Writing
Persian pearls - fragments
An
Iranian Travel Log
by Imola
Nagy
Part One of Three
Once, when the world seemed to me no more than a senseless
cacophony, Rumi’s voice broke through my veil. It was not unlike the
arrival of the gypsies in “inquisitive” Spain, after wandering
through half of the world. Signs started to reach through from “outside”,
that were lively, seductive, disturbing and meaningful, in a new way. Sometimes
whole matrixes of these new signs showed up. It seemed they came from another
dimension, perhaps that of the dreams’, which lingers around after the
break of day. And sometimes they came right out of my environment: millennial
Brooklyn. The wasteland of desolate industrial streets, decaying piers, empty
spaces became our desert, the ruined, enormous warehouses our caravanserai,
and Omar Khajjam, Rumi and Attar-ud-Din our literature of more than escape.
Thus the journey to the inside has started. My way of rending the veil, but
also stepping into a place that inures to the veil was to visit Iran.
It is early June in Tehran. As the plane banks and turns above the city, the waxing moon inquires into the cabin. Dotted lines of lights zigzag up the dark sky from the disc of the lambent city. It looks like we are landing at a distant space station. The zigzagging lights turn out to be streetlights along the roads climbing the steep mountains around the city. A “uniform” speaks to me in Persian, but it’s not hard to guess what he’s asking. And I set my feet upon Iran’s land without any trouble.
I walk south on Boulevard Shariati, one of the main avenues of Tehran. Just as I lose myself in the crowd, I feel someone is watching me. I turn around and the Alborz nearly falls upon me. The enormous, barren mountain-peak rises over the teeming city, right there at the end of the boulevard. Before me stands the city with its wild mysteries, behind me the mountain, the escape, where we all are visitors. Time and again, since the dawn of the city, the people of Tehran have discarded their sorrow in the mountains and also drawn inspiration from them to survive changing times. Now that I know where I can disappear and enjoy a moment of peace, I feel secure and free to experience whatever is in front of me, or below me, as I turn around and descend the sloping boulevard. There is another orientation to the city: smell. It could be like this: find the fragrance of the flower-shop, from there trace the smell of the little open canal by the sidewalk. When you come to the smell of fresh baked bread, make a left and go straight until you smell fruits and vegetables. The scent of rosemary in a traffic jam means you are in Northern Tehran. Southern Tehran, where the poorest of the poor live, stinks only of traffic jam.
My sense of smell comes back in Tajrish bazaar. Here I am reminded that each fruit and vegetable has a distinct fragrance. I get lost among the vibrant stands when a group of children shows up among the legs of grown-ups. The kids make startling Bedouin music. I give them money and they grab my pocket for more. Most of the abundance of the marketplace is unaffordable to three-quarters of the population. There are plenty of western goods too, and these are the most coveted and expensive. I don’t eye anything in particular, but end up with an old silver ring with a yellow opal stone. Later on in Mashad, someone checks the back of the stone, shows me the Qor’anic verse carved in it and tells me it’s a magic ring made to protect travelers. Magic is welcome in Iran; otherwise the drama of the everyday life becomes all too real. While I’m here two women are stoned in public in Tehran. An alarming number of women are found strangled and naked beneath black chador in the holy city of Qom. A young girl, still a child, tells me all this in calm voice under the shroud of the night.
A bench materializes in the green foliage, exactly where I was hoping one would be, to get a rest in solitude. I’m climbing up the winding ancient roads, between white clay walls. And here is an affluent neighborhood that turns into a village where the road runs by the stream. The streets are almost empty in the hot afternoon, but I’m happy to be out of the house. Teeny-weeny freedom. I sweat like a horse, but I don’t feel uncomfortable. My newly bought cotton overcoat and headscarf are the lightest garments of the Islamic dress code, and still they seem to me at first like fall clothes. They protect me from the torrid heat and hide me from the gazes of the leering men I meet on my way.Hours of hiking through the posh residential area bring me to Tajrish square, at the foothills of Touchaal peak.
I find a sweet little coffeehouse, where I can have homemade lemonade, Turkish coffee and a smoke. There are mostly couples in the coffeehouse, but they seem not to mind my being alone. When the waiter finds out I’m a foreigner, he doesn’t want to let me pay. I am a guest of his country. On my way home my feet go numb, so I decide to get a taxi. I find the taxi station on the shoulder of the boulevard, where a bunch of people wave their hands and yell their destinations to the passing cabbies. I scream: “Zire-pol-e-Sadr” - beneath the Sadr bridge. That’s my home, next to the Sadr highway. I arrive home on the front seat of a small “Peikan”, the national car, squeezed between the driver and a male passenger. Interestingly, it is not against Islamic law to have one’s body pressed against another, so long as one is in a taxi. You can hire a taxi alone, but on short distances it doesn’t make sense. I hop in a car with a number of other passengers, no waste of space or time, and get a ride for pennies. It feels like in an old slapstick movie. We share a comically small space together for a couple of minutes, and then everybody goes on with his business.
There are many good Iranian movies. And frequently it is impossible to tell the professional actors from the many ordinary people who act for the first time in their lives in these movies. “Shaya bidandun, oftaad tu ghandum, anbor biaarid, daresh biaarid” – “Shaia without teeth, fell in the sugar bowl, bring the claw, let’s pull her out of there. ” On a hot afternoon, my new friend’s one-year-old daughter is in a very bad mood. Her clear blue eyes (same as her mother’s) are filled with tears. After trying all the tricks I could think of to cheer her up, finally I pull out my camera and direct it towards her. Quick and complete transformation happens before my eyes. Now she is a perfect actress who acts out all her repertoire without missing a beat, from singing and clapping her hands to dialing and speaking on the “remote-control-phone”, from being a very little, innocent girl to trying to become a camerawoman herself. So I have an uncut gem of a video clip with the youngest actress ever.
Next to us a twelve-year-old boy is looking at the TV for hours. The subject matter of these Iranian style soap operas is almost uniformly that of suffering, death and mourning. In the corner of the screen a small, celestial nurse ? only her impeccable face is uncovered ? with white gloves translates the stories into sign language. They are so grim, these noir soap operas, as if the censors looked too hard and long into the sun and now they want to see only a black hole in the middle of the screen. Yet we are in the land of the poets of pure imagination, Mundus Imaginalis. My last footage from Iran shows kissing eagles in cage.
We go with a few friends to a party outside Tehran. The car stops in front of a big metal gate on the highway towards Karaj. We enter a garage home, almost Brooklyn style, half of it turned into a kitchen and a living room, half of it a studio for the women of the house; tiny, quiet, gentle Yadlaa. The garage stands on the shoulder of the newly built highway and juts halfway onto the outer lane, so that the passing cars actually have to swerve to avoid it. And that is because the house was there first and white-bearded Akbar refuses to demolish it. He lived a free life in Iran in his youth; studying, working, traveling and going in and out of prison. So by now, he is indifferent to the monthly visits of the authorities trying to remove him. I step out the back door of the garage and find myself in a wholly different empire. It is like exiting into the backyard of your Brooklyn apartment and finding yourself in New Mexico. A vast garden is in front of me, and an alley girdled with tall trees. At a cross section, to my right, I get a glimpse of the temple of music - an adobe house with high ceilings, wooden beams, fire places, couches, clay benches, and a distinct, elevated place for the main musicians. Further into the garden, there is yet another, smaller house shrouded in pine trees and flanked by a vineyard. This is the guesthouse, of clay, wood and painted glass. When the authorities tried to stop Akbar from building his temple, he put a donkey in it and told them it was a hutch, a royal hutch at that.
As I walk around in the garden with Akbar, Na-koja-abad comes to my mind, the Place of Nowhere. The 11th century Persian philosopher, Sohrawardi coined the term, and Henry Corbin, the famous French Iranologist translated it as Mundus Imaginalis. And so it is, and Akbar knows it. As partying is virtually verboten in Iran, this place is a refuge for music loving youth. Yadlaa makes rice every Thursday night in an enormous pot for her friends and for the friends of her friends. There is also stuffed eggplant, grilled kebab, cucumber, mint and yogurt salad, sweets, fruits, nuts. I am the first one to get a huge plate in front of me. “In chi-e?” – “What is this?”, Yadlaa asks me, tasting my food, gracefully inviting me to follow her example. I, dokhtar-e khoob, good girl, don’t wait for a second invitation. During the night, I make tea. Little water, lots of tea - strength is important. It keeps us up all night. Yadlaa’s quietude is soothing. To my surprise, other guests said she had not spoken this much in months.
The temple of music is stacked with instruments: daf, tumbak, djembe, sitar, guitar, synthesizer, etc. Professional and amateur musicians jam together. I had come to the party with Anvar, a pupil of the famous classical Persian singer, Shajarian. Anvar sings: “Ke eshgh asan nimud avval, vali oftaad mushkelhaa” – “Love seemed at first an easy thing, but ah, the hard awakening”. (Hafez’ first Persian line, translated by Arthur J. Arberry.) Anvar accompanies himself on sitar and sounds like a whole band. He travels far away on his voice and when he returns, he always retains some of the distance. At first he plays only pure, classical Persian music. But as the time rolls on his austerity wanes and he jams with Akbar half the night. The rest mostly listen. Akbar is a protean jammer. He provides ambience or background to any type of music, as needed. He moves without a break from African drumming to jazz, from Persian tunes to techno-music, using all of the available instruments.
We pass the dawn back in the garage, on 36 feet of highway. The sun rises over the Alborz range and unveils the mysterious garden. Anvar recites Rumi for hours. At the end of each poem, he makes an animated, upward gesture with his arm. You can almost see the poem materialize for a second at the tip of his fingers, and then vanish again into the unseen world. “What sort of day is today, there are two suns in the sky. / Today is different from any other day. / There is a call to a wedding from the heavens, / To the people of the heart saying, “Good news, this is your day, today.” (Shahram T. Shiva’s rendition of Rumi).
I’m riding with a Lufthansa crew in the funicular up to Touchaal peak. They got two days off, and tomorrow morning they’ll have breakfast at the feet of Damavand. Up on the peak, everyone is high-spirited in the rarified air. We take photographs of each other in the snow. From the 12,000 foot peak we can see the enormous, polluted city in one direction; in the other, an ocean of barren mountains? the Alborz. You could disappear here, if you had to, and knew how to make a special deal with the sun and Lucifer. It is said that Lucifer, the Lightbringer, was born in the Alborz. It makes sense; a magnificent landscape like this fits him. You can hardly aspire higher than this.
After all, we are in the neighborhood of Damavand, the second highest peak on the face of the earth. This is the place where builders bury the body of their woman in the walls to keep them erect. And farther down in the valley cut by the river, people dreamt up in ancient times the idea of the city, of urban life. Lucifer dwells high up here, where no human pettiness can disturb his divine solitude. As for humans, this is a place where the imagination can become entombed in the rocks. If we accept that having a glimpse into the substantial emptiness of the universe frees the mind, then this place must be what persists between the void and us. This sublimely simple and endless image captivates our mind and presents itself as an ultimate, unabated truth. Can you, will you come back from there?
