their wet shirts.

Whisky sipped in conspiratorial circumstances (and you really have to conspire now, with Khomeini's prohibition in effect) has, like all forbidden fruits, an additional, enticing tang. Yet the glass holds just a few drops of liquid—the host has drawn his last bottle from deep in hiding and knows he won't be able to buy a next one. Iran's remaining alcoholics are dying: Unable to purchase vodka, wine, or beer, they gulp one of a variety of chemical solvents, which finishes them off.

We are sitting on the ground floor of a small, comfortable, well-cared-for townhouse, looking through the open glass doors onto the garden and the wall separating the property from the street. Ten feet high, this wall multiplies the territory of intimacy and constitutes a sort of outer boundary of the house, within which the living space has been built. My host and hostess are both around forty; they studied in Teheran and work in one of the travel agencies (of which, due to their compatriots' wanderlust, there are hundreds).

"We've been married more than twelve years," says the man, whose hair is just beginning to gray, "but only now, for the first time, have my wife and I been discussing politics. We'd never before spoken to each other on the subject. It's the same with all the other couples we know."

No, he doesn't want to imply they lacked faith in each other. Nor had they ever made any sort of agreement about the matter. Yet they had an unspoken compact that they accepted mutually and almost unconsciously, which resulted from a certain sober reflection on human nature: namely, that you never know how someone is going to behave in an extreme predicament, what he can be forced into, what calumny, what betrayal.

"The worst of it," his wife suggests, "is that no one can predict how much torture he'll be able to stand. And Savak meant, above all, torture of the most horrible kind. They would kidnap a man as he walked along the street, blindfold him, and lead him straight into the torture chamber without asking a single question. There they would start in with the whole macabre routine—breaking bones, pulling out fingernails, forcing hands into hot ovens, drilling into the living skull, and scores of other brutalities—in the end, when the victim had gone mad with pain and become a smashed, bloody mass, they would proceed to establish his identity. Name? Address? What have you been saying against the Shah? Come on, what have you been saying? And you know, he might not have said anything, ever. He might have been completely innocent. But to Savak, that was nothing, being innocent. This way everyone will be afraid, innocent and guilty alike, everyone will feel the intimidation, no one will feel safe. The terror of Savak depended on this ability to strike at everyone, on everyone's being accused, since accusations had to do not with deeds but with the sort of intentions that Savak could ascribe to anyone. Were you against the Shah? No, I wasn't. But you wanted to be, you shit! That was all it took.