The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (29 page)

Yazd, being smack-dab in the middle of the desert, has remarkable weather except in midsummer, when it is unbearably hot. But both Karri and I enjoy the desert air and the vistas, and like most desert towns, this place has a certain languorous quality that is all the more inviting after one has spent time in a metropolis. Clean air, bright sunshine, and incredibly friendly citizens—no hustle and bustle, shoving, and the generally boorish demeanor found in Tehran and other big cities, not even in the ancient Yazd bazaar. Crossing the street is a breeze in Yazd, though probably due less to the courtesy of the drivers than to the fact that there simply isn’t as much traffic. After we toured the ancient sites, seeing the old homes, and walking through the alleyways that traders of all nationalities plied centuries ago, we also wanted to see the Zoroastrian temple in Chak Chak, perched on the side of a mountain about a forty-minute drive outside of town, a mecca of sorts for Zoroastrians the world over.

Chak Chak is named for the mountain spring that for centuries has been dripping—“
chak-chak-chak
,” as the Persians, or those with a Yazdi accent, say—through a boulder and nourishing a massive tree. Zoroastrians, followers of the pre-Islamic Persian monotheistic faith, believe it is the spot where the daughter of the last Sassanid king, Yazdegerd III, cornered by invading Arabs, prayed to Ahura Mazda (god) to protect her; in response to her entreaties, the mountain opened up, providing her with a hiding place. The dripping spring,
according to legend, represents tears of grief for her, and the ancient tree jutting out of the rock is still believed by some to have grown from the staff that the princess leaned on.

On the drive there through the desert, we passed the village of Ardakan, where my father was born. Our taxi driver, a man my age or slightly older, spent most of the time singing the praises of Ayatollah Khatami (Mohammad Khatami’s deceased father and onetime prayer leader of Yazd), not knowing my relationship to the family. He was at pains to describe, especially to Karri, with me translating, how different the ruling mullahs of the past were compared to today. The elder Khatami, he said, was a most compassionate man and never accepted the bodyguards that the revolution insisted he have; he freed drug addicts and even homosexuals sentenced to death by Islamic courts; he was a symbol of what was right and just about the revolution. Our driver was less sanguine about the country’s current leadership, especially in Yazd province, and particularly since Friday prayer leader Mohammad Sadoughi, married to Ayatollah Khatami’s daughter Maryam, had died.

He also wanted to act as our tour guide, after wondering aloud why on earth an Iranian with an American wife and child would want to bring them to Iran, and to the desert at that. He told us the story of Chak Chak exactly as I knew it, except, nonsensically, he replaced the Persian princess in the legend with a granddaughter of the prophet Mohammad, a Shia escaping the Sunni hordes, who, upon hearing the voice of the angel Gabriel—the same angel who passed Allah’s message to Mohammad—tapped her cane on the ground, and the mountain opened before her. The miracle of the spring and the tree and the mountain opening he attributed to Allah’s favor for the Shia, erasing the Zoroastrian origin of the site, something he probably learned early in his life from unlearned mullahs who could not abide miracles that were not purely Islamic.

There seemed to be no real Zoroastrians at Chak Chak, other than the guard who charged non-Zoroastrians a fee to climb the
steep steps to the holy site, perhaps because most pilgrims, I was told, make their annual pilgrimage there in the spring, a two-week period when non-Zoroastrians are actually forbidden to enter. We encountered many young Iranian couples and families, as one does at any historic site, museum, or tourist attraction in Iran, but Karri mentioned how strange the setting was without the hordes of foreign tourists one sees at comparable European or Asian sites. The large carving above the temple’s bronze doors was a Farvahar, the symbol of Zoroastrianism, with the bust of a man atop a winged disk, or sun. That and our driver’s attempt to Islamicize the origins of another religion’s holy place reminded me of Iranians’ internal conflict over their history and their faith.

Iranians are an immensely proud and supremely nationalistic people, men and women who glory in their nation’s ancient past and have always been dismissive of, if not downright racist toward, the Bedouin Arabs who brought them their faith. Even the most pious, and even some of the clerics, have been traditionally anti-Arab, which explains to some extent an Islamic Iran’s difficulty in maintaining good relations with other Muslim countries in the region. It also creates a contradiction, in revering an Arab prophet and Arab Shia saints whose people Iranians believe to be inferior. Some of the youth of Iran today, who chafe at the restrictions on their lives and disdain the theocracy that places them there, and who dislike Arabs anyway, look to their pre-Islamic past both for assurance that their nationalism is founded and as a symbol of protest against the religion that they feel was forced on them by Mohammad’s armies centuries ago and by the ayatollahs today.

There is no greater symbol of Persian glory than the Farvahar, which was even a part of the shah’s Pahlavi coat of arms. One sees the winged sun pendants around the necks of young men and women everywhere—every jewelry shop in Iran sells silver and gold versions in all sizes. These young Iranians are not Zoroastrian, of course; nor could they convert even if they wanted to, for the religion does
not allow conversion and even excommunicates adherents who marry outside the faith. And they may forget, or be ignorant of the fact, that like almost all state-supported organized religions with a clerical hierarchy, it has a sordid history, particularly in the behavior of its priests, much as Islam does in the behavior of some of its mullahs and sheikhs today.

We had only one social obligation in Yazd, one that we actually looked forward to, and that was to visit the Khatami family: the widow of Mohammad Sadoughi, the late Friday prayer leader; her son, also named Mohammad and who had, since his father’s passing, finally donned his forebears’ priestly garb; and Khatami’s ninety-year-old mother. Ali Khatami, who had driven us down from Tehran, was, of course, going to be present. We took a taxi from the hotel to the old city, where their ancient and beautifully restored house stood behind the main mosque, and the driver had assured me he knew the way to the former prayer leader’s house, which was all I told him of our destination. When we arrived, though, I saw that he had brought us to the wrong address.

“That’s the house down the alley,” he said, “the Friday prayer leader.”

I realized that even though Sadoughi had been dead less than a few months, this cabbie had moved on, having brought us to the
new
Friday prayer leader’s house. But I recognized the mosque across the street, so we got out anyway and crossed over, passing through the mosque courtyard and to the alley behind, where Ali came out to greet us. The Revolutionary Guard sentry post, which had been occupied twenty-four hours a day by an AK-47-wielding guardsman when I had visited in the past, was gone. The family was gathered in the informal den, including Reza Khatami, another of the former president’s brothers who had been arrested in the post-2009 election unrest and was
mamn’ou-khorooj
, forbidden from leaving Iran. We sat down to glasses of tea, some of the famous Yazdi pastries, and bowls of fruit.

Maryam Khatami quickly peeled an orange for Khash, who was happy to have it as he eyed her son suspiciously. He had seen mullahs on the streets, and had already met the former president in his office, but I suspect he was curious about the robes, and particularly the turban, for he always insisted that I take my hat off whenever I wore one. He warmed up soon enough, though, and Mohammad, a bright, genial, and soft-hearted man, even enticed him into his arms. Maryam made some small talk with Karri, in broken English and the Farsi that Karri by now understood, but we mostly chatted about family, and the tone was solemn, as is expected with Iranian families in mourning, which for Yazdis lasts a full year. Reza Khatami was interested in U.S. politics, the presidential election in 2012, and whether I thought President Obama was doing a good job and whether he’d be reelected. Whatever conversation we had about Iranian politics was couched with careful words and accompanied by knowing looks and assenting nods, for we all knew that the house, where the Supreme Leader used to stay when he was in town, was in all probability, no,
definitely
, bugged.

Before we took our leave, we went into a guest bedroom, where the senescent Mrs. Khatami, née Ziaie, was resting. She had recently suffered a stroke and lost almost all her sight, but was nevertheless engaged and very curious about Khash, whom she said she wished she could see. Karri said a few words in Farsi, her accent apparently amusing to the others in the room, and we left, saying our goodbyes to all the Khatamis, me a little sad about the somber mood in the house and the dramatic change in all their lives: not just the death in the family, but the way the once hopeful and ascendant reformists had been brought down by a vengeful regime that couldn’t abide even the gentlest of criticism. One didn’t feel sorry for the family necessarily, despite the harassment, the calls to Evin prison for hours-long interrogations that Reza—married to the granddaughter of the founder of the republic, no less—had to deal with, and the fall from grace in a regime they had helped create. No, the family would be all right—
better off, in fact, than the vast majority of their countrymen. One simply felt sorry for the country, and Karri, the outsider, concurred. Plus, Mohammad Sadoughi’s newfound clerical role meant I had one less friend on Facebook, which, he embarrassingly confessed, glancing at the iPad in his hands, he had now been obliged to abandon.

We left Yazd the next day by taxi, since I discovered that it would cost only about sixty dollars to go to Esfahan, some two hundred miles away. Our driver, a pleasant enough man, had an ample supply of roasted watermelon seeds on the dash and proceeded to plow through the bag, one seed at a time, cracking it between his front teeth and extracting the tiny nut with his tongue, almost all the way to our destination. As such, he was rather laconic, not even expressing interest or irritation when Khash screamed bloody murder. He would only smile, and nod his head. “Kids,” he’d say, knowingly.

But when we reached the outskirts of Esfahan, a large city with an industrial base, he grew loquacious, complaining that the Esfahanis were mean people and the world’s biggest liars. He didn’t know our hotel, even though I told him it was close to the main square and within walking distance of the famous Safavid-era Si-o-sel Pol, or “Thirty-three Bridge” (named for its thirty-three arches over the Zayandeh River), and he insisted he would simply stop and ask for directions, even though we would be intentionally misled. He’d have to ask a number of different people, he said, and would hope that a few wrong directions would cancel one another out and he would eventually be put on the right path. Karri laughed when I translated, assuming it was intercity rivalry speaking. Iranians are as tribal and chauvinistic about their hometowns as, say, New Yorkers are about midwesterners, whose abode some derisively refer to as the “fly-over zone.” Or as some Londoners might be about Mancunians—or any northerners, for that matter.

Anyway, we stopped at a traffic circle, and our driver stepped out to ask the driver of another car, parked just in front us. After much waving of hands, our driver returned and proclaimed, “He lied
through his teeth. He told me to go back the way we came, which would take us
out
of the city.” Karri was unsure whether he had intentionally been given bad directions, or his prejudice didn’t allow him to believe what he was told, or the other driver had a different, albeit longer, route in mind. But when we stopped again, and got completely different directions, she began to wonder. By the fourth time we stopped to ask—at which point I recognized the main road leading to the hotel and could guide the driver—she was genuinely tickled. How could it be, she said to me, that our driver was right? Coincidence, I assured her. But the surly receptionists at our hotel, so unlike every other Iranian she had met, made her think that perhaps Esfahanis were indeed a different breed.

The hotel, once called the Shah Abbas Hotel, for the Safavid king who had made the city his capital and built most of it, was at one time a grand Persian structure, an old estate converted to a hotel in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Renamed after the revolution the Abbassi Hotel—the regime seems incapable of even pronouncing the word
shah
—it was virtually unchanged from when I first stayed there, as a visiting student on Christmas holiday from boarding school in London. In 1972. Everything in the hotel, including the furniture in the rooms, seemed to be exactly as it was then, and the only care taken by the owners, a semiprivate insurance company, appeared to be in the gardens, which were as magnificent as ever, their persimmon and quince trees fat with fruit that greeted us when we ventured out for a cup of tea.

It was too late to go out and wander the old city, so after a long sojourn in the fragrant gardens, where Khash delighted in running around, especially on the grass where signs were posted to keep off, we decided to stay in for dinner and put Khash to bed early. Having subsisted on a diet of Persian food for days, delicious as it was, we craved something different, so we went to the cafeteria by the lobby, where I could swear the low furniture and tables were the same ones I had sat on and at forty years ago. The hamburger, a huge but thin
concoction in a bun the size of a Frisbee that just had to be custom baked for the hotel, was also exactly as I remembered it, from when my older brother, his American classmate David Smith, and I all ordered the same thing on the first night we arrived in the city by bus from Tehran.

The hotel is a short walk from most tourist attractions, the main one being Naghsh-e Jahan Square, the largest in the world after Tiananmen in Beijing, built by Shah Abbas in the late sixteenth century. In keeping with the schizophrenic naming method of the Islamic revolutionaries, its name was changed from Shah Square to the current “Image of the World” Square, but it is also known, or the regime would like it to be known, as Imam Square. Referring to Imam Khomeini, presumably, and not to one of the imams, or saints, of the Shia faith.