The cell was maybe eight feet by ten, which sounds like
nothing until you’ve lived in it for five years, and then it becomes the whole
world—a universe with concrete walls and a drain in the floor that smelled of
things Houshang Asadi preferred not to think about. SAVAK’s boys had been
thorough with him. They always were.
The mullah arrived on a Tuesday, or what Houshang believed
was a Tuesday. You lose track, in the dark.
He was a young man, thin in the way that suggested he’d been
thin even before they brought him in here, with eyes that were too old for his
face—the eyes of a man who’d read too much and slept too little and seen things
that don’t wash off. He carried a battered copy of Hafez’s poetry tucked under
his arm like a shield.
Great, Houshang thought. A cleric.
---
But here’s what you need to understand about the Shah’s
Iran, friend—and this is the part nobody tells you straight, the part they
dress up in politics and economics until it doesn’t look like what it really
is, which is a horror story, pure and simple.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was not a monster in the way the
storybooks describe monsters. He didn’t lurk. He didn’t drool. He wore Western
suits and talked about modernization and kept a white-gloved hand on the
machinery of SAVAK, Iran’s secret police, whose specialty was turning human
beings into broken, screaming things in basement rooms while the rest of Tehran
had dinner and pretended not to hear.
The Shah’s great delusion—and every monster has one, that’s
what makes them interesting—was that he believed his real enemies were
the communists. The secular boys. The Tudeh Party men with their dog-eared
copies of Marx and their cigarette breath and their genuine, white-hot belief
that history was going somewhere good.
He couldn’t see what was coming at him through the dark.
Nobody ever can.
---
The joke, back then, went like this:
Before the revolution, people drank in public and prayed
in private. After the revolution, people pray in public and drink in private.
Ha. Ha ha. Funny, right? The kind of joke that tastes like
copper on your tongue if you tell it in the wrong company, which—after 1979—was
basically all company.
---
In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence had toppled Prime
Minister Mossadegh—a lean, passionate man who’d had the magnificent audacity to
tell British Petroleum that, actually, Iranian oil belonged to Iran.
Operation Ajax, they called it. Sounds almost cute. The kind of name you’d give
a golden retriever, not a coup that would metastasize over the next twenty-five
years into something that ate the country alive.
The Shah had been grateful. The Shah had been useful.
And grateful, useful men—especially grateful, useful men with their own private
torture apparatus—get to stay in their palaces for a good long while.
America looked at Iran the way a man looks at a jukebox that
plays exactly the songs he wants. Why mess with it?
---
In Qom, in June of 1963, a short, dark-eyed cleric with a
voice like gravel and scripture looked out at his audience and called the Shah
a “wretched and pitiful man.”
You’ve said worse about your boss at a bar, probably. The
difference is your boss doesn’t have SAVAK.
They arrested Khomeini before the echoes died. But here’s
the thing about arrest—and this is something the Shah never quite learned, even
after all those years sitting on the Peacock Throne—sometimes arrest is the
best advertising money can’t buy. The protests spread from Qom to Tehran like
fire across dry grass in August, and suddenly everyone knew the old cleric’s
name who hadn’t before.
He went into exile in Iraq. Then France—the town of
Neauphle-le-Château, a name that sounds like something from a Flaubert novel,
all stone walls and autumn light. He was clever enough to know that a man in
France talking to Western journalists has a megaphone. A man in Najaf has a
prayer rug.
His weapon was the cassette tape. Hundreds of them, maybe
thousands, carried across borders in the luggage of the faithful like seeds
carried to new soil. His voice filling dark rooms all across Iran—patient,
implacable, building a picture of a world where everything wrong had a name,
and the name was the Shah, and the solution was Islam.
The left thought they were using him. People who should know
better always think that, right up until the end.
---
The winter of 1977 came down hard. The oil boom had coughed
and died. Factories went dark. Men who’d moved to Tehran looking for the
modernized future the White Revolution had promised found instead that they’d
traded their village poverty for urban poverty, which is colder and meaner and
comes with the added bonus of inflation. Khomeini’s cassettes, which had once
seemed like the ravings of a distant old man, now sounded like diagnosis.
This is what’s wrong with you, Iran. This is
why your children are hungry.
In August of 1978, someone set fire to Cinema Rex in Abadan.
Four hundred people burned alive—and here is the place where a horror writer
would slow way, way down and make you feel the heat, make you smell it, make
you understand that history isn’t made of politics, it’s made of screaming—but
even this is not the real horror. The real horror is what came after. SAVAK
blamed Khomeini’s followers. But the theater had been showing an anti-government
film. The accusation became its own confession, and the rage that followed
shook the streets like something tectonic.
September 8th. The Shah declared martial law. The soldiers,
green and frightened and poorly trained for this particular nightmare, fired
into crowds. Two thousand dead. Maybe four thousand. The numbers are uncertain
the way numbers get uncertain when the people doing the counting are also the
people doing the killing.
The Shah, that elegant, Westernized, Paris-suited man,
pressured Iraq to expel Khomeini from Najaf—and inadvertently handed the old
cleric a seat at the table of international media. Sometimes the monster
defeats itself. You see this again and again in horror. The creature reaches
for the hero and knocks over the lamp instead.
By January 1979, the Shah flew to Egypt. Flew. Just
like that. The Peacock Throne empty, SAVAK dissolved on paper, the prisons
cracked open. Junior officers and low-ranking soldiers, those kids who’d been
doing the shooting, set down their rifles. The senior officers looked at the
ceiling.
---
Khomeini landed in Tehran on February 1st, 1979. The crowd
that came to meet him was biblical in size. When a journalist on the plane
asked what he felt, returning to his country after fifteen years, the
old man looked at him with those ancient eyes and said: “Nothing.”
Which, if you listen to it right, is the scariest thing in
this whole story.
---
Houshang Asadi had been in the cell six months when he
noticed his friend—the young mullah, the one who loved Hafez and suggested they
“take a walk” around their eight-by-ten universe whenever despair got too heavy—shivering
in the January cold. The kind of cold that gets into old buildings and never
quite leaves.
Houshang took off his jacket and handed it over.
The young mullah—Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s student, Khomeini’s
loyalist, a man whose future Houshang could not have imagined in even his most
fevered nightmares—accepted it with tears on his face.
He whispered, and his voice was genuine, it was real,
and that is perhaps the most frightening part of all: “Houshang, when Islam
comes to power, not a single tear will fall from the innocent.”
He meant it. In that moment, in that cold cell, he meant
every word.
---
In 1981, Khamenei was elected president of the Islamic
Republic. His inauguration speech promised to eliminate “deviation, liberalism,
and the leftists who follow America.”
One year later, he sent Houshang Asadi back to the torture
chamber.
---
The jacket, presumably, was gone by then.
Comments
Post a Comment