The Half Known Life

The Walled Garden

Four hours in Iran, and already I was having to rethink almost everything. The local guide who'd greeted me as I stumbled out of Customs at three in the morning, elegant in black slacks and jacket, had begun to speak about his days at a boarding school near London in the 1970s. We'd pulled up at a luxury hotel, and I'd heard the strains of "Yesterday" being plaintively piped through the lobby. In one corner of the palatial space, a small sign in English pointed to a tiny room: "Mosque." Very close to it, a Swarovski shop was dripping in crystals and an Yves Rocher boutique promised this season's offerings from Paris.

Now, as I strolled back from an early morning walk in the late summer sunlight, past a series of blue-glass towers lining the spotless, near-empty street, I saw Ali, my official Virgil, striding towards me with a smile. The lobby behind him was full, when we re-entered, of women tapping away on smartphones with rose-colored fingernails, strands of silky hair slipping out from under many a hijab.

"Shall we make our first stop this morning" - Ali's English would not have sounded out of place in Windsor Castle - "Tus?"

"Actually, I was hoping we could go to the Imam Reza Shrine." Over eighteen months of correspondence with the Foreign Ministry in Tehran, I'd taken pains to ensure my trip would begin in the holy city. I was less interested in a shadowy government that seemed to shift policies with every passing season than in a culture that had dazzled me from afar since boyhood with its jeweled verses and the flat visions of paradise magicked into being on its carpets. The central mosque in Mashhad, with its fourteen minarets, four seminaries, seven interlocking marble courtyards and cemetery, was said to be the largest such compound on the planet.

"There are," said Ali, with what sounded like sculpted vagueness, "a few complications today. Perhaps we should drive out into the country?"

Captive for now, I followed my companion out to a car, where a burly older man, sporting a baseball cap - "Australia" - above his white shirt and chinos, was waiting to guide us through wide, tree-lined streets under large freeway signs in English. We passed a commanding statue, and Ali reminded me that Omar Khayyam, cradling an astronomical instrument above the modern boulevard, had invented a calendar more accurate than the Gregorian. Khayyam might be famous in England for his romantic quatrains - "Take care to create your own paradise, here and now on earth" - but in Iran he was best known for his transformative calculations.

We continued along quiet country roads that my guide could have likened to Oxfordshire, though these ones were lined with orchards of peaches and cherries. Ali spun beautifully brocaded sentences about double meanings and starlit nights, about how the same Farsi word was used for both "garden" and "paradise." All Iran was a garden in the poetry of its local hero Ferdowsi, he explained; the same man had laid down both the outlines of a legal system and a code of courtly love. No, of course, our hotel wasn't quite the London Hilton on Park Lane - he stayed there often while taking Iranians on tours of Britain - but he hoped it might prove comfortable enough.

We were traveling out to the small town of Tus, Ali went on, because it was there that Ferdowsi was buried. Jalaludin Rumi might be famous across the West; his verses about giving himself up to the "Beloved" and flinging away holy books lent themselves perfectly to secular distortion. But it was Ferdowsi who had, in the eleventh century, given the entire culture an identity and a voice. His sixty-thousand-couplet epic, the Shahnameh, which those in the West called The Book of Kings, had hymned a new Farsi into being, over the thirty years it took to complete, much as Shakespeare had sent more than fifteen hundred words and phrases into modern English.

We drew up at last at a marble edifice, at the far end of a quiet, formal garden in which couples dressed as for a restaurant in Paris were strolling around and posing for photos. We stepped into the chamber where the poet was buried, and Ali pointed out scenes from the epic poem rendered along the walls in friezes, while two romancing lovers pored over verses that warned of the capricious ways of Fate.

Then our driver slipped into the space behind us. He walked up to the sepulcher in which Ferdowsi's body was said to rest, and placed his hand on the cold stone. He took off his baseball cap and set it against his heart. Without preamble, in a rich and sonorous baritone, he proceeded to deliver a long sequence of verses from the poem that turns history into myth and vice versa.

Everything stopped. For what seemed like minutes we stood rapt.

I have made the world through a paradise of words.

No one has done that but me.

Huge palaces and monuments will fall into disrepair,

But I have made a palace out of words that shall never fade.

Through this I have immortalized Iran.

As Ali concluded his translation, the driver put on his cap once more and offered me a reassuring smile. "I didn't know if I could sing again," he explained, in perfect English. "Seven months ago I was diagnosed with cancer of the throat. My doctor advised me not to sing. But when I come here, I have to try. For Ferdowsi. For Iran."
 

~ 



A paradise of words: the driver’s incantation might have been expressing the single most urgent impulse that had drawn me here. After years of travel, I’d begun to wonder what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict - and whether the very search for it might not simply aggravate our differences. And the natural place to embark upon such an inquiry - should we discard the notion of heaven entirely? - seemed to be the culture that had given us both our word for paradise and some of our most soulful images of it. The old Iranian term “Paradaijah” had been brought into Greek by Xenophon, when he’d served as a mercenary in Persia; and for centuries Persians, as most residents of Iran were then known, had cultivated detailed and ravishing visions of paradise in their walled gardens, as emblems of - enticements towards - the higher garden that awaits the fortunate.

The Magi who had traveled to Bethlehem to pay their respects to the infant Jesus were often said to have come from Iran. So, too, the very word "magic" and the notion of a star shining above an auspicious birth. The water-softened courtyards that had bewitched me one candlelit evening in the Alhambra, the landscaped gardens depicting paradise around a marble tomb that had transfixed Hiroko and me on our honeymoon, at the Taj Mahal: all, I'd read, had been inspired by Persia.

But what gave particular power to the world's largest theocracy right now was that so many competing visions of paradise seemed to be crisscrossing every hour here, with furious intensity. After overthrowing the Shah and his Westward-facing regime in 1979, the ayatollahs who took over maintained that paradise awaits only those who give themselves to sacrifice and self-denial. The vast space in southern Tehran known as "Zahra's Paradise" was one of the largest cemeteries on earth-home to one and a half million dead bodies-and fast-track entry to heaven was said to be the privilege of martyrs.

Yet many of Iran's citizens were still known for the remarkably refined and sensuous versions of an earthly paradise they fashioned behind closed doors. The turbaned clerics, as they saw it, were ruthless politicians pursuing worldly ends under the guise of religion; the only pleasures that could be enjoyed in such a system lay in romance and intoxicants, the latest luxuries from abroad.

And both secular and religious souls, confoundingly, continued to turn for support to the Sufi poems that Iranian schoolchildren, to this day, learn by heart. Those mystical verses traffic in the language of the everyday - roses and nightingales and wine - if only to evoke a far deeper romance with the divine. Turning wordlessly in circles, Islamic dervishes incarnate a truth beyond doctrine and analysis.

Find a heaven within, Rumi had written - it came back to me now as Ali, the driver and I sat on a platform in the sun, munching on chicken with barberries - and you enter a garden in which "one leaf is worth more than all of Paradise."
 

~ 



Soon after we arrived back at our hotel, I fell into a deep sleep. By the time I awoke, darkness had fallen over Mashhad and I was hungry to experience the sacred city without my official guides.

I called Ali in his room and extended an invitation I knew he couldn't refuse. "Why don't you and the driver go to dinner alone? It looks really good."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. I need to rest."

Then, true to the spirit of the culture all around me, I slipped down to the lobby and asked at the taxi desk if there was a car that could take me into the heart of town. Before long, a lean character of around thirty, with a boyish smile and unexpectedly good English, was leading me out to his battered compact.

"You have no friend?" he asked.

"I'm here in a group of one."

Holders of American passports were required to come in guided groups, but Iran was flexible about how this, like every term, might be interpreted.

"You come for the festival?"

"Festival?"

"This week," the driver explained. "The anniversary of Imam Reza." Five million people had gathered from every corner of the Shia world, he said - from Yemen and Pakistan and Beirut and Iraq, from all the provinces of Iran - to mark the auspicious occasion. Hence the archways of office buildings flooded in blue, the green lights under the trees that lined the sidewalks. Hence, too, perhaps, Ali's reluctance to allow me into the midst of passionate crowds.

The shrine of the imam, commemorating a holy man said to have been poisoned by an Iraqi rival almost twelve hundred years before, is believed to cure sickness and sorrow in every pilgrim who visits; an Iranian in California would later tell me that it was also now part of a massive cartel, a multinational corporation with land assets alone valued at twenty billion dollars. It ran fifty-six companies, including the only Coca-Cola plant in Iran.

As we pushed through a tiny entrance, behind a wall of bodies, all we could make out was celebration. On every side, people were seated on carpets under a huge moon. They were eating or chatting or, in some cases, stretched out asleep; many were spending seven days and seven nights in the mosque. There was a low roar of devotion, as of traffic on a busy street, and soon we were inside the roar ourselves.

Pilgrims were releasing white doves into the blue-black sky. Black-turbaned ayatollahs - direct descendants of the Prophet - were delivering sermons on huge video screens, under the pulsing moon. We picked our way between the illuminated blue-tiled buildings, and our feet could barely find space to touch the ground.

At last we came to the entrance to the holiest space of all, the innermost sanctum where the imam was buried, and my new friend looked over at me, assessingly. Nonbelievers are traditionally excluded from the entire complex, on pain of death; when the English traveler Robert Byron came to Mashhad in 1934, he blackened his face with burnt cork just to enter the outer courtyards of the shrine, then risked execution again by stealing in a second time. Yet I'd come all this way to see the complex, the driver clearly remembered, and my intentions appeared to be sincere; he gestured for me to accompany him inside.

Thrusting our way into a scrum of bodies again, we emerged within a very small room, thick with the smell of unwashed socks. The crowds here were so intense that little boys were being passed from shoulder to shoulder so they could arrive at the front and kiss the golden grille behind which lay the saint. A man wailed, and a great sound rose up around us. More than thirty million pieces of silver on the walls and chandeliers turned us all into a shiver of reflections.

I was humbled as I moved among the sobbing bodies. Men were running their hands down their faces and weeping as at their mother's funeral. More people pressed in, and the whole crowd seemed to sway and tremble, as if we were truly part of a single massed body. I'd lost contact by now with my driver, but then I caught sight of him across the room. His hand was on his heart, and he was stepping backwards, so as never to present his back to the long-dead holy man. His eyes were welling with tears.

We walked around the sacred space for a long, long time: rare privilege, perhaps, for both of us. As we passed back out into the courtyard, officials were circling around, waving blue and yellow and rainbow-colored feather dusters to prevent the press from turning into a mob. The great domes of the mosque shone against the full moon. We stepped in silence around pilgrims in the direction of the entrance and started making our slow way back to the parked car.

"I want a daughter!" the young driver suddenly exclaimed, opened up, perhaps, by the experience of visiting the saint. "So cute, with blond hair. I want a daughter just like my wife!"

"You'll be bringing your first child to the mosque?"

"My wife is in Yorkshire," he said, as if to remind a friend who knew this already. "She is in England, with her mother."

Noting my confusion, he went on, "I was going to the hospital in Sheffield, every day. To translate for my friend. I was talking to the nurse and then..."

A shy smile told the rest.

It had been several years now, he explained, since he'd fled Iran. He had researched the Schengen Agreement, so he knew he could get to the Netherlands. There he had made contact with a human trafficker and had paid the stranger twenty-five hundred dollars. The trafficker had led him to a truck and given him a special pipe through which he could breathe as he lay in the back, among five fellow stowaways from Afghanistan, hoping to escape detection by officials outside.

On arrival in Britain, he had been granted by the government both a solicitor and a translator. Free health care, too, and free housing and fifty pounds a week ("I spent just twenty!"). For three years the lawyer had petitioned a court on his behalf and finally he had been given asylum. Now he was free to reside in Britain for life.