In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

As far as I could make out through the echo and distortion, Hossein was relating the anguish that he felt at his decision to fight to the death. In return for fealty to Yazid, he and his companions would be spared, but that would mean living in dishonour, indifferent to God’s will. Then Hossein’s half-brother, Abol Fazl, entered.

The portraits show Abol Fazl to be as god-like as his brother, albeit more windswept. The Abol Fazl before us was shifty and greasy; he would have been convincingly cast as a sheep rustler. He was much shorter than Hossein, whom he clasped repeatedly to his breast as they both wept. Hossein was asking Abol Fazl to fetch water from the river. Both knew that the younger brother stood little chance of surviving his mission.

Abol Fazl leaped onto a mangy grey standing at the side of the street, where the camel had been. (The camel was peripatetic and for hire; it was now appearing on other stages in the neighbourhood.) He steered the horse dexterously around the stage, calming it when its hind legs buckled as it turned on the greasy asphalt. Whenever Abol Fazl approached the awning, the women shrank, while he (holding the microphone in one hand and the reins in the other) declared his love for Hossein and for God. The young men in the audience grinned when the horse broke wind during a break in the music. Their fathers frowned.

The next bit of the story happened offstage. Fighting savagely – I had read this in the books – Abol Fazl reached the riverside. He bent down, cupped his hand and brought some water to his mouth. Then he stopped himself and the water flowed back through his fingers. His sense of chivalry wouldn’t allow him to slake his thirst before the women and children had slaked theirs. Having filled his leather water container, he remounted, but was cut down in the subsequent struggle, losing his hands and eyes. He cried out, ‘Oh brother, hear my call and come to my aid!’ Two arrows were dispatched. One pierced Abol Fazl’s water container. The other entered his chest.

Abol Fazl staggered onstage. The pierced flagon was between his teeth. An arrow protruded from his chest. His arms were two very long stumps. The stumps supported two bloody objects, which he dropped for us to see: his hands, sliced off in the fray. The Imam cradled the dying Abol Fazl. The men near me in the audience were beating their chests in time with the tombak. The women under the awning rocked inconsolably.

And that was the end of the play. It wasn’t time for Hossein to die; that would come tomorrow, the day that is called Ashura. The actors picked themselves up and left the stage. Among the audience, there was a rustling, a rearranging of positions and a collective, audible exhalation. And then, to my surprise, the inconsolable found consolation. Facial expressions brightened. The audience’s agony changed to equanimity, even satisfaction. The man in front of me greeted the person standing next to him agreeably; a few seconds before, both had been blubbing like children. In the women’s section, conversations began. Abol Fazl seemed to have been forgotten.

Had he been forgotten? Was this grief deceitful? Not deceitful, I think: simply not exclusive. The emotions in Iran haven’t been compartmentalised. They coexist; they thrive in public. The borders between grief, entertainment and companionship are porous. You can weep buckets, natter with a neighbour and take away memories of a farting nag. Stifled sobs, trembling upper lips – they don’t exist here. Emotion may be cheaply expressed, but that doesn’t mean the emotions are cheap.

Some members of the audience were starting to leave their places. The narrator strode into the middle of the stage. He addressed us fluently, softly. He craved our indulgence – he wanted to tell a story that would live in our memories. The people moved back to their places and he began.

A few years back, he started, after the troupe had performed the play we’d just seen, he’d been delighted when a man dropped a large sum of money onto the green cloth in the middle of the stage. As he was counting it after the performance, another man had approached and said, ‘Excuse me for interfering, but you can’t accept that money.’

The narrator had replied: ‘Why not? It’s a lot of money, and I’ve got a wife and kids to feed. It pleases God when money is accepted for good work.’ The man replied, ‘Believe me, sir, you can’t accept this money. Yours is Muslim work, and the man who gave you the money is a Christian. He’s Armenian.’

The audience was gripped. What a dilemma! What would you do in such a situation? The narrator went on: ‘The Armenian chap was driving off when I ran up to him and thrust the money through the open window of his car. I said, “I’m sorry; I can’t accept this money. Forgive me, by the soul of the Imam Hossein, I can’t accept.”’

When he learned why his money had been rejected, the Armenian had switched off the car ignition and said, ‘I have something to tell you.

‘Recently, I was driving with one of my employees, a Muslim, and the brakes failed as we were coming down from the mountains. There were valleys on both sides, and we were going faster and faster. I called out, “Oh Jesus! Save us!” and tried the brakes again, but they didn’t work. I called out a second time, louder, and rammed my foot down on the brakes. Nothing. A third time, I beseeched Jesus to save us. Again, no result.

‘Panic-struck, I looked across at my employee. He said quietly, “Call for Abol Fazl.” I was having trouble keeping the car on the road. I shouted, “Who’s Abol Fazl?” He said, “Sir, time is running out. Call him!” I had nothing to lose, so I shouted, “Save us, Abol Fazl!” and the brakes suddenly worked. We came to a halt just short of a cliff.

‘When we got out of the car, I asked my employee if he’d seen a man on the road, as we were braking. He shook his head. I told him that there had been a man wearing green, and that he had no hands.’

The narrator paused. He bowed his head and emitted three sobs. Then he wiped his eyes and his tone became diffident. ‘Estimable brothers and sisters, you may wish to express your appreciation, and it doesn’t matter how much you put on the green cloth …’ – he went on to list sundry denominations, all of which were beyond the means of those present. ‘No, the amount doesn’t matter. But if, during the course of the coming year, you request Abol Fazl’s intercession and he doesn’t answer, take the matter up with me …’

Nudged by their mothers, the little boys and girls came across to our side of the stage, to get money from their fathers. Then they went over to the cloth and knelt down to kiss and touch it – it had an association, however tenuous, with the Imam Hossein, and few in the audience had the means to go to Karbala. They dropped their money. Once the cloth was covered with notes, men appeared holding trays laden with refreshments. They’d been provided, we learned, by a local trader called Mr Naji. His philanthropy would earn him friends in this life and divine favour in the next.

There were cakes and cucumbers laden high on a copper plate, cinnamon-flavoured rice puddings and little stork’s bundles containing deep-fried white candies seasoned with rose water. There was a ewer pouring water into plastic cups, a loop of tea from the spout of a kettle. In her determination to get a rice pudding, a woman elbowed me in the face. I escaped from the crowd.

Rubbing my jaw, I walked away into a nearby side street. The piercing notes of the orchestra had been succeeded by a mellow, distant sound. Gradually, it grew closer and I was able to distinguish individual sounds within it: hands striking chests, a tremor of lamentation and the diesel motors on generators that were amplifying the lamentation. The processions had started.

Suddenly, I heard a scramble of words through a loudspeaker, and the boom of a bass drum. I looked back up the humdrum street, with its box-like parked cars and unsanitary smell coming from the drainage channels, and saw an army of mounted men on the brow of a hill. Their lances scintillated in the lamplight as they prepared to charge and meet their doom.

The army turned out to consist of a man carrying an iron standard, along whose considerable length oscillated swords and gargoyles and plumes of different colours. He was followed by two columns of men, marching in time with the base drum, flagellating their backs with chains on short handles – a strike for every ponderous beat. A man held up an unintended cross that was composed of two loudspeakers tied to a pole; they were wired to a microphone held by a wailing man a few paces behind.

I had to squeeze up against the wall to make room for the standard to pass. The bearer was thickset, bulging and tight-lipped in his task. He was bound to his panoply from a buckle on a thick belt around his waist. As he passed, he half-slipped, and the weight of the standard pulled him towards me. Thinking I might get hit, I ducked into a side alley.

Once the man had passed, I followed the procession to the main road, where it entered a string of processions, a dozen or more from different neighbourhoods. They were united, and also in competition with each other. The people along the pavements would decide which procession was biggest, and which had the most impressive standard. Had the flagellants been equipped with one chain or two? (From that, you could gauge the benefactor’s generosity.)

There was a mood of sombre recreation. More young men with heavily gelled hair held suggestive conversations with groups of unescorted girls – this being the only night of the year when young women, under the cover of piety, were allowed to roam without a chaperone. Families strolled. Young boys had been dressed in the white Arab robes of little Ali Akbar, Hossein’s nephew; Ali Akbar had fought bravely against Shemr’s men, before being cut down.

The more I walked, the better I understood the enormous size of this crowd; it extended as far as the eye could see. This main road was fuller, perhaps, than it would be at any other time in the year. The same was true of main roads across Iran; at that moment, tens of millions of people were in the streets. I reflected on the grief, and the entertainment that people made of that grief. Then I remembered another reason for the show: defiance.

The people on the streets were united by their love for the Imam Hossein, his father the Imam Ali and (to a lesser degree) the other ten Imams that are regarded by most Shi’a Muslims as the rightful inheritors of the Prophet’s mantle. Shi’as are an overwhelming majority in Iran, but only a small minority across most of the Muslim world. It was the forebears of today’s Sunni majority, Yazid and his followers, who rejected the hereditary principle and murdered its exponent, the Imam Hossein. (They also, Shi’as believe, murdered every other Shi’a Imam, apart from the twelfth.) Even now, in the twenty-first century, the Sunnis of neighbouring Pakistan are capable of launching murderous attacks on the Shi’as of that country, shooting up mosques and assassinating prayer leaders. In Saudi Arabia, a Sunni monarchy controls the holy places. Many Sunnis regard the Shi’as as heretics.

And so here, and in other streets across Iran, the people were showing that they would neither be extinguished nor ignored. They were showing, too, that they would not forget that dreadful sin, the murder of the Imam Hossein.

CHAPTER TWO Isfahan (#ulink_08faa035-5096-5c9b-97eb-f4db36b26480)

One afternoon in the spring I set out from the Armenian quarter in the lovely city of Isfahan, towards the Seminary of the Four Gardens. The following day was the anniversary of the investiture of the Imam Ali as the Prophet’s successor. The people were in a good mood. They revered Ali for being modest and just, and looked forward to celebrating these qualities by visiting family members, stuffing themselves with beryan – a dish that features minced sheep’s lungs – and passing judgement on their hosts’ new daughter-in-law. They strolled in the mild afternoon sun, mothers and daughters arm in arm (and fathers in their wake), buying tulips to put in iced water to keep overnight, and sweetmeats to take as gifts.

I reached one of the main roads that head north towards the river, and hailed an old shared taxi. The back seat had its complement of three. The occupant of the front passenger seat stepped out so that I could sit between him and the driver; I was suspended over the gap between their seats. The driver sat hunched over the steering wheel, leaning slightly against the door. We moved off. The driver changed gears like a surgeon replacing dislocated bones.

We were soon stuck in traffic outside one of the big banks, in front of which was a shiny blue car mounted on a gantry. The car – new, French-made – was an incentive: every account holder stood a chance of winning it in a prize draw. It was caparisoned with bunting and flashing light bulbs. It had metallic paint that had been devised by a computer. The bank had put it on the gantry to publicize it – and to make it hard to steal.

I looked in the rear-view mirror and my eye was taken by a fat woman sitting in the middle of the back seat. She was staring longingly out of the window at the zippy French car. She caught me looking at her and pretended to be scandalized, tucking her fringe under her headscarf. ‘What’s happening up there. Mr Driver?’ she demanded, ‘Why aren’t we moving?’

A car, a Buick from the 1970s, was stuck at the intersection, having carried out half a U-turn. Another car, an Iranian-made Paykan, had grazed one of the Buick’s tailfins. The drivers had got out of their cars. The wife of the Buick driver was leaning out of the window, yelling.

‘Look at the wife, egging him on!’ said our driver. ‘What difference does it make? That poor Buick’s been wounded more times than I have.’ The side of the Buick was discoloured from dents that had been amateurishly smoothed out. The engine was still running. It emitted black smoke.

The taxi driver reached under his seat, pulled out a thermos and unscrewed the cap. He poured a little tea into a dirty glass that rested on the dashboard, swilled it around and poured it out of the window. He filled the glass with tea and, putting it back on the dashboard, closed the thermos and put it back under his seat. Then he held up the glass and said, ‘Please go ahead …’

He was offering us tea. In such instances, you don’t accept. It would be bad form. It’s his tea, but he has to offer it. It would be bad form not to. But he’d be put out if someone said, ‘Yes, I’d like some of your tea.’ No one does. The driver gets to drink his tea and appear courteous at the same time. Both ways he wins.

There was polite murmuring around the taxi: ‘Thanks, but no’ … ‘You go ahead and have some’ … ‘I don’t feel like tea’ … ‘I’ve just had some tea.’

Lies. We’d all enjoy a glass of tea.

The driver took out a packet of cigarettes and we went through the same rigmarole. We felt our breast pockets for imaginary packets of cigarettes. Eventually, the driver withdrew a cigarette from his packet, lit it and settled down to watch. A policeman had arrived at the intersection. He was trying to broker a reconciliation. The driver of the Paykan was a cocky brute, well-built, young enough to be the Buick driver’s son. He danced from one foot to another. Soon, the policeman seemed to make a breakthrough. The youth hugged the Buick driver.

During the argument, the traffic lights at the intersection had turned green several times, at which cars had surged forward from all directions. Lots of them wanted to turn, this way or that, but the Buick and the Paykan were blocking their way. The cars were revving, edging forward, kissing bumpers. Someone would have to reverse. Iranian drivers don’t like reversing. It’s a form of defeat. I felt sorry for the policeman.

He did a good job. He positioned himself in the middle – whistling, gesturing, occasionally giving a winning smile. He was a professional. In a little while, at his prompting, a car edged forward from the middle, and away. Another followed. The knot was untied.

‘Well done!’ the taxi driver murmured, and we moved forward. The protagonists stayed where they had been. They would wait for more policemen, who would take statements and measure angles to determine who was at fault. As we went past, the Buick driver’s wife, a woman in a red scarf, leaned out of the window and shouted at her husband, ‘I should have known you wouldn’t have the balls to stand up for yourself! You, who took the full brunt of the Iraqi attacks! Why don’t you stand firm, instead of letting some beardless chick trample your pride?’

The woman’s husband turned around. His face was full of anguish. His wife wasn’t much older than the Paykan driver.

The taxi driver sighed as we drove off. ‘You’ve got to show them who’s boss from day one. I mean, now it’s too late. He’s let her get out of control, challenge his authority. Nothing he can do now.’

A little further down the road, a man who was sitting next to the woman in the back seat got out. He was replaced by a thin woman who recognized the succulent woman: they were distant relatives. They didn’t seem pleased to see one another. They passed on regards to each other’s families, and extended invitations for tea and lunch.

The thin woman said, ‘Did you get much rain in Tehran?’

‘More than dear Isfahan, I can tell you! You know, what with struggling to combat the illness of my late husband – may God show him mercy – and the demands it’s made on my time and health, this is the first time I’ve been to Isfahan for five years. Oh! My heart burned when I saw the river – dried up like a burned courgette, with the wretched boatmen standing around in the mud, with nothing else to do but pray for rain. I mean, is it possible for a river to have no water? Our river? In this day and age?’

‘They sold our water to Yazd,’ the driver said. ‘They sent it off in a pipeline. Cost a fortune to build. The fathers of bitches.’

We were in a long queue of cars. The driver leaned out, far enough to see past the cars in front. He swung the wheel and pressed down hard on the accelerator. We emerged from the queue of cars, into the oncoming traffic. There weren’t many cars coming; the lights ahead were red. By the time the oncoming traffic started to move, we were elbowing our way into a gap between two cars, now much nearer the traffic lights. One of the other drivers raised his hand, but was too lazy to clench it.

‘I don’t know why everyone drives so fast,’ the fat woman said to her relative. ‘All they do when they get to their destination is drink tea.’