In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

There was no corridor past the mosque. I retraced my steps and walked north along the main road running parallel to the square. I turned right and felt the anticipation the architects intended I should feel. I entered the square where they plotted I should enter and saw what they wanted me to see. A vast bounded esplanade, bay upon bay, greatly monotonous. At the northern end: the entrance to the bazaar. At the southern end, the Mosque of the Shah. About two-thirds down, opposite one another: the Palace of Ali Qapu, and the Mosque of Sheikh Lutfollah.

The portico of Ali Qapu was crowned by a veranda with a roof supported by spindly wooden legs. From here, Abbas had watched polo matches, executions and military parades that took place in his honour. Beyond, at the southern end of the square, shivered the Mosque of the Shah. Slender minarets crowning the entrance portal; the dome’s colossal bulk and the harmonious disposition of traditional forms – four aivans, facing each other around a courtyard. With one renowned aberration: in order to face Mecca, the entire mosque after the entrance portal had been oriented obliquely.

In Iran, the beloved monuments are not buildings but gardens. The most respected engineer does not make roads but the underwater channels that carry the water that cools the houses and moistens the desert. The great mosques are clay cups, and the Mosque of the Shah has water to the brim.

Up close, the tiles are coarse. Their prodigious acreage is almost unattractive. From a distance, however, you long to be submerged.

Around the square, families were claiming the garden and pavements that had been laid over Abbas’s esplanade. There were picnics on the grass and girls playing badminton. Mothers chewed sunflower seeds and spat out the shells, while their husbands lit paraffin stoves. Urchin boys clung to the axle-bars of phaetons that propelled gently the well-to-do. Every now and then a shuttlecock would rise and fall before the dome of the little Mosque of Sheikh Lutfollah, like a tropical bird in front of a tapestry.

The Sheikh Lutfollah is one of the triumphs of all architecture. It has no courtyard, no minaret. The dome is low and made of pink, washed bricks, articulated by a broad, spreading rose tree inlaid in black and white. This dome catches the light shyly; the inlay is glazed, but not the bricks. The dome floats upon an aivan of typical ostentation – but askew, for the chamber has been placed twenty metres to the north. Why?

I crossed the square and went in. A small corridor opened off to the left: dark and dimly gleaming. I followed the corridor, and the darkness virtually obscured the tiles on the walls and vault. A few paces on, I was forced to take another turn, to the right, thick-wrapped in the corridor.

Ahead, a shaft of light, strained through window tracery, appeared from a wall two metres in girth. (The walls need muscle, to withstand the dome’s thrust.) The shaft of light pointed like a Caravaggio. I followed it, turning right and standing at the entrance to the dome chamber. The dark corridors had disoriented me and made me forget where I was in relation to the square outside. I’d taken no more than twenty-five paces.

A man and a woman and a little girl were standing under the dome, talking. There was one other person in the sanctuary, a heavy man.

The architect – whose name, Muhammad Reza b. Hossein, is inscribed in the sanctuary – skewed the dome chamber so it faces Mecca, but that is the extent of the Lutfollah’s resemblance to the Mosque of the Shah. In the Lutfollah, the dome chamber’s orientation is not an ostentatious oddity, but hidden, subordinated to the serenity of the whole.

The light in the sanctuary was more plentiful but dappled through the tracery of windows in the drum and by the glazed and unglazed surfaces around the chamber. It illuminated, seemingly at random, a section of the inscription bands and a bit of ochre wall inlaid with arabesques, and a clenched turquoise knuckle, part of a frame for one of the arches.

Imagine Abbas, at prayer in his oratory, his head bared and vulnerable, fluid sunlight catching his shoulder.

The little girl, idling while her parents examined the enamelled lectern, gazed up at the dome, put her arms out, and whirled.

The thickset man addressed me: ‘Mr Duplex.’

I said, ‘Mr Rafi’i?’

The man said: ‘Can you smell him?’

I sniffed.

He tried again: ‘Can you smell God?’

I followed Mr Rafi’i back along the corridor, towards the mosque entrance. He stopped outside a door that I hadn’t noticed and pushed it open. We looked in on a plain cell. ‘The Sheikh was Abbas the Great’s father-in-law,’ he said. ‘This is where he prayed, and where he was buried.’ Mr Rafi’i seemed to approve of the Sheikh’s simple tastes.

We entered the square, and I looked at Mr Rafi’i. In the half-light of the mosque, my attention had been drawn by his thick torso and neck – not a taut musculature but a ragged peasant virility. His face was red, bulging. He wore a check shirt and dusty baggy black trousers.

‘I just got in from my fields,’ he said, guiding me across the square. ‘Next week, we’re going to start harvesting. But it’s a busy time of year; I have to teach at the same time.’

Mr Rafi’i’s subject was the sayings, sermons and letters of the Imam All. For Shi’as, Ali is the supreme example of a just and generous sovereign. During his caliphate, he is said to have bought two shirts and offered the finer of the two to his servant. His judges were so independent, one found against him in a case.

As my ears got used to Mr Rafi’i’s rural accent, my eyes were drawn to his forehead. Many Shi’as have a purplish blotch there, from the baked tablet of earth they press down upon as they pray Mr Rafi’i’s blotch had gained a crust, with small features of its own. It seemed to laugh whenever he did – a wizened sprite, living in his head.

‘Here’s my horse, said Mr Rafi’i, pointing to an old motorbike with a hempen packsaddle that might have been designed for a donkey. ‘Get on.’

We went hoarsely down the little streets, into a main road that carried us, by way of one of the newer bridges, across the river. We strained up the hill on the other side, towards a shelf of mountains. We turned well before the mountains, continued for a couple of hundred metres and stopped at the gate of the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. We dismounted and Mr Rafi’i mouthed a greeting to the martyrs.

There are some seven thousand of them and each grave is surmounted by a metal frame that contains a photograph of the man in the grave. The graves are bunched, like copses, one copse for each major engagement. They represent a fraction of the martyrs from the province of Isfahan – I’ve heard of villages with a population of two or three hundred, and a score of graves in the War cemetery. The martyr’s families would come each week, Mr Rafi’i explained, usually on Thursday evenings. He said: ‘Come and meet my friends.’

He’d been their ally, their chaplain. He remembered the occupants of many graves; there was barely one whose name meant nothing to him. The photographs were formal, taken in a studio to commemorate earthly achievement – a school diploma, an engagement to be married. Perhaps a mother had sensed the coming martyrdom and requested a memorial pose.

‘These boys were nothing like the boys you see on the streets today. Nothing! They were clean! And they were fighting for God. They were fighting for the government of Ali; they longed for his caliphate.’

He pointed. The photograph depicted a very young boy with the beginnings of a beard. ‘He and his cousin died on the same day, coming back across the marsh. He was a good boy. They didn’t find his body.’

‘His grave’s empty?’

‘No, no … Listen! His parents tracked down some survivors from the operation, and got conflicting reports. One said he’d seen their boy being crushed by a tank. Another said he was electrocuted when the enemy diverted power into the marsh …’

Mr Rafi’i paused; he’d seen someone he knew, a bald man holding a watering can over a grave.

Mr Rafi’i called out: ‘Salaam Aleikum!’ The bald man smiled and beckoned us over. Mr Rafi’i introduced him: ‘This is Mr Mousavi, and that’s the grave of his nephew who died on the last day of the War. The great Creator saw fit to draw him to his breast …’

‘Thanks be to God,’ interrupted Mr Mousavi dutifully.

‘I was explaining to Mr Duplex here,’ said Mr Rafi’i, ‘the reason why these boys went.’ He turned back to me. ‘Boys like Mr Mousavi’s nephew – Amin, wasn’t it? – were in love with justice and God. Right, Mr Mousavi?’

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Mousavi. ‘The last time I saw him, he said – it was the end of the War, we thought he’d been spared … he said he was sorry that God hadn’t judged him worthy of martyrdom …’

‘Mr Duplex,’ Mr Rarf’i said, ‘you must know it’s an honour to be martyred; not everyone gets called.’

Mr Mousavi went on: ‘God heard him and took him on the last day of the War.’ His expression went dead. He was awed by the severity of God’s kindness. I looked at the photograph of Mr Mousavi’s nephew. A normal kid, with 1970s bouffant hair and a beard and a spiky shirt collar. I looked along the line of photographs, at his neighbours. They had the same confidence; God wouldn’t let them lose.

Mr Rafi’i and I went back to the grave of the boy whose body hadn’t been found. ‘At the end of the War,’ he said, ‘some of the old soldiers volunteered to go back to the battlefields and try and find the bodies of the missing lads. They even crossed the border, into Iraq. They used their knowledge of the sites, and their memories of the battles, to find the bodies. Then they dug them out and brought them back to their families.’

‘So they found him?’ I asked, gesturing at the grave.

He nodded. ‘Five years after he died, they found him – his father told me. His trench had taken a direct hit. The strange thing is, his face was preserved, perfect. There was no smell, either. You know, the body decomposes and produces a smell. There was none of that …’ He looked at me closely. ‘Do you believe what I am saying?’

I wanted to believe him. Perhaps. It was fantastic, no? I nodded vaguely.

He started to cough, weakly, like a kitten. His face had got redder. A sort of yellow scum had accumulated at the corners of his mouth.

I said: ‘Shall we sit down?’

We walked towards the trees. Mr Rafi’i laid his packsaddle on a grave. As we sat down, I said: ‘Among Christians, it would be considered offensive to sit on a grave or walk over someone’s grave.’

Mr Rafi’i was breathing a little easier. He grinned. ‘The soul cannot be sat on.’

Something made him remember a young seminarian, Hamid, during the War. ‘He was sixteen years old. He was a good boy: pure! They were all pure, back then.

‘I remember – such a fine looking boy! Like the moon! He had an accident – I’ve forgotten what it was – and his front teeth were smashed in. I said he should go to the dentist and get his teeth repaired, and he said: “I’m not going to bother, because I’ve been summoned.”

‘A few days later, we went out to try and get an idea of the enemy’s strength in our sector. We were twenty-two of us, in a column. As we set out, Hamid kissed me on both cheeks. He smelt of cologne, and he’d put on clean clothes.’ If you’re going to meet God, there’s a protocol to be followed.

‘The Iraqis were on the heights above us. When we came under fire, we hit the deck, and Hamid was next to me. I noticed my leg was hot and I thought, ‘I’ve been hit’, but something stopped me looking down. I was afraid. Then, a few seconds later, I felt that my groin and stomach were also hot and wet, and I looked down and I saw I hadn’t been hit. It was Hamid’s blood. I looked at his face. He smiled, and slept.’ Mr Rafi’i looked up at the sky, to the bending tops of the cypresses and pines. ‘You have to be clean, to be a martyr.’